thought experiment...what if there were only electric vehicles "now"

Just a thought. I've been reading a lot about electric vehicles and they have made a lot of progress. Ranges up to 250 - 300 miles, recharge times of 60 - 90 minutes. They may be viable in 20 - 30 years.

But this question is for now, so if you had to evacuate Florida, in front of hurricane Irma, how far would anyone get if there were only electric vehicles? Could you imagine the lines if you had too wait to charge your vehicle at a charging station? A station where it took the vehicle at least an hour too fully charge?

Just a thought.

 

I think it's a good point. Electric Vehicles are for the time being, a product for a utopian society, free of natural disasters, war and life and death situations.

 

The bridge to all battery vehicles is series hybrids. Imagine an electric vehicle with a small generator and fuel tank. You could go all electric and use the generator only on long trips as needed.

 

Considering the pace of progress in this field, it will be far less than 20 years before electric vehicles have ranges beyond internal combustion and charging is continuous with the vehicle.

 

The question is "now" and while vehicles may get there before 20 years, I don't believe infrastructure will.

 

Well, yeah with an electric car trying to get out of the way of a hurricane is just dumb luck, all about whether you got a full charge or not. Hopefully you charged up at home and got a fair amount of distance between you and the hurricane before you need a recharge. By then all your follow drivers will be scattered enough that you don't put too much of a load on existing charging stations.

 

I'm happy driving a Chevy Volt. 90% of my driving is electric and once in a while if I drive out of the city then I use gas.

The technology is getting better all the time. It will certainly be less than 20 years before electric beats ICE. Graphene superconductor capacitors are going to really change things too.

Toyota recently designed an ICE that will strictly generate electricity with far greater efficiency than ICEs used to drive crankshafts. That's a promising option for people with range anxiety.

 

I honestly think hybrids are the way forward period.


Allows for pretty much any eventuality.

 

most also use gas, just the gas engine is used to to give energy to the electric motor in the event the battery is drained, that said, battery technology has a way to go before all cars are electric, kinda like when the power goes out, you can use a gas generator for electricity, only in this case it's a backup for the car

if the car had a solar roof and there was no gas to buy, which would you rather have... both have positives and negatives

until battery technology improves, I will stick with gas - but bravo to early adopters, we need them, that is how the technology grows

before good roads and reliable cars, sometimes a horse was better then a car... times change

btw, gas seems to be a shortage even while power continues on in many areas of these disasters... so there is that

Walmart already has power stations here in parking lot for charging, I imagine in future they will be all over the place like parking meters, all a business has to do is put them up like ATM's and the parking lot becomes profitable and a convince for the driver.. so it will happen as distance will keep increasing and charge time decreasing

 

Just as people filled up their gas tanks ahead of time so would people make sure that their electric vehicles would be fully charged.

Yes, there are always people who leave it to the last minute but they would just have be limited to shorter 20 minute charge times in an emergency which will provide at least 100 miles of range which should be more than enough to outrun a hurricane and reach a place of safety.

http://www.fleetcarma.com/dc-fast-charging-guide/

Something to bear in mind too, when you have an electric vehicle and you are stuck in traffic you are not "draining the tank" while you are not moving so your range does not diminish like it does for gas powered vehicles that are sitting there with engines idling. An hour stuck idling in traffic burns about a gallon of gas on average.

 

What?

Electric vehicles HAD a range of over 120 miles...150 years ago

 

Which is about 1/3 of the average fuel tank range.

 

the only thing that could set it back is oil companies buying tech and sitting on it, which should be a crime just like price gouging

 

That's not the point, so it took them 150 years to just get this far...


And now you want to claim we will have leaps and bounds it battery technology in just a few years?

Batter's suck

 

That was then and this is now. Remember the first computers were house sized to do what a calculator does. A calculator is a quaint app in the cell phone in your pocket.
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/batteries-last-longer-arrive-really/

 

Yes, and it only took years not century's, remember Obama stoped funding fuel cells and put the government funding into batteries

 

I'm a bit confused....I had assumed from your comment that you questioned my inference that battery driven cars were soon to become able to exceed gas driven cars...Now you seem to agree and delve into politics and hydrogen?

Please clarify.

By the way.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-honda-clarity-review-20170401-story.html

 

You would have a point.... IF.....
If SUDDENLY there were ONLY 100% pure electric vehicles limited to using CURRENT TECHNOLOGY
It is a question designed to show the fundamental weaknesses of electric vehicles

But.... since when is it true that changes happen suddenly, completely, and technology remains fixed and unchanging?

This will be a gradual change, that will happen incrementally, and technology will continue to advance in ways that are dramatic, rapid, and in many cases unexpected... that is what we KNOW is gonna happen.

For example.... phones used to be bedeviled by slow charging... now they have rapid and wireless charging.... will such advances end.... likely not. One thing that might well become important is super capacitor technology .... which can take on a charge essentially immediately. Charging stations will become more pervasive... etc

 

It didn't take 150 years to get this far. Originally electric cars were made obsolete by cheap gasoline which is very energy dense. The technology for electric was ignored until the late 20th century but the real interest has t been until the last ten or so years.

Right now Chevy makes the bolt which gives you a minimum of 200 miles range which is getting pretty close to what ICE does with a 30 litre tank.

It's now the charge time, which holds people back from electric and that is getting better all the time too.

It won't be twenty years. It'll be more like 8 years before you start seeing people really adopting electric in a big way.

And for that matter, some countries like Sweden, Finland and Germany have adopted them much more quickly than the USA. It probably will take the USA longer to get to the point. Electric car sales make up 42% of Norway's new vehicle sales according to one headline.


http://www.fleetcarma.com/european-countries-electric-vehicle-adoption/

 

I have not heard any stories of any electric vehicles not being able to get out, has anyone?

in fact it was the gas cars that may not of had full tanks, most people charge their cars when they get home, so they were full and ready to go, no long line at gas stations hoping they still had gas when they got in

 

Actually I heard that Elon Musk was able to remotely give people some extra power to get out.

Batteries in Tesla’s Model S and Model X cars marketed for 60 kilowatt-hours have an actual power of 75 kWh that can be unlocked on the software end, according to a story published Saturday in TechCrunch. Tesla appears to have done just that for Florida drivers in light of Irma.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/article172345607.html#storylink=cpy

 

Yes it did and you know it..






This electric car company was like the 6th? ( i forget) biggest manufacturer in America in the 1970s

 

That sounds like a pointless hypothetical to make electric vehicles sound bad. You could ask what would happen if everyone in 1900 had to travel by motor-car with the technology and infrastructure of the time. It probably wouldn't work very well but that doesn't say anything about the viability of internal combustion today.

 

If we had had the same amount of money and tech put into electric cars that we have had over the last 100 years, then the infrastructure would have been in place to move the cars and trucks. Chances are we would have either super fast charging or longer lasting batteries.

 

just think of the raw materials needed and costs associated 100% electric motor vehicles on the roadways.
Just think about all the energy wasted converting petroleum to electricity, then transporting it to the end user.