I think that right now, EVs work well for some people and not for others. They are also a pain in the butt if you can’t charge it at home overnight.
I’m not sure that it’s a pain in the butt for “most people” at this point, however.
I don’t know that cars really burst into flames at all, at any appreciable level. I’d expect that nearly all of them are simply subjected to fire. E.g. they’re collateral damage of house fires, vandalism, wild fires, etc.
So if you’ve got a burning car in your burning house, the smoke generated by an IC car is carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. These suffocate you but, if the density is thin enough, you’re able to keep going. If a lithium ion battery car catches on fire then you’re trying to escape in a cloud of hydrogen fluoride:
Toxic fluoride gas emissions from lithium-ion battery fires - PMC.
Renting a car is a pain in the ass. It is the exact opposite of why you own a car: the convenience to get in and go.
To rent a car, you have to start your trip a day earlier before you want to leave home.
You have to drive to the airport, leave your car in the long term parking lot, wait for a shuttle bus to take you to the terminal, stand in line at the rental desk, go hunt for your car in the rental lot, figure out how the unfamiliar car works, then drive back across the entire airport to your car you left in the long-term lot, then transfer the stuff you normally keep in your car to the rental ( baby seat, toys for the kid, cooler, extra dog leash, ) and then drive home from the airport.
And it costs a couple hundred dollars.
This is okay for a rare trip, maybe once a year. But if you want to drive to visit family several times a year, the hassle is enough to deter you , and you won’t feel comfortable buying an EV..
Psychology matters
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I don’t think that fire hazards are uppermost in most people’s minds when they choose between ICE, hybrid, or EV. Maybe the reason EV fires are so noteworthy in the popular consciousness is that we don’t normally think of batteries as combustible, and the fact that EV battery fires are so notoriously difficult to extinguish. But regarding that last statement, gasoline-powered vehicles don’t become “bombs”, either. They just burn.
Never mind; trying again.
I think what’s going on is that it’s a pain in the butt for most people in certain regions of the country. And it’s extremely convenient for most people in certain regions of the country.
Most of us live our lives locally and assume what it’s like for me/us near our homes is what it’s like for everyone everywhere that matters.
As has been said in other contexts, be they economic, technological, or political, the future is here; it’s just very unevenly distributed around our country. And density matters greatly. The future is very much concentrated in areas of high density and is largely absent where there’s low density. Kinda like the red state / blue state electoral maps, measured by headcount the dense areas have all the people and the undense areas are a rounding error in the headcount. Measured by land area, the dense areas are a drop in the giant bucket of undense.
Your scenario is a worst case example. Here’s how it works for me.
I call the Enterprise store (or Sixt store; they’re near one another) that’s a mile away in my 'burb and they bring a car to my residence. When I’m done renting, I call them to come get their car from my residence. At worst, I uber to their store to pick up my rental at the start and after I drop it off I uber home. If it’s a nice day I could walk there and back.
Further I don’t have a mountain of stuff that needs to be transferred from car to car. Yes, some stuff lives in my daily driver. But not stuff I really need for a trip. So the only thing that goes in a rented road trip car is my butt & my luggage. Plus GF’s butt & luggage.
I don’t often rent for a road trip, but when I do it’s not that difficult. For me. YMMV of course.
It works fine for me, too, even though I’m a Luddite and my cell phone can’t even run the Uber app (it’s apparently too old, like me).
Enterprise has always worked well for me – their pickup and drop-off feature was a major advance in the car rental industry. When I’ve needed a car repair that was more than a reasonable wait time, Enterprise was always the answer. Pick me up at the shop, then drive me back – what could be simpler! Plus, I get to drive some pretty cool cars (some of which are nice, and some of which I’d never ever buy!).
Seriously, Enterprise is a decent way to do an extended test drive of a variety of cars. Yeah, they’ll be the small engine and the stripper trim level. But you can get a good idea of everything else about the car by keeping it for a couple days.
Sixt is similar for fancier more performant cars. They’ll still be smallish-engined strippers, but a stripper Benz or BMW is still a Benz or BMW.
If I was going to buy a new car I’d sure try to rent one from some rental agency for a couple/few days first. Yeah, that might cost some money, but you’re about to plunk down 50 or 100X that much on the car and it’s cheap insurance against avoiding a mistake.
I completely agree with this.
Cell phone batteries are the same chemistry, and subject to the same issues. If your cell phone ever starts smoking, you have a couple of seconds to drop it in a metal trash can but mostly you want to get away from it.
I saw a video about battery fires and how to deal with them at some insurance continuing ed thing. Basically, the professionals cover them with water to try to keep the stuff around them from catching on fire, and wait for them to burn themselves out. (In an airplane, they put them in the oven and wait for them to burn themselves out.)
Anyway, it’s very rare for either cell phones or electric cars to burst into flames. But when they do catch on fire, it’s a pretty nasty fire. Gasoline is also a pretty nasty fire.
One of the reasons i picked the Niro when I was car shopping is that i got stuck with it when i rented a car about a year ago. It was very inconvenient, for a lot of reasons that i realized in the moment would not be a problem if i owned the thing and had prepared in advance. (it was mostly uncharged when i picked it up from Avis, and they didn’t include a charging cable in the rental.) But also, i found it easy and comfortable to drive on a road trip, and was confident that i could live with it.
I don’t believe this is a real issue.
I mentioned above that i watched a video of burning batteries. It included a couple of cars, and lots and lots of cell phones. Most had obviously been captured on security footage. Every one of those videos included people standing there watching. Not one of them included people showing any visible reaction to toxic fumes. The firefighters playing their hoses near the cars seemed unconcerned about toxic fumes. The presenter never mentioned that as a risk.
I have a friend whose plug-in hybrid caught on fire as he was driving down the highway, and he pulled over and his wife and kids got out and watched it burn, while waiting for help.
I don’t doubt that toxic fumes might be produced. But i don’t think it’s a significant issue to human health or safety. I think the fire is the significant hazard.
Also, one huge safety advantage of EVs is that they don’t produce carbon monoxide. Not that most properly functioning ICE cars produce much these days, either. But it’s an easy failure mode for the ICE.
Cars don’t catch on fire very often. I’m in the insurance industry. I look up the safety record of every car I’m considering buying. I usually look at IIHS-HLDI, the US government tests, and the EU government tests. (The EU explicitly tests pedestrian safety, and how much damage the car will do to other vehicles, not just passenger safety, by the way.) I did not bother to research which cars are mostly likely to burn, even if that’s tracked. It’s very dramatic when it happens, but it’s not common enough to be a concern. (Except in Teslas, where the mechanical door latch is hidden, and people often fail to get out when the electrical system dies. And that’s not a problem with the battery, it’s a problem with the door mechanism.)
Question, you imply here that adding in an EV charger is a considerable expense. I have a EV in the UK, don’t have a garage, and had a charger fitted to the wall of my house for £1000 ($1350). Not nothing, but a considerable saving over the price of filling up for me. What does it cost in the US?
Small datapoint: I love my EV (Mini Countryman 2024). I was a little nervous beforehand, but now it’s always charged and ready to go, it’s fully charged overnight on low rates, it saves me a lot of money compared to traditional fuel and goes like a rocket.
FWIW, I don’t have a garage, and I just had a charger installed on the side of my house near my driveway. It cost about a thousand bucks, but the power company rebates covered the installation completely.
Old housing stock often lacks enough spare electrical capacity to put a high powered charger anywhere, or specifically into an old garage. And especially an old detached garage. The US being on 110v vice your 220 means the general capacity of our household wiring is less to boot.
Almost any house built after the WAG 1970s will not need expensive electrical upgrades upstream of buying and fitting the charger itself.
But for the thousands of neighborhoods and millions of houses built between, say, 1900 and 1960, expensive electrical upgrades to the house will be probably needed to supply any but the slowest and weakest of chargers. Worst case your poorly-supplied garage could not even take a basic L1 slow wimpy charger. Unless such upgrades were already made earlier for some other reason.
Interesting, thank you!
It was expensive to upgrade my house, because i needed to upgrade my electrical service, and doing that required ripping up part of the retaining wall. That’s why i did it a few years ago (not when i was buying an EV). Because the retaining wall was a mess and we decided to replace it as part of a larger remodel. So it seemed like the right time to upgrade the power supply, and with an electrician in the house, i asked him to add an outlet for an EV while he was at it. I think it’s the first time he’d installed an EV outlet for a customer who didn’t have an EV (at least on order).
I only wish I’d known that water pipes sometimes fail from age, or i would have replaced the water and sewer, too.
There are lots of places where it’s prohibitely expensive to add an outlet for EV. And other places where it costs an hour or three of an electrician’s time.
That is a fair point. Our 1919 house absolutely wasn’t prepared for a charger; but we had the electrical box upgraded last year as well, due to its complete inadequacy and inability to pass inspection. That was a lot more than a thousand bucks.
There’s a whole lot of privilege in this thread regarding factors like home ownership as well. I rent an apartment. I can have one car. There is no place to charge an EV at the apartment, not even the slowest charger. There is no way to force the management company to install capacity. There is no place to charge at work (and I work at a place with a secured lot and we could easily have several if the landlord would do so.) The closest charger is apparently only a couple miles away but that’s still more planning and time than just getting gas.
When my Forester finally broke for good I bought a used Fusion hybrid with low mileage. I get nearly double the mpg in town, over 40 on trips, I don’t have to worry about finding chargers in the long runs of emptiness that is the southwest, and it’s paid off. If I get a decade out of it like I did my Subaru that’s still a net gain.
That also varies regionally.
Many work places around here have facilities to charge cars. Now that it’s becoming common, they often charge for it, but even then, workplace charging apps tend to be cheap, basically covering the cost of the electricity, plus a small surcharge. My town has a municipal fast charger (only a few outlets, paid) and most big malls in the area have fast chargers, usually kinda far out in the lot, but still, you can easily walk into the mall and do some shopping while your car charges. A friend in an apartment complex was complaining that she’d paid for an indoor space so she could charge, but the complex has just announced that charging is not allowed from the random indoor outlets, and it’s now only allowed at the new charging port they’ve set up.
There’s an interplay between supply and demand. It’s very hard to be a pioneer. (Some of my friends were. I wasn’t.)
Honestly not really.
No one here argues that an EV (especially a pure EV, rather than a PHEV) hits everyone’s use case in the current infrastructural environment.
Still according to Harris polling
Nearly two-thirds of vehicle owners have a parking spot in the garage or driveway
And while a level 2 charger is nice, level 1, regular wall socket, typically adds about 4 miles of range an hour, and overnight of say 10 hours would typically be enough to supply daily commuting needs of the average under 40 miles a day; 220 outlet is not strictly required for home charging.
Meanwhile according to Edmonds somewhere between 8 to 12% of new vehicle sales are BEV. If we add PHEVs to that maybe 15%? I won’t call that “only”; it has actually been a pretty decent uptake for several years until the recent relatively small drop. But still -
There is a large group privileged enough to easily be able to charge overnight at home that are depriving themselves of a superior car owning experience. That’s a lot of sales growth that is yet to happen. That segment is the industry’s low hanging fruit, their blue sky. Once it has been more fully sold to then worrying more about easy and convenient charging for the other third will be required for further domestic expansion. It is not the rate limiter right now.
Yeah. Further on @SanVito’s Q upthread.
For many older home electrical installations, they don’t begin to meet modern electrical safety codes. Even though they were fully compliant with the codes in effect when they were first built.
In many jurisdictions, once modifications or repairs beyond a rather small scope are performed, the entire home electrical system, root & branch, needs to be upgraded to current code. Which can be a $10K or $20K job. You can’t (legally) just patch in a smidgen of new stuff bolted to old ragged now-inadequate stuff.
As a wise mentor of mine used to say: “Never open a can of worms until you’re prepared to eat all the worms.” Words to live by.
Used to be that major kitchen renovations were the typical worm-can-opening event. Now it’s still that for old places never updated, but it’s also EV chargers.