Today’s chores reminded me of the other good (great!) reasons to own an electric car — once they’re available for everyday drivers, that is.
I needed to top off my power steering fluid, and I noticed that my coolant was also a little low; might as well kill two birds with one stone beat two drums with one stick (sorry — The Wife’s a bird lover). Oh, and even though it was only about 2,500 miles since my last oil change, the oil was looking very dirty — might as well change that, too. It’s 65 degrees and clear, so why not?
Thus car maintenance was today’s Thing, along with an engine degreasing (“a clean engine is a happy engine”) and the associated cleanup, especially the used oil.
And that’s why I started thinking about electric cars. If I had one, I’d have most of my day back.
Electric motors mean no oil changes. No coolant. No transmissions and no transmission fluid.
And the other things I’ve dealt with lately: EGR valves that needed to be cleaned. PCV valves that needed to be replaced. Mass air flow sensors giving strange readings. And so on. None of these things was a big deal (we’re talking less than $20 in parts and cleaners), but with electric motors they simply wouldn’t exist. There’s no airflow to worry about, no crankcase to ventilate, no exhaust gas to recirculate.
My car’s approaching 80,000 miles. If it was electric, I wouldn’t have to think about timing belts and new water pumps.
Sure, there would be other issues, but batteries and capacitors are a lot simpler (and cleaner) than what goes into a gasoline-powered vehicle. And other things would remain — tie rods and CV joints and air conditioners and so on. But overall, an electric car is orders of magnitude simpler than a hydrocarbon-powered one. So I could have spent my morning doing something else.
The Fray
Tom Richardson says:
I never thought about no tune ups, maintenance, oil changes. Makes me wonder if we should be bailing out the auto industry, or putting all that money into electric vehicle manufacturing. Thanks again!
Tom
gnomic says:
Electric cars aren’t a panacea. Common problems include premature failure of components, notably expensive items like engines, batteries, and controllers (the computer). Technology is and will improve and likely surpass the 10yr/~125K expected lifecycle on a typical auto, but right now anyone buying an electric car is an early adopter and is paying a technology penalty that could be avioded by waiting a few more years for supercapacitors and other storage device improvements that will bring the lifecycle costs down considerably.
Leland says:
If you obtain an all electric car or even a hybrid car, mark your calendar that date plus three years. Three years from the day you buy it trade it in, sell it, have an insurance fire, arrange to have it stolen, roll it into the lake or what ever it takes to get what ever is left of its value out of it.
Then get another one. Mark the calendar again, three years later, lather, rinse, repeat. Keep the cycle up until battery technology improves.
Those batteries are at the end of their life span and will cost almost a third what you originally paid for the car. Probably more depending on what the shop wants to charge you for disposing of your old batteries.
As mentioned above, with any moving device with moving parts you are going to have your share of maintainance wear and repairs. different repair issues.
Leland says:
P.S. I hit the submit button while trying to correct the spelling on ‘maintenance.’ I wasn’t quite done cleaning up my prose. But you get the idea.
Darell says:
Leland -
I wonder if you read what Paul Scott wrote? Three years? Paul’s Rav4EV seems to have doubled your three year death-of-battery situation. And what’s this!? My Rav4EV is also six year sold and has well over 60,000 miles on the clock. Original batteries? Check. Original performance? Check. Over three years? Two checks. PLease – I beg you – don’t propagate soundbites. Listen to those of us who are living with this technology every day.
If we all wait for the tech to get perfected, it’ll never get perfected. Who would keep developing it if nobody were buying it? Voting with your wallet means showing the car makers what we want. If we don’t buy alt vehicles now, we’re saying, “Please sir, give me more gasoline cars. We LIKE gasoline cars.”
Leland says:
I haven’t heard any sound bites about the battery life in these cars to propagate. I’m an electrical engineer and intimately familiar with wet cell batteries. They become the very center of our lives when the generators need to be cranked over.
So you are getting longer life out of your batteries. Good for you. But like the commercials all say, “Individual results may vary.” Bitter cold, extreme heat, duty cycle, idle time, maximum load factors and owner maintenance are are all going to affect the life of any battery system no matter what combination of chemicals it is based on.
You got lucky. Great. The average user is going to find themselves needing batteries some time soon after the third year. My advice was to get Andrew out of the car while it still had value.
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you did a specific gravity test on your batteries? Yes, the car may still move under its own power, but that doesn’t mean squat. How many cells are even reading 1.1 or better? How many are in the “one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave” category? How many are just plain dead?
As a matter of course, we change all our wet cells when they are three years old. When dealing with mission critical systems that are the back up to the primary power source, you can’t trust the outcome to a roll of the dice.
And while you are all patting your green minded selves on the back for having such tiny carbon foot-prints (what ever that scam is all about), here is something to consider. Has anyone considered what it is going to be like in 10 or 15 years when the land fills are suddenly over run with three generations of these very large lead-acid batteries filled with all kinds of user-unfriendly chemicals?
If you really want to solve the problem. Drill here, drill now, drill where ever we find it. That will give us the breathing room we need to come to a real solution like developing batteries that will not be dead in four years. Maybe even develop a battery that can be rebuilt rather then creating another Super-fund clean up site.
As for voting with my wallet, I did so just this year. I now own a brand new Chevy Tahoe LTZ. With SUV prices so low, the deal was too good to pass. And I do happen to like gasoline powered cars. I’ve driven a couple hybrids and was less then excited with their performance. If you turn the the air conditioning you suddenly become a detriment to traffic when the light turns green. Their towing and load capacities are pathetic if they exist at all.
One other thing, I don’t propagate sound bites. When I state my opinions, I AM the sound bite. So climb down off your bright green high horse and give me credit for thinking for myself. I have had it with the green-tree-hugging-left-leaning-pacifist-smarter-then-thou-types telling me and anyone else that opens their mouth in disagreement with what ever political cause is up for debate that we are nothing more then parrots.
Paul Scott says:
Leland,
We track virtually all of the RAVs that were not crushed by Toyota, there are some 800 of them left. Virtually all of these vehicles’ NiMH packs lasted well over 6 years. We’re not sure where the calendar life is since Toyota crushed all the oldest first. Those we saved are now between 6-8 years old, and the only ones that have needed new packs were at or well over 100,000 miles. The longest was 160,000 miles before needing a new pack.
If you are a man of science, you have to agree that’s a meaningful statistic.
The only issue with batteries is cost. Once the large scale factories now under construction are on line, we’ll see significant decreases in price. Currently, most LiIon and NiMH cells are selling for $600-$1,000 / kWh. Once we see $500/kWh with at least an 8 year calendar life, we’ll be at cost parity with gas at $3/gal.
Say what you want, these cars are coming.
Leland says:
Paul,
I don’t have a problem with the cars coming. I’m all in favor of using the cars where they fit into the application. I can’t see using one as a police car. I doubt they would make very good taxi cabs. It will be a while before they make one that can do what I need. It all comes down to the right tool for the right job.
I was also unaware these cars run on nickel-metal hydride batteries. That has to be one really big battery with a fairly hefty price tag to go with it.
Yes, those will live longer then a lead-acid wet cell. How much longer still depends on everything I listed above. I can still see some of those dying at the four year mark.
But those batteries come with their own set of headaches. I can only hope and pray that Toyota have something built into the circuit to keep the batteries from being pulled all the way down to zero, a condition that can ruin the battery if I remember right. If memory serves me correctly NiMH batteries do not play well with cold weather. I know that Lithium Ion batteries stop working when you cool them off.
Dollar for dollar, NiMH cannot produce anywhere near the same amp/hour capacity of a good old fashion lead acid battery. I’m not certain on how a NiMH compares on a mass/volume basis to lead acid batteries.
NiMH batteries don’t like to be on a constant trickle charge. On the other side of that coin NiMH batteries will discharge themselves while sitting on the shelf. What is the car is simply left unplugged and sitting in a garage for a few months, like a car at a vacation home for instance? I can see a couple headaches there as well, especially considering the potentially fatal condition that stems from a fully discharged battery.
It would be nice if there was some kind automatic charging system that could keep the batteries up when the car is sitting unused. Possibly even exercise the battery, alternately loading then charging it.
NiMH don’t have cadmium or lead in them, but they are still filled with all kinds of nasty things we don’t want in the ground water. A decade or so down the road, we are still going to have a clean up problem.
All said and done, the all electric car is still in it’s infancy. That industry needs to learn to crawl then maybe walk before it is ready for something beyond novelty run to the corner market and back status.
Paul Scott says:
I’m not arguing that the price for NiMH is high, but it’s not as high as you seem to think. It’s under $1,000 kWh, so one would still need a small subsidy to be on par with ICE vehicles. However, this is primarily stemming from Chevron Texaco’s ownership of the patent to NiMH and it refusal to produce more for traction purposes. You can buy all the NiMH you want for hybrids, but try to find any facility in the world that will make the 95 aH packs we have.
BTW, the packs hold about 27 kWh and weigh close to 1,000 lbs.
The liIon chemistries appear to be taking over, however. Virtually every car maker in the world is now in development on a BEV or PHEV using LiIon.
As for NiMH holding a charge, we’ve found that when fully charged, a pack will lose about 6-7% over the first 3-5 hours, then hold it for weeks after that with only about 1% loss over a week.
Leland says:
Subsidy from who? Please tell me you aren’t suggesting that the tax payer should be making up the difference…
So at under $1000 per KWH (I’m assuming you mean kilowatt hour) and a pack containing 27 KWH worth of batteries… Lessee now, I’ll use $900 / KWH to make the math easy… $24,300 for a new battery pack plus tax. What was the sticker price on those cars?
And I’m going to need to see a link or some other evidence as to who holds the patent on NiHM batteries. I was somehow under the impression that Panasonic might hold that particular piece of paper. However, I cannot remember where I got that idea.
Steve says:
Am I to understand, Leland, that the basic problem is that batteries are unreliable and lack power at the moment? And that we should just … wait longer for the tech?
Paul Scott says:
Leland,
I absolutely do mean that the taxpayers should cover this cost. Currently, the oil industry gets over ten billion in additional tax benefits over the next 5 years. This is to cover the costs of exploration and other costs that should be covered by their enormous profits. Instead, the use of their product results in massive costs to our society from environmental degradation and deaths measured in the tens of thousands. The fact that those costs are not paid by the people who use the product is a travesty.
Additionally, the war in Iraq was at least partially about the oil there. None of the cost of a gallon of gas contains tax money covering those costs. This is patently unfair and counterproductive. Cheap, subsidized gas enable people to waste incredible amounts of energy and pollute vastly more than they need to in order to do the job at hand.
Given the obvious benefits to our economy, our environment and our national security, switching to battery powered vehicles, to the greatest extent possible, will enable us to make significant progress toward our mutually beneficial goals.
The batteries of today, specifically the NiMH and LiIon chemistries, are more than good enough to get cars on the road. Hell, we’ve been driving our RAVs for 6-8 years and most still run exactly the same as the day they were new. This is not magic, it’s good engineering, and batteries that were designed over ten years ago!
One more thing, try not to assume everyone has to go electric right away. By necessity, it will be a gradual – too gradual – process. This is going to be a very good change for our society as our streets and communities get quieter and cleaner, our nation gets safer and we all save a lot of money.
A great site to learn all about EVs is http://www.evnut.com/. Darell Dickey, one of the Plug In America folks in Davis, CA, runs the site. He’s had an EV1 and currently drives a RAV EV like I do. His site will take you to a page on the Chevron patent dispute with links to others.
Leland says:
The technology is still in it’s infancy. The problem is not reliability. It is cost, weight and life expectancy in the batteries. Disposal of current batteries is going to be a major headache as well.
I am certain that in ten years we will see a viable affordable alternative for running around town. There are developments in the works using ultra-capacitors(1) that is looking really good. Stanford(2) and MIT(3) are both working on nano-tech batteries that may solve size and weight problems.
If any of that research proves out, then something an affordable, workable electric or hybrid will be on the market very soon after.
The new administration is planning on throwing trailer loads of money at “green technologies.” A consortium of US industries has already formed and extended their hands for some of that free money(4). there is a good chance that something useful will come from that.
Short answer, yes wait. Never buy anything with a low serial number.
(1) http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4252628.html
(2) http://news.cnet.com/A-tenfold-improvement-in-battery-life/2100-1041_3-6226196.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news
(3) http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4252623.html
(4) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122957206516817419.html?mod=testMod
Leland says:
Paul,
Keep you hands OUT of my wallet and off my tax money. If you can’t afford to put new batteries in your electric car on your own dime, then you can’t afford to own one. What do you think you are, an investment bank?
If you drive an electric car you aren’t paying any fuel taxes. You need to be paying more in to the system, not getting some kind of kick back.
Up until recently we did not live in a socialist economy. In my view no one has the right to any of the money our government has been handing out like candy on Halloween. Your argument comparing a government subsidy for your batteries to corporate tax breaks and the war in Iraq could not possibly be more far fetched and illogical.
You should really sit down and figure our why you think the government has any right to manipulate the population on any matter using subsidies and taxes. What are you going to do when the vultures in congress discover they can tax the ingredients needed for your fine new technology batteries?
If congress and the state can tax me to death so they can give it give it to you, they can do the same thing to me when I run out of money.
I looked at that site and found nothing about patents anywhere. I did discover that he holds some kind of almost religious hatred for all things that run on petroleum products.
And why would you send me to Darell’s web site to get facts anyway? He already showed us what he is all about in his first post on this thread.
His link “Avoid Driving Cars Like This” with the school bus crash and whining about the difference in size would be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.
But funny, pathetic or insightful, it changes nothing. The information on his sight is being spun to suit his purposes. Find me a legitimate source with facts and independent references, then we can talk.
Nothing gives you, Darell, the government or anyone else the right to penalize me over what I drive and shift the wealth to someone that drives something politically incorrect. With the new administration and Harry and Nancy pulling the strings we might see laws that do that very thing want. But there will be nothing moral or right about it.
The fact remains these cars are all still in their infancy technology wise. The fact remains that electric cars have not all shown the spectacular life spans you are claiming above. Some of the new hybrids on the road are having battery problems, especially in hot climates.
Paul, you just blew every ounce of credibility you had with me.
Paul Scott says:
OK, Leland, please explain why you think it’s OK to pollute my air, and everyone else’s air without penalty. Please also explain how you think we will continue to source oil when the economy picks back up and everyone, including millions of Indians and Chinese begin driving their new bought IC vehicles burning oil. Are you aware that China is buying up oil contracts all over the world? Do you think that maybe there will be a problem when peak oil hits and we’re at a standoff with China for oil?
And where do you stand on the war in Iraq? Do you think we’d have been fighting that war if they had no oil? Please! You right wingnuts are all the same. You want to keep polluting other people’s air and water without compensation, but you scream bloody murder if we point out that you should pay those costs.
The reason I feel tax money should be used for buying down the cost of batteries is so we, as a nation, can move as fast as possible to get off of oil, because if we don’t, the problems we see today will pale in comparison to those we’ll encounter when peak oil hits.
Leland says:
“Right wingnuts…”
Heh… Cute. I’m sorry, I don’t have time for you anymore. Have a nice day.
Paul Scott says:
Just what I thought. You don’t want to answer the questions, because you don’t have a good answer. So instead, you run.
Typical.
Leland says:
Ok…
Andrew I really tried to walk away from this clown. Honest I did…
So Paul Scott sat down at his computer an composed the following wisdom then clicked ‘Submit Comment’… “Just what I thought. You don’t want to answer the questions, because you don’t have a good answer. So instead, you run.
Typical.”
Lets see now…
You have yet to provide any proof that Chevron owns the patent on NiMH batteries. So I went and got it for you. The patent on Nickle Metal Hydride batteries is partially owned by ECD Ovonics and Cobasys. Chevron got a part interest in the ECD Ovonics when they ate Texaco. Texaco bought their interest patent from General Motors in late 2000 when GM decided production of electric cars was not economically feasible at that time.
Now here’s the good part… (Pay close attention now, this is going to rattle your warped view of reality…)
Toyota was blatantly violating that patent. Texaco, as rightful owner of that patent, sued and shut them down. The current owners of the patent can do anything they want with it including bury it. It is THEIR PROPERTY and NO ONE has any right to it or to tell them what to do with it.
Now here is the part that is really going to rattle your world. Under the settlement agreement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Toyota can use the technology now. The restriction on building the cars expired June 30, 2007. All restrictions on using the batteries for transportation are off in 2010.
I addressed everything you asked. Based on the things you said I learned a couple things which I conceded. You answered my queries with stupid questions designed to divert attention form your lack of answers. You even got so ridiculous as to try to bring Iraq into a discussion of the viability of electric cars.
And then, when you got your nose rubbed in the absurdity of handing out treasury money for things like electric car batteries, you resorted to name calling. And you call me typical.
But it is fairly obvious that all of the above is going to go right over your head. So I’ll sum it up with something on your level using some dialog from an old early 70s situation comedy:
Father Majeski: “Go from the presence of the foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.”
Archie Bunker: What does that mean?
Father Majeski: It means don’t waste your time arguing with an idiot!
-All in the Family, 1971
Paul Scott says:
Leland,
Thanks for updating me on the Chevron Texaco NiMH battery issue. Looks like we can expect that chemistry to be used again soon. That’s great because our Toyota RAVs that are using the 95 aH packs from Panasonic will need to be replaced eventually.
I do want to respond to your comment about the Iraq war having nothing to do with the viability of EVs. I’ll try to phrase it in a way that you can understand. Please show a little respect and answer these questions:
Do you believe we would have gone to war in Iraq if there was no oil in their country? If yes, why?
If you answered no, then oil clearly was one of the reasons we’re fighting the war in Iraq. If so, do you believe that at least some of the costs of the war should be paid by those who use oil? If not, why?
According to numerous studies by the World Health Organization and the American Lung Association, the cummulative effect of burning gas in internal combustion vehicles contributes to the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. Hundreds of thousands of Americans get serious lung diseases from breathing the pollution, but don’t die. These are real costs that are not paid by those who cause the pollution, but are instead born by innocent people who breathe the polluted air.
Do you believe that those who cause the pollution should pay some of these costs?
You said I was ridiculous for bringing Iraq into the question of viability of EVs. Why is it ridiculous to try and assign the costs of a product to the price of that product? That’s all we’re trying to do here. You use a product that contributes to the deaths of thousands of your countrymen, a product that we have to fight wars to obtain. The deaths of those soldiers are real costs that the soldiers and their families pay. You, however, use that oil without contributing a cent to that cost. Do you think that’s fair?
If you agree that these health and national security issues are real and we should pay for them with higher taxes on the product that causes the problems, then the price of gas will rise dramatically. That’s how EVs become viable. Do you still think it is ridiculous to conflate Iraq with the viability of EVs?
Paul Scott says:
You are absolutely correct about there being very little, to no, maintenance with EVs. I’ve been drivign my RAV4 EV for just over 6 years and 65,000 miles and the only thing we had to replace (other than tires and aux battery) were the two rear shock.
We haven’t had anything else done to the car. No oil changes, no tune up, no brake job, no degreasing (I just wipe the dust off once a year). These things (at the least the one Toyota made) are bulletproof.
Today, after 6 years and 65,000 miles, the car still runs exactly the way it did when I first got it. There is no change in performance or range. This is truly amazing technology and once they are available, everyone will want one.
For good info on the political work being done for EVs, go to http://www.pluginamerica.org, and for other info go to http://www.evnut.com.