Lithium–air battery, they could make electric cars practical.

Batteries and Chargers Rechargeable Batteries
60

I’m quite interested in this topic. Currently running a Honda Jazz 1.2 litre which is now ten years old. It has been a reliable car. I’ve covered 131,000 miles in that time. My MPG is around 50, give or take. I drive very gently. Most of my driving is the short (12-14 miles) commute to go to work or collect my children. The most miles I do in a jaunt is maybe up to 50 miles round trip, rarely more than that when I think about it, though I may do a couple of these length trips in a single day. Next month I retire, so taking away my journey to work, my mileage is going to drop substantially, I reckon to around 8,000-10,000 miles per year.

Anyway, I bought the car new, it cost me around £9,000 ($12,000).

On the basis of my MPG, the fuel over the decade (looking at roughly £1.15-£1.20 per litre or so) is around £14,000 ($19,000) - that figure is variable, bearing in mind fluctuations of fuel costs.

Car tax is £100 a year, so £1,000 ($1,350)

I’ll not include annual servicing costs or usual tyre changes etc, neither will I include any one-off repair costs I’ve had to do because that is just the luck of the draw. Neither will I include whatever my car is worth now.

So, without these costs, my 131,000 miles have cost me £24,000. Call it $32,000.

When I think of these costs, an electric car such as the Nissan Leaf starts to become attractive. I can get a deal through work where a Leaf is (after a £499 / $650 deposit) £199 / $262 per month. They will fit a fast charger at my home. This will be for three years then I can either hand back the car or give them about £10,000 ($13,200) and the car is mine. So the three years would be £7,663 ($10,000) - if I was to keep the car then it would cost me £17,663 ($23,200). This is on the basis of (in those three years) 6,000 miles per year. Extra miles are 10p / 13c per mile. Of course, if I buy the car after three years then I can do as many miles as I like in it. According to the blurb, the Leaf costs around 2p per mile, so if I did 131,000 miles it would cost me £2,620 ($3,500) in fuel. Grand total is just over £20,000 ($26,500), not including the servicing or other ad-hoc costs.

My thoughts are to maybe, potentially keep my little Jazz for those longer journeys and have something like a Leaf as my day to day car.

Certainly, the sums start to make sense. By the way, EV’s don’t pay car tax in the UK.

So over ten years, my costs would be around £3,000 ($4,000) less than even my very frugal Jazz.

Food for thought.

SP

61

Rufusbduck

Problem solving is a grade above most work.

The concept of a “Paradigm Shift” first written about by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 has yet to be fully used in how we do or could do everyday tasks.

62

EV cost of ownership has been calculated by many experts and basically a Model 3 will beat a Toyota Yaris for lifetime ownership cost. The more miles you drive the more you will save.
Arguing with naysayers is pointless, i’ll bet similar arguments were used with the horse drawn carriage, but suffice it say they lost. The best way to retire gasoline is not to argue facts with entrenched positions, its to help get EVs on the market, buy them and let creative destruction handle the rest because it will, the EV is a superior product.

63

That is exactly why Tesla is the only viable electric vehicle alternative for most customers. They have built a network of “SuperChargers” (80% of full charge in half an hour), which makes it practical to travel longer distances with their vehicles.

So far the price of a Tesla have prohibited normal people from buying one, hopefully that will change with the upcoming model 3.

64

My personal experiences back you up. My apologies to all if I come across as a heavy but it’s depressing how much like lemmings we are in the face of the obvious. It’s not just the science that needs to overcome but social inertia. I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to living down to immediate desires instead of up to my ideals. That level of self awareness seems only found in Saints and enlightened Mystics. I’m too impatient, thinking we should be further along than we are given how long the problem has been known of.

65

One solution I’ve been calling for is long-distance automotive rail trans-shipment. They’re doing it with cargo containers so why not cars? If we set up an infrastructure to support it, you could go coast-to-coast as fast as you can drive it without driving. On arrival you need no rental car and you have scads of cargo space compared to flying or normal bus and train travel, plus you load/unload just once each. A similar system could be made for express inter-city service like SF to LA. Comfortable coaches for the people and sleeper cars on the longer runs. Kind of like using an ocean ferry service. Part of the infrastructure is already there; it would give the rail industry a financial boost which could be used to upgrade and modernize their track systems for faster more efficient service for everything.

Another is creating something like ‘landports’ at the edges of large cities . Like airports, but busses or light rail instead. Park in a secure lot, then relax as you go to nearly where you’re headed stress-free. At the inner terminals you have taxis, short route busses, bike rentals etc. As the town grows, the now much more valuable land is sold at a profit and the ‘landport’ moves further out.

The biggest part of the problem in the US is the low occupancy rate of cars- just 1.2 people per car. That could be doubled cutting road congestion in half, halving infrastructure wear and pollution at the same time. Construction folks have been carpooling like that for ages when working out-of-town jobs, each person doing one week driving their car, then riding till their turn comes around again. Carpooling works but almost nobody does it- why? And as we see on driving videos, lots of oriental places use motor scooters which could be given their own lanes and now you’ve got 4 people where there were 1.2 before. Combine scooter rental with landports and trail trans-shipment and you’ve cut down traffic to the point where our current infrastructure will be adequate for the foreseeable future and the money spent on building yet more roads can go toward better things instead. And none of this prevents you from driving your own car if you want to so there’s no ‘loss of freedom’, but more of it instead. All eminently do-able right now with no need for more technology and making it far easier to implement the new technologies as they arrive since there’s less it needs to be applied to.

The things which are good for the majority will happen either willingly or they will be forced on us. Which way that happens is our choice. EV’s and new battery technology can be put to use right now to great effect even if it won’t be universal but we’re going to have to change our ways a little to best benefit from it.

Phil

66

I remember reading that rail transport is second only to the bicycle as the most efficient use of energy when measuring energy in to energy needed.

The U.S. made a tactical error in developing our highway system while ignoring the rail system.

67

Absolutely. Europe has lots of high-speed rail that gets heavily used, we have nearly none. Another lost opportunity which has bitten us in the butt.

Phil

68

That is true, but ONLY for densely populated areas like the central parts of western Europe. The USA is however NOT densely populated, so the relatively low cost highway system have served the country well. And with new technology like self driving electric vehicles it will be an asset in the future too.

What is needed though is heavy investment in modern clean electric production, like nuclear and solar cells. Oil/gas/coal just won’t cut in the future.

69

Nuclear is far too expensive. Solar and wind have now destroyed it in cost.
Someone made the argument that a carbon tax would actually make nuclear attractive since the CO2 offset credits it generates would add to its bottom line and make it profitable. So ironically republicans have done us a favour because as plants retire no one will be willing to pay to replace them since the economics are underwater.

70

And of course cheap Nuclear Fusion power has been ‘just around the corner’ for 50+ years now. We have spent billions trying to develop it, but a commercial system is still decades away as far as I can tell. I expect we will see renewables rendering fusion uncompetitive long before there is a commercially viable fusion based energy system. If we had invested half as much money in Solar as we have in Fusion, solar would have a much larger ‘footprint’ than it has today.

71

In 2013 a 5 year test began using Thorium-MOX in a conventional nuclear power plant. This is the article I found. Pretty nifty. Normally a fission reactor is supplied with enriched uranium and has very nasty plutonium as a by product. Thorium-MOX has 10% plutonium and very little waste so it actually uses up the waste from early generation reactors. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works is working on a Compact fusion reactor. “New fusion reactor” search leads to more articles on this.

72

I wish solar would be more ubiquitous but among other reasons (grid etc…) cost is still not an avantage compared to nuclear in a lot of places.

73

The breakdown for Sweden (2015) is a bit different:

47% Hydro
34% Nuclear
11% Wind
8% CHP/Thermal (oil/gas)

Hydro is obviously the cheapest way to produce electricity, but nuclear isn’t too bad either (our reactors where built in the ’70-ies, today they would be expensive to build).
Wind is the “cuckoo in the nest”, can’t carry it’s costs without subsidies when compared to hydro and nuclear (the subsidies are taken from hydro and nuclear).
CHP is horribly expensive (compared to the other types).

We are dependant on cheap energy for our standard of living in Sweden, it’s dark and cold this far north.

74

“Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011), Chernobyl disaster (1986), Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).”

Until the serious problems of nuclear energy by-products are fully solved, nuclear energy is not a viable solution. :frowning:

75

“Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans”

:slight_smile:

76

Your data is years out of date, here is an article from today

and a couple more

77

+1

Western European insurance companies are calling for fossil fuels to be kept in the ground to prevent unsustainable loses to be paid from Climate Change.

U.S. insurance companies have an additional problem in that they are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry. :frowning:

78

Regrettably:

That page also debunked as a myth the story that rapidly moving ICBMs on trailers, to enable retaliation after a nuclear first strike, was part of the design spec.

More on that here:

That was all before multiple independent steerable reentry warheads and smaller lighter stronger H-bombs. I recall a caller to a talk show, a few years back, saying that he was one of the launch control guys under that mountain in Colorado at the peak of the cold war and “we target time zones, not cities” or words to that effect.

I sure hope we stay smarter than we were in the 1950s and 1960s ….

79

The Military Industrial Complex which today would include Silicon Valley with its connection to ‘Smart Weapons’ and its ties to the Nation Security Agency has always used national security to boost profits.

The argument to build highways for a defense from nuclear attack was the ticket for profit using fear as its reasoning.

We are currently in the Holocene Extinction, the Earth’s Sixth, and some still seem to argue that we arrived at this situation from sound policy. :frowning: