Ford to spend $1.3B to transform Canada factory into EV manufacturing hub (opens in new tab)

Look, what follows is my opinion and why Im against EVs for the short to mid term future. Im not a domain expert, but I am a physicist and an engineer whose worked in energy and for the DOE on sustainable energy sources. Again, Im not a car engineer.

Carbon emissions is why we're transitioning. Its why EVs are made mandatory. Its the premise that the EV has to fulfill. Thousands of little ICE parts have little consequence since cars, typically, die for every other reason except engine failure. This has been the case since widespread adoption of automatic transmissions and fuel injection.

The math of EVs is pretty daunting too. Take an EV and ignore its greater sin of creation (ie resources to make one vs an ICE car). Now pretend it runs on pixie dust (ie actually zero emissions).

Now compare that to taking that EV's (electrically) massive battery and, instead hybridizing N number of vehicles. Ive run the numbers, and the EV has (much) greater CO2 emissions.

If you use regulatory power to funnel those batteries to preferentially hybridize contractors' vans and trucks (ie the F-250 and 350, not the wanna be cowboys' 150) the comparison sucks even more.

Note that this analysis uses efficiency numbers from current widespread ICE engines, not rather niche (for the West) CNG cars that can run at very high compression ratios (methane has an octane rating of about 120) and have much higher energy content per gram of CO2.

And you know what the funniest part of all of this is? We could slash transportation CO2 overnight by lowering and imposing lower speed limits.

But again, this is what Ive come to believe with car manufacturer and EPA data in excel. YMMV

This is the primary reason I wouldn't go back to combustion. The running costs of electric vehicles are absurdly low at times.

You can put 50k-100k miles on most EVs on sale today having only bought cabin air filters, tires and wiper blades in addition to the cost of the electricity - thats largely it!

I hope people realize that fuel cell cars are also EVs, and have only a handful more moving parts to deal with. People have mislead themselves into thinking the BEV is synonymous with all EVs. This type of thinking could easily lead people into making serious mistakes.

Not only that but all the innovations that we see in batteries can trickle down to all kinds of consumer devices.

> We are simply putting fantasy before reality. Reality means that power generation expansion must come first and cars follow based on quotas established to maintain generation/grid integrity.

None of the players are willing to expand power generation for some future possibility, we have to scale up demand before they're willing to invest in that.

It also ignores that the biggest problem currently isn't generation but is scheduling, if more utilities had the capability to help homeowners schedule charging based on system demand we'd barely need any increase in generation to begin with as we don't have much trouble generating the needed power over the scale of a night, but if everyone tries to pull an 11kwh charge at the same time (similar to California having issues in the evening as everyone turns up the AC when people arive home) we do have a problem. Even california with all it's problem has enough capacity if there was better scheduling available to help flatten the curve.

You can make the car engine more efficient by making it be a small generator that is working at optimal RPMs rather than the variable RPMs driving the car itself.

Consider some of the various hybrid approaches.

Honda has the IMA. The insight is an ICE car with an "underpowered" gas motor that has an electric motor to assist it. If it runs out of gas, it's out of gas and doesn't move.

Toyota's Prius is an electric car with a gas motor that switches on when optimal. If you run out of gas in the Prius, the car will go for some further distance until the battery goes dead.

The Chevy volt is an electric car with a gas generator (and a trick that can shunt some power from the gas generator to driving the car). https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/chevy-volts-engine-more-t...

> When the battery is depleted, the range extender engine kicks in to generate electricity for the motor, as GM noted in its press materials. But when the battery is depleted and the car is running at 70 mph or above, the planetary gearset transmits additional motive force directly from the engine to the wheels.

... however, this also should take into account the efficiency of the power grid too.

https://www.epa.gov/egrid/power-profiler#/

A hybrid car in part of the grid that is heavily coal can be efficient in terms of CO2 than an electric car because it is burning gas more cleanly than the grid is burning coal.

This is an excellent question but a massive one to answer. Probably the length of a scientific paper. It'd involve thermo, engineering economics, etc.

To keep it short, yes there is a return to scale, but it's a diminishing one. Gas turbines run at about 55% thermal efficiency. Large of small it matters little, that limit is set by the blade materials' melting temperature (which sets longevity).

Your car typically runs at about 30%, its efficiency partially offset by heat losses to the cylinder walls (ie the larger the better), but is mostly set by engineering decisions other than fuel efficiency (one big cylinder has less surface heat loss than four little guys but would be unbalanced)

But there are so many legacy design decisions in an ICE that no longer apply if we have hybrid drivetrains and ammonia/urea injection (to mitigate NOx from high compression).

The Prius challenged a lot (but not all) of these decisions and remains, in my opinion, the most revolutionary car of the past 50 years.

I really believe that an fossil fuel car engine can get an efficiency within the transmission losses of the best gas power plant. But even if ICE development were frozen, hybrids still make more sense, from a CO2 POV, than EVs

Because an off the shelf standard Model 3 is 3-4x faster 0-60 than almost any other car in its price range.

The difference between standard and performance model is nowhere near the same leap in speed.

Dude I have a Ford Focus EV and I can go toe to toe with anything short of a muscle car. It's almost even better than a Tesla because it's a sleeper.

A standard Tesla accelerates about 2x as fast as my econobox.

You sure? The standard Tesla models are quite fast for price point. the standard hyundai, kia, ford, vw crossover EVs are slower, but faster than their ICE counterparts

I drove a Tesla for the first time thinking I was going to like the driver assist and tech the most. The only thing my friends and I could talk about afterwards was how fucking fast the thing was.

Haha you clearly don't understand American car culture.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDpQpcPpuc

7M views in 3 months. Americans LOVE seeing which car is faster.

Look at how many people at unenthused with EVs because they don't make loud noises. If they couldn't at least also go faster...

EV rebates got bundled into the Inflation Reduction Act and passed last year. The Act of Congress has already happened.

Further encouragements to go electric will happen through the EPA who already have the congressional authority to regulate tailpipes. Anything they do will be challenged in court, but if they can get it through the courts they can do a lot without an Act of Congress.

> The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) amended the Qualified Plug-in Electric Drive Motor Vehicle Credit (IRC 30D), now known as the Clean Vehicle Credit, and added a new requirement for final assembly in North America that took effect on August 17, 2022. For new electric, fuel cell electric, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles acquired, delivered, and placed in service after August 16, 2022, this final assembly requirement applies. For vehicles placed in service on or after January 1, 2023, the Clean Vehicle Credit provisions are subject to updated guidance from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. [1]

[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/electric-vehicles-for-tax-credi...

The IRA was a bipartisan law passed by Congress. Part of it renewed a credit of up to $7500 per purchase of an EV that underwent final assembly in North America.

Additionally, California (which by all accounts sets national car standards) has passed updated regulations to phase-out the sale of ICE cars within the next 10 years. This is also a very important piece of legislation that will help the Ford decision.

This is technically true but they sort won in a prisoners dilemma type situation. Had no auto makers been bailed out, the shared suppliers may have all folded causing Ford to go under. So while they didn't take any direct money, the bailouts kept their upstream suppliers afloat. Ford also benefits from high import tariffs on foreign built trucks, a tariff basically designed to protect the F-150. If you check subsidy tracker[1], you're see that Ford is an enormous recipient of corporate welfare. They've received $5 billion from Michigan alone since just 2010.

[1] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/ford-motor

Pace of growth is what's important now. I'll look for the numbers but I would guess that Ford is reaching early milestones quicker than Tesla. Not a knock on Tesla, just that it's a different market now.

> There are two types of F-150 buyers

The F-series isn't the most popular vehicle in America because there are only two types of buyers. Roughly, the answer to "who is a truck person?" is "everyone."

The only people driving F-150s around job sites are management with a stipend. Half ton trucks are a lot less capable then most people think, and are primarily targeted to the former of the two groups you mention

I've actually seen a good amount of them in/around the bay area.