Yep, understood. What I outlined for both types of vehicles was best case scenario - since Machine Elf specifically said “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;…”. If one doesn’t plan ahead and gets stuck in a mad exodus, all bets are off regardless of vehicle.
And just to put a finer point on this, Atlanta still got 12+ hours of tropical storm force winds from Irma with gusts up to 60 MPH. There were several reports of people who fled here from Florida still having vehicles damaged by falling trees.
And, Evan Drake, while fast charging is certainly far preferable, keep this factoid in mind:
Fast charging in the US for non Tesla owners hasn’t even started yet, partially because of expense and competing standards.
The 2018 Leaf is up to 150 miles. Extremely short range EVs may not be sold in the American market more than a negligible amount of the time over the next 10-20 years.
But, yes, there’s no way around it. DC quick charge stations are exotic and even if they become semi-common, they are a far more delicate piece of infrastructure than a gas station. You can hook up a generator and get the pumps on a gas station to work again. A gas station’s pumps don’t need very much power. You can fuel a lot of cars quickly with a gas station. With DC quick chargers, each car you are charging at full speed needs a vending machine sized rack of electronics to support it. And, like has been discussed in other threads, the power draw is enormous - charging 10 cars at once would pull more than a megawatt from the power grid. During a disaster, the grid just might not be able to support that kind of load. It certainly won’t be able to after the disaster has already happened, a few power lines knocked down from wind would prevent it from working at all.
For everyday life, a short range EV is more than adequate. For most people, they only really need the range to roundtrip across the greater metropolitan area they live in without recharging (which is something like 120 miles down here in Houston!), with a bit of extra capacity since over time the battery life degrades.
And, they need to be able to make it to the airport. In Houston, for me, a 150 mile range EV would cover 100% of all plausible such trips.
And most disasters are unavoidable. Floods from normal rainstorms will have flooded all the roads before you can really be warned in time to flee. Tornadoes can form out of the blue and your only protective action is to hide in the best protected room. Earthquakes pretty much have no warning (other than “don’t live there!”). Hurricanes that you can see coming for days in advance are the exception.
For <reasons> I ended up “evacuating” to St. Louis, 1600 miles from home, and about 700 miles past the farthest extent of Irma damage.
While driving home we first sighted obvious fresh wind damage about 75 miles northwest of Atlanta = 650 miles from where Irma made landfall on the US mainland. Downed road signs, destroyed billboards, trees, etc. They were few and far between until we got south of Atlanta then the density of wind damage picked up slowly and unevenly until we go home to Broward.
Broward absorbed just a few hours of minimal hurricane winds. So lots of tree and power line damage but not much else.
The reason that these new ultimatums are coming out where dates are being set for “no more production of internal combustion engine cars” is now there are goals for not just car manufacture, but recharging infrastructure, development of battery technology, and methods of generation of energy.
By that time (2035 or so) all power will be generated by solar and wind, full recharging will take only a few minutes, range will be extended, locations where charging can happen will be everywhere (not just service stations but parking lots and roadsides), meaning most of the fears that people have currently will have been addressed. The articles you read about these fears are based not only on outdated anecdotal data, but don’t take into account active development of new technologies.
Setting goals makes the difference. It’s no longer ifs and maybes, it’s whens.
Eh. Most of these “goals” are simply symbolic statements by governments. It doesn’t mean those same governments are willing, or have the resources, to actually make them happen. Those same governments have set goals for far more high speed rail than was ever built, as an example.
It will come down to the technology. Whether it works or is economical or not. Will batteries be so cheap you can have a second, massive battery in your house, charged from solar, so that you can have a rapid DC charger at home? Will self-recharging, autonomous cars become common? Will the batteries even get cheap enough for EVs to actually become the majority of vehicles sold?
Many uncertainties. By 2035, it could well be that autonomous cars are the majority of all vehicles on the road, and that governments in some areas have made manual drive vehicles illegal or made the permitting requirements onerous.
Europe: where people think 200 km is a long way. USA: where people think 200 years is a long time.
Still, let’s be honest: the overarching problem is that mass evacuation capability is absolutely not a requirement in modern urban planning. Even given the US transport model, predicated on overwhelming individual ownership of long-range gas-powered personal vehicles and high-speed high-capacity freeways, it doesn’t work well. And there are many US cities with less ownership of personal cars than others, and no viable fallback for those who can’t get out the only way the system is designed for.
Low-range EV cars is just another variant of “I can’t get out”. People with no cars, or unreliable cars, clearly predate this. And we haven’t solved that problem.
Looks like economic Darwinism judges them less fit to survive if a truly catastrophic event hits.
Though not in Florida this isn’t an option for our household - we need to evacuate 3 people [1 in a wheelchair, one geriatric using a walker and one cardiac patient] a conure in a cage and 4 cats in carriers with ancilliary food supplies, 4 wire dog kennels [one per cat, to be equipped with a litter pan, food bowl and water bowl each] and a bail out pack per person [medications and paperwork, clothing] and 2 tents, 3 cots [none of us can sleep on the floor/ground without a crane to haul our infirm asses up] and minimal bedding [though if we upgrade to the mummy sleeping bags, we are good down to neg 20F] 2 totes of food supplies [dam you dietary issues!] and minimal camp cooking gear. Oh, and a 5 gallon water carrier with katydine filter for cooking and drinking water. Everything packs rather solidly into my momvan, so trying to haul all this with public/mass transport is rather silly. And I am certain we are not the only household with similar issues. [you really don’t want to deal with me if I accidentally get nailed with tropical/palm products <the shits for hours> or shellfish like oyster sauce or clam juice as a flavor booster <projectile vomiting and the shits> or mushrooms <anaphylaxis> so hauling a couple weeks food supply is much better as an option.] On the other hand, as none of us is working a job, we can be packed and evacuated in short order, we would never have to wait around til last minute. And with a military ID, I can get us to the nearest safe military base
Comparable for a defective basis of comparison from the operators’ POV.
What an operator cares about is average miles per all-up hour. IOW, I leave my morning hotel at time X fully fed with complete range in my car. I arrive at my next hotel at time Y hungry and with either a place to plug in my car overnight or with my car already fully recharged for tomorrow. How many miles did I cover today ? How long did it take between times X & Y? What’s my average MPH? That (and fully amortized cost per mile) is the sole measure of merit for long haul transportation.
At that rate, slow charging and/or short range = frequent stops is the kiss of death for efficiency. As part of my Irma response I recently covered 3200 miles. At an all-up average of over 70 mph including fuel & meal stops. It takes sustained high speeds and sustained short stops to make that work.
No getting around the earth shattering conclusion here - if you anticipate a need for suddenly traveling over 600 miles of driving with minimal stops (pretty specific to Florida and very specific hurricanes) then a Nissan Leaf as your sole family vehicle is a poor choice. OTOH if you shelter in place an EV, even the very limited Leaf, may be a better choice than an ICE vehicle, as evidenced by the experience after Superstorm Sandy.
What would happen to EV’s is the same thing that happens to gasoline cars when there’s a natural disaster that sucks the region dry.
When EV’s are directly competitive with gasoline cars the infrastructure to support them will evolve to meet demand. That will include energy reserves just like it does now.
Really? If the power line goes down you can’t recharge your car, but petrol still stays in the underground tank at the petrol station and can be hand-pumped.
One of the obvious changes that will be coming with EVs is something we’re already agitating for in hurricane country: That all new local electrical infrastructure be buried and all existing local infrastructure be eventually buried.
The majority of problems with mass electrical outages are caused by the short-sighted (= cheap) decision to place wires and heavy transformers on flimsy poles surrounded by trees of similar height.
In my immediate area they’re doing a different remediation that’s cheaper, but not as effective: replace all wooden poles with much taller and stouter concrete poles and move the power wires farther up the pole so they’re above 90% of the trees rather than being within the crown of substantially all the trees.
But the telephone and cable TV/internet infrastructure is not being moved up; it’s staying down fully within the trees. And so will be comprehensively wrecked in every hurricane. Even the stouter poles are not absolutely safe from a large enough tree falling directly onto the pole. Nor are the wires set higher than every possible tree. And if anything, the new taller poles are even uglier than the usual forest of poles and rat’s nest of wires. It’s pure 19th Century visual blight that the 21st Century should not tolerate.
Still, this retrofit in our area did reduce the volume and duration of our local power blackout post-Irma compared to post-Wilma. The two storms did about the same amount of local tree and building damage. Some of that is surely luck, but a decent fraction of it is probably due to the more robust infrastructure.
Does that actually happen? I know in our city, when a tornado cut all power to our city, all gas stations closed. Except the few that had emergency backup generators.
As mentioned upthread, petrol stations should have a small generator to keep the pumps active, but if that runs out of fuel, then you need to manually pump some more.
Here’s an article from the NYT on how well EV’s did following the tsunami in Japan, mainly because electricity was restored much sooner than fuel supplies could be trucked in:
One other advantage that EV’s have in an evacuation is their efficiency in extended stop-and-go traffic (essentially what all the highways turn into during a mass evacuation) - a EV wastes pretty much no power at idle (beyond what’s needed to run the A/C, which isn’t a whole lot). Quite a few cars with gas engines end up abandoned on the freeway during a mass evacuation. With an EV you have a pretty good chance of:
A: starting with a completely full “tank” before evacuating (No worries about gas stations being sold out)
B: Getting the full range of the EV before having to stop, regardless of traffic conditions.
C: Finding something to charge with once you run out of range. Even a regular 120VAC outlet will work.
