The Death Of Fossil Fuels

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bjn
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sat Aug 07, 2021 2:33 pm

Grumble wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 11:59 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 10:27 am
Biden aiming for 50% of new cars to be battery powered electric ones by 2030 https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis

Car manufacturers seem to be on board, as they were rolling out new models anyway, which is encouraging.
Disappointed that the target includes hybrid.
It's all about what is politically achievable today at the Federal, given the insane politics of the Republicans and their overrepresentation in the Senate and House. Individual states have already said that they are going to outlaw fossil fuel cars on a tighter timeline than that. California is the biggest market for cars in the USA, and it is outlawing diesel and petrol cars and light trucks from 2035. That will tilt the market massively in electric vehicle's favour, so I'd expect to see Biden's target more than exceeded by 2050.

ETA: that's also a ban on hybrids, as the vehicles need to be zero emission.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:32 pm

bjn wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 2:33 pm
Grumble wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 11:59 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 10:27 am
Biden aiming for 50% of new cars to be battery powered electric ones by 2030 https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis

Car manufacturers seem to be on board, as they were rolling out new models anyway, which is encouraging.
Disappointed that the target includes hybrid.
It's all about what is politically achievable today at the Federal, given the insane politics of the Republicans and their overrepresentation in the Senate and House. Individual states have already said that they are going to outlaw fossil fuel cars on a tighter timeline than that. California is the biggest market for cars in the USA, and it is outlawing diesel and petrol cars and light trucks from 2035. That will tilt the market massively in electric vehicle's favour, so I'd expect to see Biden's target more than exceeded by 2050.

ETA: that's also a ban on hybrids, as the vehicles need to be zero emission.
There are chunks of the US land area (with a very small population) where I can't see non-home recharging points being economical to install for a long time, and where you might end up with a hundred of mile or more between charging points - it's already that kind of distance between gas stations. Plugin hybrids probably have a role for a long time in those areas, as they typically have ranges of 500 miles, vs 200-300 for EVs.

But of course that shouldn't affect a 50% EV target that excluded hybrids.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Grumble » Sat Aug 07, 2021 7:41 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 10:27 am
Biden aiming for 50% of new cars to be battery powered electric ones by 2030 https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis

Car manufacturers seem to be on board, as they were rolling out new models anyway, which is encouraging.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by tom p » Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:29 pm

Is there any sane reason why one can't buy a spare battery for the longer journey days?
I'd be delighted to have an EV with a range of only 50-100 km, but with extra battery capacity sitting in my cellar of another 150+km for the days when I'd need it.
I'm sure that the car manufacturers don't permit it, but other than them trying to keep control over their punters, is there any reason why it shouldn't be possible?

On another note, does anyone know if it's possible to remove someone's electric lead from the shared street-charger if their car is full?
Dyqik's example of the streets of Oxford chimes with my own experience too - most cars in some cities almost never moving; but if someone had plugged their car in & then forgot about it, it could piss off the whole street for a week.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Martin Y » Mon Aug 09, 2021 3:11 pm

tom p wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:29 pm
Is there any sane reason why one can't buy a spare battery for the longer journey days?
I'd be delighted to have an EV with a range of only 50-100 km, but with extra battery capacity sitting in my cellar of another 150+km for the days when I'd need it.
I'm sure that the car manufacturers don't permit it, but other than them trying to keep control over their punters, is there any reason why it shouldn't be possible?

On another note, does anyone know if it's possible to remove someone's electric lead from the shared street-charger if their car is full?
Dyqik's example of the streets of Oxford chimes with my own experience too - most cars in some cities almost never moving; but if someone had plugged their car in & then forgot about it, it could piss off the whole street for a week.
100km range would do for my commute. An option to hire a 400km battery would let me do a weekend zoom off to Snowdonia, parking where there's no charging and zoom home again. I don't know how practicable that is. The car would be designed around a very, very heavy and large component that's not fitted most of the time and that's a big design constraint. I suppose you could make it modular and fit any number of luggable (25kg?) battery packs in the boot, but how much further does your EV go on each kg of battery?

I've been wondering about street charging and power leads. They're not cheap, and anything valuable as scrap that's not bolted down (and some that is bolted down like catalytic converters) get nicked all the time. I don't know how you balance the etiquette of someone else waiting to use the charger and not making it too easy to nick £100 worth of copper.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Aug 09, 2021 3:55 pm

tom p wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:29 pm
Is there any sane reason why one can't buy a spare battery for the longer journey days?
I'd be delighted to have an EV with a range of only 50-100 km, but with extra battery capacity sitting in my cellar of another 150+km for the days when I'd need it.
I'm sure that the car manufacturers don't permit it, but other than them trying to keep control over their punters, is there any reason why it shouldn't be possible?

On another note, does anyone know if it's possible to remove someone's electric lead from the shared street-charger if their car is full?
Dyqik's example of the streets of Oxford chimes with my own experience too - most cars in some cities almost never moving; but if someone had plugged their car in & then forgot about it, it could piss off the whole street for a week.
Weight and price are probably reasons.

From here, batteries generally weigh 200-300kg. A few are as low as 100 kg, Tesla batteries are as high as 544 kg. So even small batteries are likely to be too heavy for many drivers to take out of their house and install in their car (eg lots of people would struggle with, say, 10 batteries weighing 25kg each).

From here, replacement costs for a Nissan Leaf:
The 30 kWh pack prices range from $3,500 to $4,500, while 40 kWh packs vary from $6,500 to $7,500. That's the highest price difference in these replacements. Getting a 62 kWh battery pack demands $8,500 up to $9,500.
So your spare range extender battery might cost thousands of dollars and be too heavy for may people to lift into the car.

ETA and as Martin Y writes, it would be difficult to engineer adding something so heavy and dense to the car, especially as a long journey might well also involve the driver needing to carry luggage. Not impossible of course, but it would probably add to other costs.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:03 pm

There is a whole aftermarket in used Leaf and Tesla powertrains, including batteries, for fitting to classic cars - usually these are sourced from wrecked cars. But the kind of people who do that are also the kind of people that are willing to change the engine in a car with an engine from a completely different make and model, and who do things like fit a Buick V8 or V6 engine into a MGB. Such DIY work needs an engine hoist capable of handling 250 kg or so, and so changing a battery pack shouldn't be any harder.

It wouldn't be too hard to design a car that could take a second battery, to be installed in an hour by a moderately handy consumer using an appropriate specially designed lift, probably from underneath, or with an engine hoist. Done right, that could be a job that would be about as hard as changing wheels to rotate tires or fit winter tires/wheels. But this is pretty much the same idea as recharging by swapping batteries, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere fast.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by monkey » Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:19 pm

How about a great big hire car share type of thing? Rather than swapping the battery, you swap a car at the services (or wherever) that someone else left there to charge up, leaving the one that you were driving to charge for the next.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:28 pm

monkey wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:19 pm
How about a great big hire car share type of thing? Rather than swapping the battery, you swap a car at the services (or wherever) that someone else left there to charge up, leaving the one that you were driving to charge for the next.
I think this kind of "car as a service" model probably has legs. It would certainly fit with prevailing trends in how the economy works.

Commuting and other short- to medium-distance journeys can generally be done with public transport (improvements and price decreases needed, of course). Which just leaves rare long distance travel, and even then people could do the majority by mass transport and pick up a car from a terminus.

It's really a "last mile" issue, though in low-density places like much of the US I'm aware that that "last mile" might in reality be 50+ miles.

Swapping out cells at a service station would probably require special personnel and equipment, like those people who used to be employed to pump petrol. But then again there's no harm in creating some green jobs if it works economically - the fuel itself is cheaper, and governments ought to be subsidising long-range low-carbon travel.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:08 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:28 pm
monkey wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:19 pm
How about a great big hire car share type of thing? Rather than swapping the battery, you swap a car at the services (or wherever) that someone else left there to charge up, leaving the one that you were driving to charge for the next.
I think this kind of "car as a service" model probably has legs. It would certainly fit with prevailing trends in how the economy works.
It's really not going to work for holiday travel that is currently done by car, where loading and unloading the car with all the stuff for a family for a week is a major hassle.

Or for us travelling with a dog (cleaning the car, etc.)

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by monkey » Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:25 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:08 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:28 pm
monkey wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:19 pm
How about a great big hire car share type of thing? Rather than swapping the battery, you swap a car at the services (or wherever) that someone else left there to charge up, leaving the one that you were driving to charge for the next.
I think this kind of "car as a service" model probably has legs. It would certainly fit with prevailing trends in how the economy works.
It's really not going to work for holiday travel that is currently done by car, where loading and unloading the car with all the stuff for a family for a week is a major hassle.

Or for us travelling with a dog (cleaning the car, etc.)
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Just because it might not be ideal for your situation, doesn't mean its a bad idea. I think it's a bad idea because the logistics would be proper hard to work out and the network would have to be very big to be effective.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by lpm » Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:28 pm

Swapping batteries is a complete non-starter. Driving down costs is the imperative right now, to finally crush ICE cars, and you can only drive down costs by having simple structures and components. EVs are fundamentally simple machines.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by FlammableFlower » Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:41 pm

There are already hire car companies. If COVID hadn't scuppered our European holiday plans this summer, we were seriously considering hiring a bigger, more comfortable car for driving to, round, and back: as the family car, a Skoda Fabia estate + roof box is still a little cramped for the teenagers in the back on long trips.

Why not have your standard, smaller EV for commuting and general day-to-day use and then use a company that hired out longer-range EVs for those kind of longer trips?

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:41 pm

monkey wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:25 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:08 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:28 pm


I think this kind of "car as a service" model probably has legs. It would certainly fit with prevailing trends in how the economy works.
It's really not going to work for holiday travel that is currently done by car, where loading and unloading the car with all the stuff for a family for a week is a major hassle.

Or for us travelling with a dog (cleaning the car, etc.)
Trains and busses didn't help me when I bought a new mattress that time, but Trains and busses are still useful.

Just because it might not be ideal for your situation, doesn't mean its a bad idea. I think it's a bad idea because the logistics would be proper hard to work out and the network would have to be very big to be effective.
It's not that it's not ideal for my situation, but that it doesn't work for a chunk of the use cases it's trying to solve. I'm not sure how big a chunk, mind.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:05 pm

There are already car clubs in every city I've lived in in the UK. Some monthly fee for x days usage plus miles I think.

Modern workers have little capital, new builds and shared houses have little parking, etc. So there's clearly demand for reliable vehicles for occasional use only. They just need to go electric (and there's possibly extra demand for that).

Not a silver bullet of course though.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:10 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:05 pm
There are already car clubs in every city I've lived in in the UK. Some monthly fee for x days usage plus miles I think.

Modern workers have little capital, new builds and shared houses have little parking, etc. So there's clearly demand for reliable vehicles for occasional use only. They just need to go electric (and there's possibly extra demand for that).

Not a silver bullet of course though.
I've used Zipcar in the past. It's good for a few hours or maybe a day trip. Multi-day trips covering hundreds of miles, or multi-day rentals at a destination that isn't in a city and close to Zipcar spaces where you can sign out of the car, aren't really economic with that business model - traditional rental cars ended up cheaper for that. And even more so if you were splitting the driving between people.

EVs have the short/intermittent and destination rental covered with current EV ranges (either Zipcar or traditional rental), and the Zipcar model would work fine for use at a destination as long as it's in a city where you can return the vehicle each day.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by monkey » Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:54 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:10 pm
EVs have the short/intermittent and destination rental covered with current EV ranges (either Zipcar or traditional rental), and the Zipcar model would work fine for use at a destination as long as it's in a city where you can return the vehicle each day.
If you could leave them in a different city and leave it to charge, find a charged one then go to the next city, and so on, I reckon you could go quite far :P

I looked at Zipcar once. It worked out cheaper for me to use taxis because of the flat fee (it also might not have been Zipcar). But I guess a Zipcar is just a taxi you have to drive yourself anyway.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Mon Aug 09, 2021 8:03 pm

monkey wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:54 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 7:10 pm
EVs have the short/intermittent and destination rental covered with current EV ranges (either Zipcar or traditional rental), and the Zipcar model would work fine for use at a destination as long as it's in a city where you can return the vehicle each day.
If you could leave them in a different city and leave it to charge, find a charged one then go to the next city, and so on, I reckon you could go quite far :P

I looked at Zipcar once. It worked out cheaper for me to use taxis because of the flat fee (it also might not have been Zipcar). But I guess a Zipcar is just a taxi you have to drive yourself anyway.
The way the costs worked out with Zipcar, you really don't want to be holding on to the vehicle while not driving it for more than few hours. Which means that your destination has to be convenient for Zipcar parking spots.

I'd need a $100 taxi ride to get to the nearest Zipcar, but I can walk to an Avis or Enterprise.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Aug 09, 2021 11:59 pm

tom p wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:29 pm
Dyqik's example of the streets of Oxford chimes with my own experience too - most cars in some cities almost never moving; but if someone had plugged their car in & then forgot about it, it could piss off the whole street for a week.
If EVs are sufficiently successful, that will be easily solved - every parking space will have its own charger, so the situation will revert back to people being annoyed by not finding a parking space near their house - just as they were when they had a petrol/diesel vehicle.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Martin_B » Tue Aug 10, 2021 12:23 am

FlammableFlower wrote:
Mon Aug 09, 2021 5:41 pm
There are already hire car companies. If COVID hadn't scuppered our European holiday plans this summer, we were seriously considering hiring a bigger, more comfortable car for driving to, round, and back: as the family car, a Skoda Fabia estate + roof box is still a little cramped for the teenagers in the back on long trips.

Why not have your standard, smaller EV for commuting and general day-to-day use and then use a company that hired out longer-range EVs for those kind of longer trips?
I think a possible problem with that is the cost of hire cars, and some of the ethics of hire car companies. Some I've seen are ridiculously expensive for multi-day hire (basically a single day hire x number of days, so no reduction for continued hire) and then they try and screw you for any mark on the car as an expensive repair (even if it's just dirt, or on the car when originally picked up) and charge you at exorbitant rates for any fuel they can put in the tank when you return it, even if the tank wasn't full when you picked it up.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by FlammableFlower » Tue Aug 10, 2021 8:08 am

True, but I've also seen some that have been pretty good. 3 years ago we flew into Pisa for a holiday and hired a car for the week, they were very laid back about it on return and it wasn't pricey.

If hire companies recognise that with the move to EVs and range anxiety having very long-range EVs could work. With EVs, if they invested in a decent charging system of their own they could supply the vehicle fully charged and then charge a price for recharging it dependent on the %age left in the battery at return.

Also - with the ban on new ICE cars coming in, hire car companies are going to be left with fleets of aging vehicles that, over time, people will be less familiar with and happy driving.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by lpm » Tue Aug 10, 2021 8:34 am

Just needs a small tilt in tax regimes to encourage car hire companies to be early adopters.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Holylol » Tue Aug 10, 2021 9:36 am

Some EV manufacturers (Renault for example in France) are already offering to lease you an ICE car for 30 or 50 days a year for a monthly fee, when you buy an EV.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Martin Y » Tue Aug 10, 2021 9:48 am

Solving the charger problem by flooding the country with chargers will also solve unemployment by creating an army of people manufacturing, installing, regularly safety testing and repairing a hundred million chargers.

It does make me wonder about the economics of vastly widespread public charging points. Someone has to own and be responsible for the upkeep of each of these devices, getting used by any clumsy untrained idiot in any weather. At least petrol pumps have a responsible person in attendance on site, which these won't. Some will get used many times per day, presumably "subsidising" others which might only be used occasionally. I'm sure the tech exists to direct people not only to a charger but an available charger, but the problem may eventually shift to directing people to a charger which will dependably still be available by the time they get there. I'm sure clever people are years ahead thinking about this but it rather does my head in thinking what the bottlenecks will be.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by lpm » Tue Aug 10, 2021 9:58 am

Martin Y wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 9:48 am
Solving the charger problem by flooding the country with chargers will also solve unemployment by creating an army of people manufacturing, installing, regularly safety testing and repairing a hundred million chargers.
The UK has got a major problem here because there isn't any unemployment in this arena. There's a shortage of people with the interest/aptitude in building out this network.

Mainly because there's simultaneously a rollout of fibre cable networks that's a similar skill - BT etc are being significantly slowed by recruitment/training problems. And there's other major electrical projects like Crossrail. Smart meter rollout, which is linked to home charger rollout. New housing, especially London.

And we expelled loads of eastern European hard workers in this sector.
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