Electric Cars/Trucks and winter weather testing with results. What do you think? Who has taken one in Freezing cold long distance to a Ski mountain?

[SteezyRob]

Anyone else think wind turbines and solar panel fields are ugly as hell and ruin the landscape?

 

[IceEidolon]

Personally I think that solar and wind are less disruptive than, say, mountaintop removal coal mining. Further, the lifecycle impact of an EV, battery manufacturing and all, is less than a typical gas car. Especially since battery materials are fairly recyclable.

If the government didn't mandate change, y'all would still be driving around spewing tetraethyl lead out your exhaust.

And thank goodness you weren't around during WW2 (or, worse, an *any participant country other than the US* during WW2) because you would have hated rationed food, gas, tires, etc.

 

[kbroderick]

For an example of regulation speeding the innovation of private industry, consider toilets. When some places started mandating low volume toilets, they were horrendous. But one of the side effects of the mandates was greater marketplace demand, so companies responded with more R&D and we got low-flush toilets that actually work.

Would it have happened eventually? Probably.

Did the mandates speed the process?
Almost certainly.

I'm looking at EV mandates through a similar lens. Yes, we need to deal with grid upgrades as well, and distributed generation is part of that answer. But those are solvable problems.

As far as suitability of EVs for ski cars, the number of them I've seen around here suggest that they do work for some people.

 

[DoublePlanker]

I'll stick with my legacy transportation.

 

[JimG.]

I'd guess that most EV owners are also ICE owners.

 

[Domeskier]

Maybe these big city druggies in their mathematically impossible cars can pay a fee to the state every time they get saved from freezing to death after their batteries stall halfway between Charles River Square and the Spruce Peak Lodge. That should fund enough wind turbines and solar farms to make a freedom-loving roughneck's head explode all over the windshield of their rusted-out pickup.

 

[MidnightJester]

?? U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s

maybe ?? Diamond dealer heheheheh

Reality for EV's are they are improving and it is the short to Medium driving distances where the EV's can flurish cold or not. The Long distance driving of EV's for the spur of the moment or no planning trip are at max limit of the technology for now in the cold.

 

[darent]

I drive a big gas powered SUV, and cannot wait until all of you go electric so gas prices drop like a rock.

I wouldn't hold your breath for that to happen,knowing the government they will make gas $15.00 dollars a gallon to force you to buy a EV. Then they won't have the infrastructure to charge all those EV's

 

[trackbiker]

FCEV's are the real future. EV's are in because the electrical infrastructure for charging is mostly there. Batteries are heavy. Fuel cells are much lighter. And once there are sufficient hydrogen fueling stations available, FCEV's will overtake EV's.
How far out is that? Not as far as you think because that is the way the trucking industry will go. They can put in their own H2 fueling stations just like they have their own diesel pumps now.

 

[Andrew B.]

For an example of regulation speeding the innovation of private industry, consider toilets. When some places started mandating low volume toilets, they were horrendous. But one of the side effects of the mandates was greater marketplace demand, so companies responded with more R&D and we got low-flush toilets that actually work.

Would it have happened eventually? Probably.

Did the mandates speed the process?
Almost certainly.

I'm looking at EV mandates through a similar lens. Yes, we need to deal with grid upgrades as well, and distributed generation is part of that answer. But those are solvable problems.

As far as suitability of EVs for ski cars, the number of them I've seen around here suggest that they do work for some people.

I remember the outrage when it was announced in the mid 90’s that outboard motors had to be emissions compliant by 2006 and everyone rang the death bell for out boards.

Now outboard sales are outpacing all other forms of propulsion in the recreational boating business by a ton.

 

[skiur]

Just like when dirt bikes and snowmobile could no longer be two stroke. May have been a few hiccups but today's dirt bikes and snowmobiles are just as good as they old ones and more environmentaly friendly.

 

[Andrew B.]

It’s truly amazing what American business can do when they re-invest in R&D but sometimes it takes some outside intervention to force them to and I don’t only mean guberment regulation.

 

[trackbiker]

It’s truly amazing what American business can do when they re-invest in R&D but sometimes it takes some outside intervention to force them to and I don’t only mean guberment regulation.

True. None of the EV manufacturers can keep up with current demand and that demand is not government regulated. It is consumer demand.

 

[Smellytele]

all is great until lithium because hard to get.
Also…
The very process of mining lithium is not only energy-intensive and polluting, it may also be linked with destabilising the ecosystem nearby due to extensive saltwater depletion from the edge of the ‘salars’ through which lithium is extracted.

 

[1dog]

True. None of the EV manufacturers can keep up with current demand and that demand is not government regulated. It is consumer demand.

4 years ago, the average Tesla S buyer had an income of $500K+ and got $7500-$10,000 rebate depending on state. Its come down, to around $250K a year, and most of the rebates have run out( Gov gives a specific # to each manufacturer). Redistribution I think Marx called it. Without subsidies and government tax breaks it would not be the 1% of all cars ( that's it, 1%) not many have considered the pollution of mining battery material. Batteries simply store electricity, they do not create it.

Whe I compared my electric bill to two years ago - I saw a new line item - ev vehicle charge. So we are all subsidizing the industry not just from tax dollars but from electric bills.

 

[1dog]

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[cdskier]

I'll stick with my legacy transportation.

This does still work for the Amish. I've seen several of these up in the Finger Lakes in NY this week...

 

[kancamagus]

Edison had the same reasoning towards Tesla and was unable to comprehend the math....just like you.

Perhaps I not the right kind of engineer, but can you expand on what specifically "the math" is makes DC electric cars unfeasible?

Again, I'm not a sparky engineer, but it's my understanding that the entire reason AC won out for the power grid over DC is due to power losses in the transmission grid. For electricity, power (Watts) = potential (Volts) * current (Amps), and power losses due are from current (Amps) squared * resistance.

What this means in let's say we have a 500 MW power plant. We can send 500 MW over power lines several ways, depending on the voltage. If we tried to send 500 MW at only 120 Volts, 500,000,000 W / 120 V = 4,166,666.7 Amps!



That's going to need a thick wire. So thick that we may be approaching like 18 c's thicccccccccccccccccc. And 41666666.7^2 * resistance of the wire is going to result in truly insane power losses, since the primary driving factor is current squared!

The way more efficient method of transmitting power is to really crank the voltage up as high as possible. Why? For a given power in Watts, volts and amps are inversely related. Crank up the volts, and you slash the amps. On a 300 kV power line, 500 MW / 300 kV = 1667.7 Amps. Still a lot, but this is actually doable. Woohoo!

The problem is that the entire power grid cannot operate at 300 kV. We need the long power lines in between power plants and cities to be really high voltage to minimize losses, but those insanely high voltages are not at all safe to be any where near. That's why the high voltage power lines are in quite tall transmission towers. So as the electric grid gets closer and closer to homes and businesses, they need to keep stepping down the voltage lower, and lower, and lower.

And this desire to change voltages is what doomed DC back in the late 1800's. Back at the time, they didn't have any fancy electronics. The transistor was half a century away. Literally the only technology they had at the time was wires arranged in various shapes. And that's not really going to do anything for DC. Without modern electronics, there's no efficient way to boost or buck (increase or decrease) the voltage of DC.

But it's super easy to change AC voltages with literally just coils of wire. Transformers were really easy to build with the technology available in the late 1800's, so "AC won".

But that's not the complete end of the story. We stick with AC for the majority of the electric grid partially because "we've always done it that way" and partly because transformers are still cheap.

But there are limited areas of DC transmission lines in various parts of the global power grids. Why? Because many power grids are actually broken up into smaller chunks that are essentially independent. There are three independent power grids in the US, Eastern interconnect, Eestern interconnect, and Texas. And there is no guarantee that the 60 Hz frequency of the AC in each of these three US power grids are actually aligned with each other. If you tried connecting two AC power grids with a AC power line, and the AC power grids were out of phase with each other, that's essentially a dead short, and BAD THINGS™ will happen.

With modern electronics, it's way easier now to convert DC to AC, AC to DC, and DC to DC at different voltages. We all have dozens of things in all of our houses that do these.

So just as how both Edison and Tesla would shit a literal brick if you could travel back to 1880 and hand them one of the literal dozen of one inch cube AC to DC (aka USB port) cell phone chargers that you have in your house, let alone the smartphone that is charged by it, modern society can now use DC to act as a universal bridge between AC power grids of different voltages, frequencies, or even the same frequency but out of phase.

But again, I'm just an engineer of the non-electrical kind. The kind that takes the "Volts for Dolts" engineering class to check off a degree requirement. So I'd genuinely love to learn more from you about what specifically above is wrong. Maybe I'm just an idiot, and DC electricity is some magic voodoo. It's possible, I was drunk a lot in college, so maybe I was hungover that day. Either way, I'm always eager to learn and become a better and more well-rounded engineer, so I look forward to your specific mathematical formulas and expert testimony about DC electricity.

 

[kancamagus]

Let people try to make a profit unencumbered by government and watch your prediction happen 10-fold.

Because that worked out well:

Category:Lists of Superfund sites in the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Industry and capitalism does a lot of good. Way more than centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union. In fact, capitalism and democracy both seem to be the least worst systems for economic and political organization invented so far. My 401k and stocks/bonds love the market. Well, maybe not over the past year, but still.

But this doesn't mean we should blindly love and praise capitalism like the weird obesssion with Lumen as a demi god like being in the Severnece TV show.

Turns out, there are a lot of sociopathic people on the planet. If you let them run free with no rules, you get a lot of shitty negative side effects.

That's why we have rules, why we have governments, that's why companies have internal rules and make you fill out your expense reports property and use the same inane cover pages on your TPS reports. It's why practically every head-to-head sport on the planet has a referee, umpire, or similar agent to enforce the rules of the game. Every rule is written in blood. They are not all good rules, or were written well, but they started from trying to stop a problem.

The sooner we accept that this is not a black and white issue, and that the actual best result for society is well regulated capitalism, the better we'll all be.

 

[kancamagus]

Actually on topic though, I have a few good more years left in my current truck. I'm starting to look at electric ones to replace it. The Rivian R1T with Max pack, with its ~400 mile nominal range, is leading the pack right now. I do most of my skiing at Palisades Tahoe, which is only about 120 miles each way, and Tahoe winters while cold in mornings, are pretty nice during the daytime, so I'm not super worried about battery pack loss due to temperatures. But if there are other truck options available for cheaper that offer 400+ mile range within the next few years, I'd likely switch to something else.

Before buying an electric car, I'd likely install two Level 2 chargers in my garage. One 50 Amp for faster overnight charging for the main day trip car, and one lower, maybe 20 Amp, for more of just topping off my partner's car for commuting. Or vice versa if we use different cars for travel. Rough math is 2-3 miles per kWh for a large electric vehicle / truck, and charging is about 90% efficient, so 240 miles / 2.5 kWh/mi = 96 kWh depleted from battery (excluding heating losses). 10 hours * 240 V * 50 Amp * 90% efficient = 108 kWh. So this could most likely work for fully recharging overnight for day tripping on a Saturday + Sunday weekend for us to go skiing at a Tahoe resort from two hours each way away. I'm good with that. Worst case, we stop at In and Out or Ikeda's or somewhere in Truckee for a meal and a Level 2/3 charger.

I'm not worried about electric charger availability. Society has been through large changes before that we've all just kind of forgotten about. Remember when payphones were everywhere? Then one day you looked around, and they all seemed to have disappeared overnight? Or how in like 15 years, we went from relying on AOL with their 1000 hour free floppy discs and CD-ROMs to having 3G/4G pretty much everywhere populated? How everyone had cable, to rarely anyone having it?

We're likely on the cusp of major changes. We're likely going to start seeing electric chargers everywhere, like mushrooms after rainfall. Grocery stores, restaurants, rest stops, Costco, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now, half of all parking spots in every parking lot had chargers. They're about to change from rare (unless you know where to look) to everywhere. And we won't even notice it. Until the moment where we take a step back, and realize, 10 years ago, there were practically none and now they seem to be everywhere.

Electric cars are going to be the new Spotify / Apple Music. Nearly ubiquitous, good enough for most people. In 1-2 decades, gasoline or diesel vehicles will be like vinyl records. Something that only grandparents will have non-ironically, because they've always had it and it's good enough for them, and some enthusiasts will have it because they like it in specific applications. But just as how no one is bringing a portable record player to listen to music on headphones on a chairlift, most gas or diesel car enthusiasts will likely all still have an electric car.

I'm also not worried about batteries, or mining, or other size effects. There's literally no free lunch in anything in life. We just have to choose the least worst. And batteries and electric cars seem to be that. And once the batteries are depleted and at the end of their lives, it's not like the elemental molecules in the pack suddenly poof out of existence. All the lithium, cobalt, manganese, etc. It's all still there, in the pack. Just degraded into various oxides or similar. Dead battery cells would basically just be like a really high grade ore. The same industrial processes that refine ore can be used to refine batteries into raw materials, to rebuild into fresh packs. Sure it's not going to be 100% efficient, but hey, at some point regardless, we're going to run out of easy to mine stuff here on earth and we're going to have to start mining the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt. It's just what humans do. We continue to push new frontiers, and use our brains and problem solving to keep solving the most immediate problem at hand, only to develop a few more new ones.

Let's keep pushing renewables with grid storage, let's replace all our existing 2nd generation nuclear reactors with 4th generation reactors to buy them another 40-50 years of life, and let's throw all our energy grid R&D money into nuclear fusion. Fusion is just so fricking close, like ITER. In 1960, we didn't say, wow, landing a man on the moon is hard. And expensive. Let's just stay home. We threw a ton of people and resources at the problem and we did it. The United States used to do great things. Now we just turn it into a pointless red-v-blue fight, and argue, and do nothing except sit on the ground and stare at the moon in the sky. Let's go build awesome things again.