A thread about the Harley Liveware was morphing into being more about electric vehicles. EVs are becoming a real alternative and there are a lot more options than just the Livewire, so this thread is a place to have those conversations.
While there are experts on the subject out there who know a LOT more than me, I've been up to my ears in battery tech and electric vehicles since January 2013 when the first 787 battery failed spectacularly and then becoming part of a number of electric vehicle fires. (Shameless plug: www.HowItBroke.com) So this post has some background before getting to some of the classic EV myths.
With respect to the early Prius, Ford, Toyota, and other hybrid batteries, they were not lithium, they were an earlier version of nickel metal hydride (NiMH). They did OK for what the industry knew at the time but comparatively didn't have a lot of energy for the weight and the batteries were not that big. This meant those cars had an electric-only range of typically 10-25 miles so were really limited to the point they also needed an internal combustion engine (ICE) to be practical. Because the 4kWh Honda Insight and 9 kWh Prius batteries didn't store a lot of energy they needed to be charged a lot more often, and cycles is one of the biggest influences on wear. The early all-electric Nissan Leaf had MAJOR problems with batteries wearing out and Nissan eventually had to re-engineer them. But we are seeing Prius cars going 300,000 miles on an original battery, plus the brakes and tires last longer. On the upside, when a Prius battery fades or dies, it's usually just one or a few cells and they cost less than $40 each. If you are any kind of mechanic, you can watch a few Youtube videos to figure out how to test and replace them on your own.
There was a lot of manufacturing that went into these hybrids, so they did leave a larger pollution footprint. This was NOT because they were battery vehicles but BECAUSE EACH SINGLE CAR HAD THE POLLUTION IMPACT OF TWO POWER SYSTEMS, gas and electric.
This all changed after Tesla totally kicked the market in the ass with true lithium batteries, which as the chart above shows, have a LOT more energy. The other key to the Teslas was that rather than a 9 kWh block of battery limited to the area behind the rear seat, the amount of energy could be MASSIVELY increased by making the battery thin and making it so big it stretched between all four wheels, beneath the floor pan of the body.
A 9 kWh Prius battery is this little block:
While a 100 kWh Tesla lithium-based battery is the entire pan beneath the body. Having a flat 1,200 pound plate below the center of each wheel is why these things handle so well and don't roll over unless the driver does something REALLY stupid.
Because these cars could have 100 kWh of battery and didn't have the inefficiency of dragging the gas engine parts along, the range increased to 300-400 miles from 10-25 in the earlier Insights and Prius. Plus, by going to a true lithium chemistry they could divide a faster charge among the bigger number of cells, making life easier on each cell so the life of the batteries has proven to be really long. Now that the Teslas and other lithium-based cars have been around for 10 years, the industry is finding that the batteries are lasting longer than the cars. No worries about "When do I need to change the battery" because you won't.
The downside to the early Teslas was that they added cobalt in a way that significantly increased the energy, but in a way that could burn while the old Prius NMC batteries have been hit by railroad trains and not caught fire. What's happened since 2012 is that Tesla and the rest of the industry have figured out ways to reduce or eliminate the cobalt so you don't see the Model 3 (or Chevy Bolt, Hyundai Ionique, or others) have issues with fires, the way the early Model S did.
Between this and the volume of batteries now being made (largely driven by demand within China), the cost of batteries is falling fast. Outside of the US and Europe with our safety standards, you can buy a true practical EV for as little as $8,000 now. In the US, you can buy a Chevy Bolt for $23,000 and never have to buy a gallon of gasoline. If you buy one of the first 200,000 vehicles in a new model, you can subtract $7,500 from Federal tax and more for most States. While electricity does have a price, actual overall operating costs are pretty well established to be a quarter of what they would be for the same class of internal combustion engine vehicle.
btw - Pre-ordering is the best way to get into that first 200,000 vehicles for a tax benefit and the one that is currently a deal is the VW ID.4 SUV. https://www.vw.com/pre-order/ While the list price of $40,000 initially looks high, subtract $7,500+ from your taxes, then subtract about 75% of the operating costs (largely add up the gas and oil changes for the miles you own the car), and the real cost should be in the mid $20s for a really nice car. Used car prices are holding up so well that the residual value will probably not be too much less than that when you want to sell. Tesla already has more than a half million pre-orders for the ugly Cyber truck that looks like a door stop, and Ford blew through 200,000 number on Mach-E Mustangs within the initial weeks it was offered. If the ID.4 is too much, VW is coming out with the ID.3 economy car, and every other maker is hitting the market with new cars in 2021.
The current lithium batteries also have a MUCH smaller pollution impact for several reasons. First is elimination of all the parts and production to make a gasoline engine and transmission assembly. (EV transmissions are pretty simple) Second is that most of a EV battery is aluminum with some copper and other things added, but aluminum is the planets' most recycled material. fwiw, the Tesla 1,200 lb battery only has about 15 lbs of actual lithium. And finally, the industry is starting to understand how to break down used EV lithium batteries then either repackage the cells or recycle them. Our energy is fast going to renewable sources like wind and solar, so the production and charge impacts are reducing too.
Range is the limiting factor for both ICE and EV vehicles and probably the biggest goal of the car makers is to get recharge times down to where people will accept them. Recharging my old 2013 Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid from a 115 volt outlet gives about 5 miles per hour of charge, which takes a pathetic 9+ hours. Using a 220V charger cuts the time to a third of that. The big news is that with the newer systems, you can get up to 80% charge in a half hour on a 230-300+ mile range battery. That gives hours of driving time during your half hour break, so the range issue is becoming a lot less of a problem and after cutting the cost of a car, this is where the manufacturers are really focusing on improvements.
The last big limit to adoption is finding places to recharge. Doing it at home at night has hardly changed my electric bill but on the road you find that EV owners all have the same thought, where and when is the next place I'll need to charge? Fortunately, you just have to put "car charging station" into a Google map to find commercial places and not on those maps are a lot of stores which are putting charging stations in to draw local customers. Three of the biggest providers are ChargePoint, SemaConnect, and ElectrfyAmerica and each has a phone app to make charging easy to find and convenient to pay for. On the coasts it is hard to swing a dead cat and not find a charging station, but if you are in the middle of the US or Australia, there are a lot of places that an EV is just not practical and won't be for a long time.
Worst comes to worst, all of the electric cars I know of won't just run the battery down and die in the middle of the road. The plug-in hybrids will typically run the battery out, then start and run the ICE engine till it runs out of gas, THEN they will go back to the big battery for a few last reserve miles, typically at a very reduced speed. The true EVs will give MASSIVE warnings when the battery range gets low and when you think you're done, they will go into a low power limp mode to get you off the road for a couple of miles. At that point you ought to at least have found a 110V outlet.
For more, there are a bunch of web-sites devoted to busting EV myths.
While there are experts on the subject out there who know a LOT more than me, I've been up to my ears in battery tech and electric vehicles since January 2013 when the first 787 battery failed spectacularly and then becoming part of a number of electric vehicle fires. (Shameless plug: www.HowItBroke.com) So this post has some background before getting to some of the classic EV myths.
With respect to the early Prius, Ford, Toyota, and other hybrid batteries, they were not lithium, they were an earlier version of nickel metal hydride (NiMH). They did OK for what the industry knew at the time but comparatively didn't have a lot of energy for the weight and the batteries were not that big. This meant those cars had an electric-only range of typically 10-25 miles so were really limited to the point they also needed an internal combustion engine (ICE) to be practical. Because the 4kWh Honda Insight and 9 kWh Prius batteries didn't store a lot of energy they needed to be charged a lot more often, and cycles is one of the biggest influences on wear. The early all-electric Nissan Leaf had MAJOR problems with batteries wearing out and Nissan eventually had to re-engineer them. But we are seeing Prius cars going 300,000 miles on an original battery, plus the brakes and tires last longer. On the upside, when a Prius battery fades or dies, it's usually just one or a few cells and they cost less than $40 each. If you are any kind of mechanic, you can watch a few Youtube videos to figure out how to test and replace them on your own.
There was a lot of manufacturing that went into these hybrids, so they did leave a larger pollution footprint. This was NOT because they were battery vehicles but BECAUSE EACH SINGLE CAR HAD THE POLLUTION IMPACT OF TWO POWER SYSTEMS, gas and electric.
This all changed after Tesla totally kicked the market in the ass with true lithium batteries, which as the chart above shows, have a LOT more energy. The other key to the Teslas was that rather than a 9 kWh block of battery limited to the area behind the rear seat, the amount of energy could be MASSIVELY increased by making the battery thin and making it so big it stretched between all four wheels, beneath the floor pan of the body.
A 9 kWh Prius battery is this little block:
While a 100 kWh Tesla lithium-based battery is the entire pan beneath the body. Having a flat 1,200 pound plate below the center of each wheel is why these things handle so well and don't roll over unless the driver does something REALLY stupid.
Because these cars could have 100 kWh of battery and didn't have the inefficiency of dragging the gas engine parts along, the range increased to 300-400 miles from 10-25 in the earlier Insights and Prius. Plus, by going to a true lithium chemistry they could divide a faster charge among the bigger number of cells, making life easier on each cell so the life of the batteries has proven to be really long. Now that the Teslas and other lithium-based cars have been around for 10 years, the industry is finding that the batteries are lasting longer than the cars. No worries about "When do I need to change the battery" because you won't.
The downside to the early Teslas was that they added cobalt in a way that significantly increased the energy, but in a way that could burn while the old Prius NMC batteries have been hit by railroad trains and not caught fire. What's happened since 2012 is that Tesla and the rest of the industry have figured out ways to reduce or eliminate the cobalt so you don't see the Model 3 (or Chevy Bolt, Hyundai Ionique, or others) have issues with fires, the way the early Model S did.
Between this and the volume of batteries now being made (largely driven by demand within China), the cost of batteries is falling fast. Outside of the US and Europe with our safety standards, you can buy a true practical EV for as little as $8,000 now. In the US, you can buy a Chevy Bolt for $23,000 and never have to buy a gallon of gasoline. If you buy one of the first 200,000 vehicles in a new model, you can subtract $7,500 from Federal tax and more for most States. While electricity does have a price, actual overall operating costs are pretty well established to be a quarter of what they would be for the same class of internal combustion engine vehicle.
btw - Pre-ordering is the best way to get into that first 200,000 vehicles for a tax benefit and the one that is currently a deal is the VW ID.4 SUV. https://www.vw.com/pre-order/ While the list price of $40,000 initially looks high, subtract $7,500+ from your taxes, then subtract about 75% of the operating costs (largely add up the gas and oil changes for the miles you own the car), and the real cost should be in the mid $20s for a really nice car. Used car prices are holding up so well that the residual value will probably not be too much less than that when you want to sell. Tesla already has more than a half million pre-orders for the ugly Cyber truck that looks like a door stop, and Ford blew through 200,000 number on Mach-E Mustangs within the initial weeks it was offered. If the ID.4 is too much, VW is coming out with the ID.3 economy car, and every other maker is hitting the market with new cars in 2021.
The current lithium batteries also have a MUCH smaller pollution impact for several reasons. First is elimination of all the parts and production to make a gasoline engine and transmission assembly. (EV transmissions are pretty simple) Second is that most of a EV battery is aluminum with some copper and other things added, but aluminum is the planets' most recycled material. fwiw, the Tesla 1,200 lb battery only has about 15 lbs of actual lithium. And finally, the industry is starting to understand how to break down used EV lithium batteries then either repackage the cells or recycle them. Our energy is fast going to renewable sources like wind and solar, so the production and charge impacts are reducing too.
Range is the limiting factor for both ICE and EV vehicles and probably the biggest goal of the car makers is to get recharge times down to where people will accept them. Recharging my old 2013 Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid from a 115 volt outlet gives about 5 miles per hour of charge, which takes a pathetic 9+ hours. Using a 220V charger cuts the time to a third of that. The big news is that with the newer systems, you can get up to 80% charge in a half hour on a 230-300+ mile range battery. That gives hours of driving time during your half hour break, so the range issue is becoming a lot less of a problem and after cutting the cost of a car, this is where the manufacturers are really focusing on improvements.
The last big limit to adoption is finding places to recharge. Doing it at home at night has hardly changed my electric bill but on the road you find that EV owners all have the same thought, where and when is the next place I'll need to charge? Fortunately, you just have to put "car charging station" into a Google map to find commercial places and not on those maps are a lot of stores which are putting charging stations in to draw local customers. Three of the biggest providers are ChargePoint, SemaConnect, and ElectrfyAmerica and each has a phone app to make charging easy to find and convenient to pay for. On the coasts it is hard to swing a dead cat and not find a charging station, but if you are in the middle of the US or Australia, there are a lot of places that an EV is just not practical and won't be for a long time.
Worst comes to worst, all of the electric cars I know of won't just run the battery down and die in the middle of the road. The plug-in hybrids will typically run the battery out, then start and run the ICE engine till it runs out of gas, THEN they will go back to the big battery for a few last reserve miles, typically at a very reduced speed. The true EVs will give MASSIVE warnings when the battery range gets low and when you think you're done, they will go into a low power limp mode to get you off the road for a couple of miles. At that point you ought to at least have found a 110V outlet.
For more, there are a bunch of web-sites devoted to busting EV myths.
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