h a l f b a k e r yMy hatstand runneth over
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Imagine, if you will, a world where you could hire a car capable of covering 1000km without recharging. Science fiction, you might say (or the latest battery announcement).
Anyway, you buy an electric car and as part of the deal, you can borrow a petrol/hybrid car for road trips / towing.
[link]
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So what's really happening is you hire a petrol car (but have to pretend that you're really hiring an EV for the paperwork) and get an EV to tow behind it (thus increasing fuel consumption and emissions unnecessarily) that you wouldn't have asked for if you had a choice, that most won't want and that you're probably not going to use in some kind of twofer deal? .. just sounds like a gimmick to artificially pump EV use figures so the "green" lobby can lie about how much EV adoption has gone up and use it to pressure law makers to artificially skew the legal and other landscape even further in their favour to me .. but I'm more than a little jaded and cynical so maybe I'm misreading the bits between the lines here and that's not the intent, be that as it may this is how it would end up I'm sure. |
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If I needed to do some towing, or to drive across the Nullarbor Plain, I would just hire a vehicle for that one-off purpose. |
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If that were tied into the purchase of my EV, that would mean I would be paying for it whether I used it or not. After a bit over a year of driving an EV, I have not had any need for this sort of thing, so I'm glad I'm *not* paying for it. |
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I really don't know if electric vehicles are the answer to current problems around pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, etc. They certainly have some advantages but may be just pushing the problem elsewhere (greater wear on roads from heavier vehicles, more mining and extraction (using slave labour) for scarce minerals, more manufacturing because of shorter vehicle lifespans, etc.). However it's clear that petrol vehicles aren't the answer either as they tie us to a future of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Increasingly I think the answer has to be the steady decline of all private motor vehicles and the rise of bikes, e-bikes, e-cargo-bikes for city journeys and public transport for longer journeys. Citizens of the USA will be shocked to discover the exciting, novel invention that is high-speed rail! |
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//Citizens of the USA will be shocked to discover the exciting, novel invention that is high-speed rail!// |
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They don't have to, we just need to free up enough agricultural land for producing crops for enough ethanol and biodiesel (and woodchips for the power stations) to keep us going as we are. |
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Of course that may mean reducing the population a tad. |
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[An industry leader (or president) in a darkened room somewhere, idly stroking a white persian cat] |
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I always knew those old nukes would come in handy one day. |
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[A momentary expression of concern flickers across his face] |
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Oops, did I just say that out loud? |
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[Presses a button on the desk and leans towards a microphone] |
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Have we swept for bugs recently? |
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//shorter vehicle lifespans// |
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How does a vehicle with far fewer moving parts have a shorter lifespan? |
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[pert] I was thinking there that the battery represents a large part of the value of an electric car. If the battery needs replacing after a number of years it might be a better economic choice for the consumer just to buy a new car and scrap the old one. I might be wrong though - cheap battery replacements or longer battery lifetimes might happen |
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Well, when my Prius' big lithium battery conked out after about 11 years' service, I didn't scrap the car - I just replaced the battery. As a bonus, I found that the prices of those batteries had almost halved during those 11 years. |
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I'm hoping for something comparable with my Tesla battery (though its warranted life is only 8 years). We'll see. |
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Interesting - do you know how good they are at recycling old batteries? (i.e. not just saying they'll do it, but actually doing it) |
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That's an excellent question; recycling of lithium batteries does exist in my part of the world - but so far, I've only encountered it at the scale of bucket-loads of dead phones. |
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When the Toyota dealership swapped out the old Prius battery, I didn't ask what they did with the old one. |
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A more urgent priority where I live is probably to start recycling expired solar panels; there are currently fewer than 20 000 EVs between almost 3 000 000 people here, but about 40% of all homes have solar panels. |
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I don't have an electric car yet, but I'm thinking about getting a used Leaf, in which case I would also keep my petrol car. Perhaps this idea would be more suited to a used car dealer, where range/power is more of an issue. |
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[pert] I suspect that solar panels and electric car batteries are not manufactured with an intention to make them recyclable. I.e. it may be easier to extract Lithium, for example, from ore than to extract Lithium from dead batteries. It may be that very easily recyclable electronic devices are less efficient, bulkier, or heavier than the hard-to-recycle alternative. If this is the case then the manufacturer is effectively diverting cost from the initial purchaser to the person who'll have to recycle it later. |
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Even without EV dealers bundling rental coupons in their sales packages, people already do this: I know people who own an electric for in town but rent a petrolmobile™ for long trips. I don't even own a car at all but hire one when necessary. |
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I personally don't see EVs becoming a much bigger part of the market in USA without massive battery improvements - either coming along incrementally or via some breakthrough. |
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IMO a set of chargers at every gas station allowing them to smoothly transition would be all we need, aside from the infrastructure to support the extra load. |
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Personally I'd like to see 2 extra pumps at every outlet as well [Voice], for ethanol and biodiesel .. give everyone the choice and let free market economics shake out the winner. |
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Competition in real markets between alternate products is always a good thing for the customers (if not the retailers) and will never give the wrong outcome in the long run. |
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Charging points at every gas station won't solve the matter of charging time. It only takes a few minutes to pump enough petrol to drive hundreds of miles. Optimistic estimate on a 250kW charge you need at least 15-20 minutes, I think. An EV owner may chime in to correct me on that. |
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Not an insurmountable challenge - but will require a big adjustment in driver epxectations. |
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The idea of petrol cars is a bit odd really. If petrol cars didn't exist and you proposed them today you'd get laughed at.
<onesidedphoneconversation>
- "You want to power these cars with a derivative of petroleum? Isn't that quite flammable?"
- "I thought so. So how will people get hold of this?"
- "'Petrol stations' in every neighbourhood?! And you'll get the petrol to these places how? ... ah, it'll be carried around in big trucks will it?! Anything else?"
- "You'll have a law to stop children from pumping this stuff into cars?! Right..."
</ospc> |
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