No Longer the New New Thing

[GG.]

Based on the power requirements for that, I look forward to the skyline looking like this everywhere:

That's nothing compared to the view behind you:

[Jobbo]

You can generate the power wherever - the point I was making was that charging 80% of a (small) 60 kWh battery in 5 minutes means you're going to be running at about 600kW. The wire you plug into the car will have to be as thick as your arm.

[Mito Man]

That’ll be the nail in the coffin for the combustion engine.

Other than, of course, the absence of power generation to provide all the juice to charge millions of electric vehicles and on the go charging infrastructure.

Fast charging is only 1/3 of the problem for the mass rollout of EVs.

National grid has always said it won’t be a problem.

[Orange Cola]

The drive for hydrogen powered IC engines is both infrastructure and cost driven. Developing countries won’t have the infrastructure for battery cars for decades and the cost of fitting a battery to a car is huge. Not only that but the material required to make a battery is limited in supply, so the cost will only go up.

The ‘cheap’ cars today are what £8,000 - £20,000, and £20,000 will still get leather seats and other decent options in certain vehicles. This is the price bracket where most cars are sold. It’s currently costing manufacturers, with bulk buying power, over £10,000 per battery per car whereas the less expensive IC engines can be made for circa £2,000. Economies of scale won’t bring battery prices down by that much, especially when raw materials are limited in supply.

It’s therefore not viable and it isn’t looking like it will become viable to produce a battery electric car for similar costs to the mass market cars produced today. Plus the issues around charging where not everyone has access to off road parking or a regular stop over in a place where there’s charging facilities. Honda, Toyota, BMW and a few others are either actively investing in hydrogen powered IC engines or looking to move into that space.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a half way house but still not as cheap to produce.

[V8Granite]

You can generate the power wherever - the point I was making was that charging 80% of a (small) 60 kWh battery in 5 minutes means you're going to be running at about 600kW. The wire you plug into the car will have to be as thick as your arm.

If you used a high speed diesel to produce that energy at around 40% efficiency that would be roughly 12litres of diesel.

The cable size wouldn’t be that big I don’t think but the current would be particularly high. That means pressure tested cabling, armoured, very expensive.

Dave!

[mik]

You can generate the power wherever - the point I was making was that charging 80% of a (small) 60 kWh battery in 5 minutes means you're going to be running at about 600kW. The wire you plug into the car will have to be as thick as your arm.

If you used a high speed diesel to produce that energy at around 40% efficiency that would be roughly 12litres of diesel.

The cable size wouldn’t be that big I don’t think but the current would be particularly high. That means pressure tested cabling, armoured, very expensive.

Dave!

Tesla superchargers are at 480V?

So to run at 600kw means 1250A. That is quite a lot of A. About 50x the thickness of std house wiring cable i'd guess?

[RobYob]

The drive for hydrogen powered IC engines is both infrastructure and cost driven. Developing countries won’t have the infrastructure for battery cars for decades and the cost of fitting a battery to a car is huge. Not only that but the material required to make a battery is limited in supply, so the cost will only go up.

The ‘cheap’ cars today are what £8,000 - £20,000, and £20,000 will still get leather seats and other decent options in certain vehicles. This is the price bracket where most cars are sold. It’s currently costing manufacturers, with bulk buying power, over £10,000 per battery per car whereas the less expensive IC engines can be made for circa £2,000. Economies of scale won’t bring battery prices down by that much, especially when raw materials are limited in supply.

It’s therefore not viable and it isn’t looking like it will become viable to produce a battery electric car for similar costs to the mass market cars produced today. Plus the issues around charging where not everyone has access to off road parking or a regular stop over in a place where there’s charging facilities. Honda, Toyota, BMW and a few others are either actively investing in hydrogen powered IC engines or looking to move into that space.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a half way house but still not as cheap to produce.

Cost and time for creating cryogenic hydrogen production, transportation and storage infrastructure would be also huge and and I'd say much much more difficult than building on the existing electricity infrastructure.

Raw materials "Rare earths" for battery and E-motors are not limited in supply by base material availability though, but by the previously limited demmand leading to reserves being uneconomical to exploit. More demand will drive competition and availability*

I don't agree that economies of scale won't bring down battery prices. You can't argue that EV battery tech and production is anywhere near as mature as ICE, there's still orders of magnitude difference in production numbers.

Solving the charging infrastructe problem will be a huge task without a doubt, but I think it's far easier to to for EV than Liquad Hydrogen.

I cannot see any compelling reason to choose liquid hydrogen over a battery for energy storage.


*China does have the largest estimated reserve of rare Earths (44Mt) so around 400years at currently production levels. However Brazil and Vietnam have half these reserves each but currently produce at around 1% the rate of China. Russia, India, USA and Australia also have reserves in the millions of tonnes.

[Orange Cola]

The drive for hydrogen powered IC engines is both infrastructure and cost driven. Developing countries won’t have the infrastructure for battery cars for decades and the cost of fitting a battery to a car is huge. Not only that but the material required to make a battery is limited in supply, so the cost will only go up.

The ‘cheap’ cars today are what £8,000 - £20,000, and £20,000 will still get leather seats and other decent options in certain vehicles. This is the price bracket where most cars are sold. It’s currently costing manufacturers, with bulk buying power, over £10,000 per battery per car whereas the less expensive IC engines can be made for circa £2,000. Economies of scale won’t bring battery prices down by that much, especially when raw materials are limited in supply.

It’s therefore not viable and it isn’t looking like it will become viable to produce a battery electric car for similar costs to the mass market cars produced today. Plus the issues around charging where not everyone has access to off road parking or a regular stop over in a place where there’s charging facilities. Honda, Toyota, BMW and a few others are either actively investing in hydrogen powered IC engines or looking to move into that space.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a half way house but still not as cheap to produce.

Cost and time for creating cryogenic hydrogen production, transportation and storage infrastructure would be also huge and and I'd say much much more difficult than building on the existing electricity infrastructure.

Raw materials "Rare earths" for battery and E-motors are not limited in supply by base material availability though, but by the previously limited demmand leading to reserves being uneconomical to exploit. More demand will drive competition and availability*

I don't agree that economies of scale won't bring down battery prices. You can't argue that EV battery tech and production is anywhere near as mature as ICE, there's still orders of magnitude difference in production numbers.

Solving the charging infrastructe problem will be a huge task without a doubt, but I think it's far easier to to for EV than Liquad Hydrogen.

I cannot see any compelling reason to choose liquid hydrogen over a battery for energy storage.


*China does have the largest estimated reserve of rare Earths (44Mt) so around 400years at currently production levels. However Brazil and Vietnam have half these reserves each but currently produce at around 1% the rate of China. Russia, India, USA and Australia also have reserves in the millions of tonnes.

The key there is at current production rates, EV’s a tiny amount of car sales so 400 years with of reserves at today’s rates will quickly disappear. Tesla produce tens of thousands of cars a year, Toyota and VW alone produce over 20 million vehicles a year.

The cost of batteries won’t drop to £2k/unit, that’s a huge amount, to match ICE engines. Don’t forget you need to include motors in that price too AND still offer a customer equivalent range to a current £8k-£20k car. Oh and you’ve got what, 10 years to do it in as legislation comes into effect from that point onwards.

The manufactures who sell in space aren’t wrong, there’s a reason they’re backing hydrogen power.

[RobYob]

The key there is at current production rates, EV’s a tiny amount of car sales so 400 years with of reserves at today’s rates will quickly disappear. Tesla produce tens of thousands of cars a year, Toyota and VW alone produce over 20 million vehicles a year.

The cost of batteries won’t drop to £2k/unit, that’s a huge amount, to match ICE engines. Don’t forget you need to include motors in that price too AND still offer a customer equivalent range to a current £8k-£20k car. Oh and you’ve got what, 10 years to do it in as legislation comes into effect from that point onwards.

The manufactures who sell in space aren’t wrong, there’s a reason they’re backing hydrogen power.

OK, a reasonable argument, lets throw some numbers at it.

2018 Global car sales were 86 million.
2018 Global EV sales 1.26 million.
Global estimate rare earth reserves 120Mt (with the the sum of the top 7 112Mt, #1 China 44Mt, =#2 Vietnam 22Mt, =#2 Brazil 22Mt)
Global estimate of rare earth production ~0.15Mt/yr (#1 China 0.12Mt/y, #2 Australia 0.02Mt/y, #3 USA 0.015Mt/y)

So for arguments sake say all rare Earth production goes into EVs. A number I read in a brief google search was 3kg/vehicle, lets round that to 10kg. Although a Tesla S doesn't use rare earths in its motors and battery, what it does use lots of is nickel and cobalt.
But before we re-run a similar argument over cobalt/nickel*/platinum can we conclude that EV production will adapt to whatever tech has the best performance/cost ratio?

86million EVs would take .86Mt of rare earths or roughly four times the current production level. So at currently estimates there's still at least 140years of rare earth resource available even if automotive sales are exclusively EV.

I haven't seen any widespread investment in liquid hydrogen infrastructure, I haven't looked hard tbh but you've seen different? Global hydrogen vehicles sales are aiming for 40,000 in 2019, that's a collosal head start for EV and I'm struggling to see how they're going to attract either the consumer or goverment investment. Everything I've read about handling liquid hydrogen is it's dangerous and expensive.

I don't quite understand the space reference sorry?

references
http://carsalesbase.com/global-car-sales-2018/
https://investingnews.com/daily/resourc ... s-country/
https://investingnews.com/daily/resourc ... h-outlook/
*There's only enough nicket left for around a quarter of a billion Teslas.

[Mito Man]

Before you guys get into a long argument let’s just say it’s a bit irrelevant when next gen motors will use no rare earth materials and next gen batteries won’t use cobalt either according to Tesla...

[Swervin_Mervin]

I don't see digging great big fecking holes in the ground everywhere as progress really, either. You're just swapping one environmentally questionable large mining of resource for another.

[RobYob]

I don't see digging great big fecking holes in the ground everywhere as progress really, either. You're just swapping one environmentally questionable large mining of resource for another.

Visiting my uncles as a kid meant driving past the brown coal pits of the LaTrobe valley, I think my heavy green bias probsbly started there.

Big holes in the ground, huge ugly refining plants and enormous factories are in no way environmentally friendly. But if the end-game here is to have everyone on Earth able to access clean cheap transport then pragmatism will get us there sooner.

[Mito Man]

You’ll need to dig the holes regardless to get the other materials out to build the car, and everything else in this world which can’t be built from recycled stock.

[SSO]

It sounds like the simplest thing with these hybrid super cars is just to connect them to power when parked up and spend a few grand getting a automatic generator connected to the garage - which is probably something you’d want anyway if you live somewhere with frequent power cuts.

We actually are about to do something similar at the house we recently moved to. We are putting in a solar field with a Tesla Powerwall which will have the capacity to run the entire house for multiple days if the power goes out.