Peter wrote:
No need to be rude
Apologies if I came across as rude. That was not my intention.
A nice windfall for our American friends! Always good not having to depend on foreign countries for vital raw materials. Although who knows what the future brings as to materials needed for batteries. Salt hopefully.
And it comes along with the natural gas and oil that will be burned to charge the EV batteries that may someday be produced.
At least they haven’t disabled all of their nuclear power like Germany did…
And I’m pretty sure they’ll be the first ones to spread particles in the stratosphere to slow down global warming (buying everyone precious time to decarbonize).
The US today is IMO one of the only western country (possibly with the UK) actually looking out for itself and planning long term for independence and energy. In France noone in the administration even thinks about what needs to be done in the next 50 years, let alone take concrete action.
loco wrote:
Tariffs may be applied retroactively, that is, to cars bought now. In the US they’re taxed +25% already.
So the end consumer would be charged tariffs for cars bought before a finding for failures of a company? i would think the courts have to say something about that.
Lots of tariffs are simply protectionist measures to keep a market for the internal producers. One more reason why EV’s are as expensive as they are. And not only EV’s. When I was looking once a few years back to replace my car, I found that the same car in the US cost 25k which cost 60 k here. (Camry Hybrid). I was tempted to buy a brand new one there in one of the outlets specialized on European customers and have it shipped and driving it from Rotterdam to home. Even with shipping and taxes it would have been 20k cheaper than here. There are quite a few import cars around here.
Still, there are others coming from far east, such as Hyundai and other Korean cars.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
So the end consumer would be charged tariffs for cars bought before a finding for failures of a company? i would think the courts have to say something about that.
No, the importer, which is probably the manufacturer or a subsidiary… but could theoretically be a third party. Even for the manufacturer I’m not sure courts would see retroactivity with a good eye but <shrug>
A 2021 Nissan press release here describes how they reached 50% power generation efficiency with an engine powering a serial hybrid car – in other words the engine is used to charge a battery and nothing else, and the drive train is electric. Even including the efficiency BS factor that likely comes into play in a real world application this thermal efficiency is likely as good as a natural gas power plant, without the additional 10% power transmission loss to get that power to your house, apartment or street nor the ridiculous EV range limitation.
This design is much more attractive to me than a grid powered EV. I’d rather carry a small but efficient charging plant in the car than a huge, heavy array of batteries and also have no interest in mounting a solar power plant on the roof of my house, nor still more batteries in my garage to allow night time charging. The Japanese manufacturers are doing well in developing what will actually work for more people in more places over the next few decades, versus getting caught up in being fearful ‘yes men’ to ill conceived government dictates.
A friend used to have such a car, about 10-15 years ago. It was sold under various names by Vauxhall, GM, etc and IIRC was called Volta. It had a small battery. It worked very well.
Fuel cell technology has been around or researched for many years. Honda a car with fuel cell technology over 10years ago.
On a film set in Paris several years ago, all the 10Kw lights were powered by fuel cells.
The big advantage was that they didn’t need a noisy generator so the sound engineer was happy. But quite a bit of power is lost to heat. But perhaps not as much as an ICE.
The advantage of fuel cells for producing electricity from the Gw level to transport was recognised even before nuclear took a hold. The problem has always been the fuel for the.fuel cells, production of high quality hydrogen, storage and transport.
One does wonder why as Alberto Santos Dumont was producing hydrogen from rusty metal and using it in his flying machines at around the same time as the Wright brothers were around.
Fuel cells lose about 50% energy to heat. They also incur many more losses during fuel production (including a ~15% unavoidable compression cost). Compared to batteries ~90% combined charge / discharge losses it’s quite big.
