A $49,000 electric car from China can travel 250 miles on one charge, its makers claim

[steven johnson]

Now the race is on for a cost effective practical electric car.

BYD says that its new E6 electric car due out before the end of the year will do 250 miles (400km) on a single charge.

The E6 is roomy with space for five passengers and a good-sized boot. The battery tucks under the back seat.

It needs 7-8 hours with a domestic plug to charge the car but BYD - it stands for Build Your Dreams - says a specially developed fast charging point with a lead the diameter of a fire hose will fill up the car in just one hour. You can get half a charge in only 10 minutes.

The E6 will sell for £30,000 ($49,262) and is aimed initially at the eco-conscious California market. When the price comes down with mass production, it'll be rolled out properly in China.

Harrabin's Notes: Electric promise

[liberal N proud]

1. But is the car safe?

Saw a video posted here the other day that showed a Chinese car in a crash test.

The 1959 Chevy Blaire did better.

[dmallind]

2. Any car imported here has to pass the same FMVSS tests. NT

[tsuki]

3. Yup, I'm going to rush right out and buy more Chinese Crap. I

wonder why the Chinese prefer to save and wait for Ford vehicles in China?

[Ezlivin]

4. Caveat: You can only charge the car ONCE

But other than that and the use of radioactive metal for most parts it is a good vehicle.

Well, there is the fact that they inflate the air bags with hydrogen gas and the upholstery is made from endangered animals and sewn together by 6 year-old girls.

[XemaSab]

10. It comes in three color schemes:

Panda, tiger, and rhino. x(

[The Traveler]

5. Not sold on the electric car thing

Electric cars are, thermodynamically speaking, losers. You have to burn fuel to make heat to run a turbine to make electricity to charge a battery to run a motor to make kinetic energy (energy of motion.) That's a long chain, and there are inefficiencies every step of the way. (I know hydro power and nuclear power provide other ways of producing bulk electric power. But with the onset of climate change both the ecological impact and long term availability of hydro are more in question. And nuclear power remains a high risk technology in my view, and for a whole spectrum of reasons. Maybe we can scale up solar and wind power production to meet the demand, but that has yet to be clearly demonstrated. Russell Means actually has an interesting plan in that regard.)

I am much more interested in research focused on bio-fuels derived from algae. The fuel derived from the algae is carbon based, of course, and carbon is released into the atmosphere when you burn it. But the net carbon emission is damn near zero ... 'cause you are going to emit the same or a little less carbon than the algae sucked in through photosynthesis while it grew. While burning algae based fuels will do little to immediately lower carbon emissions, it balances its emission deficit with a sequestration surplus. Thermodynamically, it is more efficient (takes less fuel/unit of work) to burn it in an engine than to burn it to charge a battery, etc.

Alternatively, we can burn coal or gas to fire plants to make electricity to charge batteries. Doubtless we can reduce emissions through costly sequestration processes, but the net contribution will never approach zero. No matter how you cut the pie, you are releasing carbon that was locked up by long term natural processes back into the atmosphere. In the carbon reduction game, consumption of fossil fuels is bad because a net release is inevitable. But in the algae based fuel model, you are release carbon recently extracted from the atmosphere and thus achieve a balance.

It just seems like a more elegant solution to me.

Trav

[AtheistCrusader]

6. Well...

It's a way of 'bottling' wind, hydro, tidal, and solar power for individual propulsion. Probably be better to crack water for hydrogen, using wind or solar to perform electrolysis, but Hydrogen has handling and storage issues.

Batteries have issues too, such as byproducts in manufacturing, and disposal, plus they tend to be heavy (and I doubt the charging claims in the OP, but w/e) and eventually require replacement, but there are recycling efforts, and such.

It's one solution. One piece.

[kristopher]

8. You don't understand the elements of the problem you are analyzing

Let's start with this, "Electric cars are, thermodynamically speaking, losers."

You couldn't be more wrong.

The internal combustion engine in most automobiles delivers only about 15% of the input energy (fuel put into the tank) to propelling the auto down the road. Current generation electrics deliver *more than* 90% of the input energy to the wheels. You might think that since current grid resources are also based mostly on thermal generation, and that since the average efficiency of the generators is around 30%, it means that an internal combustion engine in a car is about the same as a battery electric drive . However, that isn't true. To compete on emissions and efficiency the internal combustion engine in a car would have to deliver around 50mpg.

But it doesn't end there. We CAN scale up wind and solar to provide the juice, and in the meantime, analysis by various agencies shows that we could power 70% of our personal transportation fleet with existing grid resources that are now operating on standby at night but not actually generating electricity (it is related to the fact that large generators cannot be shut down and restarted in less than 24 hours). There is no reason to expect EVs will lead to any substantial increase in demand on coal or natural gas burned to support the grid.

That means there are very large near carbon emissions reductions possible in the personal transportation sector and long term reductions as we transition the grid from fossil fuels to renewables.


Algae is promising, and if it works there will be a place for it in planes, trains and ships in our heavy transport sector. There are a number of serious problems with algae, for example, one is that it requires large quantities of CO2 that cannot be transferred directly from the atmosphere. It must be concentrated somehow and the method envisioned most often is to use the exhaust from burning fossil fuels - a practice that doesn't work well with long term plans to eliminate fossil fuels.

Hydrogen is not as good a method of storing electricity as batteries. The round trip efficiency of storing energy in H is about 1/2 of what we can get with batteries, so if we used H then the amount of renewable infrastructure we need to build to eliminate coal is nearly twice as much as if we go with battery electric drive.

[The Traveler]

12. Not a bad analysis

But I actually understand the elements quite well, being an engineering type. You are neglecting transmission grid losses, for example. 30 % out of a coal fired plant? Without MHD? Burning at 1800 deg C? Wow. Not sure I believe that. The newer equipment might be getting as much as 30% ... I can't swear it isn't ... we do have better designs now ... but that older legacy gear doesn't operate that well for sure and is unlikely to be decommissioned any time soon. (Not sure where it stands today but back in the late 80's it took an average of 11 years to get a power plant turbine blade assembly delivered ... from award of contract to initial operating capability. I'm pretty sure it isn't that bad now ... but I have not been close to power production as an engineering discipline in a long time. It was never my field, really, but I studied it in grad school and had lots of friends in the biz. But I digress.)

You are leaving out a lot of steps from lighting the big burner to charging that battery. Transmission grid losses are significant to the equation. There are additional thermal losses incurred in the charging equipment itself. Transformers get hot. That energy comes from some where ya know. And transformers, too, lose efficiency as they age. Batteries themselves degrade with charging and draining, introducing more inefficiencies expressed as thermal losses and dwindling performance. And I think you are basing your estimates on bright, shiny new gear, but any real systems analysis has to be based on average performance over the operational life time of the system. (30%? That amazes me. I haven't kept up on power plant technology ... how do they GET that? Back in 1977, I was doing trying to thesis work on Magneto Hydrodynamics. Burn that stuff at more like 2700 deg C or so and Q is a lot higher. The exhaust is a plasma. Run the plasma through a direct energy conversion grid ... the charged flowing gas is a kind of electric current so we can induce voltage, drawing out energy as electric potential which cools the gas down enough to not burn through the heat exchanger system that delivers steam to the turbine. That got your natural gas fired fuel burning plant into the 30%-35% thermo efficiency range, if I recall correctly. The Soviet Union actually built one or two of these ... not sure how it worked out for them. We dropped it early in the Reagan years. **sigh**)

And while I agree algae seems promising, my support amd enthusiasm for it largely derives from my perception that it has been under-studied. (I cheer lead for it whenever I can, for that reason.) I am not sure I buy your C02 argument, since I have read a couple of articles about techniques for concentrating atmospheric C02 that looked promising, etc. But there are a lot of ways for that concept to NOT pan out, so I'm not sure you are wrong, either. I just think the basic features of the solution (snag C02 from the air) are really exciting, and it deserves further study.

I concur with you re hydrogen. Expensive to make, tricky to store, etc.

Wind power and solar have promise, but we have little experience at building them up to scale and so it is difficult to predict at what rate they can take grid load off the shoulders of fossil fuel burners and what the life cycle costs are.

Life cycle costs are measured in energy, too. Back in the 70s, when I was a physics and mechanical engineering grad student a big debate broke out between certain engineering cliques on campus. It was an argument fueled by a couple of articles in trade journals. The basic question was this: When you add up the energy cost of constructing a nuclear power plant, fueling it, operating it, and disposing of its waste over the course of its operational life time, do you wind up getting more energy out of the system than you put in? Now, I would have thought that would have been an easy question to answer, and that it would be a slam dunk win for the nuclear engineering boys. But it apparently wasn't. As the discussions dragged out over coffee in the commons room and in lecture halls over a period of about a year, it became clear the answer was ... uncertain. Both sides of the case were able to present strong arguments for their point of view and lots of data and crunched numbers to back up their case.

And that was shocking to me, especially given the magnitude of investment. Then Three Mile Island happened and the debate kinda went away.

There's a moral in that anecdote. Not sure it applies directly, but it might help you understand why I regard nuclear power with more suspicion than any of the other options we have regarded in this thread. And we haven't even started talking about its political down sides, which include issues of weaponization and proliferation of weapons technologies.


Trav

[kristopher]

13. I was summarizing...

But the numbers I gave are solid and include all elements of the equations. Total line and transmission losses are <10%, and the 30% efficiency is, if anything, on the low side.

"The average thermal efficiency of coal-fired plants went from 33.15 percent to 33.54 percent in 1999. The improvement in efficiency is also reflected in the national average output rate of pounds of CO2 per kilowatthour. The output rate for coal-fired plants decreased from 2.117 pounds of CO2 per kilowatthour in 1998 to..."
Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency/ Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electric Power in the United States 2000

Analysis done within the past 10 years estimate that nuclear plants are delivering an EROEI of between 5:1 and 15:1 depending on the specific plant.

Initial estimates were that a modern grid could absorb about 5% penetration by renewables (wind/solar) before there would be significant consequences limiting further use. Experience in Europe over the past 10 years and modeling based on that experience has shown that such an upper limit is actually a false premise. The reason is that while non-fossil storage is being deployed, the system itself can function as if such storage were in place by considering displaced natural gas as stored energy. It sounds as if it is just eliminating the problem through semantics, but it is a valid conceptual construct that defines the problem facing us more clearly by segregating the effects of lack of storage for spilled renewable energy from the larger problem of how the intermittency of wind and solar impacts delivering power to consumers.

The ability of renewables to scale up is no longer in question.

[excess_3]

14. nothing to do with efficiency

energy from oil cost ten to twenty times as
much as energy from coal

pay an American worker a buck.
or give ten bucks to a terrorist.
pick one

[lib2DaBone]

7. It can travel 250 Miles.. but the front wheel falls off after 1/4 mile...

.. the battery leaks toxic fumes, there is toothpaste in the anti-freeze and seat covers are lead- based.

I was just forced to throw an electric bike from China in the rubbish. Cost new was over $600 and it was un-repairable.

[skids]

11. toothpaste in the antifreeze...

:spray:

[Braulio]

9. I can do that a lot cheaper

My B-2000 model carries six passengers for 400 km at 16.6 km/h, all for $19,900 US excluding taxes, titles and licenses. It includes the TrueCoat corrosion protector, and is designed for congested Los Angeles traffic, the seats have built-in vibromassagers and the driver has access to a periscope so he can look over tall suburbanite SUVs. It comes in Hot Pink, Eco-Green, and Psychedelic Rainbow colors.

[tinrobot]

15. It's possible

The 250 mile range battery pack (50Kwh+) would cost at least 20 grand, the rest of the car would have to come in for the other $29K. Certainly possible.

Problem is that people who can spend $49K on a car want something that looks cool and drives well. They're not going to spend that much money on what amounts to a glorified Kia or Hyundai. This is where a car like Tesla will have the edge, because it will have a much higher "cool" factor.