Petrol vs Electric - Mercedes SLS AMG Battle

[grumpydoc]

Electric cars (with present technology) are not all that green because electricity generation largely still involves buring hydrocarbons.

One thing which does bother me about solar panels is that everyone seems to believe that they have no environmental impact - which seems to be a questionable assumption at best.

[Rufus]

What I find amusing is legions of militant "engineers" shouting their convictions that EV's are no good, do not work in real world situations, are too expensive, have low energy density, are inferior to diesels, and blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars.

The Leaf is the most popular EV and has sold 100k worldwide in total, Chevrolet have sold about 70k Volts/Amperas in total, Tesla expect to sell 35k Ss in 2014. Americans bought nearly 800k Ford F series pick trucks and more than 700k Ford Focus compacts just in 2012. 

Someone trying to use EV sales to support claiming they are economical and work in the real world - that I find amusing.

[Kjelt]

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[tom66]

The Leaf is the most popular EV and has sold 100k worldwide in total, Chevrolet have sold about 70k Volts/Amperas in total, Tesla expect to sell 35k Ss in 2014. Americans bought nearly 800k Ford F series pick trucks and more than 700k Ford Focus compacts just in 2012. 

What? You mean $7,000 cars sell more than $35,000 cars? What nonsense is this? And vehicles practical for the task at hand are bought by people needing them?  Crazy talk!

I'm pretty sure the econobox cars are going to be petrol/diesel for a very long time; it's hard to get around the low cost of a metal tank of dino juice. Batteries will only break into that market with an entirely new technology.

Tesla aren't aiming anywhere near there, neither are Nissan, or GM. Nissan put out a survey recently asking if people would consider buying a $35,000 Leaf-type vehicle which did 150 real-world miles. Tesla have Model E / BlueStar planned which should be $30,000 before incentives (so potentially around $20,000 with incentives) and give 200 real-world miles from a ~65kWh pack, if the gigafactory goes ahead (who knows -- but Panasonic have discussed investment regardless.)

[Rufus]

The Leaf is the most popular EV and has sold 100k worldwide in total, Chevrolet have sold about 70k Volts/Amperas in total, Tesla expect to sell 35k Ss in 2014. Americans bought nearly 800k Ford F series pick trucks and more than 700k Ford Focus compacts just in 2012. 

What? You mean $7,000 cars sell more than $35,000 cars? What nonsense is this? And vehicles practical for the task at hand are bought by people needing them?  Crazy talk!

I was responding to the claim that "Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars."

Pure EVs have probably been bought by less than two hundred thousand people in total and I would wager that environmental willy waving was a more important consideration than practicality and economy for 2/3rds of them.

[G7PSK]

No green technology is that green at the end of the day, all these alternative power systems require large quantities of carbon in manufacture producing large  volumes of CO2. Whether it's steel or silicon the raw material comes as an oxide and needs reducing, with wind turbines you need far more steel per watt of produced power than other systems such as nuclear or gas.

According to what I have just read in the new scientist better batteries will come from the military as half of what a soldier carries in his kit is now batteries which might explain the indicates of the present lithium batteries to explode.
If you want to be really green it's on yer bike! shanks pony is even greener as that does not require tarmac roads to be built.

[tom66]

Exactly, no car is truly green, only less damaging than any other particular car.  I think Norway has recently banned car manufacturers from saying their cars are green.

[KJDS]

Until the world population issue is addressed then tinkering round the edges won't make enough difference. Once all those slaving away in the One Hung Lo factories can afford a car then we're truly stuffed.

[Kjelt]

Once all those slaving away in the One Hung Lo factories can afford a car then we're truly stuffed.

Actually China is one of the few countries that really take action now, there is a numerux fixus on new car registrations in Bejing, and it was time with that smog there.
The worst country is now India, in their capital people that never ever smoked are diagnosed with lungcancer form of seen in 30 year chainsmoking only because of the finedust that the cars emit.

[Corporate666]

It illustrates the stubborn refusal of many technical types to accept reality, even when it is happening before their very eyes. 

I love to buy an electric car when it is feasible and it is not yet. Same with solarpanels, the time to earn back the investment is still (in our country where the sun does not shine as much as in the sahara) 10 years and then nothing has to break down. Knowing as an EE that solarinverters do break down and that batteries also break down and damages do happen, I am not investing.
When the panels have better efficiency and are cheaper I probably will switch.
There are green people that fantasize about a clean world without polution that buy an electric car not knowing that the batterypacks inside that car have a worse polution index than if they would have bought an fuel car. It is still a question of calculating and personal interest, it has nothing to do with if you are an engineer or not.

You misunderstand/misrepresent the psychology of sales.  People do not buy a vehicle because it is the best at a given task or the best in all categories.  They buy what they like.  There are various features that consumers find appealing, which is why there are often dozens of cars which all compete against one another for the consumers money.  If consumers purchased based on binary tests in single categories, then there would only be one car in any given category, and no other vehicle would supplant it unless it beat the original in a comparative test.  That doesn't happen because that's not how people buy cars - yet it is often falsely represented as the way consumer will buy EV's.  Nonsense.  Consumers will buy EV's just like they have always bought cars.  People do not buy EV's because they will get some kind of ROI in a specific time anymore than people buy a new car because they have carefully calculated that the cost of repairs of an older vehicle will be greater than the payment on a new vehicle.  It's just now how the real world works. 

[Corporate666]

What I find amusing is legions of militant "engineers" shouting their convictions that EV's are no good, do not work in real world situations, are too expensive, have low energy density, are inferior to diesels, and blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars.

The Leaf is the most popular EV and has sold 100k worldwide in total, Chevrolet have sold about 70k Volts/Amperas in total, Tesla expect to sell 35k Ss in 2014. Americans bought nearly 800k Ford F series pick trucks and more than 700k Ford Focus compacts just in 2012. 

Someone trying to use EV sales to support claiming they are economical and work in the real world - that I find amusing.

This is a logically fallacious argument - named "argument by demanding impossible perfection".  By your reasoning, every vehicle that is not an F-series pickup is a failure, which obviously is not true.

And since nobody has stated that EV sales means they are more economical, that is another logically fallacious argument known as a straw man.

If the facts were on your side, there would be no reason to resort to such arguments to state your point. 

The simple fact is that consumers are spending billions on electric drive vehicles.  Tesla has a market cap of over $26 billion.  That is real money that was created on the design and sale of a totally new type of vehicle that is fully electric.  Every single major automotive manufacturer is sinking billions into EV's - including GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mercedes, BMW and all the rest.  They all either have EV's on the market or have vehicles coming to the market shortly.  Market share of electric drive vehicles is increasing rapidly, and only appears set to continue that trend.

What are reasonable conclusions to draw from these data points?

1) Clearly, the car manufacturers (the ones who are spending their own money on this subject) disagree with the Internet experts who claim that EV's don't work

2) Clearly, the marketplace disagrees with the Internet experts also, since consumers are buying these cars

3) Clearly, the finance world also disagrees with the Internet experts as well, since $26 billion (around half of it's USA competitors value) has been assigned as the value of Tesla, which is a big P/E premium vs. other manufacturers

4) Clearly, EV's are being purchased and the market sees they are the future.  Ergo, when someone claims they do not work, or are not acceptable products because they do not fit <insert criteria here>, that person is wrong.  It's not really a matter of opinion - TSLA = $26 billion says everything that needs to be said.

[Rufus]

What I find amusing is legions of militant "engineers" shouting their convictions that EV's are no good, do not work in real world situations, are too expensive, have low energy density, are inferior to diesels, and blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars.

The Leaf is the most popular EV and has sold 100k worldwide in total, Chevrolet have sold about 70k Volts/Amperas in total, Tesla expect to sell 35k Ss in 2014. Americans bought nearly 800k Ford F series pick trucks and more than 700k Ford Focus compacts just in 2012. 

Someone trying to use EV sales to support claiming they are economical and work in the real world - that I find amusing.

This is a logically fallacious argument - named "argument by demanding impossible perfection".  By your reasoning,

Not by my reasoning, by your consistent straw man misinterpretation of arguments to find something you can argue against.

What I find amusing is legions of militant "engineers" shouting their convictions that EV's are no good, do not work in real world situations, are too expensive, have low energy density, are inferior to diesels, and blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars.

is what you said. You are the one that started using sales as an indication of cars being any good. I said only around 200k pure EVs have been sold ever so your statement that hundreds of thousands buy them daily is just crap. 

[grumpydoc]

I said only around 200k pure EVs have been sold ever so your statement that hundreds of thousands buy them daily is just crap

.

Sorry Rufus - did you have a source for the 200k figure. The only one I can find quickly is just over 46k pure EV sales in the US in 2013 (with not quite 24k in 2011 and 2012 combined) so it might not even be that high.

Even if it is 200k then that represents perhaps 0.1% of the cars in the US so they've got a way to go yet.

Another thing which bothers me about EVs is the loss of government revenue. Well, that in itself doesn't bother me

What bothers me is that the cost of driving an EV will rise once sales hit significant numbers.

Looking at the "fuel consumption" of EV's seems to show a range of 30-50kWh/100ml -- so at UK electricity prices 100 miles would cost perhaps £5, 5% of which goes to the exchequer. My not-that-fuel-efficient Celica would cost me a bit over £20 to do the 100 miles some 70% of which goes to the government.

Parliament will want to claw that loss back so EVs in future will not look so good on running cost. Of course the chancellor could put the tax back elsewhere so EVs still "look good" but he will want it back.

And, as with many people, although my daily commute is well within an EV's range weekend journey's aren't so I'd wind up needing two cars.

When EVs have a 400 mile range, refuel in 10 minutes and have a battery which is good for 150k miles I'll buy one.

http://evobsession.com/electric-car-sales-increased-228-88-2013/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_the_United_States

[tom66]

$30,000 BlueStar is still an expensive car - Musk has publicly stated it should have performance & luxury equivalent to BMW 5 series.

[Rufus]

I said only around 200k pure EVs have been sold ever so your statement that hundreds of thousands buy them daily is just crap

.

Sorry Rufus - did you have a source for the 200k figure. The only one I can find quickly is just over 46k pure EV sales in the US in 2013 (with not quite 24k in 2011 and 2012 combined) so it might not even be that high.

I found 100k total sales for the Leaf, about 35k for Tesla, mistakenly (because it is a hybrid) added 70k volt/ampera sales. There must be a few thousands of obscure EVs sold so I thought 200k was a reasonable/generous estimate regardless.

[free_electron]

$30,000 BlueStar is still an expensive car - Musk has publicly stated it should have performance & luxury equivalent to BMW 5 series.

35K$. zero cost on maintenance apart from tires. free electricity at the supercharger. 8 year end to end warranty.
beat that ...

There are currently 19000 people in line (that have paid ) to buy the upcoming model X ( still a year away from production) Not a single other car manufacturer has such a waiting list.

If Tesla pulls off the 35K$ , 300+ mile on a charge car it will be game over for everybody else.

I easily get 300+ miles on a charge of my Tesla S 85, even when only charging the battery to 235. Never want a dinosaur fueled car again.
I drove rental for a day while mine was getting the armor plating installed.

Car makers are insane. the rental had 43 buttons, knobs and levers... i counted them. 7 settings on the wipers , and not a single speed was right when it started raining. 3 rotary dials, each with 7 settings, and two pushbuttons for the airco. Thats 7x7x7x2x2 or 1372 combinations to find the right cabin temperature. What drunken insane lunatic designed that control mechanism?
Get out of the car, open door - beep-. handbrake. try again -beep- . ah shift in park. try again -beep- lights are still on. sigh
finally get away only to come back 5 minutes later because you forgot to lock the damn thing.
Every time it switched from battery to gas engine ( this was a hyundai sonata hybrid . ) there is vibration, rattling and a jolt when it engages the clutch. stepping on the gas pedal does not make it go faster.. it doesnt drive... it oozes forward. you may as well be stepping on a squeacky toy. releasing the throttel engages the regeneration.. which barely slows the car down. it regenerates barely a few kilowatt.


My Tesla dumps 60 Kilowatts in the battery if i pull back my foot. It decelerates fast .
Stomp on the throttle and 360+kilowatts is pumped in the motor. You bet that thing moves.

If it rains the wipers go on , speed is automatic. When it's dark or you enter a tunnel the headlights go on automatically. The gps knows you are entering a tunnel.
if i get home the car opens the gate for me (the gps knows i am in my geofence) operating it is limited to approaching it, open the door, sit down, click forward, reverse , steer and control throttle. when done click park , get out and walk away. Navigation , entertainment and phone is all under voice control. there's no remote, no key , no handbrake , not even a button to turn on the headlights. all automatic. I can listen to the amp hour being streamed live through the intenret and browse eevblog on the big center console.

Other cars are dinosaurs using 100 year old control mechanisms. they should go extinct. the faster the better.

[Corporate666]

Not by my reasoning, by your consistent straw man misinterpretation of arguments to find something you can argue against.

I don't think you understand what a straw man argument is.  It is misrepresenting what was stated - or in other words, arguing against something that was never said.

What I stated was that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are buying electric drive vehicles is proof positive that those claiming they do not work, are wrong.  Because it is exactly that.  You are arguing that something isn't happening that we can all see with our own eyes - is happening. 

The other stuff I mentioned - like the billions being sunk into EV's by the OEM's and the fact that every single one of them are coming out with EV's, and the value the finance world has placed on TSLA just drives the point home.  The people who, for whatever reason, stubbornly refuse to accept that EV's "work" and are here to stay are just pissing in the wind in light of the billions that consumers and manufacturers have thrown at EV's.

is what you said. You are the one that started using sales as an indication of cars being any good. I said only around 200k pure EVs have been sold ever so your statement that hundreds of thousands buy them daily is just crap.

You are counting USA sales of two particular vehicles.  Even excluding hybrids using batteries and sticking with vehicles that plug in, hundreds of thousands are buying them every day.  Obviously I am not saying sales are in hundreds of thousands each day - but sales are hundreds of thousands (and increasing) and occurring every day.  Sales are certainly well below the best selling gas vehicle, but that's no more a surprise than plasma TV's being drastically outsold by 22" color tube TV's when plasma TV's were new. 

There is no shortage of short sighted folks who are quick to proclaim change as "crap", whether it's my aunt who refuses to get a cell phone, or people who think <insert any product here> isn't made like it used to be.

Meanwhile, the market moves on.  TSLA is worth $26 billion dollars.  Everyone agrees - EV's work and are here to stay, regardless of what luddites think.

[Rufus]

You are counting USA sales of two particular vehicles.  Even excluding hybrids using batteries and sticking with vehicles that plug in, hundreds of thousands are buying them every day.  Obviously I am not saying sales are in hundreds of thousands each day - but sales are hundreds of thousands (and increasing) and occurring every day.

Obviously? So when you said "Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars." you actually meant probably less two hundred thousand people have bought those very cars since time began and coincidentally they also go out every day to walk the dog or something?

Pure EV sales are a pimple, Tesla is going to sell 35k Ss this year? Toyota sells nearly 28k cars a day.

And no I don't count hybrids. They run on chemical fuel and batteries being terribly crap doesn't much effect their utility - just their price.

[Corporate666]

Obviously? So when you said "Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people go out every day and buy those very cars." you actually meant probably less two hundred thousand people have bought those very cars since time began and coincidentally they also go out every day to walk the dog or something?

Pure EV sales are a pimple, Tesla is going to sell 35k Ss this year? Toyota sells nearly 28k cars a day.

And no I don't count hybrids. They run on chemical fuel and batteries being terribly crap doesn't much effect their utility - just their price.

Considering that no car sells even close to hundreds of thousands of units per day, it should be obvious that my statement means that every day people are buying these cars to the tune of a cumulative hundreds of thousands of units.

But you're grasping at straws at this point.  The industry does not sub-divide their vehicles to the extent you want to in the quest to claim that one of those small divisions represents a small enough number to be considered non-viable.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding.  TSLA is valued by the market at $26 billion.  Elon Musk, it's CEO, has earned himself a fortune of ~$10 billion (depending on current TSLA share price, which has gone up about 500% since a year ago).  Clearly the market believes that EV's are viable.  So do the hundreds of thousands of folks who have purchased EV's.  So do all the major car manufacturers, who are all (every single one) putting billions into EV's or already selling EV's. 

Of course, all those industry experts have nowhere near the knowledge and experience of the Internet experts  but presumably Elon can cry about that from the top of his mountainous pile of ca$h 

[Kjelt]

The Tesla is no average man's car, way too expensive and still a niche market compared to the huge numbers of conventional automobiles being sold. If you discuss that you don't know where you are talking about. Porsches 911's are also sold a lot but also a niche market compared to the cars that really sells in big numbers.

Next argument about company stock prices, that says very little about succes or failure on the coming years as the internetbubbles from the 90's learned us.

I am absolutely not an electric car hater and do hope that someday they are priced at the same level and can compete with a normal car but that will take yet some years and better batteries with higher energy density, that's all.

[VK5RC]

The Tesla and Electric SLS have done more for the electric car (hybrid or not) than the Prius; they have made it appealing. The cash boost will allow some good engineering to continue and I am confident the 'trickle down' effect will occur.
Currently I am sticking with a good diesel that seats 5 in comfort with serious high end safety, 500NM torque, (only 180kW) but 1200+km on a 70L tank of 'rough Dino juice' (more if I think about it) that I can fill up in 5minutes but I look forward to a silent electric version!

[Rufus]

Considering that no car sells even close to hundreds of thousands of units per day, it should be obvious that my statement means that every day people are buying these cars to the tune of a cumulative hundreds of thousands of units.

Ok next time you talk crap I will just ignore it because you obviously didn't mean it.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding.  TSLA is valued by the market at $26 billion.
Elon Musk, it's CEO, has earned himself a fortune of ~$10 billion (depending on current TSLA share price, which has gone up about 500% since a year ago).  Clearly the market believes that EV's are viable.

Speculating investors are not a market. In the dot com bubble did the same people believe that companies like Broadcast.com, GeoCities, and Lycos were viable? Bought for a combined $22 billion two no longer exist, the third was sold at 2% of its purchase price.

[NiHaoMike]

Where EVs and hybrids really excel is getting excellent MPG(e) in slow traffic. On the highway, there's much less of an efficiency advantage, sometimes none when comparing a hybrid to its non hybrid version.

What is for sure is that engine technology would improve in order to try to stay relevant. The actual production cost difference between a regular engine and an Atkinson cycle engine is almost nothing (just a slightly different intake camshaft and some firmware changes) but Atkinson cycle engines are mostly restricted to hybrids for marketing purposes. Require all new (non commercial) vehicles to get 30 MPG or more and there would definitely be plenty of Atkinson cycle engines (and other tricks previously reserved for hybrids) in use.

[MacAttak]

I test drove a Model S a few weeks ago - it is a superbly built automobile. Performance that reminds me of the C5 Corvette I bought back in '98 (a little bit faster than the Corvette actually), but the comfort is astonishing. Much better than my wife's new BMW 550 (which is not exactly a hooptie either).

So now I have one on order, and it will be ready at the end of May / early June. I went for a performance-tuned 85 kWh with pretty much all of the options. I'm very much looking forward to getting it. I work from home 90% of the time, with a commute of only 20 miles on those days where I actually have to drive in to the office (and there is a charging station there). Other than that, I rarely travel more than 100 miles in any direction. Slow charging stations are everywhere out here... in two months the Supercharger downtown will be completed, and by the fall I'll be able to reach Miami or New York without ever being out of range of one. And by next summer I'll be able to reach my family in New Orleans and Houston as well (if I wanted to drive that far). But even with the occasional holiday travel, I average only 6 to 8 thousand miles per year.

For me, an EV makes total sense. I wanted a high-performance car but didn't want the maintenance headache or compromised comfort that comes with typical sportscars.

Also (nobody has mentioned it), but they offer a buyback guarantee of 50% of the original purchase price of the car at the three year mark - if you take advantage of their financing (at ~ 2.5% currently). Assuming a 20% down payment and 6-year loan, that essentially insures that you won't be "under water" even if the car value drops like a rock. Effectively, it functions like a lease in that regard (if you choose to exercise the guarantee). Except that you also get to collect the tax credit - $12,500 here in GA - which is something you cannot do with a standard lease contract.

Oh - and like all full EV's, it qualifies for an AFV tag in Georgia, which lets you use the carpool lane. This can be a huge timesaver for people who have to regularly deal with Atlanta rush hour.


So yeah, EV's are still a bit expensive. The people who are buying them are not looking to save money - they are buying them because they like them and have the means to purchase them. If they didn't get the expensive EV they would have bought an equally expensive gas-guzzling luxury or exotic. But those early adopters are also what drive the costs down and makes the tech affordable for more people. If you remember, there was a time when basic cellphones were a luxury item. And personal computers. And gasoline powered cars.

By the way, if you are skeptical about it then just go sign up for test drive. In the US there are showrooms (not dealerships - Tesla doesn't use the "standard" sales model) in many states. They schedule test drives all the time, and they don't really care if you are prepared to actually move forward with a purchase or not - the philosophy of the company is to promote electric vehicle adoption. These are very fun cars to drive - no reason to at least learn about what you are ridiculing first-hand.