Electric car efficiencies
 

Neil was too shy to start his own thread to explain why pure electric cars are not suitable for mainstream America.

Go for it Neil!

Electric cars are the only long term solution for cars
 

Electric cars are capable of meeting 9 out of 10 drives here in the USA:

Green Car Congress: Another cut at US electric vehicle range requirements and usage patterns; fully-charged LEAF could handle 83-95% of all driving days

Here's my recent blog post:

Neil Blanchard Designs: What Do We Do Now?

I need to chime in here, because I think that there are some glaring problems with the conclusion that the Leaf is right for 90% of the population. This conclusion is based ONLY on driving habits. Take me as an example. Sure, for my daily work commute (15 miles each way), the Leaf will work. Throw in my daily errands (~5 miles), so again, the Leaf will work. Now, take into account my lifestyle driving (4-5 days a week, ~60 miles @ 65 mph each of those days). At this point, I'm starting to get worried about the range. 100 miles per day with much of that at night and at highway speeds means that I'm already at the edge of the Leaf's capabilities.

And then, it gets better. I park my Leaf at my apartment and... @$%&!?! I don't have a power outlet. But I don't feel so bad, because the thousands of people (literally) who are living in the surround apartment complexes don't have power outlets either. My work doesn't have an electric car charging station, and I doubt that most of my neighbors have one at work either.

And then you need to consider the people who live in rural areas (my parents have to drive 45 miles to get to the nearest grocery store); the people who live in areas with extreme climates (Pacific Northwest, Midwest, Northeast, etc.) and possibly can't leave their cars even semi-exposed during the day (let alone at night); the people who have to haul objects that won't fit in a small car; the people with extreme 80-100+ one-way commutes.

I think the 90% figure is completely unrealistic and over-exaggerated. Sure, if you can help to start developing the infrastructure so that it can manage and sustain the extra load on the power grid; people can reasonably and easily recharge their cars; and several different, reasonably-priced EVs with 150-200 mile ranges are made available, then you can approach that 80-90% figure. Until then, from what I've seen, the number is probably closer to 35-50% in the extreme.

Lots of false assumptions in that. Of course the most glaring one (which I'll refrain from discussing further, as it's political) is that the size of the military is related to oil consumption.

But consider the logic in the statement that 83-90% of DAILY drives could be done in a Leaf. That means a lot of people would need a second car to handle the rest - so why not make the first car a Volt-style plug-in hybrid, which would handle ALL drives?

Then consider that life's not exactly predictable. Just for a real-life example, I live off US 395 between Reno and Carson City. Lots of people commute between, or either on from places along the highway. These trips should be perfectly doable in a Leaf. But suppose, as happened last week, we have a little fire or other situation that closes the highway, and the shortest alternate route adds maybe 40 miles of mountain driving? You have lots of stranded people. Human nature being what it is, some of them are going to get stranded in ways that block the roads, preventing emergency vehicles from getting through...

Then on the bright side, you have to consider that some substantial fraction of those daily drives are in fact unnecessary, since they involve commuting to do jobs that could as well be done at home, via the internet.

I think you mis-read Neil's conclusion. He said that it works for 90% of DRIVES, as in individual trips, not 90% of drivers. The real problem is the other 10% of individual trips--that, and the perception of the need for those trips.

Speaking about the perception: How many people do you know who drive a super-duty pickup truck because they tow a boat twice per year? How many who own one because they might at some point want to tow a boat, even though they haven't in the last two years?

Given the current constraints on refueling and energy storage, electric cars could be feasible for a good-sized segment of the population, like you and me. But only if a longer-ranged or more-capable vehicle was easily available at need, like when you want to take that 150-mile weekend trip or when you need to haul lumber for that project or tow that boat.

If we can figure out how to get more efficient (more energy, less weight and size) storage of electrical power, and if we can improve the re-charging process so it takes a reasonable amount of time, the distance concerns become much less pressing.

-soD

I did misread it, but I think my most salient point is still valid: You can't consider the Leaf to work for 90% of daily drives if, at the end of each daily drive, a considerable portion of the population cannot recharge the car.

Emphasis added:

Hit the nail on the head.

EVs have limited range which forces people to own a 2nd car. This isn't a problem for generation homes and otherwise big households where cars can easily be shared, but small households will more often than not find EVs to be impractical. Hybrids like the Volt and Zing! which rely primarily on batteries for short drives but offer no compromises when you need to travel are a much better "one size fits all" solution.

Yah sure if you dig around you can conjure all kinds of naysayer reasons why an EV wouldn't be suitable. Putting every possible, even far-fetched scenario on one's primary vehicle is how we ended up with full-sized pickups and SUVS as our primary *severely underutilized* vehicles. :rolleyes:

The fact remains, the vast majority of households are multi-vehicle already, and the vast majority of trips are short distance, single occupant.

When gas is $10/gallon I think you'll find ways to overlook/adapt.

They do make compromises, in efficiency for long trips especially, I don't know why that isn't better understood. I think the volt gets like 35mpg in range extending mode or something well under par, especially for that price range.

2001 honda insight, mild hybrid with fairly optimal hiway engine and drivetrain (manual trans) = 60mpg hiway!
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Power...ht&srchtyp=ymm

Throw a cvt in there and watch it drop to 49mpg.

As well as going a long way toward solving the atmospheric carbon content issue.

regards
Mech

Another factor that might limit some people's decision about buying an electric car is how often they typically have power blackouts due to weather (ice/wind storms, etc) or other factors. You get home on the last of your charge to find your house dark and lacking enough range to drive back into town. On the converse, if your EV was sitting at home with a full charge when the power dropped out, with an appropriate sized inverter you could use your EV as a backup generator for a period of time.

Can the leaf or volt handle being owned by some one that lives in an appartment, where there is no where to charge it?
I think I read that some where around half of people rent.

"we would stop killing coal miners"
Sunshine and wind cant make steel, unless you want to cut down trees for charcoal (which don't bother me).

I, for one, couldn't do it. In fact, the only time owning a full electric car was ever feasible was when I lived in/rented a home, and I've lived in apartments/dorms for nearly half of my life at this point (totaling probably a dozen different apartments). The apartments aren't wired for it, and I see no interest from the landlords. It might be another one of those chicken and egg scenarios.

There are a ton of people who rent and live in houses that they could plug in to, there are also a bunch of apartments at least around here that all have outlets in the parking lot.

The issue with blackouts comes up from time to time, but have you ever tried to fill up your gasoline car with gas in a black out? and if we look at natural disasters like last year in Japan after the hurricane they were bringing doctors in via electric cars because it was easier to set up and charge an electric car in a remote location then it was to get the whole gasoline infrastructure working to refine, pipe, truck and dispense gasoline to that remote area, safer too.

My Civic Hatchback is smaller then a Nissan Leaf but it still gets borrowed by friends who need a larger vehicle to haul stuff, it also gets borrowed by friends who's cars are not reliable enough to make trips out of town and I know a ton of people who's vehicles never leave the county let alone the state on these 120 mile weekend trips that people seem to be making with their boat, at night, in the snow, to the woods where there are no outlets.

The people that I know who an electric car would not work for tend to drive trucks and have them because they are a work vehicle that is hauling tools and other work related stuff, they also happen to own a regular car and drive short enough distances that an electric vehicle would work for them, but they account for part of that 10% who drive more then 100 miles per day as well.

Not every one gets to rent a house and if they are renting anything they likely will never be able to take advantage of a more efficient and faster 220 volt charger.

Seems like the folks that are most likely to buy a new electric car are also the most likely to own their own house, or at least rent a place that is nice enough that the land lord is going to want to keep them happy by allowing them to make some upgrades like EV charging.

I think that renting a place that is "nice enough" has nothing to do with it. Maybe "long term enough" would be more accurate. With a very small portion of the population buying/owning electric cars, landlords have no incentive to upgrade their facilities. Especially since most people I know rarely stay past the point when their lease agreement goes month-to-month. That means the landlord just invested in something that will not add significantly to the value of the property (i.e., it is not a selling point and might never see use).

Yep, the DOE projections show that by 2020 less than 3% of vehicles on the road will be EV or plug in hybrid.

And wouldn't it kind of suck to have a nice cheap rental house, where you charge your EV and have it sold out from under you when the lease goes month to month? Then find that only appartments where you cant charge your vehicle are in your price range?

I have had that happen, 3 months after my lease in virginia was up and it went month to month, suprize the owner wants to sell the house. :eek:

Around here people tend to stay more then a year in places that are nice, but what I meant is that the tenant should be able to convince the land lord to let the tenant pay for that upgrade, or split the cost of that upgrade, seeing as how every electric car out there can charge off a standard 110v outlet it can be pretty cheap to add in out door outlet, adding a 220v outlet in a garage would allow a number of higher voltage charging stations to simply plug in so the tenant could take their charging station with them when they do move but the infrastructure will still be there and would cost very little to have installed.
I own a Duplex and I installed one out door outlet for EV charging and had a tenant who wanted another installed on the other side of the driveway so I paid for the box an wire, they had it installed, other people I know who own rentals have said they would be willing to do that same kind of thing to keep their renters happy.
It's the same idea as providing off street parking or laundry in a rental, it can attract people who are willing to pay extra or it might keep your rental from sitting empty.

People need to deal with having a small/electric car. Just because once in a while they need to go 100 miles or move 4 pieces of luggage that can be done in other ways. But it's gonna be hard changing the way people think but it will have to change because we just can't keep going like this.

more advantages of electric cars
 

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nor is there any need for warmup time or idling in any well-designed IC-engined car. Yes, people do it, I suppose from a mixture of habit and ignorance, but what do you want to bet that the same people who idle their gassers today would look for ways to warm up & idle their electric cars?

Far from being entirely true. Many forms of renewable energy DO pollute, and have spills, collapses, and so on. Military defense would still be needed, first because oil is a very small factor in the current military situation, secondly because some proposals, like the one for providing Europe with electricity from solar generation in the Sahara, would be even more vulnerable to disruption than current oil supply chains.

In addition, virtually ALL of the benefits of pure electric cars also apply to PHEVs, while few of the drawbacks do.

I spilled wind from my sail and lost the race. Good thing the EPA wasn't looking.

As well it should. Shouldn't that energy go to African nations first?

Like manufacturing jobs go to the US?

It's even easier with an electric car, you set the timer to preheat your seat and when you come out to the car your seat and steering wheel are warm, windshield is defrosted and less energy was used then a gasoline cars block heater.

Someone has to pay to put up the PV panels, and it's not like there's going to be any less sun for the African nations.

you should turn yourself in.....

(Grin!)

For those of you still think that global warming is about science and not politics here is a little document that was circulating at the climate conference in South Africa a few months ago. This document details what the global warming supporters at the U.N. want to see happen. Pages 13-16 are most enlightening. Among other things this document seeks to:

1. Require a wealth transfer from the West equal to their entire yearly military budget to the U.N. for use in fighting global warming and paying off other nations (note that the code phrase for the West in the document is "Annex I Parties").

2. Requires the complete elimination of all military spending in the West

3. Establishes a Climate Court with jurisdiction only over the West to ensure that the payments continue to flow.

4. Establishes the rights of "Mother Earth"

http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2011.../eng/crp38.pdf

When you see anything from south africa assume it is a scam, this is no different.

Germany already is getting >20% of their electricity from renewable energy. Germany is about as sunny as the State of Washington. They are planning on getting 50% very soon and 100% by 2050.

Wind scales up. Solar scales down. Wave power is available on many coasts. Tidal power is also very possible especially in bays. Biogas / methane can be made from sewage and farm waste. Small scale hydro can be done in all the existing dams. Geothermal can work in many places, and we can drill to get it, as well. We could have about 10X more power than we need from all these sources.

Dave Cloud's Dolphin goes 200 miles on lead acid batteries. The Illuminati Motor Works 7 goes 210+ miles on a ~33kWh lithium pack. The SIM-LEI goes ~207 miles on a 24.5kWh pack; similar capacity pack to the Leaf. The Tesla S goes up to 300 miles on an 85kWh pack (if I recall correctly), and the DBM Energy Kolibri 99kWh lithium metal battery took a converted Audi A2 375 miles @ 55MPH and had ~18% of the charge left.

Both the early Aptera and the Edison2 VLCe show that <100Wh/mile is possible. The SIM-LEI uses ~134Wh/mile, and the Illuminati 7 is ~160Wh/mile and Dave Cloud's Dolphin is about 164-170Wh/mile.

For comparison, the Nissan Leaf is 340Wh/mile which translates to 99MPGe. The Dolphin and the 7 have the equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline in their packs.

Now thats a test, a realistic speed and they didn't run the batteries down to nothing.
I hate it when EV makers post 100 and 150 (or some 3 digit number) and you have no idea how they got those numbers.
One can only guess it normally involved speeds around 35mph, flat roads, no stops, no heat or A/C and they ran a brand new battery pack to the point where it would not move the vehicle any more, so on and so forth.