John Stossel | Inconvenient Truth about Electric Cars…
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brandyspaw
Member
None of the electric car fan boys seem to admit that, despite recent improvements, batteries need another generation of development to become truly practical. In their current form, they're too heavy, still lack range (particularly in high heat/low cold environments and are too costly.
The technology will eventually catch up to make them practical but wishing for them to be practical right now doesn't make them so. They should just shift the focus to hybrids which are much closer to practicality than EV's at this time.
The technology will eventually catch up to make them practical but wishing for them to be practical right now doesn't make them so. They should just shift the focus to hybrids which are much closer to practicality than EV's at this time.
brandyspaw said:
Maybe it’s because they have investments in EV. Remember Pelosi buying millions in Tesla days before Biden announced all federal vehicles will be EV? California is banning IC engines but knows the grid cannot handle all EV. Hmmm
brandyspaw
Member
Dauph said:
Sure, most certainly that would cause a bias. Just like I have a bias toward oil and gas since I have investments in those areas. However, even I realize there's drawbacks and limits to fossil fuels.
It just seems like the EV zealots (who are usually climate change dimwits as well) never seem to want to acknowledge the drawbacks and limits with them. Everything has pros and cons--it just depends on what works in a practical application. At this time, EV's still ain't cutting it.
Electric303
Member
I'm currently reading a book called The End of the World Is Just the Beginning_ Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan. I highly recommend the book. Part of the book goes into great detail into what it will take to even attempt to move away from fossil fuels to so-called "Greentech". This excerpt describes only one of the many materials required to build an EV with current tech:
"...Cobalt is going to be a tricky one.
Like all materials, cobalt has any number of minor industrial uses,
particularly in metal alloys, but all of them combined pale when compared
to their big demand source: batteries—specifically the sort of rechargeable
batteries that lie at the heart of the energy transition. The larger iPhones
have nearly half an ounce each, while the average Tesla has fifty pounds.
You think that electrifying everything and going green is the only way
forward? As of 2022, cobalt is the only sufficiently energy-dense material
that even hints that we might be able to use rechargeable batteries to tech
our way out of our climate challenges. It simply cannot be done—even
attempted—without cobalt, and a lot more cobalt than we currently have
access to, at that. Assuming all else holds equal (which is, of course, a
hilarious statement considering the topic of this book), annual cobalt metal
demand between 2022 and 2025 alone needs to double to 220,000 tons
simply to keep pace with Green aspirations.
That won’t happen. That can’t happen.
Like with the iron ore/steel nexus, the refining of cobalt ore into
finished metal is utterly wrapped up in China’s hyperfinance model. Eight
of the world’s fourteen largest cobalt sources are China-owned, and nearly
all cobalt refining occurs in the PRC (with Canada a very distant second).
As if that weren’t bad enough, there is no such thing as a “cobalt mine.”
Cobalt is one of those tricky things formed at similar times and under
similar conditions as other materials. Some 98 percent of global cobalt
production is generated as a by-product of nickel and copper output. The
reality is even more complicated than that, because not all nickel and
copper mines generate cobalt. More than half of commercially usable cobalt
comes from a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a
near-dictatorial place that is neither democratic nor a republic nor all that
far from being outright failed). Much of that production is generated
illegally, with artisanal miners (a fancy term to describe individuals who
grab a shovel, climb over barbed wire, and evade shoot-on-sight guards in
order to scrape out a few bits of ore) selling their output to Chinese
middlemen for pennies.
In an increasingly decentralized world, Congo is most certainly not on
the list of countries that will “make it,” with its future likely to be a
Hobbesian sort of famine-riddled anarchy. As goes Congo, so goes the
world’s cobalt access..."
"...Cobalt is going to be a tricky one.
Like all materials, cobalt has any number of minor industrial uses,
particularly in metal alloys, but all of them combined pale when compared
to their big demand source: batteries—specifically the sort of rechargeable
batteries that lie at the heart of the energy transition. The larger iPhones
have nearly half an ounce each, while the average Tesla has fifty pounds.
You think that electrifying everything and going green is the only way
forward? As of 2022, cobalt is the only sufficiently energy-dense material
that even hints that we might be able to use rechargeable batteries to tech
our way out of our climate challenges. It simply cannot be done—even
attempted—without cobalt, and a lot more cobalt than we currently have
access to, at that. Assuming all else holds equal (which is, of course, a
hilarious statement considering the topic of this book), annual cobalt metal
demand between 2022 and 2025 alone needs to double to 220,000 tons
simply to keep pace with Green aspirations.
That won’t happen. That can’t happen.
Like with the iron ore/steel nexus, the refining of cobalt ore into
finished metal is utterly wrapped up in China’s hyperfinance model. Eight
of the world’s fourteen largest cobalt sources are China-owned, and nearly
all cobalt refining occurs in the PRC (with Canada a very distant second).
As if that weren’t bad enough, there is no such thing as a “cobalt mine.”
Cobalt is one of those tricky things formed at similar times and under
similar conditions as other materials. Some 98 percent of global cobalt
production is generated as a by-product of nickel and copper output. The
reality is even more complicated than that, because not all nickel and
copper mines generate cobalt. More than half of commercially usable cobalt
comes from a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a
near-dictatorial place that is neither democratic nor a republic nor all that
far from being outright failed). Much of that production is generated
illegally, with artisanal miners (a fancy term to describe individuals who
grab a shovel, climb over barbed wire, and evade shoot-on-sight guards in
order to scrape out a few bits of ore) selling their output to Chinese
middlemen for pennies.
In an increasingly decentralized world, Congo is most certainly not on
the list of countries that will “make it,” with its future likely to be a
Hobbesian sort of famine-riddled anarchy. As goes Congo, so goes the
world’s cobalt access..."
First off, I'm being OBJECTIVE, based on studying electrical
engineering for the last 50 years. Computers for the last 40 years.
Politicians since LBJ... and history for as long as I can remember.
Short version: The technology is not ready for prime-time, despite
the political push for them.
Long version... and sit down for a while with your favorite cup-of-
something 'cause it is going to be LONG... so stop reading right here if you don't like reading. You have been warned! (skip to the very last paragraph, if you prefer)
There's a lot of non-technical ignorant folks out there that believe
technology is some kind of magical mystical force, and scientists can just produce these great advancements at-will. Wish it worked like that, but it doesn't. It takes a lot of decades of research and
development, going down a lot of dead-ends, and very intelligent
people spending the majority of their lives working incredibly hard.
Nobody just snaps their fingers and produces the next-big-thing.
Politicians are making engineering decisions they are wholly-
unqualified to make. They are totally ignorant on the subject... kind
of the same as they are with firearms and our rights. They are
trying to manifest the old book "Future Shock", only without the
humanity and knowledge, and it is looking more like Stalinism every day. Waving a government wand won't solve ANYTHING; historically, all it has done is make things worse. Also, just because something is new and different doesn't necessarily mean it is better. There are far too many unresolved issues, many relating to the same reasons EVs were abandoned when the ICE came into being.
Electric cars are a very old idea that pre-date the Otto-cycle
internal combustion engine. They were abandoned because of range issues, charging times, battery life and safety. Eddie Rickenbacker wrote about them in his 1967 autobiography and about how they worked... and didn't work. In the early part of the 20th Century, they were very popular for local grocery deliveries and the like... along with the Stanley Steamer. Back in the very early 1970s, I knew a dear friend of the family (he was known to us kids as Uncle Jimmy) who actually drove both kinds of vehicles as a young man for just that purpose.
In the 1970s, I knew a guy who actually built an electric vehicle out
of a Datsun pickup truck. He managed to fit a motor from an electric fork-lift to it, and filled the bed with Sears Die-Hard batteries. He was about 12 miles from work on back-roads, and had roughly a 25 mile range with the vehicle. At night, he would charge it up from his house-current for the next day. It ran rather well for a few years, and being that electricity was cheaper than gasoline at the time, he had a nifty little setup. That all changed when one day he was coming home on a very low remaining charge. He was trying to crest the final hill to his house, after which he could coast home. Well... six of the Die-Hards decided to explode. (he mentioned that with that particular motor, he was facing a 1000 ampere stall current, and Die-Hard construction achieved capacity by stuffing more thinner plates into the same spaces... which led to overheating and buckling issues. One of my old high school gym instructors had a badly acid-burned arm which he got from shielding his eyes from a Die-Hard explosion.) Luckily he was saved from the resulting blast and shower of sulfuric acid... but he never used the vehicle after that. He didn't say why, but I suspect the cost of battery replacement was high for the time relative to his salary and he decided to cut his losses. I'm also sure he was more than a little frightened by the experience.
That's pretty much the pattern for EVs and each attempted revival of them. About the only thing that has changed is bigger corporations backing it nowadays and newer battery technology. EVs were abandoned as mainstream because they did not, and never will work as long as they insist on a battery that must be charged and lose capacity over time requiring eventual replacement. The same issues exist today... despite the marketing hype! Have there been improvements? Sure. Are they sufficient to get within 20% of what ICE cars can do now? No. They still have very limited application with short-range use.
What about EV tractor-trailers? Not even a little bit practical.
Limit on the public roads for a tractor trailer is 80,000 pounds
without special permits. To carry that kind of load any appreciable
distance, cargo capacity will have to be shed in favor of battery
weight, and it doesn't take too long for the whole thing to become
uneconomical. Ford can't even get decent range out of their EV
pickup truck. (check out the reviews on YouTube as of this writing)
The real 800 pound gorillas in the room are cargo capacity, range,
battery life and charge times. Greenie-types foresee a world with
EV-equivalents of Smart-Cars. Problem is that real-world families
have to move people and groceries/other-stuff around. That takes
energy and energy sources that have high energy density. Mom's taxi service and grocery deliveries are a reality of everyday life. You
won't get that kind of range and cargo capacity with an EV as of this writing. Moms need a modern-day station wagon; today, that means an SUV or mini-van.
The very people that could benefit the most from EVs are apartment-dwelling office workers in big cities, and those folks have little access to fast-chargers at their parking spaces. Many living in big cities stick to public transportation for reasons of high vehicle expenses and traffic concerns. The cost of a parking space alone is almost like another apartment rent in places like NYC.
The infrastructure as it is will not support widespread use of
battery-based EVs. The cost to upgrade it will be enormous. Who is going to pay for the grid upgrades? Not the power companies! Who is going to pay for the 3-phase 480V delta to residential areas so the charge times can be reduced? Not the power companies! (btw., I'd actually support this cost as I could then run some nice old industrial machine tools in the basement - lathes, surface grinders and big Bridgeports... maybe even a punch-press... but right now Penelec won't run delta 2.5 miles up a dirt road for me. As of this writing, if you want access to three-phase 480V, you have to live in an industrial-zoned area.) This will end up being yet another burden for the working-class taxpayer.
Oh yeah... taxes. How much more will electricity be taxed should
battery-based EVs become mainstream? Think your electric bill is
high now?? Fuel taxes feed (well, sometimes) road/bridge construction and maintenance... and roads in the USA are generally
in piss-poor condition. (the reason why folks went to SUVs was the
tougher suspension)
Then there are the I(squared)R losses in the grid that nobody talks
about. This is a bit of electrical engineering 101. All conductors
have resistance. That resistance per foot may be low, but it adds up
in the thousands upon thousands of miles of wires. There are ways to reduce the effects of this resistance by using AC (thanks to Nikolai Tesla/Westinghouse) and jacking the voltage very high. Problem is, again, that there is no free lunch in engineering. Resistance might be a lessened problem with high voltage, but now you have issues with inductance. There are ways to work with that as well, but ultimately you lose 10% to 20% of what you put into the national grid, depending where you are on that grid. So... to do the same thing we do with ICE cars, we will have to burn 10% to 20% MORE fuel (think coal, oil and natural gas 'cause the greenies don't like nuclear) because that energy will be dissipated in the form of heat. Transmission losses are a reality, and will continue to be a reality, unless someone figures out a way to make the grid out of an ambient-temp superconductor. There is also a way to beam electric power via microwaves with pretty good efficiency, but don't be anywhere near that beam lest you be fried rather quickly.
If the EV companies insist on sticking with battery technology to
power EVs, the issues will never be solved because batteries are
really lousy at storing energy with any great degree of density. What is the sense of using 1000 pounds of battery to store the same energy that's in 80 pounds of gasoline?? Then there's the intense toxicity of the materials used in those batteries, along with the slave labor.
The battery issue is the nail in the coffin for current-config EVs,
and the same thing that stopped them cold in the last 100-plus years: battery weight vs capacity (energy density) and charge time/battery life. Pontificate all you want about change-gonna-come, but the engineering realities will stop EVs cold UNTIL THE BATTERY IS ELIMINATED.
There are other issues to consider if somehow current-config EVs come to the mainstream, AND the greenies relent on their assault on nuclear power generation so we don't need natural gas oil or coal for power generation... Your cost of lubricants will go way up when the economies of scale are lost from the petroleum cracking process being done on the currently-large scale. Are you willing to pay $100 for a single small tube of grease? (as if vehicle maintenance these days doesn't cost enough, thanks to all the fragile sensors and computer boxes that blow out with the slightest provocation.) Something else you will find is that when large-scale production turns to small-scale production, consistency goes out the window. (this applies to anything in manufacturing)
You will also find a problem with fertilizer and pesticide production
when you abandon petroleum. That directly implicates food supply. (I hear Soros and Gates have some ideas on how to get away with this, but their solution is similar to their nazzy Uncle Adolf.)
There are a lot of appliances that run on propane in use in rural
America. (you know, the people that produce the food you eat) They often have no access to natural gas and use propane for cooking and heating, along with electricity to light off the propane. Cost of propane will increase far beyond current pricing since propane is high-up on the distillation column ladder. The higher you go, the less there is in the cracking process. Ditto for asphalt production (that is at the bottom of the cracking process), which is a by-product of petroleum. We use an awful-lot of asphalt for our roads.
Plastics will go up in price as well since they are also petroleum
products. Ditto for polyester-based clothing. Many products of
today are impossible to make without petroleum. Take a good look at the modern car (be it EV or otherwise) and notice how much plastic is in it.
We in the audio world realized what economies of scale really meant when a single 10.5" reel of 1/4" mag tape went up to over 125-beans US when it used to be about *maybe* 50us. All that changed when the business shifted to digital recording. We gained a lot in quality (yes, it is infinitely better) but lost the whole analog-saturation phenomenon. Got to the point where software plug-ins had to be developed to add those distortions back *in*. Sounds crazy... but that's exactly what happened. ATR Magnetics right here in York, PA is the only US corporation left making mag-tape... and it took them years to get up to speed after Ampex and 3M shut down their production lines. The #1 problem they had was batch-to-batch
consistency. The manufacturing process is so involved that they just recently decided to sell off the parent business, which refurbishes old Ampex ATR-1xx (2, 4, 8, 16 and 32-track machines) series machines for recording studios. There are still a few of us running mag-tape machines mainly because the recording artists demand it. (I currently have four Ampex pro machines, one of which is awaiting a full rebuild. I have the parts, but haven't touched it because... well... frankly there is little call for it these days.)
Nothing operates in a vacuum... except a vacuum tube... which brings me to a bit of digression that will tangentially relate to EVs...
Here's the real issue that the audio world got kicked square in the
nuts with: the problem of recording permanence. (I warned them about this 20 years ago, and they all laughed. They are not laughing now, because they got bit hard by it.) Acetate-base mag tape has an unusually long life. I have reels from the early 1950s that still play and sound every bit as good as the day they were recorded. Digital storage mediums are not nearly as long-lived, and the initial ones failed miserably. The only reason there is anything approaching digital permanence is there is a very labor-intensive effort to bump those digital copies to newer mediums. If anyone drops the ball on this, the recordings revert to data-dust *when* (not if) that storage medium fails from bit-rot & the error-correction systems can't fix it.
In the photography world, we got hit with a similar permanence issue. Used to be that Kodak Kodachrome was the standard for archival quality. The least-stable dye in Kodachrome transparencies was the yellow, and that was good for roughly 240 years. Then the feds killed Kodachrome because of the toxic chemicals... kind of like the same way they shut down all the lead smelters here. Now we only have what few people can still afford the silver process for B&W (good for 100 years, assuming archival processing and materials) and the old E-6 chemistry for slides that is *maybe* good for 30 years before it fades. Digital... all the images are kept on low-grade consumer storage mediums, and at some point folks are going to find out just how unstable those mediums really are... just like the audio guys did. Yes, there are cloud-based solutions, but are they really any more trustworthy & do you want to keep paying them fees to hold on to your data. Also, there is the issue of data security. Seems like every week we hear about hacker breaches to our financial data. Will your audio, still image and video files be any more secure? Can you afford to sue them if those data files are lost?
Getting back to EVs and cars with excessive amounts of gov't-mandated electronics, the more complex the machine, the more likely it is to break down. Consumer-grade electronics have a long history of premature failure. Failure rates go up with temperature and vibration. There is ALWAYS a tradeoff in new-and-improved
technology, and historically this meant serviceability suffered. Don't even get me started on buggy software and endless patches/upgrades.
The main issue facing the EV is battery life and the cost of
replacement. Even if battery technology gets much better by leaps
and bounds, it will still be an expensive proposition. High-cap
batteries just aren't cheap. They are the #1 source of cost in a
current-config EV. Battery is dying in your EV? Replacement cost is
high, and your EV has little resale value if the battery is towards
the end of its life. Heaven help you when the time comes where your EV is a discontinued model, and nobody is making a replacement battery pack for it.
Fuel cells to power EVs are a nice idea, but they require hydrogen
and the delivery infrastructure on a large scale to work. I love the
idea and great strides have been made with fuel cells since the
Apollo days... but manufacturing the hydrogen and delivering it
takes a lot of energy and risk. I don't think it will go large-scale
any time too soon.
Personally, I think the best way is to build an electric chassis is
to make it in a similar fashion as a locomotive; i.e. a really big
gen-set. Run the generator section with a turbine; we have the metal technology to make a Tesla-style turbine work now. Minimal moving parts, replaces the inefficient mechanical/fluid trans and the range will be impressive. Run it on gasoline, diesel, perfume, alcohol, kerosene, JP4... whatever. Come the day when Doc Brown's "Mr. Fusion" becomes a reality, you won't need the turbine anymore. A gen-set arrangement eliminates the auto trans and those silly CVTs that don't hold up. An electrical speed control based on PWM (pulse-width modulation) will make for incredible efficiency far beyond any slush-box could ever deliver. (marketers say up to 98% on current-issue auto-trans, but I won't buy any more than 75%, assuming a lock-up torque converter - too much mechanical friction is present in the bearing surfaces and clutch packs) The turbine can be replaced when better technology becomes available... be it nuclear or matter-antimatter much later down the road. Until then, the gas/diesel-powered machine isn't going anywhere... UNLESS you plan on abandoning a few billion people & I suspect you will find very few volunteers for the job.
EVs *could* work in the interim if we ELIMINATE THE BATTERY CONCEPT. It could happen relatively soon *IF* we do a turbine setup to turn a generator (far less moving parts), then move to something better in the future that directly produces the electricity required. (i.e. nuclear reactor) Eliminating liquid or gaseous fuels will be much further down the road. That will take many more years of research. My best guess is 50 years before that happens, and I don't think it is at all out of line. Don't agree? How do you think the NRC will react to the idea of every EV having a small nuclear fusion reactor on-board?
One place where EVs *have worked* for a long time is Toronto, Canada. They have electric buses that are powered by a high-voltage/high-current overhead grid in a limited part of the city. The same overhead grid is used by the street trolley cars. There is no
battery involved.
Until they crack the 500-mile range (and without a bunch of marketing hooey), fix the slow charging issue (i.e. no longer than what it takes to fill an average-sized gas tank at the pump now) and figure out how to deliver three-phase delta to the entire country with a massive upgrade to the grid... battery-based EVs will remain a pipe-dream. If the battery-based EV was such a great idea, nobody would have any desire to buy cars with ICE engines and the feds wouldn't be trying to mandate anything.
Safety... as a safety professional I can tell you from direct experience that few really care much about safety, until it starts costing them a lot of money. (insurance companies come immediately to mind here) When a bunch of school children get burned alive in an EV
bus fire, you *might* see some real changes made in safety. Dig it:
MAYBE. (remember this is the same party that wants to abort children *after* they exit the womb) I can tell you that Li-Ion batteries will, at some point, be outlawed. About the best we can hope for now is that fire departments start reading the safety data sheet for lithium metal and realize that you need dolomite, not water, to extinguish those fires. Reading? Yeah, I know... sometimes I expect too much from folks, especially public servants.
As far as the mythical daily technological improvements... Paul W.
Klipsch used to read about them in the audio press, and say "Ho-
hum... another technological breakthrough..." His original speaker
design, the Klipschorn, is still in production. It is past the 75 year mark now. Yes... 75-plus years in continuous production. They still sound great... and yes, I have a pair of them. His argument against small bookshelf speakers always was this: how do you miniaturize a low frequency wave where the fundamental wavelength is 32 feet? If you want accurate bottom-end, you need size to reproduce it, unless your source material doesn't have all that much bottom-end.
If you remember nothing else from this long-winded post, remember this: In engineering there is no free lunch. Gains are offset by losses on the other side of the equation. You don't get something for nothing.
engineering for the last 50 years. Computers for the last 40 years.
Politicians since LBJ... and history for as long as I can remember.
Short version: The technology is not ready for prime-time, despite
the political push for them.
Long version... and sit down for a while with your favorite cup-of-
something 'cause it is going to be LONG... so stop reading right here if you don't like reading. You have been warned! (skip to the very last paragraph, if you prefer)
There's a lot of non-technical ignorant folks out there that believe
technology is some kind of magical mystical force, and scientists can just produce these great advancements at-will. Wish it worked like that, but it doesn't. It takes a lot of decades of research and
development, going down a lot of dead-ends, and very intelligent
people spending the majority of their lives working incredibly hard.
Nobody just snaps their fingers and produces the next-big-thing.
Politicians are making engineering decisions they are wholly-
unqualified to make. They are totally ignorant on the subject... kind
of the same as they are with firearms and our rights. They are
trying to manifest the old book "Future Shock", only without the
humanity and knowledge, and it is looking more like Stalinism every day. Waving a government wand won't solve ANYTHING; historically, all it has done is make things worse. Also, just because something is new and different doesn't necessarily mean it is better. There are far too many unresolved issues, many relating to the same reasons EVs were abandoned when the ICE came into being.
Electric cars are a very old idea that pre-date the Otto-cycle
internal combustion engine. They were abandoned because of range issues, charging times, battery life and safety. Eddie Rickenbacker wrote about them in his 1967 autobiography and about how they worked... and didn't work. In the early part of the 20th Century, they were very popular for local grocery deliveries and the like... along with the Stanley Steamer. Back in the very early 1970s, I knew a dear friend of the family (he was known to us kids as Uncle Jimmy) who actually drove both kinds of vehicles as a young man for just that purpose.
In the 1970s, I knew a guy who actually built an electric vehicle out
of a Datsun pickup truck. He managed to fit a motor from an electric fork-lift to it, and filled the bed with Sears Die-Hard batteries. He was about 12 miles from work on back-roads, and had roughly a 25 mile range with the vehicle. At night, he would charge it up from his house-current for the next day. It ran rather well for a few years, and being that electricity was cheaper than gasoline at the time, he had a nifty little setup. That all changed when one day he was coming home on a very low remaining charge. He was trying to crest the final hill to his house, after which he could coast home. Well... six of the Die-Hards decided to explode. (he mentioned that with that particular motor, he was facing a 1000 ampere stall current, and Die-Hard construction achieved capacity by stuffing more thinner plates into the same spaces... which led to overheating and buckling issues. One of my old high school gym instructors had a badly acid-burned arm which he got from shielding his eyes from a Die-Hard explosion.) Luckily he was saved from the resulting blast and shower of sulfuric acid... but he never used the vehicle after that. He didn't say why, but I suspect the cost of battery replacement was high for the time relative to his salary and he decided to cut his losses. I'm also sure he was more than a little frightened by the experience.
That's pretty much the pattern for EVs and each attempted revival of them. About the only thing that has changed is bigger corporations backing it nowadays and newer battery technology. EVs were abandoned as mainstream because they did not, and never will work as long as they insist on a battery that must be charged and lose capacity over time requiring eventual replacement. The same issues exist today... despite the marketing hype! Have there been improvements? Sure. Are they sufficient to get within 20% of what ICE cars can do now? No. They still have very limited application with short-range use.
What about EV tractor-trailers? Not even a little bit practical.
Limit on the public roads for a tractor trailer is 80,000 pounds
without special permits. To carry that kind of load any appreciable
distance, cargo capacity will have to be shed in favor of battery
weight, and it doesn't take too long for the whole thing to become
uneconomical. Ford can't even get decent range out of their EV
pickup truck. (check out the reviews on YouTube as of this writing)
The real 800 pound gorillas in the room are cargo capacity, range,
battery life and charge times. Greenie-types foresee a world with
EV-equivalents of Smart-Cars. Problem is that real-world families
have to move people and groceries/other-stuff around. That takes
energy and energy sources that have high energy density. Mom's taxi service and grocery deliveries are a reality of everyday life. You
won't get that kind of range and cargo capacity with an EV as of this writing. Moms need a modern-day station wagon; today, that means an SUV or mini-van.
The very people that could benefit the most from EVs are apartment-dwelling office workers in big cities, and those folks have little access to fast-chargers at their parking spaces. Many living in big cities stick to public transportation for reasons of high vehicle expenses and traffic concerns. The cost of a parking space alone is almost like another apartment rent in places like NYC.
The infrastructure as it is will not support widespread use of
battery-based EVs. The cost to upgrade it will be enormous. Who is going to pay for the grid upgrades? Not the power companies! Who is going to pay for the 3-phase 480V delta to residential areas so the charge times can be reduced? Not the power companies! (btw., I'd actually support this cost as I could then run some nice old industrial machine tools in the basement - lathes, surface grinders and big Bridgeports... maybe even a punch-press... but right now Penelec won't run delta 2.5 miles up a dirt road for me. As of this writing, if you want access to three-phase 480V, you have to live in an industrial-zoned area.) This will end up being yet another burden for the working-class taxpayer.
Oh yeah... taxes. How much more will electricity be taxed should
battery-based EVs become mainstream? Think your electric bill is
high now?? Fuel taxes feed (well, sometimes) road/bridge construction and maintenance... and roads in the USA are generally
in piss-poor condition. (the reason why folks went to SUVs was the
tougher suspension)
Then there are the I(squared)R losses in the grid that nobody talks
about. This is a bit of electrical engineering 101. All conductors
have resistance. That resistance per foot may be low, but it adds up
in the thousands upon thousands of miles of wires. There are ways to reduce the effects of this resistance by using AC (thanks to Nikolai Tesla/Westinghouse) and jacking the voltage very high. Problem is, again, that there is no free lunch in engineering. Resistance might be a lessened problem with high voltage, but now you have issues with inductance. There are ways to work with that as well, but ultimately you lose 10% to 20% of what you put into the national grid, depending where you are on that grid. So... to do the same thing we do with ICE cars, we will have to burn 10% to 20% MORE fuel (think coal, oil and natural gas 'cause the greenies don't like nuclear) because that energy will be dissipated in the form of heat. Transmission losses are a reality, and will continue to be a reality, unless someone figures out a way to make the grid out of an ambient-temp superconductor. There is also a way to beam electric power via microwaves with pretty good efficiency, but don't be anywhere near that beam lest you be fried rather quickly.
If the EV companies insist on sticking with battery technology to
power EVs, the issues will never be solved because batteries are
really lousy at storing energy with any great degree of density. What is the sense of using 1000 pounds of battery to store the same energy that's in 80 pounds of gasoline?? Then there's the intense toxicity of the materials used in those batteries, along with the slave labor.
The battery issue is the nail in the coffin for current-config EVs,
and the same thing that stopped them cold in the last 100-plus years: battery weight vs capacity (energy density) and charge time/battery life. Pontificate all you want about change-gonna-come, but the engineering realities will stop EVs cold UNTIL THE BATTERY IS ELIMINATED.
There are other issues to consider if somehow current-config EVs come to the mainstream, AND the greenies relent on their assault on nuclear power generation so we don't need natural gas oil or coal for power generation... Your cost of lubricants will go way up when the economies of scale are lost from the petroleum cracking process being done on the currently-large scale. Are you willing to pay $100 for a single small tube of grease? (as if vehicle maintenance these days doesn't cost enough, thanks to all the fragile sensors and computer boxes that blow out with the slightest provocation.) Something else you will find is that when large-scale production turns to small-scale production, consistency goes out the window. (this applies to anything in manufacturing)
You will also find a problem with fertilizer and pesticide production
when you abandon petroleum. That directly implicates food supply. (I hear Soros and Gates have some ideas on how to get away with this, but their solution is similar to their nazzy Uncle Adolf.)
There are a lot of appliances that run on propane in use in rural
America. (you know, the people that produce the food you eat) They often have no access to natural gas and use propane for cooking and heating, along with electricity to light off the propane. Cost of propane will increase far beyond current pricing since propane is high-up on the distillation column ladder. The higher you go, the less there is in the cracking process. Ditto for asphalt production (that is at the bottom of the cracking process), which is a by-product of petroleum. We use an awful-lot of asphalt for our roads.
Plastics will go up in price as well since they are also petroleum
products. Ditto for polyester-based clothing. Many products of
today are impossible to make without petroleum. Take a good look at the modern car (be it EV or otherwise) and notice how much plastic is in it.
We in the audio world realized what economies of scale really meant when a single 10.5" reel of 1/4" mag tape went up to over 125-beans US when it used to be about *maybe* 50us. All that changed when the business shifted to digital recording. We gained a lot in quality (yes, it is infinitely better) but lost the whole analog-saturation phenomenon. Got to the point where software plug-ins had to be developed to add those distortions back *in*. Sounds crazy... but that's exactly what happened. ATR Magnetics right here in York, PA is the only US corporation left making mag-tape... and it took them years to get up to speed after Ampex and 3M shut down their production lines. The #1 problem they had was batch-to-batch
consistency. The manufacturing process is so involved that they just recently decided to sell off the parent business, which refurbishes old Ampex ATR-1xx (2, 4, 8, 16 and 32-track machines) series machines for recording studios. There are still a few of us running mag-tape machines mainly because the recording artists demand it. (I currently have four Ampex pro machines, one of which is awaiting a full rebuild. I have the parts, but haven't touched it because... well... frankly there is little call for it these days.)
Nothing operates in a vacuum... except a vacuum tube... which brings me to a bit of digression that will tangentially relate to EVs...
Here's the real issue that the audio world got kicked square in the
nuts with: the problem of recording permanence. (I warned them about this 20 years ago, and they all laughed. They are not laughing now, because they got bit hard by it.) Acetate-base mag tape has an unusually long life. I have reels from the early 1950s that still play and sound every bit as good as the day they were recorded. Digital storage mediums are not nearly as long-lived, and the initial ones failed miserably. The only reason there is anything approaching digital permanence is there is a very labor-intensive effort to bump those digital copies to newer mediums. If anyone drops the ball on this, the recordings revert to data-dust *when* (not if) that storage medium fails from bit-rot & the error-correction systems can't fix it.
In the photography world, we got hit with a similar permanence issue. Used to be that Kodak Kodachrome was the standard for archival quality. The least-stable dye in Kodachrome transparencies was the yellow, and that was good for roughly 240 years. Then the feds killed Kodachrome because of the toxic chemicals... kind of like the same way they shut down all the lead smelters here. Now we only have what few people can still afford the silver process for B&W (good for 100 years, assuming archival processing and materials) and the old E-6 chemistry for slides that is *maybe* good for 30 years before it fades. Digital... all the images are kept on low-grade consumer storage mediums, and at some point folks are going to find out just how unstable those mediums really are... just like the audio guys did. Yes, there are cloud-based solutions, but are they really any more trustworthy & do you want to keep paying them fees to hold on to your data. Also, there is the issue of data security. Seems like every week we hear about hacker breaches to our financial data. Will your audio, still image and video files be any more secure? Can you afford to sue them if those data files are lost?
Getting back to EVs and cars with excessive amounts of gov't-mandated electronics, the more complex the machine, the more likely it is to break down. Consumer-grade electronics have a long history of premature failure. Failure rates go up with temperature and vibration. There is ALWAYS a tradeoff in new-and-improved
technology, and historically this meant serviceability suffered. Don't even get me started on buggy software and endless patches/upgrades.
The main issue facing the EV is battery life and the cost of
replacement. Even if battery technology gets much better by leaps
and bounds, it will still be an expensive proposition. High-cap
batteries just aren't cheap. They are the #1 source of cost in a
current-config EV. Battery is dying in your EV? Replacement cost is
high, and your EV has little resale value if the battery is towards
the end of its life. Heaven help you when the time comes where your EV is a discontinued model, and nobody is making a replacement battery pack for it.
Fuel cells to power EVs are a nice idea, but they require hydrogen
and the delivery infrastructure on a large scale to work. I love the
idea and great strides have been made with fuel cells since the
Apollo days... but manufacturing the hydrogen and delivering it
takes a lot of energy and risk. I don't think it will go large-scale
any time too soon.
Personally, I think the best way is to build an electric chassis is
to make it in a similar fashion as a locomotive; i.e. a really big
gen-set. Run the generator section with a turbine; we have the metal technology to make a Tesla-style turbine work now. Minimal moving parts, replaces the inefficient mechanical/fluid trans and the range will be impressive. Run it on gasoline, diesel, perfume, alcohol, kerosene, JP4... whatever. Come the day when Doc Brown's "Mr. Fusion" becomes a reality, you won't need the turbine anymore. A gen-set arrangement eliminates the auto trans and those silly CVTs that don't hold up. An electrical speed control based on PWM (pulse-width modulation) will make for incredible efficiency far beyond any slush-box could ever deliver. (marketers say up to 98% on current-issue auto-trans, but I won't buy any more than 75%, assuming a lock-up torque converter - too much mechanical friction is present in the bearing surfaces and clutch packs) The turbine can be replaced when better technology becomes available... be it nuclear or matter-antimatter much later down the road. Until then, the gas/diesel-powered machine isn't going anywhere... UNLESS you plan on abandoning a few billion people & I suspect you will find very few volunteers for the job.
EVs *could* work in the interim if we ELIMINATE THE BATTERY CONCEPT. It could happen relatively soon *IF* we do a turbine setup to turn a generator (far less moving parts), then move to something better in the future that directly produces the electricity required. (i.e. nuclear reactor) Eliminating liquid or gaseous fuels will be much further down the road. That will take many more years of research. My best guess is 50 years before that happens, and I don't think it is at all out of line. Don't agree? How do you think the NRC will react to the idea of every EV having a small nuclear fusion reactor on-board?
One place where EVs *have worked* for a long time is Toronto, Canada. They have electric buses that are powered by a high-voltage/high-current overhead grid in a limited part of the city. The same overhead grid is used by the street trolley cars. There is no
battery involved.
Until they crack the 500-mile range (and without a bunch of marketing hooey), fix the slow charging issue (i.e. no longer than what it takes to fill an average-sized gas tank at the pump now) and figure out how to deliver three-phase delta to the entire country with a massive upgrade to the grid... battery-based EVs will remain a pipe-dream. If the battery-based EV was such a great idea, nobody would have any desire to buy cars with ICE engines and the feds wouldn't be trying to mandate anything.
Safety... as a safety professional I can tell you from direct experience that few really care much about safety, until it starts costing them a lot of money. (insurance companies come immediately to mind here) When a bunch of school children get burned alive in an EV
bus fire, you *might* see some real changes made in safety. Dig it:
MAYBE. (remember this is the same party that wants to abort children *after* they exit the womb) I can tell you that Li-Ion batteries will, at some point, be outlawed. About the best we can hope for now is that fire departments start reading the safety data sheet for lithium metal and realize that you need dolomite, not water, to extinguish those fires. Reading? Yeah, I know... sometimes I expect too much from folks, especially public servants.
As far as the mythical daily technological improvements... Paul W.
Klipsch used to read about them in the audio press, and say "Ho-
hum... another technological breakthrough..." His original speaker
design, the Klipschorn, is still in production. It is past the 75 year mark now. Yes... 75-plus years in continuous production. They still sound great... and yes, I have a pair of them. His argument against small bookshelf speakers always was this: how do you miniaturize a low frequency wave where the fundamental wavelength is 32 feet? If you want accurate bottom-end, you need size to reproduce it, unless your source material doesn't have all that much bottom-end.
If you remember nothing else from this long-winded post, remember this: In engineering there is no free lunch. Gains are offset by losses on the other side of the equation. You don't get something for nothing.
I think for many people it's not about the environment or being green, it's about their monthly budget and income.
If someone drives a lot (like my friend does) and spends hundreds of dollars a month in gas (even though he had a hybrid that got 60 miles per gallon) and you or anyone makes the switch to an electric vehicle that can go just as far on a $3 charge as you could with a $60 fill up and you are saving hundreds of dollars a month, then I say go for it.
There is also a lot less maintenance on an electric vehicle, no oil changes etc.
If someone drives a lot (like my friend does) and spends hundreds of dollars a month in gas (even though he had a hybrid that got 60 miles per gallon) and you or anyone makes the switch to an electric vehicle that can go just as far on a $3 charge as you could with a $60 fill up and you are saving hundreds of dollars a month, then I say go for it.
There is also a lot less maintenance on an electric vehicle, no oil changes etc.
EV's aren't just about being green, it's about control. Think about it. Now you can drive your IC vehicle hundreds of miles on a fill. Relatively cheaply you can add an extra fuel tank and increase your range if desired, fill up easily at the gas station.
How about EV's? Limited range, an electrical grid that right now is struggling to keep up, such as CA telling people to Not charge their EV due to power shortages and rolling blackouts. So we're going to add Millions of EV's? We don't have the capacity to charge them and when the order to 'not charge' comes down you will comply. With today's Smart Meters they will know if you're charging your EV and will just shut off your electricity if you don't comply.
Our days of driving long distances for vacations or just because we want to are going to end because we'll all be stuck at home with EV's with dead batteries.
Control.
How about EV's? Limited range, an electrical grid that right now is struggling to keep up, such as CA telling people to Not charge their EV due to power shortages and rolling blackouts. So we're going to add Millions of EV's? We don't have the capacity to charge them and when the order to 'not charge' comes down you will comply. With today's Smart Meters they will know if you're charging your EV and will just shut off your electricity if you don't comply.
Our days of driving long distances for vacations or just because we want to are going to end because we'll all be stuck at home with EV's with dead batteries.
Control.
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