Posted on 11/25/2015 5:07:47 AM PST by thackney
In the next 60 months the automotive industry will see more change than in the last 60 years. European car manufacturers should commit to electric cars now or Europe will be in economic trouble
Once in a while a new technology comes along that profoundly changes the way humans relate to energy and transport. Wheels, steam engines and airplanes are all step changes that put humanity on a new trajectory. When I first drove the full electric Nissan Leaf back in 2011, I realized I was sitting in such a technological breakthrough.
An internal combustion engine peaks at ~30% efficiency. This is the result of a century of continuous improvement and trillions of dollars in research and development. The room for improvement that's left in combustion engines is minimal. Yet there I was, driving the first generation of a car that comfortably hit 85-90% efficiency! Immediately I understood the tremendous potential of the electric car: fast acceleration, no noxious emissions, three times as energy efficient -- and it could be driven on pure sunlight.
Since the introduction of the Nissan Leaf, more electric cars have hit the market. But this is just the beginning of a massive shift from fossil fuels and combustion engines to electric cars powered by renewable energy. At Fastned we call this the Autowende.
Here's why I think the European automotive industry has to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine and put all their effort and funds behind the electric revolution.
Combustion engines cannot compete with electric motors
As battery prices continue to fall and more people start to appreciate electric cars, the internal combustion engine and the traditional European car manufacturers are facing the perfect storm. They have to comply with ever stricter emission regulations and deal with a changing public attitude towards exhaust emissions.
There are three reasons why I believe electric motors are the future.
1. 100% Electric is the new normal for "Freude am fahren"
"We're a V-12 engine company. Project that into the future. Do I go the way of the rest of the industry and downsize the engine? Do I see Aston Martin with a three-cylinder engine? God forbid. You've got to do something radical. Electric power gives you that power. It gives you that torque."
-Andy Palmer, CEO of Aston Martin
The joy of driving -- "Freude am fahren" as BMW calls it -- is no longer possible with internal combustion engines. The internal combustion engine has reached the limits of physics. It may be able to meet stricter emission regulations for the time being, but this results in a dull driving experience.
In the coming decade emission regulation forces cars to become even cleaner, which will in turn make fossil fuel cars more expensive. In the EU for example, car companies will have to comply with an average CO2-emission throughout their fleet of 95 grams per km in 2021. This means that within six years the entire fleet sold by Daimler should have exhaust emissions similar to a Fiat Panda. So car companies can still build a growling flat six cylinder Porsche, but they have to offset this with a zero emission car. In other words, to comply with emission regulations car makers don't have many options left but to sell serious numbers of fully electric cars.
Electric cars have massive torque from the moment you hit the pedal, which makes them better than gasoline equivalents. And they can deliver hundreds of horsepowers without any emission scheme to worry about.
Soon you'll face the choice between a fun, quickly accelerating electric car, which can be charged on pure sunlight and which might earn some tax breaks -- and a dull, heavily taxed fossil car which is banned from city center and packed with expensive emission controls.
This may well be the reason Volkswagen resorted to cheating the emission tests. Building cars with an internal combustion engine that combines great performance and low emissions simply wasn't possible at low costs.
2. Electric cars are more affordable
"I would be disappointed if the price per kWh was not in the $100 dollar range by 2020."
-J.B. Straubel, CTO Tesla Motors
Digital cameras and solar panels were once expensive. Not anymore. These technologies followed a steep 'learning curve' and declining costs. A similar fate awaits the electric car.
In 2010 -- when the very first Nissan LEAF came to market -- lithium-ion battery prices were around $1000 per kWh. In 2013, at the time of Tesla introducing its Model S, analysts concluded that battery prices had dropped to around $400 per kWh. GM announced a price of $145 per kWh for its all electric Bolt which will be introduced in 2016. Tesla Motors expects to produce batteries in the range of $100 in 2020.
he trend is clear: the price of batteries is declining at an annual rate of around 20%, while the internal combustion engine is getting more expensive in order to comply with emission regulations.
It may be hard to imagine today, but we'll soon see the day that electric cars are cheaper to purchase than comparable gasoline cars. In markets with high taxes on polluting vehicles, electric cars will be competitive even sooner.
3. The 'cigarette moment' for the internal combustion engine
"Twenty years from now, the smell of exhaust will be as rare (in cities) as the smell of cigarette smoke is in a restaurant today."
-Sir Richard Branson
The vast majority of EV-drivers will tell you that they will never go back to petrol. Internal combustion engine technology feels old and obsolete once you've driven an electric car. These people realise that cars do not necessarily have to be polluting.
It is only a matter of time before society sees gasoline cars as an irresponsible technology, simply because they are hazardous to the health of others and imperil our climate.
Think about what happened to smoking. Just thirty years ago people used to accept smoking virtually everywhere -- smoking in airplanes, smoking in schools, smoking in hospitals. People smoked in the presence of babies and the elderly. Pregnant women smoked, doctors smoked, sick people smoked. With hindsight, it is crazy!
Bummer. You dudes are, like, real buzzkills, ya know?
“An electric car is no different than a spring or rubberband powered car”
You’re correct. The article mentions 95% efficiency of the electric car’s power train but does not mention the efficiency of the power plants producing the electricity, the transmission losses from generating plant to battery charger, or the loss in charging and discharging the battery.
Having said that, I’d like an electric car but the range and the time to recharge are now unacceptable.
Here’s a scheme that might have merit. An electric car would be “recharged” by replacing its dead battery with a freshly recharged one. The dead batteries would be hooked up to a solar powered charging system. In this case it’s ok if the batteries are recharged only when the sun is out. You’d have a stockpile of fully charged batteries for immediate use in the automobiles.
“internal combustion engine has reached the limits of physics.”
So, probably, have batteries. The more energy you pack into a given pound of battery, the more the battery becomes like a bomb.
Are the generators powered by electric motors, too? Or do they use icky liquid fuels like diesel?
They'll be driven by the trailer wheels. It's genius!
Electric cars = Town cars only
They have been for the last 50 years.
I assume they will be for at least the next 20.
As far as efficiency goes it takes a lot more charge to recharge a battery than it puts out. It’s a chemical process. It takes like 3 or 4 times the amount of charge you get out of a battery to recharge it. Electrics are nothing like efficient. It’s a pipe dream. Chemical batteries used in vehicles are a dead end and are extremely toxic to the environment. Replacing even 10% of the gas cars with battery cars would be a monumental disaster.
Most of the promos of these joke vehicles cleverly leave out the fact that to get the ranges they claim you have to drive at very low speed without using lights or a radio or anything. But the socialists want them so we will have them regardless of whether they make sense or not.
A prime example of the stupidity of socialists was the flourescent lightbulbs. Remember when congress passed a law that would ban incandescent bulbs? One of the prime movers of that was a congressman who thought it would allow his donors to make a killing. As we can see the industry went completely past flourescents onto LEDs. None of the genius lefties even mentioned LEDs even though anyone with scientific knowledge of these things could see that LEDs would replace everything.
Electric vehicles are an idea that sounds great to some envirowacko freak. However the actual physical universe we live in follows certain laws that aren’t subject to the wishes of the mentally ill.
We'll buy some at the hardware store, bring them along.
“An internal combustion engine peaks at ~30% efficiency. Yet there I was, driving the first generation of a car that comfortably hit 85-90% efficiency!”
Coal is around 35% efficient. So a car that converts power at 90% efficiency brings it down to 32%.
There are 2 parking spaces in front of Whole Foods where you can charge up your electric car. I have never seen a car being charged there so I have no one to ask this question. Do you know how much it would cost to charge your dead electric car to a full charge?
-— Coal is around 35% efficient. So a car that converts power at 90% efficiency brings it down to 32%. -—
6% of electricity is lost in transmission, so that brings it down to 30% from 32%.
There is a brand new Leaf in our neighborhood. Yesterday, I saw a truck from Nissan Services towing it away.
Depends on the capacity of the outlet and several other factors. Car and Driver did a Tesla test and charging overnight a pretty dead Tesla only gave about a 50% charge, as I recall.
If you were plugging it in at home do you have any idea what that one overnight charge would add to your electric bill?
People I have heard talking about how wonderful it would be don’t have an electric car but act like it would be free.
I can’t wait for the electric car revolution. However, there seems to be a problem with these cars that has not been discussed: What happens when you run out of electric power on the road? Do you get an “electricity can” and walk up to the nearest charge station and get a few gallons of electrons? Better yet, do you wait for the next vehicle up the road to “jump your POS car’s battery?”
Now, I don’t want to hear anything about an auxiliary GASOLINE/DIESEL little motor in your car that will charge the battery if this happens...FOSSIL FUEL IS BAD...ELECTRICITY IS GOOD...even if does result in the discharge of ozone gas.
Inquiring minds need to know!
that chart is brilliant. informative and really well designed. thanks for posting. where is it from?
Be nice for someone to noodle out where the raw materials to make the batteries for these cars is going to come from before they make all these starry eyed prognostications.
“Moore’s Law does not apply to electricity storage.”
I would replace ‘electricity’ with ‘energy’.
Gasoline is no different than a battery. They both store potential energy.
A car’s gas tank IS a battery.
Only its a better battery, since it can be ‘recharged’ in a few minutes. And, by weight, it has a much better energy density than a traditional battery - another advantage in a moving vehicle.
These electric car nuts think they are talking about something revolutionary. But really their electric batteries are just a lesser competitor (tried and abandoned 100 years ago) in a large class of energy storage devices that includes NG, gasoline, diesel, and even compressed air.
Some back of the envelope calcs on the LEAF, btw. The EPA says the leaf uses 0.29 kwh per mile. Coal produces around 2 lb CO2 per KWH....and gas produces 20 lb co2 per gallon. This means that, on a co2 basis, a car getting 35 mpg is equivalent to the LEAF. So, for those that worship carbon, any economy car (and some mid-size) should grant them the same carbon absolution as the LEAF.
Well what do you know...same as gas.
The author thinks electricity comes from the wall.
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