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

When I travel, I like to do a 1000 miles a day, or at least 700 if I am trying to take it easy and sightsee a little, I also like to travel in winter and seek out the mountain passes and snow, and worst, if I am lucky enough to get into it.

For me, electric cars will be ready when you know that they can handle winter and mountains, and even getting stranded for a few hours or a day or so in bad winter conditions, it’s one thing to be sitting out a blizzard with a 3/4 or 1/2 tank of gas and probably another thing entirely to be in the middle of nowhere in a blizzard, in an electric car.

I think the Tesla X might sell well in Denmark.

An EV can be a viable option for some people now, but the technology is a long way from being universally or even widely useful. And as nice as the idea seems, there is currently not enough electrical generating and carrying capacity on the grid to handle the masses driving EV’s.

No matter the battery technology, it’s not any good without charging and that will cost a huge amount to create and maintain. So do we build more nuke stations or more coal and gas burning plants in your backyard? Then where’s the ‘green’ in this going to go?

I like seeing the battery development but you have to take into account the whole big picture, and when you do that EV’s are not yet ready for prime-time and perhaps never will be if other promising technologies advance more quickly.

Phil

I’m reminded the earthquake-country advice is to always keep the car’s gas tank at least half full.

I understand Musk is going to be getting into the roofing business in a couple of years - full solar rooftops.

Now make them sturdy enough to work after a big quake ….

I think the 800 mile range is actually driven by re-charge time. If you could get the recharge time down to say 30 minutes to 80, 350-400 miles becomes quite viable. The 800 miles reflects a worst case scenario based on overnight recharging. Many people drive more than 350-400 miles in a day, and requiring a multi-hour stop over to re-charge at the 350 mile point is a deal breaker. However the ability to recharge to 80 in 30 minutes is not a trivial problem. We are probably going to be looking at something in the range of a 100KwH battery pack. That means we need to deliver something north of 160Kw to the charger. That is going to require infrastructure that isn’t located on every street corner, and generally absent in residential neighborhoods. It will also mean putting much higher voltages into ‘public’ places than is common today. It is rare to see anything ‘hotter’ than 3 phase 240v in the USA. 160Kw would require about 230 amps per phase, which is simply not very practical. Just designing a removable connector to deliver that kind of power into the vehicle is going to be challenging. Generally the electric utility gets uncomfortable if you want more than 480 volts on the premises, and as a rule in Electrical Engineering, you try hard to stay below 100 amps because I^2 gets to be very large number very quickly.

IIIRC the pack in most hybrids is on the order of 370 volts, a 100 KwH pack would need a capacity of around 300 amp hours. So to charge in 30 minutes, you would need a charge current of 600 amperes. I^2 is then 360,000 so even a tiny R (.01 ohms) in the connectors translates into a great deal of heat (3.6 Kilowatts of heat)! That means in addition to all the other issues, you would need a reliable way to cool the battery pack during charging, as well as thermal management in the charging process.

One of the advantages of Gasoline is that we can easily transfer large amounts energy very quickly. How long does it take to put 20 gallons/75 liters of Gasoline in the tank? That is about 2.5 million BTU’s. That much energy from electricity is about 73 Kilowatt hours. From a 240V/30 amp outlet that would take 10 hours to deliver! Your typical refueling plaza on can refuel about 60 vehicles per hour, and could deliver about 150 million BTU’s. that translates into 4400 kilowatt hours to be delivered each hour.

My point is the challenges in producing a viable electric vehicle for large scale use go far beyond improvements in battery technology. There is a vast amount of infrastructure that would have to be built to provide. If you want to be able to recharge 60 cars in 30 minutes, you are going to need to deliver 8.8 megawatts. That is a lot of energy, and far exceeds what is available from the light pole in your neighborhood. The costs of providing that kind of power to the refueling plaza’s or gas station on/near Interstate highways are going to be considerable, Given the enthusiasm that most people have these days for Power Transmission lines in their neighborhood or near schools., the problems only get worse.

I have to concede however that electric vehicle use is increasing. I volunteer at local hospital, and our parking garage now has several spots reserved for electric vehicles and we provide a charger at each space. When those spots were created 2 years ago, they were almost never in use. Now most of them are in use in ever day. I am sure that even a few hours of charging is quite useful to the owners of those vehicles.

My other comment is the Green part of electric vehicles is we get to choose the kind of pollution we will create, as well as where to locate it. I am not sure we are going to need a lot more generating capacity. A long range electric vehicle would need to charges no more than once per day. If we do that overnight, we will probably make the electric utilities fairly happy, since that is off peak demand, and would increase the utilization of existing equipment during a period when the utilization isn’t especially high. That range also dramatically reduces the need for recharge station away from home/office. If you can reliably get a full day’s use out of the vehicle, the vast majority of charging will be done at home at night, where an 8 hour charging time isn’t really a problem.

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It’s all very well saying many people drive more than 350 miles per day, but the vast majority of owners don’t. Most people, in the UK at least, also have 2 cars, one for commuting, and one for the family. An electric car would suit commuting, and most people do about 25 miles each way, few do more than 50 miles each way, and overnight charging is fine.

Fast charging to 80% in 30 minutes exists. Few people drive more than 200 miles without a break, and doing so becomes dangerous, you get tired, and lose concentration.

Swapping batteries has been done, I read about an Israeli company doing just that. They have a quick swap tool, drive in, wait five minutes, drive off.

Oh, and I forgot, the biggest problem in the UK is lack of generation capacity. As it is we are short of generation capacity, and the future may see power cuts. If we all have electric cars, we’d need to build lots of power stations, and these take many years to build.

I suppose if you wait until everyone has an electric car before you start building more infrastructure that could be a problem. Élan Musk would like us to incorporate the power wall into new and existing homes and businesses as a means to store site generated electricity. As it is, half of all power generated is lost transmitting it from generator plants to where it’s used. Solar panels on roof tops not only generate power where it’s used but also shade the roof itself reducing the amount of AC needed to cool it.

The commuter argument sounds great until you actually try to live with it. The reality is that even vehicles that are used almost exclusively for travel to/from work, are occasionally asked to make long journeys. A vehicle incapable of making those trips is worth a lot less than one that is capable of making them. If you own such a vehicle, what do you do when you need to travel more than a couple hundred miles? You have two choices, and neither is good. You can wait for the batteries to be recharged (and that implies a 4-8 hour wait) along the way, or you can rent a vehicle that is capable of such a trip (expensive). That expense is likely to be several hundred dollars because odds are if you are going that far, it isn’t a day trip. So the so called commuter vehicle for most potential customers will result in a substantial outlay for a rental at regular (although hopefully infrequent) intervals. That vastly diminishes the value of the short range vehicle. The place where we are more likely to see gains are vehicle that almost never have to go more than 300 miles in a day. Taxi cabs, and delivery vehicles like UPS and FedEx vehicles and similar local delivery/courier services. Because these vehicles are rarely used at night, they can be re-charged every night and not inconvenience the owner/user. Consequently I expect the first place that we may see substantial market penetration by all electric vehicles is in the fleets for local delivery/services. I’ll believe there is a real future for electric vehicles when they start to make real penetration into the obvious markets.

The people who are buying Tesla’s can obviously afford to own at least one other (and almost certainly non-electric) vehicle. That isn’t true of the general market place for automobiles. There are people who do own more than one vehicle, and greatly restrict the use of the 2nd vehicle. If you have an extra $25,000 more that you can spend that way, fine, but that isn’t most of us.

So what’s your point, that we just phone it in and quit because we can’t do it this minute?

No it doesn’t, fast charging means you stop for a coffee after 2-3 hours driving, which is the safe way to drive anyway. There are more serious issues with electric cars.

It would be difficult to drive from El Paso, Texas to Beaumont, Texas during daylight hours, and show up early enough to share the evening with family, if you stopped for refreshments every 2 or 3 hours.

I remember hearing a story about Henry Ford and the beginning of the production of the Model T. People were arguing to Henry Ford that the automobile was D.O.A. for the reason that there were ‘No Roads’. :slight_smile:

There’s a guy on YouTube that tests some of the small ~2kW inverter generators by charging his Model S. Those would be fairly easy to stash in the trunk for a long trip or one with unknown availability of charging stations. Of course, you’d have to find something to do for a few hours while you wait, IIRC the total charge time to 50% in the guys videos was a few hours.

I think the issue with people wanting an electric car to go further on a charge has less to do with time driven in one day, and more to do with the time they have to “fuss” with hooking it up to a charger. Folks be lazy lol, they want to put fill up with gas once a week and not have to worry about it again until the the following week. It’s just an indicator of people’s ignorance of all things electric IMO, plugging a vehicle in to the outlet where you park once every 2-3 days and forgetting about it till morning is easier than going to the gas station, handling a nasty pump, and waiting while your tank fills.

We have a small homestead (by Texas standards), we don’t have an electric vehicle, but we do have a number of “toys” to ride here at the house and explore the surrounding country on. You know what gets more use than anything? Our golf cart. It’s easy to drive, quuiiieeeettt, low maintenance, and you don’t smell like gas fumes when you get off it. Everyone knows when they pull it in the garage to plug it in, it’s simple and unburden-some.

I wish more people knew how nice electric vehicles vehicles are, a higher consumer demand could only help research and development of new technologies that will put us further down the road so to speak, and in better cars to boot. Tesla has done a lot in that regard, probably more than the Volt and Prius combined.

Of course, if everyone drove electric cars, how in the world would we keep up with electrical demand? Some states electric grids are already stretched to the breaking point, others not so much. I see that as another hurdle as more and more drivers switch to electric vehicles.

-Michael

Meanwhile, in my corner of the world, solar farms are being built around… :wink:

There is a big difference from driving round a homestead on an electric vehicle to electric vehicle use in the real world it’s quiet and no fumes, but your also safe in the knowledge that if you run out of charge you might only hold up a cow or some other wildlife and before long someone will miss you and come out in a gas powered whatever and recover you or bring you another battery,or at worst you might have to take a little walk back to your house across land you know well.

I’ve got both an electric car and a bike and the worst thing about them is the ‘am I going to run out of power’ or if I go to low how much will I damage to battery packs, will I be stranded in the middle of nowhere or on a fast moving freeway/highway.
That seems to be the biggest issue, the constant range worry,no spur of the moment detours from your carefully planned route, it might say range 150 miles, but it’s never anything like and it gets worst as the batteries age as we all know so for most pure EV owners, even the hardcore ones, range really is the biggest thing holding these things back, plus some of the things mentioned in this thread lol

I assume this is the far larger and heavier li-ions, not the little cylindrical ones that use polyethylene and such as the separator.

All this must have 800 mile and 30 min charging nonsense is simply incorrect. Real life experience and many articles analyzing actual driving patterns have found its simply not an issue. The only reason most people don’t drive electric is lack of availability and clinging to incorrect ideas.
In the next 5 years cheaper and easy to acquire cars will be much easier to come by, and incorrect ideas will fall away as people realize they sound good in theory but everyone else seems to somehow manage and electric costs less then gasoline cars.
Creative destruction is brutal in its efficiency, but people cling to ideas like super glue until they are personally left in the dark.

Looking far into the future, what will become of all the gas stations?

Will I have to use an electric lawnmower or drive quite some ways to find a relic of a gas station to get fuel for it?

If say 50% of people started using electric cars, how would it effect the cost of gasoline?
Would it go up? Would this impact the cost of flying?

If electric cars take hold en masse, it is really going to shake up lots of things.

I’m not complaining, just thinking…

Probably, if a lot of people start using electric vehicles, then fuel prices will drop, as there will be less demand for it. Flying, trucking, and anything else that still needs liquid fuel would be cheaper.