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Are We Reaching the Electric Car Tipping Point?
HughPickens.com writes: Geoff Ralston has an interesting essay explaining why it is likely that electric car penetration in the U.S. will take off at an exponential rate over the next 5-10 years rendering laughable the paltry predictions of future electric car sales being made today. Present projections assume that electric car sales will slowly increase as the technology gets marginally better, and as more and more customers choose to forsake a better product (the gasoline car) for a worse, yet "greener" version. According to Ralston this view of the future is, simply, wrong. — electric cars will take over our roads because consumers will demand them. "Electric cars will be better than any alternative, including the loud, inconvenient, gas-powered jalopy," says Ralston. "The Tesla Model S has demonstrated that a well made, well designed electric car is far superior to anything else on the road. This has changed everything."
The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars it is more fun to drive, quieter, always "full" every morning, more roomy, and it continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements. According to Ralston the tipping point will come when gas stations, not a massively profitable business, start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. "Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun," concludes Ralston. "The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon."
The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars it is more fun to drive, quieter, always "full" every morning, more roomy, and it continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements. According to Ralston the tipping point will come when gas stations, not a massively profitable business, start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. "Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun," concludes Ralston. "The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon."
I have a relative who is a part owner of a truck stop. I have heard how low the profits/margins are for selling gas. He tells me all the profit at those places is from the junk food inside... Apparently the deals they make with the gasoline/diesel suppliers are so bad there is almost no profit in selling gas.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The move to electric is a natural evolution, and will have a significant impact. The economies of scale in terms of pollution mitigation at power plants will utterly dwarf anything cars have ever been able to do themselves, transmission losses nonwithstanding.
Even if they only displace urban drivers (fewer per-trip miles, more population density facilitating more charging stations), the impact will be transformative. Watch the AQI loop around New York, and you can see air pollution rising and falling along the commuter roads into the City in lock step with the morning commute. I can't even imagine a New York with 50-80% fewer gas-powered cars on the road.
But that's still just evolution. Electric is just a natural step.
Driverless cars are the revolution. Electric makes existing car use patterns better. Driverless makes an entirely new paradigm. It may eliminate mass car ownership. It might eliminate parking lots. It might eliminate light rail in suburban areas. Taxis. Deliveries. Shipping. Police reponses.
Electric makes things better in well-projected ways. Driverless changes everything forever in ways we can't yet even imagine.
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The service model can be readily adopted in cities where shared car usage already exists in the form of taxis or uber/lyft/etc.
In the suburbs, people tend to allow their cars to accrete items which are useful but not something they'd carry daily if they didn't have the capacity of the car. For example, look at minivans or CUVs - there's usually various child-centric paraphernilia stored inside, or a bag with blankets and jackets. The convenience factor of having these non-essential items along in a private vehicle makes the service model a hard sell to suburban consumers.
Living in Los Angeles, the age of the electric car has been upon us for quite some time. everyone from BMW to nissan makes popular electric cars and sells them for a reasonable price here. The problem comes when you aren't in the second largest city in america.
During a business trip to an office in Ohio I learned firsthhand how awkward it must be to own one of these vehicles. In Blue Ash, Ohio I saw one or two teslas, but Ohio doesn't have a tax incentive like Los Angeles gives people to buy them. So, owners in Ohio aren't exactly the average joe. It seemed a status symbol, as though they mostly buy the car out of a desire to be perceived as 'elite' and progressive. Charging also seemed cumbersome. In LA we charge at parking garages for low cost, or free. most employers offer ChaDeMO charger stations as a perk in their garage. taking your car into the shop? its charged when you get out. Finally dedicated charging ports at some gas stations are also prevalent. None of this infrastructure existed in the cities I visited in Ohio because none of it had to. Gas was $3 a gallon, or less. Traffic was smooth flowing and quick, and mileage largely adherent to highway driving conditions above 50 miles per hour. There is also no public transit, no park and ride to charge the car at while you commute the rest of the way in by light rail.
Ohio also has winter weather to contend with. Most people owned larger SUV's or cars with all-wheel-drive in anticipation of snowy or icy roads, and temperatures well below those we're accustomed to in southern California. The car has to warm and cool much more actively, which im not sure is something electric cars can handle.
Disclaimer: I own a tesla. owning it in the midwest would seem to be a chore.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How reliable are they in winter driving conditions? How is the battery efficiency affected by temperature? What about cabin heating? I'm having a hard time seeing any of the current crop being adopted for year-round use in areas that get more than a smattering of snow, or a few days below freezing per year.
Does Norway count as an area that has a few days below freezing per year?.
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It won't be the government that pushes people towards autonomous cars. It will be insurance companies.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I couldn't be the recession that we've been suffering through for the last 8 years.
Or the increasingly reliable nature of vehicles in the past 30 years.
Or the higher cost of vehicles driven by crazy Government mileage requirements.
Nope, it has to be because everyone wants to be some communal hippy living in dense housing and riding stinky buses.
It is interesting to note that the average age of cars on the road in the US now is at an all time high. The "pundits" wring their hands trying to discover the cause of this "anomaly", when anyone with half a brain knows the answer:
Yeah, the answer is that cars today are more reliable than they were 30 years ago (all of those advancements in automation and testing), and it's not uncommon to see a car last to 200k miles with minimal issues (as opposed to the 50k that something built in the 1960s would expect).
People are sick and tired of car payments and insurance payments.
If you don't like car payments, then don't finance it. Car loans are, for the most part, a pretty dumb financial decision. It's an item that loses value over the duration of the loan, has a high potential for the value to drop to zero in an instant due to circumstances out of your control, and (assuming you're not in a dense urban environment) is something that has to be replaced asap in the event that it's wrecked. All of those factors mean that you've got a high potential to wind up owing more than the car is worth while simultaneously having to replace it (therefore risking the same situation in duplicate).
A much better choice is to do your homework and decide on a 2-5 year old model with high reliability (there are tons of readily available metrics for this), then pay cash for a low mileage used one. Half the cost of a new one (so less pressure to finance it), and it'll last 10 years if you actually take care of it.
Young men are surely going to impress their dates when they show up in the modern equivalent of a rusty self-driving Pinto. For extra points, the last user was hauling dead fish and cow manure.
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Do you have kids? Being a parent of a toddler or even a kid up to 5 or so means you have to have a Boy Scout mentality. BE PREPARED. Toting around a few extra pounds of stuff (change of clothes, snacks, first aid, entertainment) is worth every extra joule it takes to do so.
Yes.
As far as efficiency, you fell on your face. Sorry man. The 35% for the car is the engine. That's the max possible, real IC engines in consumer cars are closer to 25%. Your novel idea that that is higher than electric cars get is funny, but no. Also, battery charging using the battery technologies already used in cars is closer to 85% in the worst case, and over 90% average. Nobody is building cars with lead acid. And "battery discharge" is not 75%, the average is over 90%. 75% is the lowest efficiency, which you get briefly at the end of the cycle when the battery is already charged and you're only using a tiny bit of current to top it off. The main part of the charge that uses most of the power is at the higher end of the efficiency range for the battery. You're whacking battery efficiency down twice with made-up numbers and pretending to be science-y.
Battery charging efficiency is actually near 100% below 70% charge. Remember, you're not doing much work here, physically. There is no reason to desire there to be an extra loss here. ;) Discharge loss is also normally only a few percent, not 25%. Almost all the losses in your "equation" are from made-up numbers that are nowhere close to reality.
Fuel cell storage efficiency is only 20-60%. No surprise, because hydrogen atoms are larger than electrons, and so filling up the cell requires vastly more physical work.
Flywheels are super-heavy. The funny part about what you say there is that small flywheels used the same way as electric regenerative braking can increase fuel efficiency in a city, with frequent start/stop, but the mass of flywheel you'd need to be useful at a 50+ mile range would be really heavy, and have huge friction losses. It can be done, it has been done, but you get a slow tank that is inefficient, not a fuel-saver.
Not having better numbers is no excuse for just making them up as if a guess what you use when you can't be bothered to look any of it up, and don't already know about the technologies.
"The concept of "Being a parent" is archaic. I look forward to the offloading all the associated penalty costs of "Being a parent" in favour of a service model." :)