Electric Car Economics

[Woodland Hills]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

1) That's not what people say on this subject. They go on about the "silence"
2) Similar to noise, the vast majority of vibration is related to tires/suspension, not the engine. Modern engines are very smooth.
3) Continuously Variable Transmissions have no jerky-jerky shifts if it really bothers you...of course, unless I'm paying attention, I don't notice the shifts in my 10yr old F250.
4) Once you can spin the tires, more power from zero RPM...ehh. I don't spin the tires too often as tires are expensive and doing that will burn them up quick. I suspect you are referring to Tesla which puts in way oversized electric motors. Put a turbo on your average econobox and you have more power than you can handle....
5) Of course, if shifts bother you why would you want sportscar performance...All that being pushed back into the seat or hanging on going around curves must drive you nuts.

It is obvious that you have never owned an EV. You might have been for a ride in one a few times, but it sure sounds like you’ve never lived with one for a few years. I have.
I too had a 10 year old F250 as well as a 2018 King Ranch and neither had a smooth shifting tranny. If you don’t notice the shifts then you are simply mechanically insensitive. Modern engines can seem smooth to those who are unfamiliar with EVs, but maybe not so smooth when you are coming from 20,000 miles in an EV.
As for my not caring for performance, I have a 1000cc Laverda and a Lotus 11 waiting for me in storage when we move ashore someday. Google them......... I sold the V-12 car a few years back before moving aboard the boat.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

This is to me a massively flawed assumption.

Currently, downtown city streets are an uneasy standoff, a juggling act involving personal vehicles, transit, taxis, commercial vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians... tradeoffs between those trying to get from A to B and those who want to visit place C despite NO PARKING and NO STOPPING signs, cars running lights, pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists weaving in and out..

The rosy picture you're painting is basically surrendering the city streets to the vehicle. Pedestrians and cyclists will find it much harder to cross or move with it, street-facing businesses will see a decline in business. It's also creating a single point of failure: if a routing computer goes down, and/or a major intersection has a pedestrian fatality... gridlock again, and this time without other options.

The solution to too many cars is not to remove their drivers; it's less cars, and making it possible for people to get around efficiently without cars.

It's not an assumption; it flows out of the design and is the result of a huge amount of design work and simulation. This is no longer a pipe dream -- the systems and technologies are being developed day by day and are being integrated into city planning.



City streets carrying human-steered traffic require speeds and traffic separation which the lowest common denominator can deal with. The system starts to break down in heavy traffic with a vicious cycle of reduced capacity and increased congestion builds up.



We buy real time and historical traffic data from Tom Tom and other sources which show that average speeds in most major European cities have fallen to single digits. In London a couple of years ago, for example, the overall average speed on the road networks was 7.8mph.



So self driving cars operating with central coordination and/or neural net can pretty easily triple that speed, plus traffic separation can be reduced as much as ten-fold or more. So throughput of the system can be hugely increased. Even a rural freeway will see 5x increase in throughput to start with, and the same road area in an urban setting can see 20x or 30x increase in throughput and complete elimination of traffic jams. That doesn't mean that the road capacity becomes infinite, but traffic jams and even short of traffic jams, the heavy traffic vicious cycle slowdown can be prevented by a combination of huge increase of throughput and active routing and rerouting and in the worst case, journeys are not allowed if the system can't accommodate them.


Nor does such a system squeeze out bicycles or pedestrians at all -- on the contrary -- the total discipline of machine-guided traffic and elimination of the human factor will tremendously increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists, who will be dynamically accommodated in the traffic flow. The reduced need for road area (and practically elimination of parking) compared to human guided traffic will make it much easier to build out bicycle roads and bicycle lanes and will provide more space for bicycles and pedestrians. The city of the future will have greatly expanded infrastructure for bicycling and walking, elimination of buses and trams, limited role for metro/underground, and human guided traffic will be eliminated in city centers. Metro traffic will be increasingly intermodal with bicycle transport -- and that is already being implemented in Nordic cities.


As to ride sharing in machine-guided vans -- this is not your grandfather's bus, not whatsoever. Instead of traveling with ridiculous average occupancy of 7 or 8 people (this varies by city, but even in London it's not more than 11 or 12) along fixed routes with stops which may be far from your origin or destination, you are picked up and taken from doorstep to doorstep along with other people picked up and dropped off along a route usually quite close to the direct route from your origin to destination, with journey time quite close to taxi. This gives a massive increase in efficiency; converting to public self driving individual cars already can increase capacity utilization of the care from 5% (average in most cities of private car utilization vs. time they are parked and idle) to 50% or more; sharing the vehicle further increases capacity utilization. All this can dramatically reduce costs; it would no longer make sense at all to own your own car for driving inside a city even if it were allowed (which it won't be).



You guys are just not seeing the totally revolutionary implications of this technology. This is a much bigger change vs. 20th century human guided cars, than cars vs. horse and buggy from last century.



It's still not ready for implementation, and no one knows for sure how long it will take, but considering the revolutionary benefits and massive amounts of capital now being invested ($80 billion just in the U.S. and just as of the end of 2017, according to Brookings; see https://electrek.co/2017/10/17/compa...-driving-tech/), I think it will be sooner than we expect.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

Toronto, NYC and a handful of other N. American cities have viable public transit (though typically not as good as Europe and SE Asia)...but it's driven by the alternative being so horrible that you don't have a choice.

We used to go to Toronto a couple times per year and we would always pull into one of the suburban park&ride lots grab our bags and ride the metro in...because it was a pain to drive downtown and overnight parking was $35/night (probably double that now). Now figure $35/day for your rich uncle and that's around $10k/yr depending on exactly how many days a year he goes into the office.

As a transit user who's also driven or carpooled, having to drive into downtown Toronto daily is hellish. About the worst 60 to 90 min of the day. I much prefer transit, transit + my folding bike is even better. And occasionally biking the whole 10+ miles.

The GO train - our commuting rail/bus network, recently doubled the frequency of their main axis over the workday, and ridership went up along with it. People prefer it to the drive. It's less horrible than the drive.

btw - Downtown parking can often be had for CDN$20 to 24 for the day, depending on the lot. And my uncle coulda written off the parking, so cost wasn't really the reason.

Rich people in Toronto & NYC...and even in London, Paris & Rome drive (or take the helicopter) because they don't want to be part of the unwashed masses. Europe has just made it more expensive to avoid the unwashed masses.

The rich few are always gonna "rich". The rest of us will try to make the best of what's available.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

It's not an assumption; it flows out of the design and is the result of a huge amount of design work and simulation. This is no longer a pipe dream ......

Who's selling you this? Be careful if they tell you they have a bridge to sell.

I'm in the industry and those statements are no where close to reality. I've dealt with salesmen telling me similar BS stories but when you ask for proof, they usually give you a faulty study and then don't want to talk to you when you start questioning the assumptions in the study.

Yes, there are benefits, some very substantial benefits but nothing close to what you posted. Similar to the magic HP on the electric propulsion for boat threads, overstating the benefits does a disservice when people see unrealistic information so then they assume it's all false.

[Montanan]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Actually the economics of an electric car do not seem to be compelling at all when compared to a very efficient IC car like a BMW 118d which incredibly only burns 4.5l/100km in city driving, while emitting less than 100gm/km of CO2. That's only 270 liters per year of diesel fuel the amount I drive -- a trivial cost even in a land of highly taxed and expensive fuel.

But I will go with the electric car purely for fun. The BMW i3 is an extremely cool vehicle, with exposed carbon fiber structure, silent running, packaging different and much better than an IC car (park in any space; almost as short as a Smart while having more interior volume than a 1-series).

You will enjoy the electric car, just so long as you have a readily available plug to charge one where it is parked, and Bemmers are nice vehicles.

Just 270 liters of fuel per year, wow.

When I refuel my Chevrolet Suburban the tank holds 45 US Gallons / 172 liters. I'll use 270 liters, stopping once to refuel during an otherwise 17 to 20 hour, non-stop multi-state drive, e.g, from Montana to Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Montana to San Francisco, California. It is often frustrating to pay at the fuel pump with a credit card because the usual pre-authorization is for US$100.00 which only allows the pump to issue about 33 gallons / 125 liters thus not filling the tank properly. Generally I'll average 16 miles per gallon when traveling at 80 mph / 130 kph, just so long as I'm not hauling a two or three tons of trailered sailboat or a large utility or camping trailer , in which case the fuel mileage averages about 10 - 12 mpg in mountainous, high altitude driving. But then it has seating for eight and room for the passengers luggage with a 5.7 liter, V8 gasoline engine.

I have yet to see an electric car that is rated to tow anything of considerable weight; my friend forgot about that when he purchased a Tesla SUV, big oversight.

Also note that the all electric vehicles travel distance falls off tremendously during cold weather driving as the climate control energy is a big drain and the battery capacity is lowered.

[MarkSF]

Originally Posted by Marc1

What nonsense.
The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is at a historic low at 0.04%
The contribution of the total of human kind to this is 3%, that is 0.0012%

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.

[OldMan]

Originally Posted by LoudMusic

I've really enjoy the Fully Charged YouTube channel. They do a great job talking about all the cool technology available to us, especially electric cars. There's probably a video in their back catalog for every model of EV you could imagine.

My wife and I will be selling our 11 year old Jeep Wrangler this summer. When we bought the Jeep I said it would be the last infernal combustion car I owned. If/when we buy another car it will be a full EV, and likely a Tesla the way things are going. I'd like to see what they do with the upcoming Model S refresh, and what the SUV based on the Model 3 looks like.

When I try to sell the idea to people who don't like the thought of battery powered cars, I focus on the actual convenience of it, which is points they tend to think are negatives. No more filthy petrol station visits, ever. Maintenance visits once per YEAR. Every morning when you get in the car you have 200+ miles. Remote preheating and cooling of the cabin.

An additional benefit is not relying on a power source you can't supply yourself. And really has only one source. If the oil companies decide they want to charge 10x for their product, there's nothing you can do about it. But if you wanted to, you could make your own electricity for your car. It can be produced though dozens of different methods, some of which you can do at your own home.

https://www.youtube.com/user/fullychargedshow

And......


On a cross country trip, you will wait 1+ hours to charge your EV every 250 miles whereas my ICE/hybrid, 10 minutes every 600 miles. That assumes a charging station at convenient locations close to the highway you are traveling.


The infrastructure for charging EVs needs to expand rapidly before it can be considered on par with ICE fuel stops. Then you have to consider the electric infrastructure available at remote locations where roadside gas stations are located, there is usually not megawatts available.

[Lake-Effect]

First, thanks for your informed posts re self-driving; it's a topic that I'm very interested in following.

Regarding these points:

Originally Posted by Dockhead

City streets carrying human-steered traffic require speeds and traffic separation which the lowest common denominator can deal with. The system starts to break down in heavy traffic with a vicious cycle of reduced capacity and increased congestion builds up.

We buy real time and historical traffic data from Tom Tom and other sources which show that average speeds in most major European cities have fallen to single digits. In London a couple of years ago, for example, the overall average speed on the road networks was 7.8mph.

So self driving cars operating with central coordination and/or neural net can pretty easily triple that speed, plus traffic separation can be reduced as much as ten-fold or more. So throughput of the system can be hugely increased. Even a rural freeway will see 5x increase in throughput to start with, and the same road area in an urban setting can see 20x or 30x increase in throughput and complete elimination of traffic jams. That doesn't mean that the road capacity becomes infinite, but traffic jams and even short of traffic jams, the heavy traffic vicious cycle slowdown can be prevented by a combination of huge increase of throughput and active routing and rerouting and in the worst case, journeys are not allowed if the system can't accommodate them.

You will never achieve that sort of throughput til there's a homogeneous autonomous fleet. It also ignores weather and physics; you can have reaction times in microseconds but it still takes a finite distance to stop a moving object. A truck losing a wheel will now wreck 20 cars, not 2 or 3. So ok, we can separate and protect the self-driving lanes... and so on and so on... and by the time it's satisfactory you've created a train. I say, just go with trains.

Otherwise, I can't disagree with the above, except to point out how narrow the focus is. The only addressed problem is volume and speed of traffic, and the proposed solution simply makes it possible for more traffic, more quickly.

This analysis does not address the other problems that result from vehicle-centric urban design, such as how it makes pedestrians and bikes second-class entities. Or the fact that vehicle-centric design, a 20th century artifact, results in cities that are less "livable" and efficient.

Nor does such a system squeeze out bicycles or pedestrians at all -- on the contrary -- the total discipline of machine-guided traffic and elimination of the human factor will tremendously increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists, who will be dynamically accommodated in the traffic flow. The reduced need for road area (and practically elimination of parking) compared to human guided traffic will make it much easier to build out bicycle roads and bicycle lanes and will provide more space for bicycles and pedestrians. The city of the future will have greatly expanded infrastructure for bicycling and walking, elimination of buses and trams, limited role for metro/underground, and human guided traffic will be eliminated in city centers. Metro traffic will be increasingly intermodal with bicycle transport -- and that is already being implemented in Nordic cities.

Examples? I'm only familiar with cities who have succeeded in enabling increased cycling through separation, dedicated lanes etc.

It's my understanding that separation from vehicles is the best and most effective way to provide safe and efficient cycling infrastructure. Ditto for pedestrians. This is often aided by cooperation between cycling and transit - eg bike racks on buses. This sort of approach also makes for more livable cities.

You guys are just not seeing the totally revolutionary implications of this technology. This is a much bigger change vs. 20th century human guided cars, than cars vs. horse and buggy from last century.

I see the possibilities. I know it's coming. I just don't like how it's being treated in isolation, as the only required solution, and how it ignores the main traffic problem- too many vehicles - as well as the shortcomings of vehicle-centric urban design.

It's still not ready for implementation, and no one knows for sure how long it will take, but considering the revolutionary benefits and massive amounts of capital now being invested ($80 billion just in the U.S. and just as of the end of 2017, according to Brookings; see https://electrek.co/2017/10/17/compa...-driving-tech/), I think it will be sooner than we expect.

Yes it's being aggressively developed and pushed by several large players. That alone is reason for caution.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Montanan

You will enjoy the electric car, just so long as you have a readily available plug to charge one where it is parked, and Bemmers are nice vehicles.

Just 270 liters of fuel per year, wow.

When I refuel my Chevrolet Suburban the tank holds 45 US Gallons / 172 liters. I'll use 270 liters, stopping once to refuel during an otherwise 17 to 20 hour, non-stop multi-state drive, e.g, from Montana to Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Montana to San Francisco, California. It is often frustrating to pay at the fuel pump with a credit card because the usual pre-authorization is for US$100.00 which only allows the pump to issue about 33 gallons / 125 liters thus not filling the tank properly. Generally I'll average 16 miles per gallon when traveling at 80 mph / 130 kph, just so long as I'm not hauling a two or three tons of trailered sailboat or a large utility or camping trailer , in which case the fuel mileage averages about 10 - 12 mpg in mountainous, high altitude driving. But then it has seating for eight and room for the passengers luggage with a 5.7 liter, V8 gasoline engine.

I have yet to see an electric car that is rated to tow anything of considerable weight; my friend forgot about that when he purchased a Tesla SUV, big oversight.

Also note that the all electric vehicles travel distance falls off tremendously during cold weather driving as the climate control energy is a big drain and the battery capacity is lowered.

Well, no argument from me whatsoever. For the duty you describe, there is no substitute for the power density of diesel fuel, otherwise known, jocularly, as dino juice. Still more than an order of magnitude greater than the best electric batteries. Not even to get to the question of the distribution network.

That will change, but it ain't changed yet.

But in the city, hauling a couple of warm bodies plus a bag of vintage vinyl - the electric batteries are already adequate. Horses for courses.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

Who's selling you this? Be careful if they tell you they have a bridge to sell.

I'm in the industry and those statements are no where close to reality. I've dealt with salesmen telling me similar BS stories but when you ask for proof, they usually give you a faulty study and then don't want to talk to you when you start questioning the assumptions in the study.

Yes, there are benefits, some very substantial benefits but nothing close to what you posted. Similar to the magic HP on the electric propulsion for boat threads, overstating the benefits does a disservice when people see unrealistic information so then they assume it's all false.

Well, I'm also "in the industry", so to speak, and there are no salesmen involved, rather people trying to plan cities realistically taking into account technology.


It's all speculation as long as it's not actually up and running, so you're entitled to your own, and only time will tell for sure what is right. But the theory is certainly sound, and it has nothing to do with the silly magic horsepower in electric boat propulsion, which I have consistently argued against. Whether the theory can be realized in reality - we shall see, but I would not, personally, bet against it, and in fact, I don't -- I'm investing several million euros into legacy planning for a large parking facility under an office/hotel complex I'm building, which my partners and I don't believe will be required for parking, already in less than 10 years. That is, building it with height and configuration and services which will allow it to be used for something besides parking when there's no demand for parking.



Some people can sit around and jawbone about it without consequences; others of us have to make bets and risk money on it, and I include city planners we work with, whose professionalism we greatly respect.

[Rumpi]

EV economics are not hard to understand. You have the "normal" vehicle age related depreciation. Given that most first gen EV's are not high end limousines but overpriced small cars they don't hold value very well. Then you have the battery factor. Batteries degrade with age and use (independent of each other) and at around 80% remaining capacity the BMS decides it's time for a change. In theory the battery should last the usefull life of a car (around 10 years) and the manufacturer warranties reflect it. That is 8 years or 100 000km for the BMW i3. Considering this two factors and remembering that right now there is no big market or real long term experiences a price drop of 50-60% from new for a 4 year old car with half the official life left in the battery is normal. A IC car of similar size and age with 150-200 000km on board will experience a similar drop.

The ADAC has a running test since sept 2014 for EV's. The tested BMW is a REX with 22kWh battery. Conclusions after 84 000km: initial range (test conditions, no recuperation) 106km, now 99km. Median consumption 20,1kWh/100km and 7,5l/100km for the range extender. They attest a very precise range prediction and say it kills tires, the first set of winter tires lasted only 14000km.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Rumpi

EV economics are not hard to understand. You have the "normal" vehicle age related depreciation. Given that most first gen EV's are not high end limousines but overpriced small cars they don't hold value very well. Then you have the battery factor. Batteries degrade with age and use (independent of each other) and at around 80% remaining capacity the BMS decides it's time for a change. In theory the battery should last the usefull life of a car (around 10 years) and the manufacturer warranties reflect it. That is 8 years or 100 000km for the BMW i3. Considering this two factors and remembering that right now there is no big market or real long term experiences a price drop of 50-60% from new for a 4 year old car with half the official life left in the battery is normal. A IC car of similar size and age with 150-200 000km on board will experience a similar drop.

The ADAC has a running test since sept 2014 for EV's. The tested BMW is a REX with 22kWh battery. Conclusions after 84 000km: initial range (test conditions, no recuperation) 106km, now 99km. Median consumption 20,1kWh/100km and 7,5l/100km for the range extender. They attest a very precise range prediction and say it kills tires, the first set of winter tires lasted only 14000km.

Thanks, very useful, very objective information, responsive to the original post!

[LoudMusic]

Originally Posted by OldMan

And......


On a cross country trip, you will wait 1+ hours to charge your EV every 250 miles whereas my ICE/hybrid, 10 minutes every 600 miles. That assumes a charging station at convenient locations close to the highway you are traveling.


The infrastructure for charging EVs needs to expand rapidly before it can be considered on par with ICE fuel stops. Then you have to consider the electric infrastructure available at remote locations where roadside gas stations are located, there is usually not megawatts available.

And ...

I'd just fly if I was in a hurry to get somewhere far away. Also, I like to stop for more than 10 minutes so that I can eat.

[OldMan]

Originally Posted by LoudMusic

And ...

I'd just fly if I was in a hurry to get somewhere far away. Also, I like to stop for more than 10 minutes so that I can eat.

I guess I missed that Elon added hotdog stands to his charging stations...


Remember, the more you eat, the battery range diminishes.....

[markpierce]

What's their range versus when air condition or heater is operating?