Article: "Electric Vehicles Close to ‘Tipping Point’ of Mass Adoption" (car engine, CV)

[cvetters63]

Originally Posted by Synchromesh

Well, that's like your opinion too, man. And mine is quite factual as I've driven older GTIs, a 2005 Cooper S, a Fiesta ST and a Tesla Model 3. The GTIs sucked hard (all watercooled VWs are trash and always have been), the Cooper S was ok, nothing too special and that was before they became so bloated. The ST was quite fun. The Tesla... it was a total piece of soulless junk trash in every way. Very much like like its creator. Just computer with 0 emotion, feeling or anything else. It was not fun to drive (minus acceleration), it was horribly designed and made and felt like cheap trash that it is. If other electric cars are going to be like that (and they will) then you can keep them and I'll keep my gasoline car for as long as I can.

Sounds like you went into it with a preconceived notion and came out of it without a clue. And if you, a self proclaimed car guy doesn't like the original MK1 or MK 2 GTI from the '70s and 'early '80s, then I don't know how to talk to you in words that you'll understand. You seem pretty closed minded.

Sounds like you have no clue what a proper 4 is.

As soon as you prove there's a proper 4 in 90% of cars on the market today (sedans and CUVs) then I'll agree that they'll be missed. But you can't because none of them HAVE "proper 4s"

There is a lot more to life than Camcords. Try a high-revving Honda plant from K-series like the ones they installed in S2000. I've owned an Integra with a B18C1 previously (8100rpm redline) and it was a hoot! I currently own a Beetle with a proper flat-4 which is tons of fun to play with. My Subaru has a turbo flat-4 - also a very fun powerplant. And you being familiar with Porsches I don't have tell you about the aircooled flat-6s, right?

And again, those cars are NOT WHAT 90% OF THE COUNTRY BUYS!!!!! There's a reason why they are edge cases. If you're going to miss the sounds of a goddamn Highlander or Escape you're missing the ****ing point.

My weekend car IS A MINI Cooper JCW roadster (R59 chassis):



Decidedly not a 'bloated" car, with more power than a Cooper S. It's got great burbles and pops on the overrun while shifting through the 6 speed manual gearbox with the top down on a twisty back road. the Shrick cammed, header equipped, high compression M10 motor in my '70 BMW 2002ti would make that S2000 sound like an annoying sewing machine. I KNOW what proper 4s sound like and MOST CARS DO NOT HAVE THEM. So wringing your hands that a daily driver car loses the sound of a CRV is stupid.

But gas cars, especially the old ones are fully mechanical and they provide a connection to the road that no electric car can for a whole slew of different reasons. From lack of power steering (find me an EV without it, I dare you) to a manual transmission with a full mechanical linkage, etc. EVs simply cannot compete with any of that any way you slice it. It's basically a computer on wheels. You're not driving the car, you're telling the computer what you want it to do. And the computer will tell you how far you can get on doing that. If it doesn't like your input for whatever reason it *will* reel you in whether you like it or not.

Yeah, I thought so. You're one of hose people that decried computerized ignition and fuel injection, and think that if you have an automatic trans your just a passenger. Sorry, I don't want to deal with that closed minded BS. You've obviously not driven a car like the Bolt in sport mode with the traction control turned off.

Now, I have a CS degree and I've spent working in SQA for many years.

Oh, here it comes. The "Ive got a degree so I know more than anyone" crap.

I'm well familiar with the IT industry and I have a pretty good idea about how the computer aspect of it works. And the only way it works in this case is just one way - the most amount of money for the manufacturer with the least amount of effort. This isn't a crafted object like some cars used to be. This is just another electronic gadget that's been put together for maximum profit with planned obsolescence built right in. If you think it's anything different, you're purely delusional.

Just like 99% of new cars of any sort. You think a Corolla or Civic isn't created the same way for the same reasons? You're the one that's delusional.

Well, then you should know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not big on American cars (with exception of C2 Corvettes and Corvairs) but I get it. On the other hand it sounds like you're a major EV fanboi.

I'm a fan of ALL cars and I don't give a **** if they are powered by gasoline or electrons. I'm not a closed minded twit.

So by your rationale we should take all the multi-million dollar Ferraris, Lambos, etc and convert them too. I mean history means absolutely nothing so why not? At least they'll be more efficient because efficiency uber Alles!

Never said that. Your reading comprehension is definitely in question, Mr. I-have-a-degree. But old MGBs, VWs and Porsches where there are tens of thousands of them left? Sure. Lets make some of them fun EVs. And who's going to pine over a 180hp Ferrari 308 being converted to Tesla power? NO ONE.

I totally admire the Rich. He's converting Tesla to LS1 + 6MT setup. Now that's doing God's work right there. That conversion deserves a medal in my book. Other way around - not so much. I think it's a gimmick that's around because it's something new right now. But it will die down unless the government enforces a complete ICE ban (which they probably will if current party stays in power). That aside, classic cars should stay classic. There is nothing worse than violating an old car with this soulless trash of an electric drivetrain.

Ahh, there's that anthopomorphizing crap again. Soul is made by PEOPLE building cars. And people building EVs creates as much "soul" as people making any other machinery. Saving older cars from the crusher by giving them a new heart isn't necessarily a bad thing. Do you call a man with an artificial heart after he has a heart attack and multiple bypasses a "soulless automaton" and no longer human? No. Are you this critical of people with artificial limbs or pacemakers controlling their organs? Are they no longer human? It's no different for machines.

You do realize that eventually the battery will become junk and wear out completely, right? I mean it's not going to serve forever no matter how you slice it. And that means you'll have to recycle it chemically which means more damage to the environment.

I don't think you understand how to recycle lithium. Recycling batteries is not harmful.

Also, there is a lot more to it than that. A battery can explode or become damaged in many various ways before it reaches a proper end-of-life. Meaning you'll still have to recycle it and it's still dirty as hell.

And gas cars never explode or leak harmful chemicals into the environment. Give me a break. The risk of a thermally controlled battery "exploding" is much more minor than having a blemmy in a gas powered car (or even a gasoline tanker truck): https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/vide...ghway-65921730





That's what we call a blemmy. EVs and Electrical transportation doesn't do this. OTOH, 170,000 gasoline cars burn down on the roads every year. I was a passenger in one that exploded and nearly took me with it. I was lucky in that I only got 3rd degree burns on both legs and the side of my face. So I'm a bit sensitive to car fires.

That's extremely marginal at best. The main source of pollution is (once again) the battery. And your battery is NOT going to get cleaner until they invent batteries that can be built without producing tons of CO2 and using tons of rare earth metals.

And again, Mr I-Have-a-degree doesn't understand just what rare earth metals are. It's like you never learned anything in school.

According to Google EV batteries lose up to 40% of their capacity in the cold. Are you calling google a liar? Or perhaps you're not being very factual yourself? I wonder which one it is...

We were talking about solar panels, numbnuts, not batteries. Look at what I was responding to to make that statement and what the entire following paragraph was about. Again, your ability to read and use context clues is called into question.

If this was so simple 15 years ago why didn't they put up 20K sq miles of solar panels up already and throw away coal, nuclear, oil, water, wind and other powerplants?

Lot's of reasons. People like you voting against it, or spewing misinformation about what it actually takes. Lack of budget (it WAS expensive 15 years ago). Or companies waiting to get the newer solar panels out. That's why solar is being promoted so big on residential houses and why companies like mine are installing so many solar panels on their flat roofs. THe cost has come down and the efficinecies have gone up, so now it bcomes possible, so long as idiots don't get in the way. I mena, why WOULD you get in the way of American innovation and American businesses getting working alternative energy? Unless you WORK for an oil company, that is.

All we have to do now is to continue this process:



Installing solar panels on these flat roofs can provide the square footage without worrying about covering a contiguous 5000 square mile area.

I mean it's not even that much space considering the whole US territory. I just have a feeling that's slightly more complicated than what you're talking about. Something you may consider - I live in California, a state with lots of sunshine. Despite all of the good weather, a major green push from our moronic government, tons of installed solar panels, etc we still experience major blackouts in many parts of the state for a whole slew of reasons.

Almost all of them due to companies like PGE being allowed to not invest in things like underground lines that would have resisted the fires. Southern California Edison already did a number of studies that with the current levels of adoption, it would be easy to replace half the fleet of cars in California with EVs and not affect the grid. And given the fact that we cannot produce enough EVs to replace that many cars overnight (even if all car manufacturers switched to producing ONLY EVs tomorrow, it would still take 30 years of production to replace even half the fleet), the grid will have 30+ years to be upgraded to cover it. All it takes is private companies to have the will to futureproof their systems. PGE didn't, but SCE has. So long as people vote against it, you're going to see the same issues arise.

Oh, and the other thing, most EVs are charged at night after peak power and the plants are being ramped down. By keeping the plants running at night to charge EVS or fill up battery backups that then charge EVs later, the plants become MORE efficient and there's actually enough capacity now to cover it in most places. But again, it doesn't NEED to cover that load for a while because we can't make enough EVs for it to be an issue.

Now imagine we take millions of current gasoline cars and throw them all out.

Again, it's impossible to make enough EVs to do that even IF all manufacturers switched to only making EVs overnight. So worrying about it or scenarios built on your assumption are moronic at best.

We do it your way and take the historic cars out too

Never said that. Again, your ability to read is called into question.

(they pollute the most with no cats and all)

And they make up a mere 1% of the cars in the country. So their pollution levels are not an issue. But ones that are dead could be reborn with EV power pretty easily and for some of them, it's be an improvement in reliability and ability. But again, I never called for that. Read what I wrote again and don't lay your own biases over it.

[Malloric]

I wouldn't take Edison's analysis for being worth much though. With deregulation they're much more of an electricity distributor than a generator. Which means they're just relying on generation capacity schedules generated by the state, which as we learned last year the state doesn't bother to update those numbers as they approve natural gas generators to operate at below acceptable levels of efficiency. Doing overhaul maintenance on stuff that's just going to be decommissioned soon anyway doesn't make any sense. The operators won't do the maintenance when it makes no economic sense to do it so a lot of that inventory is quite rundown. But the state doesn't bother to take the reports from the generators into account anymore than they do the water levels in the hydro reservoirs and keep an updated list of what the actual statewide generation capacity is in the real world where there are droughts and deferred maintenance.

So can Edison distribute the electricity, well, they think they can. But they're dealing with demand and distribution and not generation. They're just taking generation from state data which as last year proved the state has no idea what the actual generation capacity is. They thought they had plenty capacity until a few hours before telling the utility companies to turn stuff off because they didn't.

Theoretically, EVs aren't as difficult to accommodate. A lot of power in California is from natural gas and that's mostly combined cycle plants that don't like to turn on and off. We pay Arizona to take the electricity and load balance the grid for us already overnight. In reality though a lot of those gas plants are in very poor condition and should have been taken offline for overhauls or decommissioned years ago. They're not going to build enough wind to replace them fast enough and solar doesn't work at night so. It might be a bigger problem given the deferred maintenance. Again, last year. They took one big plant offline for some maintenance, had an unexpected failure at another. No big deal as there was plenty of redundancy left. Except of course there wasn't because they have no idea what the generation capacity is.

[southernnaturelover]

Here's what will help EVs reach the "tipping point".... make the battery warranty 12 years or 150k miles in all 50 states. Too many people worry about having to pay for a battery replacement once they are past the 8 year/100k warranty.

This would also help used EVs retain some resale value. Right now the value plummets as soon as the battery warranty expires (Tesla may be an exception).

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by southernnaturelover

Here's what will help EVs reach the "tipping point".... make the battery warranty 12 years or 150k miles in all 50 states. Too many people worry about having to pay for a battery replacement once they are past the 8 year/100k warranty.

This would also help used EVs retain some resale value. Right now the value plummets as soon as the battery warranty expires (Tesla may be an exception).

That's something that could come with the tipping point the OP's article mentioned. If battery capacity really comes down to $100 per kWh or less, then it opens up the possibility of vehicles for any chosen price bracket to have greater capacity. As battery longevity in the context of EVs mostly revolves around the number of duty cycles it can go through without losing significant capacity, then for someone to cover the average 14,000 miles or so on average per year that Americans drive, a larger battery pack with more range can cover more miles for any arbitrary number of duty cycles compared to a smaller battery pack with less range.


Aside from being to retain enough range after significant number of miles of usage, which is a major factor especially if an EV reaches a loss of capacity to the point where it's iffy to even cover a reasonable average daily roundtrip commute between charges, another factor to consider for resale values plummeting for EVs is that the original person buying it likely bought it for $7,500 less than what the MSRP is due to the federal tax credit and are therefore more willing to part with a larger depreciation hit. This should likely be a non-factor as the larger tax credits and other such incentives start expiring for automakers in the US in the next few years.



Of course, that means the automakers need to find ways to keep their EVs price competitive past the expiration. Chevrolet's tact with the Bolt that is no longer eligible for the federal tax credit was first large discounts, and then a refresh that included better interiors, the formerly optional 50kW fast charger become standard, the packaging of destination charge and a "standard" installation of a level 2 charger into the MSRP, and the MSRP getting a $5,500 price cut.

[southernnaturelover]

Originally Posted by OyCrumbler

That's something that could come with the tipping point the OP's article mentioned. If battery capacity really comes down to $100 per kWh or less, then it opens up the possibility of vehicles for any chosen price bracket to have greater capacity. As battery longevity in the context of EVs mostly revolves around the number of duty cycles it can go through without losing significant capacity, then for someone to cover the average 14,000 miles or so on average per year that Americans drive, a larger battery pack with more range can cover more miles for any arbitrary number of duty cycles compared to a smaller battery pack with less range.


Aside from being to retain enough range after significant number of miles of usage, which is a major factor especially if an EV reaches a loss of capacity to the point where it's iffy to even cover a reasonable average daily roundtrip commute between charges, another factor to consider for resale values plummeting for EVs is that the original person buying it likely bought it for $7,500 less than what the MSRP is due to the federal tax credit and are therefore more willing to part with a larger depreciation hit. This should likely be a non-factor as the larger tax credits and other such incentives start expiring for automakers in the US in the next few years.



Of course, that means the automakers need to find ways to keep their EVs price competitive past the expiration. Chevrolet's tact with the Bolt that is no longer eligible for the federal tax credit was first large discounts, and then a refresh that included better interiors, the formerly optional 50kW fast charger become standard, the packaging of destination charge and a "standard" installation of a level 2 charger into the MSRP, and the MSRP getting a $5,500 price cut.

It's not only duty cycles, its also age. For someone who may only drive 6k miles per year, they want to know their car will last for a long time. That's why I suggested the 12 year number.

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by southernnaturelover

It's not only duty cycles, its also age. For someone who may only drive 6k miles per year, they want to know their car will last for a long time. That's why I suggested the 12 year number.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. There are many papers on secondary cells lithium batteries that go over battery degradation and the primary driver of loss of capacity in usage by far is the number of duty cycles, even more so than frequent fast charging. Are you talking about an all-in kind of warranty where over the years if your car gets into incidents where there is physical damage to the batteries are covered? I can see the appeal in that, but ICE vehicles don't offer that kind of protection as part of their powertrain warranties either. Or are you thinking about when a battery gets left by itself to self-discharge to zero percent and left there for years without any charging?

If it's more the latter, then the affordability of increased capacity could also help because then you have room to place buffers on the state of charge of the EV's batteries will still offering a good deal of usable range.


Regardless, I'm all for it if it's a warranty that covers for whichever comes last rather than whichever one comes first.

[southernnaturelover]

Originally Posted by OyCrumbler

You keep saying this, but I'm not quite sure what you mean. There are so many papers on secondary cells lithium batteries that go over this and the primary driver of loss of capacity in usage by far is the number of duty cycles, even more so than frequent fast charging. Are you talking about an all-in kind of warranty where over the years if your car gets into incidents where there is physical damage to the batteries are covered? I can see the appeal in that, but ICE vehicles don't offer that kind of protection as part of their powertrain warranties either. Or are you thinking about when a battery gets left by itself to self-discharge to zero percent and left there for years without any charging?


If it's more the latter, then the affordability of increased capacity could also help because then you have room to place buffers on the state of charge of the EV's batteries will still offering a good deal of usable range.

I'll just use the Volt, which I own, as an example. The oldest Volts are now 10 years old, and are starting to have some issues (some under 100k miles). It's not overall degradation that's the problem, it's the random weak cell or two, or a bad temperature sensor that's inside the battery and can't be replaced without refurbishing the entire pack.

Maybe the newer batteries have addressed these issues to make them more easily repairable, I don't know. I guess we will see when the Bolt gets closer to the 10 year mark, but right now they are too new to know for sure.

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by southernnaturelover

I'll just use the Volt, which I own, as an example. The oldest Volts are now 10 years old, and are starting to have some issues (some under 100k miles). It's not overall degradation that's the problem, it's the random weak cell or two, or a bad temperature sensor that's inside the battery and can't be replaced without refurbishing the entire pack.

Maybe the newer batteries have addressed these issues to make them more easily repairable, I don't know. I guess we will see when the Bolt gets closer to the 10 year mark, but right now they are too new to know for sure.

I'll try looking into that issue more. Do these Volt issues essentially result in the vehicle not being usable rather than lowered capacity?

There's a possibility that it's still ultimately related to duty cycles. The Volt has a smaller battery pack and lower range than what we consider long range EVs like the Bolt, so there's going to be a lot more cycles for the same number of miles in general unless most of those miles were driven with the engine on. I'm also curious as to what people are paying for Volt battery replacements. It wasn't a particularly high volume vehicle and GM did drop it from the lineup, so I'm curious as to how difficult battery replacements are and if anyone is using third party batteries.


Best of luck to you, though, and here's hoping that these are relatively rare issues that don't rear up for you.

[ohio_peasant]

The EV vs. ICE argument for performance-cars seems to devolve to subjective sensations, such as sound, or the visual appearance of mechanical engines vs. heavy-gauge wires... or perhaps factors of cost, or range, or some aspect of utility.

But rarely does one hear mention of an objective factor: weight. Compare the weight of the latest-tech battery pack, plus electric motors and supporting components... to the weight of an ICE engine, gearbox, differential, fuel tank and fuel. The latter is going to be substantially lighter.

I can accept a higher cost or diminished utility, such as lower range or slow charging-times. But I refuse to accept higher weight. Engineer the battery packs to weigh less, and the overall vehicle to weigh less, and I'll be an ecstatic convert to EV.

[OutdoorLover]

Originally Posted by ohio_peasant

The EV vs. ICE argument for performance-cars seems to devolve to subjective sensations, such as sound, or the visual appearance of mechanical engines vs. heavy-gauge wires... or perhaps factors of cost, or range, or some aspect of utility.

But rarely does one hear mention of an objective factor: weight. Compare the weight of the latest-tech battery pack, plus electric motors and supporting components... to the weight of an ICE engine, gearbox, differential, fuel tank and fuel. The latter is going to be substantially lighter.

I can accept a higher cost or diminished utility, such as lower range or slow charging-times. But I refuse to accept higher weight. Engineer the battery packs to weigh less, and the overall vehicle to weigh less, and I'll be an ecstatic convert to EV.

The weight of the battery pack is substantial alright. Now in a dedicated EV architecture, that weight is set down very low, so the center of gravity is actually lower than in an ICE vehicle, and body lean is normally very well controlled. But even if the car has controlled handling, the substantially increased inertial mass should make it less "eager" to change directions when turning, so chassis dynamics should still be affected in that regard. In normal driving, I wouldn't expect this to be noticeable, but if you're trying to run an autocross circuit or time trial where you're racing with a lot of short radius turns, I think you'd notice it a lot.