Don’t put the brake on electric vehicles in Oz
Freelancer writer Alice Body writes: The wheels aren’t just turning on the electric vehicle (EV); the whole industry is accelerating thanks to a major new initiative by the Chinese government. Officials are planning on completing no less than 10 million electric parking spaces by 2020, Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co’s (BAIC) president Wang Dazong revealed last week.
The plan coincides with other incentive actions by Chinese policymakers that will not only help free China from its dependency on foreign oil and lighten their carbon load, but will also further bolster their economic position in a world with dwindling oil supplies. Australia, take note.
China’s ten million electric parking spaces complement several other government endeavours to make EVs attractive to produce. The government’s 2009 $220 million stimulus package encouraged local Chinese carmakers such as BAIC and BYD to upgrade to green automotive technology. In October last year, China’s Minister of Science and Technology estimated that 8.5 billion yuan (AU$1.3 billion) has been invested in the green car industry thus far.
Consumers are also benefiting from — and thus helping to support and maintain — China’s commitment to the EV revolution. The government is giving 120,000 yuan (AU$18,276) to each EV consumer. Such strong support from both the public and private sectors should lead to increasingly affordable EVs.
China’s output of electric and hybrid vehicles is expected to reach one million units by 2020. Such developments are the rumblings of a formidable domestic market, good news for China’s already-healthy economic appetite. In fact, it all sounds just peachy — if you’re Chinese.
If you’re an Australian watching these events unfold, you may be feeling more like a backseat driver. Oil is expected to reach US$200 a barrel within five years, and at the moment Australia’s carmakers provide just 15% of cars sold in the domestic market each year. How better to reinvigorate the Australian auto-industry, and cope with skyrocketing petrol expenses, than to evolve to the future of car-buyer demand, especially when it’s so clearly foreseeable? A switch to EV production is the inevitable solution.
Matthew Wright, Executive Director of Beyond Zero Emissions, laid out the challenge for the Gillard government last week: “The time has come for the Labor government to strengthen the car industry and turn threats into opportunities, providing matched funding to retool Australian car plants for electric-vehicle production.” For Wright, laying the foundation of an EV market in Australia is the key to a profitable manufacturing sector.
Julia Gillard’s Multi-Party Climate Change Committee may continue their carbon-pricing banter, but it’s significantly harder to hear over China’s assertive statement. While a carbon-pricing model is an important part to any policy tackling climate change, direct public investment in renewable technology is inescapably integral to getting those carbon-loaded wheels out of the fossil fuel quagmire and on to the right renewable track.
Climate change writer Leigh Ewbank tells Crikey that “carbon pricing is just one policy tool and is of limited use for deploying enabling infrastructure like EV recharging stations. While this infrastructure has the potential to decarbonise Australia’s transport,” he argues, “it doesn’t directly reduce carbon and therefore won’t benefit from carbon markets. We need government and private sector collaboration and investment to build the foundation for a domestic EV market.”
Happily, Australia isn’t completely out of the EV loop. California-based EV infrastructure company Better Place is off to a head start in Australia — their project Better Place Australia installed their first electric charging station in Canberra last October, on top of plans to start establishing a nationwide EV infrastructure network later this year. Through agreements with AGL Energy and Macquarie Capital Group, Better Place Australia plans to raise $AU1 billion toward the network. Yet such seemingly positive developments are not without their uncertainties. How will Better Place fare without government assistance — and within what time-frame? Are Australian-owned infrastructure companies missing out on a glaring opportunity under their very noses?
Australia currently holds fourth place as the country with most cars per capita, a sure gauge of a society hooked on private transport and, subsequently, a rather unwholesome fossil fuel diet. Interesting when you think that each of China’s 10 million future electric parking spaces could be shared by just 1.5 of Australia’s 15 million cars on the roads at the moment.
See more of Alice Body’s writings on her blog. She is also a volunteer at Beyond Zero Emissions.
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Why wait for the Government? Clearly they have no intention of pushing ahead with any real improvements beyond regular efficiency improvements of the ICE (which are now achieved at the cost of incredible additional complexity), Marn thinks the solution of Australias fuel import crisis is to drill more, and Abbott thinks Peak Oil means a lack of investment.
I have ordered a “nine inch” electric motor from EV Works. It’s made in Europe. I guess the technology is beyond us.
The controller I intend to buy is made in the USA and programmed from Scandanavia. We don’t make them either (you can make your own controller from Open Source plans if you’re handy with SMDs).
The batteries will be from China. We don’t make them either (of any quality/performance required for EV’s, at least).
I will be making my EV from an existing car, but if our vehicle manufacturers actually wanted to, they could offer pure EV’s using their existing models. It’s not that complex.
There is a manufacturer of electric vehicles in Australia: Blade Electric Vehicles (http://bev.com.au/).
They have been operating for 5 years, and have a licence for unlimited production of their current model from the Federal Department of Transport.
They never seem to be mentioned in the blogosphere.
This has to be the understatement of the year: “[electric vehicles] has the potential to decarbonise Australia’s transport,” he argues, “it doesn’t directly reduce carbon and therefore won’t benefit from carbon markets.”
Pure Electric vehicles generate far more CO2 than petrol vehicles … because you first have to generate the electricity, which in Australia means burn coal and then lose energy transmitting the electricity. If you want to support the coal industry and kill the planet at the same time then buy an electric vehicle. Shifting the pollution from the tail pipe to your local power station would be nice if you didn’t also multiply it because of efficiency losses. The only way EVs make any sense is with non-fossil fuel power plants. If you have solar-thermal, then that’s fine except the sun isn’t shining when you usually want to recharge … so if you have a bunch of EVs then you need more energy storage … which is expensive. With nuclear on the other hand, the overnight charging is cheap because the plant is running anyway so you can use its off peak output for desalination, charging EVs, making synthetic fuel, fertiliser or anything else you care to think of.
Absolute, utter bollocks.
Burning a litre of petrol produces 2.34 kg CO2, and a new small car gets about 6 L/100 km fuel economy (give or take). Which means you get about 140 g/km CO2 from a petrol engine car.
An electric vehicle can quite easily get 200Wh/km (again, give or take). With an average efficiency of Coal Plants in Australia of some 1000g/kWh this is about 200g/km.
So the best new car ICE commonly available is already 75% of the worst EV technology commonly available. About the only way you could make an EVs CI worse is to create the electricity by burning Peat.
There’s a bloke who has converted a Mighty Boy (not the worlds most aerodynamic car) into an EV. It gets 132Wh/km from the wall. That’s already below break-even with an ICE. Using 72-volt DC and a controller which is not renowned for efficiency.
Want to reduce Carbon Intensity further than using coal-fired EV? Solar PV has an Intensity of about 100g/kWh. CST is about 50. Nuclear is about 60, winds and Hydro about 20. Besides which, the coal plants are burning coal overnight anyway, and dumping a not insignificant portion of it to ground. Why not use that power to ‘refuel’ our cars and also to flatten the load? You can also buy Green Power, or have a bank of batteries in your house that you charge during the day and use to recharge your car at night. Or you could charge at work. Or your Solar Thermal could have, you know, inherently built-in overnight storage. Or we could equip more existing dams with turbines.
Honestly, there’s so many ways around the precieved ‘intermittency problem’ that it’s not funny. Yeah, you might have to pay a little more, but electricity is an energy carrier, not a source. If a solar panel were to take a kilo of coal to build (random figure), it will still be producing useful power long after that kilo of coal would have been used elsewhere. And you can’t use coal to generate electricity twice.
So no, EVs don’t necessarily create more CO2 than an ICE, nor do EVs only make sence with Nuclear power. But hey, we burn Coal to generate electricity now, I guess we always will.
Bellistner: I should have done the calculations before making the claim … fair enough. But 40% more CO2 using your numbers is still considerably more, if not far more. Banks of batteries and Solar PV are nice toys for people with buckets of money to throw around but not viable to solve the global warming problem. There’s about 7 million households in
Australia, and at the current AGL price of $4000 for a 1.5kW Solar PV system, it would cost $28 billion to put one on each roof to deal with a small part of the ~17% of our greenhouse emissions which come from household electricity use.
http://www.energyrating.gov.au/library/pubs/hhenergy1998.pdf
Without expensive long-term storage, renewables cannot compete with nuclear for supplying carbon-free baseload. Forget it, get out of the way. Renewables can only supply niche markets that the big grids cannot reach, such as remote towns.
Electric vehicles could present such a niche market, because each vehicle already carries its own storage and presumably, its own Smart Meter. The commuter parks, plugs and programs his vehicle to accept enough energy to get him home at the premium price, and to fill up if the line offers energy at a lower preset price. That does assume that at least the lower price can undercut baseload price.
It’s 40% more if you compare the best ICEs to the Worst EVs. If you compare the best to the best (and like for like), EVs completely blow ICEs away.
A bank of batteries sized to power a EV is also about what it takes to power a house for a day. You could think of it as a back-up supply for emergencies (and the EV itself can be used as a Supply too). 15kWh of LiFePO4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries currently sell for around $6500 at the moment. Tough to afford if you’re on $33k/yr (like my partner), but not so bad further up the pay scale (especially since the batteries will pay themselves off in about four or five years, and will last ten if you treat them right). I wouldn’t actually use Lithiums in a house, though. I’d try to find some Nickle Iron batteries (Edison Cells) if I could. Not as impressive power output as modern batteries, but virtually unkillable. Failing that, a much bigger pack of PBa, and treat them really nicely.
Half the problem with the cost of rooftop PV systems is purchasing power. Damn sight cheaper overseas. Financially it’s probably better to just buy Green power off The Grid, and have someone else invest in and build the CST plants/wind farms/Nuclear reactors/Geothermal/etc, but power on your roof is at least power at a guaranteed price and that’s attractive to some people.
The danger in debates on future energy production and use is that there are some people out there that think there is a silver bullet that will solve all our problems. There isn’t. We thought Fossil Fuels were our silver bullet but it turns out we were wrong. We need a range of generating technologies and range of ways to use that power. Some mix of Wind, CST, PV, Geo, Nuclear etc, combined with pumped storage and Anhydrous Ammonia plants (AA produced – from water, air, and electricity – can be easily stored and used as fuel or fertiliser), heavily electrified transport, with some provision for Hybrid type technologies in certain circumstances. An example is the railway network: under the Pareto Principal, 20% of the track will carry 80% of the freight, so you don’t have to electrify the whole lot, just the main corridors. The remaining tracks can be served by Hybrids (possibly burning that AA in modified Diesel engines or Fuel Cells). Use the trains to move freight to distribution centres for the last 100km or so trip by truck. Most freight isn’t so urgent that an extra day in transit is a deal-breaker.
As you say, ~17% of our emissions comes from direct household energy use. Another ~15% comes from industry. The remainder is split between transport and agriculture. Concentrating just on residential uses is a fools game, but we have to take not of it and spend at least some time on it anyway. (and it’s visable, which may incentivise people to look for savings elsewhere). Plugging in a car may double your electricity cost, but you won’t be spending money on petrol and GHG intensity is likely to drop, especially if part of the electricity is Green.
This doesn’t help, of course, if our population is expanding faster that our CI is dropping.
Base-Load Fallacy.
If we, as a nation, decided to go Nuclear tomorrow, it’d probably be 15 years, minimum, before we had the first reactor up and running, even ignoring NIMBYs/BANANAs. We have no Nuclear Engineering courses at our Universities, no manufacturing capability. We’d need to go out on the open international market and compete with other countries who are also ramping up Nuclear programs. Even the USA, Europe and Japan can’t build more than a handful of reactors in the next decade. If we were to jump into the pool as well, prices would rise. Then you have to assume it’ll take several graduating classes to get enough competent people to run the reactors (or, again, go on the international market).
I’m not anti-nuclear, I’m pro-renewables. We can bring them on incrementally, and we don’t need any particularly special trades (we already have welders, electronics technicians, structural engineers, and concreters). If we started building tomorrow, we could probably have CST pumping out power in 18 months or so, with more coming online all the time.
Widely dispersed renewables backed up with storage and linked by a HVDC smart Grid. We’ve got the vision, let’s see if anyone implements it.
Addendum: Roger, I agree with your second paragraph.
I’m not anti-renewable, but why bet on a horse which has never performed?
Germany has invested a lot in renewables during the past 15 years … but nothing
much has come of it:
http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/DEELEC.pdf
Compare with what the French did in the 80s:
http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/FRELEC.pdf
I expect the Chinese to change the nuclear game over the next decade
because they understand
mass engineering principles. Western engineers want to make each reactor a
little different … can’t resist the urge to tweak. The Chinese want to make them identical
and cheap. In 10 years you may be able to install a reactor by digging a big
hole, dropping it in, covering it up and connecting your generators.
IIRC, with regard to Germanys’s Solar industry and Scandanavias Wind Industry, the cost of the subsidies and FITs in now covered by the savings to the grid of not having to run ‘traditional’ plants. Running a renewable program in isolation is fraught with difficulty because of the small amount of area you cover. When done on a big (continent-sized) scale, it will come into its own (Australia is almost uniquely positioned here. We have a single continent which gets an enormous amount of sunshine for PV and wind is largely predictable over such an area, something that can’t be said for a country the size of Denmark).
Indeed, in ten years, we may be able to buy a Chinese reactor and drop it in a hole in the ground (is there anything we won’t be buying from China?), but that’s betting on something that no more of a guarantee than a mass renewables buildout (and possibly less), which is why I suggest a ‘scattergun’ approach. If one technology doesn’t work out as planned, it’s not the big loss it would be if we’d thrown all our eggs into its basket.
If we decided to do a France we could probably largely emulate their success, but I don’t think it’ll happen, even if we used existing FF plant sites for the reactors. Too much inertia to overcome, and both major political parties are too yellow-backed to do anything more than ‘pilot schemes’.
Roger,
Energy storage technology is in its infancy. Here’s something I found out about in the last couple of weeks which could make a massive difference to the economics of intermittent renewable energy:
http://www.isentropic.co.uk/index.php?page=storage
Why do EV developers focus on small vehicles. Replacing a small 4 cylinder family vehicle with an EV is next to pointless. Most people on average only fill up there car once or twice a week.
Commercial drivers fill up there vehicles daily. We need to replace commercial vans and utes with EV’s. Only then will we make an impact.
Here’s another interesting power storage tech:
http://www.launchpnt.com/portfolio/grid-scale-electricity-storage.html
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/a-new-energy-storage-option-gravity-power/
Giant piston forcing water to drive a turbine – it’s supposed to be just a way of turning pumped hydro storage on its head.
Jonathan Maddox @ 11: That’s certainly an interesting approach. Some places in the world have been using some prototypes that use underground heat storage for space heating in winter, but that’s probably the first time I’ve seen something dedicated to electricity production (aside from natural geothermal sinks, of course).
Damo @ 12
Commercial vehicles also do ten times the work of a private vehicle, and ‘only’ fuel up 5 times as often. Besides, you’re not going to get an electric Hiace to do 400km on one charge. It’s just not going to happen. You’d need to swap battery packs halfway through the day, which would require a return to the depot or a second depot at the far end of the run. Private vehicles can, however, do 200km on a charge.
There is a case for depot-to-depot commerical vehicles to go electric with current technology, and for ancillaries on existing commercial vehicles to be electric.
MorinMoss @ 13: Interesting concept. I’d love to see the casings for the bores and the pressure rings.
When they say that traditional pumped hydro takes years and billions of dollars, are they suggesting their technology won’t?
You cant create energy you only can change it, thats why we drive petrol powered cars.
I can buy a brand new petrol powered car today for $12000 drive away that will easily do about 700 km per $55 tank at 100kph.
An electic car equivalent would cost about $100k ,get about 2-300k per charge and then i either have to sit there for hours watching my powerpoints melt while it charges or go to some facility down the road and pay $50 for a swap’n'go battery which is probably damaged or worn out.
Electric cars have been around for a hundred years, they’re a pipe dream just like solar power, too costly and not dependable.
What a pile of crap.
Where do you think petrol comes from, genius?
To start with, an EV does not have to cost $100k. An even mildly aerodynamic vehicle, when electrically powered, should be able to get at least 250Wh/km. Since the average (mean) distance a car goes each day in Australia is ~45km, enough batteries to cover this distance and still leave 30% ‘in the tank’ (for emergencies and extending battery life) is 15kWh. If you use LiFePO4 batteries, this is about $6000 (plus about $1500 for BMS and connections. If you doubled the pack capacity you’re still spending only about $15k. With electricity running at about 12c/kWh (Tariff 33), the daily cost to run the car (for the 45km average) is $1.35. For a good small ICE getting 8km/L, the same travel would cost $7.85. Do your own sums for an assumed yearly travel of 15,000km. The (45km pack of) batteries will pay themselves off in four years, and they’ll probably last for ten (and then, they’ve still got 80% of their original capacity left).
Cars may have a range of 700kms but most people don’t need it. They can happilly ‘fill up’ in their own garage each night, or opportunity charge at rest stops, work, etc. Want long-range occasionally, make a small trailer with a genset on. Or take the train. Or use the second car which probably has an ICE in it.
A 230V, 10A circuit can easily supply 2300Watts/hour, or a 6-hour charge. If you’ve got three-phase 20A circuit, you’re laughing, as it cuts down recharge time to 2 hours.
So you’re willing to buy a $12,000 car, fill it up with $1.40/L (at least) fuel for its lifetime, and you think EV’s are unaffordable? Crazy talk.
Impressive numbers sure, but you assumptions and averages are just that.
You’ve been lied to and if electric cars were as efficient and as practical as you beleive they are then surely we’d all be driving them (but we’re not).
I do about 44000 km per year in an ex taxi I bought for $2000 and it only takes about 3 minutes a week to ‘recharge’ at a cost of about $50.
So if people like you that are striving for self satisfaction are willing to pay outrageous prices for something that is a total ripoff then maybe i’m in the wrong line of work, I should be an electric car salesman. ‘easy work with easy customers’
By who, and for what purpose? Has it occurred to you that you “have been lied to”, because Maths doesn’t lie.
Part of the reason EV’s didn’t maintain market share when first introduced a century ago was the War of Currents. Poor access and lack of widespread standards made the ICE attractive. By the time The Grid was ubiqiqutous enough to support EVs, ICEs had a strangehold on the market, and there it stayed (inertia). Add to this, vehicle companies make a great deal of profit off spare parts. Since the EV dramatically reduces the number of parts required, promoting EV’s would see a great loss of income to manufacturers (an EV motor has two bearings, and if it’s DC, some Carbon brushes. Compare to the hundreds and hundreds of parts in an ICE). Why would they promote something that would slash their profits, when there wasn’t an obvious customer demand?
Add to this is the fact that there wasn’t until recently, much in the way of EV-rated parts (chicken and egg: no parts because no market, no market because there’s no parts). EV owners had to make do by appropriating components from other sources, like forklifts and aircraft. Recently this has changed, and you can get virtually any part you wish in an EV-suitable format, right down to AC, power steering, and vacuum pumps.
With that distance, an EV probably isn’t for you (maybe a Hybrid). But your experiance is not typical: you are driving nearly three time the average, and in doing so, pulling the average up. If we’re going to use personal experience instead of averages, we can use me instead. I have a daily travel requirement (I ride my deadly treadly whenever possible) of 8km, just above the average individual vehicle trip. Should I use my personal useage as a baseline? Neither yours nor my personal useage is representative of the Australian population as a whole, who, as it turns out, drive an average of about 15,000 to 17,000km a year (which is about that 45km/day figure, give or take). If I remember the ABS PDF, something like 45% of all private trips are under 10km in length.
I think you might be projecting quite a bit there. I pointed out above the costs for an EV, and since you didn’t dispute them, you probably agree. How then, is an EV “outrageous[ly]” priced, or a “total ripoff”?
If your ex-taxi gets an astoundingly good 10km/L (assuming Falcon or Commodore), then your 44,000km/yr is costing you, just in fuel, $6100 (assuming $1.40/L).
Used car: $2000
Soliton Jr controller: $2000
Motor: $1500
15kWh LiFePO4 batteries: $7000
Sundry parts and welding: $2000
Extras: $2000
Total: $16,500. Not bad for a car for the average user, considering it costs bugger-all to run. As with most efficient technologies (including housing), there is a higher up-front cost, but a lower running cost. You can go cheaper, particularly with the controller (the Soliton Jr and Soliton1 are aimed at higher-performance – but not racing – EVs).
Over ten years, your ex-taxi is going to cost you $63,000 in purchase ($2000) and fuel($6100*10). An equivilent EV would cost $41,000 in purchase ($2000), conversion parts ($25,500 – you’d need a battery pack of about 45kWh to do your daily ranges, hence the higher conversion cost), and electricity ($15,000, allowing for charger and battery inefficiency).
A saving of nearly twenty grand, and that’s assuming prices stay the same. You’d need a 3-phase connection to charge it overnight, and I don’t know if motels would have a point handy, which is why I wouldn’t suggest an EV for you.
We’re not going to see EV’s replacing F1′s or V8SC anytime soon, but for the average user (or even more then double the average user, or 100km/day), they’re perfectly suitable.
Addendum: it’s got nothing to do with whether I “believe’ EV are efficient or practical for daily use by the majority of the population. It’s repeated, verifiable, empirical evidence, based on open, freely-available statistics, as well as observable useage patterns.
@Bellistner@14 The best explanation I’ve seen of the Gravity Power Module is at http://planetsave.com/2010/10/01/gravity-power-module-turning-conventional-pumped-hydro-on-its-head/
It certainly looks simple; I hear there’s a test site somewhere in California but haven’t gotten details yet. And they do seem to think that, given suitable drilling sites, these piston arrangements would be many times cheaper and faster to get online than pumped hydro storage.
-18-
Why does everyone trust and rely on wiki so much ?, since when is wikipedia an authority to be trusted for info.
War of the currents nothing, any automotive historian of reasonable calibre can tell you the EV killed itself, ya wanna know how ?
Early gasoline and diesel powered cars, tractors and machinery featured something you’ll probably never have the inconvenience of having to suffer with, the wrist snapping crankhandle.
So when Mr. X from motor company Y heard about some guy who made a cart driven by an electric motor he thought “i’ll bolt an electric motor to the side of this gasoline one to start it.” And the rest is history.
Do you know how averages work ? It means that millions of cars do more than 500 ks per week and millions of cars do less than 100 ks per week.(black and white will always surround the grey area).
I don’t have 16 grand to build a miserably underpowered science project, even if it only has to get me from motel to hotel and back.
MorinMoss @ 20: Yeah, it’s looks amazingly simply and effective. I’m still dubious on the engineering required (seals, wall thickness etc), but if they can make it work, at ‘the right price’, I can’t see any reason not to include it in a storage mix.
It’s not ‘trusting Wikipedia’, it’s the simple fact that Wikipedia is a collection of sources, and easy to access. I could just as easily linked you to search engine results and let you go at it, but a single link is all that is needed in this case. You are free to follow the cites or do your own searching.
And?
Actually, it means that some do more than the average and some do less, that’s why they result is called an average. And averages (with error or uncertainly bounds) are the only way to handle issues that affect society as a whole (or any large group with diverse needs). The (typically few) large users pull the average up, the (typically many) low users pull it down. One person driving 44,000km/year outweighs 11 people who only drive 20km/day (The mean average of the 12 people is 7333km, or nearly twice the necessary use of 11 of the 12 people. One person is just out of luck. The median average is 4000km, so still, one person is still out of luck. Why build for 7000 when exactly as many are going to be happy with 4000?).
I’m not demanding or expecting the entirity of society conform itself to my personal circumstances (daily – total – travel of 6km, well, well below average), so please stop expecting that, since you, personally, do 44,000km/year, society has to conform itself to your needs. You and I are the outliers, not the average schmuck doing 20 or 50 or 80km/day.
What amazes me is that the same people who rail against ‘waste’ are often the same people who expect everything built or provided to suit their personal ‘needs’. We end up massively overbuilding to accomodate the statistical outliers, costing us all money, time, and resources.
And interesting quote from the ABS:
This means that the average distance a car travels per day, assuming it only moves on a workday (~250day/year), is just 54.8km. If it is driven every day of the year, it’s a miserly 37km/day. It also means that about 70% of kilometres traveled are discretionary (non-work-related). Your workday average is 176km, well over to the right of the bell-curve.
So don’t? No one is forcing you to use a cheaper, more reliable form of transport.
I suspect much of your opposition is due to the ‘green-ness’ of EV’s. Don’t worry, you can still use coal-fired power in it.
As for ‘underpowered’ do you know that it only takes about 20kW to maintain 100km/h (assuming you’re driving anything more aerodynamic than, say, a VL Commodore – Cd of 0.41!!!), right? Yet ICEV’s are marketed with engines of 200kW+. All so you can accellerate to the next red light quicker.
The electric motor I have on order is rated at 30kW continuous (and about 150kw Peak) and cots just $1600. More than enough for highway trips if I feel the need, and more than enough for virtually every single passenger vehicle.
Yeah, EV’s are underpowered (for the lazy, it’s a street-legal Datsun 1200, with ‘siamese’ 9-inch motors, 21,000kWh battery pack [85km range @250Wh/km to 100% Depth-of-Discharge], 10.4sec quarter mile @188.6km/h).
Translation: “It is inconvenient that this does not fit my preconceived views, so I will ignore it, and go off on an irrelevant tangent”.
Your argument does not suggest that it is a useless technology, merely one that requires further development.
Please people – visit my website to dispel the myths about electric cars – there’s so much unadulterated bs in these comments from people just repeating things they’ve heard or read but haven’t researched – http://www.MyElectricCar.com.au – a community based non commercial site full of information, pics, videos and researched content on why the switch to an electric fleet is an inevitability. To the naysayers – embrace the electric future …. it just makes strategic sense (no reliance on dwindling and expensive middle east oil) environmental sense (vehicles emissions are toxic) health (more people die in NSW from air pollution than motor vehicle accidents) and cost (much cheaper to run)….. it’s all good!
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