Oh, are we restarting the old TTAC "Tesla Death Watch" feature, with its regular columns predicting the imminent death of Tesla back in the early Roadster days?
I always get a grin when I thumb through that, now that Tesla is worth as much as a major automaker and just about to start rolling out an EV (Model 3) in production numbers and with a performance/price point widely mocked as impossible just a few years ago... back when they were just starting to roll out an EV (Model S) in production numbers and with a performance/price point widely mocked as impossible a few years before that.... back when they were just starting to roll out an EV (Roadster) in production numbers and with a performance/price point widely mocked as impossible a few years before that....
Forbes truncated their quote (and worse, added in a period to make it look like that ended a sentence). The actual quote is:
Tesla's Model S received the highest rating in IIHS's crash testing in every category except for one, the small overlap front crash test, where it received the second highest rating available. While IIHS and dozens of other private industry groups around the world have methods and motivations that suit their own subjective purposes, the most objective and accurate independent testing of vehicle safety is currently done by the U.S. government, which found Model S and Model X to be the two cars with the lowest probability of injury of any cars that it has ever tested, making them the safest cars in history.
The quote appears deliberately truncated to try to make it look like Tesla is badmouthing the IIHS, when they're very clearly just saying that they think the NHTSA testing is more meaningful. While that's a debatable point (I see no realistic reason to favour one over the other), Forbes' truncation is pretty questionable. Of course, what do you expect from an opinion piece that in its second sentence all but calls Tesla a cult?
The reality is that the failed test ("small overlap") is a new test developed in 2012, after the Model S design was already completed; it was never designed to the test, only adapted to try to meet it (apparently unsuccessfully thusfar). To be fair to Tesla, this same issue has hit numerous other manufacturers; only three vehicles at present pass get the best rating in it (two of them new designs from 2017) - and Tesla did manage the second best rating. On the other hand, Tesla wants to build part of its reputation on being a leader in safety, and the small overlap crash test, while new, is meaningful. It's the equivalent of sideswiping a utility pole or similar - a very real type of crash that has previously not been well represented in existing crash tests. Tesla needs to get this right next year.
Exactly. Utilities have been salivating over the prospect of electric cars for quite some time; they've been early adopters, even when the tech wasn't up to snuff, and provided significant support for some of the early cross-country EV road trips. They don't just mean more sales, they mean more sales predominantly at times when demand is low, meaning they can use their existing infrastructure to make them more money. The fact that it's at worst a steady draw, and at best a draw which they can adjust within user-set bounds, makes it a dream come true. Fast charging is undesirable to them, but if 5% of charging is fast charging from people on road trips and the other 95% is predominantly overnight home charging, that's a tradeoff they'll gladly take.
What on Earth do you think I was replying to? How do you expect me to estimate the ability of a vehicle to reach a destination without any clue what route they're talking about and what's along that route? Simply knowing the temperature (which, by the way, they didn't give - and I'm not a moron who doesn't know that "snow means cold") and "how many passengers" are in some undisclosed vehicle, is not nearly enough. The number of passengers is far less important than the type of vehicle (you're talking a small fractional change to rolling resistance, which in turn is not dominant at highway speeds). Temperature furthermore depends on the route profile, as it has an altitude correlation.
This is all meaningless without knowing the route. The thing that I specifically asked for (and have now done so three times). I can't even begin to determine how well an EV would do for their trip without that. Everything else can be rolled up into error bars.
I was asking the OP, not a general "can anyone present an example (without any route specifics that could be crossreferenced with charger locations) which might be difficult for some of the shorter-range Teslas".
The only detail you actually gave of utility concerning your route is the altitude change. A net gain in 5000 feet corresponds to roughly 50km (31mi) of range loss for a Model S. If you're talking a heavier vehicle, it'd be more. I have no clue what percentage of your "250 miles" is covered in snow (all 250 miles???), so I can't comment on how that changes the total trip's range; I can't comment on how the slopes you take will affect your efficiency because I don't know your route; I can't comment on charging opportunities because I don't know your route; etc.
When one asks about a route, they're looking for... well, a route.
You're right for bitumen, but there is zero correlation between how "dirty" an oil is and it either being in a tight reservoir or from deepwater except in a broader sense of energy cost.
Energy cost is precisely the issue. Energy in oil production almost always corresponds directly to CO2 emissions.
Abundance in the crust does not necessarily reflect extractability of deposits
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.
The latter source has come to dominate because it is generally cheaper, but is still quite energy intensive and both of them involve mining or evaporation pond operations that disturb the surface terrain over large areas. he fact the natural playa floods, typically annually, doesn't make the surface disturbance go away.
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.
Or, you could, you know, actually present facts, such as a summary of the lower court rulings and the full appeals ruling. The judge did not find that "Tesla defamed TopGear" and was liable for "£100,000 damages". In Europe, if you lose a court case, you generally bear all of the cost of proceedings. The short of the case: The lower court judge argued (and the appeals judge concurred) that viewers should recognize that the show is an entertainment program and that reasonable buyers should understand that range is relative to how you drive a vehicle; that Tesla couldn't show that the statements were "calculated" to cause damage; and that Tesla failed to put forth a compelling case that they lost sales because of the program.
Right, because I'm totally sure that thought never occurred to them. Because they've totally stayed in business all this time by simply guessing that supply chains for all of their parts will be present.
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.
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:
And the batteries are made of rare materials
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.
that require strip-mining to retrieve
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.)
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.
That's incredibly optimistic on mass. All of the ICE-related hardware on the Volt, for example, is several hundred pounds. The engine alone is a couple hundred pounds. And it's still your standard ICE maintenance mess.
That's not to say that the Volt is "as light as possible" or anything of the sort. I've seen some companies pursuing Wankels, for example (although they burn oil and are slightly less efficient) to reduce mass. A couple car companies have made prototypes with gas microturbines - but microturbines are expensive, loud, and not nearly as efficient as their larger counterparts (half as efficient as ICEs). There's a few other options being pursued, but in general, there's no option on the horizon for a light, low maintenance, cheap, quiet, efficient, etc genset for a series hybrid. If you want a genset, be prepared for ICE complexity and hundreds of pounds of dead mass.
What crash danger are you referring to with genset trailers? They're not very large, so there's not going to be much jackknife risk, and there should be no discernable fishtailing even in the most extreme situations.
You betray that you're a naive city dweller whose sole experience with driving out of the city is large highways linking cities. "Rest areas?" *chuckle* You have absolutely no idea what rural America is like, do you?
You mean, as someone who spent ten years living in Iowa, and before that Indiana? And now lives in one of the least densely populated countries on the planet (Iceland)?
Yeah, I think I have a wee bit of understanding of living in low population density areas, thank you very much.
The gas station owners likely would not let anyone hook up to their electricity for hours
I've not known a single EV owner to have ever been declined on a request to plug in, even not in an emergency. The fact that you can afford to pay them 10 times what the electricity costs and still have it be peanuts to you works as a nice incentive - one that's almost never needed.
and don't want any sparks and fires.
Are you high? So gas stations paid to install power sockets that they're terrified to use? So there's no electrical devices in use at gas stations? What sort of Amish gas stations are you stopping at?
I wouldn't let you hook up either
You'd be a first.
not knowing how much electricity you'd use and whether the system can handle it.
The amount of electricity you can use is limited by your socket. A standard 120V 15A socket means (roughly) 1,8kW max, meaning roughly 20 cents per hour max.
As for "whether the system can handle it", you tell me how many amps you want me to draw, and that's how many I'll draw.
For private housing in rural America, the grid power is often of a nature that you have to turn off the AC to run the microwave, or you'll blow a fuse
Again, you tell me how many amps, and that's how many I'll use. And if you can't run a hair dryer's worth of power, something is seriously wrong with your wiring.
The only outlet more than 10 amp is the stove, and no one is going to pull their stove out to let you charge a bumper car.
Nobody's talking about that. At 300 Wh/mi for normal highway driving or 150Wh/mi for a ridiculously slow crawl, 1800W means 1 mile range per 10 or five minutes of charging, respectively (or if you'd rather, 6 to 12 miles per hour). So if you missed your charging station by less than a dozen miles, that's an hour or so wait (if you missed it by dozens of miles, what the heck, man? It's very hard to miss one at all unless you're being an idiot, akin to running yourself out of gas)
1) You mentioned them, but still focused on the energy density difference between fuels and batteries. I responded to point out the pointlessness of such comparisons, because "gasoline" and "batteries" aren't complete systems.
2) Gasoline most definitely is light. Maybe 50-100kg in a typical car, versus 1000-1500kg vehicle weight. Again, comparing the energy density of the gasoline, which makes up a small fraction of the vehicle's mass, to that of batteries, is a pointless (and misleading) endeavour.
3) "only within cities" - most definitely not "only within cities". Virtually every last farmhouse, rest area, roadside store, and - yes, even gas stations - has power outlets.
I also strongly disagree with the idea that series hybrids are the way to go. Because you're putting in an ICE (heavy, high maintenance) in addition to a whole EV, when you hardly ever plan to actually use that ICE. And you put the EV pack into a more stressful situation which means that, in order to maintain it to a lifespan you can warranty, you have to use some combination of lower depth of discharge and/or lower energy density batteries. Not as much as you have to do for hybrids, but more than you have to do for EVs. The longer the pure electric range, the slower you discharge the pack, the more cells you distribute regenerative braking across, and so forth.
There is one series "option" that I liked, but is increasingly becoming a moot point as EV ranges increase and supercharger networks expand - that is, the AC Propulsion "Long Ranger" series hybrid trailer. Hook it up to your pure EV when you need it, leave it behind when you don't. No need to own one for every EV, or at all even; since they'd be needed so rarely, it'd be perfect as a rental or shared-usage item. And the clever way they designed the Long Ranger had it autosteer, so backing up was as easy as backing up without a trailer. But that said, it's becoming a moot point these days.
happens to drive by with a half a mile extension cable...
Wait, so your concept is that the vehicle just suddenly and without warning runs out of electricity and brakes immediately to a stop?
Here's how running out of battery works in a Tesla vehicle. After the warnings, after you hit 0 on the range estimate, you still have a reserve of 10-20 miles. The vehicle goes into "depleted mode", where it limits your maximum power usage. At the end of this, you can still roll to a stop. In short, there is nothing that should stop you from going to the nearest whatever-building on the side of the road and plugging in for a while. Or the next one, or the next one, or the next one; you have 10-20 miles after hitting "0". Even most rest areas have power sockets. And gas stations, for that matter;)
The difference gets more pronounced at higher temperatures, as not only is your rate of heat flow into the vehicle increased, but AC COP drops as the temperature difference increases. So while at 90F it's a 260/279mi (93%) difference, at 110F it's a 246/289mi (85%) difference. Note that battery range increases with increasing temperature - although this would slightly amplify the reduced range with AC, as a longer driving distance equals more time with the AC on. Indeed, the slower the speed, the more significant AC becomes. 70mph at 90F is a 238/253mi (94%) difference, while at 45mph at 90F it's a 357/410mi (87%) difference.
You see the same thing with heating, albeit to a lesser extent. At 65mph at 50F it's 253/267mi (95%); at 32F it's 233/261mi (89%); and at 0F it's 211/249mi (85%). The relatively linear decline suggests to me that they went with purely resistive heating rather than a resistive heater + heat pump approach; resistive heating's COP of ~1 doesn't change with temperature.
The worst case effects of climate control, from this, is 45mph / 0F; this yields a difference of 277/368mi (75%). One could imagine even worse from heavy traffic at slower than 45mph in 0F weather. That said, 277mi at 45mph is over six hours; halve the speed to try to amplify the cost of running the heater and you double that travel time.
The short of it: climate control does have an effect, but it's not huge - and in "moderate conditions" at highway speeds, it's hardly noticeable.
Again, pointing out the energy difference between just the gasoline vs. just the battery is an inherently biased comparison, because a gasoline vehicle isn't just a tank of gas and an EV not just a battery. You have to compare the whole system - including the heavy ICE in a gas car. Yes, currently gas cars win in this comparison, but by nothing remotely like the "53x and 129x" you cite.
Furthermore, one has to look at the consequences of running out. Yes, gas stations are currently significantly more common than EV charging stations. But you know what's orders of magnitude more common than gas stations? Power sockets. No, a regular power socket isn't going to give you a fast charge - you get several minutes of charging . But with a small amount of patience you'll get enough to get to the next proper charging station.
EVs are also have a much more graceful "running out" failure mode. By slowing down if they realize they're in trouble, an EV driver can vastly increase their range - potentially up to 3x, if you drop all the way down to ~25mph. This isn't the case with gasoline cars; they can slow down to the bottom RPM range of their top gear, but that only offers a limited improvement; slowing down further means switching gears, and the higher RPM / lower torque conditions decrease engine efficiency more than you gain by reduced aerodynamic drag.
But most importantly, it's all a moot point, as there's already a broad supercharging network, with stations regularly spaced among almost every major interstate in the US, and similarly in other parts of the developed world. Long-distance travel is the only place you need superchargers, and you use interstates for that.
Noticeable, but not the dominant factor at highway speeds. And if you're driving slowly, where rolling resistance dominates, your overall range is higher than the EPA range, potentially several times higher if you're driving very slowly. So an increase in rolling resistance isn't tragic.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. It's effectively acting as a peaking plant. An extremely responsive one.
No, because, obviously, consumption happens only once, while charge-discharge cycles happen thousands of times per pack.
I saw it constantly. Over and over. Including here at Slashdot.
Oh, are we restarting the old TTAC "Tesla Death Watch" feature, with its regular columns predicting the imminent death of Tesla back in the early Roadster days?
I always get a grin when I thumb through that, now that Tesla is worth as much as a major automaker and just about to start rolling out an EV (Model 3) in production numbers and with a performance/price point widely mocked as impossible just a few years ago... back when they were just starting to roll out an EV (Model S) in production numbers and with a performance/price point widely mocked as impossible a few years before that.... back when they were just starting to roll out an EV (Roadster) in production numbers and with a performance/price point widely mocked as impossible a few years before that....
Forbes truncated their quote (and worse, added in a period to make it look like that ended a sentence). The actual quote is:
The quote appears deliberately truncated to try to make it look like Tesla is badmouthing the IIHS, when they're very clearly just saying that they think the NHTSA testing is more meaningful. While that's a debatable point (I see no realistic reason to favour one over the other), Forbes' truncation is pretty questionable. Of course, what do you expect from an opinion piece that in its second sentence all but calls Tesla a cult?
The reality is that the failed test ("small overlap") is a new test developed in 2012, after the Model S design was already completed; it was never designed to the test, only adapted to try to meet it (apparently unsuccessfully thusfar). To be fair to Tesla, this same issue has hit numerous other manufacturers; only three vehicles at present pass get the best rating in it (two of them new designs from 2017) - and Tesla did manage the second best rating. On the other hand, Tesla wants to build part of its reputation on being a leader in safety, and the small overlap crash test, while new, is meaningful. It's the equivalent of sideswiping a utility pole or similar - a very real type of crash that has previously not been well represented in existing crash tests. Tesla needs to get this right next year.
Exactly. Utilities have been salivating over the prospect of electric cars for quite some time; they've been early adopters, even when the tech wasn't up to snuff, and provided significant support for some of the early cross-country EV road trips. They don't just mean more sales, they mean more sales predominantly at times when demand is low, meaning they can use their existing infrastructure to make them more money. The fact that it's at worst a steady draw, and at best a draw which they can adjust within user-set bounds, makes it a dream come true. Fast charging is undesirable to them, but if 5% of charging is fast charging from people on road trips and the other 95% is predominantly overnight home charging, that's a tradeoff they'll gladly take.
What on Earth do you think I was replying to? How do you expect me to estimate the ability of a vehicle to reach a destination without any clue what route they're talking about and what's along that route? Simply knowing the temperature (which, by the way, they didn't give - and I'm not a moron who doesn't know that "snow means cold") and "how many passengers" are in some undisclosed vehicle, is not nearly enough. The number of passengers is far less important than the type of vehicle (you're talking a small fractional change to rolling resistance, which in turn is not dominant at highway speeds). Temperature furthermore depends on the route profile, as it has an altitude correlation.
This is all meaningless without knowing the route. The thing that I specifically asked for (and have now done so three times). I can't even begin to determine how well an EV would do for their trip without that. Everything else can be rolled up into error bars.
I was asking the OP, not a general "can anyone present an example (without any route specifics that could be crossreferenced with charger locations) which might be difficult for some of the shorter-range Teslas".
The only detail you actually gave of utility concerning your route is the altitude change. A net gain in 5000 feet corresponds to roughly 50km (31mi) of range loss for a Model S. If you're talking a heavier vehicle, it'd be more. I have no clue what percentage of your "250 miles" is covered in snow (all 250 miles???), so I can't comment on how that changes the total trip's range; I can't comment on how the slopes you take will affect your efficiency because I don't know your route; I can't comment on charging opportunities because I don't know your route; etc.
When one asks about a route, they're looking for... well, a route.
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.
Or, you could, you know, actually present facts, such as a summary of the lower court rulings and the full appeals ruling. The judge did not find that "Tesla defamed TopGear" and was liable for "£100,000 damages". In Europe, if you lose a court case, you generally bear all of the cost of proceedings. The short of the case: The lower court judge argued (and the appeals judge concurred) that viewers should recognize that the show is an entertainment program and that reasonable buyers should understand that range is relative to how you drive a vehicle; that Tesla couldn't show that the statements were "calculated" to cause damage; and that Tesla failed to put forth a compelling case that they lost sales because of the program.
Right, because I'm totally sure that thought never occurred to them. Because they've totally stayed in business all this time by simply guessing that supply chains for all of their parts will be present.
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.
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.)
It seems you're confusing "hybrids" and "plug-in hybrids". Hybrids do not plug in at all.
Out of curiosity, what sort of "getting away to the mountains" route are you concerned about?
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.
Somewhere in the world right now, Jeremy Clarkson is banging his head against a dashboard.
That's incredibly optimistic on mass. All of the ICE-related hardware on the Volt, for example, is several hundred pounds. The engine alone is a couple hundred pounds. And it's still your standard ICE maintenance mess.
That's not to say that the Volt is "as light as possible" or anything of the sort. I've seen some companies pursuing Wankels, for example (although they burn oil and are slightly less efficient) to reduce mass. A couple car companies have made prototypes with gas microturbines - but microturbines are expensive, loud, and not nearly as efficient as their larger counterparts (half as efficient as ICEs). There's a few other options being pursued, but in general, there's no option on the horizon for a light, low maintenance, cheap, quiet, efficient, etc genset for a series hybrid. If you want a genset, be prepared for ICE complexity and hundreds of pounds of dead mass.
What crash danger are you referring to with genset trailers? They're not very large, so there's not going to be much jackknife risk, and there should be no discernable fishtailing even in the most extreme situations.
You mean, as someone who spent ten years living in Iowa, and before that Indiana? And now lives in one of the least densely populated countries on the planet (Iceland)?
Yeah, I think I have a wee bit of understanding of living in low population density areas, thank you very much.
I've not known a single EV owner to have ever been declined on a request to plug in, even not in an emergency. The fact that you can afford to pay them 10 times what the electricity costs and still have it be peanuts to you works as a nice incentive - one that's almost never needed.
Are you high? So gas stations paid to install power sockets that they're terrified to use? So there's no electrical devices in use at gas stations? What sort of Amish gas stations are you stopping at?
You'd be a first.
The amount of electricity you can use is limited by your socket. A standard 120V 15A socket means (roughly) 1,8kW max, meaning roughly 20 cents per hour max.
As for "whether the system can handle it", you tell me how many amps you want me to draw, and that's how many I'll draw.
Again, you tell me how many amps, and that's how many I'll use. And if you can't run a hair dryer's worth of power, something is seriously wrong with your wiring.
Nobody's talking about that. At 300 Wh/mi for normal highway driving or 150Wh/mi for a ridiculously slow crawl, 1800W means 1 mile range per 10 or five minutes of charging, respectively (or if you'd rather, 6 to 12 miles per hour). So if you missed your charging station by less than a dozen miles, that's an hour or so wait (if you missed it by dozens of miles, what the heck, man? It's very hard to miss one at all unless you're being an idiot, akin to running yourself out of gas)
1) You mentioned them, but still focused on the energy density difference between fuels and batteries. I responded to point out the pointlessness of such comparisons, because "gasoline" and "batteries" aren't complete systems.
2) Gasoline most definitely is light. Maybe 50-100kg in a typical car, versus 1000-1500kg vehicle weight. Again, comparing the energy density of the gasoline, which makes up a small fraction of the vehicle's mass, to that of batteries, is a pointless (and misleading) endeavour.
3) "only within cities" - most definitely not "only within cities". Virtually every last farmhouse, rest area, roadside store, and - yes, even gas stations - has power outlets.
I also strongly disagree with the idea that series hybrids are the way to go. Because you're putting in an ICE (heavy, high maintenance) in addition to a whole EV, when you hardly ever plan to actually use that ICE. And you put the EV pack into a more stressful situation which means that, in order to maintain it to a lifespan you can warranty, you have to use some combination of lower depth of discharge and/or lower energy density batteries. Not as much as you have to do for hybrids, but more than you have to do for EVs. The longer the pure electric range, the slower you discharge the pack, the more cells you distribute regenerative braking across, and so forth.
There is one series "option" that I liked, but is increasingly becoming a moot point as EV ranges increase and supercharger networks expand - that is, the AC Propulsion "Long Ranger" series hybrid trailer. Hook it up to your pure EV when you need it, leave it behind when you don't. No need to own one for every EV, or at all even; since they'd be needed so rarely, it'd be perfect as a rental or shared-usage item. And the clever way they designed the Long Ranger had it autosteer, so backing up was as easy as backing up without a trailer. But that said, it's becoming a moot point these days.
Oh, and then there's this. Try that in an ICE car ;)
Wait, so your concept is that the vehicle just suddenly and without warning runs out of electricity and brakes immediately to a stop?
Here's how running out of battery works in a Tesla vehicle. After the warnings, after you hit 0 on the range estimate, you still have a reserve of 10-20 miles. The vehicle goes into "depleted mode", where it limits your maximum power usage. At the end of this, you can still roll to a stop. In short, there is nothing that should stop you from going to the nearest whatever-building on the side of the road and plugging in for a while. Or the next one, or the next one, or the next one; you have 10-20 miles after hitting "0". Even most rest areas have power sockets. And gas stations, for that matter ;)
The difference gets more pronounced at higher temperatures, as not only is your rate of heat flow into the vehicle increased, but AC COP drops as the temperature difference increases. So while at 90F it's a 260/279mi (93%) difference, at 110F it's a 246/289mi (85%) difference. Note that battery range increases with increasing temperature - although this would slightly amplify the reduced range with AC, as a longer driving distance equals more time with the AC on. Indeed, the slower the speed, the more significant AC becomes. 70mph at 90F is a 238/253mi (94%) difference, while at 45mph at 90F it's a 357/410mi (87%) difference.
You see the same thing with heating, albeit to a lesser extent. At 65mph at 50F it's 253/267mi (95%); at 32F it's 233/261mi (89%); and at 0F it's 211/249mi (85%). The relatively linear decline suggests to me that they went with purely resistive heating rather than a resistive heater + heat pump approach; resistive heating's COP of ~1 doesn't change with temperature.
The worst case effects of climate control, from this, is 45mph / 0F; this yields a difference of 277/368mi (75%). One could imagine even worse from heavy traffic at slower than 45mph in 0F weather. That said, 277mi at 45mph is over six hours; halve the speed to try to amplify the cost of running the heater and you double that travel time.
The short of it: climate control does have an effect, but it's not huge - and in "moderate conditions" at highway speeds, it's hardly noticeable.
Again, pointing out the energy difference between just the gasoline vs. just the battery is an inherently biased comparison, because a gasoline vehicle isn't just a tank of gas and an EV not just a battery. You have to compare the whole system - including the heavy ICE in a gas car. Yes, currently gas cars win in this comparison, but by nothing remotely like the "53x and 129x" you cite.
Furthermore, one has to look at the consequences of running out. Yes, gas stations are currently significantly more common than EV charging stations. But you know what's orders of magnitude more common than gas stations? Power sockets. No, a regular power socket isn't going to give you a fast charge - you get several minutes of charging . But with a small amount of patience you'll get enough to get to the next proper charging station.
EVs are also have a much more graceful "running out" failure mode. By slowing down if they realize they're in trouble, an EV driver can vastly increase their range - potentially up to 3x, if you drop all the way down to ~25mph. This isn't the case with gasoline cars; they can slow down to the bottom RPM range of their top gear, but that only offers a limited improvement; slowing down further means switching gears, and the higher RPM / lower torque conditions decrease engine efficiency more than you gain by reduced aerodynamic drag.
But most importantly, it's all a moot point, as there's already a broad supercharging network, with stations regularly spaced among almost every major interstate in the US, and similarly in other parts of the developed world. Long-distance travel is the only place you need superchargers, and you use interstates for that.
But in an EV you don't need to leave the engine idling to run the AC.
Noticeable, but not the dominant factor at highway speeds. And if you're driving slowly, where rolling resistance dominates, your overall range is higher than the EPA range, potentially several times higher if you're driving very slowly. So an increase in rolling resistance isn't tragic.