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The Best, and Worst, Places To Drive Your Electric Car
sciencehabit writes For those tired of winter, you're not alone. Electric cars hate the cold, too. Researchers have conducted the first investigation into how electric vehicles fare in different U.S. climates. The verdict (abstract): Electric car buyers in the chilly Midwest and sizzling Southwest get less bang for their buck, where poor energy efficiency and coal power plants unite to turn electric vehicles into bigger polluters.
Found this link in submissions...- http://news.sciencemag.org/cli...
http://news.sciencemag.org/cli...
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I'm guessing that this is the link: http://news.sciencemag.org/cli...
wot no sig
I think unless batteries get much better in capacity vs weight and someone can figure out how to recharge them a lot faster. We will never see EV's as a viable solution to the masses. The trouble right now is no alternative is getting large numbers of people onboard which is required to be successful. You need another energy source like gasoline to spread throughout the world as the replacement. Not hit and misses like hydrogen, electric, solar, natural gas and so on. When you look at sales like Tesla selling world wide 34,0000 vehicles give or take. This is not a revolution by any stretch. This is a small niche market that makes no sense for anyone to invest in infrastructure for thousands of charging station to accommodate such small numbers. Elon Musk created a brilliant well designed and engineered vehicle for the time. But it lacks the stuff needed for mass market appeal. The clouded judgments of environmentalists simply make bad decisions because they don't understand the point of view of the masses. If your point of view does not match the majority, your ideals won't fly no matter how good you think they are.
I myself see uses for EV's in defined areas like mail delivery, package delivery, and other standard delivery routes. Also, in short distance commuting. But the masses are not onboard with the increased initial costs of EV's.
He's right, EVs are ideal in our temperatures and very popular in northern Europe. A low centre of gravity makes them handle well on slippery roads and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Range is reduced a little but as long as your name isn't Broder and you planned for that they are wonderful.
Speaking as a Leaf owner in northern Europe.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
At last, some useful info on /. !
More on-topic, this is IMHO an incredible misconception: if electric energy is produced with highly polluting coal power plants, then the electric car is the culprit.
While I can appreciate how a holistic vision can be important for the decision process (in choosing transportation method alternatives, that is), this is totally non-productive.
The electric car is hugely more efficient than thermal-engine based ones (something like 3 times as efficient), we should develop non-polluting methods of generating electrical power and solve the power for once and forever; but we keep saying the gas motor is better out of pure laziness and that means no progress can be made towards more efficient cars.
And we get more polltuion as deserved karma, too.
Well, at least the pollution they caused wasn't being ejected into city centers where people would immediately breathe it in, but instead at a centralized location where big bucks could be spent to achieve big gains of pollution reduction.
The main benefit of electric vehicles is the ability to move to an electricity-based society, at which point the problem that would remain is getting clean electricity. Filling a desert with solar power plants would probably do it.
pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
What is pre-heating and what has it got to do with electric cars?
Pre-heating is heating up the interior while it is still charging, so as to use less charge for heating once you depart. Heating takes a lot of energy and drains the battery faster, as I understand even more than cooling.
Of course, gas vehicles can be pre-heated as well, you just start them up a bit before you depart ( but you don't want to do that in a closed garage!)
The electric car is hugely more efficient than thermal-engine based ones... we should develop non-polluting methods of generating electrical power and solve the power for once and forever
The elecric motor it is just one link in a chain. You might even better say that an axle shaft is 100% efficient so we should develop non-polluting methods of putting power into axle shafts and solve the power problem for ever.
but we keep saying the gas motor is better out of pure laziness
Yes, l'm a lazy bastard. I don't want to push my Tesla the last 130 miles of a 400 mile journey after the battery runs out.
I would say that if you could find a "Supermodels Who Love Environmentalists" convention, that would be the best place to drive an EV to.
because it takes too long to charge them. ...oh wait.
Basically you have a timer that you can programme to turn on the heating. I have mine turn on Monday to Friday 15 minutes before I go to work. When I come out the car is nice and warm inside, and any mist/ice on the windows has been cleared. Because the car is plugged in it doesn't drain the battery at all.
I can also activate it remotely via a web site or phone app.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What do you do differently when your internal combustion engine vehicle runs out of fuel?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
But why is this an advantage of electric cars? I have a button on my gasoline Camry key fob that starts the car and runs it for 10 minutes. When it is 0 degrees F outside, you get into a toasty car.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread
Well electric block/interior heaters is hardly exclusive to EVs and diesel cars can generally do this without a grid connection using its own fuel. But yes it does come "free" by having to plug in the car to charge anyway and you have to if you want the advertised range. From what I gather if you're at a cabin with no/solar power and can't plug your EV in it'll use a lot of power just to get started in the cold.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Such as performance, see Tesla's insane button or this review of the Zero motorcycle
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
If the car is in the garage it is already relatively warm, it is the car sitting outside that benefits the most from preheating.
go ahead flamod me as I crashed in flames on the last ev article, but yes if you live in a few select areas (80% of the world dosent) or have a custom solar installation then yes electric is the best for the enviorment. Power plants take decades to plan and build it's likely your area has no plans on upgrading (mine dosent). Hybrids are great co2/dist but still cost too much - around half of people can't spend 30k a car. However give the same 7-10k subsidy to a clean diesel - a 5k usd diesel would get everyone lining up to buy.
Electric cars can be charged during off peak hours by wind or other non-carbon producing energy production.
Read the actual numbers... "(170 Wh/km), whereas the upper Midwest fared the worst in terms of energy efficiency (196 Wh/km; red)". We're talking about a 13% difference - the article uses the 15% figure from 170, cheating IMHO. BFD, one way or the other, yet the graph varies from green to BRIGHT RED!!!!
More numbers; even if you power your electric car on 100% coal, its about twice as clean per mile than a gasoline engine. The math is trivial and I suggest everyone try it themselves:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
I know that my current gas vehicle (2010 Elantra) gets about 360 miles per tank in summer, and goes down to 280 miles per tank in winter, due to (Canadian) road conditions and temperature.
If an electric only gets 15% worse, as the article seems to imply, this is still an improvement over my increased gas consumption in winter...
Who said anything about Top Gear?
Way to misunderstand it.
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle. However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
When it comes down to it, the most efficient energy usage is actually electric rail vehicles (and I'm not talking about light rail, I'm talking about grade-separated heavy-rail/commuter rail, and driverless metros), this is because "people" over-apply brakes, and make a lot of inefficient driving decisions for acceleration. However even real systems suffer in high temperatures. Rails actually buckle if they're not welded and bolted to concrete ties.
i heard of someone who bought a prius: they live in scotland (south west, near ayr). they noticed a huge drop in fuel economy (down to 30mpg) so recorded it, and year after year they found a clear correlation between winter and the drop in fuel economy. the extra cost of the vehicle, the insane pricing for replacement batteries (over $1200 per battery and there are 30 of them), and, finally, the fact that they were not actually getting better fuel economy than an equivalent ICE car, they sold it... and used their daughter's 10-year-old VW diesel Polo which got a consistent 55mpg all year round.
I have an unattached garage. It's temperature tends to lag the outside temperature - meaning the garage is colder than the air temperature in the morning.
It's rather quite simple, but you have several contributing factors other than electric cars being quite nice.
- Tesla tend to deliver in batches to different markets, so they get some real good months in the statistics.
- Added benefit for electric cars, like free parking in some areas(e.g privately regulated parking). And being alowed to drive in bus lanes(With heavy comuting from wealthy areas, you get many who can afford a Tesla to get an edge in the morning trafic).
- No general road tax and free pasing of toll roads.Norway have lots of those.
- No tax when buying one. Basicly you get it nerly at halve price compared to a gas car.
Pre-heating is heating up the interior while it is still charging ... Of course, gas vehicles can be pre-heated as well, you just start them up a bit before you depart ( but you don't want to do that in a closed garage!)
Why is this particular to electric cars? I understand that in really cold countries like Russia and Canada, gas cars have electric heaters in the cooling water circuit that you plug in on a timer to pre-warm the engine (and hence the passenger heater too). I am in the UK and during very cold weather even I put an electric fan heater inside the car the previous night on a mains extension lead, which I switch on from the house 10 minutes before I use the car next morning. It would not be very hard to build such a feature into the car.
So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency; OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
What do you do differently when your internal combustion engine vehicle runs out of fuel?
It goes the 400 miles.
EVs use no power to start. There is no starter motor, they don't work like that. The motor stops completely when the car does, it's not like an ICE that has to keep rotating all the time or be electronically re-started.
In other words, EVs don't use any energy to start and don't have any problem starting in the cold either. There can be some loss of range when batteries are very cold (like below -10C) but it recovers as they warm up while driving, so even that isn't a big deal. More over, for most EV owners range isn't an issue they worry much about anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oil refined to petrol burnt in an engine of an ICE to move it can be compared to coal burnt in a power station to produce electricity stored and used in an EV.
Wow, tell me about it.
PS Top Gear faked that Tesla running out. .... Except you appear to be far more gullible than top gear think anyone is who watches their show.
I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. Faked what Tesla?
Elon could take your post and use it to reopen the case and likely win.
LoL! 400-130 = 270 miles. The FTP-75 figure for a Tesla's range with a 85kWh battery is 265 miles.
Well done, you gullible shitheat!
Wow, LoL! My original post wan't really that serious, but it obviously all went over your head. When the OP talked about "laziness", a completely wrong and arrogant assumption about the motives of anyone with contrary arguments, I immediately thought of walking instead, and then of pushing a car. You really need to lighten up a bit, this is not religion or politics.
OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
What do you do with that waste heat in the summer?
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It's not exclusive to EVs, but it does cost you less in them because electricity is much cheaper than petrol. It often works better as well as ICE cars usually rely on the engine to provide heat, meaning they need to waste time waiting for it to warm up before they can begin warming the cabin. EVs usually have some other method of generating heat for the cabin, such as the heat pump in my Leaf.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Waste it. But that's still better than wasting it all year round.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> Why is this particular to electric cars?
Electric cars will generally have a 230V/30A connection, rather than 115/15. So they get four times the power.
They also have electrically powered heaters. So they can turn on the interior heat without having to start anything else.
> gas cars have electric heaters in the cooling
These slightly warm the fluid or oil. They are useful, but don't heat the interior.
Way to misunderstand it.
Consider your post is the clueless ones and mods have sent it from 0 to +3, well...
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
All heaters help, which is why I said block/interior. Even a block heater will help the usual warming system deliver warmer air much faster, interior heaters warm the entire interior and there's the "full package" that does both. And the last car I saw without electric heating in the seats was in the 90s, still doesn't change that windows fog up, your hands get cold and so on. This "seat only" warming is a power saving measure since using power for heating steals range. How comfy do you really think it is to have one hot side - your backside - and one cold side?
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
*facepalm* Take a look at DEFA warmup, ZeroStart or any other of a ton of integrated or not so integrated solutions to do what you say they don't. Do you live in California or something? The exact same kind of pre-heating solutions have existed for decades.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle.
That is blatantly false:
At -20C, the use of a block heater can improve overall fuel economy by as much as 10 percent. In a test program conducted by Environment Canada, a vehicle sitting at -25C was warmed using a block heater and then driven over a simulated urban driving cycle. This resulted in a 25 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared to cold-starting the vehicle and driving it over the same route
For the metric and Google-impaired, -20C and -25C is -4F and -13F respectively.
However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
Deserts are kinda the opposite end of the scale here. In cold weather, ICE cars perform weak and electrics worse. And yes, electrics like Nissan Leaf use an electric heater to heat the battery when it's too cold. Tesla doesn't, which makes it sluggish the first minutes in the cold. And heating the interior will use electric power that could have been used for range in both. In ICE cars it'll just sap a little of the battery that'll recharge as you drive, in EVs it's a real drain.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why is this particular to electric cars?
Its not. I hope I didn't imply it was, I was just answering the question.
Heating in gas cars is accomplished by diverting some of the engine coolant to a small radiator in the cabin ventilation system. In the summer, you simply don't run hot coolant through the cabin and run it all through the radiator outside of the cabin.
As Hog said, you waste it all in the summer. It's an added efficiency to the whole system in the winter.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
> So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency;
To some extent. The main problem is that it flattens the battery more quickly and impacts range in winter time, the actual cost of the heater for an hour or two is generally relatively trivial compared to the other costs of running the car.
The newer electric cars have much less of an issue though. Instead of using electric heaters they run the air conditioner in reverse (it's an 'air source heat pump' in fact) and most of the heat energy then comes from the external environment rather than resistive heating. The heat pump uses about 1/3 of the power.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency; OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
You have an odd definition of inefficiency. The fact that ICEVs generate a lot of waste heat is the real inefficiency, even if it does provide a "free" solution to the problem of cabin heat. An efficient vehicle doesn't waste energy and then sometimes apply a small percentage of the waste to do do something useful.
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As Hog said, you waste it all in the summer. It's an added efficiency to the whole system in the winter.
Rather, I'd say that it's a somewhat reduced inefficiency during the winter. An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
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Not to mention that even if you have to charge it 15% more, in the red areas that are not in the desert regions or Texas, the cost of electricity is 50% or less the cost of electricity in the green area. Overall, seems like a good deal to me.
and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread
I think betty white is the best thing since sliced bread
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It's all to often claimed that EVs just shift the pollution to the power plant, however even to the very limited extent that is true (EVs are much more efficient than ICE cars, and so are the power plants) that fails to account for the energy cost of producing the gas in the first place, which is comparable to what EVs consume on a per-mile basis: before an ICE has even burned the fuel, it's already used as much energy as the EV will just by filling the tank.
An electrical outlet is not at the boundary of a closed thermodynamic system. With an electric car, the waste heat is produced at the power plant before the energy is converted to electricity and sent on its way to you in the first place. In general heating is a wasteful use of electricity; if your utility burns fossil fuels to generate power, you'll have a lower carbon footprint from heating something with oil or gas than with electricity. That waste heat can go into your house or car instead of the air above a cooling tower miles away.
'Pre heated' gasoline cars usually have a special heat reservoir close to the engine, that is heated up during driving and conservs heat for about 2.5 days. It is used to hear up the engine and the interiour of the car.
Preheating the engine in cold climates ensures prompt starting as well as a huge cut in fuel spendings during the 'warming up' phase.
The car needs to be special equipped for that.
In north europe that is standard. No idea about the USA or Canada, would make sense to have it as standard there as well.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That's less for comfort and more for not breaking the engine. Generators tend to have a coolant heater as well.
If the coolant system is frozen, it doesn't work, and the "ambient" heat transfer from the engine to the auxiliary equipment isn't fast enough. The engine will damage itself before the coolant system is thawed enough to begin functioning.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
To give you an idea my Leaf loses about 5% range if I have the heating and air-con (dehumidifier) on. In other words, about 5 miles of range. It's really not a big deal.
Having said that, I rarely keep the heater on for very long. The car is pre-warmed or warms up quickly. The AC has a dehumidifier so the windows defog in less than 10 seconds. The rear window heater uses the 12V battery so does not impact range at all, as do the heated seats and heated steering wheel.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
An electrical outlet is not at the boundary of a closed thermodynamic system. With an electric car, the waste heat is produced at the power plant before the energy is converted to electricity and sent on its way to you in the first place.
Of course. And there are also transmission losses. However, large plants have significantly higher efficiencies than small engines. Net, EVs powered by oil-fired power plants use less oil per mile traveled than gasoline engines, by a large margin, even when you include electric cabin heat.
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An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
Let me know when you figure out how to burn something without producing heat.
There are lots of ways to generate power that don't involve burning anything.
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That's another way of stating it, I suppose. All systems produce waste heat, though. Even looking at the EV as a closed system, you don't see 100% efficiency. Any time you can use waste heat to do meaningful work, you're increasing efficiency or reducing inefficiency.
Politics aside, there's no difference between increasing efficiency and decreasing inefficiency. Both statements mean the same thing. Increasing the efficiency in any system is good, even internal combustion engines and even in light of electric vehicles being the better choice. EVs are capable of being overall more efficient, but this little subthread was discussing how ICE heaters work, which is in fact a clever use of waste heat.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The study seems focused on Leaf, but the Tesla has an active cooling system that the Leaf lacks. Some Leafs in hot climates had a lot of battery degradation. That doesn't seem to be happening with the Teslas, nor should it.
Li-ion cells do degrade with both time and charge-and-discharge cycles. Data coming in from Teslas seems to indicate time is much less a factor, and charge cycles are the main determinant. The implication is that a bigger battery pack will last longer, since it takes more driving miles to put the same number of cycles on it.
Well, they cost you less if you ignore the massive capital investment :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But there are no ways of generating power that don't produce waste heat.
Some produce much more than others, though.
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Yep. Heating eats a LOT of extra power.
If I could have I'd gladly pay extra for the heatpump system in my e-up.
My pure resistive electric heater in the e-up is 6kW meaning if I don't use pre-heating before driving to work my short 11km commute changes from a 12kWh/100km to 16-17 during cold winter.
In summer I do it on 11kWh/100km due to no heating and less rolling resistance on tyres.
Here's a general list of where NOT to drive your electric car:
Almost anywhere more than 50 miles away from your garage.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Whenever an electric car starts making the rounds, immediately all the ranges are "up to" whatever. In fact, on discussion forums, some electric zealots will usually march in and talk about how I don't *need* a range of X (where X is 80 miles, my round trip to and from work).
The other big piece is that it's not exactly obvious how the range shrinks with age. Personally, I have zero interest in an electric car until it can do 80 miles on a charge under ALL circumstances- snow, cold, 10 years old. Anything less than that will leave me stranded in some blizzard. Fuck all that. If a car is expensive and new it should be able to handle what my late 90s Subaru can do, period.
Not everyone has that need, and that's nice for them. But electrics have a long way to go if these numbers are hard to get or have some engineering wiggle room. 80 miles in the snow while being a decade old or just a toy IMO.
The report missed how EVs keep the money local to the nation, while gas/diesel cars help fund terrorists around the world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think he just got it from the 270 mile EPA 5-cycle range officially published for the 85D. I don't see any reason to link his post to Top Gear. They never featured the Model S anyway, only the Roadster.
The car. It would be far, far cheaper for you to install an electric resistance heater in your gasoline car and plug it in than it would be to purchase an electric car.
Versa: MSRP $12,000
Leaf: MSRP $29,000
Yeah, yeah, tax credit brings it down to $21,500. $9500 still buys you a lot of gas and morning 10-minute idles.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Rather, I'd say that it's a somewhat reduced inefficiency during the winter. An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
Not going to happen without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
Obviously, some waste heat will always be produced. Internal combustion engines, however, waste 75% of the input energy as heat.
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Yay, my AC stalker is back!
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WEll, having owned an electric vehicle, I thought they were going to talk about the best and worst *types* of places to drive them i.e. highways vs city - short hops vs loong trips,.. Of course chargers are now more common, and mine being a bike was able to plug into house current.. but when you're stuck out in the middle of the highway there's not a lot of outlets available, tho..
Waste it. But that's still better than wasting it all year round.
Who's wasting it year-round? Why would you turn on the electric car's heat in the summer?
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Let me know when you figure out how to burn something without producing heat.
The amount of heat matters. Internal combustion engines are ~40% efficient at absolute best. Electric motors are ~98% efficient.
They're both producing waste heat, but one is producing *a lot* less per mile driven.
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All systems produce waste heat, though. Even looking at the EV as a closed system, you don't see 100% efficiency.
No, but you do see >90% efficiency as compared to the ~40% at best from combustion engines.
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No, its because he's a wimp that can't do math. In regular cars in most situations you have a gas station every 10 miles or so in the city at a gas station every 20 miles or so at a highway. So most owners aren't afraid to push it to 50 mile reserves when they know there are gas stations everywhere.
If you're lucky there's a supercharger every 100 miles along your route. Often a long trip needs planning, and some nerve for those that are usually lazy. Oh, and cold weather makes it worse.
For us engineers, physicists, IT guys, pilots, their predicament is stupid.
It's being fixed. It's called supercharger expansion and free HPWC equipment (Tesla medium power chargers) for businesses. Give it until end of 2016 and that argument will be squashed like a bug.
For some it will take a 100 kWh battery pack plus some other range improvements that are bound to happen given Tesla insane innovation pace to finally kill this argument. By 2020 a top end Tesla should manage 500 miles range @ 60 mph and no ac or heating. At that point those people will feel comfortable to drive an actual 300-350 miles on a charge.
PS: Nissan LEAF is a compliance car. Its a glorified golf cart. Until they get to at least 160 miles, they are a joke. When you have a 100 mile car in normal conditions, and add winter problems, the LEAF becomes next to useless in cold weather. And their real plans to upgrade the battery aren't spontaneous, they are driven by the Gen 3 Tesla and the Chevy Bolt. It's called compliance cars.
In the meantime, the Tesla tells you how much range you have left projected in real time.
Unlike many gas tanks, Tesla remaining power indications are reliable. There could be some change in kWh/mile consumption (going from flat to montain terrain, going from city to highway), but its way more accurate than gas cars.
In the meantime, most cars can't even tell you how many gallons you have left with decent accuracy. Cars also greatly vary in miles/gallon rate due to changing driving conditions.
The oil situation is utterly bad.
In the worst case, refining heavy oil consumes so much natural gas just for refining that should that oil be left underground, and that gas went into an efficient natural gas thermal plant (60% efficiency), the Tesla would go further on the natural gas electricity alone vs the produced gasoline be put into a Prius. Now, most oil isn't heavy, but refining even the lightest easiest oil does consume lots of natural gas, in the end a Prius end up being about 20% efficient from well to wheel, while a Tesla gets above 40% from baseload natural gas (and even better in CO2/mile from the average USA grid generation).
When you consider Canada Bitumen Oil, the pollution is even higher, as natural gas is burned to make steam to extract the oil from the ground, then more natural gas used for refining. The final quality of Bitumen Oil is good enough, but when the whole thing is added up, its even worse than heavy oil imported by large oil tankers.
If that guy is actually doing a 400 mile journey every day, the Tesla will come out free after five years, since even without free supercharger electrons, charging a Tesla is wayyy cheaper than buying gasoline, even with today's prices.
A 85kWh Tesla * average US$ 0.12 / kWh = US$ 10 bucks to charge your car. With solar panels you can get that down by a bunch.
That drives an average 250 miles. Or 4 cents per mile.
So a full million miles would cost just US$ 40k in electricity !
How much does it costs your car to drive 250 miles ? Just Gas and Oil change to keep it simple.
Teslas don't need to change engine oil or spark plugs. Most of maintenance is tire related. Mechanical breaks are there, but due to regen breaking, they wear very little.
Most people pay at least US$ 50 to drive 250 miles in gasoline alone.
Interestingly, I did the math for the 2015 Prius, which advertises 50mpg combined, with US$ 2 / gallon gas, would also put the Prius @ 4 cents / mile, excluding maintenance. Prius maintenance isn't quite a cheap as the Tesla, but since the Prius is less than half the price of a Tesla, money wise its interesting. But the Prius has nothing on luxury, performance, style and status of owning a Tesla.
If I come out and directly say that I like electric vehicles and wish that we could stop burning gasoline in cars, could I get some replies to my comments that are actually replying to my comment and not refuting weird arguments that I'm not actually making? I see now why people put those disclaimers at the end of their posts to try and head off these kinds of replies.
You do see that nowhere, in any of my posts in this thread, was I comparing the efficiency of gas engines to electric drive systems, right? I was merely referencing the technical implementation of heating systems in gas burning cars and being a pedant about the use of the terms efficiency vs inefficiency.
Ugh. The posts here aren't even about nerdish oneupsmanship and pedantry anymore. Slashdot is increasingly driven by boring ideological quibbles and a dearth of reading comprehension.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Not all methods of electricity generation produce greenhouse gasses. Lowering coal and other ghg emitting plants should be where to put our efforts.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
To quote you:
An efficient system wouldn't produce the waste heat to begin with.
Pedantically, I was wrong. But I think it was obvious I was speaking of a system producing so much waste heat that it was usable for cabin heating.
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Do your calculations include the cost of a replacement battery?
Do yours include the cost of a replacement transmission?
The majority of US cars have transmissions that are less reliable than the gas engine which is less reliable than the EVs battery which is less reliable than the EVs motor.
So I don't usually worry about replacement parts because every step closer to EV I go I see less repairs.
Compare my Late 90s and early 2000s Saturns with no EV ability with moderate maintenance (the 98 consumes oil randomly and has had transmission work twice in the first 100,000 miles but is still a daily driver at 130,000 miles, I had to replace the 12V battery once in it so far)
to my 2005 Prius with light maintenance (I had to replace the 12V battery in this one as well, I replaced the rear shocks for comfort, it burns oil enough that I top it off with a partial quart between 10,000 mile oil changes with 120,000 miles on the car) but will never need brake pads*, the rotors and drums will last the life of the car. I'll probably never replace the HV battery
to a Nissan Leaf (no oil changes, no engine filters, no real maintenance at all). with the leaf you might replace the battery some day for $2000 and some have already replaced the battery for free and one has paid around $6000.
Honestly you could have taken that guys Leaf with the "bad worn out battery" and given the whole car to me as is and I would have retired a Saturn and saved thousands of dollars on gas and repairs. I have a 15 mile commute each way and a 2011 or 2012 Leaf even with "severe" battery degradation would do the 35 miles a day I need to go to work, lunch, and home.
If you have a commute outside the range of the vehicle don't buy it. But for those of us that can drive the shorter distances its a fine car and will be more reliable than 90% of the ICE cars on the road.
so the progression is
ICE - less reliable
Hybrid - more reliable, lower cost per mile than ICE
EV - more reliable, lowest cost per mile (assuming you don't pay outrageous prices for electricity)
Then of course some troll will say: Yeah, but the up front cost...
and
Some other troll will say you drive it because it looks odd...
and to that I say, fffft. I buy used and right now a used Leaf is cheaper than a used Prius. I don't care what they look like or how green they are. I want a car that takes less maintenance, requires less repairs/parts replacements, and costs me less per mile. I don't care what it is. Give me a Tahoe that somehow gets me down the road for $0.01 per mile and I'll drive an SUV. Give me a Cadillac with spinners and curb feelers that gets me down the road for $0.01 per mile and I'll drive it too.
I expect a Leaf to cost me half the cost per mile of a Prius which cost me half the cost per mile of the Saturn.
I'm not married to a brand, a style, or an energy source. I happen to be moving towards electricity but I'd just as quickly move back to gas if gas somehow dropped to $1 a gallon and electricity became $1 a kwh. As it is at $2 a gallon and $0.10 a kwh I'm moving towards more electric and less gas.
*Prius, Leaf, Tesla, Kia Soul EV, doesn't matter ask anyone that has an EV for 100,000 miles to measure their break pads. They'll be like new for most drivers somewhere around 70-90% pad. People with a real lead foot might run through a set of brake pads in 300,000 miles, others will never under any circumstances wear out the brake pads even at 500,000 miles. Try that on an ICE vehicle.
You're wrong a lot from what I read here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Heh. I'm wrong a lot, definitely. Anyone who says they aren't is lying.
In that particular case, however, I never said what you claim I did. I never took a position one way or the other on hosts files as an ad-blocking tool. I just said you're annoying... and I greatly appreciate your continuing to demonstrate the fact!
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Exactly. And after the cabin's warm, for most of us within 10 minutes, most of that heat is again wasted because we don't really want the interior to stay above 80F.
Having said that, I rarely keep the heater on for very long.
Then you don't live in a cold climate.
This week in Quebec you have to keep your heater on at full and the fan at almost the highest speed just to keep the windows from frosting (forget fogging, here the fog freezes on the windows IN the car).
Even then, when we're 5 or 6 in the car it can't keep up and you only have the windshield and part of the side windows that stay defrosted. And it's currently only about -20 to -20C, at -35C it's even worse.
And forget about the AC dehumidifier at those temps, even when the AC is turned on the compressor is not running, below a certain temp it's prevented from running because it could be damaged.
The heater is not only for comfort, it's primary use in our cold climate is to safely defrost the windows and see where you're going.
Try it! Library of Babel