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I Gotta Admit I Really Like The Vulcan


19Walt93

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Gas prices had very little to do with the economic collapse in 2009, and actually dropped when the economy tanked.
Gas is around $2.40 here now, during the recession it was over $4 here. Ask anyone who sold cars, $4 gas hurt the economy. The problem wasn't the price so much as the rate that the price went up. Energy prices drastically affect the economy and the country as a whole and should be regulated somewhat. NH has some of the highest electric rates in the country, partly due to the cost of repairing power lines in our climate, so few people use electric heat here. An electric vehicle is apt to cost more than a gas engine vehicle when total cost of ownership is calculated. We put a battery in a hybrid Escape in 2016 and the claim total was over $14,000. A hybrid Escape uses regeneration for braking below 40 mph, the ABS module alone cost $4000 in 2017 because it has to create a fake brake pedal feel. You don't want to talk about the expense of repairing a wrecked one.
 


stmitch

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Yes, charging overnight works great for you, or for a few, but when everyone does it then there is no longer any "off peak" time for the grid. Transformers and other current carrying equipment never get to cool down, there is less time available for maintenance, etc. If something fails the system will be at higher capacity more of the time, making that failure more of a problem. A system without excess capacity is inherently more vulnerable. We don't have more capacity because just like all of our infrastructure we can't even afford to maintain what our forbears built, let alone improve it.
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.

As for higher charge rates, when energy is transferred there are losses, and those go up with higher rates of transfer. You can't get out of these effects, it's not a technology or engineering problem, it's physics and thermodynaics.
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.


"Renewable Energy" is an oxymoron that confuses people. Energy flows from higher concentration to lower, it flows once and is dissipated as heat at the background temperature of the system (heat death), doing work along the way. It can never be renewed. For the most part fossil fuel and so-called renewable energy are all solar energy - fossil fuels are old solar energy and "renewables" are the real-time flows of solar energy. You can do a lot with the real time flows of energy, it's what mankind had for almost all of our existence. If you want to see what really smart people can do with that, look to history. Our industrial world was built on the stored energy of millions of years ago, and the idea that we can do all the same with the real time solar energy flows is absurd.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel - it puts less nasty toxins in the air than coal, but plenty of CO2 (if you are concerned about that), and is also quite finite in supply.
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.

EVs cost a fortune. If I keep some older vehicles running well and avoid buying one I will be well ahead for a very long time, even with expensive fuel. The cost of electricity is dependent on the cost of the fossil fuel it is generated from.
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.
 

stmitch

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Gas is around $2.40 here now, during the recession it was over $4 here. Ask anyone who sold cars, $4 gas hurt the economy. The problem wasn't the price so much as the rate that the price went up. Energy prices drastically affect the economy and the country as a whole and should be regulated somewhat. NH has some of the highest electric rates in the country, partly due to the cost of repairing power lines in our climate, so few people use electric heat here. An electric vehicle is apt to cost more than a gas engine vehicle when total cost of ownership is calculated. We put a battery in a hybrid Escape in 2016 and the claim total was over $14,000. A hybrid Escape uses regeneration for braking below 40 mph, the ABS module alone cost $4000 in 2017 because it has to create a fake brake pedal feel. You don't want to talk about the expense of repairing a wrecked one.
Here's what fuel prices did from 2008-2018:


The biggest reasons that people weren't buying new cars were because there were lots of jobs lost, and banks quit lending to many of those that still had jobs.

As for EV repair costs, they can be high if you do unnecessary things like replacing an entire battery pack when it's likely just a handful of cells that needs to be replaced. That's like replacing an entire engine when a fuel injector goes bad. IN general, they cost much less to maintain each year than an ICE. NYC has one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the US. Here are their average costs per vehicle:

Note the Fusion variants in this data. As the amount of electrification increases, maintenance costs decrease. The PHEV Fusion cost them an average of $1100/yr less in maintenance than the standard ICE model.

I generally think that Tesla makes overpriced junk, but there's an all Tesla taxi service in CA that puts tons of miles on them and they have some really interesting long term data on their costs:

 

franklin2

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An electric vehicle is apt to cost more than a gas engine vehicle when total cost of ownership is calculated. We put a battery in a hybrid Escape in 2016 and the claim total was over $14,000. A hybrid Escape uses regeneration for braking below 40 mph, the ABS module alone cost $4000 in 2017 because it has to create a fake brake pedal feel. You don't want to talk about the expense of repairing a wrecked one.
We have had several interesting vehicles go to auction where I work because of brake problems that were too expensive to fix. I have the opportunity to bid on these vehicles, which really interested me in how they were configured, but all of them had braking problems and I found out like you said, the braking system is tied into the regeneration/hybrid system which makes it complex and expensive to repair. Two of them were Honda Civic hydrids and one of them was a Chevy 4x4 truck hybrid.

I found the Chevy truck hybrid very interesting. Talk about being empty under the hood. It did not have a power steering, electric power steering. No alternator and no starter. The charging and starting was all done with a motor between the engine and the transmission. But this truck had brake problems, and I found a lot of people with these had the same problems and they were very expensive to fix if they got fixed at all.
 

19Walt93

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The statistics are never complete, new vehicles have start/stop that kills the engine every time the vehicle comes to a stop to increase gas mileage ratings- the cost of replacing starters and batteries doesn't count unless you're the person paying for them. I'm sure some first responders and techs have been killed by the high voltage systems, if you touch it there is no second chance, but we'll never hear about it. A major problem is generating enough power to charge all the electric vehicles.
The residents in the next town got up in arms when a man wanted to build a solar farm on some land he owned that wasn't suitable for building much else. He gave up and built it behind the hardware store in my town, it doesn't make any noise or smoke, doesn't send kids to our school system or call the cops, just adds to the tax base and generates electricity. We had an article on our ballot to prohibit any wind farms from being built in town and it baffled me when it passed. People thought it would "ruin the natural beauty" of the town. Wind power on some of our mountains makes way more sense than solar panels this far north. In the early days of electricity the Rockefeller who owned the Woodstock Inn hated the looks of power lines so much he paid to have them all buried. No one notices power poles and lines anymore. Vt had a functionally nuclear power plant for years but they forced it to close, 600 good paying jobs disappeared and now they have to buy power from out of state.
 

pjtoledo

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wind farms eh?

my electric supplier is mostly "fossil fuel" with some nuclear.

on my electric bill there is a separate line in the breakdown for CARBON CREDITS :flipoff:

my electric supplier has to buy CARBON CREDITS from a non-carboner to satisfy the greenies and whatever.

care to guess who sells CARBON CREDITS ? yep, the wind and solar farms. I suspect that's half the reason they exist. plus all the government money they get.




OK, back the the not-so-mighty Vulcan. it was a great engine in my Taurus, in a 4wd Ranger it's doable & dependable.
 

pjtoledo

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Here's what fuel prices did from 2008-2018:


The biggest reasons that people weren't buying new cars were because there were lots of jobs lost, and banks quit lending to many of those that still had jobs.

As for EV repair costs, they can be high if you do unnecessary things like replacing an entire battery pack when it's likely just a handful of cells that needs to be replaced. That's like replacing an entire engine when a fuel injector goes bad. IN general, they cost much less to maintain each year than an ICE. NYC has one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the US. Here are their average costs per vehicle:

Note the Fusion variants in this data. As the amount of electrification increases, maintenance costs decrease. The PHEV Fusion cost them an average of $1100/yr less in maintenance than the standard ICE model.

I generally think that Tesla makes overpriced junk, but there's an all Tesla taxi service in CA that puts tons of miles on them and they have some really interesting long term data on their costs:


Hmmm, I wonder if they included the cost of battery replacement for long term users?
 

Roert42

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They are fleet vehicles, so I suspect they run them till failure and auction them. Or maybe they have not had them long enough that it factors into their cost of ownership.
 

RonD

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Taxi's are also Fleet vehicles, as the miles pile up on EV's, so there is an average cost per mile to operate them, I think you will see more EV taxi's in cities where trips are short in Miles but long in Time, lol
Auto stop/start helps ICE in these types of trips but the maintenance costs is about 4 times higher than EV as the miles pile up
 

stmitch

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Full battery replacement isn't typically needed. A battery pack is made of a whole bunch of individual battery cells, and it only takes a handful of them to go bad before the whole pacl starts to lose it's mojo. Prius guys and Insight owners have been replacing individual cells in these packs for years now and saving thousands in the process. You can find individual cells for $20-30/piece. Yes, if you take an EV to a dealer and pay full price to have them swap out the entire pack it's pretty costly. The same holds true if you take an ICE with a bad injector to the dealer and they sell you a brand new engine.


If you look at the link I provided to the Tesla taxi service, they've got cars showing minimal battery degradation with 300k+ miles on them. Tesla does a lot of things wrong, but their battery management is pretty good. If you had an ICE vehicle with 300k miles and were suddenly told that it needed a new engine, that's a repair that's going to cost several thousand dollars too isn't it? Would you be upset and worried about the cost, or would you shrug your shoulders and say "well, it's an old vehicle and that's pretty expected"? When you buy an ICE, do you budget for engine replacement or count that into your cost of ownership? How is that any different from getting the same lifespan from a battery?

Here's the full maintenance history Including costs of one of those Tesla Taxis through 430k miles. It needed battery replacement at 324k miles:

 
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franklin2

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When you buy an ICE, do you budget for engine replacement or count that into your cost of ownership? How is that any different from getting the same lifespan from a battery?
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.
 

stmitch

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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.
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.
 
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85_Ranger4x4

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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.
The last time I replaced an engine I paid $200 for a used one... used 5 speed was $150.

 

stmitch

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The last time I replaced an engine I paid $200 for a used one... used 5 speed was $150.
Yeah, and you can DIY a lot of battery cell replacement etc for cheap too. The price isn't drastically different between EV battery replacement and Engine/trans replacement in an ICE as long as you're comparing apples to apples. Either one can be DIY with cheap used parts, or outsourced at a dealer for thousands of dollars. The only thing that's different is that EVs are new and we're all more comfortable with ICEs because they're what we're used to.
 
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85_Ranger4x4

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Yeah, and you can DIY a lot of battery cell replacement etc for cheap too. The price isn't drastically different between EV battery replacement and Engine/trans replacement in an ICE as long as you're comparing apples to apples. Either one can be DIY with cheap used parts, or outsourced at a dealer for thousands of dollars
A used normal lead acid car battery is almost a third the price of a transmission at a jy...
 

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