How about “Well I’m not braggin’ babe so don’t put me down, but I’ve got the fastest set of wheels in town. When something comes up to me he don’t even try, cause if I had a set of wings man I know she could fly.”? Because those lyrics apply equally well to a high-end EV as they do to a little deuce coupe. Sure, you can make a stupid song about an EV if you want to, but you can make up a stupid song about any ICE too.
Seriously, having actually bothered to look up the lyrics:
The song is mostly about how cool looking and fast (and small?) the car is. There are mentions about the gearing and the engine whine, but they’re a small part of the song.
This song is ALL about how fast the car is. There are a few mentions of engine mods, noise, and, again, those manly four gears, but they’re a small part of the song.
Not a single mention of anything that couldn’t apply equally well to an EV, aside from the car brand itself.
This song only has like ten words! So yeah, a rather high proportion of them (if we ignore duplicates) are talking about the physical specs of the car, and nothing about engine sound. The physical specs of an EV could slot in equally well.
Honestly, the real reason you’re not seeing songs like these anymore (for any vehicles) is because we don’t really admire illegal street racing anymore. Car culture has simply shifted away from boasting about modding your car up and blowing people away.
Well sort of. There is still an underground scene and they are big into modifying smaller cars.
But yes the old car culture is over. It also ended when gas became more expensive. And then most of the time today your spend stuck in traffic or trying to fit your car into a tiny parking space so all that power under the hood means nothing.
The only thing I see the younger crowd spending money on today are rims and those can be on an EV.
Few roadable passenger vehicles: mostly true; otherwise false. Vehicles for situations unsuited to ICEVs - utility trucks, golf and delivery carts, forklifts, short-range shuttles - have been continuously produced and used. ICEVs are unwelcome in closed warehouses, etc. At the other end of the range are hybrid locos and buses - EVs without fat batteries, essentially running on range extenders. Also the same big vehicles powered by overhead lines, like the trolleys and buses I rode around San Francisco. EVs have surrounded us for a very long time but they mostly weren’t branded Ford or Fiat.
“Early adopters” of EVs existed around 1895. We’re in the EA stage for automotive LiOn batteries now. Whining about cost will stop when durable batteries are much, much cheaper. Looking at roadable passenger vehicles, can you point to any battery-only EVs costing less than comparably-equipped ICEVs?
Fantastic, when i said i think EVs can work for people who drive 50-70 mpd, I meant that was their usual mileage, not the max. As others have pointed out, many people have access to more than one car, either because they own multiple cars or they occasionally rent or borrow.
When I said we are at a camp, I meant like a child’s summer camp, not a wilderness camping trip. I’m with a group that has rented out the heated buildings of a camp for a weekend event. This is rural, not wilderness. I apologise for being unclear. Like most rural buildings in the US, these buildings have electrical outlets. My point is just that you don’t need exotic infrastructure to charge a car.
And yes, my set of people that might find an ev a good purchase today is smaller than that of some other posters in this thread. Because some posters probably think it would be a good option for me, and yet, here I am, driving a PHEV, not a BEV.
Gasoline cars don’t sound like they did then, either. Manufacturers now pipe in fake engine noises via the stereo system to produce the expected sound. I had a Mustang convertible for a bit with this annoying feature. It sounded rather like a muscle car with the roof up, but as soon as the roof was done and I could hear the real sound, it was bubbles, like George Jetson’s car.
They’re working on faking the outside sounds, too. The 2018 Mustang apparently includes a quiet mode that can be set for some times of day. What’s the “real” sound of the engine? There isn’t one–it’s all just tuned baffles and Helmholtz resonators and butterfly valves and so on.
while they do use some idiotic resonator from the engine to the bulkhead of the car the engine absolutely has a “real” sound. and it’s distinctly different between the standard crank engine and the high performance flat plane crank.
There’s a lot of ground between ‘hiking their stuff deep into the wilderness’ and ‘camping more than five minutes from the car, which is also at an electric outlet that never has issues and no one, including other campers, minds you staying plugged into for the entire weekend’. And yes, I’ve heard of and even gasp gone car camping - but most of the time when I do that, I’m parking the car at the campsite, which doesn’t have an electric outlet. This ‘outlet within five minutes of the campsite’ is nothing like the camping that I do privately (sometimes I’m 30 minutes or more from the car without even hiking!), the camping that people I know who go to music festivals do, or the largish ‘cookout and camping’ events that some of my friends host 3-4 times per year.
And I get really tired of EV proponents declaring that they get to decide what disruptions I’m allowed to be bothered by. If I’m out in the wilderness camping, going up to move a car around at all is a disruption, you declaring that “it’s totally not disrupting” doesn’t change that at all. I’m either going to be busy with whatever event I’m camping out for or enjoying the wilderness, and messing around with the car is off-putting.
If they drive 70 miles per day, they’re not recharging off of 120V according to any numbers that I’ve seen published . The usual numbers I see are 2-3 miles of range for hour of charge for a tesla. If we up that to 4 to be generous, and assume that the person does nothing but drive to work at 7am and return to charge at 6pm, that’s only 52 miles of range, not 70. And that requires just going to work and coming home, it doesn’t allow time for going and doing other things.
Don’t claim that I’m ‘dishonestly’ talking about 240v charging instead of 120v charging when it’s actually clear that 120v charging isn’t up to the ranges being talked about.
What you’ve described is not what comes to mind from ‘a remote camp’. This is a very, very narrow slice of what is encompassed by camping, and definitely doesn’t include a large number of very popular styles, like ‘camping at a 3-day outdoor music festival’, camping at the non-RV spots in the state parks I’ve been to, or just getting permission to camp on someone’s land and heading out. So I do consider that ‘exotic infrastructure’ when it comes to camping.
Where is the 95% figure even coming from? It sounds like a figure you just made up. You haven’t defined what driving pattern counts for this “95%” figure, and I doubt that it’s a large enough population to bother talking about. EV proponents keep trying to pretend that driving longer distances is some super-rare event, but I don’t buy it and it’s clear that they repeatedly fail to make the case.
I don’t think that qualifies as “At the moment they are great options for people in industrialized countries who have access to home charging, typically drive less than 100-200 miles per day (depending on the EV), and can afford an EV as their next car.” That means an EV is less a ‘great option for people’ and more like ‘a great option for exactly one person in a household, but definitely not all drivers in a household,’ which is a lot weaker than what EV proponents seem to want to claim. I doubt any of the more vocal EV proponents is actually willing to say “an EV is a great choice for one person, as long as the other driver in your household sticks to an ICE vehicle, but you’re screwed if you both try to reap the claimed benefits of an EV”
Renting a car costs significant money and time. It would be utterly idiotic to buy a new, expensive EV supposedly to replace an ICE, then pay even more to rent an ICE vehicle every time you want to drive somewhere that’s not local. Oil changes occur once every 3-6 months, and take at worst the same amount of time as renting a car. Gassing up weekly for a month takes less time than one supercharge of an EV, or about as long as two ‘charge at someone else’s house’ nights. Renting a car multiple times a month (that is, whenever they want to take a ‘long’ trip) would be prohibitively expensive and inconvenient. It’s a nonsensical idea.
I really don’t get why EV proponents keep making bizarre hypothetical situations that don’t make sense. If ICE cars were worse for people and ICE fanatics were posting that they were great, I’d disagree with them too. But that’s not the case here, so I don’t see what the point is.
You’re right, I don’t, and I’m not. Aside from the fact that coming up with a specific number would require more research than I’m going to do, all that posting one would do is prompt EV fanatics to nitpick it to death instead of supporting their own claims in even general terms.
Holy shit, talk about nitpicking. I already apologized for being unclear and said that I described the place poorly, but that I was talking about RURAL not WILDERNESS. And the point I was making was not “oh wow, my EV is great for camping” but rather “It’s not very hard to charge an EV in rural America.”
Y’know, as someone wisely pointed out all the way back in post#1089, I’m getting really tired of people in this thread declaring they get to decide which disruptions I’m allowed to be bothered by.
Well, YT, there are some critics who, ten or twenty years from now with EVs having a 400 mile range, a charger on every corner, and gasoline at $15.00 a gallon, will still say they’ll never take over.
Right now there’s not much you can do besides getting towed to an outlet. However, there was a discussion a ways upthread about what it would take to fit towtrucks out with quick-charge ability. Answer: not much - they’ve already got big diesel engines, just need an extra-beefy alternator and some charging circuitry. This capability will probably arise organically as the market begins demanding it.
Tesla roadside assistance says, “We are able to assist you, but this is not a financially covered service.” So, you’re going to pay for the tow to the nearest charger, but they’ll come get you.
This is something that modern gas cars could also do, but I’ve never heard of it being implemented. If following a route on the in car map, a Tesla will warn you if you need to reduce speed in order to make it to the next charger.
People have experimented with charging Teslas from portable generators, with differing amounts of success. If wired properly, you can add charge to the car, at whatever output level the generator is able to support.
Probably the easiest, and perhaps most dangerous, way to add charge is to pull the EV behind another vehicle, and let regeneration charge the battery.
Just popping back with some new (to me) information. Back in post #946 I argued that the cost of putting a decent 240V charger in a home was not negligible. I said I would check with my electrician.
He came today and I talked to him about chargers. He said my house and attached garage fit their standard job, which included the wiring, circuitry and a decent charger. The total cost, $750.
Now, $750 may or may not seem like a major additional expense if you’re spending $37,000 for a car. But if you spend $30/wk. on gas, it’s like buying nearly a 6 months supply at one time so you can save after that.
Sounds about right in the ballpark. I’m not sure if anyone ever said that the cost would be negligible, but I guess this proves a point of some kind.
Personally, I don’t need a 240V charger, and am happy with a regular 15 amp 120V circuit.
ETA: Credit where credit is due; good job for finding an accurate and reasonable quote. I had a neighbor tell me that me getting an electric vehicle was stupid, because I would have to put in a DC charger at a cost of $50,000. He was positive that he was right. Two years in, and he’s still positive that someday I will have to spring the $50,000 for a charger.