Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Our transport is heavily oil-based. What are the alternatives?

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BritDownUnder
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by BritDownUnder »

Ralphw2 wrote: 04 Nov 2024, 19:31 The Ford F150 ev have been a huge flop in the US. USians that buy pickups are just not prepared to make the compromises needed to live with an electric pickup, and it just does not make enough noise or pollution to show that they are real men. There are tens of thousands of the EVs sitting unsold on dealers forecourts
They could put the steering wheel on the right side and sell them in Australia. I think they would fly off the forecourts. I heard they are quite poor when it comes to towing range.
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Forever_Winter
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by Forever_Winter »

Battery maker Northvolt has gone bust.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... es-battery
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BritDownUnder
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

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Forever_Winter wrote: 22 Nov 2024, 11:38 Battery maker Northvolt has gone bust.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... es-battery
One would have thought that the Norwegian state wealth fund, flush with all the money from selling gas and now electricity to the UK, would have put in some money but clearly not a good investment.

EDIT:

Here we go. Here's the real reason. From MSN.
Why did this happen?

What precipitated Northvolt into this turmoil? First of all, there's a possible technological war. The main supplier of lithium-ion battery production machines, based in China, was (strangely?) unwilling to sell its machines to Northvolt! The Swedish company then had to fall back on another manufacturer, also Chinese. But with a lesser reputation. It didn't fail: their equipment didn't live up to expectations. The faulty equipment delayed the production process with too many defective batteries. Mass-producing such batteries is a complex business. In the beginning, there are always rejects, on the order of 30%. But it seems that at Northvolt, the level of failures was even higher.
Qu'elle surprise? China doesn't want to sell the machines that make electric batteries. Before the EU settled on the business strategy of screwing the UK there was actually some industrial development going on there. Maybe they should make the battery building machines themselves.
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Forever_Winter
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by Forever_Winter »

Interesting points there BDU. Makes you wonder how a strategy to just resell Chinese stuff was going to compete with state-backed competitors?

In other news, Vauxhall is closing their Luton plant due to stringent demands to produce EVs that no one is buying (except fleet buyers). We have a company car scheme that offers only EVs, and the cheapest one is still about £260 a month via salary sacrifice. You can easily part with £600 a month if you want a Tesla Model Y.

They're just too expensive, and the battery tech is still not quite there yet. Still ,I guess we can still hit Net Zero by a) not making anything so no emissions and b) importing our cars from abroad so moving our emissions abroad. :idea:
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BritDownUnder
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

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It's about this time that the EU is realizing that they have been 'played' by China just the same as the EU 'played' the UK for many years.

I still like my EV. Built in Korea with probably China made batteries. My Kona is not a smart car so no on the air updates and no fancy app to control
my EV so less to go wrong. I have two other cars, both diesels if this EV goes wrong and this EV can be charged entirely from my home produced solar output. A nice performance and no longer supporting terrorism or Ukraine invaders by driving. Of course, all the rest of the economy is still supporting terrorism and invaders with gay abandon but I can't stop that.

I bought mine for good old cash, or more accurately bank cheque. Never a lender nor a borrower be!
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mr brightside
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by mr brightside »

What are they planning to do with all the batteries when they are knackered? Can they be recycled? The guy at the bodyshop where i take retro cars for resto work reckons there are containers full of dead Teslas at the bottom of the Irish Sea.
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BritDownUnder
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

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mr brightside wrote: 28 Nov 2024, 06:55 What are they planning to do with all the batteries when they are knackered? Can they be recycled? The guy at the bodyshop where i take retro cars for resto work reckons there are containers full of dead Teslas at the bottom of the Irish Sea.
I believe there have been attempts to recycle the old batteries. Old Tesla batteries from crashed and write-offs have supposedly been used as household batteries as they go to <70% of rated charge capacity.
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Ralphw2
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by Ralphw2 »

My Nissan Leaf is now 4 years old, done nearly 50,000 miles, and reports a battery capacity of 91% (Using the leafspy app to interogate the computer). I think this is about right, as it now reports 220 miles range when full, and used to report 240 miles (both figures are very optimistic). Previous studies show that the capacity loss rate slows after the first coupe of years, so I should have about 80-85% capacity after 100,000 miles, which would still be a practical range for the car. More modern makes of EV with better battery management systems seem to lose battery capacity more slowly.

A few years ago, there was a thriving market in used EV batteries. There are companies that build large grid storage installations using second hand EV batteries where reduced energy density is not an issue. I am not sure if the market is still there because supply has sharply increased and new prices have crashed, which may mean the hassle of reusing old batteries may not be economic. It is often possible to rejuvinate old ev batteries by replacing one or more modules within the battery box with new(er) ones. However, the batteries are not normally built with this level of repair in mind, making the procedure skilled and labour intensive. It would certainly be easy to design ev batteries where this level of maintenance would be economic, but it is not currently a priority for the car manufacturers.
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by Forever_Winter »

I used to work with someone who had a 1st generation Nissan Leaf (not sure if it was 2011 or 2013) and he reckoned that the battery had about 80% of the original capacity when he got rid of it a few years back. I'm not sure what mileage he ended up doing, but he reckons that if you don't let the battery get below 25% or charge it above 85% then the battery lasts a lot longer.
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BritDownUnder
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by BritDownUnder »

I have been told about the 80% level that you should not charge above this and then leave the battery in this state for any amount of time. In other words if you charge to 100% you need to use the car straight afterwards.

Not sure on the state of battery materials recycling but I expect this is still in development.
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mr brightside
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by mr brightside »

Ralphw2 wrote: 28 Nov 2024, 16:57 It would certainly be easy to design ev batteries where this level of maintenance would be economic, but it is not currently a priority for the car manufacturers.
There is an EU directive of some sort that mandates things to have a certain degree of servicability. If you've ever seen a torx head screw with a slot cut across it for a flat head driver, this is an example of this.
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

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Overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence,
is one of the most common illusions we experience. Stan Robinson
Ralphw2
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by Ralphw2 »

A tale of our times.

2 weeks ago my EV developed a bizarre fault. It started reporting multiple error messages about different subsystems on the car. Clearly there was a problem in the main digital bus linking the subsystems to the central monitoring computer. One fault reported was the electric controlled handbrake. This stopped the car from shutting down. When you pressed the off button, it turned itself back on again immediately and told you to engage the parking brake first. The brake was fully applied. In that state I could not charge the car, I could not lock the car, it just sat there, automatic lights on, slowly draining the remaining charge from the battery.

The car is a year out of warranty, and the local main dealer has shut down. The car did not have it enough charge to get to another main dealer. None of the local garages will touch EVs.

I found one one man garage through the Hevra website within the range of the remaining battery charge, he was out when I got there, so I had to leave the car unlocked outside. An RAC man had warned me off this guy previously, but I had no choice.

He identified a fault requiring a new ECU, 1000 pounds fitted. It took a week to arrive, needed programming to match the car, and he left the car outside the garage for me to collect the next day, Christmas eve. I got a lift to the garage and drove towards a nearby charging station, but the fault reoccurred before I got there, so I could not charge. I had to return to the garage and leave it there, systems and lights on, unlocked, the garage closed for 2 weeks and the mechanic ignoring my calls and messages.

The moral of this tale? I don't think the underlying fault is specific to EVs, but it refusing to shut down obviously is. The lack of trained garage mechanics who can work on EVs is a symptom of the complexity of the transition, but more generally a symptom of the beginning of the collapse of complex society, as predicted by Tainter.

I am left driving a rust bucket diesel until I can resolve this mess, and I will be substantially out of pocket. It is only because I had anticipated this problem at multiple levels that I still have the resources to treat this as no more than an annoyance and inconvenience. Other members of society would not be in a position to take is philosophically.
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by clv101 »

I've said it many times, there needs to be a SIMPLE electric vehicle. Fundamentally it should be possible to produce a EV significantly simpler than ICE cars, even better make it open source.

I also expect the future of EV maintenance doesn't lie with the existing independent mechanics, but with independent computer/phone geeks.
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BritDownUnder
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Re: Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

Post by BritDownUnder »

There's a big debate in Australia on whether motor mechanics should be allowed to work on EVs as they (mostly) don't have electricians licenses.

Yet another sector of industry that is now put at risk by, for want of a better phrase, poor hardware or software. There was a reasonably famous energy blogger who put out a video bragging that they had got the deal of the century by getting a cheap second hand EV imported from Japan and then about two weeks later they were asking on Linkedin about whether there was someone who could update the firmware for them as the Nissan dealers in Oz don't want to touch the thing.

Sometime better sticking with the market leaders as they have a reputation to keep. Could you have used a tow truck to take it to a legit dealer?
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