Electric cars?

[rederob]

Bearing in mind that ICE's are still being manufactured, and still account for the overwhelming majority of new vehicle sales, it's a given that they'll still be a substantial portion of the fleet in 2040.

That assumes many things.
First average car ownership is about 10 years, while about 30% of vehicles are less than 5 years old.
Next, why would you drive anything less safe and more expensive to operate, assuming their fuels were readily available, which is also unlikely.
Solar farms quickly sold off original panels as more efficient panels came onto the market and were half the price.
Apart from petrol heads I reckon the only other people owning ICE vehicles in 2040 will be those who were unable to buy an NEV due to supply.

 

[sptrawler]

Not particularily E.V related, but something to be aware of once the media blab it all over the airwaves, it isn't long before the muppets go "why didn't I think of that?
You guys with the expensive cars, keep the eyes peeled.

 

[JohnDe]

By 2040, who knows what will be available.
In 2000, no one would have guessed, we would be where we are today.

In relation to cars, pretty much all that is happening
now in the automotive world was was being discussed and developed 20+ years ago.
Unless you’re a mad automotive enthusiast or involved in the industry you’d be lucky to know 10% of what was coming.
I am both, in the industry & a car nut with my father’s help from also being in the industry.
What currently being introduced in the automotive world doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve seen it at technical seminars, trade shows, and read about it in the motoring journals for over 20 years .What surprises me is that has taken most by surprise and a few are fighting it with megaphones & toothpicks.

 

[sptrawler]

In relation to cars, pretty much all that is happening now in the automotive world was was being discussed and developed 20+ years ago.
Unless you’re a mad automotive enthusiast or involved in the industry you’d be lucky to know 10% of what was coming.
I am both, in the industry & a car nut with my father’s help from also being in the industry.
What is happening is currently being introduced doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve seen it at the seminars and read about it in the journals during for over 20 years, what surprises me is that has taken most by surprise and a few are fighting it with megaphones & toothpicks.

Well for all that foreknowledge available 20+ years ago, all I can say is the legacy manufacturers, have certainly been caught flat footed by Tesla.
A bit like the K.O'd heavyweight saying, "I knew that was coming", as he drags his ar$e off the canvas.

 

[Smurf1976]

First average car ownership is about 10 years

Average age of a car but lifespan is about double that.

Just as the average Australian is 37 years old but average lifespan is ~80.

why would you drive anything less safe and more expensive to operate, assuming their fuels were readily available, which is also unlikely.

Much the same reason cars are roughly 20 years showroom to wreckers today.

They're an expensive purchase and a large portion of the population simply can't afford to not get full life out of them. Hence most cars end up with more than one owner - someone with more money buys it new then sells it to someone with less money who may well then later sell it to someone with even less money.

Barring a war etc, fuel should still be available so long as there's substantial demand for it. For example LPG consumption for automotive use in 2020-21 was just 353 ML which compares with petrol at 16,005 ML and diesel at 30,183 ML (noting that includes petrol and diesel for non-road uses although in the case of petrol it's mostly sold via the same distribution network, that is service stations, anyway).

Despite that low consumption of LPG, which has fallen 82.5% over the past decade, it's still sufficiently available to make it usable as a transport fuel. Perhaps not for much longer, it's in terminal decline and service stations are now removing it, but it has clearly been viable to supply at just a few % of the vehicle fleet.

Based on the LPG experience, petrol sales would need to drop well over 90% from present levels for it to cease being viable to maintain availability.

 

[JohnDe]

Well for all that foreknowledge available 20+ years ago, all I can say is the legacy manufacturers, have certainly been caught flat footed by Tesla.
A bit like the K.O'd heavyweight saying, "I knew that was coming", as he drags his ar$e off the canvas.

A GM CEO saw it coming and put in process a plan, spent a lot of R&D dollars to develop a EV that was ground breaking. And then management and share holders scrapped it to chase the easy money coming from existing technology and cheap existing manufacturers and oil. It paid off for a few years but look at GM now.

Consumers have been conned for the past 20 or 30 years, we’ve been sold cheap automotive technology at ridiculously high prices. Remember the XF Falcon, the plastic bumpers fell off, the CClass Mercedes from the 1990’s, leaked like a sieve, the BMW 3 series during the early 2000’s had to have the intake valves cleaned with walnut blasting every 12 months.

They all failed because they tried to build environmentally safe and fuel efficient cars at bargain basement prices to sell at high profit margins for as long as possible while the good times where around. Now they have been caught sleeping at the wheel and are trying to recover from the crash.

 

[JohnDe]

Not sure if this has been printed here before -

All Our Patent Are Belong To You​

Elon Musk, CEOJune 12, 2014
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.
When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.
At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.
At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.
Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.
We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.
Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

All Our Patent Are Belong To You

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

www.tesla.com

 

[Smurf1976]

Well for all that foreknowledge available 20+ years ago, all I can say is the legacy manufacturers, have certainly been caught flat footed by Tesla.

That happens with a lot of things.

Olivetti tried but failed to transition from being a typewriter manufacturer to a computer manufacturer for example. Had some initial success but nobody here's reading this on an Olivetti PC right?

And the most obvious of the lot - it was Kodak who invented digital photography which, due to their failure to adopt it, sent them bankrupt. The actual leader, they invented it, but somehow still failed to grasp that it was the future.

Another is that I recall plenty of newspaper articles from the second half of the 1990's about the internet and how wonderful it all was. It seemed they failed to understand the impact of what was being published in their own papers.

Then there's GM crushing perfectly good EV's because they didn't want them threatening their existing business.

 

[sptrawler]

It is interesting @Smurf1976 they were still selling dedicated lpg falcons and commodores until about 2016 from memory, oh how times change.

 

[sptrawler]

Not sure if this has been printed here before -

All Our Patent Are Belong To You​

Elon Musk, CEOJune 12, 2014
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.
When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.
At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.
At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.
Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.
We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.
Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

All Our Patent Are Belong To You

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

www.tesla.com

That kind of contradicts your previous post, that the automakers were prepared and ready to go. But hey as long as Tesla is good about it, the rate of change will accelerate, which is good for everyone.

 

[JohnDe]

That kind of contradicts your previous post, that the automakers were prepared and ready to go. But hey as long as Tesla is good about it, the rate of change will accelerate, which is good for everyone.

Where did I say that the ‘automakers were prepared and ready to go’?

Interesting how you take snippets of what I write.

I did mention that GM spent a lot of R&D to develop and build an EV, but they scrapped it and that was over 20 years ago. Technology and software has leap frogged since then.

General Motors EV1 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[JohnDe]

Thomas Edison with his electric car in 1910.

Equipped with Edison’s state-of-the-art battery, the Bailey Electric managed to make 100 miles on a full charge.

In September 1910 the electric car competed with much bigger petrol-powered cars in a 1,000 miles long endurance run.

 

[sptrawler]

My appologies @JohnDe , I must have misinterpreted your post #4,603 above, no offence meant, just light banter.
Yes, the Edison, actually electric cars were built before ICE cars, we talked about it early in the thread.

It is quite interesting to go back to the first page of the thread, started in 2011.

 

[rederob]

Just as the average Australian is 37 years old but average lifespan is ~80.

Completely misses the point!
I have all my old analog phones, and they will last a lifetime. In fact I have a shed full of things that have been superseded so lifespan is only a consideration when you have no other options.

Much the same reason cars are roughly 20 years showroom to wreckers today.
They're an expensive purchase and a large portion of the population simply can't afford to not get full life out of them. Hence most cars end up with more than one owner - someone with more money buys it new then sells it to someone with less money who may well then later sell it to someone with even less money.

Again, completely misses the point.
It's irrelevant how much you pay for something if its no longer practical, economic or safe to use it. Moreover, I indicated the average age of a vehicle at 10 years, so the average period of ownership is much less. By 2025 there will be very few ICE offerings, and by 2030 it's difficult to imagine anyone selling an ICE vehicle. Beyond 2030 ICE infrastructure will progressively disappear.

Your additional points were clumsy dross given we are talking about a transitional technology replacing fossil fuel use in vehicles.

 

[sptrawler]

If @rederob all that you say is true, it definitely highlights the reason incentives will not be required, to encourage the uptake of EV's.
Which is unfortunate, as some of us would appreciate one.lol

 

[rederob]

If @rederob all that you say is true, it definitely highlights the reason incentives will not be required, to encourage the uptake of EV's.
Which is unfortunate, as some of us would appreciate one.lol

Right now (= today) Chinese automakers are producing BEVs cheaper than ICE because they are relatively simple builds when started from scratch on a dedicated NEV platform. The only factor making them more expensive than ICE is a battery choice for longer range driving. China has over a million charging points (sounds a lot but not for a population with the high BEV take up rates it has) so for that market they can literally afford cheaper options. Also, their high speed train network makes it cheaper to travel that way for longer journeys than drive (as we here would do).
Given most of the legacy automakers already have joint venture arrangements in China and that their ICE vehicles are not selling well (I will post data later), their pivot to NEVs is a given: VW's iD4 is doing better than they forecast. Speaking of "pivoting" to NEVs, BYD is now 95%, so that's how quickly it can occur. However, I don't think the American market will adapt as quickly.

Regarding incentives, my preference has been to drop the federal taxes that ramp prices to levels affordable only to those on higher incomes, but only in relation to landed NEV prices below, say, $30k. As I said, this would still leave the Teslas and most other imports taxed so overall little revenue would be lost. The Norwegian type initiatives at a "local" level could then add an additional incentive as these lead to safer and less polluted cities.

 

[JohnDe]

There has been a lot of mention on here about EV vs ICE emissions, this should answer most of the questions -

EV vs combustion engine: which car has fewer lifetime emissions?​

By James Jennings
November 27, 2021

With many car manufacturers planning to either greatly reduce or entirely phase out combustion-engined vehicles over the next two decades – as governments, particularly in Europe, crack down on CO2 emissions – the buzz around electric cars grows by the day, driven by their zero tailpipe emissions.

Petrol and diesel-powered cars emit the harmful greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in varying amounts, but the overall effect is vast. In 2021, the American EPA estimates the average passenger car in that gas-guzzling country produces 4.6 metric tonnes of CO2 per year, while locally, data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries reveals the 2020 average emissions intensity for passenger cars was 149.5gm per kilometre driven, which adds up to just over 1.98 tonnes of CO2 annually per car.

There are more than 1 billion cars on the road, worldwide, which helps you to understand how road transport is estimated to make up between 15 and 30 per cent of carbon-dioxide emissions each year, depending on which country you’re in.

While the environmental benefits of zero-emission electric vehicles seem clear, there are other less-obvious pluses.



The energy efficiency of EVs compared to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles significantly tips in favour of the former, according to the US Department of Energy, as EVs convert 77 per cent of the energy in their batteries to power at the wheels, whereas ICE vehicles only convert between 12 and 30 per cent of the energy stored in petrol to power at the wheels.

When the environmental life cycle of an electric vehicle is taken into account – including the greenhouse gases created during production, and potentially the burning of fossil fuels to produce the electricity that powers them – they are far from carbon neutral.

Many car companies have pledged to improve this equation, however, with Polestar – the fully electric offshoot of Volvo – pledging to build the world’s first entirely carbon-neutral car, the Polestar 0, by 2030.

Fredrika Klaren, Polestar’s head of sustainability, has compared the goal to a moon shot.

“Just like JFK, we don’t know how to land on the moon but we know that we need to do it,” she says. “We’re putting the goal out there and then we’re building the road map as we go along.”

In part, this will mean creating a car-assembly plant that is carbon neutral and runs on green energy alone, something Audi has already achieved as part of its “Mission: Zero” goal.

Its factory in Brussels, where the Audi e-tron EV is built, was awarded a certificate for CO2-neutral production in 2018, thanks in part to the fitment of Europe’s largest solar rooftop. Audi has pledged to make all of its production facilities carbon neutral by 2025.

One method used to monitor the greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles is called “well-to-wheel”, which is broken down into two parts: well-to-tank, which are the emissions created when producing the fuel (or electricity) for the car; and tank-to-wheel, which measures the efficiency and emissions associated with the operation of the vehicle.

While EVs produce high well-to-tank greenhouse gas emissions during electricity generation, the CO2 tank-to-wheel emissions are zero, unlike ICE cars.

If renewable energy like wind, hydro or solar is the source of an EV’s electricity – something the average Australian buyer can easily achieve by installing solar panels on their house – the well-to-tank rating can drop close to zero.

Car manufacturers are also increasingly using sustainable materials for car interiors, particularly in EVs, including recycled plastic waste for trims, floor mats and seats.

Audi’s new Q4 e-tron SUV, for example, features 27 components that contain recycled materials, including seat upholstery that uses polyester fibres obtained from recycled PET bottles and old textiles.

Other sustainable materials include kenaf (made from a plant in the mallow family), hemp, eucalyptus and wood (all used for BMW’s i3 EV), as well as cork, which the Mazda MX-30 Electric uses for its console (the car also uses eco-friendly vegan-leather upholstery, also seen in Teslas and Volvos).

Car manufacturers have also turned their attention to the time when EV batteries will begin to reach the end of their life cycles. Nissan and Renault have implemented ways to recycle and reuse EV batteries, and Volkswagen plans to recycle up to 3600 battery packs during the first year of operation of its new recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany – a process that will extract precious cathode metals like cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese for reuse.

Regardless of the sustainability and carbon-footprint challenges for manufacturers of EVs, their superiority in terms of environmental impact is clear.

A 2021 white paper published by the International Council on Clean Transportation compared the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of mid-sized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India across a variety of powertrain types.

The study found that all-electric vehicles in Europe produced 66 to 69 per cent less carbon-dioxide emissions than comparable ICE vehicles. In the US, a typical EV produced 60 to 68 per cent less emissions over its lifetime.

NoCookies | The Australian

www.theaustralian.com.au

 

[Smurf1976]

Completely misses the point!
I have all my old analog phones, and they will last a lifetime. In fact I have a shed full of things that have been superseded so lifespan is only a consideration when you have no other options.

The big difference with a phone is that a smartphone offers major user advantages over any other phone.

Plus it’s a relatively minor purchase. A cheap one can be bought at the Post Office or in a supermarket and even going upmarket is still only a fortnight’s pay for an average worker.

Versus an EV which does nothing an ICE doesn’t do and which is a very major purchase for most, commonly only possible with finance over several years.

Well, that’s the case unless EV’s gain something major over ICE which is not the case with current models. You still have to register it and attach number plates, speed limits still apply as do parking time limits and fees, you still need a license to drive and so on.

EV’s would need to be drastically cheaper to purchase than their ICE counterparts or offer some major advantage to see the entire ICE fleet scrapped more quickly than it would ordinarily turn over.

An EV is ultimately just a car with a different means of making it move but it still does the same thing, it's still a car.

 

[Smurf1976]

It's irrelevant how much you pay for something if its no longer practical, economic or safe to use it. Moreover, I indicated the average age of a vehicle at 10 years, so the average period of ownership is much less.

Average age 10 years = average lifespan roughly double that so 20 years.

How many owners it has during that time is largely irrelevant to the fact that a car is on the roads for ~20 years from sale to scrap on average. It's irrelevant who owns it so long as it's still being used as a car by someone.

That figure hasn't really changed in a long time now. Hence it took 20 years to get rid of leaded and subsequently lead replacement petrol use down to a point where selling it was no longer viable and that's despite massive improvement in cars during that time. Fuel injection, disc brakes all round, power steering, air-conditioning, air bags and other more passive safety features all went from something that only rich people had to something that even the cheapest cars came with as standard during that time but it didn't lead to the old ones being scrapped any faster.

 

[rederob]

The big difference with a phone is that a smartphone offers major user advantages over any other phone.

Plus it’s a relatively minor purchase. A cheap one can be bought at the Post Office or in a supermarket and even going upmarket is still only a fortnight’s pay for an average worker.

Versus an EV which does nothing an ICE doesn’t do and which is a very major purchase for most, commonly only possible with finance over several years.

Well, that’s the case unless EV’s gain something major over ICE which is not the case with current models. You still have to register it and attach number plates, speed limits still ap

The big difference with a phone is that a smartphone offers major user advantages over any other phone.

Plus it’s a relatively minor purchase. A cheap one can be bought at the Post Office or in a supermarket and even going upmarket is still only a fortnight’s pay for an average worker.

Versus an EV which does nothing an ICE doesn’t do and which is a very major purchase for most, commonly only possible with finance over several years.

Well, that’s the case unless EV’s gain something major over ICE which is not the case with current models. You still have to register it and attach number plates, speed limits still apply as do parking time limits and fees, you still need a license to drive and so on.

EV’s would need to be drastically cheaper to purchase than their ICE counterparts or offer some major advantage to see the entire ICE fleet scrapped more quickly than it would ordinarily turn over.

An EV is ultimately just a car with a different means of making it move but it still does the same thing, it's still a car.

ply as do parking time limits and fees, you still need a license to drive and so on.

EV’s would need to be drastically cheaper to purchase than their ICE counterparts or offer some major advantage to see the entire ICE fleet scrapped more quickly than it would ordinarily turn over.

An EV is ultimately just a car with a different means of making it move but it still does the same thing, it's still a car.

Not single point you made was relevant.
EVs are already being made cheaper than ICE.
This thread has many times covered the advantages of EVs over ICE so I won't repeat them.