For most of my working career, biking to work saved time over driving.
For sure, it depends on your commute. I am lucky in that I commute at times with no significant traffic. And bicycling would be more dangerous than average since I would ride home in the dark. Any of these calculations should be taken with a grain of salt since they’re so dependent on your personal situation.
Actually, my one way commute is 40 miles and there are a couple charging stations available near work where I can charge my Volt and almost always avoid using the gas engine. Sometimes other electric cars are plugged in when I arrive and/or one or more charging stations are out of commission. I wouldn’t want to make a daily commute that depended upon charging at work.
I’d expect that someone with an electric car that doesn’t need to be plugged in every day would be more likely to forget to plug in when he needs to. It would be interesting to hear from owners of pure electric cars how much of a problem this really is.
I think a plug-in like the Volt is ideal because I don’t have leave a reserve charge on the battery “just in case”. So my range is truly 40 miles. More, the Volt is not limited to local driving. I’ve taken trips of hundreds of miles as well.
I drive a 85 kWh Tesla. My commute is short, 16-25 miles depending on if we take my car for lunch or not. I typically charge 2 times a week, even though I can easily go a week without charging.
I’ve had the car since January this year and range or forgetting to charge has never been an issue. I can charge for free at work, or at home. Whenever I get down below 150 miles of remaining range I plug it in at work. I could forget to do so for days and still not have a problem.
I found my previous car to be more annoying in that I had to stop somewhere for gas. If it was a 100F summer day or 20F winter day that wasn’t pleasant. Or if I was late for a meeting already and realized I needed to stop for gas on the way to work.
A BEV with a large battery is very easy to live with.
Have you had the Model S through the winter? I wonder how the cold weather affects the battery range, and how much power you need to warm up the passenger cabin. (One nice thing about IC engine cars is that they produce plenty of waste heat to keep the cabin warm in winter.)
Not that winter is harsh where I live (TX), but we did have a week of 20-30F weather. Range is reduced, of course. Mostly it’s a spike when starting out. The first few miles use a lot of energy to warm the cabin & battery. After that efficiency improves. I’d say it’s about 20% lower than ideal (after initial warm-up).
Best way to do it if you need to drive far is to turn on the heater while the car is still plugged in so it doesn’t take away from the range.
Thanks for the info. Also, the manufacturers normally don’t insulate the doors or roofs of their cars, but I suppose that an electric car manufacturer might want to do that.
That might just be because plug-in hybrids are more common than pure battery cars.
There was pretty well-reported incident last winter, where a test drive in the New York/New England area ended with the car running out of juice, because the cold weather drained the battery faster than expected, and consequently the car didn’t make it to the next charging station. So, yes, cold weather is a known problem with EVs.
Tesla’s response was basically to shoot the messenger, accusing him of sabotaging the test drive. It was basically just damage control on Tesla’s part, because the “offense” the test driver committed was that he deviated from the planned rout to avoid a traffic jam in NYC. But really, if the EV can’t handle a detour of a few miles, doesn’t that just reinforce the range anxiety problem?
It is interesting to do a comparison between an electric car with a range of 80 miles and the amount of gas used by a gasoline vehicle for that length of drive. My car gets almost precisely 30 mpg, and therefore would use just less than 2.7 gallons for that distance. So using an electric vehicle is just like having a regular car with a 2.7 gallon gas tank. Would never sell.
For many folks living in the city, that would be more than adequate.
Of course, since they are selling, there’s apparently more to the issue than that. One example: you might get a LOT of takers for that 2.7 gallon gas tank car, if part of the deal was that you could buy the gas for it at 3 cents a gallon.
It occurs to me that the logical solution for an extended trip would be the ability to turn a pure electric vehicle into a hybrid by towing a small generator trailer. If road rips are as infrequent as once a month or less, a light-weight gasoline generator an a plug-in point near the rear bumper would make the vehicle far more versatile.
Also, if you don’t have a vehicle capable of two commutes, then as mentioned the ability to plug in anywhere, (i.e. at work) would help. It’s not unlikely that as these vehicles become more popular plugins will become more available. I saw a hotel where they had a parking spot by the front, right next to the handicapped “reserved for electric vehicle charging”. (No, nobody parked there at the time)
Excellent point there, although you’re using hyperbole. I’d say a fairer comparison would be $1 per gallon. The fact is that it costs me roughly $1.50 to “fill up” my Mitsubishi i-Miev and then I can go 60 miles. The Nissan Leaf has a 50% bigger battery, so that one costs more like $2.25. If you live on the east coast it might be $3 to fill up a Leaf. Electricity is cheaper in the Pacific Northwest, partly because we get such a large fraction from hydroelectric.
If there was a gasoline car which had a 2.7-gallon tank, but it only cost $2 to fill it up, and the motor was really quiet, and it never had that stinky gasoline smell to it, and half the fuel was from renewable energy rather than fossil fuels, and it never needed an oil change, then yes I think lots of people would want to buy one.
Hey, I have an idea for a vehicle! It will use stink smelly gasoline, but it will only have a 2-gallon tank (some just 1 gallon, some 3 gallons, depending on which model you buy) and it will be LOUDER than a regular car, and it can only go about 100 miles before you run out of gas and it won’t even have a fuel gauge, so you have to guess how much fuel is left in the tank. I think I’ll call it… a motorcycle. Nahh, no one would ever buy one of those.
My Honda CX500 motorcycle got about 120 miles on a tank. I look at some of the Harleys with huge engines and tiny tanks, and they can’t have much of a range (I think one guy mentioned 90 miles). Going cross country, distance to the next gas station and when to refill was always foremost on my mind. Even commuting, sometime it was a concern.
The big difference is what it takes to refill an electric vs. a gas vehicle. The latter, you can bring a backet of whatever and pour it in, or siphon from an unwitting donor.
Sorry, yes, I meant 3 cents per mile, which is the usual quoted figure for electric cars.
I think you’re talking about John Broder @ NY times? He has a long history of anti-EV articles and he wanted a picture of a Tesla on a tow truck so he set out to run the battery down.
He didn’t know Tesla turns on telemetry on press cars. Tesla couldn’t figure out how he could run out of battery on the the way to the SuperCharger he was headed. It was an easy drive, well within range.
Telemetry showed he set cabin temp to 80F in the middle of winter, drove well above the speed limit and took detours “to avoid traffic”. When the battery still had juice after that he found a big parking lot and drove in circles until the car stopped.
Well it is a big difference. My plug-in hybrid refill is mostly a 5 second process of pluging it in each night and unplugging in the morning … until I’ve had to use the ICE enough that I need to go to the gas station. That OTOH is a lot more time consuming. I absolutely LOVE the fact that I now do that only a few times a year (unless taking a road trip, then once every 500 to 600 miles).
A 2.7 gallon tank that I needed to go to the gas station to fill each time, every day? Hell I disliked the 12 to 15 gallon fill-up interval. The few seconds habit of plugging in every day? Not quite the same thing. I value my time.
Early going back to the 1920’s? I think they were all electric. Or just back to the 70’s? a neighbor had one when I was younger, it was a little bigger than the average golf cart. It had no gas tank, It would take him 12 miles to work in half an hour. got clear up to 35 miles an hour. He’d plug it in at the office so it would be charged enuff to get him home, barely more than a toy.
Or else get a real long cord!!!