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Volvo Says It Will Only Make Electric and Hybrid Cars Starting in 2019 (npr.org)
Volvo has announced that starting in 2019, all of the new models it produces will be electric or hybrid. From a report: "This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car," said Hakan Samuelsson, Volvo president and chief executive, in a statement. "Volvo Cars has stated that it plans to have sold a total of 1 million electrified cars by 2025. When we said it we meant it. This is how we are going to do it." The move makes Volvo the first traditional automaker to set a date to phase out cars powered only by internal combustion engines, Reuters reports. The company said it will launch five fully electric cars between 2019 and 2021. Three of these will be Volvos, and two will be sold under the company's Polestar "electrified performance brand."
Jeremy Clarkson liked the BMW i8 hybrid. I don't think he has a problem with hybrids so long as they are good hybrids;
"What we have here, then, is a car that runs silently on electric power when you just have to go to work. But that becomes a Porsche 911 when you are in the mood. This is a sport hybrid, but unlike other sport hybrids — the McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918 Spyder, for example — it does not cost eleven hundred and seventy thirteen million pounds."
[...]
Toyota had just about convinced the world that if you wanted a hybrid you could pretty much kiss goodbye to the concept of fun. But with the i8 BMW has shown this ain’t necessarily so.
I still believe that with hybrids we are going down the wrong road. But with an i8, going in completely the wrong direction is at least wonderfully enjoyable.
> I wasn't going to buy one of those pieces of crap, anyway
You took time out of your day to tell us what you don't do so you could complain about it.
Wow.
You realize that there are Prius autos out there that are hitting 500,000 miles on their original batteries, yes? Or that electrics have about 2,000 fewer parts to wear out and break as opposed to ICEs?
And I just saw an article recently that ran down the top 20 most common repairs needed by modern ICE-powered cars... and none of them apply to EVs.
If you're wanting reliability, a simple electric motor beats an ICE hands down, and twice on Sunday.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
2017 Chevy Corvette 0-60 in 3.6 sec. 1/4 mile in 12.3 sec. 296 mile range.
2017 Tesla model S (sedan): 0-60 in 2.28 sec. 1/4 mile in 10.5 sec. 310 mile range.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Damn that electric card! ;)
Meanwhile, in the real world, multiple studies have reached the same conclusion: on the US's current grid, a complete switchover to EVs:
* PM increases.
* You would see more SOx, except that grid operators are largely capped; in order to sell more power, they have to improve their sulfur scrubbing (and it's well worth them in order to sell more power). In short there's little change.
* NOx is relatively unchanged.
* VOCs go way down
* CO goes way down
* CO2 gets about a 30% reduction
Also:
* All regions of the US grid have enough generation capacity for a complete EV switchover with no new construciton needed except for the hydro-rich Pacific Northwest.
* Local grids however need to be upgraded in many places.
* That said, nobody is talking about a magic fairy coming along and converting all cars to EVs overnight; even the most rushed production pace would be far slower than the pace of grid maintenance and upgrades.
Lastly:
* Gasoline is getting dirtier, as producers increasingly switch to deeper reservoirs, bitumen, tight oil, deepwater crude, etc, which involve more emissions in their production.
* Electricity is getting cleaner, and surprisingly fast, with most new power being gas, wind, and increasingly, solar.
* EVs continue to get cleaner over time as the grid does.
On to your other claims:
No, they don't. The two rarest elements involved in lithium ion batteries are lithium and cobalt, which rank only after nitrogen in Earth's crustal abundance. Their raw material prices of 1-2 dozen dollars per kilogram give a good clue that they're not exactly hard to come by. Li-ion batteries don't even use all that much lithium anyway. By contrast, while gasoline cars don't use a tremendous amount of it, they require platinum or other metals in their catalytic converters and some times spark plugs, which most definitely are rare.
Most cobalt is not directly mined. It's a byproduct of mining the copper used for things like powering the computer you're typing on. Lithium is rarely "strip mined"; it's one of the most environmentally-friendly means of production you can get. It involves pumping brine from under the surface of a playa and drying it in the sun on the surface. Most such playas flood annually, wiping out the evidence that the mine ever was there.
(Note that while all li-ion batteries use lithium, not all use cobalt. Some for example, use iron phosphate, spinels, etc.)
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
That number is also 0 for the Corvette. What's your point again here?
Volvo CE and Volvo Cars are two different companies. Volvo Cars is a Chinese subsidiary and Volvo CE is a Swedish company traded on a public stock market.
You could also note that
1. Internal Combustion Engines in cars get about 20% thermal efficiency, while the efficiency of thermal steam turbines are gt 60%
2. Coal plants are getting phased out for gas and solar, so their argument is diminishing even as we quibble
All of this BS being thrown by the incumbent US car makers is solely to support their sunk costs in manufacturing equipment for ICE's, and has nothing to do with the value of what people are purchasing
Energy cost is precisely the issue. Energy in oil production almost always corresponds directly to CO2 emissions.
No, but as I mentioned, price does. And neither lithium carbonate nor cobalt oxide (aka the raw materials) are particularly expensive. Furthermore, the person said "rare", which does mean abundance.
Dominate overwhelmingly at present (although pegmatites might make a comeback due to booming demand). No, it's not particularly energy intensive, and I'm going to dispute the statement that the evaporation ponds stick around through flood (unless you have something to back that up); production cost reports regularly note that the annual loss of the evaporation ponds makes flooding salars more expensive to produce from (but they represent some of the largest and richest resources). They're made of salt. You don't flood something made of salt, with water, and then have it stick around.
The GP was trying to make the produditon of lithium sound like some scar-gouging strip mine. Here's what it actually looks like. It's hard to think of a means of mining that has less impact on the landscape.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.