That is my position. I wouldn’t say “tiny,” though, as I think (ignoring price) there is still a pretty large group of drivers that current EVs don’t work for. I posted a little flow chart a while ago:
I would also amend that to say, if you do drive more than 200 miles per day, think real hard about if an EV can be made to work, because the money and pollution saved will be substantial.
A large percentage of people in the US live in houses where home charging will not be a problem and drive less than 200 miles per day. Many of these people don’t need to plan their daily lives around infrequent road trips, which are still completely possible in an EV, they just require different planning than in an ICE vehicle.
Let’s just recall the insanity that someone alleges as a strawman. A few days ago, I wrote:
You strongly objected, writing:
Then just now you write:
What the fucking fuck.
Can someone explain out how “EVs can’t handle 230-ish miles of driving over two days” is a misrepresentation of “doing a commute, drive to an activity, forget to charge, then decide to make a trip during the next day, with a total distance of 235 miles…?”
I’m not sure if I’m the “loudest” proponent here (possibly the most obnoxious, but that’s different).
I would disagree completely though that “EVs are superior to ICE vehicles for all but a tiny niche subset of drivers in the country,”. I do not think this is the case at the present time.
I don’t even think that it will be this way 5 or 10 years from now. Or 15 for that matter.
But what I DO THINK is that that EV’s are quite a good option for a large number of people right now, and that this number will get substantially larger over time.
I also think that there are a lot of people (not everyone for those that are easily offended) who are unaware that they are actually the sort of driver whose use pattern would fit an EV car perfectly RIGHT NOW.
And often, the reason they do not know that an EV would be a great fit for them is that they have been fed a line of bullshit from corporations who do not want to see any movement away from consuming petroleum products.
Batteries are not intrinsically expensive. Quite the opposite: the materials are pretty cheap, and they are such simple devices that just scaling up production is enough to significantly reduce the price.
Just from 2010 to 2018, lithium ion prices fell from $1160/kWh to $176/kWh. There’s no sign of that stopping or even slowing in the near future.
Every incremental drop in price enables a new market to open up, which drives demand, which means more factories open and the price drops even further. It may take a couple of decades, but we’ll definitely be seeing $20k long-range EVs in the not too distant future.
I just came back from a week’s vacation and was a bit surprised to find this thread still hanging in. Looks like no one has changed their minds here.
Which corporations would that be?
The auto industry? Isn’t that industry trying with all deliberate speed to get into electric vehicles? Does everyone believe GM is going to repeat what they did with the EV-1 back 17 years ago?
The oil companies? Do we believe anything the oil companies tell us about anything? Wouldn’t most of us love to have an alternative to the oil companies?
Gas station owners? They’re probably the group that would take the biggest hit - between the miniscule profit margins on gas sales, after cigarettes and now e-cigs falling out of favor, they probably have the biggest legitimate fears of an EV revolution.
But the truth is, there’s no great secret war against EVs. For millions of people, its more an issue of infrasturcture and practicality. For some number, price is also a factor.
No need to invent deep dark corporate conspiracies, or blame auto buyers for being too stupid to recognize what they need in a vehicle.
And the irregular driving needs are not. That is the problem. I can only drive one car at a time, so I only own one. And I’m not going to own one that only covers my regular driving needs.
“Niche”, today, is 1) having a place to charge at home, 2) never needing to drive moderate distance in bad weather. (2) is ameliorated by owning multiple vehicles. Which most households do.
FWIW, I imagine that when EVs end up commonplace, we may end up with some other type of scheme than today’s plug-in-and-recharge for a lot of the reasons already mentioned- time being the chief one. Maybe you’ll swap batteries or something like that, kind of how propane cylinders are handled today? Or maybe the charging mechanisms and infrastructure will change so that charging an EV won’t take significantly longer than filling up with gas. The market will be there for that sort of innovation for sure.
Or charging speed will only be incrementally better than it is today, which maxes out at 250kW, and we’ll have to put up with lots of old people complaining that back in their day it took 30 seconds to exit the freeway, fill up, get back on and be up to 65.
Fast charging is only necessary when a single trip is longer than the car’s range. If anybody thinks that most people drive 300+ miles (the 90% range of future EVs) on more than a very few days a year, then they are very out of touch with what most people do. For most people, they will only ever use a fast charger the few times per year they are taking a road trip. How many days per year do you start the day with a full tank of gas, and still need to fill up again the same day? That’s how many days per year you’ll need fast charging.
How often would anybody buy gas on the road if at home it cost $2.50/gallon and on the road it cost $7.50/gallon? People would plan accordingly. That is the same price ratio between what I pay for electricity at home and a supercharger. (Once I’m done with my free miles) I’m never going to convenience charge at a supercharger for three times the cost of charging at home.
The infrastructure that needs to be built up is making sure that everybody has access to home or work charging at least a few days per week. Apartments will have to electrify a third or more of their parking spaces. Houses will slowly add charging capability as EV penetration increases, but that is a one time expense for the home owner.
And if you think apartment owners wouldn’t want to incur the expense, I think they’ll do so for the competitive advantage, to attract tenants. Much as some apartment buildings have gyms, or swimming pools, or in apartment washer/dryers.
Not to mention direct profit. Washer/dryers are probably a good model for this. Premium apartments have in unit washer/dryers, which is equivalent to dedicated charging for each unit attached to the resident’s normal electric bill. Other places have shared washer/dryers which require payment at the time of use. Many apartments will install shared charging that will be billed at a level profitable to the apartment building owners, but still cheaper than fast charging.
Mainly this, yes. And we are not getting told by the corporations directly. They have a long and proud record of putting out propaganda via a variety of sources. These “think tanks” are primarily responsible for most of the disinformation and complete bullshit about EV’s. They are the source. And the bullshit is then repeated by people who do not like change.
It’s not a nefarious scheme or anything like that. It’s “promotion” as far as they are concerned, but they do it via third parties rather than with billboards with their name on them. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry protecting their bottom line. They also tell us that Global Climate Change is a hoax.
I’m not sure if this is the right place for it but Tesla just unveiled their new cybertruck today. It is possibly the ugliest vehicle I’ve seen in years. The specs on it are pretty good and it’s priced competitively to steal business from Ford, Chevy, and Dodge but I have a hard time imagining them talking someone who uses their truck for work into their closed bed and I don’t see people who do trucks for the image swapping to that monstrosity.
That’s really dependent on where you live, and where you visit. For example, I go visit my parents in Houston about every 2-3 months- that’s a 266 mile one-way drive. And it’s not uncommon to go and do stuff while we’re there- so tack on another 50 miles. We visit my wife’s parents on about the same schedule- they live in Austin, which is a 212 mile drive.
So I’d need to charge immediately when I get there, and again before driving back either way. Hopefully the future EVs will be able to charge fully on 110V house extension cord current, or that’s going to require a lot of extra work for homeowners to have electricians build out 220v outlets by the garage.
And if that would require specialized charging infrastructure, that just adds a massive pain in the ass component to that drive- I’d have to either leave it overnight and arrange transportation, or go there (however far that might be), sit around for a while for my car to charge, and then do it all over again before leaving the next morning.
It’s not the daily commutes that are going to be the problem, but stuff like road trips and vacations- having a 300 mile range is at the VERY short end of a lot of road trip distances- I calculated that having a 300 mile range on my road trip vacation this past summer, which took 8 days, would have added something like 4 days, because many of the trip’s legs were in the 300-360 mile range. Which isn’t a problem if your car has a 450 mile range, or can be recharged/refueled quickly.
It’s got a long way to go before EV technology is going to replace the ICE in the family car.
The biggest misrepresentation is that I very simply did not state that “EVs can’t handle” the trip. I very clearly stated that “with an EV I would run into trouble” in the original post, not that it “couldn’t handle” the trip. In later posts, I made it clear that the trouble was needing to deal with charging, specifically having to spend an hour going off to a charger or change something about the trip to allow charging, and that while a longer range EV could make the trip without trouble, the longer range EVs were also multiple times as expensive as the old ICE car that could make the trip without trouble.
There’s also the fact that the trip in question covered four days, not two (Thursday commute, Friday commute and drives to friend’s house, Saturday at friend’s house, Sunday return). It’s a minor point, but highlights just how much people are distorting claims that I’ve made in order to ‘debunk’ them.
I will also note that, now that people are done obfuscating about it, a standard “250 mile” range EV would definitely require charging on the trip even assuming zero battery degradation over time, driving slower than with an ICE car, and good weather, as it would start off at 90% charge (225 miles range) since, as EV proponents have stated, you only charge it to 100% if you’re specifically planning a trip. And that EV proponents have an extremely high tolerance for running a vehicle on ‘fumes’, as in multiple cases they’ve been fine planning a trip to end with only a few miles of charge in ideal conditions (brand new battery, no detours, no weather).
