new car law

[calimac]

California is proposing a law that new gasoline-powered cars will cease to be sold in about 13 years. This is in the tradition of laws (state or federal) that mandated seat belts in new cars, or that required new cars to run on unleaded instead of leaded gas. The car manufacturers whined over those, but they got them done.

What will really enforce this law will be the gradual disappearance, in subsequent years, of gas stations. Once it becomes too difficult to fuel your car, you'll switch. This happened with leaded gas. For many years stations sold both leaded and unleaded, but gradually the leaded disappeared, and if you still had an old car you were out of luck.

We need two things to make an all-electric car environment work. One is fueling infrastructure. We're building that, rapidly. Good. The other is to get the price of electric cars down. Right now they cost about 4 or 5 times as much as a gas car. That's too great a difference. Tax credits will not help the people who need help the most. Technological advances that make them less expensive to build would be ideal. The substitute would be rebates, built into the purchase price so you don't have to fork over the money and apply for the rebate afterwards. In urban areas we're already developing a system where it's easy not to own a car and just rent one when you need it, and that's good, but that won't work elsewhere without a massive rebuilding of the entire environment.

But what I want to know is: what about hydrogen fuel-cell cars? I test-drove one of those, and if they're technically perfected, become available at a reasonable price, and acquire a reasonable fueling infrastructure, I'd much prefer one. They fuel with a physical substance, so it's easier to figure out how much range you have left than psyching out electric charge; and I believe they're less harmful to the environment, without those giant honking batteries and huge electric charges zapping around: hydrogen is very easy to get. And as for hydrogen being explosive, so is gasoline and we manage that.

Comments

[voidampersand]

The premium for a new electric car is around $10K. For example, a new Nissan Sentra starts at $20K, and a Leaf is $28K. There are federal and state tax credits that can reduce the cost by $7.5K if the car is eligible. So it's more like a $2.5K premium for electric. That is more than paid for by fuel savings.

There are some very expensive EVs but they are competing with luxury ICE cars that are also very expensive. You need to compare equivalent models. EVs like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt are not luxury cars and are not as expensive. There is a lack of very cheap EVs. The Mitsubishi iMiEV was too cheap and did not sell well. For a while, used EV prices were very low, and you could get an excellent used BMW i3 or Fiat 500e or Chevy Spark EV for cheaper than an equivalent ICE car. But then gas prices went through the roof and used EV prices followed. Given time, there will be a more robust used EV market. Used EVs are much more reliable and cheaper to operate than used ICE cars. It will be a boon to people of modest means when more used EVs are available.

I remember being excited about the articles in Scientific American about the coming hydrogen economy. It turned out to be a false promise. Hydrogen is an extremely difficult molecule to contain in tanks and to transmit without loss. A battery is big and heavy but so is a hydrogen tank. Moving electrons through power lines is way easier than moving hydrogen through pipelines. Also, most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and has a bad carbon footprint. Clean hydrogen can be made from water but it takes electricity, and the process is lossy. It is a better use of the electricity to put it in batteries. I think there will be some uses for clean hydrogen in the future, but it will be as a feedstock for making carbon neutral kerosene for aviation and other uses where electricity is not fully practical.

[armiphlage]

Hydrogen would have been a good replacement for gasoline if we could have switched back in the 1970s, when batteries were immensely heavy and we didn't have modern electric motors with rare-earth magnets.

Now that batteries and motors are lighter, and getting better every year, hydrogen just wouldn't be able to compete.

Interestingly, a way to deal with hydrogen's propensity to leak through the walls of metal tanks is to line them with goldbeater's skin (made from cow intestines). For some reason (perhaps the hydrogen atoms on the outside of the long-chain organic molecules), it repels gaseous hydrogen. Of course, gutting enough cows to line a planet's worth of hydrogen pipelines and storage tanks would be a challenge - and the lining would probably need to be replaced periodically.

[wild_patience]

My worry is recharging an electric car. You stop for gas, you know how long it takes to fill your tank. My understanding is that when you need to re-charge an EV, it takes hours, and that's assuming you have access to a charging station.

With apartment buildings and other multi-family housing, they are going to have to come up with a way for more people to be able to charge faster at the same time.

[andrewducker]

The Tesla Supercharger can give it about 200 miles in 15 minutes. But that's the best current charger, and obviously that's not a full charge, just the fastest it can go from empty to something useable.

[voidampersand]

A lot of charging will happen overnight. I have a charger in my garage. So I can charge overnight and start in the morning with a full battery. There also are chargers at work that are free for employees. I need to charge about once a week, so usually I can do it at work.

Apartment buildings are putting chargers in their garages and parking lots. Cities are putting chargers on streets. There are new light poles that incorporate chargers. There are chargers in public parking garages and parking lots in towns, shopping centers, and at hospitals. You can plug in while shopping or eating out. These are usually level 2 chargers which are good for about 25 miles of charge per hour. This is actually fine, because normally you are driving a lot less than 25 miles to go shopping or do things in town.

The fast DC chargers are meant for road trips, when you are trying to make distance and don't have time to charge overnight. There are apps and web sites like PlugShare that you can use to plan where to charge.

[wild_patience]

Good information, guys. This tells me, too, that we would have another problem. Neither Calimac nor I have a smart phone. I consider them an unnecessary expense whose cost (the service plan) far outweighs the benefits. We don’t do anything with apps. I use my iPad a lot but I don’t have built-in WiFi. I rely on home WiFi primarily. We would have to get smart phones as well and beg a tech-savvy nephew to teach us how to use them. I hope the state strengthens its electrical infrastructure before 2035. At present, PGE seems to be far out of its depth and not up to taking care of what is already in place.

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

[voidampersand]

No worries. You might eventually decide you want smartphones but they are not required. The public charger networks such as ChargePoint will send you a card.

The electrical infrastructure in California has plenty of excess capacity at night. Also, as more solar plants are installed, there are times in the mid-day when California is paying other states to take our electricity. Capacity is short during heatwaves for air conditioning, and in the early evening when everyone is cooking. Charging at night or in the morning is better for both the environment and the pocketbook.

Not that PG&E is ever not out of its depth. What a bunch of maroons. But California is on the right track.