When an ICE runs out of gas it is no longer a car. Plus, one cannot refuel an ICE car at home each night. An ICE car’s fuel is subject to great volatility. Plus, you have to take the car to a service station a few times a year to be charged an arm and a leg to safely remove and replace toxic chemicals. Just because we’ve grown accustomed to this hassle doesn’t mean it’s the only way of doing things.
not true. There are 168,000 fuel stations in the US. You can easily refuel when running low. If you’re too stupid to look at the gas gauge then it can easily be refueled while on the road. Not possible with an electric car. when an electric car runs low on energy during a trip it’s done. If it quits on the side of the road it gets towed.
sure you can. I’ve done it before. Forget to fill an ice and there’s gas in the lawnmower gas can. Guaranteed to get me to work with 1 minute of refilling. I would only do it to save the time stopping because there’s always a gas station close by. Forget to charge an electric car or lose power during the night and it can’t be put back on the road in a reasonable time. It would need to be towed to a charging station if you lost power.
I have no clue what you’re talking about regarding twice a year removal of toxic chemicals. However Lithium batteries are so dangerous they’re banned as cargo on passenger flights. This is what it looks like when it catches fire. UPS lost a 747-400 when lithium batteries caught fire. They also lost a DC8-71 to lithium batteries.
The point that you’re deliberately ignoring is that if an electric car is refueled every night, or while in an increasing number of parking garages, people rarely make 300 mile trips every day.
How many times have you filled up your car at home, say in the past year? Because an electric car owner would top off every day. And depending on the driver, they might literally never have a need to go to a charging station while on the road for as long as they own a car.
You don’t know what an oil change is?
Do you think they allow gasoline to be carried in your checked luggage?
And seriously, do you want to compare the safety of gasoline to lithium batteries? Srsly? Gasoline apparently causes about 140,000 fires per year with about 100 deaths per year. So, there.
and you deliberately ignore that people CAN’T exceed a full charge in one day which makes the car a total fail for regular use away from home.
I have 168,000 stations to fill my car. I’m not limited by my home. I can drive my car anywhere, at anytime, any distance, and expect fuel close by. Unless an electric car can be recharged in minutes it is limited by it’s charge.
Something that takes less time a year than charging a car every day.
Gasoline, not so much any more but kerosene, by the ton.
Seriously. They banned Lithium batteries from passenger planes filled with tons of jet fuel.
This is just another Volt thread with those insisting people will suddenly overlook the inability to recharge the car in a timely manner. Beyond that Tesla is famous for making promises and then delaying production for years. Right now they’re talking about a 200 mile vehicle in 2017.
Tesla is their own worst enemy and will get plowed under by major car manufacturers who have the capital and talent to engineer a car in a timely manner. Nothing Tesla has done to date has been particularly earth shattering beyond making beautiful body styles and they’re always late to their own party.
But smiling bandit really wants us to buy the car he wants to–
I expect that certain users will change their tune on electric cars when Kia, VW, Honda, or Chrysler start selling them. 
Did you crib this statement from those Captain Obvious ads I see for hotels.com? Yes, a vehicle cannot exceed the amount of fuel it has without refueling. That doesn’t mean it is useless, it means it has to refuel. For electric cars, they can refuel anywhere there is an electrical outlet, but they charge much faster at places with special equipment, such as a growing number of parking lots, Walgreens, Ikea, roadside stops, etc.
Owners of electric cars would presumably recharge every night, which allows the vast majority of them to drive up to 600 to as much as 1,750 miles a week without stopping at any kind of service station.
You have a funny definition of the word “banned.” But I can quickly see that this is going down the typical path of a disagreement with you, in which you cannot concede, against all common sense, that gasoline is much more dangerous than lithium ion batteries.
I think Tesla is a joke in the way that they promise NEW TECHNOLOGY TODAY!! and deliver three years later. However, let’s not be stupid. The Model S is probably the best reviewed car in history. One cannot ignore that.
So, Magiver, recognizing how you are well dug in to your position, can you answer me a question that you should know based on your experience working at an airport? Here’s the question: is a Cessna 172 useless?
Because a Cessna 172 has substantial range limitations compared to most other aircraft most people are familiar with. If you want to fly further than 600 miles or so, (assuming you keep an adequate reserve of fuel), you have to stop at an airport and refuel. That process of descending, landing at an airport, taxiing to the FBO, getting out your credit card, refueling, taxiing back, climbing back to cruise, and continuing one’s way probably adds about an hour to any long trip, more or less. And yet, the Cessna 172 is the best selling aircraft of all time.
So why is a 172 not useless?
Absolutely. Excepting the battery, what is the maintainence cost on a Tesla. My Jeep just hit 160 miles and I had to replace front struts ($200) and the next month a new driveshaft and new CV joint ($500 and I still don’t know why it was so cheap). The Denali needs a tuneup and an oil change ($150 + time if I do it myself) and I should probably do the same for my Jeep. That doesn’t even START to add up to the potential $thousand for the wife’s Jeep that mysteriously died at a stop light and now the pulley crank won’t turn at all.
A lot has been made about the 200 actual miles range and if you run out of gas vs. battery etc. so I did a test. The absolute most driving I would have to do in a Tesla is drop my son at (out of our neighborhood) school (Weld County to Longmont), go to work 40 miles after that in Denver, pick him up from school, take him to Boy Scouts in Loveland and head home.
141 miles. I could easily do that within the estimated range.
When I get my Model X later this year I’ll let you all know if it’s useless 
Haven’t you read Magiver’s posts? That thing is a piece of junk. Better give it to me so I can dispose of it properly, otherwise that lithium battery is going to explode and kill you. And your family. And probably your neighborhood.
So, just send it along any time it’s good for you.
Many companies in Silicon Valley offer charging stations, so the people here with electric cars charge them at home and at work. And it is a lot more convenient than going to the gas station.
We’re lucky there was no Dope 110 years ago, or you’d be telling that silly Mr. Ford that there was no way his car would ever be successful. Horses don’t need gasoline, after all.
Well I guess the obvious answer is that everyone in America move to the Silicon Valley.
Cars tend to follow a pretty straightforward price/utility relationship. Cars that are inexpensive tend to have less overall utility than cars that are more expensive. Subcompacts are less expensive than sedans or station wagons. Small SUVs are less expensive than large SUVs. Standard pickups are less expensive than crew cab full sized trucks.
Electric cars have a gap in utility, in a very basic aspect of utility, the ability to go from one place to another. People who own them need access to another vehicle to fill that gap. However, you’re not getting the normal price break for this gap in utility. If I own a Yaris, I’ll need to rent a Home Depot truck to bring sheet goods to my house, but the Yaris is cheap, it’s half the price of a crew cab pickup, so that trade off is part of the price.
Electrics are still not on par with gas powered cars from a price perspective, even when they’re at par, they still need to get cheaper to offset the gap in utility.
I’m happy to debate and disagree, but… what are you talking about? What is this gap? One can read your comments to mean that electric cars don’t actually move, so one needs an ICE car that moves to fill the gap of a permanently stationary “vehicle.”
Look, Tesla is a great car. But, at $70,000 its really is not an option for most people. But when this new project I am doing starts going full speed and reaches the first $1M revenue, I may buy one.
It cannot “revolutionize” anything if it is not affordable.
You need a backup car to fill the gap by making a trip that your electric car cannot physically make. The car moves, sure, but it won’t actually take you from your location to this particular destination, which is the primary purpose of any mode of transportation.
When a destination is outside an electric car’s available range, it’s extremely difficult to use that electric car to get you there. That is a gap in utility, one that doesn’t exist in an ICE car.
That assumes that people make long drives on a somewhat regular basis. That’s a very debatable proposition.
I can’t find any reliable data on how often people take a long road trip. But I have found cites that roughly 87% of commuting is done in cars, and the vast majority of commuting distance is under 60 miles round trip. Seeing as how the average American drives 13,000 miles a year, the overwhelming amount of driving is done in short distances.
I do not expect that someone who has a fondness for taking very long road trips once or twice a month is going to buy an electric car in the next ten years. But I do think that a hell of a lot of Americans will see a benefit to electric cars in that timeframe. Even today, the five year cost to own a Nissan Leaf is roughly $10,000 less than the cost to own a Nissan Rogue for the same period of time. Sure, a good chunk of that is the tax credit, but there’s also a few thousand dollars worth of savings due to the lower cost of fuel (whether liquid or electons) and greatly reduced cost of annual maintenance.
And besides, the idea of owning multiple cars isn’t as bizarre as you make it out to be. Currently, the average American household owns 1.9 cars. Interestingly, the average American household has 1.8 drivers. Yes, that’s right: families own slightly more cars than they have drivers. Why is it so controversial to think that the 0.9th of a car that such families may own may be electric?
It just shows that providing charging stations is no big deal. It was clearly easier to build a charging station than to build a filling station on the premises.
I stayed at a hotel in Fairbanks once, and the parking lot had engine heaters for cars staying there in the winter. Hotels could provide charges more easily - have the guest punch in a code given at check-in and charge them internet level charges. They’ll make a fortune.
All that you’re saying is that the electric car market is not 100% of the total market. Granted. No car market is. My old Saturn couldn’t pull a horse trailer - that did not make it worthless. The question is whether the electric car market is big enough to be viable. I suspect it is, once the price comes down and more infrastructure is built. There are somewhere around six electric car owners in my department, and the cars are all quite satisfactory. Leaf and Fiat, no Teslas here.
In any case, if range and charging speed are enough that you can stop for lunch and get your car recharged, effective range might be close to unlimited.
But for people who don’t use that feature, there is no gap. Some cars have 4 wheel drive, some don’t. If you live down a rough dirt road in a place with extreme weather, not having 4 wheel drive is a gap. If you use it exclusively to commute in Phoenix, it’s not a gap at all.
I can’t use my family’s car to go to Japan. Does that make it non-functional? And it I have no interest in driving a car to Japan, does it matter?