Thousands of NU fans were stranded on icy and snowbound I 95 for over 24 hours. Many ran out of gasoline and were subjected to freezing temperatures. They were mobilized by filling their tanks with a couple of gallons of fuel via gerry cans. What would be the plan in 20 years when battery powered vehicles are the norm -would they all miss the game and have to be hauled/towed to a charging station ?
Stranded on the Way to an NU game
- Thread starter docrugby1
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20 years from now there won't be snowstorms
Batteries, just like how combustion cars are jump-started when their battery dies.
The EV battery/motor would require way way more than a jump start to drive. Regular car battery just needs a little juice to get the car started. A hybrid could be jumped and it will recharge the battery but a pure EV this would be a problem. A quick internet search suggests that AAA has special roadside recharging trucks with large fast-charging capacity to add “10 miles of range in 10 minutes.” Still that takes a lot longer than putting a gallon of gas in and you can probably only charge 1 at a time.
Yes, there was a debate scrimmage in DC
I’m very confident mobile charging will scale up as EVs start becoming more the norm than the exception.
Probably true, but the problem is it takes too long to charge EVs. I have personally witnessed this at the travel plazas on I80/90 traveling to Chicago. That's the reason I would never buy or lease an EV, but could live with a hybrid.
Twenty years from now we’ll all be driving Hydrogen powered vehicles.
Plug in hybrids are the way to go for now. Just picked up a Toyota RAV 4 Prime from Jim Coleman Toyota in Bethesda and drove it back to Chicago. 45 miles of EV range prior to gas engine kicking in. 9 out 10 days we never use gas.
How many gallon gas tank in your hybrid and your combined range on a trip ? What is the range of a Tesla and how long does it take to fully charge. Your vehicle seems practical but a Tesla does not seem to be a vehicle for a long trip
14.5 gallons. About 600 miles. Full charge takes 12 hours on a regular household plug .
Since talking about basketball kind of sucks tonight...
Battery-powered cars are pretty good for the vast majority of traffic jam situations (DC on every other day in recent history). Regenerative braking means that electric cars are much better than their internal combustion counterparts in stop and go traffic.
If you sit still not using an electric car for 24 hours (or a month), you could resume your trip later, no problem. It's the blasting the heat the whole time which might put you in a bad spot.
Whether you have a IC or electric, sitting all by yourself in your own car for 24 hours blasting your heat is kind of dumb. Go make a few friends: take turns sitting in their cars for a few hours and you won't need to refill any of your tanks, and you might learn something about the human condition!
If you want to do long-distance trips, Tesla's supercharging network (which assumes you'll mostly charge your car at home but what convenient charging stations along the major interstates) remains a big help, though other networks (which initially focused on local charging) are beginning to catch up. We've driven our Tesla from Chicago to DC several times, Toronto, Minneapolis, North Carolina, Cleveland, and Denver... it's not a big deal. Charging "costs" me about an hour every 400 miles I travel. If you're the sort of person who doesn't really enjoy stuffing your face while in your vehicle or actually gets a bit of pleasure out of stopping for lunch or dinner, or likes going for a quick walk to get your blood moving and keep you healthy, or you have email which needs checking, cross-country charging may be a lot less painful than you think.
If you're on 500 mile road trips every few weeks and you're on the clock, electric cars aren't for you, yet -- get a hybrid, or wait a year or two until the batteries get better or until the SUV, minivan, pickup, or truck you really want gets electrified. If you aren't a serial road tripper, and you have a garage in a house with electricity, you'll make up that "lost time" by never, ever having to hang out with the cool kids at the gas stations near your home or office!
Go 'Cats!
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Now turn the heat on and tell me about your range.
EVs are extremely great - literally superior technology to combustion vehicles - but there are some definite use case issues. Cold weather is one of them, and traffic Jams in cold weather, especially unexpected snow james, is DEFINITELY one of them.
Agreed, Adam.
But we humans do have some weird habits. The use case we're making a big deal out of in this thread involves our fervent desire to pay cash money to have our cars blow hot air at ourselves!
Other solutions to being warm include spending that money on Northwestern sweatshirts or hats that you could wear if you get cold (and, festively, at other times).
Also, maybe we should spend the energy we dissipate bellyaching about the limitations of a technology that's getting about 20ish% better every year on trying to make other stuff in our lives 20% better. Or, perhaps, going to a few more Wildcat games.
Go 'Cats!
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One thing I have always wondered about when it comes to electric powered cars is how can our military fight a war using the electric vehicles?
Wouldn’t an EMP fry every last one of these electric vehicles?
The second thing is that I from what I know the electric grid can't handle a hurricane or winter storm without crashing. Whenever the heat goes above 100 Mayors and officials beg people to turn down (or off) their air conditioning and head to cooling centers.
How do you expect it to handle the extra energy demand put on it by replacing gas with electric cars?
And the opposite - In places like small rural towns in the south the power goes out when it drizzles a little. Now your car won’t start after a rain storm? What happens when a storm or disaster hits and there is grid lock contraflow traffic and a few EVs die?
Wouldn’t an EMP fry every last one of these electric vehicles?
The second thing is that I from what I know the electric grid can't handle a hurricane or winter storm without crashing. Whenever the heat goes above 100 Mayors and officials beg people to turn down (or off) their air conditioning and head to cooling centers.
How do you expect it to handle the extra energy demand put on it by replacing gas with electric cars?
And the opposite - In places like small rural towns in the south the power goes out when it drizzles a little. Now your car won’t start after a rain storm? What happens when a storm or disaster hits and there is grid lock contraflow traffic and a few EVs die?
Uh, yeah, horrible take. It gets cold as shit here in Mn. It gets cold in Chicago too. Going from “car keeps you warm” to “car doesn’t keep you warm and is 5 degrees inside for the entire ride” is a massive and unacceptable downgrade in technology. Humans, like, need warm air on them to live.
An EMP would fry your car too. They don’t even make cars any more with actual steering columns, you’re just driving a video game electronic controller. What sort of tech the military will need in particular.. I don’t know the answer to that, but the military is using micro grid tech and distributed generation very aggressively to increase resiliency. Requiring a huge worldwide supply chain of hydro carbons to fuel your vehicles is a massive endeavor and vulnerability.
Your grid question is fair, but it’s got a very, very simple answer: do the vast majority of the charging off peak, aka overnight, when usage is low. Same goes for things like running your water heater and other heavy tech in your home. Many locales already have time of use rate programs where your in home level 2 charger will only work overnight, but you’ll get a massively reduced rate. Issue solved.
At this point our world is SO computerized that widespread use of EMPs might bring about the end of civilization as we know it — even our internal combustion cars, as well as everything from thermostats and door locks to our current power and communications systems are loaded to the gills with computers. Though, I suspect that the metal boxes (the auto body) surrounding the computers in cars probably creates a sort of shielding Faraday cage, so they might survive the proposed holocaust at a higher rate than you'd expect. Let's not have widespread use of nuclear weapons, though, just in case!
In the third world, cheap power — even if it were only available half the time — would be a game changer for many millions of people who hardly ever have it now, and may never get it if it requires 20th century-type infrastructure.
Our standards are a little higher. We expect reliable electric power so we can do our important stuff at any hour of the day or night, so energy reliability and security is matters a lot! On that front, the length of the supply chain that brings us our current electrical mix kind of boggles the mind. The current process involves trillions of dollars of investments made or not made decades in advance and actually digging things out of the ground, sometimes in foreign countries. And it still sometimes fails when the weather is bad.
I'm hoping that eventually our local electricity supply chains don't require worrying about ships stuck in the Suez canal, nation states or cartels lurching supply back and forth (recent spot gas prices in Europe have been off the charts). What if you didn't have to keep digging stuff up every year and shipping it to the exact right place just at the right time? What if electricity kind of fell out of the sky?
The rest is mostly up to the invisible hand. Because of the rapid speed at which prices of solar and windmills have dropped over the last decade, it's now cheaper to produce electricity from solar and onshore wind (when those are available) than pretty much any electricity our species has ever created — challengingly, we still want power during freak snowstorms. Within the next decade, the prices of those renewable systems will continue to be dramatically lower, so you'll likely be able to afford to "overbuild" those vs. peak production and use the extra to charge the grid, lift heavy objects that can be lowered later, create hydrogen for Corbi's hydrogen-powered automobiles or useful chemicals, etc. literally "while the sun shines." It's probably even cheaper to use Adam Smith to restructure our demand (charge less for electricity when there's lots of it, so that energy-intensive processes move to the most ideal times) and interconnect our old-fashioned local grids... because the percentage of the time the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing within 500 miles of us is much lower than if we're just talking about just our little spot of earth. At least for the next billion years or so, the sun will always be shining and wind will always be blowing somewhere!
By comparison, digging stuff out of the dirt and shipping it around the world and then setting it on fire, at best, gets only slightly less expensive each year. We're absolutely not in a place to do anywhere near all of the stuff in this thread today, but it's worth thinking long and hard about the places where our technology is getting measurably better every year if we want the world to be a better place in the future than it is today... which I suppose is kind of a nice thing to be trying for, right?
Dissertation out. Thanks for distracting me from the basketball game... Go 'Cats!
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those of us that are still alive...lot's of oldsters here. But - yeah - the internal combustion engine and the oil industry will fight to their last breath, and lose.
As I understand it, though it may be urban legend, GM bought the patent for a hydrogen car like 50 years ago, and shelved it, to protect their current infrastructure.
I just start a nice fire by the roadside using the tires. There should be 4, plus a spare. That should last 6 hours or more. You can heat some rocks in the fire, and then stow them in the car to heat up the interior.
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I just drove across the metro in my car with the heat on. It’s currently -6 degrees. I needed the full heat and my gigantic winter coat to stay warm even after we got to full speed, and I have a nice, brand new car.
Our disagreement about the heating system aside, this response is basically correct, and fairly knowledgeable. Do you also work in energy? Much respect.
Possible, but I’m not so sure about that. Hydrogen is extremely explodey. Even if a car hit the market today and started selling, it would take a long time to get the fuel distribution infastructure going to majority market penetration. I’m not really super convinced that hydrogen is going to happen for consumer vehicles. Fleet and heavy vehicles… maybe more likely.
But hydrogen does have one big advantage going for it, and that’s that the smart (invested owned) utilities really really really really want it, and for good reason.
I was under the impression that one of the advantages of Hydrogen is that it could be distributed, with modest investment, using the existing pipeline and retail gas station distribution infrastructure. Is that not the case in your opinion?
Here’s an interesting article I read earlier this year about hydrogen fuel’s current state. Although I’d like to see hydrogen fuel become more feasible, I’m also under the impression that the energy tradeoff to manufacture it isn’t acceptable yet.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a36003212/hydrogen-mirai-california-shortage/
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a36003212/hydrogen-mirai-california-shortage/
It's possible, but again, things would require retrofits to work from a chemical standpoint (an engineer issue way above my scientific paygrade) and large pipelines of hydrogen are... super duper mega explodey.
From an article at the Dept of Energy you may like:
Hydrogen Pipelines
Gaseous hydrogen can be transported through pipelines much the way natural gas is today. Approximately 1,600 miles of hydrogen pipelines are currently operating in the United States. Transporting gaseous hydrogen via existing pipelines is a low-cost op...
So mixing a little hydrogen into natural gas a la ethanol in gas... pretty doable. Just hydrogen... more research needed.
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The energy tradeoff issue is sort of secondary, because the entire point of the use case of hydrogen is as an energy storage and transport mechanism. You can generate hydrogen at a loss from cheap/free off-peak energy, such as wind turbines running overnight with nothing else to power, and then you can utilize that hydrogen during peak hours, for transportation, etc. The only other thing that can do that is batteries, and while batteries are great, building them up to grid scale usage represents a massive cost and raw materials problem.
Personally I see the most promise in more stable/microgrid uses of hydrogen. It's dangerous for your car to use hydrogen because there's a constant threat of a small crash going Ford Pinto, but it's a much more feasible proposition to generate hydrogen, or perhaps transport hydrogen to, say, a large gas station service center or local grid transformer/microgrid system (or certainly something smaller like a large critical building like a hospital). The hydrogen is then used at peak times to generate electricity, whether that is to charge cars or run the building in island mode or whatever. Large industrial facilities or infrastructure like ports are another good example, things that are large enough to have their own large energy infrastructures on site.
But these are all just engineering problems and it comes down to which is solved in the best and most affordable way. I'm sure you could find some very knowledgeable people who are less concerned about the safety issues with hydrogen than I am.
Thanks very much for this detailed analysis. I truly appreciate it, and we obviously have some very knowledgeable posters on this Board. Your observations actually have reinforced my plan to continued leasing gasoline powered vehicles. Presently, I have a new 2022 Lexus ES 350. It burns regular gas and I average about 25 miles per gallon. On the interstate I get about 31 mpg. When I run low on fuel, I stop at a gas station and fill it up. In the winter, I never let it get very low because I live in the snow belt on Lake Erie. The heater works great, as do the seat heaters, defroster and steering wheel heater. My Lexus never need to be plugged in or re-charged anywhere. My wife and I take lots of road trips, some of which are in her vehicle, which is a 2022 Acura MDX. Winter road conditions are not a problem in that baby, and the heater, seat warmers and defrost work very well, just like mine.
Fortunately, I'm 78 years old and would think that I have only 10 - 12 driving years left, maximum, if I live that long. I'm very confident that excellent gasoline powered vehicles will be available for the balance of my driving lifetime and beyond. For those who prefer EVs, I say have at it. (Please not that I have studiously avoided all political commentary in this post, although the temptation was great.)
Like corbi, I have a plug-in hybrid car - a Honda Clarity. I love it for my drives around town as it gets about 30-40 miles on a charge (depending on use of heat/AC). We also take it on road trips as it gets about 300 miles per fill-up. It is smaller gas tank then most cars, so it only costs me about $20-25 to fill it up.
I have never driven a car with better acceleration than my Clarity in EV mode. If you haven't driven an electric vehicle yet, you should try it. They are a lot of fun!
I have never driven a car with better acceleration than my Clarity in EV mode. If you haven't driven an electric vehicle yet, you should try it. They are a lot of fun!
Late last evening thousands of NU fans were spotted crawling across the East and West lots to their cars. I don't know if that was the same mob that was stranded on I95 the night before, but if it wasn't, we got a problem developing here.
In Baltimore. You'd better have a new one for every night, because it would be immediately stolen
Sorry, I neglected /S. I lived in Philadelphia for six years. The answer is the cable TV model (infrastructure).
I live in a dense city. Street parking. Have a Tesla. Charge it when I can. Have some charging at work too. Love it and it’s fast. Waiting on 2022 wrangler plug in rubicon. So whole household will be electrified.
Will take decades still for full transition but it will happen.
The fear of EVs on road trips is real and legitimate, even if relevant only a few times a year.
I am very simple, but I can’t understand why none of the major gasoline / c-store brands are getting in the charging infrastructure game.
Given actual penetration of EVs (<2% of auto sales, and far smaller percentage of those on the road), and the small footprint required for a charger (one parking space), it would seem that a c-store chain could gain some brand strength and loyalty (from rich folks) by investing in a charging network — at the expense of 2 parking spaces and 2 fast chargers.
I’m all for public investment in charging infrastructure — but it seems like private companies are missing out strategically here.
How fantastically wrong am I?
I am very simple, but I can’t understand why none of the major gasoline / c-store brands are getting in the charging infrastructure game.
Given actual penetration of EVs (<2% of auto sales, and far smaller percentage of those on the road), and the small footprint required for a charger (one parking space), it would seem that a c-store chain could gain some brand strength and loyalty (from rich folks) by investing in a charging network — at the expense of 2 parking spaces and 2 fast chargers.
I’m all for public investment in charging infrastructure — but it seems like private companies are missing out strategically here.
How fantastically wrong am I?
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