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Electric Vehicles

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Dr. Keith said:
Cost of ownership is higher with hybrids. You pay for a charging station in your garage and oil changes every 3-6 months. It is a compromise that works for some, but everyone I’ve talked to says they wished they had bought a full EV or waited until full EV were better.
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My EV isn't a hybrid, but it does have an onboard generator (range extender) so it has most of the same pros and cons as a plugin hybrid. And ... having driven it for a couple of years, I would rather that I had bought an EV without the REX for pretty much the reasons you mention. I have only used about ten gallons of gas in three years, so I have driven less than 500 miles using gas.

I can see plug-in hybrids or EVs with range extenders being useful for things like fleet vehicles. I read that UPS is considering using electric delivery trucks with range extenders. One specific use for them was to make deliveries in London where a gas-powered truck might not be allowed.
 
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Google explains it pretty well. I was unaware of the concept behind it.

Seems like an odd setup. Since that little engine can’t come close to powering the car on its own, I wonder if replacing the space used by that engine and it’s fuel and supports system with additional battery capacity might have made more sense. But I’m not an engineer and I assume BMW has some pretty decent ones working for them. And it sounds like it solved some legal issues about needing to still call it an EV as opposed to a PHEV.

Are you satisfied overall with this implementation?
 
Fast Eddie B said:
Google explains it pretty well. I was unaware of the concept behind it.

Seems like an odd setup. Since that little engine can’t come close to powering the car on its own, I wonder if replacing the space used by that engine and it’s fuel and supports system with additional battery capacity might have made more sense. But I’m not an engineer and I assume BMW has some pretty decent ones working for them. And it sounds like it solved some legal issues about needing to still call it an EV as opposed to a PHEV.

Are you satisfied overall with this implementation?
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The engine isn't intended to power the car. It acts as a generator to add range. BMW marketed it as a way to reach a charger once the battery is nearly depleted (we call it "limp home mode"). But you can reprogram the car to allow the generator to run when the battery is at a higher state of charge. When making a longer trip, I will run tne generator while on the highway where road noise is louder than the engine so I have battery left at my destination and can drive silently at slower speeds. The system works well and the two-gallon gas tank adds about 80 miles of range (and can be refilled quickly ... though I still feel silly pulling up to a pump in an EV).

But, as I said before, I haven't used the range extender generator very much so if I had it to do over, I would have bought the version of the car without the range extender. That version is less expensive, doesn't require as much maintenance, or repairs, and gets slightly greater electric range.

The engine is a repurposed scooter engine, so it isn't very large or heavy. So, a car without it probably wouldn't have space.for.a larger battery. But its weight and the weight of the gas does reduce the electric range by about 10 or 20%.

It did a good job, though, of eliminating "range anxiety" when I was deciding to buy an EV for the first time.
 
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RecoveringYuppy said:
Not particularly relevant and I'm not interested in pursuing this.
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This started with me correcting a post on a non-existent "4000A electrical service" that doesn't exist and isn't required, but you demanded an explanation of how electricity distribution really works, so I provided one. I was then told that the "real point" was about cost so I explained why cost isn't an issue either but now you proclaim it's "not particularly relevant".


If you were not particularly interested in discussing these things you should have refrained from commenting in the first place, you'd have save us both some time and save me some effort.
 
Dr. Keith said:
I pay for it every month. Do you think my electric provider is a charity? Your utopia is weird.

$3.5 billion is a drop in the bucket when it comes to transportation investments.

We are constantly adding to grid capacity already. While also trying to reduce consumption elsewhere.

If there is demand there is no way to stop it from happening. If there is not demand there is no way to force it to happen.

I think the demand will be there as more people try electric vehicles.

You think people would rather pay more to have a hybrid. But then you also say my position is unpossible.

You may be right that people are more willing to pay for hybrids. We’ll see.

I just don’t see the hill as that high to climb.
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On that first point, electric companies are regulated monopoly providers, and as such one of the things they are compelled to do is to distribute the cost of most infrastructure improvements. While they may well charge extra for the service once it's installed, it's likely that a large proportion of its cost is distributed among consumers.
 
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lomiller said:
Why Not? I think it's pretty self explanatory?



Why is that relevant to the exchange in question? The statement is still wrong whether I explain how it's actually done or not.

Since you ask however, I'm more that willing to answer. They would be connected to a 3-phase transformer just like any commercial building would. Exactly how many transformers you'd need would depend on how big they are and how fast you want to charge.
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I would just add to this that while this is likely true in urban areas, it is not in more rural areas, where three phase service is not provided everywhere, and where the capacity of high voltage lines is limited.

In my small town, for example, there is three phase service only to a select few businesses at one end of the town. Since it requires added overhead wiring as well as substation transformers, it's an expensive process and not done routinely. This has become a heated issue here, as the parts of town in which there is space and "ampacity" to add a substantial amount of solar power to the grid do not have three phase, and thus cannot support higher kilowatt sites. And the part of town that can do so is near 100 percent capacity, so though the connection is possible the ampacity is not there, and since an upgrade would require a large investment in a transformer substation, it's not happening.

Note: for reasons not entirely clear where calculations are made on the bark of a shade tree with a dull pencil, a three phase line can actually handle more than three times the solar feed of a single phase one.

This does not mean you could not have fast chargers out here, but the number and placement of them might have to be quite specific. If the amps are in the neighborhood it's not so hard to get them into a car, but out here in the boonies, they do not grow on trees.
 
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Lot's of new EV's coming out. The new issue of Consumer Reports highlights 6 models coming out this year, and lists a whole lot more in the pipeline. I'm very interested in the new Subaru which was developed in cooperation with Toyota (who will offer their own version of the same vehicle).
 
Cheaper Chinese models should start arriving in the UK this year, that should upset the market.

I was also listening to a podcast with a battery safety guy (bev's catch fire less than a tenth as often as ice cars) and he was saying 5 to 600 mile range from a full charge will be "normal" by the end of the decade
 
bruto said:
I would just add to this that while this is likely true in urban areas, it is not in more rural areas, where three phase service is not provided everywhere, and where the capacity of high voltage lines is limited.

In my small town, for example, there is three phase service only to a select few businesses at one end of the town. Since it requires added overhead wiring as well as substation transformers, it's an expensive process and not done routinely.
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Except for the "last mile" Power distribution is all 3-phase, power never gets sent any significant distance as anything but 3-phase. In your town what is likely happening is that you have 3 single phase transformers acting as a 3-phase load and each of those single phase transformers supplies power to a specific area of the town. There may be limitations on where 3-phase power can be supplied but there will almost always be someplace in even a small town where it's available.

Note that we are talking specifically about commercial charging stations so having to locate them in one part of town is perfectly acceptable. (the statement that kicked this all off was that "sure a 400A service is available, but what how are you going to get a 4000A service to run 10 of them" 10 fast charging stations is only going to happen in a commercial setting.) If you want to put fast charging station in your house that will charge up an electric vehicle in a few hours instead of taking all night, you don't need 3-phase. High amp services suitable for this are generally quite readily available in rural areas because farmers frequently need much more power that urban households.
 
lomiller said:
Except for the "last mile" Power distribution is all 3-phase, power never gets sent any significant distance as anything but 3-phase. In your town what is likely happening is that you have 3 single phase transformers acting as a 3-phase load and each of those single phase transformers supplies power to a specific area of the town. There may be limitations on where 3-phase power can be supplied but there will almost always be someplace in even a small town where it's available.

Note that we are talking specifically about commercial charging stations so having to locate them in one part of town is perfectly acceptable. (the statement that kicked this all off was that "sure a 400A service is available, but what how are you going to get a 4000A service to run 10 of them" 10 fast charging stations is only going to happen in a commercial setting.) If you want to put fast charging station in your house that will charge up an electric vehicle in a few hours instead of taking all night, you don't need 3-phase. High amp services suitable for this are generally quite readily available in rural areas because farmers frequently need much more power that urban households.
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No. My town gets its power from two different directions. There is a substation in a town south of us which distributes three phase, and the three phase lines go a short way to the south end of the town. Further extension of three phase power would require added overhead lines, which the power company will not do because to increase the total power carried by the lines would require major upgrading of the substation. So it would likely be possible to set up a fast charging station near that end of town (assuming that the power consumption at any one time is not all that high) if it is conveniently near existing three phase lines. The north end of town gets single phase only from a substation north of the town. There are no transformer substations within the town, and the power company has no plans to upgrade in the foreseeable future.

It is of course true that in some part of the town three phase could be used and theoretically could supply a charging station, but my point was simply that placement is not at the convenience of location but at the convenience of power.

For individual chargers ironically we on the north, single phase, end of town are probably better off, since our little slice of the grid is still below capacity, and an individual could, probably, get a nice fat high amperage service for a single charger.

But realistically, if one wanted a supercharger and did not want to fund one's own, in this town at least, the closest commercial one is now 35 miles away, and in the foreseeable future will likely be between 9 and 20 away. There are six Tesla supercharge locations in Vermont at present.
 
I took delivery on Wednesday of a new Renault Zoe (it's a small car - I have no need for anything bigger). It's rather nice, but all these fancy bells-and-whistles are, I must admit, a bit daunting. Gone are the days when cars were simple devices. Anyway, I'm pleased to no longer have to pay the high price of petrol :)
 
Blue Bubble said:
I took delivery on Wednesday of a new Renault Zoe (it's a small car - I have no need for anything bigger). It's rather nice, but all these fancy bells-and-whistles are, I must admit, a bit daunting. Gone are the days when cars were simple devices. Anyway, I'm pleased to no longer have to pay the high price of petrol :)
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Did you manage to get the grant for charger installation in time? Ending April this year.
 
I've just been watching this video on the Fully Charged channel.

Ultra-cheap electric car conversion kit

A long way to go, obviously, but this is the kind of thing I've been dreaming about for years. Quick swap out of an ICE and replacement with an electric unit and you can give so many cars a new lease of life, especially those that have a blown engine but are otherwise sound.

Usual caveats apply but for certain use cases it looks like a winner to me.
 
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