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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."
Somewhere in the world right now, Jeremy Clarkson is banging his head against a dashboard.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
sorry
All automakers are going to more or less follow suit soon enough. The benefits of a mild hybrid system far outweigh the essentially nonexistent drawbacks, and if you actually convert the whole car to 48V, then there really are no drawbacks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"... and now they won't even make the type of car that I would consider buying."
Sounds like the bus and a lot of walking is in your future.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It's also a gutsy move not to. Emissions and mileage regulations are tightening. There's a crackdown against emissions cheaters. Consumers meanwhile expect better and better performance. Electric motors are really the only practical way to deliver high performance in the current regulatory regime - whether you're talking pure electric or hybrid. Electric motors actually become more efficient as they become more powerful, not less (upping the peak power requires lower resistance wiring, which wastes less energy when the vehicle is cruising)
There's also a serious danger for any automaker being behind the curve on electrification. Tesla's Model 3 production lines are finally going online for what will initially be several hundred thousand vehicles per year, with long-term plans aimed many times larger. Tesla could of course be completely wrong and the market could disappoint in the long-run. But for other manufacturers, the cost of letting your ability to mass-produce reliable electric vehicles stagnate would be a death knell if Tesla is right. Volvo can always go back to making pure gasoline cars if they're wrong, but they can't just suddenly jump to making hundreds of thousands or millions of EVs per year if they haven't built up to that point.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
Says someone who obviously wasn't around CA in the '70s. Thing is, "consumers" also want air they can breath, and water they can drink....
Sulfates and other pollutants are directly related to acidification of rainfall and as such our streams, rivers, lakes, and groundwater; directly contribute to asthma and lung cancer and other health related issues; and, of course, to our carbon footprint.
And, like coal, if an older technology can no longer do its job from both an economic and environmental standpoint, then, like horses and steam engines, it's time for it to go.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Regarding Subaru: "In an interview published Sunday by Bloomberg, the company's CEO Yasuyuki Yoshinaga said that it plans to make all-electric versions of existing models rather than develop new vehicle lines for the new powertrains."
Tesla is selling the S and X and soon the M3. Fischer is pushing forward. Chevrolet is selling the Volt and Bolt. Toyota, of course, is selling the Prius Prime PHEV plus several other hybrids. Honda has the Clarity plus hybrids. Nissan Leaf. BMW is selling the i3 and teasing the i8. Kia Soul EV and Niro. Fiat 500e. Hyundai Ioniq.
Tell your gf that they're coming, like it or not.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
All automobile manufacturers project the cost to buy a fossil fuel vehicle will be more than for an all electric vehicle starting next model year.
(yes, I invest in automobile firms, sorry if you never read the internal news)
Adapt. Nobody cares for your failed fossil fuel religion.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
I wasn't going to buy one of those pieces of crap, anyway, and now they won't even make the type of car that I would consider buying.
That's exactly why this is the right move for the kind of customer that Volvo is pursuing. Whether pursuing that kind of customer is a good idea or not is another issue. As far as I can tell, it's the middle class, and the middle class is shrinking. At least they finally figured out that they have to make their cars tall if they want to sell them.
Volvo is already selling a highly fancy-pants twincharged (super+turbo) engine with all the bells and whistles. They're fairly well-committed to taking the high-tech solution. But what do you have against hybrids? The Germans and the Koreans alike are now using it to make cars better first, and more efficient second. They still achieve significant efficiency gains, while also improving performance — sometimes by quite a lot, because the electric motor ideally complements the gasoline engine. The electric motor makes peak torque near stall, while the gasoline engine makes it much higher, especially if it is not turbocharged.
But let's say you have a tiny little engine, a big but cheap turbo, and a 48 volt lithium ion mild hybrid system. Your electric motor fills in down low to make up for the lack of torque in the engine, and for the long spool-up time on the turbocharger. The turbo comes on in the mid-range and continues to let the itty bitty engine make more power well into the high rpm/load range, as the electric motor fades away. How can that be a bad thing? The only reason you might [reasonably] complain is if it's mated to a CVT, but you can as easily use a DCT and get almost the same efficiency. Because you're doing torque fill with the electric motor, the clutches in the DCT will last essentially forever.
Automakers have to achieve mileage improvements both in specific segments, and also across their range. For the big guys who make vehicles in multiple segments, there's low-hanging fruit that they're already picking in weight reduction, Ford with Aluminum and GM with ultra high-strength steel. Dodge doesn't sell anywhere near as many pickups, and I'm not sure if FCA even has a plan there. For someone like Volvo, who only sells cars and unrelated heavy trucks into the USA, they have to literally get those mileage improvements across their range — that is, in all of their vehicles.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Oh, I forgot to mention: grid emissions are largely emitted in less densely populated areas, at altitude. Vehicle emissions are largely emitted at street level, predominantly in more densely populated areas. This amplifies the health effects significantly, particularly for short-lived pollutants.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
I remember when I was a kid, growing up in Miami. We would go to the unlimited hydroplane races at Marine Stadium on Key Biscayne. Back then, all the Unlimited Hydro's were powered by Rolls Royce Merlin engines. Yea, surplus engines from P-51's and Spitfires. There was/is nothing like the sound of that Merlin engine screaming by. If you've never heard it, I can't explain it. Fast forward a few years into the future, and I attend the Hydro races in Detroit, and all the unlimited Hydro's are using jet engines. The go by and it's just a "whoosh" sound. All the fun and excitement were gone. Last Hydro race I ever went to. Or take a dragster or funny car burning Nitro, that sound, that smell. Yea, the electrics and jet powered race vehicles may be faster, but they're just boring. This may sound silly, but soon there will be a generation that never knows the sound of a tightly tuned internal combustion engine on a Formula 1 or even a Ducati. We won't even get behind the wheel, we will just whoosh along in boring electric vehicles. I think Jeff Beck said about self driving cars, who the hell would want that. What's the fun in that. Hell, I even miss the sound of a raspy old Bultaco, Husky or CZ 2-Stroke. I'll go back to yelling at the clouds now.
The first time you read the title, it seems like Volvo will only sell electric cars in 2 years time and they will become another Tesla.
Then, if you pay attention, it says that starting 2019, all new models will have an electric engine in them. Yes, this includes mild hybrids, basically energy recovery systems where the electric engine only gives a boost, but it's too small to drive on electric power alone. And yes, they will keep producing the old models for a while.
This is good news, but by no means earth-shattering. I understand most of the European manufacturers will introduce mild hybrids across their range, due to very strict emission standards coming 2020. A PR coup for Volvo, for making public a decision that everyone in the industry will eventually take, and soon.
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.