Electric cars are a pipe dream

And just think, you only pay $20,000 for that extra range......

 

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Price is an issue, but we are looking at the technology's promise too? When the price of the tech comes down (as it assuredly will), then cars of this spec will become much more affordable. Just a matter of waiting for more people to take the leap.

Electric cars seem to be less and less the pipe dream . . .

 

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Incidentally, Tesla have clocked up around 18 1/2 million miles.

source wiki

 

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What I'm trying to get at, which you're no doubt aware of given how precise that series of tangential evasions was, is how much of the cost of a fuel cell is;

a) raw materials - the valuable one being platinum, the rest being made mainly of oil and common minerals.
b) manufacturing - the time, manpower and energy.
c) r&d - building the prototypes and short run production line, making or customizing machine tools,

Only the first one is not amenable to a reduction in unit price through economies of scale.

Which is why you'd need to know how much platinum is in them to justify the absolute certainty you affected.

The quantity of platinum is about a milligram per cm2 of membrane, 10 grams per m2 (based on the Ballard ones of the type that they say are in a couple of hundred buses). Even at 1500 dollars a troy ounce, that isn't too bad. Each meter square would cost 500 dollars for the platinum.

A dept. of energy report a couple of years ago calculated (based on that fuel cell type, and including the raw materials costs) that a fuel cell to produce 100kW would cost about five 5,000 dollars based on a production run of half a million units. That is not an insurmountable obstacle for most car owners.

 

Adding a few grand to the tag of a car is not the same as "price is no object".

Are you familiar with the pop-psychology term "projecting" ? Because I didn't say any such thing. Or imply it, or as far as I can tell give a reasonable person justification to infer it.

Yes, pain in the ass. They do it with everything. Still, if profiteering and needless waste are allowed by law you can't blame them for trying to lock everyone in to their proprietary version even though it's just the same components from china in a different shaped box. That's business.

There are a couple hundred just from the one company linked from the wikipedia page you noted earlier.

Didn't you say there was only one in the usa earlier? How can canada have less than that if they have some?

It's like you just pull stuff out of your ass.

 

Except you haven't shown that it would just be a few grand.

Sure you did.
Go back and read your post because that claim was about what cars look like as being WRONG:

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Why yes, we believe in making profits, you don't?
Yes, by that logic the govt should have also mandated Vinyl records as the standard for audio reproduction too, who needed that BS of CDs making our record players obsolete?

Nope.
Indeed I gave you the NREL program as the source for the data to make it easy to check:

 

Well first of all, the report also suggests that 78% of the cost reduction comes at just 30,000 per year production rate, so if the entire system were viable then this wouldn't be a major barrier, but no car manufacturer is selling a consumer version of a fuel cell vehicle. (93% of the cost reduction is achieved at the 130,000 systems per year production rate).

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydroge...80kwW_fc_system_cost_analysis_report_2010.pdf


So the fact is that that cost (those are 2015 costs, that assume major reductions in cost can be achieved, because that's based on technology and manufacturing methods that don't yet exist) might not be an insurmountable cost if that was the only extra cost of a fuel cell vehicle was the Fuel Cell, but it's not.

You have to add the expensive H2 storage system, a large battery (fuel cells take time to start up, and don't produce the required peak power for automotive acceleration, and so you need a battery as a buffer), the electric motors and control system to compare it to the other IC and Hybrid systems it will compete with.

These other costs are substantial in a personal car, not so much in a bus, which is why all the trials are using buses.

Not to mention the lack of H2 fueling stations being probably the biggest problem with adoption in the personal car market.

 

You don't accept the 2009 dept of energy report I mentioned? What's the problem with it? It's all very well saying I haven't given you enough details, but I don't think it's really supportable when I've told you where they can be found, especially when you're not giving even that level of detail.

Why don't you show why the department of energy are wrong? How much platinum do you think a fuel cell contains? What density per unit area of membrane are you claiming that fuel cells really need?

How much do you think the unit cost on a million fuel cells would be? What do you base the calculation on?

To me it simply seems like you heard some random person or internet rumor say that fuel cells can never be practical, and have worked backwards from that to your current set of baseless assumptions.

I really don't know where you're getting that from. All I can find is something about enjoyment. Besides, even if I had been talking about what the car looks like, the power plant of a car barely impacts that.

The point was, much of the reason people like hugely inefficient cars is because they enjoy it. That they also enjoy cars that look a certain way didn't enter into it until you started blathering on about trivialities to divert attention away from the fact that many of your claims don't have any basis in fact.

I believe in it as long as it doesn't harm people, then I believe the law should prevent them.

It isn't the same logic though. To adapt your CD analogy, it would be more like the ISO organisation telling the originators of Joliet, rockridge, UDF, High Sierra etc to combine their systems and just use ISO 9660 otherwise people would be put off CDs in general because of the incompatibilities or expense of supporting multiple equivalent types. As happened, and didn't prevent the adoption of mp3 players.

The early adopters get stiffed with unsupported models, but they're too rich to care, and by the time it gets to mass market a defacto standard has usually emerged.

Similar to the EU efforts to standardize phone chargers to prevent to massive waste and pointless expense of every manufacturer having several types that are all many times more costly than if they were standardized into just a few types.

There are plenty of examples if you'd bothered to look.

 

Oh, so you do admit you made up the bit about the raw materials cost then? Fine. No hard feelings.

I agree that hydrogen isn't very practical, and adds expense.

If you recall I said right at the beginning that my preferred approach was a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. You chose to only discuss hydrogen either because they are the most expensive fuel cells you could think of or some other reason you're not being so forthcoming about.

Assuming that fuel cells never pan out, say for example if some unknown aspect of physics is discovered to prevent fuel cell manufacturing from following the upward trend in efficiency exhibited by other technologies, how do you stand on the initial question of electric cars being impossible? How about the wider issue of "carbon neutral" cars?

I personally think the preferable approach going forward from here is to replace the source of hydrocarbon fuel, so we can keep the legacy infrastructure until it wears out, but I find it impossible to refute the suggestion that there is a proportion of transport that fully electric vehicles are suited for.

The better the technology gets the larger that proportion can become. In my country a few decades ago the majority of people received the produce of their local dairy via electric vehicles every day. And that was back in the lead acid battery and glorified starter-motor days.

A milk float which only goes at jogging speed is a very niche market, but the capabilities progress constantly with better batteries and electronics, and the manufacturing costs come down constantly with better methods.

 

I gave you the 2010 report.

They think its going to be about $40 per KW, but ONLY for the fuel cell.
They also point out, that there are a lot of other components of the drive train that drive the cost up which is why Toyota's first fuel cell car is slated to go out the door at $138,000 in Europe.

Nope, I've been following their development for some time.

What BS is this?
You said looking like that is wrong.

Big difference between an industry accepting a standard and a government mandating one.
There is likely little to no market for swappable batteries outside of fleet use, and that's just too limited for this to be an early issue in making electric cars practical.

 

No I don't agree with that, and I didn't say RAW materials cost, I said Materials cost, as in things like the PEM membrane, which is very expensive and driving down it's cost is not at all certain but is still key to reducing the cost of fuel cells.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydroge...80kwW_fc_system_cost_analysis_report_2010.pdf

I've been very forthcoming about it.
I've stuck to Hydrogen Fuel Cells because that's what they are mainly working on and virtually all installed units are powered by H2 (like all those buses you mentioned).
The impurites in CH4 remain a major obstacle to their use in fuel cells.
In H2 systems even, they don't use compressed gas as their fuel source but flash supercooled liquid H2 as that way they can totally insure a pure fuel supply.
The most costly part of the fuel cell is thus maintained.

Electric cars are obviously possible.
You can buy several different makes today.

Carbon neutral refers more to the fuel than the car.
If I fill my V-12 Porshe with an ethanol based fuel made entirely from crops it's carbon neutral (use hydro or wind energy to power the plant that produces the ethanol)

Who has ever said there wasn't a proportion of transport that fully electric vehicles are suited for?

The question is really how big an impact will it make and how fast will it make it.

The key to that is the price of batteries, the range of batteries, speed of recharging, availability of recharging locations vs the cost of alternatives.

Right now, they are still a very very very small niche player and regular IC and hybrids are much more attractive to most buyers.

Which is something well suited to that very small niche market, but says nothing about the ability of the technology to fill the GENERAL Personal and Commercial market's needs.

 

And did that support your claim that most of the current cost of fuel cells is because of the platinum? No, it didn't. What's more it did support the claim you rejected about prices coming down on everything other than raw materials with larger runs.

Actually I said "removal of the entertainment element from car designs" would result in efficiency and safety improvements. That's not the same thing at all. The appearance isn't the entertainment element. The entertainment element is being fun to drive, i.e. more powerful than is necessary to get you there in roughly the same amount of time. I should have spelled it out more clearly, I thought it was abundantly obvious, but clearly not. My may take it that I am at fault for the misunderstanding.

Yes, they're different, but since both of them exist and the issue was whether another such example could exist, I feel confident in the affirmative response I gave and don't think your input justifies altering that position.

 

I agree with what you're saying now more than what you started off saying.

I still think you're exaggerating, but I'm bored so you're welcome to have it your way.

 

Of course that's NOT what I said.

And no, if you look at the report, it's quite clear that if you make more than about 30,000 of them the price drop goes pretty flat all the way out, so for any large car maker, who plans on selling many more than that (GM and Nissan each expect to sell more Volts and Leafs this year than that low number), the lower price is ALREADY factored in to their costs. And yet they aren't making them.

And which is why the DOE's take is this:

 

"Fuel cells are not labor intensive to make, they are material intensive. "
"The PEM membrane and the need for Platinum as a catalyst"
"The cost of the materials used in making fuel cells has always been the thing that has kept the cost high."

 

Agreed. I think the future will see a shift to more electric-centric vehicles, with most of their driving covered by recharging a more-or-less standard technology (i.e. lithium ion) battery, with the remaining long distance driving covered by an internal combustion engine. By drastically reducing the amount of liquid fuel needed, alternatives like ethanol become much more palatable.

 

Yes, a PEM membrane is NOT a RAW material.

It's a complex manufactured product.

It is one of the key factors in the high cost of Fuel Cells (read the friggin report!!!).

Reducing its MANUFACTURING cost is essential to reducing the cost of Fuel Cells (read the friggin report!!!!).

 

Pipe Dream? Ha.

"(idiomatic) A plan, desire, or idea that will not likely work; a near impossibility."

HELLO! Electric cars are here now, have been here for a long time, and will be here long after gas guzzlers have gone, LOL.

Why discuss them in "General Science" if they are a pipe dream. Surely a pipe dream belongs on the fringe? Go figure . . .

 

No, electric cars for general consumer use made by car companies outside of subsidized experimental trials have not been here for a long time.

Indeed there are but 2 models for sale in the US and only the LEAF represents a somewhat reasonably priced solution.

Still at $35,000 the LEAF is an expensive way to impress your neighbors that you mean Green.

Still the first full year of sales of the first EV on the market didn't even make 10,000 units in the US, where nearly 13,000,000 IC cars were sold.

Which no matter how you look at it, is a PATHETIC showing.

Compare this to say the Prius with 136,000 sales in the US, or the Ford F-150 and Chevy Silverado, both big V8 Trucks that sold a combined 1 million units and you can see that EVs have a LONG way to go to replace ICs as the dominant form of transportation.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57352547/top-selling-us-cars-and-trucks-in-2011/

 

I think you refer to corn based ethanol here, but not to sugar cane based ethanol, which displaced most of the gasoline used in Brazil as was cheaper and slightly more powerful but did give only 70% of the range that gasoline did. Brazil is now a net exporter of oil energy. The US could be too if it grew and imported sugar cane ethanol.

The subsidy of 43 cents of taxpayers money per gallon of ethanol oil companies got for mixing ethanol into their gasoline no longer exists. (A month or so ago it died.) That means about a 4 cent per gallon increase in the cost of "gasoline" which in fact was ~10% ethanol (as anti-knock agent as ethanol has higher octane rating and additive used earlier for this caused cancer etc.). Thus now the drivers pay for full cost of corn based ethanol as additive to gasoline, instead of the tax payers paying part of it, but of course the tax payers still pay the farm subsidy to the corn growers. It is the largest of all the farm subsidy costs.

It and other farm subsidies make food exports more competitive with those of other countries like Brazil - compensate for Brazil's longer growing seasons and lower labor cost. If they did not exist, more US crops would be sold in the US and the greater supply would make price of food in the store less. So Joe Tax payer has higher taxes to pay with net effect of making his grocery bill higher.

More discussion in my old thread "How DUMB can US voters be?" - More illustration that the rich have lobbied Congress to get richer. The US has a government "Of the rich, by their lobbyist, and for their corporations." One thing the people could do, if they ever did get control of the government,* would be to eliminate the lower tax rate on capital gains as that is large part of why the rich pay about half the effective tax rate on their income that the salaried worker does.

* They never will so long as national elections cost a billion or more dollars. I.e. the "99% " are stuck with government "Of the rich, by their lobbyist, and for their corporations."

If you want to see my suggested tax code see: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1792841&postcount=1
It has all income treated equally (with a simple progressive schedule), no taxes on corporations (but they must distribute profits within 10 years to people who are taxed or send the profit made 10 years ago to the IRS) and is so simple the tax law fits on a 3.5 index card, not 30,000 volumes of special interest, lobbyist written laws. Once the income has been taxed, you can give it to someone else and it is not taxed again (no gift tax or inheritance tax) The rate progressive rate table is annually adjusted to make "pay as you go" government, except in declared war time. Thus, every new benefit for the current generation's government gives out to win votes increases their, not their children's, tax burden.

"Pay as you go" prevents the instability of democracies discussed here:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2573119&postcount=1
Which was first discussed in Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835: "... mutually corrupt citizens and the democratic state. Citizens vote for those politicians who promise to use the state to give them whatever they want. ..."
But with the invention of fiat money has become much worse, much more unstable, than de Tocqueville could ever have imagined. - As world's worst ever depression, soon to come, will show.