What we’re often looking at is a rural/Urban+Suburban split.
Folks in remote rural locations with harsh weather will need specialized vehicles, and the mass EV market and charging infrastructure is not there yet.
Folks doing commuting in suburban to urban areas are better positioned to use EV’s right now.
I think what we’re seeing in this thread is a lot of folks in rural areas saying that EV’s will not work for them - and in some cases they are saying that most people are just like them. Whereas in actual fact, statistics say that about 46 million Americans live in the nation’s rural counties, 175 million in its suburbs and small metros and about 98 million in its urban core counties.
Emphasis mine. I’ve been in a number of discussions on this board about who needs what type of vehicle. IMHO, it’s the Urban, City, and Suburban folks that don’t understand that people are different. Mostly they can’t seem to understand that someone would need a different vehicle than they do. Myself, I don’t care what you drive.
My examples (including the recent one with the medical trip) all involved being in cities or the suburbs directly adjacent to cities with populations of 450,000, 290,000, 132,000, 267,000, and 92,000 people. I’m not aware of any commonly used definition of rural that counts cities of this side as ‘rural’, typically the largest cutoff is 50,000 people which all of these are larger than. I think you’d end up with a lot more than 46 million Americans in ‘rural’ areas if you’re using half a million people as the cutoff between rural and urban. And like I said before, people in my area don’t find living 20-30 miles from work unusual, or bat an eye at driving 10-25 miles to do things like visit someone, go to a get together, visit a particular store, or play a game, and driving 50 miles is something you do occasionally, not a once-a-year sort of trip.
I dispute the implication that 273 million Americans live in areas where driving more than 50 miles in a day is so rare it’s an edge case.
You can do all those things with most EVs on the market today. I bet I drive over 100 miles a day a couple of times a month. I could do it every day and never have a problem. Most days I drive between 20 and 50 miles. It’s the “200 or more miles” in a day that I rarely do. I would have range anxiety in a Leaf, based on my driving habits. I have none with my car.
Well, good thing I never said, nor implied this.
I’d say that driving over 200 miles/day on a regular basis is certainly above average, given that the average commute is 32 miles round trip. If you are one of these people, then an EV is not for you. But it does put you “above average”.
Also, one can certainly drive more than 50 miles/day with an EV. Not a problem. I know you don’t believe this, but it is true.
And I still say, if you do drive more than 200 miles per day frequently, then take a serious look at whether or not an EV will work for you. Maybe “planning your life around the EV” is good, because it will save money and pollute much less. Maybe the planning is way less complicated than expected. I could easily drive 200 miles per day with no additional planning other than plugging in every night.
Some quick math. These are numbers for me, your numbers may be different. 25 200 mile trips per year, so about every 2 weeks, will cost me $100 in electricity and generating that electricity will create 1700 pounds of CO2. The same 5000 miles in a comparable gas car, say an Audi A4 vs my Tesla Model 3, will cost $450 on 170 gallons (30 mpg), and emit 3300 pounds of CO2. 50 200 mile trips is an even bigger win for the EV.
I wanted to compare cars that are similarly priced and in the same market segment. You can do your gas trip in a Prius, and that will make things not as big of a win for the EV. But, if it’s fair to compare to a Prius, then it’s also fair to compare to a Ram Power Wagon, in which case it’s a huge win for the EV.
I don’t think I’m expanding the scope as the OP did refer to what benefits the majority of people, and I think it’s logical to assume that “people” refers to people in general, and not only rich individuals who drive Teslas or similar. I also assume that EVs refer to what’s used worldwide.
I don’t understand your second point, as cell phone services also require extensive infrastructure. The same goes for even decentralized power.
Finally, I’m guessing that by default it’s assumed that “people” in this forum refers only to those who participate in it and not people in general, and thus EVs refer only to what forum members drive. If so, then that should have been clarified in the OP.
One more thing: the reference to container ships, etc., was not meant to move away from the discussion but to show that ICEs are not exactly expendable. If any, they’re needed to make EVs, not to mention the infrastructure which they also need to operate.
As for tuk tuks, etc., they’re meant to show that not only EVs but even vehicles using other types of fuels (such as LPG) have been used significantly in many parts of the world, but mostly in towns and cities. In the countryside where roads are rough and the need for basic needs to be delivered significant, ICEVs are critical.
I too am thoroughly confused by the rough roads thing. A Model 3 can easily traverse probably 90% of the roads in North America. Exceptions would be some remote logging roads, possibly some of the far north in Canada, etc. But typical gravel roads in rural areas are a piece of cake. I routinely drive on such in my Fit, which I’m confident is no better in rough terrain than a Leaf or a Bolt. It just isn’t an issue.
At a guess, the percentage would be even higher in Europe. It would be lower of course in less developed areas, but even there most of the roads are passable by relatively normal vehicles. It isn’t till you’re onto “roads” requiring old Land Cruisers complete with winches to get yourself out of sticky situations that SUVs and pickups can’t deal with it, and there are a few SUV/crossover type EVs on the market with several pickups on the way.
On the other hand, it’s certainly true that the more capable EVs on the market are notably more expensive than is affordable for the masses in the developing world, so in that sense the current batch of EVs isn’t ready for prime time worldwide I guess. Still, I would have thought it was pretty obvious that the thread was mostly about North America.
It’s a Bolt. The Volt (now discontinued) was a hybrid, my car is pure electric. 2 to 4 miles of range added per hour from the 120v socket is a little low. I’m gonna do some math here, help me out if I fuck it up…
The EVSE cord that came with my car provides 120 volts at 12 amps. That’s 1.44 kilowatts to the car. I’m suspect there’s some efficiency loss, but I think it’s negligible as my ‘theoretical’ math here aligns with what I actually see in real life.
So, if I have it right, that’s 1.44 kWh added to the battery every hour. My current “around town” driving habits allow me to get 4 to 4.5 miles per kWh.
4 to 4.5 miles per kWh times 1.44 kWh = 5.76 to 6.48 miles of range added per hour.
If I get home at 8p and leave for work at 7:30a, that’s 11.5 hours of charging, so that means I get 66 to 75 miles of charge overnight from the 120v outlet. More than enough for regional driving. Even if, as we do, we range as far as Thousand Oaks a couple of times a week (120 mile round trip), the base 240 mile range has enough left over that I can always keep the car ready with just my home setup, even if a couple of the days I start with 50-75% range. It’s like having only half a tank of gas and not bothering to top off.
When I go to LA or even up to Monterey, I’m dependent on L3 chargers, but like I said, I’ve never had to give that much thought, as there’s no shortage of those down here.
I never made the claim you appear to be disagreeing with. EV proponents jumped all over me for putting such things in my scenario and claimed that I was making up absurd scenarios that bore no resemblance to reality. There was a poster who actually sneered at the idea of using a figure of 10 miles drive for ‘going out’ on an evening as though nobody would ever drive that much. You appear to be conceding that such scenarios are actually reasonable, which is great but several pages past relevance.
As I’ve said before and I’m sure people will ignore, the problem is you can’t casually do those things with the EVs on the market today if you combine several of them, and/or also do things like stay at a location that doesn’t have a charger built in, like real people do, without adding an hour or more charging at stations which also are out of the way except in a very few areas. Unless all of your friends, partners, hookups, relatives, etc. have a charger that you can use at their home, you can’t stay at any of their homes overnight if you want to keep these as ‘daily’ figures.
And while I expect EV proponents to continue to claim that I’m inflating figures, This past weekend in California, the area where charging is supposedly as convenient as gasoline, actual Tesla owners had to spend multiple hours for a single charge. More Teslas on the Road Meant Hours-Long Supercharger Lines Over Thanksgiving
I would certainly agree with you that going out on an evening for a 10 mile drive after commuting an above average distance of (say, for example) 50 or even 75 miles round trip should be considered reasonable, and it should be expected that an EV you would buy today should be able to handle this.
I would strongly disagree with this poster who sneered at this idea. Which post was this in? Who sneered at this example? I have lost track.
Yes, you most certainly have. Your words are preserved in this thread, and I’m long past requoting stuff over and over. It gets really tiring when the most vocal EV proponents won’t stand behind what they say.
“Above Average” is not the same thing as an edge case that’s not worth considering, you’d generally expect around half of people to be above average and around half below. “Average commute” bears little relation to “average commute of someone who might reasonably consider an EV”, since it will include people who use public transportation, people who walk, and people who live in locations where they can’t install a charger. “On a regular basis” and “daily commute” are completely different things, and mostly unrelated (a once a month trip to visit family is ‘on a regular basis’ and doesn’t depend on commute distance). “Miles/day” isn’t really the relevant measure, it’s “Miles/charge” as people don’t always bring their car to their own home with a charger each night.
You have not actually provided any evidence to support the contention that “driving over 200 miles/day on a regular basis is certainly above average”, and that figure is pretty irrelevant anyway. A better figure than the average for the entire population would be the figure for people who own (or otherwise possess) cars, as an overall average will be driven down by people who don’t drive at all or extremely rarely, but who would not be candidates for replacing an ICE vehicle with an EV in the first place.
You ‘know’ something that is clearly false, as I have not at any point denied that one can drive more than 50 miles/day, and have discussed driving EVs more than 50 miles in a day. I don’t believe the latest strawman that you’re pummeling, and my posts in the thread clearly show that I don’t. You really should just stop the strawman thing.
I’m quite sure Pantastic is talking about me, though the only thing I scoffed at was the reasonableness of adding an extra 20 miles in a scenario where it was not mentioned in the first place except as a vague “going out”.
If that’s the scenario, then fine. Just don’t say a bunch of vague things and then assign numbers later that that turn it from an easy scenario to an edge case. That’s goalpost moving.