Tag: automotive

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Can Electric Vehicles Fully Replace Gas Guzzlers?

Formula E Racer
Luca Filippi driving through turn 1 during the ABB FIA Formula E Zurich ePrix on June 10, 2018 in Zurich, Switzerland. Photo by Oskar Schuler/Shutterstock

28 August 2019 – The short answer is, to quote Pooh Bear in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, “You never can tell with bees!” Or, with advancing technology, for that matter. Last week, however, the Analytics Team at Autolist published results of a survey of 1,567 current car shoppers that might shed some light on the question of whether electric vehicles (EVs) can fully replace vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEs).

The Analytics Team asked survey respondents what were their biggest reasons to not buy an electric vehicle. By looking at the results, we can project when, how, and if e-vehicle technology can ever surmount car-shoppers’ objections.

The survey results were spectacularly unsurprising. The top three barriers to purchasing an electric vehicle were:

  1. Concerns about lack of adequate range;

  2. E-vehicles’ relatively high cost compared to similar gas vehicles; and

  3. Concerns about charging infrastructure.

Anybody following the development of electric vehicles already knew that. Most folks could even peg the order of concern. What was somewhat surprising, though, is how little folks’ trepidation dropped off for less significant concerns. Approximately 42% of respondents cited adequate range as a concern. The score dropped only to about 14% for the ninth-most-concerning worry: being unhappy with choices of body style.

Survey Results
Survey respondants cited lack of adequate range as their biggest concern about buying an electric vehicle. Source: Autolist

What that means for development of electric-vehicle technology is that resolving the top three issues won’t do the job. Resolving the top three issues would just elevate the next three issues to top-concern status for 25-30% of potential customers. That’s still way too high to allow fully replacing ICE-powered vehicles with EVs, as nine European countries (so far) have announced they want to do between 2020 and 2050.

Looking at what may be technologically feasible could give a glimpse of how sane or insane such ICE bans might be. What we can do is go down the list and speculate on how tough it will be to overcome each obstacle to full adoption. The Pareto chart above will show the “floor” to folks’ resistance if any of these issues remains unmet.

Top Three Issues

By inspection the Pareto chart shows natural breaks into three groups of three. The top three concerns (range, cost, and charging) all concern roughly 40% of respondents. That’s approximately the size of the political base that elected Donald Trump to be President of the United States in 2016.

I mention Trump’s political base to give perspective for how important a 40% rating really is. Just as 40% acceptance got Trump over the top in a head-to-head competition with Hillary Clinton, a 40% non-acceptance is enough to doom electric vehicles in a head-to-head competition with ICE-powered vehicles. So, what are the chances of technologically fixing those problems?

Lack of Range is just a matter of how much energy you can backpack onto an electric vehicle. The inputs to that calculation are how far you can drive on every Joule of energy (for comparison, 3,600 Joules equal one Watt-hour of energy) and how many Joules can you pack into a battery that an electric vehicle can reasonably carry around. I don’t have time to research these data points today, since I have only a few hours left to draft this essay, so I’m just not going to do it.

There are two ways, however, that we can qualitatively guesstimate the result. First, note that EV makers have already introduced models that they claim can go as far on one “fill up” (i.e., recharge) as is typical for ICE vehicles. That’s in the range of 200 to 300 miles. I can report that my sportscar goes pretty close to 200 miles on a tankful of gas, and that’s adequate for most of the commuting I’ve done over my career.

The second way to guesstimate the result is to watch progress of the Formula E electric-vehicle races. Formula E has been around for nearly a decade now (the first race was run in 2011), so we have some history to help judge the pace of technological developments.

The salient point that Formula E history makes is that battery range is improving. In previous events batteries couldn’t last a reasonable race distance. Unlike other forms of motor racing, where refueling takes just a few seconds, it takes too darn long to charge up an electric vehicle to make pit stops for refueling viable.

The solution was to have two cars for each racer. About half way through the race, the first car’s batteries would run out of juice, and the driver would have to jump into the second car to complete the race. This uncomfortable situation lasted through the last racing season (2018).

This year, however, I’m told that the rules have been changed to require racers to complete the entire race in one car on one battery charge. That tells us that e-technology has advanced enough to allow racers to complete a reasonable race distance at a reasonable race speed on one charge from a reasonable battery pack. That means e-vehicle developers have made significant progress on the range-limitation issue. Projecting into the future, we can be confident that range limits will soon become a non-issue.

High e-vehicle cost will also soon become a non-issue. History plainly shows that if folks are serious about mass-marketing anything, purchase prices will come down to a sustainable level. While Elon Musk’s Tesla hasn’t yet shown a profit while the company struggles to produce enough cars to fill even today’s meager electric-vehicle demand, there are some very experienced and professional automobile manufacturers also in the electric-vehicle game. Anyone who thinks those guys won’t be able to solve the mass-production-at-a-reasonable-cost problem for electric vehicles just hasn’t been paying attention over the past century and a quarter. They’re gonna do it, and they’ll do it very soon!

Charging infrastructure is similarly just a matter of doing it. It didn’t take the retail-gasoline vendors long to build out infrastructure to feed ICE-powered cars. Solving the EV-charging problem is not much more difficult. You just plunk charging stations down on every corner to replace the gasoline filling stations you’re going to close down because you’ve made ICE vehicles illegal.

Second-Tier Issues

The top three issues don’t seem to pose any insurmountable obstacles, so we can move on to the second-tier issues of recharging time, insufficient public knowledge, and battery life. All of these concerned just under 30% of survey respondents.

Charging time is the Achilles heel for EV technology. Currently, it takes hours to recharge an electric-car’s batteries. Charging speed is a matter of power, and that’s a serious limitation. It’s the real charging-infrastructure problem!

It takes less than a minute to pump ten gallons of gasoline into my sportscar’s fuel tank. That ten gallons can deliver approximately 1.2x109 Joules of energy. That’s 1.2 billion Watt seconds!

To cram that much energy into a battery in one minute would take a power rate of 20 MW. That’s enough to power a medium-sized town of 26,000 people! Now, look at a typical gas station with eight gas pumps, and imagine each of those pumps pumping a medium-size-town’s worth of electric power into a waiting EV’s battery. Now, count the number of gas stations in your town.

That should give you some idea of the enormity of the charging-infrastructure problem that mass use of electric vehicles will create!

I’m not going to suggest any solutions to this issue. Luckily, since I don’t advocate for mass use of electric vehicles, I don’t have to solve this problem for people do. In the interest of addressing the rest of the issues, let’s pretend we’re liberal politicians and can wave our fairy wands to make the enormity of this issue magically disappear.

Inadequate public knowledge is a relative non-issue. Electric vehicles aren’t really difficult to understand. In fact, they should be simpler to operate than ICE vehicles. Especially since the prime mover EVs use is a motor rather than an engine.

Hardly anyone I know is conscious of the difference between a motor and an engine. Everyone knows it, but doesn’t think about it. Everyone knows that to run an ICE you have to crank it with a starter motor to get it running in the first place, and then you’ve got to constantly take care not to stall it. That knowledge becomes so ingrained by the time you get a driver’s license that you don’t even think about it.

Electric motors are not engines, though. They’re motors, which means they start all by themselves as soon as you feed them power. When you brake your electric car to a stop at a stop light, it just stops! You don’t have to then keep it chunking over at idle. Stopped is stopped.

When sitting at a stop light, or waiting for your spouse to load groceries into the boot, an EV uses no power ‘cause it’s stopped. When you’re ready to go, you push on the accelerator pedal, and it just goes. No more fiddling with clutch pedals or shifting gears or using any of the other mechanical skills manual-transmission cars force us to learn and automatic-transmission cars take care of for us automatically. The biggest thing we have to learn about driving EVs is how easy it is.

There isn’t much else to learn about EVs either. Gearheads will probably want to dig into things like regenerative braking and multipolar induction motors, but just folks won’t care. If the most important thing about your ICE-powered SUV is the number of cup holders, that will all be the same in your electric-powered SUV.

Overall battery life will be an issue for years going forward, but eventually that will become a non-issue, too. Overall battery life refers to the number of times your lithium-ion battery pack can be recharged before it swells up and bursts. Ten years from now we expect to have a better solution than lithium-ion batteries, but they aren’t all that bad a solution for now, anyway.

It was annoying when the relatively small lithium-ion battery pack in your Samsung smartphone burst into flames back in 2016, and you can imagine what’ll happen if the much larger battery pack in your Tesla does the same thing when sitting in the garage under your house. But, it’ll be less of a problem than when the battery packs in airliners started going up in smoke a few years ago. We got through that and we’ll get through this!

Third-Rate Concerns

Third-rate issues concerned 15-20% of survey respondents. They include issues around electric-motor reliability, battery materials, and vehicle designs. While they concerned relatively fewer respondents, enough people said they worried about them that they have to be addressed before EVs can fully replace ICE-powered vehicles.

Reliability concerned 20% of survey respondents. It shouldn’t. Electric motors have been around since William Sturgeon built the first practical one in 1832. They’ve proved to be extremely reliable with only two parts to wear out: the commutator brushes and the bearings. Unlike ICE power units, they need practically no regular maintenance. With modern solid-state power electronics taking the place of the old commutators, the only things left to wear out are the bearings, which take less punishment than the load-carrying wheel bearings all cars have.

Battery materials are a concern, but when viewed in perspective they shouldn’t be. Yes, lithium burns vigorously when exposed to air, and is especially flammable when exposed to water. But, gasoline burns just as vigorously when ignited by even a spark.

A tankful of gasoline can be responsible for a horrendous fire if ignited in an accident. Lithium ion batteries can cause similar mayhem, but are no more likely to do so than any other energy-storage medium.

Body size/style should not, to my mind, even be on the list. Electric-powered vehicles present fewer design constraints to coach builders than those with ICE power plants. In fact, it’s possible to design an EV chassis such that you can put any body on it that you can think of. Especially if you design that chassis with individually driven wheels, there are no drive-shaft and power-train issues to deal with.

Summing Up

Looking at the nine EV issues that survey respondents said would give them pause when considering the purchase of an electric vehicle rather than an ICE-powered vehicle, the only one not inevitably amenable to technological solution is the scale of the charging infrastructure. All of the others we can expect to be disposed of in short order as soon as we collectively decide we want to do it.

That charging infrastructure issue poses two problems: recharging time and recharging cost. The ten-gallon fuel tank in my sportscar typically gets me through about a week. That’s because I do relatively little commuting. I drive a round trip of about 60 miles to teach classes in Fort Myers twice a week. The rest of my driving is short local trips that burn up more than their fair share of gasoline because they’re stop-and-go driving.

In the past, I’ve had more difficult commute schedules that would have burned up a tankful of gas a day. Commuting more than 200 miles a day is almost unheard of. So, having to sit at a recharging station for hours to top up batteries in the middle of a commute would be an unusual concern for a commuter. They would top up the batteries at home overnight.

Road trips, however, are another story. On a typical road trip, most people plan to burn up two tankfuls of fuel a day in two 4-5-hour stints. That’s why most vehicles have fuel tanks capable of taking them 200-300 miles. That’s about how far you can drive in a 4-5-hour stint. So, you drive out the tank, then stop for a while, which includes spending a minute or so refilling the tank. Then you’re ready to go on the next stint.

With an electric vehicle, however, which has to sit still for hours to recharge, that just doesn’t work. Instead of taking two days to drive to Virginia to visit my daughter, the trip would take most of a week. Electric vehicles are simply not suitable for road trips unless and until we solve the problem of supplying enough electric power to an EV’s battery to supply a small town!

Then, there’s the expense. If you’re going to recharge your EV once a week (or top it off from your wall outlet every night), you’ve gotta pay for that energy at the going rate. That 1.2 billion Joules translates into 333 kiloWatt hours added to your light bill every week. At a typical U.S. electricity rate of $0.12/kWh, that’s about $40. That may not seem like much, but compare it to the $25 I typically pay for a tankful of gas.

In conclusion, it looks like EVs will eventually do fine as dedicated commuter vehicles. They’ll cost a little more to run, but not enough to break most budgets. For road trips, however, they won’t work out well.

Thus, the answer to the question: “Can electric vehicles fully replace gas guzzlers?” is probably “No.” They’re fine for intra-city commuting, or commuting out to the suburbs, but unless Americans want to entirely forgo the possibility of taking road trips, ICE-powered vehicles will be needed for the foreseeable future.

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Do You Really Want a Robotic Car?

Robot Driver
Sixteen percent of Canadians and twenty-six percent of Americans say they “would not use a driverless car.” Mopic/Shutterstock

15 August 2018 – Many times in my blogging career I’ve gone on a rant about the three Ds of robotics. These are “dull, dirty, and dangerous.” They relate to the question, which is not asked often enough, “Do you want to build an automated system to do that task?”

The reason the question is not asked enough is that it needs to be asked whenever anyone looks into designing a system (whether manual or automated) to do anything. The possibility that anyone ever sets up a system to do anything without first asking that question means that it’s not asked enough.

When asking the question, getting a hit on any one of the three Ds tells you to at least think about automating the task. Getting a hit on two of them should make you think that your task is very likely to be ripe for automation. If you hit on all three, it’s a slam dunk!

When we look into developing automated vehicles (AVs), we get hits on “dull” and “dangerous.”

Driving can be excruciatingly dull, especially if you’re going any significant distance. That’s why people fall asleep at the wheel. I daresay everyone has fallen asleep at the wheel at least once, although we almost always wake up before hitting the bridge abutment. It’s also why so many people drive around with cellphones pressed to their ears. The temptation to multitask while driving is almost irresistable.

Driving is also brutally dangerous. Tens of thousands of people die every year in car crashes. Its pretty safe to say that nearly all those fatalities involve cars driven by humans. The number of people who have been killed in accidents involving driverless cars you can (as of this writing) count on one hand.

I’m not prepared to go into statistics comparing safety of automated vehicles vs. manually driven ones. Suffice it to say that eventually we can expect AVs to be much safer than manually driven vehicles. We’ll keep developing the technology until they are. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

This is the analysis most observers (if they analyze it at all) come up with to prove that vehicle driving should be automated.

Yet, opinions that AVs are acceptable, let alone inevitable, are far from universal. In a survey of 3,000 people in the U.S. and Canada, Ipsos Strategy 3 found that sixteen percent of Canadians and twenty six percent of Americans say they “would not use a driverless car,” and a whopping 39% of Americans (and 30% of Canadians) would rarely or never let driverless technology do the parking!

Why would so many people be unwilling to give up their driving priviledges? I submit that it has to do with a parallel consideration that is every bit as important as the three Ds when deciding whether to automate a task:

Don’t Automate Something Humans Like to Do!

Predatory animals, especially humans, like to drive. It’s fun. Just ask any dog who has a chance to go for a ride in a car! Almost universally they’ll jump into the front seat as soon as you open the door.

In fact, if you leave them (dogs) in the car unattended for a few minutes, they’ll be behind the wheel when you come back!

Humans are the same way. Leave ’em unattended in a car for any length of time, and they’ll think of some excuse to get behind the wheel.

The Ipsos survey fourd that some 61% of both Americans and Canadians identify themselves as “car people.” When asked “What would have to change about transportation in your area for you to consider not owning a car at all, or owning fewer cars?” 39% of Americans and 38% of Canadians responded “There is nothing that would make me consider owning fewer cars!”

That’s pretty definative!

Their excuse for getting behind the wheel is largely an economic one: Seventy-eight pecent of Americans claim they “definitely need to have a vehicle to get to work.” In more urbanized Canada (you did know that Canadians cluster more into cities, didn’t you.) that drops to 53%.

Whether those folks claiming they “have” to have a car to get to work is based on historical precedent, urban planning, wishful thinking, or flat out just what they want to believe, it’s a good, cogent reason why folks, especially Americans, hang onto their steering wheels for dear life.

The moral of this story is that driving is something humans like to do, and getting them to give it up will be a serious uphill battle for anyone wanting to promote driverless cars.

Yet, development of AV technology is going full steam ahead.

Is that just another example of Dr. John Bridges’  version of Solomon’s proverb “A fool and his money are soon parted?”

Possibly, but I think not.

Certainly, the idea of spending tons of money to have bragging rights for the latest technology, and to take selfies showing you reading a newspaper while your car drives itself through traffic has some appeal. I submit, however, that the appeal is short lived.

For one thing, reading in a moving vehicle is the fastest route I know of to motion sickness. It’s right up there with cueing up the latest Disney cartoon feature for your kids on the overhead DVD player in your SUV, then cleaning up their vomit.

I, for one, don’t want to go there!

Sounds like another example of “More money than brains.”

There are, however, a wide range of applications where driving a vehicle turns out to be no fun at all. For example, the first use of drone aircraft was as targets for anti-aircraft gunnery practice. They just couldn’t find enough pilots who wanted to be sitting ducks to be blown out of the sky! Go figure.

Most commercial driving jobs could also stand to be automated. For example, almost nobody actually steers ships at sea anymore. They generally stand around watching an autopilot follow a pre-programmed course. Why? As a veteran boat pilot, I can tell you that the captain has a lot more fun than the helmsman. Piloting a ship from, say, Calcutta to San Francisco has got to be mind-numbingly dull. There’s nothing going on out there on the ocean.

Boat passengers generally spend most of their time staring into the wake, but the helmsman doesn’t get to look at the wake. He (or she) has to spend their time scanning a featureless horizontal line separating a light-blue dome (the sky) from a dark-blue plane (the sea) in the vain hope that something interesting will pop up and relieve the tedium.

Hence the autopilot.

Flying a commercial airliner is similar. It has been described (as have so many other tasks) as “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror!” While such activity is very Zen (I’m convinced that humans’ ability to meditate was developed by cave guys having to sit for hours, or even days, watching game trails for their next meal to wander along), it’s not top-of-the-line fun.

So, sometimes driving is fun, and sometimes it’s not. We need AV technology to cover those times when it’s not.

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The Future of Personal Transportation

Israeli startup Griiip’s next generation single-seat race car demonstrating the world’s first motorsport Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication application on a racetrack.

9 April 2018 – Last week turned out to be big for news about personal transportation, with a number of trends making significant(?) progress.

Let’s start with a report (available for download at https://gen-pop.com/wtf) by independent French market-research company Ipsos of responses from more than 3,000 people in the U.S. and Canada, and thousands more around the globe, to a survey about the human side of transportation. That is, how do actual people — the consumers who ultimately will vote with their wallets for or against advances in automotive technology — feel about the products innovators have been proposing to roll out in the near future. Today, I’m going to concentrate on responses to questions about self-driving technology and automated highways. I’ll look at some of the other results in future postings.

Perhaps the biggest take away from the survey is that approximately 25% of American respondents claim they “would never use” an autonomous vehicle. That’s a biggie for advocates of “ultra-safe” automated highways.

As my wife constantly reminds me whenever we’re out in Southwest Florida traffic, the greatest highway danger is from the few unpredictable drivers who do idiotic things. When surrounded by hundreds of vehicles ideally moving in lockstep, but actually not, what percentage of drivers acting unpredictably does it take to totally screw up traffic flow for everybody? One percent? Two percent?

According to this survey, we can expect up to 25% to be out of step with everyone else because they’re making their own decisions instead of letting technology do their thinking for them.

Automated highways were described in detail back in the middle part of the twentieth century by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. What he described was a scene where thousands of vehicles packed vast Interstates, all communicating wirelessly with each other and a smart fixed infrastructure that planned traffic patterns far ahead, and communicated its decisions with individual vehicles so they acted together to keep traffic flowing in the smoothest possible way at the maximum possible speed with no accidents.

Heinlein also predicted that the heros of his stories would all be rabid free-spirited thinkers, who wouldn’t allow their cars to run in self-driving mode if their lives depended on it! Instead, they relied on human intelligence, forethought, and fast reflexes to keep themselves out of trouble.

And, he predicted they would barely manage to escape with their lives!

I happen to agree with him: trying to combine a huge percentage of highly automated vehicles with a small percentage of vehicles guided by humans who simply don’t have the foreknowledge, reflexes, or concentration to keep up with the automated vehicles around them is a train wreck waiting to happen.

Back in the late twentieth century I had to regularly commute on the 70-mph parking lots that went by the name “Interstates” around Boston, Massachusetts. Vehicles were generally crammed together half a car length apart. The only way to have enough warning to apply brakes was to look through the back window and windshield of the car ahead to see what the car ahead of them was doing.

The result was regular 15-car pileups every morning during commute times.

Heinlein’s (and advocates of automated highways) future vision had that kind of traffic density and speed, but were saved from inevitable disaster by fascistic control by omniscient automated highway technology. One recalcitrant human driver tossed into the mix would be guaranteed to bring the whole thing down.

So, the moral of this story is: don’t allow manual-driving mode on automated highways. The 25% of Americans who’d never surrender their manual-driving priviledge can just go drive somewhere else.

Yeah, I can see THAT happening!

A Modest Proposal

With apologies to Johnathan Swift, let’s change tack and focus on a more modest technology: driver assistance.

Way back in the 1980s, George Lucas and friends put out the third in the interminable Star Wars series entitled The Empire Strikes Back. The film included a sequence that could only be possible in real life with help from some sophisticated collision-avoidance technology. They had a bunch of characters zooming around in a trackless forest on the moon Endor, riding what can only be described as flying motorcycles.

As anybody who’s tried trailblazing through a forest on an off-road motorcycle can tell you, going fast through virgin forest means constant collisions with fixed objects. As Bugs Bunny once said: “Those cartoon trees are hard!”

Frankly, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia might have had superhuman reflexes, but their doing what they did without collision avoidance technology strains credulity to the breaking point. Much easier to believe their little speeders gave them a lot of help to avoid running into hard, cartoon trees.

In the real world, Israeli companies Autotalks, and Griiip, have demonstrated the world’s first motorsport Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) application to help drivers avoid rear-ending each other. The system works is by combining GPS, in-vehicle sensing, and wireless communication to create a peer-to-peer network that allows each car to send out alerts to all the other cars around.

So, imagine the situation where multiple cars are on a racetrack at the same time. That’s decidedly not unusual in a motorsport application.

Now, suppose something happens to make car A suddenly and unpredictably slow or stop. Again, that’s hardly an unusual occurrance. Car B, which is following at some distance behind car A, gets an alert from car A of a possible impending-collision situation. Car B forewarns its driver that a dangerous situation has arisen, so he or she can take evasive action. So far, a very good thing in a car-race situation.

But, what’s that got to do with just us folks driving down the highway minding our own business?

During the summer down here in Florida, every afternoon we get thunderstorms dumping torrential rain all over the place. Specifically, we’ll be driving down the highway at some ridiculous speed, then come to a wall of water obscuring everything. Visibility drops from unlimited to a few tens of feet with little or no warning.

The natural reaction is to come to a screeching halt. But, what happens to the cars barreling up from behind? They can’t see you in time to stop.

Whammo!

So, coming to a screeching halt is not the thing to do. Far better to keep going forward as fast as visibility will allow.

But, what if somebody up ahead panicked and came to a screeching halt? Or, maybe their version of “as fast as visibility will allow” is a lot slower than yours? How would you know?

The answer is to have all the vehicles equipped with the Israeli V2V equipment (or an equivalent) to forewarn following drivers that something nasty has come out of the proverbial woodshed. It could also feed into your vehicle’s collision avoidance system to step over the 2-3 seconds it takes for a human driver to say “What the heck?” and figure out what to do.

The Israelis suggest that the required chip set (which, of course, they’ll cheerfully sell you) is so dirt cheap that anybody can afford to opt for it in their new car, or retrofit it into their beat up old junker. They further suggest that it would be worthwhile for insurance companies to give a rake off on their premiums to help cover the cost.

Sounds like a good deal to me! I could get behind that plan.