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No, the Tesla Model S Doesn't Pollute More Than an SUV
thecarchik writes "In an exhaustive 6,500-word article on the financial website Seeking Alpha, analyst Nathan Weiss lays out a case that the latest Tesla Model S actually has higher effective emissions than most large SUVs of both the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and smog-producing pollutants like sulfur dioxide. This is absolutely false. Virtually all electric car advocates agree that when toting up the environmental pros and cons of electric cars, it's only fair to include powerplant emissions. When this has been done previously, the numbers have still favored electric cars. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, concluded in a 2012 report (PDF), 'Electric vehicles charged on the power grid have lower global warming emissions than the average gasoline-based vehicle sold today.' Working through every one of Weiss' conclusions may show a higher emissions rate than Tesla's published numbers, but in no way does a Model S pollute the amounts even close to an SUV."
When the Prius first got popular the same thing was said about it. Was soon proved false.
Wow, the amount of skew in that article is truly amazing. You'd almost think that some people have so much invested in the mainstream automobile industry, that they'd say anything to keep their money from going down the drain.
* Can you power a Tesla Model S with non-polluting renewable energy?
* Can you power a gasoline SUV with non-polluting renewable energy?
One should think about those two questions for a moment before saying that the Tesla pollutes more than an SUV.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Did you read what you quoted? Do you think skeptics would *disagree* that powerplant emissions should be included?
Facts don't deter FUD. Glad somebody has, for the two billionth time, debunked the "electric cars cause more pollution than my 3 ton 5 mpg SUV", but it's not going to stop stop the True Believers (True Disbelievers?) from spreading the same old FUD. You'd think they'd be embarrassed by it, but you'd be wrong. I don't get it either.
I haven't read TFA of course, but does it include the lifetime environmental impact of the battery packs? (mining through disposal) That's what usually has me skeptical of today's electric vehicles.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Better would be to compare the S model to a typical current-model gas-powered sedan.
True, it likely does not pollute more than an SUV, but what about a Chevy Impala?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Presumably they already do since NOT including power plant emissions would make electric cars look orders of magnitude better.
It's like they say... Only Nixon could go to China. Regardless of the merits of their arguments, these guys ain't Nixon. Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Why on earth would electric car skeptics object to the inclusion of powerplant emissions in the calculation of the total footprint of electric cars???
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
That's something they will never do. Why? There's no money in it.
Regardless of the merits of their arguments ...
Translation: I don't care if they're right or wrong.
Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Wake me when the Flat Earth Society disbands. You're never going to convince the "skeptics", and if by some miracle you did, they wouldn't be skeptics anymore.
You didn't read the last half of that sentence... It's not saying virtually all advocates agree that electric cars are better. It's saying that they all agree that the powerplant emissions should be included. In other words, the advocates all agree that electric cars need to be measured by the more rigid standard, which the skeptics already agree with.
Question: What is the payback period on a Tesla Roadster?
I've been asked these questions a number of times. The Electrical car hater beams, as he has clearly won the argument.
Fair enough - since the question was asked - "What is the payback period on a Bugatti, or Corvette, or even a Kia Soul or Toyota Corolla? "
Or even my Motorcycle, for that matter. I don't drive my motorcycle because of some great payback, I drive it because I want to.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Per kwh, a coal-fired powerplant pollutes less than your average Camry. I'm not sure how significant the average transmission loss is, but powerplants obviously have enormous efficiency advantages over a standard internal combustion engine.
Assume it is true, that electric cars produce more CO2 than non-electric cars. They are still an improvement, because now our money isn't going over to warlords and dictators in the middle east (it's popular to blame the US government for propping up dictators and bad actors in exchange for oil, but when we fill up our cars, we all do it).
And if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, it's a two-step process. First you have to get electric cars (or other alternative), then you need to get better power plants. If one of these steps happens before the other, it doesn't make it less good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Mainstream automobile industry is considered a long-term dead-money play.
Tesla stock was very heavily shorted by hedge funds. They are hurting now. And yes they'd say anything, and pay anybody to say anything to keep their money from going down the drain.
They were convinced 100% that shorting Tesla was a guaranteed win---in significant measure because they really believed their right-wing ideology. They thought that Tesla was a short-term dead-money play.
Remember the mostly slanted NYT article? Why, when everything else has been very positive? Because NYC's the financial capital. Who might be susceptible to pressure or lucre? People in the financial industry or in New York close to the financial industry.
Seriously, what do people have against them?
I think they're the coolest thing out there, and they provide a way to stop importing oil from the Muslims.
It's well known that central electricity production is significantly more efficient that a bunch of separate internal combustion engines.
But why the hate? I know the NYT has a vendetta against the electric car - they're a bunch of scumbags. But why do normal people hate them?
The problem is that most of our electricity is produced through coal burning plants. That's a very messy form of production, and many of these plants have been grandfathered in and their owners intentionally avoid upgrading them because of the costs of 'greening up' their emissions. Coal plants belch out more radiation every few months than the entire Three Mile Island disaster. They're pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, way more than if the equivalent MW was produced through gas or diesel.
That said, even if we all drove electric cars right now, they'd still only soak up a fraction of the total electricity produced. A single aluminum smelting plant would probably soak as much electricity as a small metropolitan area's rush hour traffic... industrial uses for electricity still far outstrip private use; Even in the transportation industry, more fuel is used for semi trucks, trains, etc., than for your personal car.
And if we really want to talk about the "greenest" form of transportation: Diesel turbine locomotives has every other form of transport beat by a landslide. And they've been "hybrid" since the 70s; Most of them are direct-drive electric motors and use turbines and a large bank of batteries to store juice, yet are big enough to use recombinant turbines, which are very efficient in their own right.
The Tesla car can't compete with the locomotive for environmental friendliness. No car can.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
But if Global Warming does not exist, why do you care if an electric car pollutes more than a regular one?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Do these same analysis factor in the emissions caused by the mining of oil, refining it and trucking it to the gas stations? Not usually... That's not fair to count emissions from electricity generation but then only compare it to tailpipe emissions of gasoline.
To be completely accurate you'd have to compare the whole cars, not just one item. Electric does away with a lot more than gas. Oil, antifreeze, transmission fluid, etc.
There are studies that show "conservatives" here in the USA will buy CFL bulbs on their own (if they think) but as soon as you label them "green" or with other labels and slogans that have been associated as belonging to the enemy tribe, they will fuck themselves just to not have anything to do with the opposing tribe.
If you want things to get better you have to avoid terms associated by propagandists with tribalism and negative emotions. If you want the only have your tribe benefit and feel extra smug - then you continue to use the terms even after they've been ruined by propagandists knowing that the other tribe will harm itself in it's hatred of you. Depends on what kind of person you are. Me, I'm no Christian or Buddhist so I like to load things up knowing the fools will screw themselves.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The typically used comparison between Electric and ICE cars is well to wheel. This means you take into account all the factors from mining the energy to delivering it to the road in the form of torque on a wheel. This includes: drilling, pumping, shipping, refining, shipping, and burning. The efficiency gains between shipping to your gas station vs. generating electricity and delivering it to your home is enough to blow away whatever argument there might be, let alone trying to describe how terribly inefficient the internal combustion engine is. Besides all that, if you get your power from solar, wind, or hydro, then your electric vehicle's emissions are effectively zero. And you can't possibly try and compare electric to corn based ethanol, the amount of water, power, and food used to generate ethanol is absolutely staggering. You'd be better off delivering the corn to your own personal horse to ride on your commute. Nor can you really complain about the cost or effort involved in the batteries or other electric vehicle components either. Those are easily offset by the amount of material involved in making and maintaining a comparable petroleum based car, and the lithium based batteries are just as recyclable as lead acid batteries.
If the first hybrids/electrics looked/performed like the Tesla it would have probably been a lot different story. Add in that it's be tied to the "global warming hoax" and you have polarization. ie; if you believe in global warming you should get a Prius, if not f-it.
To know what the TOTAL pollution footprint of the car is. That is everything from production of all materials used in the car, the totals for all the power and materials consumed during its useful lifetime and the total cost of recycling the car once it is dead. A lot of the fancy materials used in modern (electric and petrol) cars are expensive and difficult to recycle.
My old land cruiser however, is really pretty much a chunk of steel and some aluminum and a very small amount of rubber, foam padding and cloth for the seats. Pretty much 100% very easy to recycle at a very low cost to do so.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Some of us electric drivers also take pleasure in using solar panels to charge our (overly expensive) e-vehicles so we can wallow in the pleasure of driving for free ;)
Yea, about how long does it take for those cheap, chincy Chinese solar panels to charge your batteries? 6 months or so?
OK, weak attempts at comedy aside, I actually like the idea of supplementing electric car charging with renewables like solar and wind. Just wish the tech would hurry up and reach a point where it's feasible to operate our vehicles in such a manner (get on it, science bitches!).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Because they can't afford them?
No seriously, envy is quite often a strong source of dislike in such situations.
Some local politician tried to peg cycists as big CO2 emitters compared to cars as cyclists breath hard when cycling.
Is it gasoline people or car worshippers, hard to tell, but somehow they see the current system as optimal and everything else as worse. I don't know why people latch onto the current system as optimal, but they do.
How much better are bikes?
https://www.eta.co.uk/2011/12/13/co2-emissions-from-cycling-revealed/
According to the report cycling is responsible for CO2 emissions of 21g per km. The report calculated that an average car produced 271g and a bus 101g.
Is it "fair" to include the power plant CO2 emissions? Sure, why not...but understand that such is a worst case scenario, and does not necessarily represent the norm. Also, note there is zero effective method for being clean with an SUV, whereas with an electric you do at least have the option of getting solar, if you don't already have it. At the very least, you can choose to pay higher electric rates by choosing to buy renewable energy (most markets allow for this option).
How does a freelance writer afford a $100k+ electric car?
Oh that's interesting. :-)
Why don't they put that at the beginning, saves reading time
But even if on such a financial page it says "the author holds no shares in <company X>", cynical me can't help thinking:
"I'm sure you're telling the truth that you have no shares, but the rich guy who paid you to write this article, probably does! (or is shorting it)"
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Why does it seem like there might be some kind of concerted effort to denounce Tesla?
Because you're paranoid... and apparently too dense to realize that Top Gear is a fucking comedy show (and, as it turns out, were actually quite impressed with the Roadster, save the incredibly short amount of track time they got with it; that's right, I Watched The Fucking Episode).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Where I live in Glenview Illinois I can pay .075 cents more for all my money spent on generation be provided to renewable energy providers (http://www.glenview.il.us/Reports/Lakeshore%20Welcome%20Kit%20-%20Glenview.pdf). I looked into it further and found that its currently going to mostly wind and some solar. It costs about 8 cents more for the green electricity option for a full charge with 240 miles of range. Whether an electric car is for you today or not, look to see if you can get your electricity from a green source. People who are willing to pay for a Tesla are happy to pay (slightly) more for their $ to go to a green power producer.
Greed is the root of all evil.
according to that logic, then we should include the polution levels of the petroleum industry and all of the shipping and security for it into the mix for ICE powered cars.
building a lithium battery doesn't involve middle eastern shieks, russian powergames, or drilling platforms in the most hostile places on the planet.
Better than average? That doesn't sound good. So where are these gasoline-based vehicles that are better than average, and outperform even fully-electric vehicles? I'm genuinely curious.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The concern with the stated metrics is not that the electric powerplant emissions being included, but that "total footprint" includes all the way back to coal mining techniques while the total footprint of gasoline vehicles stops at the gas tank.
Thirty four characters live here.
Read the article again. It certainly does not say conservatives "...will fuck themselves just to not have anything to do with the opposing tribe."
It clearly states that the more conservative a person is politically the more likely he is to be turned off by particular marketing strategies. It does *not* conclude tribalism as the cause.
Consider that many green products (especially earlier products) were in many ways inferior to their non-green variants. If someone has come to associate those inferior products with all things "green" he may reach the conclusion (rightly or wrongly) that the "green" bulbs are inferior. Why doesn't the more "liberal" leaning customer have a problem with it? Because he cares about his carbon footprint and so he feels good when he buys the "green" product.
How much dirty metal is mined to make a dirty oil drilling platform that's dumped into the ocean?
With an electric, that oil rig doesn't need to be built, maintained, and therefore won't pollute the ocean.
My mom says I'm cool.
The motor vehicle fleet produces (upper limits) about 15% of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Of that, the private (personal as opposed to professional transportation) is about 40-60% or so. So, perhaps 7% of CO2 emissions are from what people think of as cars, the stuff that is targeted by the mindless, uneducated morons we have put in power. So, electrical cars are possibly more efficient than SUVs, but they are not terribly more efficient than a regular car (Honda Accord seemingly). So, the savings in emissions by turning the car fleet into electrical vehicles - which can only be gotten from the 7%, I don't see Tesla Buses coming any time soon, is quite low. In fact, turning the entire worlds car park from gas guzzlers to Tesla Model S's would have something of a statistically insignificant impact on the total CO2 emissions.
Why, if changing the entire world fleet of personal cars into electircal vehicles will have no measurable impact on CO2 emissions, are all the environmental nuts yacking about this? Should they/you not be yacknig about something that can make an actual difference?
"No technological breakthrough at all"? Battery technology has been getting quite a lot better recent years.
"there is ample evidence that this will occur considerably sooner than non-hybrid (and non-electric) vehicles, just due to the higher maintenance and repair costs of hybrid vehicles that poor people won't be able to pay"? Again, really? I would rather expect there is /less/ that can break on an electric car, as they are quite a lot simpler (not so sure about hybrids due to the complex transmission systems). But if you say "ample evidence", I say "citation needed"...
First, Hybrid trains are, to my knowledge, still in the prototype phase. You're probably thinking of Diesel-Electric trains, where the power from the generators goes directly to the wheel motors. There's resistor 'nets' on the locomotives to scrub off regenerated power right now rather than store the energy in batteries. Work is in progress to change this.
Okay - why are hybrid cars mostly parallel as opposed to series?
It's mostly because of the transmission. To put it simply, electric motors and generators scale up better than transmissions. A transmission with a sufficient range to handle the slow starts of a train yet get it up to ~50-80 mph would be huge, and the stresses involved are so high that their durability would be low. It's actually more efficient to use generator/controller/motor systems - a 95%(ish) generator combined with a 95% controller, and finally a 95% efficient motor gives an end efficiency of 85%, and theis is better(and cheaper) than the theoretical mechanical transmission.
In a car, well, motor/generators are heavy, and because they're smaller, you're looking at closer to 90% efficiency, not 95%. With a parallel system while you need a transmission, you also eliminate the need to have a seperate generator, and a larger generator/motor is more efficient than 2 smaller ones. Well 1 smaller one - one actually has to be larger because it has to be able to handle all accelleration needs of the car, not just the 'battery boost' of whatever level. Trains don't really worry about weight - most actually have added weight in the form of plates/sand just so they have sufficient traction, and they're actually saving weight/expense by not having the huge tranny.
I don't read AC A human right
The key ingredient that you are missing here is that the advocates are agreeing to increase the result of an emissions calculation by including the power plant emissions.
That will happen when Bitcoin stories stop popping up on Slashdot as well... or stories about Google or for that matter something regarding NASA.
'Electric vehicles charged on the power grid have lower global warming emissions than the average gasoline-based vehicle sold today.'
Well there's your problem. They're comparing the best (electric vehicles) against the AVERAGE for gasoline. This is bogus biasing.
Instead they should compare the BEST electric against the BEST gasoline. That would be scientific.
The Tesla battery design is a technological breakthrough.
Also, electric vehicles like the Tesla have lower maintenance costs due to a significant reduction in moving parts.
Ya that's what I heard, too, when you factor in manufacturing, even more benefit disappears, if not outright being worse.
Still, I would like to see real numbers. Slammng a bunch of metal and plastic together isn't much, but hundreds of pounds of exotic materials and chemicals? Different ballgame. Thousands of gallons of gas worth?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The key ingredient that you are missing here is that the advocates are agreeing to increase the result of an emissions calculation by including the power plant emissions.
You act as if that's something new. As far back as I can remember the advocates have included power plant emissions.
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's an energy storage medium.
You use up power to isolate and store hydrogen (useful amounts of free hydrogen do not occur in nature) and then when you burn the hydrogen you get some of the energy back, with little or no pollution (other than a little water vapor). It's a slightly lossy process, just like any other energy storage method (batteries, water pumped uphill, compressed gas, etc.) and not a very attractive one for most purposes.
Raw hydrogen, being very small and light compared to other atoms, is difficult and costly to store. It migrates through most materials, you have to use exotic sealants and methods. It also has an extremely wide explosive/ignition mix range with air; compared to gasoline almost any concentration of hydrogen will ignite or explode very easily. So hydrogen carrying systems have to be built with a higher level of quality control to achieve the same level of safety as gasoline vehicles, and if you try to burn hydrogen in an engine designed for gasoline it will typically pre-ignite and perform extremely poorly, if it doesn't just blow the intake manifold right off.
Proponents and oil company shills like to brag about its high energy density, purposely misleading the public by calculating energy density per unit mass instead of by unit volume. In the Real World [tm] a vehicle can't carry around an infinitely large hydrogen storage vessel, so energy density per unit volume is what matters when you're talking hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Here's the numbers:
Cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen = 2,600 Wh/l
Hydrogen gas at around 2,000 psi = 405 Wh/l
Liquid gasoline at room temperature = 9,000 Wh/l
Any line of reasoning that assumes hydrogen is a power source - rather than just a storage medium with very poor energy density - is unfortunately based on a flawed premise. Regular electric batteries outperform hydrogen rather significantly at pretty much every metric that's important when we're talking about individually piloted vehicles.
So are the batteries in an electric vehicle. So how is the comparison invalid?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The only reason we have hybrid passenger cars (as well as electric cars) is because the government agreed to pay part of the cost. And the only reason to do that is to hide the total cost.
There is a conspiracy, but it's not what you think. The conspiracy isn't about pollution; it's about money.
I suppose we have competing conspiracies, then. The total cost is hidden for any kind of vehicle. Gas companies are incredibly subsidized. Road maintenance is subsidized. Car manufacturers (gasoline, hybrid, and electric) are subsidized the world over.
I'm not sure I see Tesla's success as a conspiracy, unless everything ever has been a conspiracy.
The concept of the battery-powered electric car has been tossed around for 100+ years, and it always failed on the marketplace until very recently.
What suddenly changed?
Batteries got better. Fuel got more expensive. And people started caring about the environment.
There was no major technological breakthrough at all
Tesla runs on lithium-ion batteries. Prius uses NiMH. You don't realise that they are better than the lead-acid batteries that used to go into electric vehicles?
There's no Moore's law for batteries. But vehicular battery technology does make incremental improvements every year. On top of the occasional entirely new battery technology.
The only reason we have hybrid passenger cars (as well as electric cars) is because the government agreed to pay part of the cost. And the only reason to do that is to hide the total cost.
The government LENT Tesla a big sum of money to be paid back over 10 years. They paid it back in about a year.
The concern with the stated metrics is not that the electric powerplant emissions being included, but that "total footprint" includes all the way back to coal mining techniques while the total footprint of gasoline vehicles stops at the gas tank.
That's exactly what I came to say. If they are going to factor in the total cost of producing the electricity that runs the vehicle, then they need to compare that with a gas vehicle where they also include the environmental cost to extract the oil, transport the oil to a refinery, refine the oil into gasoline, transport the gas to a distributor, and then worry about the emissions of the actual vehicle consuming the fuel. Likewise, if they want to factor in the cost to manufacture the batteries and motors, then they also need to factor in the cost to manufacture the engines. It's not a meaningful comparison otherwise.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Mod Parent +1 for use of a computer analogy in a discussion about cars!
You stereotypers are all the same...
Because it doesn't matter.
The value of electric cars is not that they have lower emissions but that they grant the user more freedom in how they power their car.
A gasoline car must be filled with gasoline. Sources for that are gasoline stations which are themselves supplied by national refineries which are themselves supplied by the global petroleum industry. Costs for gasoline have more then doubled over the last few years in the United States and we are continually seeing pressure on the refineries which will cause those prices to go up further. Why use gas if you don't have to use it?
Electric power is generated from a much wider set of sources. Hydroelectric power, Coal, Nuclear, solar, geothermal, wind, etc. Many sources. And any as compatible with the electric car as the last. No bottleneck in production.
The problem with the electric car is how storing the power in the car. Gasoline is a very stable, compact, and potent source of power. A mass equivalent electric storage system does not exist in a consumer price point. And THAT is a problem for the electric car which must be solved. But once that is solved, the argument for electric power will be energy freedom.
It will be that one could have solar power panels on one's roof and literally charge their car for work.
The emissions argument is meaningless for and against electric cars.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No I didn't RTFA, sorry, but the premise described in the description is the dumbest line of thinking ever. It's been debunked time and time again. If it's only fair to include the infrastructure involved in charging the car, you also have to include the infrastructure involved in fueling petroleum based vehicles too. Once you do that, it's truly a fair comparison, and the original argument falls apart pretty quickly.
My biggest issue with the marketing of all plug in electric vehicles is that they tout them as zero emission.While their emissions they cause are less than that of an SUV they are not zero. The production of electricity causes emissions because much of it is produced by burning fossil fuels. So every time an electric car is charged fossil fuels are burned and emissions are generated.
Electric cars are not zero emissions; they just move the emissions elsewhere.
There are power plants with almost no atmospheric emissions.
It would be nice for the masses to be able to afford one... but they don't make $175k per year...
Guess they'll have to do with a Civic...
For conventional cars, do we take into account the pollution needed to extract, process and transport the oil they burn?
There are plenty of ways to solve our commuting problem, and a combination of more walkable neighborhoods, bike-only transportation paths, better mass transit, and a more intelligent use of fossil fuels by eliminating the wasteful combination of millions of poorly maintained individual ICEs and our gas-powered supply chain. Even dumping the fuel in a less refined form during a process to make other petroleum based products would be preferable, because you'd be approaching 70-80% efficiency of energy conversion instead of the rather pathetic 30-40% of car ICEs.
That's the worst case scenario. We could follow Germany's lead and begin a serious effort to increase renewable capacity by using a combination of wind, geothermal, solar (panel and heat plants), hydro, and efficiency improvements. They powered half of their entire country on renewables last summer. Are you saying we can't do the same?
Incidentally, I don't know what is so popular about bitching endlessly as a response to any attempt to modernize the United States. It's the 21st Century. If it were 1900, you'd be arguing that electricity wasn't as safe as kerosene. It's time to join the rest of the world and stop hanging on to these meaningless bits of quickly aging tradition. Who cares if my car runs on electricity instead of gas? If it gets me to work and home five ways a week and to dinner on the weekends and we could build them in American factories and provide more jobs by converting gas stations into electric stations and at the same time probably solve the smog/asthma problems plaguing major metropolitan areas, what is the problem?
The true cradle-to-grave costs of hybrid cars is not yet known. It will not be until they begin to hit the junkyards in large numbers--and there is ample evidence that this will occur considerably sooner than non-hybrid (and non-electric) vehicles, just due to the higher maintenance and repair costs of hybrid vehicles that poor people won't be able to pay (assuming that the manufacturer even continues to make key replacement parts, which they may not).
Jesus. People keep talking about this, and reliability / maintenance cost (eg: "expensive battery replacements") as a huge unknown. The Prius has been available in the US since 2000. That's 13 years. If they were being junked sooner than non-hybrids, we'd know by now.
I am pretty sure the $10,000 subsidy for buyers of the Tesla hasn't gone away.
Diesels might be better than hybrids, but they suffer the same problems. To get equivalent-to-gasoline performance, you pay about a $5000 premium and get a significant weight penalty. That's a lot of gas! Though you get some of it back at resale. People are also under the misconception that MPG is meaningful when comparing gas and diesel, which is frustrating since diesel contains more energy (and carbon) and thus takes more crude oil to produce. You still end up with greater efficiency, but the payback period is very long and depends on your style of driving.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Batteries - even the old lead acid kind - are recycled as a rule and not as an exception.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
cool. What heavy metal batteries are you talking about?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've been following articles on 3D printing (via Google) and really have to laugh at the articles purveyed as journalism on the Seeking Alpha site. There seem to be few real writer/journalists on the site, rather it looks like a collection of blogger addicts and mail room boys posting for effect.. Their counts go up, they look legitimate and they even assume the mantle of 'knowledge' about a particular topic.
I wonder who pays these shills to write this refuse ? Is Seeking Alpha another one of those sites where you can get any crap published because you can click a submit button ? Or maybe the site is kept afloat by the people short selling & then having a slam article written, like I saw happen over and over and over with 3D systems, so the stock goes down and the short sellers profit ?
My opinion, FWIW, is that Seeking Alpha is a site where market manipulators post up to influence the market.
(YMMV, the opinions of the poster are not necessarily those of Dice corp, etc etc etc)
Who would want to drive a hummer? It is a trailer trash Cadillac.
Second, you might want to check your facts. There was an advert-disguised-as-study a few years ago claiming something like this. It was BS.
Third non radioactive rare-earths are actually plentiful. It is like conservatives who aren't particularly conservative. Don't know why, maybe they just like the name.
Ps
A hummer will burn about 1300kg more gasoline per year than a prius. A prius weighs about 1300 kg.
does it take to deliver the gas?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I have never liked this line of argument. After all, it's essentially true of gasoline, too; it's just that nature did the work. (And, in a lot of cases, the hydrogen is mined too; yay natural gas.) Both are chemicals which are oxidized to release heat energy. If the meaningful difference is whether nature or we did the work, then they're both storage media.
You go on to cite energy capacity differences; those are only meaningful in apples to apples comparisons.
I don't think this is actually correct.
Where do you find the actual meaningful difference to be? It's apparently not in that they're both exothermic chemistry based on the same element.
Other power sources aren't even remotely similar - eg nuclear, wind.
Why are two things that are virtually identical being seen as distinct? Is the issue whether nature put the power in instead of us? Is the difference between a power source and an energy storage medium found solely in whether you primarily imagine our having to put energy in to make them viable?
Does gasoline become an energy storage medium, despite zero actual changes, when they start sourcing it from CO2 in the atmosphere?
What is the meaningful net effect of being in one category or the other? You seem to be suggesting that the problem isn't just the energy density (and that in itself is misleading in many ways,) but rather a more sophisticated issue of whether it's a source or a medium - and that that is what's undermining their thought.
You can get hydrogen out of the ground, and you can spend energy to manufacture gasoline from the air, both today. If they're both sourced that way, does that mean that the lines of reasoning you're whargarbling at without actually showing an error, merely stating that there is one, suddenly become more ratified?
What if it happened to cost as much energy to get gasoline out of the ground as is received by burning it? That isn't the case today, but someday it will be, unless we stop using it. On that day, will it have become an energy storage medium?
Is the line about whether we have to invest energy to derive energy from it? Because calling something an energy storage medium based on how much power it takes to acquire seems ridiculous to me, as much so as does classing one chemical exothermic with nuclear and wind but against another chemical exothermic based on production rate, but I can't see any definition that seperates the two that doesn't end up with that apparent nonsense result.
Why is it that so many hydrogen cars and busses are actually doing well, if it's such a flawed premise?
Why are you measuring energy per liter? Liter is a unit of volume. The amount of energy per liter here is a direct function of pressure. No mention is made of pressure in two of the three cases.
Cryogenically stored? Room temperature? The temperature of the hydrogen or gasoline has virtually nothing to do with the amount of energy released by burning it.
Where did you get these numbers? They don't agree with the ones on Wikipedia. Granted, I'm a Wikipedia skeptic; if you can cite a valid source I'm happy to take it, but I remain somewhat doubtful that you'll be able to.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
The proper measure here is not the energy density; that is and always has been asinine. The proper measure here is the specific energy - that is, by weight, not by volume. Hydrogen doesn't become a better fuel (oh sorry, "energy storage medium,") just because you put it under pressure. That's ridiculous. What matters is how much energy you can carry by weight, allowing for a practical limit on storage size. Hydrogen as a whole is not meaningfully better as
StoneCypher is Full of BS
And what about the manufacturing "price" of those heavy metal batteries? What impact does that have on the environment? What about the disposal of those heavy metal batteries? My guess is that some child in china is going to have cancer from those things just like they get it now from our electronics waste.
Interestingly Weiss's article damning the Tesla includes the carbon 'cost' of battery production, but interestingly omits the carbon 'cost' of building a petrol engine.
He also includes the carbon 'cost' of electricity production, but omits the carbon 'cost' of petrol production.
"According to a 2000 report from the MIT Energy Lab, gasoline production accounts for 19 percent of the total lifetime CO2 emissions of a typical car. Actually driving the car accounts for about 75 percent of its lifetime carbon output.
Thus the carbon footprint of fuel production adds about 25 percent to a gas car's nominal CO2 emissions number."
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1084440_does-the-tesla-model-s-electric-car-pollute-more-than-an-suv/page-4
The proper measure here is the specific energy - that is, by weight, not by volume.
Actually, that's not entirely useful either. What really matters is how much usable stored energy can we put on board a vehicle of reasonable size, and how available the particular energy source is. You have a free choice of storage mechanism, but not a free choice of overall total volume or mass, where those include both the on-vehicle storage system and the engine.
I think we can all agree that the maximum energy storage is done using antimatter, but that's not practical due to the mass of the containment system, the high-energy radiation from the engine, or the cost of obtaining it. (I can't believe I just wrote an outline analysis of using antimatter to power cars...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Jesus. People keep talking about this, and reliability / maintenance cost (eg: "expensive battery replacements") as a huge unknown. The Prius has been available in the US since 2000. That's 13 years. If they were being junked sooner than non-hybrids, we'd know by now.
The Prius used NiMh batteries; Tesla is using Li-ion. Comparing them is an apples/oranges thing - in particular, Li-ion batteries *do* have a finite life that starts ticking down as soon as they roll off the production line, no matter how you treat them. Given the cost of batteries, I too would be somewhat dubious unless the car came with a warranty offering free (or extremely reduced cost) battery replacements for the first 10-15 years. My current (petrol) car is a bit over 10 years old at the moment, I have no plans to replace it any time soon, so I would want an electric car to have a similar life without majorly expensive maintenance.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
When the Prius first got popular the same thing was said about it. Was soon proved false.
Now that everyone has finishes wanking on about which car is the fastest, I feel there are some relevant points here that are often ignored or misunderstood. Firstly this was not proved false about the Prius. In New Zealand Toyota was taken to court and lost a false advertising suit because of their emissions claims. Not because the emissions of the power stations were not taken into account, but because their tail pipe emission figures were much higher than they claimed.
As to the Tesla, I was one of the researchers on a paper that investigated the Tesla as an example of the impact of electric cars a few years ago when the tesla was still very new. This paper was totally ignored when it came out but the findings match what seems to be generally accepted at least here in this thread: that electric cars are currently roughly as efficient and polluting as modern ICE cars. The Honda Civic seems to be the example of choice. This conclusion was ridiculed by many at the time. We did not however take into account the cost of battery manufacturing (at the time specific data about that was very hard to come by) as the article referred to here did.
A few things that I learned in this process that are relevant to the current discussion:
1) The "average" ICE vehicle is something like a 10 year old station wagon, so 'better than the average ICE vehicle' is not good at all. Modern super efficient ICE vehicles are significantly more efficient and less polluting than they were even 5 years ago.
2) It is claimed that the original article "fails to account for the carbon emissions resulting from the production of gasoline". This may or may not be true, I didn't analyse the data from that article. Information about the efficiency of the entire gasoline production process from the well to the tank is easily available and included as a matter of course by any credible researcher. The information is so easy to obtain and used so widely that one would have to make a deliberate decision to disclude the information in a study like this.
3) All electricity is not equal. Both articles make the mistake to some degree of treating the power grid like some giant universal constant. The article that says the tesla is bad at least specifies US power production, the one disputing it doesn't specify as far as I see. There are vast differences across various states. One US state has close to 90% coal power, in this state the Tesla pollutes at least as much as a decent modern diesel SUV. In other states there is a lot of Hydro power, in these states the Tesla has quite attractive pollution stats.
4) How you drive makes a massive difference. If you drive the Tesla like a sports car (it is a sports car), then the Honda Civic will have much better pollution numbers.
This is a complex issue, and I would lean towards believing Nathan Weiss article if I had to choose one without a careful analysis of their data and methods, because he shows a lot of his numbers and the article is longer. The Green Car Reports article is only half a page and shows no numbers at all.
Given the cost of batteries, I too would be somewhat dubious unless the car came with a warranty offering free (or extremely reduced cost) battery replacements for the first 10-15 years.
The Tesla Model S includes free battery replacements under warranty for the first 8 years or 125,000 miles for the 65 kWh battery (the 85 kWh battery warranty has no mileage limit). After 8 years, you can extend the warranty period for $7,500 for 3 years or 36,000 miles, which is ~10% of the Model S (85 kWh) purchase price.
(An average car does 12,000 miles per year, so one is unlikely to hit the 125,000 miles limit on the 65 kWh model. People who drive a lot will probably want the 85 kWh model anyway.)
You can convince a sceptic, the word you're looking for is "denier"
C17H21NO4
The answer to both is yes.
You can run diesel cars off of perfectly renewable oils from crops. Heck, if you don't mind having to change or rinse the filters more often, you can run a diesel car off of waste oil from fast food restaurants
The conclusion people reached from that study is questionable at best.
The reason they avoided the "green" snickered product is because they assumed that because it went out of it's way to show it was enivornmentally friendly, that they were paying extra for it. It's like buying a product where they say "50c will be donated to a charity" can backfire because consumers assume (sometimes rightly) that the product simply costs 50c extra.
Organic foods are known to be more expensive than regular food, if you buy environmentally friendly washing products they're either more expensive or not as powerful. All this study may show is that people are cautious about 'eco' products because of the negatives associated with them in general shopping.
Yes. The only reason rare earth elements are not mined much in the USA is because they tend to be found with Thorium, which is slightly radioactive. Thus, when you extract the REE's, you're left with a bunch of Thorium which has to be disposed of as "nuclear" waste. If the miners were allowed to just put the Thorium back where they found it, we'd have plenty of rare earths domestically.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
You forgot the most important comparison: Lithium Ion = 400 Wh/l
So hydrogen has no better energy density than batteries, and requires an additional (and very expensive... platinum ftw) fuel cell, has much lower cycle efficiency (the most efficient production method is to make it from natural gas @ ~80% efficiency, the cell itself yields around 50%, so your cycle efficiency is about 40%), and still requires fossil fuels... eg: natural gas. It's also stored under intense pressure (5-10kpsi), the tanks have to be replaced periodically due to pressure cycling and hydrogen embrittlement. Oh, and you can't stop it from seeping out of tank seals, so it also "self discharges."
Oh, and don't forget, 30 minutes to fill for a 150 mile range http://www.caranddriver.com/features/pump-it-up-we-refuel-a-hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicle-the-half-hour-fill-up-page-2 . The exact same rate as a Tesla supercharger.
I've never understood why anyone ever looked at hydrogen as a panacea to solve electric car ills.
Sam
it all depends on what is used to generate the electricity.. one big cole-plant is easier to replace than millions of little poluting devices.. so we really need to start replacing those little machines assoon as possible.. electricity can be generated with non polluting and endless ways...
NEW Goalposts!
Its about pollution. What if it were true that you could stop emissions? What would that world look like? 100's of millions of dirty tailpipes GONE. In the case of all-electric cars, gone completely. All-hydrogen cars, only an H2O drainpipe.
Emissions remain, not gone. MOVED. 100's of millions of tailpipes traded for single smokestacks. Economy of scale!
SO...its now affordable to capture smokestack emissions at the source, manage emissions, treat and clean smokestacks. TESLA is so smart they can engineer that technology then they OWN the category.
I didn't realize that solar power contributed to pollution, guess we should turn off the sun?. If I remember correctly with Tesla S there is the ability to use the their charging stations which are 100% solar powered. of course if you're not near one then plugging in would be the next best thing. I'm also guessing that as Tesla motors grow there will be more of these stations scattered through out the US
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger
now initially the price of the S seems steep, but if you take into consideration that you are no longer paying for Fuel/ oil and the never ending tune up of an older technology then the price doesn't seem that unreasonable
I'm wondering who financed this study/report
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Max varies from state to state. IIRC in Idaho the max on rural freeways is 85 (~136km/h). Here in Massachusetts the max is 65 (104 km/h) but on the freeways the peak of the probability density function varies from 65 to 75-80.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
11 seconds? That's probably in the bottom 1/5 of all modern cars. (No I didn't look it up.) Here in Massachusetts with its plethora of too-short freeway ramps (some of which even have stop signs at the end!) it's downright dangerous.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Sorry, but I think that hummer bit was debunked a while ago. However I believe it's still true that the nickel mines in Canada and Russia are still surrounded by something like 100 sq. miles of moonscape. Lithium batteries will be a better solution, if they can get the costs down.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
IFF one agrees with the whole idea of government using financial incentives (including tax breaks) to implement policy, then the electric vehicle subsidy makes sense as it is arguably helping to get electric car production up the startup curve to justify construction of more efficient, cost effective high volume manufacturing, which will have the effect of lowering costs and increasing competitiveness of electric vehicles sooner, so electric vehicles will become the mainstream, thereby achieving the policy goal. This is equivalent to many other such government programs, including the big high performance chip research facility in Texas that helped the US maintain its superiority in high performance electronics, and NASA's support of the COTS rocket programs like SpaceX, which is well on its way to jumpstarting a US-based commercial space industry that will eventually not depend on government launches. As a space development advocate, of course I strongly encourage that! :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I'd like a rollover lease - so much per year/month, and they replace the parts, or even the car, on a regular schedule. Then the batteries become a cost item, and the vendor will work very hard to minimize their lifecycle cost.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Indeed! :D When you hear a .22 go off, it's just a noise. When a .45 goes off, it's impressive and impossible to ignore.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Oh so much pain and suffering! You didn't have a cheap mass produced century old replacement available over night; poor you. Get over yourself.
Green washing is a problem and some terms have earned negative reputations but that study was a waste not because of factors like that having to be mitigated (every study has such problems, if only life was simple...) Irrational human behavior has plenty of evidence and study besides that 1 example that popped into my head. Don't get hung up on that 1 issue you happened to "suffer" so heavily over for some years...
Catch-22 like situations prevent progress a lot of the time. Having some temporary "suffering" by complaining wimps creates the necessary shove that is sometimes needed for progress. Sure, it's possible that eventually cheap LED bulbs would happen someday but you don't know if it ever will happen or how many centuries it would take given that market forces would be set against it all the way up to the point where it is close to competing and can attract some investment (which tends to be more short term now than in the past.)
There is a school of thought where most significant progress is attributed to WAR and the conclusion is that we need wars in order to provide the motivation to innovate; otherwise, progress is SLOW, stagnant, or doesn't even happen. I'm not saying I'm one of those, but the grain of truth they build their hypothesis upon exists and shouldn't be ignored.
Going to the moon was a huge waste of tax payer money to a lot of people too. Since it was income tax, people didn't bitch so much about it.... but I wonder if they had to change to CFL... would the political will have been there?? After it's great successes, nobody wanted to say they bitched and/or opposed the whole thing. The CFL / LED thing will be forgotten on the bitching people will forget their past positions.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Yes. Add to that, since stopping the rampant growth of the federal bloat seems impossible, most folks feel that the only thing they have any power over is local and to a lesser extent state politics, so the cities, towns, counties and states are pushed ever harder to reduce their taxes while federal unfunded mandates increase costs without limit. Of course, since these local jurisdictions have less and less ability to serve due to their limited funding, there is ever more 'justification' to increase federal activities, and therefore, spending. DOC (Deity Of Choice) preserve us from federal do-gooders.
Sigh. I'd much rather spend money locally, where there is at least some potential for control.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
While I agree that Hydrogen is a poor fuel source (especially in an ice-fuel cells would be better, but still not great) the storage issues are overcome pretty simply. You can get the density way up by using a metal Hydride or a similar storage matrix. This brings your density WAY up and makes the storage completely safe. Of course using a metal it is pretty heavy.... You can read about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage). The biggest problem with Hydrogen actually occurs on the production side. Right now it can be produced with off peak power, though if everyone had a hydrogen vehicle, this wouldnt be a reasonable answer(and batteries would still be cheaper and better). The only way to get the cost of producing Hydrogen down to where it is actually competitive is to extract it from petrol in the cracking process-which is where the largest majority hydrogen we use today comes from. This has a lot of very obvious downsides, and until a new scalable process is invented, I will hedge my bets on batteries, fly wheels etc.
And recycling is magically pollution free?
Um, no, but it beats strip mining to get new metals.
And no batteries will be dumped
I could be way off here, but my understanding is that they are valuable enough to discourage dumping.
burn in crashes,
Who cares if that happens?
fall off ships into the sea
There is a large incentive not to have your valuable cargo fall into the sea.
Remember that the alternative to batteries is some other energy storage method or fossil fuels, which also have drawbacks. It is impossible for humans to have zero impact on the planet.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, diesels definitely last longer - though many now are turbo diesels which tend to die faster.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
cool. What heavy metal batteries are you talking about?
the AC/DC kind obviously.
However, the environmental impact of electric and hybrid cars, which I haven't really seen calculated is the manufacturing process of the batteries for these vehicles. Couple that with the hangover of disposing of those batteries once they've reached end of life, and their negative environmental impact becomes much larger. I don't know how it compares with that of gasoline powered vehicles, but it is larger than most people think.
Wind isn't electricity. Sunlight isn't electricity. You have to find a way to convert them into electricity, and that's not free... Not by a long shot. In fact electricity from wind and solar are still more expensive than coal, so wind and solar are far from free sources of power...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Batteries are slightly better in real-world vehicles by any real-world metric, and gasoline is tremendously better by all metrics except pollution, where it's tremendously worse. You cannot drive a hydrogen-powered car across the USA without using more fossil fuels than you would use burning straight gasoline, and that's just a fact. You can't change that fact with your insults and innuendos.
But I think you're being disingenuous; your post ignores nearly everything in my own, completely ignores the context leading to it, and pretends issues like cost of compression and/or refrigeration don't matter. I was replying to someone who asked if squirting hydrogen into an SUV's gasoline engine's intake would be less polluting than running the same vehicle on gasoline. My answer was and is correct in context, but yours is just a sales pitch for some magical form of hydrogen that can be stored under infinite compression without cost - since you claim the volume and temperature of vehicle hydrogen storage simply doesn't matter.
As for sources of numbers, I think I used Drexel University and the US Department of Energy. While I don't have the exact pages I used graven in memory, I can supply you with a link to a chart from the US Energy Information Administration that should be suitable for you and handily proves my point. Note that it includes both energy density by weight and by volume - although it does not include the extremely important (for vehicles) difference in storage requirements for the different fuels charted.
Um, pro-lifers have been arguing that a fetus has DNA for years. And cite it as scientific proof that it is not merely a part of the woman's body as pro-choicers tout. As the scientific evidence confirms that the DNA is designated human, but neither matches the father nor the mother, distinguishing the subject as a unique and separate entity.
But, don't expect people on the left to tout that scientific fact. Nope....cause if we're honest, we'll all admit to using science to our biases.
Perhaps you've never seen photos of a .22 squib fired. *ka-boom*
Nope, new to me. Thanks, interesting and worth knowing!
For those who don't know, a squib is a round that is missing the powder or something and misfires, so the bullet stays lodged in the barrel. Then if you don't notice the lack of bang/boom and try to fire again without clearing the jam, the old 'immovable object vs. irresistable force' conflict occurs. This can cause the gun to explode. See vids and pics online, and pay attention if the sound and feel of the gun don't meet expectations on a round - or if you notice nothing came out!
This makes me wonder what about when this occurs on an automatic weapon?
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Seriously? I had an 11-second-to-60 truck and it was horrible. Just, horrible. I generally try to get up to around highway speed on the ramp, which is impossible if you have such a slow vehicle (especially when the idiot in front of you waits until the last second to accelerate).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think with automatics, the first or second stops the re-chambering process.
And with larger calibers, you can blow your barrel like it was a grenade. It is one of the most potentially dangerous accidents involving firearm mechanics.
With 22 calibers, it's more often the blow out occurs out the back via the slide/chamber.