"OK, so an electric vehicle contributes a fair bit of pollution and greenhouse gases to the world. But you know what else does? A gasoline-powered car. Even though they don’t have batteries, conventional automobiles can contain plenty of the same problematic rare metals that electric cars do. (Remember those magnets?) You can’t judge Tesla, or any other electric car, in a vacuum. You must compare it to the status quo. And that status quo has many of the same problems—plus the carbon emissions and air pollution generated by traditional gas guzzlers."

The article just confirms what we've been saying earlier. EVs aren't fully green but probably better than ICE.

 

Greenest cars 2020

#1 a Prius.

 

Yay, I'm sure Scotty will make a video about it.

 

Comparing which multi ton car is “greener” is like comparing syphilis and gonorrhea. There is nothing green about ICE or EVs. Those who actually care about the whole green nonsense should walk or ride a bicycle, and not own a car.

 

Thats not necessarily true either. An EV using nothing but solar is far cleaner over its lifetime than an ICE for sure (magnitudes cleaner). Even using coal, the EV is cleaner too just not magnitudes cleaner. Giving solar happy Californian's EVs could be a boon to the region in terms of pollution control over time.

 

It is very telling that Tesla is the target of his video even though all the top auto makers are producing EVs. If you're actually fair and balanced you talk about EVs themselves not a specific company.

 

It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it almost feels like the government is protecting Tesla and not allowing other manufacturers to mass produce EVs. For instance, the whole racket with the carbon credit - why is Fiat Chrysler buying carbon credits from Tesla when they are perfectly capable of producing their own EV, and use their own carbon credits to produce and sell even more ridiculous RAM pickups. In fact, they were producing their own EV a decade ago, the Fiat 500e, but it was impossible to buy. I wanted to buy one, and went to the local Fiat dealership back in 2013 to buy it, but they said they are only available in California. I then went to a Nissan dealer and put down a deposit on the Leaf, but after a few weeks of waiting they said they wouldn't be able to get me one for at least 3 months, so I took my deposit back. I think there was a Ford EV that was quickly discontinued as well.

I find it difficult to believe that major manufacturers can't built these measly little EVs to keep their carbon credit ratio positive. It's almost like they are being extorted to buy them from Tesla.

 

You think it more likely there is a global conspiracy to prop up Tesla instead of Tesla having a technology head start because they did the hard stuff from scratch. Why would this far reaching conspiracy and extortion scheme take place? What is the motivation? Who is doing this? All the major governments must be coordinating since Tesla has plants in China, Germany, United states and going forward India and possibly somewhere in Africa. Australia is also in the works and I've heard Ireland is possible.

 

I'm talking about the US only, I have no idea what the situation is in other countries, and whether or not they have anything like the carbon credits. Now, I am not saying that there is a global conspiracy, but something isn't right here. Most of the major auto makers haven't bothered with EVs, and those who did made it impossible to buy them. Makes no sense.

About the tech, there is really nothing complicated about it. Electric motors and a battery pack which is essentially just a larger version of a battery pack used in a any cordless power tool. It's something that can be made in a shed, and really not an issue for a major auto maker.

 

The battery supply constraints are real. Ford can't make enough Mach Es to supply all the demand unfortunately. Also, battery management systems and motor optimization are highly software dependent. Tesla's forte is software (Silicon Valley) and software is a major OEM weakness. They can get by with decent infotainment from their tier 1 suppliers but anything more complex is a big issue for them. Volkswagen pretty much admitted much of the delay in their EVs was due to the software not being ready and even now, its not working great.

Really, not much of a conspiracy...just a shift in core competency that has the traditional OEMs playing catchup.

 

This is what Bob Lutz used to say, Tesla has no tech advantage they are using "laptop" batteries. He's since acknowledged Tesla has better batteries, software and everything that goes into making an EV. That's why other auto makers have not caught up it is not as easy as you make it sound. Plus there is a volume issue, other auto makers can't produce or source batteries in large volumes. Currently Tesla makes more batteries than most if not all other auto makers combined. There are a whole host of other factors as well, you mention Nissan and Fiat, those cars are low profit (or maybe made at a loss) and are no competition to Tesla at all. You can't grow an EV market with cars hardly anyone wants, see GM as a prime example they've been making EVs for quite a while.

There are other factors not often talked about. Tesla has the mega castings, smaller and more powerful motors, custom alloys, heat scavenging via clever heat pump design. And then software, this is what Tesla does far better and is the core of an EV. Also Tesla has far fewer modules than any other auto maker this allows them to be able to update the car far easier. You don't have to write code for 25 modules only 4-5. Did you notice Tesla found a way around the chip shortage? They did this by re-purposing chips not originally intended for their use case via firmware rewrite. A legacy auto maker has no hope of doing this they are not nimble enough. Sucks for them, Ford has said they will have 1.5 million fewer cars produced this year because of chip shortages.

I could go on but I think you get the point.

 

You can make the Tesla battery pack in a shed, there is nothing complicated about it at all. It's just a bunch of interconnected 18650 batteries, they weren't created by Tesla. Open up any battery pack from a 20 year old laptop, and you'll likely find six of these 18650 batteries. I have a bunch of them that I've been using in my flashlights well before Tesla even existed.

EVs like the Fiat and the Leaf were low profit or maybe even loss because their respective manufacturers made it next to impossible to actually buy them. I tried buying both of them, and its actually documented right on this forum if you don't believe me, but wasn't able to. I believe both are now discontinued, and there are a bunch of other discontinued EVs from other major manufacturers. Wouldn't it make sense for them to keep selling some crappy EV just for the carbon credits? Especially that they could build it on a modified ICE platform to minimize costs instead of starting from scratch.

Software isn't about a number of modules, but what these modules control. You can have a separate module for just about every component in a car, or you can have one central module that controls every component, but then the software for that central module is going to be a lot more extensive. I know that Tesla makes their own chips for the self driving computer, but not sure about the rest of their components.

 

ICE motor optimization is also very software dependent and very complicated, especially when it comes to turbocharged motors. And I'm not sure about Fords infotainment, but Tesla's giant infotainment is just awful both in form and function. BMW pioneered the iDrive, and in my opinion it is still the superior infotainment system out there, although its getting a bit bloated.

 

One more thing to consider, through the convoluted carbon credit scheme EVs might be contributing to the combined fleet of cars to be less "green" than they would've been otherwise. Instead of building cleaner ICE vehicles, manufacturers just buy carbon credits, and built more pickups that only keep getting bigger and more obnoxious.

 

1865 are the dimensions of the cell there is way more going on like chemistry, cell arrangement, thermal/software management. No use debating someone that thinks all 18650 cells are the same as any laptop battery for the last 20 years.