Poll: Do you have, or plan to get, an electric car?

[Bilsch]

The home amperage issue isn't that the home's electric panel couldn't be expanded, it is that the street feed doesn't have the capacity to provide the additional amperage to the house. Expensive, you bet. Replacing the entire electric grid to increase the capacity to what is needed, is going to be very expensive. It's hard enough to get electric companies to replace a damaged pole unless it comes all the way down. Try getting them to rip out all the poles and put in new ones with larger gauge wires. Copper is pretty expensive these days. Or more expensive, new infrastructure underground. The cities and towns won't want to re-pave all their roads either. They all know this has been coming since the 70s and still haven't made any effort to upgrade the grid. So it is not likely they will be in any hurry to fix it now either. You won't find it in the sales literature either that you are out of luck if it turns out your house and the local grid can't support the new fancy electric car you bought. It isn't a qualifying issue to return the car.

Except that most of the time EV's are charged at night when other loads in the house are minimal. This is also the case for the grid which is designed to handle peak usage times which means there is plenty of excess capacity for nightly car charging. I encourage you to look up a duck curve. Anyway this is also beneficial for the power companies enabling them to even out the load from peak to off peak times to keep base load operating longer which is more efficient. Basically there is a lot of free energy to be had/saved by making the grid and generation capacity more balanced by using TOU and EV charging. We have a long way to go before anyone needs to do anything to change a house service or tear up the street etc.

 

[Bilsch]

No, the two biggest issues with EVs are battery technology and the power grid. Scientists have recently reported they can only get around 10% more energy density out of existing battery technologies. A tank of gas is 500% more energy dense than a lead-acid battery. Lithium-based batteries are 10% less energy dense than lead-acid batteries. Lithium batteries are better because they don't lose capacity as they discharge, unlike lead-acid batteries. So, short of a battery technology revolution, increased range/capacity isn't on the horizon. That is why the recent industry focus is on charging station technology.

I'm wondering where you are getting your information from? Lithium batteries have more than 6X greater energy density than lead acid batteries. This efficiency keeps improving every year at a roughly 5-8% so I'm not sure who is telling you only 10% more is possible. Heck Tesla just announced their tabless 4680 packs which are approximately 50% more energy dense then than the current 2170 battery packs.

The sky is the limit on battery technology and things are changing fast!

 

[corkybstewart]

Listening to some podcasts about the new F150 electric pickup has totally changed my mind. If they have a 4 wheel drive option I will buy one. If not, I probably won't. As a serious rockhound I spend a lot of time in 4WD driving on mine roads that were abandoned soon after WWII.

 

[doug293cz]

Listening to some podcasts about the new F150 electric pickup has totally changed my mind. If they have a 4 wheel drive option I will buy one. If not, I probably won't. As a serious rockhound I spend a lot of time in 4WD driving on mine roads that were abandoned soon after WWII.

Looks like the Lightning is full time 4WD. Specs.

This is likely to be my next vehicle. I just traded my 10 yr old Sonata Turbo for a leased Sonata Hybrid. I figure in three years there will be many more all electric options. The new hybrid gets about twice the mileage of the turbo.

Brew on

 

[Kent88]

Aptera Sol: 1,000-mile, solar-supplemented EV teases tent, space for a surfboard

 

[Broothru]

Listening to some podcasts about the new F150 electric pickup has totally changed my mind. If they have a 4 wheel drive option I will buy one. If not, I probably won't. As a serious rockhound I spend a lot of time in 4WD driving on mine roads that were abandoned soon after WWII.

If I'm not mistaken, all four wheels have independent drive motors. Could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure all the "Lightning" F-150s are AWD.

 

[doug293cz]

If I'm not mistaken, all four wheels have independent drive motors. Could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure all the "Lightning" F-150s are AWD.

Spec specifically says two motors:

Brew on

 

[corkybstewart]

Looks like the Lightning is full time 4WD. Specs.

This is likely to be my next vehicle. I just traded my 10 yr old Sonata Turbo for a leased Sonata Hybrid. I figure in three years there will be many more all electric options. The new hybrid gets about twice the mileage of the turbo.

Brew on

It'll be hard to let go of my 2000 F250 powerstroke with 353,000 miles. But somehow, I think I can manage.

 

[Bilsch]

The thing I find most interesting about the new F-150 is the ability to power your home in the event of an outage with 9600 watts of continuous power. A lot of people, myself included, have spent a bunch of money on backup batteries to do the same thing when we could have done it for no extra cost with this truck. And it's a big battery, like 5X bigger, compared to what is affordable in stationary home packs. I'm a Tesla guy but hats off to Ford for thinking outside the box. That is just phenomenal to me.

 

[Kent88]

The thing I find most interesting about the new F-150 is the ability to power your home in the event of an outage with 9600 watts of continuous power. A lot of people, myself included, have spent a bunch of money on backup batteries to do the same thing when we could have done it for no extra cost with this truck. And it's a big battery, like 5X bigger, compared to what is affordable in stationary home packs. I'm a Tesla guy but hats off to Ford for thinking outside the box. That is just phenomenal to me.

IMHO, the power-your-house feature is gimmicky. I'm not saying it can't be useful, but I wouldn't want to deplete the range on my vehicle, and leave it home to power the fridge, if the delay was long.

 

[Bilsch]

IMHO, the power-your-house feature is gimmicky. I'm not saying it can't be useful, but I wouldn't want to deplete the range on my vehicle, and leave it home to power the fridge, if the delay was long.

I completely disagree. To get a similar amount of continuous power battery backup for my house, I spent 15K on the batteries and inverter but with only about 1/8 the capacity of the Lightening battery. Comparatively you'd need 2 Tesla powerwalls to get a similar maximum power rating and that would cost 20K but still would only have 27KWH of capacity compared to the trucks 115 KWH. One of these trucks is equivalent to 8.5 Tesla Powerwalls! That is a whopping amount of battery for a house and would go for a really long time just powering critical loads. It might be a gimmick but it's a hell of a useful one when the lights go out.

 

[day_trippr]

With that much energy capacity I can't wait to see the Youtube videos of the first one of those "trucks" to experience an exothermic runaway from a separator failure (and you know that's going to happen)...

 

[Bilsch]

With that much energy capacity I can't wait to see the Youtube videos of the first one of those "trucks" to experience an exothermic runaway from a separator failure (and you know that's going to happen)...

Well since the average gas tank size contains roughly 540 KWH of energy and gas cars are 10 times more likely to burst into flames.. the numbers say you should be way more worried about the ICE car in your garage.

 

[day_trippr]

Lol! Yeah, you have a point there - even without a supporting cite.
Lots of power in gasoline, and as long as there's a GM there'll be cars blowing up in garages

 

[Bilsch]

Lol! Yeah, you have a point there - even without a supporting cite.

"From 2012 – 2020, there has been approximately one Tesla vehicle fire for every 205 million miles traveled. By comparison, data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation shows that in the United States there is a vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
Note: The data for ICE cars is from the NFPA. The data for the EV is from Tesla which would be the most accurate since they have by far the most EV's on the road. Granted this data is for driving since accurate numbers for incidences while sitting in a garage is harder to come by. However since I'm not sitting in my car in the garage, I'd still be happier about the 10x safer on the road thing.

 

[corkybstewart]

The thing I find most interesting about the new F-150 is the ability to power your home in the event of an outage with 9600 watts of continuous power. A lot of people, myself included, have spent a bunch of money on backup batteries to do the same thing when we could have done it for no extra cost with this truck. And it's a big battery, like 5X bigger, compared to what is affordable in stationary home packs. I'm a Tesla guy but hats off to Ford for thinking outside the box. That is just phenomenal to me.

Power failure is not my issue where I live. We've een here 3 years and our power has never blinked. Much more important is the range-gas stations can easily be 50 miles apart, I can only imagine charging stations are much farther apart.

 

[Kent88]

I completely disagree. To get a similar amount of continuous power battery backup for my house, I spent 15K on the batteries and inverter but with only about 1/8 the capacity of the Lightening battery. Comparatively you'd need 2 Tesla powerwalls to get a similar maximum power rating and that would cost 20K but still would only have 27KWH of capacity compared to the trucks 115 KWH. One of these trucks is equivalent to 8.5 Tesla Powerwalls! That is a whopping amount of battery for a house and would go for a really long time just powering critical loads. It might be a gimmick but it's a hell of a useful one when the lights go out.

I'm not saying that it isn't capable or can't be handy. I'm saying that the real world application isn't that straightforward.

When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Within the last few years my town lost power after a storm. We didn't know how long we'd be without power. We didn't know if we'd need to get out of town to grab some supplies. My wife took the car and went to work the next day.

When the power goes out, the common themes are that you probably don't know how long that problem will last, you need to keep some power going at your house, but you will also probably need to travel. Relying solely on something like the Lightning's feature to power your home is an interesting situation. One would need to assess how much range they might have (further complicated when you consider that the vehicle might not be completely charged anyway), what they might need to travel for, and how critical it is to keep power at the house.

It's a good option to have, but I think that backup power from a system of batteries, solar panels, and maybe a wind turbine makes a lot of sense.

 

[Bilsch]

When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Well you make some edge points I can't argue.
If the power goes off and your vehicle has low battery with no idea when the outage will end and you don't already have a second car.. Then it would probably have been best if you spent the 10-20K on a backup battery system.

If on the other hand you do have at least 20-30% battery in your F-150 and the wife can use the gas car to get where she needs to go, for the bargain price of FREE if you already have the truck, you can use your Lightening to keep the freezers going and or the house from freezing, run some lights etc. Also if the power is on elsewhere you could easily drive there, charge and tanker in some power for your house.

My point is a lot of people are already going to buy a truck. The electric Ford costs about the same as a gas Ford. The Lightening though will save you a lot of money in it's lifetime on fuel costs and maintenance costs and also be a big backup battery for who knows how many uses. Are their some people that would be better served by a gas version? Yes indeed. But for the bulk of truck owners who don't have extreme uses this thing is going to be a game changer. The funny thing is I thought I'd never be saying something like this about any auto maker much less one of the big three.

 

[Kent88]

Well you make some edge points I can't argue.
If the power goes off and your vehicle has low battery with no idea when the outage will end and you don't already have a second car.. Then it would probably have been best if you spent the 10-20K on a backup battery system.

And one overhyped feature doesn't mean the whole truck is bad or that the feature is even bad. It just isn't what they're advertising it to be.

If on the other hand you do have at least 20-30% battery in your F-150 and the wife can use the gas car to get where she needs to go, for the bargain price of FREE if you already have the truck, you can use your Lightening to keep the freezers going and or the house from freezing, run some lights etc. Also if the power is on elsewhere you could easily drive there, charge and tanker in some power for your house.

The owner of the home and truck would really have to think about which circuits to power during an outage. Essentials only. But that's what it should be anyway. The ads are really annoying, they make it look so seamless, but unless you have a dedicated uninterrupted power supply that's sized for your entire house, power outages are always a hassle.

My point is a lot of people are already going to buy a truck. The electric Ford costs about the same as a gas Ford. The Lightening though will save you a lot of money in it's lifetime on fuel costs and maintenance costs and also be a big backup battery for who knows how many uses. Are their some people that would be better served by a gas version? Yes indeed. But for the bulk of truck owners who don't have extreme uses this thing is going to be a game changer. The funny thing is I thought I'd never be saying something like this about any auto maker much less one of the big three.

I may not be a Ford fan, and it sounds like you aren't either, but I'm actually really happy to see this truck on the market and I'm really looking forward to the EV Silverado due in a couple years.

 

[day_trippr]

Back in the early 80s I designed a non-volatile PCI bus memory card that could hold up to 16MB of static ram and could ride through a power failure for a month using a 2032 coin cell. It was specifically designed for a very large customer with a bazillion of our (Digital Equipment Corp) servers running a world-wide reservation system - they used it for after-image logging of their database (per-record thing) and the minimum hold-up time was specified by them (2 weeks) based on studies IBM had done on the distribution of power outage durations across their world.

2 weeks was nearly the tail of the dragon wrt duration - if power was still out customers would have fired up off-site systems in powered environments by then and relocated the work. I wish I still had the plots from that study as they really could aid infrastructure decisions wrt batteries and gensets and the like...

Cheers!

 

[Kent88]

could hold up to 16MB

Whoa. If any 20-somethings were here, they're sure scratching their heads now.

 

[day_trippr]

Hah! That's nothing! In 1973 I installed the first ever solid state 1 Megabyte memory system on an IBM System370/145. The cabinet was 30" deep x 5 feet tall and 6 feet long and it needed eighteen 2500 watt DC power supplies to do its thing. It was installed at Sprague Electric's plant in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the facilities management there brilliantly fabricated a duct system that would direct the heat from that box either into the plant's HVAC system or straight outdoors.

And it was hella toasty, too, as the memory elements were 256 bit bipolar static rams

Cheers!

 

[doug293cz]

Hah! That's nothing! In 1973 I installed the first ever solid state 1 Megabyte memory system on an IBM System370/145. The cabinet was 30" deep x 5 feet tall and 6 feet long and it needed eighteen 2500 watt DC power supplies to do its thing. It was installed at Sprague Electric's plant in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the facilities management there brilliantly fabricated a duct system that would direct the heat from that box either into the plant's HVAC system or straight outdoors.

And it was hella toasty, too, as the memory elements were 256 bit bipolar static rams

Cheers!

When I started at "Big Blue" in 1978, they sold 1M byte of dynamic ram memory for the S/370 for ~$100K. My how things have changed.

Brew on

 

[Apple_Jacker]

Aptera Sol: 1,000-mile, solar-supplemented EV teases tent, space for a surfboard

Looks an awful lot like an electric version of the Elio:

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

About 10 years ago I was working in solid state storage and one customer was using a 1GB CompactFlash as non-volatile backup for DRAM in a server.

Now NVDIMM is just a thing you can buy.

 

[Broothru]

I'm not saying that it isn't capable or can't be handy. I'm saying that the real world application isn't that straightforward.

When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Within the last few years my town lost power after a storm. We didn't know how long we'd be without power. We didn't know if we'd need to get out of town to grab some supplies. My wife took the car and went to work the next day.

When the power goes out, the common themes are that you probably don't know how long that problem will last, you need to keep some power going at your house, but you will also probably need to travel. Relying solely on something like the Lightning's feature to power your home is an interesting situation. One would need to assess how much range they might have (further complicated when you consider that the vehicle might not be completely charged anyway), what they might need to travel for, and how critical it is to keep power at the house.

It's a good option to have, but I think that backup power from a system of batteries, solar panels, and maybe a wind turbine makes a lot of sense.

When the power goes out at you home, it often goes out at the gas station. No juice, no gas pump. A 6000W portable genset and a couple of 5 gallon gas cans will give you 10-12 hours of charge time, which would give you some "emergency mileage" in a "Lightning F-150" even if you have been using its traction batteries for emergency home use. And of course, you could opt for a built-in genset for the F-150, which has proven to be a popular option for tradesmen who use it as a work truck.

Totally agree that solar roof panels or even a small wind turbine would be better if you have special needs or experience frequent power outages. That said, either would be a special application device at a large investment cost. A Lightning would provide transportation, battery bank backup, and emergency generator power.

 

[Kent88]

Totally agree that solar roof panels or even a small wind turbine would be better if you have special needs or experience frequent power outages. That said, either would be a special application device at a large investment cost. A Lightning would provide transportation, battery bank backup, and emergency generator power.

There are tradeoffs to having your emergency power source being either your truck or a system of solar panels, wind turbines, and a battery bank.

It seems like the Lightning truck is about as expensive as the standard ICE F150, so you aren't buying extra equipment for your emergency power, but you're forced to take it with you if you need to go to work or get supplies. If your power outage doesn't happen towards the end of a weekend you've been staying in for, or at 5am, you probably aren't going to have a full battery.

A properly sized solar, wind, and battery backup system involves more cost up front, which can vary depending on the method you're using. I would just be trying to power my refrigerators/freezers, furnace/AC (AC would be adjusted to keep the house below 90F, heat would probably be set to keep us from freezing to death and keep the pipes warm), water heater, an outlet in the garage so I could slow-charge my car, lights in my utility room, modem/router, radio, and an outlet to charge my phone. I'd be trying to size my system so that the solar panels alone could comfortably power all that, and then throw in a turbine for nighttime and cloudy days. Battery backup would handle nighttime when there isn't enough wind. If we had a few weeks of really cloudy weather with no wind, I would set the battery system to charge from the grid. I'd be able to power those things all the time, without much coming from the grid, and would eventually reach a point where I have a return on my investment. It would stay at the house all the time, regardless of where my vehicles are. If I had an all-electric vehicle, instead of my hybrid Volt, I would have to go find a public fast charger.

For someone like me who has two refrigerators, a large chest freezer, a kegerator, and lives in a climate where daytime highs in the summer can get in the 90s or even 100s, and lows in the winter can get well below 0F, and we can experience tornados in the summer and blizzards in the winter, I'd rather have the latter option, but it would be a lot cheaper to get the truck. I think the big takeaway here is I want to set my house up so it can be powered by a generator.

 

[Broothru]

There are tradeoffs to having your emergency power source being either your truck or a system of solar panels, wind turbines, and a battery bank.

It seems like the Lightning truck is about as expensive as the standard ICE F150, so you aren't buying extra equipment for your emergency power, but you're forced to take it with you if you need to go to work or get supplies. If your power outage doesn't happen towards the end of a weekend you've been staying in for, or at 5am, you probably aren't going to have a full battery.

A properly sized solar, wind, and battery backup system involves more cost up front, which can vary depending on the method you're using. I would just be trying to power my refrigerators/freezers, furnace/AC (AC would be adjusted to keep the house below 90F, heat would probably be set to keep us from freezing to death and keep the pipes warm), water heater, an outlet in the garage so I could slow-charge my car, lights in my utility room, modem/router, radio, and an outlet to charge my phone. I'd be trying to size my system so that the solar panels alone could comfortably power all that, and then throw in a turbine for nighttime and cloudy days. Battery backup would handle nighttime when there isn't enough wind. If we had a few weeks of really cloudy weather with no wind, I would set the battery system to charge from the grid. I'd be able to power those things all the time, without much coming from the grid, and would eventually reach a point where I have a return on my investment. It would stay at the house all the time, regardless of where my vehicles are. If I had an all-electric vehicle, instead of my hybrid Volt, I would have to go find a public fast charger.

For someone like me who has two refrigerators, a large chest freezer, a kegerator, and lives in a climate where daytime highs in the summer can get in the 90s or even 100s, and lows in the winter can get well below 0F, and we can experience tornados in the summer and blizzards in the winter, I'd rather have the latter option, but it would be a lot cheaper to get the truck. I think the big takeaway here is I want to set my house up so it can be powered by a generator.

A dedicated generator is a good backup. A few years ago I came close to pulling the trigger on a solar array and battery bank. I also looked at an automatic LP generator. Either option even for minimal service backup would run about $20 grand, including an automatic transfer relay and sub box for essential circuits.

In 35 years we've had maybe a dozen outages, only 2 of which lasted more than a few hours, but one was over three days in the dead of winter. I'd likely never "need" a backup system, and certainly never amortize the expense. I settled on a 7000W generator with four 20 amp outlets that can provide power to a man cave "survival" room with a Vermont stove (heat, cooking), 1/2 bath, power the well pump, and power the radio, router and TV. If I can eat, crap watch the news and have a cold beer occasionally, I'll survive.

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

For someone like me who has two refrigerators, a large chest freezer, a kegerator, and lives in a climate where daytime highs in the summer can get in the 90s or even 100s, and lows in the winter can get well below 0F, and we can experience tornados in the summer and blizzards in the winter, I'd rather have the latter option, but it would be a lot cheaper to get the truck. I think the big takeaway here is I want to set my house up so it can be powered by a generator.

Spend the money and move someplace that doesn't suck, Kent!

 

[Kent88]

Spend the money and move someplace that doesn't suck, Kent!

No, no, it's fine, I wouldn't want to take up space somewhere with a more pleasant, stable climate. Y'all aren't really going to do much with this part of the world anyways, so I'll just stick around here.