Short sellers - Cut your losses before the year end

jimtech67 said:

Issue for the masses:

Where do you charge your car in a city???
You have a building with 50 units, one or more cars per unit.
You park your car for the night, do you go somewhere first for that 30 min(or more) full charge?
or are there parking spaces with chargers ???
Then you have to move your car out of that space for someone else after the that 30 min(or more) charge and find another parking space ???
YIKES

Click to expand...

What is your commute like?
How are buildings usually done in your neck of the woods? In my home country, large apartment blocks are built with garages in the basement. You'll either have a dedicated garage or a parking space and a small storage unit. If you have the dedicated garage, the problem is having a dynamic load management system on the supply to the building to avoid "shorting" it out.

If the garage space is shared, you can install a charger for yourself and even make it available to others as a paid service.

If you don't have this luxury and essentially park your car in the street, where do you do your weekly shopping? I reckon net year supermarkets will all have charging available to pull customers their way. There's always the possibility of charging at work, although it's not very common in Europe so far or as I've seen elsewhere, charge it at a gym, etc...

Yes, it's a lot of infrastructure to be deployed and technical solutions are really lacking on dynamic load management ( I found only one on the internet), but it will come to fix and make a lot of the "hassles" of EVs taken away.

I'd even say that companies that want to atract younger talent will probably make charging available as it's becoming more and more of a priority that people have when looking for new jobs (how sustainable the industry and company itself is).

I live in New Jersey USA right outside of NYC

in big cites here dedicated parking spaces can rent for what a small apartment goes in other towns...
Drive around Brooklyn.... Parking is mostly street and if it snows FORGET ABOUT IT...

Parking is free for all "Cluster ***k"

Maxkling said:

The direct pollution is obviously zero,

Click to expand...

What do you mean by "direct" pollution?

Because if electricity is from non-solar (neither wind nor hydro nor solar cells) non-tidal and non-nuclear sources i.e. fossil, then thermal efficiency of [power plant to EV] (~40%) is less than twice ICE (25-30%).

I assume by "direct" you mean there negligible pollution while actually driving, and any power-generation pollution happened before that i.e. while charging. Is that it?

I do not see electric cars really taking hold without having to build a number of high-power nuclear plants, provided other clean sources are still nowhere near economic feasibility point. Which in itself is really hard to push.

On the other hand, maybe it will become reasonable to get all the railroads in North America electrified? Here is a huge source of air pollution...

The problem with building nuclear plants is that to properly operate them safely is cost prohibitive, and utility companies are in business to make money - not electricity.

Nuclear can be a clean and safe energy, but not if a company wants to make a profit doing it.

Now, if Doc Brown's Mr Fusion can be put in every basement and car trunk lid that would be a major accomplishment.

drbitboy said:

What do you mean by "direct" pollution?

Because if electricity is from non-solar (neither wind nor hydro nor solar cells) non-tidal and non-nuclear sources i.e. fossil, then thermal efficiency of [power plant to EV] (~40%) is less than twice ICE (25-30%).

I assume by "direct" you mean there negligible pollution while actually driving, and any power-generation pollution happened before that i.e. while charging. Is that it?

Click to expand...

Direct pollution is essentially tailpipe or evap pollution.

Lifecycle pollution is where the power generation is categorized.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/electricvehicles/reducing-pollution-electric-vehicles

Sure, DOUBLING efficiency isn't worthwhile. Or tripling, or quadrupling. Why would you want to do that, when gains of two to five percent are achievable as well ?

Go put your face next to a tailpipe of a running diesel. I mean, really get it up in there. Breathe deeply. Repeat.

Then, once you've really gotten some CO and CO2 and NOx up in your lungs, use your engineering skills to tell me why for every trapezoidal move or deceleration, your chosen drive system relies solely on a friction brake and recovers no kinetic energy at all.

My car gets the equivalent of 130 MPG in real-world operation, can get to sixty miles an hour in under five seconds, and uses about eighty cents of fuel for my daily 30-mile commute.

Yes, I have to charge it every couple of days. Yes, that takes a while. I even have to trade spots with my colleagues so they can charge, sometimes taking two or three minutes at lunchtime.

Anyhow, that's enough of my snark. I'll conclude the year with my same advice to folks who think EVs are impractical or foolish or political or effeminate:

GET IN, WE'RE GONNA GO DRIVE

Ken,

One question about electrics I have,

Does the range of a charge get effected any noticeable amount by headlights, windshield wipers, electric heaters and defrosters? (Night driving in winter means a considerable range difference?)

Or is the difference negligible?

The only thing I don't like about EVs are some of their proponents

Ken Roach said:

My car gets the equivalent of [blah blah blah;-] my daily 30-mile commute.

Click to expand...

I walk from the bedroom to my office without leaving my house (today is odd because I am not still in my pajamas ;-).


Seriously, I am not against EVs, I think they are cool and a great solution. I have thought about converting my lil' (25y) old Ford Ranger to batteries. But so many folks are ignorant of how to draw and or discuss the thermodynamic box correctly* that the dialogue is often ... less than productive.

* N.B. this is one of the first places I have seen where it appears that is not true

Ken Roach said:

... enough of my snark.

Click to expand...

... and enough of mine

Ken Roach said:

I'll conclude the year with my same advice to folks who think EVs are impractical or foolish or political or effeminate:

GET IN, WE'RE GONNA GO DRIVE

Click to expand...

Yeah, let's go!

If I go will you critique the RNG (+sine, cosine and natural logarithm functions for MicroLogix) in my YAMFPP post?

Happy new year!

Ken,

As I said earlier I’ve been doing a good bit ok poking around and researching because I feel the time will come soon enough where we all need to be ready to jump to EV.

I have a question, been waiting for someone who actually owns an EV to chime in. Do you mainly charge at home? Have you tracked how much of your electric bill the car consumes? I haven’t been able to get good real world info on how much to expect the electric bill to increase. I know it still depends on commute and use, but still interested on real world not just calculators.

My Model 3 RWD Long-Range has such a big battery that the heater and defroster are not a major consideration, though I'm sure that they have an effect. I'm a windows-down-in-the-winter guy anyhow.

On my Focus Electric, it was more significant; when I switched on the heater, the range predictor immediately deducted 20 miles.

Cold weather is a major factor in EV range. I get 1/2 to 2/3 of the summer range once the temperature gets below 50. Tesla does a great job of planning your range and battery temperature (the thermal system heats, as well as cools !) but battery chemistry is just temperature sensitive and always will be.

I'm headed up to Mount Rainier tomorrow, so I'll gain about 1800' in elevation, and there's snow cover at Ashford and Longmire. My full battery will surely get me there, but I expect to stop at the new Supercharger in Auburn for 30 minutes on the way home. Fortunately it's at the outlet mall, so I expect only minor complaints from my passengers. Last time I Supercharged, it was under eight bucks.

At home, there's an EV outboard motor company next door, one of my neighbors just refitted his sailboat with an electric auxiliary, and another neighbor is refitting an '80s Wagoneer with Tesla packs and twin motors. But when I talk to folks in the marina parking lot, I uniformly get "I'd like to have an EV, but there's nowhere to charge". At the office, that was true as well... until the boss installed two 40A chargers when only one of us had an EV. For a couple of months, I was parking it to charge at the IBEW apprentice school a few miles away and walking to work. Stubborn ? Me ?

I have a standing policy with my colleagues that if they want to do an extended test-drive, I'll swap cars with them for a week. Every time I go overseas, somebody else drives the Model 3, and so far that person gets an EV within a year. We've got three Teslas, a Smart, a Bolt, and a LEAF in the company fleet now.

The Company founder, a crusty Norwegian former artillery spotter, used to gripe about how there was no possibility that he could use even the longest-range EV because it would not reach his mountain cabin.

Then somebody put in a 50A charger at the cafe in town, and he bought a plug-in hybrid Volvo and brags about how he doesn't burn any gas until he gets to Highway 2.

Has anyone given any thought to how EVs are going to pay their share of the cost of maintaining the transportation infrastructure? Currently it is funded by per-gallon taxes on gasoline and diesel. And currently EVs are an insignificant fraction of the total number of vehicle-miles. But what happens as EVs displace more and more ICEs to become a significant fraction?

I'm stupid-lucky with charging because our CEO decided to put in non-metered EV chargers. We buy electricity at the light industrial rate, which is about $0.10 per kWh.

I can't charge at home; in fact, when a neighbor got a Model 3 and was using his convenience charger on an outdoor receptacle in the parking lot, several people complained to the COA board about *me*, because I was the "EV guy", and black and blue cars look the same to them.

My proposal at the marina is to pay for two 40A Clipper Creek EVSEs and their installation myself, and install a load-sharing contactor system so we can use the breaker that serves the electric clothes dryers in the cabana laundry. I'll put in a meter and pay the COA myself for all the power that the chargers use.

I plan to get some good data about charger use from that system. But as a large residential power user without independent metering, we don't get the time-of-day tariff benefits that a single-family metered user might.

In my state, every EV owner pays a $225 annual surcharge when we renew our license tabs. That's roughly equivalent to the average amount of gas taxes we don't pay.

Eventually that's likely to be replaced by a uniform mileage/GVWR-based fee that will replace most road fuel taxes. We've been furiously studying the matter for years.

Since most EVs are heavier than similar-sized vehicles, they cause at least as much, if not more, road wear. But they contribute no spilled/dripped fuel or lubricants and almost no brake dust.

I don't feel super guilty about my road wear contribution because the arterial road I live on also serves two cement companies and hosts dozens of cement trucks a day.

I think Michigan is working on a mileage based fee for EV's.

Supposedly the owner will have to report the mileage on January 1 and pay a per mile 'road tax' for the fuel taxes not paid over the last year.