lowercasesteve wrote:
TKOPerformance wrote:
Mochaman wrote:
I looked at converting my British Mini over to the E-Scam battery systems. 20K + and it wouldn't even get me a round trip to work. Weight of the car increased so much I would have to beef up the suspension. This technology isn't ready. Keep trying to get better.
It'll NEVER be ready. The more I've researched it the more I've come to conclusion that there are problems with EVs which are simply insurmountable. The biggest issue, as you noted, is weight. Sure, they can improve the battery technology and get more power or possibly longer range. Unfortunately everything they have tried to do that thus far has made the batteries run much hotter and the chemistry more unstable. Batteries are simply never going to replace Diesel fuel, and if the goal is to reduce pollution from IC engines it turns it into a non starter. They also ignore the pollution created when the batteries are produced (mining, smelting, etc.), or when the power is produced. No, the more I've researched it the more I come to the conclusion that EV's have been foisted on a well meaning, but gullible segment of our population by a government doing favors for CEOs who are making billions off of this colossal failure.
The future isn't batteries; the future is hydrogen. Toyota and other smart manufacturers are already transitioning. My prediction is that hydrogen is going to slowly creep into the EV market place in the form of hydrogen/battery hybrids. Eventually hydrogen will just subsume batteries because once the infrastructure is in place there will be no reason for vehicles to carry the extra weight of a battery and have the added complexity of two systems of power, or its cost.
One thing that needs to be added to this discussion is that EV's reduce pollution in the air and add it in the ground. We do not talk about that. Which is worse? Polluted air or polluted ground. Remember oil production is also a great polluter of the ground.
So here's the thing, EVs DON'T reduce pollution. In fact they actually make it worse. I'll take the whole discussion of climate change and man's degree of responsibility for it off the table and just look at EV's themselves. First, they are reliant upon a battery pack with requires lithium. Li is a rare Earth element. It rarely occurs in ore concentrations of more than 0.5% by volume. That ore must be mined with Diesel powered mining equipment, and each battery pack requires thousands of tons of ore. Then the ore is smelted using either coal or natural gas. This creates an equivalent amount of air pollution to 100k miles worth of an IC car. The problem is that it doesn't do that over 5+ years; it does it in the span of a day or two. So in the short term emissions are actually going to be much more severe. Each time an EV needs a new battery pack this cycle occurs again.
Second, we aren't going to get away from oil by building a different kind of car, because 95% of the plastics we use are derived from oil. The heavier a car is, and EVs are pigs, the more plastic they use to try and reduce weight to increase range. Yes, oil production creates pollution, and we can limit that to ground or water pollution for this discussion, but so does mining. Open pit strip mines create effluent run off that is toxic. This enters the water supply and kills marine life. Those mines also destroy habitat, etc.
Third, let's look at power production in the US. 36.1% comes from petroleum, 32.4% comes from natural gas, 10.8% comes from coal, and only 12.4% from renewable sources and 8.3% from nuclear (the two "clean" methods of power production. Whether we process petroleum into gas or Diesel and burn it to move a car, or use it to make power and recharge a battery is kind of immaterial; we are still using it, still burning it, and still polluting with it. In fact, the straight line method of burning the fuel to move a car has far fewer losses, and requires less fuel, and thus less pollution. Now, hopefully one day our methods of power production will get better. Personally I'd like to see us transition to a lot more nuclear. Nuclear can also be used to create green hydrogen, so its capable of helping to solve two problems. I know a lot of folks love solar, but producing solar panels is done much the same way as EV battery packs. Its another "clean" technology that isn't nearly as clean as is touted.
In the end, I think we all want to be good stewards of our planet. However, I think in our quest to do that we need to look at life cycles of proposed solutions and see if we are actually improving the situation, treading water, or making it worse. The big problem we face is that this is another realm where folks have figured out how to monetize fear. We have to beat back that fear with knowledge.
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