Electric vehicle discussion

[Scott Kenny]

Sounds like someone is looking for a problem that's not there

No, it's a very different process putting out an electrical fire than a combustible-liquid fire, and a separate process still between electrical fires and battery fires.

You WILL NOT STOP an electrical fire without removing the power supply feeding it. End of discussion.

Fire requires 3 or 4 items to happen, depending on whether your teacher is using the Fire Triangle or Fire Tetrahedron.

1. Fuel
2. Oxidizer
3. Ignition source
4. Uncontrolled chemical reaction.

Fuel can be metals, but usually starts as the plastics used for insulation. Oxidizer is oxygen in the air. Ignition source is the heat from the short circuit or thermal runaway. And the battery itself is the uncontrolled chemical reaction, in the case of battery fires.

 

[GTX]

I know the process of extinguishing is different. The point is that the likelihood of ignition in the first place has shown to be far less which is contrary to the fear mongering some are trying to put out there that EV fires are so much more likely than with traditional ICE vehicles.

 

[Arjen]

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ5Aajp0X80

What happens when you set fire to an ICE-car with a full gas tank or a nearly empty gas tank and what's in between.
Note respectful distance from events kept by spectators.

 

[Yellow Palace]

As said above, EV are for a certain part of the population that gets to have individual parking spots where charging can be done.

If a community is too dense for EV chargers to be installed, it's too dense to be car dependent. Whether the right transport solution for that community is bikes, buses, rail, or something else will depend on the circumstances. But high density has never mixed well with cars; attempts to make it do so have ruined the quality of the urban environment and the driving experience.

 

[TomcatViP]

Good catch. But let´s say that a parking lot full of diesel cars and one with turbo gasoline is not exactly the same thing. Once again, the devil is in the details.

 

[Foo Fighter]

If a community is too dense for EV chargers to be installed, it's too dense to be car dependent. Whether the right transport solution for that community is bikes, buses, rail, or something else will depend on the circumstances. But high density has never mixed well with cars; attempts to make it do so have ruined the quality of the urban environment and the driving experience.

That argument falls at the first hurdle.

Can public transport support the population in an densely populated urban environment? No. It ignores the needs of the disabled or less able citizens and is nothing more than a paper exercise in futility.

Take the great conurbations as a holistic environ, how many services workers can afford to live in the centre anyway, how do you get them ALL to work during that crucial commuting timeline?

Until there is a reliable method of moving ALL of the people ALL the time, utopian ideals of just removing cars from the equation, are unaffordable.

 

[perttime]

A full(ish) bus takes much less space on a road or street than the same number of people in cars with one or two persons traveling on each. Less congestion. A well designed public transportation system can do a lot.

For disabled people taxi services are often a good solution.

No. Removing cars from the equation is not feasible. Not in the near future anyway. But. Well functioning public transportation can make life easier also on those who need to use a car.

 

[Foo Fighter]

A full(ish) bus takes much less space on a road or street than the same number of people in cars with one or two persons traveling on each. Less congestion. A well designed public transportation system can do a lot.

For disabled people taxi services are often a good solution.

No. Removing cars from the equation is not feasible. Not in the near future anyway. But. Well functioning public transportation can make life easier also on those who need to use a car.

Great until you try to find the vehicles (Busses/train carriages) to move those people in a very short space of time. How much roadspace do you need then?

How do the drivers of those buses/trains get to work?

Nurses, bin/waste collectors, blah blah blah.

Back to how do you charge BE vehicles at the same time too.

Talk of charging vehicles at night fails to because the infrastructure is not going to be there for decades yet. Selling energy back to the grid? OK, but, how do you get to work the next day - we already know it is impossible to both have your cake and eat it.

We will literally have to wait until we get the spot me up beamie type transportations systems or perhaps the transport tubes from a cartoon series? Well the first time we get an unfortuneate combination between a comuter and a zoo transfer, I shall laugh myself from the vertical. Especially if it is a politician of some kind.........

Even the crazy parrots have their circular discussion to kick cans (And cannots) down the road.

 

[Yellow Palace]

Take the great conurbations as a holistic environ, how many services workers can afford to live in the centre anyway, how do you get them ALL to work during that crucial commuting timeline?

Trains and buses. The great conurbations of the world are almost entirely based on public transport. The technical term for someone trying to drive into central London or Tokyo during rush hour is 'rich idiot'.

Note that I said 'car dependence'. I didn't say anything about getting rid of cars entirely. There will always be people who need them. But it makes sense to design your cities around the needs of people, not the needs of cars.

Public transport and non-car-dependent planning makes things easier for those who can't drive. It means that those who do drive - whether through need or choice - get clearer roads, and a more pleasant destination.

Crucially for the EV discussion, it also means that more people have a choice about whether to drive or take public transport. Which means fewer people are forced to swallow the costs of private vehicle ownership just to go about their daily lives.

 

[TomcatViP]

Don´t remove also cost from the equation. Public transport are often crowded and do not offer enough capacity as profitability is key, including within subsidized markets. This for various reasons, including the historic lack of efficiency of traditional public services in Western countries.
Taxi are not also a solution in many countries. A daily commute for 2 or 3 days in succession out of an airport to a city center will cost you as much as a middle range car monthly payment in many cities where cheap commuting and Taxi pooling (collectivos) are not usual.

In other words, you can´t oppose societal behavior with an economic model that would deny it just by patching with a rebranded concept what pertains to other society.
But then, it leaves you some momentum to to best with other means: car sharing, e-bike rental etc.. are popular. Public money should go into that while improving the model. Go away with the startupers and consolidate around it.
Discrimination by the pound (£*) also can only be counter productive as unpopular. You need mass, you need brain and commitment. And why do these people have to pay fee when regulation mainly put dirty cars massively on the roads?

*I mean fee put in place to drive into city center just as in London

 

[Yellow Palace]

Taxi are not also a solution in many countries. A daily commute for 2 or 3 days in succession out of an airport to a city center will cost you as much as a middle range car monthly payment in many cities where cheap commuting and Taxi pooling (collectivos) are not usual.

Yes, taxis are worse than private cars in almost every way. Lower average occupancy due to the empty runs from one job to the next, higher costs due to the driver, generally a worse user experience. Useful for some niches - and I say that as someone who uses taxis in place of a second car - but definitely not something to build a transport network around.

 

[perttime]

Great until you try to find the vehicles (Busses/train carriages) to move those people in a very short space of time. How much roadspace do you need then?

How do the drivers of those buses/trains get to work?

---

The same number of people in cars takes up more road space. Bus drivers can get to work by buses driven by drivers whose shift started earlier. That doesn't work for everybody - and I didn't say it does.

 

[Scott Kenny]

That argument falls at the first hurdle.

Can public transport support the population in an densely populated urban environment? No. It ignores the needs of the disabled or less able citizens and is nothing more than a paper exercise in futility.

Take the great conurbations as a holistic environ, how many services workers can afford to live in the centre anyway, how do you get them ALL to work during that crucial commuting timeline?

Until there is a reliable method of moving ALL of the people ALL the time, utopian ideals of just removing cars from the equation, are unaffordable.

Tokyo doesn't have a problem with it, though "crush hour" is a real thing. Avoid taking a train between 7 and 9 am. Well, 8 and 9 certainly. 7-8 isn't nearly as bad.

The train operators usually ride bikes to the station where their train is parked in the morning. Some of them drive, but people with driver's licenses in Tokyo are rare. Kinda like how people with driver's licenses in NYC are rare.

But Tokyo had an advantage of having been burned to the ground in the 1940s and getting completely rebuild in the 1950s and 60s. So that people who were displaced by the metro tracks got a new house in a different place.

The US has people who will fight for decades to avoid losing their house to Eminent Domain.

 

[chimeric oncogene]

If a community is too dense for EV chargers to be installed, it's too dense to be car dependent. Whether the right transport solution for that community is bikes, buses, rail, or something else will depend on the circumstances. But high density has never mixed well with cars; attempts to make it do so have ruined the quality of the urban environment and the driving experience.

It's actually a matter of design; if you built a very dense highway network (highways spaced out at 0.5-1km), you can actually support very high densities with cars, over 100,000 per sqkm. You end up with something out of magic motorways - dedicated and totally separate levels for cars and people, and giant multistorey parking lots underneath giant podia.

And yes, you can wire those giant multistorey parking lots with car charging equipment. It's being done in my community as we speak.

High density often means relatively short commutes and lots of starts and stops from traffic lights, which are ideal for plug in hybrids and electrics; once you get off the highway, gasoline cars lose a lot of efficiency operating in an inefficient regime.

This handsome upper-middle-class neighborhood also has two subway line and a giant bus terminal; it has been built, it has been done. Modern subway lines can move fifty to a hundred thousand people per hour per direction, with headways under two minutes. If the subway line fills up, you build a parallel one, usually some sort of faster line with greater intervals between stops. Densities over 100,000 per sqkm are very supportable if you build enough infrastructure.

The problems are not mainly technical, inasmuch as the problems with building say... 10,000 tonne sprint-and-drift Surface Effect Ships, 4-million-pound Spanloaders and other speculative and historical projects beloved of this forum are not mainly technical.

As Tomcat points out, the issues are socioeconomic and sociopolitical. The existing social order cannot necessarily conduct and absorb very large changes in a reasonable fashion, even if they are technically possible, so changes have to be tailored for the social order.

 

[Scott Kenny]

As Tomcat points out, the issues are socioeconomic and sociopolitical. The existing social order cannot necessarily conduct and absorb very large changes in a reasonable, even if they are technically possible, so changes have to be tailored for the social order.

Which is why they worked so well in Japan post-WW2. The whole existing social order was in shambles and easily pushed in a direction that people wanted it to go.

For example, it was to MacArthur's benefit to not have Japan starve, so he opened up the US military canned foods stockpiled for the invasion. Once he did that, the Japanese were very willing to listen to his staffs "suggestions" about laws. On paper, Japanese women have better protections for their rights than women in the US. Culturally, not so much. But those legal protections were the creation of MacArthur's secretaries.

Anyways.

With pretty much every industrial city burned to the ground, it was very easy to add roads and rail lines delivering things to the factories, as the factories were being rebuilt. People whose land was taken were relatively fairly compensated, not like the US Eminent Domain takings end up being. And people who owned property near the train stations, or where stations were added, really made bank.

 

[shin_getter]

"Public" transportation is legacy technology that will never be satisfactory. Buses and trains follow the logic of moving large group of people together, when in real life everyone want to start and end and different locations. The need group everyone together and follow routes means travel time is greatly inflated and just as badly, users linger in the system adding to congestion. The need for expensive and complex coordination of huge number of people with different agendas to make public transportation function means it is a non-starter in many environments, unlike personal vehicles that work just fine under anarchist drug warlord states.

The problem with cars is most simply it is not space efficient as it takes the footprint of 8+ person to move one man. This is a far easier problem to improve.

Bikes and motorcycles are a simple improvement on efficiency, however inertia means real problems remain unsolved for mass adaptation: What 2 wheelers need is:
1. Climate Control
2. Crash safety
3. Favorable regulatory environment and social support


Of course, a bike still take up 3+ times the space as someone walking. To maximize density, hoverboards and monowheels would be optimal. What is needed is suitable traffic rules to optimal throughput and safety and that can probably come from trial and error. Note that monowheels have reached 60+mph but its not a practical speed as transportation.

 

[publiusr]

You WILL NOT STOP an electrical fire without removing the power supply feeding it. End of discussion.

There was an electrical fire at one of my jobs-and I tried to explain this to the son of the owner—but he kept trying to open the extinguisher door in the guardhouse.

Well, at least I learned it was jammed.

News from my state

Electric-powered tractor to transport Honda vehicles, developed in Alabama, unveiled

In 2011, Honda challenged Doire, CEO of Virginia Transportation Corp., to find ways to reduce emissions in its Alabama operations.

www.al.com

 

[perttime]

Bikes and motorcycles are a simple improvement on efficiency, however inertia means real problems remain unsolved for mass adaptation: What 2 wheelers need is:
1. Climate Control
2. Crash safety
3. Favorable regulatory environment and social support

4. a climate that makes a two-wheeler practical/feasible year around for the masses, and not just enthusiasts.

 

[Arjen]

"Public" transportation is legacy technology that will never be satisfactory.

Have a look at the underground rail transport systems of London and Paris. As an alternative to public transport, try to get to your London/Paris destination in a private car, or survive urban traffic there on a bike. I could mention other cities with similar systems, but the London and Paris systems are two I have personal experience with.

Trains and buses. The great conurbations of the world are almost entirely based on public transport. The technical term for someone trying to drive into central London or Tokyo during rush hour is 'rich idiot'.

If the two are 'unsatisfactory', the alternatives are much, much worse.
In a relatively compact, bike-friendly city like Amsterdam, bikes make sense, but that city also has a rather elaborate public transport system.

 

[Scott Kenny]

"Public" transportation is legacy technology that will never be satisfactory. Buses and trains follow the logic of moving large group of people together, when in real life everyone want to start and end and different locations. The need group everyone together and follow routes means travel time is greatly inflated and just as badly, users linger in the system adding to congestion. The need for expensive and complex coordination of huge number of people with different agendas to make public transportation function means it is a non-starter in many environments, unlike personal vehicles that work just fine under anarchist drug warlord states.

When everyone goes to work at pretty close to the same times, mass transit works well.

For example, the Tokyo Metro has large bicycle parking lots available near the outlying stations so you can ride a couple KM at most to the station (my dorm was right at 1km from the station), park the bike, and hop on the train. Granted, I was in Kasai/Edogawa, so kinda out in the suburbs relatively speaking. There were only like 10 stops farther out our Metro line, for example. But getting around wasn't particularly difficult as long as you avoided 8-9am. Yes, that may mean you needed to start your commute in at 7 and kill an hour before class.

 

[Grey Havoc]

As EV Sales Slump, Volkswagen Scales Back Battery Factories Buildout - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Volkswagen will wait to see what electric car demand is like before building out all six of its previously planned battery factories. Thomas Schmall, VW's board member in charge of technology, told a German newspaper that "building battery...

tech.slashdot.org

Ford Cancels Electric SUV, Delays EV Pickup - Slashdot

Volkswagen said this week it would wait to see where EV demand goes before building out the last three of its six planned battery factories. And now Ford has also cancelled its planned electric SUV and delayed production of an all-new electric pickup, according to CNBC, moves Ford now believes...

tech.slashdot.org

 

[shin_getter]

Have a look at the underground rail transport systems of London and Paris.

For example, the Tokyo Metro

Technology is the ever improving factor in human life. Transport systems that depends on social cooperation and "politics" is not really going to improve much beyond historical highs and historical pitfalls that caused failure in the first place is still in place.

On the other hand, many real constrains in vehicle designs have been lifted that enables new transportation systems with:
1. Powerful, light, efficient and compact powerplants
2. Strong materials enabling safety
3. Computerized control and navigation reducing labor and increasing vehicle density

As such it is reasonable to develop new vehicles with new form factors, new traffic systems and so on as to improve on the old.

Certain the right topic to discuss on a website dedicated to vehicle designs!

4. a climate that makes a two-wheeler practical/feasible year around for the masses, and not just enthusiasts.

I wonder how much computer control and low center of gravity designs can enable practical use on light snow.

 

[Arjen]

A new development in ways to power electric vehicles: an extension cord.

Planes, trains and monster diggers: The vehicles pushing the limits of electric power

How much energy you can pack into a battery is one limit on how big an EV can get – but meet the EVs ditching batteries altogether to attain mammoth proportions.

www.bbc.com

 

[Grey Havoc]

Germany suffers ‘spectacular’ 70pc drop in electric car sales

European carmakers call for delay in emissions restrictions as EV demand falters

www.telegraph.co.uk