Unless we open the market to China or other cheap EV makers (if that happens, that means we will become a 2nd or 3rd world country then). In another word, lithium-ion battery based EV has no future to become mainstream car.
There is no way to mine lithium in U.S. The same people who support EV, Conor, TY...will be the first to jump out against lithium mining in US. Liquid lithium battery itself has a few serious problems too in term of making EVs mainstream cars. That's the rational behind my my prediction.
I’m in my early 60s. I’ve got a 2019 Tesla Model 3 LR AWD. (The middle level between the Standard Range 2 wheel drive version and the top end Performance version.)
1.) it is the fastest vehicle I’ve ever owned, and there are other Teslas that are faster. This makes it fun to drive. This idea of EVs with tiny batteries that would have low performance like a 1965 Beetle are of no interest to me or most Americans. Maybe in some other countries that are used small, slow cars, but not here.
2.) I think plug-in hybrids are the worst of both worlds. You lose all of the mechanical simplicity and low maintenance of an EV, and the added weight of having both Internal combustion engines, electric motors, battery, gas, etc.
3,) Having a car with both a Lithium based battery and gasoline seems like driving a bomb. Once again no interest in plug in hybrids.
4.) My wife has a Toyota RAV4, and I thought we would take it out of town trips instead of the Tesla. We did that exactly once in the 3 years we’ve owned the Tesla. The Tesla just rides/drives so much better, and costs so much less to drive. It limits where you stop since there isn’t a supercharger at every exit yet, but there are plenty of Tesla superchargers along every major highway that there is zero range anxiety. I seldom charge for more than 15 minutes which gives me sufficient charge until my aging body and that of my wife’s needs another bio break. The charging infrastructure for Tesla owners is just fine now for any interstate based trip. (My biggest concern with taking the Tesla on an out of town trip is that it does not have a spare tire, and the 6 year old RAV4 does. Seems like many new cars don’t have spares these days either.)
5. This article advocating for smaller, slower, boring EVs reminds me of articles urging people to drive Smartcars or similar internal combustion vehicles I’ve read for the 40 years. I just don’t see it happening.
I remain curious why residential recharging stations are not solar?
Isn't that a no brainer?
There are so many factors such as where you live, the amount of roof area, whether there are trees blocking it, what time of day you would charge, etc. that it is hard to generalize.
That said, many people that go solar and have EVs find it a better deal to connect their solar panels to their house and grid. They sell any excess they generate during the day to the utility at a higher rate per KWh than they pay to charge their EV at night. (In some places they pay up to 5 times more for KWh during the day then they charge at night.)
EV charging is about 5% of my electric bill in the summer and maybe 10-15% in the winter (Natural gas heat). When you look at it systemically, it’s kind of like having an electric oven on for an hour or two every night. Probably not worth a solar system just for that.
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Throughout the history of America’s love affair with the car, nothing has succeeded quite like excess. Electric vehicles are heading down that same path. Give an E.V. a big enough battery and a fast-charging network, and suddenly you have the kind of vehicle we’ve always loved in this country: big, heavy, powerful and ready to head off into the sunset at a moment’s notice.
If you’re lucky enough to drive one of the premium E.V.s that fits this description, you already may feel like your consumer desires are in perfect alignment with planetary environmental goals. After a decade of manufacturers selling E.V.s at luxury car prices, the government has made concerted efforts to get more people driving them. The recently signed Inflation Reduction Act offers extensive tax credits to buy both new and used E.V.s. California just announced that it intends to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035.
However, these carrots and sticks merely tweak a fundamental approach to E.V. policy that has failed to achieve its goals. Rather than unleashing a mass market of affordable E.V.s, more than a decade of subsidies favoring large batteries has created an overheated market for premium E.V.s. A serious electrification policy will have to be tailored to the way we actually drive, not the way we think we do.
Like almost all E.V.-related challenges, it comes down to the battery. Providing the power and range that have made E.V.s appealing to American buyers requires massive batteries, which help make the current crop of E.V.s, on average, around 30 percent more expensive than gas-powered cars. That problem will likely get worse as battery supply chain constraints make batteries more expensive, bucking past trends that have made them cheaper.
The path to lower battery costs is extracting and processing minerals at a greater scale. Building out that kind of supply chain is slow, expensive and dangerous work, especially as America aims to become more independent of China’s battery supply chain dominance.
Compared to the herculean task of building supply chains to sustain a broad domestic E.V. market, tackling this problem from the demand side almost seems easy. Proving that E.V.s can road trip may have been an important psychological hurdle for the technology to tackle, but it remains more psychological than real: the average American motorist drives about 40 miles per day and 95 percent of our car trips are 30 miles or shorter.
We haven’t so much overcome this psychological hurdle as thrown big batteries at it, which is having a paradoxical (if predictable) effect of actually entrenching it. Despite dramatic growth in median E.V. range, to 234 miles in 2021 from 90 miles in 2015, consumer demand for range is always one step ahead. Three hundred miles might have been a desirable figure for potential E.V. buyers in 2019, but come 2021 it was 341 miles, according to findings from Cox Automotive. We could cater endlessly to this desire for more range without ever satiating it: More is always more, but more is also never enough.
As much as these psychological challenges are born of American geography, history and mythology, they are also born of the unique attributes of gasoline. Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.
By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.
For a century, Americans have had the luxury of choosing from a single, relatively uniform class of vehicles designed to serve all of their transportation needs whether they live in a small town or a big city. Electrification replaces that simplicity with a wide variety of different options, each with advantages and disadvantages in different realms. Government policy should match a limited battery supply to where it can have the maximum impact for consumers and the environment. That means incentives for a wide variety of smaller-battery vehicles to electrify our most common transportation needs and for home charging for all levels of housing density.
For some American households that may mean owning a single plug-in hybrid. For others that may mean a 150-mile E.V. for weekday miles and a hybrid truck for weekend projects and outdoor activities. Still other households might be able to serve their mobility needs with a mix of e-bikes, public transit and an occasional rental car. All of these options are better at delivering short- and medium-term fleet electrification in an era of battery scarcity than simply waiting for batteries to become cheap enough for every American to own a 300-plus- mile E.V.
The short time frame remaining to limit climate change brings unique urgency to the electrification challenge, but freeing our thinking from a century of car-bred habits will be critical in countless new mobility technologies. Making the most of emerging technologies always starts with understanding our needs and how best to meet them, not simply molding them into an image of the past. Figuring out how to grow the E.V. market across a decade of battery scarcity is only the most immediate opportunity to embrace this kind of challenge. How we face it will be telling.
regarding the urban bubble mentioned by Baron, a drive to downtown LA through East LA will show one all they need to know that there are thousands of people living in East LA alone who will never be middle class much less able to afford an ev new or used.
The French Laundry governor and the California state legislature are just gassing the public in banning new gasoline vehicles after 2035.
Link: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/01/21/opinion/electric-cars-have-dirty-little-recycling-problem-their-batteries
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To avoid the acceleration of these trends, regulations will be needed AS WE SHIFT to an electric vehicle future. Whereas China and the E.U. require electric vehicle manufacturers to take back spent batteries from consumers, no similar regulation or legislation has been adopted in the U.S. The track record in the U.S. for recycling e-waste does not offer much relief. Only three states have extended producer responsibility laws mandating that manufacturers take back lithium-ion batteries used in electronics, and none include vehicles. There are no clear prohibitions against exporting used lithium-ion batteries or selling used vehicles with degraded batteries to low-income countries at fire-sale prices. (emphasis mine).
But these are STILL EARLY DAYS, and there is still time to implement legislative solutions that can help avert an impending waste crisis. To that end, the California Environmental Protection Agency has formed a multi-stakeholder committee, of which I am a member, that will advise the state legislature on crafting practical solutions. (emphasis mine)
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Even the author knows what the future holds...if he thought there could be no solution(s), he'd have written the piece differently.
and used batteries will eventually go to landfills as currently, once cobalt is recovered, the rest is worthless.
The Chinese manufacture 90% of the world's lithium batteries and in doing so strip mine large areas for coal to provide prowar and huge swaths of land for lithium in Western areas while using semi- slave labor. The US cannot conceivably cover that short fall and certainly environmental rules would support a million strong army of protestors against digging one spade of dirt.
We just don't have the where-with-all to compete especially in the areas needed for self-defense.
Okay, I was off track but now I'm back on the rails. Newer batteries now being developed without Cobalt will be useless to recyclers so instead of most of the battery going to a landfill, the entire battery will soon windup in a landfill.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction (Sir Isaac Newton) or the law of unintended consequences.
see link...the top three countries with the largest reserves do not include China...and we should be able to do business with them...also, progress is being made in extracting Lithium from seawater..LOTS of Lithium there (going to need it for 'Fusion Reactors').
Cobalt is already being mined for myriad uses...mostly as a byproduct of the search for other minerals...those recyclers don't have that much of a market in cobalt anyway...(see this link below)...
(https://www.britannica.com/technology/cobalt-processing)....and this...(https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/top-cobalt-producing-countries/#).
Don't fret so much about EVs...Oh, and for quite awhile you'll be able to enjoy a ride in a "JP-4" powered 'vehicle' ;-).
Link: https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/battery-metals-investing/lithium-investing/lithium-reserves-country/
People in the vast rural areas need the range he eschews.
Further, the loss of transportation for the middle class is a great tragedy, especially when it is being done in the name of “stopping Climate Change before it is too late”, when we cannot possibly stop Climate Change, or impact it to any significant degree. Thus, it appears that this entire movement is an attempt to change our way of life which ultimately eliminates the middle class….one liberty and lifestyle perk at a time.
Regardless, it seems blatantly obvious that if we don’t build nuclear power plants soon, we will have too much sucked from the grid with the addition of these EV’s. Then there will be brown outs, Air conditioning will be taken away (as it is in Europe), and I suppose ultimately even limitations on the use of our electronic devices will come under the chopping block.
All for supposedly trying to affect an insignificant temp drop (assuming they aren’t wrong about CC) that won’t matter anyways……esp with countiries like China and India not honestly participating. And in the meantime, the US funds the Paris Accord countries with our money that we don’t actually have anymore, and trusts them “to do the right thing with it”…..including many of whom are run by crooked despots.
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I drive more than 300 miles all the time, and it only takes me 15 minutes to fill up, take a bio break, and buy a soda. Can't do that in an electric car.
Forcing everyone to electric cars seems like a good way to keep everyone living in the big cities, and therefore more likely blue voters.
I have been eyeballing the Rivian R1T for awhile, but I regularly go on 4 day camping trips to the middle of nowhere for hunting or fishing. My 2017 F150 will likely be replaced in a couple years with a dodge then maybe in 8-10 years I'll be ready for the electric truck.
We will be replacing my wife's 2011 Highlander in a year or so, have looked at EVs and Hybrids but we're leaning towards another gas vehicle. This is mostly due to wanting a 3rd row SUV and lack of options. I'd love to have one electric and one gas vehicle.
EVs are the future however and if I lived in a big city I'd probably already have one. But given my situation, I'll be a late adopter.
Link: https://batteriesnews.com/tesla-600-miles-battery-range-elon-musk/
You prompted me to do some reading. I found an article about the Tesla supercharging network. They can recharge a Tesla is 15-25 minutes. So, maybe 300 miles is ok.
I guess EVs are the future, because we will run out of sufficient oil that can be purposed for gas. One wonders what we have more of, though, petroleum for gas or rare earth metals for batteries. Maybe we've got them in asteroids.
And I like this prospect.
From Neil Degrasse Tyson, paraphrased from memory
Self driving electric cars - you will not own a car, instead you will order one for your trip. It's kind of self-driving cars meets the electric scooter craze and rideshare.
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