Elecgric Vehicles - F250 Lightning - Event Date: 16 Mar 2022

OK LA, if I remind you of the old elevator engineers then you remind me of the gulls who invested in Theranos.


More than likely I adopt new tech faster than you do. I don't have time or money to be in the innovator category of tech adoption, trialling the bleeding edge beta stuff, but I typically am next in line for things that make sense to me making me a so-called early adopter. For example, I set just set up my Starlink system last weekend. I've been wait listed for close to a year now, and finally got my gen 2 system, with the covered rectangular antenna that cats can't sleep in, blocking the signal. The first gen would have been a problem for me in the winter, I have three barn cats who would have loved its nice warm snow melt feature.

Ever heard of "fake it till you make it"? I can't find one single auto manufacturers who has partnered with Ample. Can you? They modified those Nissan Leafs, and they don't say how many there are. The Leaf uses laminate type cells which are fabricated into blocks and are air cooled only, no liquid cooling like everyone else uses. So they're prone to running hotter and having shortened battery life. But relatively easy to modify. The statements that that woman at Ample made in the video that everyone uses similar batteries is flat out a lie.

If you want to see a real world battery swap system look up what Nio is doing in China. That is interesting and appears to work in that market to some extent, which is an urban use market. the Chinese do not have a century of history of travelling around their huge country in autos or big trucks towing trailers, nor do they have a century of investment in sprawling suburbia. The newly minted middle class Chinese live in urban high rise apartments and use their spanking new cars in their urban locales. the battery swap business model has benefits in this kind of environment.

The issue here is not that I am rejecting new technology it's that you are not seeing where the technology is headed. Every month batteries get cheaper, lighter, and faster to charge. Each of these steps whittles away at the battery swap business opportunity. Why would anyone want to swap batteries in 10 minutes if they can recharge them in 20 the few times they need to charge on the road? No one is going to even consider it unless they don't have a way to way to charge at home. I think it's likely that battery swapping is a technology whose window of opportunity in the mainstream US EV market has come and gone

Re hydrogen, that was a non starter.
There are many things that just don't pass the smell test from a physics and engineering standpoint. One is hydrogen fueled vehicles. It is horribly inefficient compared to batteries and there isn't going to be some magic tech that changes that because that would violate physical laws. Hydrogen is promoted by the fossil fuel as "clean" but it's anything but. The vast majority is produced from methane with CO2 as a byproduct. One of those cases of the "cure" being worse than the disease.

Re Gemany, they plan on shutting down their last nukes this year. Let's see if they actually do it. Their grid is running on around 40-ish percent renewables, of which only a small fraction is hydro and biomass, the vast majority being solar and wind.


Gemant electricity

Can they get to zero fossil fuel content? Certainly they can deploy enough renewables and very cheaply too. The issue is of course storage. Grid scale storage solutions other than batteries require storage of gravitational potential energy, which in turn requires heavy mass at a height. There aren't a lot of places to put more large scale pumped storage, so things like cranes and concrete and or heavily loaded trains on long grades would required. I think V2G EV technology will be a leading player as well. We'll see if they can do it. They can if anyone can, just as they were the world leaders pushing solar forward0 all through the '00"s.

Very few folks are going to voluntarily give up theyr high energy consumption lifestyles. The problem is that more and more people around the world are achieving a level of consumption that we have had for many generations. It's unfair of us to think that they will give up that opportunity just to let us continue to enjoy our way of life.

That's what the folks who complain about the carbon reduction agreements that allow the Chinese and indians to surpass our emissions don't seem to get. Those countries have 3 or 4x our population so can be higher CO2 emitters while their per capita emissions remain far below ours. It's like the population of tiny Luxembourg (579,000 people/10 megatons total annual CO2/17.5tons per capita) complaining about the US (323,000,000 people/5 trillion tons/15.5 tons per person) being a horrible polluter. We'd tell them to go look in a mirror, right?

In the end we need to expect that everyone want to have a higher standard of living so per capita emissions will be similar throughout the world. So, we need to get over our entitled attitudes and solve this global problem together. Either the high per capita emitting countries cut back and the low per capita emitters stay low, we reduce the global population, or we all brush up on our swimming skills.

Yep and quite wasting energy doing incredibly stupid stuff like "mining" cryptocurrencies. I'd hate to think what our great grandchildren will make of us for that nonsense.

I'm all in favor of increasing efficiency of our energy use. What we can't do unless we are willing to adopt an Amish lifestyle, is to drastically reduce our energy use. It still takes energy to heat and cool our homes and power our appliances, cook our food, clean our laundry, and many, many other things. Even the Amish use energy. While they do not use grid electricity, some are adopting solar, which is good. Mechanical (read ICE) power is used to power the lathes, saws, and other tools the Amish use to manufacture the various products we can find. They may not own cars, but they will ride in them, using energy to commute to work if it is out of horse and buggy distance from their homes.

I just don't want us to jump into something that in the end, is no better solution than what it is trying to replace. I also don'/t want us to abandon what works for what might work someday while looking to find ways to make that transition. Auto companies that are saying that they will not make any ICE vehicles after X date might be okay for a country such as Germany which is smaller than Montana but with a population greater than California. However, Germany will need to re-think abandoning nuclear power if it expects to charge all those batteries. There are just not enough alternative sources in Germany to bituminous coal or lignite. AFAIK, Germany has little natural gas or petroleum resources, so most energy has to be imported.

One thing that makes it difficult is the sheer size of the US. I see this as a very viable technology for cities where the population density is high and the distances needing to be driven are less. I don't see it working out west where there are many, many miles of no civilization between cities of a sufficient size to have such a swap facility. Reality is that Lithium Ion batteries will likely be obsolete before sufficient swap stations could be built to swap them. I keep hoping that some of the technology currently being experimented with will turn out to have the power density and speed of recharge that will allow for the range and power needed for travel. Likewise though, I am likely to be long gone and my grandchildren will still be looking for technology that is better for this purpose.

For myself, I don't have a dog in this race.  By the time any TV's with adequate towing range, charging stations, and swappable batteries sufficiently penetrate into the infrastructure and vehicle market, I will have long sold my TV and trailer.  Same for my car.  It's going to last me until I'm too senile to drive, which may not be all that far in the future.  On my retirement income, there will simply be no more vehicle purchases, EV, ICE, or horse and wagon..