Electric car efficiencies

[NeilBlanchard]

Typical Volt owners are driving 1,000+ miles before they burn through a tank of gas. The tank is only 8.x gallons so this is pretty good. A plugin Prius would fit a slightly different drive profile: 12-14 miles in EV mode and the 50+MPG after that. I have only driven a Prius II for a few weeks, and I got well over 60MPG. If it was a plugin Prius III then it could be above 70MPG.

And since this is about efficiency, I want to say that I think that EV's with 300-400 mile range are quite possible with today's batteries. That is why I'm designing and building my open source 5 seat electric car, the CarBEN EV5.

As we know, aerodynamics are huge part of the efficiency, and electric cars have some advantages over ICE powered cars; namely almost no cooling is required, and this would improve the Cd by about 10% right off the bat. Also, the lack of a hot exhaust system means the belly pan can be completely smooth (without also causing a heat problem) so that's probably another 10-15%.

Electric motors are 80-90%+ efficient. The force vectors within the motor are almost ideal, and there is no energy conversion from a storage medium to heat. ICE engines are limited by thermodynamics to roughly 54% efficiency, I think? And before you jump in and mention the generation and grid loses, please realize that gasoline doesn't appear out of thin air, either. The best estimates are that it takes more electricity to run a gasoline powered car than it takes to run an EV; because of all the necessary invested energy for everything from exploring for oil fields to drilling, extraction, transportation, refining, transporting, storage, etc. All the natural gas used to produce gasoline *also* has it's own overhead of invested energy, and that too accumulates into the actual energy consumed when you burn a gallon of gas in your car.

Each gallon of gasoline represents about 92 TONS of biological material, that has been "cooked" deep inside the earth for millions and millions of years. Gasoline packs an amazing amount of energy into a relatively small package, to be sure.

Then there's regenerative braking, which can regain some energy when you've overcooked your speed and cannot use the kinetic energy for coasting. This saves a lot of wear and tear on the mechanical brakes.

EV's have virtually no maintenance, and the motors will last a very long time -- I've heard numbers like 850,000 miles or even 1 million miles for an AC motor. Batteries should last 150-200K miles, or more. No oil changes, no coolant changes, either.

With an EV, there is no warm up time, and no idling. And most importantly, we can get electricity from several renewable sources. Renewable energy is all around us, and it will last until the sun explodes; in about 1 billion years.

Renewable energy has virtually no pollution, no spills, no explosions, no collapses, no radiation, no excess carbon dioxide, needs no military defense (the USA spends much more than ALL the other countries in the world COMBINED on our military!), and renewable energy is distributed almost everywhere on earth, so no one person, or one country can control it.

[drmiller100]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

namely almost no cooling is required, and this would improve the Cd by about 10% right off the bat. Also, the lack of a hot exhaust system means the belly pan can be completely smooth (without also causing a heat problem) so that's probably another 10-15%.

cough cough..... gag..... Ummm, No.

I encourage you to build your car however. Prove me wrong!!!!!

[NeilBlanchard]

Ask Phil (aerohead) or look it up in Hucho.

[nemo]

If the only option people had was an electric cars they would figure out how to make it work. When my son lived in Montana his apartment had outside electrical connections for block warmers.The parking lot of one of the area paper mills looked like a drive-in, with post sticking up ever other space, again plug-in stations for block warmers. Could as easily be for recharging.

Most families have multiple cars. So one of them being electric is not much of a stretch.

[Ladogaboy]

Just nitpicking here, but there is no proof that oil is the result of "cooked biological matter." In fact, it is just as likely that oil predated life on Earth. For instance, Titan, which is devoid of life as we know it, has vast seas of hydrocarbons.

[NeilBlanchard]

Huh? There are fossils in coal, and we know that it came from living plants and animals. Look it up; Wikipedia is your friend. And the geological strata tells us a lot.

No matter how it was formed -- it is finite.

Edit: quote from Wikipedia:

Formation
Structure of vanadium porphyrin compound extracted from petroleum by Alfred E. Treibs, father of organic geochemistry. Treibs noted the close structural similarity of this molecule and chlorophyll a.

Petroleum is a fossil fuel derived from ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae.[20] Vast quantities of these remains settled to sea or lake bottoms, mixing with sediments and being buried under anoxic conditions. As further layers settled to the sea or lake bed, intense heat and pressure built up in the lower regions. This process caused the organic matter to change, first into a waxy material known as kerogen, which is found in various oil shales around the world, and then with more heat into liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons via a process known as catagenesis. Formation of petroleum occurs from hydrocarbon pyrolysis in a variety of mainly endothermic reactions at high temperature and/or pressure.[21]

There were certain warm nutrient-rich environments such as the Gulf of Mexico and the ancient Tethys Sea where the large amounts of organic material falling to the ocean floor exceeded the rate at which it could decompose. This resulted in large masses of organic material being buried under subsequent deposits such as shale formed from mud. This massive organic deposit later became heated and transformed under pressure into oil.[22]

Geologists often refer to the temperature range in which oil forms as an "oil window"[23]—below the minimum temperature oil remains trapped in the form of kerogen, and above the maximum temperature the oil is converted to natural gas through the process of thermal cracking. Sometimes, oil formed at extreme depths may migrate and become trapped at a much shallower level. The Athabasca Oil Sands is one example of this.
[edit] Abiogenic origin hypothesis
Main article: Abiogenic petroleum origin

A small number of geologists adhere to the abiogenic petroleum origin hypothesis, maintaining that high molecular weight hydrocarbons of purely inorganic origin exist within Earth's interior and are the source for major petroleum deposits. The hypothesis was originally proposed by Nikolai Kudryavtsev and Vladimir Porfiriev in the 1950s, and more recently Thomas Gold proposed a similar deep hot biosphere idea. The thermodynamic synthesis routes necessary to carry abiogenic source material into subsurface oil are not established, observation of organic markers in kerogen and oil is not explained, and no oil deposits have been located by this hypothesis.[24]

The non-biotic hypothesis doesn't match the data.

[oil pan 4]

Yeah titan is an PITA truth when it come to trying to prove that all oil on earth is biotic.

Coal on the other hand is full of fossilized plants and was clearly swamp gunk at one time. Since coal was clearly fossilized plant remains it was assumed that oil had biotic origins too.

[Ladogaboy]

Again, no proof. Just theory and conjecture. At this point, no one has, definitively, proven that their theory on petroleum genesis is the correct one. And I was talking about oil, not coal.

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Coal on the other hand is full of fossilized plants and was clearly swamp gunk at one time. Since coal was clearly fossilized plant remains it was assumed that oil had biotic origins too.

Very true, unless we use science and look at the other impurities that are in crude oil and look at the areas that crude oil is found, then we start to see a connection, but that has to do with science, full of theories and facts that are backed up by research.

But even if you ignore where oil came from, we still have a finite amount of it and that is why I'm all for using it up, mostly because I hate the people who create future generations and want their offspring to suffer, but I'm also cheap and lazy so I own electric vehicles.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by dcb

2001 honda insight, mild hybrid with fairly optimal hiway engine and drivetrain (manual trans) = 60mpg hiway!

2000 Honda Insight, 71.4 mpg for my 105K miles of real world, mostly mountain driving.

To answer a previous question, if gas goes to $10/gal, I'll be paying roughly as much per mile as someone driving todays' typical 25-30 mpg car.