What Is Ram’s Upcoming Range Electric Paradigm Breaker (REPB) Pickup?

[eye exaggerate]

Eventually they’ll figure air resistance into the equation.

 

[MichaelR]

The future is horses. Don’t get me wrong, cars have had a good run, but there will never be enough gas stations to sustain them cross country and if my horse needs fuel we’ll just eat the neighbors lawn.

 

[AngelPhoenix]

The future is horses. Don’t get me wrong, cars have had a good run, but there will never be enough gas stations to sustain them cross country and if my horse needs fuel we’ll just eat the neighbors lawn.

I mean, if I wrangle up 400 horses they will pull me and my wagon 80 mph for 400 miles, yeah? Like, that's how that works, right?

 

[jimothy]

Chicken and egg problem. As demand increases, so will supply. It will take years and years to cycle hundreds of millions of ICE vehicles out of circulation.

Will supply catch up? I’m skeptical. Specifically, can there be enough battery production capacity to support new vehicles in a 100% EV future, and to replace aged batteries?

According to one source, total lithium ion capacity in 2018 was 290GWh, and is projected to reach 2,000GWh in 2028.

That 2028 projection is enough battery capacity, if all of it went to EVs, to produce 33 million entry level Telsa Model 3s each year. That sounds like a lot, except it’s half the total number of vehicles sold each year world wide. And it neglects all the other uses of lithium ion batteries, including phones, solar storage, computers, drones, robot vacuums, portable battery packs, and a gazillion other things I’m forgetting.

So, battery capacity would have to more (much more) than double again by 2030, 2035, 2040, or whenever people envision a 100% electric vehicle future.

I don’t think it’s going to happen, ever. I’ll be glad to be proven wrong.

On the other hand, we could have enough capacity to make every single vehicle a hybrid, be it a mild hybrid like eTorque, traditional hybrid like many Priuses, or a plug-in hybrid like 4xe and many others.

I’m not going to mince words: it’s not that I think 100% electric vehicles are stupid, it’s that I think they’re impossible, at least on the 1-3 decade timeline cities, states, and nations are proposing. Time will tell if I’m right or wrong, but meanwhile, we’re wasting time and money (including taxpayers’ money) on unachievable goals to the neglect of achievable goals.

 

[SpeedyV]

Will supply catch up? I’m skeptical. Specifically, can there be enough battery production capacity to support new vehicles in a 100% EV future, and to replace aged batteries?

According to one source, total lithium ion capacity in 2018 was 290GWh, and is projected to reach 2,000GWh in 2028.

That 2028 projection is enough battery capacity, if all of it went to EVs, to produce 33 million entry level Telsa Model 3s each year. That sounds like a lot, except it’s half the total number of vehicles sold each year world wide. And it neglects all the other uses of lithium ion batteries, including phones, solar storage, computers, drones, robot vacuums, portable battery packs, and a gazillion other things I’m forgetting.

So, battery capacity would have to more (much more) than double again by 2030, 2035, 2040, or whenever people envision a 100% electric vehicle future.

I don’t think it’s going to happen, ever. I’ll be glad to be proven wrong.

On the other hand, we could have enough capacity to make every single vehicle a hybrid, be it a mild hybrid like eTorque, traditional hybrid like many Priuses, or a plug-in hybrid like 4xe and many others.

I’m not going to mince words: it’s not that I think 100% electric vehicles are stupid, it’s that I think they’re impossible, at least on the 1-3 decade timeline cities, states, and nations are proposing. Time will tell if I’m right or wrong, but meanwhile, we’re wasting time and money (including taxpayers’ money) on unachievable goals to the neglect of achievable goals.

Nissan just announced that they plan to launch a solid-state EV by 2028. Even more impressive, they're already building the pilot production facility, which will be online in 2024. This tech is expected to double the capacity of lithium ion.

In February, a Drexel University team announced a breakthrough in cathode chemistry that will make Lithium-Sulphur batteries viable. This has the potential to triple the capacity of Lithium-Ion.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the pace of battery technology advancement when the demand for it exists. It will likely be exponential.

 

[jimothy]

Nissan just announced that they plan to launch a solid-state EV by 2028. Even more impressive, they're already building the pilot production facility, which will be online in 2024. This tech is expected to double the capacity of lithium ion.

In February, a Drexel University team announced a breakthrough in cathode chemistry that will make Lithium-Sulphur batteries viable. This has the potential to triple the capacity of Lithium-Ion.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the pace of battery technology advancement when the demand for it exists. It will likely be exponential.

I hope all those pan out, and that I’ll come back to 5thGenRams in a decade or less, seeing a bunch of notifications and messages telling me how wrong I was (hopefully in not-too-unfriendly terms, but I’ll take whatever the crowd decides I deserve)

I’m just skeptical, and perhaps cynical, after seeing so many Major Energy Breakthrough headlines, and yet mostly incremental updates in capacity and production. My vast Wikipedia expertise tells me the lithium-ion batteries have been around since the 1960s, and it looks like these things take decades, not years, to commercialize.

But look me up in 2032. Whoever is right can buy the other a beer. Or a maybe gallon of gas.

 

[eye exaggerate]

I hope all those pan out, and that I’ll come back to 5thGenRams in a decade or less, seeing a bunch of notifications and messages telling me how wrong I was (hopefully in not-too-unfriendly terms, but I’ll take whatever the crowd decides I deserve)

I’m just skeptical, and perhaps cynical, after seeing so many Major Energy Breakthrough headlines, and yet mostly incremental updates in capacity and production. My vast Wikipedia expertise tells me the lithium-ion batteries have been around since the 1960s, and it looks like these things take decades, not years, to commercialize.

But look me up in 2032. Whoever is right can buy the other a beer. Or a maybe gallon of gas.

10 years? We’ll all be buying boxes of electricity by then, it’ll come in packaging similar to that of Beats headphones. See you at the kiosk in the non-mall.

 

[c3k]

A buddy is waiting on a Tesla. His use is to drive ~2 hours, park it for a few days, then return and drive ~2 hours back home.

The range is insufficient for a round trip. He "hopes" that "they" will put electric chargers where he can park it while he's working. (And that means other people (taxpayers) being forced by the government to pay for this experiment to benefit his choice.) But, if that doesn't pan out, he's found a place enroute that has the fast chargers. He thinks it'll take 15 minutes to get 1/2 or 80% (I forget which he said) charge.

I asked if he included air conditioning in his estimates. He had not.

I'm not opposed to electric vehicle. I =am= opposed to bureaucrats imposing artificial constraints on the market and forcing a solution that may or may not be the correct solution. And it always seems that the anonymous taxpayer has to pay for these experiments.

 

[Ramit392]

It seems the Guberment thinks and many huge manufactures thinks big demand will be there, but what if oil companies keeps up the pace with production and the demand for EV is not there by us the boss which is the CONSUMERS? Also, the disposal of spent batteries is more toxic than oil and coal fired power plants combined. Nuke plants are by far more efficient at producing power and cleaner with far less toxicity and waste with near zero air pollution Vs. toxic waste from batteries. The mineral for Nuke though is not abundant in the USA, Uranium is very Abundant wouldn't you know it in Russia.

 

[MichaelR]

It’s things like this that keep me from worrying about EVs in the future.

The US Military's Naval Research Laboratory Transmits Electricity Wirelessly Using Microwaves Over Long Distances - Science News

Washington (USA) Scientists at the NRL (Naval Research Laboratory), a research facility of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Navy,

science-news.co

 

[AngelPhoenix]

It’s things like this that keep me from worrying about EVs in the future.

The US Military's Naval Research Laboratory Transmits Electricity Wirelessly Using Microwaves Over Long Distances - Science News

Washington (USA) Scientists at the NRL (Naval Research Laboratory), a research facility of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Navy,

science-news.co

You know it takes like 40 years for advanced military technology to become mainstrream in the public sector right?

And again, the infrastructure for that would take decades to install properly.

Does sound pretty cool though. But maybe that much electricity buzzing through the air on top of everything already buzzing through it might be pushing it.

 

[MichaelR]

You know it takes like 40 years for advanced military technology to become mainstrream in the public sector right?

And again, the infrastructure for that would take decades to install properly.

Does sound pretty cool though. But maybe that much electricity buzzing through the air on top of everything already buzzing through it might be pushing it.

According to the article, China is working on a civilian version. And while it’s still a work in progress, the idea that we could just beam energy down is pretty hot stuff.

 

[go-ram]

View attachment 120573

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That's a purely political posting, not helpful. Yes, some electricity is still produced by burning coal, but most of it is not.
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One of the very best things about 5thgenrams is that there is very little politicizing, mostly just informative, helpful posts. Please don't ruin it with any more totally unnecessary, inaccurate, purely political postings like that one.
.

 

[c3k]

.
That's a purely political posting, not helpful. Yes, some electricity is still produced by burning coal, but most of it is not.
.
One of the very best things about 5thgenrams is that there is very little politicizing, mostly just informative, helpful posts. Please don't ruin it with any more totally unnecessary, inaccurate, purely political postings like that one.
.

Here are some facts (?) presented by Lawrence Livermore labs. This site: Flowcharts

This is what it looks like:



As you can see, of the 36.6 Quads of electricity produced in the US in 2021, 9.47 came from coal. Let's call that 25%.
If you're concerned about CO2 (<- I won't ask why), then you're concerned about Natural Gas use. For electricity, it's 11.6 or almost 1/3.

Together, Coal and Natural Gas account for 55% of total US electricity generation. (Petroleum gives 0.2 Quads towards electricity. That's 1/2 of 1 percent. We'll ignore that.)

Of that total, 0.02 Quads are currently used for Transportation. (This includes ALL transportation: private autos, ships, planes, trains...everything.)

So, electricity. About 2/3s of the energy used to make electricity gets wasted as heat (23.7 out of 36.6). 12.9 of 36.6 is actual electricity.

0.02 of the total amount of energy used to produce electricity is currently used in transportation. (Zero decimal zero two Quads. Or, 1/10th of the amount of petroleum energy that goes to making electricity is electricity used to replace petroleum use in transportation.)

Electricity currently provides 0.07% of our transportation needs. In other words, we'd need to increase USEFUL electrical production by 24.28 Quads (Petroleum input is 24.3) to replace petroleum.

That would mean (due to the 1/3 useful, 2/3 wasted) an increase in electrical power production of almost 75 Quads. TOTAL current use is 97 Quads.

In order to transition to electrical transportation, we'd almost need to double our non-petroleum power sources. Let's toss a figure up there to account for ships, trains, and planes. Let's say they use 1/2. (Make up a number. I'm going with 1/2.)

That means an increase of about 40 Quads (75 cut very roughly in half) into electrical production.

And, if you're going to get rid of Coal and Natural Gas (55% of our electrical energy sources), that means you're going to need current (36.6) plus 1/2 transportion (about 40) or roughly 75 Quads total...from non-coal sources.

To make that you're going to need to increase....what?

Hydro is tapped out. If it can be dammed, it has been dammed.
Biomass is a mess. Seriously. A nationwide "old vegetable and poo" collection?
Geothermal is done. Old Faithful is about the only thing left to tap.
Solar creates huge ecological messes where it's mined. Ignoring that, if you look at the current effiiciency of solar, even covering the entire state of Nevada in solar panels would not meet our current base load electrical needs.

Nuclear is it. Remind me again of the last time a nuclear license was issued in the US?


Now, let's wave a magic wand and say "The Government demands you drive electric cars. So it will be done..." They need batteries.
Here's an interesting take on batteries:

Everything has embedded energy cost!

What is a battery?' I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That's important.

They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?

Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery."

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.


If you've read this far, congratulations.

Am I against electric cars? Not at all. Bully for Tesla!

I am against knee-jerk reactions to a non-existent need, driven by power-hungry (<- pun intended) politicians.


FWIW.

 

[MichaelR]

Eh. Not really.

Electric generation is ~ 33.7% efficient (12.9/38.2), ICE is about 21% efficient (5.95/28.3).

A Tesla motor is about 93% efficient so really we’d need ~ 6.4 quads of electricity to offset the 5.95 quads from ICEs.

That would equate to ~ 19 quads of additional electricity production depending on the efficiency of the production mix.

Additionally this is consumption as how big the bucket is at the end of the year. This doesn’t speak to how fast you can fill the bucket.

During the summer when millions of people run their A/C there is a lot more power generated on the grid than in the winter. In the same way peak/non-peak demand has huge kW swings. Given your average 2.5ton A/C unit pulls about 2.5kW at peak load and a Tesla can charge at around 10kW, you could realistically say that the grid can support 1 Tesla for every 4 households the way it current stands assuming you charge overnight.

 

[c3k]

Eh. Not really.

Electric generation is ~ 33.7% efficient (12.9/38.2), ICE is about 21% efficient (5.95/28.3).

A Tesla motor is about 93% efficient so really we’d need ~ 6.4 quads of electricity to offset the 5.95 quads from ICEs.

That would equate to ~ 19 quads of additional electricity production depending on the efficiency of the production mix.

Additionally this is consumption as how big the bucket is at the end of the year. This doesn’t speak to how fast you can fill the bucket.

During the summer when millions of people run their A/C there is a lot more power generated on the grid than in the winter. In the same way peak/non-peak demand has huge kW swings. Given your average 2.5ton A/C unit pulls about 2.5kW at peak load and a Tesla can charge at around 10kW, you could realistically say that the grid can support 1 Tesla for every 4 households the way it current stands assuming you charge overnight.

Um...no. But let's follow it, since you're (correctly) looking at ICE efficiency.

ICE is about 21% efficient....true.

Tesla motor may be 97% efficient, but the CAR is only 70% efficient in converting electricity into movement. (Still a good performance. We're ignoring air conditioning use.) See Engineering Explained Calculates How Efficient A Tesla Really Is

Let's use your 24.3 petroleum (typo in your original calling it 28.3), and 21% efficiency.

We'd need to get 5.95 quads of movement energy. If all that were swapped to Tesla (in nice weather with no air conditioning use), the Tesla would need ~6 divided by .7 as input energy, or 8.5 electric quads.

Using the 1/3 useful, that 8.5 electric quads would need about 25 quads of energy to create.

Since we're using 36 quads right now to make electricity, and you want to get rid of coal and natural gas (which combined provide 20 quads of that 36), now you're down to 16 "clean" quads...and you need 60!

That's a shortfall of over 40 quads. Or, more than our current use of energy used to produce electricity.

Tell me again about how a windmill field will create that? And, what type of battery will store that energy and at what efficiency and at what environmental cost in some dirty little third world country?

Let's also talk about transmission. If total electrical output is about 12 quads and your national tesla fleet requires another 8 quads, that's a 66% increase in load on transmission networks. How are those rolling blackouts looking in California these days? The transmission network is near/past it's limit.

The issue, again, is not WHEN you charge a Tesla...it's what will be used to create the electricity to charge it with.

 

[theblet]

Even if we could produce enough energy for everyone to have EVs, it’s gonna take decades and trillions to get the grid right to support it.

I think a mix of ICE and EVs is the key. EVs should be used in big cities where there’s smog problems, and people commute just a few miles to work. Not feasible for towing, farming, service vehicles, etc.

EVs get politicized to impose taxes, and kick backs to big tech.

 

[djevox]

I seriously think a lot of people believe that electricity is just magic and comes from turbines and generators powered by their own electricity that they haven't produced yet lol.

 

[redriderbob]

We Learn The New Name For Ram’s Upcoming Range Electric Paradigm Breaker (REPB) Pickup!​

Trademark Filing Says New Truck Will More Than Likely Carry REV Name...​

But thanks to a recent trademark put through by Stellantis (FCA US, LLC) to the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO), it appears we now will know the official name of the REPB Ram 1500 when it makes its debut in 2024. The automaker got approval for the name “Ram 1500 REV”, which we believe is short for Range Extended Vehicle.

We Learn The New Name For Ram's Upcoming Range Electric Paradigm Breaker (REPB) Pickup!

But thanks to a recent trademark put through by Stellantis (FCA US, LLC) to the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO), it appears we now will know the official name of the REPB Ram 1500 when it makes its debut in 2024. The automaker got approval for the name "Ram 1500 REV", which we...

5thgenrams.com

 

[Rammit]

This actually makes sense. Pure electric is an absolutely asinine idea. Read motor trends latest update on their long term Rivian. Truck loses 10% charge a nite sitting outside because it was cold out (not below zero just cold). Truck couldn’t make a 3 day camping trip that was only 119 miles away. I never want an EV for many reasons including that I think they are actually worse for the environment, but this at least helps solve one of the problems. Seems like a good move and will give them a competitive advantage. Still not enough for me to even consider trading my gas truck, but at least a step in the right direction.