It’s become a verb to Tesla owners.
Here’s Tesla’s side of the story.
Except they are not, or at least not by much. Culmative sales to June in the US is about 110K BEV to about 136 PHEV. And that counts the Prius plug-in lite (really a stretch as it only goes 6 miles all-electric and is designed to mostly operate in a blended mode); it accounts fro 34K of the total PHEV US culmative sales.
In any case the point was about the behavior of individual drivers. As illustrated in this thread, a Tesla owner won’t even bother plugging in at home every day; (s)he has enough to battery range not bother with it. My C-Max battery will handle my usual daily commute but an extra run out for a morning meeting or to do more than local errands will get me using the ICE. I don’t like using my ICE. Using the ICE means I’ll have to eventually waste some time going to a gas station. So I will plug in those days when out if I have a chance to do so.
Huh, I didn’t realize that the numbers were so close.
Yep - and that tank has to be filled with an eyedropper, taking all night for the process.
Stranger, you are dangerously misinformed on this point. What you are saying is technically true but irrelevant from an engineering perspective. The rate which you can charge a battery is related to the area of the anode and cathode. This is why battery technologies that create anodes and cathodes with enormous surface areas (through various forms of nano structuring) have recharge times measured in minutes.
You’ve been able to buy commercial lithium cells that can recharge in 3-10 minutes for years now. A123 systems released them more than 5 years ago.
These type of batteries have their own drawbacks, such as lower energy density (if you have bigger anode/cathodes, there’s less mass for the electrolyte) and high cost. That’s why they are not currently being used in EVs.
Integrating it into an electric vehicle is a significant engineering challenge. At such a rapid rate of charge, each cell in the battery releases significant waste heat that has to be pumped away during the charging process. You would need very large and heavy conductors to handle the current. The actual physical cable and connector might be embarrassingly large, and there’s other related issues.
What you’re saying is true - batteries that can charge this fast can also discharge at similar rates. This can be bad if you get a short circuit. However, it doesn’t mean you can’t draw on your battery pack at a slower rate of discharge to drive an EV.
Fuel cells have their own drawbacks and currently are much more expensive than batteries. The only thing holding EVs back from essentially taking over the market for passenger vehicles is the cost of manufacture of the actual batteries. (the cost of the raw materials for some chemistries is pennies on the dollar)
No, it doesn’t HAVE to take all night. There are three options.
#1 Plug into a regular 110V outlet, takes several hours (overnight is good, especially since that’s the time when there’s excess capacity in our power grid anyway).
#2 Plug into a 220V outlet, goes roughly 3x faster, takes a few hours (overnight still works great here if you have a 220V outlet in your garage).
#3 Plug into a 400V “fast” charger, gives you an 80% charge in only 20 minutes.
But even if you choose option #1, it’s still not like using an eyedropper because you’re implying that someone has to stand there and squeeze the little bulb all night. That’s not true. You spend 10 seconds plugging it in a 6pm, set it and forget it, and then the next morning you spend 10 seconds unplugging it before you drive away. Total time requiring human interaction is only 20 seconds.
In fact, the amount of actual human interaction time spent charging the car for a year is almost certainly less than a couple trips to a gas station. That’s actually the biggest draw of these vehicle for me – no more trips to the gas station in bad weather and inconvenient locations.
There are inherent physical and economic reasons why rapid charging is not the answer to the range limitations on electric cars.
Let’s take a Tesla style Supercharging station, 400V 300A, can give you ~100 miles of range in 20 minutes. Assuming 4 cars charging at a time, and absolute balls to the wall throughput, it can deliver $60 of electricity per hour. If you’re lucky, you can earn maybe $20/hr profit selling that electricity. That’s the absolute maximum hourly profit you can earn, and the things cost $250k to build.
There’s no way to make money charging electric cars. You can’t sell enough product when someone is hooked up. People can recharge more cheaply at home. When ranges get long enough, fewer and fewer people would need to recharge at a roadside place at all. At best it’s a short term niche service populated by players like Tesla who are using it as a loss leader to keep their cars interesting to buyers.
So my suggestion for swappable battery modules didn’t win instant total support, eh? I might quibble with some of the specifics, like Stranger’s assertion that the swap facility would need “hundreds or thousands of battery packs…” If the standardized pack could be given a full charge in 20 minutes, as the FastCharge systems seem able to do, then the facility only needs enough modules to serve the next 20 or 30 minutes’ worth of customers. Depleted ones come in, are put on charge, and are ready to go again in half an hour. How many customers come through a traditional “filling station” in half an hour? That is the total number needed on site (with perhaps some allowance for rush hour, or high volume/low volume locations). Not an intractable problem at all.
Safety concerns, while different in detail, can’t be much greater than traditional filling stations, either. Having thousands of gallons of highly flammable petroleum distillates, pumps, hoses, electrical appliances, masses of moving cars, hordes of untrained humans of all ages involved in the process, I’m frankly amazed that gas station tragedies don’t kill hundreds of people every day! ;)
So I’m not convinced that a standardized battery module, incorporated industry-wide across multiple manufacturers, designed for easy automated removal/replacement as a plug in/out device [I’m envisioning perhaps a pit, in which lurks a mechanical arm capable of ‘reading’ markers built into the car and the module for alignment purposes, reaching up from under the car to remove it, swing it out into an alcove or conveyor belt, pick up a replacement and slide it up onto contacts and locking points], deliberately serving as only a portion of the total battery pack thus allowing the rest of the batteries to be placed wherever in the car the manufacturer chooses to fulfil other design criteria (weight distribution, etc) is necessarily a certain failure.
I still believe that public resistance largely revolves around that “freedom” issue – free to drive across the country if I want to, cause ‘Muricah! or something. People can know, in the front of their brain, that the e-car makes perfect sense for everything except an annual cross-country vacation. And can know that they could economically rent a gas burner for the annual event and actually save money. But people don’t wanna. What they wanna instead is to drive their same car, the one they’re used to, with seats already adjusted, mirrors where I left them, wipers, signals, and every other control all familiar and committed to muscle memory. Buying a car that can’t go along on vacation is almost a personal affront. They’re willing to make some concessions to trip planning, like maybe motel reservations and a travel itinerary, but they’re just not willing to also part with their familiar vehicle and get into a (shudder) rental car. So I see battery modules as a means toward that end, and a way of making e-cars more palatable in this psychological game. But maybe there’s another way?
If, again, the problem is the infrequent trip that exceeds battery range, is there another way of extending range with an on-board enhancement other than a battery? One that could be perhaps rented for that vacation trip, allowing us the freedom to have our own car and drive it too?
Hybrids already do this, having an on-board generator that will keep the car going as long as gasoline for it is available. So perhaps what battery cars need is a portable generator package. Hang it on the bumper or pull it on a little trailer, plug it full time into the car’s charge port, and – independence!! Make the battery car into a hybrid, for the duration of the trip. I’ve got some great little generators around here, put out quite a few watts in a tiny package. Weigh no more than a big bag of groceries. Something like that, with a gas tank that can keep it running for at least 5 or 6 hours, and you should have enough electricity to maintain your charge level during a drive. Plug in at night at the hotel, and you should have no problem driving all day tomorrow without running out of electrical juice.
Enhance mass appeal, sell more e-cars, prices come down quicker and farther, and everybody profits!
Another issue with widespread rapid charging is providing the power that fast. Drawing that much power from the grid that fast is a strain on the system, especially if the charging is done closer to peak rather than trough hours. Which is of course when rapid charging is more likely to have the most utility.
OTOH one can envision having a vehicle promised to be fully charged at a particular time and between then and plug-in time being able to be used as part of a local buffer for the grid, allowing brief spikes in demand and surpluses in production relative to demand to be leveled out. This vehicle to grid (V2G) functionality would have real value if there wa a reliable/predictible mass of vehicles attached and if the electricity was priced such that the slight additional wear on the battery was worth it to the consumer.
For now the value of (free) public chargers is to the brick and mortar stores. Strangely enough the population that has plug-ins (both PHEVs and BEVs) are people who are willing to spend money on cool stuff even at a price premium, customers stores want, and at the same time will preferentially choose to patronize a place that offers them a few pennies worth of electricity for free. Go figure.
Of course longer term autonomous vehicles may change that calculus again. A fleet of EVs can plugged in at all times when not in use. The request to the system for a vehicle can include the location to and from with the vehicle dispatched that has charge a bit more than safely adequate to handle at least that distance and in between times the vehicles can be used in V2G fashion. Conveniently urban areas would be most likely to have the densest coverage with cars to be used in this fashion and the have the circumstance in which a V2G service would have the most use to a utility (including charging to full overnight during trough hours and providing some of that energy back to the grid during peak hours).
No question a pure BEV is not the best choice for long road trips, even for a Tesla and a trip that has superchargers along the way. If long distance driving is a very frequent thing you do then a hybrid is a better choice (or diesel but most diesels are just at too much of a price premium right now IMHO, when I’ve crunched the numbers they take way too many years to pay for themselves).
But for those who will realistically not need to drive outside a BEVs range, and for those of us whose typical commute is typically mostly if not completely covered by a PHEV’s range, a plug-in of one sort or the other is a great choice. And again I LOVE the time saving aspect of it. Yes, it is MY time that matters to me, not the car’s time.
Again, I am sold on the value of a PHEV in which I do not have much more battery than I will need on most days but have the capacity to travel as far as I need to when I want to. Simple fact is that these cars get little wear. My ICE is a little used item and my car is likely to last me much longer than the battery will. I figure the odds are the battery will crap out sometime before the car is otherwise worn out. Once past the warranty it doesn’t much matter to me if it is at year 9 or year 15 … if the car otherwise still has 5 plus (and no reason to believe these cars otherwise cannot last beyond 20 years with their few moving parts getting fairly little use) I will likely need to replace a battery pack once. Better that the pack is no bigger than the size that I actually use each day. IMHO.
Yes, Destroy. The High Pressure Fuel Pump for the 2009-2010 TDI has a less than 1% chance of failing, sending metal parts throughout the fuel system. The cost of repair has been anywhere from 7.5k to 11k, so 10k is a good estimate.
The theory is that there is a bad batch of fuel pumps, and/or any amount of gasoline will lead to the failure.
The problem seems to be isolated to those model years, I hope.
Read all about it here…
I’d argue that for many people it is. How much time do you really lose driving a Tesla along a supercharger route? 20 minutes of charging gives you ~150 miles.
Now look at a typical Tesla road trip day:
You pick a hotel with a charger so you start out the day with 3.5-4 hours of driving. It’s now lunch time so you hook it to a supercharger and have lunch. Take it a little easy and the car will be fully charged after lunch (~1 hour). Another 3.5-4 hours of driving. 20 min stop at a supercharger to take a leak and have a cup of coffee. Do it one more time and it’s time to check into a hotel.
So you covered over 800 miles and “wasted” ~30 minutes or so (2x 20 minutes vs 1x 10 minute leg stretcher/fuel stop).
800 miles at 35 mpg = 22 gallons = $75.
Saving $75 drinking coffee for 30 minutes is a pretty sweet deal.
It is possible to arrange your day around charging and have it work, yes. Lunch is where the charging station is and is when you get there. And you will have that hour lunch at that location. I’d rather not be forced to spend an hour lunch at a roadside food joint and certainly don’t usually on road trips. It is either a quick bite or snacks in the car until dinner or we get off the road and find a real place to eat. The next charge is not necessarily at 3.5 to 4 hours unless a charger is located in that 30 minute driving spread or less. Otherwise you stop earlier. Switching off drivers and driving more straight through a 15 to 18 hour drive, not an option.
Don’t get me wrong - I lust for a Tesla. Dang what a vehicle! It blows away other cars in so many categories, from power machine to functioning as a minivan with style and so many points in between. It can so much so well.
But trying to sell it as a car for road trips or a car that is a frugal choice because of the gas you save? Not. You can adapt your trip to the limitations of the vehicle for a specific supercharger located road trip but there is no question that doing such is not a best choice compared to multiple other options.
3,300 miles in 67 hours in a Tesla Model S:
Almost 1,200 miles/day. How much faster can you do it in an ICE? Is whatever time savings worth the $120-$200 a day in gas you’ll spend?
I agree that buying a Model S just to save gas money doesn’t make sense. But the supercharger network is being built for the Model III also. A $35K BEV that can go cross country for free on superchargers . Now that makes a lot of sense.
3300 miles in 67 hours is about 49 mph. Driving an ICE averaging 70 would take 47 hours.
Either they drove slowly to extend the range or they spent a lot of time hanging out at charging stations.
You can drive 70 mph for 47 hours straight? Never hitting traffic, never stopping for any reason?
Realistically you’d probably need about 55-60 hours to do it in an ICE.
According to the article, almost 20% faster. Out of the 67 hours, they spent over 14 hours hooked up to a charger.
Free electricity is a gimmick, it’s not the future of battery powered vehicles. As mentioned over and over the vast majority of one’s driving is going to be home charged, so you only see these savings on the handful of long trips you make each year. It doesn’t really make sense to pay a $10k premium to save $400 on gas twice a year.
Some of that 14 hours you would have been stopped in the ICE as well. Fuel/bathroom/food.
You’ll spend much less on electricity even when paying for it compared to gas. The $10k will not take that long to get back. The BEV is also a much nicer car to drive. And I say that as a life-long gear head.
Have you actually done the calculations zwede? Depends on your definition of “not long”.
The Tesla costs, according to fueleconomy.gov, about $700 a year in electricity to drive 15K. The Leaf about $500. Neither quite makes up a 10K differential in 5 years assuming, as fueleconomy.gov does, the average car’s 23 mpg and current gas costs. The Leaf gets closer at saving $8250 over 5 years. Of course add in no oil changes and fewer brake pad changes but add back in some unknown amount for the possible battery replacement once sometime along the way (again, other than the battery these cars should last at least 20 years and no one expects the battery to last that long … 12 years maybe, maybe even 14, but not 20).
So lots depends on how big that battery is and how you handle the potential likely one time replacement cost at some point in the vehicle’s expected lifetime. Most consumers however don’t think even as far as five year total cost of ownership. Gas has to lots higher or the premium for a BEV lots less than 10K before the dollars saved argument will hold much sway.
Agreed an electric vehicle is a much nicer car to drive … and a Tesla … dayum. Just not for road trips. 
Actually I have driven coast to coast averaging 75mph while moving. Taking into accounts gas stops my average would still be over 70mph.
Give me a second driver and non stop is easily accomplished.