Not sure about these specific stats, but stats can says that the median commute by car in Canada is 8.7 km.
While there are certainly cases where people need more range daily, this is not the norm.
My pet peeve is folks who look at extreme edge cases, and declare that EV’s are “useless” if they fail to address these extremes. No, that just means that an EV is not suitable for a small number of people with these needs. But they try to use edge cases to fight against the ENTIRE concept of EV’s for EVERYone.
As an aside, by coincidence, the link I posted earlier about the all electrical formula E, has a link to the currently ongoing final race of the season.
Perhaps I missed it, but I’m surprised you didn’t mention that there was a case moving through the Canadian Supreme Court arguing that a carbon price was unconstitutional. Fortunately, sanity ruled the day:
This will help reduce the massive subsidy that fossil fuel vehicles and electrical generation have been getting for their entire existence.
Norway doesn’t make electric cars cheaper; it makes gas- and diesel-powered cars far more expensive than they are in other countries. Taxation on gas and diesel vehicles turns into incentives for electric vehicles, whether powered via batteries or fuel cells. Collectively these zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) have no value-added tax, which is 25 percent on gas and diesel vehicles. There is no registration tax on used car sales, no annual ownership tax, and no fuel tax. Road tolls are “fully or partially” exempt, ferry fares are “strongly reduced,” bus lanes are mostly open to ZEVs, public parking fees are tossed for ZEVs and there is plenty of free charging for BEVs.
5 hp is too low, but not so much. I wasn’t looking to power the vehicle with it, just extend the range, trading the cost and weight of an extended rnge battery for the cost of a small diesel engine.
The way I was looking at it: A typical passenger car needs maybe 25-35 hp to maintain highway speeds. I’m guessing the average electric is lower, since they often have better aerodynamics, low rolling resistance tires, etc. So even a 10 hp engine, activated at cruise when on a long trip, could increase range by a third, or about as much as a long range battery.
You’d only do that when making a long range trip. And if you ran out of battery in the boonies or on a remote job site, running a 7500W generator for an hour would give you about 25 miles of range, since the average EV gets about 100 miles of range on about 30 kWh of electricity. Range anxiety would go way down if you knew you had an extra, say 200 miles of range if you need it by kicking in the little generator.
And when you aren’t driving the car, it would make an awesome whole-house backup system - like having a free Tesla Powerwall with a diesel generator. If you had a solar panel system, you might even be able to use the car to take the place of the powerwall in allowing your solar system to keep running if the grid fails, which to me is gojng to become increasingly important in the years to come as we try to fundamentally restructure our entire enegrgy production system.
A powerwall is over $10,000. If I can get a free one with a tesla (with limitations such as that you can only go off-grid with solar if your car is plugged into the system), then a Tesla or other EV starts to look a lot more cost effective.
But a small SUV with a generator could be great for marketing. Being able to run power tools at remote sites, having plentiful power at a camp site, Having backup protection at home… If your car can do that and the other one can only drive you places, you might have a winner.
The problem isn’t the length of the commute: it’s the outlier travel that people are worried about. Most people can’t afford separate vehicles for different uses, so they buy one that can do a bit of everything.
My commute was about 20 km each way - pretty average for people living in the outskirts of the city. But some of the services we use, including doctors and such, are on the very opposite site of the city - more like 30-40 km on the ring road. So if I drive to work and back, and then have to drive my wife to the doctor, I’d better have 150 km of range, minimum. That’s not a big problem with the current long range EV’s, but for the first generation that starts to get uncomfortably close to the total range of the vehicle. If it’s in winter, maybe too much.
My drive to see my mother when she was alive was about 400km. I often made weekend trips to see her. Again, today it’s probably okay because there are enough chargers on the route, but back when EV’s had ranges of only 150 miles or so, and there were almost no chargers around, I couldn’t make that trip.
Everyone is different - some make long trips every week or every month, while some don’t leave their local area for years or decades on end. If electric works for 90% of your uses but the other 10% is important emough to you, you still won’t buy an electric car.
I considered it a non-issue, since I never had any doubt that the Supreme Court would find the way they did.
More precisely, the subsidy that cinsumers of those things used to get. Even if I agree that this is an externality that is fair to tax, we have to be aware of the damage the tax will do to businesses and individuals. The ecnomy has adapted to getting a subsidy on fossil fuels forma hundred years, and changing that is going to be pinful. Necessary perhaps, but still painful. Energy is the root feedstock of our entire economy.
The reason I brought up Norway is that someone argued that EVs would not work well in the Canadian winter. Presumably if they work in Norwegian winters, they will work most places.
And this is the problem. Some folks go even beyond this - they want one that will do EVERYthing. This is not feasible with gasoline cars any more than it is with EV’s.
Part of the shift to EV’s will include the shift in thinking that one single vehicle can meet all of your needs, all of the time, over a period of a decade.
The shift will also need to take into account that while there will always be SOME people who use a vehicle for regular 800km weekend trips where there is little to no charging infrastructure, and an inability to rent a specific vehicle for this purpose, for the majority, this is not an issue. So while you can fairly say, an EV will not work for ME, you cannot say, " EV’s are not viable for anyone until they can drive 800km with no problem in the dead of winter"
So it’s about changing people’s thought processes, which is not easy to be sure. A friend of mine will not consider an EV because he might want to travel Vancouver - Calgary at the drop of a hat, and it might be important, so he would not have time to wait for chargers en route. When I point out to him that he has never done this in 30 years, and in fact drives about 120km a week for the past 5 years, this has no impact on him. “BUT I MIGHT WANT TO ONE DAY, so I NEED a car that can do that.” It’s silly, but I can’t get him to see that.
Yeah I agree that this is definitely a mentality that if people could get over could really make EVs super attractive to the majority of buyers. I went without a car for 6 months a few years ago (I live in Calgary as well), and I was surprised at how doable it was to just rent a car when I needed one. Now that I’ve experienced it, I would have no qualms just renting a gasoline-powered car for when I wanted to do longer trips. Obviously, this wouldn’t necessarily scale to the majority of the population (I imagine the scarcity of rental cars would skyrocket during long weekends if there were a large % of short-range EVs in the city), but for the current state of things where a lot of people see range as a hindrance to adoption of EVs, it is honestly less of an inconvenience than they probably believe.
I honestly thought that plugin hybrids would be a super popular stopgap between the current gas/diesel dominated environment and the future EV environment, but I neglected to consider that it might be more economical for people to rent gasoline powered cars when they need them rather than pay an extra $5-10k for a fossil-fuel powered charger - so it seems likely that the demand for PHEVs just isn’t as high as I would have imagined.
Agreed, it will be painful. Mainly to the fossil fuel companies that don’t want to change, and don’t want to give up that sweet, sweet taxpayer money. The ECONOMY would not be ruined with a reduction in subsidies to fossil fuel corporations. But the corporations will fight this tooth and nail. This may explain the chaff that these companies currently throw up in the air whenever a shift to EV’s is ever mentioned, and it may explain the vociferous disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change coming from fossil fuel company think tanks.
My feeling is that EVs are ideal urban runabouts and also as second cars that don’t get used so much. Then the range issues simply don’t matter. I would look into getting one once the prices look better, and I I decide that I won’t be doing any long-distance driving. Or, unless there is a good network of high-speed charging stations. There might be, by the time I get serious.
Good points would be the low running costs, especially in view of the fact that the Ded flivver is mostly used on very short runs. The sort of thing that gives awful fuel consumption because you need to warm up the engine. Not a problem with an EV, and the difference is greater in winter. However, winter use of EVs make them look expensive because you don’t have all that “free” heat from the engine to warm the interior. An EV has to use the battery to keep you warm.
One thing I have adjusted to is not having the heat going full blast to warm the inside of the car to tropical temperatures. The LEAF is the only car I have owned with heated seats (front and rear), because I scoffed at them in the past. With the LEAF, I love, love them. Ditto the heated steering wheel, which just seemed silly to me in a gas car. Basically, I heat myself instead of the entire car interior.
I’m only going by what I’ve read on the infobahn, but my impression is that in two car households with one EV and one ICEV, the EV is generally the desired vehicle. The ICEV is the second car that doesn’t get used as much.
Well, an anecdote is not data, but my hubby just bought a Tesla and still has a few months left on the lease of his previous car. So we have an ordinary, gasoline-powered Mercedes E class sitting unused in the driveway.
That specific issue is mine. But I think there are many other situations that make people hesitant to go all-electric. For example, in some households someone is tsking the car out every night. So you drive 40km round trip to work, then you go home and after supper you take the kid to a baseball game across town and back, or you have to drive all over the place for your charity work, or your husband has to drive across town to pick up a part. It doesn’t happen all the time, but if once in a while you have a day like this, an earlier EV might be a problem. There are as many home situations as there are people, and some of them are incompatible with Electric power for their own specific reasons.
People buy cars for convenience and flexibility. The fact that SUVs are so popular tells you how much value people put on perceived ‘utility’, even ifvthey never go offroad.
I had an old Ford Escape - very utilitarian vehicle. I eventually traded it in for one of the newer models. The new one is more comfortable, more powerful, has way more fwatures, etc. And I sometimes think of selling it and buying one of the older ones because of two features - the glass jn the liftgate could be opened independently, and it had an excellent roof rack. The new Escape has a panoramic glass roof that can barely hold the weight of an empty Thule box.
See, I only needed those features once in a while, but when I needed them I REALLY needed them. I could put 8’ lumber in the vehicle by opening the back glass, for example. And sometimes I do build stuff that needs it. With the current Escape I just don’t have any way to move it, and have to figure out how to get it delivered. We had to give up getting a fresh Christmas tree and now have an artificial one because I can’t strap a tree to the top of this vehicle.
Without the rear opening glass, I can only carry about half of what I could in the old one, because once you are half full you coild close the gate, open the glass and fill the thing up to the ceiling. This only comes up once a year when we go on vacation, but when we do it annoys the crap out of me that I have a larger vehicle that can only carry half as much. Also, when I could open the rear glass independently, if something shifted while driving I coild open the glass and fix it without opening the gate and have all the shifted contents fall on the ground.
The point is, these are not everyday annoyances, yet they are very important on the rare days when I need them, and it’s enough for me to consider going back to an older, otherwise inferior vehicle. If you expect to sell people on EV’s by telling them to just rent trucks or cars or take cabs when the car can’t do the job, you’ll never sell them to anywone but enthusiasts for EVs.
EVs have to be desirable on their own terms. They can’t be seen as a compromise to save the planet, or you won’t sell them. A car is the largest purchase most people make other than their home, and they aren’t going to intentionally buy something that restricts them vs another vehicle of equal price. Or if they do, other features have to be so desirable they are willing to trade some utility for them.
That was the genius of Tesla - they didn’t sell their car as a lesser vehicle you need to buy to save the planet like Toyota did with the Prius, they sold it on the basis of it being cooler, faster, more fun, and ultimately the best car for the money. They spend a lot more time talking about ludicrous mode than they do global warming.
And that’s the right way to go. If you want deep adoption of a green technology, you can try to browbeat, shame, or tax people into it, or you can just make a better product fhat people will willingly buy on its own merits.
Luckily, with EVs we are pretty much there for many people
Here’s an interesting article on all the EVs coming up in the next five years:
Some takeaways:
300 miles range seems to be all you really need to eliminate range anxiety, as most of these vehicles have about that range, but rather than increasing it from there they appear to be adding more power and features. At least their marketing people think that somewhere around 300 miles is good enough. That might be because:
Lots of emphasis on fast charging. That makes sense to me. Why carry around a 500 mile, 1500 lb battery if you can charge up 200 miles of range in a few minutes? Long range was much more important if having to stop for a charge on the way takes four hours. If it doesn’t take much longer than a fuel-up to get enough range to get to your destination, you don’t need more battery range.
Price isn’t coming down soon.These vehicles all look to be premium priced. With only a few exceptions they are luxury vehicles from the likes of BMW, Audi, Lexus, etc.
One interesting exception is the Mazda MX-30, which seems to be going in a totally different direction from other manufacturers. This car is a compact with a small motor and a small battery (35.5 kWh - about half the size of a standard EV battery), with only 124 miles of range. A commuter runabout. But they are talking about a small rotary engine being added as a range extender. If they can bring that vehicle in for compact car prices, it could be a winner. I like the efficiency of the engineering - if 80% of your driving is under 50 miles, size the battery for that but provide a range extender option.
Also, a light car with a small battery handles better, and charges faster. The MX-30 has fast charging. So this thing looked like a winner, until I saw the price: $35,000 to $45,000 USD, for a compact crossover. The CX-30, its conventionally powered twin, starts at $23,995. $11K more for a vehicle with less range and power is going to be a hard sell.
Looking at all these cars makes me think anout the timeline for getting most cars to be fully electric. It looks to me like five years from now electrics will still be niche vehicles, mostly in the luxury class. Maybe the next five years after that will see bigger improvements. But if gas cars are still the majority of vehicles sold in 10 years, the majority of the fleet will still be gas powered 25 years from now, since 15 years is about the median age for a modern vehicle.
