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Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) intends to sell electric cars for less than 20,000 euros ($22,836) and protect German jobs by converting three factories to make Tesla (TSLA.O) rivals, a source familiar with the plans said.
VW and other carmakers are struggling to adapt quickly enough to stringent rules introduced after the carmaker was found to have cheated diesel emissions tests, with its chief executive Herbert Diess warning last month that Germany's auto industry faces extinction.
Plans for VW's electric car, known as "MEB entry" and with a production volume of 200,000 vehicles, are due to be discussed at a supervisory board meeting on Nov. 16, the source said.
Fallout from cheating on diesel emissions tests continues. If German automakers, of which VW is the largest, switch to electric vehicles (EVs), will other car companies have to follow suit?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday November 09 2018, @07:46PM (11 children)
> I can't imagine switching to electric. I am way more likely to switch to Uber and/or sharing.
I can't imagine switching to electric, primarily because I can't imagine switching to something worse than what I have in every metric, except tailpipe emissions. Electric cars:
- Are more expensive
- Are generally heavier (due to the battery pack)
- Seem to be more prone to short circuits, fires and problems with the battery pack (I still don' t know if you could even drive an electric car through the flooded roads we get here, or would you be at risk of shorting something out, or getting electrocuted)
- Have a lower range, and a range that varies based on the weather and other variables.
- Have an expensive "fuel tank" (the battery) that wears out with use
- Are built with cheap parts (in order to save weight as much as possible, both for economy and to offset the heavy batteries, every single electric car I have sat in seems to be made of really cheap plastic materials).
- Have to wait hours for a "full tank" equivalent (v.s. ~5 mins)
- Are impossible for me to maintain myself (too many complex, interconnected, proprietary systems)
- Have a questionable "total pollution cost" when you take into account all the energy and toxic processes involved in manufacturing the batteries and electronics
The only other benefit is "lack of engine noise", but modern ICE vehicles make virtually no noise anyway, although they do make enough to let people know they are nearby or approaching. BEVs are so quiet its jarring just having one sneak up on you when you are not expecting it.
The only clear benefit is lack of tailpipe emissions, and the fact they consume less energy when sitting in traffic, which in a dense urban environment is very important, but then, urban environments are ill suited to personal cars full stop. Car renting/sharing of some kind, as well as public transport, cycling or just walking make more sense in cities.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday November 09 2018, @08:02PM
I am often impressed how quiet my truck is. I have on many occasions wondered whether or not it was on when I was idling. I also find it interesting that Ford has been piping noise into the cabin in the v6 versions of their mustangs and f150s to replicate the old muscle car noise, I personally find that extremely stupid but whatever.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Friday November 09 2018, @08:16PM (4 children)
While I agree that electric cars don't make sense (yet), they do have a few other advantages over ICE;
For me though, the major issue is still "the price is too high for what you get".
If they could fix that, I might be willing to put up with the other stuff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Friday November 09 2018, @08:57PM (3 children)
> You can fill-up at home. Yes, it takes longer for an electric to charge up, but it takes less of my time.
I have to say I didn't think of that. Round here, in high rise dense cities, there is no way you can charge the car overnight. You don't have a garage, or even a driveway, to park up the car, and stringing an extension cord down your window overnight to charge your car just isn't going to work. The local authority has had the idea to build "charging points" into the road, but the problem is that there just isn't enough parking spaces to have all the cars sitting there charging overnight.
That also only works if the entire daily range you need fits within one charge cycle, if you end up needing more range than usual for whatever reason, you are stuck. One of the reasons I think series hybrids will be the future for a long time to come. The ability to have a "range extender" ICE for those moments where due to unforseen circumstances you need more range than normal at a snap, you got it.
A hybrid might well be an excellent commuter vehicle. You can charge it overnight outside the city, in your big house with garage/driveway, then drive with the ICE on the motorways until you get to the cities, where you can switch to EV mode for the rush hour "stop-and-go" traffic.
> They have less down time for repairs. As complex as they are, there's still fewer parts than a modern ICE, which means less stuff to break.
I can't comment on this. The only "ongoing maintenance" costs I have had to deal with on my cars are tyres, bearings. suspension components and oil changes, which are the exact same things I expect to need replacing on EV's. One exception is for timing belts on an ICE, if your engine uses them. The engines I have had have been bulletproof (i did have to replace the head gasket on one of my cars, but at 35 years old, and a hard driven sports car, I expected something to go wrong eventually).
Also, EVs may have fewer parts, but they have a lot more electrical systems in them, and more complex ones. Ask anyone who buys and handles second hand cars for a living. The first thing to go on a car is the electronics. The mechanics will generally outlast a cars electrical systems (and most of the time the body itself, which tends to corrode and fracture due to metal fatigue, at least in the UK). The more electronics in a car, the more of a maintenance nightmare they are. Now, as the 90s BMWs are coming into "classic" area, people are finding out how horribly complex it is to maintain, when computer modules decide to misbehave, or stop working, or generate incorrect outputs. They are much harder to keep going than the 80s and earlier cars. I would rather rip apart and rebuild an engine, than have to debug 20 year old proprietary car computer systems.
I don't even want to think of all the software bugs and updates, and firmware problems, and memory corruption that will start being seen after 10 or so years on an EV, especially if, like with pretty much anything else software based, the manufacturer will stop supporting it shortly after rolling out a new model.
BEV cars have not been around long enough to gauge exactly what their maintenance costs will be. We shall have to see what the first "35 year old EV" looks like. Thing is, BEV have one big cost, the battery. Unlike an ICE vehicle, which (if well maintained), will keep the same range it had when new as it ages, a BEVs range is when "new", the more you drive it, the more it wears out. It is like my mobile phone. It lasted 3 days on a full charge when new, but after a year or so I had to charge it multiple times just to get through one work day.
On my phone, the battery is replaceable and I can get it cheaply replaced. A EV battery is expensive (possibly the majority of the cars cost), and when it goes chances are it will cost more than the cars worth to have it replaced.
Another thing to think about are the electric motors. They do wear out, the bearings would need replacing (no idea how often), and their efficiency will degrade as the winding insulation breaks down with time, resulting in a loss of power, and eventual motor burn out. Then there is corrosion (and how that would affect the power transmission to the motors), and a whole bunch of other stuff.
As such, I think, to keep an EV car going, it will cost a lot more over the long term in maintenance costs than an ICE, even if superficially, it looks like it is "simpler" than an ICE. .
> While I agree that electric cars don't make sense (yet),
Personally I don't think they will make sense as long as they insist on using batteries. Batteries suck, they can never beat liquid fuels for energy density, or refill time. The only reason we use batteries at all is because we were not able to find a way of converting liquid fuels to energy in a small enough space to fit them to portable electronics (excluding places where handling liquids is a bad idea). If something has to fit in your hand, batteries are the "least worst" option we have.
However cars, and mobile machinery are different. They don't have such extreme size restrictions. More effort should be put in generation of liquid fuels efficiently, and finding a way of using those fuels in EV's. The Ethanol fuel cells seem like a good direction, but so much misallocated capital is going into battery EVs at the moment, in the hope that people will want them (or be forced into them by the state).
Fun fact, is that one of the main reasons Diesels are a problem now, is because government subsidised them heavily in the 90s and 00s (Despite people telling them they are stupid to do so), because they listened to eco lobbies, and got it into their heads that CO2 reduction was the bee-all-end-all solution to all problems, and Diesel produced less CO2.
Now, the government are subsidising yet another technology due to eco-lobbying, with a good chance that 20 years down the line it will be shown they were stupid to do so, but governments being incompetent is so common now, it borders on cliche, unfortunately.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @03:50PM
It really sounds like battery-electrics are a vehicle manufacturers dream. Resale value of a vehicle with shot batteries is likely very low, and everything else will go bad quickly too.
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:27PM
Old-school car mechanics often claim this, but the statistics show the opposite: the electronics are the most reliable part of a car by an order of magnitude. The only justification for this statement is that the electronics often fail without pre-failure warning indications. But that is because the MTBF and MTTR are so low that it isn't worth putting in early detection systems for electronic parts and it isn't worth doing preventative maintenance like replacing wires or chips. By the time a car's electrical systems fail, it has gone through many sets of tires, a new clutch or transmission, 50 oil changes, air filters, fluid replacements, brakes, spark plugs, headlights, a water pump, some belts, several new batteries, a few replacement seals, etc.
This statement about reliability also applies to industrial machinery, computers, aircraft. Parts that move are the first to fail. I work with industrial medical devices, and the only "electronic" parts that factor into the reliability estimates are CPU fans and hard drives. And we prefer designs that don't require them.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday November 10 2018, @10:37PM
The market opportunity is to find a way to economically refurbish EV Batteries. Someone is going to make a lot of money doing this. It will certainly be cheaper than mining more raw materials to make one.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday November 09 2018, @08:35PM (4 children)
There are actually a number of pros to be considered:
EVs:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday November 09 2018, @10:12PM (1 child)
EVs Don't inherently produce additional air pollution when run (that depends entirely on the power source)
There's a bit more to this than meets the eye. It turns out that a significant source of PM10s and PM 2.5s (the particles that cause most lung damage) is in fact the dust generated from tyres rubbing on the roads, and if you live somewhere where people use studded tyres in winter (to use on minor roads) combined with salt to clear major roads and in cities, the studs generate a great deal of particulate pollution - to the extent that large Norwegian conurbations like Bergen, Stavanger, and Oslo have truly terrible air quality in winter.
https://stro.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Vegdirektoratet-presentation-of-VTI-test-EDEN-Group-meeting-25.09.25.pdf [stro.se]
https://www.scienpress.com/Upload/GEO/Vol%207_1_1.pdf [scienpress.com]
https://www2.dmu.dk/atmosphericenvironment/norpac/Downloads/Johansson_Oct2005.pdf [www2.dmu.dk]
So even if you remove exhaust emissions, you have not removed PM10 and PM2.5 emissions.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday November 10 2018, @12:15AM
Yes, that's correct. However, exhaust emissions and brake dust emissions are way down.
Tire compounds are probably generally par, but I suppose because EVs tend to stick the road better, they might actually be a little worse on tire particulates. All in all, though, since better traction makes for a much safer ride, I'll take it.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:14PM (1 child)
I'm quite curious about this. I'm an avid off-roader myself and I don't readily see too many advantages for electric propulsion over ICE.
In 4 low I already have way more torque than is even mechanically safe. In 4 low engine braking performance can only be described as "extreme." I can shift from 2 wheel to 4 hi while moving and out again but not into 4 low.
Traction control is available for 4wd and control of torque output to each wheel can be achieved too with sophisticated systems that can actively control the brakes at each wheel independently. Crawl control and descent control has been around for a while now on ICE.
Watch this ICE Toyota very carefully auto-dig itself out after the driver buried the front and rear tires in sand up to the axles [youtube.com]. That is some extremely precision and fine detailed control being demonstrated on that ICE.
The benefit seems to be in something like tons of torque or speed with out having to stop (shift from 4hi to 4low) but not in any kind of vehicle feature.
So I'm curious where does electric propulsion start offering things that we can't do now? What am I not seeing here?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday November 11 2018, @08:01PM
My Chevy 3/4 ton is the same; 4W high can be entered and left under power and rolling, but 4W low requires neutral to shift in and out of. I've never tried it rolling, don't think I will. :)
So, more about 4WD comparisons: The torque curve of an IC engine can be fairly described as a curve. The torque curve of EV motors is better described as a cliff. You get (very) large torque without having to have high RPM and gearing. No clutches are involved. Each wheel can be controlled completely independently of one another, so traction control is more easily achieved. No shifting is required, you always have the power and torque you need, presuming you have enough at all.
Also, I've not personally seen this done yet, probably because it compromises the low center of gravity advantage, but the possibility of a high-clearance design with much less stuff hanging off the chassis exists. The motor pods / chassis mounts and support structures are really all that's needed under there. No transaxle(s), no drive shaft(s), no low-hanging headers, etc. Motors can be integrated right into the wheels, which would also help with clearance issues. Imagine the wheel mounts being a thick vertical plate of steel with the wiring and brake support apparatus run safe inside it, and nothing else hanging down there at all. That'd handle deepish snow and other high-clearance challenges really well.
WRT to your observation about mechanically safe application of power: since there can be no gears, etc., the motors can be designed to apply power and get away with it right up to the point that the tires would rip off their mounts, assuming only that the motor pods / chassis mounts and motor bearings are designed to take it.