Electric Car Economics

[MarkSF]

Originally Posted by Marc1

https://electricitywizard.com.au/wp-...price-2017.png

Check the above chart and marvel at what the renewable obsession fuelled by the fraud of CO2 is baaad, will do to your power costs. Australia is at the forefront of idiocy together with Denmark and Germany. Woohoo, up the greens!
Check out how much tax Denmark is charging the poor sods that live there!

Wasn't Denmark just voted the happiest nation on earth?

[stevensuf]

Originally Posted by MarkSF

This is bollocks, or, rather, highly selective use of facts to fit a certain belief system, which amounts to the same thing.

The atmosphere is about 0.04% CO2, that is correct, but for the last 400,000 years, it has been an average of .025%. It has increased recently and rapidly, and that's entirely due to human activity.

Humans have contributed a small amount of the total CO2, that's true again, but you ignore the fact that the system was in equilibrium in 1800, before the industrial revolution. C02 produced equaled C02 sinked. The climate was stable for a very long time, about 400,000 years. Now, that is not the case, there is more C02 produced than is being sinked. Humans are responsible for ALL the excess, which is what is causing change, so humans are therefore responsible for ALL the change.

Eventually, the climate should re-stabilise. This is predicted to take 100 to 1000 years. What is causing concern is what the climate is predicted to be like when it has re-stabilised. Temperatures, sea levels etc are all predicted to be problematic.


Then there's the factor of what happens to the climate during the change. You've given a massive, complex system a big kick. You could reasonably expect some wobbles while it settles. Wobbles are predicted to be in the form of greater storm behaviour, more extreme weather, shifting weather patterns etc.

Going back further into pre-history, the atmosphere was much higher than 0.04%, but the planet was also rather inhospitable to humans.

Co2 fell to almost 200ppm during the last full glaciation period, killing much of the plantlife on the planet, most plants are geared for around 1200ppm of co2, the average co2 level in the last few hundred million
years. Most plants will die sub 180ppm of co2, which would have been

a real possibility very soon with the ice returning.



Life was very hospitable with these levels of co2, the world had few

deserts and was far greener.


Chances are that the co2 we have unleashed will actually save the ecosystem during the next cooling period.


The climate has not been stable for a very very long time, and if you think
200ppm of co2 is good for the world, then i suggest you do a bit more reading on the subject.


We are at the end of a 12000 year warm period, a return to glaciation
is due very soon, the co2 we have pumped out will do very little to stop this.


Please do your homework and stop believing the hype Sure 90% of scientists believe in climate change, but very few believe in man made global warming, the truth is hidden in the details. Go read up on the
famous 97% or whatever number they came up with, was some aussie
paper sent out a questionnaire sent out to numerous scientists, asking about climate change and not global warming. All very very misleading.

[foggysail]

Originally Posted by B23iL23

Keep one thing in mind with the Hybrids. Almost no Hybrid owners ever charge (at home, at a charging station etc) - they just switch over to the petrol engine and off they go. Because of this there will be a time (quite soon I suspect) where you won't see Hybrids classed as EV's. Instead they will carry the same tax/congestion charges as regular ICE cars.

INTERESTING!!!

[AKA-None]

I think a few people missed my point. When we switched from horses to cars there were few options for fueling a car versus a horse. After awhile that situation changed. I think a similar situation is in the making for electric vehicles. Eg for now it’s easy to refuel a ice but more difficult to refuel an ev. Over time that is likely to change along with a more distributed electrical production system. Centralized electrical generation has advantages but then so does augmenting that with a distributed system.

[flyingnut40]

I live in Canada and bought a 2014 i3 at the end of a 3yr. lease.
It is fully loaded and cost some guy a lease on $53k USD and I bought it with 15k miles (25k kms) with one year warranty left.
V.W. bought and crushed my TDI and after your commute costing $50/wk I couldn't see doubling my fuel costs for a Honda that rusts badly here so I bought the i3 for $26k CDN which is about 1/3 of new cost considering $ conversion etc. Now my commuting is $40/ month charging at home and again at work. Work charge is free. Cool car....goes quicker than ANY other BMW even the i8 that cost $160k!!
I have put 100,000km on it in 2 yrs. And the batteries are holding up well at 126k.
My only complaint is the special tires. Not expensive but you need to check availability b4 you need them. Tire rack is your friend. You need winter tires and they ONLY fit the ugly base model rims. But Im ok with that.
Btw it is NOT a hybrid but a BEV with range extender. Nobody else make one. 99% of driving is done on electric but if you get low on charge the REX keeps you going for another 60-70 miles until you can get a charge. (Or more gas)
I hacked my car back to european specs (not USA/California) and I have full control of the motor and I do 400 mile trips when I want stopping every hr. or so for another $8 worth of gas. Car can sustail 70 mph on gas while getting 37 mpg.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by MarkSF

Wasn't Denmark just voted the happiest nation on earth?

No Denmark was "rated" highest by an organization promoting the government similar to Denmark and they set up a rating system that rates that type of government highly...basically a self fulfilling prophesy.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by flyingnut40

I live in Canada and bought a 2014 i3 at the end of a 3yr. lease.
It is fully loaded and cost some guy a lease on $53k USD and I bought it with 15k miles (25k kms) with one year warranty left.
V.W. bought and crushed my TDI and after your commute costing $50/wk I couldn't see doubling my fuel costs for a Honda that rusts badly here so I bought the i3 for $26k CDN which is about 1/3 of new cost considering $ conversion etc. Now my commuting is $40/ month charging at home and again at work. Work charge is free. Cool car....goes quicker than ANY other BMW even the i8 that cost $160k!!
I have put 100,000km on it in 2 yrs. And the batteries are holding up well at 126k.
My only complaint is the special tires. Not expensive but you need to check availability b4 you need them. Tire rack is your friend. You need winter tires and they ONLY fit the ugly base model rims. But Im ok with that.
Btw it is NOT a hybrid but a BEV with range extender. Nobody else make one. 99% of driving is done on electric but if you get low on charge the REX keeps you going for another 60-70 miles until you can get a charge. (Or more gas)
I hacked my car back to european specs (not USA/California) and I have full control of the motor and I do 400 mile trips when I want stopping every hr. or so for another $8 worth of gas. Car can sustail 70 mph on gas while getting 37 mpg.

37mpg is not impressive and neither is 60 mile range on gasoline!


But of course that is not the primary usage mode for this vehicle. It's cool that it can function at all as a normal internal combustion-driven vehicle.


For my use case, this is absolutely fine. I might drive it 200km round trip once in a while, but I'll have a place to recharge in the middle, so probably manage it with little use of the REX. Mostly I need it for short city trips.


My big issue is that I don't have a way to charge it at home -- street parking only -- unless I manage to snag one of the few public charging spots near my home. Slight problem there. But my office is only 3.6km from home and I can charge it for free there. So I guess it won't be so bad. The car will still be fully charged when I get home.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by foggysail

INTERESTING!!!

It appears he is confusing hybrid vs plug-in-hybrid.

Plug-in-hybrids are commonly charged at home.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

It appears he is confusing hybrid vs plug-in-hybrid.

Plug-in-hybrids are commonly charged at home.

Different plug-in hybrids are different. Most of them are really primarily internal combustion powered, with some limited electric-only range. Like the plug-in hybrid, which has only 25 miles electric-only range. Less common are ones like the i3 which are primarily electric vehicles, with limited internal combustion powered "range extension".


So he may not be confusing them. It may be that many folks with the first type of plug-in hybrid just don't bother to plug them in -- I don't know.

[a64pilot]

Be wary of course that the charge rate from a regular domestic plug is very slow, constrained of course by how much power the plug can deliver.

For electric cars to make much market share, it’s going to take more available charging stations of course, but that’s sort of trivial.
What is going to be hard to do is to produce the amount of power needed to charge them, they pull a lot of power, it’s just physics, it takes a lot of power to push a ton of steel down the road up a hill and thru the air, all an electric car does is use a different source.

It’s a lot like the cooking with electricity thing, if you have the excess power, fine no problem, if not your going to have to generate it.
Usually in an electric grid there isn’t much excess power, from a Business perspective it doesn’t make sense to build a system that isn’t fully used, so there are going to have to be a significant number of power plants built to support a significant number of electric cars.
I’d suspect Nuclear, but we will see.

But that has been done before. To look at how much fuel, think ATL Airport, each airplane on average hold about 6,000 gals of fuel, probably less as they aren’t empty to start with and all don’t fill up, but I think the average departure rate when busy is every 30 sec.
I know that there are on average 2,700 arrivals and of course departures every day.

Anyway you can figure more than 5,000 gals per fuel per min is pumped at ATL airport, so much that it would be impossible to truck it or even by train, there is a rather large petroleum pipeline that services ATL airport.
But the average traveller never thinks about it, and to the average citizen, power just comes out of the wall, and trash is thrown “away”

Something on the magnitude of that to produce and deliver electrical power is going to have to happen to power a large population of EV’s.
Personally I don’t think the taxpayer should pay for it, that’s wrong in my book, I think the EV drivers should, but so far for some reason the average EV owner is wealthy, and is being subsidized by the average taxpayer, that isn’t.

[sanibel sailor]

Remember when WiFi was a big deal? Hard to find, Hotels and other places charged a lot for it. Then "Free WiFi" was a seller. Now it's expected and widely available. If somewhere doesn't have it, you wonder why not.
Home charging is slow on 120V; I had a hard time keeping fully charged. 4 times as fast on 220V which I just pulled an extra outlet box off my dryer circuit. No issues since.
The real deal for fast charging is DC, will bring it up to 80% charge in 30 minutes.
Most charging is done at night off peak when excess capacity yields lower prices. My car has a feature that you can select when it does the charging.

[flyingnut40]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Be wary of course that the charge rate from a regular domestic plug is very slow, constrained of course by how much power the plug can deliver.

For electric cars to make much market share, it’s going to take more available charging stations of course, but that’s sort of trivial.
What is going to be hard to do is to produce the amount of power needed to charge them, they pull a lot of power, it’s just physics, it takes a lot of power to push a ton of steel down the road up a hill and thru the air, all an electric car does is use a different source.

It’s a lot like the cooking with electricity thing, if you have the excess power, fine no problem, if not your going to have to generate it.
Usually in an electric grid there isn’t much excess power, from a Business perspective it doesn’t make sense to build a system that isn’t fully used, so there are going to have to be a significant number of power plants built to support a significant number of electric cars.
I’d suspect Nuclear, but we will see.

But that has been done before. To look at how much fuel, think ATL Airport, each airplane on average hold about 6,000 gals of fuel, probably less as they aren’t empty to start with and all don’t fill up, but I think the average departure rate when busy is every 30 sec.
I know that there are on average 2,700 arrivals and of course departures every day.

Anyway you can figure more than 5,000 gals per fuel per min is pumped at ATL airport, so much that it would be impossible to truck it or even by train, there is a rather large petroleum pipeline that services ATL airport.
But the average traveller never thinks about it, and to the average citizen, power just comes out of the wall, and trash is thrown “away”

Something on the magnitude of that to produce and deliver electrical power is going to have to happen to power a large population of EV’s.
Personally I don’t think the taxpayer should pay for it, that’s wrong in my book, I think the EV drivers should, but so far for some reason the average EV owner is wealthy, and is being subsidized by the average taxpayer, that isn’t.

Keep in mind that 37 mpg is the emergency power backup. Better than a honda civic...... but it 100,000 km I've probably only used 30 gallons of gas.
With the exception of dockheads scenario I dont recomend electric to anyone who cant install at least a medium performance charger at home. Charging in the wild is inconvenient at best. My car charges in 18hrs., 7hrs., 3hrs. Or 35 min. depending on what charger is used. The only ones i recomend are the middle two at home overnight. If I'm doing the run from Toronto to Niagara Falls and back to Oshawa, that is a 5 charge trip and even though IKEA has high power charging for free, I still drop $8 in gas in 2 min. And keep going.
Dockhead could get by on one charge a week at work......
I love going out on a cold morning to a preheated car with clear windows!

YMMV,
Dennis

[zboss]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

No Denmark was "rated" highest by an organization promoting the government similar to Denmark and they set up a rating system that rates that type of government highly...basically a self fulfilling prophesy.

Have you lived there?

Originally Posted by Dockhead

So he may not be confusing them. It may be that many folks with the first type of plug-in hybrid just don't bother to plug them in -- I don't know.

Its not cheap to install an at home 240 volt charging unit and I don't think most folks that live in apartment or condo complexes have access to the electric charger at home. There is really nothing wrong with a hybrid - its at least heading in the right direction and it may take another 20 years but we will eventually be internal combustion free for a large number of vehicles.

I find it very funny that americans somehow equate how much something costs to the value it brings, except for when they don't and for the most ridiculous things. Like cost is the only aspect of value. Where I was commuting 2 hours each way for work, not having to take an extra 15 minutes every day to go out of my way to fill my tank added the equivalent of a work week that I could be at home with my family instead. In major metro areas, 2 hour one-way commutes are fairly regular so the benefit of electric and hybrid cars are probably more apparent than in small metro areas where commutes may only be 10-15 minutes.

Where electric cars fall short is charging time but now we at least have cars with the same range in electric as gas cars. Filling the battery does take 30 minutes to an hour but the cost is about half that of filling a car with gas. Basically the time it takes for you to stop, take a pee, and get lunch.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by zboss

Have you lived there?

Nope but not many people have lived in more than a handful of countries, so a "vote" rating a few hundred countries doesn't prove much.

These "ratings" are typically not votes but systems designed to come up with the answer the author wants.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Different plug-in hybrids are different. Most of them are really primarily internal combustion powered, with some limited electric-only range. Like the plug-in hybrid, which has only 25 miles electric-only range. Less common are ones like the i3 which are primarily electric vehicles, with limited internal combustion powered "range extension".

The people I know with plug-in-hybrids have these lower range versions.

And this makes sense, (depending on who's statistics you want to believe) around 70% of workers have a commute of 25miles or less in the USA. I suspect an even higher percentage in Europe...so running on electric is very much viable for most commuters.

Also, this avoids the cost and hassle of installing a high output charger at home, since a household outlet will charge somewhere around 4miles per hour of range...so even 8hr will give you 32miles (ie: plenty of time to max out a 25mile battery pack).