On a linked but totally different subject

[Suff]

China granted Tesla a license to sell their cars made in the Shanghai gigafactory yesterday.

This will propel Tesla, by the end of 2020, to nearly 1m cars a year. When they complete. The one in Germany, they will be firmly fixed as the largest EV manufacturer in the world. For about a year until. VAG take over.

For those who are interested in the whole EV situation, it is a big milestone.

[Workingman]

My Nissan Note has a range of ~460m / 740km on its 1200cc engine and I can buy 2.42 of them for the price of the cheapest EV, the Hyundai Kona Electric at £36,290 with a range of ~280m / 450km.

I can fill it up in under three minutes - pay at the pump - and be on my way. I can top it to the brim and run it down to the warning light without damaging anything, and if I leave it standing for weeks on end the fuel does not drain away, unlike an electric charge.

As I live in a flat with no driveway and only on street parking I am never going to get a dedicated charge point. The upshot is that I am never going to buy any of Mr Musk's or VAG's or any other manufacturer's electric covered skateboards no matter how heavily they are promoted by the Green lobby.

[cromwell]

Will this mass manufacturing drop prices of EVs Suff?
Atm I couldn't afford to buy or run one (I'd like a drive though).
EVs suffer from the drawbacks WM states, plus range anxiety. Turn the heater on, lose range. Live in a hilly area, lose range.
It's interesting times though and who knows where we'll be in a couple of years?

[TheOstrich]

I was discussing this only last week with SiL. She fancies one, but looked a bit nonplussed when I asked her if she was going to be installing a home charger at her rural residence. Her view seemed to be that there was no point; the local petrol station a couple of miles away has a charger on offer so that would suffice. I gently suggested she might like to think things through a bit further …...

[Workingman]

I gently suggested she might like to think things through a bit further …...

Quite!

I quite like the hype.

The car manufacturers headline the total range, so that's 100% charge down to 2 or 3% before it dies and it's X miles / km. But read deeper and they and the battery manufacturers all recommend charging a battery to ~80% and to not let it drop below ~20, to extend battery life.

So, the "effective" range, not the max, is about 65% of the headline figure. When Tesla, and others, claim 380miles / 610km for the car they actually mean 240miles / 390km in general use

Imagine that want to go Leeds to London and back and I have a mid range Kia e-Niro, max range 282miles or 180 effective. I charge in Leeds (1) and get to Toddington for a recharge (2). I run round London for a while and need a charge to get home (3). This gets me to, maybe, Tibshelf or Woodhead services (4) to get me home.

So, it's one tank of petrol there and back, with a lot to spare, or four 20 minutes + stops, and only then if a charger is available.

EV, not for me.

[Suff]

I agree with just about everything being said. There are some moves in the business but not fast enough right now.

You would think that Nissan, with the leaf, would be in a commanding lead. But no, they did what car manufacturers do and made one investment which they are tying to squeeze blood out of.

Tesla are the undisputed market leader and the biggest innovator in the market.

The problem, as with all emerging tech, is that it is damned expensive. Then again a Tesla P100d carries the same energy as 10litres of fuel and drives 340 miles on it. The problems are that the battery weighs about 0.75 Tonnes and had a cost of about €200 per kw/h. A P100D has a 100KW/h battery. And costs range from £60,000 upwards. The Model3 has. 75KW/h battery and starts at £42,000. But this is a real Pita as the new vehicle taxation does not charge for an EV, but costs £320 per year, years 3-6 because it costs over £40k rrp. That being said, were I to replace my C8 with a top of the line Spacetourer replacement, it would cost me over £1,300 per year 2-6.

Range is a difficult thing to gauge. Forget WLTP (EU/International), figures. They are very best case mild climate, 20C day, no rain, etc. The US EPA figures presented by Tesla are a more realistic all year round figure.

Heating is not so much a problem with EV, the real killer is the wiper motor, it can knock 50 miles off your range.

Then there is computer power. A Dumb EV is fine, but go a little further and you are going to be sucking power. NVIDIA has most of the Drive market, but their latest full self drive hardware sucks 0.5KW/h under real world conditions. Tesla spent 3 years and bought in the designer of the AMD Athlon and Zen2 chips. Their computer under full automated draw uses 75w.

Battery charge and conditions are critical. Leafs in hot countries have seen 25% battery degradation in a year. The problem is that If you charge them at over 25C they degrade but if you charge them under 25C they degrade. Something to remember with your smartphone as this also applies to using them and the body is 37C.

The Leaf has a passive cooling system on the battery. As you can imagine, the Taxi drivers in Madrid pull up to a charging station and it, quite literally, sucks the life out of the battery when charging it.

Tesla, again, has an active battery management system with pumped cooling. It will warm up or cool down to 25c before charging, it will also control hear during use and during charging.

Looking at charging, all Li batteries have the same problem. They have about 500 to 1,500 full cycle charges in them before they start to degrade. But it depends how you discharge and charge them.

Go under 40% and you will incur a full cycle out of 500. Keep it between 40% and 100 and you will experience around 50% of a cycle out of 1,000 cycles. Charge it between 80% and 100% and you can charge it up to 15,000 times.

Think of that in terms of the person who runs close to empty every day and sticks 5-10 litres of fuel I.

Looking at other issues and your SIL needs to think this through Ossie. Max possible charge speed is between 0% and 50%. After 50% it starts to taper. Charging times for a Tesla, on a supercharger at 150kw give times of 45 minutes to 90% then another 45 minutes to 100%. This is due to the need to taper to very low levels of power to avoid overheating as Li batteries kick out most charging heat in the last 10%.

So if you want to charge super fast on a 250kw charger, you can only do it by stealing the life of the battery.

Think about those times for a moment then consider that almost all public chargers at car parks and supermarkets are between 4.5kw and 7kw.

Range is a difficult one. The average daily journey in the UK is 29 miles, in the US it is 45. EU cars are sized to this and it will take time to change that. However that means that the US cars get closer to long range cars and EU cars are really only city cars.

Tesla bought out Maxwell technologies last year and, apparently they will be able to produce 0% cobalt batteries which can be charged thousands of times and will drive an EV to 1 million miles. We shall see. Also they will cost <$100 per kw/h.

Cobalt is a problem. It is scarce, pollutes and is difficult to recycle easily. Current Tesla batteries use less than 3% Cobalt, VAG and others are 12% - 14%.

Then back to price. Fiat are going all in on the 500e. They already average €20,000 for their 500 range (how, God knows). Yet they think that they will be able to ramp it up to €32,000 and their styling will get people to buy their electric roller skate at that price....

On the fines it is punitive. €95 per gram of CO2 over 95g/km, per vehicle sold, based on the fleet average. Think BMW and cringe. At least they have the Mini. To put that in perspective, our C3 runabout is telling me it does 60mpg average. That was showing 4.6l per 100km when I switched it over to KM on Saturday morning.

OK so what does that mean for the 95g rule? Diesel 3.1l and petrol 3.9. Over 60mpg petrol, across the fleet, or nearly 100mpg diesel.

If you want to be a geek about it, the C3 burns about 0.6l of fuel per 100km throwing the pistons from stopped to full speed to stopped, 83 times a second at 2,500rpm. My C8, more like 1l. Leaving me 2l left to drive the vehicle for 100km....

You might want to ask why I even calculated that, but that is for a different conversation another time.

But, as you can see, it is virtually impossible for manufacturers to meet the emissions standards with the internal combustion engine as it is today. Interestingly they would have more chance with a steam engine.

Fine estimates vary. Fiat Chrysler, around €2.5bn, PSA around €3. 5bn, VAG anywhere up to €7bn.

So you are stuck with electric vehicles. The combined EU manufacturers have committed over €100bn over the next decade to getting there.

Enjoy....

[Workingman]

Meanwhile back on planet reality it is being reported that sales of ICE sports utility vehicles (SUVs) now account for 21.2% of all new car sales. They alone outnumber (B)EV sales by 37:1. This is partly to blame for vehicle emissions going up not down.

Ask any city dweller and they will confirm that an SUV is a must for off-road driving, you know, that 1m wide pavement leading to their driveway.

Lowering CO2 emissions from vehicles is not just about the machinery, it is also about culture and attitudes, and without those being modified we are persisting into the wind.

This couldt be one of those rare cases where changes in the law and taxes might be justified and might work as intended.

[Suff]

Meanwhile back on planet reality it is being

This could be one of those rare cases where changes in the law and taxes might be justified and might work as intended.

It certainly is. But try getting the car companies to listen to another way to do the ICE which is more efficient. The term stonewall is insufficient. More like scaling Everest.