Ford scales down EV battery plant in Marshall

[K-slice]

I said it in the thread about GM stock being unloaded by Buffet, and I'll say it again... Automakers jumping past mass manufacturing of plug-in Hybrid vehicles to jump right to EV is a mistake. You need to ween people into something like EV's especially when one political party has basically made owning one a no-go for membership...

[Rocket]

I said it in the thread about GM stock being unloaded by Buffet, and I'll say it again... Automakers jumping past mass manufacturing of plug-in Hybrid vehicles to jump right to EV is a mistake. You need to ween people into something like EV's especially when one political party has basically made owning one a no-go for membership...

EV's are expensive, bad for the environment, and impractical.

The pro-EV ideologues "presume" that 80% of owners will charge at home, but that only works for rich early adopters who own homes with large garages that they've installed Level 2 charges in. What happens when people who live in apartments buy them?

A video I saw last night of a cue lining up to charge their cars in CA. Was at 11 pm, and the line was hours long to get to a charger. No thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhO0LLAjwps

EV's will never be practical for most people. Hybrids are already here, and work great. They also offer around 37 x the carbon reduction that EV's do.

[SHAARI]

EV's are expensive, bad for the environment, and impractical.

that is an opinion, not a fact...

The pro-EV ideologues "presume" that 80% of owners will charge at home, but that only works for rich early adopters who own homes with large garages that they've installed Level 2 charges in. What happens when people who live in apartments buy them?

I don't disagree with your opinion here. I myself have an EV, and yep I dropped about $2k to have a level-2 charger installed. Just a point of reference, a "full tank" of electrons [[Chevy EUV) gets me about 240 miles of range, and it costs me about $6-8 worth of electrons to "refill" that "tank" full of electrons. Depending upon how DTE chooses to generate those electrons [[coal-fired plant? natural gas? wind? solar?), the total lifecycle cost of that "tank full of electrons" is different. The cost of extracting petroleum, refining it to gasoline, transporting it to the gas station, etc., that cost is also wildly variable.
so, yes, I agree with your opinion that an EV has more environmental cost/impact than merely not burning fossil fuels while I drive around and deplete my "tank" of things that cause my car to be propelled across the pavement.

A video I saw last night of a cue lining up to charge their cars in CA. Was at 11 pm, and the line was hours long to get to a charger. No thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhO0LLAjwps

completely agree that the current infrastructure doesn't currently support widespread EV adoption...

EV's will never be practical for most people. Hybrids are already here, and work great. They also offer around 37 x the carbon reduction that EV's do.

"never" is a really long time from now. I am just gonna suggest that folks probably thought that the internal combustion engine would "never" support any reliable wide-spread modes of transit either, especially given horses. But having a horse and carriage presumed a level of land ownership that poor city folks didn't have available to them, either. So having to stand around waiting for an EV charger to become available, versus having to stand around waiting for a rented horse to be fed and rested... probably equally insurmountable for poor folks.

And just point of reference, I chose my Chevy EUV over [[for example) a hybrid because my Subaru Forester got totaled and I needed something else, and I used my collision misfortune as an opportunity to see whether it now made less bad economic sense for me to switch to something other than an internal combustion engine [[ICE in industry-speak). If I had gone hybrid, I'd still need to do all of that normal ICE maintenance [[spark plugs, oil changes, sensors, filters). Which then greatly alters the break-even cost calculations.

I completely acknowledge that my ability to choose EV over ICE was borne of my privilege. Won't and can't argue with you on that. Just as choosing a new or relatively new ICE over a much older ICE is also borne of privilege. Or, frankly, using public transit which I actually did for five months solid while my aforementioned Subaru sat at the collision shop while my insurance company twiddled their fingers over fix-versus-total. Using public transit involved me rearranging my whole daily flow, kind of like the different sort of rearranging I've found myself doing with my EV.

[Rocket]

"never" is a really long time from now. I am just gonna suggest that folks probably thought that the internal combustion engine would "never" support any reliable wide-spread modes of transit either, If I had gone hybrid, I'd still need to do all of that normal ICE maintenance [[spark plugs, oil changes, sensors, filters). Which then greatly alters the break-even cost calculations.

Although it should be mentioned that my current ICE vehicle has over 100k on the clock, and I have never changed any sensors, and it still has it's original spark-plugs installed. And I do oil changes and filters myself. The only maintenance has been tires, brakes, shocks recently, and a leak fixed in the A/C. All of those except the brakes are identical issues for EV's.

One cost people seem to leave out of EV ownership is time spent at charging stations. I fill my car in 6 minutes every 9 days roughly. To do the same 500 miles would take 2 charges would take 2 hours at a fast charger. Does one count that time siting at a fast charger into account? Let's say you make $40 an hour. Does one ad that $1,600. into their annual costs?


One other thing to consider is that insurance may soon get VERY expensive for EV's. In Europe the costs are going up 3-4 x. A tesla that was $1,800 per year to insure 2 years ago is often $5,000 - $6,000 now in places. And many insurance companies are starting to decline to even quote EV's.

This is for a few reasons. One is repair costs after a minor accident. There isn't any way to know for sure if one of those little battery cells got damaged slightly in a fender bender. And if it did, that may lead to a run away fire that burns like a road-flare at 2,500F. And this could happen days, weeks or even months later. That's a disaster for an insurance company trying to decide if a car can safely be returned to service. If they're wrong, they could be liable for the car, the house / apartment building, and even the people that die in those buildings.

Repair shops / storage yards are also having to build much larger storage yards, ones where damaged EV's can be parked 30' away from any other car, instead of 3'. This quadruples the storage costs after an accident.

Many high-rise buildings are starting to ban EV's from using the underground parking.

It will be a few years yet before we begin to have a true sense of the costs of owning an EV will be. England is starting to find out as we speak.

In a year or two, will one's homeowners insurance be void if they park an EV in the garage and the car catches fire?

These are just some of the unknowns being worked out currently.

completely agree that the current infrastructure doesn't currently support widespread EV adoption...

One problem is,. there's really no way to do the infrastructure. It's not JUST about building 6 million new charging stations, OR installing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of power lines, OR installing hundreds of billions worth of transformers to power each of the charging sites, OR building 15,000 power plants to generate the electricity. The bigger issue is that unlike gas/diesel, electricity needs to be consumed at the exact same instant as it's generated. And if 1/3 of the drivers in the nation decide to plug into a fast charger on the way to work, or at 6 pm tonight, no grid yet imagined can handle that sort of swing in load. Hydro can't do it, nor can nuclear, nor solar, nor wind. What we're talking about is building 15,000 - 30,000 natural gas fired power plants. And what will that do to home heating costs? If we double the consumption of nat gas, how long until we run out? We really need to use the various fuel sources evenly, and not just switch from one to another.

The challenge is 100x more complicated than most EV proponents understand. Yes in the early 1900's we didn't know how much oil we would be able to find in the ground to power ICE cars, but we've been working on this battery / power plant thing for 100+ years now. The challenges are well known by the industry.

As such, most car companies are starting to scale back their plans.

The reality is, an EV has no advantage on the freeway over an ICE car. A disadvantage really. The big advantage for EV's occurs in city driving. Start, stop, slow, and making use of regen braking. But all that can be accomplished with MUCH smaller battery packs in a hybrid. Get to about 10KWH, and the pack is big enough to take the charge from regen braking, and also to supplement acceleration, so that you can now install a tiny and very efficient ICE engine. Now all those trillions of dollars worth of problems mentioned above just disappear.

[SHAARI]

One cost people seem to leave out of EV ownership is time spent at charging stations. I fill my car in 6 minutes every 9 days roughly. To do the same 500 miles would take 2 charges would take 2 hours at a fast charger. Does one count that time siting at a fast charger into account? Let's say you make $40 an hour. Does one ad that $1,600. into their annual costs?

I spend zero amount of time sitting waiting to charge. My car charges overnight at home, when the whole house and neighborhood are sleeping anyway

[SHAARI]

I spend zero amount of time sitting waiting to charge. My car charges overnight at home, when the whole house and neighborhood are sleeping anyway

also, FYI, that video about people waiting in line doesn't say what KIND of charger they were waiting for. Like, for example, a free-to-use DC-fast charger. There are only a few here in the area, mostly at car dealerships, and in that case there is literally a single spot available at any given car dealership.
There are supposedly a pair of free-to-use DC-fast charging stations at the Meijer near Great Lakes Crossing and at the Nissan Tech Center in Farmington Hills.
But otherwise all of the DC-fast charging stations around Detroit require you to pay to use them.
As to level-2 charging stations that are free-to-use, there are quite a few more of them. But honestly, unless the level-2 is at your own home, using someone else's level-2 is pretty pointless because it takes hours to charge, not minutes.
Just point of reference, it takes about 30-60 minutes on a DC-fast charger to get enough of a charge to go 100+ miles. Whereas, on a level-2, 30-60 minutes worth of charge will get me about 10 miles more worth of range. So a free level-2 is basically a limp-home solution.
Again, the infrastructure isn't built out.
There certainly weren't hundreds of thousands of corner gas stations when ICE cars first hit the scene.
so, anyway, back to that YouTube video. I can find all manner of things on the internet to support whatever point-of-view I care to have. Without that supposedly supporting "proof" having any meaningful context.
There's a free level-2 [[not DC-fast) at the cell phone waiting lot off Eureka Rd at DTW. It's enough juice to let you run your heater and listen to the radio while waiting for your arriving passenger to tell you that they've landed and they're at the luggage carosel and can you come get them. But if you didn't have enough of a charge to get back home before getting to the cell lot? Plugging in and waiting for your arriving passenger isn't really going to fill your empty tank. Just like driving up on vapors is your own pre-made problem with an ICE.

[Rocket]

I spend zero amount of time sitting waiting to charge. My car charges overnight at home, when the whole house and neighborhood are sleeping anyway

Of course. As mentioned before, the proponents in government like to quote that 80% of users will charge from home. But the reality is, that's just early adopters that own homes, with garages, and that can afford to install $1,500 - $2,000 level-2 chargers.

What happens when people in apartments are forced to buy them?

Fast charge is brutal on the grid. And wastes tons of worker's time sitting in their cars waiting. It's fine when 2% of cars on the road are EV's, but totally impossible to do if 80% were EV's.

Which goes back to the topic of this thread. Dealers and manufacturers are realizing [[like people 'in the know' did 3 years ago) that this is headed to disaster, and so manufacturers are scaling back their battery / EV plans. A few large manufacturers are abandoning EV's all together.