Thread: EV's ... Alternative Energies ??

Yes, I believe EV's are getting closer & closer to mainstream.
JLR have been on to it for a while, and I was reading a report from AMG (Mercedes' performance arm) who make some of the highest performance vehicles in the world, and they are heavily involved with well advanced plans for electric vehicles/alternatives right through their model range. Tesla will not have this segment all on their own, that's for sure.
Pickles.

Slanted, wonky, many assumptions, vague data.

It might be fair to say, in some cases, that purchasing a second hand fuel efficient burner and driving it 80,000 is as enviromentally damaging as buying a new ev for the same distance. But it depends!

There are many factors to consider and many are hard to quantify.

What is for certain is that a rapid uptake in evs will reduce noise and air pollution on the roads.

For Australia to show an emissions reduction over the next 15 years would be suprising. The goverment would need to support ev conversions, send a bunch of tax revenue back for home solar installations, and drop all support for coal in favour of renewables - tomorrow! As this does not seem likely I think Australia is still at least 25 years away from smoke free motoring/electricity, and thats being SUPER optimistic.

Originally Posted by manic

Slanted, wonky, many assumptions, vague data.

It might be fair to say, in some cases, that purchasing a second hand fuel efficient burner and driving it 80,000 is as enviromentally damaging as buying a new ev for the same distance. But it depends!

There are many factors to consider and many are hard to quantify.

What is for certain is that a rapid uptake in evs will reduce noise and air pollution on the roads.

For Australia to show an emissions reduction over the next 15 years would be suprising. The goverment would need to support ev conversions, send a bunch of tax revenue back for home solar installations, and drop all support for coal in favour of renewables - tomorrow! As this does not seem likely I think Australia is still at least 25 years away from smoke free motoring/electricity, and thats being SUPER optimistic.

Your not factoring in that Internal Combustion cars probably wont be available in 10-15 years , let alone 25 years. Whose going to make them specially for Australia ???

Originally Posted by goingbush

Your not factoring in that Internal Combustion cars probably wont be available in 10-15 years , let alone 25 years. Whose going to make them specially for Australia ???

Even with an abundance of suitable EVs at affordable prices, many millions around the world will not be able to buy them because of local factors that prevent convenient charging. And these are not just third world infrastructure problems. Certainly there will still be demand for ICE in 15 years.

Having just returned from a trip to London, I was reminded that there are millions of homes in the UK that have no garage and no driveway, where cars are parked out front on the street. The councils will not allow extension leads to run from houses across pedestrian path ways. My dad wants a little EV for his retirement run about but cant buy one because he is not allowed to charge it on his street. He may not get to see the infrastructure changes he needs, the council have nothing in the pipeline for his street. London proposed phone repeaters through the underground train/tube system in ~2000. 18 years later and the underground is still a blackout zone. I'm just saying, the progress of change can be frustratingly slow.

The EV will be king of the driveway, so much better than ICE - BUT for the quick transition we are hoping for we need to improve energy storage way beyond lithium. The current scale of lithium battery production is already causing significant environmental issues, and it will get much worse if this resource hungry old battery tech is packed into every new vehicle on the road. Lithium batteries are great for your remote control car, but it starts to get ridiculous when you scale it up.

If we are going to allow the auto industry to do a mass roll out with huge lithium battery packs, we should give proper scrutiny to the environmental costs, and set acceptable standards for recycling.

In Australia I would like to see mandatory recycling of lithium batteries to an acceptable standard, with huge fines for non-compliance. Currently we recycle 2% of lithium batteries in this country. Those that are recycled only salvage a small percentage of content, and much of the waste is burnt off. Most of what is not sent to recycle ends up in landfill, leaking into the ground. Surely we need to get this all in order.

The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction | WIRED UK

In the boot "Heat" the author contends that it takes between 15 to 25 years for an infrastructure change over to become dominant. Iirc the change over to electric cars is used as an example of this.

Originally Posted by bsperka

In the boot "Heat" the author contends that it takes between 15 to 25 years for an infrastructure change over to become dominant. Iirc the change over to electric cars is used as an example of this.

The changover from Horse & buggy to "horseless carriage" was only about 5-10 years .

Agree on Lithium & Battery recycling in general . IMO Lithium is not the EV battery of the future . Environmentally friendly (& abundant) Sodium is the EV Chemistry of the future (combined with Super Capacitors for ultra fast charge)

I'm convinced EV's are going to be the next big thing. They aren't going to replace all cars and certainly not initially. It will start with city run abouts and spread from there.

What will be the driver? I've worked out that at this juncture 1kw is very roughly equivalent to a litre of fuel. Most people with EV's at this point are mooching free power - but no one should be paying much more than 20c a litre (whoops KW) for their energy. That's pretty alluring.

I reckon once people work that out we're going to see a shift happening faster than people think..