Who Killed the Electric Car?

[articulett]

I'm sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you were trying to be funny. I took your post to poke fun at Bush's trouble with language: you can "have" a debate, you can "win" a debate, but you can't "solve" a debate. You "solve" problems. So I tried to be a little funny too (though admittedly my joke doesn't work that well). I had no idea you were trying to be serious, but your original post is much less interesting that way.

I'm sorry. That is funny. I misread you. One cannot solve a debate. Thanks for clarifying.

 

[TjW]

Sorry I meant a manufacturer large enough to sell them nationwide, I didn't mean to imply that it would be one of the large current manufacturers -- someone becoming a large manfucturer of them is possible but I don't think an upstart car company won't have much chance against the big players without getting bought up (or undercut by a price war).

I don't think you can judge the viability from a consumer demand point of view until consumers actually have that choice to make. To date they haven't.

Considering the internet exists, how large a company does one have to be to sell anything nationwide?
As I recall, a company called Solectria was building electric cars before GM got into the business. People were staying away in droves. They still are. Solectria has changed their name, or merged, and is now azuredynamics. You can see their products page at: http://www.azuredynamics.com/fleet_sales.htm

Note that none of those is a private automobile. Electric propulsion can be viable in certain markets where the trips are short and predictable and either the downtime can be fairly long, or the battery packs can be switched out, as in electric forklifts.

After looking up Solectria, I did a little more general search on "electric cars", and found, after great toil, www.electriccars.com.
People are, in fact, selling electric cars right now. Why not go buy one?

Here's the funny thing. Although there are advertisements for electric cars you can buy, there are also advertisements for electric cars that will be available Real Soon Now. As I have looked in on electric cars now and again over the years, I have noticed most of the companies make it much easier to find the "Investment Opportunities" than the "Products" page.

If I were of the paranoid Conspiracy Theory frame of mind, I might consider these Real Soon Now companies as part of a conspiracy to kill the electric car. After all, why buy a lower-performing car, when this great one will be out just next year? Year after that at the latest. But Real Soon Now.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Of course they are, but in all sorts of different directions. For example, people are currently being manipulated by marketing, in the form of a movie, to believe that electric vehicles are more practical than they really are. But I don't think the marketing really matters, because marketing cannot change the reality: electric vehicles are far less functional than internal combustion vehicles (hybrids are included in the latter category). No amount of marketing can make an electric vehicle succeed, and no marketing at all is required to ensure it fails, as long as that's the case. The decision to not build such vehicles, as well as the decision to oppose legislation requiring such vehicles, is really the only sensible option available to car manufacturers right now.

How do you explain the large number of people who believe Listerine actually improves dental health when it doesn't really do anything?

The examples are endless.

 

[The Don]

The Don,

I am sure we don't share the same opinion about what is a practical car. I don't have any clients to visit, and I don't drive hundreds of kilometers (and I hope I will not have to, ever). For my way of life, even an old 2CV is more than enough.
BTW, take a look at some popular cars sold in Spain. They are quite expensive, totally underpowered and still sell well:

Here in the UK the only reason that these vehicles sell at all (in tiny numbers) is that they can be driven on a motorcycle licence.

How many cars of that type are sold in Spain ?

How does this compare to the number of more traditional superminis ?


I am glad that your lifestyle can be accommodated by a 2CV. You do realise that those things are death traps don't you ?

You also realise that the later 2CVs had 4 times the power of the electic motor mentioned earlier.

 

[Peskanov]

Ziggurat & TjW,

Here's a question: Europe appears to be a much better market for electric cars than the US (if for no other reason that countries are smaller). There's all this talk about a conspiracy to keep electric vehicles off the roads. But if they could be profitable, they SHOULD show up in Europe before they hit the US. Why aren't European automakers jumping on electric vehicles? Hell, it's not like European governments aren't willing to pour billions of euros into subsidizing a vehicle based upon top-down decisions of how transportation should work (see: Airbus 380). They're perfectly poised to take the lead. Why don't they? Well, either they're as nefarious as we Yanks are, or it really doesn't make any economic sense at this point.

Let's not forget the Chinese. They're sophisticated enough to build a mag-lev train, they have lots of coal for powerplants, and yet they're not on the electric car bandwagon either.

Also, if EVs did, by some technological breakthrough, scale up to become a significant part of the fleet, many of the expense-differentials would have to go away. Some equivalent of the gas tax would have to be levied, or they would be using the infrastructure without paying for its maintenance.
As long as they're hobby vehicles, that's okay. It would cost more to tax them than would be recovered.

Well, I first saw an EV in a travel to France. The vehicle was incredibly primitive compared to the EV1 for example.
It was very similar to this "Citicar":

http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/collection/event.php?id=3456880&lid=1

I guess the reason for using that little car was ecologic activism, I cannot think of any other one at that time (the eighties).
These days we have another reason, fuel price rocketing upwards...

You ask why don't we use more EV... Well, you already seem to have the answers but my experience is different. In my city, the goverment installed especial bycicle roads around 20 years ago. The first years nobody used them, as there were not a bycicle culture on my city (few people wanted to risk his life pedaling between cars and trucks).
Some years later, maybe 10, people started to use mountain bikes, which worked quite well in the city and had reached a good price.
And few years ago (maybe 3 or 4) cheap chinese electric scooters started flooding the market, and now is quite normal to see an executive in an scooter travelling to the office in bycicle road.

I read that these days, electric powered bycicles are very popular in China (a bit like the old Solex engines). It's a cheap transport without hassles that works well in the city. And mind that Chinesse don't give a **** about pollution! (which is, imo, the real competitive feature of EVs).

It's interesting to note that both scooters and bycicles are useful because they fit in the elevators and can be recharged home, so I wonder about the potential of street pay-per-watt plugs. As I said minicars are also popular now, but the lack of infrastructures makes them non-practical.

My personal experience says that not all the appropiate technology can reach the market. You need a mix of key componentes to make it possible.

 

[Peskanov]

Ziggurat ,

Your oil is heavily taxed. Any consumer savings that come from tax differentials in the energy source is not real, but artificial. Using such a differential to justify major structural changes doesn't make any sense. As for the cost, well, the current electric grid was installed over decades, and its cost was largely defrayed over those decades. Much of the infrastructure (namely all the wiring in your house) is factored into the construction cost of your house, rather than your electric bill.

Yes, my oil is heavily taxed because I am Europen. And my electricity also is. I bet you knowed that, but you seem to like being argumentative for the sake of it...
The average price in Europe is 13 cent. of dollar / KWh. In the USA, 9.

Who's going to cover the cost of deploying a whole new electric grid to all those parking lots and street corners? Government or private enterprise? You still haven't answered. Where is the extra generating capacity going to come from? Electric power plants don't run on oil. Increasing capacity significantly will not only cost a lot for the plants themselves, but will also drive up the price of natural gas and coal, which means that your current per-kW price will have to go up when all these electric cars plug in. Why do you have any certainty that the savings will be real?

Electric power plants don't run on oil? What did you mean with that??
I didn't answer the "who's is doing to built that?" questions because I dont see any interest in that question. In Spain, it would be probably the government financing some private companies interested in the bussines. So what?

Let me ask you another question: how do you factor city pollution in the cost? You don't, don't you? Why does my city build bycicle roads? I don't see anybody making money with that, and it costs a lot of it.

It was also something that happened gradually, it was driven by consumer demand, and it was profitable from the start.

False. Lots of companies lost money in that race. Same with gasoline. Technology startups are never easy.

Where is "here and there"? How small is this fleet you propose?

We will put one plug in Gibraltar, and another in the North Pole. Another one in your house, just to annoy you. We will paint all of them green, as symbol of ecologism. Do you also want the measures of the plugs and a description of the material?

Economy of scale matters critically, and your "small fleet" simply won't cut it.

Doesn't matter. EV's cannot take off, and will not take off, until you can get literally hundreds of thousands sold. Short of that, you simply cannot get sufficient economies of scale. And don't bother with pointing out the existence of small-volume gas-powered cars: they're really just minor alterations to large-volume cars, all the technology and the manufacturing processes are the same.

Any new technology trend starts with an small level of adoption. Next.

No, it's not trivial. Recharging a car takes a lot of power, a lot more power than a street light. Current electric grids for things like street lights cannot handle the increased load, because they weren't BUILT to handle higher loads, and would need to be upgraded. Wires have load limits on them.

It's trivial and you know it. The load of a few KW plugs in some points in the city or parking lots is nothing compared with the growth of consumption of, for example, air conditioning in my city.
Ziggurat, this is starting to get boring. Why don't you stop with the "it-is-new-tech-it-is-too-complex-to-be-possible" arguments?

The comparison is simply not equivalent. Trains offered a capability that horses simply could never provide, even from the start. The calculation of whether or not to invest in them was completely different on the most basic level. Electric vehicles do NOT provide a different capability, ONLY a different way of achieving the same thing. Replacement simply isn't the same.

EVs provide a different capability. No city pollution, smaller cost per mile.
In fact, EVs today are much more useful than the original ICE vehicles in their time, wich were much worse than horses in all aspects and were only useful as toys for rich people.

Horses were dangerous too, and the first cars were very indeed small volume productions. They only got bought at all because, as I already mentioned, they provided new capabilities that horses could not provide. Electric cars do not provide any such new capability, but rather have REDUCED functionality.

Same argument. No city pollution, less cost per mile. Less maintenance. Good enough for a lot people.

That doesn't matter, because consumers WANT to drive fast, and they're willing to pay more to do so (as evidenced by the fact that they do drive fast even though it decreases their fuel economy). The fact that electrics aren't necessarily as pathetically short-ranged as gas vehicles based solely on an energy-density calculation doesn't matter, because they're still pathetically short-ranged.

And what happens with the people who does not want to drive fast or pay for it?
I am one of them and I don't have so many options. The gas price, and the maintenance of ICE cars are very expensive. My best bet right now is a second hand car, so I can employ used part for repairments, and try to drive as less as posible to save on gas.

 

[Ziggurat]

How do you explain the large number of people who believe Listerine actually improves dental health when it doesn't really do anything?

You can fool yourself into believing that bacteria in your mouth, which you can't see and as an individual can't measure, are being killed. It's much harder to fool yourself into believing that your electric car can travel 400 miles on one charge, and that it can recharge in a few minutes. At least, not for very long. Products like Listerine get sold only because you CAN'T really tell if they're doing what you think they're doing, but it's VERY easy to tell if a car is providing the functionality you expect from it.

Try again.

 

[Ziggurat]

Yes, my oil is heavily taxed because I am Europen. And my electricity also is. I bet you knowed that, but you seem to like being argumentative for the sake of it...
The average price in Europe is 13 cent. of dollar / KWh. In the USA, 9.

Actually, I assumed that electricity is not taxed as heavily as gas. And from your figures, I think this is true. I believe gas is around two times more expensive in Europe than it is here, while electricity is only about one and a half times more expensive, according to your numbers. I'm not just trying to be argumentative, I'm trying to point out what I think is a genuine issue.

Electric power plants don't run on oil? What did you mean with that??

Fossil fuel-based power plants are pretty much all either coal or natural gas. If you change from gas-powered cars to electric-powered cars, you don't simply reduce demand for fossil fuels, you decrease demand for gas and INCREASE demand for coal and natural gas. Meaning those latter two will go up in price.

I didn't answer the "who's is doing to built that?" questions because I dont see any interest in that question.

Well, you're going to need an answer if you ever want it to actually get done.

In Spain, it would be probably the government financing some private companies interested in the bussines. So what?

In other words, government will pay for it. And if it doesn't work out, you've basically forced taxpayers to pay for your driving preference. I'd rather not do things that way.

Let me ask you another question: how do you factor city pollution in the cost? You don't, don't you?

No, I don't, because neither will most individual consumers trying to decide between an electric powered vehicle and a gas-powered vehicle. Dealing with external costs is certainly a problem, but there are no simple solutions.

False. Lots of companies lost money in that race. Same with gasoline. Technology startups are never easy.

Doesn't matter if some lost money: some made money too. The profit incentive is still what drove development. It's not driving development here not because there's a conspiracy, but because there's no indication that there is profit to be had.

Any new technology trend starts with an small level of adoption. Next.

I've already pointed this out, though: from the consumer perspective, it's NOT new technology. Consumers don't really care about how a product does something, they care about WHAT it does. And an electric car does LESS than a gas powered car. It is, from their perspective, not new technology at all (in fact, electric cars have been around for over a hundred years, so even from a technology perspective they're not really new). Truly new technologies can take off with small initial adoption because they provide new functionality. People will pay a premium, even for a spotty product, if it does something that no other product can do, and that premium allows small-volume markets to survive despite the R&D overhead. But nobody pays a premium to buy something that does less than existing products.

It's trivial and you know it.

No, it's not. Ripping up a street to install power lines is expensive. The power lines going to a street light cannot handle that much more power. Houses, in contrast, are generally BUILT with excess capacity in the lines because the builders know beforehand that power demands are likely to increase. Street-light power lines were not.

EVs provide a different capability. No city pollution, smaller cost per mile.

The no pollution argument is irrelevant to the consumer, because they don't bear the cost. And the smaller per-mile cost is also irrelevant, because the overall cost is still higher. That's why hybrids haven't replaced conventional cars: the price premium is still more than you'll save in gas over the lifetime of the vehicle.

And what happens with the people who does not want to drive fast or pay for it?
I am one of them and I don't have so many options.

You're out of luck. Complain to your fellow Spaniards. Try and see if you can get your government to force your driving preferences on the rest of the population. Just don't try to pretend your fellow citizens aren't driving electrics already because of some conspiracy, rather than the simple fact that they don't WANT to drive electrics. And don't expect the world to revolve around your needs either.

 

[TjW]

Ziggurat & TjW,
Well, I first saw an EV in a travel to France. The vehicle was incredibly primitive compared to the EV1 for example.
It was very similar to this "Citicar":

http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/collection/event.php?id=3456880&lid=1

I guess the reason for using that little car was ecologic activism, I cannot think of any other one at that time (the eighties).

With very, very few exceptions, EVs are either an industrial tool, or a hobby.

These days we have another reason, fuel price rocketing upwards...

You ask why don't we use more EV... Well, you already seem to have the answers but my experience is different. In my city, the goverment installed especial bycicle roads around 20 years ago. The first years nobody used them, as there were not a bycicle culture on my city (few people wanted to risk his life pedaling between cars and trucks).
Some years later, maybe 10, people started to use mountain bikes, which worked quite well in the city and had reached a good price.
And few years ago (maybe 3 or 4) cheap chinese electric scooters started flooding the market, and now is quite normal to see an executive in an scooter travelling to the office in bycicle road.

I read that these days, electric powered bycicles are very popular in China (a bit like the old Solex engines). It's a cheap transport without hassles that works well in the city. And mind that Chinesse don't give a **** about pollution! (which is, imo, the real competitive feature of EVs).

It's interesting to note that both scooters and bycicles are useful because they fit in the elevators and can be recharged home, so I wonder about the potential of street pay-per-watt plugs. As I said minicars are also popular now, but the lack of infrastructures makes them non-practical.

My personal experience says that not all the appropiate technology can reach the market. You need a mix of key componentes to make it possible.

It's mostly an answer to why I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy against the EV.
I don't know how you missed the point, because you actually mention it four times in the above post. Forest and trees I suppose. Let me copy four sentences and see what the similarities are. Your words, my bolding

These days we have another reason, fuel price rocketing upwards...
<snippage>
Some years later, maybe 10, people started to use mountain bikes, which worked quite well in the city and had reached a good price.
And few years ago (maybe 3 or 4) cheap chinese electric scooters started flooding the market, and now is quite normal to see an executive in an scooter travelling to the office in bycicle road.
<snippage>
It's a cheap transport without hassles that works well in the city.

When EVs are the cheapest solution for their utility, there are EVs. So there are electric delivery vans, there are electric forklifts, there are cheap Chinese scooters. The delivery vans and forklifts are more expensive to buy but have lower overall costs over their long lifetime. Performance, for them, is measured differently. The cheap Chinese scooters are -- cheap. No one demands high performance of them.
When the price/utility of EVs competes with ICVs, there will be EVs. For example, there are IC engine versions of those same Chinese scooters. Some people like the additional range and speed of ICs, some like the convenience of not mixing fuel.
But with larger EVs, it's harder to convince people to pay MORE money for LESS utility. No conspiracy required, just as there was no conspiracy to keep mountain bikes off the bike trails in the period between their being built and people starting to use mountain bikes.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

You can fool yourself into believing that bacteria in your mouth, which you can't see and as an individual can't measure, are being killed. It's much harder to fool yourself into believing that your electric car can travel 400 miles on one charge, and that it can recharge in a few minutes. At least, not for very long. Products like Listerine get sold only because you CAN'T really tell if they're doing what you think they're doing, but it's VERY easy to tell if a car is providing the functionality you expect from it.

Try again.

Can you fool yourself that you need a big 4 wheeler or Hummer that you have never and will never take off road?

Can you fool yourself you are safer in such a car when accident stats show rollovers more than make up for any advantage being in a larger car affords? And, in some of those big 4X4s they only need meet cab safety standards of trucks, not passenger autos so the cabs were unsafe. (Don't know if that's still the case but it was.)

 

[Ziggurat]

Can you fool yourself that you need a big 4 wheeler or Hummer that you have never and will never take off road?

Who said they buy those things because they need them? They buy those things because they want them, and want != need.

Advertising works at getting people to spend more to buy more (more horsepower, more size, more luxuries, more flaunting), even when they don't need it, but it's much less effective at getting people to spend more to buy less. And an electric car provides less, not more. Advertising cannot change that.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Who said they buy those things because they need them? They buy those things because they want them, and want != need.

Advertising works at getting people to spend more to buy more (more horsepower, more size, more luxuries, more flaunting), even when they don't need it, but it's much less effective at getting people to spend more to buy less. And an electric car provides less, not more. Advertising cannot change that.

You are separating marketing of want with marketing of need. I doubt that are separable.

 

[Ziggurat]

You are separating marketing of want with marketing of need. I doubt that are separable.

Marketing is ONLY about want. Anything to do with need requires no marketing, or else it isn't really a need at all. And before you say it, yes, people do market products which you need (such as food). But what they're marketing is aspect of the product that you want (it's tasty), not the aspects that you need (it'll keep you from starving to death), because nobody needs to be convinced of their needs. I'm not separating out marketing of wants and marketing of needs, because only one of those two exists.

 

[Belz...]

I have a question, and I don't know if it's been discussed or not:

How much time would it take to recharge and electric car ?

Obviously, this would also be a factor. Refueling only takes a minute.

 

[Belz...]

How do you explain the large number of people who believe Listerine actually improves dental health when it doesn't really do anything?

Doesn't it ?

 

[Ziggurat]

How much time would it take to recharge and electric car ?

Many hours. It's been discussed. There was even some discussion about having battery swap-outs instead of recharges at gas stations, but I doubt such schemes could work practically in the real world.

Ultracapacitors can charge up very quickly, but do not approach even battery energy densities with current technology. Flywheels also charge up quickly, but are not safe for vehicles at energy densities comparable to batteries.

 

[Belz...]

Many hours. It's been discussed. There was even some discussion about having battery swap-outs instead of recharges at gas stations, but I doubt such schemes could work practically in the real world.

Ultracapacitors can charge up very quickly, but do not approach even battery energy densities with current technology. Flywheels also charge up quickly, but are not safe for vehicles at energy densities comparable to batteries.

Sorry for missing that, then.

Obviously, no one wants to stop at a "gas" station and charge their car for many hours.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Doesn't it ?

The alcohol in it isn't high enough to qualify as an antiseptic. Killing germs willy nilly in your mouth isn't useful anyway. The Dental Floss Association successfully sued to have them quit claiming or implying Listerine could prevent plaque since that takes flossing and brushing. And the makers of Listerine are thinking of (or have) added fluoride to be able to reinstate the plaque claim which would mean it is no more nor less than a fluoride rinse. And they have had to remove past commercials claiming to prevent and or decrease "colds and flu" as it was a false claim.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Marketing is ONLY about want. Anything to do with need requires no marketing, or else it isn't really a need at all. And before you say it, yes, people do market products which you need (such as food). But what they're marketing is aspect of the product that you want (it's tasty), not the aspects that you need (it'll keep you from starving to death), because nobody needs to be convinced of their needs. I'm not separating out marketing of wants and marketing of needs, because only one of those two exists.

This is silly. You don't "need" anything but food and water and sleep. You don't need a gas car if you have an electric one. Your rationalization here is getting far fetched.

I can use an electric car most of the time so I don't need a gas one.

It's all a matter of want.

 

[Ziggurat]

This is silly. You don't "need" anything but food and water and sleep. You don't need a gas car if you have an electric one. Your rationalization here is getting far fetched.

You're grasping for straws here. I'm not talking about needs in terms of pure survival, and neither were you. You can define "need" much more loosely than that, but it doesn't make any sense to define it so loosely that a person would not buy a product they needed unless it was advertised to them. If they wouldn't buy it without such external pressure, then they don't need it - that's really not a silly proposition at all, nor is it rationalization. I have a transportation need, for example, which means that I will buy a car, regardless of advertising. The only role advertising plays in my buying decision is what kind of car to buy (namely, what about a car do I want besides the basic requirements of what I need). So going back again to your earlier posts, most people who buy hummers do not need hummers, they don't even think the need hummers, they just WANT hummers. Just like people who buy luxury cars, or high-performance sports cars, don't really need those things either, but want them. I really don't see why that's a controversial claim on my part.

People need cars. Electric vehicles may fulfill a lot of peoples needs, but they fulfill very few people's wants, and that's where you got it wrong on the Hummers. Advertising may be able to exploit, magnify, and in some case even create wants, but no amount of advertising is going to make those wants go away. In fact, I've never seen advertising for any product that worked by making a want go away - the closest is those anti-drug and anti-smoking commercials, but even there, they work (if at all) by creating a competing want to try and override an existing want (to get high, look cool, etc). The only case you've made for a competing want is reduced pollution, but that doesn't work for individuals because it's an external cost. Even your gas savings argument won't work, because that competing want is really the want to save money, but electric vehicles cost more, so you can't set that up as a competing want. No amount of advertising could make the electric vehicle succeed in the mass market, and even making the effort doesn't come free. Car manufacturers didn't try to not because of some desire to suppress the electric vehicle, but merely because they knew something you either haven't figured out or won't admit: they just can't compete with gasoline-powered cars in the consumer market, and will never be able to without a major battery breakthrough (and don't hold your breath for that to happen anytime soon).