
Electric Vehicles Are Overwhelmingly More Energy Efficient - jseliger
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/electric-vehicles-are-overwhelmingly-more-energy-efficient
======
zizee
> Bloomberg NEF forecasts sales of electric passenger vehicles ... to overtake
> sales of those running solely on internal combustion engines in 2038.

Perhaps I am naive, but I would be surprised if it takes that long.

There are so many obvious benefits* to electric cars that the only thing
holding them back from Mass adoption (IMHO) is the price of batteries. With
such significant investments being made, and such steady progress being made,
it is hard for me to imagine it will take almost 20 years to get to this
point.

* Yes, range anxiety, cold weather's affect on performance and lack of charging infrastructure are all problems, but they start going away when cheaper batteries make electric cars cheaper to own/run, and more cars are on the road to justify businesses to start installing charge stations in carparks.

~~~
yholio
>it is hard for me to imagine it will take almost 20 years

You are drastically over-estimating the propensity for change of the majority
of the population. In Europe we have diesel versus gasoline wars with
supporters of each side declaring that the other is pure crap. The idea these
people would just run the numbers, see that electric is more efficient and go
to the dealers to pickup an electric car is funny.

We aren't even in the first phases of consumer adoption, we haven't seen the
first waves of cheap knock-offs that try to capitalize on the trend and
possibly set the public expectations about electrics to low levels. What we
have is an american tech startup building a highly advanced and expensive car,
and the major manufacturers hedging their bets and announcing electric models
to make sure they are not caught off guard.

~~~
nutjob2
Today's "highly advanced and expensive car" _is_ tomorrow's cheap knock off.
The sunk costs have been made by the Teslas of this world and economy of scale
is about to deliver its magic.

It's ironic reading something like this on a technology website, an industry
where scale and rapid development have delivered astounding value. Cars are
just the latest product to be gobbled up by the same hyper-efficient industry.

My prediction is the car industry will look like the PC industry in the
future. Complicated drive trains have been replaced by simple motors close to
the wheel. You don't have to architect a car around them anymore. Scaling will
produce more generic and interchangeable parts at much better prices. Soon
we'll be talking about our latest build, but it will be a car, not a computer.

This has already started with enthusiasts transplanting reclaimed Tesla
innards into other shells:

[https://youtu.be/o-7b1waoj9Q?t=291](https://youtu.be/o-7b1waoj9Q?t=291)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
It's also ironic reading on technology websites how important everyone thinks
the engine is in a car. While in fact engines are the least specialized and
least failure-prone part of a modern car.

Your link to people transplanting Tesla innards into other shells: people have
done this since the 1930s. Back then it was called a Hot Rod, today
aftermarket parts in the US alone is a $300+ billion industry.

------
asaph
Tesla (not mentioned in the article) deserves a lot of credit in accelerating
the shift towards battery powered cars.

~~~
goodcanadian
You are not wrong, but on HN, at least, I feel Tesla gets more credit than it
deserves and Nissan doesn't get enough. I was an early fan; the roadster made
me believe it was possible, but in the meantime, Nissan produced a mass market
car and sold it worldwide in the hundreds of thousands. Only now, with the
model 3, is Tesla arguably entering the same market . . . at the same time as
everyone else, really. I will grant that they are producing on a larger scale
than anyone else, but I'm not convinced they can keep that advantage long.

~~~
tails4e
The leaf is good and certainly helped, but in a way it alone (without the
tesla model s/x) may have held back the mainstream adoption of electric cars
as it had not dramatically addressed the challenges of battery degradation,
charging infrastructure, 'atttactive' design, and range. Tesla showed the
world electric cars could be had with almost no compromises by tackling those
areas head on. This is what will move them from niche to mainstream,
especially now with the cost making it accessible to most.

------
aaronblohowiak
Quite a bit of the total energy consumed by/through any vehicle is in its
manufacture. Due to their relative simplicity, I believe electric vehicles
offer a clearer path to a more consistent high-mileage lifecycle, with the
battery pack as the primary wear item. I’d love to see million miles become
the norm.

~~~
7952
Maybe this is a bit extreme. But I would love to see car makers be required to
offer long term (5 years +, 100k+ miles) warranties for free. Force them to
use higher quality components and be up front about long term costs. But allow
them to exclude battery packs from the warranty.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Quite a lot already do: [https://myioniq.com/hyundai-ioniq-
warranty/](https://myioniq.com/hyundai-ioniq-warranty/)

------
leoedin
Looking around urban streets in the UK, the biggest blocker to widespread
electric car adoption is almost certainly charging infrastructure.

Most people in cities here live in flats, terraced houses or other houses
without driveways. Charging therefore needs to be on-street or in centralised
locations. We have a handful of electric car charging points, but these are
often full even now, when electric cars make up a tiny proportion of the
fleet.

The amount of investment needed in street charging and supercharger like
stations before electric cars can be the majority is absolutely vast here.
It's going to need a lot of political will to happen.

I think the situation is similar across much of Europe and the rest of the
world. The US model - a driveway for every house across most of the country -
is quite unique globally.

~~~
stevesimmons
(I just posted this in reply to a different comment. But it is more relevant
here.)

On charging infrastructure, here where I live in London, a lot of the light
poles now have EV charging points. They are very subtle: just a blue LED, a
small black charger cover and a small Siemens logo. Everything else is inside
the preexisting pole (diameter about 4 inches).

[https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-
news/2018/08/2...](https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-
news/2018/08/20/siemens-to-provide-london-street-light-ev-chargers)

I would never have thought of doing this. But once you've seen it, it's an
obvious cheap, quick and non-intrusive solution.

~~~
leoedin
That's a smart solution, but it doesn't solve the whole problem.

Since I became aware of lamppost charging I've been counting the lamppost to
car ratio. It's generally somewhere around 7-10:1. Even if you convert every
lamppost you're still only 15% of the way there.

There's also the power distribution problem. To charge a lot of cars takes a
lot of power. A typical residential house uses 4760kWh/year in the UK - that's
about 500W average. It's maybe 3x as much in the US - call it 2kW. The most
basic, 13A electric car charger will draw maybe 3.1kW. A more reasonable
electric car charger might draw 7kW. A supercharger is somewhere between 50
and 150kW. at the very least, you're doubling the amount of power you need to
distribute to residential streets, at worse you're increasing it by a factor
of 75.

Total UK electricity production is around 300TWh/year. We consume 46 billion
litres of transport fuel a year - that's around 51GW, or 447TWh/year. Even
accounting for the improved efficiency of electric cars, you're still looking
at doubling the electricity production, and distributing that to 30 million
cars, each of which is down a very long wire.

I'm all for electric cars, but there's some serious infrastructure issues we
have to deal with before they're physically able to be ubiquitous.

~~~
mceachen
If you own the lamppost, perhaps you could own orchestration of power delivery
as well?

If load exceeds tolerances, the EV plugs apply a "rolling blackout" that
oscillates through the network every N minutes, to give every car at least
some juice?

Also, typical EV eMPG is double an ICE. LEAFs are 124/90 eMPG City/Highway,
for example. That makes your math for doubling electrical production a bit
less scary. The fact that EV charging is commonly off peak also makes it more
convenient for the grid.

------
ArtDev
"Only about one in four or five of those gallons of gasoline you pump and pay
for provide energy you actually use, and perhaps 60-70% of what statisticians
call the world’s primary energy use is really just waste"

Interesting.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Totally interesting! It's not waste for no reason. Energy transfers have
thermodynamic efficiencies and at practical temperatures the transformation of
chemical energy into shaft horsepower is like 30% efficient in a small engine.
Making electricity from fossil or nuclear fuel in large plants is between that
and 60% efficient.

~~~
jacquesm
> at practical temperatures the transformation of chemical energy into shaft
> horsepower is like 30% efficient in a small engine

Does that also hold for hybrid electric vehicles?

~~~
snovv_crash
Yes. That is the percentage of fuel energy that gets to your wheels. The rest
is made into heat, and is why fuel engines need such big radiators - for every
HP going to your wheels, a minimum of 2 go to the radiator.

Hybrids just recapture the heat from the brakes, another major loss point, but
unrelated to the engine. If you want to actually get better energy efficiency
you need plug-in hybrid or fully electric.

------
o10449366
What are the environmental and energy costs of producing and replacing
batteries? How abundant are the resources required?

~~~
yholio
1 Billion cars require about 20% of the known reserves of lithium and
recycling can be done with low losses. New types of batteries are developed
that use less lithium or other materials.

At current prices and technology, the raw material price for lithium carbonate
is around $600 per car, (60Kg at about $10 per Kg) and that price can give you
an idea of the environmental impact, probably on par with the 1 - 1.5 tonnes
of steel required to build the car and costing similarly.

Of course, "environmental impact" doesn't really mean anything unless you put
it in perspective. We could talk about CO2 emissions during mining and
refining - and we could reduce that to near zero by using electric mining
equipment and clean energy. We could talk about the impact mining companies
have on some beautiful South American salty desert, and I really have no
answer there because it's all relative to how you value desert landscapes
compared to urban mobility. Some people will surely claim it's unacceptable
and we should all switch to bikes.

~~~
imtringued
I bet some people would complain about the environmental impact of wooden
bicycles because they use nails made out of steel which was recycled from old
bikes.

------
interfixus
Five years from now, it will be clear to anyone buying a new car that if it's
legacy tech, its resale value is going to be essentially zero. Past that
point, the trend towards electric will go exponential.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Yes that's already happening right now. The premise of buying an expensive car
is that you can sell it a few years later for a predictable price. Once that
price collapses, things get ugly very quickly. Once new buyers suspect there
is an issue there, they will be very reluctant.

So, the luxury car market will shift to full EV a lot sooner than 2038. IMHO
that's happening right now and will largely have happened by 2025 already.
It's the rest of the market that will take a bit longer. Not because of a lack
of demand but a lack of supply: it will that long to build enough production
capacity. And while capacity is limited, the high end of the market is more
lucrative to use the capacity for. A Tesla model 3 with 20% margins selling
for 40-60K is more interesting than say the equivalent of a Ford Pinto for 15K
with 5% margins. The economics of that are different if you have enough
capacity to do both of course but that is not the case yet. As long as battery
production is a bottleneck, people will be looking to put them in high margin
products rather than low margin products.

------
foxyv
I wish I could afford an electric car, but the real cost of ownership for one
is so far beyond my gassed Honda Fit that I can never justify it. Instead I
just try to use my bicycle and e-bike as much as possible. Maybe when the
Honda finally dies I can justify an electric car, but I doubt it unless they
get a LOT cheaper.

------
woodandsteel
Here is a link that criticizes the BNEF report and argues EV adoption will be
far faster [https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/19/bnefs-latest-
embarrassi...](https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/19/bnefs-latest-
embarrassingly-lowball-ev-outlook/)

------
rapsey
No one talks about the used car market for EVs. The battery is by far the most
expensive part and the most volnurable to fail. So much so that buying a used
EV is a much riskier bet.

~~~
eecc
I dare say it’s quite the opposite. Just write off and replace the battery and
the rest is practically pristine.

~~~
rapsey
A new battery will be pretty close to the price of the entire used car. Im not
sure that is a valid economic proposition.

~~~
serpi
Citation please! This is FUD otherwise.

~~~
mceachen
For a LEAF, $2.3k for a refurb, and >$6k for new.
[https://electrek.co/2018/03/26/nissan-leaf-battery-pack-
repl...](https://electrek.co/2018/03/26/nissan-leaf-battery-pack-replacement-
program/)

Unfortunately, that's in the ballpark for a used LEAF.

------
99chrisbard
Why not transition to EV motorcycles?

~~~
dymk
Because I don’t want to die in what would be a mild collision in a four wheel
vehicle

~~~
agumonkey
if we all drive ebikes the issue is less so

~~~
dymk
Sounds good, just let me know what day we choose to all simultaneously switch
to bikes.

~~~
ntlk
Many of us already have and the more people make this choice, the safer it
becomes.

------
donquichotte
It's sad that this "article" is not going more in-depth.

What bugged me most was:

> [...] it matters where the electrons going into an EV come from; coal-fired
> power is [...] less than 40% efficient on average. [If ...] we lost 6% in
> transmission, it would still add up to only 10 million barrels a day in oil
> terms. The efficiency gain is overwhelming.

No! What about losses in the electric grid? What about losses in the battery?
As far as efficiency is concerned, electric cars are just as bad as ICE cars,
given their electricity comes from thermal power plants. Plus, a lot of rare
earths are required to manufacture them, mainly for the permanent magnets in
the synchronous motors and the batteries.

~~~
saagarjha
> What about losses in the electric grid? What about losses in the battery?

This is very small.

~~~
ggm
They're also very accurately quantified. Somehow the same losses in petrol
full lifecycle tar sands to pump are not.

