Featured Forbes pits EV's against .... Everything?

If I wait long enough, the car I'm talking about will probably become available. The car you're talking about is not likely to ever be built. I still won't dismiss it out of hand though.

 

Lol, you just did
The car I was talking about is available today.
The one you were talking about will take some time, as you said, but it will happen

 

We might be getting hung up on semantics.

I said your car "probably" wouldn't be made, and then explicitly allowed for the chance that it would. That isn't an absolute dismissal, just a pessimistic guess at probability.

Reminder: I'm talking about an electric car with a 6-minute recharge time and enough commonality to be found for $10k once it has 100k miles of wear on it.

You mentioned an ICE car that could be compared to the Bolt, yet would fill its tank every night, never have emissions and not require an interruptive refueling during use. I think that's very improbable.

 

Your first and last bullets are not quite true. You will never have a full tank in BEV if you live in a place where you can't plug in. And ICE car only needs to stop to fuel up once a week or less and does not have to be in the middle of the day, there are plenty 24hr gas stations and it takes 10 minutes or less.

The more valid points I would make in favor of EVs:

• Electricity as fuel is much more flexible as far as the primary source of energy (oil, solar, wind, nuclear)
• Electric vehicles are way more energy efficient than ICE
• Electric vehicles are way less complicated than ICE (fewer systems required) and should require less maintenance cost
• Electric vehicles produce less noise (we've all heard those broken exhausts of ICE in the middle of the night)
• Electric vehicles can be made much more fun to drive for much less than an equivalent ICE (Model 3 puts a smile on most drivers' faces that can only be seen on faces of people gunning a Corvette)
• Electric vehicles should cost less to produce (once the dust settles from the retooling the industry)

 

Aha, got it. I misunderstood. When you said "your car will never be made" I thought the "car" you were referring to was the Bolt
Thank you for the clarification!

 

My terminology was vague. The post I was referring to was talking about 5 minute charge times. A quarter of how longSupercharging takes, and it likely is under the assumption for more charge than that Supercharger session provides.

DC fast charging is needed to make a BEV work as the only car for many people. The fallacy is in thinking that in order to be successful, BEVs need to charge 300 to 500 miles within 5 minutes. Many are already showing that BEVs don't need to refuel at the rate of filling up with gasoline in order to work. For those in which today's fast DC charging does not work, there are PHEVs and there will be PHEVs in the future.

A battery swapping company in Israel has already bankrupt.

Batteries are more complex than the propane tank for a grill. Until the tank ages or wears to the point that it takes out of service, the replacement will always hold the same amount of propane when someone swaps in the empty. To ensure a customer getting the same in regards to a battery for a BEV means building more buffer into the battery packs, or keeping more new stock on hand. Both of which increase the cost.

For a hypothetical ultra charger, there are plenty of locations in which installation wouldn't be any more difficult than installing fast DC chargers. For the locations away from high power service, ultra charger stations can make use of battery of capacitor buffers. The chargers won't be able to service as many cars in a given time frame then, but neither can a hydrogen station do the same as a liquid fuel station.

 

Yeah....
Just this.....

At the risk of incurring a PC demerit I would humbly submit that properly built and lightly muffled ICE does not...."make noise."
This is a YMMV thing....


Also.....there's towing and ride height.

@ towing:
The number of threads on this topic in a Prius forum suggest that it's non-trivial and also something that CAN be addressed.

@ ride height:
This is a little more complicated.
An eco-hatch to BEV transition is fairly seamless, since proper ride height has already been sacrificed on the altar of fuel efficiency in the former but there's a very large number of non-eco drivers that are concerned about F=MA, and a little dubious about cars that are "statistically" safe.
Another YMMV thing.....but if the BEV community wants go go mainstream, they're going to have to continue the ICE battle beyond the front lines that are currently being defended by eco-hatches.

 

Let's look 7 years out - 2025, as this is the first realistic time that infrastructure and critical volume of cars will be there to pay for battery swap or ultra charging locations.

Still with the technology in the porsche taycan, which says it can charge to 80% in 15 minutes using 800V quick chargers (3C rate for charging) we are getting there. The batteries in F1 race cars can charge much quicker, but they don't need to last over a decade like we would like in our plug-in cars.

In 5 years, it should be rather straight forward to get to a 6C rate to an 80% charge from 10%. In a 400 mile aer BEV that would be a 280 mile fill up in about 7 minutes if you were down to 10%. To fill up to 100% the charger would likely have to slow down, and take longer to fill the last 80 miles of range. Of course to charge that fast the battery would probably need to be conditioned first, and it takes time to plug-in and pay, and get to the charging station, but it would be a big charge in less than 15 minutes. My guess is you would need to charge about $50 for such a fill up to build out the infrastructure. That is about $6 gallon in a 35 mpg car, but most charges could be done at L2 or slower for much less than the gasoline car. $50/fillup is nothing on a long trip, if you don't drive long very often. My guestimate of charge rate needed at the ultra charger is 700 KW, about twice the 350 KW models porsche is proposing for the taycan.

If you do drive long often a phev or hybrid is a better choice.

 

There were a lot of empty spaces in the parking lot.

Bob Wilson

 

As we've discussed many times in this forum Pulling is different than Towing, and while the X (@ $80,000 and up, MOSTLY up!) has an almost 5000# towing capacity, which is adequate for a baby crossover I did not find a factory tow rating for the 3, although the GWVR is something like 4800# - which means that unless the curb weight is 1800# it's not going to have a practical tow rating.
I looked, and the curb weight is something like 3800# which means that, like the Prius, it's designed for about 800# of cargo - pax included.
Yes.
(As we've discussed herein) You can tow a light garden trailer, airplane, bike, etc...but it would be stretching things to tow anything larger than those relatively light items.

FWIW, I think that the '3' has fairly light competition (pun almost unintended) in this department since other entry level BEVs are built without towing in mind but for some people having a trailer hitch on the rear bumper is useful for other things than additional rear-end crash protection.

 

If you need to tow, then the EV is probably your second vehicle. In my son's family, they have a Sienna mini-van for the 7-8 passenger trips, a Prius hatchback for the 50 mile commute to work. And a v for the kids to school or soccer trips. 3 drivers, three cars. My wife has her Acura/Avalon, I my v for doing the things hers can't (or she won't, but that is a different story). My trip today was as a guest in a V-6 Lexus which had averaged 30 MPG since it was in Atlanta over the weekend and driven back home at 70+ MPH.

Horses for courses.

 

I don't know that your statement that "most people do not have access to home charging" is right.

For example, this guy estimates 70% have a driveway. (Sure, so of those might be only 4 feet long in a city like San Francisco.


And the census bureau
https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/ahb-9901.pdf

quote:
At homes without a garage or carport available, vehicles may be left either on the street or in a driveway, parking lot, or other offstreet space. For homes without a garage or carport, some kind of offstreet space is available at 87 percent of the detached units, at about 75 percent of both the single attached units and units in multiunit structures, and at 90 percent of the mobile homes. All this leaves about 7.8 million households who must rely on street parking. Of course, not all of those households have vehicles. Four in ten households who report no offstreet or garage parking also have no vehicles.

Everyone's situation is different.
And people with multiple cars are most likely to buy EVs in these early days.
And people with multiple cars are probably most likely to have a garage or driveway for those cars, I would guess.

Mike

 

Please don't take my comments as any sort of condemnation of electric driving- I'm all for it! I enjoy the education and debate I get when responding to the equally inevitable question, "Why isn't everyone already doing this??"

Observations aren't objections.

This is what I was getting at- I hadn't thought that much about it before, but a recharge point using a really powerful charger like the Tesla rig is still a lot slower, and selling the same amount of "miles per day" is going to multiply the amount of real estate required for it.

...or maybe we will find that parking and charging really are meant to go together, and BEVs just won't be that useful for people who can't charge at home.

Plenty of gas station owners have gone bankrupt too. That doesn't mean the business model was wrong, just their iteration of it. Swapping batteries and managing the fleet as it gets used, abused and naturally degrades is a technical challenge, but somebody will figure it out. It's already commonplace for smaller batteries.

yeah, that's what I'm getting at. That thing is big, and yet it is delivering about the same amount of energy per 24h as a 6-pump gas station which could fit in a tiny city lot.

A big charging station like that is fine if you've got room for it- someplace out where the land is cheap. If you tried to put that in a more urban setting, you would need to charge more for the parking than the power. California still has a lot of space, so I can see that model working well out there. But that again makes me think that home charging is the key to successful BEV ownership, and can fairly be seen as a limit to the size of the BEV market.

 

It is also important to keep in mind where chargers are located.
Today, in the Tesla fleet, only ~30% of miles are charged at superchargers. If that holds (I don’t expect it to), you would only need space to replace 30% of the gas station capacity.
I would also point out that the gas station footprint is largely redundant, we wouldn’t need to replace it all even if it was the only way to charge cars.

As you already alluded to, most car charging spots serve dual purposes. They are in mall, restaurant, business, and hotel parking lots. No additional land footprint is required.

 

Somebody is going to capitalize on this to normalize higher parking prices. Every space has a charger, every space is $40/day whether you use the power or not.

 

Possibly, I have yet to see it yet.
If they did, it would help alleviate the issue of people parking in charging spots when they don’t need to charge