Another Selling Point For EV's

[Handy Don 12,217]

8 minutes ago, wh500special said:

Don, I think you and I are sometimes copying each other’s homework, although I’m pretty sure you’re getting better grades than me…I’ve made these and similar points many times when EV discussions inevitably turn toward subsidies. 

This could easily stray toward a discussion of our members’ particular positions and opinions, right? Leaving this where it is before I stir up any trouble. 😁

[Achto 27,571]

11 hours ago, Sparky said:

That in-line 6 really intrigues me. Wonder what the MPG’s are.

 

Having a hard time finding projected MPG info for the 2025 RAM 1500. In the 2023 Jeep Wagoneer it is averaging 19mpg.

[WHX?? 48,815]

I have no idea if this is all true or not. 

Stole it off FB but thought interesting. 

 

This photo below is a Tesla model Y battery. It takes up all of the space under the passenger compartment of the car. To manufacture it you need:
--12 tons of rock for Lithium (can also be extracted from sea water)
-- 5 tons of cobalt minerals (Most cobalt is made as a byproduct of processing copper and nickel ores. It is the most difficult and expensive material to obtain for a battery.) 
-- 3 tons nickel ore
-- 12 tons of copper ore

You must move 250 tons of soil to obtain:
-- 26.5 pounds of Lithium
-- 30 pounds of nickel 
-- 48.5 pounds of manganese
-- 15 pounds of cobalt

To manufacture the battery also requires:
-- 441 pounds of aluminum, steel and/or plastic 
-- 112 pounds of graphite

The Caterpillar 994A is used to move the earth to obtain the minerals needed for this battery. The Caterpillar consumes 264 gallons of diesel in 12 hours.

The bulk of necessary minerals for manufacturing the batteries come from China or Africa. Much of the labor in Africa is done by children. When you buy an electric car, China profits most.
The 2021 Tesla Model Y OEM battery (the cheapest Tesla battery) is currently for sale on the Internet for $4,999 not including shipping or installation. The battery weighs 1,000 pounds (you can imagine the shipping cost). The cost of Tesla batteries are:

Model 3 -- $14,000+ (Car MSRP $38,990)
Model Y -- $5,000–$5,500 (Car MSRP $47,740)
Model S -- $13,000–$20,000 (Car MSRP $74,990)
Model X -- $13,000+ (Car MSRP $79,990)

It takes 7 years for an electric car to reach net-zero CO2. The life expectancy of the battery is 10 years (average). Only in the last 3 years do you start to reduce your carbon footprint, but then the batteries must be replaced and you lose all gains made.

But by all means, get an electric car. Just don't sell me on how awesome you are for the environment. Or for human rights.

Edited January 21 by WHX??

[wh500special 2,179]

I wasn’t going to get  involved in this conversation but now I want to make a few counterpoints…
 

I have no desire or ability to suss out whether those Facebook facts are true or not Jim, but I am suspicious of them.  Full cost accounting is hard to do and the results are highly dependent on where a person decides to draw the boundary conditions.  The conclusions always seem to follow the bent of the publisher.   
 

I’m sure I could craft an example that will show EVs will save us from ourselves and get us back to our high-school athlete physiques. 
 

When it comes to EVs there are two big camps: The pros and the antis.  There aren’t very many small tents outside the periphery.  This makes it hard to know what is fact and what is crap.  

I put myself in one of the small tents. I don’t care whether you buy a Bolt or a Duramax as I can see the value in both.  
 

The preponderance of information I see floating on social media and in (mostly conservative) media outlets usually looks to be lists of specious facts.  Usually a lot

of important details are omitted in these stories.  

 

What I see presented on the acolyte side is typically idealized and dismissive of the realties of EVs not being suitable for every person or every application.  
 

For whatever reason, both sides seem flummoxed by how these things actually work and that there are nuances to all vehicles. 
 

In the data above for instance, the Tesla Model 3 and Y are similar cars built on the same platform.  They share a lot of components.  I think the batteries and motors are either identical or very similar.  To see such a gap between their battery pack replacement costs is suspicious and suggests at least one of them is wrong.  
 

I see a lot of mentions of batteries only lasting 10 years.  In reality - with some well-publicized exceptions - they are lasting much longer.  Many are warrantied for ten years.   I suspect we are conflating that the manufacturers are required by the federal government to warranty the battery for 8 years or 100k.  If they were to only last 10 years in any appreciable quantity we’d see statistical variation forcing a lot of warranty replacements at or before the 8 year mark.   It’s not happening. 
 

The Model S was released in 2012.  There are still plenty of these on the road with their original batteries. And they are apparently not experiencing the massive degradation many (including me) predicted.  Yes, there are those that caught fire on the drive home from the dealership, but I didn’t have to look too far to see they are typically holding on to 85+% of their capacity at 200k miles and ten years.    That’s pretty good considering everything in every car - gas or electric - degrades over time.  
 

When the batteries are spent they aren’t landfilled in any kind of significant quantity.  The expense and effort taken to mine the materials that go into them means that the stuff inside them has intrinsic  value.  EV batteries are too precious to throw away and the recycling stream for these is somewhat in a nascent stage but it is robust.  Tesla in fact has a recycling loop already in place and claim to recycle nearly all of their batteries when a car is at the end of its road.
 

 Not that we should believe all of Tesla’s claims. 
 

I don’t know where we are on this stage of things, but one of the plans for EV batteries that are aged beyond the point where they are good enough for vehicles is for stationary storage.   The weight and capacity vs size trade offs aren’t nearly as big of a deal for stationary use. there they can live on for another decade or more, quietly pushing power back and forth.  
 

Hertz selling off their Tesla and electric fleet doesn’t seem as newsworthy to

me as many outlets are making it.   These are cars that have 80000 or more miles on them.  At average rental rates and miles driven they have probably grossed at least $40000-$60000 in revenue from each car.  Most articles point to nebulous “repair costs” for the cars so the inference is that the EV systems are troublesome, but in actuality it was apparently repair costs associated with collision damage. Plus, the bizarro infotainment and driver control system Tesla uses makes it hard for customers to get acquainted in a short time, couple that with unfamiliarity with charging and I suspect customers are generally not fans.  And in a business where the rental company has their customers fuel their fleet or pay an extravagant fee to leave them under-filled it probably is comparatively costly juicing them up at the rental garage.  

The wintertime charging blues are a reality. Probably helped along by a dose of operator error or inattention here and there.  The cars precondition their batteries to make them receptive to charging and it seems this wasn’t executed in some instances. 
 

I find it frustrating that the drop in range in an EV due to cold temperatures is attributed solely to efficiency loss.  While that’s partially true (increased rolling resistance, slowed battery kinetics, etc.) that’s not the whole story.  In an engine powered car a portion of the waste heat produced by burning the fuel is used to heat the cabin.   In an electric car there is very little waste heat and none of it is available to heat the occupants.  So battery energy has to be turned into heat. And, unfortunately, it takes a tremendous amount of heat to keep a car interior warm when it’s hurtling through the icy air at 60 mph.  The electric heaters (and heat pumps) can consume 3000w of heat to maintain temperature and thus are quite impactful on range. 
 

But what about The Grid?

 

It’s a problem.  As a society we have been coasting along with cheap fuel-fired power for decades.  Since we’ve had plenty and it was cheap, there was little impetus to upgrade anything or buttress against growth or insecurity.  Out of sight, out of mind.  
 

The relative distaste for growing a coal plant or nuke in your backyard had meant we’ve avoided putting power plants where we need them.  That’s not completely unreasonable. 
 

Anyway, we find ourselves today with a power grid that usually can cover our daily needs but due to growth of electrical demand in general, aging infrastructure, and slow growth in renewable power we have challenges. If the whole vehicle fleet were to transition to electricity there isn’t enough power to go around. 
 

But we have a couple of things going for us.  
 

First, the grid generally is undertaxed at night.  So there is actually more capacity available to charge electric cars than we realize.  One of the dreams is to make the battery in your EV a bidirectional unit that can be filled up at night then partially drained back into the grid when the car is sitting there doing nothing while you’re at work.  Yes, there are issues with this, but not so complicated that it can’t be figured out.  
 

Second, increased demand will - and has been - doing what it does in a capitalistic society: spurring opportunities to make money.  These opportunities mostly come in the form of increased development of renewable power, but could manifest in other ways too.   Battery storage comes to mind.  Pumped hydro is another. Either could help smooth the boom and bust of the daily grid fluctuations. 
 

It’s gonna take more generation, for sure.  But it’s not as bleak as it seems if you think in terms of integrated systems. 
 

Nuclear seems like an easy solution since it’s proven.  There isn’t an infinite supply of fissile material so it’s not a forever solution either, but it has a lot of potential.  Thanks to some rational fears and a healthy dose of scientific and technical ignorance we don’t have a large appetite for new nukes in the US, but I see a huge opportunity for Mexico to be a power exporter to the US.  Shoot, if they built enough power plants they could sell us power and have enough capacity to desalinate water for the parched American West.  
 

Opportunities abound. 

 

I used to think EVs were a solution looking for a problem, but the more I read the more i am coming to realize they make a lot of sense.  I would consider one for my next car, especially while their operating costs are so low compared to a gas vehicle. 

we also seem to be holding EVs to a much higher standard than we do everything else.  If we flipped the script and were looking to replace our 100-year entrenched fleet of electric cars with gasoline powered cars I could imagine the friction then…

 

You expect me to stop at a filling station and pump 120 pounds of explosive liquid into a thin sheetmetal tank under the kids’ child seat in the back?  You mean I have to change the oil every ten thousand miles?  I have to wait for the engine to warm up in the winter before I get any heat in the cabin?   Why are those things so loud and why are they so slow?  How come it has to shift so many times instead of just accelerating smoothly? Wait a minute, you mean I can’t recover any energy when I come to a stop or coast down a hill?  And, to top it all off, who came up with this system where barely 1/3 of the gas I buy goes into moving the car while the other two thirds are left in my wake as waste heat from the radiator and exhaust?

 

It would be bedlam.  

 

steve

Edited January 21 by wh500special

[Handy Don 12,217]

In college, I was “lucky" enough to study both engineering and quantitative analysis. Even back then, figuring out costs was hard. One paper we had to submit was actually graded NOT on the calculations themselves, but on how we set what @wh500special refers to as “boundary conditions” for our determination.

(Sneaky professor--thankfully I got a good grade. 🙂) It was in an advanced statistics class where I first heard about “liars, d**n liars, and statisticians."

 

I’ll add only one question to the previous post. Is it possible to create a complete and accurate cost of obtaining, distributing, and using gasoline and diesel for automobiles?

[953 nut 55,223]

Steve @wh500special, as usual you have given us a lot to digest in a well thought-out dialogue. I too am always sceptical of facts and figures presented to support any cause, pro or con.  Thanks for giving us something to ponder. Personally I would like to see us go to Hydrogen powered vehicles but that opens up a whole new can of worms. Yes, a bunch of electricity is used in the production of Hydrogen but the Oxygen byproduct is beneficial and the water vapor emission from the exhaust pipe could form ice on the road  and cause an accident. I didn't say it was a prefect solution, just my personal favorite.

@Handy Don, the fossil fuel advocates don't want to know the complete and accurate cost of obtaining, distributing, and using gasoline and diesel for automobiles?

[SylvanLakeWH 25,557]

Seems to me the long and short is:

 

You can't get something - in this case energy - for nothing... always a cost. Pick your poison.

 

Always winners and losers. 

 

Private sector is not perfect. Public sector is not perfect. Both have plenty to be ashamed of...

 

I'm sure gas, diesel and battery vehicles will be around a long time. Along with propane, hydrogen, nuclear and others that come along...

 

I am equally sure my pocket book will not benefit relatively from any of them appreciably beyond getting me from point A to point B very expensively...