Battery based electric vehicles of today and tomorrow.

[3930dave]

Same reason we have Corporate Welfare...... The Golden Rule.

Rgds, D.

 

[travisbb]

Doughknob, I think EVs are past the point that they need a helping hand for a few reasons. The most obvious is that Teslas aren't heavily subsidized anymore, aren't cheap, and yet still have lines out the door waiting for vehicles. Less obvious is that EVs have proven to be cheaper in the long run for some use cases. Once something makes sense on its own merits, it no longer needs a helping hand.

I believe EV mandating EVs may cause unintended problems in several ways, but the easiest to explain is to look at the diagram of what comes out of a barrel of oil and imagine a world where ICEVs are banned. Without ICEVs, gasoline is worthless and something to be disposed of, not sold. If gasoline is a little less than half of a barrel of oil and you have to pay to dispose of it then only about half the barrel is sold so the price of what does get sold doubles.

So diesel and heating oil becomes over $6/gal. Big agricultural equipment won't be going EV any time soon, so the fuel cost doubles. In Alberta that means a 5-10% increase is crop prices. But everything else that goes into farming is made of, with, or moved by oil. The lubricants for all that equipment goes up. Tires cost more.

In this EV-only world, people still burn fossil fuels for heat and electricity (which we'll at least twice as much of!). So natural gas prices rise to match fuel oil prices on an energy basis. One critical thing made out of natural gas? Fertilizer, which will get much more expensive. So food prices rise again.

Marine shipping becomes more expensive as bunker fuel doubles in price. The feedstock for plastics double in cost. Because of that, parts cost more.

Taxes need to increase to pay for the more expensive asphalt to keep the roads up. Roads which degrade faster because EVs are heavier. Of course it's unreasonable to assume maintenance will keep up when materials are more expensive and the damage more frequent.

So where does this leave our poor person? Driving a $10k EV (no $1k ICEV junkers left) which goes through tires faster because the car weighs more, the pavement is rougher, and the suspension is worn from the bad roads. They need this car to get to work where they pay more taxes than now for less services in order to keep more expensive food on their table and pay their astronomical heating bill to keep the pipes just above freezing.

But EV passenger vehicles are cheaper than ICEVs to drive, so why would anybody make the connection? I mean, food and fuel prices would come down if only that large equipment were changed to use electricity, right?

 

[Gale Hawkins]

This was so much hippy-dippy BS!
Reminds me of some of the stoned out "discussions" from my youth...

Some missed new scientific advancements while stoned out perhaps.

As you can realize from listening to this presentation EVS are just a short-term stepping stone transportation solution.

Tardigrade is first multicellular organism to be quantum entangled

A tardigrade cooled to near absolute zero and placed in a state of quantum entanglement survived its ordeal

www.newscientist.com

More about quantum entanglement mentioned above.

 

[Fixastuff]

I always though supply and demand drives prices. If demand for crude is less because the majority of vehicles don't run on it, wouldn't it be cheaper? Seems some people in the thread have it backwards.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

Yes but we're probably looking at 2040 2050 before crude usage would drop a huge amount. The push back on lithium ion battery technology is already developing.

 

[Hay Dude]

Same reason we have Corporate Welfare...... The Golden Rule.

Rgds, D.

Yeah, well, here’s a chance to buck that trend. Why make poor people subsidize rich people’s toys of virtue
Its wrong.

 

[CalG]

If I trusted any battery to be as useful as the 70 year old IC engine in the Fordson, I would have one.

But you can't just clean the points and put $10 worth of electricity into a dead battery and get the thing to run.

Maybe some day... Fortunately, by the estimates, we have another 500 years of petroleum in the ground beneath us.

That old Fordson might just be running till then.

 

[travisbb]

I always though supply and demand drives prices. If demand for crude is less because the majority of vehicles don't run on it, wouldn't it be cheaper? Seems some people in the thread have it backwards.

That's true if you are talking about one thing, but nobody uses straight raw crude oil. Instead people use part of a barrel of oil in the form of gasoline or diesel or asphalt or plastic feedstock.

Because oil isn't one thing the supply is all mixed up with the demand of the other parts. If you get 1/6 a barrel of diesel out of a barrel of oil and you need six million barrels of diesel for heavy equipment, then 36 million barrels of crude oil will be sold. 6 million barrels of diesel will come out of it and 30 million barrels of other stuff that needs to go somewhere, even if it's at a loss.

As long as the parts that sell bring in enough money to cover the costs, the oil will be used. Even if a big percentage of it needs to be dumped. Gasoline used to be dumped into rivers because there wasn't any use for it.

 

[California]

As long as the parts that sell bring in enough money to cover the costs, the oil will be used. Even if a big percentage of it needs to be dumped. Gasoline used to be dumped into rivers because there wasn't any use for it.

Modern refineries take a grade and refine it into a more valuable grade. One example was when Valero was the first to refine Venezuelan heavy crude, nearly tar, into gasoline and more usable products. Their investment in new technology gave them an advantage for a while. I expect future petroleum refining will adjust to whatever the market wants to buy. That refining may cost a lot of the energy input to process the feedstock, making the output more expensive, but I don't think refinery output is locked into the fixed proportions we might expect.

 

[lman]

I always though supply and demand drives prices. If demand for crude is less because the majority of vehicles don't run on it, wouldn't it be cheaper? Seems some people in the thread have it backwards.

Which would also mean that the price of electricity will go up substantially. The difference is that there is no competition with my electric company. I don't have a choice of my home electricity, so I could look at price increases with no options like I have now.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

FedEx gets first of 500 electric trucks from GM's EV unit in a major advance for green logistics

Sounds like GM getting into EVs.

 

[Agvg]

FedEx gets first of 500 electric trucks from GM's EV unit in a major advance for green logistics

Sounds like GM getting into EVs.

A lot of middle of the road EVs are on its way, if you not are pushing battery technology you can make a mediocre EV and it good enough for a large base of customers, problem comes to make money on them.

 

[Hay Dude]

FedEx gets first of 500 electric trucks from GM's EV unit in a major advance for green logistics

Sounds like GM getting into EVs.

Thats great. Let FedEx guinea pig the electric trucks so the great unwashed don’t have to. Maybe they’ll be available after my Ram gets old enough to trade.

 

[3930dave]

Yeah, well, here’s a chance to buck that trend. Why make poor people subsidize rich people’s toys of virtue
Its wrong.

I don't disagree. I'm pretty sure that the surgeons that ur works with could have afforded to buy their Teslas and PV arrays on their own.... just one example.....

Integrity/Morals..... key requirements to make it onto my Personal Friend list. While I'm not an elitist about many things.... this requirement tends to keep my list short - which I'm quite OK with....

Real World..... I had to learn to pay more attention to "Them That Have the Gold, Make the Rules".....

Later extended to .... "Or, Get to Ignore the Rules When Convenient"....

While I don't agree with the above, I found ignoring the Golden Rule enhanced Pain Level when picking battles... leading to me hearing Will Rogers in my head again..... .

Rgds, D.

 

[3930dave]

FedEx gets first of 500 electric trucks from GM's EV unit in a major advance for green logistics

Sounds like GM getting into EVs.

Adoption can be readily justified for certain business usage.

A) Local drive patterns make sense.

B) Adequate Time and Space to Recharge is available. Upgrading utility wiring/Adding High Speed Chargers is likely a write-off.

C) Many businesses write-off (as in dispose of) new vehicles in not much more than 5 years.

As a personal vehicle, I don't get any of the tax advantages above. In my view, "C" is a particularly big deal, since that also means the corporate owner is ditching the vehicle before HV battery replacement time....

Yet another example ^ of the Golden Rule.....

Rgds, D.

 

[Lee Robinson]

The only way EVs will end up being good is if they eventually are charged by solar power. If they are on the grid, they don't really save enough to justify the conversion. That is why Elon Musk made solar panels for roofs. They have to eventually get away from the grid.

 

[PuffyC]

But your dancing around my question.
Why should low income income earning Americans, barely able to afford an old ICEV, have to subsidize EVs for rich people?

If it helps, the bottom 61% of Americans pay no federal income tax, so it’s really ‘rich’ people subsidizing other ‘rich’ people. Unless it’s someone in the bottom 61% buying that EV of course.

 

[aczlan]

Modern refineries take a grade and refine it into a more valuable grade. One example was when Valero was the first to refine Venezuelan heavy crude, nearly tar, into gasoline and more usable products. Their investment in new technology gave them an advantage for a while. I expect future petroleum refining will adjust to whatever the market wants to buy. That refining may cost a lot of the energy input to process the feedstock, making the output more expensive, but I don't think refinery output is locked into the fixed proportions we might expect.

As I understand it, the refineries are locked to a particular type and grade of crude oil. They can probbaly decrease the "high end" output a little and increase the "low end output" to compensate but there are limits to how much they can do without taking the plant apart and replumbing it ($$$,$$$,$$$).

Aaron Z

 

[Hay Dude]

If it helps, the bottom 61% of Americans pay no federal income tax, so it’s really ‘rich’ people subsidizing other ‘rich’ people. Unless it’s someone in the bottom 61% buying that EV of course.

Even though the bottom 61% pay no fed income tax, I’m not sure where the EV subsidy is resourced from.
Federal taxes on gas & diesel is 18.4 and 24.4 cents per gallon respectively. If the EV subsidy comes from federal fuel taxes, then the poor DO subsidize EVs
Also,I wouldn’t call people in the 39th percentile “rich”, either.

 

[California]

As I understand it, the refineries are locked to a particular type and grade of crude oil. They can probbaly decrease the "high end" output a little and increase the "low end output" to compensate but there are limits to how much they can do without taking the plant apart and replumbing it ($$$,$$$,$$$).

Aaron Z

Yes, that was my point. At the time a few years ago, Valero was the first refiner to pour big bucks into new refining technology to meet future specs. It gave them a competitive advantage until the big guys followed their example. Thinking some more about what they did, I think their refinery upgrades also included measures for separating the sulphur out of raw feedstock. This let them buy, cheap with little competition, Venezuelan oil with so much sulphur that no one else had the technology to refine it into usable product.

My perspective here is kinda unique. I've more or less followed the decline of the oil industry of Venezuela (and the crash of their economy) ever since I lived there for a couple of years, long ago when it was a prosperous democracy. They have huge petroleum resources but its all so low grade that it became unmarketable, one of the causes for their economy crash. (Then a demagogue told them he could save them with socialism but that just meant jobs for his buddies, replacing the oil managers and techs who knew what the were doing). So the industry collapsed to near zero output and the economy got even worse. While the insiders stole everything. Just as bad as Zimbabwe.

I happened to watch a related video on YouTube recently. Indigo Traveller visited the huge barrio in Caracas where I lived for a while. Relevant here, he found fuel in the gas stations is free, after the government backed down on riots over fuel prices. You pay only a decent tip to the attendant if you wish, that's his income. He says there is gasoline only in Caracas, if you need gas elsewhere you need to take it there yourself. Everything is surreal.

The free gas station description starts at about the 4 minute point in this video.