BMW, Mazda Keen To Meet With Tesla About Charging Technology

PC Magazine reports that following Elon Musk's announcement that Tesla would be freeing for other electric car makers to use the various patents that the company has amassed, at least two companies — Mazda and BMW — are said to be interested in meeting with Tesla, for a very good reason: According to undisclosed sources speaking to the Financial Times, both Nissan and BMW would be interested in working with Tesla to craft up some universal vehicle charging standards. To quote unnamed official: "It is obviously clear that everyone would benefit if there was a far more simple way for everyone to charge their cars."

Comments

nissan or mazda?

[Mishotaki]

i'm confused.... is it Nissan or Mazda that is interested?

Re:nissan or mazda?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Probably confused as Nissan have their own EV, the Leaf. I wouldn't be surprised if Nissan jump on the bandwagon too and gobble up that fast-charging / battery tech ASAP; It would make the Leaf a usable compact car. Current 8 hour charge cycle and ~90 mile range on a good day is pretty limiting, especially for £25k for the base model.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Nissan doesn't have problems with charge times (at least, no more than Tesla). The base model takes 8 hours to charge from empty, but they offer a 4 hour charge option (that runs off the same Level 2 charging stations) and a Quick Charge option that gets an 80% charge in 30 minutes. Pretty similar to Tesla.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Quite right. My information came from online automotive review sites, which didn't mention a fast charging option. Still, though, the Tesla charges to 80% in 10 minutes, and full capacity in 30. I'm certain Nissan would be up for this, especially considering the limited range.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fast-charge thing was added to the leaf in the 3rd model year.
BTW, that's pretty amazing all on its own, nissan has been selling electric cars for nearly 4 years now.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Negative. Fast charging (CHADEMO) was in the Nissan Leaf since the very first model (2011 if i remember OK).

And BTW, the charging on Tesla models is more than twice faster than the Nissan's simply because battery packs on any Tesla is at least twice as big ( 24khw Nissan vs 60/85Kwh on the Model S).

So, no, the problem is not with the technology itself, but the the limited 24 kwh or less batteriy packs offered by other manufacturers of electrical vehicles. The bigger the battery is, the longer it will take you, the longer it will last in year, the faster it will be able to recharge.

Some maths:

24kwh pack at 2C charging =~ 50kw charging capability (CHADEMO).
85kwh pack at LESS THAN 2C charging =~ more than 100kw charging capability (Tesla own's).

Yo see, Tesla's approach is even more conservative

Re:nissan or mazda?

[drinkypoo]

Probably confused as Nissan have their own EV, the Leaf.

You mean like how Mazda has its own EV, the i-MiEV?

Re: nissan or mazda?

[red_dragon]

The i-MIEV is made by Mitsubishi.

Re: nissan or mazda?

[drinkypoo]

The i-MIEV is made by Mitsubishi.

Whoops. Massive brain flatulence. Just shows what posting before caffeination can do to you.

Mazda does have an EV though, the Demio. It's only sold as a hybrid in most markets, and sometimes labeled the Mazda 2. At least it's got a rotary, so it's not lugging a heavy powerplant around.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[milkmage]

charge time might be the same, but Tesla owns RANGE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official range for the Model S Performance model equipped with an 85 kWh battery pack is 265 miles (426 km)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
The US Environmental Protection Agency official range for the 2013 model year Leaf is 121 km (75 mi) and rated the Leaf's combined fuel economy at 115 miles per US gallon gasoline equivalent (2.0 L/100 km).

yeah, a Tesla also costs 4x more than the Leaf, but if others get onboard and develop a standard... guess what - that cost goes down

Musk is a smart guy

Re:nissan or mazda?

[AmiMoJo]

The current base model is £15k and can fast charge to 80% in half an hour. I'm thinking of getting one because for my daily commute and most regular trips the range is fine.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that 80% of 85 miles is a far cry from 80% of 265 miles.

A local Nissan salescritter mentioned to me last week that Nissan will be offering
a range-extender battery, to boost the Leaf's range to 150 miles.

In that case, it makes sense that Nissan might be interested in a more powerful
Level 3 charging system.

Sunny Guy

Re:nissan or mazda?

[raxx7]

Model S' battery has both more capacity and the ability to supply and absorb more power.

I think for a given technology, battery capacity and power (both in and out) tend to be related.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[Ralph Wiggam]

I've been driving a Leaf for a year and it's the best car I've ever owned. It's very "usable" right now.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[sjames]

A battery's charge rate is measured in C. C is enough current to charge the battery in 1 hour. So a 10 A-hour battery will charge at 10A for a 1C charge rate. Same technology 20 A-hour battery can charge at 20A for a 1 C charge rate (so it still takes an hour but you gained twice the energy).

Re:nissan or mazda?

[YesIAmAScript]

No LEAF has a 3.3kW charger any more. All models, including the base S support 6.6kW beginning with the (now current) 2014 models.

Re: nissan or mazda?

[Hamsterdan]

Mazda has a *prototype*

"Mazda engineers at the event putting such technology at least three years out while stressing that the test car is just that, and not scheduled for production. "

http://www.autoblog.com/2013/1...

Re:nissan or mazda?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Not according to Nissan's website. The base S model has a 3.6 kW charger. You can add a charge package for $1250 that upgrades it to a 6.6 kW charger and adds a Quick Charge port, but the base model doesn't support 6.6 kW charging or a Quick Charge port by default (similarly, the mid-level SV model comes with a 6.6 kW charger, but requires an add-on package to get Quick Charge). Might be hard to find a completely base S model without the charge package, but Nissan claims it's an option.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I agree that a good shared standard might allow for efficient production of batteries by removing the market fragmentation that dissuades people from starting up "gigafactories".

That said, Tesla hasn't demonstrated a superior battery technology. The 2013 Leaf's range was rated lower than it really should have been. It offered a "Long life" charging setting, where it would stop charging at 80% instead of 100% to extend battery life. The EPA decided to base the estimated range on a 90% charge to split the difference between the two options, because the 80% charge was "recommended". Tesla allows you to stop charging at any 10% increment between 50% and 100%, but because lower charges aren't "recommended" the EPA assigned a range based on a 100% charge.

Factoring that in, at 100% charge, the 2013 Leaf should have a range of ~84-85 miles. Assuming 84, on a 24 kWh battery pack, that's 3.5 mi/kWh. The Tesla gets ~3.1 mi/kWh. The Tesla is heavier thanks to all those extra batteries, which is a big part of the difference; I suspect that if you made a Tesla with a 24 kWh pack, it would have similar efficiency to the Leaf. Battery tech is hard to improve; Tesla and Nissan are using the same basic tech.

TL;DR: Stacking more batteries is hardly a demonstration of superior technology.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[crispytwo]

Mazda has stated it is not going to spend money on EV so - it is Nissan.
Also, that Mazda could be changing it's mind would be news on its own.

Re:nissan or mazda?

[L4t3r4lu5]

At £15k it makes more economical sense, especially as a second car. It would start saving me money within 4 years, compared to 10 at £25k.

Re: nissan or mazda?

[Barryke]

Mazda also stated the mission to first invest in improving the Gasoline engine, as there is much to be gained in effeciency and performance.
The SkyActive engines sport a higher compression than Formula 1 cars ever had (!) which is insane.

I agree with that Mazda mission, but do hope they go all-in for an Electric+Hydrogen engine rather soon than later. To bad this article only mentions Nissan, not Mazda. :(

Re:nissan or mazda?

[stoatwblr]

"So, no, the problem is not with the technology itself, but the the limited 24 kwh or less batteriy packs offered by other manufacturers of electrical vehicles."

One of the more pressing problems is a proliferation of incompatible charging connecters and communicsations protocols.

You can't charge a Leaf at anything other than a Leaf charging station and you can't charge a Tesla at anything other than a Tesla one.

You cant even use the same power leads if plugging them into standard household outlets. It's not as if IEC320-C12/C13 haven't been around for 30 years to give an idea of standardisation.

It's Nissan

[Anonymous Coward]

For everybody who's confused by the title like me, it's Nissan (not Mazda) in TFA.

I wonder why no american companies are interested in cooperating?

Re:It's Nissan

[N1AK]

Because under the socialist Obama administration

Thank god that free market, not socialist at all Germany is interested then *rolls eyes* Fuck me some of you Obama haters are retarded.

Re:It's Nissan

[Lumpy]

Mostly because GM, Ford, and Chrysler are ran by some of the dumbest people on the planet. Which means we will get a standard that the European and Asian cars use along with tesla, and then something completely different from Ford, GM and Chrysler. Causing an even larger fall of domestic car buying with the executives having press conferences asking, "WE have no idea why people are not buying our cars"

Re:It's Nissan

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Never mind that, here in the USSA, despite the cries of "Double Taxation!" and "Highest Tax Rates Evar! Death Taxes!!!", if a decent size multinational is paying an effective tax rate higher than the guy who scrubs out their toilets at night, they probably just need to fire their accountants.

Re:It's Nissan

[Sique]

Because Tesla cooperating with Tesla would somehow be redundant?

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

The real problem is that they didn't standardize on high-power charging in the beginning. We got the SAE J1772 standard, but it tops out at 80 amps / 240V. Europe's a mess as it stands, with a bunch of competing connectors implementing IEC 62196-1, and again, no solid fast charging standard. This leaves everyone to have to pick and choose their own high-power coupler. It's idiotic, they should have standardized from the beginning, it's obvious that it's going to be a necessity for mainstreaming EVs. 20 minutes to charge your car while you take a lunch stop, fine. 3 hours to charge your car while you take a lunch stop, Not Fine(TM). Until you get fast charging standardized and available, the majority of consumers will continually hold that up as their excuse as to why they can't buy an EV (there's often some big holes in that logic, but that's neither here nor there).

There are a couple other possibilities for mainstreaming other than fast charging, but I don't see them around the corner. One is to have a whole day's worth of driving - or most of a day's worth (enough that if you charge during your meal / rest breaks, it's a full day) - on a single charge. In such a case, the upper end of J1772 is enough for all but very high consumption vehicles to charge you to full while you sleep, so you can drive another full day immediately after. But that requires multi-hundred kilowatt hour packs which would weight 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech. It'll happen eventually, batteries double in energy density every 8 years or so (price drops happen too but they're more irregular and harder to predict) - but we're not to the point yet where this would be a viable option. The other option is making available self-steering genset trailers, like the AC Propulsion Long Ranger. It seems such an obvious stopgap - you've got a generator when you need it but don't have to drag it around when you don't, you could buy them, rent them, share them, etc. Your car uses gasoline on those occasional long trips but otherwise is pure electric with none of the problems of PHEVs. Unfortunately no major automakers are pursuing this approach (I'm not really sure why, the Long Ranger got good reviews). As it stands, the majority of manufacturers are pursuing some form of fast charging, but as mentioned, the standards situation is a mess right now. :

And then there's the issue of how fast charging changes incentives. As it stands, utilities *love* EVs because it lets them sell more power for rather little added infrastructure cost, they're largely stable nighttime loads. But once you start getting to 480V multi-hundred-amp daytime fast charges, it's just the opposite, that's horrible for them. It's possible to make them become once again something desirable for utilities by including a battery buffer inside the charger (trickle charges when not fast charging a car, then burst discharges), but I'm not aware of any fast chargers that come like that by default.

The other option is to accept that disadvantage of allowing fast charging EVs in exchange for having EVs smart grid integrated, so that all the cars left plugged in during the day charge when demand is low and stop charging or even reverse flow during those brief peaks. It's possible to incentivize EV owners as well - let them pick at what time their car needs to be fully charged, whether they want to allow reverse flow, etc. The more flexible they are about timing, the more their car can wait to buy power when it's cheapest, and they could get a rebate on reverse flow power sold at higher prices during peaks. Such a system would work well, leaving owners with the ability to choose the balance between speed and price (even potentially to earn a net profit on their car if they're flexible enough), and it'd leave utilities with a nice smooth generation/demand balance, much better than today. Unfortunately, neither the grid nor current EVs are to that point.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

It's possible to make them become once again something desirable for utilities by including a battery buffer inside the charger (trickle charges when not fast charging a car, then burst discharges), but I'm not aware of any fast chargers that come like that by default.

Gee, I can't imagine why nobody would want to fill a box up with batteries that would cost what the batteries in your electric car cost, and which will have to go through nearly as many if not as many charge cycles, and then pay the efficiency loss of charging a battery from the battery from the mains. That makes absolutely no sense. Battery swapping would make sense, but a fillup station full of batteries makes none. If we get meaningful supercapacitors at a low low price, THOSE would make sense. Any decade now!

Re:It's Nissan

[Overzeetop]

Never mind that, here in the USSA, despite the cries of "Double Taxation!" and "Highest Tax Rates Evar! Death Taxes!!!", if a decent size multinational is paying taxes, they probably just need to fire their accountants.

FTFY

Re:It's Nissan

[Ol Olsoc]

Mostly because GM, Ford, and Chrysler are ran by some of the dumbest people on the planet. Which means we will get a standard that the European and Asian cars use along with tesla, and then something completely different from Ford, GM and Chrysler. Causing an even larger fall of domestic car buying with the executives having press conferences asking, "WE have no idea why people are not buying our cars"

I remember the lots full of Escalades and other huge SUV's no one wanted a few years ago.

At the same time that the big three have no idea what people want to buy, that incompatibility will hurt.

But to their way of thinking, interface standardization is a socialist construct. Much better to invent a non-standard "freedom connector" that if you are lucky, you will dominate the market, and others will have to pay you royalties to use.

Coupled with a non-trivial segment who wants to see electric vehicles fail, and their starting to sound silly sycophants, it is amazing that we don't have politicians trying to ban all EV's on patriotic grounds.

As preposterous as that sounds, consider that "Heartbeat of America" (tm) Chevrolet were touting patriotism as a hallmark of their big trucks, and the present day efforts to ban Tesla sales in certain, states. There is enough money in the hands of people who would benefit at EV's failure to set the stage for some entertaining shenannagins.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

Also, there's the issue of economics. A high power fast charger, say, 400kW, costs on the order of $100k and is the size of 1-2 soda machines. If you're only servicing 1-2 EVs a month, you're never going to pay for it. If we assume a 25 year lifetime and, after factoring in the time value to money assume that it needs to pay for itself plus, oh, let's say $50k of maintenance, during 15 years, then it needs to average $10k a year, or $28 per day, or $1.14 per hour. Since the charger provides 400kWh/h, then that'd be a surcharge of 0.3 cents per kilowatt hour at a 100% capacity factor, an amount that'd pretty much disappear under the 20 cents or so per kWh the power company would want to charge for being able to deliver such high powers at an irregular interval (you could reduce the rate by installing a battery buffer, but then you've got to pay for the buffer).

So, if the charger was always in use, its cost and maintenance would be vanishingly small. On the other hand, if it was in use 1% of the time, the costs for buying / maintaining the charger would run you 30 cents per kWh, significantly more than the cost of electricity itself, and bringing up the net total to more expensive than even gasoline per mile. Realistically, then, you need to get 3-5% utilization on your fast chargers for them to be economical.

400kWh is equivalent to about 1600 miles for a Prius-like electric car. 4% utilization of that means you need to average charging up 64 electric miles per hour. Meaning that you need one electric car that will need to stop at your station traveling down your route every hour. If we assume that you pick a spot where 1 in 3 EVs on the route will need to stop at your particular charger (you can't space them too far apart or people won't feel comfortable risking it, and not everyone is driving super-long distances), then you need 3 EVs going down your route per hour. You need to cover the whole interstate highway system, so the limiting factor will be the less densely trafficked areas. However, you don't need to cover every road that densely, just the busiest ones in a given region. Some whole regions don't beat more than a dozen or so vehicles per hour, so let's set 15 vehicles per hour as our threshold to reach everywhere. This means that you need 20% of them to be EVs to meet the 3 EVs per hour requirement. If we assume that gasoline vehicles are twice as likely to be driven on long distances out in the boonies as fast-charged EVs, this number rises to 40% of vehicles needing to be EVs. America has 250 million vehicles, so to reach that percentage threshold, that means 100 million EVs total. So that's the critical EV penetration needed to economically justify fast charging stations that would let you drive to every part of the US.

Now, of course, that's to drive *everywhere*. There are long stretches, long enough that EVs would need to charge, that receive tens of thousands of vehicles. At 1.5k vehicles an hour, the US needs only 1M EVs on the roads (if equally distributed) to justify a fast charging network in these areas. Areas with that kind of traffic are rather limited, however. The vast majority of the US could be reached by 150 vehicles per hour roads. This requires a total EVs on the roads of 10M.

US consumers buy a total of about 16 million vehicles per year.

One can change the operating assumptions to get different results. If you let chargers be more sparse, then a higher percentage of drivers will charge at a given charging station, increasing its utilization (the downside is EV drivers would be less likely to drive there). One could argue that EVs will be less than half as likely to be driven long distances as gas cars even with fast charging, which will almost certainly be true in the beginning, although the inverse will probably be true in the future. And of course one could argue over what sort of costs drivers would accept as tolerable or the exact pricing of power, chargers, maintenance, etc. For example, one could probably argue that while most people wouldn't toler

Re:It's Nissan

[Anonymous Coward]

You people who scream "Free marketzzzz!!!!" all the time are the retards.
 
The US automotive market is hardly any more "free market" than is the pharmaceutical industry. But for those of you who have no interest in reality it's not a big deal, I guess.

Re:It's Nissan

[_Shad0w_]

My reading of the sentence was "European and Asian suppliers along with only one US supplier, Tesla; the other US suppliers will just do their own thing."

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

I cover battery swapping later. The short of it, it's a non-starter.

You overestimate the cost of batteries, especially at fixed installations, and underestimate the cost of the other charging hardware. The charger's battery bank would probably run them about $0.15-0.2/Wh. So to fill even a max-range Model S (the one with the 85kWh pack, by far the largest) would be $17k (plus overhead). But multi-hundred-kW chargers themselves cost as much as a small house, they're not cheap.

Percentage-wise, battery charge/discharge losses are quite low, on the order of a couple percent. And you have to convert it to DC anyway, so that's a freebie.

Why is everyone obsessing with supercapacitors? They're the *expensive, low energy density* option. How can you talk about "cheap" and "supercapacitors" in the same sentence? And what's the reasoning for expecting them to get cheaper faster than batteries, when the opposite has been true?

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

Yes and no. Concerning storing energy in lead-acid batteries, no, that's too expensive (although it's been argued that used EV packs which no longer meet their rated capacity but still have tons of life in them might prove to be an excellent power storage banaza for utilities). It's done to some degree in isolated locations in specific circumstances, but to a very limited degree. There's also other types of battery storage done, for example, the vanadium redux station on one of the rattlesnake lines in Utah that they built to avoid having to build a second power line - but again, quite limited.

Much more widespread, however, is hydroelectric energy storage. You can of course ramp regular dams up and down to match the day and night cycle, and this is widely done - you're storing energy during the night to use during the day. More than that, however, is pumped hydro storage, where you actually pump water back at night. In some places, most notably in China, there are huge pumped hydro plants that don't even have a feed river, they're just two reservoirs that water is brought back and forth between to average out day/night consumption.

So, yes, it is done to some degree, but it's limited by your capital costs. The nice thing about EVs is that *consumers* pay the capital costs on the batteries for you. And when their vehicle no longer goes its full range near the end of its life, they consider that 70%-ish capacity battery trash.

Re:It's Nissan

[CohibaVancouver]

Because under the socialist Obama administration, there's no point to innovating and trying to increase your company's profits: the taxman is going to take it all.

Because under a Republican administration, there's no point to innovating and trying to increase your company's profits:

With infrastructure crumbling, education failing and the middle class fading the environment that fosters capitalist success is fading away. Better to start up in a country like Germany that creates an environment where it's worthwhile trying to innovate.

Re:It's Nissan

[N1AK]

Germany isn't a free market; I forget sometimes that people sufficiently dense not to know that lurch through here and thus didn't add sarcasm tags.

Re:It's Nissan

[WindBourne]

Chrysler is NOT American. It is subsidiary of Fiat.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

I cover battery swapping later. The short of it, it's a non-starter.

If battery swapping is a non-starter, then having a charger full of batteries is also a non-starter.

Why is everyone obsessing with supercapacitors? They're the *expensive, low energy density* option.

Because if they weren't expensive, they would be awesome.

How can you talk about "cheap" and "supercapacitors" in the same sentence?

Time marches on. Physics says that it should be possible.

And what's the reasoning for expecting them to get cheaper faster than batteries, when the opposite has been true?

Oh, none whatsoever. Thing is, they solve the charge/discharge rate problem, so we all want it to happen. More likely they will become part of the power storage system, not the whole thing, at least any time soon. Even that would be an improvement, particularly in the area of regenerative braking.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

If battery swapping is a non-starter, then having a charger full of batteries is also a non-starter.

What's your logic?

Because if they weren't expensive, they would be awesome.

If they weren't super-expensive, and super-low energy density, they'd be great. But that's not the case on either account.

Time marches on. Physics says that it should be possible.

Where does physics say that? Where does physics say anything about price?

Re:It's Nissan

[harperska]

Gee, I can't imagine why nobody would want to fill a box up with batteries that would cost what the batteries in your electric car cost

There is no reason why this would have to be the case. As the buffer batteries don't have to have the lightweight requirements of a battery you literally carry with you, they could easily be made of a cheaper but heavier chemistry. Maybe even a room full of deep cycle lead acid batteries.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

If battery swapping is a non-starter, then having a charger full of batteries is also a non-starter.

What's your logic?

I already explained that in an earlier comment. You are invited to go back and refamiliarize yourself with the thread to which you are adding.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

Not to mention, the charger itself is much more expensive than your whole car, and fast charges vehicles orders of magnitude more often than you have your vehicle fast charged.

Heck, if it's in a spot where maintenance isn't an issue, one may just go with deep-cycle lead-acids and oversize the battery bank. Maybe 200kWh or so. That'd make charging a model S only a 40% duty cycle and a full discharge would take half an hour, which is actually rather gentle for many types of PbA. The overcapacity would give you room for busy times when you have to charge multiple cars in a row from the same charger (if there's more than one charger at a station, it makes more sense for them to share a common battery bank). You can get such PbAs for about $0.08-$0.10 per watt hour. Running at an average of about 4% utilization (see elsewhere in this article), you'd probably get 5 years or so out of them.

There's probably better alternatives, though.

Re:It's Nissan

[ericloewe]

For a fixed installation, you can use cheaper batteries (even lead-acid if you've got a lot of room and can handle the weight) or batteries that are too degraded for in-car use, reducing upfront costs significantly.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

There is no reason why this would have to be the case. As the buffer batteries don't have to have the lightweight requirements of a battery you literally carry with you, they could easily be made of a cheaper but heavier chemistry. Maybe even a room full of deep cycle lead acid batteries.

Which room in your house do you plan to devote to these batteries? How much do you imagine you'll have to pay for the freight and installation charges? Why don't we focus on charging these vehicles during the day with solar energy from panels which pay back their energy investment in three years (as thin-film panels do today) instead of adding another lossy well to put energy into (with losses) and draw it out from again (with more losses)? It just makes no sense to fill your house up with batteries — seriously, what percentage of the potential market did you imagine doing this? And to avoid that, you have to use expensive batteries, and then we're right back to what I was talking about.

It's a great idea for a science-fiction story, in which a technological enclave reinhabits a world otherwise wiped out by plague. Sure, they might well round up the batteries lying around, and fill rooms in their inherited houses with them. For a commercial product, it's a non-starter.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

You made a claim, I made a counter, you made a remark that your claim still stands without presenting evidence. I'm asking you to present evidence.

In what way is a charger's battery pack the same as a vehicle battery pack? It's not even *remotely* close to the same use case. Weight is irrelevant for fixed installations so cost per watt hour is dramatically lower, pack size can be dramatically larger given the use case, which decreases cycling rate, the overall cycling behavior is totally different, the associated non-battery hardware on the charger is far more expensive, changing the ratio of battery cost per unit associated hardware, and there's only one format of battery needed per charger (verses a minimum of dozens for vehicles), with no need for stock, no need for consumer battery acceptance, and no mechanical swap of a massive structural component of a vehicle's body.

So please, explain to me how these situations are even remotely similar? In the vehicle you've got crash-safe, body-integrated, high-energy-density lithium ions with a discharge time of 1-3 hours, attached to 10-40k of associated hardware. In a charger you've got something like lead-acids stacked on a shelf, with a total discharge time of 20-30 minutes (in 10 minute or so bursts), doing so for only maybe 4% of the day, attached to 100k-ish of hardware, and with the battery cost being compensated for by lower electricity rates.

If you think these are the same situation, by all means, I'm all ears.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

"Room in your house"? You have no clue what a fast charger is, do you?

These aren't little sockets that cost $50. Those are Level 1.
These aren't "a little box on a wall or post" that cost a couple K. Those are Level 2.
These aren't even the lower end of level 3 "fast" chargers, which are the size of a small refrigerator or so; a few dozen kilowatts is not sufficiently fast to replace gasoline for travel. If you're talking a 400kW** fast charger, the kind of thing needed to fill up an 85kWh pack to 80% in ten minutes, you're talking a device the size of 1-2 soda machines that costs about a hundred thousand dollars.

These are not things you're going to put in your home

Nor is there any reason to whatsoever. Why on earth would a person need to charge that fast at home? Seriously, what's the use case here? Fast chargers are designed to be the EV equivalent of gas stations - in public places near major roads for people traveling long distances.

This explains why you're confused about fast chargers having batteries, though; you simply have no clue what they are or what they're used for. Even the lower-end level 3 chargers are not for houses.

Re:It's Nissan

[Nemyst]

If the Fiat EV is any indication, the American motor companies only want to make an EV to prove that the tech is doomed to fail so they can get the govt off their backs. Collaborating on creating a viable standard for charging or increasing battery capacity would go against that.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

You said In such a case, the upper end of J1772 is enough for all but very high consumption vehicles to charge you to full while you sleep, so you can drive another full day immediately after. But that requires multi-hundred kilowatt hour packs which would weight 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech. But here we are in the land of land yachts. Even if the charger only needed half as much battery as the car had to make up what it's not getting from the mains, it's still a hard sell. Maybe in disaster country, where people see significant benefit to power backup.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

You said

In such a case, the upper end of J1772 is enough for all but very high consumption vehicles to charge you to full while you sleep, so you can drive another full day immediately after. But that requires multi-hundred kilowatt hour packs which would weight 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech

Reading comprehension fail. Immediately before that I wrote:

There are a couple other possibilities for mainstreaming other than fast charging, but I don't see them around the corner.

Other than fast charging. Completely different situation. Not charging on the road with a fast charger, instead charging at home / at your hotel / whatever with a standard 80A home J1772.

But here we are in the land of land yachts.

Once again, reading comprehension fail. Immediately after I wrote "which would weigh 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech", I continued:

It'll happen eventually, batteries double in energy density every 8 years or so (price drops happen too but they're more irregular and harder to predict) - but we're not to the point yet where this would be a viable option.

You really can't actually be this bad at reading... can you?

. Even if the charger only needed half as much battery as the car had to make up what it's not getting from the mains, it's still a hard sell.

Stop mixing things up. We're not talking about batteries for home / level 2 chargers. We're talking about batteries for fast chargers. We're talking about the addition of a $20k pack to a $100k charger to be able to buy many hundreds of thousands of dollars of electricity at a much cheaper rate. Why are you having trouble with this?

Re:It's Nissan

[Areyoukiddingme]

Also, there's the issue of economics. A high power fast charger, say, 400kW, costs on the order of $100k and is the size of 1-2 soda machines. If you're only servicing 1-2 EVs a month, you're never going to pay for it. If we assume a 25 year lifetime and, after factoring in the time value to money assume that it needs to pay for itself plus, oh, let's say $50k of maintenance, during 15 years, then it needs to average $10k a year, or $28 per day, or $1.14 per hour.

Such an exhaustive analysis of a topic Elon Musk doesn't particularly care about. The high power fast chargers aren't there to be economical. They're there to combat range anxiety. That's all. Even though literally 99% of all trips are under 70 miles. 98% are under 50 miles. Average trip length is 5.95 miles. Average daily mileage is less than 100 miles for 93% of vehicles in the US. High power fast chargers are unnecessary for 99% of the 4.2 trillion passenger miles Americans travel every year. They're only useful for the road trip edge case.

Given the massive disparity in long vs short distance road travel, it's very likely superchargers will never be economical, ever. It's more likely that battery technology will advance faster than the BEV adoption rate, despite all of Mr. Musk's efforts to address range anxiety. In the end, a BEV will be capable of making a 16 hour trip on a single charge, and recharge overnight, no supercharger required.

Re:It's Nissan

[mjwx]

Chrysler is NOT American. It is subsidiary of Fiat.

Well that explains why Chrysler and Jeep are such crap... Fix It Again Tony.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

In what way is a charger's battery pack the same as a vehicle battery pack?

If it's residential then space is an issue. If it's commercial then being able to charge multiple vehicles in one day is an issue, and then space is an issue all over again. If you have to trickle-charge a commercial charger and it's making numerous charge cycles in a day, its job is actually harder than that of a car which is probably not making more than two. The only way in which the charger batteries don't need to be like those of the car is that they can be heavier. Making them much larger, however, is not really acceptable.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

If it's residential then space is an issue

In what world are you envisioning that residential users are going to be installing $100k fast chargers the size of a couple soda machines in their homes? In what use case is that remotely necessary?

If it's commercial then being able to charge multiple vehicles in one day is an issue

In what manner? Do you think the charger is powered by a hamster on a wheel? The as has been stated half a dozen times, the purpose of a battery bank is to average out the grid draw instead of having it suddenly spike hundreds of kilowatts at random intervals.

and then space is an issue all over again.

You're joking, right? These chargers are huge to begin with, which has been repeatedly pointed out to you. 200kW of lead-acid batteries, one of the lowest density techs possible, and 2 1/2 times the capacity of the highest range EV on the market, would still be smaller than the charger itself. And the more chargers you want on a single location (aka, gas station equivalent), the *less* space batteries use, proportionally to the chargers, since you use a common bank. And is orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the gas and diesel tanks that gas stations have to install.

Fast chargers = gas stations. Get that in your head and I don't think you'll have trouble understanding this any more.

The only way in which the charger batteries don't need to be like those of the car is that they can be heavier

That and everything else I just wrote in my previous post and more.

If you have to trickle-charge a commercial charger and it's making numerous charge cycles in a day, its job is actually harder than that of a car which is probably not making more than two.

So you're admitting then that the charge cycle is totally different? Fast charging a bunch of 24 kWh vehicles like leafs is doing a bunch of quick but really shallow (15%) discharges (the shallower the discharge, the less stress there is on the pack; the faster it is, the more stress), and spends about 4% of its day doing those discharges, the rest of the time, trickle charging. It's not even remotely like the sort of charge / discharge cycle of EVs. Your analogy between EV battery packs and fixed station packs isn't even in the same ballpark, they're not even remotely similar requirements in any aspect. A station battery pack is far more like a UPS.

Re:It's Nissan

[drinkypoo]

A station battery pack is far more like a UPS.

Ballocks. A UPS battery doesn't go through repeated cycles like that.

Re:It's Nissan

[Rei]

Yes, but Musk isn't going to pony up to put up a terrawatt or two worth of fast chargers at several thousand locations across the US. It's just too large of a task to expect Tesla, or even a Tesla/Nissan/BMW alliance, to do it. You need private interest. Musk may be able to handle densely populated areas of high Tesla sales, but it's never going to get full national coverage - and thus eliminate the complaint of "I can't get there in an EV" - without economic viability.

I know that such complaints usually don't stand up to scrutiny. But it doesn't matter, because they're a gut-feeling complaint from people who are used to gasoline cars and afraid of change. As a consequence, they don't replace their daily commuter that they almost never drive long distances with with an EV, they just buy another gasoline car. The "road trip" problem *has* to be dealt with somehow in order to truly mainstream EVs.

I'm not sure why you say they will never be economical, when I show above that they actually can be economical if there's enough EV traffic in an area. On really busy roads it only takes a fraction of a percent of the traffic being EVs to justify them. It's only on the sparsely travelled areas where it becomes a big challenge.

In terms of size/weight, if we assume the massive, 500kg+ battery pack of the Tesla Model S performance as the upper limit, and if we say that's a real-world range of 250mi, and we need to reach 1000mi to get that "full day's driving, 80A charge to full overnight" EV ideal, then we need two energy density doublings to reach that. That's 16 years, which actually isn't that far out. After about 25 years you get the pack down to a more reasonable, mainstream 250kg. So no problem there.

The real issue however is price. We want to, as it stands, drop the price on existing EV packs to mainstream them. But here we are talking about increasing the capacity (batteries are generally priced per watt hour) fourfold. How much do we need to drop battery prices to truly mainstream EVs - 3fold perhaps? So we need a 12x price performance increase. And despite following the industry pretty close, I have no clue when we're going to get there. Battery pricing per watt hour changes are so irregular. Sometimes the price even goes up. It depends greatly on which of the currently in-development techs take off for the next generation of batteries as to what sort of prices will even be achievable. For example, if we continue to use some form of cobalt-based cathode, the price of cobalt salts is going to continue to limit the potential for price reduction (contrary to popular belief, lithium is not the most expensive element of a conventional lithium-ion battery... nor is it particularly rare, nor is that much used in a li-ion battery). But some battery techs even in use today in EVs don't use cobalt, using things like manganese or various phosphates. And the next tech might not even be li-ion based. Lithium sulfur, sodium ion, lithium air, sodium air, and dozens of others are all vying for that top spot. So I have no bloody clue what future prices are going to be like. We can only hope that something that's both energy dense *and* made of cheap materials comes out on top. Because then it's just manufacturing costs that are the limiter, and those can be reduced steadily with time and scale.

There's one bright light in this tunnel that I think is worth attention - that cycle life becomes less important with increased capacity. The smaller your pack, the more you stress your batteries. Hybrids are harder on their batteries than PHEVs which are harder on their batteries than EVs, and so forth. If you have a 60 mile range and you drive 30 miles a day, your daily discharge is a 50% depth of discharge and you do a full discharge's equivalent every 2 days. If you have a 1200 mile range and you drive 30 miles a day, your daily discharge is a 2.5% depth of discharge and you do a full discharge's equivalent every 40 days. The combination of a shallow discharge (easier on batteries) and few discharges means y

Re:It's Nissan

[david_thornley]

The average trip lengths are irrelevant here. The number of trips under 50 or 70 miles isn't completely relevant. Over the next holiday weekend, we're going to be going somewhere 200-300 miles away, and we're going in one of the current family vehicles. So, it's important to us that one of our cars be capable of long range (the other one could be restricted to 100-mile range, allowing for two days of my commute without a recharge available). Therefore, either we want one heck of a battery pack, or the ability to recharge on the road (the gas tank does count as an impressive battery pack, and its recharge rate is multiple megawatts).

There's a big difference between a car that's useful for all of our driving plans vs. one that's useful for all but one or two a year.

Now we are arriving at critical mass

[kimvette]

Finally - EVs will become practical. Hopefully this leads them toward working together to develop ultracapacitors that charge in seconds to a couple of minutes so it can be a true ICE replacement, and allow for a small swappable ultracapacitor so that if your battery goes flat a few miles from a charging station all you need is a state trooper or AAA and exchange a capacitor to get the car going long enough to reach a charger. Once you've achieved that you've largely eliminated the need for ICE (except possibly as a backup generator - like the Volt, i3, i8, etc.). Ideally you'd have an iX-style hybrid, except using it primarily as an EV unless you drive out to remote areas.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[K. S. Kyosuke]

if your battery goes flat a few miles from a charging station all you need is a state trooper

Hah, finally an ethical use case for tasers!

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[ShanghaiBill]

... a small swappable ultracapacitor so that if your battery goes flat a few miles from a charging station ...

The best super capacitors have an energy density two thousand times less than gasoline. A small portable battery or flywheel would make far more sense.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[Rei]

Finally - EVs will become practical. Hopefully this leads them toward working together to develop ultracapacitors that charge in seconds to a couple of minutes so it can be a true ICE replacement

So you're talking about an ultracapacitor instead of a battery? Yeah, good luck with that. Ignoring the price issue, they're struggling to even get up to lead-acid energy density.

Li-ion cells have no problem taking fast charges. Some types can even charge in a couple minutes without problem. The issue comes when you build a whole pack out of them: cooling. Most types of li-ion cells are in the ballpark of 98-99+% efficient when slow charging. When fast charging it drops, depending on the chemistry, usually somewhere in the ballpark of 93-98% efficient. Let's say 97%. So 3% of your energy input is heat. Let's say your car consumed 250Wh/mile, your typical Prius-level streamlined vehicle consumption. Let's say you want a 200 mile charge in 5 minutes. That's 50kWh in 5 minutes, or 1 MW. 3% waste heat isn't much, but when your input is *1 MW*, that's 30 kW of waste heat. A small plug-in space heater is usually around 1,5kW, so that's the output of 20 space heaters. See the problem? To pull off *really* fast charges like that, you can't really just look at what the individual cell tolerates. You have to quickly be able to dump the waste heat to a cooling fluid, which is an engineering problem, and you need cells that maintain very high efficiency during high-rate charge, which is a chemistry problem. Also at those sort of powers you have to even cool your wires, both on the charger and in the vehicle (an uncooled charger cable capable of delivering 1MW would be so heavy you couldn't lift it). Personally I think the high power charging standard should simply be set up suchly that the charger supplies the vehicle with coolant on a closed-loop cycle, so the vehicle doesn't have to haul around a massive cooling system, the vehicle would need little more than cooling ducts. But who knows how things will end up.

and allow for a small swappable ultracapacitor so that if your battery goes flat a few miles from a charging station all you need is a state trooper or AAA and exchange a capacitor to get the car going long enough to reach a charger

First off, why are you proposing both couple minute charges *and* swap? Swap is designed to be an alternative to fast charge. But as challenging as fast charge is, swap is even worse. These packs aren't little lead-acid starter batteries, they're many hundreds of pounds, upwards of half a ton or so, and form an integral part of the vehicle's structural integrity. And they're very valuable, too, people aren't going to want to get stuck with a crummy one. And even *if* the auto industry had a track record of collaborating on standards, which they absolutely don't, just the widely differing weight distrubution / form factor / power output requirements / capacity requirements / etc for different vehicles would demand each swapping station storing a massive range of different types of packs. All this ignoring the actual engineering challenges involved. It's just totally impractical. And I can tell you what's definitely NOT going to happen, a state trooper just walking up and swapping out something many times his own weight that makes up an integral portion of the vehicle.

Note, mind you, that the concept of getting a "jump" on an EV isn't a far-fetched idea, that is completely workable. You could even limp to the nearest farmhouse and slow-charge on regular wall power until you've got enough juice to make it to the nearest charging station. But swapping out the battery on the side of the road? That's like saying "replace your engine on the side of the road".

except possibly as a backup generator - like the Volt, i3, i8, etc.

So the vehicle is supposed to have fast charge *and* swap *and* be a PHEV? Why on earth? You realize that each one of those things has its own major cost, maintenance, size, and mass associated with them? And thus consequently disadvantages all of the others?

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[sjwt]

Gasoline gives you 12,200 Wh/kg
University of California's currntly running a SC @ 39.3 Wh/kg So thats 310 times less, the gap keeps closeing.
  Worryed about the extra weight? Why not make your supercapacitor part of the load bearing structure of the car

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[sjwt]

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/201...

bleh, missing third link.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[Rei]

There's a big difference between a lab demonstration (which, BTW, only gets the energy density of lead-acid) and a functional marketable product. I mean, if you want to count lab demonstrations then you should compare with lithium-air batteries at nearly the energy density of gasoline (plus with far higher efficiency).

The problem isn't ultracapacitors versus gasoline, it's ultracapacitors vs. batteries. And FYI, battery packs are major structural components of the vehicles. It's pretty hard for something that's such a major percentage of your vehicle's weight not to be. But that's generally in the casing - the goal is to protect the cells, not stress them on purpose.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[blackraven14250]

You missed the point the GP was making. Fast charge for daily use, with a tiny swap ability if you happen to run down your charge and the car dies on the side of the road somewhere. That wouldn't be a half ton pack being exchanged, closer to a 20-50 pound supercap.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[Rei]

Why would a person need "fast charge for daily use"? What's the point? "Daily use" for most people is a couple dozen miles tops, and even low-end EVs at present have about a hundred miles range. And why would people prefer to drive out to a fast charge station when they can just plug in at home or at work? Or are you envisioning everyone having $100k fast charging stations the size of a couple soda machines dealing out the power of a small power plant in their garage? And FYI, a 25 pound supercap wth present commercial tech holds about 100 watt hours. Assuming *no* wind or rolling resistance or hill in the way, wouldn't even be enough to accelerate a 1500kg EV up to 50mph, wherein it would coast down (in the real world, it'd never even reach that fast). If your goal is to have hand-portable batteries, you need to use batteries, because energy density is of the essence. But the question once again becomes, why? Why physically swap out and reconnect heavy, high voltage, vehicular component when you could just simply charge the car directly from another car for the same amount of power in less time?

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[rahvin112]

Why does this always need to be repeated? The burning of gasoline in an ICE engine is ridiculously inefficient (vast majority of the energy goes into heat) and the conversion of battery power to forward motion via the electric motor is very very efficient. As a result you don't need the energy density of gasoline to power an electric car.

The Tesla 85kw/hr battery pack is equivalent to a tank of gas for that car weight and profile even if it is 300x less energy overall, all we have to do is get the cost of that battery pack to equal the cost of the equivalent amount of gas over the batteries lifetime. We don't ever need to reach the energy density of gasoline.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[Rei]

Also, they seem to be mixing up the Model S and the Roadster. And they *are* more than competitive with their luxury siblings in terms of features, comfort, performance, etc. In particular, the Model S has gotten incredible reviews.

Back to the original point: an EV drivetrain is about 3x as efficient as a gasoline drivetrain. So you should divide the gasoline energy density by 3. It still looks like it's a much higher number, but that too is highly deceiving because you're comparing one of the lighest parts of a gasoline car with one of the heaviest parts of an EV and ignoring the rest. Look under the hood of an EV. Tesla's motors are the size of a watermelons and push their cars into supercar territory. No transmission. Just 10% of the moving parts. You can't just pick and choose what parts to compare, you have to look at the whole drivetrain for both. And EVs and gasoline cars aren't all that far apart as it stands when you look at the whole picture.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[david_thornley]

From what I've read an ICE in a car is something like 25% efficient. This means that electricity cannot possibly be more than four times as efficient. A quick Wikipedia check lists gasoline at about 36 megajoules a liter, so we have an effective storage density of 9 megajoules a liter. The same source indicates rechargable Li-ion batteries as up to about 2.5 megajoules/liter (the only higher battery density listed is explicitly for non-rechargables). That's a difference of about 3.5 even counting in ICE inefficiency. Moreover, if we can put a liter of gasoline in the tank in 9 seconds (far slower than any gas pump I've used recently), that's an effective recharge rate of a megawatt.

Even if we drop the ICE efficiency to 15%, and assume near-perfect efficiency for the battery, we're at over twice the energy density for gasoline, and effective recharge rates are still in the megawatt range.

Re:Now we are arriving at critical mass

[rahvin112]

Wikipedia says gasoline is 36MJ/Liter. At the size and weight a Model S would have around a 14-16 gallon tank were it an ICE. Lets assume 16 gallons.

16 Gallons = 60.5 Liters. So total energy stored in the gasoline is 36 * 60.5 = 2180GJ.

1GJ = 277.7 kw/hr, therefore 2180GJ = 605555 kw/hr (I didn't round the factors off).

The model S has as it's largest battery pack option a 85kw/hr battery pack which is equivalent to a full tank of gas. A difference of (605555/85) 7124%.

You calculations fall on their face because you aren't doing a proper comparison of total efficiency of the entire system. Even if you assume the equivalent gas tank for a Model S is a 8 gallon tank (undersized for the weight) you're still going to end up with several thousand percent more energy (3562%) in the gasoline. That was my entire point, the Model S has a battery that's the equivalent of a full tank of gas. It's trivial to calculate the equivalent gasoline energy and see how terribly overall inefficient ICE cars are. It's not the just the conversion efficiency in the ICE, you've got all sorts of energy being sucked off for things like water pumps and transmissions that reduce the efficiency even more (not to mention peak efficiency of the ICE is almost never seen) and in addition the Model S can recover part of it's stopping energy.

We don't need batteries with Gasoline's energy density. Gasoline cars waste most of the energy in the gas. Even if we decided you needed a battery with twice the energy density we would NEVER approach the energy stored in gasoline.

BMW already met with Tesla

[brunes69]

Musk announced this days ago during a briefing call. BMW and Tesla are already talking. They were just at the plant on Wednesday.

Standardization is critical

[l2718]

For wide adoption there needs to be a full market around electric vehicles: opportunities to build charging stations, sell home charging equipment and so on. Gas stations are possible since practically all cars use the same fuel, but also because they have very similar intake openings so that the pump can stop by itself.

Tesla by itself is too small to set standards, so this is good news. It also shows how disclaim in patents helps: the benefit from a greater and more active market exceeds the payoffs from discouraging competition.

Re:Standardization is critical

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Prepare to be burned as a heretic. Everyone knows that patents CAUSE innovation by forcing inventors to do the same mundane tasks differently. Plus, they help keep attorneys employed, which is vitally important. Disclaiming or sharing patent rights that you've already acquired is socialism, which is the ultimate evil.

Re:Standardization is critical

[Kagato]

Patents aren't nearly as bad when the holders of said patents actually make things. Most of the time the end result is cross-licensing agreements. Things went down the tubes when Lawyers figured out they could buy some vague patents and PO Box in East Texas.

Re:Standardization is critical

[david_thornley]

Cross-licensing is great for businesses already in the market, or who have a lot of financial muscle (like Apple). What's really great about it is that it keeps the barriers to entry high, giving greater profits for the established businesses. It sort of sucks when you aren't a major player in the industry, or you're a lone inventor hoping wistfully that your patent would be profitable, or you're a consumer paying higher prices, or something like that.

Thanks for straightening that out!

[Two99Point80]

Now I'll be sure to remember how impractical my LEAF is as I drive to a morning meeting, then the mall for some mallwalking, then the free charging station near the gym for half a "tank" while I work out, then... Silly me, driving 2300+ around-town miles over the past three months for a total fuel cost of $9 (because one of my city's free charging stations is inside a parking deck) without ONCE realizing how impractical it was! :-)

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[bloodhawk]

For some like yourself that drives so little they are definitely practical, I don't drive a lot but I easily do more than triple your daily average, even if you doubled your mileage you will quickly run into serious limitations.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Rei]

9200 miles per year isn't that much below the US average. Just because you drive freakishly much doesn't change that.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Rei]

How about a year from now when you get 50% of your battery life?

Or what about two years from now, when unicorns ridden by fire-breathing kittens come down and stomp your leaf into the star-glitter on which they feed? I mean, while we're discussing grossly implausible scenarios here...

The LEAF has issues with this.. google it.

Given that the battery has a five year warranty, no, it does not.

What about the cost to get the charging station installed?

$1818, installed, if you want a home charger. Or you can use non-home charging, just like gasoline cars use non-home filling.

What if you have a business meeting or training out of town?

What do you do with your mustang when you need to move, say, a washing machine? Wait a minute, do you work around deficiencies in your car's capabilities with alternative solutions because you appreciate the advantages your Mustang provides? Wow, you don't say!

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[L4t3r4lu5]

The Leaf is not an economical car, either in monetary terms or for the environment.

My car, similar in performance and physical size to a Leaf, gets 40mpg average and costs £50 to fill the tank, which I do bi-weekly. It looks like we have roughly the same annual mileage, too, of around 8 - 10k. Maintenance and tax is approx 500 per year, covering tyre changes, brake pads etc as required, adding up to approximately £1800 per annum. My car was purchased for £7000, brand new.

At my (our) usage level, and if your car has no running costs at all, you will have made the money back on your initial investment of £26,000 (base model, UK price) within 10 years. I am aware that there are leasing options for just the battery, or the entire car, but leasing is never cheaper than an outright cash purchase.

Oh, and my car has a 300 mile range, doesn't suffer from poor performance in cold weather, and is "recharged" to full capacity, everywhere, in less than five minutes. But yeah, that Leaf... <s>At least it's green </s>

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Rei]

It depends. Charging stations can be loss leaders. If you put a low power Level-1 (120V/20A) charging station in front of your store, you pay about 30 cents per hour that a person is charging there. To keep a person in a particular shopping district at a cost of only 30 cents per hour can make very good sense to a city or business; even Level 2 charging (240V/15-80A -> $0.60-$3.20/h) can potentially pay for itself as a loss leader, depending on the situation. And that's just ignoring the reason most chargers were installed in the CARB era: good publicity. And not just from EV drivers who tend to do business with stores that install chargers even if they don't need to use them, just as a thank-you; it earns green cred from the general public. It's the same as a business giving money to support local youth organizations, or sending gift baskets to the troops, or whatever - you spend money to gain additional customers thanks to good publicity.

That's the cynical view. The less cynical view is that a lot of the business owners and towns who install them actually *do* want to encourage EVs.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Two99Point80]

I'd suggest looking elsewhere than the right-leaning Wall Street Journal for an objective analysis of costs and benefits. And I've owned entry-level cars over the years ('76 Rabbit, '79 Mazda GLC) but to compare their level of features to a LEAF is simply bogus.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Two99Point80]

Fine. Try this instead: at just over 4 miles/kwh, my retail cost for electricity would've run three cents per mile, or about $70 so far. That better? :-)

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[BasilBrush]

Odd that you don't mention what your car is. I'm not doubting you, but it seems a little odd.

Oh and a word of warning, since you appear to be British, and you're quoting a US link, and may be making comparisons with US figures. UK MPG and American MPG is not the same thing.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[bloodhawk]

triple that is only 75 miles a day average. hardly a freakish amount. my drive to work is 25 miles a day and same home. That covers 2/3rd of that mileage, I am pretty damn sure a 25 mile commute is not a freackishly rare number.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Rei]

The average is 12,500. 9200 is 74% of that, which I would say is quite fairly described as "not that much below". You drive 3x that much, aka, 2.2x the national average. "freakishly much" describes that well.

You have no ground to stand on, criticizing someone for their drive cycle when their drivecycle is far, far closer to average than yours.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[Rei]

Congratulations, you're in the top 10% of US drivers in terms of range driven per day, and shouldn't be purchasing a short-range daily commuter.

Anything else we need to discuss here?

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[L4t3r4lu5]

I was comparing a compact, economical car to a compact, economical car. Obviously you'd get the same disparity in price picking a top-of-the-range Audi A1, but the killer feature of the LEAF is the power train. It makes sense to compare those two features of each car. If there was a LEAF for sale for half the price without the sat nav and other pointless gumph I already own, I'd have bought one already. As I said to the parent; It seems we have similar commutes and usage. However, at the current, minimum price of £26,000 it is not economical at all.

As for my choice of source, does it matter what the source is if it's discussing figures and facts? These are all easily verifiable, and the WSJ has not been called out for slander based on the contents of the article. Therer may be other figures which contradict, or offset, the claims made by the WSJ, but it doesn't make the WSJ claims any less valid.

Re:Thanks for straightening that out!

[L4t3r4lu5]

I drive a Hyundai i20 1.4l petrol. I didn't mention the model as it didn't seem relevant. Mixed driving I get 40mpg (UK) which works out at approx. 33.3mpg (US). Thanks for pointing out they're not the same.

Re:Mazda - yes please!

[Overzeetop]

Except the waste of scrapping the engine and transmission (or having a poorly matched transmission) along with the inability to effeciently and safely mount the batteries and the complete lace of efficiencies of scale for doing a one-off project?

If you have enough time and money you can do anything that doesn't violate physics.

Generalizing your situation

[sjbe]

Now I'll be sure to remember how impractical my LEAF is as I drive to a morning meeting...

Just because you have a lifestyle that works well with a Leaf doesn't mean the rest of us do. On a typical day I drive close to the range limit of the Leaf. One extra visit to a customer and I could easily exceed it. I'm also going to visit my in-law's this weekend who live approximately 200 miles away. Unless I want to make it a 2-3 day trip, a Leaf is useless to me as primary transportation.

The Leaf is a decent little car if you live in a densely packed urban area and never need to drive more than about 100 miles in a single go. For anyone who doesn't fit that description it is either a second car or it is impossibly impractical. The problem would be significantly mitigated if the range were 200-300 miles but only Tesla has done that so far. The Leaf and vehicles like it simply have too many engineering tradeoffs to ever make a serious dent in the market. Yes it is true that most people don't drive all that far in a typical day. It is also true that a key part of the purchase decision is what people MIGHT want to do with their car and for most of us that includes the occasional long trip. Cars are not bought based on a purely rational analysis of a typical day's commute. Cars are aspirational, emotional purchases that reflect not only who we are but what we think we might want to be.

Re:Generalizing your situation

[Rei]

Leaf isn't designed to be a car for everyone. But it is a car that fits the usage patterns for a huge number of households, vastly more than its market penetration. For example, a large chunk of US households are multi-vehicle households, where one is used primarily as an in-town/commuting vehicle. Why, exactly, isn't a car like the Leaf appropriate for that?

*No* car suits all needs. A vehicle that can be used to carry a load of gravel isn't going to be an ideal daily commuter. A car that's comfortable as a daily commuter might not be so comfortable on long trips with the kids. None of the above is probably great for the track. And that track car will suck off-road. And on and on. The fact that tradeoffs exist is why vehicles on the market are so widely varied. I don't get how you don't see that a vehicle like the Leaf fills a very common role in this diverse spectrum. No, it's not some universal, ideal all purpose vehicle. But there is no such thing as a universal, ideal all purpose vehicle. It, like all vehicles, is for its niche, and its niche alone. And despite how you want to portray it, it's not even that small of a niche, it's an extremely common one.

Re:Generalizing your situation

[Two99Point80]

A little more information... the LEAF is my daily driver, but when I leased it I kept my paid-for Corolla for longer trips only. My annual driving comes to something over 15000 miles, and the annual mileage cap on the LEAF is 12000. I expect to put about 5000 miles/year on the Corolla including vacation driving. At that rate it'll last a good long while. Other EV owners have been known to rent cars for their occasional longer trips, and some lease deals even include rental credits.

And again...

[laird]

Sounds like pretty much every time there's a new industry standard, where the major players all come up with their own incompatible option, trying to be the one that wins and gets to charge everyone else licensing fees for their patents and trademarks. And so, as usual, the innovative new field is fragmented, confusing consumers, wasting money, and delaying or even killing the new industry. These sorts of format wars happen so often that I can only think of one case (CDs) where it didn't happen. You think that after wasting so many years, and $billions, on these pissing contests, and seeing that the one time they didn't screw it up it was a huge success making everyone rich for decades, that businesses would learn that it's better to cooperate on standards rather than compete. But I guess they're so competitive that they do it every when it's a consistently bad strategy.

Re:And again...

[raxx7]

It's actually pretty natural.
Usually, standards aren't created in a void. Before a standard can be written and agreed, someone has two design, test, maybe deploy real stuff.
More often than not, different teams will explore different avenues of research. And once they have invested, nobody wants to throw away their work and move to someone else's spec.
On the other hand, this often takes multiple iterations to reach a good standard

If you look at it...
CHADEMO has been around since 2010 and for a while, it was the only real solution.
But Tesla didn't like it, probably because of licensing terms, bulkiness and limited power (62.5 kW max), so they created their own for the Model S.
Other manufacturers and other players did not like it, for similar reasons. And Tesla's solution was proprietary.
So they went ahead and created yet another standard.

Finally, Tesla has decided to play nice.

Battery Factory

[605dave]

I wonder if Tesla building a huge battery factory plays into this. If other auto makers build to the Tesla standard, I bet they will need batteries that can handle it.

Re:Mazda - yes please!

[Rei]

It's true. It's a ton of work to do a conversion, and what you generally get is a sucky EV. You didn't even mention the climate control issue. It's sad what people put into home EV conversions in terms of time and parts and how little money they get out of them if they ever try to sell them.

EVs are best designed from the ground up. They're really remarkably different in terms of their demands from gasoline cars. You have disadvantages like the additional bulk/mass from the battery pack(s) and the greater need for streamlining due to the range limitations. You also have a number of advantages such as much greater freedom on where to position things in the vehicle (motors are very small, you can put the inverter almost anywhere, you can put the batteries pretty much anywhere you want, etc). So you no longer need that bulbous front end, but it's more important that you have a long, shallow taper in the back. But you don't have to worry as much about rollover because you can keep the battery weight low. The lack of a need for a geared transmission saves you space and gives you greater flexibility in drivetrain structure, but introduces its own issues, like the need for a parking pawl (or at least good handbrake!) because the car always acts like it's "in neutral" when there's no power. And of course there's the aforementioned thermal management issue - important to keep the batteries cool (the faster you want to charge, the more of an issue it is), important to spare energy on climate control, and you have some but not a ton of waste heat from the battery pack, motor, and inverter. So what solutions do you do? There's a lot of creativity that goes into designing a good thermal management system. I think the EV1's was really ahead of its time, with effective heat scrounging and reuse, a reversible heat pump for both heating and cooling, and then they made up for the limited heating power of a heat pump in cold weather by adding an additional resistive heating element as needed, and then put the whole system on computer control so you can preheat or cool the cabin before you get into the car, while it's still on mains power.

Why people buy cars

[sjbe]

But it is a car that fits the usage patterns for a huge number of households, vastly more than its market penetration.

Consider why that is. People don't buy a car based on what might fit their typical usage 90% of the time. They buy a car that will fit what they think they need/want 99.9% of the time. And most of us who own cars do on occasion drive farther than the range of the Leaf. You also are making the mistake of thinking that car purchases are rational. The number one selling vehicle of any type in the US is the Ford F150 pickup. You think they sell that many based on a rational needs analysis? The majority of SUVs and pickups that are marketed for their "off road" capability are never taken off the pavement. Ever.

For example, a large chunk of US households are multi-vehicle households, where one is used primarily as an in-town/commuting vehicle. Why, exactly, isn't a car like the Leaf appropriate for that?

Because for less money I can get a much larger and more capable car for local driving that doesn't have such limited range, cargo capacity and is a lot more fun to drive. Fuel efficiency is nowhere near the top of the list of requirements for most car purchases. Some people care a lot but most do not worry about it much. Furthermore the Leaf is a compact car with limited range trying to sell in the US market which STRONGLY favors big cars without range limits. Honestly I'm impressed they've sold as many as they have given the range limit.

A vehicle that can be used to carry a load of gravel isn't going to be an ideal daily commuter.

I drive a pickup daily. Could I get a more fuel efficient car better optimized for commuting? Sure. But I do more than just commute. I genuinely need the pickup bed with some regularity (at least once a week) and I have the budget for one car. I'm going to pick the one that fits the largest number of my needs, not one that is optimized for commuting over everything else. Don't get me wrong, I'd buy an electric car in a heartbeat if there was one available that fit my needs and budget. But I'm not about to drop tens of thousands of dollars on second a car I don't actually need with severely limited range, slow refueling, limited cargo capacity and that isn't particularly fun to drive. (yes I've driven a Leaf) The cost/benefit analysis for most of us isn't going to favor the Leaf. Too many tradeoffs.

Re:Why people buy cars

[BasilBrush]

All your issues are solved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

OK this is a niche adaption of a production vehicle. And it's no doubt very expensive. But it shows that you are not highlighting any fundamental problems.

Re:Why people buy cars

[BasilBrush]

All your issues are solved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

OK this is a niche adaption of a production vehicle. And it's no doubt very expensive. But it shows that you are not highlighting any fundamental problems.

Re:Why people buy cars

[sjbe]

All your issues are solved.

Not likely. Though the link was interesting so I do appreciate that. I've been saying for years that trucks should be built like diesel locomotives. Electric drive with an onboard generator. Preferably a diesel since they are optimized for running at a constant speed. This would make tremendous sense for semis, box trucks and pickups.

OK this is a niche adaption of a production vehicle. And it's no doubt very expensive. But it shows that you are not highlighting any fundamental problems.

So you are saying that there is no economically viable electric or electric hybrid that meets my needs and yet there are no problems? I'm a HUGE fan of electric vehicles. I think hybrids and electric vehicles are the future but the key word there is *future*. Battery and battery charging technology is not where it need to be. Electric-only vehicles will not be practical for most people until they can get recharge times down below 15 minutes. Hybrids have a fundamental economic disadvantage in that they have two power sources and thus are inherently more complicated and expensive. Hybrids and electric vehicles are still priced too high to be competitive without subsidies due to the state and scale of the technology. There are relatively few electric/hybrid options and most of the ones that do exist are mostly tuned for fuel economy above all else (i.e. Prius).

So no, the fundamental engineering and economic problems have not all been worked out. I'm optimistic that they will be solved in due time but there is still a ways to go. I do not however think the Nissan Leaf is a viable option for more than a tiny niche of people. Small capacity, short range, long recharge times, limited (though improving) dedicated charging infrastructure and it costs significantly more than competing cars in a similar form factor.

Re:Why people buy cars

[BasilBrush]

So you are saying that there is no economically viable electric or electric hybrid that meets my needs and yet there are no problems?

To be honest I don't know. I'm from the UK and we don't go in for pickup trucks here very much. I seemed to remember Musk said something about developing a pickup-truck so I was searching for that, and this link turned up.

For me, like many here, I only ever buy small cars, so a leaf fine for size and utility. Haven't bought an EV yet, but that's only because I'm not ready to buy a new car. I'll be looking at EVs when the time comes though.

Citation for that "50% capacity loss in one year"?

[Two99Point80]

There is a very active LEAF owners' group at mynissanleaf.com and folks have developed a battery-aging model based on formal tests and lots of user data. No one has reported anything like what you posit. How about some proof of that data?

EV tech-sharing

[RobertFahey]

The pie charts say it all: http://teslamondo.com/2014/06/...

Re:Your Editors Suck

[HornWumpus]

Yep. Ford and Renault respectively IIRC.