SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The rate at which new technologies get accepted into the mainstream never fails to confuse people. For the longest time, cell phones appeared to be the exclusive domain of yuppies, bankers and drug dealers. And then, suddenly, my mum had one. (No, she doesn't sell drugs.)
Could we see a similar rapid adoption for electric vehicles?
The LA Times reports that Q1 electric car (EV) sales are up 91% in California. Sales of Plug-In Hybrids (PHEV) are up 54% too. This is, of course, only one quarter, from one state, so let's not get too excited. And the actual number of units sold—13,804 EVs and 10,466 PHEVs—is still tiny compared to the 506,745 cars and light trucks sold in the state during the same period. But anyone who knows anything about math can tell you that it doesn't take long for a 91% growth rate to start making serious inroads into a particular market. (Electric car sales in Norway have already reached as high as 37% of new passenger vehicles.)
It's possible the muscle memory developed for cellphones could help with EV adoption, too: plug in the phone at night, plug in the car at night.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday May 25 2017, @01:35PM (7 children)
There are lies, damn lies and statistics.
Sales up 91%.
To 13,804 (we'll exclude hybrids for a moment).
That means they went from 7000-ish to 13000-ish, from one year to the next.
By comparison - STILL FOR CALIFORNIA ONLY:
"third quarter of 2015 — 531,514 between July and September in 2016 compared to 531,518 in that same period last year. "
So electric cars are still being outsold approximately 38 times over.
In other words, electrics cars went from being 7000 / 530,000 (not quite, but close enough for SoylentMath), to being 14,000 / 530,000. That's from 1.3% to 2.6%. We're talking a Linux-desktop-share of the car market across all their manufacturers.
Though it's nearly a 100% "increase", the overall level is still pitiful.
And I can't find the figures to compare EXACT like-for-like, but I imagine that different quarters, 2017 figures for ICE vehicles, different states, etc. will drastically skew those numbers back into obscurity again.
So before you go getting excited, remember that 98% of people who bought a car in California in that quarter DID NOT choose an electric vehicle.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:49PM (4 children)
True. The other important question is: "what's the ratio of the people who could accommodate and afford an electric car actually buying one".
The 200-mile-EV class is still very limited (about to change), and the 100-mile range class, which is more affordable, may not fit the needs of those who could barely afford them (longer distance commute if you've got less cash for housing, and regular need for a second car).
The numbers next year, with the new Model 3, Bolt, and Leaf, should be a lot more relevant.
Not that my neighbor will give up his shiny pickup with a scratch-free bed for any darn EV yuppie toy anyway...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:05PM (3 children)
The 100 mile commute might be a california thing. Its pretty unusual even there, unless you count BOTH ways.
There are starting to be companies that provide charger-equipped parking. Still its nice to have the range to do a whole day's driving on a single charge, so you can charge at home and not have to fight for a charger spot. There are still no where near enough charger parking spots.
A story was published recently that Gas vehicles will disappear from production within 18 years. I initially scoffed at that. But upon reflection I think we are just One More Jump in battery efficiency away from that.
(And there comes a new battery technology story weekly it seems - all of them seemingly years away from production).
Can the grid handle a total switch over to all-electric cars?
We've been adding solar/wind to the grid faster than we've been adding plug-in-electric cars. But that isn't likely to keep up, since 6 years of EV production only accounts for 1% of the car owners. (The plug-in segment achieved a record market share of 0.90% in 2016). [wikipedia.org]
We still burn 143.37 billion gallons of gasoline in the US annually, and it takes 33.7 kilowatt hours of electricity to equal a gallon of gas according to the EPA. So we have to come up with 4.831569e+12 kwh to replace Just gasoline currently used.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:53PM (2 children)
The Leaf's original 80 miles is perfect for most of Europe/Asia, but in the US where commutes are often 20 to 30 miles, it doesn't provide a lot of margin for a round-trip with a swing by a store or two.
Most people will indeed not want to reply on topping up at the office. I wouldn't want to be trapped there if I got an urgent call five minutes after arriving.
As far as the grid is concerned, given the US latitude, all new buildings should be built with solar, with the burden on the builder to prove why individual projects can't. At the current panel costs (installers being the most expensive part of the process), making it standard wouldn't raise house prices by much. Other countries (Australia) have already done that.
Every time I go down to the coast, I am amazed that there aren't individual wind turbines in people's yards. The big ones are more efficient, but people with that much wind could easily profit even from a small vertical axis generator.
With enough distributed intelligence, plugging your car into the grid could be a stabilizing factor for renewables. You get a discount if you agree to allow the network to discharge n% during a peak demand time, where you set n based on your commute needs. Hard to write the legalese in an individualistic country like the US, but technically feasible.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday May 26 2017, @07:06AM (1 child)
I'm sorry?
What makes you think that Europe has smaller commutes than the US? Is this one of those anecdotal things that Americans think are true?
Most people who live in London (high population density) has commutes on the order of 20-30 miles too. Round trip, that's 40-60. But there are people who regularly commute from Oxford to London and similar.
Nobody can afford to live inside London itself (central London), so everyone commutes and almost all the commutes are miles and miles. And that's the BEST CASE. Outside of the cities, it is a case of commuting to the nearest town which might well be 30+ miles away.
In places like Italy and Spain it can be even worse. Sure, there are village cultures still, but nobody can afford to live in the city center and you commute 20 miles from the suburbs or not at all.
The problem is, though, as you point out: There's no safety margin. My ICE car has a safety margin of 50 miles of fuel at all times. Because it warns me if it goes lower than that. And sometimes you can use all that trying to find a refuelling station even for conventional fuels, on major motorways. God knows where you'd find the electric points on any long journey without pre-planning.
Sacrificing what little safety margin there is, to let the grid "balance", is also not something that most people want or even care about. Again, what happens when you have to drive to hospital overnight? You're stuffed. Just because you don't need it MOST days doesn't mean you can just remove the capacity of it.
The thing that worries people about electric cars is not that they're damaging the environment (those people buy them). It's that they will be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no recourse to refuel their car. With ICE, you can get a lift to a nearby station, fuel up a can, and then carry on your journey. With electric car, you're into being towed (risky itself in some electric cars if you don't know the procedure) to somewhere you can charge (which may not be nearby, or even known to supply electric power to the guy picking you up). And, no, you can necessarily just plug it in.
Until range is solved, which means energy storage increases of at least two-fold, people aren't going to go for them. That may well come, I'd expect it to as the technology matures and invests in itself, but it's not there yet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday May 26 2017, @10:28AM
Note: In the UK overall, around 60% of people commute by car, but in London that's closer to 30%. The majority use some combination of train and tube (RAC survey, 2013 - I suspect car usage has gone down since then, as the congestion charge has gone up).
In 2014 the average commute was around 15km (11-17km for average commutes in different parts of the UK). Sorry for the Torygraph link, but they have some reasonable graphics of the OSN survey. That's not too far off the US averages, but it's easy for a car with a 100 mile range to manage a round trip and a few side trips. [telegraph.co.uk]
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday May 25 2017, @10:10PM
True, but on the other hand, doubling transistor count every 18 months got us from the 4004 to the 6950X. If BEV sales continue to roughly double annually, they'll quickly reach market domination, slowing only when they hit near-total saturation.
The real question is, what kind of curve are we looking at, and what part of the curve did this period cover? If it's a linear growth, that's one thing. Quadratic, another - and was 2017 before or after the inflection point?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday May 26 2017, @02:47AM
> we'll exclude hybrids for a moment
About the ones you excluded:
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHEV [wikipedia.org]
Plug-in hybrids have an ICE engine, but can be operated entirely on electricity.
> We're talking a Linux-desktop-share of the car market across all their manufacturers.
By analogy, it's as though you excluded the Linux installations that could dual boot into another operating system.