Gas costs approx $2.24/gallon in Utah. A Prius has a 11.3 gallon tank and a 540 miles range (again, EPA standard). That means that $11.15 would get you the same distance as a full Bolt EV charge in gas.
Now, before electric vehicle fans jump for joy at the $2.45 saving per 238 miles, we also have to account for the cost of the two vehicles. The Bolt EV costs $36,620, the Prius $23,475.
Therefore for the Bolt EV to make economic sense you have to drive 1,276,942 miles. Or fuel has to get much more expensive, or electricity much cheaper. Regardless, the economics don't add up at all when compared with hybrid gas vehicles.
Yes, I know, lower maintenance, but not $13K lower. And before you talk to me about the cost of driving to and from a gas station, let me remind you about battery loss due to cold temperatures (this is Utah we're talking about, after all).
In general people buying electric vehicles in 2017 are buying them for non-economic reasons. They lose money. Hybrids are likely the best bang for your buck, and may remain that way even after Tesla ship their $36K competitor (since no other major metric in the equation changes, electricity is still very expensive, and gas very cheap).
Also, I hate stopping at gas stations, not just for the monetary cost, but for the time and general annoyance. Now I just plug in every night, my car is always ready to go. I'm never rushing off to an appointment only to realize that my tank is nearly empty, which will make me late. And I never have to change the oil.
And now I can make my weekly ~140 mile round trips without feeling so much polluter's guilt. Sure, it's a drop in the bucket, but a full bucket is full of drops.
Did you take into account that these cars can be programmed to wait until nighttime to start charging, when rates are lowest?
Anyway, sure, economics is a big factor that will slow adoption, but it won't halt it.
Edit to add: Plus I get $9,000 in total tax rebates. Tasty.
Well yeah, you kind of do need to change the oil if you don't want the gearbox to die an early death. There's also still coolant that needs to be changed regularly as well. EVs have significantly less maintenance, but there's still critical maintenance that must be done on time if you don't want to damage your car.
http://i.imgur.com/gU4FfdY.png
It calls for tire rotations every 7,500 miles - not a lot you can do about that, and I suspect tire wear will be worse in a torque-happy EV. Skipping them will only reduce your traction, which I suppose could damage you and your car. And of course you have "required services" like brake pads when those wear out and start to squeal; probably less common due to regenerative braking from the electric motor: Engine braking is a habit that takes work with an ICE, but it's the norm in an EV. And you might want to change the cabin air filter when it gets dusty - not that my vehicles haven't gone...a long time...without cabin air filter changes. Skipping them won't damage your car, just your nose. But fluid flushes? Hardly necessary.
Coolant only needs to be changed at 150,000 miles - hardly "regularly". Most ICE cars don't need changes at less than 100,000 mile intervals. In an EV like the Bolt, coolant deals with a lot less heat than an ICE and doesn't suffer microscopic contamination from hot exhaust gasses and oil.
And the Bolt doesn't have a transmission; it's direct drive. Gearboxes (I assume you mean manual transmissions?) typically take synthetic gear lube now with recommended intervals of 200,000 to 300,000 miles. Differentials use the same stuff. I did elect to change the differential fluid in my Jeep at 250,000 miles - but those diffs are taking a lot more abuse than a typical car.
You're also right that brake pads are going to last longer, on an EV, they barely wear at all. However, there's the brake fluid that will wear out just as fast as on any car. Over time brake fluid picks up humidity, there's no easy way around this. It'll cause the car to potentially lose the brakes if ignored long enough or even rust out brake lines.
Then there's still every single suspension component that a traditional car has. Balljoints and tie rod ends are always going to wear. If you're lucky, your manufacturer might have chosen components with built in grease fittings so that with regular maintenance you can extend the lifespan of those components but that's the exception, not the rule. There's still bearings, shock absorbers, CV joints, motor mounts, and bushings on various things. Every one of those has a finite service life, just because Chevy doesn't list a recommended interval to replace them doesn't mean that they don't need to be inspected and replaced as they wear down.
As for the actual oil comment though, the Bolt isn't direct drive, it has a fixed ratio gearbox with a differential built in. It only has a couple of gears and the differential, but still, they're helical gears and they need the right viscosity oil. Over time, those gears are going to degrade the oil from the shear forces and add contaminants to it. Contaminants are also slowly going to seep in from the vent, you can't completely seal up a gearbox, you need to have a vent on it otherwise running it is going to push oil out of the seals around the axles. As for the recommended intervals you quoted, that's pretty unrealistics and most manufacturers aren't recommending crazy intervals like that.
Here's the maintenance schedule for a Honda: https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/om/SI9999/SI9999O00...
It doesn't have that high of a service interval but for something like a 2015 Honda Civic it's still just using their regular long life coolant which is supposed to be good for 5 years or 60,000 miles. Brake fluid is something that's pretty much always going to last around 3 to 5 years regardless of manufacturer. And manual transmissions typically have a much more reasonable recommended fluid life of somewhere around 90,000 to 120,000 miles. Some manufacturers are listing some transmissions as having "lifetime" fluid, but there's also identical transmissions with the same fluid in other vehicles where the recommendation is 90 to 120 thousand miles. There's no such thing as "lifetime fluid", every single fluid in any vehicle wears down in use and picks up contaminants, eventually every fluid will need to be replaced. Any manufacturer who tells you otherwise is lying to you.
Do you have a source for some of your claims? Honestly the recommended change interval of 200,000 to 300,000 is higher than I've ever seen and even on stuff like a 2015 VW Jetta you're supposed to change the manual transmission fluid every 40,000 miles. Here's the 2014 Jeep Wrangler service interval for the manual transmission and transfer case: http://www.wranglerforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=198...
250,000 miles is much too long for a differential, I'd imagine the drain plug was probably coated in metallic sludge right? I've seen a few drain plugs out of differentials and transmissions that were all treated way better and still be coated in what used to be the gears.
Also, we figured out a long time ago that sealed transmissions are okay, but it all boils down to how you drive the vehicle. Yeah, if you treat the car like shit, or you get the transmission checked (if this is even possible these days), if it's low then there's something wrong & you'll need to add fluid, or drain & fill. Otherwise? You don't touch it & it's fine. Volkswagens last a solid 200-300k miles before you actually need to do something major, but that's subjective.
Yes, there's all these wonderful suspension components, but I imagine with Tesla vehicles, those components are most likely heavier duty than a regular vehicle, given all the fucking obnoxious batteries. They also probably wear a lot differently & components will fail differently than they will & at different rates compared to a traditional ICE vehicle.
As for whether or not it's strictly necessary, you can avoid oil changes altogether and a decent car will make it quite a long way before it seizes up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/2zoc...
You can do the same with a transmission or a differential, but they'll last a lot longer if you replace the contaminated and worn out fluid with new fluid.
But even just checking the fluid level in a transmission or differential, if the fluid is low, you can't ever just refill it. It didn't burn up, you've got a leak and it'll probably just get worse if you ignore it. There are plenty of vehicles out there with absolutely ludicrous mileage on them, on a modern vehicle, if you keep on top of maintenance, engines and transmissions can last hundreds of thousands of miles.
As for suspension components on a Tesla though, I would expect to spend a decent bit keeping all of them in working order. The suspension on a Tesla is really nice, but air suspension isn't nearly as robust as a simpler Macpherson strut setup on an econobox. It's fancy, but fancy suspension and more moving parts means more things to wear out and fail. You've got 2x the ball joints to fail in the front, additional linkages all over, and more bushings to wear out.
And all ecars have at least a differential, and many have gearsets, even if they do not shift. These are mostly heilical/hypoid style gears. That fluid uses shear additives that need to be replenished to abate wear. If you have not changed your trans/diff fluid in over 100k, now is the time. Your jeep, having a solid axle, is tremendously more simple and overbuilt than a normal car too. Extrapolating from that is not accurate.
Well actually, a Nissan Leaf is going to have 8 gears in the reduction drive. 4 in the differential, 2 to couple the differential to an intermediate shaft, and another 2 to couple that shaft to the motor itself. That being said, ATF does wear out over time, those gears are going to be adding finely powdered metal to the fluid and even just the shearing forces on the fluid literally breaks down the oil chemically. It'll certainly last a whole lot longer than engine oil but eventually that inspection is going to necessitate a replacement.
If your primary concern is cost-per-mile, it's hard to beat an old $250 moped off Craigslist that gets 100+ mpg.
If you claim you need something more enclosed, an old truck for $2000 might be your answer. In that rustbucket, you're belching smoke into the atmosphere and burning a dollar of gas every 5 miles, but it will still get you more than 100,000 miles before you match the purchase price of the Prius. In those same 100,000 miles, the Prius has been burning gas as well (true, at a whopping 47 mpg) but this gas cost would be enough to buy you a replacement old truck (or, let's face it, a second old truck).
To be more serious, I bought my 2003 Toyota Matrix XRS with 150k miles for $3100, and have been getting about 30 mpg for the past 60,000 miles. Every purchase of a new vehicle - hybrid, electric, or gas - is done for non-economic reasons.
Cheap. One kid still has and drives that car. Approaching 400k miles now.
You could split the difference -- buy a Chevy Volt for $34,095 ($26,595 after Fed Tax Credit). Drive electric up to 50+ miles per charge, but still get 42mpg when driving on gasoline, with over 420 miles of total range per fueling.
> In general people buying electric vehicles in 2017 are buying them for non-economic reasons. They lose money. Hybrids are likely the best bang for your buck.
I'd argue plug-in hybrids are where the real sweet spot is.
It's only an extra $3k over the Prius, to get ~90% of your driving miles via zero-emission electricity, but still have full gasoline available for any long-distance trips. I think that's a really compelling argument. It's really easy to save more than just $3k on fuel alone, after a couple of years with that car.
Regular hybrids are cheaper up front, but are wasteful. They cheap out on tiny batteries that are way too weak to take full advantage of the vehicle's technology. Stick a wall-chargeable 10-20 kWh battery into a hybrid, and you get the best of everything in one vehicle.
The Chevy Bolt has a $7500 electric vehicle tax credit, many states have rebates of $1000 to $3000, and some utility companies offer their own rebates and incentives. That narrows the price difference quite a bit, and drops it well below the average new car selling price.
You're also not going to be producing gasoline at home, while a lot of people buying these expensive early electric vehicles are also early adopters of solar panels.
If you look at the $/kWh trend on lithium ion batteries (over 80% drop in 6 years), the most expensive part in these cars, it's only a matter of time before EVs cost no more than other types of vehicles without the government help.
I'm an electric car fan, but to be fair, unless your solar installation is proceeding more than you can use, and you don't have net-metering, then this is a false advantage here. Every KWh you use to charge your car is one you'll eventually have to buy from (or not sell to) the power company.
Solar panels which are paid for themselves by sending money back to the grid. If you redirect it into your vehicle, then you've just transferred the cost from the power company to your solar panel loan.
Costs are dropping on EVs and will continue to drop as economy of scale picks up. They may not make sense today but there's a good chance they will tomorrow.
https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...
Are you, perhaps, being sarcastic with your comment?
Anyway, there are few countries (if any) on Earth where EVs make financial sense for an average person. Their time will come, but buying into it now is not investing – indeed, as the GP commented, you do it for altogether different reasons.
That said last time I broke down my per-mile costs new tires at $1k every 40k was my highest cost by far.
If so, I get it.. you don't own a car; which begs the question of why are we discussing this?
Did I break even? No, but with prices coming down it'll happen.
Well down-vote me to make it up.
No, I didn't break even because I came from a '03 beater that I'd been driving for the last 15 years. The thing is, if no one buys EVs there won't be sustained demand. I don't mind spending a bit more on my end to make sure the industry moves forward(I believe they call that voting with your money).
What? I mean, what? Whatever you want, I guess.
The latter.
Most manufacturers recommend 10,000 miles now, some as high as 15,000 (Jaguar, known for being unreliable):
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/tips-advice/stop-changing-y...
Being as how manufacturers have to cover the warranty issues that could be related to lack of oil changes, I go with what they recommend.
The engine does not consume too much oil, either, so a single 4L bottle – about a gallon I think – is easily all that the oil I need between changes. With European prices, that is the equivalent of a single refill (even with my modest tank size), which makes you simply laugh and wonder at all the people that (always) bring up oil changes in the discussion of ICE vs EV. I can't but wonder how many of those actually own and maintain a not-imaginary vehicle.
To clarify my earlier post, I meant of course that a single bottle of oil is enough for the refill (between 3 and 4 litres) and more than enough for any top-ups for the about 30000 km before the car starts to remind of the end of the “Long Life” maintenance cycle. Oil is certainly not up there when it comes to costs of owning a small car, ICE or not.
A cursory look at used oil: it's still rather like the stuff that goes in, albeit black, of course. Without specific tools, I think it's impossible to tell it apart from oil that's used for, say, 10000 km.
It's a whole industry that you have that seems to be entirely redundant!
These days, most (all?) cars have an idiot light that pops on every 5-10k miles, based on usage patterns. Some have a more robust algorithm than others. Either way, in my experience, my last 3-4 cars (Jeep, Lexus, Volvo, VW) have all gone about 8k miles between services, as indicated by the light.
It used to be that the oil change interval was something like 3k miles for stop-n-go traffic (or dusty conditions) - ie, regular city driving. You could go about 6-8k for highway driving. If you were doing off-road driving, the number could be as low as 2k.
Today's oils are better, and so is the manufacturing and other factors; so longer intervals don't surprise me - but you have to be dealing with a newer car, something made in this century at least.
Even so, for my own vehicles I try not to go much beyond 6k between changes, and for one of my vehicles it's closer to the 3k mark (because I want it to last as long as possible - then again, its engine is a known oil-burner, and between oil changes I add enough oil for it to equal an oil change; I could almost just change the filter and do nothing else). The money I may be wasting isn't a big deal to me, plus I get a fresh filter (also, I do my own oil changes, so the numbers are a bit lower depending on what dino juice I use).
Generally, the best way short of an analysis to judge doing an oil change is by looking with your eyes at the color of the oil, by feel (rub it thru your fingertips), and by smell. It's a thing you have to get a "feel" for, and between that knowledge and what your miles since the last change, you can know if you need a change or not.
Another thing you can do (I learned this from a website that tested an analysis company - and to see how long they could really go between oil changes) is to (every 3k) drain a quart of oil out of the engine (you need something like a fumoto plug for this), and then swap on a new filter and refill with a new quart of oil. It's basically a "topping up" procedure, but if you do that, you can go for about 12k between full oil changes. However, you should only do this if you are analyzing your oil.
Compare this to GM/Chevy vehicles where this is a 'solved problem' with their on board DICT computer, it measurements the containment (via resistance? electricity?) in the oil & tells you the 'health' or 'life' of the oil until you need to change it. This leads to a lot more reasonable oil change intervals in line with Mobile's testing over the years: 5k, 7k or 10k change intervals are common.
BMW is one of the few brands that recommends once a season, or 10k, because they know what oil is capable of, in so far as they've removed dip-sticks entirely (retarded decision, but hey). However, most dealerships & shops? They still want that sweet money on that 3k oil change. 5k has become the 'open secret' standard, though.
I'm talking about the "Service Required" indicator/message that appears in the central info display, not the "Check Engine Light". Two different things in the VW, Lexus, and Jeeps I've owned.
That may be true in America. Here in Norway, fuel costs 1.7 euros/L; that is, $7/gallon. The calculation comes out rather different.
Lastly I would add that you can't directly compare the cars on price in that way because the Bolt (and Nissan Leaf) are also much nicer cars than the base $23k Prius with many features the Prius doesn't have.
EDIT: oh and one more thing; I don't know about Utah but most energy companies in the US have different rates for electricity during the day or at night (off peak) and you can easily set your EV to charge overnight, saving even more money.
Thanks for mentioning this. It is significantly cheaper to charge at night if your energy company drops the price during off-peak hours. That $8 or $9 drops to like $3 or $4 here in MA with National Grid service. I did some really rough math and figured that it would cost about half as much to charge a Chevy Bolt from 0 to 100% than it would be to fill my current car, a 2014 Jetta, with gasoline. My greenhouse gas emissions will go down by over 50% judging from an estimate I got based on how MA currently generates energy.
That said, I put a deposit down on a Bolt Premier but am not sure if I will be buying it because it is damn expensive, even after tax rebates and such.
I think a lot of it is that there's a great deal of lag in traditional drivetrains, and we rarely do 0-60 in actual real-life driving. More typically we're doing 0-30 or 30-40 or 55-65. Once the traditional drivetrain does all of its clunking around and can start putting down the power, it can compete, and in a 0-60 run that initial period isn't too bad. But in normal driving, the relative significance of the delay is huge. It doesn't just feel quicker, it is quicker for more typical situations.
At this point, the main thing traditional cars have going for them is cost. And that's probably just a matter of time.
But the 0-30 thing is exactly right in my experience. Even more powerful vehicles don't have the instant and smooth acceleration feel of an electric motor.
Electric cars opened my interest car performance. I now have a higher performance ICE than I ever thought I would spend money on, but I still miss my tiny little electric Fiat 500e, even though my ICE is definitely better at 40-80mph.
Fiddling with gears, monitoring RPM, what a terrible system. Feels like a steam engine after being in an electric.
For some of us, this "terrible system" is one of the best parts of owning an ICE vehicle with a manual transmission.
I have a case when I was driving into work this morning. I got stuck behind a funeral procession going 35 MPH on a 65 MPH interstate highway (Uggghhhhh)
I look to my left-mirror, and I see a spot I can feasibly make, I just gotta time it right to get "into" the flow of traffic. So what do I do?
I drop to 2nd gear (The Gear ratios on the Ford Focus are kinda "weak"). My engine roars but its cool, because my engine's top-Torque is in the 4000RPM to 6000RPM band. When the "spot" opens up, I floor the acceleration pedal and get in just fine.
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A fully automatic vehicle wouldn't "know" that I wanted to "prepare" for the sudden acceleration. It only knows after you push the pedal.
A manual driver however, can tell the car to "prepare" for acceleration, so that when you push the accelerator you are 100% ready to go.
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Semi-automatic vehicles (including some "sport" CVT engines I've test-driven) would work. The important bit is to be able to change gears way ahead of time BEFORE you push the accelerator.
But a typical automatic transmission? Dude, I have a huge advantage as a human. I have eyes. I can see things the engine cannot.
It takes time for a internal combustion engine to rev up to its ideal torque band. The Ford Focus is a turbocharged engine, which means it only achieves maximum torque above 4000 RPM.
Since most automatic transmissions are tuned for fuel efficiency (ie: 2000RPM band or so), they will perform worse when you're trying to accelerate. The manual driver has the advantage that they can choose fuel efficiency (ie: 2000RPM most of the time), or in cases of emergency... kick it into (low) gear for very high RPM to maximize the torque band.
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ICE Engines are all about tradeoffs, and the manual driver can choose the RPM-band that best matches the situation.
Would a properly tuned automatic beat me in fuel economy? Probably.
Would a properly tuned automatic beat me in acceleration? Probably.
But no automtaic can be tuned to do both at the same time. Since high-Torque is high-RPM only... and fuel efficiency is low-RPM only... the computer cannot be tuned to try to do both at the same time.
By the way, I'm not a manual elitist, but rather an EV elitist. I like not having a transmission at all.
The "lag" at launch would be the power curve...power doesn't peak at low rpms.
The MSRP on the Tesla is twice as much as the ATS, so I would expect performance differences.
>and we rarely do 0-60 in actual real-life driving.
Many people would be mostly satisfied with great handling over speed in daily driving, but don't know what that feels like in a car.
Price has nothing to do with performance?
0-60 time is 0-60 time, regardless of how it feels. "Performance" can be measured. Maybe I'm still missing your point.
There is so much more to actual high performance driving than acceleration numbers. You may say "oh yea, cornering!" and while that's certainly delving deeper into it, there's a _lot_ more than just that (and many, many things go into "cornering").
So the M3/M4 w/ the competition package makes 444 hp and does 0-60 in 3.9s, which is "slow" compared to a P100D in Ludicrous Mode. It's actually really fast with just 2 driven wheels, but there's much faster out there. But, now:
- The Transmission. Transmissions are a technical solution to a technical limitation of ICE, namely the fact that the delta of engine speed is much smaller than the delta of wheel speed (even at "just" legal speeds), therefore gearing was introduced. Transmissions are not necessary, and should not be seen as something that's great about a car, if a car is capable of being driven at the full range of wheel speeds its market segment targets w/o a transmission. While the DCT is perhaps one of the best transmissions in the world (on par with exotics found in much more expensive vehicles), it will be a good riddance when it's no longer necessary. No matter how good a transmission is, there will be an imbalance in power when shifting, which _will_ upset the vehicle in a high performance cornering scenario, which the closer you are to the limit (with something like DCT, you will need to be a highly skilled driver to even begin to approach having this matter), the more it will count.
- Suspension and, directly related, vehicle weight. Your Tesla can do 3.x 0-60, but you need high performance suspension and low weight to make use of it in corners. Something like the M3/4, and even more so the suspensions GM has been putting in its high performance products like the Stingray (which trickles down to Camaros and ATS/CTSes), are a world away from just "standard" high performance suspension.
- Differentials, electronics. Limited Slip Differential will make a marked difference in high performance cornering when you're not exactly perfect. All the electronics for stability control, traction control, abs/braking, they all work in tandem. On the M3/4 they work really, really well. I was able to feel like Superman by pulling some feats that simply would not be possible without these advanced systems and my skill level. You would think that this is not so much of a good thing, but it actually works both ways and _can_ be good -- for example, as I got more confident on the AutoCross part of the day, I started to hit some of the nannies, particularly stability control which would not give me full throttle until I had unwound the steering wheel. Now, the instructors had been shouting this in my ear all day long, but actually _feeling_ this really connected it for me and I started to get it and was able to learn _faster_ because of the feedback I was getting from the car due to the nannies keeping me from wiping out. It was quite amazing, and I'm sure that very few of my fellow students realized just how much the electronics had helped them that day.
- Brakes! You need to stop. The simple fact that the M3/4 can be spec'd w/ Carbon Ceramic discs (which also moves from 4-piston to 6-piston calipers) puts it in a different class. We abused these cars all day long, maximum acceleration and maximum braking most of the time. The brakes never faded, it was simply incredible. 35-40 ppl abusing 12 cars (6 M3s & 6 M4s) for about 6 hours, zero fade (and zero mechanical issues out of a dozen cars). This makes it a street-legal track machine (tool), compared to just a car that gets to 60 MPH fast. We were told early on to literally "try to break the brake pedal off," and, because some students had reservations, they insisted "please, you cannot hurt these cars, do absolutely everything possible to break the brake pedal because we want you to experience maximum braking" (this was during a maximum braking exercise early on, which the later exercises built upon), finally adding "n fact, we challenge you, if you can break the brake pedal we'll give you the car for free." God knows I tried. Contrary to what you would think, the brakes had one of the most profound, lasting impressions on me, and I would absolutely, without batting an eye, spec the $8,500 option for the Carbon Ceramic brakes on these cars if I had the slightest inclination of tracking them.
- "Abuse" capacity. I'm not talking about long term reliability, as far as the engine is concerned, an electric engine _should_ be night & day compared to a complex, "cave age" ICE. But there's more to it, there's the drivetrain -- yea, even with a single speed, there are shafts, some sort of differential, in AWD applications even more complicated stuff going on. 35 monkeys trying to break these 12 cars resulted in.. nothing, not a single one of them exhibited any issues. The school ran for the whole week and we were the Wednesday class, so these cars had already been abused in similar fashion the 2 previous days. Now, these cars are engineered to do this, so it's not really abuse since they're made for it. That's why you're paying $80k+ for "just" an M3/M4 (again, with all the right options, the brakes being almost $10k of that), on paper it looks like "wtf, a Mustang GT makes about the same power" -- you're buying a real-deal track machine that's street-legal and, in 4 door guise, can take your kids to school too.
I _cannot wait_ for the time when there will be a comparable machine that does away with all the now-unnecessary complexity of ICE. Not having gearing and the issues it introduces will change some of the dynamics of high-performance driving, it will be superior even in the hands of pros. Until then, ICE is still here with us, and the 0-60 numbers on most/all cars are like MegaPixels on digital cameras.
I think you're telling the same story from the other side. And it's a good one!
I see two major problems to overcome before EVs can start to really intrude on this particular part of the world.
First is weight. A Tesla battery is somewhere around 1,000-1,500lbs. Putting it under the floor helps a lot, but that's a lot of weight to carry around. You can overcome that in straight-line acceleration by suppling lots of power, but other aspects of handling can't help but suffer. I'm not very experienced with this stuff, but I hear that the Tesla handles reasonably well for its size but at the end of the day it's huge and heavy.
Second is heat. The electric drivetrain is efficient, so it doesn't produce a lot of waste heat, but it still produces some. And it's a lot harder to remove. You'll never run into this in normal driving, but with the sort of activities you were getting up to, an EV would start to limit your power output pretty quickly.
Different strokes and all that. And for 2 of the 3 groups I just mentioned, 0-60 times are not like MegaPixels on digital cameras.
Enjoy your track racing!
Not only does it take a while to get all that machinery rolling, doing it quickly kills your gas mileage. Most drivers aren't drag-racing out of the stoplights.
I've noticed that too. I'm no athlete, but I can often beat cars across an intersection. Another thing I've noticed is that many cyclists don't shift down before they stop. They have to get up off their seat to even start. Even people in full kit on expensive bicycles do this.
Trackstands are instinctive on the folding bike and the small wheel helps filtering through traffic immensely. The grip-shift gears are also very helpful, there may be only half a dozen of them but it is much easier to rattle through them than it is with conventional shifters. In combination the special features of the 'shopper bike' means that I ace the fixie guys, the guys that don't drop into the right gear, the road-pro's with their pedals to clip in to and the people that best know how to time the lights.
Getting off the seat is risky on a folding bike, putting a foot down easy, but there is no need for that or an awkward track stand, instead, for cool-ness(!) you can put your feet on the frame and coast along with feet up.
Anyway, as fun as it may be to be the fastest and for that to be achievable with simple gear selection on a folding bike, when I am on a different bike and going some distance, I do not care about acing every light through that town center, if I can merely get to where I am going without being sent on a mystery tour of a ring road, to not get lost (losing 5 to 30 mins) then I am happy.
I do appreciate being able to stay ahead of cars for half of each block.
Heh, I even try not to stop at all, but to slow down a while before approaching the lights in hopes of them turning green before I reach them. Works relatively often. Unfortunately, more and more traffic lights in my town detect when there's someone waiting before changing to green, so you have to paddle all the way up to the light and then stop for a bit.
Rabbit starts don't really matter (modern engines don't waste a whole lot of fuel anywhere in the power band).
But wow do I feel great for those 10 seconds before they catch up.
You sure about that? Out here they do.
Mine came with fast DC charge support, I don't know if they moved that to be a standard feature, or if I just got lucky. I've used public fast DC chargers a few times now.
At the moment I am relying on the equipped 110v home charger and public fast chargers, but I will eventually get a home 220v charger. It's just not urgent because I maintain plenty of range as long as I plug in whenever my car is at home.
I think a large part of the driver for EV currently is as a social status signal. When, that start going away and the inconveniences of EV with respect to ICE start affecting people, a lot of the momentum will stop.
http://www.zeroto60times.com/vehicle-make/toyota-0-60-mph-ti...
Are lots of people actually driving V6 Camrys? When I look at normal sedans the V6 engine is always a significant cost increase and completely destroys the car's MPG
Toyota sold about 430k camrys in the US last year, so that would mean about 43k - 65k. Which is 3-4 times the number of EVs sold that year.
http://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/1964/829160/ford_musta...
That Buick beats the time of the 1996 Saleen S281 Mustang.
Sure, ICE engines are getting better, but EVs are rapidly gaining and will soon surpass. The Bolt is a bit expensive for a car of its body type, but "gassing up" at home is amazing, the 200+ mile range is great, and the sharply reduced emissions are a weight off the mind. It's also super quiet, as you would expect, and boy howdy does it have get-up-and-go. Sure, some of it is psychological because a) it's whisper quiet as it accelerates; b) the raft of batteries in the belly keeps that car planted to the road; and c) there's no pause to down-shift. But I've owned some fast cars[1], and this one feels like the fastest yet.
It's nice that ICE engines are improving, but between the Bolt, Tesla Model 3, and other soon-to-arrive practical EVs, I believe that the sunset of ICE is beginning.
[1] Notable examples in order of speediness: 1973 Dodge Charger (340ci), 1970 Dodge Challenger (383ci), 1996 Camaro Z28 (350ci), 2000 Camaro SS (350ci).