Electric Cars

[jackellis]

The Oracle has spoken.

What bothers me most about this article is that a very strategic technology (low cost recyclable batteries) is being developed here. Likely a consequence of too many young people taking up careers in law and finance and too few in engineering.

[LCHIEN]

my personal opinion is that electric cars will have a hard time of it until there is a breakthru in battery technology. Now he may have made steps in improving batteries but they are incremental improvements. Batteries are currently too exepnsive, too heavy and not enough capacity.

Compared to gasoline,
batteries are unreliable
have lower energy per weight
have higher cost per unit of energy stored
shorter lifespan - currently batteries are only good for 2-4 years and they typically lose capacity as they are cycled.


So making a car that has the range and cost and longevity of a gasoline car is still quite a ways off. There are niches where the range of the current electric car will work. Esp in Europe and asia where cities are compact, roads crowded and distances short.

But it will be hard to displace gasoline cars in the US at a great rate.

Other problems with batteries/electric cars are pollution in manufacturing and disposal and how much conservation they really make... if you count hybrids they still burn gasoline albeit not as much, but if you want larger cars they're not that much better.
If you are talking plugins, then you have moved pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack. Which helps some but still pollutes and adds greenhouse gasses as most of our power is still coal gas and oil. Plugins have the added problem that they are discharged deeper than hybrids and charged fuller which reduces their lifespan even faster than in hybrids. Plugins require larger battery packs and may cost 4-10 grand to replace after 3-4 years. Cars will end up being scrapped mcuh sooner than gas cars and add to the environmental recyling problems.
All these amount to improvements of a few percent here and maybe 10 percent there but not on the order of magnitude that we really need.

[jackellis]

...my personal opinion is that electric cars will have a hard time of it until there is a breakthru in battery technology. ...

This article supports some of your points. Here's how I see things sorting themselves out.

There will be some breakthroughs in battery technology that allow them to be produced at more reasonable cost and operate for 10 years or 4000 discharge/charge cycles. Typical vehicles will be built with enough battery power to go for 60-100 miles, however they will be hybrids that also use motor fuels not unlike gasoline and diesel, but made from algae or some fast-growing plant that doesn't compete with food crops for land or markets. Electricity from wind will be plentiful in many places and will cost about what grid power costs today, which on a per-mile basis will be a lot less expensive than whatever we're using for motor fuels at that point.

One place were I could be wrong is the cost of biofuels. If they end up being less costly than batteries, biofuels will win but we'll also likely have better drivetrain and manufacturing technologies.

We'll pay a steep price price for delaying the transition away from petroleum-based fuels, particularly in terms of key technologies and national security. Notice I have not mentioned climate change - it's irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Someone is going to invent the necessary elements and commercialize them. If it's not us, then it will be China, Korea, Japan, the French, the Scandinavians...someone. Continued dependence on imported petroleum will complicate all kinds of foreign policy choices. We have to fix that soon.

When Shockley et. al. built the first transistor, I'm sure none of them envisioned a time when a billion would be crammed on a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail. That's sort of where we are now with batteries. There are challenges, but someone is going to find a breakthrough.

[LCHIEN]

I'm afraid there's going to have to be government intervention to make us change buying habits - tax the heck out of gas or give big rebates/tax incentives to alternate fuel cars. The cars we drive now are capital items and will be on the road for ten years or more and weening us off 10% a year will not cut it if we have to change sooner rather than later.

The so called Moore's law where computer power and memory size doubles every 18 months has been a remarkable achievement. Going from one transistor per die to billions in 40 years is a fantastic rate of increase.

Unfortunately that rate of increase has never been achieved with any other technology and the likelihood of repeating in another technology is not promising.
Once semiconductor technolgy became mature the exponential rate of growth continued even as critics said it could not be done due to physics. Batteries are mature technology now, we've been using them for over 100 years. If we are able to improve them exponentially ala Moore's law we surely would have noticed much bigger changes by now.

[docrowan]

As I understand it, all batteries involve some sort of chemical reaction. As such, I don't believe we'll have a breakthrough of the magnitude needed in order to achieve the replacement of fuel combustion engines. Capacitors are a different story. Every few months there is some sort of tantalizing new material or technology announced with the potential to store vast amounts of energy in a small amount of space and weight. I agree with Loring that the fantastic evolution of semiconductors is unlikely to be duplicated in any other technology, but I do think that the revolution brought about by steam and later internal combustion could be repeated.

In 1800 there existed virtually no practical steam engines and human society operated much as it had in the year 800, through muscle power. By 1900 steam power had completely changed our society. Then in 1900 internal combustion engines were largely experimental, airplanes did not exist and automobiles were primitive at best. By 2000 our society had once again been totally transformed. I think by 2100 the internal combustion engine could go the way of the steam engine and some sort of solid state capacitor may be the technology that drives the change.