How would electric vehicles cope with emergency evacuations? Imagine if Florida had gone EV. I’m thinking that the relatively short ranges and long recharge times would have caused serious problems. If you’re in a petrol or diesel vehicle you can extend the vehicle’s range by carrying extra fuel. You can’t do that in an EV. And EVs are dependent upon the power grid being up. Think about an area without power for an extended time.
If you randomly survey people fleeing hurricane zones in fossil-fueled vehicles, I think you’ll find that the percentage who have equipped themselves with extra fuel is extremely low. The occasional handyman/engineer/survivalist may jam an aux tank in the trunk, but the rest of the folks out there don’t plan far enough ahead and/or lack the skills to perform such a retrofit, and/or they don’t want the hassle/hazard/stink of sticking a couple of five-gallon fuel cans in the hatchback.
If you’re evacuating a storm zone in an EV with limited range (e.g. Nissan Leaf, 107 mile range), you can plan ahead, giving yourself plenty of time and knowing where charging stations are; with half a brain, you’ll be able to get out of the danger zone without any issues.
For returning home afterward, you have a choice:
-
wait to return home until authorities (or your app) tell you that the power is back on at your house, or
-
Buy an emergency generator (portable or permanent) for your house, and use it to charge your EV. To be fair, this only works as long as you have fuel available. Although if you don’t, then all the people driving dinosaur-cars are equally fucked.
That’s fine now since EVs are relatively rare. But what happens if you have most cars or even a significant number of cars as EV? Now you have scaling issues as all those cars get bottlenecked at the charger.
Although I have to assume that by the time EVs are the main form of transportation, EV tech and infrastructure will have caught up, taking this sort of scenario into account:
- Hardened power grids that aren’t so easily knocked out by wind, rain, ice or flooding.
- More charging stations (possibly augmented by solar, wind or small Mr. Fusion/Fission reactors)
- Faster charging time
- Longer range cars (possibly including portable back-up batteries to extend range)
- Portable emergency charging stations (think a battery or generator the size and shape of a 40’ intermodal shipping container)
In a way, you have the same problem with gasoline powered vehicles. During an emergency, how fast do we encounter fuel shortages once there is no electricity to power the pumps, roads are blocked to fuel trucks or petroleum shipping ports, refineries and other facilities are shut down or damaged?
Although…there is a reason that Mad Max drove the “last of the V-8 Interceptors” and not the “last of the V-4 Hybrids”.
The trip from Miami to, say, Atlanta (a common route to flee Irma) is ~650 miles. Drive time in a gasoline vehicle is going to be about 10 hours, including 2 stops for fuel at 15 minutes each. Add 30 minutes to an hour for a eating stop = 10.5 to 11 hours. Certainly doable.
Using figures that I can find online, it takes about 4 hours to charge a Leaf on a 220 volt charger. The Leaf would require a full recharge a minimum of 5 times, adding 20 hours to the 9.5 hour trip. Unless team driving, that will necessitate an overnight stop as well (which could be combined with a recharge if the hotel/motel is so equipped), so add a net 4 hours more (8 hours rest less one 4 hour charge stop). You are now looking at a 33 hour trip, and that is best case with pretty extensive route planning. All of that assumes enough charge stations to accommodate 10’s of thousands of cars on the same route at the same time.
Doesn’t seem so logistically easy to me.
Most people these days who have an EV also have a gas-burning car that they’d use on long trips (most EV owners these days don’t own Teslas, so driving from Miami to Atlanta is just not something they would do).
If you’re going to envision a future where most people own cars that are EVs and don’t own gas-powered cars as well, they need to (a) not travel, and they will be unable to evacuate, or (b) own long-distance EVs which can use supercharging stations. There is also the possibility of lower-distance EVs combined with © the electrical infrastructure will need to be updated to provide more electricity, more charging stations, bigger charging stations, faster charging stations.
Hurricanes generally aren’t logistically easy or fun. 33 hours does sound like a pain in the ass, especially with boring-ass four-hour recharge periods, but it’s certainly doable; I’ve gone on three week road trips before, so I have some experience with being on the road for long periods of time. If you have an EV - or at least one that charges at a snail’s pace like the Leaf - you’ll certainly need to plan ahead. But at least you’ll have a leg up on those poor bastards who don’t even own a car, of which there are plenty.
One assumes that if/when we get to the point that there are thousands of EVs owned by the general public, charging stations will be commensurately more common, just as fossil-fuel stations are presently common to serve the needs of ubiquitous fossil-fueled cars. I would also expect that by that time, EV cars with a range as low as the Leaf will be relatively uncommon.
I love the way you say “if Florida had gone EV”, to rhyme with “crazy”. If an area ever does “go EV”, I would imagine that the infrastructure would follow. Not just charging stations, but (in the case of an area that sees frequent hurricane evacuations) infrastructure for evacuating (ya know, buses and trains). Which, conveniently, will also help those who don’t own vehicles.
Those who do own vehicles are aware that they can’t use them for everything. If you own a Corolla, you use it for commuting, grocery shopping, going to Costco, the occasional trip, and escaping hurricanes. But that one time in 3 years when you have to move a refrigerator, you rent a van. (Some choose to own an F-150.) We’ve been using cars this way since the 1950s.
But if you own a Smart car or a Mazda MX-5, going to Costco becomes a project. And if you own a limited-range EV, the “occasional trip” and “escaping hurricanes” parts also become projects. But, on average, it’s never as inconvenient as not owning a car at all.
Such scenarios make hybrids look more attractive. Even if, due to an exhausted battery, you need to use the expensive gas-powered part of the engine, I doubt if the running cost will be your main concern.
Just curious what kind of responses the OP expected. Range and recharge time have been the most talked about and most considered aspects of EV design and purchase. They’re talked about endlessly.
Poisoning the well there, aren’t you?
Except how often do you expect to be in a mass evacuation scenario? Even in hurricane country, it’s not very often. So I don’t see the point of planning one’s auto purchase around this rare emergency. It’s about as silly as buying a giant SUV for the rare occasion when you need to move a giant piece of furniture.
I am uninterested in cars, electric or otherwise, however — and first may I say that going 650 miles to avoid a hurricane or anything else seems a little… over-cautious — but the 2 - 4 hour charge is for Level 2 charging, as from a household socket.
One can choose Fast Charge at a fuel station ( or anywhere one has it installed ) which takes about 15 minutes for a full charge, and I should very much recommend opting for it over the 4 hour charge if out-running the wind. Although we are all different.
Nissan USA — ** How Long Does It Take To Charge The Nissan Leaf ?**
People could carry a small generator to recharge their EV, have always thought that one could be adapted to be rooftop to run while the EV was running, not to give unlimited range (given enough fuel), but to greatly extend the range on occasion and slow the depletion rate of the batteries (and with enough time running with the car off it would recharge the thing if needed).
Needing to evacuate beyond the range of an electric vehicle sounds like kind of a black swan event.
Pluggable cars typically refuse to move when plugged in. So, unless you could reprogram the car, you’d still have to stop somewhere to use the generator. There is the EP-Tender, though, which seems to do what you describe.
It’s simpler to just use a car that has its own generator: a range-extended EV or a plug-in hybrid. But then, you lug around your petrol engine all year.
Ironically in Superstorm Sandy it was the gasmobiles that were relatively shit out of luck - EV owners did quite well.
Oh, Doctor Jackson -
Uh maybe when the roads are clear. But when there is a mass exodus and the highways are complete parking lots? It was not logistically easy for anyone.
Evacuations are gridlock. No one is getting anywhere fast.
When you live at the end of a peninsula 400 miles long by 150 miles wide, and a 250 mile wide storm is running up the length of it, you need to cover some considerable distance just to be where the storm won’t be.
Kinda like walking on a railroad trestle and getting halfway across when you suddenly hear a train coming. Escaping left or right doesn’t work, so you end up running along the tracks trying to outrun the train. Seems like a silly cartoon-ism. But it’s the least-bad solution to a most-bad problem.
In most cases you’re not fleeing all that way to avoid certain death. You’re fleeing the logistical hassle of lost electricity, lack of gasoline, and maybe lack of air conditioning, color TV, high speed internet, and good quality wine for a week or more.
Remember: the USA is a place where people mistakenly think 200 years is a long time. UK/Europe is a place where people mistakenly think 200 miles is a long distance.
650 miles would put me in Prague.
Series hybrids are the solution to this. I started a whole thread on it. But the TLDR is that a series hybrid uses a much larger battery, and is intended to be purely electric from day to day. It does not have a transmission. A gas engine optimized for simplicity, high power, and high fuel efficiency (but not optimized for torque or longevity) is in the car, and the gas tank has a secondary tank of fuel preservative that you are prompted to keep filled. There might be tradeoffs - you might be limited to 55 mph on the highway on pure engine power.
That’s what you need for the case of Florida. Or, use buses or autonomous cars. The OP implicitly assumes that it is a practical solution for everyone in Florida to flee these rare ‘spinal hurricanes’ in their own personally owned cars. The problem is the roads are not actually adequate for everyone to flee in time if they are in their own vehicles.
The smart thing to do would be to close the roads to anything but buses. Want to leave? Get on the bus. Then there would be enough road capacity for everyone. This might be difficult to arrange, however.
Another option is autonomous cars. The reason autonomous cars solve the problem is that a certain percentage of them would be hybrids. So during the evacuation prior to a big storm like this, in theory someone could have clicked the mouse, and sent all the short range autonomous cars into garages, while fleets of hundreds of thousands of hybrids get pulled from service in other states and concentrated in Florida. It would be mandatory to share, no car on the road leaving florida should have empty seats. That would get everyone out.
The federal government would need the power to commandeer privately owned autonomous cars in civil emergencies like this (with compensation to the owners).
The roads in FL are far more generously provisioned than are busses. Said another way, more people get out on jammed highways in personal cars than get out on uncrowded highways using all available busses.
Unless of course the busses came from all over the country and staged ahead of the evacuation.
Any of these mass-action plans depend critically on the idea that the government controls the behavior of substantially all the population and everybody both knows what the plan is and cooperates with it. And that decisions are made much earlier than they normally are.
All of which are exactly how the military moves large numbers of military equipment & personnel in short well-controlled timelines. But is almost wholly inapplicable to civil practice.
I “evacuated” on my pre-planned vacation 4 days before any civil authorities had told anyone anywhere along a shore to move inland, much less flee the state. I came back 14 days later, 7 days after normalcy had been restored to our lightly hit area. I encountered zero traffic, zero shortages, zero difficulties of any kind anywhere I went.
The actual, non-pie-in-sky way to perform mass evacuations is to encourage more people to leave much earlier & go farther. Which of course means greater expense, more false alarms, etc. Which also flies in the face of mass human (or at least 'Murrican) nature.
Or, as you suggested elsewhere, build more of our infrastructure so hurricanes don’t damage anything but vegetation; they just stop commerce for 24 hours then life goes on unaffected once we bulldoze the tree limbs off the streets. That’s the actual low-cost approach once we look at long-term cost total effectivity rather than short-term individual cost effectivity.