> "I live in an apartment, I can't charge one, on the street"
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/07/08/every-new-ho...
You're thinking about this from the wrong way around. The people who buy the first electric cars mainly don't live in places they can't charge them, they live in single family homes where they can install a charging port.
That allows enough electric cars to accumulate that the lobby for installing charging ports on city streets can form and get a few of them installed. But with more charging ports you get more people buying electric cars and so the lobby for installing even more charging ports grows, until they're all over the place.
There just needs to be a demand for the initial infrastructure to be built.
Not necessarily, see this document from the UK National Grid which discusses the options: https://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/articles/electric-dreams-fut...
The batteries are likely to survive 500k miles and there's a lot less moving parts so less things to go wrong.
So we pay roughly the same amount per mile with electricity as for gas — and I'm in CA, where gas is expensive. We do save a tiny bit when we get to charge for free or at a subsidized rate somewhere. But I think most of the savings comes from not wearing down our brake pads on the hills in our neighborhood, and not having so many moving parts to wear out. These savings are not huge when amortized over the number of miles driven.
That actually made me laugh. It might cost more than in other US states, but is almost free comparing to most of Europe [1]. Average size of cars and engines, larger car with larger engine use more gas, also tell a lot of price compared to income, and it you compare traffic in Europe and America you will also see that Americans pay way to little for gas
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/221368/gas-prices-around...
I think you're likely still saving money on the electric portion of your driving, as CA rates seem to be slightly lower than MA rates from a cursory Google search.
But most of the difference is that our vehicle is nowhere near as efficient as yours. The 9kW/h battery only goes about 18-20 miles on a charge, and it costs more than the $1 that you pay to get that many miles.
Snark aside, when we got our Chevy Spark EV in 2013, we switched to the EV rate plan and it has saved us a lot. I work at home too, and but the peak hour use on the EV plan is quite small, so the higher rate is balanced out by having the car automatically charge during off-peak.
Perhaps solar would help solve your daytime rate problem? Or a car with more battery?
Not that the people working in infrastructure maintenance waste the money.
A gas car refills to max range almost instantly. It just so happens this Camry example has particularly good range on one tank of gas by virtue of being a hybrid, but the point is no more diminished with any other ICE car. Many non-hybrid models will also comfortably manage 500+ miles on a single tank.
All that said, I suspect there is a “good enough” tipping point for EVs, especially now that we are seeing some manage ~300 miles on one charge, which is more than enough for many commutes/weekly shopping trips etc.
I do agree that there's a ton of evidence that Tesla's S/X have plenty of range for most people to not be bothered by it. And it doesn't appear to matter to these folks that a hybrid would fill up faster, which brings us back to hybrids.
https://andrew.london/2018/01/solving-the-electric-car-on-st...
An employer with a parking garage. That's a very funny concept.
But I do think between now and then we need more infrastructure for tenants to charge at home.
Consumer/taxpayer demand for a solution, like most problems in a capitalist democracy.
I imagine streets where every nth parking spot has something that looks like a beefy parking meter, but will allow thick-ish extension cords to run from a car to it. Turn it on with an RFID tied to which house you belong to on the street (ensures only locals can use it, charges the electrical costs to the right house).
It's technically doable with the technology in our hands today and not very complicated to install. Give in 10 more years, there'll be even smarter ideas.
Take 15K miles/year at 4 miles/kWh or 30 miles/gal. 3750kWh or 500 gallons of gas.
At MA electric rates, the electricity is $750, the gas is about $1500. It's unlikely that an electric car consumer would pay more than the $750 delta for the electric charging spot, and would likely be willing to pay only a smaller figure because they are unlikely to do all of their charging in that space or network of spaces.
That premium/willingness-to-pay won't even cover the all-in cost of installing a single EVSE in the first year.
Barring significant over-subscription, that's still a ~10 year payback. With massive over-subscription, it doesn't become a reliable charging source. (My prior post, which I'll leave unedited, was unclear/insufficient in stating it was longer than a one-year payback.)