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Since the last thread was spoiled with circular arguments, I'm starting this fresh. This thread is for discussion about the current (haw) and future developments in electric vehicles. It is not for whinging about how they're all terrible and they'll never work because your girlfriend's cousin wouldn't be able to charge up to get to a hair appointment after a hurricane had struck an oil pipe. Talk about batteries, talk about charging stations, talk about photovoltaics, talk about emerging technologies, trade recipes, have fun  This is me:
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Jan 18, 2012 21:15
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I would like to know how I can get 440V service installed in my garage so I can charge this thing up in 30 minutes. Do I need three phase service or something exotic? Three phase is super expensive per month and cost prohibitive. How are these public charging stations connected? Edit: I looks like three phase power to my house ain't going to happen. Duke energy told me no way. Time to get my landlord at work to install one for me in my personal parking spot. Elephanthead fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jan 18, 2012 |
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Jan 18, 2012 21:43
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Elephanthead posted:I would like to know how I can get 440V service installed in my garage so I can charge this thing up in 30 minutes. Do I need three phase service or something exotic? Three phase is super expensive per month and cost prohibitive. How are these public charging stations connected? The easiest way would be to get a large 220v circuit and run it through a transformer. If you could get a 220v 200a service you could step it up to 440v 100a (minus transformer losses). 3 phase is not feasible for most houses right now. Large segments of neighborhoods would need to be rewired. I can imagine companies will start roughing in 3 phase to at least the street level in newer developments in the near future. To anyone interested in electric vehicles in general, you might want to check out The Electric Motorcycle thread in the Cycle Asylum. Since bikes have a much better weight to power ratio than cars, they appear to be poised to reach practicality (impracticality?) sooner than cars. Nomex fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jan 18, 2012 |
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Jan 18, 2012 22:34
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Plug-in electric cars are probably going to take off more in Canada once everyone realizes that you can scam free gas from wherever you park by hooking up into the block heater outlet. Most places don't switch them off in the summer, and I've seen people run extension cords from the outlet, pinch it in their window and then put a small space heater or fan on the floor of the car so it's toasty/cool when you get back to the car. Thanks, block-shattering temperatures. Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jan 18, 2012 |
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Jan 18, 2012 22:48
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I've often wondered about that. My place in Fairbanks had a switch inside and the university would shut off the power for the first half of each class block. Any word on any AWD electric cars in the pipeline?
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Jan 18, 2012 23:14
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Advent Horizon posted:Any word on any AWD electric cars in the pipeline? Well there's this one.  We had a hand in prototyping the batteries at work and while I wasn't directly involved, I think everybody's secretly a little bit excited about it.
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Jan 18, 2012 23:24
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Nomex posted:The easiest way would be to get a large 220v circuit and run it through a transformer. If you could get a 220v 200a service you could step it up to 440v 100a (minus transformer losses). This doesn't really fix the issue at all though, does it? You've still got the same (actually slightly less) usable power, so unless there is a much faster charger available that will run on a 440V 100A circuit but would not run on 220V 200A (which would be as big as the service for an entire house normally) it wouldn't do much. Like I mentioned in the last thread, charging is going to be a big problem to solve. Presumably most developments in EV range will come from increasing the kWh capacity of the onboard battery, but without an increase in kW available at the home, that just leads to proportionally longer charge times. Of course, counter-argument to that - if you have a fuel tank with 200-300 miles of range, you don't refuel daily...
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Jan 18, 2012 23:45
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There's no reason you couldn't get an even bigger service than that. As long as the power company has the capacity, you could get 220v 1000a if you wanted. Here's some huge rear end circuit breakers 3 phase power would be nice to have, but it's not ever going to be a requirement, unless chargers for some reason start requiring a balanced waveform. (They won't) Nomex fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jan 19, 2012 |
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Jan 18, 2012 23:49
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What happened to that Israeli company that was trying to build electric cars and service stations that would be able to just replace all the batteries in the car in like 15 minutes?
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Jan 19, 2012 00:28
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sigtrap posted:Since the last thread was spoiled with circular arguments, I'm starting this fresh. OT forums thought: Nice to see a pun again. Between it's banning and the gender equality squad I was beginning to wonder why I even post here anymore. It's, punny! (haw haw)
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Jan 19, 2012 00:38
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Rev. Dr. Moses P. Lester posted:What happened to that Israeli company that was trying to build electric cars and service stations that would be able to just replace all the batteries in the car in like 15 minutes? Tesla?  Because that's their plan too...
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Jan 19, 2012 00:41
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Nomex posted:There's no reason you couldn't get an even bigger service than that. As long as the power company has the capacity, you could get 220v 1000a if you wanted. Actually, that's just about what you'd need to fast-charge a 300 mile battery (which in the Tesla Model S means just over 80kWh). Though by the time electric cars get to where they all come with 300 miles forth of batteries, we'll probably see a decent number of public fast-charging stations. Which we will of course need anyway if electric cars are ever to be usable for long trips. There's also the possibility of keeping a massive supercapacitor bank and using that to fast-charge a battery. It'd probably be better for the power grid not to have people turning 160kW chargers on and off all over the place.
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Jan 19, 2012 03:13
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Posting this from the last thread because it's pretty loving cool and got stuck on the last page. Jay Leno checks out the new Fisker. http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/cars/fisker/fantastic-fisker/
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Jan 19, 2012 06:48
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Rev. Dr. Moses P. Lester posted:What happened to that Israeli company that was trying to build electric cars and service stations that would be able to just replace all the batteries in the car in like 15 minutes? Better Place is still going: http://www.betterplace.com/
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Jan 19, 2012 10:01
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If I could get an EV with 250 mi 10 degree F range, and it was no more than a 20% premium over a similar car, I would probably jump on it. The question is, how long is it going to take for that level of EV price/performance to become a reality?
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Jan 19, 2012 16:22
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:If I could get an EV with 250 mi 10 degree F range, and it was no more than a 20% premium over a similar car, I would probably jump on it. I'll be honest with you, this seems like a thinly veiled attempt to get this thread back on the range discussion topic. To give you an honest answer to your question, probably several decades from now, so you're going to have to sit tight. Novex posted:I think on top of fast charging systems we'll start to see energy storage added to houses. Right now, charging an EV is limited to however many hours the car is parked multiplied by the voltage and amperage of the service. There's no reason a battery or capacitor bank couldn't be added to a home to allow for a 110 or 220 service to charge a battery or capacitor bank 24 hours a day and drive a higher voltage charging station. This was from last thread but I just wanted to point out this struck me as a really good idea. Let the battery station trickle charge when not needed and then it can do the fast charge on the EV when it gets plugged in. Bonus would be that if the power goes out you could feed off the battery station for the house. They are trying to enable this for Nissan Leaf in Japan where the Leaf's battery's could be used to supply the house with electricity in times of long power outages.
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Jan 19, 2012 17:19
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Nomex posted:The easiest way would be to get a large 220v circuit and run it through a transformer. If you could get a 220v 200a service you could step it up to 440v 100a (minus transformer losses). 3 phase is not feasible for most houses right now. Large segments of neighborhoods would need to be rewired. I can imagine companies will start roughing in 3 phase to at least the street level in newer developments in the near future. I thought pretty much every utility pole already has three phase power on it? There's three transmission lines on each pole, are those not the three phases? EDIT: No I'm dumb, that would be +/-/N...right?
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Jan 19, 2012 17:32
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Coredump posted:I'll be honest with you, this seems like a thinly veiled attempt to get this thread back on the range discussion topic. To give you an honest answer to your question, probably several decades from now, so you're going to have to sit tight. I'm not trying to discuss the merits or demerits of range, I'm trying to figure out when we have a shot of getting longer ranged EVs. Is this something that's going to be accomplished by evolutionary improvements to current systems or is it going to take a revolutionary shift in storage technologies?
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Jan 19, 2012 17:38
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revmoo posted:I thought pretty much every utility pole already has three phase power on it? There's three transmission lines on each pole, are those not the three phases? Your edit is correct (and describes the split-phase system used in North America for residential electric service). While all AC electric grids are 3-phase, not all of those 3 phases are necessarily brought out to every part of the network. In older parts of distribution systems, residential areas, and especially in older parts of distribution systems in residential areas (where no need for 3-phase was ever envisioned when the service was installed) you may only have single phase service available to the neighborhood step-down transformer so the best you can get is the common 240v split-phase service.
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Jan 19, 2012 18:03
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It really is too bad hydrogen technology seems to be lagging because it has some great benefits for energy storage over batteries. The thing with batteries is that chemically, there's not a lot of room for improvement so the issues we'll see today will not be magically resolved in 20 years. Hydrogen has the potential to be as convenient as gasoline in terms of refueling and can really shine when you generate your own power at home and store the excess as hydrogen. Sadly there's too many things not in place to make it work for a consumer vehicle at the moment (even apart from fuel cells behind wildly expensive). I think we'll have start running out of oil before we see major advancement anyway.
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Jan 19, 2012 18:12
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Pvt Dancer posted:I think we'll have start running out of oil before we see major advancement anyway. This is more true than anyone wants to admit. I'm glad companies are trying to push for it now because it will make that transition less painful when it happens, but people aren't going to move away from something they have been using for a century until it becomes extremely painful to keep using.
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Jan 19, 2012 18:23
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I lost track of the last thread (apparently to my benefit), but as far as re-charging, this seemed like an interesting development: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128246.500-black-gold-holds-a-charge-for-green-cars.html quote:Drivers could have three ways of recharging the semi-solid flow battery. They could pump out spent slurry and pump in fresh; head to a recharge station where tanks of spent slurry would be replaced with fresh ones; or recharge the slurries with an electric current. In the first two cases regaining full power should only take a matter of minutes. With enough "slurry-exchange" stations I image the whole "range anxiety" issue could be eliminated.
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Jan 19, 2012 18:23
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Elephanthead posted:I would like to know how I can get 440V service installed in my garage so I can charge this thing up in 30 minutes. Do I need three phase service or something exotic? Three phase is super expensive per month and cost prohibitive. How are these public charging stations connected? 3 phase only gets run out for industrial areas, almost never residential. You can step it up, but, getting all that done would be highly cost prohibitive unless you somehow lucked into getting multiple services run to your house (i.e. if a welder had requested 2 200a services run) and you can simply step up one service and leave the other to run the house. Getting 2 200a services, or a 400a service, is pretty much unpossible nowadays unless you can grease some wheels rather effectively with the local utility. Pvt Dancer posted:Hydrogen has the potential to be as convenient as gasoline in terms of refueling and can really shine when you generate your own power at home and store the excess as hydrogen. Sadly there's too many things not in place to make it work for a consumer vehicle at the moment (even apart from fuel cells behind wildly expensive). The bitch of fuel cells is the kind that can feasibly replace gas require platinum or palladium which sends the price through the roof. They're exploring alternatives (like borax*, the current hotness) but they generally have their issues but we're not quite as pigeonholed with hydrogen as we are batteries. There's one promising kind that I can't remember the name of that we'll start seeing used to replace batteries in appliances/phones/stuff like that, but it scales extremely poorly right now. It's still getting a footprint; industrial power backup is definitely trending toward fuel cells because lifetime cost is significantly reduced over a diesel generator system. * If they can get all the issues with borax fuel cells sorted out (huge, huge if right now) you'd have an ideal replacement for gas. Cheap, abundant and relatively non-toxic for what it is. I can see it panning out simply because America has ridiculous reserves and it'd be that enigmatic domestically provided for energy reserve. If you can be the swinging dick in the post-oil world, there's a ridiculous profit involved.
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Jan 19, 2012 18:51
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I'm honestly quite excited about battery tech. There are constantly progress being made and I don't think you should discount that just because we don't have it *now*.
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Jan 19, 2012 19:34
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Pretty Cool Name posted:I'm honestly quite excited about battery tech. There are constantly progress being made and I don't think you should discount that just because we don't have it *now*. This explains pretty well how advances in battery technology are possible, but do not come close to anything you can burn. Although hydrogen is the worst of them, it's still way ahead of batteries (and can be made at home using electric power). Oh and the EEStor ultracapacitors mentioned there are a scam
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Jan 19, 2012 19:53
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I think the cost is more the issue than the range - the range is already perfectly good for a commuter car, but pure electric cars cost about $10k more than their equivalent regular car. Even if it was completely free to charge the battery, which it's not, and even if the batteries didn't need replacing after not all that long, which they do, it would still take 8 years of daily 30 mile commutes to redeem that $10k in unpurchased gasoline. If the cost could be brought down to equal to the cost of a regular car, I would buy an EV right now. If the range went up and/or weight went down and/or charging time went down, and the cost stayed the same, I still wouldn't be interested.
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Jan 19, 2012 20:02
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Advent Horizon posted:Any word on any AWD electric cars in the pipeline? Azure/Johnson Controls and AM General had an H3 Prototype 2-3 years ago that was an AWD EV, they were running it out in Moab for testing, and it went under the noses of the locals because it just looked like a standard H3. Hummer collapsed, lawsuits happened and there was ton of politics before that because GM didn't want to use EV technology that didn't come from their own R+D. So where did this technology go? AM General's building the Ford Transit Electric connects now for taxi's and vans. That's not an AWD setup however. A friend of mine was working on EV's based on military vehicles [a HMMWV and a MRAP] but there's no way to do it with current battery technology, so it's an AWD electric drivetrain with a diesel generator. One is the zero south hummer and the other is the osh kosh m-atv they raced down in Baja last season in the "M class" Problem with an AWD vehicle, you got more mass and larger tires, so you need to overcome that. I think the pumpable flow battery might be a good solution, take your EV's to a filling station, pump out the old electrolyte, then pump in new electrolyte and the station recharges the fluid. That would keep the current fuel station distribution method and infrastructure mostly intact and give urban drivers a place to charge [especially those who rent apartments and can't charge at home]
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Jan 19, 2012 20:20
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Mitsubishi built an electric AWD Evo (an EVo?) back in 2005. The driver reviews at the time were favourable, but I don't think they ever mooted a price for it if it were to make production. We're seeing a good number of hybrids using an internal-combustion FWD powertrain with an electric RWD transaxle at the other end, so if the same manufacturer makes a FWD EV, and are paying attention to their parts commonality, it shouldn't be ridiculously hard to implement.
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Jan 19, 2012 20:52
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hallebarrysoetoro posted:3 phase only gets run out for industrial areas, almost never residential. You can step it up, but, getting all that done would be highly cost prohibitive unless you somehow lucked into getting multiple services run to your house (i.e. if a welder had requested 2 200a services run) and you can simply step up one service and leave the other to run the house. Getting 2 200a services, or a 400a service, is pretty much unpossible nowadays unless you can grease some wheels rather effectively with the local utility. I haven't paid attention to hydrogen in a long time, but have they figured out how a tank of pressurized hydrogen can have half the range or better of the same volume of gas? Also, any breakthroughs in producing hydrogen that take less energy than electrolysis and haven't fizzled out in a few months?
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Jan 19, 2012 21:46
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I get irrationally angry whenever people start on how Hydrogen will save us, its the worst of both worlds. Hydrogen is currently generated from fossil fuels & if you filled your car up on Friday, the tank would be approx 2/3 full when you go to drive to work on Monday. Boiling off is a bitch. Combine that with the rather poor volumetric fuel consumption required to maintain 'adequate' power & I can't see why people want to see it in cars. Battery-wise I like the idea of the redox liquid batteries, they have their issues (I think energy density?) but the only standard required is fluid type & connection. Bill by volume as per petrol & the French supermini can use the same refuelling station as the German van.
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Jan 19, 2012 21:53
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Compressed air cars seem like a more feasible idea than hydrogen, at the current technology level. The hardware is cheap and the charger is basically a big compressor. But currently it's got about a 50 mile range running solo and production seems to have been shut down by problems with getting too cold from the rapid decompression. It would make a great hybrid with other tech that normally gets too hot! (But of course as soon as you go hybrid you're necessarily going more expensive - just compressed air driven is apparently cheaper to build than a regular engine.) All the companies that were touting compressed air cars have either vanished or removed all mention of it from their pages now, though, except this one. Much like Hydrogen, it has the problem of being relatively inefficient to charge - apparently 6 times less efficient than just charging a battery - but that's still cheaper than running on gas, and avoids the $10k up front cost and expensive battery-replacing of batteries.
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Jan 19, 2012 23:29
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Out of curiosity, is there a premium that people would be willing to pay for a commuter-range EV over a gasoline equivalent? I could be persuaded to possibly pay a 10% premium if it was a second car or whatever. So that would be roughly 21K for a Focus, be generous and call it 24K for a Focus EV. But they're setting the price at $40K and even if the government were to drop substantial cash on hood again, I doubt they'd bring it down to my territory.
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Jan 20, 2012 01:37
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The problem with compressed air is you need a large tank and really high pressure to get any kind of meaningful power output. Big, high pressure tank = big, high pressure explosion in the case of an accident. With hydrogen you can store it in pressurized gas form or hydride form (low pressure), and you can actually store more in hydride form in some cases. There's also been a ton of research into different nanomaterials that may allow hydrogen to be stored at the molecular level in tiny surface pores. If they can get that going, hydrogen will have big safety benefits over compressed air.Coredump posted:Novex I get no respect 
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Jan 20, 2012 01:37
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Nomex posted:The problem with compressed air is you need a large tank and really high pressure to get any kind of meaningful power output. Big, high pressure tank = big, high pressure explosion in the case of an accident. quote:Out of curiosity, is there a premium that people would be willing to pay for a commuter-range EV over a gasoline equivalent? (Though I'm generally not inclined to buy a brand new vehicle anyway for similarly calculated reasons.) (Edit: I guess a little higher might be okay because the extra premium you add up front does kind of go in your 'car equity', which extra fuel costs doesn't.)
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Jan 20, 2012 01:47
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Brigdh posted:I haven't paid attention to hydrogen in a long time, but have they figured out how a tank of pressurized hydrogen can have half the range or better of the same volume of gas? Also, any breakthroughs in producing hydrogen that take less energy than electrolysis and haven't fizzled out in a few months? Brainfarted but I meant hydrogen fuel cell. I don't think hydrogen-as-an-actual-fuel is all that viable because the energy density is poo poo. It probably has its uses, but it doesn't come up much in the "green" industry.
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Jan 20, 2012 04:41
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Pvt Dancer posted:This explains pretty well how advances in battery technology are possible, but do not come close to anything you can burn. Although hydrogen is the worst of them, it's still way ahead of batteries (and can be made at home using electric power). article posted:Due to the theoretical limits of lead-acid batteries, there has been serious work on other approaches such as lithium-ion batteries, which usually involve the oxidation and reduction of carbon and a transition metal such as cobalt. These batteries have already improved upon the energy density of lead-acid batteries by a factor of about 6 to around 0.5 mega-joules per kilogram--a great improvement. But as currently designed, they have a theoretical energy density limit of about 2 mega-joules per kilogram. And if research regarding the substitution of silicon for carbon in the anodes is realized in a practical way, then the theoretical limit on lithium-ion batteries might break 3 mega-joules per kilogram. Therefore, the maximum theoretical potential of advanced lithium-ion batteries that haven't been demonstrated to work yet is still only about 6 percent of crude oil! To relate the articles to batteries in EVs, the article states current lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of 0.5 mega-joules per kilogram, or 1% of 50 mega-joules per kilogram for hydro carbons. The problem I have is your average gasoline car travels about 300 maybe 400 miles on a tank of gas. An EV like the Nissan Leaf can travel up to 100 miles, that is already 25% to 30% of the range, with a battery that stores about 1% of the energy per kilogram. So it's true that gasoline will store more energy, and it's also true that batteries can significantly increase their energy storage potentials. Batteries will not store more energy than gasoline cars, however because current EVs such as the leaf have achieved approximately 1/3 of the range with batteries that store 1% of the energy as gas. I believe it is safe to say that EV range will significantly increase to a point where the range is competitive with gasoline powered cars.
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Jan 20, 2012 17:42
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Out of curiosity, is there a premium that people would be willing to pay for a commuter-range EV over a gasoline equivalent? If I could buy, drive and then sell the car 4 years later and come in within 15% of the cost of doing the same with a gas car, I would probably go for it. The only real difference would be the battery cost vs the fuel cost, as the rest of the car should be covered under warranty for the whole time.
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Jan 20, 2012 17:43
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Cakefool posted:I get irrationally angry whenever people start on how Hydrogen will save us, its the worst of both worlds. Hydrogen is currently generated from fossil fuels & if you filled your car up on Friday, the tank would be approx 2/3 full when you go to drive to work on Monday. Boiling off is a bitch. Combine that with the rather poor volumetric fuel consumption required to maintain 'adequate' power & I can't see why people want to see it in cars. quote:The bitch of fuel cells is the kind that can feasibly replace gas require platinum or palladium which sends the price through the roof. T MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Jan 20, 2012 |
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Jan 20, 2012 17:58
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Colonel Sanders posted:To relate the articles to batteries in EVs, the article states current lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of 0.5 mega-joules per kilogram, or 1% of 50 mega-joules per kilogram for hydro carbons. The problem I have is your average gasoline car travels about 300 maybe 400 miles on a tank of gas. An EV like the Nissan Leaf can travel up to 100 miles, that is already 25% to 30% of the range, with a battery that stores about 1% of the energy per kilogram. The problem is while gas stores a lot more energy, our current engine technology cannot extract all of it. On average, engines are only about 30% efficient. Electric drive ends up being something like 80% efficient, thus you can get farther with less input energy on electric over gas.
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Jan 20, 2012 18:03
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Brigdh posted:The problem is while gas stores a lot more energy, our current engine technology cannot extract all of it. On average, engines are only about 30% efficient. Electric drive ends up being something like 80% efficient, thus you can get farther with less input energy on electric over gas. Yeah, you don't need nearly as much actual energy to move the electric car; this is why (battery technology aside) they are so desirable from an energy-conservation standpoint. If you could somehow get the same amount of energy that a 14-gallon gas tank has, into an otherwise-normal electric car, you probably wouldn't need to recharge for weeks.
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Jan 20, 2012 18:42
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