What are your electric vehicle plans?

In My Humble Opinion
1906

Improving the efficiency will extend the range I can drive. A 10 percent improvement in efficiency would increase the full range of the car from 250 to 275 miles, which is not insignificant. In the winter when cold temps reduce the range, it’s not without its draw

A 60 mile.trip this evening in 15 degree weather used 35 percent of the battery. Considering that I dont typically charge above 90 percent and I don’t want to drop below 10 percent, I got 80 percent of the battery available to me, or just about 130-140 miles before I need to plug in for a while. Adding a few miles onto that is worth some consideration.

However, outside of the Hankooks, no tire has more than maybe 6-7 percent efficiency gain over the pilot sport a/s tires, so I’m probably going with them again.

1907

I’m confused.
You don’t use your navigation to navigate?
You only go to places you have been before?
You think you can figure out a better route than an algorithm with real time traffic information?

1908

I understand this … thoughts you need to factor in (you mostly know that):

  • is the 6-7% increase in efficiency “a given”, or could it turn out IRL more as 2-3% … also is efficiency the same as more range (thinking of a computer’s CPU that is 50% faster and more efficient than the last one, just to get an overall 10% speed increase in the whole system - a worthy question i think (I have no answer)
  • how much tire-price-delta do you have to pay for that x% efficiency (2, 3, 6,7 or 10%)
  • I understand your 60 mile example, but might argue the case that you were perfectly fine, and more efficient tires would have rendered the same practical result (that additional 25 miles would only have rendered you 25 miles more of “reserve / piece of mind”
  • look into hypermiling …I did that once for a couple of months and lots of good habits stuck with me for the rest of my life … I consistently get 30-50% better gas milage than my wife in the same situations … coasting, pulse and glide and flow are your best friends there and could render you more than 6-7% of “added milage” … on the same note … it carries over to EV nicely, I have an electric scooter with a max. range of 80km … most people only get 55-60km out of it (everybody knows the numbers are cooked) … but I get consistently 80+ km or range out of it … again, a lot of pulse-and-glide, etc…

best of luck!

1909

I’m not @eschereal but I had the same questions you did. More for his defiant tone and his “hours off” comment than for any lack of agreement with his points.

I personally don’t use my navigator to navigate anywhere I’ve been before. I’m perfectly happy choosing my route from the few available. And once near the destination I can find it by memory. I do think the navigator is handy for “last mile” guidance to a novel destination but I’m happy to go from home to within that last mile without its “help”.

I find it scary to consider there are drivers living in my little burb who can’t navigate from home to their usual grocery store without a voice telling them when and where to turn. They literally have no idea where anything is.

Exception to the above: Unless I really care about the exact ETA. Which I only do if I’m meeting somebody / something at a fixed time and the route is more than ~45 minutes long and the time of day is such that traffic might be an issue and I left late enough that my timely arrival is in question. So rather rarely. And even then my real goal is to see whether the ETA is sliding irretreivably later as I’m progressing such that I ought to call my counterparty to warn them I’ll be late.


As to dynamic traffic-based routing, the nature of the road network here is that it’s close to useless.

On the giant suburban boulevard grid, every route amounts to the same distance and the same travel time so same ETA to within the fudge factor of the luck of the draw on how many red lights you hit or miss.

And as to the freeways, I have the choice of the close one, or the one I have to drive an extra 20 miles to use. The delta of traffic or accidents between the two almost never pays to drive out of my way. So just take the close one. And if there is a big slowdown on the close one but not the far one, very quickly all the routing-equipped drivers will equalize the delay by helpfully jumping off the freeway I’m on to go clog up the more distant formerly less-clogged freeway.

1910

Back in the day I always was the driver. I still can find hundreds of destinations by hart. I absolutely rock in memorizing routes on a map.
Since I have access to navigation with real time traffic information I ALWAYS use it. For every trip*. Life is way to short to be stuck in traffic.

  • almost all shopping/restaurants/bars etc. are done by bicycle. I do not drive unless it is more than ~5km (3 miles) away.
1911

For all of us participating in this hijack about navigators and ETAs it might be useful to indicate what sort of area you live in. The experience of a rural flatland driver, a rural mountainous driver, a European city driver, and a US suburban flatland driver are likely to be very different.

In my case I live in a generally rectilinear suburb within a 6 million person flatland metroblob. I can drive on the freeway at 60mph/100kph for over an hour in any direction before I get out into the countryside. It’s solid houses and businesses until then.

Around here “traffic” isn’t something that is on this road but not that road. More like an ocean tide, traffic simply arises pretty uniformly everywhere then recedes pretty uniformly everywhere twice a day on a fairly predictable schedule. For any temporary obstruction on a surface street, there are myriad nearby alternate routes on parallel streets.

The freeways are fewer and farther between, and obstructions (other than from mere volume) are fewer and farther apart too. But they tend to what I call the “stochastic accident”. During busy times you will get delayed by a crash. No idea when or where it will occur, but it will occur and you will be delayed by a few minutes of slow-and-go until you’re past it.

My own daily driving tends to be trips of up to 10 miles on mostly surface streets or up to 60 miles on the freeway. Driving 25 miles to go out to dinner is ordinary.

1912

This is exactly the kind of thing I find traffic aware routing to be good for. It knows where the slowdown is, and I don’t, so it will guide me away from the route which has an accident, or pick the best at the moment of several typically equivalent routes.

I’m also real good at ignoring the routing if I don’t like it. Sometimes that’s simple things like going up another block to make a left turn at a light.

To keep it on EVs, mine has a routing option to select how much of a time savings is needed to trigger a re-route. I think I have it set at 5 minutes. That prevents it from sending me on alternate paths just because there’s a bit of a slowdown on the freeway, or whatever. It will still re-route, but only if conditions have greatly changed.

I would really like last-mile and novelty aware guidance. Give me turn-by-turn voice guidance to get places I’ve never (or rarely) been, but even then, I don’t need it until I’m leaving the main arterials. Be quiet the rest of the time. Think about how you would give someone directions: “Go south on I-25, then take the Santa Fe exit and head south…” You know how to get from your house to I-25, I don’t need to tell you that, but you need to know where to exit, and probably what to do after that.

1913

This isn’t really an EV thing. Apple Maps does the same thing.

Can we please take the GPS discussion elsewhere unless there’s a difference between EV and ICE?

1914

90%+ of my driving is areas I am familiar with. Last time I took an unfamilar route, I studied a map beforehand to the point that I knew exactly where I wanted to go. That is what I do. Nav tells me take this route, but a large fraction of the time, that is not the route I want to take. I like to explore, and to sometimes wander. Nav is only interested in putting me on the main roads, which I often find annoying.

I am a luddite.

1915

This reflects my behavior, too.

On my previous car I let the data package expire, because Ford wouldn’t let me renew it on other than an annual basis, and I only needed it for a couple of more months until its replacement arrived.

I kept forgetting that I didn’t have live traffic anymore, and still used the GPS, only to end up stuck in traffic more than usual.

Eventually I started defaulting to CarPlay, but honestly, I prefer the built-in navigation for navigation.

I know where I’m going; I know alternate routes; I know dead reckoning, but I don’t always know the conditions ahead. Live traffic is now essential to my sanity.

1916

I almost always have the map displayed with the traffic overlay. And before I launch I take a quick glance at a zoom level that shows my start & end points and everywhere in between so I can see any unusual slowdowns. And if so generate my own path around them. More likely it’s just informing me of the general level of congestion.

1917

I just drove shy a couple hundred miles, on a familiar route, and saw the car getting over 3.7 miles/kWh. And even though I had a lot of range left when stopping at a grocery store, I discovered a Tritium fast charger in the parking lot, so I ran the car up to 80% while getting some stuff.

The center screen was dark almost the entire time. I choose roads less traveled, so traffic situations are usually not an issue. It was a nice calm drive, mostly. I appreciate not idling away fuel when stopped.

1918

I’m in an interesting situation.

I live in an apartment, and pay for the electricity use to my apartment.

My complex rents garages to tenants that are in blocks not connected to the buildings, and you don’t pay for electricity used in your garage.

There’s a regular wall outlet in the garage.

So, whenever I’m home, my car is plugged into the outlet, which is level 1 charging, or, the slowest, but for my use, my car is almost always at 100% every morning.

For the driving I do, the only day I have difficulty is Friday, and that has to do with the capacity of the car more than the level 1 charging. Before I drive home on Fridays, I have to make a 15 minute stop at a DC fast stop, and charge it about 60 miles.

Mind, this is just now-- if it weren’t very cold out so that I had to use power to run the heater on high, I could do all my Friday driving on a full charge.

The garage rental is $70/month, and 15 minutes of DC fast charge is about $13, so every month I spend $122 on fuel every month. Not the $300 or so I spent in my gas car I had before.

1919

I wonder how much longer apartments such as yours will have unmetered power in their garages? I’m sure the expectation when those garages were built with outlets was that tenants would use them a few minutes per year to run a vacuum cleaner or a power tool. Not consume a full outlet’s worth of juice for hours every night.

Further, IMO it’s inappropriate to treat the full $70 / mo of garage rent as fuel expense. Especially in cold country there is genuine value in storing a car in shelter. If you had an ICE you might not choose to spend $70 to protect it, depending on your budget, etc. I sure would for my ICE.

Whether you’d prioritize shelter or not, you are getting shelter value for the money you spend. Which is an investment in your own comfort and convenience, as well as (somewhat) preserving the value of your car. I personally might allocate $50 to the shelter value and consider that I’m only spending $20 / month on fuel / charging at home. Which suggests you (or me pretending to be you :slight_smile: ) are actually spending $20 + $13 = $33 for a month’s mobility. Hooray for a bargain!!


Unrelated to the above …
It’s also interesting (to me at least) that you quoted a post of mine from Oct 2020, almost 4-1/2 years ago. I’m not objecting; I’m just using it as a jumping off point for further convo here.

At the time I wrote that I had no expectation of moving anywhere any time soon, and my life was pretty stable. How wrong / naïve that was.

In that time I’ve actually been widowed, married, and divorced, moved three times, wrecked two cars and bought and sold two others, with my latest bought just a couple months ago. My current residence is well equipped with what I think are Level 2 chargers, and I could now practically own an EV. The last time I actively shopped for them, but right now the industry doesn’t make the car I want in EV. So it was ICE again for me.

But probably not next time in a couple-three years. Cheers to Progress!!!1!

1920

That’s a really good point, which had not occurred to me.

At my last place, I paid $15/month for sheltered parking for my [last] ICE car-- mainly it was about convenience-- I didn’t have to shovel snow off it, and if I came out to a flat tire on a rainy day (which has happened to me twice), I wouldn’t get soaked changing it.

It was just sheltered, not a garage, so it was not as well-sheltered as a garage, and it was not secure like a garage, and I did not get some additional storage, but I’m willing to say that I pay $55 for fuel, and $15 for car storage/shelter a month. And, I just remembered that I get a small discount on my insurance because the car is garaged! So I guess that translates to the actual cost of the garage being even cheaper. Hmm.

Additionally, even though the garage is not heated, it is always a little warmer inside than it is outside, except on really blistering summer days, when the fact that it has no windows makes it slightly cooler. This is relevant to how well it charges-- lower temps mean slower charge.

PS: I’d never responded to, nor even seen this thread before-- which isn’t exactly s zombie, just one of those perpetually relevant ones that keeps getting responses. Anyway, read the whole thread before responding, and figured any comment that didn’t have some specific reason for being expired was quotable.

1921

More about EV/PHEV performance and less about plans.

The last two weeks of variation between cold and stupid cold gave us more information on our PHEV (BEV will of course vary!) in extreme cold.

Down to, say, 25F (-4C) we took a hit of 10% or so in range IF just using in-seat and steering wheel heat. Twice that (roughly) if whole cabin heat was used in the SUV. Now, we mostly did the first, because it being Colorado, we were largely bundled up more than enough for 10-20 minute drives from place to place.

Dropping below 20F though, and the car was pretty much turning on the ICE all the time to keep things warm (de-icing the windshield and seat/cabin heat). And of course, just like most other ICE cars, there was a hit to gas driving range as well. Then again, I of course expect a performance hit when driving around in single digit temps. It was neither a surprise nor a failure of technology, just something else to expect and plan for.

1922

We were away last weekend in the stupid cold. Getaway day ranged from -8°F to a high of 12°F, before windchills, & it was windy. Almost 600 miles home.
We pulled off to get a bite to eat & the other end of the shopping center had a Super Walmart/Sam’s Club so we went in to go for a walk & stretch the legs. We got lucky in that we got the 2nd closest spot to the doors in the single digit temps so we gutted it out by leaving our jackets in the car & running inside where it was much nicer to walk around without having heavy jackets, either on or to carry. After we ran back to the car & put the seat warmers on we started to pull out & when we got to the far corner of the parking lot I noticed some EV chargers. Ain’t no way I would have gone that distance in that cold w/o a jacket; same as I wouldn’t have gone that distance w/o an umbrella, or at all if it was pouring.

IMO, chargers are (more typically) at the far end of a lot or the first few spaces; I’ve never seen them in the middle of a parking lot.

1923

Finally had a chance to drive my mom’s Volvo XC40 Recharge, which is now sold under the name EX40. My basic review from being a passenger still stands. The parts involved in being a car work great, but Android Automotive OS is really bad.

The car has three regen modes: Auto, On, and Off. My mom keeps it in “off”, which means lifting off the throttle causes the car to coast, just like an ICE car. Based on the energy gauge, I think the coasting is “real” in that it neither consumes power or regenerates power. In non-regen mode, as can be seen on the energy gauge, lightly pressing the brake engages regen before the friction brakes. The transition is mostly linear, but there seems to be a lot of brake pedal travel.

I switched regen to “on”, and then it became one pedal driving, just like in my Model 3. I could regen to a stop, and the car would hold. I’m not sure what the brake lights were doing during this time.

I don’t know what “auto” does.

So for someone who hates one-pedal driving, it should be fine, and lightly touching the brake to slow down will regen. I personally don’t see a point in it, as I may as well start slowing down when I get off the throttle.

Android Automotive OS is still bad. This is different from Android Auto, in that the infotainment system runs on Android. It can do Android Auto (and Apple Carplay). It really reminds me of the Android tablet experience from 8 years ago. Everything is poorly arranged, and confusing to operate. For example, there is a settings app, a wrench icon, and a gear icon. Each goes to different settings, and it isn’t obvious why some options are in one place and not the others.

There are also driver profiles, Google account profiles, and Volvo account profiles. It is not clear how these might be linked, or if the car can automatically switch between them, and how any of that is related to the seat position buttons on the door.

The car is pleasant enough to drive, rides well, and accelerates very fast. The seats are pretty hard.

1924

Finally had a real-time winter range hit. -8F and snowing hard, so heat and both defrosters on. Lost 100 miles of range in about 45 miles.

1925

I’m not sure this is a result of Android Automotive OS or just Volvo’s ineptitude and adapting it to a vehicle. My experience (in the Polestar 2, a cousin to the XC40 Recharge) is similar in that it seems to be buggy and laggy, but from online comments I think it’s because the integration components have been outsourced to Infosys, a large IT consulting company known for low-cost not known for quality software delivery.

AAOS is in select Chevy, Ford, and Honda systems and I haven’t experienced it there but I haven’t heard as much of an outcry as I have with Volvo/Polestar. And honestly it doesn’t surprise me, because their old infotainment, Sensus, also seemed like it was built by the lowest bidder and was years behind companies like Ford and even Chrysler/Stellantis.

It’s insane to me that AAOS didn’t come native on my Polestar with Android Auto capability. Like WTF? (I’m still waiting for an OTA update to get that feature, but the rollout seems to be delayed)