Wednesday 16 June 2021

Sent to me by a mate in Australia - (apologies for poor quality)

 

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This is a bone yard near Paris, France with hundreds of electric powered cars. Mind you these are only cars used by the City of Paris and not personal vehicles. All of these have the same issue ... the battery storage cells have given out and need replacement. Why not just replace them you ask? Well two reasons. First, replacement battery storage cells cost more than half the new vehicle cost (this is why for many EV models the price is more approximately double the cost of a petrol/diesel model) and second no landfill or disposal site will accept the batteries. So these green fairy tale electric cars are all sitting in vacant lots while their batteries drain toxins into the ground. 

Still think we need to go green???

 2 Nissan Leaf – a real story here in Australia

Phillip Carlson bought a Nissan Leaf in August 2012, which cost about $53,500. Its seven years old today, and it’s worth maybe $12,000 - if you can find someone dumb enough to buy it. But, let him tell the story.

“I bought an electric car from Nissan with 5 years warranty on the battery. They claimed 175km range. >From new I only ever got 120km. Now I can BARELY get 35-40km during winter or even 25km if I use the heater. The warranty says the battery is bad if it drops to 8 out of 12 bars, which mine has. 

“I took it in and they claim the battery is totally fine and there’s nothing wrong with it and gave me a $33,000 invoice for a new one!!!!! Nissan just won’t listen and I’ve run out of all hope. I paid $53,500 for this car and it’s pretty useless now.” - Phillip Carlson

The $33k quote

Here’s the official battery replacement quote from Lennock Motors in the ACT. 


An incredible $29,600 for the replacement battery, $750 to fit it plus GST: that’s $33,385 in total. For a car now worth $12,000? If you are lucky.

Nissan and other carmakers are moaning about the lack of government support for EVs in Australia. And I’d suggest that if you’re a carmaker like Nissan, seemingly hell-bent on taking your small group of EV first adopters in this way, then you simply do not deserve any taxpayer support.

This is a tacit admission by Nissan that the Leaf is a disposable car. A $50,000 disposable car. Which doesn’t seem very environmentally sustainable to me.

Think about it.

Replacing this battery for over $30,000.  You could buy about 20,000 litres of petrol for that. Which is enough to drive a similar sized conventional SUV about 400,000 kilometres.

So if you are buying your Leaf EV to save money on fuel, even if you are getting your electricity free from a rooftop solar array, every day, you better hope you get 400,000 k’s out of the battery. Unlikely.

If you don’t, you’re just kidding yourself. And the leaf is about $30,000 more expensive than similar sized conventional SUVs. So make that somewhere closer to 800,000 k’s - to break even, financially. In what universe does that sound like a sound financial plan?

If you’re saving the planet, with your Leaf, it’s even worse: Consigning the Leaf to landfill at seven years of age because it’s grossly uneconomical to repair seems to me like a fairly unsustainable use of the earth’s limited resources. So does throwing away the old battery and replacing it with a new one every seven years.

This is a vital point. EVs and internal combustion are in a race to reduce CO2. And there’s no question: Internal combustion starts off ahead because EVs are filthier to produce - that’s mainly the battery. So, in other words, on a lifecycle assessment basis, EVs start filthy and get cleaner over time, while internal combustion starts cleaner and gets filthier as the K’s mount up.

An ADAC report out of Europe from April 2018 found that equivalent EVs and petrol cars broke even on CO2 (on a lifecycle basis) at about 116,000 kilometres, and after that, EVs crept ahead. That’s based on Germany’s grid composition. 

(Australia’s grid is filthier, admittedly - so it takes a greater distance to reach this point of emissions equivalence.)

This means EVs cleaning things up is - at best - a long-term proposition. And if you’re throwing the vehicle away at 88,907 kilometres, which is where Mr Carlson’s Leaf is at right now, or if you’re replacing the battery, your EV is never going to be cleaner than an equivalent small petrol powered car

14 comments:

James Higham said...

Editing prob today at Mark's place.

Sobers said...

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the real reason behind EVs is to force the masses away from having their own personal transport. The eco reasons are just convenient excuses, as has been pointed out, even accepting the need to reduce CO2 emission EVs are hardly an improvement on ICEs on that metric.

No, I think the reason is that the PTB hate the fact the masses can move around freely, and this makes them hard to control. Remove ICE cars, and replace with something of far less utility and vastly greater price, especially for those at the low end of the income scale (currently you can buy a ICE car for a few thousand pounds that is perfectly functional, and will last for a good few years, most ICE cars last 15-20 years, and the last 5-10 years are the ones that provide cheap motoring for low income groups) and you will force vast swathes to give up having personal transport entirely, and be forced to rely on State provided public transport.

I have often thought that if the car had been invented now we would never have been allowed to have them. They would have been legislated away on the ostensible grounds of safety or something similar, but in reality because the PTB would not trust the people with such a potentially dangerous and socially disruptive technology.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, sometimes these things format themselves and it's best to leave well alone rather than untangle them.

S, of all the terrible things that mankind does to the environment, emitting CO2 is not one of them. So yes, there is other stuff at play here.

Lola said...

Sober. Of course it is. It's always been that. Quite frankly it's been patently bloody obvious that it's all about controlling the masses and the 'progressive' agenda.

It's about re-introducing feudalism. Globally. Not based on physical bondage and violence, but this based on debt bondage - and violence.

Of course, it will all fail. But as ever at the expense of the Common Man, not the globalist shills like Blair etc.

I'm waiting for the Zil lanes...

mombers said...

The costs that 'personal transportation' impose on everyone are enormous. Children as stuck at home because cars are everywhere. Non motorists are excluded from vast swathes of public land. Particulate pollution, nitrogen dioxide etc take days or weeks off most people's lives, and 1580 people lost decades of their lives in 2020 from accidents in the UK. I am biased of course as a non driver but there is currently very inadequate rent paid on motoring related resource use. If anything, the state is expropriates natural resources and gives them to motorists at a very low cost.

EVs will help on the NOx and particulates (not on the brake + tyres stuff though). Automated vehicles should reduce deaths and injuries hopefully

Bayard said...

I suspect that partly this is the same marketing that sells you a printer for little more than a change of cartridges or an electric razor for little more than a new cutter and foil. It's partly cashing in on an extraordinary popular delusion and there may be some more deep-laid plan to deprive the common people of personal transport. However I doubt the latter. The same PTB that progressively removed public transport from the country in favour of the car is not likely to be now removing the car in favour of public transport. Used to decacdes of state-subsidised public transport, people forget that all our public transport was originally built to make money for its proprieters, and that, should the economic conditions be favourable once more, privately owned public transport will grow to exploit them.
In any case, EVs always were a dead end, like miniature fluorescent light bulbs, because of the impossibility of making efficient batteries out of easily-obtained materials. The future is synthetic fuels and series hybrids.

Lola said...

M. Now lets look at the benefits of ICE vehicles. And the wonder of the ICE power pack using super energy density fuel that has liberated so many people.
And before that we'll just assert that modern diesels scrub both particulates and NOX very well. So that's not an argument against. On top of which research into low speed diesels shows that they are even cleaner - as they should be as they are energy efficient.
Road deaths are <2000 per annum. If you look at the stats a lot of those are motor or pedal cyclists. Cars themselves are very safe.
The ICE has given us fast ambulances and medivac helicopters. Stand-by generators ensure that after your RTA you can be sure that there won't be a power outage whilst you are on the operating table.
The ability to seqgue ones employment opportunities efficiently, especially in rural areas like mine means better wages. (and we've already elsewhere nailed the lie that motoring is costly.)
What I will grant you is that lots of ICE's in cities is not optimum. (I can remember and have ridden on LT trolley buses). And now electric tech means that sort of super-milk floats are now viable taxis and delivery vans. Stern has already applied a Pigouvian tax to petrol and diesel so that's the externalities taken care of.
Furthermore people are free to choose. Some smoke - which is daft IMHO. Others (me f'rinstance) are and have been around fume belching cars (racing cars included) all my life, and I'm asthmatic. That's my choice.
And the benefits go on. The Australian Royal Flying Doctor Service. Food. High value goods. Trains etc etc etc.

ICE's are brill.

Bayard said...

"What I will grant you is that lots of ICE's in cities is not optimum."

I think it is a very Anglo-Saxon reaction to this to try and deprive the common people of their ICE private transport, by making it expensive, rather than to invest in public transport and make it redundant in cities.

Lola said...

B. Strictly speaking it's not 'invest', it's 'spend money on'. An investment puts money into your pocket every day.

L fairfax said...

"Road deaths are <2000 per annum. If you look at the stats a lot of those are motor or pedal cyclists. Cars themselves are very safe."
Surely most of the deaths wouldn't have if we didn't have cars.
I am not saying we should get rid of cars but surely roads with just bikes on are safer (not what I am advocating).

Bayard said...

L, a penny saved is a penny earned. spending money on public transport saves much expenditure on the public costs of private transport, like time lost due to congestion, health issues due to pollution, road accidents, depreciation etc.

L fairfax said...

@Bayard true.

SteveA said...

The cars in Paris are off the road because a contract was terminated not failed batteries, They are for sale if you are a real mug you can buy one
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-electric-cars-france-idUSL2N2N60XA

mombers said...

L, disappointed that this wasn't fact checked before posting.