That means - total energy independence. I can get a solar roof and no longer need "the government" ie, a bunch of criminals, to "help" me.
Strangely this is never on the news. Ever. Go figure.
Possible but it would be highly inconvenient and people wouldn't like the consequences. At the very least we need referendums on all the big contentious issues.
The petroleum industry did just fine without government funding the building of gas stations. It took over 10 years from the introduction of the model T until gasoline outsold kerosene in this country. Not the best metric to compare against, just saying that these things take time.
The mainstreaming of EVs is coming. It's just taking more time than early adopters would like. Part of the problem is that many early adopters assumed that their EVs we're shiny and perfect like their Apple products, etc. So there's frustration that things aren't as glossy and simple as they'd like.
The market is working correctly. Demand for EVs isn't there. Give it time. Maybe a decade or two. And most cars will be EVs.
Is this because you actively want cars to be less efficient/more expensive/more cumborsome to use and maintain?
Which is a valid viewpoint, but your comment could be read as suggesting that this is somehow greener or cheaper tor simpler than BEVs, which it isn't.
For example, I'm assuming that the "better public transport" you envision is electric, and battery electric wherever that makes sense (which is in quite a lot of places, even trams with overhead lines in busy cities can benefit from batteries).
I'm still waiting to hear how the government plans to solve this or incentivize private investment for this setup to work. Because yeah, if you live in UK and don't have a private drive then I have no idea how you're using an electric car, unless you literally have a Tesla and live right next to a supercharger(I know one person with that setup and it works fine for them, it's literally one 20 minute stop a week and they get enough charge to last them a week).
>>Most of my miles are done on long journeys.
Funnily enough, for that use case you should be ok-ish, as most motorway stops in the UK are now equipped with rapid chargers, so if you're just driving up and down the country you should be able to just charge when you stop for a break, and with modern EVs easily doing 200+ miles per charge this really shouldn't be an issue.
The other thing is - you are an outlier if most of your driving is done on long journeys. Most people use their car to do a school run and commute to work, usually no more than 30-50 miles a day. If that's your setup, then EVs(and PHEVs to a large extent) are just a no brainer.
I assume that to be true in most places, however, one has to consider that even those people occasionally make long distance travels.
What happens if for whatever emergency I have drive 500 mi across the state, keep an ICE just in case? Hit the hay to wait for my car to recharge?
Uhm, you either rent a car locally if that's an option, or in any modern EV realistically you'd drive for 250 miles, then do a 45 minute stop to recharge and then do the other 250 miles. It would end up being marginally slower than in a normal car.
Also depends on the emergency, right - at 500 miles that's at least 10 hours of driving, it can't be that urgent. If someone is literally dying you'd get there faster in a normal car, I suppose - but somehow I don't pick my cars based on some incredibly rare situation. If you regularly have to address "emergencies" 500 miles away then I guess yes, don't buy an EV.
>I don't pick my cars based on some incredibly rare situation. If you regularly have to address "emergencies" 500 miles away then I guess yes, don't buy an EV.
Mr. Joe may also want to take his family for a summer trip, or attend some business at the capital city, it's not as unreasonable or rare as you think for the average person to account for the 1-2 times per year he might want or need to make a long distance trip when making their purchase.
>in any modern EV realistically you'd drive for 250 miles, then do a 45 minute stop to recharge
I'm not getting this kind of number, Google claims charging time is 31h–39h (220V) for an ID.3 and 21h–32h (220V) for a Nissan Leaf.
> Mr. Joe may also want to take his family for a summer trip, or attend some business at the capital city, it's not as unreasonable or rare as you think for the average person to account for the 1-2 times per year he might want or need to make a long distance trip when making their purchase.
No, it is not unreasonable or rare to do two long-distance trips a year. But what holds true for an emergency that requires you to drive 800km holds also true for a leisure or business trip where you can plan a little more beforehand.
> I'm not getting this kind of number, Google claims charging time is 31h–39h (220V) for an ID.3 and 21h–32h (220V) for a Nissan Leaf.
Of course not. You are looking at charging times for plugging in an extension cord from a household outlet (which in Europe is 220V AC at 16A, therefore ~3500W). It's like saying that refueling your 30t truck with a garden hose is taking really long. Well, duh!
The fast chargers you find on highways are usually DC chargers with varying specifications. IIRC, the smallest DC chargers you can find (at least in mainland Europe) are 500V at 125A, so ~62000W. These load your average car battery in less than an hour, IFF your car can do it (not all new ones can, so watch out). Really high-performance EV like Porsche Taycan or Tesla S can charge much faster, if the DC charger allows it. There are modells that go up to 240kW, which would charge a recent Tesla S with 100kWh battery in less than 30 minutes from empty to 100%.
This is goal post shifting, you said "emergencies". Vacation trips aren't emergencies. Tens of millions of us rent cars anyway for such trips since they involve flying.
>I'm not getting this kind of number, Google claims charging time is 31h–39h (220V) for an ID.3 and 21h–32h (220V) for a Nissan Leaf.
Did you seriously just use 2.3kW emergency home wall plug as your number for a stop vs 77-400 kW DC chargers (which are what are actually found at stops)? Or even a proper 7-22kW home charger? The very first hits I saw on Google for charging an iD.3 [0, 1] both showed the correct range of options, and other cars (including Teslas) are capable of handling more power. I'm curious how you arrived at the idea that owners were all accepting 1-2 days for each charge of an EV.
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0: https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/volkswagen/2020/id-3
1: https://evbox.com/en/electric-cars/volkswagen/volkswagen-id3
https://www.nissanusa.com/experience-nissan/news-and-events/...
I didn't look at what editions of the Leaf support DC charging, but it's safe to expect that new electric cars will almost all support it, and that it will get easier (in the sense of finding and paying for it).
Personally I can't imagine an emergency where I need to travel 500 miles as fast as possible but I suppose I'd either fly, take a train, or rent an ICE car. I personally wouldn't invest in a dedicated emergency car because that would cost far more than the other three options.
One scenario I could imagine is an evacuation for wildfires or hurricanes, but often there is plenty of warning with those events. Having one gas car topped off during hurricane season is probably good safety if you live on the Gulf coast.
In the short term very thin flat cables are being tested. But this assumes you can park opposite your house.
Councils are happy to lease pavements to providers but it's not a lucrative proposition right now for 95% of UK streets, it's also victim to a negative feedback mechanism where home owners won't buy EVs because charging is hard which creates low demand
Councils can't solve it without investment, most likely it will solve itself when the majority of high income charging locations have been constructed. Most charging companies are operating on long-term investments leveraging debt. It's going to take years to solve, and that's without worrying about the grid infrastructure
I can go 290 miles at £0.016/mile when charging at home. At the (expensive) motorway services it's then £0.15/mile to rapid-charge. The unleaded at that services is £1.60/l so at 42 mpg (guess) it's about £0.17/mile. The EV version of my car is more expensive than petrol but it's not 2x. A petrol car is more expensive to run and fuel (in the UK, at least).
Is that from solar? Or some tariff granting 6p/kWH delivered?
As far as I know, the distribution has for a very, very long time been managed by a private, regulated monopoly utility.
> fixed charge
I pay the same fixed (daily) standing charge regardless of how much electricity I use. This is normal here. To include it in the calculations makes no sense.
I asked, because if I chose Octopus supply, my energy supply price per kWh would vary according to the supplier but the price per kWh for distribution would not. (And Octopus would naturally only quote the price that they are charging for the part of the total picture that they're involved with.)
It will take some time to be more widespread, but I think this and small 7kW stations here and there (like the ones from Source London) charging will be the technical solution.
As for how this will be incentives, I don't expect to see much until ICE are banned. 65% to 75% of households in the UK have off-street parking, that's more than enough for charging providers to get established and have different types of cost effective chargers. Once ICE are banned, then there will probably be incentives to cover dead zones. Unfortunately, that's usually how it goes and people living there are usually getting things last, like for broadband, 5G.
Pick a random terraced road in Bristol [1] or Birmingham [2] or London [3] or Norwich [4] and you'll find terraced house residents are not yet living without cars.
If our nation's goals require such people to live without cars, I would say we're a long way off - and we're not particularly moving in that direction either. Hell, the current government's plan for the next election is essentially the opposite.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/JUVD3xy4qRuP78VP8 [2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/CGfDGEibG3zQij8MA [3] https://maps.app.goo.gl/TXZYFuuQC3aQiam56 [4] https://maps.app.goo.gl/srs27pyGuzobhp1V9
Not always a thing. Plenty of "dense" neighbourhoods have less-than-ideal transport systems. Few of even the most dense run 24/7 bus/train service. Not everyone works a 9-5 job near a bus station. Im in a dense area, in an apparment building beside the largest hospital. Bus service doesn't start until 6am, meaning it isnt an option for my work. Nearest passenger train is hundreds of miles away.
A modern minivan can get myself, 3 passengers and all their luggage from the bay area to LA without even stopping for gas. In the event that we start without a full tank, the gas stop in middle adds 150 seconds to the trip.
This simply isn't possible yet with an EV. I expect it will maybe happen someday, but not yet.
As for putting the most miles on long trips: Say I drive 10 miles a day to work and back, and I drive to LA only once a month. Hey presto, most of my driving miles are on the rare but long journey.
To me, an EV is a no-brainer, in fact I was test driving the Mercedes EV just yesterday. The only thing stopping me from getting one is that my ten-year-old car is still fine. Definitely not getting a new ICE, though.
I don't know where you got this number from - a new 7.2kW charger is £400, and I'm sure you can get it cheaper if you buy several hundred of them. They are hardly expensive devices now. Yes there's the cost of installation too - but 10k is an extremely unreasonable number.
Furthermore, if I did want to include such stops, why would I want to confine myself to the dingy dirty corner of some backwater Walmart parking lot?
With my high range ice car I can stop anywhere along the scenic way for as long or as short as I want.
You know that this is only a temporary condition, right?
>>why would I want to confine myself to the dingy dirty corner of some backwater Walmart parking lot?
I don't know, why would you? Are those the only charging options you have?
>>With my high range ice car I can stop anywhere along the scenic way for as long or as short as I want.
You can do that in an electric car too.
Most busy corridors like sf-LA have the well known charge stations full and backed up making the delay multiple times longer.
The point about stopping wherever is that my stops won't have to be near any out of the way chargers. Of course an EV can stop wherever, but it also requires a pilgramage to somewhere I never wanted to go.
Don't do it and health problems could quickly appear. Like back pain, herniated discs, at the very least. Not to mention the risk of drowsiness induced car accidents.
I don'l like to refuel in a busy gas station either, but stopping and stretching is recommended.
That's less than 15 minutes a month at a gas station. Still beats the pants off the 20 minutes each way for the ev on the long trip.
And let's say we do make bathroom stops (kids or whatever); why should the needs of the car dictate when and for how long we stop?
When I was a kid my dad would threaten to leave us behind if we took over 10 minutes dragging out a bathroom stop. I don't see any reason to tolerate a car that takes twice that long to recharge.
On a recent trip I did pull over for a bathroom stop at a gas station. The prices were too high (understandable, only option for many miles) so I didn't buy any gas. In and out, no time lost.
At no time do I want to park in the back of an economically depressed store to sit in my car for 20 minutes watching a crack head defecate in the next parking stall over. If I have time to stop, I want to stop at scenic overlooks and the like.
Look, all I'm saying is when EV charging (or battery swap, or whatever) gets to the turn around time of a gas station I'll be all over it.
Unless I'm dehydrated, no, I generally have to piss more often than every 6 hours, and it's unreasonable to ask a passenger to hold it that long unless they specifically say that can.
Perhaps mandated 50% charging places in every supermarket carpark?
I have a friend in this situation. He charges it at other places, although the council are apparently going to dig a small trench in the pavement (free of charge) to allow him to run a charging cable from his house to the car without disrupting foot traffic.
But that's still contingent on being able to park right outside his house, which is a rare luxury.
Supercharging in itself is easy enough too.
My EV has a big battery (given) but im charging publicly for nearly 2 years but my company already plans charging stations next year and other locations of my company already have them.
BP just order $100m of Tesla chargers.
QuickTrip (gas stations) around me have 2+ chargers.
Gas stations will need to have chargers to stay in business (and electrification will impact their business); With 5% electrification, gas stations have already lost ~5% of their business, if they can recoup 2% from people without high speed charging at home or for road trips, they can make up in margins (especially as a 20 min charge up is more likely to get a user in store than a 5 minute fill up)
Grocery chains, working locations, state parks, county parks have been incentivized to put chargers. So have local shopping centers.
But the majority of use cases at this point is - EVs are way better. City driving, less than 100 miles per day, which is what most people do in most countries, charge at home, etc.
I suspect people overestimate the frequency in which they drive 250 miles a day.
No.
The nice thing about fuel cars is you almost never need to think about range beyond the refueling visit to a gas station once every week or two. If you're going on an extended road trip, you know you could skip a dozen gas stations and still be fine.
I drove an EV before alongside a fuel car, and I constantly considered whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day or journey. The constant mental load, light as it was, is something I don't have to deal with driving fuel cars. Having ease of mind is priceless.
Maybe it has more to do with how much you need to drive each day?
If you’re putting in triple digits of miles every day, then you have a very different set of constraints compared to someone commuting up to 40 miles a day, which is the United States average.
OTOH, if the EV is at home, it's plugged in and is always sitting at 80% full. No load.
If that's your frequency of gas fillups, and you have a garage charger, the same is true for an EV. (If you lived in an apartment where you couldn't plug in regularly, perhaps not.)
So there I was, constantly considering whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day. It's a worry I can do without, and so batteries will need to see exponential improvements before I'll consider one over a good old fuel tank and an engine.
They might be saying "In an ideal world I'd drive a gas car, but the electric car is good enough where I'd rather not pay double." I don't think the person I was responding to was saying they "sucked", just that they had drawbacks.
California: 423970 km²
If anyone knows about it, I'd be interested to explore this further.
My understanding is that in some parts of Canada it's common to plug your currently petrol/diesel car into an electricity socket overnight to provide a low-level of heating (otherwise the car would be impossible to start in the morning) - is this level of heating insufficient for an EV?
Alternatively how much electricity would be wasted spending some power to keep batteries at a warm enough temperature to prevent performance degradation when charging? Are we talking a few percent or a double/tripling of power costs?
The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E for about 2.5 years now. In the winter the range that Ford claims drops by about 30 to 35%. That is a lot of range that goes missing just because the temp drops below 5 degrees Celsius.
Luckily I'm the perfect EV candidate: my daily commute is less than 50% of the total range so I can drive 2 days to the office if needed. And I can charge both at home and at the office.
The main problem that I see is that people cannot charge at home. If you are dependent on fast chargers by the side of the road you are going to have a hard time. The downtime for fast-chargers is enormous: my personal guess would be that they do not reach the 90% uptime. Which is bizar problem to have because a fast-charger and remote monitoring of the charger condition should be a solved problem by now.
> The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E
The Mach E delivers heat in the most inefficient way possible: resistive heat[0]. Modern EVs from other manufacturers use heat pumps, which are much more efficient. There's still some drop in winter range (like gas cars), but it's nowhere near 35% anymore.[1]
Ford's system is also Rube Goldberg[2]: they use a water-based PTC heater to warm a small isolated coolant loop (complete with its own separate reservoir!), and then run a pump to send it through a liquid-to-air heater core. Obviously done for commonality with an ICE heater core, but the unnecessary weight and complexity shows the compromises to shoehorn an electric drivetrain into a ICE (or even "flex") platform.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ejq7z4H6g&t=449
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/here-s-how-much-range-a-t...
If we look at the total energy consumption for driving in cold conditions, then moving the vehicle along the road needs in the ballpark a similar amount of energy as what is required to heat up the interior of the car to a reasonable temperature and keep it there - cars aren't (and probably can't be) as insulated as houses, so they need quite a lot of energy to stay so much warmer than the outside.
In an ICE, most that heating is done from waste heat of the engine. In an EV, that comes directly out of your range.
I don't think there is a car in production where the heating is coming not from the engine.
Of course there are some cars which do have a resistive heating, but which are those?
> heat pumping through AC
Uhm, the compressor runs from the engine so while the heat is not from it, it's still directly relies on availability of running engine.
Also don't forget that seat heaters are also resistive and most cars in cold climates have them.
I know it (or more like my bum) too damn well, though I didn't think about them in this case.
> small diesels like VW Polo
Makes sense, though as I understood, it's strictly auxiliary till the engine is heated aaaand maybe some additional heating at the parking lot with the engine turned off, though I would wary of this usage, it would drain even the extended battery fast.
Overall it's not quite what I had in my mind (think of space heaters), though yes, there are some parts which can operate independently from the engine, though it's not a primary function for them.
Thanks for the hint.
Kind of. Block heaters help warm the engine coolant which warms engine and the oil, making it less viscous and help it flow properly so that the battery doesn't need to work as hard to crank the engine. They're typically only 400w to 600w draw.
Modern full synthetic oil and a well maintained AGM battery makes it less necessary, it's just a little less wear on the engine overall over the long term. Most folks though don't spring for either since they're a bit more expensive then mineral oil and flooded lead acid batteries.
Skimming the Tesla forums, some said to estimate a drop in range of almost 1/3 in this extreme heat?
A lot of city infra just isn't set up for at-home charging in older cities, and it's a non-trivial retrofit.
Most of my miles are done on long journeys. I live in a terraced house and can’t charge at home. UK charging infrastructure seems pretty underdeveloped so far. My 2018 petrol car does 600 miles on a tank.
The upshot of all that is that an EV would give me half the range at twice the cost, and a headache every time I needed to charge it.
I really want EVs to get better, and I’m sure they will. But for now, they’re hugely inferior for me.