thoughts on the electric car
March 10th, 2009 by AriI was reading about the Chevy Volt today. (How sad is it that wikipedia has far more and better information than Chevy’s website, which doesn’t even tell me what the Volt is or how it’s supposed to work). I have a few thoughts:
- Very, very cool. Alcohol can keep it’s claim to be the cause of life’s problems, but technology is the answer.
- I’m not about to run out and spend 30k-40k on a car, but it’s still cool.
- Batteries have a memory effect, wherein if they are consistently discharged to a certain level and then recharged, they suffer. Since most people drive the same amount each day (commute to work), this is a real risk. Have they found a way to avoid it?
- The battery won’t start with the temperature below freezing (32 F, 0 C, 273 K). I’m thinking this won’t be a huge seller in Wisconsin.
- Electric car may sound very very cool (see point 1), but where does that electricity come from? Don’t you pay for the power to get from the wall? Doesn’t coal have to be burned to generate it? When calculating your total cost of ownership, don’t forget the cost of a daily recharge. A study commissioned by the state of California showed that a $3.73 gallon of gas and plugging in the Volt are equivalent. (oh-oh).
- I’m not really sure plugin hybrids are the ultimate solution – they just move the problem around a little. Given that, I don’t think I want to spend the effort necessary to completely revamp our roads, utilities, homes, offices, etc. to support charging stations. This is the first solution, not necessarily the best or ultimate one, and we’re not going to want to make this kind of investment twice
- Lastly, the car’s software is designed to be updated. One part of me can’t wait till someone hacks the firmware and comes out with a skin that makes your Volt look like the starship enterprise. (On that day even I will be tempted to go spend 30k for a car). The security professional in me thinks that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Re #5/6 – from an environmental point of view, I think plugins are great: it’s easier to change the O(n) sources of power to be less polluting than it is to change the O(n!) individual vehicles. This moves the problem to a place where scaling is a LOT better.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
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March 10th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
You also have a central point of failure – blackouts mean cars won’t work the next morning.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
I like the idea of electric cars better than hydrogen cars. Both would require a lot of infrastructure development to become widespread, but at least we already have power lines running all over the place. As for the minimum battery temperature, I’d wager that Volt 2.0 will have some sort of battery heater that runs off of a separate, less exotic battery, much like the oil heaters required by diesel engines in cold weather.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
From the article, it is listing some pretty impressive MPG ratings after converting over to conventional fuel. I’ve not kept up with other hybrid performance, but how effective is it to run this thing on just gas?
March 11th, 2009 at 12:47 am
I think the point of electric cars is that the gas->electricity conversion is fairly easy, even on a local level, whereas the electricity->gas conversion is basically impossible at any cost. Or equivalently, electricity has alternative sources (say, the sun) whereas gas does not.
March 11th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Battery memory per se is only a problem with older NiCad models. But lifetime and limited charge/discharge cycles are still issues.
I think that ultimately we will need another form of liquid fuel. My favorite idea (though I’ve only seen it in Analog (the fact section!), so I can’t really vouch for how feasible it is…) is to use renewable energy (eg solar) to make methanol from CO2 and water, creating a closed cycle that doesn’t add any net carbon to the atmosphere.