I have a 2011 Scion xB. I have 67,000 miles on it. I love my car and plan on driving it until it is broken beyond reasonable repair, then move to an EV.
You still have a lot of illusions about how the EV experience works, but I guess Tesla drivers are Kool-Aid drinking cultists, so whatever.
Competitors are just barely getting the picture that EVs make sense for a lot of people, so it’s still going to take time for every niche to get filled out. Tesla has already been growing more quickly than could be reasonably expected, like over 50% annual growth since their founding, but that’s still only just enough to cover a few models. Retrofitting an existing platform to an EV is a recipe for failure, so it’s not like automakers can instantly create a full lineup. The vehicles have to be re-engineered.
It’s unfortunate that the costs of pollution aren’t really built in to the fuel costs. And only a tiny portion is built into the vehicle costs via regulation. I suspect people would be more willing to spend a few more minutes charging if they actually paid for their share of poisoning the atmosphere and damaging civilization.
Anyway, I’ve been driving my Model 3 for like 2.5 years now and I’d never consider going back to a gas car again. There are a zillion little things that make it a far better experience–things that you hardly even realize are there because you’ve gotten used to them, like the noise and the acrid smell. I’d sacrifice a lot at this point to not have to drive a gas car again, but fortunately that’s not necessary.
I’ll be visiting my parents for Thanksgiving; it’s 280 miles round trip, but I anticipate doing some short trips when I’m out there, so probably more like 340 miles, which exceeds the car’s range. But I’ll just plug in when I’m there. Takes 30 seconds. With my old BMW I’d have to fill up somewhere along the way, standing outside in the cold. If overnight charging wasn’t available because I had to make it a day trip, it would take about 10 minutes at the Supercharger. 9 minutes of which I’d spend inside the car, warm, and not having to smell a gas station.
On the rare occasions that I have had to stop for a charge, I’m happy to spend a few extra minutes for the sake of not having to smell gasoline, or deal with those annoying card readers, or listen to those obnoxious advertisements that seem to be everywhere now, etc.
It’s not just the smell. Benzene is a carcinogen that’s added to gas to boost octane. So you’re avoiding that as well as exposure to other dangerous chemicals in gasoline.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935105802439
In the pre-EV days when I took a Washington State Ferry to Seattle in the Winter, I would sit in my cold car because you’re not allowed to have the engine running (makes sense) during the voyage. So, no heat. With my EV, I can have the heater going and stay warm and comfortable the whole way. One small example that adds to the experience. The lack of CO emissions also allows me to have the car on in my garage if I have any need to.
That’s not significant enough to be a reason to switch, of course, but it’s nice.
I bought a BMW i3 a year ago as our 2nd car, perfect for my daily commute (our first car being an ICE, Subaru Outback). I love the Beemer, even though it has limited range compared to Tesla – 175 miles on a full batter, plus another 50 on a gas-powered generator (“range extender”).
I went for BMW instead of Tesla primarily because of the tax incentives. The incentives are tiered based on models sold, and is therefore much higher on a BMW.
Then the pandemic hit, and my wife and I went from driving a combined 30k miles/year to maybe 500/month (and I also went from charging at work, to charging at home). The lease on the Subaru ends in January, and we’re going to try getting by on just the eV Beemer. We think that if we decide to take a long road trip, we’ll rent a car for the weekend.
That’s a great example. In general, people seem to have a reasonable perception of the things they would lose moving from technology A to technology B, but they have an extremely poor imagination about the things they would gain. That’s just the kind of unexpected boon that you might not think about.
There are no ferries around me, but I do value the pre-cooling/pre-heating features of the Tesla. I know there are remote start kits for gas cars that achieve the same end, but in EVs it’s a seamless feature and as you mention, it works even in a garage.
Indeed, the electric bit has been extremely convenient in these COVID “patient only, no visitors” times. Just last week I sat in the car while my wife was in for an eye appointment. I ran the AC, and was perfectly comfortable. Sure in November I’d have been fine with the windows open, but I’ve had to do similar things in the summer. A few cents of electricity versus 10 times as many cents of gas, no worry about choking out the people near by as I idle for an hour, and no stress on the car’s cooling system.
Would you get an EV that’s not a Tesla? If not, then you are a Kool-Aid cultist.
I understand that cars are make on marketing & profit decisions & not necessarily what ‘the people’ want but no one has been able to give me a good reason why traditional automakers are going away from sedans (at least partially because SUVs are more profitable) yet the majority of EVs are sedans. Why is their #1 vehicle type something that is dying elsewhere?
& here we have the bullshit! EV’s may be zero emission at the tailpipe but they are hardly zero-emission. The charge doesn’t magically appear out of the plug. No it comes from a power plant; in this part of the country that means coal or natural gas (both contributing to global warming; albeit less so than an individual ICE engine) or nukes which creates something even scarier in terms of radioactive waste & how do we get rid of that.
While they probably need to be reimagined to be based upon number of miles a vehicle drives, road usage taxes have typically been based upon x¢ / gallon of gas. EVs are not contributing their fair share towards road & bridge repair/maintenance. Then there’s the issue of what is required to make the batteries.
If you really want to be holier-than-thou, either walk, bike, or take public transit everywhere you go.
Most of my summer miles were with the top down, can’t even hear the engine over the wind noise, & as long as it’s not raining, the sunroof is usually open in the SUV (at least three seasons). I’ll give you that gasoline doesn’t smell the best but given that you’re fueling up outside I rarely find the odor to be an issue as usually the wind will blow it away.
340 miles, with very few exceptions is not 480+ miles. Everything that I’ve read (& seen with other rechargeable electronics that I own) is that it’s relatively quick to get to 80% but much slower getting to 100%, I would have needed every bit of 100% for those recent trips, which means well more than 10 min recharge times. In your example, you only need a little bit of charge to get you back home. Not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Half the time I fill up, I don’t even need to get out of my car to get the tank filled (thank to antiquated NJ laws)
I’m not so sure what is annoying about card readers, but you still have to use them with EVs, at least on the road I was driving on for the majority of those two recent trips
I’m not against EVs, It’s just as it stands today; they’re not nearly as good as ICE vehicles for my needs. I’ll repeat what I stated at the end of my last post - When the infrastructure for recharging gets close to gas stations, both in sheer number &, more importantly speed of refueling/recharging, I will consider one (& I will absolutely consider a hybrid for my next new car) but until then, I have zero interest in an EV.
Of course I would, in principle, and you’ve accused me of being a cultist despite ignoring all of the other threads where I’ve been interested in just about all EVs, not just Tesla.
But it’s an unbelievably stupid and insulting statement on your part anyway. One can be a fan of a company without being a “cultist”.
The simple answer to your confusion is that your premise is wrong. Most EVs are not sedans. The Tesla Model Y, the Tesla Model X, the Hyundai Kona, the Kia Niro, the Jaguar I-Pace, and the Audi eTron are all in the SUV/CUV category. The Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Bolt, the BMW i3, and the Hyundai Ionic are all hatchbacks. The Model S, the Model 3, the Porche Taycan, and the Mini Cooper EV are sedans (arguably, the Model S is actually a hatchback too).
Blah blah, same old whataboutism that always gets trotted out. EVs are better than equivalent gas cars even when 100% coal powered. Switch to natural gas and they are much better. Add hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar to the mix and they do become 100% carbon free.
I live in California, where we have a low-carbon mix of energy, and getting lower year by year. My car gets cleaner automatically, and if I still have it in 15 years may be genuinely carbon-free. Gas cars just get more polluting as they wear out.
I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating: it takes about 7 kWh of electrical energy to refine one gallon of gas. My car can go about 28 miles on that energy. So even completely ignoring tailpipe emissions, the Tesla is about as efficient as the BMW it replaced.
Hence why gas users need to pay for their share of environmental costs (and before you ask: yes, carbon-emitting electrical power producers should pay their share too).
I find it remarkable that EVs are as competitive as they are, and that they’re the genuinely superior solution for a wide swath of the driving public. It’s remarkable because it’s like the situation of a corporation choosing to dump their toxic waste in the river vs. getting it safely processed. Of course the latter is always going to be more expensive, so why would anyone do it if they didn’t have to pay the pollution costs? And yet here we have EVs that, even without subsidies, and even without gas cars paying their share of pollution costs, are highly competitive with gas cars.
Versus SUVs the maintenance taxes issue might not be as big a deal since damage to roads is exponential relative to weight but gas taxes only size up linearly or less. And since money is fungible, electric cars are paying some taxes via the taxes on the electricity they do use even if it is not allocated directly to roads.
And most energy used in the making and driving of electric vehicles can be carbon neutral, so it provides a bridge toward that future. With again the exception of the concrete used in roads, since carbon-neutral concrete is not a mature technology, so in that regard, biking, walking, and to a lesser degree, energy-efficient public transportation are superior to individual EVs. (I’m also pretty sure that looking at the medium-term future asphalt should not be regarded as carbon neutral either since right now it is a byproduct of oil extraction so if we stopped using the oil we might need to keep drilling for the asphalt components, but I could be mistaken about that.)
I believe part of this just stems from the fact that something with a traditional SUV profile has terrible aerodynamics (both in terms of frontal area and drag coefficient), which severely impacts highway range. A SUV with an internal combustion engine can get away with this by just doubling the size of the gas tank, which adds very little to the overall cost of the car. Unfortunately, an EV cannot easily just “double the size of its battery pack” without much more significant costs/weight/volume added.
Hence much more initial focus has been on EV’s with a sedan profile, and any SUV type vehicles have been highly streamlined and don’t stray too far from the CUV / crosssover mold. As battery technology improves, and battery costs go down, you’ll start seeing EVs that can deviate more from this.
We’re not a good candidate for our own solar panel system, so we are using our electric company’s “green power” option. We pay a bit more each month for nearly 100% renewal energy sources.
https://www.pse.com/green-options/Renewable-Energy-Programs/green-power
In many, not all states, EVs pay a much higher annual registration fee precisely for the purpose of (approximately) offsetting the gasoline taxes they are not paying. This is still an interim solution, but the problem you mention is not being ignored by state governments.
So that’s another obsolete red herring.
Overall, a guy who makes 500 mile (roundtrip) day trips roughly monthly is in fact a poor fit for current tech pure EVs. OK. I’ve been driving for over 45 years now. I’ve never made a 500 mile round trip day trip. 250 round trip is about my absolute limit to have enough time where I am to make the effort worth the payoff. To me. And I can probably count those trips on 2 hands over 45 years. 180miles r/t; now you’re talking about something I could do monthly.
Who’s right? We both are. Different vehicles for different missions.
Cost and range is the issue for me.
To get a similar size EV to the one I have now would cost £15k more. No amount of reduced fueling cost is going to make that up so it isn’t going to make economical sense at the moment.
We do several trips per year of hundreds of miles and having to plan those journeys around charging capacity would be another pain at the moment. (I’ve checked the routes)
So the next car I get will be ICE but another 5 years after that I’m anticipating that there will equality in purchase price and improvements in charging infrastructure and range to the point where I’ll probably be in a position to buy one then. (plus there is the phase-out of ICE in the UK by 2030 so my hand will likely be forced)
I’ve been meaning to do that. PG&E offers the same thing, plus we can pick alternate producers. However, I did want to first verify that the dollars actually go to building out new plants that would not otherwise be built. Otherwise, a higher green energy mix for me means a lower mix for others.
I’d also like to have solar, but I live in a condo.
A good question. I’m not sure. I think it’ll be a long time before civilization is truly carbon-free–long-haul aircraft will need kerosene for the foreseeable future (assuming anyone flies in the future…). Which makes it all the more important to convert those applications which can be effectively made electric. So there will be some leftovers, though maybe not enough.
Perhaps the nasty tar in the various oil sands deposits will be a boon in the end. No need for the lighter fractions when it’s the asphalt you’re after.
As I understand it, as a pubic utility the electric company has to buy a lot (not exclusively) from the cheapest sources. By paying a bit more, they can use that money to purchase from alternative and greener suppliers. So, my $200 this month is buying from sources that couldn’t be used by PSE normally.
I plan to purchase a Tesla in the next couple years. I have several friends who own Teslas and all of them say they will never go back to a gas-powered vehicle. Tesla is years ahead of everyone in this technology, to include building a rapidly expanding supercharger network. I have a deposit on a Cyber Truck, but may end up with a model Y if the CTs are delayed past 2022.
I thought of another one: The Front Trunk. The Model X has a pretty good size space where an ICE engine would normally be found, that is sufficient for a cart full of groceries. My wife uses it when the back is filled with bags of mulch and dirt, and the dog is in the back seat.
That reminds me of the Volkswagen Beetle and related cars. I think our Squareback had a front trunk.
You know what I keep in my Model X front truck? A battery!
I got it because you’re not supposed to jump start ICE cars directly from the Tesla’s battery, so I figured this would be a good backup in case somebody needs a jump start.
Then I ended up driving my Tesla so much that the battery in my truck died. Good thing I had a jump starter! 
ETA: I guess I’m a cultist now. I’m OK with that.