What about LiPo batteries? Will they not work for electric vehicles? I know people who use them in electric bikes and have a lot of success (long range/high speed). They are also used in R/C cars/planes...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_polymer_battery

Thanks, Tom. As Nate has pointed out, a 'longage of expectations' is likely to be our greatest liability. After a couple of centuries of realizing ever more utility and efficiency from our energy slaves, the idea of diminishing, even declining returns is a tough pill to swallow for most. It's going to be interesting watching those firmly stuck in the bargaining/anger stages vs. those who've achieved some level of acceptance.

While I have no doubt that better battery technologies can be developed, I have my doubts about our ability to achieve implementation on a scale that matters to most people. Better to make other arrangements; get past the expectations that cheap and plentiful petroleum lulled us into. We're going to have a lot more to worry about than the range of our EVs.

BTW: The sealed AGM battery on my solar fence charger lasted nearly 19 years. Perhaps we need to focus more on what batteries can do for us, rather than what they can't.

Why can't we just call it quits with carism? It's not sustainable to have individuals expending 2000 litres each a year traveling back and forth in 2 ton vehicles to places most of them can walk to with ease. It'd be good for their bodies and for everyone else who might want another decade of not dying due to famines.

Beyond Lithium Ion V
Symposium on Scalable Energy Storage
Abstracts

Some of the presentations are also available online. Li-Air and Li-Sulfur in an Automotive System Context by Thomas Greszler, et al, from General Motors is an overview of systems aspects for electric vehicles.

Battery technology has been studied intensively for at least 3 decades, driven by the need for backup batteries installed in manholes and cell sites, on customer premises, and in cell phones and laptops. There may be a breakthrough out there, but progress has been fairly slow so far.

Of course, if Alan Drake (in New Orleans) had electricity, he would probably point out that electrified rail is a far better solution. A link to one of his articles from a few years ago:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/14492
Electrification of transportation as a response to peaking of world oil production

Alan asks, and answers, a simple question, to-wit, how did we provide for mass transit in prior decades, with minimal use of oil?

The tragedy for the US is that we had pretty good electrified local rail networks, until around 1948, when most of the systems began to be shut down, because of the rising supremacy of the automobile (and with a little help from industries interested in seeing our auto dependency increase).

For example, Dallas/Fort Worth had about 350 miles of electrified streetcar lines, with a regional electrified Interurban system, until about 1948.

Ironically enough, 1948 is the year that the US became a net oil importer.

I always look forward to Tom Murphy's posts here. They are some of the best on the oil drum.

What he points out is what I have seen. I have wanted to do either an all electric car or motorcycle just for the benefits of the simple drivetrain, and quiet operation. And because I thought it would be interesting.

When you look at cost savings there aren't any really. Same thing with storing much solar power in batteries. If you look at the electricity costs for vehicles or buying it from the local power company vs solar panels and batteries, the cost of using up and replacing batteries swamps any savings. You might break even, but probably won't. There are other reasons like lower pollution perhaps.

Further looking carefully at how to make use of stored energy you quickly come to the conclusion electric vehicles would be able to come close to doing everything we need if we moved about at lower speed. One could make a nice EV if it never needed to exceed 30 mph. You don't waste very much to aero losses at lower speeds nor to stopping losses when you brake to a stop from slower speeds. Of course if we lowered voluntarily what ICE vehicles do to the same 30 mph with the engine optimized for such use we could easily double or close to triple the distance we got from each gallon of fuel used. So again the battery option isn't all that attractive. Right now no one wants to limit themselves to 30 mph. The day will come however when moving at any speed on non-human power might be quite attractive.

I think some of the developing countries not yet addicted to our speeds would do themselves a huge favor to develop their transportation systems with a hard 30 mph limit. I also wonder about cargo roads for heavy transport done at very low speeds like 15 mph. Such a speed if automated could be quite sufficient. But then so would special cargo train systems. No one is in a position to declare such will happen. And the free market is too oriented to short term profit only to take a long sighted view in regards to energy efficiency. Which is pretty much the story for all our energy issues.

A little story: In France electric car are not selling well and the Peugeot/Citroën have failed to sell their rebranded version of Mitsubishi i-Miev at the price of 22,500 Euro (range of 100 miles, max speed around 80 mph) in the first 6 month. The new governement raised the rebate from 4000 Euro to 7000 Euro but it helped little. So to get rid of their stock of car and do some advertising, Peugeot decided to do a limited sal at less than 11,000 Euro starting August 1st... they sold all the cars in 3 days and could have sold thousand more (but would probably be loosing money on each one).
The point of this story is that if carmakers could make an electric car and sell it profitably for less that 15000 Euro (without rebate), it will have a big success even with a 100 miles range. This is certainly the case in Europe and probably even in the urban area of USA. So trying to improve the range is not a major point to increase the sale, reducing the cost is, specially it the tight economic situation most of us are facing. Beside that, electric bike, scooter and motobike are probably a better solution.
Another news from France: The post office is planing to buy around 15,000 electric cars in the coming years to distribute mail. I think doing local delivery is probably the most sensible usage of electric car.

I have to take exception with Tom’s analysis. I am and Engineer and I own a Chevy Volt. I agree that battery’s cannot compete with liquid Hydrocarbons on energy density. However, Hydrocarbons energy density is not an absolute requirement for vehicles. I purchased the Volt after a very detailed financial evaluation (If the Volt falls apart or the battery is completely dead at 100,000 miles as assumed in Tom’s analysis it will not be a wise purchase). My electric rate is .062/kwhr with tax, $.80 per charge. I assumed the Volt will last 180,000 miles. The battery capacity will be diminished some; however, I don’t expect this to be significant. The volt’s battery is 16 kw-hr but only uses 10.2 kw-hr and I usually have shallow charge-discharge cycles. After the rebate the Volt cost me $33,880. After 8 years and 180,000 miles I will have spent $22,000 less in fuel than compared to our previous vehicle , a Honda CRV. That puts the total cost of ownership over 8 years less than the CRV. The CRV is a nice vehicle , but in my opinion the Volt is better in all categories except ground clearance and interior volume. Now let’s factor in the uncertainty of gas prices in the decision.

PS. I initially entered the 5 year saving. We drive 20k miles per year on our primary vehicle. the $22k saving includes the cost of electricty

As an owner of an electric car - a Nissan Leaf, and I have to correct some if not most of your statements.
-I've driven now 12'000 miles, and recharged my car about 100 times of full cycles. No problem so far, the battery capacity and range remains stable.
-Nissan guarantees 100'000 km or 1000 recharge cycles, but I can reasonably hope to extend the life of this battery to 200'000 km or 2000 cycles, with some single cells replaced. Battery life in years should be at least 7 years, I hope to extend it to 10 years
-the efficiency is far better than an ICE, I need the equivalent of 1.9l of gazoline for 100km, you can't achieve this with an ICE, and with lower velocities the relation between E-car and ICE further improves
-an important advantage of electric cars are their longevity: The drivetrain should not only last 150'000 miles as an ICE but up to 1 million miles and more. I won't have to buy another car in my life anymore, if I don't want to, only replace the batteries. Other maintenance costs are much lower than with an ICE
-Nissan already offers a power station to connect the car with your house, so in combination with a solar roof the battery can deliver electricity for my home or my office for months. This is the first step to a new electric grid, decentrally organised.
-Lithium is not a rare metal, but quite abundant.

Electric cars won't solve all our problems. We still should reduce our energy consumption to a fracture of our current consume, if we want to avoid a collapse of our society. Electric cars can be a part of this effort to reduce the energy consumption and they can help to create a decentralised and more secure electric grid!

At ASPO 9 in Belgium last year I heard an interesting talk by Yulong Ding from the Univesity of Leeds (physics department). He talked about storing electricity using heat, or rather cold. It worked as follows: you use electricity to run a heat pump that freezes a chemical which has a boiling point at something like -10 degrees C. The chemical is kept frozen by insulation. To convert back to electricity, you remove the insulation and as the chemical boils, you use the expanding gas to drive a turbine to generate electricity. All this technology is very well known: heat pumps, insulation, and turbines. He claimed to be able to recover around 90% of the electricity required to freeze the chemical.

I didn't think about asking what the specific energy of such a system would be, nor the size. One could imagine canisters of the chemical kept in storage and then transferred to a vehicle such as a bus equipped with a turbine.

This company claims to have made some breakthroughs. They are targeting a 300 mile electric range from a $20,000 car. http://enviasystems.com/innovation/ If they can make their goals, it does sound like a game changer. They lifetime for the battery is only 500 cycles, but that is 150,000 miles.

I have been driving a EV for 4 years now. It serves all of my day-day commuting needs (I am a parent with three kids). Compared to an ICE vehicle I spend nothing on maintenance and fuel is effectively free. It's a delight to drive.

I recently sold my 2nd, ICE car, as it wasn't getting used. For long distance vacations I rent an ICE car or fly. Maybe in the future I will use (electric) trains to travel interstate.

I agree we won't be swapping ICE for EVs on a 1:1 performance basis. The key point is that we don't need to.

There are other models for personal transport than every home owning two 600km range ICE vehicles. I'm living one of them.

I have my own vision for future EV pricing. EVs are far simpler than ICE cars, and have a large electronics content. The price of electronic hardware drops towards zero with volume and time (look at TVs, computers etc). So I figure commuter type 200km range EVs costing a bit less than equivalent ICE vehicles in a few years.

Try looking at electric double-layer capacitors, also known as ultracapacitors or supercapacitors.

This discussion has centred around BEVs but a topic that has been discussed a lot in Australia is supply shifting of solar power, for example
http://johnquiggin.com/2012/08/22/how-to-solve-the-solar-storage-problem/
A couple of years back both capital rebates and feed-in tariffs were quite generous. Then one State cut the FiT from 44c per kwh to 6c. That means home solar effectively became a case of 'use it or lose it'. If the real world cost of panels does get down to $2 a watt that means that many households could afford the $20k for say a 10 kw system. That system might generate even 10-15 kwh a day in winter in mid latitudes such as Australia. Provided overcast periods weren't too long a battery of say 10 kwh capacity could help with frugal electric heating in winter.

The problem then becomes not only of the cost of batteries but the space they would occupy in a suburban block. I understand building codes require heavy batteries like lead-acid to be housed in a secure shed. AFAIK there is no building code applicable to compact EV type batteries that could be kept in say a wall mounted cupboard. That assumes they have enough life cycle and the price is affordable. I'm thinking say $30k for 10 kw of panels, a 10 kwh compact battery that should last 10 years plus inverter, installation, smart wiring and so on. In summer a smart device would switch off some panels since I'm assuming surplus power is not wanted by the grid.

Multiply $30k by millions of houses and we're soon talking multibillions. I wonder if it would simpler to retain the dinosaur grid with big dumb thermal plant churning out cheap power 24/7.

post uprated.

bottom line message in last paragraph is key: batteries work. they are amazing inventions. but fossil fuels are indistinguishable from magic to us in short term. life will be different (still potentially high standard of living). But growth is over, globally. We might grow again from lower level in future. Our institutions and assumptions are not prepared for this as conventional media (and conventional economics) assumes some sort of seamless transition when fossil fuels become more expensive

If memory serves this Corvair crossed the US on battery power. The batteries were roughly $20,000, when silver was cheap

http://history.gmheritagecenter.com/wiki/index.php/1966_Electrovair_II_C...

An intresting question is if you had to create oil from scratch with non fossil energy compared to using that energy directly in a battery which one is more efficent

Btw I did not buy my Volt to save money, just like most people that buy macs instead of pcs dont do it to save money.

Why not talk about an electric car that is already competitive in performance with gas-engined cars in its price class?

Here is Motor Trend's writeup of the early production of the highest-level version of the Tesla Model S sedan:

http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/alternative/1208_2012_tesla_model_s_...

Base Price Weight Power 0-60 mph 60-0 mph Lat grip
BMW M5 $92,095 4384 lb 560 hp 3.7 sec 110 ft 0.94 g
Mercedes-Benz CLS63 AMG $96,805 4256 lb 550 hp 3.9 sec 113 ft 0.92 g Porsche Panamera Turbo S $176,275 4388 lb 550 hp 3.5 sec 105 ft 1.00 g
Tesla Model S P85 $105,400 4766 lb 416 hp 3.9 sec 105 ft 0.92 g

These are some of the best cars in the world, all limited production models and thus inflated in price. The Signature Performance Model S has the 85 kwh battery pack, and a special motor, and the price as tested included an optional glass roof and performance tires. The standard 40-kwh battery pack model costs $57,400 before the $7500 Federal credit, and the 60-kwh model costs $10,000 extra and the base 85-kwh model costs $20,000 extra. So you're paying $500 per kilowatt hour of battery or less.

Now before the usual barrage of objections from doomers, I'd like to point out that before this car arrived everyone believed that electrics could only be competitive with gasoline engines in the smallest and slowest cars. Is the real competitive curve saddle-shaped, with electrics doing the best at both extremes of price? Or are we simply missing improvements in batteries that have already occurred?

Tesla people claim that their battery costs have fallen 8% a year.
Tesla sources its batteries from Panasonic, which supplies a type introduced a year or two ago with about 100 wh/pound capacity. Panasonic has two newer generations in the pipeline; the replacement is said to have 120 wh/pound capacity.

While Motor Trend took the car only 238 miles on a single charge through Southern California in mixed traffic, it reports setting the cruise control at 65 mph, which is higher than the 55 mph used by the EPA and Tesla's own figures. Furthermore, each 20 kwh reduction in the size of the Tesla battery pack also means a loss of 200 lbs, and a reduction in its power requirements. The estimated cost of the electricity for this trip was $10.17, while the comparison cars would have cost about 4 times as much using premium fuel before the recent spike in prices. This is a huge car, much bigger than a Leaf or Volt, and very wide with lots of frontal area. Tesla has chosen not to push aerodynamics at the cost of visual appeal, which I tend to disagree with. We could do much better than this. The original GM EV-1 used only 120 wh/mile at 50 mph despite the weight of its primitive batteries.

As for Rembrandt's figures, the problem with the Volt is precisely that the battery pack is so small that it has to be recharged fairly often. For these big Tesla packs, 500 to 600 recharges gets you to 100,000 miles. You act as though gasoline engines never have to be overhauled or replaced. And as usual, electric car critics refuse to even consider that electric car batteries taken out of service when they reach 80% of capacity might still have other uses which make them economically valuable. Why is that? People at this site are usually so ingenious when it comes to ways to store energy, but not when it means perpetuating the utility of automobiles. In fact, the refusal to accept that price and energy density improvements are happening right now is due to the same attitude.

As a startup in an industry with massive barriers to entry, Tesla may not survive. But why does it accomplish so much more than established automotive behemoths? If the R&D fortunes devoted to all the IC engines in the world were directed to electric cars, how much could that accomplish?

Comparing the power density of a Li-ion battery and gasoline is not fair, gasoline is burned with an efficiency of 17% on average, electricity is returned at 90% by Li-ion battery and burned in an engine that is 90% efficient, so the tank to wheel in an electric car is 80% and barely 20% in ICE car, so saying that gasoline is 200 times more energy dense then an Li-ion battery is not the right way to look at it. On top of it you should stop by the Tesla store where you can see an open Tesla S : no gear box, no transmission, the bottom of the car is flat like a marble, when you see all the saving in weight and aerodynamic and transmission loss that the electric architecture allows compared to an ICE you can really improve the efficiency of the vehicle. Just to say a simple comparison of the energy density won't help us to see how good or bad is the future of EV cars. Asides this year ENVIA has announced a battery that is 440Wh/Kg a factor 3 improvement, 200Kgs of that battery would return like 240 miles, the Volt would only need 70Kgs of this battery... Not bad...more this battery uses Manganese and not Cobalt for its cathode, means cheaper and abundant. The future of EV is not "if" but "when" how fast it will happen is hard to say but it will happen,

We have both a Nissan Leaf and a Chevy Volt. We also have 12 KW of PV solar on the roof (yes, plenty of room) with 12 KWH of lead-acid battery backup. Dual Xantrex 6048 inverters, which switch over to battery power seamlessly in 1 millisecond. We also have solar thermal water heating and rainwater capture and storage. Our annual grid electricity use looks like about 800 KWH over the last year, which I hope to get to zero with better house insulation. The house is all-electric.

The Leaf and Volt are great! They have replaced our two former gasoline cars. We get about 40 miles electric on the Volt and 80 miles on the Leaf (we only charge to 80% since that is supposed to give better battery life).

Comparing just energy density is misleading, because the electric cars are 7 times as energy-efficient as gasoline cars. Both cars get about 4 miles per KWH, 140 mpg gasoline equivalent in terms of energy.

If you do the math, the cost of about 2.5 years of gasoline for a 20 mpg car will pay for solar panels that will power an electric car the same distance per year for the rest of your life. (The panels are typically guaranteed for 25 years, may last for 40 years.)

One of the main problems of electric vehicles seems to be the many articles bad-mouthing them. Some of the bad-mouthing is from conservatives who are wedded to or paid off by fossil fuels, but some is also from engineers and scientists who ought to know better. Take it from this engineer and scientist who not only has done the math, but also has done the experiments: electric vehicles work great.

I also have electric bikes (Tidalforce M750X), and those get 1000 mpg in gasoline energy equivalent (my 14-mile round-trip commute for 0.4 KWH, vs. about 3.5 KWH in an electric car). If energy is really short that's a savings, but in cash terms it's 4 cents versus 35 cents, not such a big deal.

Some people seem to have a religious objection to driving a car, but you can power an electric car for the rest of your life with $5,000 worth of solar panels at today's prices. That seems affordable to me.

The same distance on gasoline would cost $6500. Not an order-of-magnitude difference, but still gasoline currently wins.

Of course that assumes the price of gasoline remains perfectly constant at $4/gallon for eight years. I currently pay more than $4/gallon. And you'd be crazy to think you'll be paying $4/gallon eight years from now.

If the price of gasoline goes up (it will; but so will electricity)

Yes both will go up. But oil is the commodity that we are having a lot of trouble with. We can make electricity from natural gas, coal, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, even oil! Electricity prices are notoriously stable.

But even if we assume that they go up in price evenly (which they won't) what happens?

Let's say you pay $300/year on electricity and $1000/year on gasoline. If they both double in price then you'll be paying $600/year for electricity and $2000/year in gasoline. So the gasoline just went from being $700 more expensive per year to $1400 more expensive per year. Ouch. The amount of money you save using electricity also doubles. So the rising prices strongly favors the much cheaper fuel.

"Batteries fail—as certainly as death and taxes."

Strange introduction, why do taxes fail ? (a hint at being a "true American" I guess), volume based taxes on fossile fuels or raw materials for sure don't fail in pushing the products in the right direction (as well as the trade balance), just compare the average mpg between Europe and the US for instance.
When are the US going to get out of the legend that "the first oil shock was about the arab embargo"(that lasted 3 months and wasn't even effective from KSA to the US) ? It was about the US production peak, full stop, and US diplomacy (James Akins) were fully in line and pushing for the price rise (necessary to start Alaska, GOM, North Sea).
The result of this ("first oil shock=embargo" in public opinion) today ? You have this :
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg69/jdl75/romney.png
Or this :
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48811664
Or this :
http://www.businessinsider.com/t-boone-pickens-opec-is-the-enemy-2012-8

Otherwise clearly EVs cannot be "normal cars except that they are electric", they have to be much lighter and less powerfull to begin with.

I will apologize in advance for the length of this post; it has a number of ideas that have been working in my head for several months. I am looking for your feedback.

To start, and lay my initial bias: I am a Volt owner. I bought it partly to test the current state of the art for commercial electric vehicles, and partly to hedge against future higher petroleum prices. We operate a business that requires considerable commuting. So far, in 6 months, the Volt has gone about 9000 miles, used a total of 32 gal of gasoline, and gets about 3.7 miles per kwhr (input to the battery). Assuming a reasonable life of about 120 K for the car battery, the cost of operation is about breakeven vs. $4.50 gasoline.

The car is fun to drive, quiet, with a smooth ride (heavy battery pack duh). And it’s not burdened with guilt from soldiers dying in the middle east for oil, tanker spills or toxic emissions from refineries. Good karma is maybe worth a couple cents per mile – penance for a 30 year oil industry guy.

I am deeply troubled by this whole thread, which compares a fixed transportation concept, optimized for the unique features of petroleum-fueled vehicles, to assess the inadequacy of emerging electric vehicle technology. I think the whole tenor is inappropriately negative and drives toward seeking solutions that are hard to achieve when other solutions are much less costly or risky to develop.

While I believe that battery technology will improve, and there are clearly inherent technology efficiency advantages in storing and using electricity vs. burning petroleum in a low-efficiency ICE, I think many people have a mindset about electric vehicles that is stuck in a closed box that leads to sub-optimization – namely, that all cars need to have independent, onboard energy sources. Just like petroleum. Which then requires batteries that have energy capability like petroleum. Which they don’t. And probably never will.

Let me try to open up the box a bit, metaphorically speaking.

What is the Goal of a good Transportation System (US Centric)

- provide personal, private and comfortable transportation, whenever we want, to go where-ever we want.
- Get there fast
- Keep it cheap
- Keep it under personal control, not government control where possible and
- within safety and network efficiency parameters (traffic regulations, or highway building capital formation, for example)

This supports a suburban lifestyle and less dense cities, in many areas of the country. Many (most?) people like that lifestyle.

Petroleum / ICE / highway technology has been pretty darn good at this. But, at some point, petroleum will not be sustainable, either due to cost, outright shortage or pollution impacts (e.g. climate change).

So, then, what? Electric vehicles are a great option – they are quiet, the fuel is cheap, the technology is robust and the drive train might last longer than your children’s children. The only problems: you can’t go very far on a battery. And, charging takes forever. And, the battery costs a bomb and needs to be replaced too frequently. So, the approach we have in this thread is to bemoan the state of electric battery technology.

Ever hear this comment? “Electric cars are great, but my extension cord is too short.”

What if we actually had very long extension cords? Almost all the issues with electric cars are eliminated.

Trains in Europe and Asia (and a few in the US) have long extension cords… so do some trolleys and buses. These vehicles are run using electricity from overhead wires, connected to the grid, and to the vehicle via a pantograph or trolley whip. Most have no battery at all, but they are then limited to a fixed guideway or route.

Why not optimize our transportation system for electric vehicles, keeping in mind our goals as discussed above? It probably doesn’t require a “superhuman” battery, or megawatt charging stations… or any of those magic answer technologies.

Note that battery electric vehicles are pretty good already for short jaunts up to 100 miles (maybe a bit more for Tesla). They fall down though for longer trips.

And, so then, where do those longer trips take place? Mostly, they occur on the Eisenhower Interstate system.

It accounts for about 35,000 miles of roadway in the US. About 40% of total miles driven occur on the interstate (including urban interstate sections). Roughly guessing (since DOT does not report energy consumption differentiated for highway vs. city driving), those interstate miles driven might represent about 1/4 of total US petroleum demand - which translates to a cost of roughly $600 MM per DAY or $200 Bn per year.

This is the big opportunity. And, fixing it will enable us to move our transportation system into the next era, while still meeting the goals that we listed above.

What do we need to do? Develop 3 keys technologies and -- electrify the Interstate system.

The three key technologies:

1) Overhead Wires and Self-Connecting Pantographs

Overhead wires are tried and true for more than 100 years – but not for highway vehicles. Rubber tired vehicles need two conductors. High speed freeway traffic may require different configurations (stiffness, arcing, oscillations, etc). Pantograph / trolley whip designs need to self-connect / disconnect. Perhaps a video-guided unit that can automatically connect? I can imagine bunches of different configurations… and other inventors will too. It needs a test bed, and some funding.

Of course, there are additional electric drive issues within the vehicle (sizing the electric motor and control electronics, for example), but these are not a huge barrier for car makers, who would need to work together to create standards (voltage, current draw, etc).

Siemens is proposing a system like this for the LA port area, where heavy diesel /electric trucks will use electricity to reduce emissions in the non-attainment area.

In conceptual operation on the interstate, electric vehicles would drive on battery power from their local starting point, then enter and connect to the overhead wire. Lane changes would involve disconnecting / switching to battery / reconnecting. When near their final destination, the vehicle would disconnect, exit and proceed to the local destination on battery power.

The cost for the entire US Interstate might not be cheap – if the cost of overhead wire is $2 -10 million per mile – the overall cost would be $70 – 350 Bn. We don’t really know the cost – some research and test operations are required to optimize and to ensure the workability of various wire and pantograph types. But, we aren’t doing any research like that now.

The investment, though, creates substantial benefits. The cost can be recouped by the lower cost of electricity vs. petroleum – in only a few years (depending on vehicle fleet turnover rate). Electricity is currently about 25% of the cost, for equivalent energy delivered to the wheels on pavement, than petroleum / ICE. Over the foreseeable future, electricity will continue to be priced substantially less than petroleum. This fuel savings will pay out the investment – provided the correct institutions and financial frameworks are created to handle the money flows, and provided that a substantial portion of the US vehicle fleet switches to electricity from petroleum. Medium haul truck fleets might be among the first groups to switch, as segments of wire are completed, and PACCAR sells more electric/diesel hybrid trucks.

2) Autonomous Vehicles and High Speed Cohorts

DOT has been working on this for a while, so has Google, and GM and Volvo and DARPA….. Recent popular press articles suggest that autonomous self-driving vehicles will be mainstream by 2019-2025. Great! We can text and drive and not crash…..

And, maybe, our self-driving vehicle can tuck close to the leading vehicle at highway speed, just like AJ Foyt, legendary racer. Part of AJ Foyt’s driving skill was the ability to tuck in a foot or three behind another car at 180 mph. The boundary layer and vortices shed from the first car are then lifted by the second, greatly reducing drag for BOTH cars. This allowed the two cars to speed past single cars, and helped AJ get to the finish line faster than the rest. The same drag effect will help reduce energy consumption while permitting much higher rates of speed on the interstate.

By the way, this technology, combined with technology 1, will provide a helluva competition for high-speed rail city connections. It is way cheaper (the citizen buys their own car with self-driving electronics, a corporation or government entity buys the wire, and then there is no need to buy a train, driver, station, track and special right of way). And faster – the citizen drives onto the highway, connects to the wire, enters self-driving mode, joins a highspeed cohort, goes to near final destination, exits and goes to local endpoint. No need to embark / disembark / rent a car at the train stations. And, oh, no worries about a train driver strike either.

3) Renewable / Distributed Power

The 35,000 miles of interstate system covers a large swathe of US surface area. Back of the envelop calculations suggest that the amount of solar radiation, collected on fixed-angle PV, in that area, is 3-5 times larger than the amount of energy consumed by the vehicles that are using the highways.

Yup, not all the energy supplied is near the vehicles that will use it – for example, desert Arizona will not be able to supply power to commuters on the Jersey turnpike. Similarly, the peak energy production time is not likely to match with peak commuter times. These challenges may require additional wires, other generation, and a good market for pricing to buy/sell stored electricity in the vehicle batteries (which probably would be managed by a software “agent” on behalf of the vehicle owner).

And, Yup, renewable power is going to be more expensive than current electricity prices. But not more than double. Wind and solar are rural resources. Transmission to and along the electric interstate will enable us to capture those resources more easily and completely. The costs of renewable generation equipment will continue to drop – even faster, along the learning curve, as these large projects would be built.

And so what if the electricity price doubles? Even then, the payout is good. Because electricity is so CHEAP compared to petroleum. The capital investment for wires, and generation, is still cheaper, than for oil.

OK, I am imagining a future that is filled with electric vehicles. Where a large societal investment in wires and renewable generation enables long-term weaning from petroleum for ground transportation in the US.

I haven’t heard this concept discussed in other forums. The individual technologies look attainable, based on current technology and reasonable expectations for innovation and progress. What we may be missing is the vision to consider a 21st century transportation system that is different, in a few ways (on-board fuel supply), but still meets the goals that we have.

I despair when we look backward for technology – the 150 year old high-speed electric train (sorry, it does not meet most of our goals), or the 100 year old car with on-board fuel, driven by an individual. We need to look forward, integrating our new and emerging technologies, without wishing for “magic” technologies like 500 mile batteries which can be charged in 5 minute, that allow us to mimic the characteristics of the existing petroleum / ICE system.

I believe that an electric interstate could provide a ready solution. The issue is getting agreement and institutions in place, working on it. The biggest challenge is the transition of the fleet – getting people to buy the network and the vehicles to fit it. Early adopters might be trucking companies, going point to point.

What are your thoughts?

Sunrise Ridge

'Fuel cells provide decent specific energy, but typically insufficient power (per kilogram).'

'Data was logged by Toyota and analyzed by NREL. The maximum range of the FCHV‐adv vehicles was calculated to be 431 miles under these driving conditions. This distance was calculated from the actual range of 331.5 miles during over 11 hours driving, plus 99.5 miles of additional range calculated from the average fuel economy from the day times the remaining usable hydrogen. Driving range results were independently calculated for each vehicle, and these results averaged together to achieve the final 431‐mile range estimate. The uncertainty on these results is relatively low due to eight independent measurements of distance and six separate measurements of hydrogen usage, with a resulting uncertainty of ± 7 miles (± 1.7%) based on spread between the low and high values from all of the multiple measurements. The average fuel economy resulting from the day’s driving was 68.3 miles/kg and the total hydrogen stored on‐board at 70 MPa was calculated to be 6.31 kg. The speed profiles were analyzed and compared to standard driving cycles, and were determined to be of moderate aggressiveness. The city segments of the route had average speeds slightly greater than the UDDS cycle and the highway segments were close to the HWFET & US06 cycles. The average acceleration for the highway driving was very close to the HWFET cycle, and the city portions had average accelerations lower than the UDDS and US06 cycles. We feel that the route accurately reflects realistic driving behaviors in southern California on a typical weekday, and is an appropriate benchmark to use in the verification of a fuel cell vehicle’s range.'

http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/toyota_fchv-adv_range_verification.pdf

That sounds like adequate power and range to me.

Analyses of costs,hydrogen sources. technologies etc here:
http://www.npc.org/FTF-80112.html

And:
http://www.npc.org/FTF-report-080112/H2_Analysis-080112.pdf

For those who fancy the idea of batteries, most manufacturers are also prototyping 30kwh fuel cell stacks for use as a range extender, with a battery pack of around 12kwh.

It is still an all electric vehicle, but would do it's everyday running around on power from the plug.

Being all electric the complications of Volt-type engineering are avoided, and even on longer journeys you still have zero pollution at point of use.

This post has inspired some of the best comments I have seen in the blogosphere, even for the high standards of TOD in general. I think we are again back to the main challenge: "longage of expectations". Thanks to Nate for coining this. I have heard another version, which is maybe a bit more nuanced. "The planet can meet all our needs, but very few of our greeds". I am convinced that electrified transport in various forms will meet our needs. Electrified transport in various degrees includes some without batteries like trains, trams, and some with batteries, like cars and bikes, and hybrids of these with some ICE input, like the Volt, Prius and the flood of models coming. We have great examples of all of these that work today and are commercially competitive. It is just a matter of getting our policy and politicians aligned with this. So please remember this the next time you vote for a politician or a referendum, and if you can speak up actively for the good cause in a way to convince all candidates and parties, then please do it!

Please take a look at the PbC = Lead-Carbon batteries that are being developed by Axionpower and will soon hit the "street" in various applications (Powercube = Grid based energy storage with plug in capabilities for solar and wind, hybrid locomotive and hybrid vehicle sector).

These batteries are considered the absolutely best for start-stop vehicle applications, which will be predominant in contrast to full electric vehicles.
Their investor presentation http://www.axionpower.com/profiles/investor/fullpage.asp?BzID=1933&to=cp... gives a good summary of the truly impressive capabilities (like 40,000+cycles with crank function and ADDITIONAL 60,000 without crank function, optimized ca. 100A charge acceptance (over ca. 5 years etc.)

Look at horse-drawn vehicles. For a long term these were the pinnacle of ground transportation technology. Extremely lightweight and fairly fragile. Now look at cars. In comparison these are massively overbuilt. Heavy body, heavy suspension, they look like tanks in comparison. Both types of vehicles have been shaped by how much power they have available. My point being, a vehicle designed to operate on such a low-density power source as batteries is going to resemble a horse drawn cart more than anything an American would recognize as a car.

I've raised this issue before and I'm going to raise it again: There is an underlying assumption that BAU or some form of it will continue into the foreseeable future, e.g., 20 or 30 years.

A reasonable argument can be made that this assumption is in error and, in fact, all the efforts, including EVs, to perpetuate BAU are likely to fail and turn out to be a waste of time and resources. I'm not going to attempt to lay out that argument here since I doubt many would accept any part of it and it's not a simple one issue argument.

I believe it would be well for society to take the time to fully consider what the real future might be. I know this discussion will never take place but it's nice to think it might.

Todd

All said and done, battery technology and infrastructure to charging is just one piece of the puzzle. What we fail to look into is that we must produce electricity from renewable resources and also produce enough to replace all the gasoline in use for cars. That is a huge ask.

As everyone knows that majority of electricity produced in three most populous countries in the world is still based on fossil fuel.

Zoowie,

I've read some from here but have never posted. I've gotta say that this is the best commentary I've ever seen on a blog post, anywhere. I'm probably way out of my class and with this comment be laughed off the planet but I do have some practical experience and some back of the envelope figuring, so I'm gonna wade in.

I live in Chicago, don't have a car anymore, use public transit only a few times a month and taxis a few times a year. My personal transport is by a personally constructed electric bike (trike to be precise), year round, (lead acid powered no less), and it more than meets my needs except for comfort. You can see it here: www.etrikebikes.com and get a flavor by watching the "E-bike Shopping in Winter" video (been a TV producer all my working life.) So, yeah, e-vehicles are a major interest.

I've read a number of Tom's blogs in the past and was delighted. This article really gets into some battery nitty-gritty in very fine ways, some of which I had to work a bit to understand. However..., I was shocked by a number that I suspect is hinky right at the top of the article. It seemed to color the whole article with what I consider an unwarrented gloominess.

Tom writes, "...the specific energy of gasoline—measured in kWh per kg...is about...200 times better than the Lithium-ion battery in the Chevrolet Volt." What? If this were the case e-vehicles would be impossible. According to a Wikipedia table, admittedly not the most authoritative source, the number is more like 40 or 50 to 1 gasoline vs. Volt battery energy density. If you plug that 40 to 1 number into current e-vehicle performance characteristics that ratio works out just fine in the real world of comparison to ICE. I don't know whether I'm comparing apples to oranges, or if Tom got his number from the CEO of Fossil Fuel Corp, but there is a disconnect here.

When I first encountered the Envia Battery that others have mentioned in comment here, I looked up the wiki table that I'd seen earlier and decided to write a back of the envelope word song to electric cars. It contains some of the great points that other commentors here have brought up about the utility, power and inexpensiveness of electrics. It's probably too breathless and naive, entails some guessing and cuts too many corners, but I'm gonna just cut and paste it, begging for forgiveness, if necessary, for length and idiocy:

Why Electric Vehicles Will Win Out in the End

Have a look at this short NY Times article, not much more than a press release:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/envia-claims-breakthrough-in-...

This matters, perhaps more than is apparent on the surface. Here is why. The above link is not an airy-fairy technology leap announcement of possibilities. Envia claims they have a product in which all major gotchas have been solved. It is a product that works, functions safely, is reliable and long lasting. Presumably it's a matter of a couple of year's time before production is rolling to deliver battery packs for transport use that are almost 3 times as energy dense and less than half as costly to produce as current technology. This comes about because of a public/private partnership (Obama/GM) that neither could have done on their own in the same time-frame. It bucks the Solandra messaging of fossil fools, big time.

Let's do some back of the envelope math with a lot of rounding. There will certainly be room for quibbles about my numbers and rounding here, but I've tried to be conservative in favor of oil, so that is what they will be, quibbles, not substantial mistakes. I hope! Oil is an amazing substance, just packed with energy built up under the Earth's crust over millions of years. However, it is a finite substance. Today, while it's not the end of the line for oil, all of the easy and cheap oil has been found, most of that has been burned doing work for mankind, and the oil that remains is proving harder to find, more expensive to extract. Plus we have discovered over the last half century the price we have paid to burn the stuff – not at the pump – but the price to our planet's and our own health. The same goes for oil's cousins, coal and natural gas.

In comparison to electricity stored in batteries, oil currently stores a huge multiple of energy. The gasoline burned in your car today has an energy density of 50. I could tell you what 50, of what measurement this is, but since we are just comparing, it doesn't matter. Energy density refers to the amount of work that a stored amount of material by weight can do. A gas tank stores gasoline, a battery stores electricity. The battery in today's electric car, like a Nissan Leaf, has an energy density of a bit over 1. So 1 pound of gasoline has 50 times more stored energy than 1 pound of battery. A big, big difference, eh?

The question you might automatically ask is how the heck does an electric car do 80 miles on a charge with such a big difference in energy density between gasoline and batteries. A regular car can do 500 miles on a tank of gas, so why is the range of an electric car a somewhat respectable 80 miles not a worthless 10 miles? (500 miles in a gas car, times 1/50 energy density of battery car, equals 10 miles.)

Here's how it works. Electric motors are nearly 4 times as efficient in using the energy fed them as are internal combustion engines. The approximate numbers are gas car – 20% efficient, electric car – 80 % efficient. Inefficiency in a gas car's engine and drive train means a whole lot of wasted heat that doesn't do any work, but keeps you warm in the winter and makes the AC work overtime in the summer. So because of drive train efficiency, the effective energy density of the batteries in an electric car is now 4 instead of 1 (vs. gasoline's 50.) Plus the batteries in an electric car weigh about 8 times as much as a tank of gas in a small car (800 lbs. vs 100 lbs.)

If you've followed along this far, you might ask, then why with 8 times the weight in propulsion material doesn't the electric car go 320 miles on a charge instead of 80? (10 miles – from the theoretical mileage of an equal weight pack of batteries to gasoline above, times 4 – the efficiency of electric drive trains, times 8 – the extra weight of electric fuel, equals 320 miles range.) A number of factors enter into this significant draw down of theoretical range. First, only about half of the pack's weight is actual batteries, while the other half is bulked up with control equipment, wiring and armoring for safety; this drops the range to about 160 miles. Second, dragging all that extra weight around is quite hard on range, bringing it down to 130 miles. Third, heat and air conditioning for occupants is hard on range, particularly in temperature extremes, down to 100 miles. Fourth, jumpy drivers and difficult terrain brings us down to the 80-mile range. This 80 miles range quoted for the Nissan Leaf is a bad, not worst case, scenario. Some owners are reporting 120+ miles of range on a 70 degree day with relatively flat terrain. A zero degree day on the hills of San Francisco might see the car die in 50 miles.

Now that the comparative picture is clearer, what will be the effect of the Envia battery on an electric car? If it is half the current cost for a battery pack, this makes the whole car hardly more expensive than a gas car after accounting for the comparative simplicity of electric drive trains. And now we're talking a fully charged range of well over 200 miles. Not too shabby, when 80 miles of range already covers over 90% of our daily driving. Do I hear 97%? If, and it's a big if, these batteries can be charged at a high powered charging station in 20 minutes or less, then cross country travel becomes eminently doable, with charging stations at most gas (energy) stations.

There's a wealth of gas stations appropriate to long range travel between potty and food breaks. We know how to do the infrastructure for this. It's not rocket science or overly expensive. And that electric car power comes at 1/3rd the price of gasoline. Driving an internal combustion car could be considered stupid a very short time into the future.

The Envia battery is hardly the end of the line in battery technology for transport. Companies like IBM are working on lithium air nano batteries on a 5-10 year time-line, that will likely jump the energy density of batteries another 3 or more times. There are already experimental batteries that accomplish this, with energy densities of 9 or 10. Once you reach this sort of energy density for batteries even quick charging becomes a bit over the top, because with a normal size and weight battery pack you've got a 600 mile range, enough driving for nearly all of us in one day, and charge over night.

Perhaps all the kinks in these experiments won't be solvable, and these lithium air batteries will be a bust, another Solandra. But perhaps the next one won't. At that point batteries plus electric motors plus even better production costs meet or exceed the capabilities of petroleum engined cars. A whole new world opens up..., and not for just cars. That's when the technology takes over farm and construction machines.

If you've wondered why the Oil and other fossil fuel companies fight tooth and nail to keep their subsidies, try to shut down government research efforts, and distort the competition, this is why. Our World is going mostly electric, particularly where portable power is concerned. Just look at the proliferation of smaller machines moving from petrol to e-power in the last 5 years, battery powered electric hand tools, bikes, motorcycles, hedge trimmers, yard mowers and snow blowers.

The average person soon finds how much less maintenance and stink is required to keep these smaller tools working. Petroleum will rapidly lose its iron grip on civilization. A 3 times better energy density battery supercharges the change, and a 10 times better battery puts change over the top. Better and better batteries are the key and our government's support is grinding that key faster. Considering the filth, ecological devastation and waning supplies of petroleum, it is none too soon. Don't you believe otherwise.

Why is Tom Murphy allowed to continue to post his articles on the Oil Drum? They are all smarmy, junk science winks to the uninformed, have little foundation in modern science or practical engineering, and are oblivious to current technology trends, development opportunities, and advances. I could care little about his various anecdotal detours: on jump starting his truck on hill, exhausted PC battery, or the crud on his terminals. We know that liquid fuels have a high specific energy. So what? They burn at huge inefficiencies in a combustion engine, power an inefficient drivetrain, have major security and pricing risks, and pollute the environment. Trade-offs, there are plenty, and he doesn't see, describe, or appear to understand any of them.

I'd rather read an article from someone who can maintain his own battery (sufficiently enough to avoid having to jump start his own gas powered vehicle). Even better, someone who knows something about current research and the engineering principles behind the electric vehicle (and where imminent technological advances will likely take us in the future). No mention of nanotech, impossible to discuss advanced battery concepts without it. "does not look right to me" … "I would expect" … "cannot be directly looked up" … huh? Is this guy a science professional, familiar with rigorous and evidence based arguments, or does he just throw a dart at a pile of papers and say he's not going to look any further. Myers must think most contemporary engineers working in this field (and the major companies hiring them) are all rubes.

If he wanted to review the performance and operating characteristics of:

- Li-S chemistries
- Zinc air-flow
- Lithium-air
- Magnesium-ion
- Advanced lithium-ion with high-energy cathodes and new anodes
- Semi-solid rechargeable flow
- Solid-state lithium
- Capacitive storage
- All-electron batteries
- And more …

a useful contribution indeed. But sticking to conventional designs and well-documented performance trade-offs and existing battery limitations tells us very little. It tells us this author doesn't understand his field, and may have another purpose for generation confusion and uncertainty about electric vehicle engineering advances and designs. To say nothing about existing commercially viable batteries and vehicles.

The autor is trapped in, what will likely become, an obsolete paradigm.

It is only natural to think and see the (PH)Ev's design, ownership, industry, usage and it's energy infrastructure of the future as being similar to today's solutions using the standard car. We have seen this reasoning fallacy before: The first petrol cars were also designed and used with the horse drawn carriage in mind. Even the word car is derived form it's predecessor. The customers expectations, the legal system, the engineering standards, the industry supply chain, the roads and infrastructure; the first cars had to fit the world of the horse drawn transport. The first steamships were hybrids that were used and based on windpower thinking and engineering, the first electric train was used within and designed on the basic frame of the horse drawn tram , etc etc.

Restricting thinking and engineering in an old energy and mobility paradigm as the autor and most commentators do is a fallacy which will not help us discovering the ways into the future. The engineering constraints and business opportunities of this new renewable energy and mobility paradigm differ from our understanding based on current living and mobility solutions and the current energy business.

Early adopters and first movers in industry are discovering the new e-mobility possibilities. This leads to Rethinking, reshaping and rediscovering your mobility and energy needs. One example : the average Car commute, one way, in the netherlands is below 20 KM. The average daily km traveled of a car sold in the Netherlands is below 60 km. In this daily use when able to charge at home or work the EV users in the Netherlands and the car owners (company car) are more satisfied then ICE users. The energy needed for the average yearly car usage in the Netherlands can be generated within the nordic european climate with less then 50 square meters of PV panels. This are some insights from the first steps in this new world; where will this end ?

The autor is trapped in, what will likely become, an obsolete paradigm.

It is only natural to think and see the (PH)Ev's design, ownership, industry, usage and it's energy infrastructure of the future as being similar to today's solutions using the standard car. We have seen this reasoning fallacy before: The first petrol cars were also designed and used with the horse drawn carriage in mind. Even the word car is derived form it's predecessor. The customers expectations, the legal system, the engineering standards, the industry supply chain, the roads and infrastructure; the first cars had to fit the world of the horse drawn transport. The first steamships were hybrids that were used and based on windpower thinking and engineering, the first electric train was used within and designed on the basic frame of the horse drawn tram , etc etc.

Restricting thinking and engineering in an old energy and mobility paradigm as the autor and most commentators do is a fallacy which will not help us discovering the ways into the future. The engineering constraints and business opportunities of this new renewable energy and mobility paradigm differ from our understanding based on current living and mobility solutions and the current energy business.

Early adopters and first movers in industry are discovering the new e-mobility possibilities. This leads to Rethinking, reshaping and rediscovering your mobility and energy needs. One example : the average Car commute, one way, in the netherlands is below 20 KM. The average daily km traveled of a car sold in the Netherlands is below 60 km. In this daily use when able to charge at home or work the EV users in the Netherlands and the car owners (company car) are more satisfied then ICE users. The energy needed for the average yearly car usage in the Netherlands can be generated within the nordic european climate with less then 50 square meters of PV panels. Because cars and petrol which have a larger CO2 footprint are taxed more there is already a business-case for EV in relevant market niches. For the average consumer the current EV market is still not an competive option but the roadmap towards a market uptake looks promising. This are some insights from the first steps in this new world; where will this end ?

I think you miss the point of a Plug-in Hybrid. Further, some of the numbers you use in the article are incorrect. I am a Volt owner and driver. I normally average about 4.4 mpkWh which gives me a total range of 44 miles given the useable 10 kWh of the 16kWh battery. I am aware of the range many other other drivers get, and this is a common range. Further, I get 43 mpg when driving on gas alone. 2,000 cycles is the lower limit on battery life. I suspect that given the battery management system, the battery life will be significantly longer than that. GM is certainly counting on a greater life given their warranty.

The Plug-in concept is to provide a car that provides all electric operation for the majority of trips, but can revert to gas on the minority of trips that exceed the electric range. On this account the Volt delivers. It is a rare day that I use gas, but it is always there ready to be used. This eliminates the range anxiety that is associated with all electric cars such as the Leaf. I am saving approximately $250 a month on gas. These savings are reduced by the increase of approximately $20 a month in additional electric cost. As such, my net savings are $230 per month. Savings aside, the Volt is a joy to drive. Acceleration is smooth and responsive. It is quiet and comfortable. I regularly let others drive my Volt and they are surprised at the performance of the car, coupled with its obvious benefits.

I do not work for GM or any of their suppliers or affiliates. I am simply a satisfied customer.

This article and the responses I read have a fixed underlying assumption that cars will remain more or less as they are now, but driven by electricity. This most likely will not be the case. The objectives of the car need to be re-evaluated. For instance my VW Golf TDi does 100mph, carries up to 5 people, has aircon, airbags, electric windows etc etc and weighs 1300kg. It does 50mpg, which is not bad. Here in Australia they are $30k for the base model. Most trips are around town, covering short distances at low speed. For this we need a car that can carry the same number of people, has a top speed of 30mph and that weighs 500kg, including batteries. I am thinking of something that already exists: a golf cart. It will need some development (such as energy recovery), but I am sure these goals can be met in such a vehicle. It could include a small ICE that is used solely for recharging. The aim must be to achieve say 250mpg. In that way oil can be pushed up the value chain (ie diesel and gasoline are used for trucks, longer trips and by the rich) and provide a bridge across the physics barrier mentioned at the beginning of the article.

Great topic.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their own real world experiences with EVs, particularly those that did their own math on the total cost of ownership - something that gets lost on the average car buyer.

My view is that EVs will initially be best suited as "city cars" - suitable for relatively short commutes. While that might seem a major limitation it does indeed satisfy a very significant proportion of commuters that dont have easy access to public transport.

http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2011/11/13/how-much-time-do-melbu...

Tom, I really enjoyed reading this, but you actually have made the point that even the first-generation E-REV technology of the Volt has won in the contest of gas vs. battery.

The problem with your numbers is that you expect that every Volt owner will have to spend $8000 on a new battery once they hit 62,000 miles. In the real world there are several Volts that are well over 40,000 miles, and have shown no degradation in battery range. Do you really think that in the next 15,000 miles that these Volt owner's batteries are just going to go to zero?

GM really babies the Volt's batteries, and conservatively estimates a battery life of at least 160,000 miles without any degradation in mileage. Cell phone batteries and laptop batteries can't be compared, because they lack the advanced liquid cooling/heating system that optimizes L-I battery life.

Yes, the actual Volt battery will degrade by 160,000 miles, but the 38-mile range will remain the same because the Volt software will allow the battery to use more of it's total capacity. (When brand-new, a Volt only uses about 60% of the middle-range of the total battery capacity.)

I expect after 160,000 miles there will be some drop off in the battery range as perceived by the Volt driver, but even then, let's say a Volt with 200,000 miles has an all-electric range of 25 miles (which I think is pessimistic). For over half of commuters, that is all the range they need to commute gas-free every day. There would be no real reason to shell out $8000 on a new battery.

Check out two real world examples (you can work with the tabs on the bottom of the page to see lots of recent data on these cars):

https://www.voltstats.net/Stats/Details/88
https://www.voltstats.net/Stats/Details/474

From your article, where you wrongly assess a cost of $8000 for Volt owners at the 62,000 mile mark:

"Now figure in the estimated price of the Volt battery at $8,000 (a disputed number, but GM has not revealed the actual cost). If we get 62,000 miles of electric drive out of the battery, we will spend $1950 on electricity for charging, plus $8000 for the battery. That’s $9,950. The same distance on gasoline would cost $6500. Not an order-of-magnitude difference, but still gasoline currently wins.

If the price of gasoline goes up (it will; but so will electricity), and the cost of the battery goes down (it should), the two may cross. But there are other added costs to the Volt (or hybrids in general) besides just the battery. After all, hybrids can’t jettison the ICE, and require an electric drive train to boot. Even the fact that the space occupied by the battery forces bucket seats in the back of the Volt is a “cost” that must be paid."

A bit earlier there was some talk of possibly using overhead electric lines to power our vehicles.I came across this article which shows a couple of big trucks being tested in Germany using the overhead electric power.When I watched the video it really brought home just how much infrastructure has to be built for getting the electricity to the vehicles.I REALLY really would love to see in the road electric lines rather than the huge eye sore they would need to use for overhead.Cost will probably be mentioned as a reason for not going in the road but hell at 5-7 million per mile for overhead,could not it be matched?

http://tinyurl.com/9h5cc9p

Tim

I strayed a little into OT territory focusing so much on the Chevy Volt, but I find the current state of infrastructure and battery tech to compliment that configuration right now that I think it's worth the space talking about. But, to redeem myself a little I'll hit a few bullet points above:

I frequently go for months without driving my truck. The battery is often dead when I try to start it. Lead-acid batteries only get worse if left in a discharged state, so it’s a runaway process. Fortunately, I live on a hill and can often roll-start my way back onto the road.

This is likely due not to the battery but the truck. In most cars that are "Off" there's still something running...clock, radio, perhaps even the computer itself to a degree. Modern cars are even worse at this because of the remote entry and smart keys...there's some electronics running just waiting 24 hours a day for that signal from the key. If a Prius is not going to be driven for a few weeks the smart key system needs to be turned off, and if it's not going to be driven for a month it's recommended that the 12V accessory battery should be unhooked or the car will likely deplete it.

The rechargeable NiMh batteries I use for small electronics devices are rated for 1000 charge cycles. I’ll bet I only get about 15–20 cycles before noticing a serious degradation in performance.

Batteries lose capacity, but they don't do it linearly. Most curves that I've seen have a steep drop at the beginning followed by a more gentle slope down to 80% of original capacity which is where the line at "life cycle" ends. Often the batteries will work long past that point, but at a diminished capacity.

http://batteryblog.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/NiMH-1000-Cycles.jpg

Most of the curves for LiFePO4 have this pretty fast initial drop with a slow trickle towards 80% and hence their long cycle life. But the curve at that point is dropping so slowly that as long as you've designed for or can live with that capacity...it seems they'll last almost forever.

The big danger is in pack balancing...poor charging or discharging can hammer a weaker cell and cause it to fail completely and very prematurely - so the pack must be operated on the basis of its weakest cell through a well designed battery management system.

The first set of lead-acid batteries I used with my home-built solar photovoltaic system only lasted two years before showing substantially reduced capacity. A newer set is still in good shape after 2.5 years, but the drop in performance can be pretty fast, I have found.
Lead-acid batteries for cars tend to last 5–6 years, often failing with little warning, in many cases resulting in being stranded.

PbA batteries are very much constrained by Peukerts Law and sulfation. To avoid both you need a really large pack compared to your draw. Amp draw needs to be a tiny fraction of Ah capacity or they will never put out their rated capacity. Deep cycle batteries might say they're good to 80% DoD, but even 50% is really too far.

New laptop batteries seldom fail to delight their owners in how much longer the charge lasts compared to the previous generation batteries. But give it a few years and it is not uncommon to be operating at half the original capacity.

I think this guy's page was posted recently, but it says all: http://thisweekinbatteries.blogspot.com/2010/02/pull-plug-your-battery-w...

"What you do need to know is that if you keep your laptop plugged in, you force your battery to remain at 4.2V continuously and these side reactions continue to happen and slowly kill the battery."

This article is about scientific bulls*** [edit] and how it is used to distort our view of sustainable energy transfer mechanisms in the biosphere by wrongly relegating them to a position of lesser importance than the vaunted rapid oxidation of hydrocarbons.

Humans are, the last time I checked, living organisms governed by biochemical reactions involving complex energy transfer mechanisms. Life, as opposed to an ICE (internal combustion engine) or a nuclear reactor operates in a Goldilocks energy transfer zone; too little and death results; too much and death results. Homeostasis is the name commonly given to this phenomenum.

Some creatures with less sophisticated energy transfer biochemistry, like reptiles, need to position themselves in or out off a photon shower to assist their energy tranfer biochemistry but, regardless of the method, rapid oxidation is never used to preserve, prolong and protect life. There are some beetles out there than can perform rapid oxidation (small explosions) to defend themselves or propel themselves a short distance but that is rare and is not favored by evolution for reasons I will get into later.

Electricity used by eels is not rapid oxidation so no one can point to that as a high energy use process in nature. However the 500 watts an eel can generate to kill prey is an excellent example of what early scientists missed in his zeal to measure energy transfer. More on that later.

Neurotoxins, various other life terminating as well as protein denaturing chemicals in nature (digestive enzymes) are prevalent because they are a defense and a tool for capturing and digesting prey. For some reason, evolution didn't design humans with brick fireplaces or nuclear reactors in our stomachs to rapidly and explosively oxidize or fission the energy transfer process.

Why not? Because nature is geared toward the most effcient method of energy transfer to preserve, prolong and protect life WITHOUT destroying the environment that provides a supply of more energy (prey). This is important. This is math. This is nature's Homeostatic logic at the biosphere level. This is the Goldilocks energy transfer mechanism that the scientific priesthood that worships at the enthalpy altar of "more = better" NEVER understood.

While the sun's energy is absolutely essential for life on this planet, the biosphere can only "handle" an extremely tiny amount of energy from the sun. The Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit with the moon keeping the winds on earth from being routinely 600 mph and Jupiter has blocked untold meteors from slaming us. Those are facts. But the "scientific" mind has a fascination with gobs of power like those the sun posesses that could burn us to a cinder with by one well aimed burp.

This is where I am convinced the "science" of physical chemistry went off the deep end into masturbatory exercises in calculus jabberwokky to define energy in search of more methods of transferring energy at faster and faster rates, consequences be damned. The bias of physical science towards measurement "admiration" of massive, lifeless energy transfer mechanisms like those in stars and planetary cores on some glorified number line with positive values as "better" while "low" values on the energy number line from natural physical forces like capillary action, evaporation and counterintuitive energy miracles like frozen water occupying more space than liquid water (no miracle, they say, just a random chance - that life would be impossible without) are given little notice as a potential power source. Negative value substances (endothermic) are a curiosity good for this and that industrial process but not worthy of the worship due the ill defined "powerful" energetic processes.

Spiders don't die from eating something they killed with their venom because eating the venom is harmless outside the bloodstream in the digestive tract. Spiders deposit digestive enzymes that help denature proteins (remember that denaturing a protein requires ENERGY) along with the venom but that's just fine tuning the energy transfer mechanism. Cats have a pH of aound 1 (VERY high acidity) in their stomachs to aid digestion and kill most disease causing bacteria in the food they eat. Acid is another way that nature facilitates energy transfer.

Scientists say, yeah, sure, anabolism and catabolism in metabolism is important and all that. It's wonderful that water floats when it freezes and evaporation is nice too. Learning about that helped us design air conditioners! But hey, those are puny energy transfer mechanisms. We need to power jets, tanks, cars and make bombs and provide electricity to millions of homes, etc. How in the hell do you expect us get that kind of power from this puny shit you are talking about here? As for the moon, it's really cool the way the lunar orbit keeps the winds down and provides tides but hey, that's a given! The energy the moon is using to keep those winds down and promote ocean life through tidal activity is just a big math equation we don't use much; it's not centralized enough but, don't worry, we are looking into some tidal power mechanisms just as soon as we can figure a way to SCALE UP tidal power generation.

I say they are wrong on all counts. I say they have a bias towards death WORSE than the entropic processes that lead to absolute zero on the negative part of their number line that they fear and work to avoid by going in the other extreme. They say energy is energy. Early scientists took care of all that with their work on enthalpy. I say the only RIGHT use of energy in a closed system is to be in the ZONE, not reaching for more raw extremes in energy transfer.

So where do we begin? The Homeostatic biosphere energy transfer Goldilocks model doesn't sound too scientific, now does it? So lets get down to the brass tacks of energy transfer. The sun shines, a plant grows, something eats it and you eat the plant and/or the animal, transfer energy from the food to your body with the indispensable help of your gut microbes and then YOU provide FOOD for the plants and tiny microbes by depositing your nitrogen rich plant food known to us as urine and feces back onto plants. It's not race car sexy but it ain't optional.

Before I get to the neanderthal and primitive pig poison spewing invention known as the ICE, lets talk about how biologists figure out the "efficiency" of a life form in transfering energy (i.e. getting it out of food). They take an identical portion of food being fed to an animal, weigh it and burn it. Hello, enthalpy! They measure the energy of rapid oxidation as best they can. They weigh the droppings in a continual cycle making sure the droppings correspond to the measure of food eaten. They burn the droppings. Hello enthalpy again. Now they get real scientific and anal about all this because carbohydrates, fats and proteins burn differently. Mineral content is studied to see what what is no longer there.

The point is that there is an ASSUMPTION made that doesn't have beans to do with the energy transfer process known as digestion. WE DO NOT BURN OUR FOOD! All that CRAP you and I learned about caloric content is based on physical chemistry leaps of faith (not math) about enthalpy and the "lets burn it and see how much energy it has" boys. Of course this stuff is only partial bullshit in nonliving energy transfer processes so they were quite objective in determining MJ of burning hydrocarbons and many other substances but catalysts messed with their results so they invented a fudge factor called "energy of activation". More on that later.

What is it that living systems DO if they don't BURN the food? Something similar to what they do to move muscles; they use catalysts (substances that do not gain or lose energy or are degraded in a chemical reaction) to keep HEAT and pH from getting out of the Goldilocks zone of life. How do they do that with those enzymes? The physical scientists with their knowledge of molecules and the different kinds of chemical bonds will tell you that enzymes DO NOT rig a chemical reaction so it uses less energy. They say it can't be done. They say the enzyme just lowers the "energy of activation" so the reaction can proceed.

This the scientific concensus:
Question: Do enzymes lower the energy of the overall reaction?
Enthalpy, entropy, and Gibbs free energy are all state functions. This means they depend only on the initial state and the final state. Anything that happens between those states is irrelevant.
So no, enzymes have no effect on the enthalpy of a reaction.

I see enthalpy is back right there with the word enzyme. I see that really fascinating term "state function" as a rationale for the "no effect". This is all quite valid and true in nonliving energy transfer mechanisms. This is bullshit in living systems. Why? Because the biochemical reaction DOES NOT release the same amount of HEAT that it would in the absence of the enzyme. That HEAT that wasn't emitted is an amount of energy that is CONSERVED! That means that the figures for caloric content based on brute force rapid oxidation are WRONG. The enzymes (BILLIONS OF THEM!) are constantly operating at an efficency level no ICE could ever approach. It's not just sweat that keeps you from overheating, folks.[sup][1[/sup]

They have a "slight" problem you probably never were told about in measuring enthalpy (Especially if you work with hydrocarbons).
[quote]Although enthalpy is commonly used in engineering and science, it is impossible to measure directly, as enthalpy has no datum (reference point). Therefore enthalpy can only accurately be used in a closed system. However, few real-world applications exist in closed isolation, and it is for this reason that two or more closed systems cannot be compared using enthalpy as a basis, although sometimes this is done erroneously. [sup]2[/sup][/quote]

So, as you can see, "scientists" can have a ball with fudge factors and tell YOU they are doing science.

Even now the myriad chemical reactions in the human body are not fully understood. Scientists can write these calculus formulas for "work" done in a reaction that include the different state functions along the way and dazzle us with numbers and "empirical" evidence OUTSIDE living systems. Inside living systems, they still do not understand how gamma radiation can upregulate (cause them to accelerate activity) Tyrosine Kinase enzymes that tell cells to divide like crazy and simultaneously turn off apoptosis (cell death clock) so the newly multiplied cells don't die. It's called cancer (Almost all kinds have this same trigger - radiation just does it faster than other toxins out there). Cancer, boys and girls, is caused by too much energy slamming a tyrosine kinase enzyme. This is what happens when you depart the goldilocks zone towards higher energy.

[quote]Plant foods contain many of the same enzymes that humans use to metabolize different kinds of macronutrients. Proteases and peptidases, which help digest protein; lipases, which help digest fat; and cellulases and saccharidases, which help digest starches and sugars are examples of the kind of digestive enzymes that would normally secreted in our digestive tract or in a nearby organs like the pancreas or liver. However, these same digestive enzymes can be found in the plant foods that we eat. [sup]3[[/sup][/quote]

How do the enthalpy boys deal with the above reality? You were lacking some of those enzymes that help you transfer energy and you ate some vegetables. How EXACTLY does that translate to "state functions", enthalpy and WORK that you can quantify as MJ in energy? It doesn't! They BURN that stuff to see what the caloric content is. That's mechanistic reductionist science at its most neanderthal. Sure, it works "great" (not really but it looks that way from a distance) for engines and rockets but it's a FAIRY TALE as far as humans are concerned. Consider that the enthalpy of a human body with all its' carbon, nitrogen oxygen, hydrogen, potassium, sodium, sulfur compounds and all the rest of the trace elements that make up what it is one second before it dies and 10 minutes later is, according to enthalpy measurers, the same. Do you believe a dead body has the same energy content as a live one? You'd better if you believe the published stats on caloric food content.
Let's compare an electric eel with a human manufactured battery.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Electric-eel2.jpg[/img]
[quote]When the eel locates its prey, the brain sends a signal through the nervous system to the electric cells. This opens the ion channel, allowing positively-charged sodium to flow through, reversing the charges momentarily. By causing a sudden difference in voltage, it generates a current. The electric eel generates its characteristic electrical pulse in a manner similar to a battery, in which stacked plates produce an electrical charge. In the electric eel, some 5,000 to 6,000 stacked electroplaques are capable of producing a shock at up to 500 volts and 1 ampere of current (500 watts). [sup]4[/sup][/quote]
The electric eel is really not an eel but a type of cafish. It lives, eats, mates, lays eggs and dies. It serves a viable and useful function in the biosphere in life and in death. It's in the Goldilocks zone.

Now for the 20th century product of our "vast" understanding of energy transfer mechanisms, chemical reactions and, of course, enthalpy.

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Photo-CarBattery.jpg[/img]

[quote][b]Used Lead Acid Battery Recycling[/b]

[i]Description[/i]
Lead acid batteries are rechargeable batteries made of lead plates situated in a ‘bath’ of sulfuric acid within a plastic casing. They are used in every country in world, and can commonly be recognized as “car batteries”. The batteries can be charged many times, but after numerous cycles of recharging, lead plates eventually deteriorate causing the battery to lose its ability to hold stored energy for any period of time.1 Once the lead acid battery ceases to be effective, it is unusable and deemed a used lead acid battery (ULAB), which is classified as a hazardous waste under the Basel Convention.[sup]5[/sup][/quote]

[quote][b]Exposure Pathways[/b]
Throughout the informal recycling process, there are opportunities for exposure. Most often the battery acid, which contains lead particulates, is haphazardly dumped on the ground, waste pile or into the nearest water body. As the lead plates are melted, lead ash falls into the surrounding environment, collects on clothing, or is directly inhaled by people in close proximity.

Soil containing lead compounds can turn to dust and become airborne, enabling the lead compounds to be easily inhaled or ingested in a variety of ways. Lead can also leach into water supplies. Children, in particular are often exposed to lead when playing on the waste furnace slag and handling rocks or dirt containing lead, while engaging in typical hand-to-mouth activity, as well as by bringing objects covered with lead dust back into the home. The most common route of exposure for children is ingestion, as lead dust often covers clothing, food, soil and toys.

[b]Health Effects[/b]
Acute lead poisoning can occur when people are directly exposed to large amounts of lead through inhaling dust, fumes or vapors dispersed in the air. However, chronic poisoning from absorbing low amounts of lead over long periods of time is a much more common and pervasive problem. Lead can enter the body through the lungs or the mouth, and over long periods can accumulate in the bones. Health risks include impaired physical growth, kidney damage, retardation, and in extreme cases even death. Lead poisoning can lead to tiredness, headache, aching bones and muscles, forgetfulness, loss of appetite and sleep disturbance.

This is often followed by constipation and attacks of intense pain in the abdomen, called lead colic.5 Extreme cases of lead poisoning, can cause convulsions, coma, delirium and possibly death. Children are more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults and may suffer permanent neurological damage. Women that are pregnant and become exposed to lead can result in damage to the fetus and birth defects.[sup]5[/sup][/quote]

I'm just curious, but what "state function" in physical chemistry applies to the above? How about the enthalpy, entropy or energy of a stack of battery casings? What's the "energy of activation" needed to brain damage a kid? Where are the "elegant" calculus equations to show the "energy" used to make, use, discard and poison the biosphere, HUH!!? Anyone? How about someone from The Oil Drum? Can you explain the superiority of the car battery over the electric eel? I can't. BUT, if you worship DEATH; if you worship energetic processes above the goldilocks zone, then it is fucking OBVIOUS why the battery is head and shoulders above the electric eel!

Which brings us back to the BANKRUPTCY of the physical sciences in describing energetic porcesses in living systems. The cells in an electric eel function as a group of many, many individuals, each producing a tiny change in electric potential. In order to have an energetic process that doesn't harm the people using it (e.g. humans) you are SUPPOSED to keep each individual process tiny so as to maximize efficiency and minimize or totally avoid biopshere damage. The moment you exit that zone into "bigger is better explosive energy output", for every single MJ/L of energy you produce above the goldilocks zone of life, you are generating life destroying entropy with waste heat and poisonous chemicals. The blind, greedy fuckers that built the ICE refused to see that. Most people today STILL refuse to see that.

THIS is what the IDIOTS in science never get. For many decades they were scratching there moronic heads about why a dolphin can swim as fast as it does (Gray's paradox). The dolphin didn't match their equations so they went TILT. The arrogance is breathtaking. The same thing is going on today with the slavish devotion to oil and nuclear as some great and glorious energy process. LOOK AROUND! Look what all this "cheap" energy has produced. Don't you get it? There was NO WAY you could exit the Goldilocks zone in energy output and NOT produce untold garbage, poison and waste. The two things go in opposite directions in equal vector strength! The "externalized" effects of oil and nuclear CAN be quantified in NEGATIVE MJ/L of entropy and poisons. THAT is what the early scientists studying energy failed to see. The blindness just accelerated from then. For every bomb, car, truck, tractor, tank, plane, train, ship or powerplant high energy transfer device the Industrial Revolution IDIOCY of brain dead mechanistic reductionism worshippers brought us, we received a corresponding equal and opposite reaction in the biosphere.

For a viable society, absolutely every energetic process must be measured in the total cycle. Every ICE out there NOW, if the TOTAL enthalpy, entropy and poison generating math was done, would never have been built because NONE of them were EVER cost effective compared to living system energy transfer mechanisms, PERIOD! Everybody that likes cars should lock themselves in their garage with one and start the engine. After an hour or so, you will experience the part oil EROI worshippers and the scientists like those at The Oil Drum fail to mention. The fact that these oil energy loving F***S [edit] that call themselves scientists can believe it's wrong to run your car in a garage but a mark of "advanced civilization" to do it outside is proof that they are SERIOUSLY math challenged idiots. Have a nice day.

"In our mechanistic greco roman western reductionist linear fragmented compartmentalized disconnected democratized individualized parts oriented thought process, we never think about the whole." Alex Hillman

[table]
[tr]
[td]1. http://www.healthline.com/galecontent/thermoregulation [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]3. http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=120 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_eel [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]5. http://www.worstpolluted.org/projects_reports/display/65 [/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Renewables, why they work and fossil and nuclear fuels NEVER DID.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/07/17/hope-for-a-viable-biospher...

Electric vehicles are here to stay and while they are certainly a niche product today their market share will only grow. Energy density comparisons with gasoline are less than useless when trying to determine the future of electric vehicles. The only thing that matters is utility. Assuming a 3.5% annual increase in energy density (a modest assumption) the utility of EVs will continue to grow. With a doubling time of 20 years a Nissan Leaf will have a range of 200 miles in 2032; 400 miles in 2052 and 800 miles in 2072. This can be achieved without coming close to current theoretical limits and would have EVs commanding a majority of market share in the second half of this century.

Tom,

You may be well intentioned, but your posts in general, and this one in particular, are exercises in tearing apart straw men. In this case, this cites an article which suggests that pure EVs won't be ready to replace conventional ICE vehicles any time soon.

Of course! It's pretty clear to car-industry analysts that hybrids, plug-ins, and extended range EVs will dominate for quite a long time. For instance, a Prius C appears to be the lowest cost vehicle around: at $19k and 50 MPG, it's price is less than 2/3 of the average new vehicle price, and it's fuel consumption is 50% of the US average new vehicle. Add a plug and $10k in batteries and you still have a vehicle that's cheaper than the average new vehicle, but gets about 300 miles per gallon of liquid fuel.

Even for the special case of pure EVs the analysis is highly unrealistic:

External costs like security of supply (both short term and long term), criteria pollution (sulfur, mercury, etc) and climate change are very, very real. Not including them is just dishonest - if a media writer wants to focus their article on slow adoption rates due to artificially low market prices, that's fine, but they should make that explicit.

An honest market price analysis that looks at the entire lifecycle, includes maintenance savings, and uses realistic assumptions about operations, miles driven, etc, will find that pure EVs are already cost competitive - that is to say, their costs no higher than for ICEs. Hybrids are currently the sweetspot for low costs, but PHEVs and EREVs will claim that spot reasonably soon.

Finally, battery prices appear to be continuing their long-term decline rate of 7-10% per year. The Reuters article below indicates that consumer li-ion is going for $300/kWh: that's 25% less than several years ago. Please note that consumer devices have the advantage of large volumes, but their size is small and costly. For instance, an iPhone has a 5.3 watt hour battery. The Volt's battery pack at 16 kWh is 3,000 times as large. So, when the Volt gets to 25k vehicles per year, that's equivalent to 75M cell phones (a little more than Apple sold in 2011). That's pretty good scale.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/11/autos-batteries-idINL2E8IB5UT20...

On the other hand, individual cells for automotive uses are much larger, which is cheaper to manufacture (per unit capacity) and can use cheaper materials (because weight isn't nearly as critical).

The bottom line: automotive traction batteries will stay cheaper than consumer batteries (which continue to fall in price, driven by intense pressure from places like Apple).

2) The overall price of an EV is a very complex mix, and can't be reduced to the cost of the battery. Car makers have many costs: drive train; ancillary devices such as steering and braking; suspension/wheels; body (including aerodynamics); etc. Almost all of these have to be redesigned for an electric drive train (which includes EV/HEV/PHEV/EREV) because the design requirements are very different. For instance, ICE vehicle efficiency is dominated by weight. Weight is much less important for EVs because they have regenerative braking, so aerodynamics move strongly to the forefront. Another example: elimination of mechanical control and power transmission (brakes, steering, etc) affects a lot of secondary systems. Heck, window wipers get redesigned!

Battery packs are complex: there are the individual cells; the connections; cooling and heating systems (air and liquid); charge and discharge management systems; temperature sensors, heat insulators and radiators; electronic communications and control, with hardware and software (including 10M lines of code, more than recent fighter jets); containment systems, structural support and crash protection; etc.

So, economies of scale apply to the whole car, and cost comparisons are complex. That's why I raise the example of the Prius C, which has the advantage of Toyota's economies of scale and willingness/ability to aggressively price a new vehicle based on long-term costs before it has achieved the large sale volumes which will enable those low costs.

A Prius C has both ICE and electric drivetrains, each of which are sufficient to drive the vehicle. That's substantial duplication. And, they have a full battery pack (with battery management), yet they can price the vehicle starting at $19k. We can get a pretty good idea what a small PHEV could cost, based on that.

One aspect of the discussion I don't see in the article (though may well be in some of the 300+ comments) is the energy demand of the vehicle itself. If we are focused on Volts and similar vehicles, then we have to push hard at the R&D envelopes to chase the horizon for the FreedomCar goals. If we have vehicles with significantly less energy demands, however, suddenly we can ready to go with the batteries we have.

Some of the (potential) vehicles that require far less energy (e.g., rolling, aero, F=ma) include;

VW XL1 (200+ mpg)

C-1

And of course, there are many 100+ mpg cars from the Progressive Auto X-Prize;

Li-On and Zap Alias

TW4XP

And there are many other such vehicles that participated in the XPrize competition;