More on the 135-mpg fantasy

Hmmm... I want you to respond well to my silly evaluation I have a fresh joke for you) What does a dog get when it finishes obedience school? A pet degree.

I suppose one small advantage for those of us that have stupid gassers is the ability to drive more than 50 miles without having to stop and recharge. When I take a 1000 mile trip, I stop for gas twice. It doesn''t matter if it''s 2 PM or 2 AM. Gas is always available and I stop for ten minutes and then I''m on my way. How long would it take your miracle mobile to trek 1000 miles? It''s great that you''re saving massive amounts of money on your choice of transportation, but there are severe limitations compared to the gassers. And buying one vehicle for trips and one for commuting isn''t economically feasible. By the way, ICEs have undergone tremendous progress in the last decade. Low emissions, 300 HP and 30 MPG aren''t mutually exclusive anymore. By the way, what is this magical car you own? Your numbers seem wildly optimistic compared to my short experience with a Prius. Your comment from 11/20 , "My daily driver electric vehicle fuel cost per mile is 0.1 cents per mile.", equates to 1000 miles for $1. That just doesn''t compute for me.

True efficiencies in motive power.. Talking Fuel BTUs to Horsepower hitting the road... ICE = 23% Hybrid = maybe 28% Electric = 6% to 12%.. Where does all that energy go tree huggers?.... If you know the answer to this question you would be qualified to have an opinion, but then your opinion about the eco-impact of an electric car would be shattered. The electric car scam is a bubble waiting for pin-pricks of reality to pop. I am proud to be one of those "pricks".

Has everyone forgotten the principle advantage of electric vehicles? It''s understood that if you are not constantly stopping and starting, climbing hills and rolling down the other side, then the simpest most direct power system is best. But electric vehicles regenerate "fuel" when stopping or rolling down hill. This is something an ICE can not do.

Let's try this again. Tesla Motors reports test results that its Roadster gets 9km per kWh of input electricity, or 5.5mi/kWh, for a car far more powerful than a Volt or a Metro. The claim that the Volt gets 40 miles on 8kWh, half its total battery capacity of 16 kWh, is more conservative than this. You report that the Volt turns on its gas engine well before the pack is fully discharged, combined with the fact that charging would stop before fully charged, to permit regen at any time, certainly makes the use of only half of the capacity for pure-electric operation plausible. In cost terms, at the typical US price of $0.10 per kWh, this comes out to 55 miles per dollar. (Your $0.22 per kWh is an aberration due to panic signing of long-term, high-cost contracts during the power crisis several years ago.) With a gas price of $2.50 per gallon (lower than the average over the past several years), a car would need to get over 135 mpg to match this fuel cost. In energy terms, a gallon of regular gas contains about 130 MJ per US gallon, or 36 kWh/gal. So a Geo Metro getting 36mpg is getting 1.0 miles/kWh of fuel input. It takes about 1.25J in raw crude to provide 1.0J in refined, delivered gasoline, so it is getting net 0.8 miles/kWh in "well to wheel" analysis. It takes about 2J of raw feedstock energy to produce 1J of delivered electrical energy, so the electric vehicle is getting 2.75 miles/kWh net. The equivalent mpg is therefore 36*(2.75/0.8) = 124 mpg. Of course, the numbers can change around significantly depending on the assumptions, but claims of equivalent mileage of well over 100mpg are plausible on reasonable assumptions. Whether this justifies the additional cost of the car is a different question entirely.

Arrgh -- it swallowed 90% of my comment, and I don't have time to do it over now..

You are making this much more complicated than it needs to be. Tesla Motors, for example, reports that it gets 9km per kWh of input electricity, or 5.5mi/kWh. This is basically consistent with the claims of 40 miles on half of the Volt''s 16kWh battery capacity (and there is agreement that the Volt goes off pure electric well before the pack is fully discharged

The "why don''t utilities store energy in batteries" discussion gets into a chicken-and-egg issue. Amory Lovins of the the Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org) has been discussing a "Smart Garage" concept which circumvents this problem. The basic concept is that an increasing number of electric vehicles creates a distributed energy storage system. If the vehicle can be charged "off peak", very little more is needed to allow it to be slightly discharged during peak hours. In effect the vehicle owner can choose to sell back some of his off-peak energy. This wouldn''t make much sens for owners who are routinely exceeding their electric-only range, but could be quite attractive for the many who don''t. What I find the most intriguing is that this approach provides a pathway to the eventual widespread use of load averaging without requiring the up-front investment in huge battery farms. Think about the aggregate storage capacity of millions of EVs...

In general, I agree with what Paul has said - "135mpg FANTASY". It is a fantasy to ignore the cost, value, or energy of electricity and just count the gasoline used for mpg, and that is what most of the adds and articals I''ve seen have alluded to. I''ve own a hybrid and I''ve saved on gasoline the cost of a new battery pack in only two years (compared to the 28mpg car I drove before). This is a REAL savings, I''ve kept track of every .01 gallon I''ve ever put in it. And I don''t expect to have to replace the batter for a long, long time to come (California requires the manufacturer to warrantee the battery for 10 years or 150,000 miles, not prorated, either). So a hybrid makes good sense to me. Lastly, many electric companies "time shift" with pumped water storage (specifically, Grand Coulee dam in Washington and Diamond lake in California). Who says you need batteries to do this? Water doesn''t weare out!

From the latest November Short Term Energy Outlook: "Electricity - Prices. The recent drop in power generation fuel costs has caused some utilities to reconsider the steep price increases announced this past summer." Electricity prices continue to be far more stable than liquid fuel prices. Want to get off the upchuck up-down-up yo-yo of gasoline prices and funding the middle east to give us imported oil? Move to electric drive and diversify fuel sources for transportation. It doesn't have to be all electric, nor everyone, nor instantly, but every person who moves to at least part electric makes a positive difference. Move to electric and make a Hummer more affordable (for a little while). Using less gasoline keeps gasoline prices lower than they would be otherwise, and electric allows us to do that with without any sacrifice. Quite the opposite - we save money and gain performance. Paul - will your next electric vehicle conversion be a Hummer?

@ Bellhop Yay. I have to agree with you that minor self directed behavior modification is easier and cheaper than buying a fun, new vehicle. I was just concerned that most folks don''t know what all the options are, there are so many new ones coming on line every year. We get into habits and then don''t think about them or notice what''s new. I''ve been recently noticing how much oil is spread all over and ground into the roads (mostly, those darker areas you see towards the lane center) (not cosidering what gets washed off by rain into our watersheds). I never would have given it a second thought if I didn''t now have a vehicle where I know it''s not me that''s dripping oil all over. I have a military friend who just bought a new, small hybrid SUV (32 mpg real world average). I''m happy, because he bought an appropriate vehicle that he actually uses to make and save money, such as for going in the mountains hunting for his winter meat, as opposed to the giant, never been off road, 65K, 10 mpg average, E85 gasser SUVs I see in the city with only one person in them, towing air. My friend''s job helps improve military fuel efficiency through electronics. If the big domestic automakers won''t step up to the plate more and faster, maybe we''ll have to get our electric vehicles in the future from Army Surplus stores. Last, using Paul''s reported understanding of the goverment methods, my electric vehicle gets 4,100 mpg. Cool. I get between 600 and 822 mpge using a cost method like Paul does. I like Paul''s method, but no matter how you slice it, 21st century real world production electric vehicles win big on fuel costs, national, one year average.

I am glad that Zero X Owner has found a solution that works for him. I am still looking for solutions. So far, I have saved substantially through route planning and timing. Yes, I make a lot of "off peak" use of roadways. As soon as I find something that makes sense for MY situation, I apply it!

Why aren't the utilities doing it? They are. Your question was a joke, right? There's no if. I'm making money doing it. Right this second. Some utilities are doing it , without batteries, by asking consumers to not use on peak power and use off peak power instead. Other utilites have been doing exactly what you've described, using batteries, for some time, only its called cost saving, not profit, when a company interacts with itself. Welcome to last century. Maybe by 2100, folks on this blog will know what industry has been doing in the last generation. It takes two to tango. This a better dance when you have at least one comuer (with an electric vehicle) and one utility. A utility would be willing to pay me less than peak rates for electric vehicle's power as it could make money from it by charging peak rates. I'm willing to sell it at less than peak rates as I got it at off peak rates. Get it now? The logical fallacy employed by the original questioner is called suppression of alternatives or a leading question. The textbook example is "When did you stop beating your wife?." Is someone here practicing to become a paralegal or are really that willfully uninformed?

@ Paul I applied your peculiar situation of 22 cents a kWh and $2.25 a gallon gas (wildly high on electric and wildly low on gasoline compared to my situation) to my electric vehicle. The resulting electric costs per mile are still less than half the gasoline costs for an equivalent gasser, using only your situation. You can be pretty confident all you want, but you''re wrong if you consider a real world, existing electric vehicle, such as mine. My real world electric vehicle, in your situation, is way cheaper to run on electricity than a comporable gasser is and way, way, way cheaper to run on electricity in my situation. Your choice to use some yet to be (if it all) manufactured vehicle, no earlier than 2011, with today''s unusually low gasoline costs (rather than at least a one year average with a five year trend applied out three years) strikes me as at least as dishonest as GM''s attempt to game the concept of mpg.

If it makes money to buy off-peak power and store it in a battery and then sell it back to the utility at peak rates, why doesn''t the utilities do this?

@ Bellhop As we substitute away from gas drive to electric drive, demand for electricity goes up mostly in the night time, when most electric vehicle owners charge their vehicles as they sleep (at least I do - how about you with yours?), when there is spare capacity. As there is spare capacity at that time, there''s no effect on prices. With vehicle to grid (a cheap inverter - I got mine at a big box store) electric vehicles owners can sell some of their extra juice during peak demand during the day between their commutes, when they are not using their vehicle (I like that money that I get for that). Since the vehicle is supplying electricity during peak demand, the price of electricity goes down. How about that - electric vehicles cause electric prices to go down from their power demand smoothing capabilities, which means less inefficient instant system on-peak investment required from utilities in the future. Ask power utility researchers, such as EPRI, if you don''t believe me. I thought my earlier blog references to off peak rates would have made this clear, but apparently not, so I''m spelling it out more here. This is too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Next.

Re: Power pack life. ya, whatever. I've done all the math, over and over and over, and seen how my power packs perform in the real world. Even if I changed my power pack out every three years, my electric vehicle still costs less than the gasoline equivalent in every way calculable that I've thought of (dust to dust, vehcile life, up front, maintenenace and depreactiation, resale vale, fuel costs, operating costs, etc., etc.). In addition, each time I swap the pack, in seconds, I get a performance improvement (more range) as part of the deal. Just another benefit that doesn't exist with gassers that I can add to my win-win list. Remember the FUD about power pack life in Priuses when they first came out? There are hundreds of Vancouver based Prius taxis with well over 100,000 miles on them, years and years later, with no power pack issues. Also, the novelty of beating a Maserati off the line never wears thin.

@ CrunchMaster They are. The Prius is among the top 10 best selling cars in the US. The only major production numbers vehicle that posted both month over month and year over year sales increases last month was the hybrid Highlander. Market penetration takes time. Automobile lifecycles are about 20 years and full market penetration takes about 100 years (unless you still use a horse, you holdout). It's only 3% now for hybrids after the first 10 years. That's huge penetration. That'll keep growing, regardless, once people can get car loans again.

@ Paul I still like your method of cost per mile. Yes, John, as prices change, your cost changes - you notice price differences at different gas stations, so this allows you to a meaningful economic choices when you consider a new vehicles'' fuel eficciency (on cost). Where you live and what you use for fuel matters. My daily driver electric vehicle fuel cost per mile is 0.1 cents per mile. I''ve done the math several hundred times now. The worst I can get it the cost go, under any ridiculous assumptions about my power use or electric rates, is 0.6 cents per mile. That feels pretty darn insubstantial to me. That some day when CA gas is 5 dollars a gallon and PG&E off peak cost is 7 cents per kWh already happened - this past summer. In fact, off peak rates go all the way down to 5 cents per kWh, according to PG&E. (www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/shared/environment/pge/cleanair/ev4pt2.pdf and www.pge.com/tariffs/doc/E-9.doc) The rest of you are hopelessly off-topic. There is no debate. The question at hand is can you directly compare gas to electric, using cost as your efficiency measure. The answer is yes. As Paul is showing us - a) electric is always much cheaper that gasoline per mile and b) how much cheaper depends very much on where and when you live. Gasoline is at very low prices now, due to a free falling economy, so expect electric to only get much, much cheaper relative to gasoline, as is was over the last two years, and still is.

Continuing on the battery issue. Would you be happy if your gas tank shrank by 10% every year? That is the reality of battery capacity for something that will be recharged every one or two days.

30 year battery life?????? Wow, where did you get that number? Life cycles on most secondary cells are more in the 500 to 1000 charge-discharge cycles at best before the capacity drops below 50% of the new battery. I predict in the next few years, there will be many unhappy, disillusioned hybrid and EV owners. Soon the novelty will wear off and the consumer will understand the total life cycle cost of owning this type of vehicle.

I was only trying to be "green" by operating my engine at its most efficient point of operation.

Allright all you hybrid-electric cool-aid drinkers, if hybrid/electric vehicles are so wonderful, why doesn't everyone use them? Why hasn't the worlds auto makers produced a plethora of products to leverage this wonderful, miracle technology to increase their profits? Why hasn't battery technology been developed to the point of allowing this pipe-dream to happen now? Because it is beyond our present technological capability to produce such a product that humans will want to use, be able to pay for, allow for some level of perceived safety, and have infrastructure to support it. It will happen, but not any time soon. Judging from history and the past propensity for government intrusion into the private sector, I would estimate approximatly 20-30 years before we will see any significant entry of hybrid or electric vehicle technology into the market. Oh, there will be the fad vehicles (golf carts), but real vehicles in sufficient numbers are still a little ways off. Much, Much more oil, please! ICE rules, hybrid-electric drools!

How is the average consumer to sort through all of these "facts" when engineers cannot agree? It should be pointed out though, that energy sources "track" each other cost-wise. When the cost of one source goes way up, demand shifts to another, which then goes up. Electric rates are artificially low now, but that will change very soon as regulation is phased out. If too many consumers are charging vehicles from the grid, then we are looking at upgrades to the entire electric grid infrastructure - very expensive. I would have to upgrade my own electric service in order to charge electric vehicles. What worries me the most is that in the rush to adapt new technologies we may choose those technologies that actually consume even more energy "cradle to grave". www.tinaja.com has some interesting calculations under "Energy Fundamentals". [I am in no way affiliated with that web site.]

"As to mpg ratings on the electric portion of a car, lets just go to cost per mile and forget gallons and kwh." This would be the worst way to rate a vehicle and make comparisons almost impossible. If the station I usually go to is 2.09 this week and one across the road is 2.15 should my vehicle ratings change? If you can''t do the math for your situation you should not be driving a car.