Above, more from my Skype interview with Brewster MacCracken of Austin’s Pecan Street Project – today, surprising findings about EV owners – what they really like about their electric vehicles, and what car companies have to learn. Brewster is so knowledgable and such an engaging communicator, that this material will certainly be part of an upcoming video on climate solutions.
More here from auto journalist Jim Motovalli – note – this is from a “sponsored post” at Business Insider, but I think the discussion is worthwhile and credible:
..now that EVs are becoming popular, it’s fair to wonder: What’s it like to own one? We asked veteran automotive journalist and author Jim Motavalli how EVs are similar to, and different from, gas-powered vehicles. Motavalli has been writing about alternative vehicles since the mid-1980s, and in his assessment, EVs are “not only just as good as gas-powered cars — in many cases, they’re better.”
3. What’s it like to drive an EV?
Unlike other cars, EVs don’t ramp up to full power. As soon as you turn them on, they have 100% of their torque. “They take off with great speed and alacrity,” Motavalli says. “That’s why they’re so good in drag racing. They just take off, with a feeling of effortless power.” That means when you’re merging onto the highway, an EV seems to glide into full speed. They’re also great for hills, because they don’t have that slight lurch as they shift into gear.
4. How easy are EVs to maintain?
EV maintenance costs are lower. “You don’t have to worry about timing belt replacements, transmission maintenance, fuel injectors, gasket replacements, oil leaks, exhaust systems, and so on,” Motavalli says. And because most of the braking in an EV is done magnetically — to capture the energy of the moving car and recharge the battery — the wear-and-tear on the braking system is less.
Over time, EVs are cheaper to maintain, at about $600 to $700 per year (whereas gas-powered cars come in well over $2,000 and scale up from there). Purchasing an electric vehicle also qualifies you for a $7,500 federal tax credit. And since time is money, we’ll point out that in some states EVs can drive in the HOV lane and avoid traffic jams.
5. What’s the future for electric cars?
If Motavalli is right, someday we’ll be seeing electric cars everywhere. “EVs are going to dominate the roads,” he claims, “and most of the heads of the auto companies agree with me on this. It’ll take time — decades even — but sooner or later, EVs are going to take over the highways.” It doesn’t hurt that EVs are better for the environment than gas-powered cars, even when their electricity comes from coal-fired power plants.
6. When will everyone be driving an electric car?
According to Motavalli, the electric-vehicle future is going to ramp up slowly “but it’s going happen.” Some experts go even farther than Motavalli, on this: they argue that the real argument for electric cars is not the environmental one. It’s just that they’re better designed, more reliable, and more efficient than gas-powered cars.
On a recent Formula E test day here, the pit lane had to be equipped with a piercing siren to let mechanics know (electric formula one race) cars were coming. Though the cars can reach speeds of up to 140 miles an hour, what little noise they make sounds somewhere between a kitchen appliance and a sci-fi movie special effect. Whatever it is, it doesn’t scream like any race car you’ve ever heard. And it is definitely not loud.
“The sound is futuristic, which you don’t expect. It’s very light and high,” said Virgin Racing driver Jaime Alguersuari, who raced in 46 F1 Grands Prix between 2009 and 2011. “At a certain speed, you hear just the wind. You hear the car. I miss the noise of the V10 engine, but I don’t miss the modern Formula One car.”
Fans and drivers of Formula One have also been twitchy about volume this season. The sport recently made its first major engine change in a decade, switching from V8 engines to smaller, quieter V6s in an effort to be more environmentally conscious. But when drivers complained, the sport briefly panicked.
The Mercedes team even experimented with a so-called “megaphone exhaust”—a tailpipe shaped like a megaphone to amplify engine noise. It didn’t work and Mercedes, one of the most advanced teams in the most advanced motor sport, dropped the idea.
Here, a PBS Newshour feature on the Pecan Street Project, from 2012.
The report looks to new technologies and engineering designs for cars. Plug-in hybrids and battery electric cars represent the biggest fuel efficiency gains on a per-vehicle basis compared with the average gasoline light duty vehicle, offering fuel savings, What kind of savings are they looking at? The numbers are striking. Savings are equivalent to 409.8 gallons per year for plug-ins, and 361.5 gallons per year for battery electric vehicles. Plug-in hybrid vehicles, they explained, is the term they used to refer to vehicles that use a combination of an electric battery and a gasoline internal combustion engine to power the drivetrain. The battery can be charged by plugging the vehicle into an electricity grid, such as a wall outlet. By battery electric vehicles, they are referring to those that use only rechargeable batteries to power the drivetrain.
Some small number of folks may be discovering good things about EV’s, but most American car buyers apparently are not interested. They are doubling down on bigger internal combustion powered vehicles.
Article in the Washington Post today says “Sales of trucks and crossover SUV’s jump: The trend toward big means discounts for mid-size and compact cars”. This “jump” has been going on for some time now. Another article says Volvo is planning to push a bigger and “hunkier” SUV as its “flagship” in a campaign to gain back market share (Volvo is now owned by the Chinese and has been struggling).
Do we have alternate universes existing side-by-side on this planet? Does mandating improved gas mileage mean to some folks not “decreased emissions” but instead “now I can buy a bigger vehicle but run it on the same amount of gas as the smaller one I traded in”?
I think what we’re seeing is a phenomenon of people not thinking any further ahead than the end of next week. Gas prices are down a bit as the summer driving seasons ends, and the discounts on the 2014 models make them look even better than the slightly-improved EPA sticker figures make them. Buyer’s remorse will come later.
Brewster McCracken didn’t say anything particularly controversial in this video, but in the previous one he did, though I had no time that day to comment about it. I’m talking about this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1b79p1-5CY
His big blooper in that part of the interview is when he said that he envisions a burgeoning market in developing countries for used car batteries. I found that statement to be nothing but ridiculous. My experience with rechargeable batteries – be they lead-acid batteries or lithium ion – is that they’ve got a life expectancy of about five years. After that, they are useless, and should be sent to be recycled. Just what does he expect someone in Nicaragua or the Congo to do with a dead battery?
And that’s not even to consider the energy cost of shipping the dead battery to Nicaragua or the Congo. Or the energy cost of shipping it back to the developed world for recycling (though more likely it will wind up in a landfill, which is perhaps the intention of shipping it to them in the first place).
Lead Acid batteries are right up there with the most recycled materials in modern civilization. Given the value of some of the components in lithium batteries we should expect them to experience similar treatment.
But you are, of course, correct about used batteries.
The lifetime for Li batteries depends heavily on how they are used (discharge rate, depth of discharge, temperature extremes, etc) and the quality of the Battery Management System (BMS) used with the battery pack. Failing to keep a battery pack charged, frequent deep discharges, and subjecting the battery pack to either extreme heat or extreme cold will wear out a battery back in a hurry.
In EV applications the battery pack is typically swapped out long before it’s at the end of its useful life. The symptoms of an aging battery pack are loss of range and, to a lesser degree, loss of acceleration. EV owners take their vehicles in for service when these symptoms show up and the ‘fix’ is usually a replacement of the whole battery pack because local service centers aren’t equipped to troubleshoot to the individual Li cell level. Which leaves a battery pack with a lot of capacity left, just not enough for high demand EV service. Recycle? Or reuse for a less demanding application?
Let’s look at the Tesla Model S as an example. The Model S can have either a 60 kWh or 85 kWh batter pack, and the electric motor is a 310 kW max power rating. When an 85 kWh pack has aged to having about half its capacity left, say 40 kWh, the owner will see a BIG loss of range, particularly if he or she has a heavy foot on the accelerator. But a 40 kWh battery pack is ample for an application such as a residential Distributed Energy Storage (DES) system. Residential electrical service is typically less than 25 kW (25kVA) peak capacity. A 40 kWh battery pack wouldn’t run AC, dryer, or an oven very long but a 2kW nighttime load could be easily suppled until sunrise when rooftop PV resumes generation.
My advice is to avoid ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to new ideas and innovations.
What I love about electric propulsion is the wonderful quiet and smoothness.
What I hate is that it’s not widespread enough to have the support for charging in all the places I like to go. That will take time, but I don’t want to wait.