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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.
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.
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.
Boring electric vehicles that have almost no "top speed" and can accelerate faster than just about anything on the planet.
I have always suspected, and it's now being borne out, that being "into" fast cars was nothing to do with performance, or handling, or engineering. It was about making loud noises and getting dirty and feeling manly.
Now that every car on the road can do 130mph, nobody cares. Now that electric cars/bikes out-accelerate everything else, nobody cares. Now that even Harley Davidson have electric models, nobody cares.
It was never about the engineering. It was about making noise, and being seen to make noise.
Formula One is as boring as fuck, since they keep making silly rules to dial everything back to "safety". Noisy cars are boring as fuck, since every decent car is whisper silent and can out-perform all the others. Even convertibles - why on EARTH is it at all fashionable to show the world that you can't afford air-con and would rather have every bug smacking you in the face?
Fact is, the ICE's days are numbered. Environmental factors, cost, wear on parts, etc. Almost every car on the road is technically better than a Formula One car from my parent's generation. You can't really speed anyway because of the cameras, and even when you do, they are designed so that it doesn't actually feel fast at all (a dangerous combination).
How about we get over "WOAH! CARS ARE BIG AND LOUD AND NOISY AND LOOK AT ME COMING!", finally? Most kids these days have zero interest in cars, for the same reason they have zero interest in computers - the point are which they were "amazing" was in the previous generation. Now everything's a Formula 1, and you can't do anything with it.
My technician bought himself a brand new car last year. Was telling me all about specs, sporty wheels, such-and-such-a-limited-edition, etc. Spent a fortune. Turned out that, when we checked the specs, the car I had bought a few years before outperformed every spec he gave but didn't look like a terrible boy-racer tricked-out car from the 80's, could carry 5 and a ton of luggage, and was whisper-quiet internally.
Cars are no longer the must-have teenager item. They have Uber if they want to go somewhere. As such, those still clinging to that idea are clinging to a childhood, not to a fascination with engineering. We've been using sub-standard engines for decades because nobody "wanted" an electric car. Now that they do, they win on almost every metric.
P.S. I don't like electric cars, but because of practicality - purchase cost, replacement cost, range. My father was also a motor engineer for decades, built all his own tricked-out cars, did all kinds of stuff in his youth, massive garage dedicated to the hobby, etc. He bought a second-hand Volvo last year.
Cars are just utility vehicles now. And so the sporty ones make no sense. And a battery-powered Harley will beat just about anything away at the lights. Fact is, nobody really cares any more except the guy who bought the Harley because of the Harley name.
self driving cars, who the hell would want that
A commuter driving the same route to work every day. Or a parent dropping off the kids and doing shopping.
In other words, the vast majority of drivers.
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.