Electric cars

[richardfrost]

The car industry is first-class when bending sheet metal into a car, how low can be the price of all that bent sheet metal?  Dacia Sandero .....  £7995.
An electric car is a package of a very expensive battery pack and less than £7995 worth of sheet metal.
Moore's Law  applies when something doubles in performance for the same money, or, same performance for half the money.

Since when did Moore's law apply to battery technology? As far as I know, the law applied to computer processing power, and now it is starting to break down anyway. Battery tech is coming on in leaps and bounds now that there is a massive potential (no pun intended) market for it.

[E27006]

The car industry is first-class when bending sheet metal into a car, how low can be the price of all that bent sheet metal?  Dacia Sandero .....  £7995.
An electric car is a package of a very expensive battery pack and less than £7995 worth of sheet metal.
Moore's Law  applies when something doubles in performance for the same money, or, same performance for half the money.

Since when did Moore's law apply to battery technology? As far as I know, the law applied to computer processing power, and now it is starting to break down anyway. Battery tech is coming on in leaps and bounds now that there is a massive potential (no pun intended) market for it.

Moore's Law came from Gordon Moore of Intel, and you are correct, it applied to semiconductors in the earliest instance.
Moore's law for semiconductors may well be breaking down, but it has held true for  50 to 60 years of semiconductor manufacture, 50-60 years being  25 to 30 iterations of a 2-year Moore cycle, not a bad record for an empirical concept.
Moore's Law is such a useful  concept, it has expanded beyond the semiconductor  industry.
The battery manufacturers  have  described battery capacity developments  as having a 7 year Moore cycle

[richardfrost]

Moore's Law came from Gordon Moore of Intel, and you are correct, it applied to semiconductors in the earliest instance.

I didn't say it applied to semiconductors. It doesn't. Semiconductors is a wide term ranging from individual transistors to complex integrated circuits. Moore's Law applies to the number of transistors that can fabricated into a single integrated circuit. More specifically, it applies to the ability to make the circuits smaller and more dense over time. It has slowed as certain theoretical limits are being approached but other techniques are being developed now which might circumvent these limits, along with changes in the way processing units are being designed, scaled and made to work together.

I think the same sort of acceleration in pace of developments certainly apply in the battery world now, but it is confusing for me, given my IT background, to hear Moore's Law being used to describe them. They need their own name for it. Maybe the Duracel Bunny's Law or something.

[John Ratsey]

Unless we can get a reliable source of electrickery BEV on a large scale are pie in the sky, and when you add all electric houses into the equation = madness.

I completely agree, yet those who think they are running the country can't, or won't, realise this. I recall that one was recently quoted as saying that "Britain will become the Saudi Arabia of wind power" which might work if enough turbines are built in the mid-Atlantic to improve the geographical spread and reduce the vulnerability to the weather. I see no alternative in the short term to ordering some more nuclear power stations. This should have been done several years ago in order to improve future supply reliability with less quibbling about the cost. Much of the time the UK is importing 2 to 3 GW of nuclear power from France which is fine until that power is needed elsewhere.

[culzean]

The car industry is first-class when bending sheet metal into a car, how low can be the price of all that bent sheet metal?  Dacia Sandero .....  £7995.
An electric car is a package of a very expensive battery pack and less than £7995 worth of sheet metal.
Moore's Law  applies when something doubles in performance for the same money, or, same performance for half the money.

Since when did Moore's law apply to battery technology? As far as I know, the law applied to computer processing power, and now it is starting to break down anyway. Battery tech is coming on in leaps and bounds now that there is a massive potential (no pun intended) market for it.

Maybe the duracell-Bunny law can cover the density of AmpereHours in a battery,  the more Ah in a battery and the smaller and lighter it is makes it better as a chemical storage medium for electrical power.  Not sure a hard cell is the best way to market batteries though,  maybe soft-cell will turn out to be more flexible ( are lithium polymer batteries and example of soft cell ? )  I try to be positive about future battery tech,  but unfortunately there still has to be a negative as well. 

Now here is a thing - conventional power flow in a battery is said to be from positive pole to negative pole,  but this was when scientists thought that 'ions' ( positively charged bits ) were the basis of electricity,  unfortunately it was later found that electrons ( negatively charged thingies ) are the real prime mover,  and they migrate from negative to positive..... So then they came up with the 'hole flow' convention,  where it is the holes on the valency that electrons leave behind when moving from - to + that constitute 'electrical flow' and the 'holes' move from + to -.........

[JimSh]

Now here is a thing - conventional power flow in a battery is said to be from positive pole to negative pole,  but this was when scientists thought that 'ions' ( positively charged bits ) were the basis of electricity,  unfortunately it was later found that electrons ( negatively charged thingies ) are the real prime mover,  and they migrate from negative to positive..... So then they came up with the 'hole flow' convention,  where it is the holes on the valency that electrons leave behind when moving from - to + that constitute 'electrical flow' and the 'holes' move from + to -.........

Electrons move in the external circuits. Ions migrate wihin the cells.

[culzean]

Now here is a thing - conventional power flow in a battery is said to be from positive pole to negative pole,  but this was when scientists thought that 'ions' ( positively charged bits ) were the basis of electricity,  unfortunately it was later found that electrons ( negatively charged thingies ) are the real prime mover,  and they migrate from negative to positive..... So then they came up with the 'hole flow' convention,  where it is the holes on the valency that electrons leave behind when moving from - to + that constitute 'electrical flow' and the 'holes' move from + to -.........

Electrons move in the external circuits. Ions migrate wihin the cells.

Yeah they used to think Ions moved in external circuits....

[JimSh]

Now here is a thing - conventional power flow in a battery is said to be from positive pole to negative pole,  but this was when scientists thought that 'ions' ( positively charged bits ) were the basis of electricity,  unfortunately it was later found that electrons ( negatively charged thingies ) are the real prime mover,  and they migrate from negative to positive..... So then they came up with the 'hole flow' convention,  where it is the holes on the valency that electrons leave behind when moving from - to + that constitute 'electrical flow' and the 'holes' move from + to -.........

Electrons move in the external circuits. Ions migrate wihin the cells.

Yeah they used to think Ions moved in external circuits....

Nope, Ions can be positive or negative. They used to think that electrical charge moved from positive to negative.
Elecrons flow through metals.
Semiconductors are best explained using holes.

[Jocko]

How about a Morris J van?



https://www.morris-commercial.com/

[richardfrost]

They should have started with a Morris Minor Traveller recreation, complete with wood. I think that would have had more retro / eco appeal. I’d buy one.

[JimSh]

You could have anything you want.
https://www.carscoops.com/2020/12/zero-labs-skateboard-ev-platform-has-been-designed-specifically-for-electromods/
https://driving.ca/column/how-it-works/how-it-works-electric-vehicle-skateboard-chassis
Added second link

[John Ratsey]

The end of the road for petrol stations? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57416829 . My impression is that thousands of rural petrol stations have gone already but there are still enough places to refill. More efficient engines means more miles per tankful. My Austin A35 needed refilling every 150 miles. Perhaps, if demand for liquid vehicle fuel reduces, then supermarkets will reduce the number of pumps and mabe add some EV chargers instead.

[culzean]

The end of the road for petrol stations? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57416829 . My impression is that thousands of rural petrol stations have gone already but there are still enough places to refill. More efficient engines means more miles per tankful. My Austin A35 needed refilling every 150 miles. Perhaps, if demand for liquid vehicle fuel reduces, then supermarkets will reduce the number of pumps and mabe add some EV chargers instead.

The 400 to 800 volts DC needed to charge EV is also deadly,  and when charging points get vandalised ( as they will because they are scattered around in small groups in multiple unsupervised places ) that electricity will be exposed...  There is basically only one type of petrol and one type of diesel fuel, but already we are seeing many different types of charging plugs and many different voltages.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-44874476

https://flipboard.com/article/vandals-are-stuffing-meat-into-electric-vehicle-charging-stations/f-2ee53371e9%2Ffuturism.com

https://www.greencarfuture.com/electric/tesla-voltage

[Jocko]

The end of the road for petrol stations?

I lived in Burntisland for most of my life and when I first started driving we had three garages and a filling station selling petrol. Now the nearest filling station is 6 miles away, in Kirkcaldy.
I even remember filling up at a garage in Killin and the pumps were on the outside wall of the garage and you had to stop in the street and fill up across the pavement. Similar to this in St Mawes.

[JimSh]

.......  and when charging points get vandalised ( as they will because they are scattered around in small groups in multiple unsupervised places ) that electricity will be exposed... 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-44874476

https://flipboard.com/article/vandals-are-stuffing-meat-into-electric-vehicle-charging-stations/f-2ee53371e9%2Ffuturism.com

Creme eggs and raw mince ? 
Not the materials of choice for your common or garden vandal.
More likely some Luddite inebriated old farts with an aversion to electric cars and the effect they will have on the price of their BP or Aral shares.