Are We Reaching the Electric Car Tipping Point?

Posted on Slashdot today

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/07/30/1545246/are-we-reaching-the-electric-car-tipping-point

Geoff Ralston has an interesting essay explaining why is likely that electric car penetration in the US will take off at an exponential rate over the next 5-10 years rendering laughable the paltry predictions of future electric car sales being made today. Present projections assume that electric car sales will slowly increase as the technology gets marginally better, and as more and more customers choose to forsake a better product (the gasoline car) for a worse, yet "greener" version. According to Ralston this view of the future is, simply, wrong. — electric cars will take over our roads because consumers will demand them. "Electric cars will be better than any alternative, including the loud, inconvenient, gas-powered jalopy," says Ralston. "The Tesla Model S has demonstrated that a well made, well designed electric car is far superior to anything else on the road. This has changed everything."

The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars it is more fun to drive, quieter, always "full" every morning, more roomy, and it continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements. According to Ralston the tipping point will come when gas stations, not a massively profitable business, start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. "Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun," concludes Ralston. "The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon."

Linked Articles:

The Essay:
http://blog.geoffralston.com/the-electric-car

Supporting Articles:
https://webberenergyblog.wordpress....c-vehicles-are-better-than-gasoline-vehicles/
http://www.teslamotors.com/customer-stories/what-it’s-own-model-s-long-term
http://www.inc.com/sageworks/why-gas-station-margins-are-razor-thin.html
http://evobsession.com/electric-car...0-years-tesla-cto-jb-straubel-predicts-video/

Nice. Yeah, gas stations are a bother. Junk food, cigarettes, boner pills, alcohol, and fossil fuel all in one place.. you'd be better off not going, plus they smell.

Convenience really sells, and not having to visit this weird place that smells like fuel vapor every week is a big upside. Once we have EVs with so much range that the average doofus can forget to plug the car in without consequences, they're really going to take off.

Getting Iranian oil back on the world market will really help too. Everybody will dump on $2.50 gas for a tesla. Especially those limited income retirees and minimum wage workers.

But those same guys will love a cheaper e bike battery.

If we can only see the future.

My friend's wife bought a Ford fusion energi plug in recently.

Their only reason for getting the car is to get the green Hov sticker.
They are leasing the car and planning to get rid of it when the sticker expires.

I read that the prius plug in and accord plug in were both axed

The prius plugin is slated to come back with the next generation prius, actually.

I might be burned at the stake for being a heretic here... But electric cars won't make much sense until we eliminate combustion from the process. Right now, an all electric car recharged from the grid is actually running on Coal by way of remote combustion. There may be no tail pipe on a Tesla it's self, but it's still spewing pollution into the environment back at the power station. Power generation is a far bigger polluter than personal transportation.

The human race can spend trillions developing electric cars,, and give up all the conveniences and fun of gas powered transport. And if we convince everyone in the world to ditch gas and go electric, we still won't see much improvement in global pollution. E-Cars may be more efficient, but they still need fuel burned. And more E-Cars would mean more and more power plants need to be built. the cheap solution is coal fired power plants.

Or, The Human race can spend trillions ditching coal and natural gas powered power plants, and begin developing and installing home solar and wind generation, along with geothermal, tidal, Hydroelectric, large wind farms, and large solar arrays. That would eliminate most of the world's pollution sources, and be a far better return on our investment.


Yeah, I know I left Nukes off the power list. It's a viable alternative to coal, but a dangerous one. It's like Lipo; Powerful, but too dangerous except in specific uses. I think we have enough other options that we can forget nukes in our future power plans.

I think the smart phone analogy is valid. Look how far phones have come in 5 years. I can buy an Android phone at walmart for $30 that can do most everything an expensive early model iphone could do. The tipping point for sales will be when your electric car can go as far as your ice car can, because it will start with a full tank everyday.

Drunkskunk said:

I might be burned at the stake for being a heretic here... But electric cars won't make much sense until we eliminate combustion from the process. Right now, an all electric car recharged from the grid is actually running on Coal by way of remote combustion. There may be no tail pipe on a Tesla it's self, but it's still spewing pollution into the environment back at the power station. Power generation is a far bigger polluter than personal transportation.

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Well, you should be burned at the stake. :lol: This is a frequent argument made by fossil fuel lovers, and both points are totally incorrect.

Not all electrical energy is created by burning coal at all, and an electric car running off coal power is actually cleaner than a gasoline car after you even account for things like grid losses.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/electric-vehicles-cleaner-than-gasoline-anywhere/



Here's some energy generation figures from the united states, circa 2013. This has improved since. We have shifted towards natural gas.

Even if you live in the great republic of coalistan, your EV is still cleaner than gas car.

neptronix said:

Well, you should be burned at the stake. :lol:

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Ouch. Well, my toes were cold.

But nothing I said is in disagreement with your points. Sure, switching to E-cars would improve pollution. Just not as much as we could do if we went after the big easy but politically harder of the problems. Power generation.

I've seen a lot of different sources on how much power is being used by various sources. but for example, lets use this one.

Lets say you can take all of that 22% transportation and convert to electric. thats boats, planes, trains, as well as cars. But say we get 100% converted. and lets say they are on average 50% more efficent. That means we eliminate that 22%, but we increase the power needed from the grid. if roughly 3/4 of that power is from combustion sources, then we increase the pollution by 8%.
That means we actually reduced 14% of the pollution. Great.
But if we took the same money and effort, we could go after the coal and natural gas plants. If people spent their $35,000 on home solar and wind instead of eCars, and if the government and corporate entities started funding zero pollution solutions instead of coal and gas fired plants, then we could reduce that big 41% instead to zero instead.

41% reduction is better than 14%. I don't doubt that going to electric cars would be a good thing. I just see the opportunity to do much better by going at the problem from a different direction.

People won't have home solar instead of a car, though. People will have a car anyway, so might as well make it a more efficient EV. EV's also all but eliminate urban air pollution, the health effects of which are becoming an increasing concern.

An awful lot of pollution is involved in the actual manufacture of a car.

I see what you're saying and it's a valid argument. The real answer is that we must do both.

Drunkskunk said:

I might be burned at the stake for being a heretic here... But electric cars won't make much sense until we eliminate combustion from the process. Right now, an all electric car recharged from the grid is actually running on Coal by way of remote combustion.

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One thing to consider is that e-cars are radically more energy-efficient than gas cars. They use a lot fewer kWh of shaft power to get the job done, largely because they have much better average efficiency across their whole range of output power and speed, but also because they don't burn up so much energy at idle. Plus, the efficiency of a fossil fueled power plant, even after line losses are taken into account, is better than a car engine.

But e-cars, no matter how efficient, won't do much to rectify the urban blight and loss of human community brought on by cars. I would like to see the day when all vehicles weighing more than their drivers are limited in the city to speeds that are demonstrated to be non-lethal to other road users. Like 10mph, enforced by the car's self-driving system. If you want to go faster, use something lightweight.

And... no free public parking anywhere for such vehicles.

Drunkskunk said:

41% reduction is better than 14%. I don't doubt that going to electric cars would be a good thing. I just see the opportunity to do much better by going at the problem from a different direction.

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You make it sound as if there's some committee somewhere that's deciding between these. Reality is the market is already responding in both areas. Uptake of solar, both at home and in larger centralized form is rapidly accelerating. There's significant political drive to phase out coal power completely in the immediate future (<20 years) and you definitely won't be seeing new coal power plants being spun up to accommodate the incremental load increase from EV use. All over the world we're seeing appreciable increases in efficiency across a lot of other electrical loads, so the increase from EV's is even less of an issue.

In your graph of pollution, what you haven't clicked to is that the graph would look dramatically different if you took into account kwh/unit of pollution. The transportation sector if converted to additional electrical generation would only add a small amount to the total electricity pollution, even if it was coal. Power stations put out a lot more energy with a lot less pollution than a Ford F150. In addition EV's are much more efficient at USING that energy, especially in urban environments.

With many power providers you can opt to have the energy you consume come from renewables. This drives further investment, lowering costs and further increasing uptake. 100% of my energy use is from Hydro/Wind/Solar, though to be fair most of my country is renewable by default. That's an easy, relatively cheap way to personally contribute towards change.

I want EVs to be as affordable as ICE cars and bikes. That's all - price. I can live with a 100 km range - I top up every day anyway. It's the $40,000 upfront that keeps me away from a new EV. The cheapest second hand production EVs in Australia are about $16,000. For a 5 years old iMiEV. Still too much.

I bought a $2500 second hand Honda CRX and it's still doing it's job, despite smelling like a tar pit and sounding like a sewing machine.

A $2500 EV is still a long way off, but they will hit the big time in the next 5 years without a doubt.

And above all else, I want to see less cars on the road, in general. So let the wealthy buy their autonomous EVs and they can rent them out to guys like me who need a car once a week

The issue of depreciation has to be addressed - not only initial price, but some sort of guaranteed buyback needs to happen before mainstream buyers would look at EVs.

jonescg said:

I want EVs to be as affordable as ICE cars and bikes. That's all - price. I can live with a 100 km range - I top up every day anyway. It's the $40,000 upfront that keeps me away from a new EV. The cheapest second hand production EVs in Australia are about $16,000. For a 5 years old iMiEV. Still too much.

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YES. This...

Right now, an all electric car recharged from the grid is actually running on Coal by way of remote combustion

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While its true that "right now" most of the US electrical grid gets its electricity from coal-fired steam turbines, by moving the pollution from the millions of individual cars to centralised generation plants, the state and federal governments will be able to implement improvements to the plants. These plants can be closely monitored to ensure they are complying with the latest regulations and methods.

Quite a few years back, there was a Polk county (Florida) coal-burning plant that was the site of a pilot project to use new processes to find out just how clean a coal-plant can be made to run. The results were quite good, but of course...it is more expensive to run. I seem to remember that the pilot plant even dealt with sulfur emmisions and also radiation release (along with carbon footprint).

I have to shake my head in dismay whenever this plant comes up. Pro-coal forces refuse to voluntarily make any changes to existing plants, and anti-coal forces refuse to support adopting new standards. The anti-coalers position seems to be "No coal at all, or no change at all". These are some of the same people who protest wind-gens and solar-thermal plants because they occasionally kill birds...go figure?

The US is the "Saudi Arabia" of coal, and our economy has an insatiable hunger for electricity, so...coal will continue to be used in one form or another. The German WWII "Fischer Tropsch" process extracts methane from coal (which Germany has a lot of) and makes synthetic fuel out of it. The last time I read up on it, the most recent estimates were gasoline for $5/gallon, sooo...that might be the cap for future fuel prices (adjusted for inflation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

jonescg said:

I want EVs to be as affordable as ICE cars and bikes. That's all - price. I can live with a 100 km range - I top up every day anyway. It's the $40,000 upfront that keeps me away from a new EV. The cheapest second hand production EVs in Australia are about $16,000. For a 5 years old iMiEV. Still too much.

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+1

Let's hope that Elon floods the Lithium market with cheap batteries. I think the cost of the batteries is what ends up making EV's so much more expensive. It's like I have to pay the same as an ICE scooter (say $2k), then add on $1-2k for batteries. Suddenly my EV scooter costs twice as much as a new Piaggio. That's a hard sell for most.

Although, I have almost 10,000km on my EV scooter, and I haven't put a penny into it since I bought it. Zero maintenance. Okay wait, I had to replace my rear brake pad. So $30. With an ICE scooter, it would have been much much more than $30 to drive it 10,000km.

There's also the pure joy of riding electric. My bike is so quiet. It doesn't stink. 2-stroke ICE scooters are loud and belch out more exhaust than a delivery truck. I think I would hate riding one.

And here in Vancouver, our power comes from Hydro, so it's relatively clean. My electricity is included in my rent as well, so that costs me nothing.

"But e-cars, no matter how efficient, won't do much to rectify the urban blight and loss of human community brought on my cars. I would like to see the day when all vehicles weighing more than their drivers are limited in the city to speeds that are demonstrated to be non-lethal to other road users. Like 10mph, enforced by the car's self-driving system. If you want to go faster, use something lightweight."

I have said this very thing on electric car sites. I didn't make many friends.

I think when the technology matures a BEV will be as cheap (or cheaper) to produce than an ICE. Batteries are more complex than a fuel tank, but an ICE is more complex and costly to manufacture than an electric motor + battery + inverter.

We second-hand car buyers will have a long time to wait for a decent, affordable EV. The new ones currently being sold are too few (scarcity pushing up resale values, buyers are mostly driven by ideology, not economy) and the batteries have too poor a life. Tesla is an exception here, but an 8-10 year old Leaf battery is likely to be a paperweight only. An 8-10 year old ICE car works much like new.

Punx0r said:

[...]the batteries have too poor a life. Tesla is an exception here, but an 8-10 year old Leaf battery is likely to be a paperweight only. An 8-10 year old ICE car works much like new.

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A new battery is a bit like having to do the clutch, the timing chain, the head gasket, and all the oil changes at one time, isn't it?

I see what you're saying, but it doesn't stack up. Modern cars of modest performance and driven sympathetically are pretty reliable, with head gaskets, timing chains (but not belts) and often clutches lasting the lifetime of the car. If they do need replacement, each can be done DIY for <£200. With the wet UK climate (and salted winter roads) cosmetic and structural corrosion usually determines the lifetime of a typical at roughly 20 years.

An average 8-10 year old ICE car comparable in size/spec to a Leaf costs less than £2000 (It's surprising how many good condition 12 or 13 year old cars you can buy for £500). But then it's going to need a replacement (reconditioned most likely) battery at what? 24 kWh x £200/kWh = ~£5000. Add in actual manufacturing, fitting (maybe it'd be DIYable for some) and profit and you could double that.

And that's still for a car with what is a pretty poor range and performance even by today's standards of EV.

I'd go for a 8 year old Model S (or equivalent) no problem, but it's going to be a long time before EV's of that standard are widely available on the second-hand market, especially outside the U.S.

Electric vehicles will never be as cheap as ICE vehicles, if you don't count the environmental costs. This is the problem, We are partying like crack hoes. Cars make no sense, but that has never stopped us.

My huge 6000 lb Toyota still has three gallons of gasoline in it when it reads 0 miles left on range. That means it can go another 60 miles even after it is on 0. There are electric cars that can only go 60 miles, so starting out on a trip with one of them is like me starting out on a trip with my car when it reads "0" for range. My sister-in-law has a policy of never having less than 1/2 a tank of fuel as she lives in CA and if there is an earthquake or something, you don't want to need fuel.

Electric cars are subsidized. If that ends, that will be a factor. Gasoline is going to $2 a gallon this September. That will hurt electric sales. $20,000 battery packs don't help electric car sales. A Tesla with the bette battery is still $110,000 and probably as nice as a $60,000 gasoline car.

A Tesla with 100 miles more range and for $60,000 would be interesting to the general public. I won't even say very interesting, but just interesting. For people who like technology, it is already very interesting.

Yes. ICE cars are very easy to use, and pretty cheap for what they allow us to do. Electric cars will do nothing to get our CO2 emissions to zero by 2050. That is the inconvenient truth. They are a distraction, and a way to pretend we give a damn, while we destroy our children's future.

Warren said:

Electric vehicles will never be as cheap as ICE vehicles, if you don't count the environmental costs. This is the problem, We are partying like crack hoes. Cars make no sense, but that has never stopped us.

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Someone on here made the excellent observation in what has happened in terms of performance and popularity for radio controlled scale racers: a decade ago it was almost entirely ICE, now it's almost entirely electric. Casual observation also suggest the equivalent (or better) electric models are also cheaper. This is probably a predictor of what will happen with full-size vehicles.

To counter your point about cars making no sense, I can only offer my opinion that they are kinda awesome and I'd find it hard to live without one, especially considering the cold, wet climate many people outside California inhabit