Wow, 100k is no small change. Hoping this accelerates the "tipping point" for electric vehicles - in my mind that's when the infrastructure for EVs (e.g. charging stations, or something in the future like battery swaps) actually makes it easier to own than a gas vehicle.
It's already easier with a plugin hybrid. You can drive electric for a huge amount of the typical 20 mile daily commute, and rarely having to visit the gas station, with most of your miles being powered by the grid.
If you're interested in that route, there are a ton of used Chevy Volts on the market now for $15-20k. And PHEVs are great for people in areas without good public charging infra, or who can't afford the current crop of high-range EVs (the latter being my case).
If instead you live on i.e. the West Coast, and can afford a high range pure-EV, you can go almost everywhere on electricity alone.
Yup. This is my experience. Bought a used Volt for $10k 3-4 years ago and probably have only visited a gas station about a dozen times since then.
And there's significant East Coast charging infrastructure. I bought a used Leaf (first gen, I needed 5 seats for my wife's car since the first gen Volt only has 4) for $10k a year or two ago and have used Chademo charging several times without problem. The low range of the Leafs is a little annoying, but the Chademo charging capability compensates fairly well. With a >200 mile range EV, I wouldn't even need the fast charging.
If you can charge at home, you realize how annoying it was to go to the gas station all the time. When I travel and rent or borrow a gas car, I always find it annoying that I have to go to the gas station regularly. It's just not convenient compared to just habitually plugging it in when I get home. It also smells.
The gas tank is pressurized and vacuumed or something. Actually have to press a button to open the tank to put more in.
If you don't use the gas engine for 6 weeks, it runs for 15 min to lubricate. If you don't keep the average gas age below 1 year, it will run the gas engine until the average age is below 1 year. And that logic is very much as a software developer would expect. It burns half the gas away and you refill it? Average age is now 6 months. In 6 months it'll do it all over again.
The car takes care of that by keeping track of when you fuel. It will burn some of the gas to keep it from going bad, to keep the engine oiled, and occasionally to keep the vehicle warm.
The gas tank is pretty small (9 gallons), so it's not a big issue and only a tiny amount of fuel is used for these things. I normally keep about a quarter to half a tank in there, which is enough to be more than comfortable but not enough that I'm burning a lot of gas to keep it from going bad. It automatically keeps the average age of gas in the tank from going over 6 months.
>Can the gas in the tank go bad? I know modern fuel has a lot of preservatives.
This is something that is occasionally mentioned in speculative apocalyptic scenarios. It will go bad, after about a year you wouldn't be able to use any random car without swapping out its gas with some from a better preserved source.
I suspect it'd work, just not recommended. I drive around with nearly 6 month old gas all the time and have used >1 year old gas in lawnmowers and boats (etc). I suspect it'd run rough after a year or so, but probably good enough in such a scenario.
I know an ex-junkman. He said that MTBE gasoline pissed him off because it went bad they had to pay to get rid of it. But they would fill their cars with the non MTBE gasoline no matter how old it was.
I have a truck that has 300k miles on the original engine and transmission but I have to change the headlight switch every 50 to 70k miles. I also have to replace the interior door handles every 100k. So, 6 door handles (right and left), 6 light switches, a fuel pump, radiator, and she's ready for a suspension. But rocking the same engine.
I've had an incredibly good experience with the Volt. They deployed their best engineers to work on it. It was probably the best made Chevy at the time, a kind of flagship project.
> It was probably the best made Chevy at the time, a kind of flagship project.
In 2013, the Volt and Cadillac CTS shared the highest score (3.00) of any General Motors vehicle in Consumer Reports Reliability Index (excluding the Pontiac Vibe which is really a Toyota rebadge).
For comparison: 37 (of 41) Toyota vehicles scored the same or better than the Volt.
I have an i3 REx right now (also super cheap for older models), which is basically a BEV with a backup generator that powers the battery (not the wheels, like a typical hybrid or PHEV).
I am on electricity 99.9% of the time for any commuting or local drives, but it enables me to do trips of practically any length which is great for me. It's a good stepping stone and my next car will be a pure BEV, but the convenience (and backup gas generator because I don't have in-home charging, I live in an apartment complex) is a lifesaver sometimes.
I totally missed this question, but in case you find this answer:
It can barely keep up at true highway speeds. It can keep up at ~60-70 mph on flat ground, but just barely. Given highway speed limits are 60 mph minimum in most places (meaning traffic goes at 70 mph), this means I usually am losing charge on long journeys. If I lived in a place like TX where the speed limit was higher, then the REx wouldn't be able to keep up at all and there'd be a net loss in charge.
However, I have hold state-of-charge (HSoC) on-demand coded to my car (in the EU, you can enable the REx any time you want. CA regulations prohibited this in the US, but it can be enabled via an ODB-II adapter). If I am going on along journey, I enable the REx with a button at 80%.
I've done 600-700 mi trips without charging the car by filling the gas, as long as I'm conscious to begin looking for a gas station when the gas tank is ~10% (which is about 10 miles, and I've found that within 10 miles is about the max you'd find gas stations apart on a major highway).
By the time I get home, I'm down to 40-50% charge on the car (from 80%, since I can't turn on HSoC/REx at 100%, so the first 20% doesn't count for determining whether the REx can keep up) if I'm paranoid. This also is through the Cascade mountains in WA, so the real world usage holds up even over mountain passes. Going up the pass is a real pain since there's a high net loss of electrical charge, but going back down is basically "free" thanks to regen.
From the specs it appears that it can barely average highway speeds in range extender mode. Which is probably enough that the performance for passing and whatnot is the same as the electric mode.
To build a PHEV with all the performance characteristics of a Battery Electric Vehicle while running on battery, you need a motor, battery, and inverter that's almost as large as those on a BEV.
So the best PHEVs tend to be those that look more like BEVs with an accessory motor/generator, which is the Volt (sadly now discontinued) and the i3 Range Extender (Range extender models discontinued in EU).
I think at some point things might flip around, with non-plugin hybrids being the economy option, pure BEVs being the mid-priced option, and BEV with a range extender being a premium option for those who want all the advantages of both.
It would be nice, but I doubt the chargers they install will be available to the public. R&D for installing them is good, but will probably trickle down a lot less/slower.
Also those 100k will be on the road only by 2030, and 10k by 2022 according to the other tech-crunch article [0]
I honestly don't understand why electric vehicle manufacturers went direct to consumer. Fleets are the ones that are looking at pure economics and would have the most to gain by cutting down on energy consumption.
Yes. Musk has been exceptional at figuring out markets to drive a tech up the experience curve that aren’t his ultimately desired market. Often it takes multiple companies to do that.
Maybe five years ago I observed that Nissan and Tesla were homing in on the same market from opposite directions.
Tesla built the Roadster which is a toy. Then the Luxo Model X and S Sedans followed by the affordable Model 3. Nissan built the affordable but limited range Leaf and just kept increasing the range every other year or so.
They basically started each with one type of suck (Tesla=Price, Nissan=Range) and worked to reduce over time.
It makes sense to go for the premium segment if you can sell in it. I do doubt that Nissan could have sold a Roadster under their brand, but stranger things have happened.
As it is, Nissan has cemented the Leaf = bad range association in people's minds.
It'll be interesting. Leaf have a not good rep vs battery life. Probably because of poor thermal management and a smaller (more highly stressed) battery pack. And short range.
But interesting to see what happens with the Leaf Plus over the next couple of years. (200 mile range more power).
Truck prices are already out of control, and the superior towing (if they do the torque right) should put in the class of superduty trucks.
Plus these will have tons of commercial customers who get to depreciate it on schedule, and the longer term lower maintenance and fuel costs come into play more.
let's take 100,000 vehicles with (I'm conservatively guessing) a 100 kWh battery each, that's a 100,000,000 kWh load each night!
100,000 Mega watt-hours is roughly the output of about 10 nuclear power plants in a 24H period.
Unless a lot of new capacity comes online, it could easily overwhelm the existing electrical grid's capacity.
Isn't it more like 10,000,000 kWh, i.e. 10000 MWh? New nuclear units go up to 1600 MW of output, so it's less than 10 hours of output from a single reactor.
I'd say that number is a bit suspect as the amount of work to refine Texas Sweet (WTI) vs the more difficult to refine oil you find from Venezuela or the entire Middle East (it is heavier or more "sour") is vastly different. This gives a primer on it:
Except for Saudi sweet. There is plenty of very high quality oil in Saudi Arabia, which is no doubt in the heart of the "middle east". (Iraq and the UAE also produce sweet crude.) The really nasty stuff, the really energy-intensive gunk, is the tarsand bitumen from Canada. Saudi oil is positively green in comparison.
Much to most of KSA's oil is full of heavy sulfur content and is considered sour. Virtually all of the Texas oil is considered sweet. WTI (Texas Sweet) is basically the benchmark for the best oil. Some of the best oil (sweet) in the middle east traditionally was from Libya, but since team america world police took out Gadaffi it has been a mess there. I'm not very familiar with Canadian oil as we don't need much of it here.
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Saudi crude is generally a mix of heavy to medium sour oil, which is generally high in sulfur and yields a decent amount of residual fuel and vacuum gasoil.
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More than for "a while". Oil was discovered hundreds, thousands, of years ago. It used to seep out of the ground in many places (See the opening sequence of The Beverly Hillbillies). Only once we started pumping it did all the surface seeps dry up.
Fun fact, it still does, in 2019, seep out of the ground in downtown Los Angeles. Literally on the miracle mile sits the La brea Tarpits. You can see the pond with oil bubbling out of the water. If you're ever in Los Angeles, it is a very memorable thing to visit.
Indeed. That does not, however, impact the actual energy available in a gallon of gasoline.
Technically the 6kWh of energy spent on refining (or any other work) is itself subject to inefficiencies in generation, transmission, etc. It would also suffer from inefficiencies in the electrical storage and motive portions of an electric vehicle as well. And at the end of the day even if there were perfect 100% conversion it would still only be 6kWh of energy available vs 33-34kWh.
I think the point is that the energy inputs required to produce a gallon of gasoline could approximately power an EV vehicle roughly the same distance that a typical ICE could go on a gallon of gasoline. A quick google search seems to back that up.
I'm not sure I'm seeing the same comparisons that you are regarding travel distances. A Tesla Model 3 uses 24-29 kWh/100 miles (depends on drive/battery options) which would be 4-5 gallons of gasoline. That would be 20-25MPG assuming the 10kWh/gallon ICE which is pretty low for a mid-sized sedan. An Accord hybrid pulls around 48MPG, while a Dodge Charger Hellcat SRT manages an EPA combined 23MPG (hardly a typical ICE given that it puts out 707 horsepower).
The average MPG in the US is around 25mpg[1]. So assuming that 6 kWh of electricity from the grid (big assumption, see below) is used to refine a gallon of gas, then it seems like the math pencils out. Of course the MPG average includes trucks and SUVS, etc, so not a perfect comparison but very much in the ballpark.
Regarding the 6kWh number, I have been having a lot of trouble confirming it. Some stuff I have read says that refineries are major consumers of grid electricity. Others claim that they can produce most of their energy needs from the oil distillates on-site. My best guess is that it probably depends on how old the refinery is, because it seems like the older reports/estimates tend to mention the electricity consumption, whereas the newer ones mention the 'on-site' energy generation/consumption. I think a lot of the energy demand of the refinery is used for heating, so burning the oil distillates would be way more efficient than using grid electricity for that. So, it may just be the case that older refineries are way less efficient than newer ones, and the 'EV vs ICE' comparison depends on how modern the refineries are in your area.
That is incorrect. You have to compare the 6kWh where it is used (at the refinery) and the 10kWh available on the vehicle. Both numbers already include the inefficiencies and therefore are comparable.
Which gives to a mere 4Wh of additional power extracted from gasoline.
That's true, but it does ignore the waste heat, which in winter months is used to warm the passenger compartment. It's one thing EVs do have working against them, though it doesn't make up for the huge efficiency gain EVs have overall.
I know several coworkers who prefer to drive their EV in the winter because it heats up quicker (waiting ~5 minutes for the ICE to warm up the car vs. an active electric heater that starts right away)
Yes, but they're having to actively use battery power to do that, instead of just passively using waste heat from the ICE engine. So this greatly reduces their range. It probably works out fine for them because the car's maximum range is probably much greater than their commute distance, so they probably have battery capacity to spare and burning some of it on heat isn't a big deal as it gets recharged at home every night (and maybe also at work). If they had more "range anxiety", however, they probably wouldn't be so eager.
Residential net consumption is more complex than that due to solar and wind. There is a duck curve, and sometimes the lowest energy prices are in the middle of the day, for wholesale it could be negative.
Delivery trucks run during the day mostly. Cities may prohibit deliveries at night for noise reasons. Deliveries at night might be more likely to be stolen, etc. Could be able to fix the first issue with the quietness of EVs perhaps.
