The Rivian will be there. And the Tesla “Cybertruck” (to be announced later this month) will likely also be an excellent 4-wheeler.
EVs have distinct advantages here. The Rivian will have a motor for each wheel, and like all EVs a shitton of torque. I’m hoping the Tesla truck also takes this approach.
The flat underbody is also a distinct advantage. No driveshafts or exhaust or whatever to get damaged by rocks.
I think off-roaders will have a great time with EVs once there’s a couple of them out there. No snorkel needed for fording rivers, either…
Meant to include this story about EV charging stations in Germany. TLDR: they want 100,000 by 2021 & a million by 2030. US square mileage is ≈ 27x what Germany’s is & our population is ≈ 3.8x what theirs is. Not sure which figure is a better gauge for how many we should have to match them.
Anyone know how many truly public ones we have now? Not ones limited to guests staying at a given hotel & not ones specific to just a certain brand of EV?
Dual motor Teslas are kind of a mix between AWD and 4WD. Because they can control the front and rear independently, they are similar to a 4WD vehicle that has a locking center differential. However, the front and rear each have an open differential. The Tesla is smart enough to use the brakes to hold a spinning tire, allowing the motor to drive the tire with traction. Dual motor Teslas can pull themselves out of situations where three wheels are slipping and only one has traction. However, they are like an AWD in that they only need to send power to one end, if that’s all that’s necessary.
Teslas can be fitted with snow tires, mud tires, and the like. What cannot be easily done is to lift them. The Model S and X can raise and lower on the air suspension, but that’s all you get. Due to the suspension geometry, it’s not possible to put on larger tires, even if you put on some sort of a lift kit. I’ve read of people lifting their Model 3, but also that it compromises handling. Which it does on a Jeep or pickup, but those tend not to be known for their handling in the first place.
I can’t speak about the Audi, Jaguar, or Porsche all wheel drive EV systems.
Snowtires and a Tesla will be fine in all except the most severe snowstorms we get in the Colorado Front Range. Our once-a-decade 2+ feet of snow at one time will not be passable by a Tesla, but by experience, they are also not passable by the majority of SUVs and even trucks. Many of those have poor ground clearance, and all season tires, which just aren’t up to the task.
Something like what Enipla drives is really necessary for those severe conditions. Even then, down here in the city, it’s safer for everyone to just take a snow day, if at all possible, and give the plows a chance to work.
As keeps being said in this thread, the majority of EV charging will be home charging. Public charge points are only necessary if home charging is not possible. It is not necessary to create anything near the gas station density in charging points, because most people out and about in their EVs won’t ever need them.
I can think of two main situations where public charging is necessary: When charging at home isn’t available because home is an apartment or the like that doesn’t have charging; and when farther from home than can be done on a single charge, so trips. As EV penetration increases, the apartment problem will probably decrease as chargers get added. At the moment, less than 20% of Americans live in apartments or condos.
So having to go a bit out of your way to charge won’t matter, because most of the time you’ll just go home to charge. Then having to go out of your way on a trip is the inconvenience paid for being so convenient the rest of the time. And I’m still jealous of the people that take so many trips they have to organize their life around them. I had my last car for 130,000 miles and 16 years, and it went out of state three time, and two of those were just to Cheyenne.
It’ll have to be some blend of population vs. area. In places like the Dakotas, EV chargers will have to overrepresent the number of vehicles, especially away from the Interstates where everyone agrees range anxiety is a real thing.
I notice that in Chicago, retailers like Walgreens and Jewel/Osco have charging stations in their parking. That isn’t so common in St. Louis, and I think that’s a mistake. If someone is going to drive 50 miles into town to go shopping or see a doctor, they should be able to plug their car in while they’re doing it. I had lunch with a friend who drove 60 miles to meet us, and she didn’t think that was an unusually long trip just to have lunch.
Flip it around and think of it the other way. Say your friend has a Bolt with 238 mile range. She can charge at home for $0.10/kWh (average rate in St. Louis), or she can pay to charge at the Walgreens for $2/hour, which is what the one near me charges. That Walgreens doesn’t list the power, so let’s say 6.6kW, so $0.30kWh. Why bother? As long as her car was at 60% before she left, she’ll have plenty to make it home. Sure, throw on some other errands or make other excuses to need to charge and maybe it’s worth plugging in to get a few miles over lunch. Really, if she knew she was going to drive 150 miles to get lunch and do errands, she’d have charged to 90%, and had plenty of range.
Translate it to gas. If you’re car has a 300 mile range, and you leave on a full tank and drive 120 miles to the big city, where gas is 25% more expensive than near your house, you’re not going to bother to fill up until you get back home, even if the place you stop is right next door to a gas station. In fact, many people would remember gas is expensive at the destination, and fill up at the cheap place before leaving.
The primary groups those level 2 chargers are good for are people who drive plug-in hybrids or can’t charge at home. Plug-in hybrids maybe only have a 25 mile electric only range. They can pay $0.50-1.00 to top up the electric battery and save the 2/3 of gallon it would take to drive those miles on gas.
The last three weekends* have been over 1000 miles; only two of them were three states.
Okay, one was a three-day weekend, but as stated upthread I got in at 2am & was out again at 6am; there was no overnight charging available at the hotel (which was free since the event paid for it); also, I left after work so I wasn’t even starting with a full battery. Including the less mileage but slower surface streets to get gas & get on the interstate one stop later filling up before the trip was probably only six minutes. Much more than that to recharge batteries & that trip would not have been possible due to lack of sleep. The second three-state weekend involved overnight on the street (I got lucky) in the city, so again, no overnight charging option.
I had the opposite situation last weekend. I needed to get to a Con in Tucson 120 miles away. I checked prices and, as historically, Tucson’s prices were about 15% lower than here. I had plenty in the tank to get to Tucson so I drove to Tucson Friday, parked at the hotel all weekend, and filled up on Sunday before leaving town for home.
This weekend is the opposite – I’ll be in Los Angeles so I’ll fill up here, and again before crossing the border. I’ll probably have to buy a few gallons to make it back to the border where the price, even along I-10, magically drops almost a dollar when you cross into Arizona.
In other words, you had to plan your life around the car instead of the car simply working for you. Which is… exactly the thing I pointed out in my first post, and what EV proponents have repeatedly denied one has to do with an EV. If you’re willing to do that, good for you, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a significant amount of planning around your car instead of having it simply work for you.
In other words, as soon as real people become involved rather than automatons, EV proponents can no longer make a realistic argument and have to resort to insults and pathetic attempts to belittle actual people who have actual lives and sometimes don’t plug devices in. All of the people who leave their phone uncharged are apparently not fit for society, and should not be considered in any discussion at any time whatsoever.
And using ‘your kids may want to start looking for a home for you’ and ‘start looking now for one of those simple telephones with the really big buttons’ as an insult says a lot about your ugly attitude towards disabled people. You’d think that someone big on EVs would be progressive in general, but apparently you’re very, very much regressive when it comes to certain issues. If you’re trying to convince people to switch to EVs, you might want to include a little less raw bigotry in your ‘arguments’, it’s not a good look for anyone.
No, I’ve never posted a scenario remotely like that. No idea where you’re getting it from, but the one I posted was someone goes to work one day, goes out that night, forgets to plug in when he gets home, goes to work the next day, decides to visit a friend a town over who doesn’t have charging available in their parking lot. I’m really getting tired of the amount of nitpicking and weird changes EV proponents are making to a simple and pretty bland scenario, I doubt that I’m going to keep repeating it.
And I declined to because it’s bad math that doesn’t correspond to anything in the real world. Making up a bunch of weird probabilities and then multiplying them together to say that an event would only occur every few decades is just silly and shows nothing useful. It doesn’t make sense to treat regular events as probabilities, or to treat things like ‘went out one night’ and ‘forgot to charge’ as independent events when clearly the more that you do the more likely you are to not charge that day. Most notably:
Someone’s commute is the distance that it is and doesn’t change randomly on different days of the week for most jobs. Treating someone’s commute as if it has a 1/5 probability of existing makes no sense, and throwing that into the final calculation makes it an absurdity that reflects nothing about reality. Also, the commute isn’t random. You normally commute five days of the week aside from taking days off, the 1/5 chance would only make sense if you worked 1/5 days at random which is generally not the case, and certainly not the case in my scenario.
If you do awful math, you can come up with all kinds of absurd probabilities. But I’m really getting bored with bad math, weird assumptions, bizarre nitpicking, and bigoted insults coming from EV proponents. It’s pretty obvious that EVs don’t work well for large portions of the population, not just weird edge cases, and reading EV proponents metaphorically stick their fingers in their ears and should ‘nuh-uh’ gets old.
That’s literally just a graph as a single image, it’s not something I would regard as a credible cite. If there was an article explaining what went into it it would at least qualify as a cite, but just showing a graph that has no supporting inforamtion is not going to convince me of much of anything. If there’s an actual article about battery life it could be interesting, but posting just the chart is… less than convincing. Especially since EV proponents seem to be really insistent on ignoring real world issues like…
what’s shown in the chart at https://teslike.com/range/ , where I see that the range numbers people are listing like 375 and 250 miles are apparently for vehicles driving around 50mph, and that driving at regular highway speeds like the 80Mph drops the range considerably - to the point taht the ‘250 mile’ range vehicles actually have a range less than 200 miles. Since that’s the speed I’d be driving for a large portion (especially the longer road distances) in the scenario I posted, I think it’s pretty relevant that none of the ‘250 mile’ range vehicles would actually have the range needed even assuming 0% battery degradation.
Do you consider “taking the car for its checks”, “getting the tires changed”, “remembering to pay when the 2-hour maximum limit for local street parking is reached” and “checking how’s the gas and the mileage before parking” are “planning your life around the car”?
No, it says a lot about our disdainful attitude toward people who insist on making silly arguments. We wouldn’t take seriously someone who argued that modern pharmaceuticals aren’t what they’re cracked up to be because some people only take their pills when they feel bad instead of as directed on the prescription or that mass transit is overrated because some people can’t be bothered to go to the bus stop at the scheduled pickup time. Your argument is precisely equivalent.
Nobody is belittling actual people who have actual lives. We’re belittling the idea that only a robot who plans their life around their car can effectively manage an EV.
This is the crux of my original complaint. EV’s do not work for some. Fine. But don’t tell me that they are useless based on your personal situation, or your imaginary scenario, or your ignorance of how an EV works.
The other thing is; EV’s are evolving rapidly, as many new technologies do as they are introduced to the market. They are improving in range, particularly. More models are being developed. Also, the EV charging network is being improved daily. More chargers are being added. When ICE cars were first on the roads, there were many places where you could not drive due to a lack of road infrastructure and a lack of places to buy gas. This changed. Things change. THINGS CHANGE. Get used to change.
Of interest ONE SINGLE MANUFACTURER - Ford - is unveiling a new Crossover (4 door hatch or whatever you want to call it) on November 17. The electric F-150 is coming soon. Ford has announced 16 fully electric vehicles and 40 electrified vehicles through 2022. Ford has announced The FordPass network which will include more than 12,000 charging stations with a total of 35,000 plugs in the United States
If you consider something as trivial as plugging it in every night as “planning your life around the car”, then every car owner does that. Like stopping at a gas station on the way from home every week.