Embodied energy: 1 million ebike miles on a 90kWh pack.

[Moltenmetal]

Embodied energy is regrettably often the hobgoblin of people who are afraid of change. It's easy to do the calcs wrong, deliberately or by accident. If there were a carbon tax in place at say $150/tonne, all you'd need to know is the cost of capital and operating and a simple calc would tell you all you'd need to know. But without it, you end up in an endless rabbit hole of chasing energy inputs- do you include workers' food and transport energy costs? How about the support workers like R&D, patent lawyers...?

I converted an old IC engine car bound for the scrapyard. It consumes, source to movement, 20% of the input energy it did pre conversion- that's as accurate a calc as I can make, which does not confuse heat or chemical energy with work or electrical energy. More importantly, with Ontario's 9% nat gas fired, balance nuclear and renewables (most of the renewables being hydro) power grid to fuel it, it emits 3% of the CO2 it did pre conversion. When I get panels on my roof at home and convince my boss to do the same at work, that will drop to zero.

It is not even remotely likely that my 18.5 kWh LiFePO4 pack, used for 3000 cycles before replacement, will not reduce greenhouse gas and toxic emissions dramatically when compared to my other car, a 2013 Prius C which gets 4.5 L/100km year round average. And that is nearly best available technology from an emissions perspective in total in the IC engine car world. In fact, my converted car leaves diesel transit buses in the dust, even when they are full. It cannot compete with an electric train, though, nor with an e-bike- but it isn't an e-bike. It's way safer and more comfortable and more practical for my long commute, which by the way saves three other family members from needing a vehicle of any kind.

 

[Lurkin]

Without spending the resources to change, nothing will change. Meanwhile, the environment suffers for our lacking of willingness to change.

Its a pretty hard thing to admit continuing to use fossil fueled vehicles of any kind, is a long term, serious error.

Yes, in the short term, change will involve pollution, use financial resources, so forth. We've spent a long time perfecting a turd, I literally do not want to know how much pollution, financial resources, human talent, loss of life and more have been poured into the fossil fuel/ transport "solution" overall cycle.

 

[flathill]

In the future we will all be electric nomads. The "low" class with have mobile homes that drives themselves low on land and the "up" class will have mobile homes that fly themselves up in the air.

Why would I want to own a stationary house when I could wake up tomorrow and be anywhere on Earth and still have the comfort of my own home. Autopilot makes home ownership and permanent housing structures obsolete. This will result in re configurable cities which will allow for mass gatherings during joyous events. Buildings that don't move will be monuments

 

[Syonyk]

In the future we will all be electric nomads. The "low" class with have mobile homes that drives themselves low on land and the "up" class will have mobile homes that fly themselves up in the air.

Go figure out how much power it will take to fly a house. I'll wait.

Why would I want to own a stationary house when I could wake up tomorrow and be anywhere on Earth and still have the comfort of my own home. Autopilot makes home ownership and permanent housing structures obsolete. This will result in re configurable cities which will allow for mass gatherings during joyous events. Buildings that don't move will be monuments

Dunno, "paying an insane amount of money for a feature I'm not likely to use very often and that will be a pain in the ass every time I want to use it" doesn't seem a selling point.

Look at what happens even in a minor earthquake. You want these things to drive on roads or fly regularly? Are you envisioning some sort of hyper-minimalist pod?

 

[liveforphysics]

In the future we will all be electric nomads. The "low" class with have mobile homes that drives themselves low on land and the "up" class will have mobile homes that fly themselves up in the air.

Why would I want to own a stationary house when I could wake up tomorrow and be anywhere on Earth and still have the comfort of my own home. Autopilot makes home ownership and permanent housing structures obsolete. This will result in re configurable cities which will allow for mass gatherings during joyous events. Buildings that don't move will be monuments

Funny, you described my own home plans. First an E-RV with solar roof to live in, next something lighter than air and solar as materials tech improves to make it easier to do on a modest budget.

 

[flathill]

A vacuum airship is possible but not robust. There are other ways to make "cheap" airv's but we are still talking big coin to do it right

The Tesla pickup will be perfect for solar RV conversion since auto driving is built in. We can make our own auto drive system but it wont be road legal and I would not use auto mode while sleeping like the Tesla since it wont have group intelligence. This may be one case where Open source/data wont work as a closed system reduces the brain size

"Camp" out a couple days in the middle of no where and drive another 500 miles. Gonna be beautiful. Sleep some auto drives, be reading on other auto drives, or drive yourself in race mode

 

[Chalo]

Funny, you described my own home plans. First an E-RV with solar roof to live in, next something lighter than air and solar as materials tech improves to make it easier to do on a modest budget.

On my recent road trip to New Orleans, it occurred to me that self-driving car technology has the potential to completely remake RV living. Once you remove the elements of vigilance, fatigue, and boredom from driving your RV from place to place, it no longer matters how fast you go. And if you go slowly, you can extract most of the motive energy you need from the massive solar panels that an RV's roof can accommodate.

I imagine a future where quiet, lightweight, self-driving solar electric motor homes become a legitimate option for many people's permanent residences.

Just the act of living in a road-going vehicle would tend to radically reduce the average person's resource footprint (apart from fuel consumption). So if fuel consumption can be taken out of the equation, that could be a very effective way of allowing people to live better while leading cleaner and leaner lives.

 

[Syonyk]

And if you go slowly, you can extract most of the motive energy you need from the massive solar panels that an RV's roof can accommodate.

A full size bus, 40' long, 8' wide, has a roof area of ~30 square meters. At 150W/m^2, 5 good hours of sun, you can collect about 22kWh/day. Which should get a large RV about 30 miles. Maybe. If you have the battery capacity.

 

[Chalo]

My assumptions are that between good panel efficiency and being able to tilt the panels a few degrees laterally, you can do better than 150W/m^2. I also assume travel speeds that human drivers are not disciplined enough to maintain, more like that of sailing vessels and less like motor vehicles as we know them.

 

[Syonyk]

Ok, so we're off in the infeasible weeds of Futurology. Got it.

 

[Chalo]

Actually, 10-20mph is more feasible than 40-60, not less. That's how you eke range from a solar vehicle.

 

[flathill]

u CAN fix stupid


"""
A solar-powered family car has completed a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco fuelled entirely by sunshine - a journey covering almost 385 miles (619km).

Called Stella, the vehicle can travel up to 500 miles (800 km) on a single charge, clocking speeds of up to 80mph (130 km).

The prototype four-seater has solar cells on its roof to provide power while driving, and it boasts a tablet that tracks traffic lights.

 

[Chalo]

Incidentally, the very first e-bike I built, for and with a friend and co-worker back in the late '90s, used solar charging. We made a disc front wheel array and a frame size panel array with gallium arsenide cells, and lying down in full sun they delivered 100W. (That's a lot more than 150W/m^2, by the way. So instead of futurology, maybe I'm studying history.)

 

[Punx0r]

Slow moving RVs might be tolerable to their passengers, but would not be to the passengers of self-driving cars, who would be held up by them on anything but quiet roads.

 

[DAND214]

Slow moving RVs might be tolerable to their passengers, but would not be to the passengers of self-driving cars, who would be held up by them on anything but quiet roads.

Then they will have to fly

Dan