Another challenge for electric vehicles

[Huston55]

My brother is an extremely liberal, Methodist pastor (contradiction in terms, I know ?), who believes that his carbon footprint was way too big. He went out and bought a used Nissan Leaf, and was telling me (a car guy) about the extensive planning that he has to make to drive the car in the Winter at any length greater than 40-50 miles. He told me about one time that he was watching his range diminish faster than he thought possible, while going down the highway in a cold, headwind (25 degree day with 25 mph wind). He had to make a side trip to a charging station for a few hours before he could attempt the drive home.

Needless to say, my GT Mustang, or my diesel Ford Excursion doesn't thrill him, and his beliefs.

Also, I am always intrigued that the "carbon footprint" crowd apparently does not realize that in this country, electricity is developed mainly using coal, fuel oil, and natural gas. So that is what you are "filling the tank" of your EV with.

Second, your carbon footprint does not matter. India and China are spewing more carbon that you can offset. If you believe man is warming he planet, you are barking up the wrong tree.

Perhaps your Methodist brother should move to a third world county...if he’s really bothered by his carbon footprint. This would include India & China, both of which have dramatically lower carbon footprint per capita than the US (and almost all of the developed world).


https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm

 

[Rianne]

This smugness is getting to me. The EV fans are looking for support, but I think they are just creating a backlash with all this diversion and smoke and mirrors. At this point, if some place I frequent started offering free charging for EVs, I'd ask for a top off of my gas tank. Why not? What's the deal? That EV isn't saving the planet, why am I paying for their travel? It's getting aggravating.

-ERD50

This argument is narrow minded. Where does one begin to save the planet? I assume you do not believe carbon emission is, in part, causing global warming. According NASA, we have :


Carbon dioxide (CO2)
Methane
Nitrous oxide
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)


All accelerated by human activities. Which one should we address? How do even begin to bring this planet to normalcy? At least EV's are a start and an individuals contribution to the bigger issue.

 

[Music Lover]

I'll take NASA's claims a little more seriously when they stop repeatedly "adjusting" the raw temperature data, both past and present.

I'll also take the topic of warming more seriously when people stop calling CO2 "carbon", and when they stop calling CO2 pollution.

EV's wont save the planet...notwithstanding that no one has proven that it needs saving to begin with.

 

[Rianne]

I'm not a scientist, engineer nor do I claim to know the specific physiological processes that are happening to the earth. I do know whatever is happening is happening fast. The earth's gone through drastic changes in the past. I'm willing to sit back, save money and go about my life without interruption. After all, the dinosaurs learned the hard way. Why can't we? The earth will be here, regardless. If humans go extinct, some other life form will take our place. I'm at peace with that.

 

[marko]

Could I perhaps offer a palate cleanser on this discussion?

Not trying to hijack the thread or anything but just wanted to offer a memory of the first time I saw an electric car.

It was somewhere around 1956 or so.
We had an old couple down the street and.......their only car was a shiny, red, electric from something like 1919 or something ridiculous! It had red leather seats, was in perfect condition and might (don't remember exactly) have had a tiller instead of a steering wheel.

If I close my eyes I can still see them tooling up to the old A&P, the old man dressed in a suit and a straw hat, parking in the lot and helping his wife out. I don't think they worried about how far they could go as long as they could get to the A&P and back.

Ok. Sorry for the distraction.

 

[Mr. Tightwad]

We get it...you don't like EVs...that's pretty clear. I am not an EV owner, nor looking to be swayed one way or another. I drive very little and have no reason for an electric car, but I appreciate hearing the perspective of an ER owner. If you are hell bent and determined to never touch an EV, then why do you continue to disrupt this thread?

Also, I think this WAS valuable and actually CONTRIBUTED to the subject matter:

Best post of 2019. This guy deserves an award.

 

[Offgrid Organic Farmer]

" brightly colored pattern" makes me think "spaghetti and meatballs" or "pizza", Yummy!

Yes, not a big deal overall, but it is just getting to feel like the straw that breaks the camel's back.

I personally think senior discounts are kinda stupid, why would a business want to age discriminate? Of course, I have no problem with people taking advantage of any discount or credit, if I were to take any action, it would be to talk to the manager.

-ERD50

I see the same thing happening every Veterans Day. Restaurants offer a 'Free meal' to all vets. What happens is the vet brings his wife, so they eat two meals and they pay for one meal.

Vets make it sound like a bid deal. Whoopy do!

For that one day 50% of the meals served were served for 'free'. In the big scheme of things, they serve meals 365 days a year and for one day they give away half of the meals. That cuts their total annual sales by 0.5/365, or 1.37%

In exchange for dropping their annual sales by 1.37% they get good press and all the area vets love them.

 

[NW-Bound]

Could I perhaps offer a palate cleanser on this discussion?

Not trying to hijack the thread or anything but just wanted to offer a memory of the first time I saw an electric car.

It was somewhere around 1956 or so.
We had an old couple down the street and.......their only car was a shiny, red, electric from something like 1919 or something ridiculous! It had red leather seats, was in perfect condition and might (don't remember exactly) have had a tiller instead of a steering wheel.

If I close my eyes I can still see them tooling up to the old A&P, the old man dressed in a suit and a straw hat, parking in the lot and helping his wife out. I don't think they worried about how far they could go as long as they could get to the A&P and back.

Ok. Sorry for the distraction.

Was the car like this?

Note the charging station in the photo. This is 100 years ago.

Now, on the Web many posters mistake the handles on the charger as the crank handles to generate electricity. This is silly because you would need to generate a mechanical output of several horsepowers to produce the required electricity. You would have to be as strong as a team of horses.

The handles are part of a rheostat for manual adjustment of the charging current. The juice comes from an off-photo generator.

 

[eroscott]

Originally Posted by eroscott
.... Heres the thing that people are missing. When you are in the car and you tell it you want to go some place outside of your current level of charge (40% or 95% or whatever), it has a built-in "route planner" and figures out waypoints (superchargers). It would add stops for a given length of time AUTOMATICALLY. No real hard planning by the driver. This is how the Teslas work. Other EVs ... not so much ...

Hope that stuff helps explain and gives a better perspective.

Also, I think this WAS valuable and actually CONTRIBUTED to the subject matter:

Thank you ExFlyBoy5, I appreciate that. I'm trying to give people an idea of how it works. I don't really care if it doesn't fit everyones lifestyle or needs but there are probably some people that only read or understand they myth and don't know how far these cars or infrastructure has come. At least people can learn something for future conversations they have with friends or whoever.

I was running around today out doing some indoor sports activities.

I came home with 57% battery charge. I pressed the button in my Tesla and said 'Navigate to Lousiville, Kentucky'. It did some math and based on my current battery level (57%), elevation changes, temperature .... it told me this is the route it planned.

 

[Offgrid Organic Farmer]

I can not really comment on carbon footprints, or whatever elitist thing you folks think is going on.

The last time that we wanted to get a new car, we started with a list of the lowest priced MSRP vehicles. We visited all the local dealerships, focusing on those lowest priced models. At that time the fourth model from the top of our list, turned out to be the most comfortable that we had been in. It handled great, and it is a plug-in hybrid.

Starting from the cheapest new car on the dealer lots, we test drove four vehicles, starting from the absolute cheapest, to the second cheapest, etc. Until we found the car we liked the most, at $27k.

By our good fortune it is also the highest MPG of all those cars we looked at.

So the almost cheapest car, gets the highest mileage, handles great and it is very comfortable for four adults to ride in.

If we recharged it using grid power, a recharge would cost around 50-cents.

I am kind of surprised to see so much hatred displayed in this thread.

 

[Offgrid Organic Farmer]

Can you tell what you are consuming when you use up electricity? Natural gas? Nuclear? Coal? Water power? Solar? Wind?

Or is this not your problem?

Sure, when I plug it in at home, I can tell that I am consuming solar-power.

The sun's reflection from our photovoltaic panels hits the windshield of my car.

 

[NW-Bound]

Here are some more charging stations.

A question for engineers: How did they generate DC power for charging from AC power? Note the transformer at the bottom of one of the chargers. Remember that this is 100 years ago, and they did not have silicon rectifiers then. Not even selenium rectifiers. Vacuum diodes were invented in 1904, but would not be able to handle the current.

Answer: Mercury-arc rectifiers!

What the heck is that, and how does it work? I am still trying to learn about this.

 

[Walt34]

And here's the thing that you are missing. I (and lots of other people) LIKE my gasoline V8 powered 4WD pickup truck, or whatever other Internal Combustion Engine powered vehicle they drive. I am used to looking at a fuel gauge and finding a gas station when I need more fuel. They are easy to find and well mapped even without some smartypants smartphone app. This system works, and has done so for all of my life. I am not interested in changing, nor do I see any advantage, and a lot of disadvantages, in doing so. Others have spelled those out in excruciating detail for you in this thread and if it hasn't sunk in by now I doubt it ever will.

I don't care that on a good day my truck gets 18 MPG. I knew that when I bought it, and even at double the current prices I can afford it. (I know that because I've done it.) And while I don't believe for one instant that using my pickup truck contributes one tiny bit to global warming, nor do I care if it does. I don't want to be bothered with calculating, or having the car calculate, my charging stops. On a trip I stop for one of three reasons: I need gasoline, I need to pee, or I'm hungry. That's it. I am not interested in changing any of those reasons.

I don't want to plan my route according to when I'll need to recharge. I already do that for refueling and those stops are a lot easier to find, and on a whim when convienient. And if that's not good enough I can throw a few easily available and cheap 5-gallon gas cans, available in any hardware store worthy of the name in the country, in the back of the truck and use those to extend range by hundreds of miles if needed and on a few minutes notice. And they even work on cloudy days, at night, and in snowstorms. Try that with batteries!

In short, electric cars may well someday be practical. They are already for some people in very limited circumstances. But they are not practical now for the majority of people or the majority of people would be using them.

Would that some people didn't miss that.

Heres the thing that people are missing. When you are in the car and you tell it you want to go some place outside of your current level of charge (40% or 95% or whatever), it has a built-in "route planner" and figures out waypoints (superchargers). It would add stops for a given length of time AUTOMATICALLY.

 

[ponyboy]

Why do people speculate on what or where electric cars are going...or what they'll be in 10-20 years from now? Yes, in the current state, its a pain for long distance driving.

Do you not think that batteries/range will improve in 2 decades? Why are we even assuming electric cars are the future? Its interesting to see how people havent really changed in hundreds of years...but everything around them has...yet they continue to make the same assumptions when it comes to any change. Bizarre.

 

[NW-Bound]

Why do people speculate on what or where electric cars are going...or what they'll be in 10-20 years from now? Yes, in the current state, its a pain for long distance driving.

Do you not think that batteries/range will improve in 2 decades? Why are we even assuming electric cars are the future? Its interesting to see how people havent really changed in hundreds of years...but everything around them has...yet they continue to make the same assumptions when it comes to any change. Bizarre.

People who do not want current EVs will buy one when it is cheap enough, and has a better range. They are talking about what is in the showroom now, not about the ones in the future.

 

[NW-Bound]

Back on old electric cars, even their lead-acid batteries were a hassle.

Remember that they had no plastic to make the battery case. Wood and tar?

 

[eroscott]

And here's the thing that you are missing. I (and lots of other people) LIKE my gasoline V8 powered 4WD pickup truck, or whatever other Internal Combustion Engine powered vehicle they drive. I am used to looking at a fuel gauge and finding a gas station when I need more fuel. ...

You actually think I don't get that part of it?

My previous vehicle was a V8 Ford Expedition that I pulled a smaller camper with. Had some great roadtrips and camping adventures with my wife and kids in that. It was what we wanted/used at that point in our lives. I don't miss the brake jobs (rotors, pads, etc) and other maintenance cost.

I drove a V8 Ford Mustang in late highschool and college. Enjoyed that vehicle too.

EVs are one my hobbies now and they have come a long way in a short time. I like sharing real world examples that fit some. My roadtrips are a journey and relaxing. I visit a lot of places.

Repeat my comment from above: "I don't really care if it doesn't fit everyones lifestyle or needs but there are probably some people that only read or understand they myth and don't know how far these cars or infrastructure has come. At least people can learn something for future conversations they have with friends or whoever."

Pictures from my Tesla (AWD 100D) trip last year over 5000 miles. Enjoy the journey.

Picture taken while out on four-wheelers with the family -- roughly half way between West Glacier and East Glacier -- Glacier National Park area

Picture taken while out on four-wheelers with the family -- roughly half way between West Glacier and East Glacier -- Glacier National Park area

Just before Pendleton OR -- just thought cool hill install : Put this in google maps: 45.6789889,-118.8601417
Article on it (glare) but talks about where it is and who owns it: http://www.eastoregonian.com/eo/loc...ndleton-solar-farm-gets-complaints-over-glare

Snake River Canyon - Twin Falls ID -- Evil Kenevil tried to jump this.

Shoshone Falls - Twin Falls ID -- 'Niagra Falls of the West'

Clifton CO : Put this in google maps: 39.1119778,-108.4116889

Just East of Glenwood Springs, CO

Channahon, IL -- I just like the view of the Tesla Model X's "bigsky" extra large (over your head) windshield in mountains, bridges, cities, etc.

 

[eroscott]

Can you tell what you are consuming when you use up electricity? Natural gas? Nuclear? Coal? Water power? Solar? Wind?

I'm guessing you meant when he is not able to use solar (& battery storage if he has it) but then uses electricity from the grid.

What people forget is that electricity is one of the only fuels getting better/cleaner over time.
I posted this article up thread. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...tricity-generation-changed-in-your-state.html
Other state graphs in the article in my prev post: http://www.early-retirement.org/for...or-electric-vehicles-96228-3.html#post2189800

His user ID indicates Maine. Here is how that state has changed in the past only 17 years:

 

[NW-Bound]

The percentages at the start and end points of the "wavy chart" add up to 100%.

But in between, there are white gaps. What are these?

PS. Never mind. They are caused by the bands overlapping, when they switch the ranking order. There is a better way to show the same data.

PPS. I think the hydro power used in Maine is imported from Canada. Is that correct?

 

[ls99]

Here are some more charging stations.

A question for engineers: How did they generate DC power for charging from AC power? Note the transformer at the bottom of one of the chargers. Remember that this is 100 years ago, and they did not have silicon rectifiers then. Not even selenium rectifiers. Vacuum diodes were invented in 1904, but would not be able to handle the current.

Answer: Mercury-arc rectifiers!

What the heck is that, and how does it work? I am still trying to learn about this.

The photo above is missing the bucket of baking soda to neutralize the spilled acid when overchrging lead acid batteries

Mercury arc valve (rectifier) The big one is copied from the Edison center.

Mercury-arc valve
A mercury-arc valve or mercury-vapor rectifier or mercury-arc rectifier is a type of electrical rectifier used for converting high-voltage or high-current alternating current into direct current. It is a type of cold cathode gas-filled tube, but is unusual in that the cathode, instead of being solid, is made from a pool of liquid mercury and is therefore self-restoring.More at Wikipedia


One at work:

 

[eroscott]

The percentages at the start and end points of the "wavy chart" add up to 100%.

But in between, there are white gaps. What are these?

PS. Never mind. They are caused by the bands overlapping, when they switch the ranking order. There is a better way to show the same data.

PPS. I think the hydro power used in Maine is imported from Canada. Is that correct?

Documented here with footnotes for sources as well: https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ME

 

[marko]

Was the car like this?

Note the charging station in the photo. This is 100 years ago.

Yeah! It was a lot like that but seems to me (60 years later) that there was less of a front to it. It really was a 'horseless carriage' with the spoke wheels and such. This photo is pretty close.

 

[Music Lover]

We get it...you don't like EVs...that's pretty clear. I am not an EV owner, nor looking to be swayed one way or another. I drive very little and have no reason for an electric car, but I appreciate hearing the perspective of an ER owner. If you are hell bent and determined to never touch an EV, then why do you continue to disrupt this thread?

This thread was originally about the challenges of EV's in cold weather, so those perspectives are welcome as well as the ones who like EV's and are willing to live with the drawbacks and inconveniences.

The original article was about a 40% drop in battery at 20F. I posted a link that stated a 50% drop at 0 (or -4?), and then suggested that perhaps at -25 a 60% or 70% drop was not out of line if the decrease was linear.

40% useful battery life at -25 is not good enough for a lot of people.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

This thread was originally about the challenges of EV's in cold weather, so those perspectives are welcome as well as the ones who like EV's and are willing to live with the drawbacks and inconveniences.

The original article was about a 40% drop in battery at 20F. I posted a link that stated a 50% drop at 0 (or -4?), and then suggested that perhaps at -25 a 60% or 70% drop was not out of line if the decrease was linear.

40% useful battery life at -25 is not good enough for a lot of people.

I am quite happy to be retired...if it was *ever* -25 degrees outside, the only thing that would drive me out of my warm home would be if the house caught fire! As a matter of fact...if I require a jacket to leave the house, odds are I am staying inside. I assume that all those days/nights on airport ramps across the globe sometimes in not-so-great conditions has made me less inclined to deal with going out and about when the weather is crappy.

 

[Offgrid Organic Farmer]

... PPS. I think the hydro power used in Maine is imported from Canada. Is that correct?

I recently attended a public workshop presented by the Maine Public Utilities Commission. It was pretty interesting to hear them present the map as they see it.

The Northern 1/4 of Maine is powered by Canada. That grid is almost all hydro-electric.

The Southern 2/3s of Maine is a USA power grid. This grid generally makes enough power for itself, the small amount of surplus power then goes down to Mass.

There is a band of a few dozen townships between these two grids without any power grid access.

There is currently a debate here about doing an eminent domain ROW straight North-South to bring Canadian power through Maine and into Mass. The Repubs want this ROW and the Dems do not want it.

At the same time there is also another movement afoot to run a East-West ROW from Quebec to St. Johns, to cut right through Maine, dividing Northern Maine from Southern Maine. For an oil pipeline and a private four-lane divided toll highway, to be owned and operated by the Irving oil refinery primarily to transport tar sands crude oil to refineries in St. Johns. This ROW cuts through my town.

It is also highly contested, the Repubs want it, and the Dems do not want it.