EV's

ckahleer post=874885they should be able to mandate a standardized battery pack. 

In the mid-'00 I toured the A123 battery company HQ in MA.  They had built a modular battery pack using their LiFePO4 cells, each individual cell about the size of a D battery but longer.  Each modular pack was self contained with battery charging and monitoring/protection, and each pack was about the size of a 1U rack unit.  So something like 1.75" H by 19" W by maybe 12" deep.  

As a way to demonstrate their product, they had projects going to install these packs in all sorts of things.  They had a rack of packs that filled up the trunk of a Prius and gave it extended range.  They had a rack of them about 6' x 10' that was intended to replace an existing roof pack of lead acid batteries used on hybrid-electric public transit busses, offering more capacity with much less weight.  Then they had filled a 50' trailer with these same packs.  The trailer had a narrow hallway down the center, and both sides were floor to ceiling with what looked like server racks, with these battery pack modules all stacked together.  There were big bus bars that ran along the ceiling connecting all the pack together.  The intent with the trailer was that they could park them outside power plants to provide easily expandable grid battery storage.  If you need more storage, just drive more trailers over and plug them in.  

The original A123 went bankrupt around 2013 it looks like.  It seems they invested in manufacturing but the orders never showed up and they ran out of cash. 

But it seems like their product was good.  At the time we spoke to them they has tested the cells to 5000 cycles and had near zero loss of capacity.  They said they didn't really know how many cycles they could go because they hadn't had enough years since the cells were created to run enough cycles.

I would say that the biggest challenge currently with making a standardized automotive pack is that the cell capacity is just too low.  That is, in order to get decent range with an electric-only vehicle you need a huge volume of batteries.  The battery pack takes up so much space.  Wikipedia says the Tesla battery weights 1200 lbs .

Removing that thing as a single pack is never going to easy, and splitting it up into easily liftable modules (20 lbs max?) would dramatically increase the size of the overall package.  That's 60 individual boxes that would need to slide into the car.  Adding packaging around each of those 60 packs would add a ton of volume to the overall size.  And where do you put 60 doors?  

All of this is a real serious engineering challenge.

wrote:

As I mentioned before, CARB set of goal of 10% of total sales for ZEV by 2003.  But when it became clear that wasn't feasible, they created the Partial ZEV (PZEV) classification.  This was even before the first hybrid vehicles hit the market.  Many PZEV vehicles were just regular gas cars that had very clean burning engines.  The original 1990 regulation was intended to reduce smog, and I guess a PZEV maybe produces near zero smog contributing chemicals, but it can still be a car that burns nothing but gas.  





 

You just exposed the issue here. The push toward green energy isn’t based on technology, or real word demand. It’s just a bunch of people that want to tell us how to live, and spread our money around to the lobbyist, This has been the problem with the whole green stuff since Al Gore and his Inconvenient truth. They make predictions, then when that doesn’t come true the move the goalpost or change the name, first it was global warming, then green house effect, then climate change, climate crisis, climate emergency, now climate disaster. Somewhere in between was global cooling. “Come on man”. But what do we care, according to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the earth will die in ten years. 

It’s an ever changing and developing field that can only achieve new goals as technology allows. Forcing car companies to be 100% EV by any date isnt helping. Building battery plants, to do what, assemble chinese bought parts. Unless I missed it I have not heard of investing in technology. We want to invest in building parts. We need to invest in growing and spurring technology. 

A123 got $249m of green money that Obama toss out the back Whitehouse door, Solyndra received $535m both of those we got stiffed on because there were grants that didn’t need to be paid back. I’ve read it could have been as much at 15 billion we took a hit on with Obama. We are gunshy for a good reason. It’s gonna take a long time to gain back trust. Mandates and green new deals don’t help. It appears to be 2009 all over again. 

wrote:

They make predictions, then when that doesn’t come true the move the goalpost or change the name, first it was global warming, then green house effect, then climate change, climate crisis, climate emergency, now climate disaster.













 

you have literally described the scientific method. Science is not prophetic and its insane to think it is.

noun: scientific method; plural noun: scientific methods

1. a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."criticism is the backbone of the scientific method"
   
   You have a strong desire to parrot cable TV speaking points on here, you should keep that partisan bullshit on Facebook

wrote:

I have been. 
Steve
 

Here's an "opinion"  - Steve isn't fit to be a moderator, since he wants to be a troll as well.

wrote:

  The cure is worse than the initial problem only no one is telling you about it or you refuse to see it for what it is. 

Rick H.

















 

Thanks for assuming my opinions.
You clearly don't know what I think with an accusatory sentence like this. All you could know is that I have defended EV tech from some ignorant claims. It is possible to remove your political bias from observation.

You are correct in assuming I don't give two shits whether you like an electric motorcycle or not. However,  I do appreciate that you took the time and effort to experience one first hand before arriving at any kind of conclusion. Its more than most people do and it is commendable that you shared your experience here.

I have ridden a few electric motorcycles and I overall enjoyed the experiences. Like you, I was not overly impressed by the Livewire. However the Alta was a real deal fucking bike. Riding motocross they work well - they make instant torque, and because there is no rotating mass of an engine the moment of intertia is drastically reduced. It has the power of a 450 with the handling of a 250.

I also don't expect everyone to have the same needs, wants, or aesthetic desires, in a vehicle. That would be monumentally stupid. If you need a vehicle that can drive 800 miles in one day, there are options for you. if you only commute 40 miles a day an EV might make sense. Some people want a vehicle for their 95% use case rather than their 5% use case.

 Keep the political garbage in "daily shatter".

 

I have endeavoured to keep my comments in this thread based around technical and infrastructure limitations currently, along with suggestions to rationalise the cost of ownership through thoughtful design. I generally don't do politics as it's just too volatile especially in a global forum such as this where there is such a diverse membership each with their own local challenges. My hope is that as technology progresses then an efficient method of "on-board" charging will be developed (much like many hybrids now) which would significantly improve range 

This will be my last post in this thread.
I hope  that all others will move on too  and let this EV discussion die a natural death from lack of new posts
and pass into history. 

wrote:

wrote:

As I mentioned before, CARB set of goal of 10% of total sales for ZEV by 2003.  But when it became clear that wasn't feasible, they created the Partial ZEV (PZEV) classification.  This was even before the first hybrid vehicles hit the market.  Many PZEV vehicles were just regular gas cars that had very clean burning engines.  The original 1990 regulation was intended to reduce smog, and I guess a PZEV maybe produces near zero smog contributing chemicals, but it can still be a car that burns nothing but gas.  






 

You just exposed the issue here. The push toward green energy isn’t based on technology, or real word demand. It’s just a bunch of people that want to tell us how to live, and spread our money around to the lobbyist, This has been the problem with the whole green stuff since Al Gore and his Inconvenient truth. They make predictions, then when that doesn’t come true the move the goalpost or change the name, first it was global warming, then green house effect, then climate change, climate crisis, climate emergency, now climate disaster. Somewhere in between was global cooling. “Come on man”. But what do we care, according to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the earth will die in ten years. 

It’s an ever changing and developing field that can only achieve new goals as technology allows. Forcing car companies to be 100% EV by any date isnt helping. Building battery plants, to do what, assemble chinese bought parts. Unless I missed it I have not heard of investing in technology. We want to invest in building parts. We need to invest in growing and spurring technology. 

A123 got $249m of green money that Obama toss out the back Whitehouse door, Solyndra received $535m both of those we got stiffed on because there were grants that didn’t need to be paid back. I’ve read it could have been as much at 15 billion we took a hit on with Obama. We are gunshy for a good reason. It’s gonna take a long time to gain back trust. Mandates and green new deals don’t help. It appears to be 2009 all over again. 

EV's are an alternative to ICE's because we can no longer afford to continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.  It is the reason we are beginning to see more variability in weather patterns.  More drought in dry areas, more tornados and hurricanes and more floods.  Unfortunately these events are now baked into our future so we need to begin hardening facilities to withstand them.  But we CAN take steps to slow and possibly even halt global warming in the future by limiting our GHG emissions.

There is a long history of scientific study of climate change, going back 150 years to the days of Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish climatologist from the late 1800's.  The physics of thermal radiation are also well known, going back even farther.  This stuff is pure science.

Climate scientists have created models to understand what will happen in the future.  My opinion is that all models are wrong, but all models are useful to help understand a problem.  With climate models the results have been pretty accurate so far.  Check out what James Hansen said in his 1988 Congressional testimony.  It's actually a pretty good prediction of where we are today.

There are just many that say it isn't true. In a recent interview the REAL Climatologists pointed out the temperature hasn't gone up more than .03* since the 1700's. Ask yourself this question, if the sea levels are raising then why is Obama and the Elites buying up ocean front property? Oh yeah some of the Hollywood crowd are selling their estates but that's not because of climate change, it's because they're going broke. 
Trees and other plant life take in CO2 and give us O2. I'm with the plant a tree crowd not the climate De Jure phonies. 
Steve

All I’m gonna saw is they have found 3000 to 7000 year old tree stumps under melted ice fields in Western Canada and Iceland. 

Glad to hear you're planting trees Steve.  We're going to need all the trees we can get.  Part of Canada's plan (if you can call it a plan) is to plant 1 billion trees.

Steve, that site you linked is clickbait, not true science. There are plenty of good sites you can access.  NASA and NOAA are pretty good.  Here is one on the history of climate science.

skepticalscience.com/history-climate-science.html

Indeed, sea levels are rising, but not at a rate that will submerge oceanfront property in our lifetime, or probably Obama's as well.  Here's a question for you...where do you think all the water from the polar ice caps and glaciers is going to go?  Here's another one for you...what happens to water when it warms up?  

The earth has been warming for about 150 years.  You can see it in this chart.  The general trend since about 1910 is warming.  Prior to that there was a cooling variation, and there have been several minor cooling trends since then.  Overall the warming is about 1.3 deg over the last century.

www.climate.gov/news-features/understand...e-global-temperature

All I ask is for you to be open to information on climate change.  If you aren't open then there is no use discussing the subject and I won't waste my time providing you with links.

 

If you can't question or debate it it's not science. 
Steve