Electric Car MPG?Follow

There really needs to be a forum law for the "I could explain it if I thought you'd comprehend" schtick.

Nice bait and switch there Smash. Do the comparison in dollars/mile and see how they stack up.

Stacks up to about $1.75 a gallon, Einstein. Of the equivalent mileage in gasoline.

A "gallon" is kind of a ******* useless measurement of a gaseous substance, genius. Hence the word "equivalent" in my post. Most people probably missed that, right?

****.

Efficiency values of standard cars and power plants are well known and widely accepted values. You can find them in textbooks, not just research papers.

In my estimate above, I left out factors which contribute to efficiency. I did not attempt to compute total cost of ownership or how much power (resources) consumed in the construction/maintenance of each as this was not the question asked above.

It is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to move to electric cars that efficiency is improved.

move its weight plus the car and passengers for 800-1000 miles along existing roads

While this would be nice, or hell, one that you recharged once every 10,000 miles, most people drive less than 100 miles per day. By a large margin. Now, granted most people probably have at least one day a year where they really do drive a couple of hundred miles, but 800 miles? This is borderline absurd. Virtually no gasoline powered cars have a range this large. With sufficient infrastructure, a range of 300ish miles would be more than enough for 99% of vehicles.

No. That's not sufficient. You have to be able to carry enough charge for an entire day of driving. With a gasoline powered car, I can stop at a gas station and refill the tank and be on my way in under 5 minutes. How long do you think it'll take to recharge my electric car battery? Not 5 minutes. Most batteries take hours to recharge. There has been some promising developments, but that's using cadmium batteries, which are massively toxic.


I suppose you are correct though. We could alternatively develop a battery that could be charged in a short amount of time using reasonably available charging technology and it might work as a replacement for gasoline. Either way though, the problem is not on the efficiency end (especially including efficiency at the plant as Yoss did), but the battery charge end.


Either way, a viable alternative actually has to allow us to do all the things we currently do with a car. That means that if I want to drive out to Vegas, I should be able to do so. Right now, I could drive there in some of the available electric cars, but it might take 2 or 3 days to do so. That's not really viable as a true alternative...

That's true. Some computers just need to be able to check email and play Diablo II and not be upgradable and cost almost nothing...but sometimes that just drives people ******* crazy.

Nexa

Sure! BUT SOMETIMES WE DON'T NEED THEM TO BE FASTER...because they're just for EMAIL AND DIABLO!

Nexa

You're a compressed file.

Nexa

My saint-like patience with you must be countered somewhere or the balance of the universe is thrown askew.

Nexa

Geez you two! Get a damn room... ;)



Not at all. It doesn't have to do everything, but before the majority of American's will replace their existing cars with electric cars, those electric cars need to fill all the roles they use their current cars for.

And the gap isn't in the efficiency or cost performance of using electricity versus using gas. It's the lack of sufficient range on a single charge. Always has been. You build an electric battery/charge system light enough to work in a passenger car and capable of allowing people to drive for 8 hours cross-country (or just around town all day), and on that day you'll see electric cars take a significant share of the market. Until then, fully electric cars will never be more then a niche and therefore irrelevant in terms of any sort of broad energy policy.




No. It wont. It'll maybe serve the majority of the market of people who already live in urban areas and don't drive much anyway. No one living in a suburban or rural area will ever buy that car, no matter how cheap it is. You can't subsidize your way out of this Smash.



Every time I want to run errands around town? Seriously. I can easily drive 300 miles over the course of a single day just running errands and having any sort of plans for the evening afterwards.

Edited, Aug 8th 2008 12:16pm by gbaji

No. It really wouldn't. People aren't going to replace a car that they can drive to and from work everyday *and* drive on longer trips with one that they can only drive to and from work. I suppose I'll grant that if the whole car was very very cheap, maybe, but even then probably not. 12k still buys a whole lot of years of gasoline, and if I still have to pay it when I take the longer trips anyway, there's just not much reason to buy a second electric car just for the short local ones.



Sigh. The closest Frys to my place is 15 miles away. One of my good friends lives 15 miles away. My mom lives 20 miles away. My brother lives 30 miles away. Heck. The closest Best Buy is about 12 miles away. I recently went hunting for a specific video game and ended up driving up to San Marcos (you really don't want to know what the round trip was). This was *after* driving to a couple other stores.

On Christmas, it's not uncommon at all for me to cover several hundred miles. Heck. I drive to the aforementioned friends house for breakfast, then drive to my brothers house (usually) for the whole family thing. Total round trip? 130 miles (cause they're in opposite directions). That assumes I don't stop *anywhere* else or need to take any side trips and only visit two different groups during the day. Sure. I could charge my car up at the stops, but that's not the point. I may not know how long I'm staying. It may not be enough time to charge the vehicle. And if we're talking about mass adoption of electric cars, exactly how many extension cords are we talking about for everyone to do this?


You really don't have a clue about how much (and far!) people in California drive do you Smash? And honestly, that's dwarfed by folks who live in states like Colorado, Utah, Iowa, etc... where going to the darn store might well be a 100 mile round trip. I knew some folks who lived in Telluride. You want to know how far it was just into town much less the nearest large store (Walmart in Montrose IIRC)? Heck. I used to live in Bonny Doon California. The nearest store was easily an hour drive down a windy mountain road.


It's not uncommon at all for me to go on a series of errands in which I drive to UTC, then off to I15 (other end of Miramar Rd), then down into the Friar's Rd area, then to La Mesa, perhaps down to Chula Vista, then back to Del Mar area. All without stopping anywhere for more then maybe 30 minutes or so. And that's just errand running. What about people who drive around town for a living? I know several people in the Real Estate business. They drive clients around all day long Smash. An electric car wont work. Anyone with a delivery job? Wont work. Anyone with a hobby that requires travel (I know a whole slew of people who do Ren activities every few weeks which require often hundreds of miles of travel in a single day and no convenient electrical outlets).


I'd be surprised if more then maybe 1 in 10 people I know personally would gain *any* real advantage from that (cost aside). Heck Smash. I know people who own electric cars. They owned them long before people like you got into them because they were a popular political issue. For them it was the geek factor and fun of building and operating an electric car. Guess what? Every single one of them owns another vehicle. I don't know *anyone* who owns an electric car as their only car. Not one. Heck. Most of them own a truck in fact. Want to know why? So they can tow their electric cars to where they want to use them.


The biggest obstacle is range Smash. Always has been. 150 miles is nice I suppose, but still not nearly good enough for mass adoption of electric cars. If you want to get more then a niche market for the tech, it has to be a full replacement for everything people currently do with their cars. 150 miles just isn't enough. Not by a long long long shot.