Featured What if BEVs were what we used for 100 years?

right. no one would even be trying to invent it.

 

We'd have a whole lot of lithium-ion batteries laying around waiting for someone to figure out how to recycle them efficiently.

 

Not quite sure what you mean here, electric cars have been around a hundred years. Basically they fell out of favor for an entire human lifetime and are going through a huge revolution at the moment. I suppose if that is what we used as the dominant form of automobile a lot more attention would have been given to developing batteries and charging infrastructure perhaps our batteries would be a little better? A lot of the fancy cooling and other systems they use now depend on cheap computers that can be in cars that has really only been around a couple decades or so. Maybe we would have DC fast charging a decade or so earlier as it needs two way communication. I am not sure if we'd really be all that ahead except perhaps for battery technology.

 

I wish they could make them last 100 years. That's the biggest thing I'd love to see changed in switching to electric cars. Maybe they could put a big tax on them and you get it back (with interest) if you keep the same one on the road 40 years. It would be a start.

 

Truth is fixed BEV taxes don’t make sense in a market where one newer EV goes 300+ Miles but another older one barely hits 40.

and normally high fixed registration taxes do decrease over time based on value or age.

I guess it motivates folks to unload older more limited ones

 

There actually are a few 100 year old EVs still around. Jay Leno has one The 100-Year-Old Electric Car There was one in a consumer reports video on EVs recently. I suspect most gassers do not last 100 years, most either do not get maintained properly, get totalled or whatever in that time. Gassers start nickel and diming you to death as they get older and taking more time to fix. What will die on an modern EV other than the battery we shall see. I doubt the computers in modern cars will hold up that long and can be more challenging to fix when they are like 50 years old (weather gas or electric). Can you fix a hundred year old mobile phone? A PC? Can't just machine new parts for some of it.

I do want to add I actually sympathise in your wish against this disposable culture we find ourselves in, I am just not so sure how to make that happen particularly with the computing technology in all modern cars. Easier to keep a 1950s car on the road for a century or a steam engine

 

not sure what i mean either

 

maybe we'd be on to fusion

 

Weird, they just announced a Lithium based battery recycling center near Rochester. Canadian company called Li-Cycle.

But in all reality we have a bigger problem with old Lead Acid batteries not being recycled. According to the lead acid battery manufacturers, 99% of all lead acid batteries are recycled. Walmart brags that they sell about 3M batteries per year which means about 30,000 aren’t being recycled per year from Walmart alone. Kind of dwarfs the Lithium battery problem and probably always will since Lithium lasts much longer.

I would also argue nobody would just throw out an entire battery when the replacement of a few cells will be all it takes to refurbish one.


iPad ? Pro

 

Current Li-Ion recycling doesn't recycle the lithium because mined lithium is 5 times cheaper.

 

Not exactly sure what the assumption is. Are we assuming if we had BEV like we have today for the last 100 years? If that's the case, invention of gasoline engine automobile that can go far longer range on a single tank maybe welcomed. Of course that is if gas station infrastructure as we know today is also available instantly.

 

if new replacement cells are available, which they aren't for the Prius. Checking in a used, not yet failed cell is not refurbishing.

 

Well just now BEVs are getting close to the range of a tank of gas in your typical car, looks like we are on target to hit parity soon. charging time is getting better an e-tron on some new ccs chargers can go to 90% in 15 minutes it seems. If we had not had gasoline cars dominate it may be possible that we would possibly have hit that range sooner but not so sure with the lack of cheap compers in the car, I do not think we would have had computerized cars any sooner. On Fusion we've been working on it anyway, I doubt it would develop it any sooner sure we'd have more pull on the grid but it would have just been more coal IMHO. The modern BEV with fast charging and all these other fancy features depends on computers in the car. Longer range sooner is about what I'd see as different.

 

BEVs lost out a hundred years ago, because ICE car makers put an electric motor in the car.

Which may not be the case with this hypothetical, nor in the future.

 

Batteries have more than one element and some of them are easily separated and reused.

Bob Wilson

 

What percentage of gas engines are recycled?

Mike

 

Close to 100.

 

About 95% wtih 80% of vehicle material recycled.
Automobile Recycling Stats: What Percentage of Old Cars are Recycled?

The gasoline is not recycled it is converted to energy CO2 and water and some pollutants. It is a very limited resource. Steel, iron, and aluminum are not but it is economically profitable to recycle. I'm sure the gaskets, filters, etc end up in land fills.

The reason lead acid batteries started being recycled is because they are toxic. They can't just go into a landfill. Now it is profitable to recycle, as lead from batteries is cheaper than mining.

Lithium batteries are fairly safe in a landfill. The cobalt and nickel though are expensive though so we can expect that to pay for recycling. Until now the packs were small for phones and laptops. With larger battery packs for cars it is only a short period of time before they are recycled. The cheapest way is smelting, which requires a lot of energy so it is likely it will be done where energy is cheap. If we had a large number of evs for 20 years there would be a lot of recycling. For now the partially spent packs can be used for grid buffering and solar off grid storage. By the time there are large amounts of cobalt available from packs there will be a recycling industry for it.

 

If it has been only, say 99%, for decades wouldn't there be piles of them in numbers far in excess of all the EVs sold in the last 10 years?
Batteries removed from EVs could be put to use in storage solutions.
Engines from old cars can be used as....

Mike