It's hard for me to even enumerate how many ways this is wrong. But I'll try.
Batteries are still too heavy
Changing. Rapidly.
take too long to charge
Improving, rapidly. Much more rapidly than, say, gas mileage.
(batteries) are too expensive
Sorry to be a broken record, but this too is improving rapidly.
require materials that in widespread use will probably become far more of a problem than fossil fuels in terms of scarcity
This assumes that battery tech will remain static, and use the same materials, forever. Bad assumption, there.
Or the amount of infrastructure retro-fitting that needs to happen (power to parking garages being just one).
This is already starting to happen and will only accelerate. I'm working on a gigantic office building project which will have hundreds of charging stations in its parking area. This will be the norm, very soon. And perhaps you forgot, but building tens of thousands of gas stations all over the place wasn't easy, either...nor is maintaining them. We already have a beefy electrical infrastructure; we just have to keep working on that.
Or ignoring issues or range and recharge times.
Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers. And again, this is rapidly improving, even though we're not working very hard on it as a society. Imagine what would happen if we tried!
Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.
Yeah, and we already have that infrastructure. By the way, gas isn't free, either. Nor is it nearly as efficient as electric power can be.
Someone brought up what's happening in NJ but if you had an electric car you'd be even more screwed. At least now you can transport gas to people.
Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
Seriously, out of cost, weight, range and charging time all of them need to get an order of magnitude better to even be on par with fuel-driven vehicles.
Er, no. Do you know what an order of magnitude IS? Cost: we're within a factor of 2-3 of this being affordable, even if you use the very expensive Tesla as your test case. Weight: Already at parity with many cars. Range: Already discussed above; near parity with many gas vehicles. Charging time: This doesn't have to get much better at all; you can recharge at night.
> And perhaps you forgot, but building tens of thousands of gas stations all over the place wasn't easy
You're not the only one to bring this up and it confuses me why. The gas infrastructure has already been built. It's a sunk cost. EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
> Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers.
For significantly higher capital cost, with (probably) much lower shelf life. And when the "gas guzzler" hits its range, what does it do? Spends a few minutes filling up and does it again (as opposed to recharging for 8 hours).
> Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.
> Er, no. Do you know what an order of magnitude IS?
Yes, but we're talking about the battery tech and the batteries are only some portion of the total cost of a vehicle.
Fair enough. You say that batteries are "too heavy"; I pointed out that they are getting steadily lighter, which is true. It's also true that they are plenty light, right now, to make the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla. To me, it's self-evident that batteries are therefore not "too heavy" to make a viable product.
Part of EV infrastructure is already built, too, and you know this. Yes, we do have to build 9 megashitloads of charging stations, over time. But we may see a model where lots of that charging occurs at home, and the consumer upgrades their own infrastructure, or the power companies offer a free or cheap charging station in return for selling lots more electricity to the customer. I don't see this as an insurmountable issue at all.
Yes, the cost is currently higher, but the obvious point is that it's coming down rapidly per unit of vehicle range. Shelf life of the Prius batteries has proven very very good so far, although that's a hybrid and not a pure electric.
Yes, power is down to an extent not seen since the 19th century. But gas deliveries are affected in a major way, too. Anecdotally, I have tons of friends telling me how hard it is to find gas.
The use case for charging at night already encompasses most drivers in most situations. And with a range of 250-300mi with one-hour recharge at free Tesla stations for longer trips...the use case is getting broader all the time.
What's the deal? Did you buy $1M of Hummer stock and lose your Charles Schwab password? This tech is clearly valid right now and getting more attractive by the year.
And it works very well: for gasoline. Hydrogen cannot be contained in a rubber hose. Ammonia will eat away copper pipes (see http://encyclopedia.airliquide.com/Encyclopedia.asp?GasID=2#... ). CNG works fine, under pressure, which requires retrofitting everything, but natural gas is a fossil fuel. Biofuels come with a whole host of other problems.
The simple fact is, whatever we use, we're going to have to rebuild stuff. There's no way to reuse the gas infrastructure for any fuel that isn't a non-oxidizing hydrophobic liquid, which rules out approximately everything. Hydrogen fueling stations aren't retrofitted gas stations: they're a totally new thing:
>However, this does not begin to replace the existing extensive gasoline fuel station infrastructure, which would cost a half trillion U.S. dollars in the United States alone.
> You're not the only one to bring this up and it confuses me why. The gas infrastructure has already been built. It's a sunk cost. EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
Back in the day countries had a huge infrastructure for horse-based transport (stables, travellers inns, places to buy food). That was also a sunk cost.
I think gas and electric are not mutually exclusive.
It's clear that today's EVs have drawbacks, but many of those drawbacks are non-issues for a lot of consumers out there already. As the technology and infrastructure improve, people will switch.
Subconsciously, most of us feel electric is the way to go. There's just something right about it, maybe because all top consumer technology in the 21st century has a battery inside. Or simply because electricity has been the force driving change in society the last 150 years.
For a long time to come we'll depend on fuel, for hybrids and traditional cars, be it a jeep in the middle of the Amazon or John Doe's, who loves the sound of his V8 Mustang in the morning.
Fast charging is faster than that, you just need special power feed, but that can even be included in every home, which is not the case for a gas station.
> Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.
The actual problem is that the US infrastructure is in bad shape. Also by looking at the news, the places which have issues with electric power seem to also have oil delivery problems as well.
> You're not the only one to bring this up and it confuses me why. The gas infrastructure has already been built. It's a sunk cost. EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
EV infrastructure, unlike gasoline, can be piggy backed onto existing facilities - service stations, restaurants, hotels... It is much simpler to deploy and maintain - no tanks to install, no gas to deliver, no hazmat, etc. - just a connection to existing electrical infrastructure at those facilites. Adding EV charging to existing businesses also has potential to increase sales as drivers shop, eat and purchase goods etc during the wait. As EV marketshare increases, this will provide motivation to existing businesses to add EV charging capabilities on their own dime and thus stimulate the build out of such infrastructure. Tesla has finally built a practical EV that people want, which can kick start this whole process.
>> Changing. Rapidly.
> That doesn't negate my point.
Actually it does, and all of your arguments sound like:
> The gas infrastructure has already been built. [...] EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
which misses the point you're trying to make, which is (emphasis mine):
> I still don't see electric cars as being the future.
Of course things are not ready, because now is not the future.
This kind of things doesn't happen overnight. It's not like Carnot and Otto woke up a morning and everyone sold their horses and were suddenly busy building infrastructure for cars that didn't even exist.
> Given a fairly narrow use case, sure.
Here in France, more than 90% of (non-truck) traffic drives less than 2x10km per day. It is ludicrous to have people drive 160kph+-able 1'000km-ranged seven-seaters alone in a ICE car and spend 30min to drive 5km at 10kph mean. Yes I acknowledge that there exist people who do need longer range vehicles, but numbers demonstrate that many simply don't. (they could statistically almost drive a plug-in Prius in full electric all year round). (The situation is actually even more ludicrous as they're talked into buying mostly diesel cars, whose engines by design constraints completely hate being driven short distances, being started and stopped endlessly, and highly varying rpms, which results in higher fuel consumption, pollution, running costs, and failure rates).
The "running-out-of-energy" argument is for most, a classic case of psychologically biased risk assessment (similar to how people assess the terrorism risk, or planes crashing, while at the same time they smoke, drive recklessly and dry their hair in the bathtub). And you fell for it right there:
> Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.
Seriously, how often does that happen? I live in comparatively small cities (500k, and 300k before that) and the grid went down on me like three times in twenty years, the longer being a few hours. Also, I don't know how fuel pumps work but I bet they're electric with no fallback so you could very well be unable to refuel a gas car either. And then, what? tomorrow may bring in different habits, and as the dependency on electricity grows the grid will be made more reliable in a way or another (including possible fallbacks like generators in buildings, especially those who already burn some form of fuel to heat water).
The irony is that they could actually have power were their car electric, as some electric cars are designed to be able to power demanding external devices, or even a whole house from the battery (not exactly relevant here, since we're talking about whole buildings).
So, why do they buy such cars around here? Because once a year they go on vacation to the beach for a week or three with family, luggage, dog and cat. They completely overestimate the exceptional need. And contrary to the enthusiast minority, they don't even care what car they own (the logo being a domestic one is often the main - yet untold - argument), so they might as well rent a bigger, longer ranged car for the vacation duration and run on the cheaper car otherwise. Even smarter, take the train and rent the car on arrival. And when they go at Ikea they get delivered or rent a van.
My own brother bought a huge station wagon so that he can lug around bed and fridge when he moves in. Which happens once in ten years (at best). Which is basically the lifetime of the car, or the fridge. Seriously when you move in, you just rent a damn van(which has the advantage of even being able to fit everything at once instead of going back and forth filling the comparatively small SW).
As for energy consumption, it's not even like people will be charging from empty to full every single day, at once (remember 20km per day). And it's not like every single people will move to electric cars at once. So the current network will be able to grow as people slowly migrate to other sources of energy, and we might just even be able to analyse growth and identify the better way to enhance the infrastructure.
Again, we're talking, as you mentioned, about the future. Ten years ago the Internet in your pocket was for the nerdiest of nerds, xDSL was emerging and FTTH was unthinkable. All of that came in gradually, and EV infrastructure will certainly come the same way, just not the same rate.
If we accept that battery technology is rapidly improving and will be an order of magnitude better in the future, then those points of cletus' argument are indeed invalidated - the root comment is arguing that electric cars will not be the future because (e.g.) batteries are too heavy and take too long to charge.
For internal consistency, the argument should have read "batteries will continue to be too heavy and take too long to charge".
It doesn't matter how rapidly they are changing; the original comment was saying that they are too heavy now. You can hypothesize about where they will be in 5 years, but that's uncertain and doesn't apply to cars that are available now.
>take too long to charge
> Improving, rapidly. Much more rapidly than, say, gas mileage.
Again, rate of improvement doesn't have much to do with what's available now. And even if it is improving now, where will it top out? I can fill my tank in a minute and a half at the pump; will I ever be able to fully charge a car in that amount of time?
> Sorry to be a broken record, but this too is improving rapidly.
And again, it doesn't matter how fast it's improving; what matters is whether in the end, it will wind up such that it's cheaper than fuel-powered cars.
> Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers. And again, this is rapidly improving, even though we're not working very hard on it as a society. Imagine what would happen if we tried!
This doesn't matter to me if I need to take a 500 mile trip. Then, instead of just filling up for a minute or two at the pump, I have to wait for hours for a charge every couple hundred miles.
> Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
It's a lot easier to clear a road to get trucks past than it is to repair a full power grid.
> Charging time: This doesn't have to get much better at all; you can recharge at night.
No, I can't. I don't have a parking space where I live. I have to park on the street, and can't rely on being able to park in front of my house. Unless we get recharge stations installed at every parking space, an electric car will never be practical for me.
What does "the batteries are too heavy" even mean? Too heavy for what?
Tesla just released a really big car with a heavy battery that goes 265 miles on a charge (under the very strict new EPA rating; at older methods of measuring range this number would be much higher). So I ask the batteries are too heavy for what exactly?
Also, if you are paying attention, you know that Tesla has just opened to the public a number of Supercharger stations that will charge the Model S battery 50% of the way in about 20 minutes. So your complaint of "wait hours for a charge" is already solved, today, in 2012, at least if you live in California (and Tesla plans to expand the Supercharger network rapidly).
There have been anti-EV arguments for years, but the arguments keep changing, which is how you know that EVs have won. The main argument used to be that EVs would never go far enough, that people would have too much range anxiety. That has been solved. Then the argument was that the cars are too expensive. That is in the process of being solved right now, as you see from Roadster->Model S. There are other problems but they are much smaller. "I park on the street so I don't have a place to charge my car" is not very hard to solve: it is obviously just a matter of will.
However, part of the perception that EV cars are almost here is caused by people having gotten used to the blistering pace of innovation in IT. Batteries to heavy? Mwah, "wait a few years and it will be good enough".
In reality, if you look at the weight/power density curve of batteries it has been improving at a pace that 10 times slower than what happened in IT. So it may take decades more to get where we need to be. Just trying to be realistic here.
> the original comment was saying that they are too heavy now.
I beg to differ:
> The Tesla Model S is a great-looking car but, unlike some, I still don't see electric cars as being the future.
The comment is arguing that electric cars are not the future because batteries and energy delivery and what not is not ready now. Guess what, now is not the future. It would be like arguing that ICE cars were not the future in the 19th century.
The important thing is that those who believe that electric cars are viable be able to finance the enterprise. The sooner the taxpayer is no longer forced to subsidize them, the better.
Hopefully soon. Its wrong to subsidy the automobile, whether it is electric or ICE powered.
Yes, we do pay gas taxes, put I doubt they are enough. And even if they were, it makes no sense to charge the same regardless of when one travels.
Most of the road building is to accommodate rush hour traffic. It makes sense to more at that time, just as hotels charge more when demand is high.
The way roads are currently paid for winds up wasting enormous amounts of time at rush hour. Charging a price that reduces the traffic to the level that the roads can efficiently handle will save everybody a lot of time.
Of course, that issue has nothing to do with how cars are powered.
Batteries are still too heavy
Changing. Rapidly.
take too long to charge
Improving, rapidly. Much more rapidly than, say, gas mileage.
(batteries) are too expensive
Sorry to be a broken record, but this too is improving rapidly.
require materials that in widespread use will probably become far more of a problem than fossil fuels in terms of scarcity
This assumes that battery tech will remain static, and use the same materials, forever. Bad assumption, there.
Or the amount of infrastructure retro-fitting that needs to happen (power to parking garages being just one).
This is already starting to happen and will only accelerate. I'm working on a gigantic office building project which will have hundreds of charging stations in its parking area. This will be the norm, very soon. And perhaps you forgot, but building tens of thousands of gas stations all over the place wasn't easy, either...nor is maintaining them. We already have a beefy electrical infrastructure; we just have to keep working on that.
Or ignoring issues or range and recharge times.
Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers. And again, this is rapidly improving, even though we're not working very hard on it as a society. Imagine what would happen if we tried!
Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.
Yeah, and we already have that infrastructure. By the way, gas isn't free, either. Nor is it nearly as efficient as electric power can be.
Someone brought up what's happening in NJ but if you had an electric car you'd be even more screwed. At least now you can transport gas to people.
Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
Seriously, out of cost, weight, range and charging time all of them need to get an order of magnitude better to even be on par with fuel-driven vehicles.
Er, no. Do you know what an order of magnitude IS? Cost: we're within a factor of 2-3 of this being affordable, even if you use the very expensive Tesla as your test case. Weight: Already at parity with many cars. Range: Already discussed above; near parity with many gas vehicles. Charging time: This doesn't have to get much better at all; you can recharge at night.