I don’t understand how this is possible. Charging a Tesla takes 6-12 hours according to Google. The range is around 350 miles. That hardly qualifies as a long trip. I couldn’t even drive to NYC and then find a place to charge it before having to stop for the night and I live in New York.
EVs will not be practical for long trips until their range is 500 miles and charging time is under 15 minutes. That’s a long way off.
I don’t know what scenario you have in mind but even if my power is out, I’m never more than 3 miles away from a dozen or more working gas stations. I imagine EV owners are much more likely to be competing for far fewer charging stations and waiting longer due to the logistics of recharging.
And if I have to make a long trip to see family, I don’t have to then also plan to find a charging station when I get there, or run extension cords to 120V plugs because they don’t drive an EV.
Look, I’m not a never EV-er. Just not ready for another plug in rechargeable appliance in my life.
An EV would be absolutely fine for 90% of my driving needs in any given year. An ICE suits me 100% of the time.
The thing is, EV owners do 99% of their charging at home, so they rarely use a charging station. I’ve never seen one crowded, although I did see news reports of Tesla wait times in California during Thanksgiving weekend last year. I’m talking about the super chargers (level 3). Level 2 chargers are great for plug in hybrids, but you wouldn’t want to count on one for road trips, because it could take hours to get your 300 mile charge.
As for finding one, the car does that for you.
That’s a low-speed charger. Tesla has their Supercharger network which can give you an 80% charge in around 30 minutes. At peak rates, it can add range (to a Model 3) at 1000 miles/hour. That rate isn’t sustained (you only get that at low charge levels), but getting 500 miles/hour is easy for a wide part of the charge curve.
So the trick is that you drive for around 200 miles, which is about 3 hours and the point where many people want to stretch their legs anyway, and then charge for about 20-30 minutes. That’s about 10-15% extra.
If any of this charging is overlapped with stops you were already going to make, like a lunch break, then it’s “free”. And you start your trip with a full charge because your topped off at home the night before.
I was addressing the local power outage situation described by Dr.Strangelove.
I bought a Prius when it was time for a new car and my commute meant I did over 20000 miles per year. I drove it about 7 years and my daughter is enjoying it now.
I will eventually buy an electric car but not sure when, I hope to get 4 more years out of my Rav4. My first All Wheel Drive car. I’ve been down to under 5000 miles per year.
What if their power is out?
Anyway, my power hasn’t gone out in years, and then only for a few minutes, so for me it’s academic. I’ve run into closed/out-of-order stations more frequently than power has ever been a problem. And when I drove a gas car, it was a common occurrence to have to scramble to get gas when I had to get somewhere and even 5 minutes was going to make me late. That’s not something I’ve ever experienced with my EV.
Sorry, I didn’t read that close enough. An extended power outage could cause a problem, if a lot of people with EVs needed to drive a lot. (but gas pumps need power too I think)
For me, it’s hard to imagine the combination of the power being out and needing to drive over 200 miles. We usually just hunker down and wait for it to come back on.
I mentioned it in the context of natural disasters, which often get brought up in these threads. You mentioned “anxiety”, and I didn’t know the origin of that but thought it might be related. EVs are a great choice if you worry about having to get out of dodge quickly, say due to a hurricane or earthquake. If the power is out across a wide area, the gas station pumps are also out, but a long-range EV is still charged and can go anywhere within its radius. That’s in contrast to an ICE, which is likely to have less range at half a tank than a modern EV (there are exceptions, of course). EVs also do well when stuck in traffic or moving at very low speeds, if that’s a concern.
Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this number? If traveling at 70 mph, it means you are only willing to spend an extra 2.1 minutes on charging per hour of driving. But that’s a negligible amount of time; far smaller than any number of other factors, like traffic or weather, that also impact travel time, and we don’t say that a light rain makes long trips “not yet practical”.
I was exaggerating slightly about range anxiety in my car. I mean, I rarely let my tank get below 50%, but that’s just how I am.
Like I said, for 90% of all driving I have to do, an EV would be perfectly fine and it would have more than enough time to recharge fully when I got home from work or whatever. My objection to having an EV right now stems from two factors: One, I’m a car guy and I drive an AMG model car in which the engine was hand assembled by one guy whose name is engraved on a plaque attached to the engine. Now, that may not mean much to most people but it rings my bell every time I crank the engine and hear the drama coming from under the hood and out the exhaust. Two, I’m an IT guy and I deal with tech all day long. I want my car to be as mechanical and engaging in all the ways a performance car is built to be. So yeah, I don’t want to drive an appliance with an iPad interface. At least not yet.
That’s all fair, though I do wonder how many gearheads would stick with “drama” if they had to pay the real environmental cost of climate change and pollution. If gas was $20/gal, I suspect more than a few die-hards would decide that losing those revving noises isn’t so bad a trade.
That kind of sums up my situation, but for different reasons. I’m retired and not in a position to spend as lavishly on a new car as I used to be. Some of my friends who are also retired still manage to spend on fancy new cars, but I’m not that financially fortunate. So there’s a budgetary aspect that awaits EVs getting cheaper and more mainstream. Also, as to residence, I’m the opposite of you – I could have an EV now in terms of being able to set up a charging station for it, but if I end up in a condo later on that may pose a challenge.
Conversely, I drive very little since most of the things I need are right in the neighbourhood or if not, most are about a 15-minute drive away. This also means that the cost of gas and the corresponding environmental pollution are both minimal. Paying a premium for a vehicle that uses little or no gas makes little economic sense since the extra cost may never be recouped.
So I checked “eventually but not in the foreseeable future”. But I’m definitely in the category of “high enthusiasm but no foreseeable plans to act on it”.
To clear one thing up: I’m not implying here that non-Teslas cannot make road trips. A few years ago this was true because Superchargers were the only real game in town, but the charging networks have improved for others. I’m just less familiar with those other networks, so I don’t know the current situation for EVs like the Taycan, I-Pace, e-Tron, etc.
They’re currently spotty. On the West Coast, they seem to be plentiful. I had no problem doing a run to Eastern Washington last year (just to experiment). One was out of order for some reason, but another one was only 30 miles down the road. I got a pretty good charge in 30 minutes at a Level 3 charger. There was also a bank of about 6 empty Tesla charges right next door. Level 2 chargers are practically everywhere, but as I said earlier, that’s not a good solution for a road trip, absent an emergency.
I’ve heard there are areas in other parts of the U.S. where it might be a problem planning a trip via superchargers. I assume that is changing pretty fast.
Speaking only for myself, I’m going to keep mine as long as it continues to give me that thrill. And I drive well below 5K a year. I’m not sure I’ll get anywhere near 2K this year. So my carbon footprint is very light.
That sort of thing is increasingly true even of conventional IC engine cars.
Perfectly reasonable. Lots of people own horses, too. No problem as long as they pay to clean up their shit, metaphorically or not.
When they can make an EV truck that’ll do what my 1 ton Duramax can do, I’ll be thinking about it. Undoubtably they will, so I voted “eventually”. It’ll have to be able to haul/tow 10,000 lbs. a couple hundred miles at least, as the truck hauls the camper & my 21’ boat from home to the Oregon coast or central Oregon several times a year.