If you read this thread you’ll realize that I am hardly an EV proponent. They don’t work for me & they don’t work for many of my friends. I fall squarely into #2 & many of my friends fall into #2 with an addition of #3 &/or #4.
However, unlike you, I realize that the do work for some subset of the population. I think my biggest ‘argument’ with the EV proponents in this thread is what percentage of the population they would work for. I believe it’s greater than 0% but less than some of the kool-aid drinkers do.
3000 miles/3 months is old-school thinking, at least 12 years out of date based on this article from 2008. According to AAA it’s only every year for low mileage on newer cars.
If your thoughts on oil changes are so outdated maybe your assumptions on EVs are as well.
Besides, if you read what I actually wrote, what I was saying is that someone who needs 4 oil changes a year is driving so much that they would regularly need to be charging away from home & therefore, the extra time to do such would mean that an EV is probably not a good car for them.
I think they frown on Kool Aid as a beverage of choice there.
A base Nissan Leaf (range about 150) can be had for under $30K not counting the still extant $7500 tax credit. Compare it to anything you can get for the net of $22,500. It blows it away and save several hundreds of dollars a year on fueling costs.
But correct you need a place to charge regularly and no need for frequent long distance trips or hauling with that vehicle.
A better route planner is the most configurable option I know of. It is web based, not an app, but it does have an in the car mode. It is great for the “what if” type planning. The user interface takes some time to learn, but much of that is because so many things can be tweaked.
You can pick your car, what types of chargers you want to consider, and adjust things if you’ll be carrying lots of weight, or losing range to cold, etc. It may tell you that you only need to charge for 10 minutes at a particular stop, but you can go in and say you’ll charge for 45, because you know you’ll be getting lunch, and then it will know how to plan for the next stop.
I’m not upset, just calling you out on your history of insults. Anyone who bothers to read this slog of a thread can see what you base your ‘EVs are not for you’ bit on.
At no point have I done either of these things, so again your declaration that I’m ‘determined’ to do something I haven’t even done.
No, I was answering someone who asked why people who actually take trips where charging is an issue would not want to buy an EV, then rent an ICE for trips where charging would be an issue.
If longer drives are so rare that even talking about them is absurd, why did so many EV owners need to charge over thanksgiving weekend that there were hours long queues for superchargers? At first EV proponents were huge on the whole “you can just charge you big baby, do you just like buying lottery tickets and slim jims at a gas station” schtick, now they seem to be changing that tune a lot.
You say ‘unlike me’ then state the exact position that I’m arguing in this thread. You may not be an EV proponent yourself, but you’ve drunk enough of their kool-aid to believe the strawmen they keep trying to attach to me. Or can you cite the post where I have said that EVs do not work for any subset of the population?
Or maybe, like I said and you ignored, I used that estimate as a safe estimate to avoid a useless argument about oil changes. As I said, normally in an argument you can just assume the case that within reason is most favorable to your opponent to give their argument as much leeway as possible and avoid pointless dickering about things like oil change rates. Of course, you’ve decided to descend into pointless dickering about oil change rates in some weird attempt to claim that when I refer to things like Tesla’s website, I’m making ‘outdated’ assumptions about EVs.
Using published facts is not making assumptions.
Yeah, and what you wrote is a nonsequitor, since at no point did I discuss someone who **needs **4 oil changes per year.
Yeah, and if you read that analysis they do exactly like EV proponents in this thread and consider only daily commute and not longer trips. Their 42% does take into account charging and hauling, but not the “frequent long distance trips” criteria. And ‘frequent’ here has included every thing from ‘twice a month’ to ‘more than once per year’.
I think he’s saying that no one can drive an EV for long distances because the waits are too long at charging stations, because there are too many people driving EVs long distances.
I think there’s a legitimate concern with EV quick charging bandwidth over major travel holidays (i.e, Thanksgiving). I think EV quick chargers are generally equipped to handle most driver’s average need (at least based on my experience), but since 95%+ of most EV charging is done at home, quick chargers only really need to be able to support the remaining <5% of charging miles. This approach generally works out fine, as long as everyone’s long distance travel needs are evenly distributed throughout the year. Unfortunately they aren’t - tons of people drive 250+ miles over Thanksgiving weekend specifically.
All of a sudden, you have charging stations that are rarely more than 1/4 full seeing excessive queues.
This doesn’t happen anywhere to the same degree with gas stations, which are already sized for 100%+ of all drivers average gas needs (since nobody fills up gas at home), so they are much better able to absorb any extra holiday weekend driving.
I don’t really think there’s a good answer for this right now, other than “don’t drive an EV over thanksgiving, unless your destination is within the car’s range” . Of course, EV quick charging stations could be sized for 100% of peak holiday traffic, but that would mean massive amounts of stations that sit empty for almost all days of the year, so there’s little incentive for that.
I am a member of the group you describe. And thus I, like Pantastic, am not a good fit for an EV, at least until I can arrange for a change in my life circumstances, which won’t be for a couple of more years at a minimum.
There are a non-trivial number of people in this very thread who have described taking occasional road trips using an EV, taking various approaches to the power issue. You ignore them because you don’t like the reality they represent.
You have no evidence whatsoever for your bizarre conclusion that only five or ten percent of the population have a place to charge a car and the wherewithal to figure out how to power it for all their use cases. And nobody has made the contention that people who make occasional longer trips are in the minority; they have contended that people who make occasional longer trips and cannot manage to make an EV work with that one way or another are in the minority.
And I agree - I think that at least 51% of adult drivers either tend to stay local and fly when they want to travel, or can manage to use the tools available to find places to charge while on the road, or just don’t mind renting if they feel like driving long distances instead of flying.
You disagree, based on sheer opinion, but I find your opinion (and the utter lack of supporting evidence for it) uncompelling.
I believe you are incorrect about the number of drivers who can’t manage for other reasons besides lack of home power - which was the specific set of drivers I was describing in that set of stuff you cut because you’re in such a hurry to erroneously call things strawmen that you fail at reading comprehension.
Of course the daily commute is part of the discussion, as are all the examples of how actual EV drivers have dealt with occasional long commutes. (And “multiple times per month” is not “occasional”; that’s downright frequent and such people should only use EVs for those trips if their routes and/or destinations consistently allow for sufficient charge.)
But no, I’m not going to bother to dig up statistics for you to ignore. Your unfounded disbelief is not my problem, and your argument style is such that you don’t merit much effort on my part.
The other potential related issue is even outside peak driving times, it’s not clear how growth in auto maker and publicly sponsored charging stations will compare to the growth in number of EV’s, if the % really takes off from asterisk %.
If it were a market system, the answer would just be ‘don’t worry about it, prices/costs will align to where there are enough charging stations for the number of EV’s people want to buy, including their willingness to put up with long waiting times occasionally to charge away from home (peak or non peak)’. But EV’s are different than some other products. Groups of ‘Concerned’ people want to create non-market subsidy/penalties to boost EV market share to a high number. Generally for what they really believe are good reasons, I at least am willing to assume. However in non market systems like that you often run into shortage/oversupply situations that would not be as likely in a more market oriented system.
Right now most charging stations are mainly installed either as a marketing tool for EV sellers or by govt entities, both of which have some incentive to keep up with demand, but more limited incentive than that of a strictly for profit system like gasoline retailing. Although OTOH the govt at least could decide to create enough public chargers to cover Thanksgiving and Labor Day etc. (various peaks in particular areas like vacation areas) since it can lose money freely ‘for the greater good’.
But this would tend to get around to the real question about EV’s IMO. Which is how much should they and their infrastructure be subsidized, and how much should ICE car use be penalized (fuel taxes, etc) to make market share numbers like 10’s of % for EV’s in the US come to pass before a very long time. A lot of discussions here on environment/climate stuff seem to be heated about what’s going to be economical. I’m as a rule just willing to wait and see what’s economical. If someday an EV is practical/economical for me, I’ll buy one, if not (not practical as of now) not, no problem either way. Same on a macro level, if they are so superior that they flood the market without subsidies, why would I object to that even if I don’t want one? The issue I tend to be more concerned about is what regime of subsidy/penalty is required to make various environmental agenda’s come to pass. And the secondary issue from that, eg. you give out big tax subsidies (up to $7.5k/car) to buy EV’s that non-EV driver taxpayers like me have to make up for, but the subsidy arrangement for buying EV’s doesn’t prevent a bottle neck in say charging stations.
I haven’t ignored them, I have disputed the more absurd claims and pointed out that the ‘approaches’ involve singificant time, risk, and lack of flexibility over an ICE. Some of them make assertions that are flatly wrong (unless Tesla’s site is lying), like claiming that superchargers are so abundant that there is always one conveniently located, or that L2 chargers are available at virtually all hotels and shopping centers. Others claim that having to decide where you’re going to eat and take breaks based on the car instead of your preferences is no big deal, when I (and others) do think it’s a significant drawback. Others claim that adding multiple hours of supercharger time and driving at 80% of the speed I would in an ICE doesn’t add significantly to the trip time, which again is just silly. (And ignores the issue of charger availability).
No, I dispute that an EV is a good option for someone if by using one they need to add 25%, 50%, or more to the travel time on their non-commute trips and plan the trip tightly around the car’s capability and risk getting stranded because they have to go down to near-empty. It’s not about ‘managing to make an EV work’, it’s about whether the EV is actually an option that is at least on par with a less expensive ICE vehicle. If you’re going to have to add 50% to the travel time every time you take the kids to visit grandma (or a variety of other trips) that means the EV is not a superior or even equal option, it’s a significantly inferior option.
I think that if less than 10% of your trips are long, that qualifies as ‘occasional’ rather than ‘frequent’. And I think that if you’re going to fly off the handle over ‘twice a month’ trips, you should be specific about exactly what qualifies as ‘occasional’ in your book. 24 long trips a year is ‘frequent’, so where is the line on ‘not frequent’ - is 12 (once a month) occaisonal? What about 6, that’s traveling for half of the big holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day, and July 4, plus one beach trip and two 2-hour drives to visit someone sort of nearby but not a short distance away over the course of a year? I think your estimate of what’s a rare amount of driving is wildly off.
I find idea that most people who already have a car will tend to fly for a trip to somewhere 2 hours drive away, pay for an uber from the airport to the destination (and any additional destinations) rather than just drive the trip in the first place. You don’t even save time with that because of all of the airport delays.
Yeah, I’m not a pushover who just accepts bogus numbers that people make up and claims that don’t match reality, and I don’t fold when multiple people are ganging up and being insulting to me. Clearly if I had an argument style of folding when people turn nasty, you’d provide statistics… except that I’d already be out of the thread if that were the case, so there would be no one to provide them to.
Show me the specific posts where someone claimed that super chargers are “always” conveniently located or the posts that L2 chargers are at “virtually all” hotels and shopping centers.
You can’t, because nobody is saying those two things, and so you made those strawmen up.
Yyou keep spreading misinformation - like that anyone said those things - and you’re mad that you are getting called out on it.
Thank you very much! That is a great app. The trip is doable even now, which surprises me. But it does add on a few hours.
Let us be precise. The limiting factor item is not individuals who take “frequent” long distance driving trips, but those who need that vehicle to be able to do that trip. The vast majority of families that own one car own two cars, and for whatever number of individuals there are who take “frequent” long distance driving trips, an other vehicle in the household that is long distance capable (such as my PHEV for my family) would be sufficient. Do you have any estimate how many individuals take “frequent” long distance driving trips? I know of only a very few, and none of them who are not two car families. I’d also suspect that having a place to charge at home and having more than one vehicle are not independent factors but strongly correlate instead.
Still, let’s imagine that one in four (a pretty high estimate I’d think) of those with access to home charging and no need to haul both take frequent long distance road trips and do not have access to a second car to use for those trips. Even that is still over 30% of the market for new cars … consistent with surveys that show 36% of American prospective car buyers would consider an EV as their next car purchase.
Cite provided that it is more like 56% that have access to charging.
Just an aside - a fair amount of the new charging infrastructure coming is actually part of VW’s diesel cheat settlement:
The investments will be done in four staggered 30 month cycles and include the free installation of chargers in multifamily residential sites and businesses.
A quick excerpt:
"With Ford, that starts at the dealership level. When potential future owners call in asking questions about the vehicle or electric cars in general, staff need to be well informed on the subject. This isn’t simply choosing between a 4-door car and a coupe or the pros and cons of an SUV, it’s a whole lifestyle change. Gasoline vehicle and related maintenance aren’t just things people are already used to, they grew up with them. When making the change, people have questions or more commonly, misinformation regarding electrification.
Questions related to simply charging a Tesla shoot up to almost 100,000 monthly online searches across the board. For those in the know, the answers are simple but each of us began with similar inquiries. A large part of Tesla’s success comes down to having outlets for answering questions of those skeptical. Whether through their stores or online communities, concerns are rectified. The Tesla Reddit community alone has over half a million registered users ready to help. This is where Ford is drastically slacking. There has been exactly zero training done in relation to electric car ownership at Ford Dealerships and there’s no incentive to even begin.
To test my hypothesis we set out to call each and every Ford dealership within a 200-mile radius. With electric cars already a taboo subject and the Tesla Model Y electric crossover around the corner, these things won’t be selling themselves. Asking very straightforward questions regarding both the Mustang Mach E and general electric vehicle ownership, the results were baffling. My expectations were already low but some of the statements made were simply outrageous."
If Ford can’t get their act together, how is the average consumer supposedto make heads or tails of it?
To be fair, it appears, based on a Google search, that the Mustang Mach E won’t be available until late next year or early in 2021. So there’s still time for Ford to educate dealers. And I’ll bet there will be a couple of people in the sales team at each dealership who will be more familiar with it than most of them (especially given it’s going to be a niche product for a while, meaning it’s going to represent only a small fraction of overall sales).