I Gotta Admit I Really Like The Vulcan

[19Walt93]

People definitely do think about cost of ownership. They pay a little more and get a Toyota or some other vehicle with a known good longevity record. We are in here messing with old Ford Rangers because we are cheap.

If I had an hour I could give my opinion on "Toyotas or some other vehicle with a known good longevity record" and other myths. Why would anyone want a vehicle built by lazy, stupid Americans like us?

 

[racsan]

I love my ICE’s and ford rangers.

 

[franklin2]

Agreed on all counts. The point was nothing mechanical lasts forever. If you're not concerned about the cost of replacing a transmission at 200k and an engine at 300k in an ICE, then why is EV battery replacement cost at 300k so scary? If you don't plan to own a vehicle when the miles get that high it's obviously not a concern, and if you do plan to own a vehicle at that point, they're similar costs, and both have the same effect on total cost of ownership. If batteries were only lasting 60k miles, and couldn't be repaired for way less than having a dealer replace the whole pack, then the math for EVs would be pretty terrible. But that's not what the data that we have shows. All of the data that I've ever seen for cost comparison between ICEs and EVs seems to agree that EVs have much lower total cost of ownership over the lifespan of the vehicle (which is usually 150k or more) even when serviced at a dealer. The cost per mile is much lower, so the more miles the EV has, the greater the cost savings.

Most batteries are ticking time bombs, if I had a EV the battery would be replaced before 100k because I just don't drive that much. I am lucky to get 10K per year on a vehicle, and that would be one I drive to work everyday. I don't know about the newest batteries they make, but most batteries are considered old at 5 years, though on most of my alarm systems I can usually get 7 years out of them before they croak. I have had some car batteries last over 10 years but that is not the norm. If you figure only driving 10k a year, and giving the battery technology the benefit of the doubt, I bet I could not get over 100k out of the EV battery.

I am not against EV, I actually was building one till I ran out of money and could not afford the batteries to get it on the road.

 

[stmitch]

A used normal lead acid car battery is almost a third the price of a transmission at a jy...

A 30 second search returned Prius battery cells under $35 each:

Toyota Prius Hybrid Battery Cell 8.2v | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Toyota Prius Hybrid Battery Cell 8.2v at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

If you're capable enough that you're willing to do junkyard engine/trans swaps, you're probably capable of replacing a couple of bad cells in a battery pack.

 

[stmitch]

Most batteries are ticking time bombs, if I had a EV the battery would be replaced before 100k because I just don't drive that much. I am lucky to get 10K per year on a vehicle, and that would be one I drive to work everyday. I don't know about the newest batteries they make, but most batteries are considered old at 5 years, though on most of my alarm systems I can usually get 7 years out of them before they croak. I have had some car batteries last over 10 years but that is not the norm. If you figure only driving 10k a year, and giving the battery technology the benefit of the doubt, I bet I could not get over 100k out of the EV battery.

I am not against EV, I actually was building one till I ran out of money and could not afford the batteries to get it on the road.

As EVs become more common, and the earliest ones grow older we're finding that not to be true. I've already posted multiple links to Teslas with more than 300k on their original battery packs. There are tons of Leafs, Bolts, and hybrids like Volts/Prius, etc with many hundreds of thousands of miles on their odometers. Some of these things drive more in a month than you do in a year. Outside of some very early air cooled battery packs, battery replacement just doesn't need to be a significant concern. At least anymore than one might be concerned about engine or transmission replacement. If you want to be concerned about longevity with EVs, it's not the hardware that should concern you, it's the software.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

Interesting.

Personally I don't even trust jy batteries lol.

At 8.2v... How many batteries does a prius carry?

 

[franklin2]

As EVs become more common, and the earliest ones grow older we're finding that not to be true. I've already posted multiple links to Teslas with more than 300k on their original battery packs. There are tons of Leafs, Bolts, and hybrids like Volts/Prius, etc with many hundreds of thousands of miles on their odometers. Some of these things drive more in a month than you do in a year. The batteries are just not a significant concern. If you want to be concerned about longevity with EVs, it's not the hardware that should concern you, it's the software.

I didn't make the point in my post clear enough. A ICE automobile can last many years if only driven occasionally, needing minor repairs. An EV's battery is going to go bad after a certain period of time, even if it sits around with not many miles, it's going to need to be replaced.

 

[stmitch]

I didn't make the point in my post clear enough. A ICE automobile can last many years if only driven occasionally, needing minor repairs. An EV's battery is going to go bad after a certain period of time, even if it sits around with not many miles, it's going to need to be replaced.

I'm not sure that's true? Oil, coolant, fuel, rubber hoses/seals/gaskets etc all break down over time when a vehicle sits and an EV has a lot fewer of those things. And again, entire battery packs very rarely go bad. If for some reason the pack loses voltage, it's often just a single cell or three that are the problem, and those are fairly economical to replace

 

[8thTon]

But not everybody will be charging at the same time, just as not everybody currently fuels up at the same time. If you have an EV with a 90kwh battery pack that averages a very realistic 3 miles driven per kwh you've got a range of 270 miles. It might be a bit more during warm more moderate months, and most EVs are capable of around 4mi/kwh right now, so using 3mi/kwh seems a bit on the conservative/realistic side. The average American drives around 12k miles per year, which averages out to 33 miles per day. Lets go ahead and double that since we're being extra conservative with our numbers and say that 66 miles are driven every day. With a (relatively poor) efficiency of 3 mi/kwh, our theoretical EV uses 22kwh of electricity each day, or just under 1/4 of it's battery capacity. So our EV driver can plug in every day and refill 1/4 of the battery, or they can plug in every 4 days and fill the whole thing, or anything in between. Just like we currently fuel our vehicles at different times based on situation and need. If the EV is smaller/lighter/more efficient, or the driver has a lighter foot and can achieve better than 3mi/kwh then the charging demands are even lower.

You started out trying to quantify it but ran out of data. Of course everyone will not need a full charge every day, just as they don't need a full tank of fuel every day. Nonetheless the totally energy normally supplied by liquid fuels would need to be supplied by the electric grid, primarily at night. If instead a lot of it needs to happen during on peak, that's even worse.

Your initial complaint was about time needed to charge, not overall thermodynamic efficiency of the system, so it seems like the goalposts kind of moved here but I'll roll with it. Putting fuel into an ICE is a pretty thermodynamically inefficient process too when you consider all of the pumping/refining/transporting/etc that's required. While addressing your concern about charge time, I simply pointed out that the time required to charge an EV can be less than the time needed to fill the tank in an ICE if a person charges at home, and that charge times are dropping pretty rapidly for any cases where charging at work or home isn't an option. It's not yet the same, but it's getting to less inconvenient all the time for the user. Bonus to the EV owner that charges from home/work is that slower charging is more efficient and better for battery health.

There are multiple problems in trying to create an EV based transportation system, with time to charge being a big one that cannot be dealt with by increasing rates of energy transfer, unless one is willing to accept big losses. Transferring energy into matter cannot be compared to moving around already charged material (especially energy dense, easily portable liquids), as it is two very different operations. Rapid charging REQUIRES big losses, it's not going to change with technology improvements. Thermodynamic effects don't apply the same way to moving the charged material as they do to transferring the energy - it's only mechanical/pumping losses.

Renewables aren't just solar. There are places where solar makes sense, and places where it doesn't. Same is true for wind, or hydro or tidal. Lets use the tech that's most appropriate given the location. That's what humans have done for as long as there have been humans. Use the resources around you. They're called "renewables" because the time it takes to renew them is several orders of magnitude shorter than the old way. It's a lot faster and easier to generate electricity with one of those technologies than it is to wait a few hundred thousand years for organic compounds to decompose into the earth in order to be pumped out later. So it's not perfect, but just like natural gas replacing coal, it's an incremental improvement and a pretty decent one in my opinion.

It's almost all solar - wind and hydro are both driven by solar energy. Tidal perhaps not but there's almost none of that and it's not very efficient. Solar energy flows every day, doing work along the way. You are still talking about trying to run an industrial society on the real time flows of solar energy rather than on the stored energy which it was built with. There is no evidence that is possible, and none of the very smart societies of the past was ever able to harvest enough spare energy from the real time flows to do such a thing.

New vehicles are expensive period, regardless of what's powering them. You are correct that keeping an existing vehicle on the road can be the better financial decision. That being said, there are something like 16-17million new passenger vehicles sold each year in the US so people don't seem to mind. The average new vehicle transaction price is in the ballpark of $37-38k these days. You can get a brand new Chevy Bolt for under $20k right now. A Hyundai Ioniq EV or Kona EV is in the mid 20s. These are high quality, new vehicles with warranties and decent EV range for 40% less than an average new vehicle. And they'll have much lower running costs and maintenance costs than an ICE too. So if you're going to buy new, as millions of people do each year, I can certainly make a financial case for an EV over an average new ICE.

The cost of electricity does depend somewhat on the source of generation, but the prices are much more stable than liquid fuels, and often lower if one can charge at home. Most states have regulatory boards that have to approve rate hikes. Nobody is regulating prices on liquid fuels in any way, so we get $0.10/gal swings in a matter of hours because of the weather in a different part of the country, or because some refinery somewhere is down for maintenance, or some oligarchs in other countries decide to play geo-political "chicken" on a global scale. Pricing uncertainty is usually bad for any person or business with a budget.

I've been in some very nice EVs, all of which were manufactured and sold at a massive loss, subsidized by the taxpayers. Also, I've never purchased a new vehicle for more than $25k, which is why I consider EVs to be nice second vehicles for the well off. Other than the power train EVs are just like every other vehicle, with all the same systems and usually more expensive materials in an attempt to keep weight down. My Dad's electric focus will need a complete brake replacement because he drives so slow that he almost never activated the mechanical brakes, and they rusted to hell. Given the higher weight tires will wear more etc. They're still cars.

Texans might be able to offer you some alternative electricity price examples right now.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

I didn't make the point in my post clear enough. A ICE automobile can last many years if only driven occasionally, needing minor repairs. An EV's battery is going to go bad after a certain period of time, even if it sits around with not many miles, it's going to need to be replaced.

For a road vehicle around here the thing will rust in half before it has major powertrain problems if the powertrain gets pretty much any kind of care. 300k is getting pretty long in the tooth. I don't think an EV is going to be significantly different.

Without rust... things will run a long time. My second most heavily used tractor was rerung in the late 70's, bores are factory from 1946. It is a cultivating/hay raking machine...

My main one was rebuilt in the early 90's after it leaked oil out powering a sawmill and spun the mains. Heavy tillage and snow pushing are its specialty.

 

[cbxer55]

Yes, the 3.0l Vulcan was built to last
Needs the 4.10 to keep RPMs high

Not great for automatics unless shift points are set high enough

Makes best power/torque at 3,500rpms, most engines do that at 2,500rpms, so people would drive it and shift at 3,000rpms thinking this thing has no power
Be like shifting any other engine at 2,000rpms, never see the power band

Gotta get the RPMs up and keep them up if you want the power from this engine, but that's the DESIGN

Ranger 2.8l, 2.9l and 4.0l were Cologne designed engines, Ford Germany
3.0l Vulcan was strictly US Ford designed

I was thinking of having my 3.73s changed to 4.10s. With my intake and exhaust, the high rpm thing is exaggerated. I mainly shift mine manually (Auto) to keep the rpms in an appropriate range.

 

[stmitch]

Nonetheless the totally energy normally supplied by liquid fuels would need to be supplied by the electric grid, primarily at night.

What year do you estimate this need will exist? CA will stop the sale of new ICEs in 2035. For simplicity, lets assume that all 50 states follow their lead (obviously they aren't likely to all ban ICEs at the same time). About 16-17 million new passenger vehicles are sold per year in the US. There were about 275 million passenger vehicles registered in the US in 2019

That's about 16 years of sales if everybody banned ICE sales at the same time (unlikely) before the entire US fleet was EV. That would be 2051 if the timeline starts at 2035. I'm sure they'll want to have that capacity available long before 100% of the fleet is EV, but I think we've got a couple of decades before things get tight due to EVs.

There are multiple problems in trying to create an EV based transportation system, with time to charge being a big one that cannot be dealt with by increasing rates of energy transfer, unless one is willing to accept big losses. Transferring energy into matter cannot be compared to moving around already charged material (especially energy dense, easily portable liquids), as it is two very different operations. Rapid charging REQUIRES big losses, it's not going to change with technology improvements. Thermodynamic effects don't apply the same way to moving the charged material as they do to transferring the energy - it's only mechanical/pumping losses.

The real question is, what percentage of EV users will be using these public facing, less efficient fast chargers? How many miles driven will come from slower, more efficient charging at home or work? And systemically, is that fast charging inefficiency + slow charging better or worse than nearly everybody currently using a liquid fuel in vehicles that are only extracting ~35% of the energy stored in these liquid fuels? Right now about 80% of EV charging is done at home:

Charging at Home

Because residential charging is convenient and inexpensive, most plug-in electric vehicle (also known as electric cars or EVs) drivers do more than...

www.energy.gov

That may change over time, but nearly anybody with a garage already has access to more efficient charging that's both cheaper and easier/more convenient, so it will always be a higher percentage than public fast chargers. If you had a fuel pump in your garage that was $0.20/gal cheaper than those at the gas stations, how often would you use gas stations? That's essentially the choice for most EV owners. The only people that use public chargers are those that have to, or those on long trips. The inefficiencies of the occasional use of public fast charging are not nearly as concerning to me as a series of 35-40% efficient ICEs pumping fossil fuels out of the ground, transporting them to refineries, transporting the refined fuels to fueling stations where they are then pumped into more vehicles that turn the majority of the energy stored in that fuel into waste heat/noise/pumping losses. How much energy is used just to get a gallon into the tank of a vehicle that can't even convert half of the energy in the fuel into propulsion? Detractors always want to bring up transmission losses in electricity, but there are massive transmission losses in our current fueling infrastructure that shouldn't be over looked.

It's almost all solar - wind and hydro are both driven by solar energy. Tidal perhaps not but there's almost none of that and it's not very efficient. Solar energy flows every day, doing work along the way. You are still talking about trying to run an industrial society on the real time flows of solar energy rather than on the stored energy which it was built with. There is no evidence that is possible, and none of the very smart societies of the past was ever able to harvest enough spare energy from the real time flows to do such a thing.

Why can't this renewable energy be stored? It doesn't have to be real time. Store it in old EV batteries. Store it in a liquid like hydrogen. Store it in water and use gravity.

I've been in some very nice EVs, all of which were manufactured and sold at a massive loss, subsidized by the taxpayers. Also, I've never purchased a new vehicle for more than $25k, which is why I consider EVs to be nice second vehicles for the well off. Other than the power train EVs are just like every other vehicle, with all the same systems and usually more expensive materials in an attempt to keep weight down. My Dad's electric focus will need a complete brake replacement because he drives so slow that he almost never activated the mechanical brakes, and they rusted to hell. Given the higher weight tires will wear more etc. They're still cars.

I can't really tell what your point is here. Are you upset about new vehicle prices? Are you upset about subsidization? Because the oil and gas industry gets a whole lot of taxpayer dollars too. For someone as concerned about thermodynamic efficiency as you seem to be, I'd think that you'd be thrilled to see a vehicle that didn't use it's mechanical brakes and turn a bunch of kinetic energy into useless waste heat. That's not a bug, that's a feature. I'm not saying there's any perfect solution, or that EVs are flawless at all. But a lot of the negative things that people come up with aren't really a big deal.

Texans might be able to offer you some alternative electricity price examples right now.

The people responsible for the electrical grid in TX said this week that 60% of the lost power in the state would've come from "thermal" (coal/gas) power plants, while wind and solar were responsible for 40% of the lost power. It's fun to crack on the treehuggers and all, but glass houses aren't a great place to be throwing those stones.

Grid operator restores more power overnight

News releases published by ERCOT.

www.ercot.com

 

[MikeG]

Grid is broken here, that I can assure you. If it wasn't for a fireplace (stove) insert, I'd be wearing insulated coveralls INSIDE the house. A friend, without a fireplace, that is exactly what he did.

Plugging more shit into the (non-functional) grid does not help things.

Wind doesn't always blow (over the past week I'd estimate the wind velocity less than 4mph most of the time (here), and wind turbines can freeze/ice up. Plus most of them are hundreds of miles away (where the wind blows) and the cost of maintaining the power lines isn't free. That isn't the entire story of why ERCOT went tits-up, but it didn't help either. Solar (with govt subsidies!!!) is great, here, in the SUMMER (after the rest of the taxpayers pick up part of the tab). Not so much in the winter. Tides? Yeah right.... Texas gulf coast, couple of feet, maybe.

A Tesla costs 4x more new, than my little beer-can car did. So..... not much of a cost-benefit there. If it gets to where I can justify one.... sure, you bet. But will have to keep a second ICE vehicle for long trips. ICE works because it is portable, and quick to refuel. Will batteries get there? Maybe, dunno. Hope so, but.....

I know people with Teslas and EVs, they either live close to work, or work from home. Great for them. Doesn't work so well for me, personally.

Pollution-less electric power, great fantasy, just doesn't work out in the real world (yet). Can we get there? Hope so, but not holding my breath. Hey, wasn't nuclear going to be that????? "Too cheap to meter" and the nuke plant cost liability is a major chunk of your electric bill, if you live in Austin, and little or no power out of it. At least that was true in the recent past, haven't kept up with developments.

Want to conserve a commodity? Raise the price. That's an unpopular thing for politicians to do. But I bought my little car in 2008, after the price of fuel hit $4+ a gallon, so fuel price matters. It is still running.

 

[franklin2]

What year do you estimate this need will exist? CA will stop the sale of new ICEs in 2035. For simplicity, lets assume that all 50 states follow their lead (obviously they aren't likely to all ban ICEs at the same time). About 16-17 million new passenger vehicles are sold per year in the US. There were about 275 million passenger vehicles registered in the US in 2019

That's about 16 years of sales if everybody banned ICE sales at the same time (unlikely) before the entire US fleet was EV. That would be 2051 if the timeline starts at 2035. I'm sure they'll want to have that capacity available long before 100% of the fleet is EV, but I think we've got a couple of decades before things get tight due to EVs.




The real question is, what percentage of EV users will be using these public facing, less efficient fast chargers? How many miles driven will come from slower, more efficient charging at home or work? And systemically, is that fast charging inefficiency + slow charging better or worse than nearly everybody currently using a liquid fuel in vehicles that are only extracting ~35% of the energy stored in these liquid fuels? Right now about 80% of EV charging is done at home:

Charging at Home

Because residential charging is convenient and inexpensive, most plug-in electric vehicle (also known as electric cars or EVs) drivers do more than...

www.energy.gov

That may change over time, but nearly anybody with a garage already has access to more efficient charging that's both cheaper and easier/more convenient, so it will always be a higher percentage than public fast chargers. If you had a fuel pump in your garage that was $0.20/gal cheaper than those at the gas stations, how often would you use gas stations? That's essentially the choice for most EV owners. The only people that use public chargers are those that have to, or those on long trips. The inefficiencies of the occasional use of public fast charging are not nearly as concerning to me as a series of 35-40% efficient ICEs pumping fossil fuels out of the ground, transporting them to refineries, transporting the refined fuels to fueling stations where they are then pumped into more vehicles that turn the majority of the energy stored in that fuel into waste heat/noise/pumping losses. How much energy is used just to get a gallon into the tank of a vehicle that can't even convert half of the energy in the fuel into propulsion? Detractors always want to bring up transmission losses in electricity, but there are massive transmission losses in our current fueling infrastructure that shouldn't be over looked.



Why can't this renewable energy be stored? It doesn't have to be real time. Store it in old EV batteries. Store it in a liquid like hydrogen. Store it in water and use gravity.



I can't really tell what your point is here. Are you upset about new vehicle prices? Are you upset about subsidization? Because the oil and gas industry gets a whole lot of taxpayer dollars too. For someone as concerned about thermodynamic efficiency as you seem to be, I'd think that you'd be thrilled to see a vehicle that didn't use it's mechanical brakes and turn a bunch of kinetic energy into useless waste heat. That's not a bug, that's a feature. I'm not saying there's any perfect solution, or that EVs are flawless at all. But a lot of the negative things that people come up with aren't really a big deal.



The people responsible for the electrical grid in TX said this week that 60% of the lost power in the state would've come from "thermal" (coal/gas) power plants, while wind and solar were responsible for 40% of the lost power. It's fun to crack on the treehuggers and all, but glass houses aren't a great place to be throwing those stones.

Grid operator restores more power overnight

News releases published by ERCOT.

www.ercot.com

Not sure how passionate you are about renewable energy and the "green" thing, for all I know you are playing devils advocate here. It is fun to debate it though, I am glad the moderator police haven't stepped in yet.

My question for you is, what is your "ideal" state of our energy grid and what is going to make the tree huggers happy? What would this actually look like? Unless they have some sort of tech break through, with the technology we have now, is every square inch of US soil going to be covered with solar panels? Windmills too? And of course we will have large battery factories with battery recycling and lots of chemicals to support this?

Will we keep trucks ICE or is it practical to go electric with them also? Will the weight limits of the 18 wheelers have to raised since they can't carry as much load because of the extra battery weight? What about construction equipment running all day moving dirt around. Are there any practical tree huggers that admit the ICE will always be here and have some practical uses? Some sort of final balance of ICE versus EV?

 

[19Walt93]

I'd like to see us find a way to burn liquid fuel cleaner, we've already come a long ways in the last 50 years. My 2.0 EcoBoost Escape AWD averaged 29.3 mpg on a trip to Bar Harbor with the a/c running, an air cooled beetle would do about 28 mpg with a fresh tune up, one person in the car, going 50 mph, if the tires were properly inflated. Air Conditioning wasn't ever a dream. Nor was 75-80 on the highway. We already have the infrastructure to dispense the fuel. Higher fuel prices would make a difference but would hurt low income people most because they would be most likely to drive older less efficient vehicles. Getting alcohol out of the fuel would improve mileage, universally available E85 would allow much higher compression ratios so smaller engines could make the same power. Either way, the power grid needs to be upgraded or we'll all get a dose of Texas' experience. While we're straining to reduce out carbon emissions, China and India are burning massive amounts of coal and building more coal fired power plants. The future will be "interesting" about the same way 2020 was "interesting".