Electric Cars - the discussion continues.

[old man emu]

40 minutes ago, onetrack said:

https://www.wired.com/story/electric-cars-cold-weather-tips/

First warm up the battery. Very reminiscent of 

 

[red750]

HEADS UP PEOPLE!!!!!

  

What's a person to do?    

 

Imagine Florida with a hurricane coming toward Miami.  The Governor orders an evacuation.  All cars head north.  They all need to be charged in Jacksonville.  How does that work? Has anyone thought about this?    If all cars were electric, and were caught up in a three-hour traffic jam with dead batteries, then what?  Not to mention that there is virtually no heating or air conditioning in an electric vehicle because of high battery consumption. 

 

If you get stuck on the road all night, no battery, no heating, no windshield wipers, no radio, no GPS (all these drain the batteries), all you can do is try calling 911 to take women and children to safety.  But they cannot come to help you because all roads are blocked, and they will probably require all police cars will be electric also.  When the roads become unblocked no one can move!  Their batteries are dead. 

 

How do you charge the thousands of cars in the traffic jam?  Same problem during summer vacation departures with miles of traffic jams. There would be virtually no air conditioning in an electric vehicle.  It would drain the batteries quickly.  Where is this electricity going to come from? Today's grid barely handles users' needs. Can't use nuclear or coal, natural gas is quickly running out. Oil fired is out of the question, then where? 

 

What will be done with billions of dead batteries, can’t bury them in the soil, can’t go to landfills.

 

The cart is way ahead of the horse.

 

No thought whatsoever to handle any of the problems that batteries can cause. 

The liberal press doesn't want to talk or report on any of this.

 

In France, thousands of electric community cars are now stored as inoperable because the batteries are dead and to replace them would cost more than the value of the vehicle itself!

 

[old man emu]

It seems that the widespread use of electric vehicles is a Utopian dream.

 

Now, if a bloke was smart, he'd start breeding up horses to use as tow-motors.

 

 

[spacesailor]

To get electricity on most roads, their is a power line overhead  !.

Just get a electrician to thow a coupling cable up to those FREE power supply  wires.

If done right, you can slide the coupling along to each vehicle in turn.

BUT

Are All the differant car makers, using the same plug to charge their different vehicles? .

A sparky will know which wire is 240 v & which to avoid.

spacesailor

[facthunter]

When all the service stations get flooded you can't get fuel either..  Nev

[red750]

2 hours ago, spacesailor said:

 

Are All the differant car makers, using the same plug to charge their different vehicles?

No Spacey, they are different.

[Marty_d]

8 hours ago, red750 said:

Imagine Florida... 

 

The liberal press doesn't want to talk or report on any of this...

 

Something tells me this is a chain email from a Trump supporter.

[onetrack]

The article that Red750 posted, forgot to mention that electricity is needed to power petrol bowsers - and if the power goes out - everything stops! - not just electric cars!

 

You run out of petrol in that rush to escape the hurricane, and you join all the electric cars with flat batteries! 

 

A simple solution would be a small portable, engine-driven camping-type generator. Not ideal, for sure, but quite "do-able". 

[old man emu]

7 hours ago, onetrack said:

A simple solution would be a small portable, engine-driven camping-type generator. Not ideal, for sure, but quite "do-able".

  

 

The English Royal Automobile Club has developed this: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/rac-launches-ev-flat-battery-recovery-scheme

 

 

[onetrack]

This all comes back, to what I reckon is a far better option for EV's - swappable batteries. A battery tray that rolls out, whip out the flat battery, and slide in a fully-charged one, and Bob's yer uncle.

[spacesailor]

Iv,e just heard that France has a ' fleet ' of ev,s that have dead batteries.

Doesn't sound bad, untill they say the cost to replace the batteries is more than the car,s are worth.

I wonder why that is not open information.

Also why not give them to someone else to sort it out.

spacesailor

[onetrack]

The story about the French cars is pure American right wing BS, typically of the Trumpists. It's easy enough to do some fact checking.

 

Reuters - Fact check - abandoned French EV's - https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-electric-cars-france-idUSL2N2N60XA  

[Old Koreelah]

19 hours ago, onetrack said:

This all comes back, to what I reckon is a far better option for EV's - swappable batteries. A battery tray that rolls out, whip out the flat battery, and slide in a fully-charged one, and Bob's yer uncle.

…just like swap-n-go gas cylinders.

 

A great idea, but a couple of reasons it wouldn’t work: as battery packs degrade over time, they are not of equal value, so car owners would resist swapping their expensive new battery pack for an older one.

 

Tesla are now being built with the battery pack as a structural member, which connects the front and back sections, each of which is cast as a single unit in a giant machine. That’s one way Elon Musk is getting the unit cost down.

[Marty_d]

Maybe not the whole battery then - but what about a section which plugs in, normally connected up so it's used along with the rest of the battery but it can be swapped out to give say 30km range - enough for most vehicles to get to a charging point.  If that module were made universal and all manufacturers agreed to standardise the fitting for it, RAC (or whatever equivalent) could just have a rack of those in their van to swap out on stranded vehicles.

[old man emu]

 Tesla guarantees its batteries for eight years or 240,000kms, whichever comes first, on the Model S and Model X, with the brand promising 70 per cent battery capacity retention over that period. 

 

The average Australian drives around 13,000km per year. The average age of Australia’s vehicle fleet is 10.1 years. 57% of vehicles are below that average. Up to five years of age (30.5 per cent), followed by vehicles aged 6-10 years (27.2), 11-15 years (21.2) and 16 years and over (21.0). The average age of the vehicle fleet has not fundamentally changed since 2006. That means that the average Australian car will travel 130,000kms by the time it reaches the average age. With that average annual usage, a car battery could last about 18.5 years. By that time most would have joined the 4.4% annual scrappage numbers of all vehicles.

 

These useful life of battery figures are based on current (no pun) battery performance, which we all know is being rapidly improved. Maybe those of us who own historic vehicles will have to go back to the early days of motoring and buy petrol from hardware shops in cans.

 or from drums 

[pmccarthy]

Like many Australians living outside cities, I drive 30-40K km each year. So 6-8 years battery life for us. The economics will be much less attractive for us, and we have range anxiety. And almost everyone needs to tow a horse float, a tandem trailer, a boat or a caravan from time to time.

[Old Koreelah]

My wife and I each have 2 litre diesels, bought 2nd hand and hopefully the last fossil fuel cars we ever own. 
We drive fewer km than the average and they should see us into the next decade when, hopefully, we can afford electric. 

 

 

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Yep, I fact checked the story about the french electric cars and it just was not true what was said.

ALSO....  you can easily make up a small trailer with extra batteries for your electric car. And of course this could include a small generator.

I reckon my next car will be electric. My chainsaw, and my ride-on mower, are already electric and they are much better as a result.

[red750]

I generally travel less than 75 km per week, rarely do I travel more than 5 km from home. Annual travel would be less than 4,000 km. A mobility scooter would just about do me.

[spacesailor]

I have a ' mobility scooter ' it,s batteries lasted 18 months.

Then was quoted $ 200 each battery, From the scooter supplier. Imagine a small car battery costing $ 200.

It was their ripoff, as was everything they sell ( all overpriced ), just like anything aviation !.

Of couse now l don,t need a walker or a scooter, don,t even use a walking stick. All dumped out in my garage.

That French car thing was only a " one liner " & l never checked it out, so my bad .

I initially thought the batteries had failed by being flat for a long time. 

spacesailor

 

 

 

 

[nomadpete]

Sadly, Spacey, the mobility scooter industry is rather old fashioned. They mostly use old tech lead acid batteries and these don't cope without regular use.

If you shop around usually replacement batteries can be found. But they will die if left unused for months at a time.

[Old Koreelah]

On 08/12/2021 at 9:44 PM, Bruce Tuncks said:

…you can easily make up a small trailer with extra batteries for your electric car. And of course this could include a small generator.

During the fuel rationing of WWII lots of cars towed a trailer with a big ugly gas generator.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Yep Spacey, the scooter industry envies the medical industry where 1000% markups are the go. ( check out stents for a typical example )

I would replace those batteries with cheaper and better as soon as possible if you ever need the scooter again. The motor doesn't know or care about anything other than amps and volts.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Last time I bought a car battery, it was well over 100 dollars. On complaining, the guy said it was the price of lead...  So I said that my old battery was just as heavy and so the lead used was zero and it should therefore be worth a lot.

He looked at me as if I was crazy... The old battery fetched 2 dollars.

[nomadpete]

Electric cars, hmmmm........

 

Now that we are down to only 3 petroleum refineries (is the oil industry planning ahead, I wonder), electric cars sound better and better. I think I'll hang onto my old non-DPF, non-Adblue diesel ute for a while, at least until an affordable electric conveyance comes along. Industrial diesel will probably still be available long after petrol is scarce.