The all-electric Roadster from Tesla costs $109,000.
Courtesy of Tesla Motors
Some of the world's biggest automakers--Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Nissan-Renault--will begin building all-electric vehicles next year. In his presidential campaign, Barack Obama proposed putting one million plug-in vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. But production numbers will be tiny for years. Even General Motors, notwithstanding all the publicity it received for its commitment to bring the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid to market in 2011, plans to build only 10,000 Volts in 2011, and 60,000 in 2012. The consensus among industry analysts is that worldwide, fewer than one million of the 70 million vehicles manufactured annually will be electric-drive cars until at least 2015.
Boston Consulting Group further predicts that in 2020, under current trends, just one million plug-in vehicles will be sold in North America--roughly 5 percent of all vehicles. And market share is expected to stay in the low single digits until the cost per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion batteries falls to a third or less of today's level of $500 to $900 (see "Scaling Up Is Hard To Do").
The growth path that conventional hybrids have followed may be a good indication of how the newer technologies are likely to play out. Conventional hybrids, which charge their batteries using a gasoline engine, took 10 years to garner 2.5 percent of the U.S. market and about 1 percent of the global market. They will probably represent 4 or 5 percent of global production, or three million vehicles, by 2015, and the automakers expected to be leaders are Toyota, Honda, Ford, GM, Hyundai, and Volkswagen. Sales of plug-in hybrids and battery-electric vehicles are likely to grow at a similar rate unless development is accelerated by aggressive subsidies or tax advantages to offset the high cost of their battery packs.
Electric-car startups could have a presence in the market. Tesla's all-electric Roadster, which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than four seconds, is already for sale at $109,000, and Fisker's Karma plug-in hybrid luxury sports sedan, at $87,900, will be in drivers' hands by the middle of next year. But going beyond boutique production is a hard, hugely expensive challenge. Not since Chrysler was founded, in 1925, has a U.S. automotive startup grown into a major brand.
Meanwhile, electric cars will compete against gasoline and diesel engines that are growing ever more fuel-efficient. Between 2020 and 2030, midsize sedans may reach 40 to 50 miles per gallon thanks to much smaller engines, turbocharging and direct-injection technology, a 30 percent reduction in vehicle weight, and aerodynamic improvements (see "Petroleum's Long Good-bye"). Whether they will cost less than an equivalent electric-drive car is the question facing the industry's planners today.
The truth is we had viable 100% electric cars more than 10 years ago. However, after GM piled up and crushed the EV-1s, Toyota RAV4-EV drivers are still running on 100% electric and getting 100+ miles per charge. Chevron owned the rights to the NiMH battery and released the smaller capacity batteries recently but they are holding onto to the large traction NiMH batteries that could turn the industry around. Check out twocentspermile.com
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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erbium
338 Comments
There's your answer why they are going slowly
your sidebar shows fuel as 27 mj/kg
and lithium batteries as 0.3 to 0.5 mj/kg
basically 1/50th to 1/75th the energy density
and you can't just 'fill up' batteries in about two minutes.
so batteries are incredibly wimpy in versatility. you can't go long distances. even if freeways had electric charging stations, they'd turn into truckstop sized parking lots while people recharged for 15 minutes(?) to 8 hours.
they might be good for around town shared cars, as long as when the batteries degrade they are replaced.
and horridly, I saw someone else suggesting on this website that the govt subsidize these to 'get them started'. I'd suggest that person donates his own money but not even suggest the govt force taxpayers and the 'mystical magical money fairy' - which is where money comes mystically from thin air without being taken from other purposes, to pay for a losing technology.
The energy used in cars is seven times that of the electrical grid. The electrical grid is near overload in many places. It is ridiculous to assume it could charge tens of millions of cars nightly.
What would be more practical but less sexy in terms of dumping money on high tech ventures, is that we require buildings to become highly insulated. this would reduce energy use in the US 33%.
The zinc -air battery listed on these pages also looked like a neat idea. but only if they can 'recharge' it by pumping in new slurry.
This then becomes very much like the idea of using aluminum pellets, magnesium, or now zinc as energy source. They are reformed back to the base metal, storing energy for the next cycle, at a 'gas station' or probably called fueling station at that point. In this case the energy source for reforming the metal oxides back to the metals is flexible (electricity from grid can be any source), including any renewable or non-renewable source, so we can later transition to renewable source.
In these cases the energy density is that of the metals, a full tank of aluminum pellets or magnesium, plus the hydrogen source, water to react with will get you 350 miles and can be filled as fast as gasoline. These would be much safer than gasoline also as the hydrogen is produced only slightly faster than needed on demand from the H20 plus metal ===>> metal oxide plus free hydrogen.
http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html
http://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/3498
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage7355.html
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killian
74 Comments
Re: There's your answer why they are going slowly
Your comment is filled with false information.
Energy density is an important parameter, but is hardly limiting as your post suggests. Compare the mass of a gasoline-powered vehicle to a battery-powered vehicle and you'll find only a small increase. The Tesla is actually less massive than the cars it competes with.
Next, while you cannot fill up today's batteries in two minutes, you can charge them to 90% in five minutes (e.g. A123 LiFePO4). Fast charging allows highway driving.
You wrote, "The energy used in cars is seven times that of the electrical grid. The electrical grid is near overload in many places. It is ridiculous to assume it could charge tens of millions of cars nightly." Where did you get such misinformation? Various studies (e.g. Pacific Northwest National Labs) have found you could have 73% of the US fleet being charged without building any new power plants. If the 2.8 trillion passenger vehicle miles in 2007 were 100% electric, it would require approximately 900-1000 TWh of additional generation at the power plants each year, less than one fourth of what we generated in 2007.
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