As I said upthread, the history of new consumer electronic products (like CD players, DVD players, VCRs, flatscreen televisions and so forth) is that the first generation or so is priced and aimed at early adopters, who are, generally, upper middle-class residents with enough disposable income to drive this sort of change. Later, the products become cheap enough for the mass market to adopt. Volkswagen, for example, expects a version of its ID.3 hatchback electric car to be available for about €22,000 or about $24,300 (although that will probably have less range than more expensive models).
Getting chargers in place for homeowners or apartment dwellers will simply not be the massive challenge that you are supposing.
As pointed out upthread, there are vanishingly few rural houses that could not accommodate a Level 2 charger. Those remote shacks that have yet to experience the miracle of "lectricity will just have to use gasoline cars until they get power for stoves, fridges, EV’s and the like.
I’m not convinced that vast wealth is needed to get a charger for an EV.
I"m not convinced that putting chargers into homes or apartments can be considered “completely overhauling our electrical infrastructure”. This sounds like hyperbole.
Remember back when A/C units were relatively rare? I wonder how we managed to get all of these electricity-consuming appliences into so many homes? Wow, what an impossible task that was, eh?
That works out to 34 miles one way. Unfortunately though not unsurprisingly almost all information about average commutes is given in minutes rather than distance. The one cite I can find for US average commute distance is 16 miles, but that’s not a particularly compelling data source. A more official source albeit for Canada gives a median commute distance by automobile of 7.8km. Either source puts your commute at more than double average, so calling your commute “short” seems some problematic.
Someone upthread said they didn’t think that EVs would be practical for most people even in ten or twenty years. I’m skeptical, and if you look at how high-speed internet access has become available to most people in the past ten or twenty years, I think you should have some understanding that things change. Twenty years ago, I had DSL service installed in my apartment as soon as AT&T said it was possible. That was probably well before most of the other 111 apartments in my building had it, but now I’ll bet that most have cable modem or some other high-speed service. So twenty years ago, I was the early adopter and today it’s pretty much a standard thing. (FYI, I recognize that there are still pockets of the country that do not have fast internet available; there is a thread elsewhere from someone who moved to rural South Carolina and doesn’t seem to have any option for high-speed internet. But virtually the entire country is wired for electricity, so I expect most will be able to charge an EV at home, although it may require installing some hardware. But even if you have to incur that expense, it’s offset by no longer needing to stop at gas stations.)
So which is more inconvenient? Plugging in your car every night and having to go through the horrible hassle of renting a vehicle every time you want to haul something that can’t fit in a tiny sedan, any time you want to carry more people that can sit in a sedan? Every time it snows so you need higher ground clearance and all wheel drive to get to work when it snows? Every time you want to go on a road trip? Or using one vehicle that you need to put gasoline in once a week.
There’s a reason you see pickup trucks and SUVs driving on dry roads with one person on weekdays. By far the most convenient thing is to have one vehicle that can do 100% of what you need it to even if it’s more than you need 95% of the time. Until we have electric crossover vehicles and pickups with reasonable range and reasonable price electric vehicle aren’t going to be mainstream.
First, your “short” commit is 60 miles round-trip, right? So what would actually happen is you would lose 17 miles of net range a day. By the end of a work week you would be down 85 miles, out of 250 for a decent EV.
Then you would catch up on the weekend, regaining the lost range by Monday. Supercharge if you have a weekend road trip or keep forgetting to plug in. (Some EVs will text you if you park in the garage but neglect to plug them in)
Or you just need to increase the voltage. Run a new circuit at 220 volts. Limit the charger to 10-20 amps if necessary and you only have 100 amp service. This would still mean 10 miles of range regained per hour at 220 volts and 15 amps.
Not a big deal.
Pickup trucks and SUVs with gas/diesel engines are actually more expensive than conventional cars with gas/diesel engines, so for those buyers, “reasonable” prices for electric versions of them can be similarly higher.
Ford F-150 electric truck available as early as 2021
Ford electric SUV will be unveiled later this month
Interestingly, automobile manufacturers are not stupid.
Wish they would stop calling Cross Overs SUV’s.
I wish they would stop calling this thing “mustang inspired”, but hey, the dudes in marketing seem to be calling the shots.
Double post
I didn’t explicitly state the length of the trip for going out, but assuming that it’s ‘zero miles’ and not ‘a usual drive to get somewhere’ is absurd. And while I didn’t explicitly state that the scenario included going to work the second day, that was part of the original trip I had in mind. But this seems typical of EV proponents; instead of addressing the meat of the discussion, you make silly assumptions (like that ‘going out’ involved an insignificant distance, or that the ‘overnight’ was not a work night) and make accusations based on your assumptions.
No, as I’ve pointed out and you and other EV proponents don’t seem to get, I cannot “just stop at a public charger” as they are not “all over the place” according to the website of charger locations posted here. In the journey I had in mind, there is literally no point in the journey where I could just at a supercharger, they’re all at least 20 minutes off the trip. L2 stations are closer, I think there is one within around 10 minutes, but as you point out they take at least 30 minutes. So going to any of them is going to realistically add another hour to the trip assuming traffic is not bad and there’s not a significant wait at the destination.
It gets worse if I were making a trip to my parent’s house an hour and a half away, as there are no superchargers closer to their house than my house is. This assumption that EV charging infrastructure is common and convenient is not true, and pretending that it is is not going to convince anyone to adopt an EV.
“I wouldn’t want to have to spend an extra hour driving on an already fairly long trip” is not remotely like ‘you only have exactly enough time to drive straight to the airport and can’t possible pause for five minutes on the way’.
In other words, you’re just going to dismiss real world issues in the discussion. I’m going to take that as equivalent to you saying “EVs are not for you if you’re at all absentminded or ever get distrated”. Like I said in my OP, EV proponents seem to assume some sort of highly regimented lives for people, which isn’t how me or my friends actually live. I know a lot of people who drive ICE vehicles until the needle is on E and run their phones out of charge, acting like it’s a weird edge case to consider the effect of such ordinary behavior doesn’t really help your argument.
Are you saying that you leave the cable hanging outdoors in the rain, wind, and snow, and expect it to never ever have any problems that prevent an overnight charge from that? Or are you assuming that the car is stored in a garage, which has never been the case for any of my cars and likely will never be? EV proponents seem to make a lot of assumptions that don’t actually hold true for everyone.
If smartphones required me to go to a special charging station that added an hour to my trip to charge them, it might be similar. But I can plug a smart phone into my car to charge it, or buy a $25 battery charger (slightly less than $80,000), or plug it into wall current anywhere. It’s not remotely a comparable situation.
As I said before, I looked up the text that was posted identifying the car in Edmund’s and used their number. If that’s false information, again you should file a lawsuit against Edmund’s and get rich. Your attempt to transform me looking up a vague description of a car I’m not familiar with into dishonestly using false information is not going to stick.
As I pointed out before, $80k is still more than I’ve spent on cars in my entire life. I’m not sure why you guys don’t get that I have zero interest in buying a vehicle that costs more than five times what my current car does and is much worse, as I’d need to plan my life around it’s needs and expect to routinely add an hour or more to road trips.
Why? They’re both essentially meaningless terms. What sport are SUVs for?
I confess that I’ve been having a chuckle at the “Mustang-inspired electric crossover.” It’s like rolling out a cotton candy-inspired jalapeno toothpaste.
You’ve obviously never filled up at Costco. Or Fred Meyer in parts of the country where they are. And perhaps other retailers I’m unaware of who also have gas pumps.
Maybe they’ll sell a “Shelby” version with two big white stripes across the hood and a sound system that plays a recording of a 289 with a 4-barrel Holley?
Living 20-30 miles from work is pretty normal around here, so 50 miles to get **to and from **work is not unusual. Way more than 3% of people in the area have that sort of drive or longer, it’s not some weird edge case no matter how much EV proponents want to make it one. No one said that ‘everything in the world’ should be built to accommodate it, but since gas stations for ICE vehicles are already built to accommodate it, perhaps it is not unreasonable to expect a similar level of support from EV charging stations before switching from ICE to EV.
I have never waited longer than 15 minutes for gasoline, even in situations where there’s unusual demand. If it looks like there’s going to be more than a ‘wait for one car to finish’ wait I’ll probably just go to another station entirely. The idea that people are routinely sitting for a half hour at gas stations is, again, just weird to me.
I wonder how well EVs will fare after a hurricane - if a lot of people lose power at home for a week (which is a ‘once per 10-20 years’ type event, so not common but not ‘once in a lifetime if you’re unlucky’), getting around is not a big deal with a gas car. I can even take advantage of the car’s battery and engine to charge small electronic devices. Gas stations will be out of commission for a short time, but come back into service fairly quickly in my experience. I’m not sure how well the smaller number of specialized charging stations will do at getting back online, or how long the lines to use them to charge a car while no one can use home power will be. I would be hesitant to make the switch to electric until I’ve seen charging infrastructure bounce back from that kind of emergency.
Also here - The difference between SUV MUV and XUV
If the term is meaningless (it’s not), why have the term Crossover?
From a personal perspective, when I hear about a new SUV, I may investigate it. Euphonious Polemic link was to a Crossover (basically a 4 door hatchback that may have AWD) that was called an SUV. Waste of time, and sort of pisses me off. That’s why.
So when you wrote this:
… you were actually talking about 235 miles of driving over multiple days? Just about every new EV on the market can handle that, even in winter.
Three percent of the population of the U.S. drives more than 50 miles each way to work. You and your neighbors (I’m guessing we’re not talking about a great number of people) are the extreme cases. I’m not saying that you’re bad because of it, but you probably just don’t realize that your commutes are quite far outside the norm.