Electric and Hybrid road vehicles

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I think MRT is common in parts of Asia where it's the name for the metro/subway system or agency that runs transit more than terminology (and to some degree regional).
Yes. IIRC Singapore introduced the term into our vocabulary many decades back.

Also the phrase "Heavy Rail" used in this context is an FRA-ism, and AFAIK no one calls their subway systems "Heavy Rail" outside the US.

That's certainly true - although the Philippines is, well, a mess in a lot of ways, so no surprise the system hasn't grown.
These things depend a lt on how the national governance situation goes. India took over thirty years to move from having a single Metro line to the veritable explosion of Metro systems we see blossoming now, making India one of the lead builders of Metro systems in the world.
 
FWIW I've been driving electric cars since 2013 (Tesla for 8 years, now a VW ID.4). And I'd still rather take the train.

But I have to admit, electric cars are a hell of a lot nicer than gasmobiles. I do have a garage so it's charged every morning. The heat comes on instantly (important here in upstate NY) instead of after 15 minutes like the typical gas car. And they're so much quieter.
 
FWIW I've been driving electric cars since 2013 (Tesla for 8 years, now a VW ID.4). And I'd still rather take the train.

But I have to admit, electric cars are a hell of a lot nicer than gasmobiles. I do have a garage so it's charged every morning. The heat comes on instantly (important here in upstate NY) instead of after 15 minutes like the typical gas car. And they're so much quieter.
I haven't yet made the switch to battery cars, but I have a Toyata RAV-4 hybrid, which is a lot quieter than my 2001 Honda CR/V.

By the way, I suspect, though I haven't done the analysis, that even if an electric car was recharged using utility power 100% derived from coal burning, the aggregate greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution is still less than from cars burning gasoline. It's also easier to regulate emissions from a few thousand power plants owned by a few utility companies than it is from millions and millions of cars owned by individuals.
 
Yes, its (GHG emissions/carbon footprint) is lower. Electric motors are more efficient users of energy than ICE. I'm actually in the middle of teaching a 4-hour class on vehicle electrification tonight, but a speaker from NYPA is presenting so I am checking my e-mails and forums. Shhhh I'm supposed to be watching (I've seen the presentation a dozen times already) If you buy an ICE today it will never be cleaner, whereas as the grid gets more and more clean power, the ev will be progressively cleaner as well.
 
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These things depend a lt on how the national governance situation goes. India took over thirty years to move from having a single Metro line to the veritable explosion of Metro systems we see blossoming now, making India one of the lead builders of Metro systems in the world.
Indeed, indeed! India's blossoming has been quite impressive!

(and if I were really, really, truly pedantic, I'd also have mentioned Yangoon's circle line which is commuter rail - interestingly I just looked it up to confirm and apparently there is proposed/under construction urban rail too)
 
(and if I were really, really, truly pedantic, I'd also have mentioned Yangoon's circle line which is commuter rail - interestingly I just looked it up to confirm and apparently there is proposed/under construction urban rail too)
A great way to see the surrounding area but boy is it slow.

I don't believe they have started any construction yet on the Yangon mass transit system, but I could be wrong. I'd be surprised to see any advancing of the project with all the political unrest there now.
 
Kyle finds out that the new Electrify America chargers that they co-developed with BTC don't work in cold temperatures. He also heads to ChargePoint, EVgo, and other EA chargers to see if they have similar issues in this cold snap.

 
Kyle finds out that the new Electrify America chargers that they co-developed with BTC don't work in cold temperatures. He also heads to ChargePoint, EVgo, and other EA chargers to see if they have similar issues in this cold snap.


Fascinating video, though it got repetitive about 3/4 way through. That guy sure gets excited about his work. :)

How does he afford all those EV's? I can't afford even 1!

I followed a link to another video where they "deep-froze" a Tesla to see how long it would take for the batteries to warm up enough to accept a charge.
 
Electric cars aren't great in cold weather - one of my friends bought a Leaf to drive to the station and in cold weather could only use the heated steering wheel since the heater drew so much power that it wouldn't allow her to get to the station (like ten minutes or 15 max from her parking space). She charged it at the station since the surface lot she parked in overnight didn't have electricity. Of note: she lived walking distance from a closer station without parking...
 
Crescent Oregon (50 miles south of Bend) is being dragged into the 21st century. In the south end of the Shell station, 8 brand new Rivian charging stations have been installed. I don't know when they will be up and running. I'm guessing that if you are driving on US 97 toward Bend and you are worried about making it to the charging station near the WalMart in the south end of Bend, you can stop for about 40 minutes to charge. We have had several nights when it did get to about -5F but I would not plan on starting a trip at that temperature even with a gas powered car.
 
A few days ago I did see a Rivian EV charging at the new charging station. My research indicates that only Rivian (not Tesla or any other EV's) can charge there. It is unfortunate that EV producers would build charging networks that only serve their own brand. The other charging stations can charge Rivians and other brands but not Teslas. Having a charger in your garage for charging overnight and travelling less than 200 miles per day will work for many people.
 
I feel it is a failure of federal regulation that there isn't a standardized charger; imagine if you needed a Ford gas station to fuel a Ford.

Yet another reason why electric cars won't save us.
Ever changing requirements, at some point there will be a regulatory guidelines.

Remember Ford did not invent the automobile. With certain brands declaring all electric line up in a few year, the end of big oil is approaching.
 
One thing to note is that when people talk about standards of Chargers, more often than not they are talking of the Connector and which pin carries what. The actual Charger is in the car.

Considering that it is only now after the Europeans got on the case we are starting to get a standard USB-C force fed to everyone who wants to sell in Europe,,leading to a worlwide standardization, my suspicion is that the Europeans are or will be there with standardization while Americans will have five different stadnards as usual, more the better being the ruling philosophy :D But more seriously, there really are I think about three that are in common use even in the US, and it is possible to have physical adapters from one to the other for at least a subset with similar feed voltages and current., though not all combos are available at present.
 
OK, here's some research news on the EV front from my two weeks at the TRB and SAE meetings.

One issue that was getting a lot of attention is "equity/Environmental justice." The idea is that moving to EVs might have more emissions impact if they can get in the hands of the masses who have less money. Right now, EVs are basically a toy for rich people, but there would be great benefits to those with less wealth, as EVs save money on fuel (sone speaker mentioned an electric charge good for 300 miles costs about $12, as opposed to 10 gallons of gas at $30 -$40), plus they are less expensive to maintain. However, there's an issue of inadequate charging infrastructure in low-income areas, plus a lack of charging ports for people living in apartment houses. Thus, there seems to be a push to ensure that a reasonable chink of the new public funds being appropriated for EV charging stations be located to serve these communities.

There was an interesting research paper that suggests that EVs won't have emissions benefits in all cases. (How clean does the U.S. electricity grid need to be to ensure electric vehicles reduce emissions?, by Madalsa Singh (Stanford Univ.) et al. (This is probably behind a paywall.) What they did was use a life-cycle assessment to estimate the total emissions from electric vehicles (a Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and Tesla Model S), including those "upstream" due to the marginal emissions from electric power plants cause by charging of the EVs. They then compared these with the total life-cycle emissions from a Toyota Prius and Honda Accord Hybrids. Using national (USA) averages, they showed that the Leaf and the Bolt have a lower "emissions intensity" (grams CO2/km) than the Prius and the Accord, but the Tesla has a higher emissions intensity. But the US electric grid varies regionally in its emissions intensity. It seems that the grid west of the 100th meridian and in New England has low enough CO2 emissions that EV's perform better than the hybrids, and the upper Midwest, south and mid-Atlantic have CO2 emissions from their electric generation sufficiently high that the Prius and Accord are better bets than the battery cars if you really want to minimize your CO2 emissions. The Tesla S performs worse than the Hybrids in all the regions. Perhaps Mr. Musk needs to rethink the need to market a car that can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2 seconds. :)

Another interesting paper was When Will California’s Electric Distribution System Need to be Upgraded to Meet Electric Vehicle Charging Demand? by Yanning Li of UC-Davis. In this study, they estimated the electric grid capacity in 12 diverse neighborhoods across California, then used travel demand models and reasonable estimates of the growth of Electric vehicle sales to estimate the numbers of electric vehicles that will be charging in each neighborhood during the years 2026 - 2045. Then they estimated the charging loads based on existing charging data. These "charging profiles" are different for residential and commercial neighborhoods, with the residential neighborhoods having the highest loads during the night and the commercial neighborhood having the highest loads during the daytime. They then used all these estimates to calculate "EV charging loads versus remaining feeder capacity" during a 24 hour period in 2045. While 3 of the 12 neighborhoods have no problems with overloads, the other 9 apparently will have to deal with overloads at some times of the day, and a few of the neighborhoods clearly don't have the feeder capacity to handle charging of electric vehicles. I hope that electric utilities across the country, in addition to reducing the CO2 emissions intensity of their electric generation, are also starting to make serious plans to increase feeder capacity before we get to the point that nearly all new cars will be EVs. Otherwise, we're going to be taking the risk of having some serious electrical outages during the 2040s. Unless, of course, people start seriously driving a lot less than they do now.

Finally, my attendance at the SAE meeting included a free sneak preview of the 2023 Washington Auto Show, complete with an open bar (beer and wine only) and hors d'oeuvres. In the spirit of the priorities of AU, I do have to mildly complain about the free food served, the quality and variety served up by the Washington Convention Center has declined over the years, or the meeting organizers have specified lower quality for cost-cutting reasons. (This also applies to the official luncheons at the SAE meeting, the last time I attended one in 2019, the food was better. I mean, it's all rubber chicken banquet food, but there's good rubber chicken, and rubber chicken of lesser quality.)

As far as the cars on offer this year, I wasn't all that impressed. For one thing, all of the manufacturers seem to be emphasizing larger and larger cars, even for an even in a city where most people don't need big honking pickup trucks and SUVs to meet their mobility needs. Of course, they did have smaller vehicles on display, but they were sort of hidden away, and even some of the smaller vehicles are getting larger than they used to be. I also see some backsliding on fuel economy, even on some of the small cars, I mean a little Fiat 500 only has a combined fuel economy of 26 mpg, my new Toyota Corolla Cross (4WD, 2022) has a combined fuel economy of 30 mpg. Most of the small SUVs that I also looked at were less, about 26 -28 mpg, but at least they had more room than a Fiat 500. Of course, most of the manufacturers were touting their battery electric models, though I think their price will need to come down before they can really increase their market share. Unfortunately, with the exception of a Nissan Leaf, a Chevy Bolt, and a Hyundai Kona on display, all of the other EVs were sports cars (the EV Corvette), large SUVs or really honking big pickup trucks, the sorts of cars that might not really have any emissions benefits if you count the upstream emissions in the electric grid. (Oh, and don't forget these big EVs have really heavy batteries that are a drag on their power consumption and make the vehicles safety hazards, too.) No Teslas on display, as the show is sponsored by the Washington area Auto Dealers Association, and Tesla doesn't sell through dealers. But it was interesting seeing what the auto industry has on offer, plus there were some displays of classic cars and, weirdly for an auto show, a big display of e-bikes.
 
I haven't yet made the switch to battery cars, but I have a Toyata RAV-4 hybrid, which is a lot quieter than my 2001 Honda CR/V.

By the way, I suspect, though I haven't done the analysis, that even if an electric car was recharged using utility power 100% derived from coal burning, the aggregate greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution is still less than from cars burning gasoline. It's also easier to regulate emissions from a few thousand power plants owned by a few utility companies than it is from millions and millions of cars owned by individuals.
Whoops, the last sentence might still be true, but check my review of a recent research paper where it seems that, in some cases in some areas, the upstream emissions from electric generation might be greater than those of a gasoline electric hybrid car.
 
One thing that is seldom considered is the carbon footprint of a car's manufacturing. We were considering biting the bullet and getting an electric vehicle to replace our gasoline-fueled 2016 Honda Civic. We don't drive a lot--between Mr Flitcraft and me, it's about 4000 miles a year, post-retirement. Likely in the future it'll be closer to 2000 miles a year. But even at our current 4000 miles a year, my husband went to an online carbon footprint calculator and determined that if we continue to drive our Honda, it will take 23 years before the carbon footprint of a new electric vehicle would zero-out, and that was assuming that the electricity used to fuel it is 100% renewable energy sources. (The likelihood that either of us will be driving any car in 23 years is close to nil...)

So, our environmental decision was, keep the Honda and just concentrate on driving less. Our goal for 2023 is to do only 2000 miles this year...we'll see if that gets achieved! (So far, so good--the last three full months we clocked in at just over 240 miles total! Summer will bump that up a bit, I know.)

Oh, and he discovered that the biggest impact we could have on our carbon usage was to replace our gas furnace with an electric heat pump. Which we did this past year. As far as money savings, we won't live long enough to recoup the costs of installing the heat pump in lower energy bills. But it represents a large decrease in our home carbon footprint, so we're happy with that decision.
 
The other charging stations can charge Rivians and other brands but not Teslas.
Not true.

The Tesla website says:

Third-Party Charging
Third-party charging stations can be located through Plugshare.com. Charging stations labeled as J1772 will work with a SAE J1772 adapter and 120 volt stations labeled as 120 volt will work with the Mobile Connector. When a Mobile Connector is not in use, we recommend storing it in the trunk for easy access. For maximum flexibility on the road and to charge from a 240 volt outlet, store an adapter bundle in the trunk as well.​

And Car & Driver says:

Every electric vehicle on the road today is compatible with the U.S. standard Level 2 chargers, known in the industry as SAE J1772. That includes Tesla vehicles, which come with the brand's proprietary Supercharger connector. A Tesla owner just needs to use the adapter that came with their model to connect to a J1772 plug.​
 
I would think a new EV owner would be willing to try to get a. sustainable energy supply to power their car. It might be interesting if the standard rebate that EV owners get would instead have an option for the government, to give them both cash and ownership of a very small segment, of an EV farm somewhere, say New Mexico. The segment’s output would be equal to the approximate kwh of their car.

I know that land particularly in New Mexico is cheap. Whether it’s nearby the grid would be a question but it could be made near the grid if it was a government program - especially for solar farm of say 100GWe …. or about 200 coal plants

Yeah, well land is expensive if it’s in New York City but in New Mexico it’s around $100 an acre.

The government could also offer a “farm” deal for current EV OWNERS and send monthly checks to EV owner on butter energy produced by their share of the “farm”.

Maybe the “Solar pv Farm” becomes a necessary requirement. To make it fair the average Joe could also purchase a segment of the solar pv
farm.
 
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I wonder what kind of chargers they use in Norway, where 80% of new car sales are of EVs.
Norway is pretty much 100% for everything else as it is - they banned (as in required removal of) oil boilers for residential use - there weren't very many - outside of specific conditions a couple years ago. Their electric grid is far more robust than ours - never experienced a power outage while living there.
 
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