Mad Mike
Well-known member
Encouraging.
Replacing a smoky auto rickshaw with an electric one is probably better than replacing a small diesel car.
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Feds plan to melt ICE
- Thread starter Mad Mike
- Start date
Replacing a smoky auto rickshaw with an electric one is probably better than replacing a small diesel car.
Cleaner air is a huge incentive there.
Aqauvit ( powerful booze ) , the aerosol spray can , invented in Norway , the best crude oil in Europe , very good chocolate . Salmon sushi , a Norwegian thing . So some stuff
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bigpoppa
Well-known member
Not sure what you mean by this
China certainly is an interesting case, being the sole exception, but the overwhelming majority of EV sales are in western countries, even then, I suspect its not due to consumer demand, but lots of arm twisting/forced legislation, taxation, rebates, vast subsidies etc.
(missing from the list are: USA, India, Russia, All of africa, All of latin america)
Electric car use by country - Wikipedia
Im also not entirely sure just how socially responsible, or environmentally friend EVs are(battery disposal, slave labor mining etc).
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Short answers. Use as the basis for your own digging.
Batteries will be recycled (already starting to happen) when enough EVs reach end-of-life that it becomes economically viable to do so. An existing, if worn-out, battery, contains more lithium and nickel and all the other goodies in greater concentration than any natural raw material does.
The "slave labor" argument is mostly (not entirely) nonsense. Cobalt mostly comes as a byproduct of copper mining, using normal mechanized mining techniques. There's a town in Ontario called Cobalt ... take a guess why it's called that. Even if we grant that a certain amount of raw materials are coming from a third-world country, what's the best way to (eventually) lift that country out of being a third-world country into becoming a developing country? (1) Abandon them and buy none of their products. Or (2) Buy some stuff from them, thus sending them some money, while simultaneously urging them to improve their labour practices.
We do not live in a perfect world. There is no such thing as perfection. In order to make things better, maybe we have to pass through the stage of being good-but-not-perfect first. Perfection will never be achieved.
I invite comparison between copper and nickel mining (which is something that is done "once" and the end product is good for the lifetime of whatever it ends up in, plus more lifetimes if it is effectively recycled afterward), and oil-sands mining (which produces a product that can only be used once and has to be repetitively done throughout the lifetime of whatever is using it).
Here's another thing to chew on. A normal combustion-engine vehicle weighs about 1.5 tonnes. It uses, let's say for easy numbers that are not too far from normality, 8 litres of petrol per 100 km, which is 6.5 kg per 100 km. So in its lifetime of let's say 250,000 km, it uses 16,250 kg (over 16 tonnes) of fuel. The resources consumed through its lifetime usage by far dominate over the resources used for its original manufacture. And a fair bit of the resources used to originally manufacture it, can be recycled (and the metals are). The fuel is one-and-done.
Yes, the EV consumes electricity, too ... but we can, and do, produce that mostly by means other than fossil fuel. CER – Provincial and Territorial Energy Profiles – Ontario
On the recycling front, there is a very good argument that if a manufacturer chooses to be pig-headed and actively combat repair and recycling (cough, tesla), they should be ineligible for any government subsidies or programs for green vehicles. It isn't that hard to design things for repair/reuse. As a start, don't pot all of the expensive bits in undissovable plastic. Conformal coat if desired or use a product that can be safely and easily dissolved with a solvent. That cleans up the back end substantially.
Fun fact: Not far from Cobalt is the ghost town of Silver Center... take a guess why it's called that.
bigpoppa
Well-known member
Turns out the overwhelming majority of cobalt used today is from "artisanal" mining (fancy words for slave labor)
around the 5:00 mark is where you want to listen (professor who went down there and wrote the book on the subject):
Also from the government of canada website:
natural-resources.canada.ca
Not judging anyone, Id still be first in line to buy a ducati Electric motorbike if they ever made one, but also not one to shy away from reality
around the 5:00 mark is where you want to listen (professor who went down there and wrote the book on the subject):
Also from the government of canada website:
Cobalt facts
natural-resources.canada.ca
Not judging anyone, Id still be first in line to buy a ducati Electric motorbike if they ever made one, but also not one to shy away from reality
Oh, gosh. Don't believe ANYthing you get via Joe Rogan without confirmation from another source.
www.cobaltinstitute.org
Cobalt mining "exists". But there's no way someone, or even a whole bunch of people, chopping away with a hammer is going to keep up with mechanised production. Even in the Congo. (Information about this, and what's being done to help, is provided at the website above.)
If the cobalt really troubles you that much, LFP batteries contain none of it. (Ford mach e base model, Tesla 3 and Y standard range, among others) - The energy density is a little lower than other types, which is why these are in the lower-range versions.
The standard version of the BYD Seagull (China) is the first production EV using a sodium-ion battery. No lithium, no cobalt. Again, energy content is a bit lower. The optional higher-capacity battery is a lithium-ion type.
EV charging stations are battery-chemistry-agnostic.
Cobalt Life Cycle | Cobalt Institute
Your go-to resource for all things cobalt life cycle, covering its significance, extraction techniques, environmental impact, and where it is mined.
www.cobaltinstitute.org
Cobalt mining "exists". But there's no way someone, or even a whole bunch of people, chopping away with a hammer is going to keep up with mechanised production. Even in the Congo. (Information about this, and what's being done to help, is provided at the website above.)
If the cobalt really troubles you that much, LFP batteries contain none of it. (Ford mach e base model, Tesla 3 and Y standard range, among others) - The energy density is a little lower than other types, which is why these are in the lower-range versions.
The standard version of the BYD Seagull (China) is the first production EV using a sodium-ion battery. No lithium, no cobalt. Again, energy content is a bit lower. The optional higher-capacity battery is a lithium-ion type.
EV charging stations are battery-chemistry-agnostic.
One problem with EV's is that with today's technology the driver must, to some degree, plan their usage so they don't get stuck in line waiting for a charge. Most drivers today can't plan what lane to be in to get the required exit. Think squirrels.
Start every day with a full tank and there are only a few days a year that I would need to think about power before returning home.
Sadly, morons have a lot of money and don't quickly learn. I know of one that drove from niagara to their cottage and arrived at their cottage basically empty. No level 2 at their cottage. Plugged it into a normal receptacle. Panicked when the car told them it wasn't going to be full for the drive home. No planning at all. You can't fix stupid.
you never really want to be full, because it's counter productive to your time (like modern smartphones, at around 80% battery it slows charging to preserve battery life). rented an early model s for my wifes bday last year on Turo (great experience using the service btw, would recommend). and part of the contract was to return the vehicle charged. think i paid $20 at a supercharger and waited about 45mins for an 80%ish charge, owner said that would suffice
I have a suspicion about what you saw. Vegas is prime rental-car territory. Rental-car agencies in the USA are starting to have some EVs to rent, but that doesn't mean the people picking them up have any clue about what to do with them.
I've said this before: EVs, for now, in most places, aren't good rental cars. The people renting them typically aren't going to know what to do with them, how to find a charging station (if there are any that work in the area), aren't going to be able to connect to the charging station and get it going even if they do find one, etc. In a strange place, I wouldn't want to deal with it, and I have an EV. Someone not familiar with them (as most tourists wouldn't be) ... Not good.
You should never use a DC fast-charger to charge past 80% unless absolutely necessary - as in, there's no other charging station available from here to your destination and it's beyond the range that 80% is going to take you.
On a Tesla, any of them, it shouldn't be more than 20 or 30 minutes to get from some low-but-not-ridiculous charge level, to 80%, at a Tesla fast-charger, unless the car has sat overnight in below-freezing and you went straight from there to the fast-charger giving no time for the battery to warm up.
Electrical isn't hard to understand if you can do simple math and physics. However some people think you can heat a barn with a 120 volt ceramic heater if you turn it all the way up.
Thermostats became popular in the 50's. We don't have many people alive that predate them (not many experienced adulthood pre-thermostat). There is still a decent percentage of the population that thinks the higher you set it, the faster your house heats up.
Add in all the marketing woo woo about heaters based on size of space and some being more efficient than others (even though the vast majority are all 1500W heaters and by definition all electric heaters are 100% efficient) and you can see how people without a solid understanding of fundamentals get lost in the weeds.
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