Interesting car rental (electric or dino juice?) experience

[Leo Enticknap]

The level 3, high speed chargers (the ones that can add an 80% charge to an EV in 20-30 minutes) each need up to 400 amps of 480-volt three-phase power. They would make whatever Edison used to zap Topsy the Elephant look like an AA! The infrastructure for that is not ready to go at your local gas station. I've heard the figure claimed of $100K to $250K to install a level 3 charger, depending on how far away the nearest transformer is that can provide that amount of juice.

Level 2 chargers are an order of magnitude cheaper (and will work on a single phase 200-240 supply), but take an order of magnitude longer (overnight to charge a typical car). I've noticed more of them appearing in hotel garages and lots, which is obviously a good use case for them. But seriously big bucks are needed to put in chargers that can fill up an EV in less than a few hours.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Leo, I think there is money in Biden's "Build Back" budget to install lots of fast chargers. Auto manufacturers should also be chipping in on the costs of installing them since they benefit as well. I certainly wouldn't consider buying any sort of electric anything until there are a lot of fast chargers out there. For instance... there are only 25 fast chargers in all of Tennessee. Fuel cell powered cars certainly looking more inviting.

[Frank Cox]

I was talking to the local tow truck guy a while back and he told me that he won't touch any electric vehicle. If you call him about anything to do with an electric car he tells you to phone someone in "the city" to deal with it. Even if it hasn't been in a wreck he says there's just too much risk involved.

[Randy Stankey]

I certainly wouldn't consider buying any sort of electric anything until there are a lot of fast chargers out there.

Just what I need! Another gizmo that needs to be recharged every night: My phone, iPad, computer mouse, TV remote and a dozen other things that take rechargeable batteries.

And, now, my car? No way, José!

Besides, our electrical grid is being stretched to its limits, more and more, every day. The idea of plunking down a charger at every gas station is a hare-brained scheme, at best. Where do people think the energy to recharge their cars comes from? Unicorn dust and happy thoughts?

I don't care what people say. There is one and only one solution: DRIVE FEWER CARS and USE LESS ENERGY!

Conserve now or pay later! Building electric cars is NOT conservation! It merely shifts the burden from one scarce resource to another.

If people don't get this through their thick skulls...and soon...they will be forced to do it.

[Leo Enticknap]

I was talking to the local tow truck guy a while back and he told me that he won't touch any electric vehicle. If you call him about anything to do with an electric car he tells you to phone someone in "the city" to deal with it. Even if it hasn't been in a wreck he says there's just too much risk involved.

What risk is he worried about specifically - thermal runaway and battery fires? Or the reported infamously long lead time for repair parts, and the resulting fear that he'll have Teslas sitting around on his lot for months for that reason?

As Randy notes, the problem isn't so much as fast chargers themselves (from what I've read, the actual machines only cost a couple of grand a piece), but the infrastructure needed to supply them with such a big voltage and current, and the generating capacity itself.

If there is going to be a wholesale transition to EVs, I believe that fast charging is not going to be what facilitates that. The sheer volume of power needed at any one time (hundreds of volts at hundreds of amps DC) simply costs so much in new infrastructure as to be fundamentally unviable. A more hopeful approach, IMHO, is to continue to develop alternative battery chemistries to the point at which it becomes viable not to need fast chargers. As soon as you can build a car for a price that your average middle class family can afford and that can hold a 600-700 mile charge, the need for fast chargers is over. That is about the maximum that any non-commercial vehicle will ever need to drive in a day (and for someone who cannot install a private charger at home, would typically mean only having to use a public one once every 1-2 weeks); and if you're doing a drive across the country (for example), you can then charge it overnight on a hotel lot. Those slower chargers can be powered by solar panels, birdie blenders, powerwall-type batteries, and all these renewable approaches that cannot be scaled up to deliver half a megawatt or more to a single parking lot, continuously.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Just what I need! Another gizmo that needs to be recharged every night: My phone, iPad, computer mouse, TV remote and a dozen other things that take rechargeable batteries.

And, now, my car? No way, José!

Besides, our electrical grid is being stretched to its limits, more and more, every day.

There are a lot of people with roof top solar panels and power walls or equivelent that sell electricity back to power companies, run their homes, and charge their cars. If you have to be all electric, this is the way to do it. A friend that owns a Tesla said he has paid over $20 per charge to fast charge his car on trips up to Chicago and back...

In Utah CNG got big really fast because CNG was only .58 a gallon when it first got going. There were also plenty of gas stations, 30+, that you could fill the CNG at. Heading South on I-15, the last CNG was in Beaver, UT. But heading east on I-80, the last CNG fill was in Rock Springs, WY. Once that ran out I had to switch to regular petrol. There was only one in Billings, MT., none in Idaho or Nevada. Today in Utah, a CNG fill is 2.86 a gallon. At that price, the only thing one can brag about regarding CNG is that the engine oil stays very, very clean. I can buy 87 octane Shell gas a few miles from me for $3.27 a gal! So it's impossible to justify spending 32k dollars on a CNG system for the company service van these days.

[Leo Enticknap]

LPG (aka propane) went through a brief spell of popularity in the UK, from around 2000 to 2010, and for pretty much the same reasons. I owned a LPG-capable car from 2002-07 (bought it used with the conversion already done). When away from my usual commute route, finding stations that sold it meant looking them up online in advance, but I rarely had to drive far out of my way to find one. The problems were that the tank in the trunk reduced the luggage capacity of the car to near zero (not a problem then because I was single and only really used the car for commuting, but it would have been a big problem if I'd had two kids and needed to haul them and all their crap around), and the maintenance cost of the LPG system gobbled most of the savings on the fuel itself. And if I'd actually paid for the conversion, I would have lost money overall, over the five years and 80-90K miles I had that car.

I eventually got rid of that car for two reasons: a lot of gas stations that had sold LPG stopped doing so around 2006-07, until things got to the point at which I was having to make detours to fill up, and the thing needed a valve cleaning and realignment that would have cost about a grand to fix a fault whereby it wouldn't switch from gasoline to LPG until after around 50 miles (meaning that on most of my journeys, it never did).

[Frank Cox]

What risk is he worried about specifically - thermal runaway and battery fires?

I think so.

We were talking about this one day when he said that a guy's electric Ford truck refused to start in his driveway and they called him to tow it to the local Ford dealer. He said he won't touch it.

I haven't actually seen any Teslas around here. There might be one or two somewhere but none that I've noticed. There's a few electric Fords and that's about it as far as I've seen.

[Scott Norwood]

I almost rented an electric car by accident. I did not know that electric rental cars were a thing, so I used a travel web site to pick a location, sort by price, and limit the search to mid-size cars. The first option listed was "mid-size electric vehicle" or something like that, which would have been easy to pick accidentally when sorting by price. It would have also been disastrous for my intended use case (staying in a hotel, with no obvious easy access to charging facilities). It also was not clear if I needed to return it full of electricity or how the billing for charging even worked.

From this thread and reading elsewhere, it seems that the current state of electric vehicles makes them poor candidates for rental cars, in the same way that, say, a diesel car would be. Many of us have never driven one, and lack the base level of knowledge that is needed about how the charging infrastructure works. In a different context, it might have been an interesting choice (if I had, for example, been staying at someone's house with access to power, or working somewhere with an EV charging device), but travel web sites need to make clear to people what they are renting. Lesson learned, though thankfully not the hard way.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Here is another reason to avoid Electric cars at least until batteries are improved, or perhaps until they include a built in fire extinguishing systems ssuch as are included in Jet Engines. This tiny Nissan Leaf went up in flames and it took nearly 500,000 gallons of water to extinguish the fire. It normally takes 500 to 1000 gallons of water to extinguish a normal car fire. This happened not very far from me in a town I frequently go to.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Document a bug and call it a feature! It's a seat heater and does not require a subscription.

In any case, it SEEMS that there should be over temperature sensors that shut stuff down well before there is an issue. When I designed a product (dental curing light) using a lithium battery pack, the pack supplier included protective circuitry for over voltage, under voltage, over current, and over temperature. It would disconnect the cells under any of these conditions. Of course, I HAVE heard of cells that develop internal shorts, and protective circuitry cannot do much about that.

I've also heard about people charging the rental scooters in their apartments and burning down the apartment.

The article states that they had to keep cooling the battery until all its energy was dissipated. It seems that the same would be true of gasoline. But, perhaps gasoline releases its energy more quickly (explosion) so the fire department does not need to stick around as long.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Document a bug and call it a feature! It's a seat heater and does not require a subscription.

In any case, it SEEMS that there should be over temperature sensors that shut stuff down well before there is an issue. When I designed a product (dental curing light) using a lithium battery pack, the pack supplier included protective circuitry for over voltage, under voltage, over current, and over temperature. It would disconnect the cells under any of these conditions. Of course, I HAVE heard of cells that develop internal shorts, and protective circuitry cannot do much about that.

I've also heard about people charging the rental scooters in their apartments and burning down the apartment.

The article states that they had to keep cooling the battery until all its energy was dissipated. It seems that the same would be true of gasoline. But, perhaps gasoline releases its energy more quickly (explosion) so the fire department does not need to stick around as long.

Yes, gasoline dissipates much quicker. While in a car one single battery can cause this sort of thing, and the fire spreads slowly. I think we trust lithium batteries way too much! I can remember that UPS 747 that was brought down by a lithium battery fire. That crash is what set today's safety standards for shipping lithium batteries. As for lithium batteries used in a car... I think that thermally fusing each battery internally might stop a fire from starting, I also find it humorous that the fire started in an employee Nissan vehicle that was parked at Nissan USA headquarters. I wonder if any employee Tesla's ever went up in flames while charging at a Tesla plant?

[Marcel Birgelen]

The article states that they had to keep cooling the battery until all its energy was dissipated. It seems that the same would be true of gasoline. But, perhaps gasoline releases its energy more quickly (explosion) so the fire department does not need to stick around as long.

There is a major difference here and that's how the fire is started. In case of gasoline, if it's "just burning" and not exploding, it's relatively easy to stop the source of the energy release, which is "burning" or "oxidation". Take away one of the fuels and the reaction will stop. Cool down "the system" below the threshold to sustain the reaction, and the reaction will stop.

So, in case of a traditional fire, you can use water to cool the system down. You can use a powerful hose of water to temporarily disrupt the flow of oxygen and you're diluting the fuel with the water. Also, liquid gasoline doesn't burn, so for gasoline to burn, it first needs to be evaporated. Water will not only dilute the gasoline, it will also cool it down, making it less likely to burn.

As soon as you have extinguished the fire, you're usually good, as there usually is nothing left to produce sufficient energy/heat to restart the fire, even though there probably is still enough "potential energy" left in the system, the entropy is now sufficiently low that it won't automatically start a new fire.

The situation with electric batteries is completely different. First of all, the source of the fire is excessive energy release/heat by one or more cells inside those batteries. So, contrary to the gasoline-based fire, the source of the initial energy release isn't 'burning" or "oxidation", it's a run-away redux reaction inside the battery. Also contrary to the gasoline fire is that all the components to sustain the reaction are already inside the battery. There is also no minimal enthalpy here, because the source is a short circuit that doesn't require a minimum amount of energy in the system to sustain itself.

Using water trying to extinguish the fire will be far less effective, because you're only fighting the resulting fire. You're not taking away any fuel of the thing that's causing the fire, neither are you doing a good job at diluting the fuel. The only thing you're effectively achieving is cooling down the system and thereby slowing down the release of energy, hopefully to a`point where the fire can no longer be sustained. But this also means that you do need to keep cooling the system, until all the energy inside the system has been released, which may take quite a while.

An additional problem with water is that those disintegrating high voltage batteries may pose a risk of electric shock. While water isn't the best conductor out there, its conductivity may still pose an additional risk. That's why lithium battery fires are usually extinguished with foam. Foam is far less conductive and the idea is to take away the oxygen. While this usually effectively kills the fire, it still doesn't kill the source of the fire. Once the energy in the system has reached a critical point again, a new fire will start. That's also why automatic extinguishing systems like those found in planes, aren't really effective against those kind of fires and why battery fires are often so vicious.

Looking from a perspective of energy density v.s. safety, then gasoline isn't all that bad and it seems to be hard to find a sustainable alternative that comes close on both aspects. The problem with hydrogen for example, besides creating it from sustainable sources, is that its highly volatile and explosive and while we have found solutions to reduce that risk, getting an energy density close to that of gasoline or modern lithium batteries seems to be a hard to solve puzzle.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Well, there are special fire extinguishers made just for small lithium fires. I seriously doubt that scaling them way up for car batteries would even work. And since large lithium packs release their energy slowly in a fire, due to the fact that up to a couple thousand or more individual batteries have to ignite and burn up, it pretty much is what it is. I know that Tesla packs are made up of 2000 to 4000 individual 18650 batteries, depending on the car model. There is a place I visited once in Salt Lake City that rebuilds auto battery packs. At that time, about 7 years ago, they were doing Prius and Tesla packs. Prius packs are tiny compared to Tesla's, but they are hybrid cars anyway.

CNG...
I drove a Natural Gas powered van for a couple years. The conversion cost a little over 30k, so it was a long payback... You could switch back and forth between Natural Gas and Gasoline by flipping one rocker switch. The Natural Gas was fine until you had a big long hill to climb. Then it's inefficiency in a V-8 engine reared it's ugly head, so I would switch to gasoline. Agree on the Hydrogen risks. Ya also need hydrogen to run a fuel cell.

[Leo Enticknap]

Which brings us back to the need for a replacement battery chemistry for lithium ion to make the mass transition to EVs reliable. If you Google "alternatives to lithium ion," you will find a ton of puff pieces such as this one, and I'm hoping that sooner rather than later, one or more of these technologies will make it out of the lab and into volume production.

As for hydrogen, its association with the Hindenburg in popular culture is not for nothing. The builders and operators of rigid airships spent nearly four decades trying to manage the risk caused by the stuff, and in many ways they had a simpler engineering problem, because they weren't trying to burn it to release energy: simply contain it, stop it from mixing with oxygen, and prevent any sources of ignition from getting near it. As not just the Hindenburg, but literally dozens of other airships that were destroyed in hydrogen fires, notably several pre-WWI passenger Zeppelins, the Dixmude, and the R101, demonstrated, that problem was never fundamentally able to be solved. Given that in a hydrogen-powered vehicle, you actually want to ignite the hydrogen, the risk of that ignition getting out of control and turning your car into a bomb would seem to be unacceptably high.