“There’s no need to change your driving habits. Where refueling infrastructure exists, simply fill the hydrogen fuel tank and you are ready to enjoy zero emissions driving at its finest.” ~ straight off the Toyota Mirai web page. “Where” and how much?
Price of used Tesla's falling like a stone ...
- Thread starter JimDandy
- Start date
If you have ever read the car issues of Consumer Reports, the Teslas generally do very poorly. The quality simply isn't there. So the business will suffer, as it should, for producing poor products. Certainly when i was considering a new vehicle, I did my research and it indicated that the Tesla was over hyped.
Tesla filled a breakthrough need. Sure the electric car has been around for a long long time, mostly based on lead acid golf cart style batteries, but those were mostly DIY hobby cars or small volume producers that dabbled in electric vehicles. Battery EV’s never really pushed over the edge to MAINSTREAM volume passenger vehicle production until Tesla made it happen. They were focussed, comitted, leveraged established battery technology, and brought some swagger and sexyness to the party.
Chevy and others tried but didn’t quite pull it off. Troubled prototypes, overly complicated systems, over priced value proposition for the range and style of car. Somehow Tesla put the pieces together in a way that the whales couldn’t. Typical—Big entrenched players find a lot or reasons why not to take some risks, and struggle in new spaces. Innovative disruptors like Tesla just ask “Why Not?” and go for it.
Elon’s vision was to make an electric vehicle a mainstream success—to start the momevent, regardless if Tesla was to become the market winner or not. He accomplished that. The stock market rewarded him for being the first to make BEV’s a real contender in the passenger vehicle market space, the same way it Rewarded Toyota for Hybrid electric vehicles. Yes, the market now sees strong competition coming from the big boys, which is predictable. Pretty much all major car manufacturers are launching a flotilla of new BEV cars and trucks over the next 5 years, propped up by strong ZEV mandates by regulators over the next 20-30 years to wean us.off fossil fuels The transition to BEV’s is well on it’s way, and I believe there is no turning back. The hype and rediculous market cap that investors bought in to Tesla with trainloads of cash is of course reversing as sales plateau, scrutiny emerges, and the market responds with credible alternatives. By the way, Tesla is a tech stock—have you seen ehat’s happed to tech stocks lately? How’s Meta/Facebook doing? Go google Google’s stockprice trajectory. So some of the fall is based on Tesla’s future prospects, and some is based on tech market woes/inflation/Hawkish fed policy on interest rates/covid carry-on/Russian warmongering/Chinarrogance/etc.
My sense is that Tesla has a chance to fix its problems and compete in a maturing market, but it remains to be seen if they have the leadership to do so, or if they will get swallowed up in the process. But I don’t see Elon taking back the reins. He’s already accomplished what he set out to do.
Chevy and others tried but didn’t quite pull it off. Troubled prototypes, overly complicated systems, over priced value proposition for the range and style of car. Somehow Tesla put the pieces together in a way that the whales couldn’t. Typical—Big entrenched players find a lot or reasons why not to take some risks, and struggle in new spaces. Innovative disruptors like Tesla just ask “Why Not?” and go for it.
Elon’s vision was to make an electric vehicle a mainstream success—to start the momevent, regardless if Tesla was to become the market winner or not. He accomplished that. The stock market rewarded him for being the first to make BEV’s a real contender in the passenger vehicle market space, the same way it Rewarded Toyota for Hybrid electric vehicles. Yes, the market now sees strong competition coming from the big boys, which is predictable. Pretty much all major car manufacturers are launching a flotilla of new BEV cars and trucks over the next 5 years, propped up by strong ZEV mandates by regulators over the next 20-30 years to wean us.off fossil fuels The transition to BEV’s is well on it’s way, and I believe there is no turning back. The hype and rediculous market cap that investors bought in to Tesla with trainloads of cash is of course reversing as sales plateau, scrutiny emerges, and the market responds with credible alternatives. By the way, Tesla is a tech stock—have you seen ehat’s happed to tech stocks lately? How’s Meta/Facebook doing? Go google Google’s stockprice trajectory. So some of the fall is based on Tesla’s future prospects, and some is based on tech market woes/inflation/Hawkish fed policy on interest rates/covid carry-on/Russian warmongering/Chinarrogance/etc.
My sense is that Tesla has a chance to fix its problems and compete in a maturing market, but it remains to be seen if they have the leadership to do so, or if they will get swallowed up in the process. But I don’t see Elon taking back the reins. He’s already accomplished what he set out to do.
H2 anyone? I will pass on hydrogen as the eventual winner. I think BEV’s will win the vehicle race long-term for several reasons:
1. Total system efficiency
BEV: Produce electricity—>Store electricity—>Use electricity
H2: Produce electricity—>Make or Refine hydrogen—>Store Hydrogen—>Ship Hydrogen to Depots—>Transfer hydrogen to vehicle storage—>Chemically react hydrogen with O2 to make electricity—>Use electricity
2. Total vehicle solution
- Charge at home, leverage the grid and your solar panels, stable well-proven technologies (electric motors, batteries), small footprint, total cost of materials, total cost of ownership, low system complexity, low maintenance cost, plug back in to your house to provide home backup power (Ford Lightning already does this)
Vs.
-go to fuelling station, still using a fuel and has l/100km rating, multiple complex and costly components, very fussy fuel cell stacks that inherently don’t like shock/vibration/big temp changes/impurities/etc , inherently higher number of points of failure/lower reliability, have to carry multiple high pressure tank bombs onboard (BOBs).
3. Think of Hydrogen as a Hydronon-carbon. It’s a fuel, it just doesn’t contain carbon, so it’s way cleaner. Fuel is inherently harder and more costly to make, ship, store, use, replenish than electricity, which flows quite nicely through wires, has a well established distribution grid (no trucking fuel or pumping through pipelines required).
4. You still need a battery! Did you know that the Toyota Mirai Fuel Cell vehicle has a Prius battery in the back to get the voltage up around 650 or so to run the motors efficiently and provide regenerative braking capability? So the illusion that hydrogen will not require mining a lot of precious metals is a falacy..Toyota has had fuel cell technology for decades, but sat on it for good reasons. They’ve been slow to the party on PHEV’s and BEV’s too, so I am not convinced at all that their FCEV will be a gamechanger It will be interesting to see if the Mirai succeeds or not. My guess it will be a stop-gap vehicle that will cease when alternative battery technologies prove out. When they switch their whole platform to 100% fuel cell vehicles I guess I will have to eat my shorts (or at least have them rubbed in my face vigorously). Don’t see it happening.
5.the Hydrogen Economy never happened, and probably never will. I am still waiting for a reason to buy Ballard stock, but I just can’t pull the trigger. It’s a niche application thing. Small forklifts in sensitive environments, specialty stationary backup power, and aerospace.
There will be more nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar in our lives as coal and gas phase down slowly. It’s inevitable, and electricity is the easiest and safest form of energy to move around. No need for hydrogen. When someone figures out how to run jet engines on hydrogen and store enough on a 737Max , I’m in. Until then, I’m staying juiced! 🤪
-Punt.
1. Total system efficiency
BEV: Produce electricity—>Store electricity—>Use electricity
H2: Produce electricity—>Make or Refine hydrogen—>Store Hydrogen—>Ship Hydrogen to Depots—>Transfer hydrogen to vehicle storage—>Chemically react hydrogen with O2 to make electricity—>Use electricity
2. Total vehicle solution
- Charge at home, leverage the grid and your solar panels, stable well-proven technologies (electric motors, batteries), small footprint, total cost of materials, total cost of ownership, low system complexity, low maintenance cost, plug back in to your house to provide home backup power (Ford Lightning already does this)
Vs.
-go to fuelling station, still using a fuel and has l/100km rating, multiple complex and costly components, very fussy fuel cell stacks that inherently don’t like shock/vibration/big temp changes/impurities/etc , inherently higher number of points of failure/lower reliability, have to carry multiple high pressure tank bombs onboard (BOBs).
3. Think of Hydrogen as a Hydronon-carbon. It’s a fuel, it just doesn’t contain carbon, so it’s way cleaner. Fuel is inherently harder and more costly to make, ship, store, use, replenish than electricity, which flows quite nicely through wires, has a well established distribution grid (no trucking fuel or pumping through pipelines required).
4. You still need a battery! Did you know that the Toyota Mirai Fuel Cell vehicle has a Prius battery in the back to get the voltage up around 650 or so to run the motors efficiently and provide regenerative braking capability? So the illusion that hydrogen will not require mining a lot of precious metals is a falacy..Toyota has had fuel cell technology for decades, but sat on it for good reasons. They’ve been slow to the party on PHEV’s and BEV’s too, so I am not convinced at all that their FCEV will be a gamechanger It will be interesting to see if the Mirai succeeds or not. My guess it will be a stop-gap vehicle that will cease when alternative battery technologies prove out. When they switch their whole platform to 100% fuel cell vehicles I guess I will have to eat my shorts (or at least have them rubbed in my face vigorously). Don’t see it happening.
5.the Hydrogen Economy never happened, and probably never will. I am still waiting for a reason to buy Ballard stock, but I just can’t pull the trigger. It’s a niche application thing. Small forklifts in sensitive environments, specialty stationary backup power, and aerospace.
There will be more nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar in our lives as coal and gas phase down slowly. It’s inevitable, and electricity is the easiest and safest form of energy to move around. No need for hydrogen. When someone figures out how to run jet engines on hydrogen and store enough on a 737Max , I’m in. Until then, I’m staying juiced! 🤪
-Punt.
No one solution will work. It will be a mixture of solutions. And rather than people saying one technology beats all it is picking the right technology for ease of employment and immediate impact.
Example, hydrogen is being used on semi rigs right now in BC to supplement diesel. It is a moderate modification at a reasonable cost. It allows the use of the installed fleet but contributes to a decrease in CO2 emissions but also noxious diesel NOx. Good technology for things like trains. And yes, there is capacity being built, in fact, a new plant on the North Shore.
Example, hydrogen fuel cell are being used underground. Why, because the lithium battery ones are burning. Nothing scares a miner more than a fire in the hole. I would be comfortable underground with a fuel cell but not with lithium batteries. By the way, I hate the old style cable units.
Fuel cells for passenger cars? Not sure. I suspect hydrogen combustion technology as being developed by Toyota may turn out to be the best long term choice. Short term you could use transition vehicles on gasoline (with hydrogen augmentation) until infrastructure could be build out. Never bought Ballard stock and told my friends not to but a lot of the dummies did.
Hybrid vehicles - a lot of positives, not sure why they are not considered good enough by many. Maybe it is politics. We have idealogues in politics but also on the environment and technology.
Lithium battery cells. A fair amount of capacity has been built. We will however see a change in battery technology and this will have a major impact on lithium use. Personally I would not rush out to buy shares in lithium mining companies. Think sodium batteries, i.e. salt based. But for the next 5 to 10 years, sure, lithium will dominate in transportation. Then it will be sodium or other technology.
Big power storage. Lithium sucks. Lots of alternatives there - lead, antimony batteries, etc. Hydro dams.
Back to Musk. He has showed that it is possible and we can 'drive' towards a solution. But competition is coming up fast. If he can't survive too bad. We owe him nothing. It is government subsidies and investments by punters which made Tesla possible. He just made himself the face, the spokesman.
Well, I am positive things will progress. Also certain that I won't invest in Tesla!
Example, hydrogen is being used on semi rigs right now in BC to supplement diesel. It is a moderate modification at a reasonable cost. It allows the use of the installed fleet but contributes to a decrease in CO2 emissions but also noxious diesel NOx. Good technology for things like trains. And yes, there is capacity being built, in fact, a new plant on the North Shore.
Example, hydrogen fuel cell are being used underground. Why, because the lithium battery ones are burning. Nothing scares a miner more than a fire in the hole. I would be comfortable underground with a fuel cell but not with lithium batteries. By the way, I hate the old style cable units.
Fuel cells for passenger cars? Not sure. I suspect hydrogen combustion technology as being developed by Toyota may turn out to be the best long term choice. Short term you could use transition vehicles on gasoline (with hydrogen augmentation) until infrastructure could be build out. Never bought Ballard stock and told my friends not to but a lot of the dummies did.
Hybrid vehicles - a lot of positives, not sure why they are not considered good enough by many. Maybe it is politics. We have idealogues in politics but also on the environment and technology.
Lithium battery cells. A fair amount of capacity has been built. We will however see a change in battery technology and this will have a major impact on lithium use. Personally I would not rush out to buy shares in lithium mining companies. Think sodium batteries, i.e. salt based. But for the next 5 to 10 years, sure, lithium will dominate in transportation. Then it will be sodium or other technology.
Big power storage. Lithium sucks. Lots of alternatives there - lead, antimony batteries, etc. Hydro dams.
Back to Musk. He has showed that it is possible and we can 'drive' towards a solution. But competition is coming up fast. If he can't survive too bad. We owe him nothing. It is government subsidies and investments by punters which made Tesla possible. He just made himself the face, the spokesman.
Well, I am positive things will progress. Also certain that I won't invest in Tesla!
SUPER LONG POST ALERT (SORRY) !
Self-driving is such bullshit. The AI's for these things are not nearly ready for real world conditions. Basically, at best it is a "the car drives, but you still have to pay attention to the road as if you were doing the driving.". So why not just drive it yourself?
I have a theory about this: self-drive is for the drivers who are so oblivious at driving that they would be causing high-idiocy accidents anyway. (Like real Mr. Magoo stuff.)
Twitter just brings out the worst in him, so he may not last long as a CEO of anything important as long as he pisses away his life on Twitter (how ironic).
Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. They did some shady shit in their lives too, from stealing others' engineering work and taking credit, to being quasi-fascists, so even Musk's eccentricities are not that innovative.
The problem with Tesla (the company) are exactly what you expect from big corporations. They will try to swindle people if they can, will choose gimmicks over quality, monetization over reliability. The auto makers are all like that to one degree or another,
As for Tesla the cars - well, I would be interested to hear how they compare to gas-powered names like Jaguar, BMW, etc. in terms of how much they are in the shop or subject to recalls. As well as other EV's & makers.
Musk is a tech guy; Tesla runs like a tech company. There is a long documented culture clash between the techies and the "how to do industrial car production" guys, and while it's nice to see the old-school car business get shaken out of complacency by Tesla jumping ahead of them in the market, Tesla has always struggled on the "getting shit done like professionals" side. That may be down to the leadership of it, but hey we already know Musk is an "ideas" guy, not a "details" guy or a "thoroughness" guy.
I said before, sometimes I think Tesla and EV's get more criticism than the facts warrant - people have an agenda where they want EV's to fail will grab onto anything, and never mind if gas & diesel cars are every bit as unsafe or certain brands are known for always being in the repair shop.
EV's may be just as old, but the energy capacity needed to power them only really took off since the turn of this century. Before that development languished - as someone said, it was the domain of vehicles like golf carts & moon rovers. I expect the manufacturers to work these things out gradually. At least if government does the job of holding their nose to the grindstone (instead of acting as their country club enabler buddies as they find ways to either resist change or fail on consumer ethics).
Tesla did one thing though that up to that point the hybrid and EV makers had not done: they made ballsy EV's. EV's had a wimpy image, up to that point - even though engineers said there was no reason why an EV couldn't be fast as hell, the automakers seemed to tout efficiency only for EV's, and meanwhile "manliness" still went hand in hand with gas-guzzling. Tesla took a different approach and built an electric car that could kick the ass of all but the most hardcore sports cars, and doing that lit a fire that saw EV's in general become a viable thing in the public mind. Most of that capability seems to be due to their battery innovations, but what's appalling is that companies like GM once had a huge head-start on that aspect, but buried the technology so that nothing could challenge their buddies at Big Oil. Well, that advantage did not keep for long - after all, everyone with a laptop and cel phone needed better batteries too, so it was only a matter of time until the battery performance (scaled up) would improve until it became good enough to use in a fast & long range car. But for all the success, Tesla sometimes still acts like what they're making is just a big smartphone with wheels. I think that's why the quality & reliability issues crop up sometimes. The attitude is "well, the next model will be better" or "that's a feature, not a bug". Dumb attitude to have if you're selling something that's sometimes over $100000, and which can actually kill its users if it executes actions poorly.
They don't fail alone, though. Some established auto-makers are still doing dumb shit with cars that makes you ask "is this meant to be a car, or a DJ booth?" while forgetting sometimes how people actually need to act while driving. Dicking around with touchscreen menus to even execute the basic functions of a car is a bad idea.
As you said, the battle for dominance in light passenger cars is basically coming to an end; any car maker that thinks it can offer just a couple of lame EV's or none at all will be bankrupt & gone in 20 years. EVs will continue to grow in capability as gas & diesel gets pushed off the road piece by piece.
The next phase, the real killing stroke for internal combustion engines, will be when they finally start mass-producing EV common cargo/utility vehicles. Those have to be above all efficient, simple, & reliable. Fuck all the luxuries & gimmicks - make sure it runs and goes a long way between charges. Maybe it will not be Tesla doing that one, because it may prove too "boring" for a guy like Musk. (His cyber truck looks like it should be in a video game with 1980's graphics.) Once those vehicles are actually being built by more than one manufacturer, expect the switchover to be mandatory real fast. When you take a hard look at how most vehicles really operate, it is very easy to make this happen if it is a vehicle that operates for business purposes, from a home base which it returns to at the end of each work day (where charging facilities will be). Super-heavy and long hauling vehicles will probably be the last hold-outs (using diesel), and those are the ones which eventually might be using hydrogen & fuel cells.
That's how I see it anyway.
Self-driving is such bullshit. The AI's for these things are not nearly ready for real world conditions. Basically, at best it is a "the car drives, but you still have to pay attention to the road as if you were doing the driving.". So why not just drive it yourself?
I have a theory about this: self-drive is for the drivers who are so oblivious at driving that they would be causing high-idiocy accidents anyway. (Like real Mr. Magoo stuff.)
Yeah, Musk is one of those "get stoned, have 'cool' idea, try to make it work in world of sober reality." I've seen cats with a longer attention span than this guy.
Twitter just brings out the worst in him, so he may not last long as a CEO of anything important as long as he pisses away his life on Twitter (how ironic).
Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. They did some shady shit in their lives too, from stealing others' engineering work and taking credit, to being quasi-fascists, so even Musk's eccentricities are not that innovative.
The problem with Tesla (the company) are exactly what you expect from big corporations. They will try to swindle people if they can, will choose gimmicks over quality, monetization over reliability. The auto makers are all like that to one degree or another,
As for Tesla the cars - well, I would be interested to hear how they compare to gas-powered names like Jaguar, BMW, etc. in terms of how much they are in the shop or subject to recalls. As well as other EV's & makers.
Musk is a tech guy; Tesla runs like a tech company. There is a long documented culture clash between the techies and the "how to do industrial car production" guys, and while it's nice to see the old-school car business get shaken out of complacency by Tesla jumping ahead of them in the market, Tesla has always struggled on the "getting shit done like professionals" side. That may be down to the leadership of it, but hey we already know Musk is an "ideas" guy, not a "details" guy or a "thoroughness" guy.
I said before, sometimes I think Tesla and EV's get more criticism than the facts warrant - people have an agenda where they want EV's to fail will grab onto anything, and never mind if gas & diesel cars are every bit as unsafe or certain brands are known for always being in the repair shop.
EV's may be just as old, but the energy capacity needed to power them only really took off since the turn of this century. Before that development languished - as someone said, it was the domain of vehicles like golf carts & moon rovers. I expect the manufacturers to work these things out gradually. At least if government does the job of holding their nose to the grindstone (instead of acting as their country club enabler buddies as they find ways to either resist change or fail on consumer ethics).
The car industry definitely needed Tesla to come kick their ass, because unless a gun is to their heads, they won't change. And as the 2008 Bush & Harper bailouts of the auto industry showed, government is too captured by the old boys network to ever place real demands on car companies to do better. They could have been way ahead of Tesla or anyone else if they had actually tried, so seeing the Big Three get fucked by actual innovators (Tesla, or even just Toyotas and Nissans) made me smile.
Tesla did one thing though that up to that point the hybrid and EV makers had not done: they made ballsy EV's. EV's had a wimpy image, up to that point - even though engineers said there was no reason why an EV couldn't be fast as hell, the automakers seemed to tout efficiency only for EV's, and meanwhile "manliness" still went hand in hand with gas-guzzling. Tesla took a different approach and built an electric car that could kick the ass of all but the most hardcore sports cars, and doing that lit a fire that saw EV's in general become a viable thing in the public mind. Most of that capability seems to be due to their battery innovations, but what's appalling is that companies like GM once had a huge head-start on that aspect, but buried the technology so that nothing could challenge their buddies at Big Oil. Well, that advantage did not keep for long - after all, everyone with a laptop and cel phone needed better batteries too, so it was only a matter of time until the battery performance (scaled up) would improve until it became good enough to use in a fast & long range car. But for all the success, Tesla sometimes still acts like what they're making is just a big smartphone with wheels. I think that's why the quality & reliability issues crop up sometimes. The attitude is "well, the next model will be better" or "that's a feature, not a bug". Dumb attitude to have if you're selling something that's sometimes over $100000, and which can actually kill its users if it executes actions poorly.
They don't fail alone, though. Some established auto-makers are still doing dumb shit with cars that makes you ask "is this meant to be a car, or a DJ booth?" while forgetting sometimes how people actually need to act while driving. Dicking around with touchscreen menus to even execute the basic functions of a car is a bad idea.
As you said, the battle for dominance in light passenger cars is basically coming to an end; any car maker that thinks it can offer just a couple of lame EV's or none at all will be bankrupt & gone in 20 years. EVs will continue to grow in capability as gas & diesel gets pushed off the road piece by piece.
The next phase, the real killing stroke for internal combustion engines, will be when they finally start mass-producing EV common cargo/utility vehicles. Those have to be above all efficient, simple, & reliable. Fuck all the luxuries & gimmicks - make sure it runs and goes a long way between charges. Maybe it will not be Tesla doing that one, because it may prove too "boring" for a guy like Musk. (His cyber truck looks like it should be in a video game with 1980's graphics.) Once those vehicles are actually being built by more than one manufacturer, expect the switchover to be mandatory real fast. When you take a hard look at how most vehicles really operate, it is very easy to make this happen if it is a vehicle that operates for business purposes, from a home base which it returns to at the end of each work day (where charging facilities will be). Super-heavy and long hauling vehicles will probably be the last hold-outs (using diesel), and those are the ones which eventually might be using hydrogen & fuel cells.
That's how I see it anyway.
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Hydrogen & fuel cells might prove unnecessary for most ordinary vehicles, especially smaller ones. I see hydrogen fuel cells being a solution for long-haul uses, maybe heavier vehicles, but most of all, imagine its use at sea. Ferries, for example. BC Ferries is already getting into fuel cell use for some newer ships, but those are LNG powered - however, they have also said they can be later upgraded to hydrogen fuel cells. Once that starts to scale up to power the really large ships (freighters, cruise ships) and can provide the range needed, that will change the game. Right now, they all either burn diesel or that toxic "bunker fuel" sludge. That's a cost thing, not a performance thing. But ship emissions are one area where the world had lagged, and long range shipping will probably never be able to run on stored electric batteries alone, so hydrogen fuel cells make sense. (By the way some navies are already adopting it for subs, because they are so quiet. No exact word on range, because that is a secret.)
Why the BC government is so obsessed with LNG (either United BC Conservative Libs or the NDP), when it should be pushing hard to make BC a clean hydrogen juggernaut instead, I do not know. It is brutally short-sighted and every LNG plant they build will produce as much GHG emissions as hundreds of thousands of gas & diesel vehicles.
The point is: Match the energy source to the task at hand, and I think hydrogen's best use is not to satisfy the needs of the typical urban-area light vehicle driver, or weird small applications like forklifts, which can definitely be battery powered. Big scale and long range applications like ships and perhaps long haul trucks sound more promising. Industry just needs to get off its ass and design & build it.
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For the long term burning Hydrogen is cleaner (produces water) than burning any other Hydrocarbon (produces CO2) like gasoline or diesel or propane or LNG (methane ch4 with ethane C2H6). The problem is hydrogen takes many steps to make, making it less efficient than electricity stored in a battery. The best way to make hydrogen is to use electricity to separate the Hydrogen and oxygen. Any other process uses hydrocarbons (which is what you don''t want to use, because it leaves the carbon behind etc etc). So to be the most ecological you needs tons and tons of electricity (Giga watts many times over)to produce hydrogen. Hydrogen other problem is those German Hindenburgs.... blowing up..... Hydrogen needs super cooling and pressures to be a liquid. Vehicles need redesigning to protect the hydrogen tank. Lots of infrastructure.
The problem is that you can't replace all the energy in fuel (gas and diesel) with electricity right now.
1. Not enough electricity is being produced now to make up for the loss of gas and diesel and oil (if North America went cold turkey right now)
2. Not enough infrastructure (Battery Banks) to store energy made by wind and solar now. Wind and solar don't work at the same time. Solar works in day, wind at night depending on area. So wind and solar only add a bit to the grid in the daytime, while most Electricity grids are still running off of there dedicated hydro, LNG plant, coal plants, nuclear plants.
3. Although lithium batteries are great for lightweight SUV (still not up to range of gas vehicles), energy density storage is not good enough for bigger vehicles like ships and still get same performance.
There is research being done to other types of batteries to store electricity for the energy grids that have heavier energy density than Lithium. Lithium just doesn't pack the energy density that the grid will need. Its fine for smaller cars etc. Small and lightweight. The other thing is lithium won't meet all EV demands for the estimated amount of lithium in the world... Lithium is the new battery for they yachting industry.. so there is competition for it. Its used for other things too.
Newer different batteries are around the corner that have better energy density. Sure the world might go this way with batteries. Now talk about the recycling of lithium batteries.
Grid storage will get there. Solar and Wind will produce electricity. Nuclear while come back too. Either we get electric planes or more high speed trains for transport.
I agree with Rlock that the future should be hydrogen. Batteries of any type are only going to take energy storage so far. The thing with hydrogen is that it is cyclical, make hydrogen, burn hydrogen get water, make more hydrogen. Nothing about the hydrogen cycle looks to be toxic. Still I wil get the idiots who say making iron and steel still produces CO2; thats going to happen anyway, cause I don't see steel being dropped by anyone soon.
For both lots (battery or hydrogen) of infrastructure has to be built, and safety measures taken in.
An hybrid of EV and hydrogen will out perform even the gas engine. Fuel cell charges batteries that drive the car....
I don't think the price drop of Tesla cars is linked to the Twitter shit. Elon is smart, you have the right to free speech, he is just going to make you pay for it on Twitter.... People like free things, they just don't like it when they loose it. Those people in Rome, when the wheat shipment stopped are a prime example....
Elon does care about his companies, but there is nothing he can do about an idiot who fucked up on the assemble line. And he probably knows more about that assembly line than the plant managers. Compared to the big car companies Tesla is small enough to care and to be able to do something about product quality, than the unionized fuckers in the big 3 plants. But hey that is why you have plant managers and dealerships to deal with the defects. Granted his house battery shit was ill conceived. How long did it take the American auto companies to get good customer service. They been working at it for over 100 year now. times 3. that's 300 years of customer service and even the big 3 have fuck ups.....
Also Tesla has the best electric motor (light years ahead of anybody) for the ECar. And he is giving that to the big 3 for free. What Elon is trying to do is restart innovation in America, which is so stagnant. Getting engineers thinking again... His reusable rockets are the stuff of dreams, making them more affordable to put mass into space. The space race is on again.
INNOVATION!!
Mad Hatter and off his rockers, maybe a man with a god complex... So what....For a guy who made billions, he keeps reinvesting it back into bussinesses that were stagnate. Breathing new life into America and the world. Paypal, EV, rockets, mass transportation (boring for high speed trains), satellites etc. He is more of an industrialist than FORD (1 company) and the WW2 industrial complex. He is building shit in America, who can say that these days????
His satellites supplying internet to the Ukrainians....
Another Tesla, a man who will die penniless?
The problem is that you can't replace all the energy in fuel (gas and diesel) with electricity right now.
1. Not enough electricity is being produced now to make up for the loss of gas and diesel and oil (if North America went cold turkey right now)
2. Not enough infrastructure (Battery Banks) to store energy made by wind and solar now. Wind and solar don't work at the same time. Solar works in day, wind at night depending on area. So wind and solar only add a bit to the grid in the daytime, while most Electricity grids are still running off of there dedicated hydro, LNG plant, coal plants, nuclear plants.
3. Although lithium batteries are great for lightweight SUV (still not up to range of gas vehicles), energy density storage is not good enough for bigger vehicles like ships and still get same performance.
There is research being done to other types of batteries to store electricity for the energy grids that have heavier energy density than Lithium. Lithium just doesn't pack the energy density that the grid will need. Its fine for smaller cars etc. Small and lightweight. The other thing is lithium won't meet all EV demands for the estimated amount of lithium in the world... Lithium is the new battery for they yachting industry.. so there is competition for it. Its used for other things too.
Newer different batteries are around the corner that have better energy density. Sure the world might go this way with batteries. Now talk about the recycling of lithium batteries.
Grid storage will get there. Solar and Wind will produce electricity. Nuclear while come back too. Either we get electric planes or more high speed trains for transport.
I agree with Rlock that the future should be hydrogen. Batteries of any type are only going to take energy storage so far. The thing with hydrogen is that it is cyclical, make hydrogen, burn hydrogen get water, make more hydrogen. Nothing about the hydrogen cycle looks to be toxic. Still I wil get the idiots who say making iron and steel still produces CO2; thats going to happen anyway, cause I don't see steel being dropped by anyone soon.
For both lots (battery or hydrogen) of infrastructure has to be built, and safety measures taken in.
An hybrid of EV and hydrogen will out perform even the gas engine. Fuel cell charges batteries that drive the car....
I don't think the price drop of Tesla cars is linked to the Twitter shit. Elon is smart, you have the right to free speech, he is just going to make you pay for it on Twitter.... People like free things, they just don't like it when they loose it. Those people in Rome, when the wheat shipment stopped are a prime example....
Elon does care about his companies, but there is nothing he can do about an idiot who fucked up on the assemble line. And he probably knows more about that assembly line than the plant managers. Compared to the big car companies Tesla is small enough to care and to be able to do something about product quality, than the unionized fuckers in the big 3 plants. But hey that is why you have plant managers and dealerships to deal with the defects. Granted his house battery shit was ill conceived. How long did it take the American auto companies to get good customer service. They been working at it for over 100 year now. times 3. that's 300 years of customer service and even the big 3 have fuck ups.....
Also Tesla has the best electric motor (light years ahead of anybody) for the ECar. And he is giving that to the big 3 for free. What Elon is trying to do is restart innovation in America, which is so stagnant. Getting engineers thinking again... His reusable rockets are the stuff of dreams, making them more affordable to put mass into space. The space race is on again.
INNOVATION!!
Mad Hatter and off his rockers, maybe a man with a god complex... So what....For a guy who made billions, he keeps reinvesting it back into bussinesses that were stagnate. Breathing new life into America and the world. Paypal, EV, rockets, mass transportation (boring for high speed trains), satellites etc. He is more of an industrialist than FORD (1 company) and the WW2 industrial complex. He is building shit in America, who can say that these days????
His satellites supplying internet to the Ukrainians....
Another Tesla, a man who will die penniless?
I believe that Tesla reached the peak of it's success before it's recent 70% slide in market cap. More and more competitiors are coming out of the woodwork. Already vehicles like the Ioniq 5 are, at least in some reviews, coming out ahead of the Tesla Model 3. Soon we will see cheap Chinese EVs reaching the international markets as well as more competition from the established automotive companies like Chevrolet, Volkswagen and Hundyai. Even after Tesla's 70% slide in market cap, it's market cap is $357 billion, while GM and Ford have a combined market cap of $62 billion. That is almost 6 times the market cap. And yet GM and Ford sell many times as many vehicles and have many times as many models. It might not have mattered when Tesla was more of a tech company than a manufacturing company, but Tesla is trying to transform itself into a manufacturing company. And from my point of view, it can't have it both ways. Especially when you consider that both GM and Ford (and pretty well all of the other established automotive manufacturers) are migrating to EVs as fast as public demand for EVs allows.
JD
Well, the numbered reasons are why many says hydrogen will have to fill a niche for certain larger applications, or ones like planes which might not suit battery electric power.
Lithium mining is not worse than any other sort of mining, probably better than many others already used to support energy systems (coal, uranium, etc.)
But we have to also consider that the old practice of throwing away recyclable materials and just mining more "virgin" minerals is just something done for cost reasons, and this has to end. (Think throwing away a cell-phone is wasteful? Imagine what is chucked away when someone demolishes a house!)
The future will be in recycling practically everything, but that too requires technological development and energy too.
However, the energy grid being so power-plant-to-user only is maybe a model that can be altered. Face it, aside from nuclear & geothermal, all the energy we are using is solar of one form or another. Hydroelectric is just water evaporated by solar energy being collected at higher altitude and stored behind a dam for controlled release; solar evaporation carried it into the atmosphere. Wind energy comes from weather (air pressure variations) generated in our atmosphere by the sun.
Even hydrocarbons got their energy input from the sun (hundreds of millions of years ago). So making pure hydrogen is not that much of a stretch if you harness that energy differently.
Solar and wind are held back mainly by a need for energy storage, but think of "storage" in a different way and the equation changes. As well, think of wind and solar as decentralize power sources to power local applications, or just augment an electricity grid powered by something else. It may be intermittent, but if you're using it to do something like draw in sea water and desalinate it into drinking water, or power some pumped storage system that enables a local hydroelectric generator, maybe it being intermittent is not an obstacle after all.
Likewise with hydrogen. Not hard to find a source, but it does take energy to produce pure elemental hydrogen we can use.
Solar energy or wind or hydroelectric can be used to "crack" water into 2H and O cleanly (no carbon burning energy source or hydrocarbon extraction just to get at the hydrogen itself). Problem solved if someone actually builds it.
The energy source for this process is already there - the sun.
Hydrogen is just the storage medium for that energy, which we can release at will (fuel cell or straight burning), but without the GHG dangers that come from hydrocarbon fuels.
As for steelmaking GHG emissions, that is mainly from the coal used in coking. Most of the coal burned on earth is unsuitable for that use and is thermal coal for generating electricity. That is what most discussions of coal emissions are worried about in the short term. (I have not heard of another steel making process to achieve what coking does, but some have talked about hydrogen for it, oddly enough.)
You want to see a real culprit that will be hard to do without? Cement / concrete production. No real easy answer there.
https://insideevs.com/news/640684/average-price-used-tesla-down-18000/
With price drop of some new Tesla's, used Tesla's have dropped in price dramatically more even from when I started this thread. If I had bought a year ago ome of the Tesla models whose price was dropped so dramatically, I would be really pissed off!!! Luckily I don't own a Tesla.
JD
With price drop of some new Tesla's, used Tesla's have dropped in price dramatically more even from when I started this thread. If I had bought a year ago ome of the Tesla models whose price was dropped so dramatically, I would be really pissed off!!! Luckily I don't own a Tesla.
JD
Started looking for a new car about this time last year (the XC70 is still pretty OK) but the choices are many and it will be most like a PHEV, maybe an EV but no hurry. The choices get better and better.
Ford sure has come a long way in this regards and the Mustang Mach-E is definitely a contender. Their plan to cut prices to match Tesla's price cut and increase production seems like a good one to me so watch for more Mach-E's soon
Ford sure has come a long way in this regards and the Mustang Mach-E is definitely a contender. Their plan to cut prices to match Tesla's price cut and increase production seems like a good one to me so watch for more Mach-E's soon
I agree that the choices are definitely getting better and better, as other have noted as well. My sister and her husband have put their name on a witing list for an Hundyai Ioniq 5 which from the consumerreports I have read looks like a great choice.
And as mentioned before, with all these new EVs coming on the market, Tesla will be forced to make more price cuts which will eventually severly impact it's profit margins which in turn will severly impact it's share price.
JD
A friend just got an Ioniq and it easily as good or better than a Tesla.
There is a lot more to building cars than software and batteries. Things like the wing mirrors, door handles, shape of the trunk.
All those are things Hyundai, Ford and GM have massive experience with.
Toyota makes a gazillion Prius taxis that see severe use. Toyota makes electric forklifts that see harsh use under industrial conditions.
Tesla’s main appeal was it’s uniqueness but that’s over.
I want a car the local dealer can service and has a good supply of parts for. Tesla does not have much of a dealer network or support.
There is a lot more to building cars than software and batteries. Things like the wing mirrors, door handles, shape of the trunk.
All those are things Hyundai, Ford and GM have massive experience with.
Toyota makes a gazillion Prius taxis that see severe use. Toyota makes electric forklifts that see harsh use under industrial conditions.
Tesla’s main appeal was it’s uniqueness but that’s over.
I want a car the local dealer can service and has a good supply of parts for. Tesla does not have much of a dealer network or support.
Yeah, clearly there were a lot of people who were speculative buyers, looking for a big score on resale due to the excess demand / inadequate supply. Well, as always speculators at the end of a trend get burned.
I guess they thought they could somehow dodge the old rule that a used car will never surpass the value of a new one (unless you're talking ancient & rare collector cars that have no practical driving value anymore).
At first Tesla wanted to be a company that did not even have dealerships/showrooms, but do everything online. It took some serious convincing before Musk even understood that people need to be able to see a car, get inside it, do their own test drives, and so on.
To this day, Tesla under-serves the market in terms of dealerships - or is it all the other majors who over-serve it? (There is that problem too, which many identified after the crash of 2008.)
The price between gas vs electric car was huge so I bought a gas car.
Corym
Corym
I beleive the difference in price will continue to go down as the compents of an EV, batteries especially, become cheaper to manufacture. Also, batteries seem to be evolving to be able to hold larger charges and and to charge quicker.
My main issue with owning an EV or PHEV is that I rent and I believe my landlord would be happy if I moved out because if I did, he would be able to raise the rent by a minimum of 1k a month. And therefore, he would have very little motiviation to install a charging station so that I could charge an EV or PHEV, if I requested him to do so.
JD
