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We're almost at the end of the first month of the Volkswagen scandal, which now includes 11 million cars and Leonardo DiCaprio. VW's US boss has testified to Congress, blaming a few rogue software engineers. All the while, questions have raged about VW Group's future: which projects are safe, which ones are on the chopping block, and how exactly will the company recover from this?
...
VW's board has finally started to answer some of those swirling questions. For starters, there's going to be much more emphasis on electrification. Electric vehicles and hybrids have played more of a bit part at VW, compared to Toyota, GM, and domestic rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz. That's going to change with a standard electric architecture that can be used across multiple vehicles and brands.VW Group isn't devoid of hybrid and EV know-how. Audi's Le Mans program has taught it a lot about high voltage automotive systems, and Porsche has a wealth of experience from the 918 Spyder, Panamera Hybrid, and even the 919 Hybrid racer. VW would be smart to leverage all these programs.
VW is the largest car company in Europe. This is what sudden, disruptive technological change looks like.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ayn Anonymous on Friday October 16 2015, @03:48AM
Do the math:
Energy Density sorted by Wh/l
Ethanol LiFePO4 (best large scale battery tech at the moment, no a fantasy, you can buy it)
6,100 Wh/l 970 Wh/l
7,850 Wh/kg 439 Wh/kg
Batteries are high tech in every aspect: production, use, (little, if any) recycling.
They use rare earth or other non regenerative materials that only last a couple of decades on a global scale.
Forget it.
What's also not working is the way ethanol get produced today. Monoculture maize to ethanol ? No way.
What's needed is a cheap (in terms of money an embedded energy) and distributed way of ethanol production.
Ferment the shit (sugar) out of EVERY organic mater.
The key technology is (cold) molecular filtering of ethanol molecules, not high energy distilling from max. 18vol.% (fermenting) to 99vol.% (fuel)
Affordable Graphene or Graphene analogs filter is the thing we need badly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @04:03AM
Energy density matters not one whit. So long as the miles per overnight charge is comfortably greater than the miles driven during a day...that's all that matters.
For most people, the Nissan Leaf and its competitors with a mere 80 miles per charge already fits that bill perfectly. For most of the rest, the upcoming generation of 200-mile base-model electric vehicles are luxurious; short of a vacation, when was the last time you drove 200 miles in a single day? Even at 65 MPH non-stop, that's over three hours of driving -- and 50,00 miles / year if that's your daily commute.
And, for basically everybody, a Tesla coupled with their Supercharger network is downright overkill.
We've already got all the technology we need; now, it's just a matter of economies of scale to bring the price just a bit lower.
It's also worth noting that EVs absolutely smoke their gasoline equivalents on pretty much every other metric you could care to mention -- performance, maintenance, noise...you name it, and EVs are better. And, when they cost not much more than the gas guzzlers...well, let's just say that the transition to electric will be much faster than the transition from manual to automatic transmission.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ayn Anonymous on Friday October 16 2015, @04:54AM
You absolute not understand what sustainable practise means.
Not one bit. And so almost everyone else, influenced by *green wash*.
You can't use *anything* from the earth crust in a systematic way.
That's a non-go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural_Step [wikipedia.org]
You have horizon of a day, a year a decade ?
That's nothing. That's the way of thinking that causes the destruction of the biosphere.
Look at what you are proposing. Can it be done for thousands of years ?
You probably don't know, because you never thought about that time frames.
Yes that's heretical. How can I think in thousands of years ?
Nobody is doing that.
Exactly.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @05:26AM
Anything that assumes continued growth is going to be unsustainable at the scale of millennia. But, conversely, even that which seems an insane luxury of conspicuous consumerism would be insignificant if we could mirror the historical 3% growth with 3% contraction until human population levels are at 1% of where they are -- an hundred million globally, rather than the ten billion (with rounding) where we're at today.
Make all forms of birth control free with no questions asked (beyond, of course, medical necessity) paid for with taxes, make IUDs and silicone plug vasectomies required for attendance at public school the same way we already require vaccines, do it on a global scale...and pretty much all our civilization's problems magically take care of themselves by the end of the century.
And, no. There's absolutely zero chance that we'd face extinction because birth control is the norm and only the oddballs have children. Make birth control the default from childhood with the option to reverse for those who're serious about wanting children, and we'll never lack for new generations. It's the current situation that's driving us to extinction....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday October 16 2015, @07:42PM
First of all, thank you for that fascinating link about The Natural Step, I'll look further into it.
About the sustainability of battery technology: any chemical reaction has exactly the same composition of elements as before the reaction (law of Lavoisier [wikipedia.org], conservation of mass, incidentally his books are out of copyright and some are available on Gutenberg).
So you have to ask: how is it done today? what happens to the Lead and the sulphuric acid in my car battery, when the battery died and I exchange it for a new one?
The answer is, of course, that they get sent to a factory where new batteries are made from the broken old one, and only very small losses are incurred in this production cycle, because lead poisoning is a no-no in countries with environmental rule of law.
The same goes for more expensive battery technology (LiFePO4 with Lithium, or Vanadium flow battery).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2015, @11:37AM
This, more than anything, is why the transition to EVs is going to be especially abrupt: they are a dream to drive. After you've driven an EV going back to an ICE is like reverting to horse & buggy. Just plug it in at night and don't worry about anything else, and most people have already developed that muscle memory from plugging in their smartphones at night.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @05:36AM
Do the math:
Um, I was told that there would be no math. Batteries don't do math, so why should I? I don not want the Big Electrics replacing the Big Oil and screwing us just to move from point A to point B. Hey! I had an idea? How about we walk? Maybe with Mormon carts, but it still counts as walking on my smartphone (if it is so smart, why doesn't it know how many wives I have, or at least "had" before wall of mud and water that was in no way God's judgment on my lifestyle and that I am at least 40 years older than my "wives" who just last year were out homecoming queen and head of the (*Y(&#(E)Q#*R_ cheerleading squad. OMG, or OMM (Oh my Moroni, archangel, you see, covers a lot), were we talking about VW?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2015, @02:05PM
You don't appear to be thinking this through, very far. If you're producing most or all of your own electricity, then "Big Electric" can't screw you very badly. The worst that you can be screwed, is if the electric company won't pay you for your excess production. But, I think some laws have already been passed to prevent that. The worst situation seems to be that you buy electricity for X/Kwh, but you sell for 1/2 X/Kwh. But, even so, they can't screw you to terribly if you're producing more than you use.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 4, Informative) by RedBear on Friday October 16 2015, @06:06AM
You seem confused about a number of things, Mr. "I so smart, I think to thousands of years out unlike anyone else!" Yes, I read your other post below.
Electric vehicle batteries are so big and so full of valuable raw materials that they will be (are being) recycled to a much higher extent than typical household or personal device batteries have ever been. A lot of people seem very confused about this, but it just makes no economic sense for anyone to discard EV batteries.
Then, you make another common mistake in thinking that "rare earth" materials are rare or will run out in an extremely short period of time. Tell that to the guy building a $5 billion dollar plant to make the batteries his company needs to produce hundreds of thousands of EVs every year for the foreseeable future. Rare earths are quite common and will last hundreds of years even if we don't recycle them, which we will, especially lithium which is the bulk of what we need for batteries. They're called rare earths only because they are relatively "rarified" in the Earth's crust, which means that unlike other materials that can be mined more easily in concentrated form, we have to process through a lot of dirt/ore to find significant quantities of rare earth materials. But they are still abundant enough that we will not run out until long after our civilization has moved on to newer technologies and perfected our recycling procedures. That's really not something that should stop us from moving to EVs and away from petrochemical fuels. Reducing climate change is the far more pressing problem for our civilization right now.
Converting vast quantities of biomass to fuel is a dead end. Except for partially closing the CO2 cycle, it does nothing to decrease pollution. It damages soils by permanently removing biomatter, and wastes land area that should be used for producing food crops. That biomatter should be put back into the soil to build up soil fertility to support more productive food crops. One way of doing that is to use biomass in wood gasification power plants (to produce energy for our EVs) and then put the remaining "biochar" waste matter from that process back into our fields to enhance the soil's ability to hold nutrients and water and support beneficial microbial and fungal life, which in turn helps our plants grow quickly and abundantly and produce nutritious food. Among other very positive side effects this also can help us drastically reduce our use of petrochemical-derived fertilizers and lets us postpone the serious problem of "Peak Phosphorus" as well as reducing the fertilizer runoff that is producing huge oceanic dead zones and dangerous algae blooms that poison our waterways. What I've just described is already being done in various places. We need to do a lot more of it.
We already have an EV that goes nearly 300 miles on a charge and recharges at 300mph. It's working great for everyone who has bought one so far, and the relevant battery technology is increasing in energy density and longevity every year. The comparisons between energy density of batteries and petrochemical fuels are meaningless in practice. EVs are the future and there's nothing that can stop them at this point. You'll be driving one and loving it within 7-14 years, as will almost everyone you know. And many of them will no doubt have "VW" on the front.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:32PM
> They use rare earth or other non regenerative materials that only last a couple of decades on a global scale.
FYI, 'rare earth elements' are not actually rare. [forbes.com]