From what I’ve heard, those stories are greatly exaggerated. Yes, they do have lower range because you have to run the heat and defrost off the battery, but most people have far more range that they actually need for daily commutes, so it’s not really an issue. ICE cars also have decreased range for basically the same reason and no one writes stories about that.
To be fair, when your ICE car runs low on dino, unless you are in some remote unpopulated area, you just pop into a nearby fueling station for 2 or 3 minutes and refuel. It’s not a big deal and people do it routinely. When your electric vehicle runs out of electrons, first you have to find a recharging station and then you have to plug it in for 2 or 3 hours (correct me if I’m wrong). So it’s a much greater inconvenience.
Also in the really cold my ICE range drops from 420 miles to 400 miles (maybe, probably not even that much). My coworker’s Nissan Leaf drops from 140 miles to 90 miles.
I have thought about range maybe ten times in 35 years. Electric car owners talk about range ALL THE TIME. In between angry denials that range is an issue!
Better still if you can do without a car altogether
Volkswagen is promising to make 100% carbon neutralcars in the (near) future.
Scribd link, e.g., page 41 and 48
They promise that the upcoming “ID” model, to be available in a year will be already CO2 neutral.
I’m not taking this at face value - for one thing, that promise relies significantly on “compensation” aka “indulgences” - but, relevant to the OP’s question:
Technology is improving and things change. Tomorrow’s tech will be better than today’s tech.
So a worthwhile consideration regarding car replacement might be: keep the old car for some more time, while waiting for future cars that will be manufactured with greatly improved emission footprint (as well as better data on what the emission footprint of that future car is).
I have read everything and was going to reply yesterday, but the Oldsmobile actually broke down oddly enough. It got me to work, but the water pump bypass hose busted and I shot my coolant all over the place, which is a bummer.
So I had to fix it. I replaced it while I was at work for 8 dollars, and put new coolant in the car and bled out all the air in the system. It is holding in like a champ. I was thinking the entire time I was replacing it (about a 20 minute job) if this car were electric I wouldn’t be doing this…
I think after reading everything I am going to keep this car alive until I can buy a carbon neutral electric car to replace it. I have gathered that that would be the best use of carbon I could do. Does this sound like the best use of carbon?
The area I am in gets pretty hot in the summer (100F) but gets pretty cold in the winter as well (-10F). I understand that it will make a battery in a car preform worse and take some of the useful life off of it, but I don’t drive that far each day and I don’t think that the range issue would be an issue so much.
I think I could make the switch to an electric since the wife has a brand new Sonata and I have a '68 Volkswagen if I need to drive further than 80 miles or so in a day.
Not if it’s a level 3 charger. Those are 400+ volts and will recharge in about 20 minutes. That’s to about 80% charge. Unless you’re going on a long trip, that’s all you want, because leaving the battery at a greater charge shortens its life.
EV owners talk so much about range for basically the same reason ICE owners talk so much about the price of gas. Mostly habit because at one time, it was a significant factor.
Electric car owners talk about range because we keep having to explain why it’s a non-issue.
Define ‘tiny’. A 5 kW home solar system will take up about 250- 400 square feet of space, depending on panel type and layout. Assuming it’s angled perfectly and south facing, the average power return per year in the U.S. for such a system is about 7,000 kWh. If you live farther north than average, or in a cloudier or snowier place than average, this number will be lower. That’s about 19 kWh per day.
So if you had a fairly large home solar panel system, charging your car to go 20 miles will use up about 25-30% of your entire daily power generation, and take quite a few hours. That’s the best case scenario. If your system is older, or you are using it to charge a battery then charge your car from that (most charging is done in the evening and at night, when there is no sun) subtract another 10-20% in losses.
Or put another way: To fully charge a Nissan Leaf battery from an average 5 kW solar system would take about two days of 100% output. That will take you about 150 miles. So if you dedicated a 5 kW solar system just to charging your car, you could drive about 27,000 km per year with perfect assumptions. The solar system that could do that would cost you about $15,000 for parts, probably $20,000 to $25,000 installed.
You know, you can buy your own carbon offsets from various companies, so if you’re willing to spend a little bit extra, you can become carbon neutral no matter which option you choose.
I just got back from an out of town meeting where our Tesla driving colleague stayed at a different hotel than the rest of us because it had a rapid charging station. If he wasn’t a VP he would have to get authorization to stay at a “non preferred” hotel. And “my car prefers this hotel” isn’t a valid reason. Next time he’s going to be given a company car, most of us would be laughed at if we requested that. When the bosses want ten people at a meeting 150-200 miles away from the office, they don’t want to deal with people’s car issues.
Same with the soccer/ski/hockey dad with the Leaf. He has to get his ex-wife’s car when he goes to tournament or clinics that are two or three hours away.
So no, it’s not just because EV skeptics keep bringing it up.
There is probably be a large part of the car owning population for whom this is simply not an issue. Drive ten miles to work each way run errands, charge overnight at home. I just don’t seem to know too many of those people. Probably because I live in the suburbs, have kids into sports, and work for a company with a huge number of distant locations (stores, warehouses and offices) that we need to visit at least every few weeks.
Fine. I’ll be more precise and say range is not an issue for the intended use of electric cars. Long-distance road trips aren’t one of them at this point.
And? I’m sure that’s why he bought a Leaf, because he has access to another car when he needs to drive beyond the range of the Leaf. The Leaf is a budget EV with much less range than other mainstream electric cars.
Electric cars have way more range than 10 miles. If you regularly or even occasionally drive 120 miles in a day, an electric car with 200+ mile range (Bolt, Tesla, etc) will still work well for you. If you sometimes need to drive more than that, and you don’t have access to another car, I definitely would not recommend buying a pure EV. At least not until there are more charging stations available.
See I don’t get this. How is putting money with the carbon I dump in the air make it better? I don’t understand how carbon offsets are regulated or tracked.
Not saying you are wrong by any means. Just pointing out my own ignorance here.
You basically subsidize renewable energy producers. Say an utility has a mandate to produce 30% of its electricity using renewable sources. And they are located in a place where solar, wind and geothermal are not very cost effective. To meet the 30% target they buy credits from a utility that has no mandated renewable energy targets, but had the opportunity to generate oodles of energy from renewable sources.
On the one hand the seller may just be getting paid for something they may have done anyway, but this will encourage SOME additional renewable generation.
This being the Dope, several people will be by presently to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.
And that’s why it’s still a niche product. I have a 120 mile commute each day. I’m not necessarily normal, but I’m also not abnormal. My previous commute was 90. A complete battery vehicle is not a viable solution for myself except if I purchase a car that is several times the cost of my current car, or I only use the vehicle in the most optimum of circumstances.
That’s not a road trip, it’s my commute. EV’s have at least hit the point where they’re good for multiple short trips, but they’re not yet quite a general purpose vehicle.
It probably has a 3.8 liter V6 engine, model L27, which was a refinement of the previous LN3 engine. It uses multiport fuel injection, so it’s not like an old carbureted engine.
It’s older than 1996 when OBDII was rolled in. After that cars reported their own emissions numbers to the test computer. Before that a tailpipe “sniffer” test was used. However that’s not a laboratory test, nor does it test on road performance, emissions during engine warmup, etc. Key emissions improvements since 1992 involve reduced hydrocarbon and CO emissions during the warm-up phase.
That test also only measures emissions at engine idle. I believe 1992 US cars are subject to the FTP75 test standard which did not require meeting any emissions standards at higher throttle angles or engine speed. This policy was continued until at least the mid-2000s; I don’t remember when it was changed. IOW a brand new 2003 car at higher engine rpm or throttle angle was legally not required to meet any emissions standard whatsoever. It was felt too difficult to maintain emission compliance in that operating regime, plus most cars only spend a small fraction of operating time there.
It is likely a new 2019 car has much improved traditional emissions parameters over the 1992, such as lower hydrocarbons (HC), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and carbon monoxide (CO). This is especially so over a wide engine operating range vs a static test at idle speed.
The EPA highway ratings for that car, new, were 24 or 27 mpg highway with the 3 or 4 speed automatics. Not questioning your figures necessarily. The long road trip average (including some local driving and some aggressive windy road driving, usually) for my 2015 BMW 328i is 37.5 (directly measured by gas bought v odometer not the trip computer) v EPA rating of 33. But our road trips are generally in warmer weather (an MPG plus for most cars) and it’s a fairly new car. That’s quite an overshoot by you year round in an old car. But anyway it is relevant in that either driver factors could mean a new car with 32 mpg rating is significantly superior to your car under your foot, although, OTOH a particular newer car might turn out less conservatively rated than the current car insofar as that’s the reason for the big overshoot. Some cars are notorious for significantly undershooting their EPA estimates in real driving across drivers on average, some hybrids in particular have been.
As everyone knows, annual fuel cost when considering electrics must consider the difference in cost per unit of energy between motor fuel and electricity. For 2018 the EPA assumed $2.28/gal regular v $0.13/kWh. That’s about right for regular gas where we live now but electricity is more like $0.17, so EPA figures are significantly friendly to electric cars compared to reality in our area right now. For premium which we use in our car EPA assumed $2.91/gal which also high right now for our area, it’s around $2.70.
Once you try to make value judgments not based on end user cost, more variables enter in.
It really is a 3.3 liter, its some sort of lower displacement variant of the series I 3800 V6 that GM used in the BOPC (Buick Olds Pontiac Chevrolet) cars of that vintage. It looks like they used the 3800 in the later models when they switched them over to OBD2 as far as I can tell looking through Rock Auto’s catalog. It does have multi-point fuel injection, one injector per cylinder. They did use the tail pipe sniffer in the emissions test because its OBD1.
There aren’t emissions requirements here where I moved to Colorado, but where I was in the Portland area before, they take the sniffer for the OBD1 cars and do an idle test, then ramp the engine under load on the wheel rollers in gear up to a series of different engine RPM loads. They hooked up an induction clip to one of the spark plugs to get the RPM reading. A side note, those tests are dangerous as hell. The guy told me one time that the bearings in one of the rollers failed and the car shot off of the rollers. He was very insistent that nobody stand in front of the car and the door was kept open.
In emissions testing counties in Oregon, you have to go to a place called DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality I think) and you essentially drive it through. I am assuming they didn’t trust the readings that they were getting from the sniffer initially. I had to drive it out and into another testing bay that was set up with the sniffer for a retest. Then they tested one of the employee’s cars on the same rack, then passed a pole with a mirror under my car for about 20 minutes trying to find a place where the tail pipe could be leaking.
The mileage I am assuming I am getting could be wrong a little due to the odometer being off or something, but I drive very easy on cars and I’m a little pokey when I’m driving around. I’ll do the speed limit if it isn’t 75. I just don’t like driving 75, I’m more apt to drive 65 unless there are a lot of people around and then I’ll keep up with everyone to keep traffic moving along. I don’t accelerate quickly and I have new gas mileage saving tires on it. All the parts I put on it tend to be AC Delco if they are available.
I found the emissions test results I took in 2/24/17. They are due now in Oregon again but since I moved here I’m just having to transfer the title. Here they are as listed on the form:
Tailpipe emissions test results: PASS
Standards: HC(PPM) = 220 CO% = 1 CO+CO2% = 6
1st Idle Emissions = HC(PPM) = 9 PASS CO% = 0.000 PASS
The rest of the fields in the form are all NA.