I can’t flip down the rear seats of my Bolt because of the kids’ car seats. When I go to Costco, I have to remember their cart holds more than my car’s cargo space. Sometimes the kids get to carry groceries on the way home. :smack:
A) That’s assuming there’s no wait for the charger.
B) It will be quite some time before these chargers appear anywhere buy major metropolitan areas. PHL to PGH is 300 miles, with mostly farms, fields, & forests in between; when do you think that’s really going to be possible to do in an electric car?
C) That takes a 5hr drive to a 6hr one. I won’t stop on a 5hr drive (other than 3-4 minutes to fuel up); 6 or more hours in a car is the tipping point for doing much, if anything else that day.
Totally. This is a real issue and will always come up when we are car shopping. How do I go to costco with this? The bolt was ruled out as a result. The 500e Fiat was ruled out as a result. Seriously, the fiat lease deals made it a net positive in cash flow compared to the SUV we currently use in that the cost of the lease was less than the gas we were spending, and it wasn’t close. But the car is so damn small!
And with young kids, they are *always *with you.
What irks me is the variability of the rebate schemes in Canada. There’s no federal program at all, and the provincial ones vary from $0 (Alberta, of course), to $14000 in Ontario [plus a $1000 rebate for the home charger]. As an added bonus, I get to pay the exchange rate of %30 roughly so my $35000 USD Model 3 becomes $45500 Cad before taxes.
Now, obviously that’s not Tesla’s fault but it makes it just that much harder to make the leap to an all electric. I’m prepared to make adjustments to the way I drive and treat the idea of driving a Tesla in Northern Alberta in much the same way as my forebears would have driving a Model T 100 years ago in that trips require a bit more planning and preparation. In fact, most of my present vehicle’s duties would be admirably suited to a Leaf, Bolt or a Tesla (Although I despise the Bolt’s exterior design, and the Leaf for that matter). 99% of any distance driving we do is covered by my wife’s Edge, and the little distance we do in my car is usually for maintenance for same. I really want to buy a Model 3, but I’m not shelling out 50 large for a car I haven’t even sat in.
There are two current supercharger stations between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, one in Harrisburg, the other in Somerset. Shouldn’t be more than 30 minutes of extra time tacked onto the current trip to allow for charging, but that’s assuming you’ll have some sort of charging available at your destination.
To start with there’s nothing wrong with a little fanboy love for the Model 3. A little. Musk has always had a bit of Barnum and Bailey in him. I see it as a multiplier for Tesla. The brand already created big initial pre-sales based on Tesla’s sporty image. But the multiplier effect is a two edged sword. It can also hurt long term sales if it there are mechanical problems because I don’t think there is the infrastructure in place to handle large volumes of repairs.
Musk took the Apple route. he isn’t selling a product as much as he’s selling a product designed to generate other purchases. Yes, you can buy a Model 3 for $35,000. If you want wheels and paint it’s $40,000. Bigger battery, fake leather, dual motors, a robo-hooker, $60,000.
The only thing I don’t like is the display. It’s going to cause accidents with people looking at it instead of the road. It’s too far off the center line of sight. Hopefully there’s a video bluetooth option so people can use their ipads mounted in front of the steering wheel.
Even if sales for the Model 3 are modest the company sits tall in the saddle in the production of batteries and could easily shift production to meet world demand for them.
Yup, and my local Ford dealership has a rock bottom Fusion for $17,444 all the way up to a V6 Sports Sedan version for $35,219, or just over twice the price of a base model.
Paying more for extra stuff is no mystery or rip-off. That is the way it has always worked.
Has there been a rash of accidents in the Toyota Yaris that I haven’t heard about? The Model 3 display is actually significantly less off-center, and it’s never blocked by the spokes of the steering wheel.
I don’t know, has there? By default the farther away from the center line of traffic the less you’ll see in your peripheral vision.
The Yaris display would be a deal breaker for me. Wouldn’t be the first car I rejected because I didn’t like the ergonomics.
Musk did address the subject and basically said to pound salt despite consumers requesting a center display. It’s his company so at this point the consumer is left with “thank you sir, may I have another?”
Here’s a poll on the subject. 81% say they don’t like it.
Does any of this ring true to anyone (passed along email from my Dad):
*Subject: Gas vs Electric Automobiles
ELECTRIC CAR…Hmmm… It makes you wonder…
Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things has never been discussed. All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention of the cost of electricity to run it. This is the first article I’ve ever seen and tells the story pretty much as I expected it to.
Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power things yet they’re being shoved down our throats… Glad somebody finally put engineering and math to paper.
At a neighborhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He laughed, then got serious. If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than 3 houses with a single Tesla, each. For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.
This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles… Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load. So as our genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we being urged to buy these things and replace our reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery system! This latter “investment” will not be revealed until we’re so far down this dead end road that it will be presented with an ‘OOPS!’ and a shrug.
If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are eco-friendly, just read the following. Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. It’s enlightening.
Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors … and he writes, "For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.” Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles.
It will take you 4-1/2 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.
According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned so I looked up what I pay for electricity. I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery. $18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery. Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg. $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car costs about $20,000 while the Volt costs $46,000+… So the American Government wants loyal Americans not to do the math, but simply pay three times as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country!
*
if the high end charger requires 75 amp service then a separate box is required which is not the problem. the charger is expensive enough that the cost of adding another box is just part of the budget. The problem is the inability to service even a small fraction of the increase in power consumption in many locations.
THAT’s a problem. Of course the consumer can just buy a generator that runs on natural gas but the co2 levels will probably go up.
If we know how many of the cars will sell in California then it should be easy to calculate the net increase in power consumption and the savings in co2.
So let’s see a BC Hydro (water power) exec disses electric cars and renewable energy. Isn’t that like asking an oil exec for his opinion of the same?
I’ve never heard the wild claim about not being able to have 3 cars on the same block charging up. Sounds like unadulterated bullshit. Lol, from a Straight Dope archived thread I found through Google: “Typically, in an urban area, tower power transmission lines are 100,000 volts at 1000 amps.” (User name: Ice Wolf) Also, larger houses these days are sometimes equipped with 200 amp service. I seriously doubt that a neighborhood of McMansions is going to suffer regular brownouts on hot days or when they’re all partying because of power draw. But I’m sure we have dopers on board who can explain this better.
The whole Chevy Volt thing is unadulterated bullshit. You wouldn’t bother to recharge the battery on a long drive, you’d stick to the gas engine.
It’s almost entirely nonsense.
You don’t need 75 amps for a Tesla charger. The Tesla needs about 0.3 kW-h/mi, and the average American drives 12k miles per year. That comes to 10 kW-h/day. If you charge for 12 hours while home, that comes to an average of 7 amps. Less than a typical hair dryer. A Tesla has more than enough capacity to smooth out typical daily fluctuations.
It does not take 10 hours to charge a Tesla at a Supercharger, which are along all the major routes and increasing over time. They will charge 170 miles in 30 min, which increases trip time by perhaps 25%.
I don’t know where the author lives but $1.16/kW-h is ridiculous. I have a hard time believing anyone pays that much, even on time-of-day plans at peak hours. Most electric companies have electric car plans that give discounts for nighttime charging; $0.05-$0.10/kW-h is more likely for these plans.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a McMansion or a tent. The electricity comes from the same source. Either there is excess capacity to handle the additional load or there isn’t.
California currently has a surplus capacity of 21% going into 2020 which should work out nicely in the ramp up of electric cars.
A poll on a Mac tech support forum from 2009, asking in the context of cars without any kind of self-driving, and largely answered by people who have never driven a car with a center speedo. That’s really… convincing.
The few reports from people that have drive a Model 3 have said it’s not a problem and the increased visibility is nice. I’ll take their opinions over random Mac users from 2009.
How many chargers are at each station? I’ve hardly ever seen a gas station with less than four pumps & some have 20 or more. At 3-4 minutes a fill, that’s a pretty short line to wait in on the rare times I do need to wait. Do they have a take-a-number system like at the deli counter or a pager like some chain restaurants do when your table is ready so that I can at least go in & have a meal while waiting or do I need to stay with my car so that someone else doesn’t jump in while I’m inside?
Electricity doesn’t come out of thin air either. What’s the cost to the environment if it’s produced in a coal or nuclear plant vs. ICE engine in a car spewing exhaust? I’ve never seen those figures anywhere. Just because it’s pushed up the chain doesn’t mean it’s really zero-emissions.
It varies, but on the order of a dozen is common. Most of them are not so busy that you can’t find an open slot. Some–mostly the ones you don’t want to use anyway (because they are in urban centers instead of on the highway)–can get very busy, and they’ll have a line.
If the electricity comes purely from coal, a Tesla is about equivalent to a decent hybrid–in the ballpark of 50 mpg, IIRC. A decent mix of even natural gas reduces the equivalent CO2 output considerably, and of course hydroelectric, nuclear, solar and wind do better yet. Considering the overall mix of US electricity, Teslas are equivalent to >100 mpg.
One of the major benefits of electric cars is that they benefit automatically from improvements in generation. Install some solar panels on your house and your car has automatically gotten more efficient.
That’s your choice. With 220 service, you have home charging options from 60 amps down, and 110 VAC options, too. There’s no requirement.
It would seem that the Volt really sucks, then. I’ve talked to Volt owners in real life, though, and their experience isn’t like this at all. As a then-user of a Fusion Energi, I was always a bit envious that Volt owners got 45 to 50 miles before the switch to gasoline, whereas I got from 15 (when freezing or colder) to 25 miles. On pure gasoline, my gas-only mileage was about 44 mph, and this was on the freeway (never needed fuel for local trips or commuting).
All other things being equal, it proves why a Volt should get about double the electric range of my 7 kwh Fusion.
I’d like to know where in the country this dude lives. A kwh of energy is less than 15 cents in most of the country, and about 12 cents here, including distribution. If you take a peak rate plan and charge at night, then you can conceivably charge at half this rate at night.
It’s all FUD.
Here are the raw numbers for my Bolt: I had a 30-amp, 240V charger installed. The car’s battery nominally holds 60 kWh. Nominal mileage rate is 4mi/kWh. Those are all numbers from spec sheets. My night-time electric rate is 0.08$/kWh.
Doing some calculations: nominal complete recharge in 8.3 hours (actual is closer to 10 hours). Nominal mileage recharge rate is 28.8 mph (actual closer to 25 mph). Nominal cost to fully charge is $4.80 (actual closer to 6.00). Nominal marginal cost per mile is 0.02/mi (actual closer to 0.025$/mi). Nominal numbers are based on the spec sheet; actual numbers are based on mine experience.
I haven’t included service costs. Electric cars don’t need serviced as much as liquid-fueled cars. Just things like rotating tires, topping off windshield fluid, replacing cabin air filters. Brake pads last a lot longer, because almost braking is done via regenerative with the electric motor instead of the friction. No oil changes, of course. No engine air filters.
I have no experience with Tesla-network chargers. But other charging networks let you check-in to a charging terminal to claim your spot in line. You’ll get a text and/or email when it’s your turn. No one else will be allowed to charge in that spot. You get something like 15 minutes to plug in once it’s your turn. Usually a cluster of terminals will share the same queue. So if there’s eight chargers and you’re next, whenever any of the chargers opens up, it’s yours.