It really was fine, but it was near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger. Extra trips around town would put me at a deficit, and it'd take a few nights of charging to bring things back up to my set point of 80%. Additionally, I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer. Now, having a charging circuit that can put out over 9kW means I can think about it a lot less.
But I thoroughly agree with you: a normal mains outlet is often fine, and holiday road trips can be messy.
How much time do you have available for charging? I'd have thought you'd spend a lot more than 6 hours a day at home. And chargers at work would allow charging the car near constantly when it's not being driven (other than days when you travel elsewhere), so I think that's an important part of transitioning to EVs.
But is that an issue? As long as you always have enough juice to get to a fast charger, and you can always get back to 80% by Friday morning, isn't that enough?
Sure, it's nice to have a 9kW charger, and I'm glad I do. But if I would have been forced to pay $5K to upgrade my mains connection I would likely have just kept the $5K and charged on 120V.
My Bolt lets me say that the circuit is dedicated to it at home and pulls 12 amps instead of the 8 amps it would pull anywhere else. It's trying to make sure it doesn't overload the circuit.
We are moving to a newer home and I already have the 240V charger installed there. Looking forward to 25-30 miles of range per hour (running at 32A normally but have a dedicated 60A circuit) instead of the 3 I'm getting now.
At this house, the 200A panel is full so I would have had to add another panel.
My 200 service was also "full" but when monitoring the energy, we rarely pull above 40 amps. We'd only hit 200 if the emergency heat was running at max for both HVACs, the oven was on, the water heater was going and the dryer was running. Pretty hard to do by accident, nigh impossible if you think about it
Seems like an optimal solution in some respects, if optimized. For example, millions of Canadians travel to Florida each year for the winter, a lot by car. If such a train ran once a day, it would help many with range anxiety for such cases.
But imagine if major cities had such trains between them daily? These can still carry commuters without cars, too! And of course, we don't need everyone to be covered by this solution today, because the goal is to keep the transition to electric happening. This would help.
I don't see this catching on for links between cities.
A more realistic comparison is something like Villach in Austria to Edirne in Turkey, which is 1400km by road, and €259 one-way for a car plus €149 for one person (https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm).
(Though for a journey this long people with multiple cars would probably be taking the larger one.)
The train costs more, but means families can play with their children (around a table) rather than having them stuck in the back seats for hours, and probably part or all of the journey is overnight.
Driving 100km on a nauseating mountain serpentine can easily take 2-3x longer.
But yeah, 300 dollars in Turkey is a lot of money that most people will be willing to save.
I’ve driven 680 km each way on interstates to my in-laws’ home. There on Friday, back on Sunday. Had to drive because I was bringing gifts, way too much for air travel.
And to most Americans, that’s not a particularly long drive. It’s all a matter of what you’re used to. I’ve done 4800 km in eight days and didn’t do anything but local driving on three of those days. That’s a bit more than Madrid to Berlin and back. It’s a lot of driving, but it’s definitely doable even if you’re not twenty years old.
In my own little world, I don't worry too much about 1400km in one day. I'll probably stop and take a long break at some point (and maybe catch a nap), but I don't think I'd be willing to pay $300 to avoid the drive.
It's a long day of driving, but I enjoy the diversions on trips like that. There's a whole world of stuff between A and B and it's nice to be able to stop and take some of it in whenever I feel like it when driving alone, which I can't do with a train that has my car loaded on it. (My solo driving style suits me very well.)
Or: With passengers, we can take turns driving and the cost per-head decreases instead of increasing.
Also a lot of the cost is load/unload time.
I am skeptical about the ease of scaling this, especially given the state of non-car distance travel on Amtrak.
Train: Auto-Train costs $280 per head, flat, for minimal accommodations. (Transporting the car itself is... free? I guess?)
Driving: The IRS mileage rate is $0.67 per mile (which is supposed to cover fuel and other easy-to-spot consumables, as well as purchase price and insurance and depreciation and and and), and the distance is 811 road miles between those same two points that the Auto-Train covers, or about $527.
Based on these assumptions,
For one person, the train looks cheaper. It is $280 to take the train, vs $527 to drive.
For 2 people, it's very close the same price: It is $280 per head to take the train, vs $264 per head to drive.
For 3 people, driving pretty clearly takes the financial win: It is $280 per head to take the train, vs $176 per head to drive.
The background noise should be much less than a plane, and the air pressure etc is obviously normal, but the erratic noise can be more -- e.g. some clunks if the train stops.
That IRS rate is incredibly high. It's probably around $150 or so in fuel depending on prices and efficiency to make that trip. I can't see food, insurance, and depreciation adding another $300. The ability to not drive is what can make it worthwhile for some, as you note.
These things come hand in hand, if you want to make it work things either need to be walking distance from the station or with reasonably frequent buses. If a bus comes once an hour (actually the case in my city off rush-hour) it may as well not exist.
raze = tear down
That’s the public infrastructure equivalent of technical debt.
A better solution imho is to create a plan for building train capacity where it makes sense (high traffic areas where trips are such and such - Boston-NYC-Philly-DC) and fund them through public-private contracts.
[0] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...
You'd be better of installing a new circuit with proper equiptment. Most homes would be able to at least accommodate a 20amp 220v socket, which takes about 40% of the charging time of a regular socket (15amp 110).
Turn the breaker off and plug something in and see if it turns on
This (multi-path circuits) is not uncommon when homeowners try to wire up a smart switch requiring a neutral to a switch-circuit without a neutral (as most light switches actually only need to switch the hot) and so they "borrow" a convenient neutral from a neighboring circuit which causes it to immediately trip!
A certified electrician will know how to cable up a higher-capacity appliance such as an electric oven or level 2 home EV charger.
Darwin Awards don't just win themselves, you have to be creative about it, right?
My partner and I did it in less than a day in conduit in our garage. No jury rigging necessary.
The Y extension lead would work, except that if either outlet has line and neutral swapped, you have a dead short, and if you pull one of the male ends while charging, you have a live male prong.
Quick 220 mostly resolves this, but you still need a 3 lamp tester, IIRC.
I hired an electrician to come out and install the 240V 50A circuit. I'm sure I could've, but our local code requires it, I don't want our insurer to deny our claim if something goes wrong. I, obviously, think people should be pretty careful with 10kW (or more) continuous load for hours at a time.
I definitely don't think people should lean on janky solutions that are technically feasible when it comes to EV power.
i've got 240V 40A and I trickle charge at at most 10A overnight, and it's way way beyond adequate. i don't drive super far daily...but easily could still.
But as I mentioned in my comment way above, 120V12A works, but 240V32A is notably more convenient.
Yes, that's why it's recommended to install a home "Level 2" charger (1). that's that's several times faster than "a normal outlet". It's both fine and practical to do that.
Not everything in a typical house runs on just "normal outlet" power. e.g. electric ovens also do not.
1)
https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/a39917614/best-...
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-electric-veh...
Having a device installed by the power company would be ideal.
And some chargers would have an integrated meter as well. Would this suit you? But we don't really know what your intended for that meter use is.
As a person who doesn't drive I'm getting pretty sick of the expectation that I pay for parking spots every drivers may want to go, and find the exasperated and demanding attitude that drivers display when they can't find convenient parking to be utterly childlike behavior. God forbid you have to walk a block. You know how many blocks I walked to get here?
Also we need to have a discussion about the hoarding going on in suburban garages. People buy these tacky box houses and then cram all kinds of dumb shit in their garage where their vehicles are supposed to go and then park on the street and bitch about their neighbours friends stealing 'their spot.'
This is all so insane.
https://www.evstreetcharge.co.uk/
The electricity delivery infrastructure actually already exists, and has for a long time: street lamps were spec'd before the transition to low power LED lights.
Consider a group of 200 people, where 50 drive 10 miles a day, 100 drive 20, 20 drive 30, 5 drive 40, 5 drive 60, 5 drive 80, 5 drive 100, 4 drive 200, 4 driver 400 and 2 drive 600.
That's 8100 miles per day by 200 people, giving an average daily drive of 40.5 miles. If we assume 40 miles is too much for an overnight charge on an ordinary outlet to cover then we might think this means the average person would find they need more than an ordinary outlet.
But 75% of those people drive 20 miles or less per day, and 85% of them drive 30 miles or less per day.
"fast charger" usually means one of those fancy DC systems, not just a bigger outlet.
"Fast charger" in the context of home charging means 20-50A at 220V, which is enough to fully charge the battery in a few hours. Basically, you can roll in on fumes at midnight, plug in and go to sleep, and wake up and leave the next morning with a full tank.
> I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer
Its hard to accept a future that involves this sort of compromise and introducing new stresses for an inferior solution.
And the future has enough fast chargers that it's hard to be caught out no matter where you go.
The future also involves more high power plugs, which would have removed the issue you quoted.
If you would mind that issue more than they did, then you just need to get a plug installed when you buy an EV.
Electric is on the whole better & cheaper, but insisting the downsides around charging and endurance do not exist isn't going to help convince anyone
You realize for a home-charged EV, that literally never happens, right? Your car is always charged, always ready. You never need to make a "detour + pit stop", ever. EVs are the superior solution in this regime, not a compromise. This is 100% not a "downside", period.
All the comments on here calling them inconvenient seem to be either people who are clutching at straws because they want to believe that EVs are bad for whatever reason, or people with transport requirements well outside the norm (e.g. >~200km per day fairly regularly.)
It matters that many people don't have outlets at all, but when we're talking about "how many EV charging stations does the US need" that lack of outlets is a problem that will be fixed.
"We shouldn't say EVs are good because they aren't good in all ways" is... kind of a dumb point. And in particular the specific point you tried to make is, as I pointed out, actually incorrect for the bulk of actual owners.
Have you travelled in the past 40 years? There are gas stations on every corner across the USA. Even the smallest hovels have them.
Not sure what you are looking for, but it isn't sensible to use "hovel" (="a small, squalid, unpleasant, or simply constructed dwelling") here. "Hamlet", maybe?
On my ICE, I think about if gas is expensive or cheap now, maybe I should go ahead and stop at Sam's/Costco while I'm out, but I still have a bit more than a quarter tank, maybe I'll get gas next time. Or I think darn I'm low, I guess I'll have enough, better stop on my way home. And then when I'm there I have to negotiate payment, stand in the 100F heat for several minutes, worry if this pump has a card skimmer on it, and get ads blasted at me. Rinse and repeat every couple of weeks.
How would you feel if your car automatically had a full tank of gas every morning? Even when near empty the night before. It's described as the complete opposite of "worry every day".
However, going off the post I initially replied to, it seems that this person did have additional anxiety on account of their EV - ie the issues EV's have with charging, short distances, etc.
But like I mentioned: I installed a 240V50A outlet, like I think most people will do. 120V15A works with some awareness. 240V50A is easier than having a gas car.
> And the future has enough fast chargers that it's hard to be caught out no matter where you go
For sure. I will happily sit here waiting for the future. It’s just probably good to acknowledge this isn’t the future yet.
Does your home have an electric dryer or oven? Use a circuit like that. Does it have that outlet in the garage or parking area right now? No, likely not. But the question is about running cable, not "introducing new stresses for an inferior solution".
It was annoying mental overhead to have to plan out the charging so often.
Three months ago we ran 240v to the garage and now have 12kw charging at home. It has been a game changer! We don’t have to think or plan around the charging. Every morning the car is at 75% (the limit we have set). And if we are going on a long drive I can move it to 90% or 100%.
I really regret not getting the level 2 charger years ago when we got our first EV.
He left his Chevy Bolt parked across the street from his former residence (or rather, across from the construction site that replaced it).
Eventually, the car got impounded and I got roped in to go bail it out and bring it to another friend of ours who had space to store it legally.
When I got the car, the battery was almost completely discharged. When dropped off the car I don't actually know how it was still moving. We plugged it in to a regual home wall outlet be cause that's all there was. The car computer said it would take SIXTY HOURS to charge to full.
That's two and a half DAYS.
The fact remains that a full EV battery can really take you a long ways.
A fully charge bolt (when it's still new) will take you about 250 miles.
You won't find a gas car that can't go 300 miles on a tank.
I currently have an old prius (which is admittedly far above average compared to regular cars) and it can go 450 miles on a tank.
And that tank gets filled up faster than the time it takes to walk inside and buy a bag of chips.
Assuming you plug in when you get home, you likely have ~10 hours of charging time. Standard wall outlet is 12A continous, so 1440W. Most 120V is relatively 'inefficient' due to needing to run all the cooling infrastructure which tends to be a fixed overhead. A good number is roughly 4 miles of range per hour of charge on a 120V standard outlet for most normal vehicles (Bolt, Model 3, Ioniq 5, etc)
So, as long as you're driving less than 40 miles per day, 120V outlet will always keep you topped up. If you charge longer (i.e., plug in at 8PM, leave at 7AM) then the numbers look even better. Some considerations for cold climate and whatnot, but 40 miles in a day is a good commute.
yes, the largest possible charge on the slowest possible charger is not fast. That's why a higher capacity "level 2" charger at home is recommended.
The upside is that you don't have to attend this home charging. It's usually done overnight while the car owner sleeps. So the vehicle has "a full tank of gas" automatically, every morning.
0-100 is incredibly rare. If I had to deal with that commenter's situation back when I was only on 120V and actually needed 100% soon (this is getting pretty contrived,) I would've charged to 10-20% and then gone to a level 3 charger. Admittedly, this still isn't going to be fast -- but it's not going to take 60 hours.
Since then, batteries have gotten bigger, I have a 220v charger than can easily fill the large battery overnight with cheaper power, many parking garages have chargers, and high speed fast chargers have become commonplace.
I kind of wonder if the people purchasing cars for these theoretical events have a first aid kit in their car, emergency food in the house, or savings for a few months out of work.
I think getting a older big gas SUV with plenty of storage space is a good backup. You can haul things too big or dirty for your EV, use gasoline when electricity for some reason doesn't work, and haul around a big family visiting from out-of-town. You can also lend it to the people who don't understand EVs.
Given housing costs, that assumption of access isn't a sound one. And Apartments from what I've seen have maybe 5 total charging stations for every few hundred cars?
>Fortunately this isn’t a problem in the vast majority places today and I hope continued investment in fast charging networks ensures this remains a limited problem.
well, not today. If the adoption is aggressive this can and will quickly be an issue in urban areas.
Most people already have an EV "gas station" at home...
Personally, we own a Chevy Volt and get about 3.5 miles per kWh out of it. I installed a 240V/30A outlet in our garage, but the Volt's max recharging rate is 4 kWh. Still that gives us 14 miles/hour.
If you can charge at home (ideally at 240v), and you don’t drive more than the range of your vehicle in a day regularly, it’s gas that has an inconvenience to overcome. I don’t have a gas pump at my house.
If you are an Uber driver and you do 2-3x the range every day, it’s a different story. But if you can charge for free - which isn’t hugely uncommon currently - you can save a lot of money on gas with an EV, so there are tradeoffs.
They're thinking about visiting family, or short day trip vacations, or longer hauls through very rural areas.
Or, they live in an apartment complex that doesn't let them run extension cords out to their cars or have charging stations for everyone yet (though admittedly this is only a matter of time).
Of course I rented a Tesla for this trip and at home I can’t charge because I live in a condo.
So it’s tradeoffs all the way down in life
Seriously, it's great. The FUD around EVs is ridiculous and so many people seem to have swallowed it wholesale without really thinking very hard.
To put it another way, I'm not telling you an EV doesn't work for me because some online article told me what to think. I'm telling you that because I've investigated the options for myself, and come to a conclusion that, ultimately, only I am qualified to make.
You can’t (generally) refuel your ICE car at home. The times to recharge at a fast charge station is coming down and down.
You potentially can, though. In many areas, laws/regulations/ordinances allow one to have a large tank and a pump. Bulk gasoline delivery can also cost less than what one would typically pay at the pump. I've rarely seen it done except at businesses with fleets of vehicles or large farms, though.
A house will already have electricity, even high-power plugs for electric stoves and dryers. A house will not already have any gasoline taps. A gasoline storage tank is another avoidable source of fire and chemical contamination risk. The shelf life of gasoline is not indefinite, it is "about six months".
Both are upfront costs, but the average person won't put a gasoline storage tank in the same ballpark as a L2 EV plug.
Note that I'm not suggesting this be done, only that it's potentially possible, and in some rare cases is done.
Capless tanks in cars are kind of a pain, but other than that it's easy. Storing filled gas cans isn't an option for everyone; usually the same people who will have trouble with a charger at home will have restrictions on gas cans. Regulatory devices to prevent spilling gas seem to ensure spilling gas too; it's better to use a 'for entertainment purposes only' flexible spout if you've got one.
Unless the average needed charge time is more than the average gap you have between "come home" and "go out again" it's a meaningless number.
As someone who owns an EV and doesn't regularly drive more than ~200km in a single trip the EV is much more convenient than my old ICE. "Oh no I need to stop off at the petrol station before/after work" used to be a fairly regular occurence and now it's something I never think about.
I agree for me as a home owner the charge station question is no big deal, but when I was doing apartment living it's a completely different consideration.
Uhhhh, you mean an extremely brief stop along a common route I was already traversing anyway?
I really don't understand your approach here, are you speaking from the perspective of some region where gas-stations are rare remote outposts that require a dedicated trip?
We're quibbling over very small amounts of inconvenience with either option.
They're both about 7 years old now. My wife's Volt has 80K miles and has been to the gas station only a handful of times because 95% of my wife's driving fits within its 50 mile all-electric range. Literally just on the rare road trip she takes does she need to gas it. Meanwhile my CX-9 with half the mileage (I work from home) has visited the gas station a hundred or more times. Plus the additional maintenance that it has as an ICE vehicle over the Volt which isn't even pure electric.
But yes, we use the CX-9 for our yearly family road trip of 650 miles because for me, I like to stop, gas and go. But not everyone has my driving stamina or willingness to sit in a car w/o a longer break. So for them, having to spend 30+ minutes charging an electric car might not be an inconvenience at all.
A few years ago I swapped out my gas mower for an Ego electric mower. Despite having had a top-of-the line Honda, I don't miss an ICE mower at all. And I don't have a tiny lot or easy to cut grass either. I'm in NC with a thick fescue lawn that takes me 45+ minutes to mow. The Ego has no trouble with it.
Recently I was at a hotel and bumped into another guest with a Chevy Bolt. I think he said it had about 200 miles range. I asked him if that was an issue, but it turns out with his wife and dogs, he couldn't drive more than a couple hours at a time w/o taking a break anyway. So for him the vehicle fit his lifestyle and it was no compromise or inconvenience at all. Meanwhile the hotel had an on-site charger he could use.
At the end of the day we've spent 120 years building our lives and infrastructure around ICE vehicles. Electric vehicles have only been on the scene for what, 20 years now? So using electric vehicles in an ICE world requires compromises in some situations. But even since I purchased the Volt 7 years ago the equation has changed and my next vehicles will likely be electric. There's enough fast charging stations now that I no longer see that as an issue any more.
With a dedicated level 2 charger, you can charge with 10+ kW, making the percentage that is lost in the electronics of the vehicle much smaller.
Yes, those living in the Bay Area with a Hummer EV will find the economics problematic but this solution is fine for the vast majority of other situations throughout the US.
This is the first I'm hearing of this. Is this for real? Six modern desktop PCs worth of power, doing what? And that draw only occurs while charging, so it goes away when the car is "off"? Is this for heating the battery when it's cold? I'm not trying to jump on you, I'm just seriously surprised.
https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/elektromobilitaet/lade...
They say 100-300W for the onboard electronics, and 15-25% total loss when using a wall socket (other losers contribute as well, e.g. cables that weren't originally meant to run at peak current for hours on time).
Premises wiring seems like a red herring. At least in the US, conductors are sized based on a maximum percentage voltage drop at rated current, which means the branch circuit losses should be similar when using either one at full capacity. (A lower current circuit for a longer time is actually going to be slightly more efficient because the feeders are fixed sizes)
That's obviously not going to work for everyone, but between the two of them it drastically reduces the number of charging stations needed in suburban areas.
This could be a problem in the future though. As the newer chemistry for batteries increases energy density, it would demand more power or time assuming one still drains the battery a sufficient amount to reduce cycles in an effort to preserve battery life.
Edit: why disagree?
Limiting max charge is easier if you have extra range, and so is staying away from empty. Making the battery hold more energy only improves things. Go ahead and charge every night.
If you see someone giving "cycle count" as a spec, they mean full cycles. If you charge 10% five times, that's half a full cycle.
I think the biggest hassle is that we need to make sure that each place we spend vacation in has enough EV charging stations. We do go for distances that need intermediate filling/charging quite often (reads once per month perhaps) I never had to worry about that for my gas burning Tucson 2020. Even having to worry about it, having to do research about that is a hassle for ordinary people. We already have too much to worry about.
And then there is the issue of charing is way too slow. It may also induce excessive shopping at the charging station -- the most expensive places for drinks and foods.
And then there is the issue of long-term (read 2-5 days) power outage in Quebec early springs which occur more often than I want to believe (we just had one last year, and minor outages occur after EACH rain here and there). It does hit gas stations too, there are more gas stations than charging stations anyway.
And what benefit does EV give me? I don't care about driving experience. I'm insensitive to gas price jumps. And the cynical me believe that once we have more EVs the businesses would simply double the charging costs.
I'll probably switch to an EV eventually, but that's when charging stations are literally everywhere in Canada.
But everyone has one's own needs so I fully understand your scenario.
That is because a lot of people have ICE cars already.
If there were a lot of people like you, I suspect rentals would get more expensive. In addition, because of the likelihood of correlation (for example a blizzard that knows out power) you may have a bunch of people also wanting to rent he ICEs at the same time making them unavailable for you.
Electricity only really exists in a transient state, and has to be stored in bricks made up of complex materials that are harder to scale than equivalent chemical storage mechanisms.
That's not the same thing as saying EVs have no place, because they clearly do, but I don't think that place is as a general replacement for a standard vehicle in societies that rely heavily on cars. I think they're a niche product there.
Ultimately, everyone needs to make the call for themselves. I'm glad you're happy with your EV, but I can't see myself purchasing one within the next fifteen years or so. Even then, I'd still have an ICEV backup. But that's based on my particular needs, and not necessarily applicable to others.
But at home, I have to get on the limited-access highway to get to work (there really isn’t a good alternative). If it can’t travel at 100 km/h, it’s not a suitable commuter car, but that puts it in a very different price range.
And I’m still going to use the ICE car to get there and back. Needs 320 km each way of range with air conditioning running to be viable. That’s a trip I make at least every six weeks. The ICE car has a range of almost 1000 km on a full tank.
EVs have a lot of potential but there are still a lot of details to work out.
The whole thing about expensive battery replacements every 3 years is mostly propaganda from entrenched interests. There are legitimate isolated horror stories, but battery replacements don't generally need to be a thing. Do your own research, but that's my experience. I know a fair number of EV owners.
Or conversely, folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car.
If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor. Not glamorous, but enough to get you through your average day.
The car culture has very little to do with averages. And for what it's worth, it's the same for most other goods, from computers to kitchen appliances. I mean, how many techies need a kitchen in their home to begin with?
Maybe if you live somewhere like New York it's possible, but I can't see it in other US cities. You definitely need a car in the US. If you don't have one as a parent in the US, you wish you had one.
It’s anxiety. I took a parent’s EV to Sonoma and back (100 mi each way + detours + driving around Sonoma) and stopped once for a 5-minute fast charge on the way back. The battery got to a low of 5%, but that was expected.
Unbeknownst to me, my father was checking the battery level remotely and freaking out that it would get that low. Let me remind you, this is in the Bay Area. There is no deficit of public chargers here.
Another: I had a mid-forties friend visit me in Wyoming. I have a gas Subaru. Its fuel level getting to quarter full—good for at least 100 miles—freaked them out. To go to the grocery store. Two miles away.
The same thing cannot be said about electric cars, unless you have a good friend with a fuel generator. Even then you still have to wait for it to charge. More likely you will be towed, at least in The Netherlands they will tow you to the next parking place. If you are lucky it will be one with a charger, if you are unlucky you are once again on your own.
I think the shitty part at least in Canada is the sheer network fragmentation for fast charging. Understandable why it's fragmented but it's still frustrating nonetheless.
Gas cars need a jump all the time.
If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger. That should work in 90%+ of situations.
In my family's 20+ years of owning multiple vehicles I can count on one hand how many jumps we've needed, and they fall under the category of 1. old battery or 2. left some lights on.
The latter wouldn't even kill the battery any more.
All the time? That's some strong exaggeration there. Last time I needed a jump start was in 2016 and before that.. can't put an exact year to it but it was back in the 80s.
> If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger.
Please describe in some detail how you expect this to work? Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?
As in it's frequent. I'd estimate about as frequent as someone running out of charge in an EV nowadays.
(If you're in a hot climate, e.g. Arizona, and park your car outdoors, it literally can be every year or two.)
> Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?
Apparently they're still marketed to commercial users, pricing in the $5k+ range. EV to EV charging, emerging on newer vehicles, would be the analog.
A quick Google turns up this kind of thing [0] which, based on the price point and form factor, is aimed at tow truck operators rather than individual drivers. Costs $10k+ and will take up most of the back of your car.
[0] https://jtmpower.ie/collections/electric-vehicle-charging
That's probably the right solution to this - and something every tow truck will carry in 10 years - but it's not the "capacitor in the back" analogue to an empty jerrycan.
"The scenarios where this is useful are plentiful, from helping a stranded EV driver with no power to whipping up a brew with a portable kettle."
https://www.ag-elec.com/vehicle-to-load-v2l-what-is-it-and-h...
I see it like "give the vehicle a few miles, to get to a better charge point" and nothing more.
If you come to a busy charging station... are you really going to wait for an hour? are you going to risk it with the next one? What if that one is even busier?
I live in a country which is full of people transiting every summer from norther europe to croatian beaches, like literally 10km traffic jams to go through a tunnel, police stopping transiting vehicles from leaving the highway (so the locals can use the side roads, but the gas stations can manage it, because refilling takes just a few minutes.
Now replace just 10% of those german cars with electric ones, calculate how many refills you need to drive between eg. frankfurt to split, multiply by thousands going through every weekend, and there's no way to get efficiently charge all those cars, and noone is designig charging stations for peak traffic. 30km left? 8 charging stations, 15 cars waiting, will you really risk it? Or will you wait two hours at least to get a chance to charge your car?
On the road trips I've gone on with my EV the average charge time I had was like 15 minutes. The longest was 22 minutes. I sometimes charged a little longer than as it took some time getting the kids through the bathroom and get a snack.
And my EV kind of sucks for road trips. Smaller battery, only 400V instead of 800V, and a less efficient motor setup compared to other EVs on the market.
VW id.3 are one of the most popular electic vehicles here.. They don't need an hour on fast charger, but still...
I took the data from here: https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro
> Charge Time (35->280 km) 31 min
So, for ~250km of driving, you chrage it four half an hour (let's say everything is ideal, no AC needed, no stopping in traffic with ac running)... for a drive from eg Frankfurt to split (~1200km) and then back, this means 9 charges (assuming you did the first charge at home, which is far from a common thing in frankfurt with a lot of apartment buildings and not a lot of chargers there). For a normal diesel car, that would be 2 refills (assuming you started with a full tank... and you'll still haeve half a tank left over).
So, 9 charges means using the charging stations for 279 minutes, a bit over 4 and a half hours if done ideally. Refilling a diesel would take 10 minutes. So to serve an equivalent number of tourists here in transit (since our gas is cheaper outside of highways, and locals fill their cars there), we'd need 28x more charging stations compared to gas/diesel pumps. Also, even with gas pummps, during peak times (weekends all summer), you sometimes have to wait for 3-4 cars infront of you to refill, so even that is not enough for peak usage.
So, for an average german tourist going to croatia for a vacation (and there's a lot of them.. a lot!), the electric car is useless until we build A LOT more charging stations, 30x more than our curret gas ones, and add 4.5 hours of drive time.
Sure, living in a house (charge at home) and commute to work and back within the range of the vehicle... that's great. But for road trips, we're not really there yet.
But you're saying 4 and a half hours to charge to go 2,400km is worse than the above poster who said 1+ hour to go like 200-300km. 4.5 hours of charging to go 2,400km is ~533km/h effectively, assuming starting with a good state of charge.
But you're also ignoring the fact nobody doing that route would be driving 1,200km and then immediately turning around and driving back home. They're probably going to stop at some point along that 24+ hour journey, right? Probably going to spend the night somewhere, probably going to get food to eat somewhere, right? I imagine most people need to use the bathroom at least once every 24+ hours? And they're probably driving that distance to actually visit someplace, so they're likely going to stay there at least a few hours if they're willing to drive over a dozen hours each way right? So some of those charging stops are realistically only a few minute wait, as you're just talking about the time to plug in to the charger near a restaurant, or plug in to the charger near your destination, etc.
Do drivers in Frankfurt really get in their car and drive 24+ hours round-trip only stopping to get gas a couple of times? Do people in Frankfurt not need to sleep, eat, or pee? Is driving 24 hours non-stop round trip an ideal German vacation?
And then to top it all off, the ID.3 isn't the best road trip EV. There are many other models that will charge faster. If you're the kind of person making non-stop 2,400mi road trips every few months you could pick a different EV that has better charging speeds.
Pick a Kia EV6 Long Range and you'll get an average of nearly 200kW charging speeds doing a 10-80% charge. The ID.3 Pro in your link only gets about 82kW average charging speed for a 10-80% charge. (1070 km/h vs 470 km/h). You'll end up doing the trip in significantly less charging time.
I also live in a transit country for them, so I have to actively try to avoid them every summer: https://www.rtvslo.si/slovenija/zastoj-pred-predorom-karavan... most of them have german plates (this is on the way back in a 15km long traffic jam before a tunnel, and our police closed the exits so they can't leave and use the local roads.
This is the charging station before that 15km traffic jam: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xBrxbccqVg7mSw3D8 ...so, either wait here in line, or risk it for a few hours... will you use the AC, or not? :) It's not much better in austria, and even worse in croatia.
The obvious difference is that you can’t pump your car at home, and by installing chargers in ordinary car parks you can mitigate the need the specific infrastructure of petrol stations, but the number of total chargers needed is still high, they are just not in the same places.
If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor.
In the suburbs or even smaller cities, driving is still faster. Hell, the trains here hardly have time to accelerate past 120kmph so driving can actually be faster than the train too unless you are going directly from city center to city center (most people need a 10 min bike ride on one or both sides).
Even If North America starts taking transit seriously, the routes needed to connect the suburbs to most metro downtowns will be enormous. There will either needs to be hundreds of bus routes feeding into light rail, or perhaps better bike infrastructure can get people close enough to one of dozens of light rail stops.
In any case, sprawl is currently setup to make urbanizing a slow and painful future for transit enthusiasts.
I was just rarely traveling to other city centers, and some town or forest isn't going to have a time competitive public transport options.
Hell, the Flixbus Amsterdam-Maastricht (station to station) is faster than the train. It has a lower top speed, no direct line, but it just doesn't stop 7 times or so in between.
If the Netherlands wants to continue to be competitive and ease the housing crisis, the trains need to be faster and cheaper so everyone can spread out and not be forced to spend 3 or 4 hours a day commuting to work if they live in a different city.
NL public transport is super expensive. Doesn't mean it's never interesting, but when I lived in France near a TGV station, I took the train much more often. It did often have both speed and price advantages.
Where things really shine is high-frequency, high-speed rail plus bikes. The IC Direct Rotterdam-Amsterdam is fast enough that I used to go from my place to my sister's, door-to-door, in about fifty minutes by bike+train, versus typically around a little over an hour for a car.
If you want a really impressive ratio you have to look to the TGV; in college I did Marseille-Paris, Paris-Lille, Lille-Brussels often and each of those segments are three times faster than the car!
Car dependency is a choice. Even in Europe the norm of cars is strong.
That argument can be made everywhere even with perfect public transport.
On the other hand, capacity planning e.g. for charging or gas stations, has everything to do with averages and the aggregate effects of people each exercising that flexibility occasionally.
Needed capacity for EV charging will be lower, and more centred around longer trips, since a large percent of charging is at home, from wall sockets or L2 chargers.
It’s not a matter of being glamorous or not. Public transit is with relatively few exceptions much slower than point to point driving. This is true even in places with excellent public transit, like Tokyo.
I don't care about personal emergencies. I care about local emergencies. It only sounds unreasonable until you've had to do it multiple times.
Or maybe you can stop a few more minutes when it happens?
I understand your worries but I am not sure it’s a great excuse to keep driving ICE cars.
Those trips were Houston to San Antonio. A bit under 200mi. It took over 12 hours. Loads of modern EVs would have made that trip in one charge, slowly crawling along the whole way, without an issue. My EV can idle for hours without using much range. My ICE chugs gas sitting there doing nothing but running the AC.
It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs. People don’t buy vehicles for what they need 95% of the time, they buy vehicles that will do whatever they want it to do 100% of the time.
Suddenly inherit a boat? Perhaps your towing capacity is inadequate.
A ravine appears due to an unexpected earthquake? Four tires probably won’t traverse it.
You’re out at a dinner party. Your friend’s car breaks down and you now need to carry 9 people? Anything but a small bus will be inadequate.
How to solve this? Look at your last X years of driving and solve for that. For everything else, vehicle rental exists for the exactly-once occasion.
I’m impressed by how many 9’s people try to solve for. It’s completely unreasonable. I solved for my 99.9% of days driving and am extremely happy.
Plus, how many of us would be currently unemployed if our respective industries demanded a 100.0% solution before adoption?
That’s mostly what people are trying to do. In that 1000 days of driving, they are going to have ~three of every annual event. Thanksgiving travel to family three times. Christmas travel three times. Three years of summer vacations or ski trips, etc.
We have an EV and love it. We also have a hybrid for road trips.
I never said it was about saving the environment. (It’s about not being outright ridiculous in either direction.)
Well, yeah, but they said consumers "overestimate" their needs, not "contract pathological monomania leading to psychiatric and financial disaster."
Are you sure that the reason isn't the cost of them? I mean, sure charging is one aspect, but is there actually a study that compares the two? There's plenty of "normal" people buying cheap BYDs.
> It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs.
That's a very region/culture-specific thing.
I live in Canada and I really can't see myself driving an EV right now. It doesn't guarantee my not-so-rare but crucial requests:
- Going to some random places for vacationing without worrying about whether there are enough charging stations;
- Going through early spring without adding anxiety about a power outage that sweeps for 2-7 days;
The infra is just not ready. And TBH, I don't think it's going to be ready forever. Infra construction is so corrupted and so expensive in NA that I absolutely have zero faith in it.
Actually, the push to more EVs in China is already a bit problematic due to lack of Infras. Just imagine you are in the middle of Spring festival traffic jam...it's already bad for gasoline cars but it's a nightmare for EVs.
We live in a semi-rural part of Canada, and have a bit of a (pleasant, country) commute. I want the most efficient vehicle. I ran the numbers and an EV just did not make sense. If you're driving mostly highway, the overall cost/km isn't that much better than the best ICEs, and the ICE is much cheaper.
Financial-wise, I actually haven't compared the cost/km because of two things:
- I'm not sure how expensive a switch of battery going to be (do we have data on that?)
- Yeah they are outright more expensive than ICEs, and with the current financing climate, not very attractive
If you live in suburban and commuting to downtown for work, large part of the driving would be high way. Having hybrid makes way more sense in this scenario.
If you live in downtown, you probably don’t need a car or you are parking in a underground parking lot that does not guarantee you a charging plspot
A more interesting statistic would be something like daily commute https://www.thinkinsure.ca/insurance-help-centre/commuting-t... which recently was ~30min each way on average - very much in range.
On the other hand the power issues could actually improve with enough V2L deployed.
Even then, the question "what are the actual preferences when adjusted for price" is valid even in today's US.
Excluding cars without active thermal management, which mostly means the Nissan Leaf.
That’s not how many Americans view vehicles though. They view them as a reflection of themselves and as a status item.
$50k to you seems insane but I was eyeing a car that was about $280k in Redwood City last week. It’s been sold. Some of us enjoy cars.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
This is entirely rational, and reminds me of people who can’t understand why everyone doesn’t bike everywhere. It just reeks of solipsism.
I own a Tesla, and I have to tell you it’s a massive pain to own an EV and live in an apartment complex. It’s honestly frustrating to the point that I regret getting it. The performance is great, but the interior, significant price drop in the year I’ve owned it, and the constant anxiety about the battery has not made for a pleasant experience.
If I could go back I’d get a Mercedes S class that’s 5-7 years old.
Imagine having a fridge that isn't cold enough for storing ice cream and frozen veggies.
And yes, none of my shoes are even remotely close to covering 95% of floors. Some are good for hiking, some are good for running, some are warm in the winter.
The issue is not the lack of 100% coverage. The issue is that there is no sufficiently appealing option for a large number of people to get access to the 5% of cases when you do need it. Apparently rentals and other sharing options aren't quite up to snuff, so everybody overprovisions like crazy.
It gets awful stressful awful quick when you have to deal with availability uncertainty and other things depend on it.
A car is just a fundamentally different product to a set of shoes. If cars ever get to the point where the cost of one is trivial for the average person, we'll probably see the kind of specialization you see in other cheaper products. Also note, we can see pressure in the opposite direction for phones. Phones have become more expensive as they become more general purpose.
I take your point though. There are still plenty of delivery trucks and personal autos, even in this biking paradise.
His canonical example was "kosher food is acceptable to nearly everyone, and required by a small minority." Thus kosher takes over.
"EVs vs. ICEs" is nothing like that. EVs have been rejected by vast numbers of consumers because they find them impractical. That's all.
Which is a great example of how Taleb's "examples" are BS. Really, when Taleb goes into a grocery store, is all of the food kosher? Or even a majority? Kosher has not "taken over". It's a niche product.
Secondly, his examples were from the Middle East, where kosher food is indeed ubiquitous even for non-Jewish consumers. Because almost no one really objects to it.
Whereas US consumers really do object to EVs.
I didn't bring Taleb into the thread, adolph did.
> his examples were from the Middle East
Not the one in the article adolph referenced:
"The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher."
This implies that some sort of considered effort has been made to produce these drinks as kosher. This is just paying some money to get the private certification and the license to put it on the can. In the context of a drink, the drink ingredients is almost certainly already kosher, so the certification is just saying: "there was no cross-contamination in the making of this product". Which isn't a special consideration made for kosherness.
If I told you that you could increase your TAM by a million people, and open new wholesale marketing opportunities for a onetime payment of ~$1000, you take the deal.
My analogy for the most intolerant wins is treating a decision-maker’s personal values as a population, one of which is “the most intolerant” and thus drives the decision because the others are indifferent to that quality.
There are a variety of aesthetic or prosaic values that might drive a decision for EV or ICE. A minority of those values will likely drive the decision since the majority will be satisfied by any number of options.
I guess you don't read the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise follow automotive news. I don't feel a need to provide links for you.
> the others are indifferent to that quality
No auto buyer is indifferent to the choice of EV vs ICE.
How is that a failure? Slow sales are occurring across the entire auto industry probably because people are broke/unemployed and dont want to spend the cash right now.
I don't read the WSJ, but I do understand numbers. This site seems to indicate that 4% of global new car sales were electric in 2020, and 18% are electric at the end of 2023. https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
What are you reading that would indicate that an industry segment that is up 450% in four years has "failed"?
You have made an extraordinary claim, and refuse to back it up in the face of compelling evidence.
The rate of growth is falling, but the overall sales trend is still up. Perhaps you are confused with the math, and the difference between rate of growth and growth?
The problem is that I need to move and I can't afford a house, only an apartment. I may never afford a house. So I'll be relying 100% on public charging. Not because home charging is too slow, but because I will have no access to it.
"several" doesn't convey the reality here. It's a lot of hours. My partner has an EV and coming back from work it gets plugged in and by noon next day it is still not charged up to what it was before going to work the day before.
It kind of works because here they only need to go to work twice a week and not on consecutive days, but on rare occasions when consecutive days are needed it requires a trip to a commercial charger.
> You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on.
No. They drive to whole foods and spend an hour or so waiting around to charge it up enough to get to work and back (not 100%).
It takes a lot of committment and careful planning to drive an EV. For an occasional commute like here, it's mostly ok.
What kind of outlet are we talking about here. Either this outlet is somehow very limited or the commute is very long.
A standard wall outlet, as in the post I was responding to.
I mean, yes and no.
But there's side effects.
Haven't looked at TFA but unless they considered realities of condos/etc (my condo, parking is more like an apartment) that must be considered too.
If I don't have a way to charge my car at night I will hold on to an ICE with every fiber of my being, and at this rate unfortunately it's the just about-ish 12 year old 20-25MPG WRX instead of the 2.6 year old 37-45MPG Maverick Hybrid, based on downtime/repair cost if I had to pick one today.
As far as 'driving habits' mine vary greatly.
However whenever possible I take the Maverick for trips that can be hotshot (my current record is ~830 miles in 14ish hours with 10-15 minute stops along the way as needed.) Honestly with a good side crew I can do it all myself while clearing my mind (i.e. spare cycles while focusing on driving, I think about baggage.)
I honestly don't know if I could do the same sort of trip in a current EV even if there were the best charging stations at every stop we went to.
Maybe we could?
OTOH that's the 'distance' case. Compare to driving up north in MI where stations are few and far between, or worse, the UP where a car accident may cause a many-hour backup.
I should note, for my hybrid, my 'cutoff' for Hotshotting, once I am <100 miles till refuel, I get topped fully back off.
I know how to mitigate, but how do we deal with the people that can't even handle stop signs and signals?
And if it's an emergency, why would I want to waste 10 minutes charging instead of just going where I need to go right away--since it's an emergency?
Arguments like this boil down to "I think you should accept just giving up something you want, for nothing in return." Which ordinary people quite rationally do not see as a deal they should accept.
I have relied on this setup for multiple years without stress.
For EVs to truly win in the US, we’re going to have to wait for boomers to die, or stop driving.
Edit: downvote me boomers. Do it.
It is going to be a while until a brand has the trust per dollar that Prius/camry/corolla/rav 4 hybrids and the like do.
My wife has the charging concern when I bring up buying a Tesla as her next car. She's worried about running out of juice but she only drives 30 miles round trip to work every day plus maybe a grocery run or a similar trip to relatives.
She asks about going on longer range trips and I say that's why our second car would be a hybrid, such as the Prius I have.
That's because gas stations are plentiful in most areas and you usually only spend a few minutes refueling. If gas stations are rare and/or the pumps are slow or unreliable, you bet most drivers will keep themselves topped up more often than not.
The behaviour is caused by "ease of resolution".
Low Petrol - 10 minutes to drive to the servo and fill up, almost guaranteed and no more worries. If a long drive, then maybe another stop.
Low EV charge - where I live, maybe you can do a quick 10 minutes somewhere and get a long way and while you're travelling find another 10 minute stop etc.
But people don't want to add extra "unknowns" - however small - in an emergency. People want certainty. People want "Problem fucking dealt with."
Emergencies don't happen often, it really isn't optimal day-to-day behaviour. But sometimes emergencies matter; for themselves, their family, or their friends.
So I don't think you'll stop this range anxiety until it is as easy - and well known to be easy - as dinojuice currently is.
A sibling comment put it well -ease of resolution. I can drive comfortably with less a 1/4 of a tank either in town or on long trips. I can easily find a gas station, fuel up in 5 min and drive away with a full tank without worrying much about it. I don’t want to think about looking for chargers, or structuring my trips around them. It would just not be fun for me and add extra hassles. That’s just my personal take, of course. One day we’ll have super high capacity batteries, much faster and ubiquitous chargers, and then I will happily buy an EV.
I am sorry but NO. EV fans always push this narrative but now finally having experienced it myself by doing day long road trips in Mach-e, Bolt, and Tesla I can clearly say that this is more of a problem than you let on.
Maybe if you are on Tesla NACS which is plug in and 3 seconds later it starts but for others you must account for the time it takes to get the charger to start. Even if you are on Tesla, repeating the process of stopping, connecting and then waiting still adds time to the trip.
Typically on Non Tesla it involves bringing up the app, waiting for the charger to "negotiate" with the car and then accounting for any failures in communication and restarting the process to compensate. To be fair, Tesla has really perfected this as much as they can but that time is still spent.
Repeat this process for every "10 mins" you have to stop and for a long road trip all of a sudden all those minutes end up to 1+ hours.
And no typically, 10 mins gets you 300-500 miles of range in a gas car depending on model but 10 mins cannot get anything close to that in any electric car(and thats accounting for ideal conditions like being in the right part of the battery charge curve, no other cars occupying the same block of chargers, etc.)
You will spend more minutes despite Tesla being the clear leader in making this experience as painless as possible and in an emergency that could be a dealbreaker.
10 years driver of evs here (california then arizona): 110v wall outlet was more than adequate almost always...not adequate if trying to go super far.
the question is what fraction of daily distances driven exceed what overnight recharging can do, I believe.
A standard wall outlet will charge a car perfectly fine for your average driver assuming you can park the car for several hours. I would hope the vast majority of Americans who have access to a driveway will be able to find a block of time for this. Perhaps this duration may be found overnight when one sleeps.
If the worst happens and you need to travel for an emergency, you just need enough juice to get you to a DC fast charger. You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on. I would place bets that most people do not keep their gas cars filled to 100% in case they need to do that weekly emergency 300-mile drive that everyone seems to have.
The bigger and most realistic issue is capacity for travel rushes. When everyone’s driving to relatives for the holidays, finding a line at chargers isn’t ideal. Fortunately this isn’t a problem in the vast majority places today and I hope continued investment in fast charging networks ensures this remains a limited problem.