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Thread: Electric Car Challenges

  1. #16
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    I have to figure out how to reword this..

    It came across all wrong.

    We have 6 rental houses & they all will need some sort of (expensive) wiring done to make them EV friendly.
    Last edited by Rich Engelhardt; 04-27-2021 at 4:30 AM. Reason: initial posting - sort of whiney...
    My granddad always said, :As one door closes, another opens".
    Wonderful man, terrible cabinet maker...

  2. #17
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    The EV car issues are interesting and challenging. The last time I bought a car I looked at them. I was concerned due to the range in cold weather which is greatly reduced. In brutal cold weather, the range is short and takes significant power to heat the car.

    I would also like to hear if they have the capability to recycle the batteries. The use of rechargeable batteries is greatly increasing and there is a need to safely and economically recycle them. It reminds me of the issues of trying to take care of spent nuclear fuel.

  3. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thomas McCurnin View Post
    China doesn't seem to have a problem with this and they have more people and more cars than we do. I spent nearly a month there in 2019 and visited three major urban areas and about 1,000 miles over the road in a car. Nearly 100% of the cars are electric. Larger trucks and buses are fuel based, but for average Joe, it is all electric.
    This is interesting, how are these cars charged?

  4. #19
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    Swappable batteries seems like a relatively simple and stunningly obvious solution.

    My son's company does a lot of Tesla charger installations, mostly in older homes. Cost runs $2500-3000 installed assuming the service panel is adequate. These would surely be adequate in an apartment situation where cars are parked overnight. The per unit cost would go down if you were installing a coupe dozen of them, but might well require a service upgrade.

    We spent the equivalent of $530 billion (not including the Big Dig or the new Bay Bridge, I'm guessing) to build the interstate highways. Our great grandparents would have thought that to be a absurd impossibility.

    I'm guessing that here in the Boston area we're up to perhaps 5% electric cars on the road now, everyone I know is assuming their next car will be electric, at least a plug in hybrid that will cover 80-90% of their use on electric (including me). Clearly there will be a progression with those with access to easy charging converting first, and, as always, those in poor neighborhoods living in unstable rental housing being last. Virtually every parking lot, public or private, in the leafy green suburbs now has a row of chargers. Someone clearly thinks they are going to make money from them! If you buy power for ~12 cents/kwh and sell it for 28 (as Tesla does now) it certainly seems possible.

    Here's a very interesting web site that calculates a full life cycle cost for lots of vehicles. Despite higher upfront and infrastructure costs the EV's are pretty consistently at the low end of TCO (total cost of ownership). This is biased by the tax credit that EVs other than Tesla get, but the numbers are pretty compelling that EVs will save money for most of us in the long run. Early data suggest that repair costs as vehicles age may be dramatically lower. They sey they've modeled the full cost of recycling batteries, I retain a little skepticism about that. They've at least made an effort. They have, to the extent possible, factored in costs of power generation and distribution. https://www.carboncounter.com/#!/explore

  5. #20
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    I ask where is the electricity to come from. Every Summer seems to bring fear of blackouts when everyone turns the air conditioners on. These cars aren't being "trickle charged".

  6. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Hunkele View Post
    I ask where is the electricity to come from. Every Summer seems to bring fear of blackouts when everyone turns the air conditioners on. These cars aren't being "trickle charged".
    It's not likely that they are being charged during peak A/C hours. In fact, they are a great solution to "load balancing" - a bunch of EVs charging at night makes use of energy from base load power plants (e.g. nuclear) that are otherwise not useful for meeting peak load demands during the day.

    For that matter, in the distant future, it's foreseeable that EVs become a way to avoid blackouts. Should the grid require more energy than exists from available generation, its conceivable that EVs sitting in people's garages or workplace parking lots could sell stored power back to the grid to meet transient demands.

  7. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Larry Frank View Post
    The EV car issues are interesting and challenging. The last time I bought a car I looked at them. I was concerned due to the range in cold weather which is greatly reduced. In brutal cold weather, the range is short and takes significant power to heat the car.

    I would also like to hear if they have the capability to recycle the batteries. The use of rechargeable batteries is greatly increasing and there is a need to safely and economically recycle them. It reminds me of the issues of trying to take care of spent nuclear fuel.
    There's a large Lithium Ion battery recycling facility being built in Rochester at the old Kodak site if I remember correctly.

    Just like the recycling sucess that lead acid batteries are, other battery technologies will be as well.........Rod.

  8. #23
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    Dan has asked the most important question. If you expect to convert 25% of the countries gas powered vehicles to electric you better start building power plants today. Nuclear plants take about twelve years to build and most of the USA cannot support any more hydroelectric plants. Using gas, oil or coal defeats the purpose. Surely we don't want to plan to use solar or wind power to provide such a huge demand for electricity, the technology is unproven and the lifespan is to short at this point. Today it takes a lot of coal to produce silica for solar panels, once again it defeats the purpose. Currently we purchase about 60% of our solar panels from China, this is not a comfortable situation.

    California might be able to continue to impose black-outs because of poor planning but the majority of our country will not welcome loss of electricity in extreme cold or hot seasons. On second thought it is probably to late because we don't have anywhere close to the number of qualified construction workers to even consider a massive construction program. It takes at least ten years to train people so they will be able to work in the industry. In the 1970's we never had enough construction workers to keep all of the nuclear construction projects going effectively. Quality Control Inspectors were very rare to find and employ, we could leave any job on Friday and be working on the following Monday with a huge raise in pay. Most of my friends were bouncing all over the country in those days.

    The cart is presently before the horse IMO.

  9. #24
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    There's already enough capacity, if every car became electric overnight. Factor in all the redundant pump jacks, refineries and fuel depot's and there's a surplus of power.

    That's today - no new power sources required.

    https://www.barrons.com/articles/the...em-51605368406


    This has been done to death for ten years now.

    Before the next, inevitable tangent is taken "Whaddabout...?"

    Electrification is about energy independence. If you're opposed to energy independence you're buying your power (particularly in the form of Oil) from foreign interests, corporations that answer to no authority and a deeply entrenched military escort.


    https://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy...ctric-car.html

    https://cleanenergy.org/blog/evs-are...and-other-fud/

    I leased my first plug in four years ago.
    My wiring upgrade and level 2 charger cost $600.

    None of this has anything to do with the OP.

  10. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by roger wiegand View Post
    Swappable batteries seems like a relatively simple and stunningly obvious solution.
    Don't think so, most EV's are built with the batteries as an integral part of the structure to save weight. The batteries weigh over a thousand pounds. Don't think any EV makers are considering swappable batteries, do you know of any who are?
    Agree with the rest of your post.

  11. #26
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    In California when someone buys an existing gas station the first step is to pull out the old tanks and the dirt around them and throw it all away. Even more if any gas is found in the soil. Then they install the multiple layer gas tanks with sensors in each layer. They do this so they can not be sued if gas is found in the soil later on or water table nearby. That liability to clean it up lasts fore ever even after the property is sold unless you can prove you did not cause it.
    So 50,000 for charger seems cheap to me with no long term liability for petroleum spills.
    Bil lD

  12. #27
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    Tesla's Mega chargers for their semitrucks are literally meagawatt chargers. Some thing like 400 amps at 240 volts for each charger.
    Bill D.

  13. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by Keith Outten View Post
    ....

    The cart is presently before the horse IMO.
    There is a horse?? That part is clearly ...uhhmmm, well ...unclear.

    Tho' this thread is clearly on the way to it's doom, for the same thinly veiled reason as its predecessors.

  14. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Dufour View Post
    Tesla's Mega chargers for their semitrucks are literally meagawatt chargers. Some thing like 400 amps at 240 volts for each charger.
    Bill D.
    I think the truck megachargers operate at a higher voltage than 240 volts. I don't remember exactly but I think it was about 600 volts. You really have to do that because cables that could handle 400 amps would be heavy, expensive and difficult to handle.

    Mike
    Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.

  15. #30
    I have never thought of buying an electric car because I assume they are meant to be an "around town" vehicle. When I've gone to Florida.... around 1200 miles I stop every few hours and fill up with gas in 5 minutes and I'm on my way. I can't imagine stopping every few hours and sitting around for 2 hours or more to charge up.

    Also, I'm suprised in this day and age they can't make a system that charges the battery while the car is driving.
    Last edited by Barry McFadden; 04-28-2021 at 9:26 AM.

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