Thread: EV general discussion

Originally Posted by Arapiles

This one could - it has a 1500km range:


J-Spec Imports


NB, it runs off a battery so it's an EV but it carries an ICE to recharge when needed - the ICE doesn't run the wheels.

That is like Paul Scarry suggesting the EV's tool kit includes a small ICE Generator. Tongue in cheek I hasten to add, or was it?


Oh how oi did Larf.

Originally Posted by Arapiles

This one could - it has a 1500km range:


J-Spec Imports


NB, it runs off a battery so it's an EV but it carries an ICE to recharge when needed - the ICE doesn't run the wheels.

Range maybe fine,say 1000Km,but throw in the Engle,and there wouldnt be much room for the camping gear,although i could leave SWMBO behind,which would kinda, sort of, half sort the issue

Originally Posted by RANDLOVER

You both raise interesting solutions to the question, How much more power is needed if we all drove a EV?

I saw an interesting proposal yesterday saying that we shouldn't be totally committed to 100% renewable just yet, as it would be very expensive as you do need 3x the load in renewables for 100% reliability. This made me recall my power factor correction days, and it was always worth correcting to between 0.95 and 0.98, but not to 1.0 or parity, as the last little bit was not financially viable.

My thought is we need power, we need reliable, clean and economical at scale and at smaller scales to suite. C02 free is a term I prefer to renewable. As much as I rubbish CCS carbon capture and storage IF and a big IF it can work economically and at the huge scale needed I am fine with that- I doubt it will ever happen!!


The significant Cost to not have that is not worth thinking about.

The options are very clear, the waffle is very very loud and frequently distorted by vested interests such as gas, oil and coal sectors.

A view by many in Morwell Vic that Coal and Timber are in need of urgent removal V some pushing to continue to pollute the area is fascinating. Many there seem well aware of the charge needed. Some clearly disagree or try and exploit it politically.

My hydrogen investment may fail. Suspect it will be bigger than Ben hur myself. My nuclear investments seem assured just not here in Australia yet despite much of the amazing technology at our universities and Lucas Heights .

For a interesting view on silly walks check out what a $8 Billion $ 50 year old stuff up made for a museum and film set "Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant, in Austria, was ready to go: it just needed starting up. But that never happened, and forty years later, it still sits mothballed. Here's why. Thanks to all the EVN team: you can find information on tours (in German) here: http://www.zwentendorf.com/ - and about EVN here: https://www.evn.at/EVN-Group/Energie-"

Denham WA Hydrogen is expensive yet cheaper that the diesel Gen sets. Denham had a wind power 40 years ago! It saved a lot of fuel. If the new Hydrogen saves "It could cut the town's use of diesel by 140,000 litres a year" the billions of litres of diesel saved already if fine with us all. The Wind was not enough and batteries could and in my view will not be cost effective at scale even in smaller micro grids like Denham. It could be done- Should it is an important question.

Debate and opinions are imported. If the Health costs to the Gippsland cominuities was viewed you might be able to see a HUGE cost already? Look at Latrobe! Several factors including pollution from our coal fired power is very clearly shown!

rant over sorry. Hope you like some of it or forgive me for the bits you think silly. Off to the pics page . I got a ripper I think

I can recall that it was announced with great fanfare about 8-10 years ago that Coral bay was now wind power driven .
When I did research I found tha they still had 12 diesel generators that backed up the wind.
The interesting thing about it was that they had several mini flywheels that balanced the frequency of the power from the wind farms and smoothed the transmission to the diesels.
I don't know what has happened to the flywheel idea as there are many old mine pits that enormous flywheels could be built into to act as batteries.
An idea that has gone out of vogue, but you never know it may resurface. Switzerland used to have a bus fleet that ran on flywheels at one stage, and airport no break gen sets used to have flywheels to cover the gap between power failure and diesel start up.
Not sexy I guess.
Regards PhilipA

Originally Posted by 4bee

That is like Paul Scarry suggesting the EV's tool kit includes a small ICE Generator. Tongue in cheek I hasten to add, or was it?


Oh how oi did Larf.

Well, if it solely runs off a battery then it's an EV - it just happens to carry it's own generator instead of having to recharge off mains power. Same system as the Holden Volt.

Long but well worth a watch

EVs & climate change deception. We're trashing the benefit | Auto Expert John Cadogan - YouTube

Volvo CEO: Price parity between electric and combustion vehicles by 2025 | CarExpert

An American View but an interesting read none the less.

Depending how and when you count, Japan's Toyota is the world's largest
automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of
the world's largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the
market moves. That's including Volkswagen's inherent advantage of sporting
12 brands versus Toyota's four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and
Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.


GM, America's largest automaker, is about half Toyota's size thanks to its
2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car
manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it
sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If
you're driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably
American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce
gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago.
It hasn't been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and
the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other
manufacturer on the planet. It hasn't grown its footprint through
acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn't undergone bankruptcy and
bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it's probably worth
listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered
before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to
support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota's head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified
before the Senate this week, and said: "If we are to make dramatic progress
in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges,
including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer
acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer's remarks come on the heels of GM's announcement that it will phase
out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers,
including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such
promises. Honda is the world's largest engine manufacturer when you take
its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the
auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs &
Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers,
and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufacturers have announced ambitious goals, just
2% of the world's cars are electric at this point. For price, range,
infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose
ICE over electric, and that's even when electric engines are often
subsidized with tax breaks to bring price tags down.

The scale of the switch hasn't even been introduced into the conversation
in any systematic way yet. According to Finances Online, there are 289.5
million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are
gas-powered. Toyota's RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S.
market in 2019, with Honda's CR-V in second. GM's top seller, the Chevy
Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S.
market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and
Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren't there to
support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S.
government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed
charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That's
about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking
about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering
about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM
and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we are gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting
all those cars to the power grids, a WHOLE LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have
now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by
population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even
at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of
which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable
in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline Wind
simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not
to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage
capacity to account for this doesn't exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars
if we're all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we're
charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging
them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have
to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be
greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in "as little as 30
minutes," according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast
charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and
specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few
hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power
bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from
generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or
hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas'
experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass
is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin
didn't even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump.
It's about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends
to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute.
That's for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine
the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single
charge time isn't reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements,
but those won't come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch.
Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power
grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said
we might need double the amount of power we're currently generating if we
go electric. He's not saying this from a position of opposing electric
cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even
more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is
pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those
in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota's addressing
reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn't saying none of this can be done, by the way. It's just saying
that so far, the conversation isn't anywhere near serious enough to get
things done.

YOU CAN IGNORE REALITY, BUT YOU CANNOT IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF IGNORING REALITY.

You know if the current power grid cannot handle a night of -20 degrees
without rolling blackouts. How in the hell are we ever going to plug 25
million electric cars in over-night without causing the grid to crash.

You know there are three kinds of men in this world: There are the ones
that learn by reading. There is the few who learn by observation, and then
the rest of them who have to pee on the electric fence and find out for
themselves.