22 thoughts on “Electric Cars”

    1. “But can I still have a P85D?”

      Heh. I was thinking along similar lines. More specifically, “I’m okay with ending ‘Green’ worship of electric cars, but can I still worship them for their instant torque and ability to melt tires?”

      🙂

      1. You know as soon as people enjoy driving electric cars and they become adopted by people who are not super rich or progressive ideologues, electric cars will become targets of the environmental movement. Just like plastic bags and bottled water, which sprung forth from the environmental movement.

  1. “Electric cars’ global-warming benefits are small. It is advertised as a zero-emissions car, but in reality it only shifts emissions to electricity production,”

    Isn’t this the leftest way, to shift things around on the back end to obscure from common people what is really going on? Medicare expansion is free. Obamacare makes insurance affordable by lowering costs. At least now we have a word for this dishonesty, grubering.

    1. I’m thinking someday, somebody will tackle an opera for the Obama years of Wagnerian proportion and scope. Here’s a working title: “Das Reich Von Der Grubering”

      Dave

  2. One other item people forget about. The inability of the residential power grid to handle 100% of homes with electric cars, charging away on the 220VAC feed in the garage. The grid NEEDS lags. If off peak ceases to exist because of everyone arriving home and plugging in the electric charger, power brown-out at inopportune times will increase. There will be no hour-by-hour relief as peak rate consumption today typically drops in a rolling east to west fashion from 11pm ET onwards allowing for generation redistribution that cannot occur when demand does not go down. An “all renewable” grid (pure green energy fantasy) only makes the problem worse.

    To paraphrase a favorite from the sixties: Plug-in, tune-in, turn-on, and be dropped-out…..

    Dave

    1. Don’t worry, Elon will be happy to fix that problem, too. Once he rolls out whole-house batteries, charging themselves from local renewables and/or the grid, you can just charge your car’s battery from your house’s battery.

      Although, to me, that solution smacks of those portable charge-extender battery packs that companies make for cell phones/travelers, but with even higher inefficiency losses.

      How would everyone arriving home and plugging in their car be any different than everyone arriving home and cranking down their A/C or cranking up their heat? Unless, of course, most of the country just leaves their heat/AC running full blast while they’re out of the house, which is a completely different issue in and of itself…

      1. I see “Ctrot” beat me to it. Too bad I can’t see all of the comments on a thread until I post one of my own…

    2. I expect that utilities will roll out demand response systems that let electric car owners save money by automatically charging when there is spare capacity, similar to the programs they have for smart thermostats that adjust temperatures at times of peak demand.

      1. Yeah, because it’s not like they might actually need that car to go anywhere.

        ‘What do you mean the car has no charge?’
        ‘Grid demand was high all night.’
        ‘But I’ve got to get to work!’

        It’s also not much help here, where we typically get one or two multi-hour power outages a year, when we usually drive to a restaurant or some other warm, comfortable, spot with electric lights and wait it out. With no power, we won’t be able to drive, and will be shivering at home instead.

    3. The grid isn’t in danger because world lithium production, and indeed total known lithium reserves, ensure that there won’t be enough battery packs out there to cause a problem.

      It’s like developing a car that stores energy in Spotted Owl poop. Once you’ve got the assembly line running you quickly realize that the supply of Spotted Owl poop is really rather small.

      1. “known lithium reserves”

        Haven’t we seen this hoary fallacy many times before? Reserves are proven resources, and if demand goes, up reserves go up as new deposits are found and proved. This is happening right now with lithium.

        At current prices, the cost of lithium carbonate adds between $5 and $10 per kWh to the cost of Li-ion batteries. I’d be more worried about the cobalt in one of the electrodes in the battery design Tesla’s been using.

  3. I could care less about the CO2 reduction. What I think is a lot more important is that electric cars:
    – decouple the energy source from the motive engine. this is economically important because it means that as the energy markets fluctuate you can switch to the most economically suitable energy generating method without replacing the transportation infrastructure. hence it increases the security of the transportation segment.
    – have cheaper per mile costs than petroleum fueled cars.
    – are less complex in terms of parts and maintenance than combustion engine cars.
    – have more torque than combustion engine cars.
    – the cars produce less sound and air pollution. i’m not talking about CO2. I’m talking about CO, benzene, and NOx. which are known causes of heart disease and cancer.

    The main problem is the batteries are too expensive right now. Whether this can be solved or not is debatable.

    1. I wanted to buy a Model S last summer when I was in the market for a new car, but I couldn’t find enough change under the couch cushions and had to settle for a Mazda instead.

      I’m not an engineer, but besides the advantages you listed I’ve read about criticisms as well, such as limited range, longer time required to recharge a battery compared to refueling a gasoline-powered car, and poor battery performance in cold weather. I also agree with the main article that the supposed “green” benefits of electric cars are mythical, and that the vision of cars running off an electricity grid powered by solar and wind is a fairy tale.

      Having said that, I wonder if there might be a future for electric cars, if we build a new generation of thorium nuclear power plants. I also keep reading about nanotechnology that could lead to new breakthroughs in material science. Is it possible that new materials could create lighter, cheaper, and more efficient batteries that don’t require rare-earth minerals? As I said, I’m not an engineer, so there might be physical limits to battery efficiency. It’s just speculation on my part.

  4. Elon built the Tesla because he understood something basic… whether he wants to be green or not has absolutely nothing to do with the market place. I’ve always felt there would come a time when the curve of battery performance crossed into a muddy inbetween area where the vehicles become practical. From an engineering perspective they just beat the hell out of the internal combustion engine on almost any measure you want to suggest.

    I can’t wait for that next generation when the batteries get a bit smaller still and there is an electric motor on each wheel so that dynamic braking and control gets even more direct. At that point you have totalfly-by-wire in the driver seat, 4 motors, batteries, chargers and computers. No mechanical parts to wear out or break down. Just 4 electric motors… and those things can run (have run) for continuously for decades.

    Perhaps one day we’ll get our ‘fusion batteries’ to run them. Next century perhaps. But for now, all of the power distribution problems mentioned above are what I call ‘opportunities’. Any good entrepreneur knows this. Problems are just things on which you can get rich by providing a solution.

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