The advantages are obvious to anyone that’s actually driven an EV, but ultimately there’s only one reason that matters: we have to move away from fossil fuels to limit the amount of damage we’re doing to the planet and human civilization.
There really aren’t that many alternatives. Hydrogen fuel cells appear to be inferior to EVs on pretty much every dimension. Biofuels are even worse.
In a way, we got lucky that EVs are so fantastic, because everything else pretty much sucks. Green energy producers like solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and nuclear produce electricity, not chemical fuel. That makes for a good pairing between them and EVs.
Batteries still aren’t good enough for most air travel, so we should save the planet’s limited carbon budget for that, instead of ground transportation where there is already a viable alternative. And enjoy the clean air and quiet while we’re at it.
?! What world is it $3000? Try $10,000, minimum. By the way, the Prius battery - which stores a little over one kWh, is still $2000 to replace with a new one. And you need 60 kWh to make an EV with ~200 miles range, 90 to hit 300 miles.
Ok. I stand corrected. Still, at $170 a kWh, that’s $9180 to replace the battery in just materials costs. At *least *$1000 in labor.
To be fair, Elon has tweeted a $5000-$7000 replacement cost. He’s projecting several years into the future, when significant numbers of model 3s expire their packs.
Yes, prices will keep dropping, but as a percentage of the present price. 2024 is the predicted “below $100” price point. At that point, such a battery would be $6000 to replace. And at that price point, “Toyota Camry” priced EVs would be feasible. (you could build a car around a $6000 battery and sell it for $22000)
Another interesting factor is that million-miles packs (and million mile cars) are possible, but they would normally never show up in consumer grade vehicles. This is because million-mile longevity is too good - almost no one would drive a vehicle for that long and thus see any benefit from the slightly increased costs for the components.
But since manufacturers - including Ford, GM, and Waymo - are planning to run their own fleets of autonomous EVs, the manufacturers will have an incentive to build actually reliable and repairable cars. Finally. They won’t necessarily sell them to anyone but they’ll keep for themselves cars with incredible reliability that they will run for a million miles before scrapping.
The other possibility is that the packs are already good enough to last longer than the rest of the car.
One guy has already driven 100,000 miles in a Model 3. The car still reports over 300 miles of range–essentially just a few percent loss. At this rate, the car will still have ~75% capacity after a million miles.
Jeff Dahn, a well known battery researcher, released a paper laying out a chemistry good enough for a million-mile battery. The thing is–this wasn’t some super-ambitious chemistry only available in the lab. It was a fairly ordinary one with an optimized electrolyte mix. While by no means certain, it’s possible that Tesla is already meeting the same benchmark. We don’t know for sure, clearly, but it’s almost certain that Tesla has some sort of secret sauce in the electrolyte and from the reported degradation levels, it’s proving effective.
It’ll take time to see if the one 100k mile example is just an anomaly or if all their cars only see a few percent loss per 100k miles, but it’s looking promising so far.
Yes, I already pulled that up before posting. There’s exactly 1 in my area. The ones in Columbus are not along the highway and they’re located in traffic hell holes. If you had to pull off and use one of those during anything close to rush hour traffic it would be a major delay.
There is 1 along the highway between Columbus and Cleveland. So, there’s that. You could go to a destination charger but it significantly adds time to a trip.
It’s better on the West Coast but it’s currently not a panacea in the Midwest.
That’s a pretty ordinary commute which I had for years (though currently I live much closer to work) combined with a trip a regularly make now. If I was still working my old job it would be something I do reasonably often. I think it’s pretty telling that in a thread like this that complains that people are making up unrealistic situations that a regular commute in my area gets a “Yikes!” and someone speculating that I live in my car. 40 minute commutes are not some weird phenomenon people make up, neither is having friends who live an hour and a half away.
I’m pointing out that a perfectly ordinary situation like doing something not average one day, then going on a trip to a nearby town the next is a significant undertaking in an EV, while doing the same in a gas vehicle requires no special planning. Like I said before, with an electric car, I’d have to plan my life around the car or just “don’t do that” while with a gas car I just live my life without planning around the car’s issues. “Stop being absentminded and never be distracted or busy” or “don’t use a car for driving” aren’t real solutions, and pretending like perfectly ordinary driving is some kind of extreme marathon of driving isn’t exactly convincing.
I don’t have to run out of gas, because gas stations are abundant and I can just stop at one without any pre-planning. (Also if I do manage to run out of gas, it will generally take 30 minutes to an hour for my roadside service to turn up with a gallon of gas to get me to a station and on my way). I can’t do the same for a charging station. I used the map someone posted earlier and found that the nearest super charger to my house is 20-30 minutes away, the nearest one in the destination is also about 20-30 minutes from the destination. So that’s more like an hour to an hour and a half for the whole supercharger process.
An $80,000 vehicle is still more than I’ve spent on cars in my lifetime, so I’m not sure why you’re quibbling that some specific model is cheaper than the Edmund’s price I found. Or why you think whether Pábitel mentioned price is relevant; I mentioned price, and the price of that vehicle is absurd in general, much less for a vehicle that would require me to plan around it.
First of all, your updated trip, even after your goalpost moving, is still fewer miles than the range of a Model 3 SR+. So it still doesn’t require special planning.
Second, I can invent all kinds of bizarre scenarios that would be a serious problem in a gas car and zero problem in an EV. But I don’t hold that against gas cars; they’re so rare as to not be worth thinking about.
After driving an EV for a while, forgetting to plug in is like forgetting to put the car in park, or leaving the keys in the ignition. It just doesn’t happen, at least not at a frequency worth thinking about (to be fair, I do have a friend who has forgotten to put his car in park more than once, and would be well served by a Tesla since it has an auto-park feature).
But what if you’re running late for your flight and your tank is empty and even a five minute delay will mean missing your plane!? What then!? In an EV, my car is already charged and so that’ll never happen!
If you think this argument is stupid (it is), then just reverse it in your mind to see what I think of your scenario.
So it’s ok to use a ficticious price to support your argument just because both numbers happen to be more than you’re willing to spend?
Incidentally, gas cars are stupid because a Bugatti Veyron costs like a million bucks and that’s more than I’ve ever spent on a car.
I didn’t move the goalposts. Accusing people of ‘moving the goalposts’ when they didn’t actually change the scenario is not likely to convince anyone about the practicality of EVs.
What I posted is not a bizarre scenario. The fact that EV proponents declare perfectly ordinary driving to be ‘bizarre scenarios’ does not make the scenarios bizarre, and is not going to make someone who deals with said ‘bizarre scenario’ on a routine basis suddenly change their mind on EVs. It’s the commute I had for about two decades, coupled with a trip I routinely make now, and me forgetting to plug in an electric device.
Is it as easy as forgetting to plug a phone in to a charger after setting it on the nightstand? Because I manage that pretty often. It seems like it would be much more difficult than leaving the keys in the ignition, because you’d have to get out of the car, drag a wire out to the car or take a wire out of storage and plug it in, which is more work than taking the keys out, and isn’t required to shut the car off the way removing keys is.
Your insistence that people never forget to plug in devices does not ring true to me at all and insisting that someone forgetting to plug in a battery is a “bizarre scenario” not worth considering seems at odds with the way I see actual live people interact with batteries. Maybe you live with automatons who would never decide to bring in the groceries before hooking up the cable, then forget to come back and hook up the cable.
The stupid scenario you made up is nothing like my scenario. I didn’t include some arbitrary time limit, and didn’t do anything like ‘assume the gas tank is filled but the EV is decharged’. I did assume that the gas car will pass multiple filling stations on the trip while supercharging stations will be more scarce, but that’s based on the actual real world and not just invented for the scenario.
I got the price from Edmund’s, if it’s fictitious then there is probably money to be made by suing them for publishing false information.
To be clear, again, every car you can order through Tesla’s main page can handle the trip you mentioned (you did not mention two commutes in your original trip description, nor the 20 miles for “going out”).
Of course you did. Because even if you found yourself in a car with less range than your trip, you can still just stop at a public charger. If you were in, for example, one of the new 2019 LEAFs with 215 miles of range, you only need to make up an extra 20 miles for your trip. That’s under 10 minutes at a CHAdeMO station, or maybe 30 at a decent L2 station (which are all over the place). And you can make this stop at almost any point in your journey–before or after the trip to your friend.
Don’t want to stop? Well, that sounds like an arbitrary time limit.
Note too that your example is only a problem when your forgetfulness lines up with a trip to your friend. Forget in the middle of the week? No biggie. Rare * somewhat uncommon = extremely rare.
It’s much harder to forget than that. There’s no dragging a cable out of storage involved. The plug hangs on a hook about two feet away from the charge port, and I walk by it every time I get out of the car. I would bump into it if I weren’t looking. Most people with home charging will have a similar setup.
Also: are smartphones useless because hardly any of them last more than a day, and so you’re screwed if you forget to plug them in overnight?
Again, your price was from a completely different car; a performance edition. But you can get a 373 mile range car for $80k. It would have been quicker to just go to tesla.com. The price you see there is exactly what you’ll pay (no dealer negotiation).
You may be mistaking me for someone who thinks an electric car will meet your needs. There’s not currently one that meets my needs, which are much less than yours. (My needs include paying less than a Tesla costs and being able to park in the city and also hauling modest amounts of stuff. ) I have a hybrid electric, which doesn’t really satisfy what I’m looking for in a car, but it’s so much fun to drive i haven’t been able to give it up.
I’ve had a 50 minute commute much of my professional life, but let’s just say there’s more traffic where I’ve lived, I’ve never routinely driven the miles you cite. Oh, and I have lots of friends who live far enough away that I only see them on special occasions. That would include anyone an hour and a half away.
I think it’s pretty telling that people believe it’s reasonable to live that far away from where they work and then act like everything in the world should be built to accommodate it.
I’ve lost the thread on this – you’re still saying that 50 miles to get to work is an “ordinary” commute? It’s “ordinary” for 3 percent of the population, which is just a tiny tiny bit higher than the current market share of EVs for new car sales.
Yes, your commute is as ordinary as someone buying an EV. And very soon, like probably next year, your commute will be less ordinary than buying an EV. That’s not to say you should buy one, but to illustrate how your idea of “ordinary” is shared by almost nobody.
Most people have the charger set up right next to their car’s charging port. Mine clicks into a dummy receptacle on the wall about 3 feet away from the car.; others may have it hanging on a hook. Either way, all you have to do is grab the plug, turn around and plug it into the car.
Of course it’s possible to forget. I’ve done it 2 or 3 times this year. But you really shouldn’t be buying an EV that doesn’t have enough range to last at least 2 days of typical use. If you drove way more than average, you’re not likely to forget to charge (at least, you’ll probably remember it before yo go to sleep). And of course, this will become even less of a problem when more public chargers become available (e.g. if you forget to charge at home, charge it at your workplace).
And, I know for a fact there are superchargers near me that haven’t made it to maps like this on-line, but exist and can be found on the various smartphone apps.
For most of the country finding a place to charge won’t be a problem in a year or two (or already isn’t)
I don’t know about distance, but I suspect there is a geographic component as well. In the bay area, a 1 hour commute is pretty normal, but that could be 10 miles, or 40. For most of my career I’ve had at least a 1 hour commute, and as much as 2.5 hours. That being said, in the bay area, there are chargers everywhere - I even have about 25 at my office garage. I’m seriously considering an electric motorcycle just for commuting, and I already have a EV.