Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

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BigFoot48
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Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by BigFoot48 »

Interesting article on how to "brick" a Tesla: http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/22/tesla-brick/
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jdb
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by jdb »

BigFoot48 wrote:Interesting article on how to "brick" a Tesla: http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/22/tesla-brick/
A little surprised that a post would be made of a nonsense blog from over a year ago that has been totally discredited, both by the company and many owners. A more prescient attachment would be the The Car of Year Award dated 2013.
http://www.motortrend.com/oftheyear/car ... ewall.html
jdb
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by jdb »

More to the point of my last message, see response from Tesla Motors from more than year ago to the blog of over a year ago about "bricking". This is old and discredited news, at least as to Model S, occurring months before delivery of first Tesla Model S. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/plug-it
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BigFoot48
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by BigFoot48 »

jdb wrote:A little surprised that a post would be made of a nonsense blog l
Glad you corrected the record and I withdraw my post. Nothing to see there. Move along. I will admonish the C-Max forum for printing such nonsense too.
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Leesbro63
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by Leesbro63 »

pc95 wrote:Doing a "back of the envelope" calculation, our power company states that in higher tier usage the cost of electricity is $0.30 per kwh

As an arbitrary example if my all-electric car gets 3 miles/kwh efficiency, then it costs roughly $0.10 per mile.
Now for a gas engine at $4.00/gallon at a rated fuel/motor efficiency of 35 miles per gallon, the cost is $4.00/35miles so it costs $0.11 per mile.

Approx a $0.01/mile savings. $1000 over 100,000 which is something, but not considerable. What really needs to be compared is maintenance costs which also can vary based on how much you're will to do-it-yourself. As another example, over 5 years I've put in $6000 for an older (10 yr old) gas car I've had of maintenance - that's taking it into the shop. For an all electric car, how much would those reduce considering no motor? The major cost from what I understand are battery, brakes, and tires......anyway.....
This doesn't sound right. Basically you are saying that electricity will cost almost as much as gasoline (perhaps MORE if gas is somewhat below 4 bucks). The anecdotal reports I read suggest the fuel cost savings is super high...not negligible.
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by pc95 »

Ual, how much would it cost to cover your roof with panels nowadays? And would that suffice your energy needs? When are you considered a higher tier energy user by your power company? What is that tier? Our company has 0.15 and 0.30 tiers. I assume the worst case for the example since what the power company charges may not be controllable.

There are many physical and energy constraints with transportation (trains, planes, ships, autos....). Believe I read the combustible engine is only energy efficient at something like the high 20 percentiles. The best solar panel efficiencies are also in the high 20s. Meaning at the moment these systems leak, waste, or cannot harness 70% or so of the energy they take in. If these and other problems were easily and cheaply solvable problems, we probably would've seen fast progress and cost savings, but it's much slower than that.

Maintenance-wise, since electric cars are so new to mass-manufacturing comparatively, their history is not charted long enough to compare properly, but my hunch is you're battery cost over time with the engine would be modestly something at least.
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by jimhend1 »

Granted, I am way overly cynical, but you pay ultimately $40K for sub-compact. You don't save any real energy cost unless you can get subsidized electric to recharge by hanging out at Target for 5 or 6 hours. I did not see the question about how the A/C gets along with the batteries, but probably just as bad as they get along with the heater when you need it. Tuscon, in the summer, with an electric car? This thread seems like a hobby discussion. Now of the only reason for maybe feeling electric cars are necessary, I probably cannot discuss.
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interplanetjanet
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by interplanetjanet »

yakers wrote:Wow, .30 KWH, highest I have heard, even the folks in Hawaii are lower than that.
My highest rate is about 0.35 - which is a big improvement over 0.50 a few years ago! This is the biggest utility in California (PG&E).

TOU might save me a little but the rates go sky-high in the day, when A/C is sometimes needed. Solar is sadly not an option (I rent). Sigh.
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by madbrain »

yakers wrote:Wow, .30 KWH, highest I have heard, even the folks in Hawaii are lower than that.
You live in California, probably in PG&E territory. You should be very familiar with this kind of rates.

The most common PG&E electric rate schedule for California is E-1 : http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-1.pdf .

The current rates are :
$0.1323 per kWh for 0-100% of baseline
$0.15040 per kWh for 101-200% of baseline
$0.31114 for 131% - 200% of baseline
$0.35114 for 200% and above

The baseline quantities vary depending on your location based on territory, and for summer are between 7.5 to 18.5 kWh per day.

From http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-6.pdf , PG&E E-6 TOU schedule, the peak summer rate is currently $0.50623 per kWh for tier 4 and tier 5.
This is the rate schedule I'm on. Of course, I have solar so I don't hit those tiers .
But even baseline usage for summer peak is $0.28719/kWh ! And that is about the rate that PG&E pays me for the kWh I feed into the grid.
I wouldn't be on E-6 voluntarily without solar.
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by Valuethinker »

pc95 wrote:Ual, how much would it cost to cover your roof with panels nowadays? And would that suffice your energy needs? When are you considered a higher tier energy user by your power company? What is that tier? Our company has 0.15 and 0.30 tiers. I assume the worst case for the example since what the power company charges may not be controllable.
It costs an American roughly twice as much to 'panel up' than it does a German. The reasons have to do with the structure of the market, local regulations (ie which are uniform across Germany) etc. Conversely European electricity prices are generally much higher than American, solar is 'grid neutral' in Italy and Spain (at least to a point).

Most people would find that solaring their roofs doesn't match their full consumption. Say 1 peak kw generates c. 1250 kwhr pa (in the UK it would be 850, in Italy 1500), the average US household uses something like 10,000 kwhr pa. US house probably has room for 4-5 kw capacity? And you still have the storage problem, so you are not going to be 'off grid'.

There might be some clever things that can be done with solar concentrators-- people are working on it. However that also means more *heat* and that lowers the efficiency of solar cells.
There are many physical and energy constraints with transportation (trains, planes, ships, autos....). Believe I read the combustible engine is only energy efficient at something like the high 20 percentiles. The best solar panel efficiencies are also in the high 20s. Meaning at the moment these systems leak, waste, or cannot harness 70% or so of the energy they take in. If these and other problems were easily and cheaply solvable problems, we probably would've seen fast progress and cost savings, but it's much slower than that.

Maintenance-wise, since electric cars are so new to mass-manufacturing comparatively, their history is not charted long enough to compare properly, but my hunch is you're battery cost over time with the engine would be modestly something at least.
You start to run into the laws of physics though-- Cornot's law etc.

The maximum theoretical efficiency of a solar cell is something like ?65%? and I cannot remember what physics principle is invoked in that.

On Internal Combustion Engines the efficiency *is* in the high 20s, and since the engine design is over 100 years old I doubt there is a lot more to squeeze out of it. That said, my boiler on my house has 90% efficiency due to a secondary heat exchanger -- so I wonder if there is some clever trick we could do with an ICE?

(I have a passion for steam cars as a concept, and there is an alternative universe in which the steam car beat Henry Ford et al to become the predominant form of land vehicle propulsion. Steam cars have considerable mechanical advantages over ICE cars).

With solar panels 20% efficiency is not a big problem, what was a problem was *cost*. And that is what has come down. We are now in the area of doing clever things like cooling the panels (and using the hot water) to increase efficiency.

Electric car technology has come on by leaps and bounds. No doubt it will continue to improve.
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interplanetjanet
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by interplanetjanet »

madbrain wrote:
yakers wrote:Wow, .30 KWH, highest I have heard, even the folks in Hawaii are lower than that.
You live in California, probably in PG&E territory. You should be very familiar with this kind of rates.
yakers is in or near Pasadena, I believe - this is probably PWP or LADWP territory. Both of them top out at vastly lower rates than PG&E does (about 1/3 as much, I'd guess).
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by Valuethinker »

jimhend1 wrote:Granted, I am way overly cynical, but you pay ultimately $40K for sub-compact. You don't save any real energy cost unless you can get subsidized electric to recharge by hanging out at Target for 5 or 6 hours. I did not see the question about how the A/C gets along with the batteries, but probably just as bad as they get along with the heater when you need it. Tuscon, in the summer, with an electric car? This thread seems like a hobby discussion. Now of the only reason for maybe feeling electric cars are necessary, I probably cannot discuss.
Electric cars are at the beginning of a very long downward sloping curve on cost, and a rising one on performance. This will go on for decades, in technological terms we probably are where the IC engine car was in about 1935. (not strictly true, electric motors are an advanced technology, much changed in recent decades, but batteries still a long way to go, and the integration of the various technologies similarly).

Published estimates by US National Research Labs and others suggest equivalent efficiencies of c. 100 mpg. There are calculators online to work out your pollution depending on where you live and hence where your electricity comes from. That's double what the best ICE cars do (thinking US gallons-- they quote measures per Imperial Gallon here of 70 mpg highway).

Given that gasoline is far and away the most expensive way of accessing energy, per unit energy, that you can find (other than jetfuel) it's not hard to find a fuel saving cost (we pay c. USD 8.00/ gallon of course, not an uncommon fuel cost in the developed world).

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/how-a ... explained/
Making things even more confusing, the answer involves yet another form of measurement. The EPA uses the standard conversion of 115,000 British thermal units (BTU) per U.S. gallon of gasoline as the basis for its MPGe metric.

When a U.S. gallon of gasoline is burned, it releases the equivalent of 115,000 BTU. Since BTU is a measure of energy, it can be used to directly measure electrical output. In this case, 115,000 BTU is equal to 33.7 kWh.

When an electric car draws 33.7 kWh of electricity from its batteries it has used the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline. Take the Leaf: it requires just over 33.7 kWh (34 kWh, to be precise) to go 100 miles, so it gets a rating of 99 MPGe.
Type in your postal code and get an estimate of tailpipe emissions.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=bt2

Objections to the electric car on the internet always follow this pattern of raising things that are 'obvious' but it is assumed have not been argued and thought through. But in fact these things are the subject of huge amounts of research and debate.

Whether they will ever be fully competitive with ICE engines is almost moot. Because it's a disruptive technology: it provides the functionality of a car (ie 90% of car journeys are probably less than 10 miles - at least that's the UK case) but in a way which offers opportunities to be radically simpler in drivetrain. Disruptive technologies *never* look appealing to incumbents-- the IBM PC could not do a fraction of what a DEC VAX mini could do and as Ken Olsen said (taken out of context) 'what would anyone use a personal computer for?'.

if you read wikipedia 'Disruptive technology Clay Christensen' then you'll get a feel for what is going on.

The issue for electric cars is increasingly now primarily one of price. I realize that could be the deal breaker, limiting their adoption. Countries like Denmark though are making a big push. If your country has a strategic need to be independent of foreign oil (and Denmark suffered mightily in WW2 and during the 1973 oil crisis) then it will damn the expense, and get their sooner.
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by leonard »

ualdriver wrote:
Epsilon Delta wrote:
Valuethinker wrote:I think it depends where you are in the USA-- one would have to google.
Googling does not work very well.

If I search "EV charging station" at google.com I get sellers of charging equipment. If I search in google.com/maps I get Walgreen's drug stores. These are not useful, my local Walgreen's does not have a charging station. Further, I know of a local charging station, but had to search using it's address to get google to cough it up.

Compare this to a google search for "gas station" and you can see that the electric car infrastructure has a long way to go. :twisted:
Googling "electric car charging locations" yielded me good hits on 1, 3, 4, and 8.

http://www.chargepoint.com/
http://carstations.com/
http://www.plugshare.com/
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electr ... tions.html

There are apps for Android and Apple that find local charging stations for you. They even tell you their operational status and whether or not they are occupied.

If everyone had a gas station in their garage like electric car owners do, I would argue you would need a lot fewer gas stations in the U.S.
Charging stations is a red herring in the whole EV argument. You don't have a requirement for a whole charge usually - if you do - you are pushing the range too much to begin with. You really just need a "top off" at work for your commute. As long as you have the 110v adapter - you have millions - if not billions of "charging stations" all over the place.
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Re: Electric cars (full electrics and plug-in hybrids)

Post by jdb »

[quote="leonard If everyone had a gas station in their garage like electric car owners do, I would argue you would need a lot fewer gas stations in the U.S.[/quote]

Charging stations is a red herring in the whole EV argument. You don't have a requirement for a whole charge usually - if you do - you are pushing the range too much to begin with. You really just need a "top off" at work for your commute. As long as you have the 110v adapter - you have millions - if not billions of "charging stations" all over the place.[/quote]

Leonard is correct. With my Tesla Model S I can recharge on any 110 volt outlet, and have done so. A lot faster with the 240 volt outlet in my garage (same as dryer or refrigerator outlet), and even much faster if use the Tesla proprietary supercharge locations, but the 110 volt ordinary household outlet does the trick. And it is disruptive technology. I will never buy another ICE vehicle, including hybrids, have order in for Tesla Model X in 2015 and my wife is looking forward to driving the Model S on everyday basis.
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