What are your thoughts on electric cars?

@saragoodtimes Can you imagine what will happen at 6pm when everyone gets home from work and plugs in their car....

@sunsporter1649 if we switch to nuclear power Vlad will laugh like hell when we Nuke ourselves

@saragoodtimes Maybe a sour faced smirk. He has no laugh neurons.

Nuke ourselves? Could be. Nuke each other, more likely. No one will laugh that one off.

@Really most families have 2 cars at least. when both get home and plug in you'll see the glow from space

@saragoodtimes unless something has changed 200 amp service is normal for a house, however maybe other countries are different I’m in the USA.

@BackyardShaman maybe it's changed when ours was built it was 100. even so it's going to still be almost double charging 2 cars and if you have kids look out we have 4 cars here

@saragoodtimes Your electricity bill may double, but your gas/petrol bill has, what, quadrupled??

@saragoodtimes Can most families afford to spend $320,000-$400,000 on four electric cars?

@saragoodtimes My 2015 Model S adds 1 km to its range for every amp-hour at 230 V. So from 18:00 to 06:00 even on a 10 A circuit it adds 120 km. You certainly don't need 75 A to charge an electric car. Smaller lighter EVs add range faster. If you add a dedicated circuit then you could charge at 11 kW, which would be 50 A single phase but that would charge the car from zero to 100% in six hours which is very rarely necessary.

@Diotrephes Why would anyone need to spend that much? Most people are not in the market for cars in that class regardless of fuel. A perfectly usable Hyundai EV can be had for less than 30 kUSD. If you spend 80 kUSD you can get a Porsche Taycan. A Ford Mustang Mach-E is about 50 kUSD

Source: https://insideevs.com/news/534027/electric-car-prices-us-20210918/

@ninalanyon I'm sure that you can find a "cheap" one but what will it cost you for new batteries and other electrical repairs?

@ninalanyon It's Kw/hr that matters, not A/hr.

A lower current simply means that it takes longer to charge any battery for any given accumulated potential energy.

So if you charge your car from, say 20% to 80% capacity it will cost you the same whether the current is 50A or 15A; assuming the same efficiency.

@saragoodtimes Sweden is working on building electric roads. The roads will have and electric grid under the asphalt and the vehicles will have devices under them that will receive the electric waves as they pass over them. That will provide the vehicles with a constant touchless charge.

https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/sweden-to-build-worlds-first-permanent-electric-road-in-2025/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-first-electrified-road-for-charging-vehicles-opens-in-sweden

https://www.worldhighways.com/wh12/news/sweden-create-permanent-electric-road

The vehicle owners will pay a fee.

There are over 4,000,000 miles of interstate highways (not including city streets, county roads, etc.) in America. Throw in the number of lanes and both directions and you will get an astronomical number multiplied by maybe $1.5-$2 million per mile lane. Then, add in the power plant generating costs. And the additional costs of the vehicle systems. Do we really want to go down that road?

@ArishMell I'm well aware of that. I'm an electronics and electrical engineer. The current is a useful measure because it is the parameter that can be adjusted. In domestic situations the voltage is fixed so the rate at which range is added is directly proportional to the available current.

So for my car the rule of thumb is that I get one km per amp per hour. It makes the arithmetic simple in cases where I need to adjust the current to avoid overloading the circuit.

@ninalanyon Sorry - I didn't mean to undermine your knowledge! Other readers though might not have realised the point I was making.

One thing I have wondered, and I have seen questioned elsewhere, is to what extent the existing mains supplies to houses, not within each house, will cope with greatly increasing numbers of both high-rate car-chargers and electricity-hungry heating/hot-water systems.

Pumping extra electricity into the National Grid is all very well, but not very useful if the street cabling becomes overloaded!

@ArishMell No need for apologies, I was unreasonably annoyed. :-)
And your point was a useful reminder as you say for others with less specialised knowledge.

The National Grid has said that they are not concerned either for grid capacity or supply; the already planned and budgeted improvements will be sufficient. You might have a point about local low voltage circuits in some places but in general distribution transformers in western countries spend the vast bulk of their lifespan at well under 50% load so there is a quite a lot of room for extra load especially if the loads are smart and sensitive to price signals. In addition it is usually the case that LV connections are over-sized at the time they are installed in order to reduce the risk that they will need replacing early. A typical lifetime for a transformer is between 25 and 50 years so it can pay to install a better one than strictly needed at the time.

@ninalanyon Thank you for the explanation.

I had heard the National Grid is reasonably confident it will handle the growing load, but of course we also need the growing electricity generation!

What worries me more is a lot of very big chickens coming home to roost, thanks to successive UK Governments, both Labour and Conservative led, having developed no sensible, long-term energy plans over many decades. I suspect much of that stems from too many politicians of all flavours having desperately little technical knowledge - how many even know the difference and relationship between energy and power, for example?

A friend who owns a battery-electric car told me if you have a high-rate charger for one, rather than a low power unit plugged into a 13A socket, it has to be installed professionally and via smart meter of its own. (In the UK.) I am not sure though, if that is by national policy or that of his electricity supplier.

@ArishMell I don't know about the UK. Here in Norway all electrical installation work has to be done by a qualified electrician. The high rate chargers don't have a separate meter though. No need because most people here buy electricity at spot price. My supplier simply charges me the cost of the electricity at the time I use it plus an administration fee which is about four GBP per month.

In Norway the bill has three components and typically involves two separate companies. One company supplies the electricity and another supplies the infrastructure to get it to you. The second one charges a fee per kWh for the losses in the cables, etc., and a fixed charge for the maintenance of the infrastructure. It's much more transparent than it seems to be in the UK. Regularly charging an electric car by just plugging it into an ordinary domestic socket is not supposed to be done here because the Schuko plug and socket are not rated for continuous full load use and all sockets are on spurs, no ring main.

When I visit friends in the UK and charge at their houses I normally set the charge current to the lowest that will add the needed range. On my car I can set the charge current in one amp increments down to five amp (120 km of added range per 24 hours) so it's actually perfectly safe.

Personally I'm not convinced that the short termism that is rampant in the UK has much to do with a lack of technical expertise in electricity, after all one can hire an expert for that. On the Tory side it seems to have more to do with an obsession with privatisation. Not sure what excuse Labour and Liberals have but all three of them seem blinded by their own ideologies.

@ninalanyon Electrical installations in the UK can be done, downstream of the consumer-unit, by the householder but still need to be tested professionally and signed off as safe.

The regulations for that were introduced in the late 1990s as I recall, perhaps 2000s; and led to the strange situation that very highly experienced electricians at work, all used to domestic 240V, industrial 3-phase, American 120V/60Hz equipment and the complexities of ship-board wiring, became regarded legally as incapable of fitting an extra socket in their own homes!

I take it your car has its charger, or an auxiliary regulator for an external charger, built in, then?

I don't know either what our Labour and Liberal parties are obsessed with these days, but Labour has been just as ready to sell anything and everything - preferably abroad under the "inward [sic] investment" belief - as the Conservatives were. However, we do have strong regulatory bodies that do their best to ensure the utilities meet the laws and expectations as far as practicable, irrespective of the ownership, and by and large they seem to succeed.

@ArishMell I think almost all EVs (except the very cheapest) have an onboard switched mode power supply that converts the 230 V supply to the 400 V (or 800 V in some newer cars) battery voltage. And most of them have some ability to control the current they draw. In my car, Tesla S, it is selectable in 1 A increments from 5 A to 30 A. Other brands have similar features but in some the settings are just low, medium, and high I believe.

@saragoodtimes Mine has 200 amp service. I still can add on.

I just don't understand.

@Diotrephes There are a lot of unknowns in the EV business at the moment simply because we haven't had modern EVs for very long. The question is not how much a battery replacement will cost but how much will such costs be over the lifetime of the vehicle. That is how much does it cost together with how often it will need replacing.

Source: https://berla.co/average-us-vehicle-lifespan/

Tesla's warranty is eight years, some other manufacturers have similar warranties. So we would expect at most one battery replacement in the lifetime of the vehicle. So then you can simply add the cost of one battery replacement to the purchase price of the car if you want to get a pessimistic estimate of the 'capital' cost of the vehicle.

Battery replacement costs vary wildly at the moment, I have seen online prices from less than 5 kUSD for a 24 kWh leaf battery replacement in the US to 21 000 USD for a 80 kWh Model S in Finland. This suggests to me that the market is simply not mature enough or large enough to generate effective competition yet. Once there are enough EVs on the road there will be a market for third party battery suppliers and prices will stabilize.

So at a very rough estimate it seems to me that adding say 5 to 10 thousand USD to the price of an EV would price in the potential costs of battery replacement over the life time of the vehicle.