The Current Problems with Electric Cars (no pun intended)

"BaconSandwich is tasty." (baconsandwich) 04/07/2014 at 22:26 • Filed to: None

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Lately, I've been thinking a lot about electric and plug-in hybrid cars. Despite our best efforts, my wife and I end up spending a considerable amount on gas each year. Whenever the price of gas goes up, we generally just have to bend over and take it. We all need to get around one way or another. Yes, some of us have the option of walking, biking, or public transit, but let's be honest here - there's nothing quite like the freedom that a set of wheels can bring. It's the American way.

Even something with an electric range of < 40 km would cut our gas bill in half. This thought got me looking around at plug-in hybrids and electric cars. Needless to say, I'm not too terribly impressed with what's out there. In all my reading, I'm noticing a few common problems among the current offerings:

1. Looks.

Let's be honest - most of the electric cars out there are either so that only their vegan, tree-hugging, Birkenstock wearing mothers could love them, or are shaped like a jelly bean. There's some pretty obvious reasons for this, but still. Take for example the Mitsubishi i-Miev - an electric car with a range of roughly 100 miles (160 km):

It looks like a jelly bean. No, seriously. Look at it. Heck, this one is even colored like a popcorn flavoured Jelly Belly. Not exactly the kind of thing that I'd like to be seen hooning. Perhaps I'm being a bit unjustly hard on the i-Miev, but come on!

That being said, there's a reason for it's shape. The more slippery the shape, the more range it can get with the same amount of battery. This makes perfect sense. Especially since batteries are so heavy, you want to try to carry as few of them as possible, and make the best use of what you have. The important metric here is the drag coefficient - a measurement of how much the vehicle's shape slows it down (See: !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ). The larger the number, the more the drag, the worse the shape of the vehicle. The i-Miev clocks in around 0.35. That's actually not all that good. There's quite a few production cars that have a better (lower) coefficient of drag. Such as:

The Tesla Model S (drag coefficient 0.24):

The Porsche 918 (drag coefficient: 0.29):

... or the BMW i8 (drag coefficient: 0.26):

(Don't you normally park your car with both doors open, for added sexiness?)

Do all of these look better than the i-Miev? Arguably yes. So why are manufacturers still pushing concepts and production models that are hideous? There's a few reasons for that.

For one, there's a small segment of the market that loves to show off how much they are (supposedly) saving the environment while driving around and swilling a Laté. They want the world to know that they are driving an electric car. It's no good if it looks the same as a regular car. Car manufacturers know this, and want to milk that market for all it's worth. That's fine.

I can also imagine that designers are excited to work on something new, hi-tech and innovative. Take the BWM i-3 for instance. Here's a shot of the exterior and interior:

It certainly looks quite different than anything on the market. I'm sure the designers were thrilled to be working on the project, and wanted to go all-out, and they did. To me, I think it looks pretty good. To the majority of the market, maybe not so much. By going overboard on the styling, they are driving potential customers away. This brings me up to another major sticking point...

2. Price.

The price of one of a Tesla Model S starts at around $79,000 (in Canada). That's a lot of moolah. The arguably better looking BMW i-3 goes for a handsome $45,000. Even a Nissan Leaf (another pseudo jelly-bean) clocks around $33,000. That's much much better, but still not quite there.

There's a few reasons for the prices being what they are. The price of the battery packs isn't cheap. Even if you are looking at making your own electric vehicle (EV), you are looking at $15,000 - $20,000 in batteries for something that will give you decent range. There's really now way around it with an EV or hybrid - you need batteries. The tech in the past few years has gotten better, and prices are slowly coming down. Now if you have to include a gas motor as well, the price will be even higher. Things brings up the third major issue:

3. Range

There's no dogging around this one either. The range of most electric vehicles is generally... not good. Again, a lot of this comes down to the batteries. For anyone living in a cooler climate, the situation gets even worse. Batteries (even Lithium ion batteries) don't like the cold. Plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt can use some of the power from being plugged in to help warm the batteries, but only down to a certain point. Below -9 Celsius (that's 15 degrees Fahrenheit) the gas engine has to kick on when first starting the vehicle to get the batteries up to temperature. This means... using gas. And if you are owning a plug-in hybrid to get away from using gas... well, you can see that the situation isn't great.

It seems like every second day there's some wonderful new technology using graphene or carbon nanotubes to make super-powered batteries, but until these technologies are tested, and fully put into production we are going to have to deal with what we have.

This also brings up another smaller problem: charging times. Unless you have the resources to install a fancy charger, a lot of these electric cars will take a long time to charge. I really don't see this as being too much of a problem though. Just like how we are getting used to plugging in our smartphones every night, we'll have to learn to do the same with our cars. This doesn't help when doing a long-distance run, though. If I want to make a trip to the next nearest city, I'm looking at a 250+ km drive. That'd be enough to drain the batteries on almost anything short of the Tesla Model S, and even then, I'd have to charge up while I'm there in order to get back home. Faster partial-charges are slowly getting around that. Take, for example, the Tesla Supercharger stations. They are able to give up to a half a charge in under 20 minutes. Not bad, but this does mean that on a road trip you'd be getting out to stretch your legs every hour and a half.

So with all these disadvantages, why would anyone want to own an electric car or plug-in hybrid?

1. Getting away from fuel prices.

Electric vehicles are cheaper to run than their gas counterparts. With fewer moving parts, there's also less maintenance to do on them. In theory, a vehicle with regenerative braking won't need brake changes as often. If it is a purely electric vehicle, the only maintenance items are tires, brakes, and suspension components, with the rare electric motor brush replacement. When you've got a watermelon sized engine and only a few moving gears, there's a lot less to physically break. Early on there were concerns about battery life over time, but the Prius has shown that this isn't actually as much of a concern as what was originally thought, and that battery packs are lasting quite a while.

With a gas car, you are at mercy of the price at the pump. It's pretty difficult to make your own gasoline, but a little bit easier to make your own electricity. A decently sized (but expensive) solar panel installation on the roof of a house could, in theory, be used to charge an electric car. That's kind of nifty.

As someone who has worked in the oil and gas industry, I have seen what it's like. I want to be doing something better. I personally believe that we can't keep burning through fossil fuels at the rate that we are, and we might as well fix the problem now (or at least work on fixing the problem). The more we work at it now, the less of a problem it will be in the future. We might as well get started on things now.

2. Instant Torque

As the Tesla Model S (among other cars) has shown, the instant torque of an electric motor or electrically assisted system can be amazing. Like this:

3. Low center of gravity

Having the battery back low down can drop the center of gravity of the car to stupidly low levels. (This can really help hide the fact that you're potentially hauling a lot of extra weight around, but that's a bit beside the point). As anyone who has driven a BR-Z/FR-S knows, having a low center of gravity is a good thing.

4. Quietness

This could be seen as a con (especially for anyone visually impaired), but I see it as a pro. On my honeymoon, I had a chance to go to a tropical island is the South Pacific. It was amazing, but the constant clatter of diesel vehicles on the road near the beach was a bit of a downer. A place like that would be so much more amazing if the sound of traffic was much lower. Like electric car levels of low.

Anyway, enough rambling for now. G'night oppo.

pfftballer > BaconSandwich is tasty. 04/07/2014 at 22:33

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Even though it sounds like you've made up your mind already I'll throw this out there.

Diesel Jetta. Solid 50 mpg with an ecu reflash, bone stock will get you 40+ all day every way. Torque that will straight up surprise you. Drive one. Not ugly either.

jariten1781 > BaconSandwich is tasty. 04/07/2014 at 22:41

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Solution: Motorcycle

BaconSandwich is tasty. > jariten1781 04/08/2014 at 10:19

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Motorcycles do work, but they also have drawbacks. Ever try grocery shopping for a family on a motorcycle? Yeah, not so fun. Same with trying to carry anything larger than what'll fit in a backpack.

BaconSandwich is tasty. > pfftballer 04/08/2014 at 10:25

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It certainly is a valid option. The only problem with that is the current price of diesel fuel. Right now it's going for ~ $1.349/L, which is a good $0.10 to $0.15 more per litre. That's what - something like $5.10/gallon? Even with the great mileage a Jetta gives, it still ends up costing a fair bit to run around town compared to something electric. That being said, it still might be a better option for winter driving, and would definitely be able to handle hauling around a family.

With VW's recent Blitzkrieg, is the quality still good? I've heard mixed reports about supposed cost cutting measures that they've been taking in order to maximize profits.

Hanzr > BaconSandwich is tasty. 04/13/2014 at 09:16

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"The larger the number, the more the drag"

Well technically this is not correct, as the equation below demonstrates.

The drag (force) also depends on the density of air, the velocity of vehicle relative to the air, the coefficient Cd, and the Drag Area.

This sentence is somewhat misleading to me, so I just point that out. But I agree with your gist. Nice write up!

BaconSandwich is tasty. > Hanzr 04/14/2014 at 20:18

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True - but for the most part, air really doesn't seem to change density all that much, at least within a normal person's drive. (E.g.: not driving up Pike's Peak).

Hanzr > BaconSandwich is tasty. 04/14/2014 at 21:39

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That's true. But don't forget the Drag Area—- that matters a lot.

http://bigmike.marlincrawler.com/forum/index.ph…

well let's take the second and third vehicle appeared in this thread as the example car.

The NSX's cd is 0.34, larger than Alpine B3's 0.29; however, the Drag Area of NSX is 1.78m^2, which is significantly smaller than Alpine's 2.14m^2. As a result, the Cd*A of NSX is smaller than that of Alpine, hence the smaller Drag Force if driven at same velocity and in the same air.

I think the reason for which a got high Cds is the additional aero devices, while the Drag Areas small as a needle still hold them decent Drag data.

Disclaimer: I'm not a aerodynamics major (high schooler actually), so this is as far as I can explain...