Just Not ready

[2Fingers]

I have a Toyota BZ4X for 2 years, great vehicle, bought it for the reliability but the info system sucks.

Maybe Canada should open a Chinese car manufacturing plant in Canada, they are coming and it would give the middle finger to the auto industry and prices will fall. Of course as Per said, reliability still has a long way to go.

The battery that charges in minutes, wonder the true cost and the life span on them. Chinese are either that much more advanced than other batter technologies or they haven't released the technology yet.

[5thhorseman]

Exactly what I am saying Reefski. Get some manufacturing jobs here and diversify away from the US auto industry. The Chinese EVs are probably coming in at the low end of the market like the Japanese did way back when and we need that. The European EVs that Per talks start around CAD 70K and that's just the base price, probably 80K after tax, duties, shipping and TruCoat undercoating.

[rats19]

China will save us…

[Meds]

In theory the range should be 504 km, but that test cycle is at 23 C, indoors and at an average speed around 30kmh. Makes no sense.
In reality I get 400+ in the summer and roughly 330 in the winter. Takes roughly 30 minutes to charge, so I plan a lunch break on road trips that exceed 400 km.

How easy is it to find a charging station in northern Sweden?

A range of 330 km is pretty inconvenient, and borderline useless, in much of northern Canada, even your summer range of 400(ish) would be inconvenient here, and not exactly something anyone should be confident in during the cold winter months.

I think one of the major drawbacks to EV's in the winter is not just the projected 20-30% decrease in range in the cold, it is the 30-40% decrease in range when it gets cold enough that you have to ramp up use of climate control to keep your windshield clear and your ambient temperature acceptable. Apparently the cabin heater contributes to two-thirds of the excess energy consumption. No way around that one, with petroleum engines the heat is a byproduct of the combustion process.

[Meds]

China will save us…

Said absolutely no one ever.

[5thhorseman]

We used to complain about sub 200 km EV range, now we're complaining about sub 400 km range (in the cold). By the time we stop complaining manufacturing will be established in other countries.

[Per]

In theory the range should be 504 km, but that test cycle is at 23 C, indoors and at an average speed around 30kmh. Makes no sense.
In reality I get 400+ in the summer and roughly 330 in the winter. Takes roughly 30 minutes to charge, so I plan a lunch break on road trips that exceed 400 km.

How easy is it to find a charging station in northern Sweden?

A range of 330 km is pretty inconvenient, and borderline useless, in much of northern Canada, even your summer range of 400(ish) would be inconvenient here, and not exactly something anyone should be confident in during the cold winter months.

I think one of the major drawbacks to EV's in the winter is not just the projected 20-30% decrease in range in the cold, it is the 30-40% decrease in range when it gets cold enough that you have to ramp up use of climate control to keep your windshield clear and your ambient temperature acceptable. Apparently the cabin heater contributes to two-thirds of the excess energy consumption. No way around that one, with petroleum engines the heat is a byproduct of the combustion process.

Charging stations are everywhere. For several reasons. Any parking lot with more than 50 parking spaces must have charging available. Not sure about exactly how rhe rules work, but that means every shopping mall has to have charging. Also, all gas stations invest in charging stations. They make better profit from those than from selling gas. Also, most people who charge a car combine it with a meal, so they will go inside and by some hot dogs, sandwiches, coffee or whatever. And the profit margin is usually much higher on the food items than it is on gas/diesel. And then, for basically the same reason, all the fast food joints are getting charging stations to attract customers.

And you can see for yourseif. This is my favourite app for finding charging stations. You only really want the purple ones. If you click on a dot it will show you the number of chargers and their charging speed, if they are currently used and with just one more click you find out the charging fee as well. If it says 3/4, it means there are 4 chargers and 3 of them are currently being used. Usually I just go to a gas station or restaurant that I find convenient, as pretty much all of them will have chargers, but if it’s a one horse town it could be a good idea to check that not all of them are taken.Then it may be smarter to go elsewhere if you are in a hurry.

https://chargefinder.com/en

Now, if you move around in the map it may take a while for all the stations to show up, and first you only see the purple ones, that are the fastest chargers, but if you zoom in more stations will pop up. If you want to write in a placename you could check eg Umea or Ornskoldsvik. Or just click the map and look around. It has information of most providers within Europe.

I tried to type in Vancouver, and it seems to work there as well.

[Aaronp18]

Per, now just check out that map and take a look a the sporadic offerings through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Western Ontario.

Any route off the Trans-Canada you will have a hard time finding resources needed to travel efficiently across Canada. Especially in the winter if range decreases 30%, and we have seen range decrease more than that when it's really cold. The battery seems to hold about 1/3 the charge when it's around 20-30 below.

One of the other issues we have found is that many of the fast charging stations are actually larger batteries themselves, they aren't tied directly to the power grid. So what happens is they get used up throughout the day and if you try and charge after the station battery has been depleted it essentially becomes a trickle charge.

Love the EV for around town and in and around the Okanagan, but the resources are still not there for road trips of any length.

[Meds]

We used to complain about sub 200 km EV range, now we're complaining about sub 400 km range (in the cold).

Well of course. We are creatures of convenience.

But I was specific to the northern parts of the country.

Only a level 3 charge station can get you to 80% charge in 20 minutes, the final 20% is significantly slowed down to protect the battery, add at least another 30 minutes for full charge, so most people aren't doing that. The average range of an EV on 80% charge is a shade over 300 km, which is not winter conditions. If I'm stopping every 3 hours for 20+ minutes, when I can fill my wife's Sienna from empty in 3 minutes or less (68L tank), and have 800+ km of range, there is no marketing campaign on the planet that has me switching to an EV.

I do think that electric could be the future, but hydrogen makes more sense environmentally. Right now the environmental impact of mining for the rare elements for batteries is ridiculous. The media won't talk about it, and most people want to remain blind to how their comforts (not just vehicles) are manufactured. Producing green hydrogen results in a clean emission when burned as fuel, however it is not economical to produce at this time.

Grey hydrogen is much cheaper to produce but carbon heavy, so it is considered to be not necessarily a smart solution for moving away from fossil fuels since it requires them to get the hydrogen.

Grey hydrogen production results in an average of 10.5kg of CO2 per 1kg of hydrogen produced, whereas petroleum production results in 2.5kg of CO2 per 1L of gasoline.

Hydrogen engines emit no CO2. The average gasoline engine emits 250g of CO2 per km travelled.

So a thought here based upon the Toyota Mirai, a production hydrogen burning sedan.

The Mirai has an average tank capacity of 5kg of hydrogen which gives it a range of over 647 km (we'll round down to 600). That tank put 55kg of CO2 in the atmosphere to produce the fuel and will never contribute more CO2 emissions over the 600 km that it will be burned on.

Take a similar mid-size sedan that burns gasoline. The average tank size is around 55L. That tank put 137kg of CO2 into the atmosphere to produce and will then add another 150kg of CO2 over the next 600 km.

Grey hydrogen is still the winner. The production cost of grey hydrogen is roughly $1.30 per kg (I think that excludes taxes), and the cost of gasoline production is an average of $0.60 per L in Canada (excluding taxes). There is a serious case, I think, to be made here.

There is also blue hydrogen which is essentially just grey hydrogen with carbon capture.

Circling back to EV's.....

Yes, a good option for the future, but the cost to beef up our infrastructure to support it, as well as the current limitations, would suggest that it is not there yet and is nothing more than a marketing scheme right now because people are getting insanely rich off of it.

[Per]

Circling back to EV's.....

Yes, a good option for the future, but the cost to beef up our infrastructure to support it, as well as the current limitations, would suggest that it is not there yet and is nothing more than a marketing scheme right now because people are getting insanely rich off of it.

It’s not just a marketing ploy. One of the main direct benefits of EVs that is showing up across Europe is improved air quality in the cities. Sure, the 25% share of new car sales only translates to perhaps 10% of cars on the road, but there is a higher concentration of EVs in urban areas and fewer in rural areas. Thus many European cities already have seen particles and other pollutants drop by 15-20% and of course even more so in Norway, where EVs account for 98% of new car sales and more than 30% of cars on the road. And the same is happening in China, where EVs account for roughly 50% of new car sales, and plug in hybrids another 20%.

Also, sodium batteries are now beginning to compete with the currently dominating lithium ones.They use a lot less rare metals, so they are cheaper and don’t require as much mining. There are also various versions of solid state batteries being introduced. Not sure exactly what goes into them, but rest assured that the battery technology is changing almost as rapidly as compter performance used to.

And I don’t think hydrogen is the way to go. You waste a lot of energy producing it and transporting it, so it is far less efficient than battery EVs. And charging at home is so convenient, I doubt you can ever convince EV drivers to start going to the gas station again. Hysrogen might be the future of aviation though, as big long distance airplanes need such huge batteries that it’s not really feasible at this moment. Battery electric aircraft will probably only work for smaller planes travelling shorter distances. Like the ones going from Vancouver to,Victoria. But converting the bigger airplanes to hysrogen could be the future of air travel.

[Topper]

The power grid in BC is quite simply insufficient to make EV use feasible outside the urban use. Comminities are already operating at brownout levels. A wind storm creates a 3 day power outage.

A large part of the EV market in North America, as former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt like to point out, was artificially created by Biden/Trudeau government market intervention. Both government interfered in the auto market by creating stimulus (subsidies, tax breaks, loans and direct government investment) for producers and consumers to switch to EV's. It was never a ground swell of consumer demand, it was the traditional first adopters buying in as consumers.

The current US administration has cancelled those programs, the demand has cratered

It is a large leverage point for the US in the current Canada-US trade war as Trudeau's Canada had bought into the EV fallacy and bet the future on it and now auto makers are stepping back.

I'm interested in seeing how battery swapping is coming along for heavy equipment in a mine site setting.

[Cousin Strawberry]

There are plenty of effective electrical components operating with minimal issue in any other mining environment, why would batteries be more susceptible to failure? Dust and debris? Chemicals?

None of that is anything that hasn't been solved before

As for the challenges of implementing an EV mandate, Norway invested in the necessary infrastructure early and now something like >95% of personal autos are electric there. It's a direct comparable for a country like Canada climate wise but the distances between communities is obviously less.

It's a pity Doc's aliens haven't bequeathed upon us the technology for perpetual micro generation

[Topper]

It is a case of battery storage capacity and size for shovels and haul trucks. It is slowly emerging.

[Meds]

How will they charge the batteries on heavy equipment in remote sites?

[Cousin Strawberry]

It is a case of battery storage capacity and size for shovels and haul trucks. It is slowly emerging.

Ah ok that makes more sense.

Energy storage is seriously holding things back from taking that next step. Whoever solves that will be the next jesus