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China, Europe Drive Shift To Electric Cars as US Lags (reuters.com)
Electric cars will pick up critical momentum in 2017, many in the auto industry believe - just not in North America. Tighter emissions rules in China and Europe leave global carmakers and some consumers with little choice but to embrace plug-in vehicles, fuelling an investment surge, said industry executives gathered in Detroit this past week for the city's annual auto show. From a report: "Car electrification is an irreversible trend," said Jacques Aschenbroich, chief executive of auto supplier Valeo, which has expanded sales by 50 percent in five years with a focus on electric, hybrid, connected and self-driving cars. In Europe, green cars benefit increasingly from subsidies, tax breaks and other perks, while combustion engines face mounting penalties including driving and parking restrictions. China, struggling with catastrophic pollution levels in major cities, is aggressively pushing plug-in vehicles. Its carrot-and-stick approach combines tens of billions in investment and research funding with subsidies, and regulations designed to discourage driving fossil-fueled cars in big cities. The road ahead for electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States, however, could have more hairpin curves.
That's a fallacy, what difference does it make how far you need to travel? Unless you are driving 10 hours a day, an electric car will get you as far as you can possibly drive without stopping. And the best part about electricity is that the infrastructure for electricity is massive compared to gasoline.
How can you possibly drive far enough to get to a gas station and not far enough to get to an electrical outlet? Doesn't make sense, cause that gas pump is electric.
Certainly the technology needs to advance, but this seems like one of those arguments that can be summarized with "same argument was had about the horse and buggy"
We still don't have batteries! I'm serious I forgot to buy some at Safeway the other day.
No well seriously, we don't have batteries that can enable us to replace gasoline. We need to improve capacity at least 4x, if not 10x.
Some say the answer is Lithium-Air batteries .. but then hardly anyone is doing any research on order-of-magnitude battery technology improvement .. let alone Lithium Air. Whoever is doing research on new battery concept has virtually no funding. The ones getting slight funding are the people working on incremental updates.
We need companies like Tesla, Google, Apple, Samsung, Panasonic to get serious in funding a foundation or institute that researches advanced battery concepts. Battery research funding budget should be in the billions not thousand.
You want me to connect dots for you? Adding a half hour for charging for every couple hours of driving is not a small time sink.
I've owned a Chevy Volt for over 3 years now. In the warmer summer months, (I'm in Canada), the small battery supplies pretty much 100% of all my power needs. In the winter or if I decide to go long distance once a year, it switches to gas usage seamlessly. It's really too bad folks see it only as EV or only as gas. It's essentially both without compromise. So you charge it when you don't want to use gas and you can use gas when you need the distance or heat.
That's only logical if there isn't some other reason to switch from fossil fuels. As it turns out, the overwhelming majority of experts in atmospheric and oceanic sciences happen to have a reason why we should encourage the transition to vehicles powered renewables sooner rather than later.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I posted the links above. The US's urbanization is largely the same as Europe's larger countries, and in fact, China hasn't even reached 60% urbanization yet. The only real exceptions are relatively small countries like Belgium and Luxembourg. Heck, Germany has a higher rural population per capita than the US.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They also tend to be far more polluting that a gas powered car. From the production of the batteries to the coal fired power plant that generates the electricity.
Every time you say this I will shock you through your keyboard, but with a minimum of CO2. From the Wikipedia:
Even when the power is generated using fossil fuels, electric vehicles usually, compared to gasoline vehicles, show significant reductions in overall well-wheel global carbon emissions due to the highly carbon-intensive production in mining, pumping, refining, transportation and the efficiencies obtained with gasoline.
They even have a dandy little chart with Tailpipe and total CO2 produced for electric and gasoline cars.
I live on Vancouver Island. The distance to the nearest large urban center is an hour's drive, and it's a drive I make maybe every three or four weeks. In fact, to get to Vancouver, in actual "driving" terms (ie. not riding a ferry) is about an hour and a half. Yes, if you live in Prairies, the drive between, say, Edmonton and Calgary is pretty long, but really, what percentage of the Canadian population do you imagine makes that trip on a regular basis?
Once again we see people trying to argue against EV's based on driving patterns that only a pretty small fraction of the population actually partake of.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't understand people. I can't drive to the middle of a mountain range, and charge an electric car. There's no electric grid there. I can easily fill up on fuel wherever a fuel truck can drop some off -- which is basically the very same places that my car can go.
North America is very different than Europe. Paris and London are how many hours away? A European train can take you through ten countries in a single day. In North America, you'd be lucky to hit five major cities in 24 hours of driving.
There's a lot more middle-of-nowhere around here. It's not about electric vs gasolene. It's about portable fuel vs transmission-over-infrastructure. We don't have any infrastructure -- that's why we have roads to get between places.
Use cases like yours and mine where I have a lake property 2.25 hours away where I have to tow stuff to and there isn't electricity on site are not something EVs can meet now in the future maybe but then we are a limited few. That said you have people like my wife who 90% of the time drives 5 miles a day and the rest of the time drives at most 60 miles a day can get by with an EV without issue. My mother, step dad, step mom, sister, mother-in-law, and father-in-law could have their entire driving needs met by just about any EV available now (maybe not the volt without it going to gas mode). So in my immediate family only myself, my father, and my brother-in-law who can't meet all our vehicle needs with an EV. Even then my father would only need a non EV to tow his race car to tracks as he doesn't have a long commute and everything he needs is close by otherwise. So that leaves myself with my 64 mile daily commute plus what ever else I have do that day, and my brother-in-law who fixes commercial restaurant equipment and drives from job to job in a big ass van all day.
Time to offend someone
You can drive 250 miles in two hours?
but with ICE you pollute 24/7 .
You need to get out of your car more.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
And somehow, those five people always have enough time to be available to poo-poo on any Internet thread discussing EVs :-)
Have you actually calculated the amount of CO2 released per distance traveled for a car powered by gasoline, versus one powered by electricity from a coal plant? If so, I'd be genuinely interested in comparing notes. If not, please sit down and do a quick calculation before claiming electric cars "tend to be far more polluting."
Here's my (admittedly rough) calculation:
Gasoline:
Approximately 9.5 L/100km (average for 2015 model year)
times 2.31 kg CO2 emitted per L gasoline burned
= 21.9 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled
Electric:
17.9 kWh/100km (for the 70 kWh Tesla Model S)
divided by 80% wall charger efficiency (Tesla claims 95%, some users report 80%)
times 0.527 kg CO2 per kWh (EPA average, includes line losses)
= 11.8 kg CO2 per 100 km traveled
Mind you, we're unfairly penalizing the electric car here because we're counting transmission losses over the power grid, whereas we're only counting the emissions from the gasoline already in the tank. A fairer comparison would take into account the carbon involved with gasoline distribution, but that goes beyond something I can easily estimate.
I'll admit I'm not factoring in the environmental impact of battery manufacturing. (I suspect it isn't as bad as the anti-EV crowd claim, since lithium isn't a heavy metal.) Perhaps someone more informed than me can speak to the overall impact of manufacturing an electric versus gasoline car... I'd be interested in reading their insights.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
A Leaf is a realistic 120 (30kWh battery). Tesla is a really solid 300 (100kWh battery).
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I live in Calgary, I drive a Tesla.
I regularly make trips to Vancouver, Kelowna, Merritt, etc. all of which are hundreds of km away and require recharging.
If you don't think an EV can be used in Canada you're living in the past.
No one is actively taking your gasoline driven car away. If you really need it, keep it. But for the largest part of the population, it might make sense to drive an electric car most of the year, and only for the few long trips into sparsely populated regions, they can rent a gasoline powered one.
Your argument is akin to arguing that cars are not usable for anybody, because there are some people living on small islands who need a boat to get somewhere else, or because once in a while, you need to go by airplane, because it would take too long to drive from New York City to Seattle. Yes, there are special cases, when a car is not a good solution. For those cases, we have other solutions. But that doesn't mean that we have to abandon cars. People living on small islands will not be frequent car customers. So what?
The same can be said for electric cars. Yes, there are special cases where they aren't a good solution. But for most people in most cases, they are. And for special needs, there are special transportation means you can use -- be it a gasoline powered car, a train, an airplane, a boat or a bicycle. It doesn't mean that you have to own all of them.
Fine - cancel all oil subsidies first please. They outstrip EV subsidies by a large margin. Add in the cost of pollution and damage done to people, and determine the new price at the pump. Then see how much you like paying for gas.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The existence of people who have that driving pattern was never a question. The issue is whether the percentage of people who rarely if ever commute beyond their own metropolitan areas is great enough that a shift to the majority of the population driving electric cars is economically and practically feasible. Pointing out that counterexamples exist to a trend in an attempt to question the existence or magnitude of the trend is fallacious and dishonest.
What range do you think EVs have on a single charge, anyway?
Between 100km and 150km per 20kWh worth of battery charge.
Exact mileage depends on car model.
(e.g.: Tesla use lighter than average material and are designed from the ground up for longer ranges.
Other cars are simply "an electric motor replacing the ICE under the bonnet and batteries bolted wherever there's free place" quick conversion like the VW e-Golf and VW e-Up that VW hastily released in the wake of the diesel scandal, and might have lower mileages).
Also depends on the driver (driving like an aggressive idiot at high speed on the highway, and you'll get a lower range than driving conservatively maybe a bit under the maximum speed limit).
I can drive upwards of 3 hours without a break.
Which is *definitely* not recommanded.
Current recommendations here around in continental Europe is a break each 1 or 2 hours max.
(e.g.: There are big public service campaigns to advise drivers to have at least a quick "turbo-nap" every once in a while when driving long distance)
But let's make the assumption that you are 2 drivers sharing the load, and that you'll switch midway (without charging the car, nor making any break longer than required to change seat - no the best experience, but hey).
With an average-priced EV, that's not even near possible.
Renault Zoe are currently the cheapest e-cars with a decent battery.
(You can even get them for the price of an average priced ICE-car if you decide to rent the battery instead of buying it).
(They are definitely after the same market as Tesla's upcoming model 3, except that Zoes have been on the street for quite some time, and Renault chose the opposite progression from Tesla, release progressively longer range vehicle while staying affordable - instead of long range vehicles while progressively releasing cheaper models)
The latest model has upgraded the battery to 45kWh, which should give you between 200km and 300km of range. (depending on the speed/aggressiveness of driving 130km vs 100km on highway vs. 80km on streets between cities).
That's definitely in near the 3 hours of your example (and by now, both drivers of our assumption should get a nap, or at least make a long break - enough to put quite some additionnal range back into the battery using standard 50kW chargers)
For a car that cost in the general ballpark figure of ~30k USD (not some 100k+ USD Tesla Model S super car).
And all of the above aren't made up numbers, but my actual experience with Zoes.
They are available at the local car-sharing company (though not the more recent 45kWh battery), and I've already driven quite a lot of trip with them.
I can easy get 100km when I drive aggressively or 150km when much more conservative.
The current drawback I see, is that Renault doesn't have collision avoidances option available on their smaller cars like the Zoe.
(unlike VW where - like lots of european constructors - for the last several years even the lowest entry-level model like Up comes with a LIDAR [a.k.a. "City Safety"] in standard configurations,
or unlike all the noise that Tesla is making around their "Autopilot" since a couple of years ago).
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