Electric Cars

[Keith Sinclair]

I was wondering if electric car growth is happening around the planet. Here in last few
years have seen growth. Still electric & hybrid
vehicles are vastly in the minority. One reason is cost of hybrid & full electric cars are more than gas. The other reason is a big one roughly 40% of Hawaii residents live in multi family buildings from smaller town houses to condo high rises with no or a just a couple slow charging stations. There is serious lack of charging stations in Hawaii.
Biden administration gave 18 million to build more charging stations here.

Many locals drive pickup trucks or large & small SUV like Toyota 4 Runners, Toyota Rav 4, Honda CR-V are favorites. Toyota Tacoma pickup is the Hawaii state vehicle.
Since they are all reliable last a long time. You still see many Rav4, Honda CR-V with spare tire mounted on rear door. Older 4 Runners & Toyota & Nissan trucks still on the
Ford F 150 is another local favorite truck.
Also older Subaru Foresters still on the road.
With gas prices still over 5 dollars it's putting the squeeze on some families. Driving less so they can buy food.

 

[MarcelNL]

out here electric is happening, much of it was started by the gov't subsidizing it heavily so company car drivers would benefit and lead the way. I'm on the fence, charger infrastructure in the Netherlands is pretty good yet the cars that can tow a load only start to come on the market. ogling the BMW i4 M50, polestar 2, Kia EV6 GT and the Mercedes C class EV but am hoping that the battery technology advances a bit faster as I have little faith in the overall benefit of an EV using LiIOn due to the associated environmental issues those carry. For now I'll keep the C300.

 

[MarcelNL]

should add that Petrol costs like 2.20-2.35 (05 Octane vs 98) a litre aorund here, so fuel economy is more important anyhow, like 8.30 per gallon assuming the dollar equals a euro

 

[timebard]

Another factor right now is that some popular EVs and hybrids have much longer wait times for a new vehicle vs equivalent ICE only models. Unless you're willing to pay way above MSRP, you're looking at well over a year wait for some like the RAV4 plug-in hybrid.

 

[MarcelNL]

Another factor right now is that some popular EVs and hybrids have much longer wait times for a new vehicle vs equivalent ICE only models. Unless you're willing to pay way above MSRP, you're looking at well over a year wait for some like the RAV4 plug-in hybrid.

To me that is not a huge issue, I can easily wait a year since i'm not using my car THAT much it has an impact (not driving has more environmental impact than the difference between ICE and EV IMO)

 

[MarcelNL]

a plug in hybrid is not an EV...a friend of me had an EV, those only make sense when driving to a shop close by often....

 

[LostHighway]

My personal take with some caveats is that it still too early to jump on EVs in the States. Like @MarcelNL I think we need another generation of battery development to make them both environmentally benign and more suitable for diverse uses. Reliable EV infrastructure is in still in relatively short supply in most of the US away from major urban centers and interstate highways. There is also the issue of used EVs, other than Teslas, having relatively poor resale value although this may be changing.
It will be interesting to see who survives from among Rivan, Lucid, and Aptera. I think the other proposed startups (Canoo, Faraday, Lightyear,...) are even more dubious propositions. Among the legacy manufacturers at this point I'm most impressed by VW/Porsche/Audi and Hyundai/Kia but I think some legacy manufacturers could be in trouble depending on their progress in the next decade. IMO it is all a crapshoot right now.

 

[timebard]

a plug in hybrid is not an EV...a friend of me had an EV, those only make sense when driving to a shop close by often....

I mean, agreed, but I think they're a good middle ground right now. The RAV4 I was looking at gets 42 miles all electric, which would be enough for almost all my day to day trips to run with zero gas (especially in a metro area with reasonably abundant charging infrastructure), but without range worries for road trips, wilderness adventures, etc.

 

[MarcelNL]

oops , should have wrote; had a hybrid prior to his current Ev

 

[Keith Sinclair]

I think plug in hybrids are a good option if you have charging abilities. We are going to get solar with state & fed tax rebates. Janice
is looking at the Kia EV.

Agree about the batteries. The same guy who brought out Lithium Ion batteries has teams working on better batteries not cost effective yet. Batteries now don't work well in extreme heat unless have very good cooling system. Also extreme cold not as efficient either.

 

[ReiHamono]

I think we’ll see hydrogen dominate in the next decade

 

[MarcelNL]

I think we’ll see hydrogen dominate in the next decade

really, why do you think so?
What i see so far even Iron Oxide based power generation is more efficient than Hydrogen...

 

[ReiHamono]

I think it will come down to waste/pollution, availability, and range/refueling.

The most practical energy source is the one that’s most abundant/easy to produce, creates the least amount of waste/pollution during its production and use, allows the greatest range and quickest refueling.

I think a lot of people forget that we’re not just fueling cars and trucks. We need to be 100% rid of fossil fuel, however the new energy source must at least be equivalent.

 

[MarcelNL]

I agree with that principle, it's just that hydrogen production is is not yet very green so that leaves me puzzled as to why hydrogen will be the energy carrier of the near future.
LiFePo appears more green to me for near term, FeO2 as next gen, and perhaps H2 as a future energy carrier once we've solved a few issues.

 

[ReiHamono]

That’s why I say in the next decade, so we have 10 years to find out and see what comes of it

Some countries and some car manufactures are making the same bet, time will tell

 

[Keith Sinclair]

Think of what today is like compared to just 20 years ago. Who knows what next 20 will bring.

 

[MarcelNL]

10 years is not a lot of time to figure out a POC that is now looking to be a promise IMHO.. we'll see

 

[Nemo]

If you live in a big sparsely populated country with limited charging infrastructure between population centres, there is a fair bit or "range anxiety". Hydrogen makes a lot of sense in this situation.

Who knows, maybe next gen batteries approach hydrogen's energy density and refuelling (recharging) times. But this would (pleasantly) surprise me.

 

[ian]

Pretty thrilled with my EV. But I'm in a city, and I rarely need to drive long distances.

 

[blokey]

I'm stay with ICE for now for the sake of convenience and they are still cheap compare to EVs, at least for now. But I can see EVs could be very nice in a city where you can charge your car in your own home and in most of your destination, the electric grid is already here so the infrastructure could catch on rather quickly. The major concern for me is battery degradation, some manufacturers do offer free change tho, but how that works in long term is yet to see.

 

[Michi]

How well an EV stacks up depends a lot on driving patterns. If you are regularly doing multi-hundred kilometre trips, the need to stop for 40 minutes to top up might get annoying. (On the other hand, after 3-4 hours of driving, having a break is a good idea anyway. And the chargers are usually near other infrastructure, so I can do some shopping or have a meal.)

In normal commuter use and for weekend trips, range anxiety is a non-issue. I plug the car in overnight and, by morning, it is full again. (I have a dedicated charger, so I can get the car from completely empty to completely full in about eight hours.)

Battery life shouldn't be a problem. I have an eight-year warranty on my batteries. But data suggests that the batteries will last a lot longer than that, unless one is driving 100,000+ km a year.

 

[Keith Sinclair]

Sounds like down under has better charging station situation. Ours are few & far between. Reason we decided to go solar was talking to folks we go hiking with. Fed & State tax rebates will go down after this year & more 2024. Tesla rebates are not happening any more, but Hyundai & Kia still have good rebates. We are getting Sun power panels will easy be enough to charge electric car or plug in hybrid. I think the coolest looking plug in is the Subaru Crosstrek. The regular Crosstrek has become Subaru's second best seller after the Forrester.

 

[Nemo]

Sounds like down under has better charging station situation. Ours are few & far between.

Depends where.

I think it's a bit easier in the big cities. I live in a small city and there is a fast charging station here but I understand that it's not uncommon for the rural charging stations to be out of order, at times leading to substantial queues to recharge on even an inability to recharge. Not to mention that most of these charging stations are along the arterial roads between major cities. Too sad if you wanna go somewhere else.

Having said all that, I suspect the recharging infrastructure (and it's maintenance) will eventually catch up, especially if EVs become mainstream.

 

[Michi]

Superchargers are where they are needed most over here. You'll be fine all along the east coast and the south coast. You get a fair bit further inland, too. But It's not possible to drive from Adelaide to Perth in an EV at the moment. (To be honest, only lunatics drive from Adelaide to Perth, regardless of propulsion mechanism.)

Pragmatically, it all works. The more remote you get, the less feasible an EV gets. (And there is plenty of remote Down Under…) But that's where people don't go, by and large. (If they did, it wouldn't be called "remote" anymore.)

To me, the entire EV exercise was a no-brainer. I've had a 6 kW PV system on the roof for ten years, and our house is a net-generator of electricity. (We export about 1.5 times more than we import.) An electric car is effectively maintenance free. There are thousands of parts in a conventional car that an electric doesn't have. Because of regenerative braking, I hardly ever touch the brake pedal, and there are loads of other things that can't wear out in an EV (because don't exist). The main maintenance costs for my car are tyres (the usual ~40,000 km per set or so), and aircon filter every two or three years, and wiper blades every now and then.

I used to drive a Golf R32. Fun car. In petrol alone, that car cost ~5 times as much as my EV. Add to that a service at several hundred dollars a pop every 15,000 km and, suddenly, the EV stacks up extremely well. (And I get the added satisfaction of being a little kinder to the planet.)

Right now, the downside of EVs is that they are expensive. If I drive mine for about ten years, I think I'll break even. That's too long for most people. For EVs to win, their ROI needs to improve.

 

[Keith Sinclair]

Hydrogen has same problem as EV no fuel infrastructure yet except maybe California.
Also only few car makers like Toyota have one in their whole vehicle lineup. And they are expensive. Around 60,000 dollars. The most available element in the Universe only water vapor exhaust. If fueling stations can be incorporated with gas & electric charging.
Kind of like Diesel & regular gas now. Prices will come down if more can be built it's a viable technology time will tell if it will succeed in the future.

 

[Michi]

The problem with (liquid) hydrogen for vehicles is that, per volume (not mass), it stores only about ¼ the amount of energy of gasoline. You need a gas tank four times the volume to go the same distance (all else being equal).

There is also the annoying tendency of hydrogen to make for truly stupefying explosions if it gets loose. Not ideal for cars.

I think a sensible way for hydrogen to make a difference is in stationary applications, such as a mine in Western Australia, for example. Set up a large bunch of solar panels to make hydrogen (argh... that's in the middle of a desert, where does the water come from?) and then use that to power the mine.

It all sounds simple on paper. But, if hydrogen were that great, we would have switched to it long ago.

 

[LostHighway]

The new/revived tax credits for EVs in the USA may have supply limitations due to battery supply/country of origin. I'm all for bringing manufacturing back to the USA (or at least to this continent) but that isn't an easy matter, especially when there are materials supply chain issues. This second article deals with storage batteries, not auto batteries, but is an interesting illustration.

 

[Nemo]

The problem with (liquid) hydrogen for vehicles is that, per volume (not mass), it stores only about ¼ the amount of energy of gasoline. You need a gas tank four times the volume to go the same distance (all else being equal).

There is also the annoying tendency of hydrogen to make for truly stupefying explosions if it gets loose. Not ideal for cars.

I think a sensible way for hydrogen to make a difference is in stationary applications, such as a mine in Western Australia, for example. Set up a large bunch of solar panels to make hydrogen (argh... that's in the middle of a desert, where does the water come from?) and then use that to power the mine.

It all sounds simple on paper. But, if hydrogen were that great, we would have switched to it long ago.

All else is not really equal. Hydrogen fuel cell is over twice as efficient as the best ICE engines and an electric drivetrain is significantly more efficient than a mechanical drivetrain There is also the possibility of using a small battery for regenerative braking. These last two also apply to electric cars and are the main reasons why electric cars can get into the same range ballpark as ICE powered cars despite being heavier and carrying an overall smaller amount of energy.

Petrol (gasoline) vapour is also explosive. In smaller concentrations than hydrogen. It's vapour also disperses more slowly than hydrogen (because its heavier). Both can be ridiculously dangerous if safeguards are not engineered into the systems that use them. And even then...

The government of NT (Australia's Northern Territory for those not from around here) are working on a technology to extract water from the (very dry) air around Tennant Creek, with exactly your suggested application in mind.

I'd contend that the main reason that we didn't switch to hydrogen long ago is that up until the time that large volumes of hydrogen can be produced with renewable energy (obviously not yet economically viable even if it is technologicaly possible), the most economically efficient means of producing hydrogen is by cracking methane with superheated steam. This process uses a lot of energy and produces a gas with less available energy than the original methane. Much simpler to just burn the methane (or other hydrocarbon) in an ICE or a turbine.

I don't want to give the impression that I think that hydrogen fuel cells are the bees knees. There are certainly a lot of problems in their implementation and would necessitate the widespread rollout of hydrogen production, storage, distribution and delivery infrastructure. Creating the hydrogen is also much less energy efficient than storing electricity in a battery. But HFC certainly have the potential to get around some of the range/ remoteness issues.

The other use that I can see for hydrogen is to fuel turbines in aircraft. Heavy batteries would be very impractical in an aircraft, wheras hydrogen turbines could probably be made to function somewhat similarly to hydrocarbon powered turbines (although I expect that it wouldn't be possibsle to just pump hydrogen into a modern jet's turbine and expect it to work).

Hydrogen fuel cells and/ or turbines may also be used in long distance transport. Shipping as well as train and truck routes that are away from an electrical grid will need power and we probably can't afford to keep fuelling them with fossil fuels. They may well also be used for military hardware, where it's not really practical to ask your enemy to wait a couple of hours while you connect to the grid for a recharge.

 

[AT5760]

I've become more interested in an EV over the past couple of years. My commute is short enough that I won't have range anxiety even if I don't plug in for a couple of days. What's holding me back? First, I've got three kids in car seats so the options are extremely limited. Second, my current vehicle runs well. I haven't done any analysis, but it seems that my carbon footprint is probably lower driving an already existing vehicle for several more years than purchasing a new one. Third, I don't want a new car payment and car pricing (EV and gas) has gotten crazy over the past several years.

 

[PappaG]

I want an electric car so bad. Whether it be a "cool factor" or all the advertising working on me, my next car will probably be an EV. The real problem is that no matter what way you crunch numbers, there is no real genuine value proposition to changing over. You can make any and every argument to me about saving on fuel, saving on maintenance etc etc.... But EVs, at least EVs that I like, are so much more expensive then regular cars, and so much more then I would have ever considered spending on any car in the past (even a few years ago) that it is really hard for me to justify the cost of entry.... Comes back to the cool factor If i'm being honest. I do think they will get cheaper, but it will be a little while. I think VW will be the leaders in affordable EVs. Then the question will be whether the cool factor test will be met... time will tell.