Featured This Weeks' Anti-Electric Car Hit Piece -"The Dirt on Clean Electric Cars"

it's good to have a known industry company make these statements. that way, knowledgeable intelligent people can challenge and shame them.

 

Sure do enjoy how they keep getting more and more desperate... But a century from now when they ask people what they most know about what happened in 2018, I bet almost all of them say that was the first year that Tesla finally achieved mass production at scale and soon thereafter destroyed ICE-based car markets forever!

 

My favorite part:
[QUOTE ]"...We’re facing a bow wave of additional CO2 emissions,” said Andreas Radics, a managing partner at Munich-based automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors, which argues that for now, drivers in Germany [] may still be better off with an efficient diesel engine ..."[/QUOTE]
After GERMANY's VW went & fraudulently created cheat software to trick everyone into believing their diesels are clean ...? Well of COURSE Germany can be cleaner with diesel - their Executive, behind bars now, for fraud proved it .... at least until we figure out their next fraudulent /cheat scheme !
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Strange article for Bloomberg for sure.
Chelsea Sexton used to say (not sure her current approach) that the eco-angle was weak, and should focus on drive quality improvement, and many people feel getting off petroleum is the No. 1 bonus. So in a sense this article is saying something similar. I would also question if current EV's life will be 12-years like my 2006 Prius, so I would put my 2006 Prius up against any vehicle for life-cycle eco-goodness, yet many would say it stinks due to no plug and it uses some petroluem. All depends on your personal value system, which may be different outside USA.

 

With friends like these, who needs enemies.

Bob Wilson

 

...is there no room for the idea that Bloomberg is correct? That building a battery might actually involve some environmental nastiness?

I'm certainly allowing room for the opposite- maybe this is garbage news bought by somebody selling oil for a living.

I have a sneaking suspicion that while we are discovering all the previously-unaccounted costs of burning oil for transportation, we are too busy to notice the previously-unaccounted costs of electrified transport. And soon we will discover that it's crazy stupid expensive to burn oil, but not really much cheaper (environmentally) to use electrons instead. That's my fear anyway.

As far as using 10 years as a break-even for the environmental penalty for having a battery? seems pretty reasonable actually.

If we are to pass an automotive lifestyle on to future generations, why not pass on the actual automobiles? Why aren't we building them to last for 50 years / 2 million miles apiece?

 

There is plenty of rope room. Just we’ve heard this nonsense refuted before. Repetition of false claims doesn’t make so. But that is not as important as a quiet ride, no vibration, great acceleration, and half the cost of gas miles.

Bob Wilson

 

More important is what we do with batteries afterwards.

If / how they can be recycled

 

We mine them. All of the elements that went into them are still there. Use mining technology to separate the material and sell on the wholesale market.

Bob Wilson

ps. Do you know where the landfill full of Prius batteries is? I have a shovel.

 

Irony of ironies, no one seems to care if there is a landfill somewhere, full of cast iron V8 blocks, or tranny housings .... because after all, Transportation would be worth it, then, but not for plug-in batteries. It's not too dissimilar from the freakish occurrence of plug-in battery fires. Those will make the news, while seldom if ever do you hear of the much much more common gas Auto fire - because gas is expected to explode now and then. Much more ubiquitous.

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Well aside from trash to China, our No. 1 export is old cars ground-up into iron powder.

 

My chief problem with the article (from comments I thought it was an opinion piece, but they actually had real research), is the sensational stuff is at the top, and the reasonable stuff is on the bottom.

Headline stuff - It will take 10 years to create less ghg than a diesel - small print - That assumes making the diesels and batteries in germany that has a heavy mix of coal in its electricity then charging in germany. Each year is a german 15,000 km - or 9300 miles - in other words it would take a car to go 150,000 km or 93,000 miles to be less co2 intense than diesel in germany if car and batteries were built in Germany. I expect a plug-in bmw, mercedes, or tesla to go a lot further than 150,000 km before it is recycled.

Later in the article - Tesla is building batteries in Nevada using a much cleaner lower carbon mix. Payback is much faster. If you charge the car in most of the US, Scandinavia, or France the co2 payback is much less than Germany or Poland. Bottom line is perhaps the battery packs should be produced in Scandinavia for Europe and not in Germany or Poland. That is very different than the headline. They also used the 2017 grid, but in 2030 the grid in germany should be much less carbon intense. In 2020 the tesla battery factory in Nevada should also drop even lower than it is now.
Tesla finally starts installing its massive 'world's largest solar rooftop array' at Gigafactory 1 - Electrek

 

Research has already shown that BEV production has higher carbon emissions than the production of an ICE car.

It also has shown that the lifetime carbon emissions of the BEV will be less. This depends, of course, on what supplies the grid. IIRC, Germany rolled back some renewable electric targets, and stuck with coal. This is also a factor for where the batteries are made. From the article, "By 2021, capacity will exist to build batteries for more than 10 million cars running on 60 kilowatt-hour packs, according to data of Bloomberg NEF. Most supply will come from places like China, Thailand, Germany and Poland that rely on non-renewable sources like coal for electricity."

So the ten year emission claim is assuming worst case electric emissions. Meanwhile(also in the article), "For perspective, the average German car owner could drive a gas-guzzling vehicle for three and a half years, or more than 50,000 kilometers, before a Nissan Leaf with a 30 kWh battery would beat it on carbon-dioxide emissions in a coal-heavy country, Berylls estimates show."

An efficient diesel will emit less than a gas-guzzling car, and it could emit less than an EV, if the EV is built and operated on a grid that has carbon intensive sources. Like Germany or Poland that the analysis focused on. It will be different in regions with more renewables in the mix, like California, Texas, and future China.

Note the yellow line in the first graph of the article. An EV Norway has no carbon emissions for operation.

Also in the bottom, it quotes a former Tesla exec that is building a battery factory in Sweden that would use hydroelectric power.

As the grids get cleaner, the EV cars will too. Fossil fuels for ICE cars, will go the opposite way has we have to go after more energy intensive sources for them.

 

This was not the article’s position. No one would hold the position that manufacturing batteries, or anything else, doesn’t create some nastiness. The articles position was that an Electric car isn’t much better than the diesel car in terms of cleanliness. For just about everyone in the USA, that is false.

Previously on accounted costs by who? These numbers are well understood in there of been many studies done by about this. This one is just a hit piece, taking one of the worst situations for manufacturing batteries. And even in this case over the lifetime of the vehicle, the electric vehicle comes out ahead.
Also important to remember, the electric vehicle will get cleaner as time goes by. The diesel vehicle will only get dirtier.

Reasonable for who? Certainly not anybody in the United States. In the USA the “payback period“ ranges from six months to a couple years.

The point to be taken away from this article, is that Germany needs to get off coal.

 

Yes, true cost accounting is where the rubber hits the road. And the root of it all is either a battery or a gas tank has to be filled up again and again for the entire lifespan of the vehicle. The amount of energy used to produce a battery vs amount of energy to produce a gas tank is an argument an ICE idiot will always win. But they cling desperately to that truth when it's always been the wrong argument entirely.

It's what you refill/refuel/recharge your vehicle with again and again for a quarter million miles... There's so many different ways to produce lots of electrons to fill your battery up with. There's only one way to dig up fossil fuels and put it into your tank and then put it into the sky. In the long run. the true cost of the latter is ten thousand times more costly than the former.

 

Bob Wilson

 

Bill is there a text version, that video is too slow for me to watch while doing other things.

 

I agree... I can skim thru text real fast, but give me info via video and I won't ever bother to know what it says... Unless it's a video of a DIY project that I'm about to do, posting a video isn't much different than posting nothing at all.

 

You do realize there is a playback speed control on YouTube videos. Faster is still understandable ... like Alvin and the Chipmunks. They subsample the audio to minimize the pitch change.

Bob Wilson