EEVblog #1337 - I Bought An Electric Car

[EEVblog]

Charging at home certainly is helpful, and having solar (and plenty of sun) is nicer still, but I'll wait until hydrogen fuel cells or standardized swappable batteries are common. Electric cars are still immature technology.

Swapable batteries are preferable to taking 10 seconds to plug in at home every night? 

[wilfred]

Charging at home certainly is helpful, and having solar (and plenty of sun) is nicer still, but I'll wait until hydrogen fuel cells or standardized swappable batteries are common. Electric cars are still immature technology.

Swapable batteries are preferable to taking 10 seconds to plug in at home every night? 

Swap-able standardised batteries have several advantages. But I can't see auto makers embracing them because they will dictate the styling of the car to ensure rapid swap access. If that is a requirement. It requires a standardised battery compartment. Since they are so big they will constrain mechanical design to a degree as well. Also innovative companies will want to market their technology as superior. If it is a good idea buyers will have to force them.

It would be great on trips where you might swap a battery for a freshly charged one much as you do with a gas bottle for the BBQ. It would help prevent queueing at charge point as the popularity of electric cars increases. I can see that becoming a problem in smaller towns where a music festival or some post Covid large event is held. The charging infrastructure might meet normal usage but an extra few hundred people all wanting to charge at the same time could be a problem. But then so too will holding a stock of replacement charged batteries unless someone with foresight plans for the influx of visitors.

Plus owners needn't own the batteries and therefore they wouldn't own the need to pay to replace it when it dies and neither would the resale value of the car be as diminished because the new buyer will discount the car by the expected battery replacement cost. Availability of replacement batteries will limit the lifetime of a used car and with electric cars being mechanically simpler you would hope electric cars could have a long service life that isn't foreshortened by the unavailability of replacement batteries. At least at reasonable cost commensurate with the reduced value of the older car and the cost of just buying a new car.  With standardised and backward compatible batteries older cars could hopefully utilise newer (cheaper?) technology even at the first battery replacement let alone the second or third.

Even if you didn't have slide out - slide in quick recharge battery upgrades, standard and hopefully cheaper mass produced common battery packs still seem a good idea to me. You rent the battery as long as charging is convenient and swap them when time is short like on a trip. If your car is a glorified mobility scooter 95% of the time as if it were a second car for school runs and shopping then you could just rent a small battery until you needed a longer range one for the holidays.

Yes it seems like you're paying something that you needn't if you owned the battery but you do get the benefit of not selling the car extra cheap because a new buyer doesn't want to wear the large cost of a new battery in a car they don't intend to keep long enough.

The decisions made when a battery eventually needs to be replaced is to me one of the unspoken of disadvantages of electric vehicles. I wouldn't like to see cars with useful service life left just scrapped like we do with other appliances because the new ones are just too cheap and new battery packs too expensive. Getting the huge capital cost of battery replacement off the table seems like a good idea to me. 

I just wish power tools had something similar. The modern fad of power tool skins is a partial solution but there seems no reason that benefits the end user to stop there.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

EVs , combined with smart charging, actually benefit the grid, as they can help balance load.

[EEVblog]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

EVs , combined with smart charging, actually benefit the grid, as they can help balance load.

Yes, I've signed up for a government trial where they will give me a free 4G networked EV charger in exchange for me having to run various tests over the next year or two, and that primarily involves timed charging. They want data on how to best charge EV's at home on a large scale.
Haven't been picked yet though, application still pending.

[Monkeh]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

No electrical grid? No pumps 50m from your house. Next daft argument?

[SilverSolder]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

No electrical grid? No pumps 50m from your house. Next daft argument?

It's not a super-daft point...  some parts of the world (even civilised parts) have power outages that can last up to 2 weeks, e.g. after a storm or a hurricane (which occur with boring regularity in some areas).

But, the risk of being immobilized due to grid failure can be mitigated with a generator, or perhaps a PHEV is a smarter solution in those areas where power is unreliable.

[bw2341]

Swap-able standardised batteries have several advantages. But I can't see auto makers embracing them because they will dictate the styling of the car to ensure rapid swap access.

From Tesla’s battery day presentation, they will be moving towards batteries that are permanently attached to the car’s structure. The steel cans of the cells themselves will be part of the car’s structure.

The decisions made when a battery eventually needs to be replaced is to me one of the unspoken of disadvantages of electric vehicles. I wouldn't like to see cars with useful service life left just scrapped like we do with other appliances because the new ones are just too cheap and new battery packs too expensive. Getting the huge capital cost of battery replacement off the table seems like a good idea to me. 

While it is still early, battery degradation seems to be low enough on modern Teslas that the rest of the car may wear out before the battery does. I think we will see more scrapped EV batteries reused in other applications than EV bodies with unusable worn batteries.

[nctnico]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

EVs , combined with smart charging, actually benefit the grid, as they can help balance load.

Well before you sign up for that do the math first on how much the energy company needs to pay you for it to make sense. Keep in mind that the battery usage will affect the depreciation of your car. Ask yourself if you would pay good money for an EV with 20k km on the odometer and 200k km worth of battery use.

All in all your costs are very likely (several times) higher than the costs to generate the electricity and someone will have to pay for the storage costs. IOW it is likely more economic to use the electricity elsewhere (to make hydrogen for example).

While it is still early, battery degradation seems to be low enough on modern Teslas that the rest of the car may wear out before the battery does. I think we will see more scrapped EV batteries reused in other applications than EV bodies with unusable worn batteries.

Nowadays maybe but don't mistake durability for reliability. Improved battery technology also involves making batteries good enough to last a car's lifetime (which means a well controlled durability to operate reliable for an X amount of kilometers). For most cars a battery which lasts about 300k km is good enough. By that time the suspension and many other parts of a car are worn as well so repairs are not economic anyway. Which leads me back to the point of why grid balancing using the EVs is not economic.

[SilverSolder]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

EVs , combined with smart charging, actually benefit the grid, as they can help balance load.

Well before you sign up for that do the math first on how much the energy company needs to pay you for it to make sense. Keep in mind that the battery usage will affect the depreciation of your car. Ask yourself if you would pay good money for an EV with 20k km on the odometer and 200k km worth of battery use.

All in all your costs are very likely (several times) higher than the costs to generate the electricity and someone will have to pay for the storage costs. IOW it is likely more economic to use the electricity elsewhere (to make hydrogen for example).

While it is still early, battery degradation seems to be low enough on modern Teslas that the rest of the car may wear out before the battery does. I think we will see more scrapped EV batteries reused in other applications than EV bodies with unusable worn batteries.

Nowadays maybe but don't mistake durability for reliability. Improved battery technology also involves making batteries good enough to last a car's lifetime (which means a well controlled durability to operate reliable for an X amount of kilometers). For most cars a battery which lasts about 300k km is good enough. By that time the suspension and many other parts of a car are worn as well so repairs are not economic anyway. Which leads me back to the point of why grid balancing using the EVs is not economic.

It would be more environmentally friendly if we could make cars last e.g. 500Mm (1K Km has to be 1 Megameter, right?) or even more.  -  The 300 megameter life of today's cars shouldn't be cast in stone as a limit, is what I'm getting at.

[nctnico]

I didn't run the exact numbers on it but the average car roughly needs 20 years or so to reach 300k km given normal use (say 15k km per year). Replacing a car every 20 years on average doesn't seem excessive to me. 500k km would stretch the lifetime of a car to nearly 35 years. Meanwhile safety features and environmental regulations, etc advance as well. And there is the economic part of it as well. Cars do rust and wear so the entire car would need to be much more expensive to reach such a long service life. 300k km seems to be the optimal spot.

[SilverSolder]

I didn't run the exact numbers on it but the average car roughly needs 20 years or so to reach 300k km given normal use (say 15k km per year). Replacing a car every 20 years on average doesn't seem excessive to me. 500k km would stretch the lifetime of a car to nearly 35 years. Meanwhile safety features and environmental regulations, etc advance as well. And there is the economic part of it as well. Cars do rust and wear so the entire car would need to be much more expensive to reach such a long service life. 300k km seems to be the optimal spot.

Good points, I agree with you.   The flip side of the 20vs. 30 year life debate is that we have to build 50% more 20y cars annually to keep a constant car parc.  That's a lot of resources being churned.

If material science improves further from today - and why wouldn't it -  it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect cars to keep lasting longer, while still looking good.  Maybe they won't even be made of steel...   

[coppice]

I didn't run the exact numbers on it but the average car roughly needs 20 years or so to reach 300k km given normal use (say 15k km per year). Replacing a car every 20 years on average doesn't seem excessive to me. 500k km would stretch the lifetime of a car to nearly 35 years. Meanwhile safety features and environmental regulations, etc advance as well. And there is the economic part of it as well. Cars do rust and wear so the entire car would need to be much more expensive to reach such a long service life. 300k km seems to be the optimal spot.

How many cars actually reach 20 years before being scrapped? Its a serious question. In hot dry places they last. In wet places they rust. The interior of some cars degrades so rapidly the car is ready for the scrap heap quite early. I have no idea how that all plays out to the global average life of a car. I think its clear that many cars are scrapped when most of the car is still in good shape, because one expensive part (e.g. the gearbox) has failed, and its cost exceeds the value of the vehicle.

[SilverSolder]

The average car age in the USA is 12 years, I seem to recall.

[timelessbeing]

Swapable batteries are preferable to taking 10 seconds to plug in at home every night? 

When the car is dead and I need to go somewhere right now, yes absolutely.

But why are you disingenuously presenting it as an either-or choice? I can swap my power tool batteries or charge them.

[timelessbeing]

Swap-able standardised batteries have several advantages ... they will dictate the styling of the car to ensure rapid swap access.

I don't give a flying squirrel about styling. Just drive over a pit where a mechanical lift drops the dead battery out and lifts a new one in.

[timelessbeing]

EVs , combined with smart charging, actually benefit the grid, as they can help balance load.

Please explain. To me it seems that every day at 5pm there will be a gigantic spike in demand.

[timelessbeing]

No electrical grid? No pumps 50m from your house. Next daft argument?

When did I say I didn't have access to the power grid? Next rude and daft comment from the peanut gallery ...

[timelessbeing]

While it is still early, battery degradation seems to be low enough on modern Teslas that the rest of the car may wear out before the battery does. I think we will see more scrapped EV batteries reused in other applications than EV bodies with unusable worn batteries.

This simply not the case with most EV cars. More likely the used market will be flooded with vehicles that need batteries.

[Monkeh]

No electrical grid? No pumps 50m from your house. Next daft argument?

When did I say I didn't have access to the power grid? Next rude and daft comment from the peanut gallery ...

Your petrol pump depends on it. Is context hard for some reason?

[timelessbeing]

But, the risk of being immobilized due to grid failure can be mitigated with a generator, or perhaps a PHEV is a smarter solution in those areas where power is unreliable.

To clarify "dependence on the grid": I can fill up some jerry cans with fuel and head out into the bush for a couple of months. Electric cars may be fine in densely populated areas like Europe and Asia, or for people who never leave the city and designated roads. For people who don't share those limitations, it is a burden.

A generator is just an extra step where to waste a ton of energy. Hybrids are a good idea in principle. In practice, they combine the worst of all words. I've driven them, and you get a gutless car that sounds like shit, and you still get the batteries and other EV parts that cost a fortune to replace.

[Monkeh]

Your petrol pump depends on it. Is context hard for some reason?

There are many ways to get fuel into your tank without a grid connection. I can see that you are a very bitter and vile person, ready to spit venom at any ideas outside of your own tiny sheltered box. Poor thing.

There's really no need to get personal.

Besides, I'm not the one rejecting an idea because it requires changing my habits and expectations.

[timelessbeing]

There's really no need to get personal.

you made it personal

Besides, I'm not the one rejecting an idea because it requires changing my habits and expectations.

right because we should all change our habits to accommodate frivolous tech trends and consumer marketing.

And don't try to paint me as some kind of ignorant naysayer. I've stated my practical reservations, criticisms and concessions.

[EEVblog]

Got a fuel pump at home?

Also, I don't see dependence on the electrical grid as a good thing.

No electrical grid? No pumps 50m from your house. Next daft argument?

It's not a super-daft point...  some parts of the world (even civilised parts) have power outages that can last up to 2 weeks, e.g. after a storm or a hurricane (which occur with boring regularity in some areas).
But, the risk of being immobilized due to grid failure can be mitigated with a generator, or perhaps a PHEV is a smarter solution in those areas where power is unreliable.

Pro Tip: Petrol pumps don't work without the power grid either.

[EEVblog]

I didn't run the exact numbers on it but the average car roughly needs 20 years or so to reach 300k km given normal use (say 15k km per year). Replacing a car every 20 years on average doesn't seem excessive to me. 500k km would stretch the lifetime of a car to nearly 35 years. Meanwhile safety features and environmental regulations, etc advance as well. And there is the economic part of it as well. Cars do rust and wear so the entire car would need to be much more expensive to reach such a long service life. 300k km seems to be the optimal spot.

People change cars also (and often solely) because their lifestyle changes. Change locations, change jobs, have kids, etc presents different needs.

[timelessbeing]

Apparently people have never heard of fuel containers, pump trunks or gravity fed fuel tanks.