"Fully Charged" - Robert Llewellyn's excellent video podcast on EV's

[NeilBlanchard]

Three e-bikes, 1 electric scooter, and an electric motorcycle:

[NeilBlanchard]

[NeilBlanchard]

[NeilBlanchard]

[NeilBlanchard]

Powering factories with renewable energy and replacing disposable batteries with PV:

[NeilBlanchard]

Mostly on inductive charging:



All about new "smart" meters:

[Daox]

I find it interesting that they claim the inductive charging has no efficiency penalty. I've always heard that there is, and its not insignificant.

edit: a quick google finds this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging

For example, the Magne Charge vehicle recharger system employed high-frequency induction to deliver high power at an efficiency of 86% (6.6 kW power delivery from a 7.68 kW power draw).[6]

So, you have a ~15% efficiency penalty plus the 5-15% charger inefficiency. It starts adding up.

So, looking at the worst case, you got:
inductive charging: ~72%
direct charging: 85%

So, you're loosing 13% more to induction. 13% of say the Leaf's 24 kWh is just over 3kWh, not insignificant at all.

[NeilBlanchard]

I wonder about that, too. Maybe with the resonant induction it is lower loss?

[thomason2wheels]

Originally Posted by Patrick

Interesting video. One thing I noticed is that he focused on cost to "run," not cost to own. Take the iMiEV, for example. It costs $43,000 to buy (before government incentives). The Aygo costs $10,753 to buy. How many miles will he have to drive his iMiEV before he recoups the cost difference?

The iMiEV electricity cost $0.30 for 14 miles: 30/14 = 2.14 cents/mile.

The Aygo gas cost $0.92 for the same distance. 92/14 = 6.57 cents/mile.

So the iMiEV saves him: 6.57 - 2.14 = 4.43 cents/mile.

$43,000 - $10,753 = $32,257 price difference.

$32,257/$0.0443 = 727,923 miles he'd have to drive the iMiEV just to break even on the price. After that he'd start actually saving some money.




And then therev is the part that noone seems to address....the carbon footprint of the battery manufacturing process and the pollution footprint of dead battery disposal

I highly doubt the car would last that long. But if it did, how many times would he have to replace the battery pack and at what cost?

And he says that if the powerplant is coal fired the carbon footprint is 30-40 % lower. Not much better than the ICE cars. I don't think too many people are going to pay the huge price difference for a small reduction in CO2 output.

see above

[NeilBlanchard]

Driving a Tesla Model S or a 15-20MPG vehicle 200,000 miles costs about the same in the end. But that is at today's fuel prices and if you don't get zero down solar PV panels put on your house. It includes regular maintenance.

"Dead" batteries will get recycled. And even at 100% coal, that is still a similar carbon footprint to an ~80MPG car. Here in the USA we are down to about 38% coal generation at this moment, and this is dropping all the time. We are adding a fair bit of renewable sources, and many new gas fired plants; though these are questionable in the long term. Today's natural gas is much "dirtier" than older gas because of fracking.