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Electric Car/Truck

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My son and his wife have 2 Model S Teslas. They live in California.

His wife has a long commute and can drive in the HOV on the freeways for the first 3 years of ownership of an electric vehicle. So the time saved is worth it for her since she is an MD and the the time saved allows her to see more patients.

My other son has a Leaf electric vehicle and a Prius. He lives in Denver.

I can't see buying an electric vehicle for myself in Wisconsin with the cold winters and the need for 4 wheel or all wheel drive. There very few charging stations available and no dealer support. I've seen 2 Teslas in the MD parking lot at my hospital . They were bought in Chicago. a 5 hour drive from here.

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To many questions, the rare earth metals for batteries being just one, and how is the electricity produced to charge the vehicle? And now we see fires starting from cars being charged. Nice idea but take some time and get right.

Mike.

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1 hour ago, partsman said:

To many questions, the rare earth metals for batteries being just one, and how is the electricity produced to charge the vehicle? And now we see fires starting from cars being charged. Nice idea but take some time and get right.

Mike.

You have to pick your poison.

Green electric energy  is 20% of all electric power generation in the USA.

There are 52 nuclear powered electric power plants being built in the world. The last one in the USA was finished in 1997 but never activated. In my opinion, the decision is either global warming vs nuclear energy.

Of the two nuclear is safer over all.

There have been 3 major nuclear power plant accidents.

Chernobyl was caused by a faulty reactor design. 3 Mile Island by a system failure without any loss if life.. Fukushima by a tsunami and a reactor placed where it should never have been located. 

Global warming poses a greater threat to life and property than nuclear power plants in mu opinion. Just look at the fires and loss of life due to fires in the western USA,

 

 

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An electric car would be great on my commute but would not fill the rest of my needs. I would either need one with a lot of range or charging stations in the middle of nowhere. Is there a place to charge in Maupin, Oregon? Someday we may get there. 

I'm not sure they are as 'green' as some would have you believe. As much as wind and solar are hyped, last time I looked most of the country's electricity comes from coal and natural gas. A friend used to call them coal powered cars. In the Pacific Northwest, most of our power is hydroelectric. Which is renewable and clean except that it severely damages fish runs. 

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28 minutes ago, Jaydub said:

I'm not sure they are as 'green' as some would have you believe. As much as wind and solar are hyped, last time I looked most of the country's electricity comes from coal and natural gas. A friend used to call them coal powered cars. In the Pacific Northwest, most of our power is hydroelectric. Which is renewable and clean except that it severely damages fish runs. 

The EPA states that even considering power plants, electric vehicles create less greenhouse gases..

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

 

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A local lady drove to Nashville to visit family. Her husband wanted her to take the hybrid but she took the all-electric car. Took hours to find a charging station and then took three hours to charge the battery. Our local Cracker Barrel had two charging stations. Gassers would park there. CB finally took the charging stations out. The following is from a friend. Read it carefully.

 

 
An Engineer's Take On Electric Cars
 
As an engineer I love the electric vehicle technology. However, I have been troubled for a long time by the fact that the electrical
energy to keep the batteries charged has to come from the grid and that means more power generation and a huge increase in the distribution infrastructure Whether generated from coal, gas, oil, wind or sun, installed generation capacity is limited. 
 
IF ELECTRIC CARS DO NOT USE GASOLINE, THEY WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN PAYING A GASOLINE TAX ON EVERY GALLON THAT IS SOLD FOR AUTOMOBILES, WHICH WAS ENACTED SOME YEARS AGO TO HELP TO MAINTAIN OUR ROADS AND BRIDGES. THEY WILL USE THE ROADS, BUT WILL NOT PAY FOR THEIR MAINTENANCE!
 
In case you were thinking of buying hybrid or an electric car:
 
Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things has never been discussed. All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention of the cost of electricity to run it . This is the first article I've ever seen and tells the story pretty much as I expected it to.  Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power things yet they're being shoved down our throats. Glad somebody finally put engineering and math to paper.
 
At a neighborhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro Executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He laughed, then got serious. 
 
If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our small street (approximately 25 homes), The electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla, each. For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.
 
This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles. Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load so as our genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we being urged to buy these things and replace our reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery system! This latter "investment" will not be revealed until we're so far down this dead end road that it will be presented with an 'OOPS..!' and a shrug. 
 
If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are eco-friendly, just read the following.  Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. It's enlightening.
 
Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors and he writes, "For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine. "Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles
It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging Time) would be 20 mph. According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned, so I looked up what I pay for electricity.
 
I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery. $18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery. Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg. $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 Mpg = $0.10 per mile.
 
The gasoline powered car costs about $25,000 while the Volt costs $46,000 plus. Simply pay twice as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.

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Skeet,

Snopes fact checked Eric Bolling and found his article "The Chevy Volt “costs more than 7 times as much to run and takes 3 times as long to drive across country” than a standard automobile" to be false.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevy-revolt/

Both of my sons program the charging stations to charge their cars at night when the power companies lower their rates for them. Here are the pros and cons for electric vehicles by the US Government and 

https://www.energysage.com/electric-vehicles/101/pros-and-cons-electric-cars/

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml

My view is that delivery companies that have huge fleets of vehicles have done the math and found electric vehicle more cost efficient.

UPS is buying 10,000 electric vehicles.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a35875342/arrival-microfactory-to-build-ups-ev-delivery-vans/

Amazon is buying 100,000 electric delivery vehicles.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-creating-fleet-of-electric-delivery-vehicles-rivian-2020-2

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2020/12/09/the-us-must-get-ahead-of-the-curve-on-electric-vehicles-and-climate-change/?sh=2ec1f7084e72

Yes, “peak oil” and climate change are interrelated. Enter electric vehicles, which according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance will gain speed: it says that EVs are now 10% of the global passenger market. But that number will grow to 28% in 2030 and 40% in 2040. Why? National policies will favor decarbonization while the cost of batteries that power the cars will keep falling. The cost of EVs and cars with an internal combustion engine will even out in the mid-2020s, it says. 

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I will never buy one. One day we will all be forced to by those who believe they are smarter and more noble then the rest. 
 

skeet, the roads will take care of themselves. One thing smart and noble politicians are able to do is to raise and spend taxes.  In PA they are already talking about charging a tax on how many miles you drive. So when you take your car in for mandatory inspection (another tax just called something else) they are going to charge you a tax based on the miles you put on after your previous inspection. Don’t worry though it won’t be called a tax. They Will come up with something like road usage fee, route toll, or road license. This way the enlightened can tell me my taxes were not raised. How about a battery disposal fee? Or a battery acid credit, electronic disposal reclamation fund. The new taxes will be endless. 

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Electric Vehicles are the future.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2020/12/09/the-us-must-get-ahead-of-the-curve-on-electric-vehicles-and-climate-change/?sh=2ec1f7084e72

Yes, “peak oil” and climate change are interrelated. Enter electric vehicles, which according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance will gain speed: it says that EVs are now 10% of the global passenger market. But that number will grow to 28% in 2030 and 40% in 2040. Why? National policies will favor decarbonization while the cost of batteries that power the cars will keep falling. The cost of EVs and cars with an internal combustion engine will even out in the mid-2020s, it says.

 

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I do like the new tech going into batteries. Hopefully one day in my lifetime lithium batteries for my trolling motor won’t cost a few or three thousand dollars, pre-tax of course. 
 

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Hydrogen makes much more sense. Homes that currently use gas for heating can easily (relatively) be converted to hydrogen and maintain the same level of comfort. Electric heating only works well in modern super insulated homes. 

So if homes are going to need mass hydrogen storage then wouldn't it be sense to run cars off the same. 

 

Or as Silver says, embrace nuclear and sell cheap power to the masses 

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This is a great topic ... it really is.  However, it is a ticking time bomb of political rage.  People on both sides of the pros/cons are fanatical in their beliefs.  So, we'll leave the current opinions up for your contemplation, but lock the thread before it gets out of hand.

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