Slashdot Mirror
Musk, Others Want Volkswagen To Go Electric Instead of Fixing Diesels (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Volkswagen has put itself in a tough spot. After cheating emissions standards, the company faces billions in fines and repair costs to bring those vehicles into spec and make peace with regulators. But a group of business owners, investors, and environmentalists has a different suggestion. The group, headlined by Elon Musk, sent an open letter to the California Air Resources Board outlining their solution. They want Volkswagen to be released from its obligation to fix cars already on the road, and instead require that the company substantially accelerate its rollout of zero-emission vehicles.
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.) The letter says, "In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW."
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.) The letter says, "In contrast to the punishments and recalls being considered, this proposal would be a real win for California emissions, a big win for California jobs, and a historic action to help derail climate change. The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW."
Even with all the lying and dishonesty from VW, I'd still expect them to do a better job at making something useful out of that money then our government.
Greater acceptance and availability of electric vehicles and the growth of electric vehicle market segment would benefit Musk, and it also adds to hi good guy image. It is quite possible Musk appears to be a good guy is because he *is* actually a good guy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Musk is smart. The more competition he has in electric car manufacturers, the less is his share in the infrastructure of recharging stations, battery building, and the research and tech behind it all. The more companies that jump on the electric car path, the easier it is for him to sell cars (though he seems a little more high minded than that which is why I like him).
inch for inch a Golf, not an unproven model (leaf) encroached or compromised trunk space (energi, volt) and more-than-commuter range. $21K with the rebates - that's less than a GTI. This is a huge opportunity for VW. If my commute gets below 80 miles I'm getting one.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My wife has a 2011 VW Jetta (Mexican made) It had its water pump replaced after six months and the replacement pump has just failed now. The car has gone 62000 km. This is crap. Water pumps were a solved problem 200 years ago. Any Japanese engine will go 300000km before serious problems set in.
Maybe musk should just buy VW shells and put his drive lines inside.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As others have noted, what he is suggesting is a little self-serving, but anything that helps progress the technology and reduce the cost is a good thing IMHO. The making available the patents of the super-chargers, for example, is a benefit to him, since it helps increase needed infrastructure, which Tesla can benefit from, but also benefits everyone else, since they have one less argument against the electric car.
The next two places that the research money needs to be spent, IMHO, is simplifying the electric engine, to reduce parts, and solving the post-life problem. For example, while the batteries can be used for homes after their life in a car, there is still an issue of what to go with them afterwards. While the electric car reduces emissions during its use, we still need to solve the environmental impact involved, from digging up the raw materials to doing something with them after the cars's life.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
what they need is longer range...
Can California's electric grid hold up if VW really did replace all those vehicles with electric cars? Electric cars aren't actually zero emissions - they just don't emit anything at the point of use. There's still plenty of emissions (or other environmental concerns) from the site where the power for them is generated, which is why CA has tried very hard to push most of their generating capacity out of state. Even hydro capacity has decreased, as more dams are broken than built because they apparently bother the fishies. So a massive surge in electrical demand from plug-in vehicles may genuinely hammer the local grid, a grid that is already prone to widespread brownouts. It's great to suggest that everyone go electric with their vehicles, but someone somewhere must actually generate the electricity first. It's like pushing the benefits of dairy products while banning anyone in the state from raising stinky cows.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
“completely unfair to the people who have been lied to” Agreed, but it sounds like a software change can fix most the problems in emission, performance may be affected.
And I totally agree with the problem of batteries, not just the cost or future cost, but sometime down the road we are going to end up with a huge toxic waste problem with all the chemicals in old batteries that can no longer be economically recycled.
A huge trade off, replace fossil fuel to move our cars and replace it with a system dependent on electricity and chemical batteries.
But I think thats the direction we should go.
The bigger problem is convincing governments around the world to look at the long game, right now they are eyeing all the money they will get in fines, and it will be near imposable to convince them that the future depends on long term thinking.
Musk must be nuts. Many of these VW diesels can be fixed just by software update, or minor hardware changes. Now we should leave these smog & cancer machines on the road just because Musk wants to create market for his battery factory? Oh, yes, it is all "for greater good", so it must be ok. He would better invent a quick way to fix electric grid from reliance on dispatchable power sources like natural gas from fracking and coal.
They want Volkswagen's money to go into manufacturing plants and R&D for zero-emission technology rather than to government-mandated fines. (Note that these investments would give Musk, in particular, another direct competitor.)
Would it really give him a competitor? How about first it reduces the competition against existing electric vehicles, and when Volkswagen finally is ready to market, Musk can lease them some patents and sell them some batteries from his gigafactory.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Everyone talks about how dishonest VW was. But strictly speaking, they followed the letter of the law as it was written.
Well, no. They violated the letter of the law as it was written by introducing a "defeat device", which is a device which alters the behavior specifically for the purpose of defeating the test, or software which fulfills the same purpose. This is expressly prohibited.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most of US electricity is produced from coal and gas, zero emissions my ass. 67% coal/gas/petroleum. 19% is nuclear, technically zero emissions apart from the waste.
I think they first need to get the generation of electricity cleaned up before pretending the electric cars are zero emissions.
Many of these VW diesels can be fixed just by software update, or minor hardware changes. Now we should leave these smog & cancer machines
Calm down there, Wilbur. The diesel emissions regs are so tight now that it's questionable whether anyone is actually going to be harmed by these VWs running over the allowable limits.
Now we should leave these smog & cancer machines on the road just because Musk wants to create market for his battery factory?
Compared to the average full-sized SUV, they're still clean and green. If you're going to be all upset about them, be upset about something much more harmful first.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I wonder about is going with a hybrid car, but a different design from the Prius. Insted of two engines, one engine would just be a generator/alternator whose sole job is life is to spin at whatever RPMs (its DC, so it doesn't need to be at 3000 or 3600 RPMs for proper Hz), and keep the battery charged. This way, the vehicle would be completely electric... but it will still go the distance for a long trip.
TBH, I wouldn't mind more cars like a plug in Prius. It is "good enough", and doesn't have range anxiety problems.
elon gets....Pride
He would better invent a quick way to fix electric grid from reliance on dispatchable power sources like natural gas from fracking and coal
Isn't that his powerwall system? Energy storage close to the consumer actually makes it easier to rely on wind and solar power.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why use the battery at all? Diesel locomotives have been around for a very long time. The diesel engine turns an alternator (or generator) which powers electric traction motors. In a car, you wouldn't need a diesel. A small gas engine, optimized for it's most efficient rpm turning a generator to power the electric motor would do fine. Problem is, since it isn't zero emissions, the environmentalists won't go for it. On the other hand, neither is the power plant that generates electricity to recharge all of those batteries.
That is absolutely incorrect, and I have no idea why you would say such a thing. They merely couldn't be prosecuted for violating the law, due to a loophole provided by said second law. They still violated the first law. Nobody denies the (but you apparently.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
What if I want to drive from New York, NY to Beverly Hills, CA on a single charge? Hey even a smartphone that would last 4 of use hours with cellular off on a 10 hour flight would be nice.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I need a long range car for my work. But a hybrid is not more economic than a pure car (whether it is fossil or electric). I've rented one for a few weeks, and I with my driving style it consumed more than my current 13 year old diesel with 173 horse power. The hybrid had better acceleration when battery and fuel were combined, but was really slow in economic mode. Once you drive at the highway, the battery is useless, since it can only do 20-30 km of my 120 km commute. The too small fossil fuel engine has to work too hard to keep the extra weight of the batteries and electric motors at a steady 130 km in a hilly environment. I also think that the small engine has to recharge the battery while I'm driving (but I'm not sure). I could slow down and save fuel, but I could also do that and save even more with my 13 year old car.
The price at the gas station was more than twice as high as my own car, while the price to buy a hybrid was really high. (about 38000 euro with subsidies)
The hybrid is more economic in other use cases (shorter commutes), but they should stop marketing it as the ideal green replacement for any use case... Telling lies about a good product can kill the product because the wrong people will buy your car and will be disappointed and start spreading the news about expensive mistake.
The average person only drives 30 km a day. Well you can also drown in a river that's on average only 10 cm deep.
Already VW and other companies are planning to go way into electric vehicles. And why wouldn't they want to? It's an easier and cheaper way of passing the EPA buck onto someone else. Instead of having to try to meet every stringent reg they can let someone else entirely (power companies) deal with that issue. And will they be able to deal with the issue either? Doubtful.
That would be a management issue, rather than a technical issue.
For decades now there are off-the-shelf gas scrubbers and other technologies that can very thoroughly clean up the exhaust of a power plant, including coal fired ones. It's not cheap or so of course, but there is nothing technical in the way. Add to a small number of sites, all of which are permanent managed, this is the best scenario possible for limiting pollution. Even CO2 can be dealt with this way, but that's getting a lot harder of course.
For cars it's much harder to manage. Many, many small units, often poorly maintained (yearly checkups or less). The sheer number of units makes it impossible to install scrubbers, and catalytic converters go only that far. It's technically very hard to get car exhaust as clean as power plant exhaust, and cars are often spilling their pollution right inside densely populated areas.
For your argument about trucks: well, sure, for now they won't be able to go electric. But that's not an argument to stop electric in vehicles, and even should be an argument to improve electric cars as improving technology there may just make electric trucks a reality, possibly via the hybrid diesel/electric stage where pollution can be kept out of the cities (running electric in the stop-and-go traffic of cities where diesel has a hard time, diesel on the motorways where it can shine). There are already electric and hybrid buses out there, so trucks don't seem to be too far off, either.
Can't we just make big drones that can carry people?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Could you be more specific? What emissions do you allege that an electric vehicle produces?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have personally driven from NY, NY to San Francisco (when I finished university and went to my first job and took all my stuff with me). According to Google Maps, this is a 44 hour drive. I took 4 days to do it, allowing myself some sleep at night (a safe and normal thing when driving such distances).
If the infrastructure for EV were there (what the article is encouraging) you would recharge at night so why on earth would you need to drive there on a single charge? Diesel cars can't do this either.
Electric vehicles are zero emissions... Electricity in an area may get produced by waste-causing means, but the vehicles themselves do not produce any emissions. The term is entirely accurate. It is only misleading to say that consuming electricity in general does not cause greenhouse gasses, but the operation of the devices themselves do not pollute at all.
Further, electricity does not necessarily have to be produced by burning products that pollute the environment, and this is certainly the case in many areas.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And electric doesn't actually help much because almost all diesel pollution is from heavy trucks which at present aren't really going to be made electric.
Pure electric big rigs won't be widespread anytime soon, but hybrid-electric trucks are a real thing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The government will hit them with damages and fines. Give the damages to the car owners and use the fines to build out the electric car charging infrastructure.
They want Volkswagen to be released from its obligation to fix cars already on the road, and instead require that the company substantially accelerate its rollout of zero-emission vehicles.
And how do they propose to make whole the people that VW defrauded? You can't simply leave those people hanging. Moving to electric vehicles is fine and all but VW has two debts from their lies. One to society (indirect victims) and the other to their customers (direct victims). This proposal only deals with the first one. Any proposal that does not compensate customers of these vehicles is a non-starter. Could be as simple as a cash payment but it can't be a promise to develop new technology someday.
The average commute is less than 20 miles round trip. An electric car may not be right for you, but it would work just fine for a whole lot of people.
You are welcome on my lawn.
2nd generation Chevy Volt (Vauxhall Ampera) does 87km per charge so if your commute is 120km round trip you could do all electric, otherwise it wold be ~40km at 5.6 L/100 km.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What a crap a you talking about, "so tight". Do you have a slightest idea how diesel engine works? SUV or not SUV just increase engine size by 30-50% or so, compression is still low and all that cancerous stuff from high compression diesel engines is emitted only by diesels that skip on these limits. No, limits are not tight, they are too loose and too loosely enforced. Especially on older diesels, and all cars inevitably get older with time.
The term is entirely misleading. Zero tailpipe emissions would be accurate.
No, you can't produce clean electricity in practical way that can be used to charge cars (typically after sunset). Hydro is limited by geography and doesn't work so well in dry years. Solar is reaching its peak and daytime demand is going closer to zero in California due to too many solar installations. Demand peak starts at sunset. Google "duck" and "California grid". Solar/wind relies on new gas plants that can be turned on/off on demand. Most older ones can't, so you just run them whole day. Basically you can only use intermittent renewables under condition that your neighbors (or neighboring states) are not using them much and are ready to back you up with power of fracking product. Electricity storage is way too expensive, more expensive than peak wholesale rates for now. Seasonal power demand fluctuations are entirely hopeless matter for solar/wind without (whatever) gas that can be stored for seasons.
Oh I'm sure I could cram a large enough diesel tank into a truck assuming you could manage 30mpg (its pretty much all highway it could plausibly be done) you would only need about a 100 gallon tank they sell those that fit in the back of your truck were a toolbox would normally go so still plenty of space left over.
Afaik if you were to attempt the same with electric you wouldn't have anywhere to sit and you still wouldn't have enough battery power to make the trip.
I've yet to see a motel with a ev charging station most do have outdoor outlets but I have no idea if they would let you use those to charge your car or not probably for an extra charge.
I feel electric has a much better chance of sucess than cng or hydrogen. Cng takes a lot more infrastructure and hydrogen is basically electric with extra conversions. (Cng must be shipped while hydrogen has the potential to be made onsite)
Although what I'm really wondering is will there ever be a low end used electric market my understanding is getting the batteries replaced costs more than a cheap used gas vehicle.
Aside from that afaik electric is still completly impractical for freight cng (I've started to see ups and fedex cng vehicles) or possibly hydrogen could possibly replace diesel.
I hope ev's catch on I like the idea of a heater that works without having to start the engine beforehand as you can't get enough watts out of any other type system to have electric heat. If only they weren't so darned expensive.
Either way I would love to see cleaner vehicles catch on.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Lifecycle analysis shows that electric cars produce 25% less emission than plug-in hybrids that use a drive train similar to the kind you are advocating for.
Environmentalists have always been for more efficient cars but pure gasoline powered cars just aren't necessary. And there are a TON of engineering benefits to an electric car: the center of mass is super low, you double the storage capacity, you get rid of the vast majority of the maintenance cost, and the performance is really phenomenal.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
When they use energy produced by coal power plants the emissions are roughly equivalent to driving a regular gas powered car. In most places, they range somewhere between an efficient gasoline powered car and a hybrid. There are also emissions involved with the manufacturing and recycling of the car.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
For years the EPA and other interested parties have deluded the public into thinking we can have our cake and eat it too. We can drive cars as much as we want. And it's clean! In fact cars always will be about trade-offs. Risk and benefits. And nevermind net CO2, which isn't even part of this.
This is not precisely what happened.
The emissions requirements on vehicles are strongly tied to what we are and are not able to easily and economically test. If it's hard to test something, it doesn't get tested, it gets ignored. What happened is that we became better able to test diesel emissions to a high granularity, and so we tested them to that granularity.
This same thing happens in reactive software testing. You build a product iteratively, and as you discover bugs, you write tests for those bugs, and then you verify that the software passes that test as a result of some bug fix, and as long as it keeps passing that test on each iteration, you declare it good software. The theory being that you can arrive at (or asymptotically approach) some ideal that approximates the set of tests you would have arrived at had you written your tests from the design document in the first place.
When we became better able to test diesel emissions, CARB started ratcheting down the emissions diesels were allowed to have based on their ability to test; this is the "less is better" theory, without providing a correlation to visible emissions or health effects from emissions, visible or not (this is the "any emissions more than zero are bad" theory).
This was also not an issue until they started turning the ratchet; the rate at which they turned the ratchet was higher than the rate at which technology to reduce emissions was advancing.
Sure, there are a small minority of systems that are capable of keeping up with the ability to test these specific emissions; but this is not by design on the part of the vendors, this is based solely on luck: the emissions they have are not the emissions for which we are able to test easily and economically. In other words, these other vendors don't actually have overall "cleaner" vehicles, what they have is a different set of emissions for which testing is currently difficult.
Time to follow the money...
Do we require freight haulers to meet these emissions standards? Specifically, do we require freight hauling trucks, and diesel electric trains to meet these emissions standards? No; doing so would cripple the economy.
OK...
Why passenger vehicles, but not these other vehicles? The answer is that passenger vehicles utilizing diesel fuel make less diesel fuel available for trains and trucks. The intent of these vehicles was to take advantage of the price differential in diesel vs. gasoline pricing, in order to cause cars to be cheaper to operate. In doing that, they create a scarcity market for diesel fuel, and drove the price up.
So in the end, we have that CARB really doesn't care about diesel emissions, they care about passenger cars, and they care about them in two ways: they would like fewer passenger cars, period, and they would like diesel to be cheap for the freight companies. So they would like to get passenger vehicles off of using diesel fuel entirely. In fact, California had a ban, which did not stand up to legal challenge, as it violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, on importation of diesel passenger cars to California; so it's not like we can't see the hand they are playing.
Comparatively speaking, we also have the "phase-in", which on the face of it looks reasonable, but which in practice disadvantages passenger vehicles compared to other vehicles, since it doesn't apply to other vehicles, and for which there are not real, measurable justifications.
So Volkswagen hacked the law, by meeting its letter, and defeating its spirit.
Lest you think this is evil, this is precisely what H&R Block do for you, personally, when you have them do your t
So in what way are those emissions caused by the vehicle itself? That is caused by the production of electricity in general in regions that do not have convenient clean sources of energy, but one may equally condemn absolutely all electricity usage on that basis for contributing to that end... the responsibility for which is actually assumed by the owner of devices that are powered by such electricity, and not necessarily the devices themselves. Electric cars are indeed zero emission. It is misleading at best to suggest otherwise simply because the production of electricity may not be.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Uh, no. The affected VW's wouldn't have passed 1984 emissions standards, in fact they would have been over by about 50%. By completely turning off emissions equipment during non-testing mode VW went from barely above regulations to untuned Mercedes 300 levels (obviously not in soot production but almost every other metric).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's like how your smartphone lasts all day when you don't need it and dies at 1pm when you do, but with cars. Not awesome.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So there is going to be a charging station for all 500 people who stop to shop? Per mall??
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This just in: T. Boone Pickens thinks they should be required to spend the money on natural gas vehicles and wind harvesting technologies.
The percent of electricity in the US generated from coal has dropped from 50% to 39% in about a decade. Almost 3/4 of the coal plants in the US are 30 years old or more. 40 years is the average life span. A lot of coal plants are going to be replaced in the next 10 to 15 years, - most likely with something other than new coal plants. Especially when you take the EPA's clean power plan into consideration.
A Tesla did almost that same trip in just under 59 hours recently: http://jalopnik.com/they-drove... ...they'll get better times every year, I'm sure.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
These car manufacturers need to sell people big batteries so they can charge up when power is abundant and have enough to cover their night time driving. They could even integrate them into the cars somehow.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When they use energy produced by coal power plants the emissions are roughly equivalent to driving a regular gas powered car. In most places, they range somewhere between an efficient gasoline powered car and a hybrid. There are also emissions involved with the manufacturing and recycling of the car.
Actually when powered solely by coal, they are the same as, or in extreme cases worse than, a regular car. Places like India and China have terrible emissions per kWh and this translates to bad environmental impacts for electric cars. The USA has a decent mix of power and also emission standard but a large portion comes from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. It really depends on your regional power grid, there isn't a one size fits all explanation.
In general the recycling isn't too much worse at all for today's cars that use lithium batteries as these are relatively non toxic. It's the NiMh packs that are the environmental disaster.
No there is no such thing as a free lunch. Electric cars are just the equivelant of a regular gas powered car where you can hide the tailpipe. Most Americans don't understand grade school level physics and don't realize it is impossible to have a zero emission vehicle. By your reasoning, light bulbs are a zero emission device and these newfangled efficient LED ones are a waste of money
As I said in the op it should be made transparent and people should not be lied to. Some people are actually buying electric cars because they believe things like they have no CO2 impact (completely false) or that the human noticable soot and smell from some diesels (older ones that need maintainance) are worse for you than the non noticable nano particle laden emissions from gas vehicles(also false).
Or, the VW Crafter. Seen the vans in the US? You either buy a RAM Promaster which is pretty much a Fiat Ducato, or pay Mercedes prices for a Sprinter. If VW managed to get the Crafter onto US soil, they would make a mint due to fleets, just because the van could be serviced at not just VW places, but M-B, as well as Freightliner depots.
You do realise that the Sprinter and the Crafter are basically the same vehicle, co-developed by VW and Mercedes, just with a different radiator grill in the front? VW and Mercedes have been doing that for several generations of Sprinter/Crafter now: the body is the same, and each of them puts a different grill on it, and offers slightly different engines. But that is as far as the difference goes. Co-developing these things probably saves them $$$, and there would be little point to have two different vehicles that are almost identical anyway.
Except that electric cars are great stuck in traffic, driving at slow speeds, etc. What kills their range is driving fast on the freeway, so the stuff you're mentioning isn't really a problem.
I have a Fit EV which is very similar to the Leaf in terms of range. In practice, I have about 1 trip a month that isn't convenient to do in the EV (because it's too far). Yesterday was a good example, though. Normally I commute to/from the airport I work at (about a 50 mile round trip) and it usually uses about 1/2 of a charge for the round trip. Yesterday I knew I needed to drive into Boston after work to do some Christmas shopping. This would have been at the limit of my range, maybe even a little beyond. So, I had to charge the car while I was at work.
Now, there happens to be a charger about a 10 minute walk from work, so I usually don't use it but yesterday I did, so that by the time I finished work I had a full charge, did all my shopping, picked up my daughter from her work, and got home with about 1/2 charge left. If there was a charger at my work, it would have saved me walking 10 minutes each way to get to my car. So, as more and more EVs get purchased and the charging networks expand, I think this will be less and less of an issue.
I'm planning on buying a Tesla Model 3 when they become available (and a Bolt if the Model 3 is delayed too long). I figure with 200 miles of range there will only be 1 or 2 trips a year that I can't reasonably make with the EV. For those I will either borrow my wife's car or rent from Avis. This works for me because I live in a sub-urban/urban location (suburbs of Boston). It won't work for people who live out in the boonies, but a large percentage of the US population is like me: living where distances aren't huge. Electric cars don't have to work for 100% of the population 100% of the time to have a big impact on air pollution / greenhouse gasses. You can always construct a scenario that won't work even if you have 500 miles of range in your EV. But, for 99% of what I do, it works great.
Why do I need to charge my car in 1-5 minutes? It charges while I'm not in it so it takes effectively 0 minutes as far as I'm concerned. The problem with the way you're thinking about it is that you're imagining refueling your EV the way you do a gas car - run it until it's empty and then wait for it to be refilled. That's just not the way EVs get used. I get home, plug it in, and when I want to go out again it's fully charged and ready to go. I seldom charge while away from home, but when I do it's while I'm someplace I'm spending a while at, i.e. if I was running in to shop for 5 minutes I wouldn't bother. But if I'm at the mall for an hour I can plug in and generally have 100% charge available by the time I return to the car.
My car has 100 miles of range (84 EPA). That ends up being enough for me to do all but about 1-2 trips a month. 300 miles would be awesome, but when the Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt come out with 200 miles of range, that will probably be enough for all but 1-2 trips a year. I don't mind renting 1-2 times a year if it means I get to enjoy an EV the rest of the time. They're that nice to drive.
Experience with the Tesla Model S would say you're probably wrong about the longevity of battery packs. What I've read suggests they'll have similar lifespans to ICE engines.
I guess one question is what you define as "significant traction"? Around here I see Tesla Model S's all the time, lots of Leafs, lots of BMW i3s. When I've let people drive my car (Honda Fit EV) they love it. I think you'll find demand for EVs increase quickly. It will take a long time for the entire fleet to be electric (30/40 years?) but it won't take nearly as long for a large percentage of new cars to be EVs, IMHO.
Do you have a slightest idea how diesel engine works?
Obviously better than you.
SUV or not SUV just increase engine size by 30-50% or so
And vehicle mass by 100% or so
compression is still low and all that cancerous stuff from high compression diesel engines is emitted only by diesels that skip on these limits
"All that cancerous stuff" that you are talking about is NOx, which is not cancerous. It is the primary component in acid rain, and it can lead to the formation of nitric acid which will damage lung tissue, but no part of it is cancerous. Gasoline vehicles produce more PM2.5 soot than do diesels, and they also emit more unburned hydrocarbons (until the catalyst heats up, they just spew fuel out the tailpipe) so they are actually more cancerous than are diesels.
No, limits are not tight, they are too loose and too loosely enforced. Especially on older diesels, and all cars inevitably get older with time.
We're talking specifically about the NOx limit here. The NOx limit for diesels was deliberately set to about an order of magnitude tighter than necessary (as measured by making them pollute no more than gasoline cars, measured in health and environmental impact) to continue the attack on the diesel engine, because American companies still have inferior diesels to European ones, whether you make them follow the smog laws or not.
Especially on older diesels, and all cars inevitably get older with time.
Gasoline vehicles are worse polluters than diesels, and gasoline cars get old too. Diesels run lean all the time, so when they get old they still don't release a lot of unburned hydrocarbons. But gasoline engines don't, and when they get old their catalyst wears out, and their emissions start to rise. It takes longer for the catalyst to function as it wears out, so the time they spend spewing HC at startup increases. Why don't you think gasoline cars wear out as the age, too?
Only the oldest diesels (pre-1996) are exempt from smog testing, like my 1982 300SD and my 1992 F250. They are a minuscule percentage of vehicles on the road, so they have minimal environmental impact. Most of the ones I see still running are being maintained well, because most of the ones that weren't have fallen apart already, and even some of the ones that were. My F250 died due to cavitation even though I was running a precharged coolant filter. Now I need to find it a 6.9 block. I'm just finishing up the engine work on my 1997 Audi A8 Quattro, though. That's definitely going to pollute more than my 300SD, because it has a 4.2 liter V8 and 400 more pounds to haul around. Happy yet?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where are you getting "80 minutes of driving"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
There are a lot of journals and web site which tracks how reliable car are. German car are very reliable. Plus you seem to make a fallacy that very reliable means never get a lemon. That is not true over million of car sold, some will have a problem. So sorry for your 1200$ repair, but that does not mean on average that german car are crap. You have got to look at the bulk, not single incident.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The article notes that VW would become a new competitor to Musk. It also notes that the bottleneck for electric vehicles is availability of batteries. But Musk is currently building the largest battery factory in the world, in Nevada. So VW would also be a customer of the Musk batteries. So now we know why Musk is so excited about VW entering the electric market.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
...they just don't emit anything at the point of use. There's still plenty of emissions (or other environmental concerns) from the site where the power for them is generated...
Whats more efficient: 10,000 tiny petrol/deisel engines being carted around or one big fossil fuel X plant? honestly the fuel doesn't even matter that much to figure this out. Also replacing cars first at least gives you an infrastructure that is ready to run on clean energy even if the backend still needs replacing... EV's can be done right now, power plants will take time but we are getting there. So lets do the stuff we can do now - NOW
Second: The main reason to want EVs today? your lungs: cities stink, they weaken your lungs and vastly increase your chances of various types of lung disease... the fumes are comparable and in some cases many times worse than smoking - yet you don't see anti-deisel campaigns or cars with pictures of lung disease on the back of them being sold.
If you don't care about global warming, think about that awful stench, that burning sensation at the back of your nose if you ever try to run in a densely packed city in busy traffic and wonder what it's going to do to your lungs... even pedestrians can't escape this.
And media bought it.
As if Volkswagen did not know their options. They already sell electric cars too, but it is not a mass market. Guess they don't have the Apple-like image of Tesla that allows them to sell lots of overly expensive cars.
If we continue to have personal transportation vehicles (a big if), in the long run they will be a combination of pure electric (Nissan Leaf) and extended-range electric (Chevy Volt) - because that's the only sustainable set of transportable energy sources. However, the engine in the extended-range vehicle will need to be diesel rather than gas since we can manufacture diesel fuel from non-fossil sources. Therefore long run we really need better diesels with good efficiency and emissions controls. Volkswagen has managed to set this process back a decade. Thanks Merkel.
sPh
Demand peak doesn't start at sunset. It starts in the heat of the afternoon while businesses are still operating and A/C loads are the highest. The "Duck" problem is real but often exaggerated and solvable. Excess production can be exported and relatively clean solutions like storage or Natural Gas turbines can be used to cover when solar production is low.
Agreed.... but that is saying something different than saying that electric cars have emissions
Electric vehicles *ARE* zero emission.... it is the production of electricity in the first place that may not be.... Electric cars do *NOT* directly cause any emissions, and suggesting that they are not zero emission just because the production of electricity may not be is *FAR* more misleading about the nature what is actually causing harm to the environment.
The LED ones use electricity more efficiently.... if the production of electricity in the first place causes emissions, then at the very least, using LEDs instead of light bulbs will at least contribute less pollution to that end. If somebody made light bulbs that used electricity as efficiently as LED's and could produce just as much illumination and were cheaper than LED's, then LED's would indeed just be a waste of money, as you said.
I didn't say that electric cars have no CO2 impact.... Certainly their CO2 impact could be substantial (albeit still far less than a gasoline vehicle) if the production of electricity in the first place causes CO2, and there is a CO2 impact for their manufacture as well, although that impact is not any larger than the CO2 impact for the industrial manufacturing of anything, per kilogram of manufactured and produced goods. However, I am specifically talking about *vehicle emissions* here, that is, the gasses that would actually be emitted directly from the vehicle itself. An electric vehicle produces none of those. Certainly it's fair to say that electric vehicle vehicles have CO2 impact, and if you want to draw attention to that point, then don't be talking about emissions at all, because that only confuses the issue.
Like I said before.... if you want to simplify things for the person who is too dumb to understand the difference between emissions caused by the production of electricity in the first place and emissions that are directly caused by the usage of that electricity, then stick to your opening phrase.... "there is no such thing as a free lunch". It's concise, entirely true, and very well understood by most people.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are engaging in game of words to support your agenda. This doesn't make your agenda look credible, rather the opposite. Agenda that requires game of words to look good can't be credible. You may as well say that gas car doesn't produce emissions, only the fuel produce them. It is misleading as makes people to assume things that may or may not be assumed.
You have no other practical forms to charge but to use electric grid that is not going to become clean any time soon. Whatever you install on your roof to sell power to grid at teaser rates is irrelevant. You don't have any choice when and where to charge - and anyway it would be the same grid, there aren't any fantasy green chargers that collect solar to cheap fantasy batteries for half a year and then everybody can use this saved energy. Battery capacity is very limited, you must charge it from grid as soon as it gets half empty, or your trip next day may end with flatbed or being stuck for a half of day at lower power charger. It is not going to change in the next decade.
Please check here how "duck" looks:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Please tell us how do you "solve" duck problem. When Sun goes down, it goes down everywhere in half of the Earth.
Yes you can use storage. Except that you don't have any practical storage, and when you account for capital, electricity from battery/pumped hydro/compressed air storage costs more than peak wholesale rate. Makes little sense for utilities to invest into it. It may be different for household when you are playing with various incentives, but no seasonal storage is available to households to disconnect from grid now, other than keeping natural gas generators, natural gas appliances, and it is obviously bad idea if you have electric grid available.
Yes you can use natural gas plants, but you need to build new, as typical old plants can't go up and down many times a day, they need up to a day to reach full power. Now you build new gas plant and use it at full power for like 2-3 hours a day, maybe at night, or when wind is not blowing. How is it going to repay capital costs and staff salaries? The shorter the usage time, the higher the cost of its electricity. Basically solar/wind allows you to offset natural gas plant fuel cost at random times, and that is all, you still need to pay for new gas plant for full required power.
Yes you can rely on export/import. This is what it is done in practice. This relies on your neighbors NOT using much intermittent renewables, as otherwise they would follow similar supply/demand pattern and you would have nowhere to export/import. That is what I was talking about. Great solution that enables to pose as superior to others but have little value as global solution as it leads to dead end. Long transcontinental transmission lines are inherently unreliable to rely just on them.
In more distant future, you may come with power-to-gas technology, that means production of hydrogen or synthetic methane and storing it in already available natural gas storage that has capacity for seasonal storage. It is likely to be more expensive than fracking, and battery cars would make less sense when paying full price for clean electricity, accounting for huge cost of balancing electric grid. Hydrogen fuel cells may make more sense than batteries then.
Gasoline cars *do* emit greenhouse gasses. Electric cars emit none. My so-called "agenda" is nothing more than to expect people to use words that mean what they say, rather than playing twisting the literal defininitions of things of the words involved and suggesting the co2 impact of using an electric vehicle are the emissions caused by the vehicle itself. They are not. Go ahead and talk about how dirty electricity production is if you want, go ahead and talk about how everything that uses such electricity inherently contributes to that end, but it is grossly misleading to say that the cars produce emissions, because that suggests that the cars themselves do, and they do not. Not saying what you actually mean, that electricity production is dirty, is misleading at best and lying at worst. If the phrase "zero emissions" is taken to mean "no co2 impact at all" then one should again say precisely what they mean and expressly point out that the since the production of electricity is dirty, everything that uses such generated power contributes to that, the amount ring dependant on how much power is being used. Or if that is too complex, as another person put it, try "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
{The article} also notes that the bottleneck for electric vehicles is availability of batteries. But Musk is currently building the largest battery factory in the world, in Nevada. So VW would also be a customer of the Musk batteries. So now we know why Musk is so excited about VW entering the electric market.
that's what I tought, but when reading further the part that you quote:
The bottleneck to the greater availability of zero emissions vehicles is the availability of batteries. There is an urgent need to build more battery factories to increase battery supply, and this proposal would ensure that large battery plant and related investments, with their ensuing local jobs, would be made in the U.S. by VW.
Aparently Mush wants that more factories get build.
(Not that this couldn't too help him further his own cause at a higher level: market for electric cars will end up increasing if the necessary infrastructure increases).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
uh... "Also don't forget about being stuck in traffic, driving at slow speeds, etc... A vehicle that's only good for approximately 80 minutes of driving" unlike ice, electric cars consume practically nothing, you could sit in traffic all day and the charge would probbably be fine. The only way a leaf is going to run out of power in 80 minutes is if you're going 80 miles per hour... getting stuck in traffic is actually where electric shines.
Agreed.... but that is saying something different than saying that electric cars have emissions
Electric vehicles *ARE* zero emission.... it is the production of electricity in the first place that may not be.... Electric cars do *NOT* directly cause any emissions, and suggesting that they are not zero emission just because the production of electricity may not be is *FAR* more misleading about the nature what is actually causing harm to the environment.
The LED ones use electricity more efficiently.... if the production of electricity in the first place causes emissions, then at the very least, using LEDs instead of light bulbs will at least contribute less pollution to that end. If somebody made light bulbs that used electricity as efficiently as LED's and could produce just as much illumination and were cheaper than LED's, then LED's would indeed just be a waste of money, as you said.
The point being led bulbs are mandated for enviornmental reasons and the enviornmental impact argument is often right on the box. I have not seen this for electric cars, i live in an area of the us where electrics get 38 mpg, and are marginally better to not better for the enviornment than efficent gas/diesel. Yet this is never made transparent to customers. Agreed that you at least understand decoupling the power generation and impact from devices is disingenuous.
I didn't say that electric cars have no CO2 impact.... Certainly their CO2 impact could be substantial (albeit still far less than a gasoline vehicle) if the production of electricity in the first place causes CO2, and there is a CO2 impact for their manufacture as well, although that impact is not any larger than the CO2 impact for the industrial manufacturing of anything, per kilogram of manufactured and produced goods. However, I am specifically talking about *vehicle emissions* here, that is, the gasses that would actually be emitted directly from the vehicle itself. An electric vehicle produces none of those. Certainly it's fair to say that electric vehicle vehicles have CO2 impact, and if you want to draw attention to that point, then don't be talking about emissions at all, because that only confuses the issue.
It does noting of the sort. You admit the importance and sanity of declaring light bulbs to be coupled to the power generation source, electric cars are absolutely no different. Pretending its someone else's problem while actively usng the energy is two faced. If anything this should be clear so more people vote to reduce the emissions of their electric cars
Like I said before.... if you want to simplify things for the person who is too dumb to understand the difference between emissions caused by the production of electricity in the first place and emissions that are directly caused by the usage of that electricity, then stick to your opening phrase.... "there is no such thing as a free lunch". It's concise, entirely true, and very well understood by most people.
Sure but if we are talking transparency it needs to be clear. Where i live, and it's not uncommon in the us, electrics get 35-40mpg. This wont change substantially over the next 10 years eit
That could be solved by quick but small inductive charging e.g. while you wait at the stopsign or red-lights. {...} That way congestion might actually benefit drivers (as standing in a trafic jam recharges your car's battery).
I you want to quickly charge the car in short burst, these bursts are going to need quite some current (or power, more precisely).
We're not speaking about wirelessly charging your tooth brush, your smartphone or your vibrator.
We're speaking about wirelessly charging something that can have up to 90kWh Batteries.
(That the reason why, when using simple household main power, you need to charge the car over night. Or conversly if you want to charge the car in less than half an hour, you need special high-current DC "Super chargers").
A fast charge can significantly input extra power in such a battery during its brief stops is going to be quite some feat (bordering on a small EMP~ just joking but that still a big electromagnetical emission).
Also Tesla forgot to put solar panels on the roof of their cars,
They have been considered. Covering the whole surface of the car with solar pannels would cost way to much compared to the small input of energy.
Better putting them on the roof of chargers: then the panels can be optimally aligned for as long as there's sunshine and thus maximize their energy output (and thus partially offset the energy required during a fast charge).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Electric vehicles are zero emissions" without elaborating anything further is half truth that intends to make impression to uninformed people that they result in no pollution when battery is made and when you charge a car. I would call it "intentionally misleading" but you may have different opinion.
well you're looking too narrowly. Electrical generation plants that burn fossil fuels are a lot more efficient than ICE. The use of ICE is based on the ease of accelleration/torque on demand, lack of long startup phases. If you use an electric motor for the kinetic activities, the the options for generating electricity for the powertrain to use are wide open. Say when the battery gets down to 25% charge, you start up a compact gas turbine, and run it until it's back up to >90% and then shut it off. so the duty cycle is long, no varying torque, something like this: http://www.bladonjets.com/ has only one moving part... should last forever, far simpler than an ICE, and likely more efficient. another product: http://www.capstoneturbine.com... Walmart's gas turbine hybrid truck: http://www.greencarcongress.co...
Average SUV doesn't consume 100% more fuel than typical sedan. Though you of course can do some extreme comparison between subcompact and largest SUV. You can always make such excuse, "my car pollutes less than Boeing 747, so who cares". It doesn't fly.
World Health Organization (WHO) has classified diesel engine exhaust as a carcinogen – a substance that causes cancer. It is scientific fact and you may as well argue that Earth is flat. It isn't just NOx but whole complex of substances.
Paris and London has hard time now due to diesel exhaust - they are victim of stupid earlier policy to promote diesels and need to suffer more smog as result. Now they try to put on all kinds of restrictions do not admit diesels to downtown and reverse the stupid policy, but it is a bit too late. The EPA (or whoever set emission limits) has done good job keeping this junk out of the US as much as possible.
Sometimes in year 2100 when battery weight and price will be 50 less than now, they will sure do. Antigravity transportation should be popular by then too ;)
Yeah, I'm pretty well aware of the geography and population census of the United States / North America. I'm also aware of the total fraction of the US/North American population that lives there (very small) and the questions that have been raised over the last 30 years as to whether it is possible to maintain human habitation there for anything other than specialized purposes such as mining towns ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). Whether or not it is ecologically or economically possible to maintain the use of personal transit vehicles is entirely separate from the question of whether people live in certain areas of North America or prefer to live there.
But sure: some pure diesel vehicles as well. Heavy construction and heavy delivery vehicles will presumably remain diesel, and some passenger vehicles as well. As originally noted diesel can be manufactured from non-fossil sources which means it will be with us for a long time.
sPh
No, it isn't. It only helps somebody who wants to feel green and better person. Not the grid in the long run. First, the price makes energy from battery expensive, higher than peak wholesale price. Lithium battery cost only allows to use them for very short term balancing, e.g. gives some minutes to turn on regular generator. E.g. recent battery project was announced for German grid. But it is still too high for peak cost shaving. Household tesla powerwall may help to acomodate a bit more solar into grid, as it reduced "duck" pattern when demand goes too high at sunset. But the end result is still the same, dead end. You need seasonal storage to make grid clean and reliable. That is not lithium batteries.
Electric cars are zero emissions, in the same way your computer, smartphone, and dishwasher are also zero emissions. I don't see the need to twist words around as anyone who's somewhat intelligent will know that the electricity used to run the vehicles may come from a polluting source. Unless of course you have an agenda to push. But hey, let's not forget where the oil comes from either. Does that mean anyone who drives a gasoline car supports brutal middle-eastern regimes and terrorism?
Note also that I did not say that light bulbs emit any pollution, because they do not. The only enviuronmental impact that they have that is worse the LED's is in the fact that they *draw* more power in the first place, requiring more work to be done in power generation, which may itself lead to more pollution. Nonetheless, lightbulbs are still entirely zero-emission devices, because they do not emit any pollution.
Electric vehicles are absolutely no different in that respect.... and it is still ultimately the *production* of electricity that may be dirty, while the vehicles themselves do not directly emit any greenhouse gasses. I would even concede that they may *contribute* to greenhouse gas emissions because of how much electricity that they use, but that is entirely different than saying that they emit the gasses themselves, which is what the term 'vehicle emissions' means... that the car *emits* those gasses, when in the case of an electric car, it does not.
If a person cannot distinguish between the two, then one should explicitly say exactly what they mean (which isn't a bad policy to be following in the first place), instead of using popular terms to refer to something that does not describe the literal truth. In my opinion, people who allege that the average person is genuinely too unintelligent to understand this if it were explicitly spelled out in that way is probably only making an excuse for being too lazy to make the effort to try.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Without a breakthrough in battery technology, electric vehicles are a pipe dream, at least in the US. People simply are too spread out and need to drive too much. To be feasible, they need a 200 mile range and a 10 minute recharge. That technology simply doesn't exist today and isn't on the horizon.
A generator/electric car will use 75% less fuel than a current vehicle. So, even if the miracle breakthrough comes through, it would only drop another 5% from today's vehicles. As such, we are faced with hoping for a miracle breakthrough or doing something feasible right now.
The term is entirely misleading. Zero tailpipe emissions would be accurate.
No, you can't produce clean electricity in practical way that can be used to charge cars (typically after sunset). Hydro is limited by geography and doesn't work so well in dry years. Solar is reaching its peak and daytime demand is going closer to zero in California due to too many solar installations. Demand peak starts at sunset. Google "duck" and "California grid". Solar/wind relies on new gas plants that can be turned on/off on demand. Most older ones can't, so you just run them whole day. Basically you can only use intermittent renewables under condition that your neighbors (or neighboring states) are not using them much and are ready to back you up with power of fracking product. Electricity storage is way too expensive, more expensive than peak wholesale rates for now. Seasonal power demand fluctuations are entirely hopeless matter for solar/wind without (whatever) gas that can be stored for seasons.
I notice how you leave out nuclear power. It's proven and baseload (meaning when it's running, its' running) and, given appropriate sane measures (proper waste disposal or *reprocessing* ) it's fairly clean (my gripe with nuclear is waste water heat, but most power plants are bad in more ways than nuclear.
Nukes + Solar + Wind + (legacy coal/gas) is a reasonable power portfolio. The gas plants don't really shut down during the day either.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Electric cars aren't the answer unless every car charging station is powered solely by solar and wind power.
As long as their using coal for electrics, they might as well leave diesels the way they are.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
This plan, though it might be environmentally beneficial, does nothing to compensate the car owners for their substantial losses. They are stuck with cars that they can't drive in good conscience, and can only sell at a considerable loss.
Nukes are legacy of military development. They are rarely built anymore because capital cost is several times more of alternatives, especially in the US with cheap natural gas. Even with government provided waiver for liability insurance that would be huge or unobtainable. Nukes don't help solar/gas because nukes are always on, so they can't compensate for lows in solar/wind supply. Technically you can stop reactor or reduce power, but nuclear fuel cost is small fraction of capital cost, so it doesn't make sense. So if you already have nukes, you don't need solar/wind because they can't provide reliable power at peak time or at any time. Unreliable power isn't what such grid needs.
Solar/wind plus NON-legacy, but new natural gas turbines that can ramp up in seconds may work. But solar/wind needs compete with fuel cost only, because you need full power backup from gas whey solar/wind is not available. Natural gas is very cheap, so it is hard competition. Legacy coal/gas needs A DAY to ramp up, so it doesn't work with solar/wind that requires constant change of other power supplies.
The only renewable that is better is hydro. But it is limited by geography and has similar seasonal issues, and dry years issue.
Sure you may say that for now solar/wind penetration is low in most places and you may get away with import/export. But what kind of solution it is if it can't do more than 30% or so of grid power? Even at 30% it becomes an issue, e.g. Germany has 30% renewable grid and invested a lot in cross country lines and grid balancing, and household electricity prices are around 0.30 EUR/kWh now. Charging from clean grid becomes very distant and expensive fantasy then.
That way you don't need to use any words at all because everybody is intelligent enough to know everything :/
If you still use words, you may want to use them in unambiguous way (like zero tailpipe emissions) to avoid discrediting your agenda. Event blatant advertising puts "* conditions apply" notes and lists conditions at least in fine print.
"Does that mean anyone who drives a gasoline car supports brutal middle-eastern regimes and terrorism?"
I would not stick terrorism here as it doesn't stick very well. But for hostile regimes in Middle East or more important in Russia, yes, it does support them, I agree.
Musk is on the right track, but he misses one big point: even a fixed up Diesel is cheaper to buy and goes much farther with a full tank. Until EVs are on par with gasoline cars in purchase price, cost of operation, and can be refueled within a matter of minutes and then drive several hundred miles on one charge not much will change. EVs are too expensive for the regular folks.