Soldato
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Yeah, orders in for an i4, so probably got the Audi for 6 mths or so ... likely slowest car i've had in 20 years. Doh!
When are you going fully electric?
- Thread starter Ricochet J
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Caporegime
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It swings in roundabouts, all the cash saved is making decent money in stocks at the moment.
Associate
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Counter to the 'EVs aren't great' Rowan Atkinson opinion 
www.theguardian.com
Fact check: why Rowan Atkinson is wrong about electric vehicles
Last week we ran a piece by Rowan Atkinson casting doubt on the environmental benefits of electric vehicles. Here Simon Evans of Carbon Brief offers his response
www.theguardian.com
Counter to the 'EVs aren't great' Rowan Atkinson opinion
Fact check: why Rowan Atkinson is wrong about electric vehicles
Last week we ran a piece by Rowan Atkinson casting doubt on the environmental benefits of electric vehicles. Here Simon Evans of Carbon Brief offers his response
Quite a skill 'fact' checking with a crystal ball...
Edit - in fact half of the "facts" are projections and predictions. It's a valid counter argument but fact check is a misleading term by The Guardian imo.
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It’s clear that hydrogen and synthetic fuels will be more expensive, than just sending the power into a battery vehicle, because they use significantly more energy to get that fuel. In the case of hydrogen it’s between 5-7x more energy, then you have transport, storage and ‘people managed’ pump station costs.
For sure, they will be another option, but more expensive and less environmentally friendly.
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Soldato
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You were doing so well until you got to this, and then you failed. For two reasons, firstly:
The reason the ICE ends up as a cube of low value scrap is thats the value of a cube of low value scrap.
If you look at the value of the (recoverable) rare earths that will be in the EV the scrap value will be much much higher.
Ev batteries will have 3 lifecycles, 1) EV, 2) some storage non-mobile, 3) harvest back the rare earths for ££££
ICE cars engines have two, 1) ICE vehicle, 2) scrap cube ££
and secondly: the potential demand for grid scale and home scale storage will probably suck in every EV cell possible for decades. Unless we crack fusion in the short/medium term.
This basically.
I’m not clear what the tax situation is over there but the cost of hydrogen in Norway is double the cost of buying diesel.
The other elephant in the room is that an individual hydrogen pumps can’t actually service that many cars per hour because of all the de-liquidation processes which recharge the buffer tanks that need to happen in the background. The nozzles also freeze when used repeatedly, even in very warm climates.
The cheapest hydrogen currently comes from gas reformation which is very carbon intensive. Hydrogen from electrolysis is not going to be cheaper than putting the electricity in a battery.
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Yep -these were exactly my thoughts after watching Bjørn's recent video on the Toyota Mira
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This hasn't been proven to be the case at any meaningful scale yet so is very much a 'might' instead of a 'will'.
Edit - as for home storage... There is such an obvious solution to this which is already in the pipeline. Vehicle to home and vehicle to grid. Why stick half a decade old Tesla to your wall when you can just send power to and from the car you drive every day? It'll almost definitely have way more capacity and has the added benefit of being replaced with the car.
The counter 'fact check' to Rowan's article said that EV batteries didn't contain rare earth materials so it seems that argument gets spun whichever way suits! As for the rest of the materials, yes they have value but what will the cost be to A) get them out and B) deal with the rest of the waste in an acceptable way? If A+B doesn't significantly undercut the value of those materials then it makes that business model a hard sell.
Honestly, if I had to put money on how I think this industry will pan out, it will be levied back on to the manufacturers to deal with the problem of EoL batteries and that any talk of them being a proverbial pot of gold that companies can't wait to snap up never coming to fruition.
Although even that prediction doesn't hold up when we accept the innevitable fact that we will only be able to buy something from Geely or direct from the Chinese state by the time scrap EVs become an issue
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it’s amazing - EV’s have been mainstream since ~2011 and there isn’t a market for recycling EV batteries.
Yet all the anti-EV crowd suggest EV batteries only last 3-5 years.
Where are they all going then ?!
Surely no one is dumping anEV battery with said ‘rare eath metals’ worth thousands into landfill /Shrug
Soldato
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This hasn't been proven to be the case at any meaningful scale yet so is very much a 'might' instead of a 'will'.
Edit - as for home storage... There is such an obvious solution to this which is already in the pipeline. Vehicle to home and vehicle to grid. Why stick half a decade old Tesla to your wall when you can just send power to and from the car you drive every day? It'll almost definitely have way more capacity and has the added benefit of being replaced with the car.
The counter 'fact check' to Rowan's article said that EV batteries didn't contain rare earth materials so it seems that argument gets spun whichever way suits! As for the rest of the materials, yes they have value but what will the cost be to A) get them out and B) deal with the rest of the waste in an acceptable way? If A+B doesn't significantly undercut the value of those materials then it makes that business model a hard sell.
Honestly, if I had to put money on how I think this industry will pan out, it will be levied back on to the manufacturers to deal with the problem of EoL batteries and that any talk of them being a proverbial pot of gold that companies can't wait to snap up never coming to fruition.
Although even that prediction doesn't hold up when we accept the innevitable fact that we will only be able to buy something from Geely or direct from the Chinese state by the time scrap EVs become an issue
I think the argument is that the rare earths are declining but I am working on now. If they do then the model could well change.
They are still almost certainly going to be of a higher value than a contaminated lump of steel/aluminium though.
V2G or V2H which works perfectly for the 30% or so who can guarantee they will be parking on their drive.
The other problem is that if I am out during the day then my car cannot take the benefit of my solar. I think V2H or V2G will have its place, but that will be alongside and not instead of home storage for most.
In regards batteries and manufacturers I would agree, thats how it should work, not just for the Evs but also for every other item that potentially got ewaste battery problems. Such as vapes...
Problem is thats fine if you can guarantee the manufacturer will be there, but what if they wont...
They aren't but the scale IS different now that we can all agree on.
There is more demand that supply right now for used EV parts which will change over time.
Soldato
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He sort of had a point on some of his points.
One was like we shouldn't dump 3 year old ICE cars, I am not sure I have seen anyone argue we should, but he was not wrong.
What the pro ICE lot seem to fail to get, or completely deny, is climate change.
You can't really suggest we carry on with ICE and get with it in regards the changes taking place.
I don’t think anyone sensible is advocating that we should dump existing ICE cars. We just shouldn’t really be building many new ones and the ones that do exist should be maintained to a high standard so they last. I say many because I do recognise that there are vehicles and use cases which don’t have viable replacements yet.
For the amount of money people are spending on new cars these days, particularly in the luxury segment, there really are few excuses left.
Norways sales figures always make interesting reading and a sign of things to come:
83% BEV
8% PHEV
4% HEV*
*who actually owns these? I’m guessing mainly Toyota, rather than private owners as I’m pretty sure there is less than a handful of operational filling stations in the country. There might even be more NIO battery swap stations now.
For the amount of money people are spending on new cars these days, particularly in the luxury segment, there really are few excuses left.
Norways sales figures always make interesting reading and a sign of things to come:
83% BEV
8% PHEV
4% HEV*
*who actually owns these? I’m guessing mainly Toyota, rather than private owners as I’m pretty sure there is less than a handful of operational filling stations in the country. There might even be more NIO battery swap stations now.
Soldato
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HEV is a hybrid.
V2G/V2P (premises) will be most prevalent in work car parks, and places like airport long stay etc. Where cars are parked for long periods of time and will have the ability to store excess renewable generation and feed it back when needed to the local grid/premises. I was talking to a company at Fully Charged Live who are working on a software solution for their chargers, it will allow users to have a unique I.D on any work place/car park charger via an account they have and that will generate credits based on supply/storage of energy. They are hoping to also be able to link it in to their home chargers with the energy supplier, and spend the credits based on time of day without needing to have the V2G/V2H equipment so there would still be a benefit; even possibly spend credits at the rapid chargers depending on who the tie up with etc.
Atkinson was an EV early adopter though, his article comes after all that experience.
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but the point is you have a surplus of wind generated electricity amd you need to store it somehow - which is what shell are planning in the netherlands with biggest electrolysis implantation,
even spare power from nuclear would seem an ideal candidate for that.
thought they were being stoockpiled at the moment until recycling technology & financing has caught up.
Makes more sense than them being hydrogen!
Why do you need to store it in hydrogen? You can sell the same surplus wind energy to charge electric cars and incentivise them to use the times of surplus via time of use/agile pricing - that’s your storage.
Electrolysis plants are not really a flexible energy sink, they have start up losses and really need to be ran continuously. You are not going to invest tens of millions into an electrolysis plant and only run it every other week. That sounds like the quickest way to go bankrupt.
We are decades away from decarbonising existing uses for hydrogen, let’s concentrate on sorting that before trying to shoehorn it into passenger cars where other solutions which are better.
Despite all the money Toyota has ploughed into fuel cell cars, the only advantage of the Mirai is refill time over BEV and tailpipe emissions (probably no total emissions is using brown hydrogen) over ICE.
The advantages of BEV/ICE are numerous by comparison.
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