I often hear people saying “But where does the electricity for the EV come from? Driving an EV is not better than driving a diesel.”
They have to realize that the thiny ICE in your car is optimised for weight, and has an efficiency of 30-35%. So about ⅔ of the fossil fuel is turned into heat and blown out of the exhaust. Compare that to the turbine in a coal or gas plant, which can archive up to 90% efficiency.
And don’t forget that an EV is an investment, which will likely still be on the road in 20 years time. The electricity mix at the moment is still rather fossil fuel heavy, but this will change completely within the next 10 years.
Edit: not 90% but 40% efficiency. See comments below
Compare that to the turbine in a coal or gas plant, which can archive up to 90% efficiency.
Nope, you might have seen 90+% efficiency when talking about steam power plants, but that’s the efficiency of the generator(converting the mechanical energy of the the rotating turbogenerator to electricity). You have to multiply with the efficiency of the turbine(converting the energy of the heated gases into the mechanical energy) and there the efficiency is much lower, ~40% for a coal fired and maybe <60% for a gas combined cycle.
Huh, that makes a lot of sense actually. Thanks for correcting!
Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.
It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.
Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.
Give me a small 4dr sedan with crank windows, manual mirrors, pleather seats, tape player, shitty heat/ac, room for just 4 ppl (barely) and electric for $12-15k. They will fly off the shelves.
Instead let’s build 7 passenger SUVs with a massive ass IPad, that drives itself into other cars, and fetch key fobs.
That’s due to battery prices. You can’t pay $25,000 for a battery, put it in a shitbox and sell it for $30,000 because nobody’s going to buy a $30,000 car with the features and quality of a $5,000 car. Batteries can only be maybe a third of the cost of a car, so everyone’s been targeting the top of the market with expensive EVs.
The good news is, battery prices are continuing to plummet each year. When you have $2,000 batteries, $12,000 cars are doable.
Bullshit. You can easily get a battery for less than $25,000. The Tesla model 3 is a 50KWh pack and is $14000 to replace and likely costs way less to make.
If you were really skilled you could buy 50KWh worth of cells for less than $10000.
The reason the batteries are more is because you have SUVs and Trucks that need twice the amount of cells for about the same range because they’re not aerodynamic
The math still stands even with those numbers