You know those monster battery packs powering electric cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt? It turns out they protect more than just the environment, helping to earn them the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s highest safety ratings:
As small cars by length, width, and passenger capacity, the Volt and the Leaf might seem at a glance to be at greater risk in an accident. But there’s one key thing that sets them apart from other small cars: their battery packs are extremely heavy. In fact, the Leaf and Volt tip the scales at 3,370 pounds and 3,760 pounds, respectively, which the IIHS says puts them on an even playing field with midsize and larger sedans like the Nissan Altima and Chevrolet Impala, which weigh 3,200 pounds and 3,580 pounds, respectively.
“The Leaf and Volt’s extra mass gives them a safety advantage over other small cars,” IIHS chief administrative officer Joe Nolan said in a statement. “These electric models are a win-win for fuel economy and safety.”
Now if only I had a garage in which to plug in an electric car. And, you know, the money to buy a new car.
And that extra mass makes them a menace to every OTHER car on the road. How’s your brakes? How’s your handling ability? Well, at least they won’t tip over.
Batteries are as big an ecological catastrophe as oil, maybe more.
Just making sure I’m clear on this –
Extra mass is a good thing for safety if it’s in an electric car.
Extra mass is a bad thing for safety if it’s in an SUV.
I’m all for using electric power in automobiles for a multitude of reasons, but I would disagree that the “monster battery packs” in these cars and all of the nasty stuff contained in batteries is really doing a whole lot to “protect the environment”.
Expanding on part of Fnarf’s sentiment…how much juice do these electric cars use? Most of the energy made in the US comes from coal plants–how much CO2, methane, NOx and other pollutants or greenhouse gases are needed to power these electric vehicles? Does it just shift the environmental concerns of auto emissions to the locations of power plants?
Not to mention the mining and disposal concerns of the heavy metals, etc used in making the batteries. (Exploitation of natural resources, especially within undeveloped countries and where that money goes, disposal leading to environmental contamination in various parts of the world, etc.)
But, this does reduce our reliance on the volatile oil market.
There must be papers published on the life-cycle assessment of fossil-fuel vs. electric cars, I just haven’t looked them up and read them yet.
We should do away with batteries and just put electrical tracks down the middle of every lane like slot car tracks. All the electrocution deaths would also help with the excessive idiot population, as well.
We should just give up on everything. Despair is the only logical option
It really depends on the battery used and the design and location.
Batteries allow you to shift where the energy is produced. They also allow you to transform one energy source to another (e.g. electricity could be from stored water pumped up an incline by wind, solar – or from heat recapture – or even trickle charge from rooftop/south solar panels).
All energy has negatives. Externalities. EVERY. SINGLE. FORM.
(damn, hamster powered car ftw)
@7, and by “Americans”, of course, you mean “humans”. Everybody drives cars, or wants to. Car ownership in China, India, and other parts of the developing world is exploding. Once real income reaches $5,000 per capita, widespread car ownership becomes almost a given.
@4, I’d be much more concerned about your second paragraph than your first. Electric cars are indeed extremely efficient energy users. But the mining of minerals and disposal of batteries is a major global problem. Your laptop computer/phone/tablet/ipod/etc. is a bigger one, but cars will catch up.
Read “The Trouble with Lithium” (warning: large PDF): http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects…
It is truly unfortunate that the production of bullshit by Will in Seattle is not a recoverable energy form.
By riding on your bike, you consume food which is grown using non-sustainable farming practices involving the use of potash and other fertilizers, including the use of pollutants from the factory farms which kill off the salmon.
Everything is interconnected, Fnarf.
You’re just making choices. Usually bad ones, because our system doesn’t provide the bads (negatives) as inputs to market decisions, so pollution is costed out at about 1/20th total value on an economic good/bad scale.
Will, is there any topic on which you know anything? I know you like to chime in and not be left out of the conversation, but I was wondering if, in fact, there was something you knew besides how to type. Just curious.
@11, you are the biggest idiot in the history of the universe.
One of the mistakes you make ALL THE FREAKING TIME is thinking that because you glanced at some gee-whiz thing in the popular press for two seconds, and failed to understand, you now have a grasp on the worldwide ramifications. You’ve done this over and over; for example, your suggestion that because there are local shops that do plug-in hybrid conversions, one at a time, this work is a good solution for the billion or so cars that exist in the world.
Likewise, you are here avoiding the fact that the mining of lithium for batteries, which is increasing at 25% a year, is already reaching the limits of what can be processed by current methods. And further expansion of this mining is going to make the Gulf oil spill look like a single used tissue in comparison. IT DOES NOT SCALE.
But instead of reading the article, or knowing anything about anything, you prattle on meaninglessly about “everything is connected” — just like I did when I was fifteen and on my thirtieth bong hit of the night out in the woods behind Chuck’s house. “All energy has negatives” is MEANINGLESS TRUISM. You have no idea what those negatives are or how to measure or compare them.
In short, SHUT THE FUCK UP. For your own sake. You are MAKING YOURSELF LOOK RIDICULOUS. EVERYONE ON SLOG IS LAUGHING AT YOU.
We like our Chevy Volt. It’s convenient when we need a small car – parallel parking, navigating the Berkeley hills. Not really an “econut”, got it more out of curiosity.
But, I still prefer my Toyota Tundra. Fuel economy is poor, but it feeds my anti social personality. While the Other Half & I swap between the Volt & the minivan, nobody drives my truck.
Sadly, though, as the stay at home parent, I find myself usually limited to the 10 year old minivan. Nothing screams, “total geek & completey unsexy” than a middle aged parent in a minivan.
Glad to hear the Volt does well in crash tests. I can assure you that skis – not so much.
I love you so fucking much Fnarf.
Fnarf’s right, and about more than Will’s pointless ramblings. Batteries are kind of a shit deal – they’re heavy, expensive, and don’t last very long either. Hopefully we can come up with some better methods because oil’s a shit deal too.
Electric cars are the dream of power utilities and makers of generating equipment like GE.
Instead of having you pay all day for refrigerators, lights and heat, they get you pay all during the night to recharge your leaky, heavy battery car with energy made from coal, or if renewable, stolen for other, better uses, and driving up the costs of one the few affordable necessities.
No greater scam has ever been conceived than the battery car. So of course it’s fully supported by the current Democrat administration.
So lets make the batteries even heavier for better safety eh?
Serioulys, if the batteries were lighter, it would probably run faster. Allow you to pass a slow moving car on the highway, which is a main concern for those who refuse to switch from their gas guzzlers.
You know what really kills the want-want electric car buzz for me? The batteries. The fucking lithium batteries.
You know how your 2-year-old laptop has about half the battery storage capacity now as it had when it was all new and shiny and had that new-plastic aroma? That’s your car in two years.
And, yeah, I can buy a new knockoff no-brand laptop battery on eBay for $30, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to do that for your car.
Those puppies are expensive, and maybe half the price of the whole car. If you’ve got to budget $15,000 for a new battery pack every two to three years, it completely fucks the economics. As for the environment, that’s a huge amount of waste.
The tradeoff for battery weight is volatility (safety) and range (power).
(source: various scientific papers on Chinese, European, Canadian, British, French, American vehicles and battery/safety and battery/power)
If Americans either a. lived in a small country and used trains or bus to get around between urban centers b. stopped insisting on high power consumption for driving c. weren’t such whiners
… then we could talk about this reasonably.
But we can’t because you’re all upset that gasoline will cost $6 a gallon by 2015.
Adapt or die.
@20 replacement battery costs are projected at approx. $6000 to $8000 USD at the time of end of lifespan, based on market economics and adoption rates.
@21, ah, it’s the old “various scientific papers” story, is it?
EVERYONE HERE IS LAUGHING AT YOU, WILL.
“The tradeoff for battery weight is volatility (safety) and range (power)” isn’t even remotely germane to the story or the discussion here. It sounds like something you lifted off of some website without bothering to figure out if it even related to this discussion or not — as you always do, in your perpetually doomed project to convince people here that you have a clue or would recognize a clue if it fell down your pants leg.
As for “small countries”, Luxembourg, about as small a country as you can find, has a higher per-capita car ownership rate than the US. So does Iceland, New Zealand, Italy, France, Germany, Australia, AND CANADA. Oh noes! Facts are confusing!
Your $6,000 to $8,000 number does not take into account the dramatic increase in costs if lithium mining is extended beyond current capacity. It only applies in a world in which there are relatively few electric cars. Even without those cars, the cost of lithium is going up rapidly because of cell phones and computers.
I’ve made this point now three times here and you haven’t picked up on a single word of it. Various scientific papers, my ass. You are a donkey.
Luxembourg is a finance and insurance capital, with a large surfeit of government and military workers. So, unsurprisingly, it has a high per-capita car ownership rate.
Seriously, if you’d actually travel a bit, you might not be such an idiot.
price projections are internal Ford (used to own direct shares) and GM (backchannel) numbers. I think they covered some of the details in the auto show coverage for Japan and France.
As a car nerd, I’ve been following the evolution of the Volt (and the leaf, and all the conventional hybrids) pretty closely. So I can answer quite a few of these questions.
@1: The Volt has excellent brakes; GM’s ABS system is one of the best in the industry, and it rides on pretty wide tires for a car of it’s size.
As for handling ability, Car & Driver had it at over .8g on the skidpad, making it competitive with entry-level sports cars in emergency maneuvers. That outperforms most compacts and hybrids, probably due to it’s excellent center of gravity, and GM’s passion for sticking a LOT of rubber under their cars.
@2: Extra mass can be ok in a “car”. Cars have stricter safety requirements than SUV’s and light trucks; their bumpers are all at the same height, and are made to line up properly with the height of the side-impact beams installed in car doors. SUV’s not that much.
And we’re not actually talking about all that much extra mass here. At ~3800 lbs, the Volt is still lighter than a typical 2-ton full-size car like the Crown Vic, or even a compact pickup or SUV – those little Toyota Tacomas tip the scales at around 4200 lbs, while a high-end full size pickup can be 6000 lbs or more, empty.
Jesus Christ.
@3) To date, every hybrid battery pack produced (that is not still in use) has been recycled. The automotive industry is no stranger to recycling programs, and these battery packs are far too valuable to end up in landfills, no matter their condition.
Due to the way the on-board computer manages the battery charge (i.e never allowed to fully charge or fully deplete), we’re still only guessing at what their true lifespan will be. Some of the first generation Prius & Insight hybrids have been on the road for over a decade, and there has not been a single report of a worn-out battery pack. The only packs that have been replaced are those with mechanical damage from serious collisions.
@4: Assuming the a worst-case scenario for electricity generation (coal w/ steam turbine), a full-electric like the Volt or Leaf causes about half the CO2 production of a Prius. This is mostly due to the higher efficiency of an electric motor vs. a piston engine, as well as the lack of power loss in the vehicle’s transmission (the volt and leaf have no transmission in the traditional sense).
@8: Hi Will! The Volt and Leaf are using a Lithium-ion battery pack, as are most of the new hybrid models, like the Ford Fusion hybrid. Toyota, however, is still using NiMH battery packs in the Prius (they’ve largely transitioned to Lithium for the Japanese market, though). Li batteries allow for more energy storage per pound vs. NiMH.
@19: The Volt’s 0-60 and 60-90 acceleration times are pretty decent (9.2 & 13.8). While no one is going to confuse it for a Camaro, it’s in a class above most econoboxes, comparable to most V-6 powered sedans. If I had to convince a piston-engine loyalist to go green, this is the vehicle I would have them test drive.
@20: See my post @27 regarding battery pack life. Empirical evidence, baby! Cars =/= cell phones and laptops
@28, 29: you still have to make the batteries the first time, which means you still have to mine the lithium. Lithium isn’t just lying around on the ground; you have to dig up the ore and then electrolyze it, which is extremely energy-intensive. I’ve heard that more than half of the lifetime energy use of a lithium battery can come in the manufacturing process — not the repeated charging process. Which makes your figures about CO2 suspect. And CO2 is far from the worst thing about lithium mining, which is problematic today in it’s close-to-tapped-out state, and going to get massively worse to meet future needs. But hey, fuck ’em, it’s only Bolivia, right?
In fact, lithium car batteries DO equal phone and computer batteries. They’re just bigger.
@30 In laptops and cell phones, the batteries are fully charged and then allowed to run completely dead. This dramatically shortens the lifespan of the battery, but the theory is that the device will be obsolete within a year or two anyway, so it’s better to get the extra charge capacity in the short term than the extra lifespan in the long term.
In a hybrid or electric vehicle, the onboard computer manages the battery charge, never allowing them to go over 90% charge or below 25%. This extends the life of the battery pack, at the expense of 30% of the capacity. We’re still not sure exactly how long they’ll last like this, but based on testing so far it’s at least a decade.
My CO2 figure was only for day-to-day operation of the vehicle. But if you want to talk about a dust-to-dust CO2 figure, we can go there.
The world’s largest lithium deposit has recently been found in previously unexplored Afghani mountains, which completely changes the mining game. Yeah, Afghanistan. So, uh, once that war thing ends over there, the lithium shortage is over.
Mining it is dirty, filthy, and ugly to be sure. Getting enough lithium together for a 375 lb battery pack is not without it’s environmental consequences. However, oil is not a pretty business either. For every gallon of fuel that makes it into an American gas pump, another dozen gallons are used extracting it, transporting it, and refining it. The CO2 footprint of a gallon of gas is enormous, even before you burn it. And these new tar-sand explorations are even worse.
So which is it going to be? 300-some pounds of recyclable lithium once in a blue moon, or a 40,000 pounds of unrecoverable oil every year?
Supreme Ruler, Your Most Imperial-ness (18), I think your tin foil crown is on a bit too tight. If anything, EV chargers are not like hot tubs: They present some sticky challenges to utilities, particularly when they advance to the point of vehicle-to-grid operation. That’s problematic from both an equipment and safety standpoint.
But you are probably right about GE.
And fnarf, I fear for your health. You get so very worked up at Will, and you’re not getting any younger. A stroke is a terrible way to go, dear. Please try to calm yourself, or I shall have to drive over in my Leaf and sedate you (just kidding. I don’t have a Leaf, and I’m not qualified to sedate anyone)