A very significant portion of the light trucks sold here aren’t used any differently than cars are, and EV versions of them will suit those users needs just fine.
Not a mandate, not yet. “The government announced the proposed regulations on December 21, 2022, and will officially launch a formal 75-day consultation period upon their publication in the Canada Gazette, Part I, on December 31, 2022.” So please let your government know what your feelings are on this proposal.
Perhaps. I don’t have any information on how they are used. But the trucks suffer more than cars in winter for several reasons: Their batteries are physically larger and require more energy to keep warm, the cabins are large, at least the F-150 doesn’t have a heat pump, and I suspect that winter truck tires will make a much bigger difference in mileage than winter car tires.
But even more importantly, they are really, really expensive. The Ford Lightning has gone up in price by over $20,000. The base XLT Lightning is now $81,195. The Platinum is an eye-watering $123,000.
I just priced out a base XLT with the long range battery option. $97,843. Payment is $1482 per month over 60 months. That is well outside the range of affordability for probably 90% of Canadians. The only version of the Chevy Silverado EV available in Canada is $119,000. They promise there will be a ‘base’ version for around $80,000 - about the same as Ford. The non-EV version of the $119,000 RST is $67,000. The Non-EV F-150 XLT is $49,000. That’s a hell of a premium to pay for electric.
I was quite excited for thr Ford Lightning, and boosted it quite a bit here on the board. But that’s when it was $59,000. Now they’ve raised the price to $81,000. And if you want the extended range battery and Ford Pro charger, the base model jumps to $97,000.
And guess how much it costs to install the charger with a transfer switch so you can use the truck to power your home in an emergency? You have to get a Sunrun Home Integration System, which is $9500 installed in the U.S. So probably $13,000 or so here.
And to charge the truck most people will need to upgrade their electrical service, which in my city costs a minimum of $15,000 and as much as $40,000, because all our power lines are buried. The Ford Chargestation pro which comes with the extended battery requires a 100A circuit for itself.
It’s the details that kill you.
I mean, that’s basically just a litany of reasons for why people living in urban settings (or even large towns) are silly for insisting on driving pickups when they almost never use them for anything that a mid-sized CUV can’t do. And for some reason they all seem to be driving turbo diesel models in fancy trim packages, which are easily north of $80k as well.
(various other links to EV price rises snipped) I noticed that all those links that had dates were from last August. If you check out more recent reports, you’ll find that EV prices have come down, at least for Teslas. They had a significant price reduction last month and have had several adjustments since then, fine tuning prices to match demand.
https://electrek.co/2023/01/12/amid-demand-concerns-tesla-cuts-prices-by-up-to-13k-in-us/
After the most recent adjustment, the price of a basic Model 3 is now just $43K, whereas before the big drop was $47K.
https://electrek.co/2023/02/12/tesla-adjusts-electric-vehicle-pricing-us-again/
Gift link to a New York Times article that also talks about how EVs are getting cheaper. The headline is “Electric Vehicles Could Match Gasoline Cars on Price This Year” and one paragraph reads
Increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials are making electric vehicles noticeably more affordable. The tipping point when electric vehicles become as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines could arrive this year for some mass market models and is already the case for some luxury vehicles.
If you can get the ICE version of the vehicle you like for $50,000 less, than by all means, get that one.
I noticed that as well. Also, this one…
…is about a $600-$900 increase in the price just a few months after a $6000 reduction. I think you’re still coming out ahead on that one.
Some people perhaps. But I question “most people.” I live in a house from the 30s, upgraded in the 70s. No one batted an eye when we asked for a charger to be installed in our garage.
The Ford Pro charger draws 80 amps max. Many older homes only have 60 A services. Average modern homes here have 100A services. If your home has an electric stove, electric dryer, and other modern electric gadgets, you are likely already approaching the limits of your service. If you had a smaller level 2 charger installed it might only draw 20 amps and you will be okay. But almost no one will be aboe to install an 80 amp charger without upgrading their service.
Upgrading a service generally involves pulling wire to the house. If your wiring infrastructure is overhead on poles, you might get away cheaply. In my area, all wiring is underground, so increasing your service can require tearing up sidewalks or roads, and digging a trench from the service entry to your yard to the house. It all depends on the neighborhood and how far your house is from the nearest distribution transformer. Hence $15,000 - $40,000 for the city’s part, and you are responsible for your own trenching on your property.
It gets worse, because many neighborhoods can only handle a few service upgrades before major upgrades are needed to the local infrastructure.
This under-appreciated problem is a real show stopper for trucks for many people. EV trucks are inefficient as EVs go, so they need huge batteries. The Ford F-150 has a 133 kWh battery. To get similar range a Tesla Model 3 only needs 67 kWh. So to get the same rate of charge in km/min, you need to push about twice the current into the Ford.
If you can’t install a level 2 charger, a level 1 gets you around 1.2 kWh charging. A Tesla model 3 or other small EV gets 4-5 miles per kWh, so 8 hours of level 1 gets you 30-40 miles of range. For a commuter, you can keep the battery topped up if you drive less than that per day. That’s workable for everyone who has access to a regular electrical outlet and an extension cord. You don’t even need a garage.
The Lightning gets more like 2 miles/kWh. The same level 1 charge for 8 hours will get you less than 20 miles of range. So you will be stopping at chargers if you can’t install a level 2 charger at home.
It’s also not that cheap. At .30/kWh, an F-150 Lightning has an energy cost of .15 per mile. The gas version uses 4.5 gallons/100 miles. At $3/gallon, that’s .13 per mile. At $4/gallon, it’s .18. So the Lightning is only cheaper to ‘fuel’ if gas is more than $3.50 or so, or electricity is cheaper than .30/kWh. At home it it might be cheaper, but if you are stopping at Superchargers , not so much. And you will need level 3 charging if you are stopping to charge in a truck, or you’ll be sitting there for hours.
Wow. We pay only $0.11 per kWh.
I agree that level one charging isn’t going to cut it for a Lightening F0150. But for many, a regular 30-40 amp level 2 should be fine. We manage two EVs from one Level 2 charger without ever having a problem.
Home electricity prices are much better than public level-3 charger prices. That was my (poorly worded) point about the cost of an EV truck - if you can’t charge at home, the cost of ownership and the hassle goes way up. Many people don’t even have garages, let alone services that would allow the installation of a 30-80A charger. I picked .30/hr because I believe that’s the price at Tesla superchargers.
Some places have per/minute charges. I just looked up some Canadian costs. BC Hydro charges .2717/min for 100kW charging. To fill a Ford F-150 long range from 0, it would take 1.33 hours and cost $21.68. That’s not bad. So YMMV.
It depends how far you drive on average each day. It also depends on summer vs winter. In winter, you could get more like 1-1.5 miles/kWh. If you drive 75 miles in a day, you’ll need to pump 50-75 kWh into the thing to keep the battery up. Level 2 is 3-18 kWh, so driving 75 miles per day could require anywhere from 3 hours to 18 hours of level 2 charging to keep the battery level from slowly depleting. If you can’t do that, you’ll be topping up at public chargers at a higher price.
That’s my point. An electric truck for $81,000 base is a hard sell when the same truck in gas is $49,000. And if you want reasonable range, especially in winter, the base EV is $97,000.
When 70% of the vehicles sold per year are trucks, this puts a pretty hard stop on EV penetration in the market.
Yes, the Bolt had a price reduction, but is now increasing. You found one of the three cars (Tesla Model 3 and Ford Mustang-E being the others) that have come down in price in the last year. But most EVs have gone up in price quite substantially - especially the ones in high demand, like the Ioniq 5 and the EV trucks.
Part of this is just general inflation, but a worrying part is that, after years of price declines, battery prices are going up again. This may be whynthe trucks went up moremthan cars - those huge batteries.
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/rising-battery-prices-threaten-affordable-electric-car-push
If we try to push EV demand higher with rebates and incentives, this will get worse. If we don’t, we’ll never hit the EV goals set by politicians.
I was curious about the range loss due to winter tires, so I looked at my logs. With winter tires I get 89% of the range as when using my all season tires.
Average values:
| Tires | kWh | Wh/mile | Efficiency | Minutes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Season | 3.54 | 244 | 99.7% | 26 |
| Winter | 3.82 | 274 | 89.9% | 26 |
To try to keep things constant, I used my commute to work, ~14.6 miles, during the month before and after I swapped tires last fall. I only considered commutes where the temperature was between 40 and 50F. The average time of the commute is the same for both. It is a mix of 25-35MPH surface streets and 65+ freeway.
“kWh” is the total energy used in kilowatt hours.
“Wh/mile” is the number of Watt hours used per mile traveled, and can be thought of as MPG for EVs.
“Efficiency” is the ratio between the observed energy usage compared to what the car is rated at.
The winter tires are Pirelli Winter Sottozero 3, and the all season tires are Michelin Primacy MXM4. Both tires are called compatible or recommended for EVs. I’m not exactly sure what that means.
In our recent episode 0F highs, driving the EV was so, so much nicer than the ICE (no pun) car. 5 minutes before leaving, tap my phone, and the EV is nice and warm inside. Even when I forget, the resistive heater is blowing hot in about a minute. The ICE car, not so much. It took about 3 miles (10 minutes) to get any heat, and 6+ miles to get good heat. Of course once the coolant is up to temperature, the heat is plentiful and “free”, but on a short run to the store I’d much rather the instant heat.
That sounds about right. I would expect the loss from winter tires on a car would be somewhat less than on a truck with those huge wheels.
There are a lot of great things about EVs, even in winter, or perhaps especially in winter. Rapid heating, not having to worry about the car not starting, etc. But the range issues are real, especially in a spread out place like the Canadian prairies.
I have to pick up my kid from the Edmonton airport tonight. I just checked the round-trip distance from where I live in Edmonton - 112.5 km. Going from one end of the city to the other on the ring road and back is 70-80 km. Going to a hospital appontment at the Grey Nuns is a 60 km round trip. If you have to drive to work downtown, drive back, then drive out to the airport later you can easily burn up 200 km. On a cold, snowy winter day, that will be a challenge in many EVs, especially if you are trying to keep the battery between 20-80% for long life.
You might not be the ideal EV target market.
The sum of all loads in a house can–and usually does–exceed the maximum service level. Often by 2x or 3x.
Whether a given charger is appropriate depends on the circumstances, but given that EV charging loads are generally at night, while peak electrical loads in other areas (kitchen, A/C, water heater, etc.) are not, there’s likely no problem with installing a high-amp charger even on 100A service.
80A would be a bit much, of course, but 40A is probably reasonable. That’s enough to add 96 kWh to a vehicle over 10 hours.
Hardly anyone will need that much in practice. Even if you have a long day that fully drains the battery, you’d need a second long day–and no access to external chargers–to really demand that your home charger completes a full charge overnight.
When I was using L1 charging at home, sometimes I’d come back from a trip and it would take a whole week to get back to 100%. Wasn’t a big deal since it was just a bunch of short commute days. And if I really needed a fast charge, I had other options.
This is when having that extra percentage comes in handy. For example, this most recent Sunday I went skiing when other people were busy with some TV show. About a 250km round trip through the mountains, and I did it on a single charge, by using my full range.
I set the car to charge to 100%, and be ready by 7am. At 7am the battery was completely full, and the car was warm. The battery hit 100% at 6:06am, and I left at 7:44am. Less than two hours at 100% charge is not going to go cause serious harm to the battery.
By the time I got home the battery was at 11%. Time to charge, but not into any sort of danger zone. Plugged in, and the car was at 90% the next morning. Total cost was $7.04. Estimate is it saved me about $24 in gas.
If, like in your example, I had a day where I knew I’d have lots of driving, I’d be sure to charge up the night before.
Not everything can be planned for, though. If I’d not bothered to charge for a few days, and then had an unexpected airport run before charging at night, well that’s what DC fast charging is for. Starting with a 15% charge, a round trip to the airport (100km) would require 6 minutes of DC charging. That’s barely more trouble than if I had the same surprise trip and only had an 1/8th of a tank of gas.
The goal needs to be thinking of what needs to be done to make an EV work for your situation, not all of the ways using an EV can’t possibly work.
We planned to install a hot tub with a 30A heater, and to meet code on our 100A service it had to be installed with a subpanel and a ‘load miser’ to shut off the dryer or other appliances when the heater was running. It added almost $6,000 to the estimate. I was told the same thing would apply for a car charger. Also, if we installed the tub, adding a car would mandate a service upgrade. So it’s definitely a YMMV thing.
The problem with charging at night is that we have replaced a lot of baseload with solar power, so we lose a lot of supply when people want to charge their cars when the sun goes down. Also, we will have to stop people from plugging in their cars when they get home, because peak energy prices here are now in the period between 5 and 8 when the sun has gone down but people are still cooking bathing, etc.
Look at this energy supply chart for Alberta from 9:30 last night:
https://twitter.com/reliableab/status/1625713157804097537?s=61&t=DMRG0DxBpVvwY4jr_LJ7Vg
At 4AM the pool price of energy rose from about $60/MW to $400/MW by 6AM. This period is also the period where people are going to want to warm up their EV batteries and interiors.
At 3PM prices started to rise again, and went all the way to $800/MW, stayed there for a couple of hours, then declined back to the median by 8pm. All those people wanting to stop and get a charge after work would be paying .80/kWh plus delivery fees and taxes.
Also notice that not only were we importing energy, but so were all our grid partners. Also note that despite having 4800 MW of wind and solar capacity, which is almost 50% of our demand, at that time we were only generating 569MW of power from wind and solar, or only 5.7% of our demand. That’s the difference between capacity and capacity factor. When people talk about how cheap solar is getting, they are talking capacity. Capacity factor is what matters.
So as we build out more wind and solar, our daytime power will continue to go down in price, but nighttime power will get more expensive. In winter when the sun is down during peak demand, power prices will go insane. We’ve already seen peak pool prices close to $1500/MW. At that price, charging an F-150 battery would cost close to $200, without tax or delivery charges. Probably $300 all-in.
There are a million cars in Alberta, and over a million trucks. If even 10% become EV, that’s 200,000 vehicles charging at night. At 100kW per vehicle, that’s 20,000MW of load. That is not a small amount. in fact, it would triple our nightime energy demand. Of course not all would charge every night, but then our government is pushing towards 100% EV. Does not compute,
I encourage everyone to look up the power situation in their own area. The issue relating to this thread is that if the ‘transition’ to renewables is handled this poorly going forwards, EV ownership could get very expensive and difficult to manage with restrictions on charging. We are already in a precarious energy situation, and adding solar does not help one bit with nighttime charging.
Sounds like the electrician was ripping you off. You can get load misers or ~$1200 CAD. 5x that for installation seems extreme. And you could go cheaper than that if you used a manual transfer switch.
Something here does not compute, surely…
I asked the electrician. I have the quote here somewhere. I think their load miser was around $1800. But our electrical panel is also full, so it required changing out a bunch of breakers for mini split breakers, running a couple hundred feet of armored 40A cable, putting in a subpanel, and pulling permits. I think it may have also required routing the dryer and stove and such through the load miser. I can’t remember. Also, we are in Canada, where everything is more expensive.
As for charging, feel free to put your own numbers in. If you want to use a lower charging rate, fine. But then, I only used 10% of vehicles. If our federal government gets its way, within ten years we’d be well over that. If we have 20% of sales being EV in 2026, 60% in 2030 and 100% by 2035, and we retire 8% of the car fleet per year, then… Wait, I had a differential equation for this…
Anyway, it would mean that we’d have a lot more than 10% of our fleet being EV by 2035. Even at 30kW charging, 10% of EVs in the fleet would double our nighttime power needs. Even at level 1 charging, if people just plug their cars into a standard socket, our power needs would jump by more than 10% at night. That’s 10% we don’t have. We’re already importing nighttime energy.
And people will have to not preheat their cars in the morning or charge them when they get home or stop at a charger to/from work, because that’s when we are REALLY short on power as seen by our pool price.
Once people realize this, what happens to EV adoption?