I gave this video a look and although I don't think it is the only one of its kind, it is a starting place and something to think about.
Something to think about with EVs...Total and Hidden Expenses
- Thread starter CharBaby
- Start date
With every vehicle that I've owned since the early 70's, I have calculated the total cost of ownership with each vehicle in terms of its:
Acquisition Cost
Insurance
Registration
State Inspection
*Repairs & Maintenance(Actual)
Years of Ownership
Resale Cost of that Vehicle
* I do most of my own work, but not all of it unfortunately. If there is 6" of snow & 4 deg's outside in FEB and I need my car, I'll pay a shop to do the work.
I think I've done OK but maybe it's time for a recalculation?
Acquisition Cost
Insurance
Registration
State Inspection
*Repairs & Maintenance(Actual)
Years of Ownership
Resale Cost of that Vehicle
* I do most of my own work, but not all of it unfortunately. If there is 6" of snow & 4 deg's outside in FEB and I need my car, I'll pay a shop to do the work.
I think I've done OK but maybe it's time for a recalculation?
Propflux01
$100 Site Donor 2025
Please turn up your A/C to 78 or above, wait to do your laundry and dishes, and use minimal lighting during the day to help offset the extreme load on the electrical grid. Oh, and go out and buy an electric car.
Clearly, the first gen EV’s had major battery expenses. I’m not at all sure that wont continue into todays products. Pouch cells are known to bloat, and dendrite formation has not been solved. I expect better than 10 year battery lives for Tesla/Rivian products and less for other brands. Even the Chevy Volts are now seeing battery replacements
EV's are immoral. The amount of fuel used and damage done to the environment to extract the precious metals to make the batteries is astounding. Disposing of the spent batteries will rival the problems of used up nuclear fuel from power plants.
No thanks.
No thanks.
As in any car purchase, or purchase in general, buying quality pays off in the long run. Fixes can be big bucks. Replacing a battery would be the worst!
Ah come on now... let's all go and find a tree to hug each and every day!
From what I understand recycling lithium ion batteries isn't feasible now, but there is a lot of work going on to develop recycling methods that are feasible. I'll bet we'll see large scale recycling programs within a few years.
Tesla batteries are good for a million miles. Or so they say. Of course no one is going to keep their Tesla more than about 20% of that number. But Tesla supposedly has a plan to re-purpose their batteries, maybe in their powerwall systems or solar systems ? And give those batteries, which will have less stress upon them than in a vehicle a 20 year warranty ?
Here is something to consider: the increase in rates by the electrical power suppliers is nowhere near the increase in the cost of gasoline over the that year. If you have a solar system on your home and that is used to recharge your Tesla they are even less costly to drive than an EV. The other costs of ownership like tires and brakes and oil changes ooops forget the oil changes haven't risen much in the last year. The break even point in buying a $60,000 Tesla vs. a nicely equipped ICE vehicle for $40k is going to come quicker than it used to.
Here is something to consider: the increase in rates by the electrical power suppliers is nowhere near the increase in the cost of gasoline over the that year. If you have a solar system on your home and that is used to recharge your Tesla they are even less costly to drive than an EV. The other costs of ownership like tires and brakes and oil changes ooops forget the oil changes haven't risen much in the last year. The break even point in buying a $60,000 Tesla vs. a nicely equipped ICE vehicle for $40k is going to come quicker than it used to.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
That's going to depend on whether taxpayers are subsidizing your solar install, whether you are getting a feed-in tariff, net metering or market rate, what the solar irradiance level in your area is, whether you had to finance the solar panels or not, and at what rate...etc.
Solar is not the silver bullet many make it out to be, and it creates grid management issues as well.
Someday the need for batteries will no longer be, EVs are still very primitive. I mean, lets go back, like, 100 years in time?
Except for the ones that make their own electricity using fuel cells and dont need massive battery packs, hopefully the is the start.
Another country, Germany is at the forefront of H2 stations, though we need widespread adaption, it might be only a matter of time.
I mean Fuel Cells are the future, is the modern technology. Costs will come down, it will take time.
Fuel cells will be powering the vehicles of the children and unborn in the future, though I may not be alive at that time to come into BITOG and gloat! *LOL*
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/20/vol...ucks-with-fuel-cells-powered-by-hydrogen.html
Except for the ones that make their own electricity using fuel cells and dont need massive battery packs, hopefully the is the start.
Another country, Germany is at the forefront of H2 stations, though we need widespread adaption, it might be only a matter of time.
I mean Fuel Cells are the future, is the modern technology. Costs will come down, it will take time.
Fuel cells will be powering the vehicles of the children and unborn in the future, though I may not be alive at that time to come into BITOG and gloat! *LOL*
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/20/vol...ucks-with-fuel-cells-powered-by-hydrogen.html
Last edited:
Source?
There was internet rumors that Tesla was going to announce something like that a while ago but it never happened.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Germany is a complete gong show that just committed to firing up 10x coal fired power plants because they are shuttering their three remaining nukes. I wouldn't be holding them up as some kind of example.
So, producing hydrogen, for use in fuel cells, by burning coal, then reforming methane (or, burning gas, cogen is also popular) is not much of an emissions reduction plan, it is virtue signalling framed as environmental action.
You seem to be very enamoured with fuel cells, why is that?
For sure. The lithium/nickel/cobalt is so valuable there’s almost zero chance they won’t be recycled ultimately. The idea that manufacturer/ scrap yards/ etc. are just gonna drop off batteries with thousands of dollars of metal inside at the local dump is pretty ridiculous.
And he continually goes on about the "make their own fuel" nonsense as well. It's a ridiculously ignorant predicate for everything that follows in that argument.
But I seem to be on ignore with this user, perhaps you can reach him - if it makes any difference.
JHZR2
Staff member
Journal of the Electrochemical Society, 166 (13) A3031-A3044 (2019).
This was work by Tesla, Jeff Dahn (the Tesla endowed professor at Dalhousie University in Canada who has been very engaged with this stuff, etc.
Its an extrapolation of performance based upon generic driving estimates. They looked at 20C and 40C exposure and a variety of scenarios/conditions. The extrapolation indicated that at 40C 10 years was viable, and 20C it was much better in terms of fractional capacity fade.
As well know from most anything and everything, the theoretical doesnt match the actual. For a wide variety of reasons. It will be very difficult to validate such claims until 10-20 years out. And like we experience on ALL vehicles, at some point everything else starts to fail - rubber parts, computer parts, infotainment, HVAC, etc.
Yet it is guaranteed to happen in an EV, extrapolations that I cited above or not. These are chemical systems that have calendar and cycle life ageing challenges. Keep pushing the envelope on depth of discharge and how much energy can be accessed, and it gets worse unless additional phenomena are resolved. Doesnt make it unresolvable. But the resolution adds expense, and you still have the million other parts of the car slowly failing around it anyway, which makes a million mile battery pretty much folly anyway.
That's not a valid comparison or statement. Are you even aware of what is inside of a Li-ion battery? Its pretty simple... Copper and/or aluminum current collector foils, a carbon-rich electrode coating on each side, a polymeric separator, and liquid electrolyte. Nothing else. Pretty darn simple actually. Since the majority of the mass of the cell is the metal case and metal current collectors, all of which we readily know how to recycle, this isnt anything remotely like cancer causing HAZMAT nuclear waste.
Managing the electrolyte, and recovering the lithium from the powders coated on the current collectors is a process challenge. You dont want people opening cells that have some amount of potential, and causing an explosive event. Short circuits on Li-ion are quite often gassing and release-level events with significant energy. So the long pole is getting the batteries truly discharged and opened safely so the materials can be recovered.
Yep
Registration and Insurance kill EV ownership. I only pay a couple hundred a year on my daily driver for fuel why would I pay more on registration than I do fuel?
Tires, meh, that is a problem with all modern cars, it’s not like they will start using $25 13” tires on new cars again
the treads on my volt went 60,000 miles, which seems normal
Registration and Insurance kill EV ownership. I only pay a couple hundred a year on my daily driver for fuel why would I pay more on registration than I do fuel?
Tires, meh, that is a problem with all modern cars, it’s not like they will start using $25 13” tires on new cars again
the treads on my volt went 60,000 miles, which seems normal
Last edited:
JHZR2
Staff member
Well, EVs are seen as part of the solution to that. Hydrogen electrolysis can be as well. For a long time now the concept of grid tied EV with the ability to take and dispatch energy to the grid has been a thing. Implemented? No. That adds cycles to the batteries which of course the consumer will not be adequately compensated for.
But one can certainly imagine that smart control and demand management for solar, hydrogen, EV, etc. would provide a lot of options to manage the generation/load demand issue.
Fuel cells were also the future 15 years ago. Back during the GWB era there was significant DoE and DoD investment in fuel cells, including hydrogen fuel cells and solid oxide (DoE SECA program focused on using coal for high efficiency cleaner generation). I remember being at one of the fuel cell seminar (the industry's big annual meeting) back then, maybe it was in Palm Springs or Honolulu, and the keynote noted that fuel cells have been 5 years away for the last 30 years. O decided it wasnt their idea, and was too far off, so scrapped much of that in the interest of other tech. What's old is new, and now there is separation, so there can be investment again... Here we are 15ish years later, and theyre still 5 years away. None of the real issues with tankage, cold storage, etc. have really been resolved. Just incremental analyses and the next generation of academics reinventing the wheel. Hydrogen fuel cells bring their own issues with longevity, cyclic performance, inerting, poisoning, etc. Not to mention the old platinum issues. There are niche applications beyond the space program where they fit, and if hydrogen can be done as a load leveler for renewables, that could be an interesting play. But it still has baggage. At least as much as EV, if not more.
Fuel cells if set up right can be cycled. Its all about water management. What do you think an electrolyzer is?
Note Im not saying anything about the practicality aspect.
That depends. If renewables are load leveled by hydrogen there could be a reasonable approach. However, the right balance would be for renewables to meet typical demand, and have enough generation that the hydrogen meets its demand (standby power plants, car fueling, etc.) to barely ever need to flare any hydrogen. That is surely a gigantic investment and requirement, which is why its currently impractical. What hasnt been well evaluated to my knowledge, is if with true complete renewables penetration at a level of scale and investment on par with the complete inflation adjusted investment in coal, hydro, nuke, and other power generation of the past, is the amount of generation then sufficient to do anything worthwhile? But then the rest of the baggage remains.
That said we need to look apples to apples at the baggage of nuke, oil, gas, etc. as well. And the paradigms should shift to where most practical. Like liquid fuels for mobility with PHEVs, nuke generation at small scale baseload, hydrogen for clean fast refueling (hybrids again, FC vehicles need batteries too) for local distribution and transportation, etc.
Afaik, the problem component in current Li-ion batteries is cobalt. Not only is it relatively rare, it’s only abundant in a small number of somewhat troubled places. There are programs trying to replace cobalt with sulfur, but unproven so far. And recycling these things isn’t simple: as they have to be made incredibly strong, deconstructing them is difficult. Current practice is simply to shred everything and not bother separating elements.
JHZR2
Staff member
Like I said, you need to get the coated powders off of the current collectors. That's a carbon rich powder that has all the Li, Co, etc.
You dont need Co in batteries. LFP is an example of an option.
Tesla has developed LFP batteries with the Chinese (CATL) for use in vehicles. Comming to a "domestically produced" Tesla near you.... But it is an option. You just need to design in the energy density of the pack, or go with a doped variant that has a higher voltage.
At that point much of the recycling problem is still identical... you still have the cans, foils, separators, powders, electrolyte... But you dont have the Co (and can also be rid of the Ni issue).
Regarding deconstruction, all cells have some type of vent built in. Most are just crimped shut with a rubber seal. Not really a difficult thing to resolve with machines, or even careful humans. Its just a slow process because you need to truly deplete the cells to zero, then cut them open without an inadvertent internal short which can source thousands of amperes and make a huge mess/injuries.
Common form factors that can be opened up might help in this area.