EV Thoughts Thread: cause the old farts did their usual thing

[Berserker]

Seems automakers have decided that one of the only differentiators in the coming world of electric appliance pod cars is going to be the software experience. Powertrain and performance are likely to be pretty much identical for every low to midrange car.

So GM has decided it's going to have be a software company that's going toe to toe with Apple, Tesla on UI/UX. All I can say is... best of luck guys!

That's exactly what management at Ford and GM think ...

They clearly have the skills to make world-class cars, but management doesn't think that will make money. Instead they think they're going to make their money on subscription services or who knows what else ...

I've been wondering whether there is going to be a commoditization of EV drivetrains. And, if so, whether that will usher in a new era of coachbuilding.

The Low Volume Manufacturers Act of 2015 might have made that easier.

 

[NorCal Blackwing]

There's an interesting EV discussion in the Media Dumps thread. Copying some of it here:

Following up on my post from there, I'm not Anti-All-EV - I'd love a Rimac Nevera, but I'd Nevera be able to afford one. I'm sure it has some form of infotainment but I hadn't bothered to check

 

[jbawden]

Not sure a software company trying build cars (Tesla) is necessarily a model for long-term success. The success of Tesla to-date is because of an early and meaningful commitment to a charging infrastructure and being first to market with a decent BEV. The execution of design and production is middling at best.

The whole BEV as a performance car is overrated. Our Model 3 Performance acceleration was fun and games for a few weeks, but now its simply part of the utility of navigating merges. Our next BEV will also be about charging infrastructure, but range will take precedent over the gimmick of huge instant torque. Will be interesting to see how OEM's differentiate these appliances.

 

[rubberduck]

As long as it has a bagel warmer, that's all I care about.

 

[99sport]

Our next BEV will also be about charging infrastructure, but range will take precedent over the gimmick of huge instant torque.

Curious why range is so important to you? Can you charge at home? Do you drive cross country frequently?

Clearly I'm not the EV makers intended audience. But a lightweight EV that is fun to drive and has 50 or 100 mile range makes a lot of sense to me. I can charge at home and a 40 mile range would cover my needs 95% of the time. If I need to travel a longer distance, I have plenty of ICE cars and hybrids in the stable to choose from. The 1,000lbs of battery and $10,000s of dollars for a 400 mile range in an EV makes NO sense to me. I don't want the weight, handling penalty, acceleration penalty, tire wear, initial purchase cost, eventual replacement cost, etc of a large battery - in short, it seems to me, large range in an EV makes every single thing about them worse. If range is critical, get an ICE or hybrid - extra range in one of those only adds a few 10s of pounds of fuel and essentially has no downsides.

Personally, I think the optimal solution today, if you want an EV and need to drive long distances, is:
- to have a second vehicle in the stable (maybe a suburban or pickup if you regularly need to haul plywood or dirt bikes or tow a trailer, etc) or,
- if you really only have room for 1 car and must have an EV, get a plug-in hybrid that will run on electricity 99% of the time but still let you do those cross country trips when you need to. Or,
- buy my mythical short-range EV and rent an ICE or hybrid for that annual cross county trip. The $10,000 battery cost savings of this short-range EV vs one with a 400 mile range would pay for a whole lot of rental cars and fuel. And, one day, when you or the next owner need to replace that battery the bill will be $3K instead of $15K.

Perhaps in 20 years things will be different, but today, in any of my propoesed scenarios that cross country trip that actually requires long range is going to be a whole lot faster and less nerve-wracking than with an EV. And it will allow you to venture off the major roads and into the empty parts of the country if you so desire

 

[jbawden]

@99sport Ya kinda left out the giant chasm between local errands and a two week road trip bud. I never said I wanted a 9,000lb 750mi range BEV, just that I'm going to deemphasize "performance" in the future. I have a level two charger at home, but your point is like saying the range of my 5BW doesn't matter because I have a fuel station in the garage. And for someone that doesn't have a fleet to choose from or the ability to charge at home, this is a significant adoption barrier.

Our personal experience with Tesla is advertised range is no where near real world range, particularly with seasonal temperature extremes. Even with a 95% charge, a mid-winter or mid-summer trip that is 75 miles one way to see family is an unintended hypermiling experiment to get home without supercharging. My primary point was that BEV are not very compelling performance cars so I'm going to let that aspiration go.

 

[Dmkp621]

- if you really only have room for 1 car and must have an EV, get a plug-in hybrid that will run on electricity 99% of the time but still let you do those cross country trips when you need to.

This is where I think we need to be headed. The push toward all BEVs is unrealistic because the charging infrastructure isn't there and will require an upgrade of the electricity grid to get there. I think we are decades away in terms of matching the availability and convenience of gas stations. If I want one (future) car to do everything including an occasional long range trip, it has to be a hybrid. The push to move everyone to all BEV is really bothersome for this reason.

For now, love the 5BW! It is the perfect do-it-all car!

 

[99sport]

The EV Transition Explained

The challenges posed by the transition from ICE vehicles to EVs at scale are significantly larger in scope and more complex than the policy makers appreciate. The systems engineering task alone is enormous, with countless interdependencies that are outside policy makers' control.

spectrum.ieee.org

Above is something like a 13 part series (from the trade magazine of the professionals' that have the most to gain from the EV transition - electrical engineers). It's a couple of hours of reading. There is a lot to digest here, and, depending on your bias, you'll probably reach a different conclusion.

My conclusion was the EV transition will have no effect on the climate (10% of human C02 production is from cars; it will take decades for existing ICE cars to be replaced; not all electricity production is or will be renewable, BEVs require 40% more energy to produce than ICE ones, so a BEV needs to drive a LOT of miles in it's life to pay that initial energy input back and see a net decrease in energy usage (8,000 to 80,000 miles per year depending on how the electricity is generated). Actual, meaningful decrease in anthropogenic CO2 production would take people using mass transit, bicycles, working from home, becoming vegetarian, etc...

Other takeaways:
High-paying union jobs in auto manufacturing will be lost to China, since they have a 5-10 year lead in BEVs and battery manufacturing (which is currently most of the value of an EV) and it is unlikely the US will catch up.
Every single end-use transformer in the US (the thing hanging on the telephone pole in your neighborhood) will need to be replaced and redesigned with a heavier-duty version (and there are MILLIONS of them in the US) and the telephone poles they hang on will also need to be replaced to support their weight.
Truck stops of the future will be tied directly into the high-voltage distribution lines to get the power needed to recharge BEVs as the current infrastructure is incapable of handling the load.
We are all going to pay for this transition in the form of higher utility rates and taxes, and the cost is going to be in the tens of thousands of dollars per person over the next decade or two (good thing we'll save a few dollars on putting "gas" aka electrons in the tank).

Some quotes:
"more than 95 percent of residential transformers would be overloaded if Palo Alto hits its EV and electrical-appliance targets by 2030."

"Professor Deepak Divan, the director of the Center for Distributed Energy at Georgia Tech, says his team found that in residential areas “multiple L2 chargers on one distribution transformer can reduce its life from an expected 30 to 40 years to 3 years.” Given that most of the millions of U.S. transformers are approaching the end of their useful lives, replacing transformers soon could be a major and costly headache for utilities, assuming they can get them."

"Supplies for distribution transformers are low, and costs have skyrocketed from a range of $3,000 to $4,000 to $20,000 each. Supporting EVs may require larger, heavier transformers, which means many of the 180 million power poles on which these need to sit will need to be replaced to support the additional weight. "

 

[99sport]

@99sport Ya kinda left out the giant chasm between local errands and a two week road trip bud. I never said I wanted a 9,000lb 750mi range BEV, just that I'm going to deemphasize "performance" in the future. I have a level two charger at home, but your point is like saying the range of my 5BW doesn't matter because I have a fuel station in the garage. And for someone that doesn't have a fleet to choose from or the ability to charge at home, this is a significant adoption barrier.

Our personal experience with Tesla is advertised range is no where near real world range, particularly with seasonal temperature extremes. Even with a 95% charge, a mid-winter or mid-summer trip that is 75 miles one way to see family is an unintended hypermiling experiment to get home without supercharging. My primary point was that BEV are not very compelling performance cars so I'm going to let that aspiration go.

I was genuinely trying to understand you use case. Frequent 200 mile round trips would indeed be a reason to get a 400 mile range.

For me, I have a 10 mile commute (although I mostly work from home now). I can charge at home and a 500 mile range would last me months (I know because I fill up the 10 gallon tank on my daily driver about 6 times a year). My mom is 25 miles away, so I suppose that would stretch a 50 mile BEV range, but mostly she comes to see us and I could easily take an ICE car to visit her if it meant saving a bunch of money on a BEV.

My other use cases are either:
Driving 2,000 miles in 36 hours 4 times per year - a BEV is never going to be the ideal vehicle for that.
Driving 250 miles out into the wilderness for camping / dirt biking (and you have to get the dirt bikes there as well!) every couple month or so. A BEV might be able to do that some day, but ICE is clearly the better choice given the long range, remoteness, and heavy payload.
Or a 4-10,000 mile vacation (did 10,000 miles driving around Alaska a couple of years ago and started with 4,000 miles in a week to get to Prudohe Bay). Again, a BEV is a poor choice.
I really have no 200 mile use case that a BEV might possibly work for, but a 50 mile range would be perfect for me - if it could do it more cost effectively than my 1st gen Honda Insight (that gets 50-70mpg and goes well over 500 miles on a 10 gallon tank)

 

[Berserker]

a lightweight EV that is fun to drive and has 50 or 100 mile range makes a lot of sense to me.

The Honda e is a car like that. But they don't sell it in the USA.

I'd buy one this weekend if they were on sale here.

 

[Neveready]

I just found out that these EV tax credits are pretty limited. I'm sure we all heard the recent news about a handful of EV models that qualify for the tax credit. What I didn't know was the buyer can also be excluded due to their income (If you file single and make over $150k or married combined income is over $300k you don't qualify for the tax credit).

Financially speaking, most people spending $75k($1200/mo) on an EV vehicle making under $150k a year seems like a stretch, esp considering they probably have a mortgage.

One thing for certain is that you'd have to be a fool to buy an EV with today's infastructure without access to a home charger.

 

[CBH]

I bought the Blackwing because it truly is the ICE GOAT. I love the sound and shifting my own gears most about this vehicle and everything else I own.

Those 2 critical elements are what is missing from EVs.

Everything else about them is actually nice. Ironically, emissions, gas mileage minimums, and safety requirements have taken much of the fun out of new ICE vehicles already.

People talk about instant torque from an EV. Know what ? If your ICE has the same power and is in the right gear, with no govt/electronic nannies, it'll have PLENTY of instant torque.

Besides the lack of sound or gears, most other aspects of EVs are very pleasant.

For people who don't care about sound or shifting (vast majority of all drivers) EVs are great.

I have always marveled that "range anxiety" was such a driver of the EV initiative. As many have pointed out, hardly anybody routinely drives more than a few dozen miles from home very often.

Truth is, the entire automotive industry is one giant herd. One company announces something, and everybody else jumps on the bandwagon as fast as they can type a press release.

Tesla's market cap has been the industry's envy for several years. Tesla had to be better than ICE to disrupt the market, thus they innovated with:

1. Power. High powered cars are fun to drive. There's nothing inherently better about EV power - Elon just wanted a key feature to make people switch.

2. Range. Again, Tesla's only competition was ICE vehicles. So they were naturally compelled to offer ~300 mile range, which is about what most gas tanks offer.

3. Software. Tesla invented the Software Defined Vehicle, selling optional features and honing OTA to a fine art.

Now the entire industry is aping Tesla in hopes of also mirroring their PE ratio.

Does anybody believe they all just became tree hugging fanatics overnight ?

 

[NorCal Blackwing]

Does anybody believe they all just became tree hugging fanatics overnight ?

Well, also government mandates ... it's been decreed that ICE cars are to be phased out by a certain date. Whether it really happens remains to be seen, but manufacturers hands have been forced.

My conclusion was the EV transition will have no effect on the climate (10% of human C02 production is from cars; it will take decades for existing ICE cars to be replaced; not all electricity production is or will be renewable, BEVs require 40% more energy to produce than ICE ones, so a BEV needs to drive a LOT of miles in it's life to pay that initial energy input back and see a net decrease in energy usage (8,000 to 80,000 miles per year depending on how the electricity is generated). Actual, meaningful decrease in anthropogenic CO2 production would take people using mass transit, bicycles, working from home, becoming vegetarian, etc...

Which is why people get so upset about those mandates - punish consumers to make it look like something is being done to fix the problem.

 

[bloominguez]

My other use cases are either:
Driving 2,000 miles in 36 hours 4 times per year - a BEV is never going to be the ideal vehicle for that.
Driving 250 miles out into the wilderness for camping / dirt biking (and you have to get the dirt bikes there as well!) every couple month or so. A BEV might be able to do that some day, but ICE is clearly the better choice given the long range, remoteness, and heavy payload.
Or a 4-10,000 mile vacation (did 10,000 miles driving around Alaska a couple of years ago and started with 4,000 miles in a week to get to Prudohe Bay). Again, a BEV is a poor choice.
I really have no 200 mile use case that a BEV might possibly work for, but a 50 mile range would be perfect for me - if it could do it more cost effectively than my 1st gen Honda Insight (that gets 50-70mpg and goes well over 500 miles on a 10 gallon tank)

Also worth mentioning, particularly for camping use case: EVs have parasitic losses when parked, larger than some people realize. I recall reading that Rivian owners in particular were surprised by this. You can't just park and camp and expect the same range and the end of the week.

I completely agree that a small, light EV with limited range, designed specifically for commuting duty would be ideal for a lot of people, including me. I don't want or need an EV to duplicate what my ICE vehicles can do.

 

[Neveready]

Which is why people get so upset about those mandates - punish consumers to make it look like something is being done to fix the problem.

Not only that, but it's an underlying finger pointing at the consumer, it's your fault so spend money on something you don't want (or in most cases, spend money you don't have) to be part of the solution.

Global change from Manufacturing and Infrastructure would have a much greater impact on decreasing pollution, not the end consumer.

 

[565565]

People talk about instant torque from an EV. Know what ? If your ICE has the same power and is in the right gear, with no govt/electronic nannies, it'll have PLENTY of instant torque.

1. Power. High powered cars are fun to drive. There's nothing inherently better about EV power - Elon just wanted a key feature to make people switch

I used to think the same way until I got an electric car.

I don't have a supercar garage like some of these people in the forum do but do have an C5 z06, X3M Comp and the 5BW and honestly our lowly Model Y long range will savagely butt rape all three ICE cars without lube in the instant highway passing department. However in a straight up race the Tesla is the slowest.

The issue is that unless you are cruising around all the time at 6k rpm, by the time you get into the right gear and the rpms get to powerband the Tesla has already made the pass.

That's the inherent advantage of EVs in real world driving. For an ICE, the right gear for acceleration and the right gear for cruising are very different gears. For an EV, it's always in the right gear for everything.

I was daily driving the Tesla in the winter but now switched back to the 5BW and occasionally the wife's X3M. I had to recalibrate my brain on how much room I need now to get around a left lane camper. In the time it takes to put in the clutch change gear, let out clutch, or the time it takes for the ZF8 speed to drop 3 gears and boost to build, the Tesla is pretty much done passing and moving back into the lane.

 

[Neveready]

1. Power. High powered cars are fun to drive. There's nothing inherently better about EV power - Elon just wanted a key feature to make people switch.

No doubt that EVs typically have more power than it's ICE competition. However, EV power delivery is superior to ICE given how quickly and effective the power delivery can be manipulated. Take the tire size on a Tesla Plaid, 285s out back and it runs 9s. On a non prepped street surface they can outpace AWD ICE vehicles with the same power and grip.

 

[565565]

No doubt that EVs typically have more power than it's ICE competition. However, EV power delivery is superior to ICE given how quickly and effective the power delivery can be manipulated. Take the tire size on a Tesla Plaid, 285s out back and it runs 9s. On a non prepped street surface they can outpace AWD ICE vehicles with the same power and grip.

 

[Neveready]

What's your point, this race is a prepped surface.

And the $3 million Bugatti is not remotely in the same class as a model S plaid.

 

[565565]

What's your point, this race is a prepped surface.

And the $3 million Bugatti is not remotely in the same class as a model S plaid.

No I'm saying I agree with you.

The EVs left the Bugatti for dead off the line because EVs have far superior traction management.

Also the video mentioned it's not a prepped surface.