Road damage scales with the 4th power of axle weight. A single fully-loaded semi does as much damage to a road as thousands of passenger vehicles. The trucking industry would utterly collapse if they paid for their share of road construction expenses.
Those big pickups and SUVs certainly do more damage than my compact car.
I am not planning on buying one. I have no place to put a charging unit as I park on the street. I live in a rural area with very few options for charging outside the home.
My Chevy Impala is 10 years old and I will probably keep it until it totally dies and replace it with something similar (4 door sedan). Not looking forward to dealing with all of the changes in these kinds of cars either.
That said I recently visited Norway and Denmark and was amazed at the electric public transportation in those countries.My first taxi from the airport was electric.
Very quiet vehicles that run extremely well.
You and I have exceedingly different understandings of what ‘rural’ means, because to my thinking these two statements directly contradict each other.
Right now I have a PHEV minivan and it gets about 30 miles on the battery alone. I do as much charging as I can and usually end up with 50MPG or more depending on where I have needed to go. At this point I am not considering an EV because of where I live. It is a townhouse and our parking spot is not right next to us so I run an extension cord to charge the minivan. If we moved to either a house with a garage or one where the parking spot is adjacent to the house, then I would likely consider it.
//i\\
And, to be fair, I think most people still come out way ahead.
Some very quick calculations tells me that if you drive 12000 miles, at 30mpg, with gas being $3/g, it’ll cost about $1200 (just for the energy, not counting maintenance). Those same 12000 miles at 4m/kwh at 15¢/kwh, is $450.
A $100 (or $200) fee still leaves you more than $500 ahead.
However, while the government does need to keep up with infrastructure repairs and I don’t have a problem with that responsibility falling, at least partly, on the people using it, we still need to push back. If only because I think it’s safe to assume oil companies will lobby governments to continue closing that gap. The more ongoing fees and taxes that can be milked from EV drivers, the less people will want to bother with them.
I live in rural western PA in a very small town northeast of Pittsburgh. One side of my street is a forested hill. I don’t have a garage.
Okay, but the thing is, when I think rural I’m thinking of something more like this.
Ain’t nobody parking on the “street” in the rural parts I hail from. Nobody would ever even call them streets. To my way of thinking, if you have a street to park on, you aren’t actually rural.
Yeah, but you need to come out significantly ahead, because at least to date an EV costs notably more than an ICE in an equivalent class.
EVs have much lower maintenance costs, though.
We paid more for our EVs than any previous car. But we got a lot more. The driving experience is better. The cars themselves are better (more features and luxury, for example). The refueling experience is better. I don’t expect to save money by driving an EV, but I’m getting a better product and perhaps reducing (in a small way) greenhouse gasses.
I haven’t run the numbers for a Model 3 or Chevy Bolt. I assume at those price levels there are savings to be found over ICE.
It’s possible to accept the truth that most trips are less than 40 miles, and also accept that Americans will absolutely not accept anything less than something that provides a reasonable amount of space and comfort for a family to drive from Minneapolis to Chicago without stopping to charge 10 times. Americans switching short trips to scooters or electric bicycles or yaks or 40 mile range tiny, uncomfortable cars and then being SOL if we want to take a road trip isn’t going to happen. So Slate needs to figure out the best way forward to for us to start producing more carbon-friendly cars that Americans will actually drive, rather than staying in some fantasy world. As another poster pointed out, maybe plug-in hybrids rather than huge battery packs are the way to do that, but if so we have to rethink our current idea of banning ICE cars in a few short years.
Hasn’t been suggested, so wish granted!
The proposals are for stopping the sales of new ICE cars, and I think the earliest proposals only in some states is 2030 (Vermont) with California in 2035 and even this likely to be pushed back. So the expectation is fully that ICE cars will still be tooling around for at least the next couple decades.
I’m not clear that this is your belief as to the current state of EV travel, but for laughs I put this into ABRP to plan trips trip using my wife’s Tesla Model Y as the travel vehicle. Plenty spacious, lots of storage for a road trip for a group of 4 or 5.
Downtown Minneapolis to downtown Chicago would require two stops, both of 12 minutes. Both stops as planned automatically are immediately off the freeway, both in places with a number of restaurant and shopping options.
Eh, banning the sale of new cars is a significant restriction.
Many American households own more than one car. Switching one of those cars to electric (and drivers taking turns, to optimize its use) is a fairly easy change for many households.
No argument there, but it’s a far, far cry from both “a few years” and “outright ban”
Someone who no longer posts here complained repeatedly about Canada’s proposed ban, saying that it wouldn’t be possible to travel between cities in the frozen north. But then I read the actual proposal from the Canadian government, and it proposed allowing the sale of hydrogen-powered and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles as well as purely electric vehicles. And Googling, California also seems to include PHEVs in its 2035 zero emissions mandate.
I think banning new sales of ICE in the medium-term future is both too much and too little. We don’t have 7 years to address the GHG crisis*. But we also can’t immediately convert everyone to electric. So I think we should have ironclad (rather than tepid like CAFE) MPG standards that aggressively increase, starting as soon as possible. While at the same time encouraging the spread of charging infrastructure. Then, in a few years, if it is possible to easily switch over then we can think about mandates.
*Sure, converting as much passenger travel as possible to electric would only make a few percent difference in GHG emission, but you can say that about any single measure. There’s no reason we can’t address several sources at once.
Which is what we do. The Mach E is the fun, daily driver, but it sucks for road trips. It’s still the best car I’ve ever owned, other than the 5% of use cases I use my Expedition for.
But, you know what? If the Mach E were an Escape instead, the Expedition would still be a better road trip (subjectively) and trailer-pulling vehicle (objectively).
I’m aware of the Model Y and it’s capabilities. The point of the Slate article seems to be that we shouldn’t be allowed to have nice things like the Model Y, and instead be forced to have cars with a 50 mile battery, or even nothing but electric bicycles.