The parameters of the scenario were set by using my old commute (which I had for around 20 years), the location of an actual friend of mine, and a short trip estimate for ‘going out’. I didn’t specifically design the scenario to get a specific result, I took a set of real world circumstances I would likely encounter and looked at how they’d work in an EV. I don’t think that looking at how an EV works in real-world scenarios that you’re personally likely to encounter is ‘silly’, it’s what anyone considering the switch to an EV should do.
And I don’t think that the ‘charge the car every night like clockwork’ that EV proponents insist is the case is at all realistic - people will forget, or their partner will be parked in the charging spot, or they may have a power outage, or they may leave the car parked and take an uber home because they were drinking, or the same sort of kids that steal change from unlocked cars might unplug it, or any of a host of other circumstances.
And what happens if your battery is at 10% charge (10-25 miles for cars that aren’t the very latest extended range) and the charging station is out of service, with the next one 50 miles away? No one has provided uptime figures for superchargers, but when they tend to be 40-70 miles from each other I would want an awful lot of .9s in the 99.9…% uptime before I’d want to be driving around without enough range to make the next one if the current one is out of service. Better hope there are no detours or washed out roads, this is like driving a gas vehicle down to the last mile of range which is a dumb way to drive. Also if you’re planning on hotel charging, better hope that hotel’s charger is in service and that no one else is parked in the spot, otherwise you’re stuck until they drive out the next day or the charger gets fixed.
And it means that when you get to your destination, you’re stuck in place. You can’t get home, unload, and decide that you want to go to a game at a gaming store 25 miles away (50 mile round trip, no charger there) - which I did with no problem with an ICE vehicle after the long trip I used in the example earlier in the thread. You can’t put your stuff in the hotel, then decide that you want dinner at a place 10 miles away, then go to a bar 5 miles from that after, because you’ve got to leave the car charging. And you definitely can’t do uncle Ed a favor and give him a ride to his house a little ways in the country, because that 20 miles out and back is way too much.
And none of this requires any planning in the ICE vehicle, just a 10 minute stop at a gas station which are so common that finding one doesn’t need any planning.
People say I’m exaggerating when I talk about planning your life around the car, but here you’re talking about the car telling you how fast you can drive instead of you picking a speed. When I’m driving an ICE on the interstate, I put the cruise control on 79 and once in a great while spend 10 minutes at a gas station to completely refill the range, adding hours to the trip both for the car telling me to drive sloooowwwlllyy and for charging time (all of the published figures say something like 40 minutes for an 80% charge to a battery, not the 10 minute figures people keep tossing around, and that doesn’t include to/from the charger) is a pretty significant limitation.
This is an excellent example of what I mean by planning your life around the car. If I’m on a trip, I want to decide where to eat based on MY preferences, not the car’s preferences. Same thing with going to the bathroom, I’ll go when my bladder is bugging me, not when it’s convenient for the car to stop.
As I said earlier, why would I want to spend more money for a car that requires me to plan my life around the car when I can get a much cheaper ICE vehicle that doesn’t?
We’re not talking about rare trips taking 20-40 minutes longer, we’re talking about common trips adding an hour or more for charging, and rare trips adding multiple hours for charging plus driving at much slower speeds. Your estimate of 20 minutes to charge is laughable when the places I typically drive require a detour of 20 minutes (plus 20 back) just to get to a supercharger, and all of the published numbers say that it takes on the order of 30-40 minutes to do significant charging (up to 80% of battery, not even full), not the 10-20 minutes EV proponents keep tossing around in the thread.
And again, all of these short charging times that EV proponents throw around are for VERY constrained trips. If you get to the destination, then decide you’d like to drive 10-20 miles to do something fun, you probably don’t have the range because the super short charging times rely on running almost to empty before charging.
Everyone has different driving habits. There was a time in my life when I took longer trips. In the past 5 to 10 years, I very rarely exceed 200 miles. I have charged my EV on a trip exactly one time since I bought in in June (well, two times. Once on the way there, once on the way back) I took that trip primarily as an experiment to see how it would go. (I had a plane ticket but cancelled because I wanted to take a longish trip in my EV)
So, for me and people like me, we are indeed talking about a rare trip taking 20 to 40 minutes longer. (I’ll grant you the 40 minutes, rather than the 20). I estimate I will need to charge on a trip about once per year. I’m happy to “plan my life around my car” on that once a year trip in exchange for the great pleasure of driving an EV every day, never stopping at a gas station, never scheduling an oil change, and reducing my carbon footprint significantly.
As a person who isn’t going to replace my ICE with an EV today, I look at this with flat eyes and mutter “uh huh”. Next year there will be more fast chargers. The year after that, more. The year after that, yet more. By the time I get around to getting an EV, there will be tons of fast charge stations all over the place that I’ll never ever use because I’ll charge at home.
If the technology and infrastructure were frozen forever at their exact current level then yes, 50% of people should never, ever, ever get an EV. But that’s not realistic. Range may or may not get much greater, but chargers will spring up all over the place. You can bet on it.
I guess it makes you feel better to repeat something that I’ve never disputed? I was specifically talking about the suitability of EVs as a replacement for ICE vehicles now, not at some indefinite time in the future. I don’t think anyone in the thread has actually disputed that eventually the charging infrastructure will improve, though exactly when is an open question especially with the current trend of incompatible charging networks.
So, I don’t think you should buy an EV for the foreseeable future. They are better for people like me, who usually drive short distances. I could go a week without charging a Tesla, no problem. The 35 mile range of some of the PHEVs that will be on the market soon would mean I only bought gas when I took a road trip, something I do about three times a year. Well, maybe some weekends I’d burn a little gas. But I’d be worrying about my gas going stale, not about keeping the tank full.
But I feel like you are exaggerating here. When I used to do regular road trips that required filling the tank, I never stopped because my bladder was bugging me. I knew where the cheap/reliable/convenient gas station was on my regular trip, and that’s where I stopped. Subbing in a fast charging station that was close to the road I planned to take anyway would feel just the same, honestly.
There’s a standard plug that everything but the Tesla uses, and I Think the Tesla comes with an adapter. I guess I’m not thinking of the “super-charging” stations, because I don’t anticipate ever using one.
Which is great. . . if you have a Tesla. Does Tesla make/license a converter so other electric vehicles can use Tesla superchargers?
If not, then whatever Tesla does is rather meaningless for everyone who’s looking at some other brand. It’s Mac vs. PC all over again and we know how that’s shaken out.
And for anyone planning on driving more than 200 miles, it looks to me like Level 2 charging along the way is pointless, because it will take several hours to get back to long distance range. If you aren’t planning to be in one place for at least four hours, you might as well stop for the night and charge off any old household outlet you can find.
I am not exaggerating at all, and it’s pretty damn absurd that people keep claiming that I don’t know my own life and directly contradicting documented facts. I have literally never done a stop on a long (50+ mile) road trip based on going to a particular gas station along the way. I do not know anyone personally who does that, they will do like I do and pick a gas station based on either wanting to take a break, wanting to go to a nearby attraction, wanting to go to a particular restaurant, or something other than selecting a particular gas station. I don’t doubt that you have a preferred station somewhere on your route, but to claim that I’m ‘exaggerating’ for simply describing the process that I and literally everyone I know in real life who I’ve discussed driving with uses for stopping on long trips is just silly.
There are literally no charging stations along the 85 mile route from my house to my parents’ house, even though it’s going along a major freeway and both are not ‘dot on the map’ towns (one is about half a million people, the other is around 50k). I’m not ‘exaggerating’ when I talk about driving 40 minutes to and from a charger, I literally looked at Tesla’s website that shows locations, the exact data a Tesla would use when computing a route. The longer trip that I used as an example requires a charging stop in a town that I have literally never stopped in in my life, as it’s the last supercharger before the 70 miles to the destination city. So no, it’s not an exaggeration, it is in fact directly factually true and documented by Tesla’s own website that I would not be able to stop like I normally would.
Also, even aside from the distance, you can’t get the same experience by ‘subbing in a fast charging station’ as a fast charging station takes something like 40 minutes to charge a car to 80%, while a gas station takes more like 5 minutes to charge all the way to 100% of a longer range. Even if it’s conveniently located, topping off takes much, much longer at a charger and has to happen more often. It’s not a one to one substitution even if you posit a hundred times the current density of superchargers.
Supercharging (L3) stations are the only thing remotely like gas stations. The more common L2 chargers require an overnight charge to refill a battery, and L1 (wall outlet) charging gives something like 3-4 miles of range per hour of charging (so 50 miles in a 12-hour overnight charge). If you’re making a trip that the car won’t cover off of it’s base range without overnight stops along the way, you’re going to use L3 charge. If you’re comparing to filling up at a gas station, you’re talking about a supercharger, because while 5 minutes vs 40 minutes is not entirely unreasonable, 5 minutes vs overnight (or worse ‘multiple days’) is.
At the bottom of that link I can’t help but notice how many different Electric Car Charging Station Network Operators there are & how many of them require membership. By definition, one would be using most of them on a road trip to a non-familiar area. I wonder how may of those networks can be setup on the fly & how many of them might need to be setup in advance, say to receive a dongle. I’d hate to get to a charging station in a remote area & find I couldn’t setup/use it because I don’t have cell coverage. If you city dwellers don’t believe me, drive out into the rural country on any network other than Verizon; even then you encounter dead spots, sometimes while driving on interstates.
There are two possible use cases. One is traveling within the vehicles range and charging overnight, or while at an event. (Like shopping.) The other is needing to fill up en route. Personally, I don’t think the “fill up en route” is ready for prime time. I don’t anticipate doing it, and I wouldn’t recommend an electric vehicle to most people who would need to do that. I do know people who do it, but they are either ev fanatics or they are Tesla fanatics.
On the other hand, if you use is more like mine, and you might drive downtown, or to a friend’s house, or something else within the range of a Bolt, for instance, you can pick up enough charge at an L2 station to get home again with plenty of margin. Not over a coffee stop. But at an evening party, or at the train station during your commute, or while Xmas shopping… You can pick up more miles than you spent to get there. No, not 200 miles. But I don’t drive 200 miles to get to a party, I might drive 20 or 30 miles.
And L2 stations are quite standard, and have already become fairly common where I live and drive.
And there are lots of people like me. And some of them ALSO have an ICE they can use for the rare longer trip. That’s who the current market it’s for EVs, I think.
Okay. It just seems weird and foreign to me to drive in a familiar place along a familiar route and not have a preferred gas station. I have preferred gas stations even on routes I only take once a year. But to each their own.
Yeah…I think you’ve got the weird part backward. Who does that? My criteria for gas stations–in as much as I have a “process” at all–is maybe: “close to me at the time I need gas,” “convenient to get in and out of,” and in the case of gas stations right next to each other, “which one is cheaper?”
I would guess that’s way more typical than brand loyalty, unless you have a family member that works in the oil industry or get specific rewards at one location.
By the same token though…
I have remotely turned on a charging station for one of my customers who had forgotten her wallet.
Try doing that for petrol.
We can get a key ring dongle…so you don’t need wallet or card for better than 80% of thhe charging network here.
And something else I’ve been meaning to bring up…
I remember driving vack in the 80s and 90s…
I would leave work at 930 pm for an 80 km commute home.
That commute would not have a single petrol station open.
I remember living in rural areas where the local gas station would close at 5pm and it was a 50/50 chance as to finding one open on a Sunday. Those days required just as much, if not more planning around fuel stops as an eye trip car does now.
It’s surprising how quickly we forget.
No brand loyalty. Just an idea of where in my trip it’s going to be convenient to get gas, and where it will be harder/more expensive. I suppose I’m anti-loyal to interstate rest areas, which are always expensive.
If most roads worldwide are rough, then ICE vehicles will remain critical. And if disposable income is not very high, then cheap EVs will be needed. By cheap, that is, given a global market where many earn less than $10 a day.
And given diminishing returns, even more ICE vehicles and fossil fuels in general will be needed to support very high resource demand globally. For basic needs, it’s the equivalent of one more earth. For middle class conveniences like EVs, even more.
I’m the same way. To give a concrete example, I drive to San Francisco maybe a couple of times per year. Unless I start the trip on a completely full tank, I know I’m going to need to stop for gas at some point on the way. I also know from past experience that Dixon Gas & Shop usually has the cheapest gas along the I-80 corridor between Sacramento and the Bay Area. And I certainly don’t want to pay Bay Area prices for gas. So that’s where I usually stop. And since I’m stopping anyway I take the opportunity to use the bathroom and maybe get a snack. Does that mean I’m planning my life around my car?