EV general discussion

SkodaMart said:
I’ve done the electrical vehicle charging course, I’m qualified to install all manner of charging points.
Even the guy teaching the course thought it was folly, he admitted to have being ‘bribed’ with a generous salary to teach the course.
EV are great in the short term, whilst most of us use internal combustion engined vehicles.
You just wait to see how things will work out when we all own one. (This isn’t ever going to happen) in fact this EV rubbish is more of a lie than the diesel being more green than petrol scam.
If anything electric 2 wheeled vehicles make more sense than electric cars and vans.
Makes me laugh when an owner of an electric vehicle states his car is 80% efficient.
It might be discharging the battery into forward motion, but how was this energy generated in the first place? How much efficiency was lost during this generation? How much efficiency lost charging and discharging the batteries?
As for batteries lasting 30 years? You’re utterly having a laugh, as I said I predict 5 years at max.
One final point, where is all the lithium coming from to make these batteries? Have you seen what a lithium mine looks like? Finally what happens to these ‘green’ batteries when they are at the end of their useful life?
I would happily own an EV whilst it suits my pocket to do so, but as a long term solution to save the planet it’s utter folly.
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I think you went on the wrong course mate.
 
SkodaMart said:
Anyhow, sorry this has gone off on a silly tangent.
My point is could more responsible vehicle selection, cutting out unnecessary journeys, employing local labour - people literally used to live where the job was not so long ago.

Could these measures delay or remove the need for an alternative source of energy for our vehicles.
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They could, but I think that these are all things we should do regardless of whether we develop new energy sources or not - I just don't think we should do them suddenly or forcefully.
 
SkodaMart said:
Maybe try logically addressing some of my points rather than resorting to insults?
Unless of course this is just an electric vehicle circle jerk?
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I'm sorry if you were insulted by that. I was trying to highlight the fact that a lot of your concerns have been debunked as myths quite a while ago now. I will tone it down a bit.
SkodaMart said:


in fact this EV rubbish is more of a lie than the diesel being more green than petrol scam.

In what way? The statement is a little too vague.

If anything electric 2 wheeled vehicles make more sense than electric cars and vans.

for a pure efficiency point of view, sure. Why not 1 wheeled? steel wheels running on steel tracks. There are some concessions we have to make for practical terms, carrying goods, keeping passengers dry and comfortable etc.

Makes me laugh when an owner of an electric vehicle states his car is 80% efficient.

Which is conservative in terms of vehicle use and is probably quite close in terms of total efficiency. It still far out strips ICE vehicles.

It might be discharging the battery into forward motion, but how was this energy generated in the first place? How much efficiency was lost during this generation? How much efficiency lost charging and discharging the batteries?

The point here is that we can use a mix of energy generation. Renewables will make up the majority with some efficient nuclear or gas etc to pad out peak demand. We will then start to see early generation EV battery packs start to make their way into home battery banks, and grid based storage. These will be charged with renewables ready to be discharged during peak demand when the grid needs it. This will slowly see Gas / nuclear phased out.

As for batteries lasting 30 years? You’re utterly having a laugh, as I said I predict 5 years at max.

First Gen cars are still going strong. Reports are being published all the time around them doing much better than expected. Then following their useful life as a car battery they will be repurposed into home energy storage. A pretty efficient house uses around 8kw per day. Most EV's carry around 40kw batteries. So each time a car battery gets repurposed, it can be used to provide power to 4-5 homes.

One final point, where is all the lithium coming from to make these batteries? Have you seen what a lithium mine looks like? Finally what happens to these ‘green’ batteries when they are at the end of their useful life?

The amount of lithium required for each cell is very small, generally less than 1g per cell. Also remember that there is an incredible amount of research going into battery tech at the moment and I doubt lithium will be the end point for our battery tech. I read an interesting piece on batteries based on aluminium the other day. Not sure how much snake oil was involved but goes to show what we have currently will seem VERY out of date in 10 years. Remember where we were 10 years ago!
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It's almost like oil companies and traditional manufacturers have bots spouting the same nonsense, trying to influence public discourse.

5 year battery life when vehicles have been around longer than that already- I mean, come on.
 
SkodaMart said:
OK then, would someone, obviously more intelligent than me care to answer my points of concern:

Starting with the obvious one:

How are we going to generate the electricity to power these electric vehicles when every petrol and diesel vehicle has been replaced?
I know with the vehicle charging course, there is a register, every new charging point has to be notified so that the electricity board can keep a track on demand on the national grid - they are fully aware that the current distribution network cannot support the future potential number of electric vehicles.
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As of 2017, the UK had generation capacity of 103.5GW, and annual demand of 338.3TWh (per EU "Energy in Figures" Statistical pocketbook).

The UK is more than capable of producing enough electricity annually. The difficult bit is making sure there's enough electricity to satisfy demand at any given moment. From the generation side, there are three main options:

1. Forget going low-carbon and stick with Gas. Gas plants can scale well to meet demand. And an EV powered by a Nuclear base load, variable "green energy" load, and gas making up any shortfall, will still result in a fall in the UK's carbon emissions.

2. Build a crap load of Nuclear generation. It'll be expensive and won't scale well with variable demand, but we could maybe build interconnects to Europe to sell any excess (assuming there's sustained demand from the continent, now and in the future).

3. Store energy, and use it to meet spikes in demand.

Given the desire to have cheap, low-carbon energy, the third option seems the most desirable. It also has the potential to treat EVs as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem (V2G).

Demand management is also likely to play a key role in the future of power. Managing supply is far easier when the peaks and troughs of demand are less frequent and less extreme. Easy enough to do, if the technology is deployed. Live pricing. Devices and machinery that can respond to that pricing (a simple example would be a washing machine that aims to wash clothes as cheaply as possible while you're out at work).

Got to admit, the "batteries will last five years" comments made me chuckle. Most manufacturers now offer 8 or 10 year battery warranties, guaranteed to 85% of original capacity. My Leaf still shows 12/12 battery bars after 6 years. Making such a claim does strongly suggest that you don't really know what you're on about.
 
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satchef1 said:
Given the desire to have cheap, low-carbon energy, the third option seems the most desirable. It also has the potential to treat EVs as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem (V2G).
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V2G is the solution, there is no doubt at all. Generation of energy during hours that it is not required is already an issue, and will be even greater in future with more of the grid made up by wind. Not to mention the increase in solar PV estimated to be a total of 15,674MW by 2023 alone, and we went from 5,488.6 MW in 2014 to 13,259 MW by June 2019, or 13TWh of generated electricity.

30m+ mini moving power stations that talk to a smart grid isn't hard to imagine as being the most useful thing happening over the next 15-20 years.

I think people forget that the average UK home only uses 11kWh of electricity per day presently, most of which is at two fixed periods of the day for very short bursts of peak power.

Back of fag packet maths, using 39m vehicles doing the average 8k miles per year, at 4mpkWh put the electricity user at only 78TWh, that's not a huge amount, I wonder how much power we'll be saving by not refining as much oil, got to be a good few TWh.
 
Fusion said:
It's almost like oil companies and traditional manufacturers have bots spouting the same nonsense, trying to influence public discourse.

5 year battery life when vehicles have been around longer than that already- I mean, come on.
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Some have lost a lot of range though.
 
Interesting that its confirmed Elon signed up with LG/CATL for batteries, (if the virus doesn't delay them)
https://www.bestmag.co.uk/industry-...on-cell-supplier-partner-lg-chem-and-catl-its
will they get the secret sauce from Panasonic, or, are all the manufacturers on par now in terms of technology, so its a commodity.

The economic importance of good battery technology seems just as important, more so, to 5G and microprocessor technology, but we seem to be more lax in controlling it.


[
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/gr...-emissions-reductions-in-passenger-car-market
On average, SUVs consume about a quarter more energy than medium-size cars. As a result, global fuel economy worsened caused in part by the rising SUV demand since the beginning of the decade, even though efficiency improvements in smaller cars saved over 2 million barrels a day, and electric cars displaced less than 100,000 barrels a day.

In fact, SUVs were responsible for all of the 3.3 million barrels a day growth in oil demand from passenger cars between 2010 and 2018, while oil use from other type of cars (excluding SUVs) declined slightly. If consumers’ appetite for SUVs continues to grow at a similar pace seen in the last decade, SUVs would add nearly 2 million barrels a day in global oil demand by 2040, offsetting the savings from nearly 150 million electric cars.
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so they are pariahs
]
 
read recently that the average car covers under 8k miles a year. surely it cant be far off for the vast majority of people with off road parking being in a position where they can run a pure EV

unfortunately i still need to be able to do 800-1000 miles some days and whilst thats certainly doable with the right car (top spec tesla would eat this up with the range and superchargers if i'm heading south, i wouldnt like to do glasgow to wick and back with a pure EV with less than a genuine 700 mile range even in the coldest of winter my big diesel eats this run up a couple of times a month charging times need to improve overall as does availability of chargers, i can always find a pump full of the black stuff and be back underway in under 5 minutes even stopping for 30 mins at a time isnt an issue but the charging points just dont exist in a great enough number yet for me
 
233 said:
read recently that the average car covers under 8k miles a year. surely it cant be far off for the vast majority of people with off road parking being in a position where they can run a pure EV

unfortunately i still need to be able to do 800-1000 miles some days and whilst thats certainly doable with the right car (top spec tesla would eat this up with the range and superchargers if i'm heading south, i wouldnt like to do glasgow to wick and back with a pure EV with less than a genuine 700 mile range even in the coldest of winter my big diesel eats this run up a couple of times a month charging times need to improve overall as does availability of chargers, i can always find a pump full of the black stuff and be back underway in under 5 minutes even stopping for 30 mins at a time isnt an issue but the charging points just dont exist in a great enough number yet for me
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tbh I’ve never really heard of anyone doing 800-1000 miles a day and I’m willing to bet you’re in an absolute minuscule proportion of car owners so frankly your needs don’t matter to car makers.
 
As I said perfectly feasible if I’m running south just not for any runs north of Glasgow with the current infrastructure
 
I'm quite leaning towards the model 3 (performance) as my next car. I've read performance drops off with the battery charge, but i wondered if anyone knew how much. Is it like a li-ion drill where it will maybe run at say 90% max speed up until its flat?
 
theone8181 said:
I'm quite leaning towards the model 3 (performance) as my next car. I've read performance drops off with the battery charge, but i wondered if anyone knew how much. Is it like a li-ion drill where it will maybe run at say 90% max speed up until its flat?
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No, it's more significant than that. You notice a slight drop down to 75% compared to a higher SOC (State Of Charge) but nothing substantial. Below that the reduction becomes more significant. There's a good article about this here. I'd say it's still a very fast-feeling car with loads of pep even with the battery around half full, but if you're comparing it to a much higher charge percentage you'll probably feel the difference.

 
theone8181 said:
I'm quite leaning towards the model 3 (performance) as my next car. I've read performance drops off with the battery charge, but i wondered if anyone knew how much. Is it like a li-ion drill where it will maybe run at say 90% max speed up until its flat?
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I have seen a youtube video of the SR+ where they dynoed it at various SOC and it did lose performance as the SOC went down but it wasn't too terrible iirc.
 
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