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Another Elon Musk Bet: Half of All Cars Built In 2032 Will Be Electric
New submitter cartechboy writes "Ears perked up when Elon Musk made another bold statement he'd be 'willing to bet on.' This time he says that in 20 years, half of all new cars sold would be plug-in electric cars. Believe him? The math looks a little fuzzy, and one research analyst is willing to take Musk up on the bet. 'It expects the U.S. plug-in market to grow at a 32-percent average rate from now through 2020. That takes sales to roughly 200,000 units in 2020. Even if that rate continued for another 12 years, which Hurst considers unlikely, that would only take plug-in cars to roughly one-third of the market in 2032, or about 5 million sales. But Hurst thinks 8 or 10 percent annual growth in plug-in sales is more reasonable, taking the total to 480,000 or 574,000 plug-ins sold in 2032 in the U.S.'"
I wanted to make a post from my electric car but I ran out of powe*&^%^@*&^#####
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
1977 Mercedes-Benz, 300,000+ miles and still going strong.
I expect I will STILL be driving it in 2032 when I has 600,000+ miles on it.
I suppose the other 50% will be petrol or diesel powered. Will these fuels be affordable in 2032?
The first electric car with 200+ mile range and a less than $25,000 price will be the biggest seller in the market overnight.
Just those two items alone would probably cause Musk to be right. And that's what he's betting, that the battery range and price will come down to the point that everyone can afford an electric car and that it will have a range similar to that of a gasoline engine. If the market delivers those specs I think he'll be right, you can drive an electric car for about $0.10 cents a mile, the gas savings alone would so massive everyone and their dog would want one.
What could you do if you didn't have to buy gas anymore?
Battery powered electric cars were dropped in the past, and will be in the future. Without the vast subsidies propping up the things, they will simply not be built except in limited quantities.
Now if he had stated simply electric, and not plug-in electric, then I might have agreed. The future is electric - it's just not battery powered electric.
But the real truth is hydrocarbons dominate, and will be with us for a LONG time to come as a means of transportation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's all about Battery technology really. If battery technology improves significantly and the price becomes more affordable then I think electric cars, particularly commuters, will start selling much better. Absent some big improvement they will remain a niche market.
Hydrogen fuel cells will win out because you can refuel them in as much time as it takes to refuel a gas or diesel car.
Electric will be held back by the cost, limited lifespan, weight, and recharge time of the batteries.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Predictions are hard. To borrow someone else's words (from RIM I think), in 1880 people were looking for some better way to move horses through the streets instead of changing to a different game like a car for personal transport. Instead of a better car it could be a move to something like a skilift, more motorbikes, or more likely something else I've never thought of.
Fuel isn't the only problem. Traffic congestion is a nightmare in many places. I doubt we'll see hundreds of millions of electric cars in tightly packed Chinese cities.
2008 - The Tesla Roadster is a $110,000 (base price) sports car with a 244 mile range.
2012 - The Tesla Model S is a $57,000 - $77,000 (base price) sedan with 160 - 300 mile range.
2015 (estimated) - Tesla Gen III Sedans are targeting $30,000 base price with comparable Model S ranges.
In addition, Tesla is rolling out a "supercharge" network to support changing away from home in convenient locations in target markets. The Model S has also been promised to include a 5-minute battery quick change option. Once that is available at (for instance) gas stations, it'll take as much time to refill your electric as it does to refill your gas car, except it'll cost a whole lot less.
This guy is actually delivering functioning, functional electric cars and building the infrastructure to support them. I wouldn't bet against him; everyone who's done that so far has been proven wrong repeatedly.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I wouldn't even say it is that dependant on gas prices going up much more than they already are. Electric cars just need to overcome the current hurdles. Namely the issue of charging, max speed and battery life. Currently we have a few paradoxes, People aren't going to invest in an infrastructure for charging electric cars, until enough people have them. Only crazy people are going to buy a car that can't work without an infrastructure. If I can't drive a car more than an hour from my house or risk having to have it towed home, that is a big problem. If I can't have it charged up on the way, that is a huge issue. So first off we need technology that can get a good distance per charge, then we need a universal system to allow for charging it (currently without a set agreed upon charging system, we are kind of at a dead end, as no one is going to invest heavily into an infrastructure, that could be the wrong one when all the cars go the other way).
The growth curve won't be steady. It is going to grow fairly slow for some time, until there is a break through and the curve will jump to another level. When the curve will jump and by how much is unknown. It all depends on innovation. Taking an average rate on this kind of curve is only useful when you look back and try to measure the impact of the past innovation. It is not useful for predicting the future.
If gasoline powered vehicles become cost prohibitive to operate and electric vehicles are still expensive, total sales may drop as people are economically forced out the market. "Plugin" vehicles (which include plug-in hybrids) could still be 50% of the (smaller) market.
"Second, an oil price shock would have to drive gasoline prices to $8 or $10 a gallon"
Are these guys kidding? If the global economy wasn't in such a precarious state, gas would be over $5/gallon *now*! In 2032, $10/gallon gas will be a fond memory.
"I doubt we'll see hundreds of millions of electric cars in tightly packed Chinese cities"
Why is that?
With mass urbanisation and huge infrastructure investments Chinese cities are better able to handle traffic congestion than millennium old European cities (London, Rome, Paris, etc) or large North American cities that pre-date motorised vehicles (LA, NY, Vancouver, etc).
Beijing is pretty much a worst case and has 5 million car for 20 million people .. that is right on par for 350 million vehicles for a population around 1.3-1.4 billion
Front, back, left or right?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It makes more sense to pump diesel to everyone's homes and have them burn it in in a CHP system than to distribute gas or electricity/
Hint: I am European - when I say "gas" I mean a gaseous substance, and not a petroleum based liquid.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If they can bring that down, the other issues aren't such a big deal. A big reason is that you can refuel an electric in your house, which means that range doesn't need to be nearly as large. Sure if you are the kind of person who does big road trips you'll need more range and the ability to refuel all over, an electric doesn't do that. However most people don't do that, they drive around the city.
160 miles will do nicely for that, provided you can refuel often. If you can do it every night, no problem at all. Very, VERY rare someone would drive more than that on a normal day.
So the big issue is just getting electrics cost competitive with gas cars. At that point, I think the market will take off.
Most people have their car as a dual-use vehicle. First they commute to work, bring the kids to school and get groceries at shops nearby. This is something an electric car can do just fine. (except for really long commutes). But then they also use that same car to go to friends who live 200 miles away, or go on vacation 500 miles away. Those are things that electric cars are not good at. When it becomes accepted practise that you rent a car for this, that's when things can take off.
Markets are complicated things. If it is accepted that you pay $700 for a fancy phone, that's what people will pay. If it is accepted that you pay for owning and driving a car. that's what people will pay. If the prices to own and operate cars continue to rise slowly, then people will adapt and continue to pay rediculous amounts (according to current standards), even if it starts taking a significant portion of their income.
A sudden increase in say gasoline prices of say a factor of two will make a bunch of people think twice. Some will say F*** it and sell the car. Some will switch to electric. But most will adapt, and simply pay the higher price. A few years later a few percent of the population has changed their behaviour due to the increased pricepoint. But the majority continues the same old way.
The parallel here is cigarettes. Sometimes the government increases the taxes by a few percent causing a significant bump in the price for those things. A few people give it up and a few months later, everything is back to the way it was.
Until you look at the amount of land you will need to grow that much algae.
I don't have the figures handy but they are less energy efficient per m^2 than the current generation photovoltaics, and that is before you take into account refining and tranportation costs.
You also need mass quantities of fresh water and feedstock to sustain them, just pulling hte carbon out of water that naturally absorbs from the atmosphere is not enough for the scale you are proposing.
I can't see how this will work when not a single electric car is aimed at families.
Living in London I am repeatedly told I should be driving a "green" car instead of my big Renault Espace diesel. The complaint I normally get is that diesel is dirty but as far as I can find while that is true for old diesels without modern filters (+10 years old) it isn't the case with the modern diesels.
Also I almost never drive anywhere with less than 6 people in the car and walk whenever the distance is within a mile and there is nothing bulky to transport.
I have done extensive research into available electric cars but they simply aren't big enough to fit more than 3 children or 4 in a pinch when they have grown out of the legally mandated child seats.
Until we see 6 and 7 seater electrics I don't see it as being anything other than a DINK statement to show off the "green credentials".
Hemp can grow like a weed. That's the thing it can do better. In a situation where resources are scarce, that's a valuable property.
Of course, this runs counter to the "I want the best, and I want it now" mentality that we've all grown into, but I get the feeling we are all going to have to give that up at some point soon.
Who would buy a second hand electric car? They are only good for land-fill.
[Citation needed]. I can see that the battery pack will eventually need replacing, and that can be a significant chunk of change (and will be factored into the value of the car), but I see nothing that suggests the rest of the car will be any less robust.
If anything, the EV drive-train is (or can be) far simpler than any liquid-fuel car, since a battery pack, some wiring and four electric motor/generators (one at each wheel) can replace:
- the engine block
- the fuel system
- the gearbox, drive shaft and differential(s)
- most of the axles
- much of the cooling system
- the air intake
- the alternator and starter motor
- the exhaust system
- etc
That's a lot of saved wear & tear.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Current electric cars have comparable performance to equivalent petrol cars and ranges that cover the daily distance the average driver covers (30-50 miles in the US).
Consequently, since for the average person an overnight charge at home is easily sufficient to cover their needs, the importance of charging points outside the home is relatively low.
For the majority of drivers, an electric car is a drop in replacement today for the majority of their journeys.
Developments in Lithium-Air batteries are rapidly making them viable, and are conservatively estimated to give ten times the power/weight of Li-Ion.
There's also been a number of advances in high-surface-area electrodes that dramatically increase charge and discharge rates. Some of these have already made it to market, such as the MIT spinoff A123 Systems - which coincidentally enough has developed a Lithium Iron electrolyte that handles extreme temperatures very well..
There's a great deal of industrial interest in improving battery technology, and claiming that there's been no breakthroughs in years is simply ignorant, I'm afraid. If you're paying attention, the future of batteries looks pretty rosy.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The way I put it, an electric motor is ten times better than a combustion engine. Having experienced the wonderfulness of a plug in electric lawn mower compared to a crappy gas powered kind, I can say gas power does not compare. The electric is lighter, quieter, simpler, safer, more durable and reliable, and has instant on/off.
But a gas tank is twenty times better than a battery. If we ever get that worked out, the electric car will sweep gas powered cars away. It'll be like the way LCDs vanquished CRTs in 2009.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Europe already has expensive gas due to taxes and the roads aren't filled with electric cars. It'll still take some time.
OTOH we have roads filled with diesel cars. Diesel cars are usually more expensive to buy than gas cars. This shows that people *are* capable of looking beyond the initial purchase price.
No sig today...
And is but one fiber/oilseed crop with this property. Honestly, hemp's stats aren't that impressive compared to a lot of its competitors. Yeah, it beats some common commercial crops, but there are other plants which beat it in the various properties people boast about for it (productivity, fiber strength, oil production, oil quality, etc).
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
I find the idea that electric cars would solve the sustainability problems we're seeing naive, at best. Most of the electricity production comes from fossil fuels anyway. Wind and solar won't be able to step in to replace this energy production, we simply don't have enough material to produce that many wind/solar farms. Nuclear, you say? If we were to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, the uranium would last about 20-50 years, just postponing the problem while adding a shitload of radioactive waste to it.
The only reasonable thing is to step away from the entire automotive regime. This is the only solution that will reclaim the cities to their citizens and stop the killing of 1.3 million people per year (and that's just in direct traffic accidents, not counting indirect deaths through e.g. air pollution).
Technical "progress" in the current system of innovation won't be able to do anything about the fact that the material basis of our existence is quite finite.
(Sorry about not posting sources, I work in this field and generally would - but I'm on vacation!)
Really, I think the breakthrough will be better energy density. Even the best batteries only have about 5% of the energy density of something like vegetable oil, and chemical fuels have other advantages such as requiring smaller changes to existing infrastructure, and replacing burned oil is faster than electric recharge.
Fuel cells might be an answer though. Especially if they use a more convenient fuel than hydrogen.
Of course, Europe already has expensive gas due to taxes and the roads aren't filled with electric cars.
Even though our gas is expensive, unfortunately so are our electric cars. There is still no purely economic argument for changing to an electric car. It's a chicken and egg situation, especially as regards the availability of charging stations.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm with Musk on this one. It's really easy to underestimate the growth of emerging technologies.
In the 2000 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency forecasted that the installed capacity of PV solar cells in Europe in 2010 would be 1.6 GW (see page 294). To hedge their bet, they also included an "alternative policy scenario" where PV capacity reached 2 GW in 2010, corresponding to an average capacity growth rate over 1997 levels (0.5 GW) of 11.3% per year. So, what really happened? In 2010, there was 28 GW of PV capacity in the EU. And just last year Europe installed another 22 GW.
Sometimes, revolutions happen.
Not just a little less efficient, but way less efficient. The best yields reported in the literature so far are something like 0.5 gallons per square meter per year - and good luck getting near that in a real-world plant. But even that is 18MJ/m^2/yr. By comparison, Ausra's proposed CLFR plant would produce 177MW per square mile, and their pilot plant had a capacity factor of 27%, so using that number, we get 582MJ/m^2/yr. And to top that all off, your average gasoline car operates at about 20% average efficiency and your average diesel at about 25% efficiency (note the word "average" - don't complain and then write a post where you cite peak efficiency numbers, because that's not what you get in real-world driving). Your average EV gets about 75% generator-to-grid-to-wheels efficiency.
Biological processes are just so lossy. And algæ has lots of problems of its own. Namely, you can either grow it in open ponds or closed ponds. If you grow it in open ponds, you can't keep it species-pure and thus get predatory microbes, insects, etc which you can at least try to control, and competing algæ species which you generally have no chance of controlling. Since biofuel microbes are highly optimized, your production rate drops like a stone. Hence most companies don't pursue this and are instead looking at various forms of closed systems. Closed generally means plastic film, as the cost of thick plastic or glass would be absurd. But when you're dealing with such low yields for a given amount of area (small fractions of a gallon per square meter per year), even plastic film gets expensive, especially when you consider that the UV in sunlight tends to destroy plastic film very effectively (polyethylene-film greenhouses generally replace their film annually, polypropylene greenhouses every 2 years).
And that's hardly the only issue. To get your fuel out, you have algæ interspersed in water. You have a lot more water than algæ, but need to get dry algæ out. There are a lot of different processes out there, but at its most basic level, it's generally a very costly, energy-intensive process. And this says nothing of preventing fouling of your systems by algæ, of maintaining purity in even closed systems, of refining the dried algæ, and so forth. Or the fact that in general, extremely sunny / cloud-free areas typically have water shortages as well, and the most productive algæ are freshwater species who only yield their high figures in very controlled circumstances pertaining to what's in the water.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
You missed his main point. Just like the car brought about a complete rethink compared to horses and carts, there could be some radically game changing technology introduced which makes cars redundant within cities. My personal bet is along the lines of robotic taxis...
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
None of this is true.
1) Cost is the killer, not battery life. Most EV from major manufacturers are coming with 8-10 year warranties on the packs. Toyota and Honda have had no problems maintaining long lifespans on their hybrid packs, and hybrid packs are put through a *lot* more stress than EV packs (far more charge/discharge cycles, at faster rates)
2) They are not "only good for landfill". "End of life" is usually defined at about 80%, but you can obviously drive it beyond that. And even when they're not used for cars any more, you better believe that power companies would love to get their hands on cheapo used EV packs with 50-80% capacity left in them, to buffer the grid. Battery buffers are often useful for things you wouldn't even think of, not just the obvious ability to use more intermittents or deal with sudden losses in generation or surges in demand. For example, one of the rattlesnake lines out in Utah, which runs from Moab through Castle Valley and onward, has very limited capacity, but they keep getting new requests to hook up to it that they couldn't handle during peak times. Well, what do you do - build a brand new, expensive line in the middle of nowhere? Nah, they just built a big battery buffer halfway down it, which they load up during off-peak times and unload during peak times. Batteries are incredibly useful for the grid, but oftentimes these days, they're too expensive for a lot of tasks they'd be great at. Hence...
3) Automotive-style li-ions (which pretty much everyone except Tesla and their partners are using) are of chemistries that are so eco-friendly that you can literally dispose of them in with municipal waste after discharging in most localities. The CEO of BYD likes to show off his batteries by drinking the electrolyte from them for reporters.
4) Even algae is grossly, grossly inefficient compared to solar panels on the same land, orders of magnitude difference. And way too expensive.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
An electric car is fast and practically soundless. The 3rd World War on roads, with current 1.5 million killed and about 7 million wounded per year, will go on for 20 more years.
But maybe by 2032 people would get smarter and build the Internet of things at last, not to drive 3000 pounds vehicle to sign a document or buy a bottle of milk.
Indeed, and that's the real issue.
Battery chemistry seems well poised to continue the 8% energy density increase per year it's been getting for the past couple decades. Price per energy density hasn't really tracked that, but it is going down. But the real question is, will there be a big jump at some point that can, over the course of a decade's worth of refinements, take us far beyond that?
It's not impossible. Even conventional chemical batteries are way far away from their maximum potential limits (their bond energies). But there's a number of types of non-chemical batteries out there. My favorites that I've read about involve using quantum effects to "cheat". For example, if you build an array of nanoscale capacitors, you can prevent them from hitting voltage breakdown until you reach extremely high voltages because current is quantized, you can't discharge an arbitrarily small amount of current at once. Another one is basically making an array of nanoscale cyclotrons, with electrons orbiting around carbon nanotubes. Normally the particles in cyclotrons lose energy rapidly through cyclotron radiation, but again, this is effectively prevented by quantum limitations at these scales.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Surely with this technology there will be an inflexion point when it becomes economical to sell electric cars instead of petrol engine cars. This will probably be a combination of rising petrol prices and dropping prices for batteries, and infrastructure for recharging being widely available. Up until that point growth will be fairly staid, then over a period of five-ten years the entire market switches to the new technology. Elon Musk clearly thinks that inflexion point is before 20 years from now.
One thing you cannot do is simply extrapolate a line from a couple of years of electric car sales and assume that is how it is going to continue.
OK, I'll bite ... how does a robotic taxis instead of a car relieve congestion?
At an average 8% per year energy density increase, today we are getting over twice the energy density of ten years ago.
In 20 years time we will have over 4x the energy density of batteries today if that 8% continues.
If, for your average city dweller, today's electric cars can do 95% of their driving needs, then in 20 years time a battery 1/4 of the size will be needed to match today's automobile battery packs (+efficiencies gained from having to move less battery weight along with the car). That should reduce the price of battery packs somewhat, although many people would prefer to be able to quadruple their range instead (maybe that would be something you could hire when you do that twice a year long car journey).
Someone above mentioned Lithium Air as potentially having 10x the energy density of today's batteries (i.e., 30 years worth of 8% increases). If that is the case, and they get it working in the next 10-20 years) then that would probably provide the leap forward that makes everyone switch to the new technology fairly rapidly.
One proposed solution is to buy the car but lease the batteries; you'll pay a monthly fee or perhaps a fee based on usage, and when the battery is at end-of-life, the company swaps it out and recycles it. This scheme would also enable battery swaps at gas stations: if you own the battery, you would not want your empty but brand new battery swapped with a crappy worn one. If you lease them however, it does not matter (other than that an older battery will give you somewhat reduced range). This would also be a strong driver towards standardisation of battery packs (with different cars requiring a different number of standard packs).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Great. Between this and power generated by cheap natural gas due to fracking, which puts 40% less CO2 into the atmosphere already (this has caused he US in the last 5 years to exceed the rest of the world's Kyoto efforts already) we're gonna risk inducing another ice age and will have to mandate huge gass guzzlers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No, it would not.
A battery pack is not like a little AA battery sitting in your car. It's a massive structure weighing hundreds of kilograms. It's a key structural element of your vehicle, a key part of the load balancing. Every vehicle has a different optimal placement, location, and geometry, depending on the other aspects of vehicle design. Different vehicles also have radically different power consumption needs (compare an electric moped with an electric semi). High-end vehicles will want much higher capacity packs than low-end vehicles. And to top it all off, it's a moving target; battery tech is constantly changing, rapidly. The powertrain needs to be engineered to pair with a given battery.
It's really just a stupid idea. It's like saying "we're going to have the gas tank in a gasoline car attached to the engine block and part of the chassis, and we'll swap that all out at the gas station for someone else's whenever you need to fuel up". Only worse.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
This has been widely studied. It's actually not the generation side that's the issue; most power plants spend over half their time sitting idle, mainly at night when EVs would be charging (it's a boon to grid operators - selling more product without new capital costs). The part that needs improvement is the last leg, neighborhood distribution. Of course, upgrading neighborhood infrastructure is far from an alien concept, as neighborhoods grow and change normally.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Just remember that even today, energy density isn't really the issue. It's price per unit energy stored. If you increase the pack capacity 4-fold without dropping the price per unit energy stored, you're actually increasing the pack cost fourfold.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Commercial trucking may go to natural gas. Once that's well along, getting it deeper into the suburbs for light vehicles may not be a stretch.
The EV1 was a GM test run of battery powered vehicles that was crushed out of existance by the Bush administration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
There is actually a good reason for the slow change. The energy industry gets massive subsidies (mostly in form of tax breaks) and hides the true cost of energy. We pay just 10 cents for kWh, and $3 for a gallon of gas, but the actual cost is much higher than that. The subsidies make it look cheap to drive a giant Chevy Suburban. I drive a small car that gets about 50 MPG, and I hardly ever pay anything for gas, while Douchebag Bob with Chevy Suburban gets 10 MPG and fills up a hundred dollars worth every week.... YET, I am paying a lot for gas because thanks to the subsidies, I am paying for Douchebag Bob's gas too, we're all paying for Douchebag Bob's gas. The energy industry does not need subsidies, they're already making record profits, and the subsidies hide the true cost of things.
With all the TEA party uproar about having smaller government, you would think they would be mentioning cutting billion dollar subsidies to industries that don't need them? Subsidy is corporate welfare, and the energy companies abuse the corporate welfare system. No, instead the TEA baggers just want to cut the Planned Parenthood funding, which is less than 0.1% of energy+farm subsidies.
When I say subsidy, I also include tax breaks. It's the same thing in my book. A subsidy takes money from people who have paid tax, a tax break takes money from everyone who hasn't received that tax break.
Since this is the most talked about alternative energy source for a car but are we ready for that ? I'm not sure but 1 thing I'm sure is that some countries or provinces like mine are not ready. Well I'm not too positive about the idea of all the population of Quebec using electric cars. I just think about the electricity cost and what we use right now and what we will need won't be small. I fear that.
the average price per Kw/h is around 6.8. The table is here.
The company has 2.8 million customers responsible for 4.01 million residential, commercial, institutional and industrial service contracts. - Hydro Quebec
Most of the money and profit Hydro-Quebec is making is towards exporting energy. Without those exports, Hydro-Quebec would increase the price to make a profit margin. They've told that countless times in press conferences.
Imagine if the same amount of customers using electric cars on the same grid ?
I don't have the exact number but in 2011 the monthly consumption of Hydro Quebec was around ) 3,06m. Can you imagine if you put around 2-3 million cars on that same grid ? This is just a thought but I think the price will increase without any hesitation and Hydro-Quebec will force it on us. Twice a year or so Hydro-Quebec is asking the goverment for a price increase as they tell us we don't pay enough. I can imagine they will have lots of arguements to increase the price and the goverment will have almost no choice but too accept.
ps: this is just Quebec, I can imagine worst numbers, facts or stories in other provinces or countries.
interesting.
First off, I think that it will more than 1/2, more like 3/4 or more. Lithium Air batteries are coming this decade. At that time, a car like the nissan leaf will either get 500 miles to a charge, or more likely, the range will be 150 miles and prices will be cheaper than gas car. In addition, over the next 8 years, loads of electrical stations will come on-line.
Now, once Tesla is profitable (expected early next year), he is looking to walk away from it and allow somebody else to run it. So, he is focusing on another form of transportation: a rail system.
One thing about Musk, when he goes after an idea, he gets it to work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Every car is different. In addition, in the tesla, the batteries are located in a skateboard under the car (basically, providing a nice low CG). Since this is actually a unibody type construction, doing battery changes make little sense.
As to battery costs, well, for Tesla, 20KWH is only $10K. Others are at 20-30K, but Tesla is using the lowest costs. Over the next decade, these battery costs will only drop and range will increase. Check out Lithium-Air batteries.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nope, IFF the majority of charges are done at night. In fact, the electric companies WANT this. It will allow them to upgrade final connects, sell more electricity all around the clock, and more importantly, balance the power load. Basically, if 75% or more of the charging is done at night, then it increases demand and night and allows power companies to drop expensive on-demand generators and move to base-loads.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
0-60 is a none issue. Leaf and others purposely gov. their motors to keep electric usage down. Look at Tesla. They have 0-60 that blows the doors off similar priced cars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Personally I think by 2032 95% of all NEW cars will be electric (or some form of that). By then we'll have better charging and storage systems, the battery technologies have really taken off the last few years.. We'll also have some form of coatings on our vehicles which are like solar cells and extra energy producing components like the brakes which will also prolong the driving distance..
Oh I have an electric lawn mower as well and hate it. Why? very easy, I HATE DRAGGING THE DAMM CORD. Half of my lawn mowing time is wasted on shoving the cord from one corner of the lawn to the other corner.
The problem that we have with electrical is that it can not in the near future provide the energy density that fuel can:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Fuel has about 45, batteries 1.8. Assuming an efficiency in the gas motor of 30%, we have we have 13. Electrical cars have about 80%, which puts it at 1.44. This means a car has an advantage in pure energy of 9x. Electrical batteries are dicking around with maybe double better energy in the near future. In other words batteries in the next 20 years are not going to cut it.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Car pool, reusable throughout the day (not locked in a garage for 8 hours) and at night. Its like public transport but much more flexible.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
... in the increasing number of severe storms we get as a result of global warming.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There are two big things that can help electric cars (does Musk also include plugin hybrids?) 1) like you said, is the cost of gas. It's not going to stay at $3.50 or $4 a gallon, in 20 years, we may well have hit oil's terminal decline phase, and even if not, the cheap stuff is gone. Expect at least $10/gallon in current dollars in 20 years. 2) the cost of batteries. They're going down. Fast. see: http://www.plugincars.com/lithium-ion-battery-prices-drop-160-kwh-2025-123193.html I actually used the 8% growth in energy density claimed above, which brings my price to $220/kWh in 2025 (not $160 like mckinsey claims). At that price, a 100 mile range battery will cost $8000, down from about $20,000 today. By 2032, prices could come down to $4500 for a 100 mile range. This assumes exponential gains in capacity/density/etc, but those gains have happened in the last ~15 years. The big question is whether they'll continue in the future. I'd say we'll get to about $250/kWh before battery scientists slow down, but improvements won't stop. That will get us to some pretty cheap, reasonable range electric cars in 20 years. Basically, the Nissan Leaf will go from $35,000 ($20k for the car, $15k for the battery) to $25,000 ($20k for the car, $5k for the battery) [assumptions: no EV efficiency gains, still 35 kWh/100miles, which is what the Leaf, Volt, and plug in Prius achieve today.]
I thought I was reinforcing his point. Why do you assume each comment is to refute something above?
Yes, the cord is of course the big downside. I had to work out a strategy for dealing with it. I start near the outlet and work out from there. I keep the mower pointed the same direction, alternating between pushing and pulling rather than turning around. Others turn around, flipping the cord to the other side of the handle when they do. Also my yard is a typical suburban lot, maybe all of 50 ft x 50 ft. Only need 1 extension cord. If I had to mow an acre, I'd probably use a riding mower.
Good batteries aren't the only possible solution. For instance, electric passenger rail doesn't use batteries. It doesn't seem likely that we could extend the methods used for bumper cars to real highways, but it's not impossible. There's also solar power. Someday maybe we will have solar powered flying cars.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Then why'd you buy a corded one?
Grossly misleading, and not just because you cite the efficiency of the gas motor at 30%, which is peak efficiency, not average, which runs more like 20% or less in real-world driving, or because you act like batteries aren't increasing much when in reality they've increased in energy density about 4.5x in the past two decades and show no signs of stopping.
No, it's grossly misleading because the analogy is wrong. In a gasoline car, the engine is heavy and the fuel is light. In an electric vehicle, the "fuel" is heavy and the motor is light. You need to be comparing net system mass. Gasoline still *currently* wins that one, but not by that huge of a margin.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
It would be most informative if you could list those plants. I have no doubt that they exist, but if they were overall that great, I would expect to see them used to make clothes, paper, and ropes. I am surely ignorant, but it was my impression that hemp was first-class for making rope, also makes durable and comfortable clothing (I own some, and it appears to be), and quite good for paper. Cotton is a known bad guy in cultivation (loads of water, among other things), and I believe it makes inferior rope. For clothing and paper, I was under the impression that linen (also flax) also scored well, but I don't know that flax was ever used for rope production on an industrial scale. Flax is also a source of linseed oil, which is darn useful stuff.
So, please repair my ignorance. What's better than hemp? In what ways is it better?
it would still be more efficient to have electric vehicles powered by whatever.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
We are running out of oil. We're at or near the halfway point now,
Yeah, they keep saying that about every ten years, and then they figure out more is stored somewhere, and how to get to oil elsewhere...
Basically we have an endless supply of oil, because it will easily last until real alternatives simply cost far less and use peters out naturally.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gasoline's current problem is that while there are still improvements being made, it's not even in the same ballpark as the rate of advancement of battery technology.
The problem is that there simply is no potential in sight for a battery that can realistically do what gasoline does - 300 miles on a single 2 minute fueling, that weighs only about 20 lbs and lasts for a million miles or more (how often do you replace a gas tank?).
Batteries are great for some uses (it's just as silly to fuel up a laptop as it is to battery up a car) but cars simply are not one of them. The current electric cars are gimmicks that a struggling economy cannot afford to prop up much longer.
In the end we'll be using electric motors but powered probably by hydrogen, not clunky battery technology. It is way more likely we can solve the problems of using hydrogen as fuel than we can address all the issues batteries have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you have a link?
1. Must be able to feed them with grass and hay
2. They must be able to drink their water from a stream or pond
3. Must be able to travel over rough terrain without need of special roads
4. Must be able to procreate
5. Will need to be priced starting at $10
Until these new-fangled horseless-carriages can meet this criteria then there is *no way* they will ever be adopted by the masses.
50 miles of electric-only range, 250 miles+ of gas-powered range with a small, efficient, range-extender engine. The GM Volt-style plug-in hybrid is exactly the right solution to this problem.
It just needs a few more generations of refinement to reduce the cost and make the gas-engine smaller, lighter, and more efficient.
NiMH, yes. Possibly PbA. Not Li-ion. Li-ion cells are over 99% efficient in slow charging, and usually something like 96 or 97% in fast charging. The US grid averages about 93% efficient, chargers are usually around 93% efficient, and the drivetrains usually average around 85% efficient.
But of course, half of that is irrelevant in a conversation about *fuel density*. You only care about onboard losses.
Depends on what type of power you're talking about. But in general you get better efficiencies at a large fixed plant with a given fuel than a small mobile generator, and much better scrubbing of any pollutants (plus have a far wider range of possible energy sources). Wind, hydro, tidal, and some forms of wave power are exceedingly efficient.
More than gasoline, true, although the amount varies greatly depending on your implementation. Even 15% waste heat is not irrelevant when you're burning a dozen or two kilowatts on traction, and heat pumps can act as multipliers.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Public transport doesn't scale well to low population densities, and by trying to make it, you actually make the problem worse (running a nearly empty bus does nobody any good, and it's even worse when the bus is taking circuitous routes and constantly starting and stopping to pick up scattered passengers all over the place). The fewer people who need to go into a given area, the longer you need to make wait times to justify it, but the fewer people then who will want to do it because of the long wait times. The system just breaks down. The whole concept of "mass transit" requires that there be a "mass" of people involved.
It's great for high population density areas, though.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Who says you need to grow algae on land?
The problem with turbodiesels (and the reason I no longer drive them) is that in the effort to reduce emissions and increase specific power output, they are getting very complex and expensive to repair. So much so, that a turbine failure can be a lot more expensive than, say, replacing the batteries in a hybrid. Also, as the supply of natural gas replaces oil, synthesising gasoline becomes more economic than extracting middle weight oils from shale or tar sand. It looks as if the balance is tipping in favor of gasoline/natural gas.
On the second point, the Prius transmission deserves study. It has not one but two electric motors, one of which can run backwards. They are connected via a differential. The effect is that, within limits, the engine speed can vary independently of the road speed; the second electric motor spins in either direction to take up the difference. This means that the gasoline engine can run on an optimised cycle.
I have worked with straight generators, and they have several problems. The main one is, what constant speed do you run at? If it is high enough to ensure that full power is available to drive the electric motor, that reduces the life and is uneconomical. If it is run at low speed, the battery will rapidly die if high road speeds or hill climbs are called for. Constant speed generators are fine for fixed loads, or for intermittent loads with battery back up, but not good for cars which are called on to operate over a wide range of duty cycles. That, basically, is why Toyota were willing to invest vast amounts of R&D money in their hybrid design. Nobody has yet equalled it.
Among its many virtues is that peak torque is provided by an electric motor so that the gasoline engine never needs to operate with very high BMEP, which contributes to wear, it is normally aspirated eliminating the expensive turbocharger, and that there is no gearbox. To get high efficiency from turbodiesels either a manual transmission or an automated crossover gearbox is needed, ideally with a large number of gears. This adds another expensive component, so that overall the add-ons to the basic Diesel lump are more than comparable to the add-ons needed for a hybrid.
Which, basically, is why I switched. Given the choice between a VW with a 7 speed automated gearbox and a turbocharger, and a Prius, the Prius seems a lot less likely to go very expensively wrong if I keep it for a long time (and it is cheaper to run).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If you want examples, for fiber, kenaf is better in both production and tensile strength. For oilseed, there's dietary and food uses. For dietary uses, hemp oil is actually problematic in various respects in that it's sort of "in-between". For dietary uses, it has a small fraction as much omega-3, for example, as flax or walnut oil, but it has enough that it still goes rancid from being left out or exposed to heat. And for fuel, you get twice as much jatropha oil, for example, per acre.
Hemp isn't useless - it's just not the sort of miracle crop that a lot of people (most often, in my experience, stoners) like to make it out to be.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Honestly, hemp's stats aren't that impressive compared to a lot of its competitors.
I have a lot of land with relatively poor soils in New Hampshire. What would you suggest would be a better cash crop than hemp, at similar production costs?
I would like to grow hemp to ramp up the organic matter and then move on to grains, which currently won't grow. I've tried soybeans and vetches to little success. Alfalfa grows, but not very much.
I've seen pictures of nearby hemp fields growing over 7' tall on similar soils.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Hemp can grow like a weed. That's the thing it can do better.
Right, which means it can grow in lots of places for very little cost. That means that it's a cheaper material. Rarely does a material need to be idea, it needs to be good enough and as cheap as possible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Whether Musk is right or not probably mostly depends on whether worry about global warming increases over that time period, and chances are darn good that that will happen, as the effects of the already-wired-in warming start to become more and more obvious, even to the studiously blind.
So his bet probably depends a lot on whether the US government grows a pair and institutes a rapidly escalating carbon tax, as almost everyone who actually knows anything about the GHGs and global warming problem believes is the most effective approach to getting the energy and transportation economy to turn the corner rapidly.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Argh - the top gear review is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRagsjSpkE
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Look how fast LCD's have supplanted CRT's.
Add a little demand due to high gas prices in there and Musk's estimate is likely too conservative, in my estimation.
expandfairuse.org
If you mean half the cars in Palo Alto, maybe. But you're forgetting about China, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, Pakistan and all of Africa.
Sorry Elon, but unlike the Americans, Toyota has been working on fuel efficient cars for the last 20 years, and they are good at cost control.
Yeah, Toyota is so confident in their ability to produce electric automobiles that they purchased a major stake in Tesla Motors (one of the reasons why Tesla got the NUMMI plant in California BTW). That was pre-IPO investment into Tesla I should add.
Elon Musk has met personally with the Toyoda family, in particular the current CEO of Toyota, Akio Toyoda. I'd say that Elon Musk knows quite a bit about all of the stuff that Toyota Motors is doing with regards to fuel efficient automobiles, hybrids, and other such projects.
That "Hyperloop" system is so far out there that most people even trying to comment about it don't even know what it is. I'm not even sure it is a rail system, or if it is that must have as much relationship to current rail transit as monorails have or even more remote than that.
The idea he expressed in the same speech about the electric turbofan seemed interesting though. The problem with an electric airplane, however, is simply getting the energy density needed to make it work. About the only thing that might work for something on that scale would be a fusion energy plant (something Elon Musk also hinted about in that same speech).
Actually, from what I can gather (talking to some friends), he is thinking of a suspended monorail running cars (not trains), possibly in a vacuum tube, though that might not be needed. BTW, look at the seraphim linear motor. The real issue is not the cost of the equipment, but the assembly/construction of it. Here in America, that is our REAL issue (labor costs).
I do not think that Fusion would be needed. Thorium is certainly interesting. The more so, for cargo and military aircraft.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hey, what do I know, I'm just quoting figures from actual hardware I've messed with. And, FYI, there's not a li-ion pack out there on the market that will get you as low as 90% efficiency. At least 90% efficiency in the charger is possible, although definitely on the low end. Even rapid chargers are usually more than that.
And I knew the wind, solar etc would come up.
I find that funny given your insistence on talking about the current situation.
Um, FYI, they *are* now part of the current situation. Wind is nearing 20% of the generation in some US states like Iowa (where I lived before I moved to Iceland). Over here in Europe, solar is growing like crazy, although not here in Iceland (we're already nearly 100% renewables, of course ;) ).. And it's strange that you wrote that comment, because solar wasn't in the list, but hydro was. You took what I wrote, added in something I didn't write, and took several I did. Solar wasn't in the list because it's not near 100% efficiency. That was a list of generation techs that are near 100% efficiency.
Then you go on to do some "funny math". First off, your doing the math is pointless to begin with because there's countless peer-reviewed studies on this already, which all show major benefits for going to EVs even on current grids, both in terms of CO2 emissions and in terms of other emissions (in the US, PM and SOx go up, NOx goes down, VOCs and CO are nearly eliminated, and all of said emissions are displaced away from population centers, leading to dramatically lower health consequences). But just to point out the "funny" side: you tacked in every loss you could for EVs, but then assumed that the gasoline appears at your car without a single loss in producing it. Did that not occur to you as strange?
Anyway. 50% efficiency for a large plant is doing well. As for larger having higher efficiencies, that's usually true w/ the caveat that smaller means use of energy that isn't economical to use in a larger plant, as well as more use of waste heat (heating the car), and of course those transmission inefficiencies.
So. Yeah. Getting back to comparing.
slower recharge
How fast does your gasoline car recharge in your garage? Oh yeah, that's right... you have to go out of your way in your daily life to fill it up, and pay out the arse to do so.
strains our grid
BZZZT, wrong. Electric companies are some of the biggest promoters of EVs, as they help *stabilize* the grid and get better utilization of power plants. They're nice, even, predictable, predominantly nighttime loads. Used battery packs give grid operators an additional boon.
batteries require periodic replacement as efficiency falls off over time
The efficiency drop over time is trivial. Most people concern themselves with the range drop. The standard warranty on the packs is 8-10 years to 80% capacity. Hardly a problem, I would think.
that doesn't work well in cold climates
The packs are more cold tolerant than your PbA starter battery. Of course *all vehicles* lose range in cold weather, and EVs are no exception, but at least it'll start.
that doesn't handle long periods of storage.
100% false. Unlike gasoline cars, li-ion EVs couldn't give a rat's arse about how long they sit. There's no "fuel going stale" issues, there's no issue of the engine needing to turn over to pump the oil through, etc.
You know, all the reasons people don't want them.
Demand way outstrips supply, FYI.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
Fission-based aviation was tried by the U.S. Air Force a couple of decades ago as a platform for a bomber which could stay in the air for long duration flights (a week or more of continuous flying was envisioned). Actual flight worthy test articles were developed as prototypes, including notably the X-6 aircraft that put a working reactor into the air, even though it wasn't directly linked to the propulsion system of the aircraft. The 12-ton lead shielding needed to protect the crew was a major draw back of the project.
I don't know if a Thorium reactor would do any better than the Plutonium reactor used in that aircraft, but I would suspect similar kinds of radiation shielding would be needed and would likely encounter similar kinds of problems in its development. For it to be used for passenger flight seems extremely unlikely.
As for the hyperloop, it will be interesting to see where it will go. Elon Musk announced that he will be releasing a more detailed explanation of the technology in the next few months (sometime in August was a suggested publication date). I'm sure that will be something on Slashdot when the document dump happens.
Nope. Thorium needs just a fraction of the shielding that U does. My guess though is that long term, electric planes will become the norm. Perhaps via lasers providing electricity.
Yeah, one thing I like about Musk, is he makes things happen. Hopefully, he will cause this insane attitude about twin rails to be re-examined.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In 15 years, more than half will be electric. In 20, virtually all cars will be. Musk is predicting a smooth growth curve for something which will have an outrageous knee.
Come back to this post in 15 years. Either I'll be right, or Musk and I will both be outrageously wrong.