Babbage

if the car is driving in the area with lots of hill, you may find the juice drained from battery much faster than before.

Plug-in hybrids are a better short-term option, and also of course regenerate (as does a Prius). See www.raeng.org.uk/ev

How about a battery trailer for longer trips ? There's a rental business waiting.

Bamps, I have to say I think that is a pretty damn good idea. Uhaul already has the distribution/retail network and even the equipment for the most part. I've been looking seriously at getting an all electric car, however currently there isn't much that meets my needs outside of the Nissan Leaf, and they're sold out for the forseeable future.

bampbs:

Great idea. But, unfortunately, towing the trailer will cut down on your mileage...

My wife would't need any training for this car...She's a master in optimization. The latest experiment is with the toilte paper. The hypothesis is that by squishing the roll hole so that is not circular anymore would prevent a more liberal dispensation of toilet paper and avoid overuse. Maybe she should patent her idea!

I'm curious: if the range falls to 64km in cold weather, what is that attributable to? I can understand why range might fall under normal driving condition, since such conditions might use up more energy for a given distance. However, the only significant reason I can come up with for the cold weather range discrepancy is a loss in battery performance at these temperatures. Since battery-powered cars' main advantage is that electricity from the grid is more efficiently produced than power from a gas/diesel engine, how does cold weather affect efficiency figures?

willstewart and article author,

Plug-ins continue to be promoted, but with or without hybrid arrangements, the use of electricity is a misguided course of action.

For many years to come, if not longer, the energy source for the EV is going to be coal, and the climate impact of that is worse than the impact of driving a simple good hybrid car. The only thing that can change this is a draconian tax of some form imposed on coal. Neither the economy of the UK, the USA, nor Europe is in a state of abundance that will allow that to happen. It seems like we are having a hard time figuring this out.

We have children who should have been left behind in charge of things, both in the USA and the UK. The many bungling agencies in the USA include our EPA, our DOE, government laboratories such as Argonne, California Dept. of Energy and California Air Resources Board to name a few. In the UK the Chief Advisor to the DOE and Climate, Prof. David MacKay, has published an absurd bungle of the laws of physics, as he asserts that, "I think the timeless and scientific way to summarize and compare energies is to hold 1 kWh
of chemical energy equivalent to 1 kWh of electricity." Page 27 of 'Sustainable energy -without hot air'. And to think, this is said in the land of Lord Kelvin. Clearly, Cambridge should have kept David MacKay behind until he learned what Lord Kelvin taught.

I am discovering a serious scarcity of people who actually learned freshman physics. (First year of college in USA.) MacKay's book is generally quite useful, but something went very wrong when he tried to pump up the case for the electric car. See page 27 at: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c2/page_27.shtml

Few seem to be willing to come out of the bushes.

A Young,

Cold weather does not matter much to most engines. Batteries do not like it at all.

But you are misinformed about engines. Diesels are about as efficient as the average fossil fuel power plant. Coal plants run a little worse, and natural gas plants average a little better. The Prius gasoline engine is about as good, maybe better than diesels.

It is true that the run of our experience with gasoline engines has been with sloppy engines, so performance of these that seems to be fixed in many of our minds.

For climate considerations, realize that the central power plant provides not much improvement, if any, over simply better gasoline and diesel engines; there are distribution losses for electricity, and on top of it all, coal power plants produce more CO2 when they produce heat than do engines using gasoline or diesel fuel. In the end, electric vehicles come out a little better if the central power plant uses natural gas and a little worse if it uses coal.

But coal is far cheaper than natural gas, even if there is enough natural gas. There is of course enough natural gas if the price is high enough, to shake it out of the ground in the USA or ship it in as LNG in the UK. So the fuel of overwhelming economic advantage is coal.

@Jim Bullis
You mention transmission/transport loss of electricity, but fail to mention the same for the Gasoline/diesel at your local petrol station. How many ounces of fuel is needed to transport 1 gallon of gasoline to your local station?

Also, you fail to mention that the both US and UK generation fuel mix includes nuclear and gas fired power stations, and their share in the generation mix is quite large during the nighttime hours when the plug-in vehicles are charged.

As I mentioned in my response to you in another article, a country's enthusiasm towards plug-in cars is proportional to the share of nuclear or hydroelectric power in their power generation mix. (France, Canada, Japan, in that order)

@Jim Bullis

As I understand it, approx. 75% of the energy in a combustion engine is lost on other things than propulsion (heat, overcoming internal friction) whereas the same figure for electric engines is 25%. I would consider the electric engine to be more efficient, and thus a better engine.
The pollution from central power plants is much easier regulated and reduced than that from decentralised power sources like car engines.
All in all, I consider electric engines to be the propulsion of the future, no matter how much american automakers resent it.

And if you don't feel like a man withoput the roar of the engine, use an MP3...

As a commuter with a daily distance of 100 miles (161 km) the range of todays pure plug-ins electrics is simply not sufficient, but I believe that we will see a dramatic rise in storage capacity in batteries in the next couple of years.
The other possibility would be to use fuel-cells, possibly as plug-in hybrids.

I hope that my next car is an EV of some sort.

The same comment I have made before - its all great, now make it a bus. The issue is not which power supply we use, the issue is more that the era of singular at-will a-b travel is dead.

And OMG please not Uhaul. [libelous comment self-censored].

Can anyone comment knowledgeably about battery drain for heating the interior in Winter? In an internal combustion engine, heat is a free and abundant byproduct.

All electric or hybrid cars are vulnerable to sudden changes in temperature. They are not that fuel-efficent when you consider the sheer weight of the batteries and the damage to the environment manufacturing them. The real answer is HYDROGEN if only it could be transported at freezing temperatures. BMW did some work on this system. At the moment DIESEL fuel is the most fuel efficent. Even new petrol engines with turbo boosters are getting 55 mph average consumption; if driven properly. The problem is that people (esp in Britain) refuse to drive at 30mph in cities. Petrol at over 6 pounds per imperial gallon may spell the end of the car industry in Britain. Battery driven cars are too expensive and irrelevant. Sorry Nissan LEAF.

Humble servant....a regular car battery for heating interiors and engine starting (plus electric windows) and radio provides a standard energy source; with limitations in cold weather. Turning the wheels....well that requires a powerful energy source.

The French devised a powerplant system in 1930 using electric motors in each wheel. Brake-force energy transfer/redistribution is another stored source of energy now used by BMW and other mfgs to enhance the life of the standard car battery.

I suppose someone has calculated the nighttime load on the electrical grid. Since most use is in daylight hours, nighttime charging might help level out demand and make electrical production more efficient. If designed in, cars left charging could also provide a capacitor-type reserve that power grids could call back from time to time to meet spikes in demand. Electrical cars will be lighter (in the future, with advances), so roadways could be lighter/cheaper. Maybe more narrow too. Also, the coming digital wave in robot-driven cars should tie right in to electrical vehicles. Maybe we can provide power to cars on the roadways by radiation, as Tesla explored. Interesting times ahead, and the changes this will bring in financing, pollution control, international politics, and other areas will be immense.