Quite. I’ll reiterate some points but note that I’m not critical of EVs themselves, which have been around for a long time, but expectations are inflated. EVs will be mandated in the 1st world but acceptance is still a function of battery capacity and infrastructure, same as 120 years ago.
I don’t think battery development follow Moore’s Law but we can probably expect affordable batteries sometime. Where’s the tipping point for cheap vehicles?
Infrastructure is key. AFAIK current personal EV owners in the US tend to be a niche market of well-paid suburban homeowners who can plug-in EV(s) in garage or driveway. But I drive past apartment complexes whose remote parking areas (if any) aren’t equipped for plug-in recharging. EV owners there must juice-up elsewhere.
Where elsewhere? I suspect employers and shopping centers may enticingly install charging facilities in their parking lots. Jurisdictions will upgrade (and profit from) on-street parking meters with chargers. Ubiquitous chargers may be the tipping point.
I’m in a remote mountain village. The nearest charging stations are 1/2 hour downhill and 1 1/2 hours over the Sierras. I nearly evacuated from a massive wildfire not long ago. Escaping uphill in an EV would have been tough. I’m in PG&E territory where planned outages are the new normal; the last big one left a 500-mile range dark. EV infrastructure demands a stable grid which might arrive in 20 years.
Yes, EVs are the future, but the buildup will be long and costly. First, fix the grid.
Swappable batteries seems like a likely future development. Either as an alternative to time consuming charging, or at least as an optional way of extending range. Maybe for the latter, just a way to plug in a separately charged battery as a sort of auxiliary fuel cell. Preppers and people who take long distance trips regularly could buy them and keep them ready for use. Others will scramble to get them in an emergency, just like not everyone owns a gas can, or keeps it full, with gas powered cars.
Heat in an emergency when stranded will not be much different from how it is now with internal combustion powered cars, except for timing potentially being a bit different. Some people will be prepared with blankets, extra clothing, hot packs, or “a small generator.” And some people who were running low on fuel will run out and not be prepared. People who have more will assist. Authorities will have to address evacuation in some way if the situation drags on too long, and people are at risk for hypothermia.
Tesla offered a battery swap station on what should have been the single best route in the US for this purpose: I-5 between LA and the Bay Area. Lots of Teslas, rich owners, and a drive which is just a bit too long to go on one charge (at least at the time).
Wasn’t popular at all, so they closed it. Although battery swaps sound kinda good in theory, actual EV owners quickly realize that with fast DC charging, the wait time on road trips simply isn’t a big deal. EV threads always seem to bring out people who like to go on 4000 mile road trips and drive 15 hours a day, but they’re the exception.
Maybe preppers would buy them, but they buy all kinds of stupid shit. They aren’t representative of the general public.
While I see lots of growth opportunity with current infrastructure, I agree that widespread public charger distributions will drive acceptance along with dropping costs … most key to me is developing smart charging that includes V2G which makes wide deployment of EVs a tool for grid stabilization.
As prices drop and chargers become more widespread the niche will really end up being those who are not best served with an EV. But yes this will be a decades process.
As someone who does not own an EV, is there some sort of mechanism in place to make sure you plug your car in when you’re at home? Does your car bitch at you or something, in a way that’s not gonna be forgotten? I’m afraid I’d forget. I usually charge my phone overnight, but that’s because I’m using it till the last moment of the day.
My EV interfaces with an app on my phone which allows me to check the battery charge level, charge the battery (if its plugged in, and set to a different % level than desired) , lock/unlock the doors, turn on the AC, or see where its current GPS location is on a map overlay (occasionally helpful in large parking lots). It also knows where “home” location is and will open the garage door and fold the side view mirrors once I reach the driveway. It will also notify me if charging is interrupted, or if I didn’t close a door all the way and the car has been sitting for awhile.
While I can’t actually set it to “remind me to plug it in if after 10PM, battery is below x%, and car is at my home location”, I don’t think there’s anything preventing them from just issuing an app update to do so, and I think third-party apps already have this feature.
Keep in mind though, that with 300mi+ of range, its usually not a big deal to forget to plug in for a day (or two, or three), unless you have substantial daily commute.
There are third party services, such as Teslafi, that can be programmed to (for example) send a text if it is 10pm and the car is at home, below 30% charge, and not plugged in.
Mostly it is a similar thing to remembering to get the milk out of the trunk and put it in the fridge. You either know it is a day to charge, so you plug in, or you eat dry cereal for breakfast.
If you’re the kind of person who constantly forgets to get gas on the way home, so is late for work in the morning, then this could be a real problem.
Pretty sure I could use the Chevy app to send me reminders to charge but I really haven’t looked that hard at it. I pull up in the driveway, there’s the cord, I plug it in. In the last two years of ownership, I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten to plug it in when I needed to.*
To be a little gentler on the battery, I don’t bother plugging in when the car is above 75% or so unless I’ve got a bigger driving day planned. Especially now during COVID, I mostly charge once a week on the weekend.
Just like closing the garage door, if you have one, or locking your car doors, plugging in when you get home is an easy habit to form. Bonus with EV, you very quickly get used to not having to pull into a gas station on the way to or from work.
Yep. The dash shows your charge level when you park the car. It’s the last thing you’ll see when you turn it off. And, for me and probably most people, the charging cord is the first thing I see when I exit my car. You might forget if you’re carrying a crying baby or something, but in my years with plug in hybrids and now EVs, I have never failed to charge by accident.
One potential problem with an electric car future is the coupling of transportation with the electricity grid, creating a aingle point of failure. In a disaster situation the power often goes out, but people can get in their cars and drive out of the disaster area. But if the power goes out and cars are electric, the ability to flee the problem will be greatly diminished. And it will only take a few people running out of juice on the the freeways to bottleneck everyone else.
This will be much worse if we also bail on natural gas and rely on electric heat for our homes. Then if the power goes out, we lose water, heat, and the ability to escape all at once.
I’ve got to say, with -40C temperatures if the power went out under such circumstances, it will be a mass casualty event. And a grid reliant on renewables will be much more likely to go out than one that depends on fossil energy sources and has backup load-following.
Single point of failure is a reasonable issue. If your electricity is out, you have to travel to a functional charging station. I can imagine that would have been VERY difficult after Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast. Our power here was down for a week to multiple weeks all over the area. If my car was down to 100mi of charge, I’m not sure I would have been able to travel at all.
You don’t even need to rely on electric heat, many homes require electric for their heating system to operate, even if it’s natural gas, oil fired, or pellet stove.
If you have an electric car, you can draw on the battery to supply power to the house in the event of a power outage. Or, if there is a spike in demand, the utility could draw power from the EVs plugged into garages all over the region (with the consent of the car owners of course).