The issue is that 40% of Americans don’t believe that we are currently battling (the metaphorical) World War II.
This isn’t necessarily true: Most EV drivers are going to start the holiday trip with close to a full charge. As long as the round trip is within the cars range (or there’s an outlet available at aunt Betty’s house <250 miles away), all these cars should have Zero need for fast charging.
To really figure out the peak demand, you’d have to find out the distribution for how many miles people drive beyond ~ 250 over the holiday weekend, and what % of cars would have charging available at their destination.
Do you seriously think that no one will notice that you’re acting like the following was not included in the quote: “They don’t take 30 minutes to get to if you’re sticking to major routes, and it would be pointless to go to one if they were”? I knew you were going to just dismiss the examples (like I said, I posted it for people who think I’m mischaracterizing, not for you) but completely ignoring a bold statement like that is pretty impressive even for you.
I will continue to respond as I feel appropriate in this thread unless and until a moderator instructs me to do something differently. You aren’t an individual who is empowered to direct what people are allowed to post here, but giving directions like this fits very well with the general tenor of your posts.
It gets really tiring to be accused of ‘moving goalposts’ when I’m accepting the terms that EV proponents are using. If people are going to call a set of distances ‘long’ in this thread (to the point that they’ll talk about a ‘half billion mile commute’), it’s not reasonable to accuse me of moving the goalposts if I accept their definition and refer to them as ‘long’. Also (and this is another example of the sort of strawman you claim doesn’t exist), I never put a stipulation of ‘can’t possibly find a charge anywhere’. That is just a ludicrous standard to use.
But consumers living in ‘densely populated’ urban through suburban areas have friends and relatives that live and activities that take place outside of their said densely populated areas. Your contention seems to be that the vast majority of people (over 75%, as you considered ‘25% not’ to be high) follow a model of sticking to things that are within the distance of their work commute the vast majority of the time, but I haven’t seen anything that supports that contention. As I and a few others have said, that is radically different from what we have observed, and no one has been able to find statistics supporting the claim.
I definitely agree with this, the idea that the typical 2 car household has one ‘commute to work’ vehicle and 1 ‘long distance trips’ vehicle seems to be firmly embedded in several people’s minds, but I don’t see many households that practice this. Usually if people have two cars, they’re both used for regular commuting. I’ve seen a lot of households where two parents with kids have one large car (van, minivan, pickup, crossover or the like) and one small car, where the large car gets used for the shorter commute and for any family activities, while the small car gets used for the longer commute and any trips where the kids aren’t going (one parent doing a trip, or leaving the kids with someone for a weekend). This doesn’t lend itself well to the ‘replace one car with an EV’ model at all.
The post of yours that I responded to was asking a person who isn’t currently looking for a second car whether they would consider getting an EV if they were looking for a second car, so I answered it because I’m in the exact same situation. To make it clearer, if I was looking to buy a second car, getting an EV would make no sense as it wouldn’t provide me any benefit. If I was going to get a second car, it would be to add a capability I don’t have right now like a pickup truck for towing and hauling, 4-wheeler for offroad driving, minivan/van for driving a large number of people, or something along those lines. Adding an EV as a second car wouldn’t add anything for me (and I think it wouldn’t for the person you were asking either). Later on next year when I will probably become a 2-car, 2-driver household, converting one to an EV would still not make sense because both of us would prefer to retain the ability to do things like ‘each visit our own parents on a weekend’ or ‘one visits friends a distance away, one goes to a convention the other isn’t interested in’ over the small to nonexistent savings of converting one car to an EV.
One (well actually two) commuter + one “long trip” car is exactly our usage pattern.
We have on small MPV and one larger MPV - if we’re going anywhere “far” we’d take the larger MPV.
An electric car would be more than sufficient for either of our daily usages.
Should one of us be going “far” alone, the larger MPV could be taken, with the other partner being quite ok with an EV for the short time the partner was away.
I’m a BIG proponent of EVs - the only thing currently holding me back is:
Price - my daily car was purchased for $5,000 3 years ago, we just replaced an accident damaged MPV for $3,500
There aren’t (yet) any EV available this price point.
Now of course - my daily commute is less than 5km each way - so it’s pretty hard to justify the extra spend from a petrol saving viewpoint. However I can well imagine that an 80 km round trip daily commute would provide enough impetus to stump up the extra cash for a dedicated EV commuter
It doesn’t seem that you are listening -
AGAIN - for our family, and we’re by no means unique in our area -
We very seldom need to drive more than 50 km to an event / meeting / outing
And IF we do - we would simply take the ICE car instead of the electric.
Alternatively - often there will be a 3-8 hour time where we are parked up AT the event - as charging stations become more and more common, this time can be spent charging.
I can’t understand what you’re objecting to at this point. Ravenman’s interpretation of my statement here is correct. And anyone that even casually glanced at Tesla’s Supercharger map can see exactly what I meant by my statement.
If you are driving a long route, you’ll need to stop at a Supercharger at regular intervals. Depending on the car, your driving style, and the exact route, the interval might be every two or three stations. When you do need to stop, however, it will never be the case that you have to go 30 minutes out of your way. Just like gas stations, the Superchargers are generally right off the exit. The extra time spent in diverting from your route is negligible.
A few things to think about
- The charger installation is a one time cost that will last for the next 20 years or more, so can be amortised over many cars (and as an aside, it can also be used by your friends who drive EVs - removing one of the other hurdles to EV uptake)
- If you take out the range “problems” - an EV is much nicer and more fun to drive than a comparably sized ICE - it’s quieter, smoother, faster and more comfortable
- Maintenance in an EV is much less - particularly if it is a commuter car which is known to be hard on ICE engines (arranging an oil change / service is inconvenient for me)
We have “his and hers” but freely swap between them as needs (and, with long narrow driveway so the cars are parked nose to tail, parking order) dictate.
Actually, that lends itself very well to “replace one car with an EV”. That’s exactly the market the Chrysler Pacifica is aimed at. That’s not a true EV, it’s a PHEV, but with enough EV range that most drivers will rarely burn gas. It would work for your hypothetical family as an EV.
In my household we never take long road trips for just one of us. That’s what airplanes are for. We could use a conventional minivan or SUV for family trips, for dump runs, and for the shorter regular commute, and a small EV for the longer daily commute and routine shopping and visiting folks. The only reason we haven’t gone that route is that we have a third driver who mostly monopolizes the second car, but that’s just enough slop that the two of us can basically share one car. Which is currently a PHEV (Ford c-max) but might be replaced with a ICE. But… Much as my lemon drives me nuts, the idea of needing to buy gas all the time just seems so annoying.
Your claim is the exact opposite of my experience.
I know of no two EV households. I know of roughly 20 friends and acquaintances with EVs. It’s typically a larger car for commuting for one parent and very long road trips, and the EV for commuting for the other parent and everything other than very long road trips.
That’s because everyone who drives an EV knows they are much better than an equivalent ICE car, so they want to use them as much as they can until it gets unreasonable to do so.
25 pages in & no one has brought up fire trucks yet.
Way back, on like page 3, the New York Times article I posted said that 60% of households don’t travel more then 50 miles from home in a given year. Its not the 75% you’re talking about but its true a lot of people don’t travel. I would bet the 9% of carless households fall into that 60% so its probably more like 50% of households with cars don’t travel more than 50 miles from home each year.
The other 50% take 20 drives per year of at least 50 miles and prefer driving trips of 8 hours before they spend the night. I think that is where a lot of the talking past each other in this thread happens. Until, EVs can deal with long trip half of us don’t see EVs as viable, unless the charging infrastructure improves dramatically and or EVs get 500 miles to a “tank” they aren’t viable. On the other hand the other half see adding 300 miles in 5 minutes as crazy and needless.
I’d agree with you with two caveats…
a) that assumes single car households with no “gas” car (seems to specifically exclude the concept of two car households)
b) Driving 8 hours before spending the night is different from 8 hours without a break for lunch, sightseeing, letting the dog pee, changing the baby’s pampers etc. I’ve done trips where it truly was 8 hours with only 5 minutes for petrol, but also trips where we stopped every two hours for 15 or 20 minutes (or more) and adding electrons (if a charger were available) would not have been even a slight inconvenience.
The most recent “long” trip I’ve taken was with the family (the only one in the last 3 years where a 300km range wasn’t enough) we made enough stops along the way such that an EV would have been easily sufficient (assuming charging available at popular tourist spots)
I’ve been off for a few days and TL;DR so I don’t know if this has been addressed yet. This CityLab piece covers electric buses, 99% of which are in China. Cities and districts trying to build electric bus fleets run into infrastructure problems - like how and where to charge the buggers, and how much power capacity is needed.
That’s just buses. This leads to my question: How much must the entire US power grid, source to outlet, be upgraded to charge many millions of EVs of all sizes? Mega-doses of personal cars and pickups will be joined by fleets of buses, semi-tractors, cargo vans, ambulances, fire trucks, all thirsty for juice. Hint: invest in copper and nukes.
Put it in perspective. Don’t compare 4,000 MWh to nothing, compare 4,000 MWh to 600,000 gallons of burned fuel. 16,000 buses at 124 miles each is 600,000 gallons of diesel (based on a transit bus average MPG of 3.26). How much needs to be spent to clean up from fuel burning buses? How much is lost in illness and death due to pollution?
Sure whataboutism, but here it is: Option B has costs. Yes, but what about the costs of Option A. Those have to be considered when deciding between the two options.
How will the electricity demands be met? Building transmission infrastructure, and new generation sources. How was the demand for providing 600,000 gallons of fuel to the bus fleet met? Building holding tanks, pipelines, refineries, and tanker trucks.
Interesting news here. For this year through November, guess which is the 11th best-selling passenger car in the United States?
I don’t know either, because the Tesla Model 3 is in the top ten.