Interesting article on the impact of EV growth to jobs in auto industry

[cjshaker]

Well, here in Penisylvania they put a $.30 a gallon tax on gas so we could have better roads and bridges....The thought of driving a car that will not contribute anything to those pecker heads in Harrisburg is really appealing. I need an electric car more than I thought. Thanks gdaddy. I never considered that angle.

And how long do you think it will take them to come up with a new tax for electric vehicles?

This isn't directed at anybody here, but where do people think the electric comes from? Solar or wind? Those are unreliable sources, so they are ALWAYS using coal, natural gas or water to power the stations. Wind turbines have some very drastic shortcomings, which are well known among communities that have them (like where I work; we have 3 on campus, of which only 1 or 2 work at any given time....IF there is wind present). And you might want to check out the lawsuits against turbine companies that install them, then disappear or fold up once the money is in their pockets. It might surprise you. Solar is only available for a given time under perfect circumstances, which very few areas have.

So I guess this is the answer....diesel powered charging stations...

[shady]

I don't care how the electric is generated. No tree huger here. In PA the state gas tax is $.587 and add another $.184 fed., & we have  the highest in the nation. With an electric car the only tax I am paying is the one on my electric bill. I get to go up and down the road and contribute nothing for the upkeep and improvements to it. The Amish have been doing it since the beginning of time. It's a nice loop hole that I never considered until today.

[cjshaker]

With an electric car the only tax I am paying is the one on my electric bill.

That will change. There's no way they will give up all that tax money without replacing it somehow. As soon as EV's become more mainstream, and gov't subsidies fall, there will be increases in areas that nobody even dreamed of. Power transmission increases, charging station fees and taxes, included taxes for battery recycling etc etc. Those are just a few I can dream up, and I'm not even a bureaucrat 

[Drew Pojedinec]

From an engineering standpoint, one large engine or power station is always more efficient than 10,000 smaller ones, even with transmission losses.  So it doesn’t matter if it is generated with natural gas etc.

I don’t know of many coal powered plants, seems the last few years I’ve been bringing Nat gas parts to power plants. Even if nat gas was more expensive, the transportation costs and ease of handling is where it’s at.

[Stangman]

Doug I think that Im older than you and I think we will both be around to witness the next generation of cars. Think about it look at the difference in cars from the 80s till now that was only 40 years ago. God willing I hope to be here to go to another 25 to 30 Fe Reunions.

[RustyCrankshaft]

Washington state has a pilot program if you drive an a hybrid or EV vehicle where you pay a "use tax" and then based on miles driven you get credited back the gas tax based on the EPA mileage of your vehicle.

Seattle Metro Transit already has a small fleet of electric buses, and around the 1st of the year will be 100% hybrid with no straight diesel coaches left in service. They have a push to be 100% electric in a few years. The technology is moving along and fairly quickly. In the last 15 years the high voltage battery packs have tripled in service life and capacity for the same size foot print. There is an entire industry that is springing up revolving around telemetrics and that is where the real money will be made as industry transitions to fully electric. Maybe not so much on a consumer level, but for transit and trucking, anything fleet related the need to understand state of charge, recharge times, etc will be invaluable in staying competitive. And if you look world-wide electrification is well underway. Several cities in China were built AROUND being as near to 100% electric as possible and already have a fleets of battery powered buses, trucks and cars there in large scale.

Based on what I see from inside the industry, diesel/gas will not go away for a LONG time. But mostly electric in big cities is closer than it seems. The big issue right now is that the power grid infrastructure is at or over capacity already. So even if you could generate enough power you can get it where it needs to be. That will change, around here there is already a lot of visible work being done but it's still a long road.

As far as generating power and whether electric is more environmentally friendly, well that's sadly mostly irrelevant because the switch to electric is a commercial/political push and not based on science or any sort of meaningful research. From the little I've done at work, I would say that the cradle to grave environmental impact is quit a bit more significant for electric vs diesel or gas. But since this is profit and politically driven electric checks the right boxes and so that's where we are going right or wrong.

From a hobby/enthusiast standpoint, electric cars are fast no doubt, but they aren't that much fun in my personal opinion. For that reason alone I think it will be a great while before traditional stuff goes away and even then it'll still be around but it will be more and more of a novelty just like Steam is for us in this day and age.

[allrightmike]

   Rusty C, as Paul Harvey used to say "you hit the nail with your head on that one"!  LOL
   
Mike.

[HarleyJack17]

Arkansas, not many EV anyway, has already imposed an annual registration tax on electric vehicles. $200 per year for all electric, and $100 for hybrid, both annual fees.
There are drawbacks.  I for one, do not see myself ever in the need for one of these gizmos. Cities and states and other government entities and utilities will fight green alternatives when it hurts their coffers.

[RustyCrankshaft]

Arkansas, not many EV anyway, has already imposed an annual registration tax on electric vehicles. $200 per year for all electric, and $100 for hybrid, both annual fees.
There are drawbacks.  I for one, do not see myself ever in the need for one of these gizmos. Cities and states and other government entities and utilities will fight green alternatives when it hurts their coffers.

No they won't and have not been. Too much political pressure.

Take for instance the public transit industry. A typical diesel with a Allison or Voith hydraulic automatic powered 40' transit coach. Typical yearly maintenance costs (assuming around a 100-150k mile per year service) will run about 25k dollars if it's a non DPF equipped bus. The SAME bus but in a hybrid costs around 80-100k per year in maintenance costs. Yet they are buying these things in droves and not looking back. It is NOT more environmentally friendly, they typically DO NOT get better fuel mileage, they are NOT more environmentally friendly but it's politically the only direction to go. I don't have accurate yearly maintenance costs for a large fleet of battery only buses handy, but on our test fleet that is not 100% in service they're running around 150k dollars per year. This is JUST maintenance costs, that doesn't include all the costs associated with operation, just what it takes to keep it on the road. I also do some work in the trucking and equipment industries and the dollar figures are not the same but the trend is EXACTLY the same.

There are a LOT of drawbacks to EV stuff, but some of those are simply the hurdles of a technology in it's infancy. But in big cities, especially "progressive/left/liberal" cities the push to go EV is too great and it'll happen because the right pressure is being applied.

It'll still be a long time before everything is EV and I suspect even in my lifetime I won't see 100% EV, but we will see an exponential growth. I still don't see this drastically affecting hot rod stuff. Racing, show cars, off road stuff is all about the fun of the sport and for most of us in some type of hobby like this the fun is the smell of burning gas and the all the stuff that goes with it. Plus there are regions where it will take decades to build infrastructure to support EV stuff. Just like electric lights and gas lights before them, EV's will/have started in big cities and will spread unless the political pressure changes or MSM starts reporting real scientific facts from respectable sources about climate change and the real impacts of hybrid and EV technologies.

You should see the bill for our ESS batteries! That alone SHOULD scare anyone away from this, but the public has spoken and we will be 100% hybrid within a few weeks.

[cjshaker]

You should see the bill for our ESS batteries! That alone SHOULD scare anyone away from this, but the public has spoken and we will be 100% hybrid within a few weeks.

I've tried to get people to see this; the side that nobody wants to talk about...the reality of real world experiences.
We got 3 Honda electric hybrids at work. When the salesman delivered the cars, I asked about the lifespan of the batteries, which are not even accessible except by Honda dealerships. He confidently stated the batteries will last the lifespan of the vehicle. Turns out that lifespan is 120k miles, at which point they all started throwing codes that the AGM batteries were junk. Cost to replace them at a dealer was $5k. More than the cars were worth.

At the same time, we purchased 8 48 volt carts to replace aging campus vehicles, to go the "green" route. At about 4 years, those carts were done....gone. They got tired of replacing $1000 worth of batteries about twice a year (PER CART!), which I had to do. Talk about back breaking work!! They also had to replace my uniforms once or twice a year due to the battery acid eating holes in them.

Then there are the 3 wind turbines that I previously mentioned. They take, on average, about 1-1 1/2 years to get parts for and fix whenever one breaks down, which isn't uncommon (turns out that giant towers that sit in the middle of open fields make GREAT lightning rods  ). Then there's the company that installed them, which said that they would NOT fix the turbines unless the school agreed to extend their service contract with them. Sound like extortion to you? They got sued, but after a couple years of litigation, they caved and signed the contract (just recently) just to get them fixed.

And WHY do people think this is new technology? Both electric cars and wind turbines have been around since the 1800's.
I am not anti-new technology, but people need to hear real facts. Of course that won't make a damn bit of difference. There's money to be made.

[RustyCrankshaft]

You should see the bill for our ESS batteries! That alone SHOULD scare anyone away from this, but the public has spoken and we will be 100% hybrid within a few weeks.

I've tried to get people to see this; the side that nobody wants to talk about...the reality of real world experiences.
We got 3 Honda electric hybrids at work. When the salesman delivered the cars, I asked about the lifespan of the batteries, which are not even accessible except by Honda dealerships. He confidently stated the batteries will last the lifespan of the vehicle. Turns out that lifespan is 120k miles, at which point they all started throwing codes that the AGM batteries were junk. Cost to replace them at a dealer was $5k. More than the cars were worth.

At the same time, we purchased 8 48 volt carts to replace aging campus vehicles, to go the "green" route. At about 4 years, those carts were done....gone. They got tired of replacing $1000 worth of batteries about twice a year (PER CART!), which I had to do. Talk about back breaking work!! They also had to replace my uniforms once or twice a year due to the battery acid eating holes in them.

Then there are the 3 wind turbines that I previously mentioned. They take, on average, about 1-1 1/2 years to get parts for and fix whenever one breaks down, which isn't uncommon (turns out that giant towers that sit in the middle of open fields make GREAT lightning rods  ). Then there's the company that installed them, which said that they would NOT fix the turbines unless the school agreed to extend their service contract with them. Sound like extortion to you? They got sued, but after a couple years of litigation, they caved and signed the contract (just recently) just to get them fixed.

And WHY do people think this is new technology? Both electric cars and wind turbines have been around since the 1800's.
I am not anti-new technology, but people need to hear real facts. Of course that won't make a damn bit of difference. There's money to be made.

I agree, wind turbines are more of a tax loophole for deprecation than viable power generating sources and from the little I've been around them they have been a maintenance nightmare.

Right now we are spending about 6-7 million per year on the ESS's that we rebuild in house that are out of warranty. When we got our first hybrid fleet Allison wouldn't let us rebuild them, 2 of us tore a couple down and figured out what they're all about and figured out that Toyota used the same cells. When Allison found out we were buying cells from Toyota they went to Hitachi and they threaten Toyota who then stopped selling us cells and we were forced to find another work around but in the mean time were buying more 80k ESS's that a week before we were rebuilding for 25k.

On top of that, most of the worlds battery making minerals (besides good old fashioned lead/acid) come from countries that are unfriendly to the free world AND have zero environmental controls in place. The lithium mine in Russia has about a 30 miles ring of death around it. And that's just in the mining raw materials, you still have to manufacture the batteries and then you have to deal with them once they reach their end of life.

Electric is not environmentally friendly with the current or near future technologies. But the evening news makes it look good and people won't do any meaningful research on their own usually so the politicians get away with it.

I remember my Grandpa telling me about a gal who was from some royal family (couldn't remember which country) driving an electric car in the 30's. She used to buy stuff from his Mom's store in Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle and would drive the electric car there with an escort who would charge the car while she shopped. It's not new technology, and only marginally improved!!!

I'm not anti-technology either, but I'm also not a fan of installing technology just for the sake of technology. Sorry but my washing machine and dyer don't need a computer to wash and dry my underware........an on-off switch and timer works just fine.

[BruceS]

https://www.prageru.com/video/are-electric-cars-really-green/

Here's a video that discusses this titled "Are Electric Cars Really Green?".  It has a slight European slant because the presenter is Danish but the main points still apply.  What I like is that it looks at the issue from a lifecycle point of view as Rusty has mentioned.  What I have read from several sources and what isn't mentioned is the estimated 30% reduction in labor cost of an EV vs. a comparable IC vehicle. 

[HarleyJack17]

I agree with all that has been said. My point was that any entity that "profits" from taxing fossil  fuel type items (cars, electric, and the like) will be hurt from EV vehicles and solar. Short term mind you.  I don't look for California input on anything...no logic to what is going on there by IMO. Arkansas taxes EV in excess since they do not contribute to the road tax(fuel). Entergy is also trying to charge solar homes....they get really jacked, high cost to go solar, then go off grid, and even put energy ON the grid, but will get charged excess fees that make it not wise financially.  Again, short term issues but if business and governments don't make money they die off or increase already high taxes.  I see the point especially on electric.  A lot of our bill covers wiring, maintenance, etc., not just electric production. Solar contributes $0 to that.

Electric cars are far from green as much of the green stuff out there. As others said....look at what it takes to make a battery, how toxic they are, and they do NOT have an infinite life span. The argument is recycle but that has to be cost feasible and profitable....just like when metals tank...scrappers shut it down or slow down....
I could go on and on with the reasons etc. but in the end, just know reality catches up.  We are a half century away from any common place stuff but I feel it is coming....just like self driving vehicles are....the movie Wolverine or Reel Steel comes to mind....that kind of stuff.  You can book it, freight movers will have the first self driving or auto pilot vehicles since it poses the greatest savings potential.  I don't trust a machine to drive but then again there are a lot of non drivers on the road.

[allrightmike]

    Just a couple more points to throw fuel on the fire (pun intended). One, a single gallon of gasoline contains the energy of seven sticks of dynamite, and weighs about seven lbs. Not going to happen with a battery. Two, a dead battery weighs the same as when charged, an empty gas tank weighs as much as the empty tank! Mass media unmentionables.

Mike.

[cjshaker]

I don’t know of many coal powered plants, seems the last few years I’ve been bringing Nat gas parts to power plants. Even if nat gas was more expensive, the transportation costs and ease of handling is where it’s at.

According to the government, there are still 336 coal powered power plants in the U.S., although that number is slowly dropping.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html

Natural gas does seem to be the most prevalent, followed by hydro-electric. The "Other Renewables" table are mainly small generation plants that produce very little usable power in terms of public usage. The only point being that, unless the power used to recharge an EV is produced by nuclear or hydro, electric powered cars are anything but "green". So unless the "green" pushers are riding horses and sailboats, they are no better than the people they condemn, which makes them hypocrites at best, and just plain stupid at worst.

Bruce, PragerU does a good job of exposing many myths, on many subjects. Of course that's why YouTube and several other platforms have made a concentrated effort to bury their videos.