People buy their vehicles with the 1% use like the 5 hour road trip in mind. The cost of renting a car is high enough that it is cheaper just buy the one you need for everything. That is before you realize that sometimes who show up to pick up your rental car and they don't have anything.
Yup. My parents bought a Jeep Cherokee back in the day as the family car rather than something like a Ford Taurus just so they could drive on the beach. That probably only happened a few days a year, but they were beloved outings and made the Jeep worthwhile to them. You could say that it would make more sense to drive a more economical car for most of the year and only rent a Jeep for the beach excursions, but how realistic is that? Most rental car places won’t guarantee much in terms of what sort of vehicle you’ll get. And most forbid offroad driving. It makes sense to a lot of people to buy vehicles for the 1% case if that 1% case is something they really value.
If every couple had one EV truck for heavy lifting and a small ICE hatchback for long distances, we’d reduce our emissions and our gas bills massively.
Most people don’t have to pick an everything vehicle. We all benefit when we focus on maximizing our division of labor.
> If every couple had one EV truck for heavy lifting and a small ICE hatchback for long distances
Maybe it's because I'm a dad but I can't imagine telling the family, "Roadtrip time! Let's all pack into the smaller car!". When we're taking the long family road trip to the beach or whatever, we always end up with the big car full of boogie boards and pool toys and cooler and beach umbrella, etc. Bigger cars with longer wheelbases tend to be more comfortable on the highway as well.
The folks I know who do the ICE/EV split household like you've mentioned tend to do the opposite. Dad has a small EV for a cheap and easy commute to work and Mom has an ICE (or hybrid) SUV or minivan that gets used for the long road trips as well as daily errands (but Mom doesn't rack up enough miles for the cost of gas to be much of a worry). There also seems to be less willingness from women (at least in the US) to make the switch to full EVs.
Yea, I just think that's a luxury for folks who have plenty of money. When you're basing your use case on 1% of use, then you're buying a luxury car, but pretending it's practical.
A practical plan is a diversion of labor that maximizes the best and most frequent use cases.
That is how most of the middle class in the US works. Now granted the US middle class is well off by world standards but they don't consider it luxury they consider it normal.
No, because the family is going to have two cars anyway.
Once we're at the point where a single vehicle and, say, an ebike are acceptable transit options, then America will have already exceeded it's climate goals. To achieve that, we'd likely need density near that of San Francisco (about 1.10 vehicles per household) or Chicago (about 1.12). Even bike friendly cities that are fairly dense, like Portland, have about 1.5 cars per household.
Again, though, the savings from that would be exceedingly obvious for anyone who chooses this path.
The weighing though is "and extra hour per 5 hours driven, cost of a rental, savings using an EV (time and money) the other 99% of the time".
For example, my boss, who has a 1.5 hour driving commute, refuses to get an EV because he drives a 750mi road trip once a year. In order to avoid spending an extra 3 hours for this road trip, he shoulders all the additional gas costs (and many more than 3 hours spent driving to and sitting at gas stations annually) and then service costs of owning a gas car on top.
The guy is trading $2500+ a year and 20 hours a year fueling, to save 3 hrs on a single road trip. Totally illogical.
Now that I've had an EV for a few years, I don't even think it's saving 3 hours. My lunch stop on a road trip is almost never shorter than my charging session; I usually have to hurry out to get back to the car.
And with lots and lots of typical road trip hotels (your Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn Express) now with L2 chargers, there's even a good chance that my only charge for the day is the lunch charge, and overnight I fill up for free. A few years ago they'd sometimes be broken, or there'd only be two, or whatever, but it's just steadily getting better.
It is a reasonable bet that your boss has a "wife" who is also driving a car every day. Which is to say they could have an EV for the closer trips and whoever really is doing the long trip that day can get the gas car. Or a PHEV works well in this situation, my wife has that and it saves more than $200/month in gas since we now only fill 1/month.
