Good news, 8 car firms have agreed on a standard fast charge socket.
http://www.nextgreencar.com/news-item.php?Global-EV-charger-standard-agreed
http://www.nextgreencar.com/news-item.php?Global-EV-charger-standard-agreed
Electric Cars coming in a year or two
- Thread starter Johnnytoxic
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Soldato
Won't this break the batteries? Fast charging never seems to be without its drawbacks..
Caporegime
Nope, batterie tech and controllers have come a long way.
Cells aren't just charged they have controllers, so individual cells aren't over charged, that was one of the biggest problems with rapid charging.
For a start it's nothing like those formats, as you can use adapters, like ev cars do at the moment.
Secondly Asia as far as I read haven't got there own standard yet, so may well use this anyway. Seeing as they are a massive growing car export industry.
Also yet more battery news
More info
http://m.smartplanet.com/blog/intel...le-battery-could-slash-ev-costs-by-half/13541
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And?
It'll still be cheaper and massive improvements like air qaulity and that's without future oil price increases.
true, but i think i will be sticking with fossil for a long time tbh,
Why would oil price increase if everyone goes to electric cars?
There may bebe a point where fossil derived fuels will be cheaper than electricity. Government has to get its tax income from somewhere
Soldato
Out of interest how are they going to solve the issue of residential on street parking where people don't always park in the same place? Charging points you log/check into?
Will be interesting to see how quickly charging points are rolled out and who ends up paying, especially in residential areas.
Will be interesting to see how quickly charging points are rolled out and who ends up paying, especially in residential areas.
We are a very long way away from everyone driving ev and oil prices are only going up and will continue to go up. At some point in the very distant future it is very likely new cars will be banned from being ICE, just like new cars have to meet ever increasing conditions.
Off course the government is going to maintain tax revenue. Why would you think otherwise.
Electricity is cheaper to produce than petrol.
Already available.
Supply and demand... Electric will be the new petrol. Unless more electric is created by nuclear power it will be catch-22 after so many years.
Electricity does not get harder to produce, oil however does gets harder to reach. So no it won't be catch 22. There is already huge work into upgrading the grid to handle it. 3billion a year, that doesn't include new power plants, just the network. And they have a couple of decades yet.
Soldato
Man of Honour
It's possible that there might be some dramatic breakthroughs that might make it viable, but it's implausible rubbish at the moment. Even if you completely ignore the storage and transportation problems and assume the existence of fuel cells that are efficient, cheap and use no rare materials, hydrogen would still be just a very inefficient energy carrier. It was fashionable fluff pieces in the media for a while, that's all. Maybe it might be something more at some point in the future, perhaps. Economic fusion might make it viable, since it would technically be possible to generate such a superabundance of electricity that we wouldn't need to care about how wasteful it is to use hydrogen as an energy carrier.
Man of Honour
You do need research as well, but you're right about that being the main point.
The crucial thing is driver experience, especially with regards to charging. Maybe it's possible to recharge an EV for maybe 60 miles range in maybe an hour, if you have access to a suitable high powered charging point. That's the sort of thing that makers of cutting edge EVs are boasting about as major selling points for their forthcoming EVs.
Whoopie-do. With an ICE, it's possible to "recharge" several hundred miles range in a few minutes and there are "recharging" points all over the place.
Battery swapping makes it possible to bring EVs up to a par with ICEs in this crucial area and, as you say, that's about standardising battery packaging and connections and about getting battery swapping stations set up (maybe initially as a small add-on to petrol stations).
But you do need research because there is a lot of scope for improvements in batteries. Maybe it's too early to standardise. Let's say they standardise EV battert setups today. So you've got a 300Kg block the size of a large suitcase (that would get you a range in the region of 120 miles with Li-ion batteries, so it's a reasonable example). 5 years down the line and one or more of the battery technologies currently in research or prototype stage have come to market. So now enough charge for that 120 miles range can be stored in a 30Kg block the size of a briefcase (also a reasonable example, based on battery technologies currently in R&D)...but you're stuck with using the standardised suitcase-size at least and maybe also a much higher weight, depending on what equipment is standard in battery-swapping stations. It's possible that kit designed for moving 300Kg around wouldn't work entirely correctly with 30Kg.
Man of Honour
The same aliens who faked the USA moon landings, obviously.
Nobody "killed" the electric car. It was hugely inferior to ICE cars, simple as that.
It's still very much inferior to ICE cars. Even the most ardent advocates of EVs acknowledge that EVs are only anywhere near viable if they are propped up by massive amounts of public money (grants, lack of taxation, etc) and state-level force (requirements imposed on manufacturers by the EU, etc). That's necessary because EVs are very much inferior to ICEVs and will remain so for years to come.
I don't mind the advocacy so much, but the outright lying about EVs being cheaper does get on my nerves. Right now, the real cost of running an EV is much higher than the cost of running a comparable (but much more versatile and practical) ICEV. It's only wads of public money propping up EVs that makes it possible to pretend they're much cheaper to run and that's not a sustainable practice.
Man of Honour
What makes you think it would be cheaper? I'll take some convincing before I'll accept that the government would (or even could afford to) voluntarily take less tax.
Oh, maybe they might take a bit less from driving and put a bit more on something else, but that's just the usual taxation sleight of hand.
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Before I wrote this topic I didn't realise how much the batteries cost to replace. So the selling on of these cars would be very difficult.
Man of Honour
The true running cost of an ICEV is about the same as the true running cost of a comparable EV and thats without taking into account the battery replacement costs of an EV and without taking into account the far higher purchase price of an EV. If you take those into account, running an EV is far, far more expensive than running a comparable ICEV.
Here, for example, is a simple comparison of a Leaf and a comparable Golf:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring...shock-the-true-cost-of-electric-motoring.html
If you want, I'll do a full comparison, taking into account purchase price and battery replacement costs. That'll put the true cost of running an EV at about 4 times the true cost of running a comparable ICEV.
The cost argument is rubbish. It relies on ignoring major costs of owning and running an EV and it ignores the massive publically funded subsidy of EVs. It is at best ignorant and at worst deceitful. It's propaganda.
Man of Honour
I did some back of an envelope calculations a while back and came up with about 1/3rd to 1/2th of the Mojave desert being enough to meet the electricity demand of the entire USA using currently existing CSP technology. Not potentially, possibly, with not yet existing tech, but with stuff that could be built today, including unused space necessary for access for maintainence. Obviously, it wouldn't work that well in practice (CSP plants can generate into the night, but not at full whack 24/7/365, not even in a sunny desert), but it does rather imply that a hell of a lot could be done with CSP in the USA.