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.'"

Comments

I wanted to post this

[kimvette]

I wanted to make a post from my electric car but I ran out of powe*&^%^@*&^#####

Re:I wanted to post this

[GeLeTo]

The amount of electricity required to travel a certain distance with an EV is roughly the same as the amount of electricity used to refine the gas for a regular vehicle that travels the same distance. According to DOE:
http://gatewayev.org/how-much-electricity-is-used-refine-a-gallon-of-gasoline

Re:I wanted to post this

[hairyfeet]

That's not the big problem the problem is the batteries. we just haven't had any true battery breakthough in years and lithium batteries just don't take extremes in heat and cold like a lead acid does. The average temp in the south has been over 100F, ever leave a lithium battery in a car in this kind of heat? Say goodbye to more than half your capacity.

Until battery tech can take temp shifts like gas can its gonna be a hard sell, the vast majority that own vehicles don't own temp controlled garages and with the batteries for the things running a minimum of $7500 a piece unless the government wants to eat billions in costs for giving away batteries there simply won't be a used market, nor will those that buy one want to keep the vehicle once the batteries die out of warranty, they'll end up scrapped.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Noughmad]

Simple, just use electricity we currently waste on drilling, refining and transportation of oil.

Where is the plastic used to make the bits for the cars going to come from?

I don't know, maybe from all the oil we won't be burning?

Re:I wanted to post this

[Xenkar]

It is called hemp. You can make all of the plastic, paper, and cloth parts for the car out of it. The only problem is that the DEA currently prevents any industrial farming with it since it is also a CLASS I drug which means "It has no medical benefits" which most people disagree with.

Until we get our DEA problem under control, we'll need to import it from Canada which has police agents who are smart enough to tell the difference between an illicit drug growing operation and an industrial hemp field.

Re:I wanted to post this

[tehcyder]

I wanted to make a post from my electric car but I ran out of powe*&^%^@*&^#####

Yes, because no one ever ran out of gas, so your point pretty much demolishes the very idea of an electric car.

What's rather surprising is that no one has ever thought of this before. I expect the all powerful electric car lobby has bribed everyone to sweep this under the carpet.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

The problem with this statement Musk makes, is the countries electric infrastructure can barely keep up with the demands and it is falling apart, it will take close to 20 years to get the systems to where it has been upgraded and added onto so it is not getting maxed out.

This is simply not true. The DOE and other groups have studied this over and over again. There is no problem generating enough power to switch over almost all of the US's vehicles to electricity, except a small shortfall in the pacific northwest** if everything was switched. The issue is that power plants spend most of their time sitting idle (in order to be able to meet peak demand), while EVs predominantly charge in off-peak hours. The net result is that EVs increase power plant utilization percentages and are thus a huge boon to grid operators (who unsurprisingly are big supporters of electric vehicles), as they get to sell more power without having to build new plants, and the power that they're selling is a nice even, steady draw.

There is one weakness in the link, but it has nothing to do with generation, or even bulk distribution. It's the final leg of the journey, neighborhood distribution. Several studies have shown that once neighrboods hit 10-20% penetration or so (which is still a long time from now!), you can start having problems with too much load on the local circuits. But this is nothing extraordinary; local circuits are upgraded all the time as neighborhoods grow and power usages change.

** - The pacific northwest, due to its heavy use of hydropower, doesn't have as much idle capacity sitting around at night as other regions. Hydropower doesn't care whether you use it during the night or the day; it's generally energy-per-year-limited, not peak-power-limited.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

That's not the big problem the problem is the batteries.

The one true statement in this paragraph, but not for the reason you think.

we just haven't had any true battery breakthough in years

Remember what cell phones looked like 20 years ago? Remember that giant brick of a battery? Compare that to the battery on your smartphone today. Now look at what your smartphone is wasting power on beyond just maintaining a cell signal.

It's a common but utterly false myth that batteries haven't advanced much. They've been advancing dramatically and show no signs of stopping. Now, increasing power *consumption* on electronics tends to waste a lot of this, but as for storage, it's had a pretty consistent 8% energy density by mass gain per year. Power density has risen even faster.

and lithium batteries just don't take extremes in heat and cold like a lead acid does.

Most automotive-style li-ions are rated for much more extreme temperature curves than lead-acid. I've seen some rated for as low as -50C, although -30C is more common. Ever tried to start a lead-acid vehicle in -50C weather? Yeah, that's what a block heater is for. And guess what? The block heater concept works with EVs, too. And yes, the same applies on the upper end of the temperature spectrum.

The average temp in the south has been over 100F, ever leave a lithium battery in a car in this kind of heat? Say goodbye to more than half your capacity.

Again, automotive-style li-ions (which are a different chemistry than laptop-style li-ions, they're more akin to the li-ions in power tools) don't do this; they're amazingly durable. Something you don't seem to get is that there's not just one chemistry available in each family. Battery manufacturers have an array of tradeoffs they can make in chemistry selection, chemistry details, DOD (depth of discharge), and so forth. This radically alters the ratios between price, energy density, power density, and lifespan. For most consumer electronics, they're thought of as disposable. Hence price and energy density are typically highly optimized at the expense of power density and lifespan. For vehicles, lifespan is fixed at a target (usually something in the 7-10 years to 20% capacity loss range), power density is fixed at whatever the demand is (high for hybrids, medium for plug-in hybrids, low for pure EVs - basically, the more batteries you have, the less power you need per cell), and then the price/energy density tradeoff is adjusted for the vehicle's particular market niche.

for giving away batteries there simply won't be a used market, nor will those that buy one want to keep the vehicle once the batteries die out of warranty, they'll end up scrapped.

Simply not true. Grid operators are dying to get their hands on used batteries from the EV industry which they could snatch up at bargain-basement prices. As if they care that they're only 80% capacity or less; energy density is practically irrelevant when your batteries sit in a warehouse in a fixed location, and 50-80% of the density of a li-ion is still way more than a lead-acid anyway.

Re:I wanted to post this

[stepho-wrs]

From wikipedia

Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa var. sativa is the variety grown for industrial use, while C. sativa subsp. indica generally has poor fiber quality and is primarily used for recreational and medicinal purposes.

So, the type used for making things with is not the type the druggies like.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

But when I run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, I just push my car to the nearest farmhouse and plug my gas tank into the gas socket to get enough gas to drive to the next refuelling station. Can't do that with electricity!

Re:I wanted to post this

[stepho-wrs]

Horses also produce a lot of pollution.
Hint: bring a shovel.
Large scale use of horses could potentially lead to large scale epidemics from organisms breeding in the faeces.
The smell probably won't be enjoyed either.

Re:I wanted to post this

[MrL0G1C]

How did your drivel get modded up? Have you been living in a cave for the last decade, if you actually read the news you might have noticed the continuous stream of stories about improvements in battery technology.

The anti-new-energy-technology mindset on Slashdot is just sad, thankfully this doesn't matter because renewable energy is catching up pricewise with fossil fuels and large-scale energy storage is feasible. Renewables are the future whether nuclear and fossil fuel loving slashdot ignoramuses like it or not.

Re:I wanted to post this

[PhillC]

The problem with the article is that just because Musk made a statement "he'd be willing to bet on," people automatically assumed that he thought it was guaranteed to come true. This is incorrect.

Just because someone is willing to place a bet on something, doesn't mean they believe the outcome is 100% likely to occur. As an example, using one of the most common betting mediums of horse racing, if I thought a horse was a 3/1 (3-to-1 or 33%) chance of winning a race, but someone offered me odds of 5/1 about this horse, then I would also be willing to place a bet on it. This is because I would be receiving good value. Over time, if I continue to place good value bets, I will make a profit.

Therefore, if Musk believes his prediction has a 33% chance of coming true, and the research analyst thinks it only has a 20% chance of coming true, offering these odds of 5-to-1 to Musk, then he should probably place that bet.

Re:I wanted to post this

[GrahamCox]

Assuming that's true, it means that a gas car is using the energy twice - once to refine the fuel, then again to use the fuel. At least the EV car is only using it once.

The problem with petrol is not this anyway, it's that a) it's a finite resource and becoming scarcer, b) it's releasing CO2 that was sequestered over million sof years in a short timeframe and that doesn't seem to be a good idea by any measure, and c) it's a very inefficient use of the energy it embodies.

If batteries could even get to half of the energy density of petrol, EVs would be a no-brainer. IC engines are really quite unsuitable for the task they are given.

Re:I wanted to post this

[drinkypoo]

IC engines are really quite unsuitable for the task they are given.

That's odd, people seem to do quite a bit of traveling while being dragged around behind those ICs. I'm pretty sure they're capable for the task they are given. If you want to argue that the task they are given is stupid, you might have a point.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

Considering more power plants are being taken offline than built I think your math is slightly off.

Tell it to the DOE and PNNL.

Are you really not aware of the fact that much more power is used during the daytime than at night?

And lastly the range of current electric vehicles isn't anywhere close to being useful. I live in the city where GM developed the EV. you barely see the cars in the summer and never in the winter as the range just isn't there

Clearly that has nothing to do with there being *incredibly small numbers produced so far*, heavens no...

100 miles sounds good in theory but if you turn on the air conditioning you get 50-60, you turn on the radio and head lights it is cut down even more.

Also outright false. Cruising at 300Wh/mi at 70mph is 21kW of cruising power. Max load for a car air conditioner might be something like 3kW. Maintaining temperature at a steady state even on a hot day will be a small fraction of that, perhaps 0.5-1kW. Headlights are even less, around 100W total, give or take depending on your headlight type. The radio is (generally) even less still.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

And modern electric cars do loose half of the battery capacity in cold climate

That's simply not true. As GM points out, most of the winter difference, which isn't as dramatic as you make it out to be (25-30 miles instead of the average/nominal 40 miles, with 45-50 in spring) has nothing to do with loss of battery capacity, and is simply that it takes more energy to drive a car of any fuel source in the winter, between increased tire losses, snow, harsher driving cycles, interior cabin heating, etc. In case you didn't notice, your gasoline car also gets worse mileage in the winter. Also, the Volt unfortunately doesn't have a reversible heat pump, just a standard resistive heater, which is a big hit. Most future EVs should be expected to have reversible heat pumps for climate control, with the motor and/or battery pack as the "hot" reservoir.

Lastly, a pet peeve of mine...

Re:I wanted to post this

[GrahamCox]

That's odd, people seem to do quite a bit of traveling while being dragged around behind those ICs. I'm pretty sure they're capable for the task they are given. If you want to argue that the task they are given is stupid, you might have a point.

They work, because they have had trillions of dollars thrown at them for over a century. Nevertheless, they only seem suitable, but they're not.

Think how many components in the average car are dedicated to working around the IC engine's basic unsuitability. A car has to start at zero speed. No IC engine can run at zero speed, so you need a clutch of some sort. Then they have no power until they are revolving quite quickly, so you need to gear down the output. Then as soon as you're going at a few mph, they've run out of revs and you need a different gear. They are so inefficient that they get very hot indeed, so you need a large cooling system. The fuel/air mixture has to be just so, so you need a pretty complicated system to deliver that with any sort of control and frugality. The internal forces generated are enormous - really, think about how many g a piston pulls reversing direction - so they are big and heavy to contain those forces. And they are a one-way process, so there is no way to recover excess energy of the vehicle in any usable form - you have to throw it all away as waste heat. And when all is said and done, they turn in a measly 25% or so efficiency, which is crap.

An electric motor is perfect by comparison - efficiencies in the 90%+ range, reversible (i.e. it can recover energy back into electrical form), generates torque from zero speed and capable of delivering that torque over a usable range of speeds with no gearing. Sounds like a winner to me.

An IC car has been successful because of the convenience and density of its energy storage, not because of the Victorian engineering hack-job that converts that into motion. And it's only the lack of a suitable energy storage solution that holds back EVs, not motors.

The modern IC engine is a miracle of engineering, but that doesn't mean it's not a bunch of band-aids on top of hacks on top of an essentially unsuitable method for converting chemical energy into motion.

Re:I wanted to post this

[CrimsonAvenger]

The amount of electricity required to travel a certain distance with an EV is roughly the same as the amount of electricity used to refine the gas for a regular vehicle that travels the same distance. According to DOE: http://gatewayev.org/how-much-electricity-is-used-refine-a-gallon-of-gasoline

Fascinating link.

Alas, it's carefully overlooking a few key details.

One of which is that the energy of crude oil is in no way related to the electricity required to refine said crude oil.

What they're actually making a guesstimate to is the amount of electricity that could have been generated INSTEAD of making the gasoline.

And they're overestimating that by assuming that the making of electricity is 100% efficient.

Which it's not, in case you were curious.

Re:I wanted to post this

[dr2chase]

Headlights are far smaller than 100W with modern lighting technology, LEDs or otherwise. I expect the air conditioners in an electric car will be somewhat more effective because the engine itself is not barfing out enough waste heat to heat a house (*). The usual goal is to try to NOT vent that heat into the car itself, but it's hard not to have leakage, given that you're driving the car through the heat from the front, and the exhaust pipe and catalytic converter are routed underneath it. It's not like you have R-33 insulation between you and it.

  (* comparison; we have an oil-fired furnace with a max burn rate of 1.1g/h; 33mph @ 30mpg is also 1.1g/h, and the fraction of useful work from burning gasoline in an ICE is about the same as the fraction of heat that goes up the stack from our aging furnace. And the furnace never runs constantly, even when asked to maintain a temperature 60 degrees warmer than what is outside.)

Re:I wanted to post this

[scharkalvin]

You can't just run a transformer at higher voltage, the core is limited in wattage. So if you doubled the primary voltage the core would saturate at half the current, with no net gain in power.

Re:I wanted to post this

[dr2chase]

Your car can theoretically run on algae fuel. In practice, it won't. Imagine replacing our cornfields, all of them, with fancy-schmancy algae incubators, and all the maintenance and labor that is going to require. We can get to about 20% of our current fuel consumption if we convert all of our corn to ethanol; if I give algae a 5x efficiency advantage, that's still all our cornfields. We can't grow it in open ponds, because there will be weeds that compete, birds that contaminate, never mind the loss of water to evaporation on that scale. Plants are not very efficient converters of solar energy -- today's photovoltaic kicks their ass.

Be careful, also to avoid confusing capacity with what you need for the usual case. My car is almost never driven anywhere near its 1-tank range in a single day, almost never carries more than one passenger (and often, just me), usually carries not much cargo, and never ever hits its top speed. On my commute home, it often travels miles at an average speed slower than a bicycle (I ride a bicycle on the same route, so I know the places where a bike beats traffic). On the bike I get to observe lots of commuters when I pass them, and my use of my car looks a lot like other people's use of their cars. And yeah, we're an urban/metro area, not Montana, but Metro Boston (*) alone has three times the population of Montana. (*) Not even "Greater Boston".

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

Actually, I'm not; I'm just using US figures because I know most of the people at this site are from the US. I actually live in Iceland (did you notice my sig?). And no, automotive-style lithium batteries have no problem with cold temperatures. Most are rated down to -30 or so, and I've seen as low as -50C. You're confusing automotive-style with laptop-style. Each type of cell is optimized towards its particular use.

Re:I wanted to post this

[GrahamCox]

I'm not arguing that your car isn't a highly practical and useful thing. I'm arguing that we're so used to the darn things being built the way they are we don't even recognise them for the horrible inefficient mess that they really are.

If the car hadn't ben invented yet, but other technology was at its present day level, and someone said he's invented the car, that would be fine. But if he then went on to describe how it worked and how it was fueled, he'd be laughed out of town and his patent would sink without trace. Cars are a throwback to the day they were invented in 1888, and only work due to the tireless efforts of engineers applying band-aids.

If you were to start today, you'd start with the electric motor as a given and then apply the century of research to the batteries.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

Thanks - I appreciate it! You know, you should consider donating to my kickstarter page for developing a snark detector. We're nearly halfway to our goal!

Re:I wanted to post this

[dr2chase]

The ocean's a really hostile place for "civilized" stuff, and the desert is short on water.
It's the scale that's a problem more than anything else.
We also might want that desert for, say, photovoltaic panels instead.
And notice also how nobody (as far as I have heard) has proposed floating solar plants; for some reason they like to put them in flat places not filled with energetic waves and loads of random life (barnacles that encrust boats, sharks that bite cables, that sort of thing). (Which is not to say that nothing lives in a desert, but the life seems to be much less troublemaking.)

Re:I wanted to post this

[JWSmythe]

Yes, but they're upgraded piecemeal. If people suddenly started buying EVs en masse then they wouldn't be able to find enough labor (or budget) to upgrade all the neighborhoods.

I may be getting old, but I always hear about some catastrophic effect that new technology will have. As CPUs approached 50Mhz, people were telling warnings about if their frequencies got faster, there would be widespread FM interference.

With the public availability of wifi, people made relations to the 2.4Ghz signal being so close to microwave ovens, that the world population would be sterile, we'd all die of cancer within a few years, and other false claims.

Ages ago, it was suggested if the population started (oh my gosh) having their own vehicles, the road infrastructure would fail. There simply wouldn't be room on the roads for all the cars, and if there were, there would simply be no usable area for anything but highways.

And lets not forget about oil shortages. The 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, (I think we forget about it in the 1990s), were all going to be the end of the world, because there would be no more oil, or at least not enough to provide for consumer use. I doubt many people here remember WWII war rationing.

As for your assertion that there will be a conflict with electric vehicles and power grids, is irrational. Sure, if everyone bought an electric car today, and plugged them all in at 6pm, it would most likely cripple some areas.

We'll use the Chevy Volt as an example, since it is a newer plugin hybrid that is available to consumers.
http://gm-volt.com/2009/08/20/charging-the-chevy-volt/

There will be a portable 120 V unit (R) that can be plugged into any standard receptacle. It will be able to recharge the car fully in 6 hours at 12 amps or 8 hours at 8 amps.

The other device option (L) is a 240 V stationary wall-mounted unit that has to be installed in the owners garage per code. This unit running at 16 amps can recharge the Volt in 3 hours.

For comparison, a 3 ton residential air conditioner draws about 14A@240VAC. A 4 ton draws about 17A @240VAC.

It could be equally claimed that building newer homes in excess of 3000 sq/ft with vaulted ceilings would have crippled the power grid. I may not have received the memo, but it looks like we all still have power for our computers, so I'm guessing the power grid survived. That gives a good impression of what the peak current is. For those who turn on their air conditioner (or heater, depending on location and climate) when they get home, make dinner, watch their big screen TVs, etc, etc, the peak power consumption is higher.

The only real problem would be if everyone bought new plug in electric cars within a *very* short time span. If I were to step outside, and look at my neighbors cars, I would see cars made from the 1970's through maybe 2010. I don't need to look right now, I did last night. I've also noticed similar trends just about everywhere I've been (which is an awful lot of places).

Just like the telephone and cable companies upgraded areas to support faster Internet speeds, the power companies will upgrade areas as needed to support higher demands.

The article makes a 20 year prediction that half of new cars sold will be plug-in electric. That doesn't mean half of homes will have them. That would indicate for half of homes to have them, you'd still be looking more like 50 years in the future. Now think, what was the spot you're sitting in now, 50 years ago? Where I am was a partially wooded rural area, a few miles off a 2-lane highway that was probably farm land of some sort. Now it's a residential neighborhood, surrounded by residential neighborhoods, off of a 6 lane highway, and a 4 lane bypass.

If you think back (or imagine, if you aren't old enough), households have grown, power needs have grown. A typical 1940s

Re:I wanted to post this

[kimvette]

Factory HID ballasts are 35W each, so you're looking at 70W for headlamps.

Some vehicles (Audi R8, Audi A8, Lexus LS600H, Cadillac Escalade, some motorcycles, ) feature LED headlamps but there are problems with LED headlamp design - mainly cooling (see http://www.caranddriver.com/features/2010-audi-r8-led-headlights ) and collimation/focus (it's not a single-point light source like HID, and it's not a filament like halogen incandescent, but an array of LEDs) but if a headlamp assembly is designed from the beginning to use LEDs it's not a problem.

It took a bit of searching but I found that one of VW's concept cars uses Osram's new headlamp module which requires only 19W, and Osram expects to get it down to 15W in a few years without sacrificing light output.

Re:I wanted to post this

[dgatwood]

To some extent, yes, they do. To the best of my knowledge, all rechargeable battery technology exhibits capacity decay over time. The only question is whether they show significant loss of capacity after five years, ten years, twenty years, or some period of time that's long enough that nobody cares anymore. This, in turn, depends on not just the battery technology, but also on how you use it and how the car's charge circuitry was designed—deep discharges from long trips versus lots of very shallow discharges, continuous trickle charging versus letting the battery sag to 90% before you top it up, whether you always charge the battery or allow it to stay mostly discharged for a period of time (which promotes dendrite formation), etc. all play a role in how long a battery lasts.

As far as I can tell, we really have no idea how LiFePO4 is going to hold up in the real world; the sample size of LiFePO4 batteries that are more than a couple of years old is too small. But for older designs that use NiMH or older lithium ion chemistries, we know approximately how long they'll last, and it isn't pretty.

Re:I wanted to post this

[Rei]

To some extent, yes, they do.

And to some extent, an elephant is like a dinoflagellate. Sorry, but the sort of cells that go into laptops have completely different behavioral properties than the spinels and phosphates used in EVs (except Tesla's, but Tesla overcomes their issues by babying the heck out of their cells), everything from cycle life to temperature tolerance to power output to energy density to flammability and on and on down the line.

As far as I can tell, we really have no idea how LiFePO4 is going to hold up in the real world;

Um, yes we do. They've been used in power tools for something like 7 or 8 years now. And they were first developed nearly 20 years ago. Beyond that, that's what accelerated aging tests are for.

But for older designs that use NiMH or older lithium ion chemistries, we know approximately how long they'll last, and it isn't pretty.

First off, older NiMH packs are doing just fine. Have you totally forgotten about hybrid vehicles and their very low pack failure rates? And second, not only is lumping cobalt-based 18650s designed for low cost and high energy density at the expense of power density and lifespan with chemistries with an entirely opposite design criteria ridiculous, but such 18650s *are* meeting their design criteria quite well. It's just that their design spec doesn't call for very long lifespan because the devices they go into aren't expected to need it.

Re:I wanted to post this

[dgatwood]

Um, yes we do. They've been used in power tools for something like 7 or 8 years now. And they were first developed nearly 20 years ago.

Ah, but people use cars very differently than they use power tools. Most people keep one battery on a rapid charger, then swap it out when the one they're using goes dead. That's potentially a very different usage model than plugging in your car every night and trickle-charging it over twelve hours or more. You'll probably see a much broader variation of usage patterns in automobiles, too, with some people driving ten miles a day, and others driving a hundred. Finally, cars have a *lot* of cells crammed into a tiny space, all being charged and discharged at once, which means it is also a completely different thermal environment than the one in which power tool batteries operate.

Folks can certainly speculate on how they'll behave long-term in cars based on lab behavior, but I've seen a lot of stuff that works in a lab, but falls apart in the real world. I don't want to be an early adopter of these things. In a few years, when the kinks are worked out, great. Until then, I view batteries with suspicion. :-)

Sorry, but the sort of cells that go into laptops have completely different behavioral properties than the spinels and phosphates used in EVs...

All the laptops I've seen in the past six or seven years use LiPo packs, which as I understand it, is a direction the automakers would like to move in, for space reasons (hopefully after they improve the life expectancy). But point taken.

Get a car that lasts 50+ Years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Get a car that lasts 50+ Years

[Kupfernigk]

In fact, because of the low loading on the power train and the lack of frictional components like a clutch, there are plenty of examples of the Toyota Prius going around with similar mileages. Over that sort of mileage, the fuel cost saving becomes enormous. One potential problem for the EV industry is that the electric motors are such a proven technology that no real improvements are likely, and battery upgrades should be rather simple. There is going to be very little reason other than a crash to replace an EV. The car is gradually ceasing to be a status symbol anyway, so the net effect could be a dramatic shrinkage of the car industry, with the replacement cycle perhaps extending to 30 years or more.

All you need is one car.

[rahvin112]

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?

Re:All you need is one car.

[game kid]

Perhaps, though by 2032 "less than $25,000" would probably mean "less than $250,000", or "less than CNY159,350" if China decides to choke more than just rare earth supplies.

Re:All you need is one car.

[Loki_1929]

Why wait for a 200 mile electric car

How can one wait for a car that came out 4 years ago? The Tesla Roadster had a 244 mile range and is all-electric. The Tesla Model S (which began shipping this year) has up to a 300 mile range on the top end battery option.

The pricing is a bit higher for now, but it's coming down very fast and they're aiming for $30,000 on the next generation. That said, the 200-mile all electric car is a few years old now and they work great.

Re:All you need is one car.

[Rei]

The rare earth thing is a red herring. Tesla, and pretty much all other modern EVs, don't use rare earths. They use AC synchronous motors, which don' have permanent magnets. And anyway, it's not that rare earths are only found in China; they can just produce them a bit cheaper than other parts of the world. The result of the stockpiling is that mines in other parts of the world are starting to be built / reopen (there's one in California, for example, that shut down years ago due to cheap Chinese rare earths that's now reopening).

Re:All you need is one car.

[tazan]

In the world I live in we have these things called poor people. They drive 10 year old beaters in need of a tune up that get lousy mileage. They live in crappy neigborhoods where there are no jobs and so drive their junkers way more miles than they should. They spend a much higher percentage of their income on gasoline than you do. If the price of gas doubled there would be a _lot_ of really angry people. Not to mention what it would do to the price of food and everything else.

Re:All you need is one car.

[loshwomp]

Tesla, and pretty much all other modern EVs, don't use rare earths. They use AC synchronous motors, which don' have permanent magnets.

This is not correct, and is evidently a point of much confusion on the internets. Synchronous motors (aka "brushless DC" motors) do indeed use permanent magnets. Virtually all hybrids and EVs on the road today use this type of motor, and absolutely employ the so-called "rare earth" magnets.

Tesla is fairly unique in that they (like AC Propulsion from which they sourced their technology) use AC induction ("asynchronous") motors, which do not use any permanent magnets.

While the stators are the same in both types of machine, the induction rotor uses only iron and copper (or aluminum or other conductor). I also happen to believe induction motors are mostly the better choice for traction applications--particularly for high performance and larger motors.

Major OEMs use synchronous motors mostly because they don't know better, they're simple to build, and they used to be easier to control (although cheap modern microprocessors have made that irrelevant). Synchronous motors can be made slightly more efficient at a specific power-and-RPM point, but that's not representative of real world driving, where the typical power is about 10% of the peak power.

Re:All you need is one car.

[Rei]

Synchronous motors (aka "brushless DC" motors) do indeed use permanent magnets.

Which would be relevant if Tesla and the others used a brushless DC motor. They use induction-based AC synchronous motors. Almost all older EVs used brushless DC and "neighborhood electric vehicles" (aka, glorified golf carts) still do, as well as most hybrids, nearly all modern, highway speed EVs being developed/on the road are now using AC synchronous motors, which have no permanent magnet. This includes not just Tesla's powertrain (which it also shares with a couple other auto manufacturers and was used in, for example, the electric mini and Toyota's new RAV4EV), GM's vehicles, Think's, Renault's, BYD's, etc. Nissan is the only exception with the Leaf, and I doubt they'll stick with it for long.

AC motors like this used to be grossly impractical, but this has changed with the advent of readily available high power switching electronics. "Brushless DC" motors are history as far as EVs go.

Re:All you need is one car.

[Rei]

Let me be clearer, then: I'm talking about inductive AC synchronous motors. The Leaf (and apparently the ActiveE, hadn't checked out their motor tech) are the only modern highway-speed EVs with permanent magnets in its motor. Is that clear enough?

GM does not use a permament magnet motor. I linked to a GM site for you, where they quite clearly say it's an induction motor. The difference in motors between it and the Leaf is one of the oft-cited differences, so I'm surprised that you don't know that.

Re:All you need is one car.

[Rei]

Where did you hear that the Volt has two electric motors? That's one of the most bizarre claims I've heard yet. It has a single motor and a gasoline engine.

Don't like that site about the Volt? Here's some more. Good enough for you?

You act like there's a ton of Japanese manufacturers out there. Toyota is going induction. Nissan is going brushless. The other two, Mitsubishi and Subaru, are bit players in the EV field with really minimalist vehicles; I don't think Subaru even has anything that can go highway speeds. In the US, we have Tesla, GM, and Ford actually selling highway-speed EVs. Tesla: all induction. GM: induction on sale, with a prototype unveiled that uses a brushless. Ford: assuming it uses the same motor as their Focus FCV, the focus EV is induction (the EV transit connect definitely is). Others: Th!nk: induction. BMW: two "demonstration" EVs, one induction and one PM.

Yes, there were more permanent magnet ones out there than I realized. But the basic point is the same: the concept that rare earths are necessary to EVs is simply false.

Batteries

[amiga3D]

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.

Fuel cell

[chebucto]

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.

Re:Fuel cell

[Sqr(twg)]

I worked with fuel cells for about 7 years, and I'm fairly certain they will never be used in cars on any appreciable scale. They were used as an excuse by the auto industry for a while. ("Don't make us do battery cars. Wait for fuel cells!") Now that battery cars are about to become economical, the excuse is no longer needed, so automotive fuel cell programmes will be scrapped. (There are applications where fuel cells do make sense, but cars is not one of them.)

The main arguments agianst fuel cells are:
* Efficiency. Making hydrogen from electricity on an economcial scale has an efficiency of about 50 %. Charging a battery is better than 90 %. Converting hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell is again about 50 % efficiency (so 25 % round trip). Discharging a battery is again better than 90 % (so 80 % round trip). * Complexity. A fuel cell needs a supply of moist air to function. This requires a compressior, a humidifier, a water tank, lots of pipes, etc. All of this costs money, adds weight, and introduces potential problems.
* Cost. Fuel cells require platinum catalysts that are expensive.
* Reliability. Fuel cells just aren't as reliable as batteries.
* Lifespan. Again, batteries are better than fuel cells in automotive applications, and since they are also cheaper, they have a much better price/lifespan ratio.

Modern batteries can actually re-charge quite quickly if you have a powerful enough charger. (A car draws much more power than a house, so residential chargers cannot be very powerful.)

I imagine in the future there will be robots at gas stations that switch batteries in your car faster than you could refill a gas tank.

Before thinking Musk is a fool...

[Loki_1929]

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.

50% is not necessarily a large number

[erice]

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.

Re:Depends on the price of gas

[Anne Thwacks]

Battery life is the big killer. Who would buy a second hand electric car? They are only good for land-fill. They are massively less "green" than mechanically injected diesel vehicles which have a life of a million miles or more with a bit of low cost (potentially DIY) maintenance. The future is algae produced diesel, and not gas produced electricity.

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.

Cars are dual use.

[rew]

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.

Where are the bigger electric cars.

[yendor]

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".

Re:Depends on the price of gas

[Namarrgon]

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.

Lithium-Air

[Namarrgon]

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.

Re:Depends on the price of gas

[Rei]

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.

Re:Depends on the price of gas

[Rei]

Battery life is the big killer. Who would buy a second hand electric car? They are only good for land-fill. They are massively less "green" than mechanically injected diesel vehicles which have a life of a million miles or more with a bit of low cost (potentially DIY) maintenance

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.