This is a big reason I haven't even considered an EV. How I'd find someone to do this work on my garage, and how much it would cost is a huge unknown, and that's just enough friction to simply not consider getting an EV.
My vehicles are first and foremost utilitarian; I use them to get from A to B. EVs make that simple equation "complicated", and I have other issues maintaining a household that demand my attention.
At my current place I'm just using an extension cord to my outdoor outlet and I give it the 1500 watt option. You can even cut that in half if you don't want the "my this cord is warm.." effect.
In the end, the slower charge is the better charge, so my laziness has been winning. I don't see installing a 230vac socket any time soon given how well it's been working.
I've got an older phev that originally only got 14 miles of pure electric @ up to 79 mph, it's battery is down to about 9 miles expected. And that isn't a lot, but it is enough for 90% of my trips around town. Where you REALLY see this working well is if you have to go out every day to pick something or someone up locally. The amount of fuel burned on warmup cycles and local trips is not insubstantial.
The gas tank needle just LOVES to move with every small trip otherwise.
I sometimes go months without buying gas using that tiny miniscule range.
is it cheaper paying the electricity for charging? I can't imagine it is, but while everyone talks about things like only having to gas up once every 4 months now, it's not as if the electricity comes for free.
A base Tesla 3 is 70kWh * 5¢/kWh (my Toronto overnight rate) is ~$3.50 CAD for ~400km range. Gas in my Volvo C30 would be 400km * 8l/100km * $1/l = $32 CAD.
If you drive every day, a plugin-electric can save you a LOT of money. And that's before the savings in oil, brakes, and other maintenance.
I'm stuck with street parking, so it is much less appealing to me.
Well, no. It depends on all the variables. It may or may not be cheaper.
Your case is quite extreme with nearly free electricity! Sure, EV will be cheaper to run for sure.
Here in California with overnight rates around 30c/kWh and day rates over 70c/kWh, the numbers come out different.
Peak rates are ~20¢/kWh here, but there is a largish fixed per-customer monthly hit for various debts and obligations. And people regularly complain we're the highest cost province in Canada. 70¢/kWh (in BIG dollars!!!) is just insane.
Compared to a gas car that can get 40 mpg on the highway this works out to: 40 mpg == 1 gallon == ~$2.85 (current price here) == 0.07125/mile EV == .360 * .15 == .054/mile
Of course, if you have time of use rates, you might pay half that for the EV. If you drive in town, your efficiency might be more like 270wh/mile too.
Similarly, that MPG is... very arbitrary. But the bottom line is that most people are getting a significantly lower $/mile purely on energy usage.
Gasoline is very expensive. If it wasn't so expensive, we'd burn it to make electricity.
EV promoters will say it is always cheaper but you need to do the math. Depends on your fuel cost vs. electricity costs vs. your gas car mileage.
For example my first EV (Fiat 500) was more expensive to run than my gas car that got over 40MPG. This is in CA with extremely high PG&E electricity rates (but also high fuel costs).
So, it depends.
Also if you use public chraging stations they usually charge a premium for profit. You can see your local charging station rates on e.g. chargepoint website. Use the actual numbers and do the math to be sure.
Car dealerships will sell the hookups and have connections with local companies who will install for you. No effort required on your part .
My understanding is that this is largely a myth, at least with modern BEVs with intercooled battery packs. My understanding is that modern battery packs can Level 2 charge with no additional degradation, because they don't get any hotter than during a Level 1 charge.
Level 3 charging is different, but even then, the degradation in battery life isn't as much as you think -- I've heard numbers as low as just 3% faster degradation.
I actually do that with my phone- I use a fast charger with a peltier cooler, that can rapidly charge the phone while keeping it cold. Family/friends think I'm crazy for caring about it, lol
This is all moot. Sodium ion and lfp and newer battery techs will increase range and drop the initial purchase price of EVs under what an ICE can compete with
Some snap in time clickbait article won't change the technological tsunami. Even if the US drags it's feet, the rest of the world will eagerly adopt them. EVs promise energy independent and cheap transport combined with wind / solar.
Every automaker knows this to differing levels of organizational denial, but they all feel it coming.
There are some very real problems that can’t be solved by battery tech, and only by removing the battery and switching to an alternative fuel source.
The only reason EVs are succeeding now given all their shortcomings is because we’re being forced into them. Remove that force and I don’t see EVs seeing mass adoption.
Look Tesla can already build EVs at price parity with ices, they are currently sitting here n their profit margin. This isn't a hype cycle, Chinese EV makers and battery suppliers have 200+ wh/kg lfp and 150 wh/kg sodium ion in mass production scaling.
This isn't a hype cycle, there are entire car companies in mass production with equal to ice costs now, and the cheaper than ice can ever be is in production scaling.
Yes it won't be over night, but if you are doing production planning, financing, stock prediction and other 5-10 year planning, the writing now on the wall.
This is without solid state and sulfur techs. Im only talking about the CATL LFP and sodium ion techs. Those alone will beat ices on cost at initial purchase, to say nothing of cheaper permile "fuel" and maintenance costs.
And keep me n me and wind / solar is STILL dropping in cost, under what any old school power generation method has been. EV costs will only drop.
" Very real problems"
Please name one
Neither gas nor electric cars got that kind of range when they first launched in the early 1900s. But as is true today, gasoline engines got about 20% more range than the electric and were easy to fill.
> This isn't a hype cycle, there are entire car companies in mass production with equal to ice costs now, and the cheaper than ice can ever be is in production scaling.
As there was before. Entire car companies went out of business because they chose to make electric cars instead of gas.
> Very real problems
I’ll name a few:
Battery decreases range with ambient temperature changes
Cannot refuel outside of a charging station
Battery degrades with every charge
Fire hazard having that much energy in a battery that it’s not an if it will fail but a when
Towing anything
It absolutely could be. Ever lived in an apartment?
You really should never be charging past 70% (the exception being before climbing in sub freezing temps in the sierras) on road trips and instead plan to make much shorter charging stops more often. I’m normally out of a supercharger in 15-20 min if I precondition the battery before charging and it’s about the time my wife needs to stop for a pee break anyways so it’s kinda great to stop. Use the restroom and be ready to go again. If you are charging 45 min you are doing it so wrong.
Give me 500 miles of realistic range and a 10 minute full-tank "fill-up" in an EV and I'll consider it. Until then, it's simply not going to happen for me.
But this is what makes it so painful. You need to map out available working charging station at short intervals which adds a lot of extra driving and stopping.
On a road trip I drive the full range of the gas tank (~450 miles) nonstop and then stop for 5 minutes at the next exit which invariably has a working gas station.
A friend circumnavigated the United States in a 300 mile Range Tesla so I don't doubt what's possible here.
If you ask my Eastern Europe wife, that's pretty much the way she needs to road trip lol. I think if we get it to 3hrs / 15 minutes break it would be perfect. 240km/40 minutes is a bit of a reach.
DOT regulations for truck drivers is something like every 8 hours stop for 30 mins. This is the first I’ve heard stop every 2 hours which would drive me nuts if we were road tripping together.
Any time i'm road tripping more than 3 hours i'm trying to find some cute little town along the way to stop in at. Usually these cute little towns have chargers.
you're free to describe gassing up as this arduous event that takes all this time, planning, and mental energy, but that doesn't make it true, and while your wife may have anxiety around gas stations, most women don't unless they're gassing up in a strange place late at night. It's generally a non-issue.
You can be pro-EV without trying so hard to vilify gas.
Maybe. The closest public charging station to our house is in the parking lot of a semi-abandoned office complex a mile away. It has the best rate but my partner refuses to use it, both for the boredom factor and the isolated location factor.
The second closest is 5 miles away at a Whole Food which yes, the car would be parked there sometimes anyway. But having to spend an extra hour sipping coffee at WF waiting for the car gets old pretty fast.
The only way this works is reducing 0-100 charge time to 5 mins.
try again.
I haven’t had to ‘go get gas’ for 4 years. People probably argued “getting water from the well isn’t that hard compared to maintaining all this infrastructure”… but none of us want to go back to that. Completely losing a class of chore is freeing, even if it wasn’t that horrible anyway.
For long distance trips, I mostly agree with you. My habit was always to stop every hour to get a drink and stretch legs so it doesn’t bother me as much. For your 11 hr trip, it would probably add 2 hours.
yeah, no. A minor convenience vs running water is not comparable, stop being dishonest.
I have never seen anyone say fueling a gas car needs planning and mental energy. Unless the first car you ever drove was an EV, it is hard to believe that it NOT almost a second nature to drive to a nearest gas station as soon as your car beeps about remaining mile range. This is greenwashing at its finest.
I also live in an urban area that seems to have fewer pumps per capita than other urban areas I've visited. This results in lines at the pump, which are exacerbated by automakers not standardizing on which side of the car to place the fuel filler. So cars end up queuing up from two different directions for the pump - and I've seen fights break out over people believing other drivers had cut in front of them at the pump.
Let's not even talk about trying to get gas during rush hour when getting in and out of the station may be problematic and exacerbates all the other problems noted above. So you go home to wait out the traffic but you still have to go back out on a separate trip just to get gas.
So yeah, that requires planning and mental energy. I'd love to get an EV and just come home and plug it in and not worry about it.
For the 2-3 long trips I take per year, I rent a car anyway. That way I upgrade to a nicer, bigger car than I drive on a day-to-day basis, I don't have to worry about breaking down on the trip, and if I do end up buying an EV, I don't have to worry about charging on a trip. It's the way to go.
It turns out, even 10-30 seconds during a commute matters to people. I've personally met people who don't like using a particular station that is basically within a subdivision. Why? Because like most drivers, they fuel up more often on the commute home than out, and this station requires turning left onto a residential street.
It is a small annoyance, but it really is nice not having an annoyance. :)
It certainly doesn’t bother me, but given there are people who will drive 100 MPH to save 3 mins on a commute, I can see how some would be impatient and act this way.
EVs have also not standardized the location of the charging port, and it takes substantially longer to charge an EV vs fuel a gas car, so doesn’t an EV exacerbate your issues here if you don’t have home charging?
Everybody seems to like home charging, which makes sense, but it’s not available to everybody. So what are these people to do? Spend an extra 1-2 hours a week at a charging bay? That’s a hard sell, spending an hour or more per week doing something that used to take 5 mins.
I'm not anti-EV (we're on our third one, over 10 years!) but I'm not a fanboy either, I try to be very objective on them. There's good and there's bad. The expenses are higher than some will want you to believe, but there's benefits.
If you want to promote EVs it's good to be objective. Claiming that filling up a gas car is a major hassle doesn't pass the smell test. Gas stations are everywhere so you never need to plan for it or go out of your way or wait more than 5 minutes.
However, your experience is so far out of the norm that it does not translate to convincing people to buy an EV. For just about everyone who drives, finding a gas stations and filling up is not something that requires planning or mental energy. It's so easy that it's lost in the noise of daily tasks.
Parking lots are dangerous for women, yes. Purse-snatchers and carjackers exist. They all insist on carrying expensive iPhones that can be fenced, so there goes calling for help. Vehicles themselves are mobile rape cabins (ask Uber) and corpse storage lockers. It's a very vulnerable position for women.
But if your wife thinks a 2-minute refuel at a gas station is bad, wait'll she has to recharge the EV while out and about and can't make it to Walmart.
Some of those recharging lots make illicit gay cruising spots feel like Disney World-- we're talking an empty parking lot in a wooded area behind an office building after-hours, with nobody around to hear you scream.
I don't feel comfortable sitting around there.
Is there something about that RAv4 vehicle that makes fueling difficult? I have a Lexus, generally it tells me “hey! I’m low on fuel” so I stop at the next convenient gas station I see, fill it with gas in about 5 mins, and I am back on my way to wherever. Sometimes when I am feeling particularly rebellious, I happen to be driving by a gas station even before the car is low on fuel, and I stop and top it off in a few minutes and then am on my way to wherever.
Also, sometimes I’m driving and want a cup of coffee and stop at a coffee shop too…
What percent of the US population falls into this demographic? And what percent of this demo already has one EV?
Sure.
> , planning
A little.
> , and mental energy.
C'mon now.
Refuelling the Rav4 is an errand that takes time, planning, and mental energy. For my wife it's also a low-level danger: women find gas stations spooky, apparently.
Refuelling the Tesla is automatic and effortless. After you park at home, if the charge is <40% then plug it in. The next time you need to drive somewhere it will be full. It took me an afternoon hanging out with my electrician cousin and about $400 in parts from Amazon to build our own at-home electric refuelling station.
Road trips with the Tesla, however, are currently impractical: we end up adding another ~30% to the drive time. With only a ~220 mile range the Tesla needs to stop about every 150 miles for 40 minutes which is brutal. Range anxiety also becomes a much bigger factor driving through more rural areas and your route choices weigh supercharger locations above everything else.
We've got used to the self driving convenience of the Tesla but the Comma[1] on our Rav4 is just about as good for highway driving.
1. https://comma.ai/