So to paraphrase this….trying to solve the biggest problem with EV’s is foolish. Really?

We are starting to transition to lithium batteries in the UPS world. While not as subject to environmental issues or vibration, we don't see any issues. We will see though,

I’m just glad I’m winding down my engineering career towards early retirement and not going to get caught up in the attempted transition to alternative power.
I’m still skeptical if electric can work economically for most truck use vocations. Cars will be a hard sell also to most.
I’ve heard there is work going on towards development of fuel cells for truck use but I know that’s no panacea either.
I remember a time maybe 10 or 11 years ago where a new 50 mpg fuel economy standard was being instituted by the then president. I was talking to my brother in laws dad, who was a CEO of a non automotive related company telling him I didn’t see any way the automakers could achieve that. His response was “well they’d better!!”
I later thought I should have told him the government should mandate that cancer deaths need to be cut 75% by 2025 or they were going to cut off Medicare and Medicaid payments to all Doctors, hospitals and drug companies, then it will surely happen right? Why not, cancer sucks and we need to cure it. Just pass a bill is all that’s needed.
I’m not sure what happened with that 50 mpg standard, as looking around at the cars and trucks sold today I’m sure we aren’t getting anywhere near an average of 50 mpg. Lot of smoke and mirrors going on, a lot of postering by blowhard politicians putting out policies they claim will make great strides forward but leave so many outs, loopholes and credits, but years later we see not much really has changed.
In the end the consumer buys what they want and there’s only so much government and manufacturers can do to alter demand.
I recently bought a rare “malaise era” Mopar and it inspired me to work on setting up a display of Malaise era special interest cars for a large car show next year. It’s been really interesting studying that era in automotive history where engineers were tasked with meeting strict new emissions standards, crash standards and improve fuel economy all at the same time, performance of cars and trucks sucked for years while engineers worked at figuring things out. It was mid to late 80s before they really started to get things dialed in, 12 to 15 years.
I don’t think the quality of engineering acumen has improved now to the point we can make dramatic progress today compared to what it took in earlier times in history.
Probably opposite. Look at aviation for example. Read accounts of the Skunk Works in the 50s and 60s where the engineers then got out incredible huge advancement aircraft like the U2, A12 and SR71 in remarkably short times.
Then look at the time it took to get the F35 out more recently and what a cluster that project was. Pretty embarrassing.
Time will tell and maybe I’ll be wrong but I don’t think we are going from 1% EV cars where we are in 2021 to a majority EV anytime soon. Don’t get me wrong, the % will increase, but it will be gradual.

So to paraphrase this….trying to solve the biggest problem with EV’s is foolish. Really? [/quote]

Yep - really. Ask yourself this: why even the push to transition to EV's in the first place? I'll wait..............


The most common answers are typically:

1: We are running out of oil. (not true at all - so that's not valid).
2: Climate change caused by pollution & other man-made emissions. Believe it if you want, but I don't buy it. Mankind & everything we do on this planet equates about to a grain of sand on an elephant's ass.

I believe the real reason for the big push to EV's is about one thing mainly - MONEY. Plus, I think we have a bunch of restless engineers & auto/truck manufacturers. Not satisfied with just restyling & support engineering from year-to-year, I believe they got together & decided to push an entire new concept. The "need" now to completely re-tool, re-engineer, & create a whole new network of supplier products is a huge challenge, & creates a whole new industry, albeit unnecessary. I just can't believe they got people to buy into all of this. It's like the big lie.

I think there are gems of wisdom in this that I totally agree with. As to engineering, I look at something like the Nordberg hoists that were used at the Homestake mine. Acceleration control was accomplished by a tapered drum, all mechanical, super reliable. If that hoist was designed today, it'd have a VFD and a load of other electronics that would require constant tinkering to work. Just think, the atom bomb was designed without any electronic computers and worked. They couldn't get a telescope to work because somebody didn't know the difference between imperial and metric units. Sad.

Well most people here know that I lost my 69 Dart GTS and my wife's 78 Pontiac T/A to a lithium ion battery I just put in my drill charger, this was in 2013. I doubt the technology has gotten that much better by now. I worked for Motorola Battery from 1995-98 and could see issues then, and this was just with a little cell phone battery...

while tech has certainly expanded , in 1980 i bought a dodge colt, and if memory serves me, i was getting hway mileage of 35ish.... a similar sized car today probably would exceed that mileage, but not by a great amount... as said above... smoke and mirrors...

If you were to get t boned by a pickup in the colt you would probably die, todays car would likely allow you walk away. But yeah I agree, we had super high MPG cars in the 80s.

Reminds me of the GM Geo Metro, damn things got incredible mpg, but were death traps.

As far as battery tech (and electric motors) look what drones can do. If someone said a few years back that we would be playing with drones that could fly thousands of feet up, miles out, with great cameras recording everything I would have said hogwash.

And it is easy to find video's online of drones catching on fire and falling out of the sky...

On paper, electrics seem like a good idea for fleet operators whose rigs come home every night. School buses, in-city delivery, etc. However, then you have a huge infrastructure cost for charging. Let's say you have a fleet of 50 trucks, and all require 230V/100 amp charging over night. How much fuel can you buy for the cost of a dedicated substation that can re-power 50 trucks or buses? (Not sure the amperage requirement, but 230/100 is not far off.)

Is it? I just looked by searching drone fire and I see a bunch of vids about drones being used to fight fires and gather info.

You need to put in "drones catching on fire" and you will see plenty of posts and pictures...

I don’t need to do anything. Battery tech has come a long way and is advancing. I don’t own an EV, likely never will, but the technology is impressive.

Electric cars cannot follow the same successful build plan as a drone. A drone is made to be as light as possible to do a specific job. A car or truck is simply already heavy due to the battery- but then factor in all the mandated designs to make it crash safe plus the bells and whistles to make it appeal to the masses and you have a HEAVY lunk to move around. Battery tech is amazing and has made leaps and bounds in just the past 20 years. I just learned- according to the Manhattan Institute that 500,000lbs of earth/material must be extracted to produce an EV battery that weighs 1,000 lbs. This will certainly rape and pillage the planet where the mining takes place.

I can say with 99% certainty that government led opposition to mining ANYTHING inside the USA is higher than ever.

USA had the first Lithium mine on earth at Gastonia NC. The soft drink 7-Up was invented there.
It is now closed, but not because the ore ran out.

USA had the first rare earth metals mine in Mountain Pass Ca near Nevada border.
It is struggling to re-open.

The joke: If a miner did not mine it, or a farmer grow it, you do not have it,
is not understood by many citizens.

And then there's this company - stock symbol MP. I believe it is booming right now & in the years to come - it HAS to - we need to get away from China as the main source for these rare earth materials. I recently added a bunch of MP shares to my portfolio. I think we will see a resurgence in the mining of materials like these. More & more politicians are realizing that we cannot afford to allow China to hold us hostage anymore.


Company Overview

Sector
Basic Materials
Industry
Metals & Mining
MP Materials Corp., formerly Fortress Value Acquisition Corp., is a producer of rare earth materials. The Company owns and operates the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility (Mountain Pass), which is a rare earth mining and processing site of scale in the Western Hemisphere. The Company is focused on producing Neodymium-Praseodymium (NdPr), Lanthanum, and cerium oxides and carbonates. The Company's NdPr magnets are used in many technologies, including electric vehicles, drones, defense systems, medical equipment, wind turbines, robotics and many others.
Headquarters
6720 Via Austi Parkway, Suite 450
Las Vegas, NV
89119
mpmaterials.com

Just read this article a few minutes ago - it's long, but well worth reading if you are interested in the EV topic. Very timely:


Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?

BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET

Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota
and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with
each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting
12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016
it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago.
It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better
than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said:
“If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to
make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.

The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current
trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push
4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling
to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way.
It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.


YOU CAN IGNORE REALITY, BUT YOU CANNOT IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING REALITY!

The article does give some good points and reflects my thinking.
My local Meijers store let Tesla install charging stations in the back of its parking lot, and recently the number of stations increased to maybe double what it was.
Usually when I go shopping there I’ll see 25% of the stations being used. When I look at the Teslas as I drive by, most have no one in them so I wonder where the drivers wander off to. Shopping at Meijers or having a snack at nearby restaurants maybe? Mostly the same cars will still be plugged in there when I leave.
I went there the weekend after Thanksgiving and almost every station was in use. A few more cars and people would have been having to wait, on top of having to kill 20-30 minutes at least for a charge.
And that’s with around 1% of the US car fleet EV.
I just don’t see how things can change dramatically overnight or in 10 years for that matter.
I’ve found the old adage “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans” to fit in with my philosophy concerning EV. Things may seem to make sense and governments may push something, but what happens may end up not being changed like the best laid plan was.
I’m involved in general aviation and there’s been plans and directives to get lead out of aviation gasoline for 25+ years, but despite a lot of money spent on research and money spent trying to develop a drop in no lead gasoline so far the effort has failed and leaded avgas is still what almost all reciprocating engine planes use. Getting lead out of gas should have been easy right?
When I started in the truck industry 10 years ago there was a lot of push toward propane to replace diesel, and it has only ended up a minor player in truck fuels. A handful of fleets use it and the refuse companies often embraced it because they could get their own fuel from their landfills, but otherwise not much enthusiasm came about in the industry.
My company developed a propane option for school buses, and given how similar propane engines and gasoline engines are, and the problems diesel has had since complex emissions control systems have been required, increasing numbers of customers started asking for gasoline powered buses. It was fairly easy to adapt the propane configurations to gasoline, and then gasoline powered school buses were back in the product line. Imagine that..
Time will tell how powering cars will evolve, but any company devoting all their resources and commitment to just one solution is taking a big risk IMHO. But what do I know!

After reading all that, was Edison right all along? Reading about Edison and Tesla and their relationship, then Tesla dying a pauper, you really have to wonder what would have happened if Edison had won the contract...