The worlds first Electric RV is coming!

[radar]

Originally Posted by Gordon Dewald

If the graphic is correct it would be the same in all parts of the world.

And yet many nations seem to be making steady progress with wind solar and renewables. From what I have read so is the US. Nothing happens overnight.

[Tony65]

Originally Posted by timjet

Gm announced they will be all electric by 2035. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/aut...gines-n1256055
The headlines didn't say where the power to recharge the batts will come from.

The recharging will be done with alternators connected to home bicycles.

There will be less pollution, fewer fatties on the street and ... best of all... even less RV on the streets!

My RV is full of solar panels and yet it only takes one cloudy day to force me to turn on the generator or plug into the grid.

Not even lithium batteries give you enough autonomy to make you truly independent.

These ecologists are just deluded poor.

The only thing that ensures you energy independence without fossil fuels is the nuclear power, unfortunately nuclear powered RVs aren't on sale yet.

[chs]

Originally Posted by Gary RVRoamer

Hardly the first - Winnebago has already produced some for commercial use, starting in 2018.


https://drivinvibin.com/2020/07/31/all-electric-rv/

85-125 miles is the range of The Winnebago Electric RV .

So you drive an hour a day and charge it the rest of the day. I'll keep my gasser,

[chs]

Originally Posted by gator398

I am so relieved to see many others acknowledge this.

Nobody can or will predict the severe consequences of letting our power grid decline to the demands of the obsession of electric power combined with elimination of fossil fuels. Done together is simply a long drawn out disaster. Wait till people so against fossil fuels start complaining about wide spread brownouts and our power grid performing like a 1980's 3rd world country. But then again, sadly that may be some of these policies goal.....

You are correct.
I would like to know what they are doing with all the batteries after they are no longer useful.

[radar]

Originally Posted by chs

85-125 miles is the range of The Winnebago Electric RV .

So you drive an hour a day and charge it the rest of the day. I'll keep my gasser,

1. Its not a motorhome. Its meant for mobile medical etc.

2. It would take no where near that time to charge it. The article is weird and uninformed.

[radar]

Originally Posted by chs

You are correct.
I would like to know what they are doing with all the batteries after they are no longer useful.

Hot market for used batteries right now. Eventually they will be recycled just as they are now. Lots of valuable materials inside.

[chs]

Interesting article for disposing of batteries (or lack there of)
We are trying to get rid of fossil fuels and creating a whole new environmental disaster. But hey, They (Corporations & politicians) are making money.

from wired.com

EVERY DAY, MILLIONS of lithium-ion batteries roll off the line at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. These cells, produced on site by Panasonic, are destined to be bundled together by the thousands in the battery packs of new Teslas. But not all the batteries are cut out for a life on the road. Panasonic ships truckloads of cells that don’t pass their qualification tests to a facility in Carson City, about a half hour’s drive south. This is the home of Redwood Materials, a small company founded in 2017 with an ambition to become the anti-Gigafactory, a place where batteries are cooked down into raw materials that will serve as the grist for new cells.

Redwood is part of a wave of new startups racing to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist yet: How to recycle the mountains of batteries from electric vehicles that are past their prime. Over the past decade, the world’s lithium-ion production capacity has increased tenfold to meet the growing demand for EVs. Now vehicles from that first production wave are just beginning to reach the end of their lifespan. This marks the beginning of a tsunami of spent batteries, which will only get worse as more electric cars hit the road. The International Energy Agency predicts an 800 percent increase in the number of EVs over the next decade, each car packed with thousands of cells. The dirty secret of the EV revolution is that it created an e-waste timebomb—and cracking lithium-ion recycling is the only way to defuse it.

Redwood’s CEO and founder J. B. Straubel understands the problem better than most. After all, he played a significant role in creating it. Straubel is cofounder and, until last year, was the CTO at Tesla, a company he joined when it was possible to count all of its employees on one hand. During his time there, the company grew from a scrappy startup peddling sports cars to the most valuable auto manufacturer on the planet. Along the way, Tesla also became one of the world’s largest battery producers. But the way Straubel sees it, those batteries aren’t really a problem. “The major opportunity is to think of this material for reuse and recovery,” he says. “With all these batteries in circulation, it just seems super obvious that eventually we're going to build a remanufacturing ecosystem.”

There are two main ways to deactivate lithium-ion batteries. The most common technique, called pyrometallurgy, involves burning them to remove unwanted organic materials and plastics. This method leaves the recycler with just a fraction of the original material—typically just the copper from current collectors and nickel or cobalt from the cathode. A common pyro method, called smelting, uses a furnace powered with fossil fuels, which isn’t great for the environment, and it loses a lot of aluminum and lithium in the process. But it is simple, and smelting factories that currently exist to process ore from the mining industry are already able to handle batteries. Of the small fraction of lithium-ion batteries that are recycled in the US—just 5 percent of all spent cells—most of them end up in a smelting furnace.

The other approach is called hydrometallurgy. A common form of this technique, called leaching, involves soaking lithium-ion cells in strong acids to dissolve the metals into a solution. More materials, including lithium, can be recovered this way. But leaching comes with its own challenges. Recyclers must preprocess the cells to remove unwanted plastic casings and drain the charge on the battery, which increases cost and complexity. It’s part of the reason why spent lithium-ion batteries have been treated as waste ever since the first commercial cells hit the market in the early 1990s. It was often several times cheaper to mine new material, especially lithium, than recover it with leaching.

[move on]

Another way to ameliorate the battery pollution problem is to transition not to full EV's but to plug-in hybrid EV's (PHEVs). Most people drive less than 40 miles per day and a PHEV can do this using full electric mode from a much smaller battery. The PHEV might have a battery of less than 18 MHW while an EV will have one of 100 MWH. That's an awful lot of battery to waste for your average trip to work.

[move on]

Woops! That's KWH, not MWH (wouldn't that be cool, a 100 MWH battery. You could run a locomotive)

[radar]

Originally Posted by move on

Another way to ameliorate the battery pollution problem is to transition not to full EV's but to plug-in hybrid EV's (PHEVs). Most people drive less than 40 miles per day and a PHEV can do this using full electric mode from a much smaller battery. The PHEV might have a battery of less than 18 MHW while an EV will have one of 100 MWH. That's an awful lot of battery to waste for your average trip to work.

I have no problem with hybrids and think there will probably be a market for them for awhile yet. There sales are waning though in favour of BEV's and the R and D is starting to stagnate as well. At this point their performance is not comparable to BEV's and they have much higher maintenance. They don't suit our needs but they are definitely good at some things. They also tend to be similar price to BEV's which will work against them going forward. But they are a great solution for many right now.

[move on]

Take a look at the new Toyota RAV4 Prime. It takes the PHEV concept to a new level. It's essentially an AWD EV with 3 electric motors and a motor-generator set to recharge the battery for those occasional trips greater than 40 miles. It eliminates the need for an oversized battery and the search for a charge station. I'm not sure it won't eventually supplant the BEV as the typical electric daily driver. It will depend on whether 100 kwh batteries ever become economically feasible.

[radar]

Originally Posted by move on

Take a look at the new Toyota RAV4 Prime. It takes the PHEV concept to a new level. It's essentially an AWD EV with 3 electric motors and a motor-generator set to recharge the battery for those occasional trips greater than 40 miles. It eliminates the need for an oversized battery and the search for a charge station. I'm not sure it won't eventually supplant the BEV as the typical electric daily driver. It will depend on whether 100 kwh batteries ever become economically feasible.

One of the neighbours in our townhouse community has one. Seems nice. She likes it. Has a great cargo area. I don’t think we could give up the performance of a BEV but that’s just us. To each his own. Not everyone wants or needs a high performance sports sedan.

Searching for an EV charge station isn’t a thing. They are all on the cars database.

[move on]

You must live on the West coast. I'm on the East coast and there are hardly any charge stations here.

[radar]

Originally Posted by move on

You must live on the West coast. I'm on the East coast and there are hardly any charge stations here.

Yep. Could be. Different places have different infrastructure. Which province or state?