Slashdot Mirror
EVs In the Spotlight At West Coast Green Conference
DeviceGuru writes "Electric vehicles were prominent among the 'hot products' showcased at West Coast Green in San Francisco this week. The event's product expo featured an assortment of preproduction units, prototypes, and concept models based on two-, three-, and four-wheel designs, along with several of the vehicles' creators. Specifically, the EVs and plug-in hybrids that participated in the show included Wheego's Whip, Saba's Carbon Zero Roadster, Green Lite's three-wheeled plug-in hybrid, Brammo's all-electric Enertia motorcycle, and Mitsubishi's i-MiEV EV, which PG&E is evaluating for some unstated purpose. Notably absent were Nissan's LEAF, Chevy's Volt, Toyota's Prius Plug-in, and Tesla's sexy Roadster, though in fairness the conference wasn't an actual auto show. So how many Slashdot readers plan to switch over to a plug-in EV in the next few years?"
How about Better Place? The creator had a prominent TED speech. Fills up faster than a regular car, and cheaper to own. The only issue is that they plan on charging by the mile, but insist it's still cheaper than your gas guzzler.
Give me something that goes the same distance of a tank of gas
I've heard that several times and it doesn't make any sense to me. If I am driving around town, I only need to fill up once every week, at most. If I can charge my car at home, I really don't need it to last an entire week. A little margin is required, in case I forget to plug it in one night, or decide to run extra errands, and accounting for diminished battery capacity over the life of the vehicle. Three days of driving is fine, which for most people is 90-150 miles. The Nissan Leaf can do that now. Some people have longer commutes, so that could be increased a bit, but I don't think the average commuter needs the 300-400 miles that a normal car can get on a tank if you can fill up at home.
On the other hand, if I am going out of town, there are very few places I can go on a single tank of gas. Even if there were charging stations available everywhere, the amount of time it takes to charge is unpractical for long drives. I would want to to hold a full day's drive, at least 1000 miles, and confidence that there would be a somewhere to charge where I slept, before I considered using a pure electric for out of town trips.
I don't see much added value in increasing the range over ~200 miles, unless you are surpassing ~1000.
And give me a million dollars, world peace, and a comfy pair of shoes or don't even bother.
Tell you what, junior. Why don't you give me a call when gas is six bucks a gallon?
Can you imagine if Thomas Edison had been working on the light bulb and this guy would have said, "Whaddya mean I need a cord? My candle doesn't need a cord. You can keep your stupid electric light until you don't need a cord.
Sport, that's just not how progress happens.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course Edison didn't say that. He said "hey this dude Swanson has something that I can make a ton of money off, so I guess I'll just steal it".
Paid to stand in line and expect delivery by end-of-year. I nearly had an EV-1 back in the day, but backed out when they refused to sell them, would only lease. This time should be the charm. The charger location is approved by my HOA and the install estimate is done, so it's just a matter of when Nissan can get production ramped up enough. there's a set of legacy chargers across from my office, so I have the option of plugging in during the day. And the city gives free parking to EV owners in their garages, so it is even subsidized. They just need to update the AVCON plug to the newer version and things should be set.
Since we can plug in an electric car for repowering in our homes and at our offices (and other destinations), they don't need as far a range. And since we generally use our cars for much shorter trips than the maximum range, that range was wasted capacity anyway, except for rare trips. Trips for which we can rent a car more suited for it.
The main problem with our transit economy has been buying cars with much more capacity than we need, and then looking for excuses to use it. If the lower capacity of early electric cars gets Americans to change our driving habits to use less energy, plus they're more efficient, we'll have won on both the important fronts needed to use energy responsibly.
Once the technology can offer the same full range at the same price for the machines as combustion cars did, we'll largely have outgrown them. But to get there, we need more people to realize that these early versions are completely satisfactory for reasonable use. Which will increase consumption, deliver returns on the initial models' investment, and bring down prices while increasing performance.
--
make install -not war
Can you imagine if Thomas Edison had been working on the light bulb and this guy would have said, "Whaddya mean I need a cord? My candle doesn't need a cord. You can keep your stupid electric light until you don't need a cord.
He would have had to ask Tesla nicely?
"Why don't you give me a call when gas is six bucks a gallon?"
Rrrrrring! It's more than that on the gas-station I can see from here. (Europe)
People are mis-identifying their concerns, in my opinion. The average consumer is concerned about getting stranded because their vehicle runs out of fuel. In a gasoline powered fuel, you walk to the nearest gas station, fill up a container with gas, walk it back to your car, and you are good to go. If we could come up with a similar mechanism for an electric car, and help people feel comfortable that the need to employ it would be rare, then the concern would be mostly gone. I think the best suggestion I've seen so far is make sure the batteries used are modular, and easy to replace. If you run out of power, you can go grab a single replacement, which would get you to the station, where you could swap out the rest. That deals with the recharge rate - and might even be faster than refilling with gasoline, if it could be done correctly. The problem with that line of thought is that battery technology, and electric car technology - is not yet at a point where it is "good enough". And any educated market analyst will tell you that modularity in a market where the product isn't yet "good enough" will not compete well against integrated and proprietary product stacks that can be tweaked and changed more quickly in response to technological changes.
[...] when I do drive, it's generally over 500 miles (my trips have been 700-1500 miles and I do maybe four or so of them per year [...] Even if I do transition to a typical commuter profile, I still am going to be very reluctant to maintain two cars (one for commuting and one for traveling) when all I really need is one car which has typical endurance (300-400 miles between refuel/recharge).
Two words: Rental Car.
You have the electric for most of your driving. When you need a car for some kind of distance, rent one. Especially if you're doing it only four times per year.
I like to do bike rides in my area. I'll rent a minivan for a day once a month, since I have a little sports car that won't fit a bicycle. It costs me around $50. That's cheaper than a car payment on a second car.
This one probably won't be true. Most wires just can't give out enough power. Recharging a car at speeds at which a gas car is charged takes around 5 megawatts. That means that 10 of my local costco gas stations = 1 powerplant.
It's not quite that bad. 1 megawatt is more like it. The Tesla Roadster battery has a capacity of 53kWh. Their "fast charge" is 3 hours, and requires 220V 80A, or 17.6 KW. To charge 60x faster, in 3 minutes, would require about 1 MW. (4KV at 250A, perhaps?)
It's been suggested that stations on weaker parts of the power grid might have local batteries, to level out their load. They could still charge a car in 3 minutes, but maybe only 5-10 cars per hour. Then they only need 100KW coming in.
Batteries that can take charge rates like that don't exist yet. There are claims from the "nanotechnology" crowd that they will be available Real Soon Now. We'll see.
15 minute charge, though, is feasible now. That can be addressed with marketing; the combo gas station/Burger King/Starbucks/grocery store might work. (Or not.)
Consider a service plaza on a major Interstate highway in an isolated area. A good example would be I-15 from LA to Vegas. Assume a range of 200 miles, like a Tesla roadster. Every 20 miles, there's a service plaza. Assume 10% of cars come in for a recharge at each service plaza. An expressway lane has a capacity of 2000 cars per hour, so an 8-lane freeway has 16,000 cars per hour at max. If 10% of those need a Tesla-sized recharge, that's about 50KWh per car, or 1600*50 KWH/hr, or 8 megawatts per service plaza per direction, or 16MW per service plaza, or 80MW for 100 miles of road. That's big, but not unreachable.
The average consumer is concerned about getting stranded because their vehicle runs out of fuel.
Another possible option: call a tow truck, have the tow-truck use its engine to recharge your battery to the point where you can make it to the nearest recharge station. Not really all that different from what a lot of people would do when their gas-powered car runs out of gas.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
&& >= 60 km/h.
Ignoring that 60km/h can be done on a moped, I'll assume you meant 60mph. Which, if you had done more than jump on the groupthink bandwagon, you would realize is easily doable (admittedly with "high-performance" electric vehicles, but still). Mass-production vehicles don't necessarily need to be all that speedy, although I don't think 60mph is outside the realm of "normal" unless you're some kind of anti-technology freak.
The biggest factor against electric vehicles is currently range, not speed. Tesla motors has had an electric drag racer for several years; you can easily find videos of their electric car absolutely smoking petroleum-based racers on the track. Power is actually *better* with an electric motor - the power (torque) curve is dramatically different in an electric motor as compared to a combustion engine, in that (in a basic sense) the power is all available regardless of the RPM of the motor, as opposed to a combustion engine requiring rotational energy before it can crank out decent numbers.
I've heard some absolutely ridiculous arguments against electric motor ranges, by the way - someone actually commented that traffic would obliterate the supposed fuel-efficiency numbers of any EV... without stopping to think that when the vehicle is not in motion, the motor isn't doing anything. If you are at a red light, the only things taking electrical power are your radio and the vehicle's climate-control system - unlike a combustion engine, which keeps a massive flywheel turning as long as the vehicle is "running". This can be unsettling in a hybrid; it takes some getting used to when your car appears to stall and die every time you come to a complete stop.
Energy storage technology is improving at a rapid pace, both on the size/mass end of things (how big/heavy is it), and on the capacity end of things (how long does a single charge last). A recent development in the field (were one to inquire) would be a battery that can be printed using an ink-jet printer, on normal paper (special ink, of course). This should make capacitor technology achieve things previously thought of as outside the realm of possibility, and quite soon.
On the "consumer-ready" side of the equation, a Swedish company recently received a prize for designing and building a vehicle they believe will cost approximately US$20,000 per unit for mass production. It's a 4-seater that achieves highway speeds, and it actually resembles a car (as opposed to the "concept vehicles" that have been being trumpeted as the latest and greatest but which no one in their right mind would be caught actually driving).
I don't mean to get all ad-hominem on you, but did you bother to do a simple web query before responding, or was this more of an off-the-cuff knee-jerk type of thing?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I thought you could have a standard charging interface a bit like USB. You hook up your car and it uses a data interface to talk to the electricity provider. They exchange account details and if that works then you get charging current. Devices like this could be installed on a lot of electricity poles. Pretty much anywhere you can safely stop you could charge from the grid.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
...I would want to to hold a full day's drive, at least 1000 miles...
Good grief. 1,000 miles is a lot more than a full day's drive... For the sake of argument, we'll say you're doing circles on a highway in Texas, so you can actually get away with an average speed of 75 miles an hour... Do you realize you're casually throwing around nearly 14 hours' driving time, not accounting for stops for food/bathroom breaks? Never mind that (assuming a very generous 350 miles per tank of gas) you would need to stop at least 3 times, simply for gasoline. That's nearly double the amount of time that truckers are legally allowed to drive in a single day, for fatigue reasons. All of this is at high speed, with no stopping. Drop the average speed to something more reasonable, like 60mph, and you end up with a driving time of nearly 17 hours. I have personally managed an 1800 mile cross-country trip in three actual days (not "driving time" but "actual time elapsed"), and let me tell you, that was a brutal pace. A thousand miles is closer to two full days' reasonable driving time than to the "full day's drive" you claim. Having driven to remote locations as part of my job, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that a full day of "on the clock" driving is more like 400 miles per 8-hour day, assuming perfect weather/visibility and no construction.
To stay on the topic of "a full tank of gas", I get about 300 miles to the tank in my PT Cruiser. A full tank is approximately 15 gallons, but that probably isn't relevant information for this conversation. So let's call 300 miles "a tankful". Driving to the nearest town to the north of the one I live in is about 30 miles. I did this 5 times a week to get to my place of employment - and then drove back in the evenings. "Aha!" you shout, "that's a whole tank of gas right there!" To which I respond "Yes, it is. In a week, not a day."
Unless you are a commercial shipping company, or someone whose job it is to drive for hours on end every day, I simply cannot understand your argument.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Or you could just buy a better gas car for a hell of a lot less and fill up in 5 minutes at a gas station.
Define "better", please, because I'm not seeing any definition of "better" that fits that description. Electric vehicles have as much power as gasoline vehicles, they're much quieter, they're just as comfortable... Tell me how a loud, smelly thing is better than a quiet, clean one. Please.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The answer, of course, would have been an Aptera 2h.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_2_Series
An electric that went 100 miles or so, and later a hybrid that has the same batteries but when it ran down, a tiny gasoline motor would kick in recharging them. It's the exact same principle as diesel-electric trains that has been around since the 30s. The plus side is you can still have power (electric DC motors are potent) but you don't need a huge gasoline engine whose size is only used to 100% effect at hard acceleration (and wasting gas otherwise) and instead gear towards the lowest possible gasoline motor (smaller is much more mpg friendly) whose maximum output will roughly match the average depletion of the batteries during normal driving. Maybe a tiny fraction more.
Hell, even the really advanced big motored cars are trying to save gas by turning of cylinders (some Mercedes and Cadillacs, maybe others), why not bypass all that mechanical complexity and go with a tried and true system that worked the last 70 years for big ass trains?
Jay Leno testing the all electric Aptera just to prove it's not 100% vaporware:
http://vimeo.com/5285448
It doesn't need to be aptera only, but I think the only thing holding up the system are the weenies that think it's better to reach Utopia first (no gas instead of, say 100+ mpg) forgetting their little envirobiles will be made of plenty of lightweight plastic (petroleum).
I mean, if you really have a hard on for an electric car but need range from time to time, the only other real solution is to buy some electric car and rent a gas car when you need it.
In a gasoline powered fuel, you walk to the nearest gas station, fill up a container with gas, walk it back to your car, and you are good to go. If we could come up with a similar mechanism for an electric car, and help people feel comfortable that the need to employ it would be rare, then the concern would be mostly gone.
We don't need to come up with one. There is one - at least for lead acid battery vehicles. Lead acid batteries 'recover' a small amount of voltage when left to stand, so if you run out of charge in a lead acid EV, you let the car sit for 10-20 minutes and you'll have enough charge to creep a few kilometers home. And in any EV, 'running out of charge' is a gradual process, it's not like in a fuel powered vehicle where you go from 100% performance to 0% instantly.
I think the best suggestion I've seen so far is make sure the batteries used are modular, and easy to replace. If you run out of power, you can go grab a single replacement, which would get you to the station, where you could swap out the rest.
This actually ain't bad. A 10kg lithium booster battery would hold enough charge to get you to the nearest charge point.
The problem with that line of thought is that battery technology, and electric car technology - is not yet at a point where it is "good enough".
Actually, for the vast majority of purposes and drivers, EV technology IS good enough. Sadly, when people come up against new ideas we love to play "what if" and come up with scenarios where the new thing won't work. It's a cheap, easy way to feel smart. That's why you talk to the guy from Chicago who does 20km a week, and he says "yeah but what if I want to drive to my aunt's house in London?" Bingo, electric cars are obviously useless and he gets to feel smug for 10 minutes knowing that he's smarter than whoever suggested electric cars to him.
The end result is that until a new technology is markedly better in every way than the old technology it replaces, it will see undeserved resistance from the general market.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
will be electric, or plug-in hybrid.
Yes, I know it's more expensive, but I can afford it, and the electric car industry needs help to get established.
Gas cars have had 100 years of development by some of the brightest people around.
It's not surprising that they are refined to such a high degree.
Yes, I know that the first generation electrics will not be as good as the gas versions.
but... WE NEED TO STOP BURNING OIL!