Re:Tesla Third Quarter 2018 Update [pdf]
by sokoloff on Thursday October 25, 2018 @07:41AM
(#18300135)
It seems to me that a long road trip is an edge case. It's not extremely rare, but it's quite far from the most common use of a car, IMO.
If you plot "number of long road trips per car per year", the mode is probably zero and I'd wager that fewer than 10% of cars are taken on a long road trip more than one time per year and fewer than 5% more than two times per year.
Taking your one-year figure of 39% of vacations as road trips, that's still fewer than one road trip per car per year. There's little over 1 car registered per adult in the US. Assuming an average 1 week vacation 1 time per year, with 39% being road trips, and 2 adults per road trip, that's one road trip per year for every 5 cars. If the average car is driven 8000 miles per year (lots of cars driven under 1000 miles to offset the more typical 12-15K/yr figure) and a road trip is 500 miles, it's about 100 miles of road trip usage against an average of 8000 miles, or about 1.25% use for road trips. Considering most of the road trip car use would be on cars used a more typically 12-15K, it's under 1% of usage.
It would take some significant errors in the Fermi estimates above to suggest that road trip usage is a typical use. If you have a battery electric and don't want to or can't road trip in it, rent a gas car one week a year. If you do more frequent road trips, a gas car or hybrid is a better bet probably.
If you plot "number of long road trips per car per year", the mode is probably zero and I'd wager that fewer than 10% of cars are taken on a long road trip more than one time per year and fewer than 5% more than two times per year.
Taking your one-year figure of 39% of vacations as road trips, that's still fewer than one road trip per car per year. There's little over 1 car registered per adult in the US. Assuming an average 1 week vacation 1 time per year, with 39% being road trips, and 2 adults per road trip, that's one road trip per year for every 5 cars. If the average car is driven 8000 miles per year (lots of cars driven under 1000 miles to offset the more typical 12-15K/yr figure) and a road trip is 500 miles, it's about 100 miles of road trip usage against an average of 8000 miles, or about 1.25% use for road trips. Considering most of the road trip car use would be on cars used a more typically 12-15K, it's under 1% of usage.
It would take some significant errors in the Fermi estimates above to suggest that road trip usage is a typical use. If you have a battery electric and don't want to or can't road trip in it, rent a gas car one week a year. If you do more frequent road trips, a gas car or hybrid is a better bet probably.