Comments about the coming EV revolution and our 100's (1 Viewer)

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Today conversions are impractical, fiscally. However as the tide turns to EV becoming the norm instead of still being the anomaly on the road, the costs for the parts to perform these conversions will fall precipitously. Watching guys like Rich Rebuilds scavenge Tesla parts form salvaged cars and build other cars from those parts exemplifies the trend in the EV sector going forward, I think. Once it gets down to a formula where you can buy kits where you pull out the ICE and bolt up a big ass DC motor in place of it and fill the engine bay with a few hundred pounds of batteries then roll on in the same rig, the days of the ICE car are numbered.

Check out these guys down in OZ: Voltra
 
I had a good experience with CNG in my last two 80s. I figure I saved about $25k over the cost of the kits, over the lifetime of the cng experience. Now I have an 04 LX (no CNG.) which I absolutely love. Here in Utah, about 85% of our electricity is is coal, gradually moving towards Natural Gas. Overall... more carbon output per mile than a gasoline car when considering manufacturing of the batteries plus the coal burned for electricity. I take no small delight in pointing out to my leftest next door neighbor how much I admire his coal burning Nissan Leaf. The bigger challenge, by far, is the infrastructure in the generation/transmission of electricity to power any significant switch to EV. Our power grid nationally is stretched to the point of being fragile and the investment to handle upgrading the grid to support a significant EV percentage is a generational challenge at best. Talking to an Power company engineer friend of mine, he says decades, or next century at best.
 
Watched the video and question some of their assumptions.

One of the reasons people are moving to SUV's is that the cost penalty for driving one is not as great as it use to be. The gas mileage has improved to the point that a lot of people are willing to pay extra fuel cost for the benefits of a SUV (let's face it, most of them are glorified station wagons anyway).

The electrical infrastructure may not be able to support the rapid expansion needed to meet support the growth. Read an article about the new 450 kW chargers. It said that a station with 20 chargers would use the same amount of electricity as a small town.

Resistance to change. While first adopters will jump at the chance for a practical EV, there is a segment of the population who will not want to jump on the bandwagon. I can't imagine some of these massive turbo-diesel pickup drivers suddenly switching to an EV.


As far as the original question, I doubt that the EV revolution is going to effect us much (except it might help keep the cost of gas manageable). Let's be realistic, in 10-15 years, most of us will have moved on to different vehicle and if we still have a 100, it will be a weekend toy.
 
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This future is right behind you, so let's drive the shirt out of it will we still can !

Enjoy !



:cheers:
 
I personally can’t wait for EVs.
However, the tech is just not there imo.
The problem is the batteries, they are just nowhere near as easy as liquid fuel.
And when it comes to overlanding/4wd, they just don’t have the range.
 
I don't see why so many view electric vehicles as so high tech. It's an electric motor with some batteries and a tablet on the dash. I drove one around this winter and in the extreme cold it lost quite a bit of juice in a short time. Charging seems like it takes too long. The high amount of current flowing through the vehicle freaks me out, and has killed mechanics who have made mistakes while working on them. What happens if you drive through 6 inches of water say on a somewhat flooded road? Will u make it? Or will you electrocute yourself and every driver within 30 yards? So I have some concerns about electric. But in a city electric may be fairly convenient for many and perhaps the way to go. As far as ICE vehicles, I think one of the issues with them polluting is poor road design in the cities. Traffic doesn't flow efficiently and you get a lot of stop and go. The constant acceleration from a stop causes a lot of closed loop tail pipe emissions. Millions of cars a day spend a awful lot of time in stop and go traffic. Interesting side note, the new Rav4 that just came out is so fuel efficient, that it costs the same amount of money in fuel to drive a Rav4 vs the amount of money in electricity to drive a Tesla. Except the new Rav4 is a SUV and can be taken on mild offroad trails.

 
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Fun stuff to ponder!

Batteries are nothing more than a energy storage medium. Drawback in conventional batteries is they're heavy, use a lot of natural resources to build, expensive and have a limited life span. Energy is captured from fossil fuel or alternative sources and store for future use. These alternative sources can be "green" renewable sources such as thermal, wind, solar and water. A better use of fossil fuel may be to build the mechanisms that convert alternative fuel sources to usable form and store it for on demand use.

One storage minimum "battery" that's very interesting, is Hydrogen. Converting it back to H2o, we can release it's energy in the form of electricity through a fuel cell, or burn directly in an ICE engine.

Plethora of scientist are working on an effective renewable methods to convert and store energy in hydrogen.


 
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When oil was $100 plus, and "peak oil" was believed reality of the time. Ever major car company was working on alternative power sources.
 
My take:

The timeline is nearly entirely dependent on government intervention in the market.

If left alone, the market for ICEs will remain strong for decades with a very gradual shift favoring EVs more and more every year as battery storage and manufacture becomes more efficient. If governments push EVs then we could see a huge shift in the next 10 years, regardless of technical progress.

I'm confident ICEs will remain relevant in the used market for our lifetimes, at least through 2040.

The only thing that really scares me is a over-reaching government that would seek to completely ban consumer ICEs on principle. I'm a big fan of EVs, but I hope I never live to see the day ICEs are banned on public roads in the US. I'm still bitter over the Cash for Clunkers program. That happened during the peak of my junkyard hunting days and it was a tragic waste to see all the otherwise nice cars with intentionally ruined motors.
 
What I would like to see is oil producing nations start panicing at the falling demand for petro and start flooding the markets with cheap oil thinking that they will never get higher prices than the present. We saw a little of what this panic is going to be like a year or so ago with a Saudi report that they are never going to be able sell all their oil and they need to start dumping,
 
I know old thread and I'm not an EV car fan at all, but I'm insanely interested in the topic as I do see it being the future.
There are a couple of items nobody mentioned, that I think will bring it to the next level

1. Nissan has been working in Israel to develop car battery swap stations, drive in swap your battery for a full charged one in minutes.

2. Self driving EV cars that are part share owned in cities. Pay a subscription and anytime you need a ride you pull up your app and the closest parked car drives to you and take you where you are going, uber without drivers, it would be so much more efficient and would drastically reduce traffic, I can see this become a mandate in cities like San Francisco on all but the main streets
 
Another startup focusing on partially solar powered EV. Yeah long way to go, but EVs getting real traction

 
cwmoser said:
Whats your predictions about the coming EV revolution and our 100's?
How many more years till self driving and more efficient Electric Vehicles make Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles less desirable and irrelevant. Some forecasters suggest the year 2025.

I suspect the price of gasoline won't stay at current levels and will either deviate significantly upward, or deviate significantly downward.

Personally today I would be somewhat reluctant to purchase a new ICE vehicle and would instead look for good used vehicles anticipating the disrupting technology switch to electric.

GM and Ford are getting out of passenger cars and I think they in the future. A lot of other manufacturers are scurrying to come out with Electric Vehicles.

So, I suspect our LX100's and Land Cruisers can easily ride us to 2025 and might just be ready for scrap or collector car status.
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In 1995 met up with a fellow ham radio operator who owned the exact same kit car called The Manta. The Manta was used in the 1980s Hardcastle and McCormick TV series. If you jump on to YouTube and type in that TV series name you'll see the car. The frame was a Volkswagen Bug which probably wasn't the best frame but it worked. The electronics were the racks of 12 volt lead acid batteries and the electric motor and the DC converter. Everything worked and it was very very quick. However the one question I asked the gentleman was what was the downsides of owning this vehicle. He said it was the weight penalty of the batteries and The Limited range of the batteries. At the time the price of Lithium Polymer or better known as lipo was just extraordinarily expensive. Eventually at about the time a company called Tesla which was created by two business partners, they had built themselves their first Lithium Polymer batteries packs. They installed it under the body of a t- zero kit car. They finish the product they were extremely impressed and needed funding to expand this small tiny car company. They hired a manager that became the president however they weren't satisfied with him Unfortunately they had to let him go. And then they hired another person to become the project manager but they weren't happy with him because he wasn't able to secure funding. The third person that heard was a young gentleman who started the company called PayPal. They approached him for funding to get the company started. His name was Elon Musk. He was so impressed that he funded the company and he found a different car manufacturer to use the existing body from the lotus. And the Lotus body was rebranded as Tesla and that's how Tesla got started. What has kept electric cars out of the production industry was the price of lithium batteries that was the main barrier. So the whole purpose and reason of converting internal combustion engine vehicles to Electric engines, is because electric vehicles are 90% efficient compared to 40% efficiency from internal combustion engines. But the primary reason is to reduce the carbon dioxide emission carbon footprint. Carbon dioxide and methane are the leading greenhouse gases that are trapping heat in the atmosphere. Countries that are within 500 miles maybe a thousand miles north and south of the Equator our experiencing the worst of climate change. They're experiencing more frequents and increased flooding events. More droughts. Larger Marine heat waves that has killed roughly half of the core reefs of the planet. On climate.nasa.gov shows the ocean heat temperature that's literally out of control. Scientists have been warning previous presidential Administrations for nearly 70 years that the rise of CO2 gas with overheat planet Earth melty icebergs and flood the coast. And the only way is to completely shut down carbon dioxide emissions. This is the reason why that the United States and other countries are transitioning from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles. However there are some barriers but those barriers are partially being met with renewable energy. Nuclear energy Hydro energy that will provide clean renewable power to power tomorrow's electric vehicles. The power grid is going to have to be upgraded as more cars come online and pushes the transition of energy from fossil fuels to the electric grid. Electric cars are not the only answer. I've studied Urban Design and public transportation out of Europe and Asia at least from a observation standpoint. Unfortunately United States infrastructure and highway bridge system was designed specifically around the vehicle. In most cities in Europe, the city design was built before the invention of the car. The buildings are built next to each other. They're not spread out like in a typical Urban city in the United States. Apartments are built above the retail and commercial space on the same street. So in most cases you don't need a car because you literally walk down to the street level and within a block you can walk right into a store and buy your groceries. There will also be a day that I believe that you won't need to own a car there will be such a saturation of electric vehicles all throughout the city and all streets, that you will just rent it for that time of day. That spreads the cost across several different people that use the same vehicle so the total cost of ownership is less than owning a vehicle.
 
Asanka said:
Another startup focusing on partially solar powered EV. Yeah long way to go, but EVs getting real traction

Click to expand...

So this is always a matter of physics. Energy required to accelerate Mass from a start at V1. In kinematic physics when calculating energy it's usually V1 is the start point and VF is velocity final. Mass is calculated in kilograms and speed is in kilometers per hour. So the challenges in making a vehicle extremely efficient especially in acceleration is the ideal design is to make the vehicle as light as possible. And for efficiency at highway speeds, the exterior body design has to have an incredibly low CD of drag. I believe cars will be very similar to the aptera and also to the light year they will have very long tails which helps to streamline the air leaving the rear vehicle which reduces the turbulence to a very minimal amount of drag.
 
4.5 years since this thread started and still the EV share is smallish @ 6%. But that’s up 4% in 5 years. Initial cost and charging infrastructure are barriers to entry for the near term. Gonna be a while before our ICE’s are obsolete.

Toyota has the right strategy imo- hybrid and fuel cell. Leadership won’t buy into a total EV switch over- they’ll have some but they don’t see EV as the best solution. I’m on board with any carbon neutral tech that doesn’t rely on China being the primary component or raw material supplier.
 
EV's should be called IR's. Ignore reality. Maybe pull up a physics YouTube channel.
 
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