Major issues with Tesla Model 3

[Blumlein 88]

If you look around, there are a lot of $60k cars on the road. Even Chevy, Toyota, and Ford trucks get in that range! One distinction is right now you can't lease a Model 3. snippage..........

Actually Ford reported after 2015, that 62% of its trucks sold for more than $40k. Ford sold more than 1 million pickup trucks that year. Their guy over that division was somewhat mystified by that, saying he didn't know where it would end, but they'd offer even fancier trucks as that is what truck buyers wanted. Cheap trucks, two door trucks with regular cab they could hardly sell them. It seems invisible to people, but trucks and SUVs are what is selling and the average price especially of trucks is way up there. $50-60K isn't the rarified market many think. I don't think that is good, and it is a lot of money to me, but that is the fact of the matter. I know 3 people who in the last 6 months purchased trucks costing between $60-70K. It isn't the norm, but these aren't super high income people either. A $50K model 3 is apples to oranges vs a pickup truck, but the idea something with some panache in the market place won't sell for that appears to me incorrect.

 

[Wombat]

There will no doubt come a time when a human will be tested against AI standard for driving capability in order to obtain a general driving license.

 

[garbulky]

There isn't an issue yet because there are so few fully electric cars.

I don't think converting all cars to electric is going to happen anytime soon. I think it will take a long time if it happens at all. I sere a more realistic thing as electric vehicles being very common. Just as automatics didn't do away with manuals and gas vehicles don't eleiminate diesel or even propane driven cars, it's probably more a proportion. But if there are challenges to power infrastructure, they don't seem insurmountable. Well to me at least - somebody who has zero knowledge of power infrastructure.

Some of what you are talking about is moving pollution. If most people eventually move towards electric vehicle, I doubt pollution would be foremost in their minds or even on their minds at all. For me my concern has been cost of gas, maintenance headaches, predictability of break downs (I hate surprises) and longevity. So for instance if I know in 10 years of doing 20k an year, I should expect to replace an expensive battery, I can deal with that. But to just randomly find out your oxygen sensor went out is a lot more annoying. I can deal with a high upfront cost I can save for, but really appreciate lower recurring costs like gas. I'm okay with spending a good bit of money up front if I don't have to deal with the headache of shopping for a new vehicle after only 100,000 miles.

However when you move pollution to say power plants, you can put more resources towards managing the pollution at these plants. So if it really happens where all people convert to electric vehicles, I doubt the reduction in pollution will be "slight".

 

[gingerbeer]

Does anyone else think that electric cars are just a fad? There is essentially no way that the power grids of developed countries can be overhauled with increased the generation and distribution capacity that will be required to get rid of internal combustion engines within 30 years without pouring very large percentages of GDP into the project.

**snip**
If anyone thinks electric cars are going to take off anywhere outside of the densest cities you you see the infrastructure growing to accommodate it?

I own a model S.
* Cheapest charging is behind the meter (excess solar that would otherwise go to the grid for a small payment)
* 2nd cheapest is offpeak power 11pm-3am

Basically i plug the car in every few days and set it to charge at the cheapest or 2nd cheapest time, ie driven by the incentive of the pricing scheme

The grid isnt impacted by either scenario and even with mass adoption everyone can charge their car at midnight without any impact, given the grid is built to serve peak sumner air conditioning demand or similar.

Tldr: price power low when there is excess capacity avoiding the need to build new infrastructure.

 

[Cosmik]

So how do you see the infrastructure to support a large number of electric vehicles coming together?

I think you may be missing that electric cars may be seen as the crucial component in changing over fully to renewables. The idea was floated over twenty years ago of using electric cars on charge as a source of power to fill in when the wind stops blowing.

But before you get there you have to manufacture them, and you have to dig up Bolivia to get to all the Lithium. It will need an awful lot of conventional energy to do that, I should think.

 

[maverickronin]

No. They've already gone from "impractical eccentric rich person plaything" to "reasonably practical rich person transportation" to "well within the reach of working professionals." Battery chemistry is likely to improve, due to all the work being done on it right now. We're a battery-powered world.

Yes, the Russian agent in the White House may want to make us like we were in the 1800s with coal. In reality, absent the heavy hand of crony capitalism forcing coal down our collective throats, new power plants are far more likely to be natural gas than coal.

I'm not disputing that Tesla has made the first practical electric cars. Also, the US has the largest coal reserves and Russia has the largest natural gas reserves so I'm not sure why Russia would be "forcing coal down our collective throats" unless it's just because we're more averse to strip mining.

Bio-fuels are a non-starter for anything beyond niche use. Biofuels essentially capture solar energy. The best of them are about 2% efficient at that. Crappy solar cells are 10% with good ones closer to 20%. Plus they put out electricity rather than the long complex processing required of bio-fuels.

I'm not talking about growing crops specifically to process into fuel. That is definitely far too inefficient. I'm thinking along the lines of genetically engineered bacteria that can process organic was and turn it into fuel. That's going to take some leaps in technology but I find it more likely than pipe dreams about no more internal combustion engines by 2050.

What is a fad (though a long lived one) is car ownership. Once fully autonomous self driving cars are worked out, ownership of your own vehicle will be on its way out.

That's definitely in the future but still a long way off. I think that fully self driving cars which can handle driving anywhere a human can are essentially going to require true AI and we're nowhere near there yet.

It will definitely take off in the cites first where the population density make it practical to keep everything mapped, keep construction and accident reports up to date, and where an auto taxi can just drop someone off in front of a building and go on it's way. Out in the country, or even the suburbs self driving cars will face much larger challenges.

I don't think converting all cars to electric is going to happen anytime soon. I think it will take a long time if it happens at all. I sere a more realistic thing as electric vehicles being very common.

My proposition is that something better, like synthetic bio-fuels, or maybe something completely out of left field, will probably replace electrics durn that transition period.

Tldr: price power low when there is excess capacity avoiding the need to build new infrastructure.

Plenty of people are still going to need to charge during the day though. If you own your own house you can install a charging station, plug the car in, and set it to charge in the middle of the night (which will soon stop being off peak when so many people are doing it) but what about people who live in apartments or condos? That would be the majority of city dwellers, where the zero emissions of electrics would be most beneficial.

Unless and until the market is essentially all electric there aren't going to be enough public charging stations in long term parking spaces for everyone to just leave their cars plugged in over night. They'll need to take their cars to a gas station with the equivalent of a Tesla supercharger installed and charge it during the day.

I think you may be missing that electric cars may be seen as the crucial component in changing over fully to renewables. The idea was floated over twenty years ago of using electric cars on charge as a source of power to fill in when the wind stops blowing.

What kind of renewable power are you expecting to take over for primary power generation?

 

[Blumlein 88]

snip



I'm not talking about growing crops specifically to process into fuel. That is definitely far too inefficient. I'm thinking along the lines of genetically engineered bacteria that can process organic was and turn it into fuel. That's going to take some leaps in technology but I find it more likely than pipe dreams about no more internal combustion engines by 2050.

snip

I'm aware of those methods using bacteria or more likely micro-algae to create bio-fuel. There was much enthusiasm in that a decade or so back. Nearly all of that funding has dried up and most companies abandoned making fuel that way. They could never make the fuel inexpensively enough. The most optimistic projections for that put the energy output roughly equal to 20% efficient solar cells. Yet with worse up front and on going operating costs. If someone does it great, but I wouldn't expect it to happen at this point. It's a maybe at best.

 

[DonH56]

Hmmm... Many $60k cars? Not around me, but whatever. And I'm well aware of the price of trucks, insane... They got popular and now it's hard for working farmers who need them to afford them anymore. Of course a lot of farms have been sucked into conglomerates. My dad had an agriservices type business serving mainly family farms in the deep south and by the end all but one had sold to large management companies.

My friend wants the charging station as part of a long-range plan to add battery backup and a converter in case they lose power. He's in town so that rarely happens; where I live, we have fairly frequent short glitches, and longer outages (day to nearly a week a few years ago) a couple of times a year. We added a (natural gas) backup generator a couple of years ago to help ride them out.

When we built our place 20+ years ago the electric company said there was not room for another line in the main feeder box (or whatever it is called) on our circle and charged us $2500 to run a line across the circle (about 50') and add another meter box. There were four lots on the circle when the road was run, never did understand why there were only three meter slots. Forward-thinking they were not. When I asked last year (out of curiosity) they said it would cost us over $25k (each) to add additional 50-A lines because we don't have that much capacity in the feeds to our little out-of-the-way circle. The electric company (a rural coop) said they'd have to add a feeder from a pole about half a mile away to support the added demand. Not all the country lives in your neighborhood. Assuming everyone lives in the city is an issue but it has always been (my grandparents complained about the same things happening when they were younger, city folk applying city rules to the country where they just did not make sense).

I'll drop this; it's fairly off-topic and there's no convincing either side.

 

[Cosmik]

What kind of renewable power are you expecting to take over for primary power generation?

I expect it to be wind - but I am under no illusions that the world is saved. I still don't know whether a wind turbine actually pays for itself in terms of energy if you trace all the work that has gone into making it: the machines that made it, the machines that made the machines, the machines that mined the cement, the mining of the cement, the maintenance, the transport, the installation etc. And if it does pay for itself, will the surplus energy be used for manufacturing more throwaway crap?

The paradigm is still growth at all costs - business as usual airbrushed with green PR, virtue signalling for politicians and consumers, cash for the corporations, constant expansion of the population - so I can see that almost everyone involved has an incentive to churn out wind turbines and all the rest of it regardless of whether it makes sense.

 

[maverickronin]

I expect it to be wind - but I am under no illusions that the world is saved. I still don't know whether a wind turbine actually pays for itself in terms of energy if you trace all the work that has gone into making it: the machines that made it, the machines that made the machines, the machines that mined the cement, the mining of the cement, the maintenance, the transport, the installation etc. And if it does pay for itself, will the surplus energy be used for manufacturing more throwaway crap?

The paradigm is still growth at all costs - business as usual airbrushed with green PR, virtue signalling for politicians and consumers, cash for the corporations, constant expansion of the population - so I can see that almost everyone involved has an incentive to churn out wind turbines and all the rest of it regardless of whether it makes sense.

I don't really see wind power making a huge impact. FWIR places where it's most efficient seem to be farthest away from large population centers. Even discounting that, I doubt too many will be placed in populated areas anytime soon since most people consider them eyesores.

 

[Cosmik]

I don't really see wind power making a huge impact. FWIR places where it's most efficient seem to be farthest away from large population centers. Even discounting that, I doubt too many will be placed in populated areas anytime soon since most people consider them eyesores.

So do you see renewables taking over from conventional, and if so, what type?

 

[maverickronin]

So do you see renewables taking over from conventional, and if so, what type?

I guess what it depends what you mean by "conventional". I think that new generation nuclear plants with better fuel cycles are going to take off in the west eventually. (I've heard China is already planning to build a ton of them.) Possibly when pollution concerns edge out coal and price and distribution edge out natural gas. After that I think fusion looks most likely, but that's probably at least 50-100 years out.

I think "renewables" will continue to as an adjunct to "conventional" power generation because they so dependent on geography. The one excpetion to that might be geothermal. If somebody comes up with a good way to drill deep enough while keeping things pressure-tight geothermal could become the primary method of power generation in seismically stable areas.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Oh I think wind will play a part. I think nuclear reactors will play a big part. Fusion obviously if it ever actually is made to work. But in the end, it is going to be solar. There simply is too much power available that way dwarfing any other source. The cost of solar cells in large installations is already roughly competitive. So fossil fuels will be around quite awhile longer. One day in the future it pretty much will have to end up solar being the big dawg in energy supplies. Or so it seems to me.

 

[maverickronin]

But in the end, it is going to be solar.

...along with some absolutely gigantic liquid vanadium batteries...

Who wouldn't a 60 megawatt hour hour power bank?

 

[Blumlein 88]

...along with some absolutely gigantic liquid vanadium batteries...

Who wouldn't a 60 megawatt hour hour power bank?

That depends. With better major grid lines you can move power across time zones to reduce the number of hours solar isn't available to a region. Yes, that isn't going to happen overnight, but it can happen. There is no technical reason you couldn't girdle the globe so various large solar installations could link to supply power around the world at all times. That infrastructure is way in the future, but quite a doable thing.

There is also the possibility of orbiting stations that beam power 24/7 down to power substations via microwave. I'm pessimistic that will be significant anytime soon due to the cost of things in space. But it is very doable, we already have all the knowledge to do that. Just a matter of reducing costs. Probably more likely than fusion power.

Terrestrial microwave re-transmission is also possible to distribute efficiently solar power from the ground over very long distances.

I can also see developing 3rd world economies that could benefit without 24 hr power. They don't have it now, and don't have much. A good supply of daytime only power would be a big boon to those places.

 

[jhaider]

A $50K model 3 is apples to oranges vs a pickup truck, but the idea something with some panache in the market place won't sell for that appears to me incorrect.

I don't think it's apples to oranges. Most trucks in the US are bought by suburbanites as commuter vehicles.

I'm not disputing that Tesla has made the first practical electric cars.

Nissan Leafs were and are plenty practical for a lot of people. Chevy Volts likely would have been too, had GM built them better.

Assuming everyone lives in the city is an issue but it has always been (my grandparents complained about the same things happening when they were younger, city folk applying city rules to the country where they just did not make sense).

Over 80% of the US population lives in cities or suburbs. According to the World Bank, a majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. Doesn't it make sense for transportation policy to focus on the needs of most of the people?

 

[Blumlein 88]

I don't think it's apples to oranges. Most trucks in the US are bought by suburbanites as commuter vehicles.



Nissan Leafs were and are plenty practical for a lot of people. Chevy Volts likely would have been too, had GM built them better.



Over 80% of the US population lives in cities or suburbs. According to the World Bank, a majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. Doesn't it make sense for transportation policy to focus on the needs of most of the people?

This look at what is counted as an urban area is worth reading. Lots of urban areas and urbanized clusters are pretty small.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/

 

[Brad]

I think using solar to make chemical fuels (hydrogen, hydrocarbons and ammonia for industry) will be significant once they can achieve large scale. After all its hard to see aircraft becoming electric. One main advantage of chemical fuels is that the aircraft loses mass as it burns fuel, and is more efficient. A battery doesn’t lose (much) mass as it discharges

 

[maverickronin]

That depends. With better major grid lines you can move power across time zones to reduce the number of hours solar isn't available to a region. Yes, that isn't going to happen overnight, but it can happen. There is no technical reason you couldn't girdle the globe so various large solar installations could link to supply power around the world at all times. That infrastructure is way in the future, but quite a doable thing.

I'm pretty sure you'd need superconducting transmission lines to make that sort of thing possible with any usable efficiency.

Nissan Leafs were and are plenty practical for a lot of people. Chevy Volts likely would have been too, had GM built them better.

There are judgement calls involved with this kind of thing but I think the extended range gives Tesla the nod.

 

[DonH56]

Over 80% of the US population lives in cities or suburbs. According to the World Bank, a majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. Doesn't it make sense for transportation policy to focus on the needs of most of the people?

Depends upon what you mean by "focus on". Too often that seems to mean "screw the rest, we're most important, they'll have to succumb to our edicts and get by". A balanced approach to help build infrastructure seems to be needed, but that usually comes at high cost along with government mandates to drive/force the issue. I tend toward more conservative and libertarian approaches.

I'll say again, this is a waste of time, it is clear we are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and since my family has generations of farm-based living behind me in the midwestern and southern "fly-by" areas I am what you would call a "deplorable". I need to just stick to technical stuff.