I’m getting the impression that large parts of Canada are suitable only for dogsleds nine months out of the year.
It’s not a diesel, you don’t have to wait for the glow plugs to heat up. Get in and start driving. I’ll leave my EV in the cold all day when I’m at work, skiing, or whatever, and I just drive it when I need to. The power the battery can produce, how low the battery can be drained, and how quickly the battery can be charged are all changed by the cold, but in daily life it doesn’t matter at all.
Doesn’t mean it has to. My mobile charger can draw 32 amps, but it only draws 24, because that’s all the circuit supports.
Again, can take 100kWh of charge, is not the same as must take 100kWh every night. First, people will plug in long before the battery is close to 0, and they don’t need to fill it until full. This only matters if somebody plans to completely drain the battery at a faster rate than they can fill it by charging at home. If you can only add 40% of charge overnight, then over the course of a week that may look like 20-60, 18-58, 30-70, 40-80.
If you have a need of 100kWh everyday then perhaps an EV isn’t right yet. On the other hand, if you’ll be using that much fuel, then the cost to upgrade to a charger that can output 100kWh in 8 hours might be worth it.
In 2016, 12.6 million Canadians reported that they commuted to work by car. For these commuters, the average duration of the commute was 24 minutes, and the median distance to work among those who had a usual workplace was 8.7 kilometres
This means about 20km round trip for the 12.6 million car commuters. A 15 amp circuit 120v plug will give you about 5km range for every hour of charging. So a 4 hour charge per night would keep you topped up for your commute. Another 4 hours would give you more. A level 2 charger (220v, 40 amp like for your dryer) will give you approx 50 km of range per hour. So this would be a good option for those who drive well above the average commute.
And of course there are outliers. There will need to be exceptions made.
And of course there is an election coming up in Canada shortly. If the Conservatives get in (which is somewhat expected), then P. Poilievre will have these rules rolled back faster than you can blink. In fact, oil producers are already waiting for the next election before doing anything about new emissions rules.
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The oil industry is well adept at "stall, stall, stall, obfuscate, ignore, etc.
I thought we were talking about PHEVs, and how you aren’t getting that 30 miles of battery range in Canada in winter, and how if the battery is ice cold you are going to be running the engine anyway.
It depends on the vehicle, but many plug-in hybrids simply run the engine full time when it’s cold. Some will always run the engine if you turn on the heat or AC. Some run the engine all the time below certain temps to keep the catalytic converter warm.
I never said any such thing. I DID point out that level 1 charging in a Lightning will only charge at a maximum rate of 2 miles per hour (in winter, 1-2 depending). It will be less if some of the power has to be used to keep the battery warm.
And you completely neglected the point about the job site. Most working trucks do not spend their daytime near charging infrastructure. When the carpenter shows up at our olace for an 8 hour job, he’s not plugging in his truck. If he’s working in a new subdivision he’s sure as hell not plugging in his truck, because there’s no power. Or if he’s working on the farm, or at a refinery upgrader or shutdown, or in many other places.
In winter, about the only thing level 1 charging is good for in a truck with a huge battery is preheating the battery.
I just took my kid to the train, and took the opportunity to drive around the block counting trucks. Just around my block there are 24 trucks parked on pads or on the street. There wasn’t a single power cord going to any of them. Most of them were newish F-150s or Silverado 1500’s. A couple of F-350s.
My guess is that the 24% number for trucks is skewed by the GTA and the need for fewer trucks in a congested urban area. Out here in the prairie provinces, light trucks are everywhere.
In Saskatchewan 36% of all vehicles on the road are light trucks. Alberta is probably a little less because of our big cities.
Another problem with big battery vehicls in Canada is that our charging infrastructure is weak for fast charging. I have heard that from Edmonton you will not find a fast DC charger anywhere along the road to Jasper, Banff, Drumheller, Fort McMurray, Cold Lake, etc. Red Deer has a 150KW DC fast charger installation. Currently in the Edmonton area there are only 32 fast chargers serviing a population of about a million people. 87% of all the chargers in our city are level 2.
That’s fine for most passenger cars, but a level 2 charger will take a long time to charge a large truck battery.
Most people using their trucks aren’t going to the same location all the time. They do a contract and move on. In the oil patch the work is remote and not near the kind of infrastructure that would be required to allow 50 or 100 trucks to charge at 50KW or more. Most of these sites run on generatoers, and have no access to grid power.
Bringing DC fast charging to work sites is pretty much a non-starter. Maybe head office.
A Leaf can be charged enough for city commuting with a level 1 charger. We are specifically talking about trucks here. Go ahead and plug your Lightning into your 110V block heater cord. Get back to me when you have enough charge to drive to work and back in winter. About all that cord is good for in a big truck is keeping the battery warm. Which helps, but it doesn’t charge the truck much.
Also, bear in mind that in winter it can get to -30 here easily, and in that temperature your battery will start to cool down the ninute you shut it off, and even if you are only gone for half an hour expect to lose some range as your truck has to re-heat the battery to the optimum temperature.
Oh, the Ford level 2 charger is only certified to -22. I just read a story about a guy whose truck did not charge overnight because his charger failed. He had to disconnect it from the wall and bring it into the house to warm it up before it would charge the truck.
One test I saw, a guy left his Lightning outside overnight in -20 weather, next to a fast charger. In the morning, the truck would not take a charge, because the battery was too cold. The charger went into battery heat mode, and the guy had to sit there for something like half an hour to an hour before the truck would even START to take a charge. And then it charged at a very low rate until the battery was warm enough to enable fast charging.
Why? I have an electric stove, electric dryer, and central air, and can operate all three of these 220v appliances simultaneously. Even if an EV charger means I can only run two out of the three while the vehicle is charging, I can live with that. What I can’t live with is climate change and gas prices.
Would you like some personal anecdotes?
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My brother was a mechanical insulator. He drove an F-350 because he worked on remote job sites, and had his own 5th wheel RV to live in. Otherwise, a bedroom in a shared home could be $2,000/mo. He lived in Redwater, and routinely had to drive to Fort MacMurray, 430 km away. He also often hauled things like generators, compressors, etc. He had one of those big red box-spanning snap-on toolboxes permanently installed in the bed of the truck.
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My nephew is a foreman for a construction company. He has a Silverado 1500. His days are often spent driving from job site to job site, bringing materials and tools to workers, dropping off and picking up workers, etc. I don’t think he tows anything, but the bed of his truck is often loaded.
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All farmers have pickup trucks, and I guarantee you they are putting stuff in the bed, towing things, and in general using their trucks as trucks. Alberta and Saskatchewan have a LOT of farmers.
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One of the reasons there are so many pickup trucks on my block is because in summer the block also fills up with RVs and boats on trailers. Pickup trucks are used for towing a LOT.
Are there some idiots who buy huge trucks to commute to work in the city? Sure, but not many. Go look in any office parking lot and count the trucks. There might be a handful, but there won’t be many. And those guys may be driving trucks because they need them for other things. Hunting, towing an RV, whatever.
At least in Alberta, most pickup trucks are used as trucks at least part of the time. I can’t speak for the denizens of the GTA.
How big is your service? I have the same setup (air, stove, dryer). I looked into getting an EV charger, and was told that I would have to have a service upgrade before I added anything more. That, or I could have a sub-panel installed, and an ‘energy miser’ to control it.
We couldn’t even install a hot tub without an energy miser/subpanel. And given the load already on our 100A service, The charger would still have to be quite current limited when running, at least until we’ve shut everything else down around midnight.
Clearly, you aren’t going to run an 80A charger on a 100A service that’s also powering a house. So best case is you’ll be throttling the charger down, and increasing your charge times accordingly.
Check with an electrician.
Clearly, you aren’t going to run an 80A charger, period. The Tesla home Wall Connector can be installed with charge outputs between 12 and 48 amps. The lower end of that range is less amperage than my hair dryer or plug-in portable electric heater.
I’m not sure I understand the premise of this thread… It looks like the argument is “The free market is failing horribly, therefore we need to rely on the free market”. Except that argument doesn’t make any sense.
It’s possible to make a profit on electric vehicles. The old-fashioned automakers don’t know how, because they’ve never had an incentive to figure it out. So the way to get electric vehicles is to give them that incentive.
And maybe not all of them will figure it out. That’s fine. The ones that can’t figure it out will go out of business, and the ones that can will take over their market share. That’s the free market for you.
Who runs an 80 amp charger at home? Seriously, I’ve never heard of anyone pulling more than 50 amps at home to charge their car, and that’s high.
A 24 amp charger on a 30 amp circuit (you are supposed to give them some heads room) adds about 18 miles per hour. (29km). Plug in your car overnight, and you have more than 200 miles in the battery. If you are driving more than 200 miles daily, on a regular basis,
- you are an outlier
- you should stick with gas for now
I have had jobs where I was commuting 100-150km and driving twice that. I looked into getting a Tesla way back then. In addition to a paucity of charging stations, there was the question of Canadian winters. So I got something else.
Canada makes virtuous pronouncements and sets (more often than meets) ambitious future goals. If people love driving hybrid and electric vehicles, they save money and are environmentally better - this is a win. But only if long commuters have options. And if prices aren’t considerably higher just through the act of making things mandatory.
I don’t knock the happy thoughts. If the technology improves accordingly. I see this as a mixed bag. Things people love can survive through markets rather than subsidies, but it is also true some nudges are helpful. Is this a step in the right direction? Maybe. Does a lot of other stuff need to happen? Sure.
There’s nothing ‘free market’ about a government picking and choosing technologies then mandating hard dates for markets to adopt and implement that technology.
Why don’t we just mandate that there can be no fossil fuels used anywhere at all by 2035? Sure, some people will be inconvenienced, and some huge companies might go out of business and a lot of lives destroyed. But hey, you’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omellette, amirite?
I predict a whole bunch of turmoil and complaining, and the date will eventually be pushed back, again and again. That is, if Trudeau stays in power, which is really unlikely. If he doesn’t, I predict the next government will kill this mandate with fire. As they should.
Oh for Pete’s sake! You said that low-range PHEV’s would be useless in cold weather because they’d have no range starting the day with a cold battery. All I did was respond that that specific point is false because anywhere that routinely gets really cold people have access to 120V power for block heaters already and so can easily have level 1 charging overnight and hence warm batteries.
Instead of conceding that specific point, you go off on this tangent about full-size EV pickups and construction sites. What relevance does that have wrt low-range PHEV’s morning battery state?
Specifically with regards to looking power cords running to vehicles today, it’s freaking 0C in Edmonton today! Why would anyone be plugged in? Are you going to tell me that in a -35C cold snap those people don’t have ways to plug in their block heaters? I live in an old neighbourhood where almost no one has driveways, and I’d say a small majority of people park in garages or open parking spots off the back alley, which make plugging in easy, and many of the rest string cords to the curb (frequently overhead, from their eaves to wrapped around one of the big elms along the street so they aren’t creating tripping hazards). And of course some just don’t bother, because modern cars start a lot better in cold weather than the carburated vehicles of our youth. But that’s the worst case. In neighbourhoods less than 50-60 years old the lion’s share of houses have driveways. Of course, you know all these things.
Seems to assume that the next government will reflect your particular ideology WRT fossil fuels.
A LEAF charges at the same rate as a Lightning on a level 1 charger. You know this. The average commute in Canada is 8.7 km. I cited this above. Please stop posting inaccuracies.
Are you trying to say that most job sites are at places without electricity? Most?
Once again, threads like this devolve into silly exaggerated claims with no backup.
It’s like playing whack-a-mole.
And these things and others have been explained to him over and over and over in many previous threads, but the same silly points just keep popping up like bad weeds.
The free market is made up of folks responding to incentives. In order to use the free market, those incentives have to come from somewhere. It doesn’t just happen automatically.
Because that’s not an achievable goal. But this is.
No I would not. We don’t build public policy on personal anecdotes and edge cases.
Jesus.
I said that 120v power would be useful for keeping the battery warm, and that’s important. But level 1 charging in the best case would add maybe 15-20 miles of range to a Lightning overnight. In winter, it will be less. And since the truck is less efficient in using that charge, that 15-20 miles of charge might translate into 7-10 miles of real world range. I hope your commute is short.
If you have the PHEV Ramcharger, it’s not much better (94 kWh battery vs 113 to 133 kWh for the Lightning). Of course, the Ramcharger can also,just charge off the engine, so overnight range gain isn’t as critical. Less charging just means more gas use, not being stuck on the side of the road in -30 weather.
But we are all over the place here, with simultaneous conversations about EV trucks, PHEV trucks, and standard PHEV vehicles. So we are probably talking past each other a bit.
Let me sum up my points:
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A BEV truck is severely compromised in Canada, and will never be able to replace gas trucks for many truck owners. Therefore:
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In Canada, we are going to yave to heavily lean on plug-in hybrids for trucks. They’ll work, but they are nowhere near ‘zero emissions’, especially in winter. If they want to call them that and allow their use, I’m okay with that. At least it’s more realistic.
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In winter, any PHEV is going to struggle with battery-only performance. That 30 miles of battery-only range will likely be zero if you need cabin heat or the battery is cold, or both. Some PHEVs heat the battery with engine heat, so in cold weather the engine has to run. And the catalytic converter has to stay hot, so the engine may run just for that.
I like PHEVs, especially series hybrids. I think they are a big part of the future for Canada’s transition to higher efficiency transportation. But I don’t like hand-waving away potential issues because I want political support. I hate happy talk that ignores issues no one wants to address. So I can support something and offer criticisms of it at the same time. Burying our heads in the sand for political reasons is really not the way to go, and it leads to a lot of terrible decision-making.
You said
Which I quoted in my first reply, before you went moving the goalposts with full-sized pickups and construction sites.