Electric Car Prediction - Whatdayathing???

[TheOffice]

He may have said it, but I find it hard to believe!

They are opening their charging networks to other vehicles and selling adapters so you can use other networks to charge Teslas.

[Panope]

I don't know anything about this stuff, but he seems legit.

https://youtu.be/IcIzaqSnBdA

[Panope]

Double post.

[Olaf Hart]

I suspect once you start production in China you have effectively open sourced anyway…

[BeauV]

Beau,

I recently saw a video clip of Musk saying that Tesla has "open sourced" all of their patents.

Is it as simple as that? Or do they still have some secrets?

Steve

Sigh.... Elon is a very strange person. I don't really know what he means by this. If he means: "Make them all available to folks", then all he needs to do is not sue folks who try to use the IP. If he means that he wants the Open Source Software Community to pitch in and help on things, as one does with the Linux OS, then I could understand that for software but it's not like you could fix something in a motor design and submit the change back to the project. Please keep in mind that US patents are already public information, you can read them all at the Patent Office.

Like many things Elon says, a certain amount (maybe all) is just BS for the press coverages is desperately needs to feel important. You'd think that his success would deplete this desperation, but it hasn't.

[avramd]

I complete 3/4 of a century today.

Holy cow that's awesome! Happy belated birthday!

I'm not interested in a Tesla; it's too much sedan and not enough cargo carrier.

Yes, while there are many reasons NOT to get a Tesla, lack of cargo ability isn't one of them. Many don't realize the S is actually a hatch-back, disguised as a sedan, and it is VERY big inside. They are expensive, that's a really good reason not to get a new one. But surprisingly good deals can be had on used ones if cost is a consideration.

I would second Beau's comment - make sure to actually look at one before deciding out of hand not to get one. The Model 3 I'd agree isn't a record-setter with cargo ability, it's got a real trunk, not a hatch-back. The Model Y is pretty impressive w/ cargo space, and does have a hatch.

[avramd]

I suspect once you start production in China you have effectively open sourced anyway…

That was very funny... and probably very true!

[avramd]

He may have said it, but I find it hard to believe!

They are opening their charging networks to other vehicles and selling adapters so you can use other networks to charge Teslas.

I actually looked into this over the holiday. There is a long leg between Boston and Newport that I drive regularly that doesn't have any on-highway superchargers, and the ones it does have are all the way at the Boston end, not in super-safe areas, and a few minutes off out of the way. However there is an on-highway 3rd party fast charger that is so perfectly located for me that I would use it regularly over free charging at the poorly placed Tesla superchargers.

Unfortunately I can not find an adapter for less than $800.

It is absolutely crazy-making to me that this adapter, that isn't even changing the electricity itself, costs more than my 50 amp 240v home charger. Also, it is huge - bigger than a lunch box. The standardized connectors are ENORMOUS too - even if the adapters were cheap, I wouldn't want the thing taking up space in my car all the time. It makes me cry a little that they don't simply have a Tesla connector or adapter right on the charging stations - they already have two different giant standardized connectors - CHAdeMO and CCS/SAE. It's nuts to make 10,000's of cars carry around a giant adapter instead of just having one built into the station.

[avramd]

The other day I woke up east of St. Louis, and went to bed in Midland, TX. I think I drove well over 900 miles that day. Started with a full tank, filled up twice. Acura Rl. Tesla can't do that, yet. But they will.

Hey Rob, the Model S Plaid kinda can do that, depending on how particular you are. With the less expensive wheels, it has a rated range of 396 miles. You have to ignore 20% off the top of that to protect your battery longevity, but that still leaves you with 315 miles of useable range per leg. If the superchargers were optimally located for your trip (unlikely), you'd have been able to do exactly your trip - two stops, 900 miles. Granted, you'd have spent roughly 45 mins x2 charing, instead of 5-10 x2 getting gas.

Some people think they wouldn't tolerate the time spent charging. I was one of them, but I've found that charing stops don't faze me me unless an unanticipated extra stop is making me late. That has only happened twice in 14,000 miles and 11 months (and it was self-inflicted both times, I didn't follow the GPS and I ignored the charging stop recommendations).

One thing you CAN do in your Acura that you CANNOT do in a Tesla however, is make up time by driving faster. The extra time required by an extra fuel stop is much less than the amount of time you can make up by driving say 90 instead of 70. The extra time spent charging a Tesla in the same scenario would be more than the time made up by driving faster.

[SemiSalt]

Finnish Man Passes on Paying $22,600 to Replace His Tesla's Battery, Blows Up Car Instead

https://gizmodo.com/finnish-man-passes-on-paying-22-600-to-replace-his-tes-1848268874

[BeauV]

Finnish Man Passes on Paying $22,600 to Replace His Tesla's Battery, Blows Up Car Instead

https://gizmodo.com/finnish-man-passes-on-paying-22-600-to-replace-his-tes-1848268874

I find it astounding how important it can be to some people to exhibit their rage publically. That said, it's certainly fun to see something get blown up like this. It reminds me of the various stunts that have been performed on other lemon cars. My favorite was the guy who filled the entire interior of a Cadilac with concrete from a truck. Some movie directors decided to use that stunt and did it again in one of the Clint Eastwood movies. pretty funny to see just how heavy a Cadilac full of ready-mix becomes.

[SemiSalt]

Finnish Man Passes on Paying $22,600 to Replace His Tesla's Battery, Blows Up Car Instead

https://gizmodo.com/finnish-man-passes-on-paying-22-600-to-replace-his-tes-1848268874

I find it astounding how important it can be to some people to exhibit their rage publically. That said, it's certainly fun to see something get blown up like this. It reminds me of the various stunts that have been performed on other lemon cars. My favorite was the guy who filled the entire interior of a Cadilac with concrete from a truck. Some movie directors decided to use that stunt and did it again in one of the Clint Eastwood movies. pretty funny to see just how heavy a Cadilac full of ready-mix becomes.

I definitely expected to see more in the way of lithium fires.

[BeauV]

Finnish Man Passes on Paying $22,600 to Replace His Tesla's Battery, Blows Up Car Instead

https://gizmodo.com/finnish-man-passes-on-paying-22-600-to-replace-his-tes-1848268874

I find it astounding how important it can be to some people to exhibit their rage publically. That said, it's certainly fun to see something get blown up like this. It reminds me of the various stunts that have been performed on other lemon cars. My favorite was the guy who filled the entire interior of a Cadilac with concrete from a truck. Some movie directors decided to use that stunt and did it again in one of the Clint Eastwood movies. pretty funny to see just how heavy a Cadilac full of ready-mix becomes.

I definitely expected to see more in the way of lithium fires.

I'm guessing that the explosives didn't get it hot enough to set the batteries on fire. They are surrounded in a massive amount of coolant, so you'd have to get them really hot before blowing the thing up to have them catch fire. Also, the coolant is a fire suppressant. If the Li Batteries weren't good and hot, it would quench any fire.

[SemiSalt]

Short segue to a different sort of electric transportation. YouTube presented me the option of viewing a particular video.

2021-12-28_16-06-47.png

And the question occurred to me. Does the concept suggested - powering an electric vessel with solar panel area of LOA x Beam - get more or less feasible with size?

No extra points for suggesting it would work better Florida than the PNW.

[TheOffice]

might work as a ferry. Too ugly as a personal vessel.

[Tigger]

It would work great in the PNW in June, July, and August!

[BeauV]

might work as a ferry. Too ugly as a personal vessel.

Oh, I don't know. Some folks buy these, and I find them puke-in-my-mouth ugly.

[Steele]

A cat seems the best choice for this experiment especially if kept light and utilizing very narrow hulls. Having said that the idea of moving the boat under solar alone seems very optomistic. The photo shows 30 solar panels, probably around 150 watts each based on size. With perfect efficiency and no parsitic losses this equates to about 6 HP. In real world use you would be lucky to get 1/2 that, even on a sunny day. The effect of heat on output, the inability to keep the proper angle to the sun, and all the other losses to run the sytem, and other loads the boat needs needs to operate, would seem to leave little energy to move the boat. I am sure you could make it work as a proof of concept exercise. For a usable boat you still need plug in charging, big batteries and perhaps even a generator.

[SemiSalt]

The thing that struck me was that as sailboats change in size, sail area changes as the square of length, same as would happen with the panel area. Of course, a power vessel would have a battery charge/discharge cycle that changes the problem a lot. Idle time at dock would be an important factor.

[H B]

I have not seen the Finnish dude blowing up his Tesla, but the hive-mind (ha!) over at SA said the batteries & AC motors were removed prior to the stunt. Sounds like the 3rd time the batteries were out of warranty so he blew up the car instead of replacing them.

[BeauV]

Regarding the solar Cat, as an engineering project, I think it is a GREAT illustration of why sails are far more environmentally friendly. Consider the carbon footprint of the solar-powered cat vs tub I posted above. The hideous sailboat I posted has a much smaller lifetime carbon footprint.

[Olaf Hart]

I have not seen the Finnish dude blowing up his Tesla, but the hive-mind (ha!) over at SA said the batteries & AC motors were removed prior to the stunt. Sounds like the 3rd time the batteries were out of warranty so he blew up the car instead of replacing them.

I suspect electric cars are not a good idea in areas that freeze over for months at a time, ..

[BeauV]

I have not seen the Finnish dude blowing up his Tesla, but the hive-mind (ha!) over at SA said the batteries & AC motors were removed prior to the stunt. Sounds like the 3rd time the batteries were out of warranty so he blew up the car instead of replacing them.

I suspect electric cars are not a good idea in areas that freeze over for months at a time, ..

You're right. The only reasonable way to do this is at least to leave it plugged in every night and when at work. A Tesla will keep the batteries warm for you, but it uses power. Thus, the need to plug it in. Teslas are extremely popular in Norway where it's quite cold. I have a lot of European friends with Teslas, there aren't any complaints like this guy.

[avramd]

Who all hear has heard about Daedalus Yachts, and their onboard hydrogen-fuel generation system? As far as I can tell it is still vaporware, but I've spoken to the owner of Daedalus, and he clearly believes the technology is real.

The link is below, but here is the best I've been able to do to process it:

In short, they are designing Gunboat-class high performance luxury sailing catamarans that will have fossil-free range that rivals or beats an equivalent cat using fossil-fuel. They're calling it "global range," and seem to be suggesting you won't need to factor ports into your cruise plan, except as destinations.

I don't quite follow the details, so here is my half-getting-it summary, I invite correction: It sounds like they purify seawater, break it down to extract the hydrogen from it, store that in "carbon-fiber reinforced tanks" (under pressure I presume), and then later react it with air to produce electricity when needed. Supposedly this has good energy density (unlike batteries). There is talk of a proton-exchange-membrane, and some gibberish that sounds to me like the system involves sort of an "anti-battery" where protons are stored and then move, instead of electrons - but causing a need for electrons to move. I dunno.

Anyway, I guess the main point is that the hydrogen fuel can be generated wherever you are, thus the global range. I don't see any claims for how far the thing can go at night if there is no wind.

Deadalus Technology - search for "Hydrogen is generated onboard" to get to the important part.

It'd be great if someone could unpack the talk of membranes and "oxygen & hydrogen electrodes" talk! I only have high school chemistry under my belt though, so...

The reason I know anything at all about this is that Daedalus is the company who bought Farrier Marine, and are supposedly buy now building the F-22R trimaran - my new boat - in the US. I had an order placed with them for one before I found the used one that I bought. Placing that order is when I got to talk to Michael Reardon, the founder/owner, and found out what Daedalus' true mission is.

[Steele]

The issue is how much energy is needed to produce hydrogen from water. Google is not too helpfull, the numbers are all over the place, but about 40KWh per 1 KG of hydrogen seems to be a rough guess. This is fresh clean water, not goopy sea water, so you need to add the energy cost of water desalination and filtering to the energy equation. I am sure there are folks here with a much better understanding of the physics and chemistry who can correct my estimates, but in either case a lot of electricity is needed to make hydrogen. This raises the question, why not use that energy to power the boat instead of making hydrogen. Electricty has it's issues, but Hindenberg did not explode because it was full of batteries.

[avramd]

This raises the question, why not use that energy to power the boat instead of making hydrogen.

You would not make hydrogen when you need the power for something else, you would only do it when you are generating more power than you are using. That is expected to be most of the time, b/c it also will have solar, wind and hydro-generation; the electric motors will produce electricity when the boat is sailing (or even anchored in a current). You'd only run a power deficit at night in calm winds, and when motoring in daylight and calm winds. If you were motoring in a blow b/c it was too windy to sail, I believe the idea is you'd get more than enough power from wind generation.

They do claim it is silent. It is unclear to me if they've figured out a way to make wind generators silent, or if they just mean "besides that." I haven't looked for info on the wind generation part of it.

[BeauV]

Here's what I know about this stuff: (Caution: This post is a RabbitHole. Those who aren't into spelunking such holes should skip it.)

There Is No Free Lunch: What that means is that every time you convert one type of energy (electrical, kinetic, etc...) into another type of energy, there are losses. My Dad once said a good rule of thumb is to assume you lose 1/3 of the energy to performing the conversion. This is roughly true of converting mechanical energy provided by an engine spinning an alternator, into electrical energy and then stuffing it in a battery. There are two types of energy transformation so you lose 1/3 on the first one (mechanical to electrical) then you lose 1/3 of the leftover 2/3s as you stuff it in the battery. Finally, when you want to use the energy in the battery you lose another 1/3 of that. Source for the 30% losses when using a lead-acid battery HERE.

There is a LOT of research about the Hydrogen Economy (Good write up HERE) In this you'll find the useful quote: "current best processes for water electrolysis have an effective electrical efficiency of 70-80%" Once again the "1/3" is roughly light, although this is slightly better. Please note that this does NOT include the energy it takes to compress the hydrogen into a liquid, which is massive and currently makes this technology a non-starter for an onboard generation.

So.... I believe that you're driven to the conclusion that one should think of hydrogen, either gas or liquid, as yet another storage/transport medium. You can store energy in a battery, in a tank of hydrogen, or by lifting up a heavyweight. Similarly, you can think of the cold plate in a freezer/fridge as a way of "storing" energy, in this case, you stored "coldness" in the cold plate while you're freezing the plate using excess energy while a generator or solar panel is running.

Here's The Rub: Most folks want energy when they want it, not sometime later. If sailors were willing to wait, then they'd just sail when the wind blew and sit around reading a book when it was calm. Or, if they didn't care about carbon footprint, they would take chemical energy (diesel fuel) and burn it to replace the missing kinetic energy provided by the wind. It's always fun to point out to kids that a sailboat is one of the all-time best at capturing kinetic energy from the air and converting it into momentum (the boat moving). The problem is, capturing the total lifetime carbon footprint, which I'm sure you all understand.

So.... we have to look at the entire system and evaluate the lifetime carbon footprint of the construction, use, and disposal/re-cycle of the complete system. It is always trivial to make one piece of that lifetime look great or even "carbon negative" by ignoring the massive carbon footprint of some other part of the process. This is why my immediate response to a high-performance sailboat built out of petroleum products (Resins and fibers) is more than a bit disingenuous when it tries to green-wash itself by only talking about the propulsion system. For grins, consider swapping the expended carbon footprint spent on the epoxy and generation of carbon fibers for simply using wood. You have to, to be fair here, include the entire disposal cost of the epoxy and carbon-fiber hull and rig. The results are pretty clear. Don't get me wrong, I use epoxy all the time. But I don't try to pretend that it's not made from crude oil or claim its NMP (Not My Problem).

Back to "There's No Free Lunch". Currently, there is a pretty low-carbon source of electricity in hydro, except that if you build the damn from concrete you've burned a MASSIVE amount of energy (which may be "clean energy") in the process. Concrete is one of the worst offenders. Once built, that massive carbon footprint of a damn gets amortized across a lot of hydropower, so it can genuinely reach a carbon-neutral at some point and may actually reach a point where it's helping. This is why building a dam out of rocks and dirt is far better than concrete (EG: Hoover Dam vs Oroville Dam) The other very low-carbon source of electricity could be solar. There are numerous well-funded projects that are getting close to building small-scale reactors that run with extremely small amounts of nuclear waste. Indeed, there is also some hope that a breakthrough will result in a zero-waste reactor. (Think: the Flux Capacitor in the DeLorean in Back To The Future - Fun reading HERE)

Finally, the lowest carbon-footprint power source is solar. But, so far, it requires a lot of surface area - a LOT more than the deck of a multi-hull can provide. Yes, solar cells are getting better and better. But, we can't forget it's the lifetime Cradle-2-Grave carbon footprint we're after here and solar cells take a MASSIVE amount of electricity to create. The best we can do with the latest technology, the right angle, and great weather is to have a solar cell pay back the energy it took to make it in 6-9 months. On a boat where you certainly don't have the last two of those criteria, it would probably take 1 to 2 years of constant use for solar cells to "break-even" (pay back the energy it took to make them). Only after 2 years would solar start to reduce the carbon footprint of the vehicle. Put another way, you can think of a solar cell as an energy transport mechanism. It absorbs energy rapidly as it is built, transports that energy to some other physical place, and then pays it back over the course of its life. It's almost directly analogous to a battery. Of course, unlike a battery the solar cell keeps on giving out power after it has paid back its energy cost. But.... (here we go again) the lifetime cost of solar includes recycling or at the least paying the landfill cost Harvard projections are: "With the current capacity, it costs an estimated $20-30 to recycle one panel. Sending that same panel to a landfill would cost a mere $1-2." (Source: HERE) It's pretty clear that the solar cells won't get recycled, so there's the environmental damage of filling dumps with glass panels. At least that doesn't release a lot of carbon.

OK, I've dragged the poor reader down this particular rabbit hole far enough. As you can obviously tell, I enjoy trying to figure stuff like this out.

[BeauV]

I suppose I should have posted this before the long post above:

There is no known technology that will beat a sail on a wooden boat for low-carbon transport. The only difficulty is predicting when you'll arrive and how long the boat will last before it recycles itself.

All the other things we do are motivated by our inability to wait for the wind to blow or our desire to have various luxury features like hot water, refrigeration, warm food, music, tv, etc....

[Steele]

Thanks Beau for your thoughtful analysis. The losses for conversion of energy sources are greater than I would have guessed.

One thought about carbon footprints. Although a wooden boat that sails is a great example, do you think a steel or aluminum sailboat might trump wood? Although metal is very resource intensive to produce, wood has it's own issues with road building, logging, transport, lots of waste etc. Wood can not be recycled when a boat reaches the end of it's life. Metal not only lasts longer (if cared for) but can be recycled while wood tends to be left to rot in landfills or burned.

[BeauV]

Well, before people got fussy about wood, they built boats from the wood they had. Indeed, in New England the wood for ships built there was rarely from more than a few hours wagon ride away. In California it was Douglas Fir from the local hills. Indeed, when the SF brigantine was built over the last 5 years, she was built out of Fir. It was donated by a wealthy guy in the PNW, but it could have been cut in the forests above Sonoma and Napa. So the transport cost is small.

Milling it is the modern way to build a boat, but up to the industrial revolution all the pieces were cut with hand tools. Despite this crews built good sized boats in a few months. No engine or air conditioning, but it certainly is low carbon.

Finally, when wood sinks, as it does when a boat Is ballasted with stone (the standard up to around 1900), the wood is taken to the bottom and doesn’t rot much. This is why we are still digging wooden sailing ships out of the mud along the SF shoreline and why ancient 16th century ships can be found. Sinking wood into salt water is an extremely good way to capture carbon for a long long time. Sinking it into mud seems to keep it captured for centuries. Aluminum dissolves into salt water pretty fast, months. Steel takes s couple decades, and Iron 50-80 years. That’s why Titanic his still partially with us. It’s iron.

I maybe nuts, but it would be very interesting to think about carbon capture by sinking logs into the deep sea off CA. I’ll have to look up the carbon capture rate of fast growing trees like Fir and lodge pole pine. Hmmm.