Certainly there are people who routinely drive 300 miles in a weekend.
There are also many people who never drive more than about 40 miles from home.
Both usages are real for millions of Americans each. One is more suited to current-tech EVs than is the other.
And even with a supercharger network, the time spent charging during those weekend trips is going to be onerous. It just isn’t like stopping for a 5 minute fill up.
Exactly LSLGuy. It will be a long time until any EV is a good choice for someone who want to be able to use that vehicle to drive from Key West to Anchorage without much planning. An ICE or minimally a PHEV is a much better choice for that particular utility. Even the supercharger network won’t serve you well getting to and through Alaska.
OTOH routinely 300 miles over a weekend is no problem without superchargers or other DC fast charge so long as it is not much more than 200 in a day and you can charge overnight (particularly easy if you are driving around lots but still at home at night), or at stops, at a level 2 for at least 4 hours total during meals or other stops. (25 miles of range per hour so 4 hours gets you another 100.) That allows for a buffer so no range anxiety and for YMMV some.
The time spent would be inconsequential Ravenman - not “onerous” as the car is parked and left charging while you are doing other things, such as sleeping or eating or whatever. As opposed to having to be with the car at the gas station.
Some people will have wants that do not mesh with an EV … and others have wants that an EV satisfies much better than an ICE does.
nm, someone beat me to it 
Sure, if you need to recharge at lunchtime. That’s great! Otherwise, you may be stopping to kill at least thirty minutes while you find something to do while you’d rather be continuing on your Anchorage to Key West journey.
This is opposed to stopping at a gas station for all of five minutes, not thirty.
I’m saying this as an EV owner: it is much easier to own an EV around town than a gas car, because you never have to go out of your way to refuel. And it is much easier to refuel a gas car on a long trip, because it is so quick.
You are confused and thinking about the Key West to Anchorage trip, not the more mundane 300 miles of driving over a week end that I was talking about. The former is a long trip; the latter is not.
The former is something that is indeed a task poorly suited for an EV and would require fast charge system and planning with half hour stops every three to four or so hours. (The Bolt has 238 and someone wanting to do that would opt for the larger Tesla 3 pack with its 310 mile range.)
The latter is something that many owners of EVs with 230 miles plus range could and likely will do with no specific times that one would need to recharge. 300 miles of driving over a weekend is much more time with the car parked various somewheres than it is being driven and pretty much any of that time is fine to use.
Do you drive an EV?
ETA. Should’ve refreshed first. This is ref DSeid’s post 183 with which I agree.
The critical infrastructure innovation isn’t supercharger networks as the EV equivalent of gas stations.
It’s widespread intermediate level chargers at most hotels/motels and restaurants situated near interstates and lesser main highways.
e.g. I rarely take road trips. If I had could install a charger at home then even a mere 100mile EV would fit me perfectly. But when Hurricane Irma threatened I ended up combining evacuation with vacation into a “hurrication” as we Floridians call them.
That was 1200 miles of interstate driving over 2-plus days leaving and the same coming back. In an ICE car with no thought to when or where I might buy fuel or eat or sleep. We just went until we or the car got hungry or sleepy then stopped at the next appropriate establishment to fill the need. We had no idea where any of these would be; we were simply confident (enough) that they’d appear when needed.
Had I owned an EV *and *been confident that *most *Holiday Inns, Applebees, etc. had enough chargers for all comers, I’d have given no more thought to “range anxiety” than I did with my ICE.
We’re not there today. But we will get there soon enough via a mostly bottom up organic process. IANA expert, but if there is any kind of charger standards war going on, that is the largest thing the nascent EV industry can do to shoot themselves in the foot / tire :).
For the longer term, range anxiety is actually mostly “range angst”: an free floating vague worry not really backed up by the facts that will come into being.
IOW, it’s perfectly fine and correct for someone, e.g. Magiver, to say “Today’s EVs with today’s infrastructure don’t work for my mission today.”
It’s error to generalize from that to “Therefore future EVs with future infrastructure will never work for my mission.” or “That future of EVs and EV infrastructure will never happen at all.”
Ravenman -
A PHEV. A Ford C Max Energi now 5 years old which does not have the greatest EV range but still with my usual commute most (non-frigid) days I’m pure EV and only some days running as a hybrid for some of it. Some days avoiding having to go out of pure EV mode by way of having a chance to charge up at the movie theater parking structure or near the restaurant, for example. The car has been a good choice as we have done the trips from Chicago to Maine to NJ and back, and multiple other all day driving trips, in it, which a pure EV would be poorly suited for. I absolutely love how rarely I need to waste time at a gas station.
The Nissan Leaf, even at its new 150 mile range and let alone at its previous 84 mile range, was not a great choice for me even without those long road trips. I do have the occasional 300 mile weekend and the over 150 in a day before getting back home to plug in for the night, and I’d rather not be a guest asking for a spot in the garage to plug my my car into. Even at my brother’s it would be awkward. The Bolt and the Tesla 3, any EV with over 200 miles of range, would make those weekends brainless. The Leaf, even the new one, would be inadequate. I’d need to use my wife’s hybrid on those days if I had that. I didn’t want to do that so I crossed the Leaf off. Plus its build felt cheap to me. At the time I needed the three seats in the back so the Volt was off too. I also like that the C-Max does not scream anything: it is just a car.
This car should do me fine for a while. Barring something unforeseen my next car will be both pure EV and at least largely autonomous with V2V communication as well. I’m guessing it will be a Volvo. That might be five years and it might be ten but even if it is longer so long as I can keep those gas station runs this infrequent I’m fine.
the flip side is that an event leading to such an evacuation can cause “gas runs” and stations run out. Then you’re up a creek regardless.
Agreed. We left a couple days early vs even the early birds and were later watching the news of folks stranded on the interstate with no gasoline for a couple hundred miles, and none coming for a week.
The EV corollary I suppose is the hotel along the interstate that has 100 rooms, 100 parking spaces, and 40 charger stations once highway EVs become commonplace. They’re usually at 70% occupancy unless there’s an evacuation or similar going on. Then carloads of folks are doubling up in rooms and lots more people need, not want, to charge overnight.
It’s always the case that modern finance capitalism is real good at catering to base demand and sucks at providing for surges since that represents idle capital most of the time. We can smoosh the toothpaste tube all we want, but shortages under peak demand are gonna be commonplace someplace somehow.
An eternity in thread time, I half proposed a solution to this problem.
Apparently, autonomous cars are actually going to be mass deployed soon-ish. Google has let some of theirs loose as of 2 days ago, with no safety driver. The 2021 date for the beginning of mass deployment sounds plausible.
Anyways, once there are vast autonomous car fleets, some of them are going to be hybrids and most will be full electric. So responding to a disaster would in theory be a matter of making the right mouseclicks, and deploying every hybrid autonomous vehicle within a couple states of Florida to meet the huge surge in demand of people trying to escape the next big one.
Or, other option is that simple the residents of the tip of Florida, and all those folks who do those intermittent 300 mile+ roadtrips can get hybrids, and everyone else can get pure electric. Automakers could readily make 2 models that are almost identical, but one has a range extender engine and the other has a void or a storage bin or an extra battery in that space. Like how the i3 is packaged.
The reason I asked is that I’ve done weekend trips in my i3 and your assertions about how convenient fast charging is during these trips does not match my experience.
For example, on one trip my hotel didn’t have a convenient level 1 plug. So the first thing I had to do in the morning is go find a CCS charger, which was on the opposite side of a huge shopping mall from where I wanted to eat breakfast. Literally a mile walk to the restaurant.
Then another time, I couldn’t fully recharge at the hotel, and we wanted to eat lunch at a winery, which meant that I had to go to a fast charger and sit in the car for 15 minutes during a rainstorm so I would have enough range to get to the vineyard and back.
There have been a few times where it has been convenient to park, fast charge, and run an errand or two. But they aren’t many examples of this for me, because (a) it is rare to need to use a CCS and (b) it’s not common to find a CCS fast charger where I want to go, as opposed to planning a trip out of my way to get to a fast charger.
So when you tell me that fast charging is easy - just go get lunch! the time is “inconsequential!” - you’re telling someone who owns an EV and has been annoyed about how consequential the inconvienence is, that I am wrong about my firsthand experiences with an EV on weekend trips; when you clearly are not speaking from experience.
And what do you suppose the people in those “couple of states near Florida” will use for transportation to get to work while all “their” local cars are busy ferrying en masse to the tip of FL? And where will all those cars charge as they do so?
And who will be paying for the deadhead time and mileage? Remember that a car will drive empty from, say, Atlanta to Miami, pick up an evacuee household, carry them back to, say, Atlanta then do it again a week later in reverse. The point being there’s between 200 and 1000 miles of extra ferrying above and beyond the normal ferrying that’s part and parcel of autonomous vehicle ops.
One solution to paying for the ferrying is to charge premium prices for evacuation services. Sounds economically sensible, but just like price gouging for board-up supplies or generators or gasoline is illegal, it’s a pretty good bet that price gouging for evacuation transportation services will be (and should be) illegal.
Yes, I get the basic economic / physics principle that if you spread out a surge in demand over a larger area or a longer time you can ameliorate some of the worst effects of the peak. But you don’t alter the total amount of demand in the surge. You’re just moving it around in space or time. In fact, given the big bump in ferrying required, you’re actually increasing road miles driven by about 2x over what the actual evacuation demand is.
Do not mistake individual technological possibility with collective economic and political outcomes. Can some of this be done? Sure. Is it a magic wand that easy peasy fixes the whole problem with a couple mouseclicks? Not even a little bit.
The problem with most futurist SF is it assumes nearly infinite capital demanding roughly negligible rates of return. So it can be deployed almost willy nilly in pursuit of social goods, public convenience, etc. Our future may indeed have a lot more capital available than we have today. But nothing in human history suggests the return the owners will demand will be significantly less than they demand today.
One, yeah an i3. Pure EV 81 miles range? Roughly a third of range of the Bolt and a bit more than a quarter the range of the bigger battery optioned Tesla 3? Or the PHEV (REx) version of the i3 that adds a whopping 1.9 gallons of gas driving range too (pretty useless)? Like the Leaf a great pure commuting car and a complete fail for anything other than that. Not a car to use for driving 300 miles over a weekend, even if you are ending at home to charge each night after a lot of local stuff. There are stretches from Chicago west on I-88 that the REx version could not make it from rest stop to rest stop! I know, I’ve traveled it over week ends and there and back same day many times with a kid who went to Knox College in Galesburg. Heck, for Thanksgiving we are traveling fairly local from my just West of Chicago home to Kenosha just over the Wisconsin border. It’s about just 60 miles each way, just 120ish round trip that day. No worry for any 200+ range EV, not even close. No worry for my PHEV. But for an i3, even the REx one, it’s range anxiety and planning. Using experience with an i3 to inform about driving a car with three times the electric range is not realistic. If you bought that car thinking to use it for anything other than pure commuting, well you should have thought again.
Two, acknowledged that if your 300 miles of week end driving does not include either a place that will at least give you access to plug in your portable 110 charge overnight, or some level 2 spots near where you might want to stop for a bit, then it could be a challenge. A 3 hour drive into the countryside stopping at some random motel might not work. Pretty easy to find ChargePoints in most metropolitan areas and not too difficult to arrange to stay at a hotel that has level 2 in many week end level tourist locations.
This is a problem to solve, but it’s not an insurmountable one. And it’s one that we face in other areas when there’s some kind of shock.
Some people will work from home. Some people will carpool more, or bike to work, or whatever. Maybe the economic hit of the disaster spreads out a bit more geographically, but that’s ok because the added efficiency of the system will make up for it and then some.
And the rest of the system can adapt and respond. A self-driving car can go a long way in a single night. So reinforcements can arrive from other areas, even ones that are pretty far away.
I’m not convinced that this will be that much of a political problem, either. Sure, people who have to wait longer to get to work because they’re a few hundred miles from a hurricane might gripe, but is anyone really going to begrudge their local transportation fleet being used to save people from disaster? When someone has a medical injury on a plane, the plane lands ASAP. Sucks for the other people on the plane, but there’s no one seriously advocating that the rest of the passengers’ schedules are more important than emergency care.
Depends on the pricing structure. Could be the evacuees, like any other long-distance traveler. Maybe if you request a longer trip, you pay higher per-mile costs to handle the logistics of the deadhead. Or maybe it’s just built into the cost and it’s paid as a sort of evacuation insurance by all passengers. Not every trip has to have the same profit margin.
I think public opinion will be mostly ok if an evacuation cost a bit more, since it requires lots of logistical scrambling. It would be nice if people were more rational about supply and demand shocks increasing prices, but oh well.
There are other ways to limit the costs. Evacuation situations could require filling cars. They could be more time or location constrained (sorry, you might not get to evacuate as far as you want, because the priority is getting everyone out of immediate danger).
On advantage that we don’t think about is that a fleet evacuation would be much more efficient. My parents live in Santa Rosa, and they told stories of people evacuating from the fire on foot because the roads were so clogged they couldn’t get anywhere. A centrally dispatched fleet wouldn’t bother putting more cars on the road if they’d just get stuck in traffic, which means people would get out faster, and the required cars to aid in the evacuation might be lower than you think.
I never said nor implied that I drive 300 miles over a weekend. The weekend trips that I’m talking about were all less than about 50 miles from my home.
And what’s with your weird habit of lecturing an EV owner about the advantages and disadvantages of an EV, when you don’t have one? Especially your effort to explain to me the attributes of the car I drive every day, that you have apparently just read about? Are you the sort of guy who goes to parties and says, “Oh, you’re a doctor? Well I’m a software engineer, but let me tell you about what being a physician is like…”
But you’re not really following the point: trips in EVs that amount to something more than the round-trip range of the EV require planning that is something that the vast majority of people just aren’t used to. You had asserted a while back that fast charging for longer trips is “inconsequential,” as someone can charge up when they have lunch. Ideally, yes, but it isn’t a simple as that. And it doesn’t have to do with the absolute range of the car: an eGolf owner planning a 150 mile trip will more or less face the same planning issue as a Model 3 owner planning a 350 mile trip – the main difference is simply how often they do such trips.
You might need to recharge when it isn’t lunchtime. You might need to recharge in places where there’s nothing to do but sit in your car for a while. You might need to go out of your way to get to a charging place. You might be at the charger, but it is in use for long-ish periods of time. You might get to the charged and be ICEd out. You might need to pay more to stay in a hotel in a place you’d rather not want to stay because they have a level 2 charger. There’s all sorts of reasons why long trips with EVs is kind of a pain, and being told by someone who has never even tried to do so is very peculiar.
No matter how you slice it, if someone plans to take longer trips in EVs, there’s just a different set of calculations that have to be taken into account: the driver must pay more mind to the needs the EV, whereas an ICE driver can do whatever they want because refueling is so easy. This issue can be mitigated in many ways over time, but putting more supercharging stations on highways only addresses a little part of the issue.
But at the same time, people choosing Tesla over any other maker of EVs on the basis of a dedicated supercharging network isn’t making a good choice.
Then color me puzzled. 100 mile round trip was difficult for you because you “couldn’t fully recharge at the hotel”?
Seems to me more like you are the sort of person who says they’re a dermatologist so they must be considered expert about neonatology. Your experience in an EV with 81 miles of range is completely immaterial to the question of driving an EV with three or four times the range.
Agreed that given some regions have low availability of public level 2 charger and some 300 mile driving weekends are not spending the night at home, that sometimes some planning is required. But the last bit illustrates why your experience in an 81 mile range EV is not transferable to a larger battery vehicle. You have no margin, no buffer. A larger battery EV can top off anytime. Down 50 miles, down 100 miles, down 200 miles, if lunch and at a place to charge then charge. Lunch place does not have a charger but dinner place does? Fine. Have to wait until at the hotel, or at breakfast? Also okay.
Yes, some planning. But little. And the point is that assuming somewhere along the route you have the level 2 charger where you’d be stopping anyway the time is not “onerous” because in general people do not sit with the vehicle when it is at a level 2. They are doing other things.
Words of wisdom coming from a wealth of experience with a 20-mile PHEV. I am outclassed.
Well yes you are.
Which does not necessarily say too much positive about me.
At least I knew that an EV with the range of the i3 or the Leaf would not be enough range for my wants and made the choice that allowed me to commute daily all electric most of the time while meeting my other desires for the vehicle just fine and didn’t spend something like $45K on a car that has more range than I need to commute with but not enough to give me any other utility … but hey look everyone it has a BMW badge! And I know that an EV with 200+ of range will meet my wants fine … but not enough more than how well they are met now that I will rush it. I’ll wait for mostly self-driving too.
I indeed have not had direct experience driving an EV with 200+ miles range. And neither have you. If you want to argue that a car with 238 miles of EV range requires charging at a very particular and specific point in time in order to be able to gain the additional 70 miles it needs to drive 300 miles that week end and if your lunch or dinner or walking tour or overnight does not occur at that specific time then you just have to stop where ever you are and wait with your car until it is charged … because you pretty much need to do that with a tiny battery EV like yours … and since you own an EV you are the expert to be deferred to … you are free to do so. And I will be free to laugh. (I was wondering who were among those several hundred a month spending that much on the i3; now I know!)
BTW I don’t think we disagree too much really. I agree and have stated that “long trips” in an EV are more than kind of a pain. Someone planning on frequent long road trips really would be better not choosing an EV. I just don’t consider 300 miles over the course of a week end as a “long trip.” Sometimes that’s just a busy weekend with lots of schlepping to be done and a family visit within the broad metropolitan area thrown in. That could be just three hours of driving a day for two days. With kids and activities in and around the city and burbs I would do that some weekends. Let me remind you of what my claim for these large battery EVs was:
Please note the qualifiers including so long as you have a place to charge overnight or at stops. And so long as you do then there is no onerous burden of time or inconvenience. Now with a tiny battery EV you need to charge within 70 miles to avoid getting anxious which is maybe an hour and a half or less of driving and you need to charge at that time. Trying to use that car as anything other than a commuter would be … oh something maybe to do as a dare for the challenge of it. And fair enough to argue that one cannot always assume that my “so long as” qualifier exists … one would need to take a minute to be sure and yup, if I wanted to go the the Wisconsin Dells in a Chevy Bolt I’d need to stay at the hotel that has the chargers and I’d first call to make sure they promise me I can use it overnight, or I’d need to scope out what stops on the road there or back had chargers to use while eating. Yes, I agree that a road trip beyond the EV range of the vehicle would require some planning or taking a car that can travel on gas if it needs to (and I do not include the i3REx in that mix even though in a very limited way it is).