What are your electric vehicle plans?

In My Humble Opinion
706

Happy to answer any questions.

In regard to your other comment, I don’t believe that manufacturers are very interested in small electric vehicles at this point. They have sold them in the past (for example: the Ford Focus EV and the BMW i3), but they were never very popular. People want large cars with lots of range. And they can sell for a higher price, so the manufacturer makes more money on each one.

However, at some point we will see a robust market for used EVs. EVs last a long time, but the range goes down over time. If you do not drive very far, a car that goes 220 miles may be totally sufficient for you, even if it originally went 300 miles.

That will be some years out, though. Teslas are so popular that used ones sometimes sell for more than new ones! (because they have a waiting list for new ones)

707

Delivery vans? Sure. Other vehicles where there is some headroom to make them heavier(like busses)? Absolutely

But do you really think that it will be economical to drastically reduce the payload of a semi to allow for the massive (and astronomically expensive) batteries? I can’t make those maths work.

The only one I see pushing electrical semi’s is the guy from Tesla, not exactly known for actually delivering. (Except the landing rocket: that is actually cool). The competition has already been caught with their pants down showing a “working” prototype rolling down a hill “under its own power”.
I cannot see electrical long(er) haul trucking without stuff like overhead wires (like a trolleybus) or something else that will increase range without adding weight.

708

I’ve got an Audi Q4 e-tron on order as a company car. My employer’s company car scheme is all-electric which is quite progressive, and EVs are extremely tax efficient as company vehicles in the UK. I placed the order in November last year and the projected delivery date is January next year. I have colleagues who ordered the same vehicle through the company car scheme who have similar lead times, so it’s not just me.

I already have a wall charger installed - the UK government was running a scheme to fund installations and I clicked for that. It’s sat there on the wall, waiting for that happy day when an electric car turns up.

709

I mean semis. The batteries are heavy, but not enough to significantly impact the payload. And in fact, US and EU law allows electric semis to be heavier than their ICE counterparts.

Musk’s time estimates are not always that great, but he delivers on most things eventually. We got the $35k Model 3, and it was better than what was shown at launch. They’re selling basically a million 3s+Ys annually and showing no signs of slowing.

The Semi is late, but the reason is not so obvious: battery supply. It’s not that they can’t produce it, but demand on all their models so outstrips supply that they have to choose where to ship their batteries. They can sell personal vehicles, commercial vehicles (i.e., the semi), household battery storage units, or commercial storage units.

The personal vehicles, especially the high end ones, not only have great margins, but make the most money per battery cell. If you are limited by cell supply, that’s what you focus on. Although they’d make money on the Semi, it does need a giant pack. They can make 5 or 10 cars for each Semi. That makes more money and is probably the right environmental choice as well.

There are other electric semis out there, or getting close. Freightliner and Volvo are two, though they don’t have quite the range that Tesla does. They’ll get better, though. And yes, there is the one from Nikola that turned out to be a fake, but personally I saw them as basically a scam even before that came out (though they may end up producing something after all…).

It’s probably a few years before they’re really shipping in quantity. As I mentioned, cell supply is the limiting factor, but Tesla and others are ramping up cell production at a rapid pace, so it’s just a matter of time.

710

Didn’t know that. Thanks - that should make it a little bit easier to make them economically viable.

I know I started it, but let’s not go into Musk here.

The ones I’ve seen are mostly lighter vehicles, for local distribution - I think that is a great use case for EV trucks, heavier loads or longer distances? I don’t know if that is even desirable, wear and tear on roads is a real thing and as you mentioned, batteries are not getting cheaper (or lighter) anytime soon.

711

For the big national OTR trucking firms it won’t be that big of an issue. They’ll set up depots every so often, you drive in Tractor A, swap out your trailer for (fully charged) Tractor B. Two hours later, your cow-orker driving Tractor C comes in & swaps out his trailer for now-fuly-charged Tractor A & put Tractor C on the charger. They only need a few more tractors than drivers but they already need that now due to some going in for maintenance.
Who it will hurt is the independent owner-operators (IOO) & small trucking firms. They’ll not only need recharge stations big enough that a tractor-trailer can sit in & not block the road/parking lot but I’m guessing there will need to be some change to the laws to keep them competitive. OTR drivers are limited in how many hours they can drive in a day (10?) Right now the IOOs take just as long to fill up as the large, national firms. If the national firms can swap out in 10 mins while the IOOs need, say, two hours to recharge, they can only go a little over 80% of the way that big guys can. However, if recharge times don’t count against their driving times then they are still competitive.

I saw the Budweiser Clydesdales recently; they have three tractor-trailers for that dog & pony show (literally, there’s a dalmatian that rides on the carriage). Into some small town, out to the farm where the horses spend the night, into the next town, etc. If there’s only a truck recharge station halfway between two large cities they’d spend a lot of time going out of their way whenever they need a recharge; they can’t just pull up to a Tesla recharger in a convenience store lot w/o screwing up traffic while they sit & charge.

712

It’s funny, I think people see electric cars and imagine they’re like a Prius, or rather, they assume that they’ll perform in a way similar to how they see Prius drivers driving. That is, they expect long, slow accelerations from stops, a top speed of 3-5mph under the limit for that particular road etc. People are generally very surprised when I take them for a ride in my car. More than once I’ve punched the gas and they’ll say ‘wow, it’s like being in an airplane’, though the Niro’s odd sound effects play into that feeling.

When the F150 Lightening was announced, I heard a lot of [disingenuous] concerns about the torque. Why someone that’s never had, wanted or needed a pick up and has no interest in EVs is so concerned about the torque on this specific vehicle, I don’t know, but I just reply that I’m pretty sure it’ll have plenty of torque, especially considering what my car can do and I don’t think Kia designed it around maximizing torque.

713

When I charge at home, it’s about 4 cents per mile. Charging on the road (infrequent) is probably twice that.

I do get free charging at my doctor’s office and a restaurant we go to about once a month. Also, our Tesla was one of the last with “free supercharging for life.” So, when we take our Tesla on the road, it’s free all the way down the coast.

714

At home, the car is a steady, continuous power draw, so it is pretty easy to figure out how much it costs to charge. Here is what it costs me to charge for 1 hour.

\begin{aligned} \approx{238}\; \mathrm{volts} \times 24\; \mathrm{amps} &= 5.712\; \mathrm{kW} \\ 5.712\; \mathrm{kW} \times 1\; \mathrm{hour} &= 5.712\; \mathrm{kWh} \\ 5.712\; \mathrm{kWh} \times \$0.09_\mathrm{/kWh} &= \$0.514\; \mathrm{per\, hour} \end{aligned}

To do that estimate I need to know how much I pay for a kWh of electricity. My electric company tries to keep that a secret, but burying it in a PDF on their website, and splitting it apart into multiple charges on my bill. Depending on the time of year, for off-peak use, I pay $0.08 or $0.09 per kWh.

The car claims that at 238 volts and 24 amps I’m charging at 22 miles/hour, so you can figure out the cost per mile from that. Just like a gas car, mileage varies, so that’s only an estimate. Same exact logic as the cost of gas going into a car is a fixed amount, but how far you drive on that gas will change due to conditions.

715

I agree that local distribution is an excellent use case as well. I’ve started seeing Amazon’s Rivian-based delivery vans around here, and they’re great. Just a quiet woooo sound (artificial) instead of the obnoxious ICE engine. EVs are great for all of those start-stop cycles.

I would love if garbage trucks went electric; they wake me up multiple times a week due to their noise. They have to rev the engines just for the hydraulic power. They don’t drive for many miles; even a modest battery would suffice given regenerative braking.

Ultimately, though, we have to make essentially all ground transportation electric. Even the more difficult cases like long-haul trucking are easy (and within current technology) as compared to the more difficult problems like electric aircraft. We should be smart about using the limited (but growing) battery supply, but it won’t be all that long before all new ground transport can be made electric (and ideally, taking existing ICE transport off the roads before their natural lifespan is over).

716

There are special applications where liquid fuels make sense, and the essential production limitations and logistics make a rapid transition to all electric personal transportation and cargo shipping problematic to say the least, but ultimately electric vehicles do make a lot of sense in the vast majority of applications. Even better would be expanding electrified public or shared transport so that the embedded carbon footprint is reduced and capital costs are distributed but this requires some substantial restructuring of housing, urban planning, et cetera, and of course isn’t really feasible for most people living in small towns and rural areas,.

Stranger

717

I read this and was quite surprised that the major casinos don’t have chargers. I mean, in the last year I’ve stayed at three tiny and semi-remote B&Bs that had chargers for guests! I went to look at PlugShare and it looks to me like ALL the resorts/casinos on the Strip have Level 2 chargers in them - there are literally too many to list. I don’t know if they are constantly full or broken or something, but right at this second looking at the map I see over 20 charging locations on the Strip, so in theory this is not really a problem.

718

I suppose I should have excluded human-powered ground transport; namely, bicycles. While electric-boosted bicycles are nice, the plain old mechanical bicycle is still an excellent form of transportation, and I expect to be in use for millennia to come (that includes the scenarios where modern civilization has collapsed).

At any rate, there don’t seem to be any showstoppers in the electric transition. The open questions are about how rapidly we can accomplish it, given the scaling of the supply chain–mining, cell production, vehicle production, and so on.

719

I purchased a 2020 Honda Civic in December 2019. It has a 6-speed manual and averages around 34 mpg on my 70 mile per day commute. It’s also completely paid off.

If I had the extra cash I would trade it in in a heartbeat for a fully EV right now. When I got the Civic Kia was promising to bring a fully EV Soul to the American market and I really, really was jonesing for one of those. But it wasn’t available at the time and so far hasn’t been offered here. The upfront cost of the vehicle and the cost to install a home charger (which isn’t too bad, really) is the only thing stopping me at the moment from upgrading. I currently have zero consumer debt I want to keep it that way. Even if gas prices were half of what they are now I’d be saving a significant amount of money each month if I had a fully EV.

So to answer the OP, I would like to upgrade to an EV as soon as I can afford it.

720

Check KBB or Carmax, you might be surprised at what it’s worth. I had a leased 2018 Civic (SI) that I traded in. The buy out was 17k but the dealership gave me 26 or 27k for it.

721

The thing we should be pushing for is 2 way charging/discharging for EV’s. 10% of all parked EV’s battery capacity would do wonders to dampen/mitigate peak demand or supply.

722

For 70 mi/day, you really don’t need much. In fact, a standard 15-amp, 120v socket would do it in about 12 hours (that’s at a downrated 12 amp rate). It’s nice to have something a little beefier, but you can get away with less, especially if you can top off on the weekends or at the occasional public charger.

723

Semi-trucks are also used for local deliveries and pretty much all the E-semis being built are aimed at that market. That’s because they don’t have to worry about recharging out there along the highways; they can recharge at their home base at night. Even Tesla’s Semi is going to initially be sold for local deliveries. Here’s an article just published today about a couple large orders for them:

724

Just got a ride in my buddies brand new Rivian–holy shit. 0-60 in the mid 3s, and it feels all of it. Corners well and very flat. Surprisingly small and lots of fiddly motorized bits to break, but very, very impressive nonetheless.

725

I love my Mach E. It’s the best car I’ve ever owned. But you’re crazy if you think one car can accommodate 100% of your needs. Thus, thank God the ICE SUV I ordered in October last year looks like it will finally be delivered to my dealership next week. Because, yeah, I still need ICE for certain things.