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Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.7%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 39.4%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 38 19.2%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 25 12.6%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    198
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3 hound said:
Thanks will check it out, can you summarise it?
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Basically Electric cars are much better for the environment than petrol ones, and as the electric grid continues getting cleaner the electric cars will continue getting better and better.

Electric cars also have many other benefits, even if climate change wasn’t an issue they still help by making the air cleaner in our cities, produce jobs in the Australian energy sector, increase our energy independence and save you time by not having to waste time standing at the petrol bowser every week.

I know you might feel like the cart is being put before the horse, but that is probably because you haven’t been paying attention to the slow steady progress over the last 15 years or so.
 
Watched it, thanks. It was very simplistic.

My question was really about data on the specific Australian context and our timeline to phase out and replace fossil fuel powered electricity supplies, the proposed energy mix and the impacts on the economy versus gains to the environment.
 
Australia has committed to achieving zero carbon by 2050 as have most western countries, whether that can be achieved is still unknown, but for now in the early stages is where the major savings will be, when the low hanging fruit is picked that's when the real hard questions have to be answered.
But it's a given coal generation will close, what replaces that successfully is yet to be seen. Removing as much fossil fueled transport off the road is a given, what the end transport mix looks like is yet to be seen, decarbonising industry where possible will happen, if it increases costs that will have to be absorbed and passed on.
What it costs actually wont matter, if people can't afford it, they will live with out it, or make themselves afford it, if it is an absolute necessity for society to function the Government will subsidise it.
Same stuff, different day.
 

With that many technology unknowns and uncosted policy black spots the goal of a better, cleaner environment sounds more like a platitude than a plan.
 
Japan , like us here in OZ, drives on the Left hand side of the road, and of course the cars are considered RHD.
One of the policies Japan has is that cars are are required to have more rigorous inspections the older they get, so that it is often cheaper and less hassle to trade in a 5 year old car on a new one.
So these "older cars" are moved on to other countries, part of the so called "grey market".
I myself took advantage of the grey market when working in Tanzannia, and got a 5 year old Suzuki Vitara that had done barely 30,000 miles.
Japan has around 82million cars on the register, and despite an aging population, this number has increased every year since 2012, as there are more single person households now. The average age of vehiclkes in Japan is under 10 years, so every year, on average around 8 million vehicles are traded out to the second hand market.( source Statista ).
Australia has not been such a big market for these vehicles, but there are some imported every year.
Since 2011, the Japanese EV market has grown every year so that there are now around 12,000 EV's on the road, a fairly small proportion of all vehicles.
If the same sort of rigorous testing regimes are applied to EV's, we should start to see second EV's appear in this grey market soon. This may be one of the ways that more EV vehicles find their way into our market.
The other markets for the grey cars , Africa,
and some south east asian countries, are unlikey to have the charging infrastructure to warrant shipping them there.
So we may be a more likely destination.
Mick
 
Lol that headline cracked me up, it is so representative of how so many in the green movement think ie; the idea sounded so much better before someone did an actual study.....


I worked in a lab that worked on the hydrogen storage problem for example in a car, think like a petrol fuel tank except for hydrogen. The research started decades before I arrived and went for decades after with no practical solution. Haven't followed up in a long time, could be solved by now.

Classic.

​

"Hydrogen 'twice as powerful a greenhouse gas as thought before': UK government study"​

 

It is a simplistic video, but as I said all the sources are linked in the description if you want to read the science.

All the info you seek about the Australian context is available if you just spend a few minutes googling it.
 
3 hound said:
With that many technology unknowns and uncosted policy black spots the goal of a better, cleaner environment sounds more like a platitude than a plan.
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At the moment coal stations are closing earlier than they were originally scheduled to just because of the economics, the coal stations are struggling to compete in the market against renewables.

I guess it sounds like a platitude plan because you have admitted you haven’t actually looked very deeply into the topic, and instead are asking to to be spoon fed the information from a bunch of people on an EV thread.

I think you actually just have pre conceived political issues with the move to greener fuels that you wish to air, rather than a genuine interest in the facts, other wise your genuine interest would have lead you to look up the answers rather than make broad statements based on opinion.
 
3 hound said:
Does anyone have any data they can link to how much we save in carbon emissions into the atmosphere by increasing EV usage within the expected timeframes of phasing out and replacing fossil fuel powered electricity production with renewables?
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A very difficult question for anyone to precisely answer.

Eg what time will the cars be charged?

Mass consumer behaviour in that regard is thus far an unknown. Engineers certainly have an "ideal" answer there but what happens in practice probably will differ.

Then there's the question of what portion of the emissions from war does one attribute to the oil and gas industry?

It certainly wouldn't be zero on any objective measure, the only question is how much exactly? Wherever there's things being blown up, oil and gas are all too often either the direct target or the source of funding.

What I can say though is that if someone were to charge a Tesla Model 3 in Adelaide using electricity generated at Barker Inlet power station, and with the power station operating on diesel (it's dual fuel gas / diesel), and with 6% network losses then that's 2.7 litres per 100km based on the Model 3's claimed electricity consumption.

That beats most comparable ICE cars. Noting that I picked Barker Inlet as the generation source primarily because the technical details of the power station have been publicly disclosed.

Of course if they charged it at midday on a day when wind and solar was being curtailed then the fossil fuel used is zero. Hence the issue of when it's charged.

There's no single answer to the question so anyone giving an answer necessarily is making some assumptions which may or may not hold true in any given situation.

Generation from the absolute worst power station in the NEM, which I won't name for reasons of confidentiality, would give the Model 3 an equivalent fuel consumption of about 6.5 litres / 100km. That facility would rarely be the actual marginal source of electricity when someone's charging their EV. Could happen but generally won't be the case.

Emissions from manufacturing and maintaining them is similarly complex.
 
Years ago, when H2 first popped up as a potential saviour, i argue strongly that it was impossible to contain and so would leak everywhere so the idea of H2 as car fuel was silly...each car leaking then the whole transport chain etc..that was even not counting it as a CC culprit.
So use ammonia, syn fuel but not compressed H2
Not that any one cared or wanted to spoil a feel good story.
I do not expect decision maker to read the Frog posts and trust them, but maybe have some proper non biaised scientists and experts giving out the facts, same for covid, CC, etc if they are too uneducated to follow even basic sciences.
I think we should take a lesson from this, the covid scam or even Ukraine fiasco.
We in so called democracies are managed by tools and clowns who are only answering lobbies and polls.
Make your own decisions based on these assumptions before any rationality or logic.
 
mullokintyre said:
The above statement looks great until you read that they will still be producing PHEV's, which have an ICE engine.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Mick
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As mentioned about 3000 post’s ago, ICE development will stop as R&D dollars are reallocated to EV development. Any hybrid EVs that are produced will use existing engine technology, and slowly fade into the sunset.
 

Also factor in the cost of mining the rarer metals used in EV batteries and electronic systems and you have major environmental damage/disaster + effectively modern slavery including children in the most horrific conditions.

TBH I would like to hear more discussion on city and public transport design to make personal cars redundant and possibly banned in high density urban centres.

I lived for a decade in big cities and never owned a car. A car is an unnecessary PITA in modern high density cities.
 
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3 hound said:
Also factor in the cost of mining the rarer metals used in EV batteries and electronic systems and you have major environmental damage/disaster + effectively modern slavery including children in the most horrific conditions.
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This stuff has been thought about and assessed by many people over the last decade, and EV’s still come out on top.

You need to mine materials for all cars, battery material do not create significantly more “damage”, and when you factor in that these materials will be recycled and perhaps in circulation for multiple uses over decades then the damage is much smaller than the continuous mining and drilling for oil.
 


Thought about and assessed by who, the people selling EV's??
 
If you knew anything about climate you would know that CO2 with a GWP of 1, irrespective of time period, is somewhat more of a problem than a potential doubling of hydrogen's GWP in a hundred years time, as hydrogen is almost imperceptible in our atmosphere which contains just 0.00005%, compared to CO2's 0.04%.
By all means mitigate any leakage wherever possible, but for that leakage to be a problem to climate we are going to have to wait tens of thousands of years. What the report did not cover, however, was the potential for the planet to "absorb" hydrogen naturally - into the soil mostly - just as most additional CO2 over the past century has been absorbed into our oceans.
 
Nice way to start a reply "if you knew anything..." settle down.

How are you producing your hydrogen by using high carbon emission natural gas or carbon monoxide producing methods?

Both sound stellar for the environment.
 
3 hound said:
With that many technology unknowns and uncosted policy black spots the goal of a better, cleaner environment sounds more like a platitude than a plan.
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That's like knowing a nuclear accident would be a problem but we shouldn't worry until we know if it's going to be a Windscale, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima-type incident. In other words we can go about solving or mitigating impacts without needing to know their precise scale.
3 hound said:
Also factor in the cost of mining the rarer metals used in EV batteries and electronic systems and you have major environmental damage/disaster + effectively modern slavery including children in the most horrific conditions.
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This is what so many critics say, yet they willing have probably bought many clothing items which have come from sweat shops and nations employing underage children. And how many engagement rings contain blood diamonds? Your point is a diversion as the capacity of individuals, through their own labour, to produce the necessary quantities for industry is almost zero.
3 hound said:
TBH I would like to hear more discussion on city and public transport design to make personal cars redundant and possibly banned in high density urban centres.
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Read through this thread.
EVs are championing fully autonomous driving which includes taxi services. FYI Cruise and Waymo already have permits to operate commercial autonomous taxi services in and around San Francisco. China has had driverless taxis for longer, and apart from industry leader Baidu, companies including DeepRoute, Pony.ai, and AutoX have also begun trials of their own robotic taxi rides.
 
3 hound said:
Nice way to start a reply "if you knew anything..." settle down.

How are you producing your hydrogen by using high carbon emission natural gas or carbon monoxide producing methods?

Both sound stellar for the environment.
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Hydrogen can be produced using green energy sources.

Seriously mate, it’s like you are working off information and arguments that are 10 years old, and have completely been ignoring everything that’s been happening in this space recently.
 
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