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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the chips-on-the-table dept.

Ford Motor Company plans to substantially increase its investment in electric vehicles:

Ford Motor Co's plan to double its electrified vehicle spending is part of an investment tsunami in batteries and electric cars by global automakers that now totals $90 billion and is still growing, a Reuters analysis shows.

That money is pouring in to a tiny sector that amounts to less than 1 percent of the 90 million vehicles sold each year and where Elon Musk's Tesla Inc, with sales of only three models totaling just over 100,000 vehicles in 2017, was a dominant player.

[...] "We're all in," Ford Motor Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr said of the company's $11 billion investment, announced on Sunday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. "The only question is, will the customers be there with us?"

[...] Investments in electrified vehicles announced to date include at least $19 billion by automakers in the United States, $21 billion in China and $52 billion in Germany.

Also at CNBC.

Related: Ford Pumps Cash Into Company Creating Maps for Self-Driving Cars
Ford Invests in Michigan's Autonomous Car Testing Grounds


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  • (Score: 2) by gottabeme on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:15PM (2 children)

    by gottabeme (1531) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:15PM (#623769)

    If Ford realizes this, and other mass-market brands follow suit, the oil companies are done for.

    Why?

    1. A large amount of the electricity that is used is generated with oil. Electric cars run on electricity, and are produced with electricity. Therefore, unless and until none of our electricity is generated by oil, they ultimately run on oil.

    The convenience of recharging at home or at your destination instead of taking detours to a gas station is welcome.

    2. The electrical grid cannot currently support the equivalent amount of energy that is currently used by cars in the form of petroleum products. Even if everyone wanted to dump their gas-powered cars and buy electric cars right now, the infrastructure could not support it.

    3. Even if the grid could support it, battery technology cannot replace gas tanks for all needs. Energy density and recharge/refill times are not equivalent. This is not likely to change anytime soon, although hopefully it will, eventually (wouldn't we all like it if our smartphones could last more than a day or two between charges).

    Therefore, oil companies are not going anywhere. That is silly hyperbole.

    The quiet is a blessing.

    Compared to drivers who equip their cars with intentionally loud exhausts, I agree. Compared to normal vehicles, no, because most of the noise that normal gas-powered cars make is tire noise, especially inside the car.

    Their compatibility with autonomous driving is another benefit waiting in the wings, for those who mostly drive in congested urban areas.

    This is a puzzling myth; I really wonder how it got started. Electric cars are no more compatible with self-driving than ICE-powered cars. Cruise controls have been around for decades, and all the major car companies and self-driving car projects already use ICE-powered cars (with the obvious exception of Tesla, which is beside the point).

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by RedBear on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:17AM

    by RedBear (1734) on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:17AM (#623920)

    2. The electrical grid cannot currently support the equivalent amount of energy that is currently used by cars in the form of petroleum products. Even if everyone wanted to dump their gas-powered cars and buy electric cars right now, the infrastructure could not support it.

    This is a view that doesn't seem to be shared by the people who actually run national power grids. And it is usually based on the false premise that electric cars have to charge from zero to 100% every day, which isn't true. The average daily drive even in the US is 36 miles and many drive less than that. The amount of energy millions of electric cars will need every night is therefore much lower than many people think. Plus, the time of charging is scheduled to be during the time of night when the energy usage will help flatten out the "bathtub effect" that makes operating the power grid less efficient. That's why utilities in many areas already give a discount for nighttime EV charging.

    There is another aspect. Progress has been made on Vehicle-2-Grid systems that can feed energy back into the grid from the car just as if it was a household solar array or wind turbine. That can and will help even out the huge spikes that happen in grid usage in the morning and evening, which again causes grid operators to have to fire up additional capacity just to serve those spikes, and thus increases the overall cost of running the grid and providing electricity. With V2G integrated into future EVs and charging systems, electricity will be cheaper, and EV batteries will help provide the "energy storage" that is needed to make solar and wind even more cost effective than they already are. I just read an article that projected the costs for both solar and wind to drop to $0.03 per kilowatt-hour by 2020. The future for fossil fuels for electricity production is looking pretty bleak.

    1. A large amount of the electricity that is used is generated with oil. Electric cars run on electricity, and are produced with electricity. Therefore, unless and until none of our electricity is generated by oil, they ultimately run on oil.

    It's mostly coal or natural gas, at least in the US. And many EV owners either have solar panels already or install solar panels after buying an EV. As the grid gets cleaner by transitioning to renewable energy sources, the EV gets cleaner, even if the owner doesn't charge partly from solar or wind. We get all our power from a local dam, so in this town if you drive an EV it is already 100% clean. With the costs of renewable energy dropping so rapidly, the grid is on the verge of getting cleaner much sooner than anyone expected.

    Compared to drivers who equip their cars with intentionally loud exhausts, I agree. Compared to normal vehicles, no, because most of the noise that normal gas-powered cars make is tire noise, especially inside the car.

    I don't think you've spent much time in an EV. A nice new mid-range or premium ICE vehicle can be pretty quiet and smooth, but there's still always something there, a level of noise and vibration even when sitting at idle that is simply missing in an EV. The best sound dampening and vibration isolating mounts can't completely negate it even in the most premium of vehicles. It's like the difference between a barely perceptible hiss in a pair of headphones versus absolute silence. They aren't the same.

    And then there's the smells. Even nice ICE cars are permeated over time with the smell of oil, gas and exhaust fumes. Once you get away from it for a while, spend a year not going anywhere near a gas station, you'll really notice it.

    But you're right that the oil industry isn't going to collapse even if we're all suddenly driving EVs tomorrow. Oil is used for too many different things outside of transportation, all around the world. Fossil fuel use is even expected to continue increasing for a few decades, driven by demand from developing nations. They will be "finished" however, in the sense that the auto industry will no longer be closely tied to what the oil industry wants. I expect that's basically what Phoenix meant.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:00PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:00PM (#624112) Journal

    1. A large amount of the electricity that is used is generated with oil. Electric cars run on electricity, and are produced with electricity. Therefore, unless and until none of our electricity is generated by oil, they ultimately run on oil.

    No, it isn't. In 2016 oil generated about 1% of America's electricity [eia.gov].

    2. The electrical grid cannot currently support the equivalent amount of energy that is currently used by cars in the form of petroleum products.

    Most people would charge their EVs overnight, at home, when electricity demand has traditionally been lowest and the utilities have generally taken losses because they have to keep coal plants running to maintain base load. Here's the 24-hr demand curve [eia.gov] to illustrate. Residential solar power has also been growing [seia.org], so it is increasingly not on the grid to supply the power that EVs will demand.

    3. Even if the grid could support it, battery technology cannot replace gas tanks for all needs. Energy density and recharge/refill times are not equivalent.

    The average American commuter drives 30 miles per day [dot.gov]. Nearly every EV at this point can handle that distance.

    Further, most oil consumption in America is for transportation [eia.gov]. As such, when the transportation fleet switches over to EVs, as it is with this Ford announcement and others, and because Americans these days replace their cars much more frequently than before, the demand for oil in the United States will plummet.

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