I just did a 2 day 2000 mile trip in my long range model 3. Total charging costs were around $100, which didn’t include two stops where the superchargers were free (network connectivity problems?). Required a total of 13 supercharging stops. Each stop was between 20min to 45min. I started off completely full, and charged overnight at a Tesla destination charger, (so, 14 stops?). Roughly half the cost of the article’s reported charging costs.
At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked.
What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that.
At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert.
Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.
I've done multiple ~1000mi road trips in my Model X, and I've peed in a lot of bushes too. A lot of the newer chargers (at least on the east coast) are located at WaWa's, and have 24hr restrooms. But the chargers at malls are a pain. Either the mall is closed, and you need to pee in the bushes, or the mall is open and the traffic is terrible and the chargers are ICE'ed in.
There is one charger in Hardee SC thats in the parking lot of a police station. I was a bit nervous to use the bushes there..
I've taken multiple long trips in my Toyota Prius, and never once had to pee in the bushes. 600 mile range on a single fill-up, but after driving for a few hours I'm usually ready for a 5 minute break.
I totally get how cool EVs are, and how much fun they can be to drive. And if you're spending 90+% of your time just commuting to work, it can potentially save you money on gas.
But I would definitely not subject myself to long road trips with EVs at this point in history. One out-of-service charging station along the way can ruin your whole week.
My experience with hybrids and long trips is that you're stopping more frequently for gas. They've got small gas tanks and small batteries. Both of which are burned through quickly when you're on a freeway and not touching the brake pedal.
I'm real curious as to which hybrids you've been taking trips in. A gen 4 Prius can easily do 600 miles at highway speed. A gen 3 should be able to do at least 550 on a full tank. That's nearly 8 hours at 70mph.
The Prius Prime is the PHEV version, which is more expensive than the standard Prius. It has the same gas engine and nearly the same gasoline range as the standard Prius (it gets slightly lower MPG due to the increased weight). You're obviously not going to get far on battery power alone, that is about 25 miles. The intention was to be able to cover a typical commute to work, and then be able to charge a work.
Just read a little bit on the 330e. It doesn't get nearly as good gas mileage as a Prius, but is obviously a much peppier car.
Though if I was spending that much money, I'd try to get a Rav4 Prime, which is nearly as quick (5.7 seconds for 0-60 mph), 600 mile range, and all wheel drive. But that's a personal preference, I'm not in the market for a sports sedan.
my Prius Prime plug in hybrid is great. 40KM full EV range which is 90% of my yearly trips in town so only have to fuel up on longer trips. Highway range (with extra drag of a roof rack and bike on top per my last trip) was 800km per tank.
Its too bad PHEVs are not modular to allow for removing the gasoline engine for the 90% of trips where you don't need it.
In fact, I have a vision for modular PHEVs where the gasoline engine is on a trailer you pull on trips, and all it does is charge the electric battery to keep the electric motor running. You wouldn't even have to own or maintain the gas engine, you could rent them at u-haul or some a car rental chain.
I would actually love something like this for my Tesla.
I'd hazard a guess that most people will opt to urinate as far away from sources of high voltage electricity as they can. In the UK we periodically get news stories about people being electrocuted by urinating on railways, and many will have been traumatised by watching the terrifying "Play Safe" Public Information Films as children.
In the UK an ancient law says it is legal to pee against the rear wheel of your carriage.
Don’t try “googling” the validity of this law. The mainstream (ahem) media anti-public-disorder industrial complex seems to have polluted cyberspace with articles falsely claiming this law is a myth. Stand up for your rights and pee on your wheels.
/s
See also: British women having the right to urinate in a policeman’s helmet if they are caught short in public (and are pregnant.)
Is it possible to drive 1000 miles in one direction in Britain?
Edit to add: nope, The greatest distance between two points is 968.0 km (601+1⁄2 mi) (between Land's End, Cornwall and John o' Groats, Caithness), 838 miles (1,349 km) by road.
I did a 1,857mile (2,989km) road trip including some of the more remote parts of Scotland in an electric car last year. Interestingly most of the ChargePlace Scotland chargers were in public car parks, which have public toilets. The Highland Council even has a map of public toilets. All very civilised.
When it comes to Tesla superchargers in the UK, most are in service stations, which tend to be open all the time, and indeed were some of the few facilities to remain open in the strictest periods of lockdown given that good transportation was classed as essential service. There are a few superchargers by hotels and restaurants, but in my experience they're always fine with you using their facilities (the main issue seems to be a few who charge excessive parking fines if you don't register with them while charging).
It's interesting that these charging stations are even permitted to be built without restrooms.
No gas station built today would be exempt from that requirement. Although I can think of at least a few unattended gas pumps that also are without restrooms.
It's obviously an emerging market, but it seems like charging stations would be suited for bucee's or even truck stop style facilities, with areas to rest, eat, shower, etc. At least compared to consumer based gas stations. I'm not sure what the economics of building those would look like without selling hundreds of gallons of diesel at a time.
So I did the same recently, but in a PHEV, and I honestly think it's the best of both worlds. In my daily usage, I use zero fuel. Last time I filled up was in March, because I just charge it at home and nearly all of my daily driving is within the 30 mile EV-only range. But when we drove across Europe I could just carry on for about 600 miles per tank, only filling up once at a well stocked petrol station(with working bathrooms and a restaurant).
Anecdotally - tried to charge the car in Germany when we stopped for lunch, but found that it was impossible to start the session, the app wouldn't accept my non-german payment card so that was that. Would suck if I had to charge.
When the infrastructure is multi-fuel, the car being multi-fuel is a great value.
Many years ago, I was driving across Europe with my old petrol car that was converted to use LPG. I like LPG because it's cheaper, the engine makes less noise and it is more environmentally friendly(but it's bad for the car AFAIK, the car was a clunker anyway).
What I found out was that in Europe, even within the EU, LPG stations don't have the same popularity everywhere and even if you find one it may have different port, thus you may need an adapter to fit yours.
When driving In Austria, I run out of LPG multiple times because the LPG stations were more like novelty, away from the main roads with no guarantees on the working hours.
Electric chargers still feel like that. There are many of them but not everywhere and the quality and availability on the spot is non-standart.
Petrol stations are actually quite good experiences most of the time. The refuelling experience is very robust and most of the time they will provide you with a WC, a place to rest, a place to wait, a place to eat, a place to shop.
Petrol stations at remote places tend to be relaxing, revitalising experiences even when the facilities are not top-notch. Well, at least in Europe.
I would love electric infrastructure to catch up and preserve that culture.
LPG is becoming progressively less common in Australia, this article[1] focuses on Queensland but the story is the same across Australia
”Since July 2010 there has been a 70% drop in the volume of LPG sales,” Mr Jeffreys said.
“The number of LPG registered vehicles has also fallen in the last five years.”
RACQ Technical Advisor Bill Reeves said the availability of LPG is set to further decrease.
“New fuel outlets simply aren’t putting in LPG bowsers and many existing stations are removing their LPG tanks when they are due to be recertified because the limited returns from the sale of LPG do not justify the expense,” Mr Reeves said.
Regional Queenslanders bear the brunt of the shortage with only one LPG bowser in 15 regional centres and no bowsers in Blackwater, Childers, Moranbah, Proserpine, Tully and Cunnamulla.
For residents of Moranbah this means a more than 270km round trip to the nearest LPG bowser at Puma Carmilla.
“Remote service stations may be less reliable because, if the LPG machinery breaks down, they have to wait a long time for parts and a technician to repair the equipment,” Mr Reeves said.
“This can cause problems for regional Queenslanders when there’s only one LPG bowser in the area.”
In addition to the shortage, no new LPG passenger cars are being manufactured in Australia and the benefits of choosing LPG are diminishing.
“LPG tanks in your car are expensive and must be recertified every 10 years,” Mr Reeves said.
“The costs associated with maintaining your car’s fuel tank means LPG is no longer a cheap fuel source for Queenslanders.
> So I did the same recently, but in a PHEV, and I honestly think it's the best of both worlds. In my daily usage, I use zero fuel.
Yeah in theory PHEV provide the ideal flexibility of EV for commute and ICE for long-range driving, however apparently lots of people with PHEV never charge them, mostly resulting in less efficient ICEs / HEV (because the plug-in-ability means a larger battery and more complexity, so a PHEV is heavier and more complex than an equivalent HEV).
I think that mainly happens when they are bought for fleets where cars are issued to drivers who did not choose the PHEV. The drivers are often told that they can be reimbursed for fuel and only need to turn in receipts, but there is no provision for reimbursement of electricity. This pushes people to just drive them as hybrids instead of EVs.
I’ve got to think that anyone who chooses and buys their own PHEV has done so because it meets their needs and they plan to use the EV mode significantly. Most PHEV drivers that I know hate it when they have to switch to gasoline partially because of the added noise and cost and partially because it seems like a kind of failure.
>>Most PHEV drivers that I know hate it when they have to switch to gasoline partially because of the added noise and cost and partially because it seems like a kind of failure.
Ha, that's literally me. It's like a game - you have to keep the needle in the EV range when driving normally, pushing it a bit too much and making the ICE start feels like losing. Obviously as long as there is any charge in the battery, if I'm driving long distance then it really doesn't matter, but it's cool to see the ICE shut down every time I lift my foot off the throttle.
I know, it's a disgrace - apparently here in UK a lot of people buy PHEVs because they have a much much lower tax rate for company buyers, but obviously you get the tax discount whether you plug it in or not. So some people just....don't. Which as you said, actually means poorer fuel economy and increased complexity for zero reason. I absolutely think that those people should lose their tax discounts entirely.
As an electric car owner, the thought of paying for batteries and oil changes sounds terrible. I looked into the hybrid jeep to replace my aging one, but I know how much the maintenance on my gas beast is. I'll pay a premium to add a electic drive train and still have to take it back to the dealership every several months. Awful. I'll just wait for the fully electric version.
I mean, that's a fair point, except that the pricing structure doesn't reflect the differences at all. Servicing a fully electric car should be cheaper, but in practice it just isn't. Servicing a PHEV should be more expensive but it also just isn't. A service of the E-Tron or the MB EQC costs the same as an equivalent ICE car even though there's hardly anything to do, and the service of my PHEV Volvo costs the same as the service of a regular ICE Volvo despite there being more to do.
So you might find that you'll get a fully electric Jeep but your servicing costs won't go down at all, it will still require an annual service to keep the warranty, and the dealer will almost certainly charge the same as for a normal one if not more(and I've seen dealers charge more, since EV cars can only be worked on by technicians trained to work on them, and there's comparatively fewer of them)
I've got to disagree with you. I've got a Tesla. Maintenance costs going into 2 years have been tire rotations. I guess I'll see in years 3-5, but I have a VW of about the same vintage and it's required coolant system repairs (thankfully under warranty), oil and other fluid changes, brakes are coming up. I don't really expect to see anything like that in the Tesla unless there is suspension wear/tear and then eventually things like the power windows, etc.
Interesting that other car manufacturers are requiring maintenance of their electric cars. I haven't hear that before. Sounds like legacy businesses maintaining their legacy business models.
The best part about things not working in Germany is seeing the lengths they'll go to to blame you for the failure and refuse to admit the system in question is anything other than the Best Thing Ever That Never Breaks.
So what you are saying, you could do the 2000 mile trip in 33 hours! Of-course, that assumes you do not sleep for the entire trip, don't take bathroom breaks or stops for food.
I think I rather do the 2000 miles in a BEV and take some breaks in the driving.
With multiple drivers, sure, why not drive non-stop? My brother and his family drove across Canada a year or two ago to visit family; with kids, flying would have been exorbitantly expensive ($1000 per person) and he only had so much time off of work, so him and his wife made the 4000 km trip in less than 40 hours. And the same on the way back.
The non-Tesla public chargers I used are pretty well all at gas stations or big-box stores. So there's always a bathroom, a fast-food joint, and sometimes even a real-food diner.
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to.
Isn't there?
Right now for me to own a Ford Mach E, a Tesla Model 3 or a RAV4 Prime is $3400 to $3700 per year for comprehensive insurance, $1400 a year for liability only. My SUV right now costs $1100 a year to insure comprehensive, but even a 2021 Acura NSX or Jaguar F-Pace is only $1400 for the same level of insurance that I have right now.
I only spend about $1200 a year on gasoline for the SUV and another $200 for regular maintenance. So right out the gate, assuming electricity is free and tire rotations are free, I'm already looking at least $900/yr increase in operating expense.
And then there's the upfront; the above is on top of the $10,000 to $20,000 more I'd have to spend to buy an EV vs a comparably sized and equipped ICE. And an additional $1500 to $2000 to have my garage accommodate charging a car, assuming main panel doesn't need upgrading and only installing a 240V circuit.
Right now it's a detached garage with a single 120v to it, so it's retrenching and installation of new conduit and wire, installing a new sub panel in the garage, and rewiring everything. Not going to count the cost of a level 2 DC charger (Chevrolet and Kia are offering one as an incentive for purchase). Main uncertainty is whether or not the main panel would need to be upgraded.
If I didn't have a garage, I'd also have to be super concerned about charging stations though. You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit. A nearby truck depot gets the copper wire cut from the trucks battery systems sitting there overnight every few months.
120v over night will add about 45 miles of range to your typical tesla. Most people drive less than 20 miles a day, so you always start out with a full tank. When I go skiing, I drive 120 miles, so I come back with a lot of range depleted, but it charges up the next few days. On the rare occasions over the past 8 years when I needed to go a long distance, I just use the super charger in my town, although once I went to a pay place that has 220v and 40 amps (so instead of ~3.5 miles of range per house, I added 20 miles of range per hour). What doesn't work with 120v regular power outlet charging? If you drive 250 miles and spend 5 minutes and then need to drive 200 more miles. That is pretty rare.
In 18 months of use, I’ve done all except three charges on my regular old 120v outlet in the garage. I just plug in at night when I go under 60% charge, usually every few days.
I ordered the adapter, outlet, and new wire to move an unused electric dryer service to the garage as soon as I got the car, but haven’t bothered to install them. It just isn’t necessary. (And I dislike taking the face cover off the main breaker box, nothing rational, I just don’t like being that close to the live circuits. If I need to charge a lot overnight, it’s a 30 minute job to install the service.)
For the upfront cost… I had been waiting for the little Jeep pickup truck, but when it came out and I got done adding the basic functional packages it was well up in the Tesla price range. (I’m keeping an elderly F250 out of the crushers for my occasional pickup truck needs, but I could just as easily rent one from the big box hardware store when I need it for less than I pay in insurance on the F250.)
> I ordered the adapter, outlet, and new wire to move an unused electric dryer service to the garage as soon as I got the car, but haven’t bothered to install them. It just isn’t necessary. (And I dislike taking the face cover off the main breaker box, nothing rational, I just don’t like being that close to the live circuits. If I need to charge a lot overnight, it’s a 30 minute job to install the service.
You could do all of the work except for landing the circuit and pay an electrician for an hour to terminate the circuit for you.
The main issue is that it's a single 120V circuit for everything in the garage, including the garage door opener. Assuming you open the garage door (say with a remote garage door opener) while the car is charging, it will trip the breaker in the basement. IIRC your average garage door opening motor uses 500W to 700W while in operation.
So at the least I need to install a second circuit. But the cost of installation is mostly tied into labor rather then material since it involves bringing out a trenching machine out. And the cost difference between just 1 extra 120V circuit and a full blown 240V service with subpanel is significant, but not bad enough for me to think it's makes sense to penny pinch there.
Edit: Well in theory you could also have a receiver and relay that cuts off the charging to the car before initiating powering the garage door motor. That said I don't think it's worth the hassle... at minimum that's two electrical mechanical relays for the 120V lines, some sort of RF receiver for the car, a controller for the relays and to probably some way to signal the garage door itself (replacement for the button inside maybe), and way for the controller to state of the door itself so that it doesn't cut power at the wrong time. Certainly hackable but I doubt I could build it reliable without way more money and time spent on it.
Will it? It’d depend on the breaker and load rating of the wire run to the garage.
I can draw 6kw from one 240v, breaker, so about 25 amps, for a few minutes before it trips from thermal overload.
I load tested a new outlet that was wired on the same circuit, with five devices plugged in, kettle, pressure cooker, slow cooker, fan heater, and hair drier for good measure.
The breaker should trip before the wire is damaged, it did.
Bit of an aside - how is American insurance so stupidly expensive. Here in UK I have a brand new Volvo XC60 PHEV, £60k, 400bhp car, in one of the highest insurance groups(like group 45 out of 50), I'm 30 years old and my fully comprehensive insurance is £400 a year. That's including 20 million liability limit, legal cover, courtesy vehicle, key cover.....etc etc.
Yeah when I was 21 my insurance was £2000 a year on some crappy old econobox, but in general once you turn 25 the insurance falls down rapidly. On my previous Mercedes AMG I paid about £500 a year for fully comprehensive, aged 26.
It cost me a simple written exam (free) and a driving test (free) and then about $25USD for the actual license when I was 16. How much does it cost in the UK? If the barrier to drive is low, you end up with people driving around that got a 70% on the written test (lowest passing score) and a 70% on the driving test driving around doing stupid things. It drives up insurance considerably.
Uhm, in the UK you can only pay for the test if you want, no actual training is strictly required. So....like £99 or there about?
But of course majority of people pay for training because they want to learn somewhere, and not everyone has parents willing to risk the family car. Surely even in US people pay for training and there's more to the cost than just the $25 test fee?
Most families in the states have more than one car, so there’s less risk to teaching your kids how to drive. There are schools though, but I never had that (neither did my wife, apparently). My dad was an insane teacher though. He’d have me slam the brakes in the middle of an empty highway to learn how to stop at-speed. I’ve never been in an accident (knock on wood) but I’ve seen more than my fair share of deadly accidents happen right in front of me.
Americans drive a lot more than Europeans, that's probably why. For comparison, I'm in Canada in my mid-20s and only pay CAD$700 per year, same as you (clean record).
You have to specify how many miles per year you're going to drive - that £400 a year insurance is declared for 10k miles. How many more do Americans drive? 20k? 30k? Aren't those very silly numbers quickly? I thought even in America people drive no more than 20-30 miles a day on average, no?
This is the most noticeable difference between US and UK.
Cars here generally have perhaps $300,000 liability, perhaps $500,000. I have $1,000,000 but larger number is covered by an additional "umbrella" policy that includes liability for multiple cars and also my house.
I imagine there are much greater limits for the likes of Bill Gates. But not commonly for the ordinary 99%. Also, despite auto insurance being legally required, probably 10% or 20% don't have it. They don't care, they have no assets, so they're "judgement proof". There are never any serious criminal consequences for this.
Ordinary people can protect themselves against uninsured drivers by adding additional coverage for that to their own insurance policy. In effect, if you have an accident with an uninsured driver, your own policy pays out whatever liability that driver would owe you. This added coverage is not all that expensive.
Here in Germany, liability limits are usually much higher. 100 million isn't unheard of. The reason certainly is partly advertising, but also because some freak accidents have caused these amounts of costs. A few millions are not uncommon for bad accidents where for example semis with delicate load are involved.
The minimum required from any insurance in the EU is €5M in 3rd party liability, no vehicle insurance can offer less. The ones offering 20/50/100M are doing it mostly for advertising, there's no appreciable difference in cost.
I would guess it's because your insurance pays someone's medical bills if you hit them in the US, which can be >>> the cost of replacing a car even if it's a relatively minor injury.
> assuming main panel doesn't need upgrading and only installing a 240V circuit.
A Load Miser can split the dryer circuit; charging happens overnight, so no usage conflicts. It was about $1,500 USD for my house to run a line from the attic. YMMV, but probably less expensive.
> You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen
Vancouver is experimenting with curbside chargers.
>A Load Miser can split the dryer circuit; charging happens overnight, so no usage conflicts. It was about $1,500 USD for my house to run a line from the attic. YMMV, but probably less expensive.
I'm not sure why that would make any difference.
>Vancouver is experimenting with curbside chargers.
Maybe; I'd be concerned about someone cutting the cables for scrap copper here. I don't know if richer Vancouver suburbs would have to worry about such a thing.
You're forgetting the initial layout -- that's a car starting at $70000. Who the hell pays that for a car, when half that gets you a car just as nice but running on gasoline?
I haven't bought a new car in ages, but my limit was, and remains, €30k. As long as electric cars cost double what comparable fossil fuel cars cost, with half the range, I don't see any electric revolution happening.
>>Who the hell pays that for a car, when half that gets you a car just as nice but running on gasoline?
Does it? What example do you have in mind? Because the only one I can think of is perhaps the E-Tron compared to the Audi Q5, and I'd argue that to reach the "half" mark you'd get a Q5 that has barely any options fitted in, while the E-Tron will come packed with tech. And then yes, there is the Tesla Model S which is absolutely not worth the money they are asking, but it's an exception not the rule. There's more and more EV vehicles where there isn't a non-EV equivalent for half the price.
The example I had in mind was the Volvo XC40. Gasoline model starts at €30k, electric model at €59K. More often than not you pay a huge premium for electric cars. I think the cheapest right now is the Nissan Leaf, but that's still a tiny car for a lot of money.
I just don't think electric cars make financial sense at all right now. All those car manufacturers saying they won't be making ICE cars within < 5 years anymore must know something I don't, but I don't see who's going to be paying that premium in the low/middle end.
Yeah that's fair enough - the electric XC40 is a stupidly expensive car. I still think it's not exactly a fair comparison, as the cheapest XC40 is a 100bhp 3 cylinder petrol, while the electric XC40 is a 400bhp all wheel drive car. That alone would command a large premium even in an ICE car, no?
But yeah, I'm thinking more about the cars like the MG ZS EV, which I actually put a deposit down on last year(and cancelled due to coronavirus and working from home, but I test drove it and was 100% willing to buy it) - at £25k it was very affordable for a full EV, with loads of space inside.
And then remember that all manufacturers always start with the most expensive models first because that's where the money is, but more and more cars are arriving form various manufacturers. ID.3 from Volkswagen is already approaching affordable prices in lower specs, but there is the ID.2 coming. And if I were to buy a second car as a runaround now, I'd happily buy a £12k second hand e-Up, it's more than enough for driving around and will cost nearly nothing to use.
But that isn't the case. The Jaguar in the article is undoubtedly expensive, but a Tesla Model 3 currently starts in Germany at €35k. Basically the same price as comparable ICE vehicles. And that is not even counting in the savings on operating the car.
My excuse is that I just don't drive much. So yeah, money. The incentives don't favor me selling my good-condition low-mileage ICE for a used high-mileage hybrid, even though I do want one.
If the government passes a carbon tax (or just cuts gasoline subsidies) then the math may change and push me over.
But to avoid harming poor people, they'd have to atomically pass an increase in welfare while making gasoline more expensive for the middle class. So it's politically difficult.
I don't claim to understand the reasoning behind it, these were just the quotes I got shopping around. I never imagined that a $180,000 hybrid supercar would be cheaper to insure the PHEV version of a family oriented CUV but but here we are.
-Not the OP, but the situation in Norway is that new EVs are incredibly competitively priced compared to ICE vehicles, as we tax the latter to high heaven while the former are exempt from just about any tax. This is how it ought to be to speedily increase EV market share.
However, if your personal finances suggest a used vehicle is the way to go, your options are rather limited, and will be for a few more years until the current EVs start trickling down. Current 2nd hand EV offerings mostly are Leafs and eGolfs, with a generous helping of Teslas (still rather pricey) on top.
If you need a large-ish family car and cannot afford a new EV, you'll be driving an ICE for a few more years - more if the authorities start taxing EVs to bring them more in line with ICE levels, boosting 2nd hand prices.
Can easily be, if you compare comparable. I buy BMWs for cca 25% of the price of new (that means 6-7 years old and up to 100k km). Last one lasted 11 years and still counting. Maintenance costs are almost 0, apart from mandatory stuff (oil, brakes & pads, wheels every +-5 years).
Hell will freeze sooner than we will be buying a new car - its just such a stupid waste of money, when the price drops so rapidly and you still get 95% of the new car. ICE cars, especially diesels, just age so well compared to electric ones. I know we will be buying our next car as used ICE, for next maybe 10 years. And so do people around us, in richest country in Europe - Switzerland.
Electric car on level to say well equipped BMW 5 wagon series is what... Tesla model S? Not really, BMW has much higher quality of literally everything that matters in car while sporting much bigger trunk (necessity with kids and active lifestyle).
One should not ignore the price point - most of the world simply can't afford buying electric cars. Its great that western democracies will lead this transition, but when considering whole human population this is a tiny sliver at the moment.
Well, if you compare used cars of course ICEs are much cheaper, because the market is so much larger. That+s why I asked for new. It seemed surprising to me that you'd even consider a new car when an EV is that expensive compared to income.
Well, its simple - I am considering a car. Don't care about underlying technology as much as: initial purchase price, required yearly car insurance & taxes, and ongoing costs of replacements/repairs due to its usage/aging.
After that comes comfort, space, practicality, engagement in driving (aka fun). And somewhere after that, noble discussions about ICE vs electric vs hydrogen etc. So far its a nobrainer. Maybe in 10 years things will be different, I'll vote with my wallet then.
> You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit
Same here. Most of my cross country trips are in an ‘08 corvette. It gets about 26 mpg if you leave it on cruise, and takes about 8 minutes to fill up. And I can also stop wherever I want for a nice meal or whatever. Combined with zero maintenance because it’s built for about 10x as hard as you’d ever think of driving it, it works out just fine. I think electric vehicles are awesome, but it’s pretty hard to beat gasoline in terms of power for your money.
Already factored into the $200/yr maintenance. Oil changes at dealerships nowadays are essentially loss leaders for them; $75 to $80 for full synthetic change, oil filter replacement and windshield wiper fluid top off, and most include shuttle service nowadays to and from the dealership itself.
Only other items that are ICE specific I can think of off the top of my head is engine air filter and fluid changes for the transmission and transfer case. Most of the other maintenance is the same AFAIK.
Like I said though, the insurance difference for me kills whatever savings there are from lack of oil changes by a wide margin, even before factoring in higher upfront.
You probably don’t need to change your oil as often as you are, if it’s registering as an expense at all.
Check what the manufacturer actually says - for example my manufacturer says don’t bother changing for two years. Lots of Americans driving the exact same cars change their oil every three months for no reason.
Actually this is exactly about expenses you are not consciously "registering", but they are real, and they add up. A daily coffee is not "registering" as well, but it's massive amount of money if you consider how much you spent in a year.
Would you mind quantifying how the coffee argument applies to this discussion, which is about oil change?
For example, here in the UK the average cost of oil and filter change (if you pay someone to do it rather than doing it yourself) is £102 [1]. Done every other year, this amounts to £51 p.a., which is less than a typical tank of fuel [2].
Oil changes are pretty much the least costly part of my car's maintenance. Brakes, suspension and tyres cost far more and I can't imagine that heavy EVs are any better on any of those.
No less than with a manual transmission car. I went 5 years before replacing the pads on my last car, with 150k km driven—not because they were worn, but because they were falling apart.
I haven't driven an EV yet, but from what I hear regenerative breaking is much stronger than engine breaking with a manual car and can essentially bring the car to a stop in city traffic.
I drive a diesel. Back when I had a regular freeway commute, I would regularly come to a complete stop at the end of freeway exits without touching the brake pedal, just for fun (last few km/h I used the handbrake). And one time when I was randomly pushing a little too hard on the brake pedal when I was parked, I burst a brake line somehow, and I ended up driving 20+ miles to my mechanic on busy city streets with no brakes, safely.
I doubt regenerative braking is any stronger than that.
I don't have an opinion on this, but how much of that is due to subsidies for the traditional energy industry? Make no mistake, electric vehicles get a lot of subsidies but I imagine governments around the world want energy independence, so they're probably throwing lots of money to help the industry.
"Excuse" roughly means "good reason to do something bad". All of that is pretty subjective. So now you mostly know a little more about how the authors feels.
US vs Canada I assume. Last time I looked at the Bolt Premier some years ago the dealer would not budge off of the $50,000+ price.
And for that price I was sitting in the most uncomfortable seats I've ever sat in for a personal vehicle; thin, hard and not well sculpted for my back. The only positive I recall was the excellent throttle response.
Never pay list. Leasehackr forums broker price: $4700 up front / out the door for 36 mo, CA $2K rebate, Costco member discount, competitive lease discount, local buyer discount, clearing ’21s before new model.
Broker sources online leads for lower price, because buyer’s knowledgeable and ready to sign.
"In this context, there’s another number there that I think is really interesting: The “km/c-h”, how far you can get on an hour’s charge. For this particular car on this selection of chargers, it was over 200km (124 miles) per charge-hour. I think that’s enough? Maybe in the lower regions of enough, but there."
So at 110km/h, less than 2 hours of driving for every hour spent charging? In what world is that close to "enough"?
My next car will likely be an EV, but the evangelists hand-waving away limitations like this do nobody any favors.
Yes it is ridiculous to claim that this is somehow minor.
That said, there are electric cars far better for road trips than the Jaguar mentioned in this story.
A long range Tesla Model 3 will easily do about 350km within its 10-80% state of charge bounds and the charging stops can be limited to 20-30 minutes each.
Experienced EV drivers with good EVs can achieve 100km/h average speed INCLUDING stoppages for charging.
You seem to be right that the Jaguar is a poor car for road trips. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 will charge in half the time as a Jaguar I-Pace, and the car costs about a third less.
Exactly right. EVs are perfect for day-to-day commutes and what not where it's drive a distance, let it sit for several hours (while at work or at home at night), lather-rinse-repeat. Long distance continuous driving would be brutal with an hour pitstop every couple of hours.
It really depends... The EV travel is a different cadence, for sure. Whether that's a bad thing or not will depend on the individual.
The 30-40 minute stops every couple hours that I have experienced in my older Tesla (60kwh, later upgraded to 75kwh), is nice to nap, visit attractions, eat and use restrooms, walk the dog... It definitely makes for a different trip than screeching to a stop at the pump, running in to pee while the pump is running, and then lighting the tires up on the way out of the station. I've done that plenty of trips in the past. It's kind of brutal TBH.
Except you just turned a 2 day drive into 3 days. 24 hour drive from DFW->LA. That takes 1 overnight stay now in sane driving conditions for a solo driver. You now just kicked it into a 2nd overnight.
>running in to pee while the pump is running
anyone doing this deserves to be ripped off for leaving an authorized pump to do whatever someone wants to do while you're not there. no different than leaving the keys in the ignition and the car running while you "run" in for a sec. you're also being rude to the next person in line.
anyways, back to my original point is that an EV is great for in town day-to-day use or maybe shorter hops. cross country trips would make me consider renting ICE powered just do i don't loose more days than i already am for driving vs flying.
Can't speak specifically about DFW->LA (looks like 1,400 miles), but in my Tesla I can do Denver to Wilmington with 0 overnights, sane, as a solo driver... 1,800 miles. Precisely BECAUSE of the charging, I can get in a "power nap" while charging, doing the recommended 25 or 50 minutes to fit with sleep cycles. Usually around 24 hours in I need to take an extra 50 minute nap in there.
Again, it really depends on the individual. This works for me.
As far as leaving the pump goes, I was painting a picture of some of the "death march" drives I've done, didn't necessarily say I was solo. I, personally, wouldn't leave the pump while pumping, not because of theft but because, you know, of the spewing of gasoline if something went wrong.
As far as your original point... I've done that math multiple times, I have 2 gas cars and the EV, and continue to pick the EV over the ICE. But, again, that will vary by individual. My personal experience, coming as a gearhead who has taken quite a few non-stop road trips both solo and with others, is that the EV for long trips (I've done 5-6 1,800 mile trips in it), are better in my EV than ICE cars, and that's with 5 year old tech. A current Tesla will have fewer, shorter stops.
Your speculation is perfectly valid, of course. Doesn't sound like you've had an EV, which is why I call it speculation. The point I'm making is that I've actually had that choice, 1,800 mile trip where I can take a EV or a ICE, and I've chosen the EV on multiple occasions.
I dream of a world where everybody can leave the keys in the ignition and the doors open because nobody steals. Thieves are caught and are given a stern warning and therapy. It's an utopia.
It is a crime of opportunity that "you" created. Had "you" not been lazy, the situation would not have existed for the thief to thieve. "You" did it to "yourself"
This is the insight that I need. I'm all about EVs, but my fam and I will go on at least 1 500 road trip each year, and we don't stop for sleep (unless we have to).
Assuming you're saying "one 500-mile road trip" per year, I don't think you should let that stop you. That's one or two 10-80% charging stops max for any Tesla.
I'd play with https://abetterrouteplanner.com and test your potential road trips with the type of car you're interested in. It'll plan out where you'd need to stop, for how long, etc. Pretty cool way to alleviate (or confirm) your fears.
Not to mention if you're commuting or doing daily driving the rest of the year, and charging at home or work, you e saved all the other time you would have spent filling up at a gas station.
So 30 minutes charging on a road trip is probably less then the sum of the time you would have spent filling up and getting oil changes.
I took a look at the site as well, and planned the DFW->LA trip I mentioned earlier in the thread. I was shocked at the number of stops required just to get to the Texas border. That's normally a full day, but now it is 2 days. It's just not viable yet for cross country. I'm not saying stop EVs. I'm just saying stop with moronic concepts of using something it's not designed for. A 300 mile range is plenty for 99% use cases. Solve for the low hanging fruit. Lower pollution in cities where it collects the most. Then, continue working on larger battery capacities for longer trips. Harping on the viability is of what we have now is good is just doing a disservice.
I'm from Helsinki but live in Berlin, and drive between the two somewhat regularly. For this trip you essentially have two options - either via Denmark and Sweden, or Poland and the Baltics. You need to take a ferry to reach Finland regardless of which route you pick.
The experience and emissions differ pretty dramatically. Intuitively you might think the total emissions would be lower for the Baltic route because of the significantly shorter ferry trip, but this is more than negated by how dirty the grid is in Poland and Estonia. Polish electricity production is about 100x as polluting as Swedish electricity.
The Nordic route also wins in terms of infrastructure. There are plenty of Superchargers as well as non-Tesla charging stations, located at highway rest stops with good services. Making the 1000km+ drive in one day isn't a big deal at all, and I find that plugging the car in for the time it takes to go to the restroom and grab some food is enough to continue the trip.
> You need to take a ferry to reach Finland regardless of which route you pick.
Well technically not on the Sweden route but it would be crazy to drive the extra to go all the way north to Tornio and then drive back south to Helsinki instead of just taking the ferry from Stockholm (this adds around 1300km to the trip)
Yeah, there's a ferry from Rostock to Helsinki. However I'm trying to reduce my travel-related emissions, and after crunching the numbers have concluded that the best option would be ferry+train via Sweden, with electric car via Sweden a close second (per head, assuming two people or more in the car). Fingers crossed for that tunnel and a direct overnight train connection!
My understanding is that these numbers (try to) account for actual real world usage rates. Actual emissions will of course depend on a whole lot of things, including the things you mentioned, prevailing winds, etc. Same for estimating grid emissions for charging the car of course - the exact mix of sources is always in flux.
Depends on if you have someone to do it with and the scenery. I just drove from CA to NV, little bit of ID, and OR in a day and it was a great drive (just shy of 800mi). Lots of interesting scenery and places I've never seen. Broke it up into 2 days on the way back and slept at a nice campground.
I find that on trips, I'm a whole lot less interested in doing long drives than I used to be. I arranged a trip in the Western US for September and one of my decisions was that I'd basically limit the trip to one area of a state rather than zip around to multiple distanced places.
It's not so bad if you make sure to get good sleep the night before and start in the morning sometime, and perhaps take a long break somewhere in the middle.
That works for some people. I found that the seats in my P3D were decidedly mediocre at best (but I've gotten spoiled over the years by a lot of cars with Recaros). And AP does not drive either as smoothly as I do, nor as defensively as I do, which actually raises my blood pressure a bit. Cruise control with me steering is my most comfortable.
I did a similar roadtrip back in 2015 (!) in my ex-boss's Tesla Model S: we traveled from Montréal to Atlanta for a weekend conference (JSConf, IIRC). We were driving continuously, switching drivers every time we hit a charger (we were 4 in the car). I think it took us about 24h to do the trip.
My main takeaway from the experience is that charging wasn't actually "painful" at all. On the contrary, it was a welcome break every time. Most times we even exceeded the charging time the car was asking for, because we found something interesting to do (like eating dinner in a nice restaurant).
When I was on the marked earlier this year, I really wanted to get an EV, but there aren't any that comfortably seat 6 (I have 4 kids). We ended up with a PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica), and I love it. Next car is going to be an EV, though.
I find this kind of "it's great to have a break" justification tiring. Glad that you found something to do while your car is charging, but pretending it's not a limitation feels like just glossing over something that does make it less flexible, whether that was a problem for you or not.
It's also tiring on the other side hearing how bad a 30-40 minute charger stop is. C'est la vie.
However... Add up all the time a gas car spends at the pump, that an EV does not (charging at home), and I'd guess most people will spend less time waiting for the EV than for gas.
And the charging time is coming down. My older Tesla is limited to 100kwh charging, the modern ones can use chargers in the range of 250kwh.
You're right, wasn't thinking about the numbers just what I remember on the displays. It's charging at ~100kW, (usually in the range of 90-120), and new ones can deliver power ~2.5x as fast.
Driving to a gas station and waiting to fill up is a time wasted, compared to charging at home or at work, which takes 30 seconds extra time. So if you want fair comparison, you should add up time you spend waiting at the gas pump and the detour time for a gas car. Seriously, one of the reason I like electric car is the convenience - less time wasted for gas station trips, and less time wasted with maintenance.
I refill once in 2 weeks. That would be about 28 plugs/unplugs of charging cable if I want to keep EV topped all the time. I bet 28 plugs/unplugs take about as long as a refill stop.
Each one takes about 10 seconds, so not even 5 minutes total... You're lucky if it takes less than that filling up, actually. Having just one person in front of you will easily double that time.
Agreed. It reminds me of people who arrogantly proclaim "it's the journey not the destination" when excusing why they don't let people who want to drive faster pass on 2 lane roads.
It’s not, though. It is genuinely a nice break. The very first road trip I took on mine was with my three teenage children. It was a moderately lengthy trip, from Texas to Colorado. After we got back home I asked them which they preferred, and their answers were surprisingly unanimous: electric. And given that they had taken many road trips with their mother and her ICE vehicle, they had something to compare it against.
This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.
Are the breaks annoying enough you'd go back to a gas car if you had to pay the fully loaded carbon costs per gallon of fuel? At ~$100/metric ton of CO2, that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.
Current U.K. price is $1.60 a litre or $5.60 per us gallon. That’s significantly more than current US gas prices and people still buy petrol cars. I don’t see a 90c/gallon charge impacting much.
Absolutely not, it’s minor. For me it’s not really a financial decision, it’s about driving a very nice and practical ev with much lower lifetime emissions than a gas car. Also most of my driving is local.
> that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.
Right now european gas prices range from 1.2 to 1.6 euros per liter depending on the country (eastern europe tends to be cheaper and western more expensive). And that's for 95, 98 tends to be a few cents higher.
That's 5.3 to 7.1 USD/gal. 90c/gal would be a significant but at the end relatively minor increase: it's less than the increase in gas prices since the start of 2021.
As long as you use taxes to internalize the cost of those emissions for people who don't want to wait an extra 15 minutes to refuel (and those funds go into air source carbon removal), that's a fine solution. At the rate at which EVs are selling [1], it seems the wait is not an impediment to ownership. It's important those who don't want to wait (and require liquid fuels because of that) don't put that burden (carbon emissions that aren't paid for) on everyone else collectively.
... or you incentivize the wait by decreasing cost.
Sometimes I feel like these discussions about EVs are strangely divorced from most people's lives. We will likely make our next purchase an EV purchase, and I think the cost of waiting on long trips probably has to be considered against other annoyances of ICEs, but the economics of this are a major reason more people don't switch to EVs. Even the cheapest ones still cant compete against the ICE market as a whole, especially when you consider the used vehicles that will be in circulation for some time.
Adding costs will just make it more difficult for people to afford anything.
If people want EVs to take off, they need to incentivize purchasing them, not tax the ubiquitous alternative. If the carbon costs are real, manifest it in decreased costs for the alternative. Otherwise it's all theory.
Ideally I think this could be resolved by having electrified freeways, so you can charge while driving and only have to stop because you need rest/food/etc...
We're a long ways from that, or even having the political will to start planning, let alone construction. It would do wonders for vehicle cost and weight, though, if people could get by with a 100-mile battery and still be able to make cross-country trips. And the environmental and cost benefits of electrified trucking would be huge.
No, he means Model S. It was an option (that is currently discontinued) that put 'jump seats' where the trunk would be. Not useful for anything except younger kiddos, but could be fine for younger kids.
Sort of like the 7 seater option for the Model Y, yeah it technically exists but it sounds uncomfortable...
I have a model Y 7 seater, it's actually not bad in the third row. Kids totally fine, small adults for short trips. Over six feet would hit the roof though.
Also, charging by the minute seems wrong .... a Porsche Taycan is going to get a whole lot more range out of each minute than a five-year-old Nissan Leaf, so why should they pay less for the same amount of range? Hmmmm.
Bear in mind that at home with the Level 2 charger in the carport, charging feels close to free.
You are primarily paying rent to take up a charging spot vs. buying electricity. If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.
Yeah, I own an EV with piss poor fast charge rates so it pains me to say this, but charging per minute is probably the right move. It certainly feels like the bottleneck right now is charger availability, not amount of electricity available. We should be incentivizing higher charge rates to make the chargers more accessible especially as EV penetration increases.
Nothing more annoying than arriving at a charger on a roadtrip and having to wait 45 minutes just to start your charge because all the spots are full. And don't even get me started on the people who just leave their EV on the charger for hours at a time even after fully charged.
IIRC the primary reason there are any chargers with bill by the minute is that in some jurisdictions it is illegal for any entity other than the electric utility to sell power by the kWh.
In Canada where this trip took place it’s currently illegal to sell electricity via DC fast charger because Measurement Canada has not defined the standard to which your charger has to measure against to ensure fair dispensing. They are really dragging their heels and it’s super annoying. Even utility like BC or Quebec Hydro can’t sell by the kWh and either have to give it away from free or charge by time.
in canada, all governmental power belongs to the federal government. provinces only have authority when it is granted to them by the federal government. there is no such thing as the feds encroaching on "state powers" because provinces are not states.
Plus the us constitution grants congress the power to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures” in article 1, section 8. The official measure is exactly what measurement Canada isn’t supplying. If the us congress did want to impose a standard accuracy for dc fast chargers the weights and measures clause plus the commerce clause would give them all the authority they need without encroaching on states rights.
It's not true that all government power belongs to the federal government and that provinces only gain power by devolution from the federal government. The Canadian constitution describes areas of responsibility for both the federal and provincial governments with some shared areas of responsibility.
> If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.
I wouldn't be so sure, not in the US anyways. It sounds like a captive audience, and convenience store+gas station combos are already known to generate more profit from the overpriced crap inside than the gas since gas prices are so cut-throat competitive. There's already a few gas stations around me that I explicitly avoid because their pumps are notoriously slow to pump. If gambling were legal here, they'd have video slots in the convenience store.
About a week or so ago the Greek PM (I think it was the PM) strongly advised his fellow Greek compatriots to use less air conditioning because the electrical grid was very close to collapsing. No way one can add a few million EVs to that grid.
And Greece is a EU member with a resonably well functioning economy (ignoring the financial crisis from a decade ago), I fail to see how poorer countries will be able to make all this work.
Could go either way. Where I live we also had issues with the grid getting close to capacity due to air conditioning.
That said, someone mentioned to me once that it's about 7 years from the time a power company to notify the government of intention to build a power plant to completion. At least for natural gas plants. So it's plausible for the necessary capacity to be built over the next 15 years.
It varies from country to country. If your grid is at the brink of collapse, it might be a challenge.
Here in Germany, even changing all cars to electric would increase the total electricity consumption by less than 20%, not counting in the elektricity savings by no longer providing gasoline. This would probably doable by todays grid and the transition to electric cars will take 15 years even in the best circumstances, just by comparing the 45 million cars owned with the 3 million cars sold every year. Enough time to do adjustments to the grid where needed.
One also needs to consider how much electric cars can be beneficial for the grid. With charging of parked cars remotely controlled, they can help with stabilizing the grid.
An electric car in Germany uses about 8kWh/day - that is probably less that the AC unit now use in Greece. And if Greece doesn't have ample solar yet, it would be about time to change that urgently.
An interesting anecdote, but I've never understood why anyone would willingly drive a car (electric or otherwise) such a long distance. The longest I've ever driven in a single trip was a bit over 750 km, and I think I slept for 16 hours straight after I arrived. The next time I took that same trip, I rode the train instead.
Sometimes the train trip is absolute hell e.g. you need to switch a lot with significant delay inbetween, and the trip ends up significantly longer by car.
You can use the train trip to read (or sleep if you can do that, I can't) but you also can't really put your music or podcasts and you have to deal with other people. The train changes can also be very stressful.
Then there's traveling at your destination, if you need a car at your arrival the advantage of the train plummet, whether you need to rent one (which is expensive) or borrow one (which imposes on your hosts).
FWIW that's exactly why despite being in europe after years of taking the train when I go back to see my family I ended up now renting a car instead (I usually live car-free):
* both my own home and my family are a bit out-of-the-way, there's public transport (though not ideal) around my own home but none at the destination so I'd need to impose e.g. be fetched at the train station, with regular issues of delays and friends
* by train the entire trip takes about 8 hours, with 6 transport changes (some rather annoying / stressful), by car I can take a more direct route so it only takes 0530, and I can stop when I want (I usually end up stopping twice and taking between 0600 and 06:30)
* by train there is no real independence unless I rent a car anyway, I just end up bothering to go see the rest of the family, meanwhile renting a car lets me more actively help
* even if I don't rent a car at the destination, the financial gain of the train is basically nil, the train is rather expensive unless I take a slow train and basically need two days to make the trip
* and finally carrying shit in the train is a pain in the ass, both ways, I can easily load presents or stuff in a rental car, and bring comfort food or whatever back, there is no space premium of any sort
Different people react differently to long car trips. I can drive the 1,800 miles to my wife's family in one shot, especially given time to nap while charging and the driver automation taking up the slack for being tired. I can then have a normal nights sleep and be fine.
My wife, on the other hand, being a passenger for such a trip, she arrives and then is wasted for 2 days.
But if you really want to be miserable on a trip... Take a train. My wife and son did that same trip by train a few years ago and: was delayed a solid day by flooding, lost power, had to suffer with malfunctioning toilets for part of the trip, and it cost more than flying or driving (counting hotels).
Am I? Because in another part of this thread we're talking about how terrible EVs are for long trips because they force you to stop so much for so long... Which is it, am I given adequate time to rest, making EVs unsuitable for long trips, or are EVs not terrible for long trips, wearing out the driver? :-)
Key word here is "probably'. I made multiple 16 hour almost non stop trips through Europe, and it's fine for me. LA to San Jose and back in one day, with useful activity in SJ (working in the data center servicing our colo hardware) is almost a monthly routine now, without the need to book a hotel overnight
but when they are caught exceeding the limits they are hit very hard (possibly including confiscation of the vehicle & cargo, as well as massive fines and possibly loss of drivers license). And that's good for everybody, the lorry drivers included, it gives them the expectations of a reasonable work day as well as the improved safety for everybody else and a level playing field. Fraud with these devices used to be rampant, it is getting a bit better now with the digital generation which is more tamper proof.
As someone who has driven across Canada on numerous occasions, it's a special kind of zen. I did BC to Newfoundland by myself, and 16-hour driving days were normal. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
It also depends on the car, for example, driving 750km with my GTI in a day would really tire me, as it is very uncomfortable. On the other hand, my father’s A8 is very, very comfortable, and I could drive it for 12 hours a day and not feel that tired.
If my math is correct, driving 1,725km in a Prius (assume 6L/100KM - which is fairly conservative) would cost about $135 CDN in fuel - (approx. $1.30 per litre).
Not much more than $120 spent on charging. For a car that is much less expensive than the Jaguar.
Environmental considerations aside, this is a tough sell for most consumers.
For most long trips are rare so if 90% of your miles are charged from home (for much less than the cost of gas) you’d prefer charging outside of home to be more easily available even if it comes out more expensive than gas for that particular trip.
Even if you set aside environmental considerations (which is mental) the gas is only a tiny portion of the value proposition of EVs. In 5 years of used leaf driving i've visited 0 gas stations, 0 repair shops, 0 emissions inspectors. It's the burden of all that mess that you get to avoid, not a just $0.15 on the dollar savings.
There’s this documentary I really enjoyed watching called “Long Way Up” where Ewan McGregor (plus another actor I was not familiar with) rode from Tierra del Fuego to Los Angeles on electric motorcycles.
They talk a lot about the pros/cons of going electric, and there are issues with like cold temperatures affecting battery performance at the start.
But I also found that I just really enjoyed the show even excluding that.
In the UK at least, I think the thing with electric cars isn't so much the price (leafs are pretty cheap-ish, seems like a perfectly good A->B car) but that you basically need land or a safe area to be able to charge them. That's what makes them a toy for the rich at the moment.
Yeah. If I had a car here in London, I'd keep it on the street (prefer to use the garage as a workshop). There's a public charging point within a minute's walk. However, the parking space it's next to isn't reserved for EVs and so there's always some non-electric car parked there, rendering the charger useless.
I suppose I could run a charging cable from the house onto the street (across the pavement), but that doesn't seem like an ideal long-term solution.
There's a process for an EV owner to ask the council to install a public charging point close to their house, but I've no idea how well that process works. And again, if they don't reserve the adjacent parking space for EVs, it'll likely also be quite useless.
People who are financing brand new cars are either wealthy enough or uneducated enough to not worry about a $40k+ MSRP.
I've frequently championed my Chevy Bolt. Caveat being the recent recall on the battery fires, but ignoring that...My 2017 Bolt, bought used with ~35k miles was ~$16k USD. 238 mile advertised range, 50kW "DC Fast Charging". My Bolt (and I believe all of the new ones) still have the pathetic 50kW "fast charging" which is pretty shortsighted, but I still think a used Bolt is the best entry into the EV world.
Another point I'd like to make is that even with the slow "fast charging" on some of these EVs, the use case of long road trips is very infrequent, and often biased online by users presenting their edge case commutes or 'frequent' roadtrips. According to https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips 95% of trips are < 30 miles.
I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it again.
By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US. I am increasingly finding that I don't even bother to plan the drives anymore or micromanage the charging-- this is a significant difference from when I first started doing >1k mile trips in the car 4 years ago.
I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.
> while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car
Is that you, Robert Dunn of Aging Wheels? (I don't think he owns either a Tesla or a Bolt, but he owns a lot of weird cars so I wouldn't be surprised, and you're aping his speaking style almost perfectly.)
The public charging tech is improving steadily. You might want to give the Bolt another try at fast-charging. Look for a high-power charger, like 200kW or higher.
> I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.
If it doesn't plug into a supercharger it's pretty much defective on arrival.
What would be best is if Tesla just went ahead and put a CCS inlet on their North American cars, like Tesla already does in Europe. The European Teslas are better cars purely because they support the open charging standard and can plug into more chargers with no need for an adapter.
Tesla's proprietary plug is a dead end. CCS Teslas in North America would gain access to an additional 4,566 charging locations with no need for an adapter:
Is anyone working on an active adapter to make a Supercharger think the device on the other end is a Tesla vehicle, so it'll put out a charge?
I have no idea how Superchargers work, but I assume there's some sort of active electronic handshake going on over some control pins to authorize power delivery — perhaps even something cryptographic, e.g. the "pump" and the car both having Tesla-signed TLS certificates and peer-verifying one-another.
If so, spoofing a Tesla might involve cloning a cert from a real Tesla vehicles, possibly from the car's TPM. Full-on DRM-breaking stuff. Stuff I would expect from the kind of teams that present at DEF CON.
Tesla are supposedly opening up their network soon, but that's not really the issue. Cars have a limit on how fast they can charge, and for a lot of more economic cars that's often quite slow.
The 2022 Nissan LEAF 40kW (149 mile) model can only charge at 50kW, the 60kW (226 mile) model pushes that to 100kW. The marketing says that's 45 minutes to 80% capacity. The 2022 Chevy Bolt is similar. If you are just commuting to and from work, then these cars are fine, but for a long trip you definately want an EV that can charge faster.
Sure, but a car isn’t the only thing you could potentially plug into a Supercharger. (That’s why I said “the device on the other end” rather than “the vehicle on the other end.”)
Maybe you just want to charge the gigantic custom-built battery bank you use for accessories power in your RV! Or maybe one that’s just a hacked Tesla Powerwall or five. (That’d be the “white-hat” use-case.)
Or perhaps a portable (towable) hydrogen generator, to fill bottles for hydrogen-powered cars. Still an “adapter”, technically, though doing it at the substation-level rather than the near-power-generation HVDC level is probably horribly inefficient and wasteful.
Or perhaps a mobile Bitcoin mining rig consisting of server racks installed in a air-conditioned shipping container on the back of a semi-truck…
Or the lighting and sound for a pop-up roadside rave event!
I just splurged and bought a very used Prius for $3,400, when my $400 car was stolen. I can't afford an EV. Many oriole can't. That dictate just ensures fewer people will be able to afford a car. Which might work with decent public transport.
It'll be interesting to see what the used car market for EVs looks like once they age out where the battery packs start degrading. Not sure they'll have the same long-term value that quality ICEs do today.
Median new car in the US is over 38k, give it time and plenty of cheap EV’s will be around. Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 base model Nissan Leaf: $32.6k.
Considering even with a Prius most people would still be paying ~1,000$/year on gas, old EV’s will likely be more affordable.
Once again, the "average" fallacy. In normal circumstances, the average is rarely the statistic you want to quote (and definitely not unless it is accompanied by standard deviation values). Median is the correct way to identify "the typical" [0].
You're in luck though. The median appears to be about $38k, so the difference in this case is not that great.
[0] there's the old joke about (Gates|Bezos|Musk|...) walks into a bar, and the bartender says "hey! thanks, on average we're all millionaires in here now!"
How about having the luxury to even park or charge your electric
car near your house or place of work? So often a very important factor forgotten by more well off EV drivers who are wondering why people still buy ICE cars
At least in the US, a significant majority of people live in single family homes. So home infrastructure is an issue, but at the current rates of adoption we have a ways to go before it becomes a hard limit.
And who knows, at the rates range and charging speeds have increased over the past few years, we might be pretty close to apartment dwellers being able to buy one and use it exactly like their ICEV -- charge it up once a week.
Reasonable numbers...if you can afford it. Saying $40k is "reasonable" depends on how much you earn. That is 20-25% more than US median annual gross income...it is a lot of money.
Also, most people who are unable to buy this kind of car aren't polluting a great deal anyway. A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes.
I have an ICE car, it cost something like $4k, it does 50+ mpg, I haven't taken a plane or boat in something like two decades, I do at most 5k miles in my car per year...sorry, I don't really think I should be forced to buy a car that costs 10x, probably pollutes about the same amount, and is only being suggested because some rich person had a "come to Jesus" moment (after polluting as much in a year as much as I do in a decade). It is the worst kind of puritanical grandstanding.
Average for a new car. A lot of people can't drive at all. A lot of people buy used cars. It is funny because I find it hard to imagine a wealthy person in my own country not being aware of this...in the US, the wealthy seem to live on another planet.
Okay, maybe. But lots of ICE manufacturers have 10-year warranties...they don't break down a lot. I also think that whilst a car is a "fun appliance" for some people, for most people it is how they earn money. They can't live closer to their work because property is too expensive. It is practical, it is how they feed their kids, not fun. Making everyone pay the luxury price because people without your "fun appliance" are morally inferior is...questionable.
> The median household income is somewhere north of $60k.
The median personal income is about $36K [0], so $40K is about 10% more. The median full-time worker is about $50K. [1] Households frequently have more than one earner.
Not sure where you get that. Just buy an SR+ without any options and it's 39.9k on the nose. Tax and fees not withstanding, so it'll be closer to 45k all said and done... but that's the same with any car price, it's pre-TTL pricing that people compare.
I leased a Bolt for about the same for 3 years, paid it up front for $6K (for the high mileage options; was closer to $5K for 12K mi/year). Bolts have routinely been available for this price, or outright sale for $23-25K after discounts & such. They're momentarily more expensive now because the refresh was just released, and the car market is currently insane.
I’ve done 1300km in two days in an EV comfortably along the east coast of Australia. ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving, charge overnight at the hotel, ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving and arrive at destination. Same in reverse. Cost was only charging at home to 100% before departing (under $10) at both ends. The supercharging was free. The autopilot makes a huge difference to driver fatigue, and keeps paying attention when you’re distracted by kids in the back (saving me from at least one accident). It really has made it more of a difficult choice between flying and driving across the major cities on the east coast of Australia. Going further west is possible, but will just take a bit more planning.
One could generalize Tim Bray's "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now." into "everyone should stop burning stuff ASAP". Burning stuff is the largest source of CO2 emissions.
The two largest sources of direct personal CO2 emissions are transportation and heating and/or cooling our homes.
For personal transportation, EVs are a great replacement for ICE. They allow you to stop burning fuel directly and instead buy electricity. They're improving really fast, to a degree they're getting usable even for 1000 mile trips. And they use less energy, about a third of an ICE.
For heating and cooling homes there's heat pump, which uses electricity to pump the heat either into the house when in heating mode or pumping heat out of home when in cooling mode. No more dealing with soot, ash, and chimneys, and they're so efficient that you get more heat if professionals burn gas in power plants to power your heat pump than you would get if you burned the gas directly.
Both these allow you to drastically reduce your direct CO2 footprint, also known as scope 1 emissions.
A lot of electricity is produced by burning stuff, that's where it makes sense to get solar panels to try to produce most of your consumption or at least offset your use. Those are a modern miracle - getting 20% of sun's energy into usable form is far better than photosynthesis, which gets few percent at most.
While Tim says "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles now", I acknowledge that it's logistically impossible to replace all the vehicles overnight. But the car market in the USA sells about 4 million of new cars every year, and those really should be electric if at all possible. Buying an ICE is essentially buying a 10-year subscription to fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.
I drove 2000 km in a single day, on a number of occasions, when I was younger. I don't see how anyone could do it in less than 3 days with this many charge stops.
I had no idea the range of electric cars was so short. I expected that they'd do better at cruising speed on the highways, because the mpg in my car goes up as I get up to 70 MPH. Apparently a Tesla Model 3 is only good for 289 miles at that speed before giving up the ghost.
13*40 --> 520 miles is what I'd expect to get out of our car.
Electric cars tend to be the opposite as far as highway vs city MPGs. Range at 80MPH is far worse than at lower speeds because of air resistance. On the other end of the spectrum, around town they do better because of regeneration capturing a lot of the stop and go that kills gas car range.
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [ ... ] There’s no excuse not to.
Admirable sentiments, but can anyone point definitively to the net gain/loss in CO2 terms of actually ditching a fossil fuel based car and replacing it with a new EV? And how does that look if the FF car is something like a Honda Fit (good mileage, lower than typical emissions)?
I'd be willing to dump our Fit for some sort of EV, but I'm really not convinced that it's helping climate change to do so.
> [EV and ICE vehicles were] comparatively
analyzed by dividing into five categories: raw material production, vehicle manufacture,
transportation, operation, and decommissioning. The analysis [...] revealed that electric vehicles have a markedly lower impact in
both categories, especially in regions with clean power sources like British Columbia. This
conclusion is reached after consideration of the higher environmental burdens of raw material
production and decommissioning inherent to electric vehicles. The significantly lower impacts
from the operation stage had the strongest effect on the results. Sensitivity analysis showed that
a longer lifespan shifted the efficiency balance further toward the electric vehicle.
That's great, but it's biased in several ways that make it not relevant to my lifestyle.
1. I'm never going to live in Vancouver, so my electricity is probably never going to be near as clean, even though it is relatively low carbon by US standards.
2. I'm never going to own a Ford Focus - my car gets much higher mileage, around 50 mpg, which is a big reduction in CO2. There are a few different options with similar mileage, too.
3. I'm never going to own a clown-car Mitsubishi EV; at present, I think the plausible choices are a Nissan Leaf, a Chevy Bolt, or a Kia/Hyundai (I forget the models). I don't know these would increase the CO2 from manufacturing a lot, but it wouldn't surprise me.
What is your car? It doesn't actually get 50mpg unless its a hybrid or you only drive it long distances on a freeway. If its a hybrid, it has all the environmental impact of having two complete power systems, the negative effects of a battery etc. If its not a hybrid, then you aren't getting 50mpg around town.
>If its a hybrid, it has all the environmental impact of having two complete power systems, the negative effects of a battery etc
No, it doesn't. This is a popular thing to say, but I wish people would think about it for a minute.
My car has a ~1.2 kWh battery. A Bolt or a Leaf has 40-60 kWh.
I don't understand why people don't get this. With a gas engine, you have 98% less battery. So you are not just adding complexity for super long trips. That's not the equation at all.
If batteries get better, it doesn't change the proportion of 50:1.
And batteries also become harder and harder to get perfect the larger they get. So there's no question in my mind of more chance of a defective one on an EV.
Carbon zero transportation is a two step process: electrify the transportation and green the electricity. They both have to be done, and they both take a long time. If each side waits for the other, neither gets done.
At current prices, renewables are the cheapest energy sources, any increased demand for energy will bias the electricity mix greener.
> If each side waits for the other, neither gets done.
But for it to get done, we essentially have to junk all current IC vehicles, and build replacements. My question was whether or not that actually puts us ahead CO2/climate-wise.
Vehicles are being replaced every year. Think of buying a new ICE car as a subscription to fossil fuels, as you can't easily make fuel for ICE engine from renewable energy.
The reverse is true - you can make electricity from fossil fuels, if really needed.
I interpret Tim Bray's "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now" as a conclusion, that EVs are usable enough for most personal transport needs and if buying a new car, make it an EV.
There seem to be several TV series that show people converting ICE cars to electric, the cost seems comparable to buying new electric cars but with a lot less environmental impact.
> The plug-in hybrid car also has an electric-only range of 25 miles in EV Mode
with an 8.8 kWh battery.
That gets us to 2.84 miles/kWh.
Going back to the lbs/kWh with a US average of 1.363 lbs/kWh that gives 2.84 miles / kWh * 1.363 lbs / kWh which gives us 2.084 miles/lb which is 217 grams per mile... and that's in the ballpark of the Primus value given on fueleconomy.gov
Lets assume that fueleconomy.gov is correct for the US average and use an adjustment of x0.72 to get the value.
Taking this to Wyoming and you've got to increase that number by 1.67x (just using the ratio of US average to Wyoming)
Prius at 158 * 1.67 brings it to 263 grams/mile in Wyoming... which is the same as the Honda Fit.
It would probably not be a great idea to destroy a perfectly fine ICE, though even that can in some cases be a win, if you drive very high mileage.
But that isn't the point. We should stop buying new ICE vehicles as soon as possible. So instead of buying a new ICE vehicle, which might be on the roads for another 10-15 years, rather drive your existing one a bit longer and then switch to an electric vehicle. Currently the manufacturing capacity wouldn't be high enough to go to 100% electric vehicles for new cars anyway.
Well, I didn't take it literally, because it literalyl isn't possible :). It will take some years until the car industry can supply all new cars needed, even at best effort.
At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked.
What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that.
At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert.
Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.