Posted on 09/18/2008 2:33:43 PM PDT by bestintxas
Um, the gas stations weren’t open either in the impacted areas. They also require electricity to operate.
Maybe you want to think through this issue again before proclaiming your personal destruction of a liberal myth.
sorry, but gas stations did start again, each needing just one generator to operate all their pumps to fill up hundreds of vehicles to be one their way.
contrast that with what would have happened if all folks had were eletric cars that could not be recharged.
i enjoy my independently-operated vehicle that has a range many times that of the best electric car.
There was reality within this storm which we need to learn from.
I don’t know about you, but my sister had to drive 90 minutes to Katy to get gas and wait in a line that was over an hour long. If she had wanted to charge a car on electricity, she could have driven about three miles to one of the areas that got power restored early on and done it there.
couple of comments:
1.Your sister should have gotten gas beforehand and had a range that could have been several hundred miles.
2.Electric chargers do not get the battery charged for several hours. A gas fillup takes about 4 minutes.
3.Widespread power outages can keep the option pretty closed for her to recharge, much more than the three miles you quoted.
I am not against electric cars. It is just not a solution that should be mandated for us, and does not seem to me to the best thing to have during something like you sister and me went through. I prefer the option of being self-reliant as much as possible, which means if I am mandated to get an electric car then I will also obtain a generator.
1. She did get gas beforehand. You need to travel a lot more after a natural disaster strikes to pick up basic necessities and equipment to repair damage. You can’t just hop over to the corner grocery store when it has a tree through its roof.
2. It depends on the power source. Oahu, for example, has a network of 60kW chargers, and they come bigger than that. You’re talking minutes for a charge like that, not hours. And no, they don’t need a high power connection; they use internal battery packs.
3. There *was* power within just a few miles of them. Power outages don’t work like you’re picturing. There’s long distance power transmission lines, which are repaired first thing if there’s any damage. Then they go repair the most critical and easy to get to circuits, and then move on down the list. Hence, power comes back not region-by-region, but block by block or even street-by-street, in a piecemeal manner throughout the entire affected region. In this case, my grandmother’s old house that my family hasn’t sold yet got power back just a day or two after the storm hit; it was on the same circuit as a water pump. My parents house still doesn’t have power back yet, and may not for another week or two. My older sister’s house just got power back; my younger sister’s hasn’t yet. They all live in the same general area.
Electric would have been a lot more convenient for them.
It really all comes down to in my mind to have your gas tank filled up and several containers of gasoline available.
Pretty simple when you think about it, compared to charging and, as I have said several times, it keeps you much more independent than electric.
I will be curious next time a storm comes if she ops for an electric car how her experience goes.
Keep in touch.
“Hey, you’re free to be an idiot and deny reality if you choose to.”
Hey, I may be an idiot, but since NONE of these vehicles have any real-world experience (aka “reality”), I submit that I may well be in good company with you, and any other idiots that buy these vehicles for use anywhere but the most benign of environments.
So keep a good pair of walking shoes handy when you buy your EV if you plan on cranking up the AC.....They’ll probably come as standard equipment, right next to the spare tire!
I'm not sure what your point is here.
Or your electric car chugging along for all its worth on a major highway as a half dozen tractor trailers come barrreling down on your from behind at 85 mile per hour.
What makes you think electric cars are going to be slow?
I don't think it's a good idea to plan our long-term transportation needs around pretty rare disaster scenarios.
Electric or electric/gas hybrids are probably going to become very common over the next couple of decades. Even if there is no improvement in range between recharges (a foolish assumption), a car that can do 50 miles roundtrip before recharging would be perfectly fine for most trips.
And there's the added benefit of knowing the money you spend at the pumps isn't going to end up being used to kill Americans or our allies.
“2. It depends on the power source. Oahu, for example, has a network of 60kW chargers, and they come bigger than that. You’re talking minutes for a charge like that, not hours. And no, they don’t need a high power connection; they use internal battery packs.”
Ok, I’ll bite. How many minutes? 5? 15? 30? 60? You can do the math - just divide the capacity of the battery pack in kWh by 60kW and you’ll get your answer in hours.
It’s not pretty..... This is some serious juice, especially when you multiply it by the number of charging stations needed if there are very many of these on the road (especially the ones using their AC!)
You should be very patient when you have an EV and use it like a regular car, because it will force you to adapt to it, which is the whole purpose of the green movement.
“What makes you think electric cars are going to be slow? “
They will spend most of their time by the side of the road, out of juice, or in line waiting to be recharged. Stopped is pretty slow.
Granted, they’ll have short-lived bursts of speed in between.
Until the technology is more advanced, most households will have a regular car in addition to an electric/hybrid car.
The Tesla battery is made up of 6831 individual cells, each cell having over 3V so they must be arranged in a series/parallel configuration; the assembled pack is quite impressive looking but must make up over 30% of the overall cost of the car.
There is only one Tesla dealer in the U.S. and it is in California.
The vehicle will be assembled in the UK. and shipped over here from the Lotus plant specially retooled for its production.
There are not likely even ten of them on the highway right now.
Virtually everything on the car is proprietary so that there is no aftermarket support at all.
If anyone’s interested, I have a Coleco Adam in my attic.
Too rich for my blood, anyway.
60kW is just what’s installed as a testbed in Hawaii. AeroVironment makes chargers as big as 250kW, and Avcon Level 3 charging connectors support that much power. A car like the Volt uses about 200Wh/mi. 60kW is thus 5 miles per minute of charging. 250kW is 21 miles per minute of charging. Let’s say your typical gasoline car will go 300 miles on a 4 minute fillup, and that it takes you two minutes of overhead at the station (hookup, disconnect, paying, etc) and three minutes of overhead between finding a station, getting off the freeway, getting to it, getting back on the freeway, etc. That’s 9 minutes for 300 miles at 70mph, or 3.5% of your time spent on fuelling or overhead. Let’s say your li-ion EV takes twice as many stops to do 300 miles at 70mph, so we double the 5 minutes of overhead to 10 minutes, and add to that either 300/5 minutes charging (60) or 300/21 minutes charging (14), for a total of 70 minutes and 24 minutes, respectively. This works out to 27% and 9.3%, respectively. This means that you’d go 23.5% and 5.8% further on gasoline, respectively.
Assuming that your goal was to race straight out and never stopped for a break or a meal, and ignoring that you start out with a full charge (i.e., the numbers are actually going to be a lot closer than that).
With current tech alone.
While fuelling up for a third the price.
Without sending dollars to dictators overseas.
You oppose this why?
“This is some serious juice, especially when you multiply it by the number of charging stations needed if there are very many of these on the road”
It’s only serious juice in terms of *instantaneous delivery*. In terms of running averages, it’s not that much. Instantaneous delivery is provided by batteries in the charger, which are themselves charged over time from a three-phase feed from the grid. The energy used in ground transportation is dwarfed by that used for electricity. A 200-250kW charger costs $120k or so. A 60kW charger costs $40k or so. The more you install in one location, the lower the price, because they can use a shared battery bank. For comparison, an 8-pump gas station generally costs around a million or so (more in more expensive areas). A gas pump can serve more cars per hour, but has far less leverage in terms of profit margins (since the fuel is so much more expensive), and much higher maintenance costs. A charging station like that can turn a profit with just a few cars per day and selling electricity for the gasoline equivalent of $1.50 a gallon or so.
And once again, I don’t give a rat’s arse about the green movement. You could build a nuclear reactor in my backyard today if you want for all I care. I care about not propping up people like Chavez, Putin, Ahmadinejad, and the countless other anti-American thugs who’ve gotten rich on their oil resources. I see your attitude of “Well, the Greens like it, so it must be bad!” as doing just the opposite.
Tesla’s pack price is estimated at $20k (under 1/5th the cost of the car)
Tesla’s pack is made of many cells because they started work on it half a decade ago when large-format cells of the advanced li-ions were unavailable. This unsurprisingly raises the cost. Also, since they’re using conventional “laptop cells”, there’s almost no room for price improvement on them. The modern automotive cells have a huge potential for price improvement as they scale up.
There are about 30 Roadsters in private hands right now. They’d been keeping production low because of work on Powertrain 1.5, which is now complete (Powertrain 1.5 eliminated the third-party transmission in favor of a more powerful, more efficient (thus longer range) motor). They should be significantly scaling up over the rest of the year. The bad transmission set them back about six months.; it wasn’t strong enough for a car as powerful as the Roadster.
The powerpack and drivetrain are proprietary. Almost everything else is either produced by Lotus or third parties. Tesla only makes about 20% of the parts inhouse.
“60kW is just what’s installed as a testbed in Hawaii. AeroVironment makes chargers as big as 250kW, and Avcon Level 3 charging connectors support that much power.”
Friend, you toss out these kilowatt numbers as if they are trivial things. This is some serious power, as you scale up to support even limited deployment of electric vehicles.
A gas pump can easily pump 10 gallons of gas in 5 minutes. A gallon of gas has the energy equivalent of 36 kWh. So the equivalent of 20 gallons, 720 kWh is dispensed at the local gas pump in 10 minutes (usually much less than that, but let’s be conservative)
20 miles per gallon, * 20 gallons = 400 miles.
400 miles would take 80 minutes of charging using your numbers.
The electric car is taking 8 times a gas powered car at this 60 kW station.
Ok let’s upgrade to 250 kW - that’s 19 minutes
Let’s go with 250 KW stations. My local gas station has 24 pumps, when used simultaneously, that’s 6 Megawatts. When you consider you’ll need double that (since it takes twice as long to “fill up” then that’s 12 Megawatts. That requires a substantial substation and transmission infrastructure for just one charging station that would be equivalent to a gas station.
“You oppose this why?” I don’t oppose, I simply point out that the answer is more complex than it seems.
“While fuelling up for a third the price.” If you exclude electrical infrastructure, e.g. power plants, transmission lines and extra real estate for substations at each gas station, and extra real estate to accommodate twice the charging stations, to get an equivalent functionality.
And even then, your electric car is much much much less than it’s gas powered equivalent.
“I care about not propping up people like Chavez, Putin, Ahmadinejad, and the countless other anti-American thugs who’ve gotten rich on their oil resources. I see your attitude of “Well, the Greens like it, so it must be bad!” as doing just the opposite.”
So, you say that if I don’t agree with you, then I must support Chavez, Putin, Ahmadinejad, the house of Saud, and the myriad of questionable characters out there? I say you are a freedom-hating control freak that wants everyone to do what you say and drive a golf-cart.
The electric car hype means you have to ignore most of the actual hard costs of operating them. The “1/3 the cost” mantra is dishonest. The mantra that an electric car is just like a gas-powered car is simply wrong.
Fine, let people buy electric cars if they want, I’m not against them. Maybe some folks will even be happy with them, but for most people, they will fall woefully short of expectations.
People want what an internal combustion engine gives them - freedom of movement. The electric powered-storage battery vehicle can’t touch it yet, and maybe it never will be able to.
They work great on the golf course though.
Thanks, specs seemed hard to find; any idea who actually owns these and where they’re titled, driven?
You’d think there would be some owner reviews available as they become more visible.
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