EV Charging Infrastructure in America Still Sucks
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1. For me, my commute is about 12 miles one way, so my Volt has enough electric capacity for my commute plus 1 errand on a single charge. 95% of my days are 100% electric.
2. I never have "range anxiety" - if I do go slightly over my limit the gas engine kicks in. I use a tank of gas about every 4-6 months.
3. Since my car's electric range is only ~38 miles, I can fully charge in about 8-9 hours overnight on a plain 110v outlet - no custom installation required for a home charger.
I bought a low-mileage used Volt - it was a great deal and the best car I've ever owned.
Software engineers like me tend to prefer the idea of making something as simple as possible though. I hate having a relational database AND Elasticsearch for full-text search. If I can get away with the database taking care of my search needs, I'll gladly rip Elasticsearch out of my architecture. Likewise, the idea of ripping the ICE and associated components out of the car feels satisfyingly simple. But, sometimes you need robust full-text search. And sometimes you need to drive a lot of miles in a short amount of time.
I was strongly considering the Volt when it first came out but never pulled the trigger so always curious to hear how it worked out for the people that did.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40168/2022-mazda-mx-30-ev-the-...
No engine RPM changing when coupled with a generator. Use as a range extender is perfect for a rotary where it's power to weight ratio smashes all other ICE designs. Far fewer moving parts too. The only things that really gave a hassle with rotary engines were the seals and this isn't the 80's any more either.
I always wanted an RX-7 and had many friends who did. I'd rather change seals in a rotary than a timing belt!
If a bigger/heavier engine could charge the battery more efficiently, but you only use it 1% of the time and the other 99% of daily commutes you're draining your battery to carry a bigger engine around, is it really more efficient?
Hopefully someone at Mazda has run those numbers and they figured that for a range extender, this was the best solution.
Has Mazda improved their design or manufacturing in the last 20 years? Probably. Would I trust it even if someone gifted it to me? Not a chance.
VW skipping the ID.3 hatchback and only bringing the crossoverified ID.4 to the US on the other hand, is more disappointing. It's one thing to do that with a gas car where gas stations are all over and it takes two minutes to fill up. For an electric you're making a direct tradeoff of less battery range to turn the car into a fake SUV that is never going to leave the asphalt. Boooo.
I went in to ask about them early on and the people knew nothing. I was confused by ads about them that talked about 'range' I thought maybe the car couldn't run only on the gas generator and it just extended it or something.
The dealers were anti-selling them and directly hostile.
In the end it turned out just to be stupid advertising - I'm not sure why you'd talk about a 'range' when you can fill up and immediately keep going, it's misleading.
These companies have no hope against Tesla - the superchargers are excellent.
Even now, they've bought Cruise and relegated them to one trim level on one model? There's no hope for them. That tech should be default on every model in their entire fleet.
With that said though, I've found that sales not knowing anything about the cars they sell to be the trend of late. Even with ICE cars I've bought lately, the sales people have known virtually nothing about the car that I couldn't read on the sticker.
I lived in Western New York suburbia at the time and there was a strong anti-ev anti-liberal tribal sentiment that seemed to be contributing.
Bingo - the real rub for existing car manufacturers - their existing dealer networks.
Then again from the frequent Tesla repair horror stories I see it seems Tesla would do well to court a lot more dealers/repair options.
1. More expensive than an equivalent ICE car
2. Less environmentally friendly than an EV
3. More complicated than either
4. Harder to fix when something goes wrong because now you have two powertrains crammed in one package
5. Zero cool factor
That doesn't work on a hybrid, because the big battery is often drained during normal operation, and you have to worry about the fuel going stale.
Random example, no affiliation: https://no.co/products/power/jumpstarters
a) the Volt keeps about 10% battery charge unavailable for driving. To help maintain the battery and also for the purpose you mention.
b) the Volt keeps track of when you last ran the ICE, and runs it every few months on a "maintenance cycle" to keep the fuel and fuel system from going stale
The Prius is one of the most reliable cars on the market. This whole EV = less complex = more reliable idea is way overrated by the EV community.
If its Volvo style PHEV then yes, correct. It has normal ICE and gearbox on front and electric motor on rear.
If it's Toyota style PHEV then no. Because then the comparison is not a gasoline car with gearbox etc but it's Toyota's classic hybrids that started with Prius. You basically just take that kind of hybrid, slap in a bigger battery and you're done. They already have electric motors in them instead of traditional gearbox.
5. Case in point: RAV4 Prime. That thing is cool.
Yes, it adds more complexity but it also gets you something you can't get with an all electric - hundreds of miles of range in minutes with a simple gas tank fill up.
Yes, it would be great if the technology was mature enough to go pure EV. But batteries and power delivery for them isn't there for the vast majority of people. So rather than stick our heads in the sand, what's wrong with transitional technology while we work on plugging the gaps?
Our new inability to compromise is going to be the death of western society :p
1. Government requires 50 mile range (about 20kwh battery) in all new cars. PHEV quickly becomes the default for all models (cars, SUV, trucks). Battery supply is less of an issue (A single 80kwh Tesla battery can be used in 4 PHEV cars).
2. DC fast charging (250kw) infrastructure is built in all cities. A small PHEV battery (20kwh) + DC fast charging means battery can be completely charged in minutes, as fast as filling up a gas tank. Maybe DC fast charging could even be built right next to the gas pumps (fill up gas and battery at the same time) This makes PHEV work for those without charging at home.
3. PHEV works fine in all weather. Battery range drops during winter? Just use some more gas, there's no range anxiety.
4. People get used to the feeling of driving in EV mode. And they notice how nice and quiet it is compared to when the ICE warms up. Also the environmental benefits.
5. Car manufacturers and battery companies get solid state batteries ready for mass production. Now is the time for 300 miles+ full EV cars. With solid state, no cold weather problems, much faster charge rate, no fire risk, no liquid cooling system, much higher durability. This is the battery tech that can fully replace ICE.
> 5. Car manufacturers and battery companies get solid state batteries ready for mass production. Now is the time for 300 miles+ full EV cars. With solid state, no cold weather problems, much faster charge rate, no fire risk, no liquid cooling system, much higher durability. This is the battery tech that can fully replace ICE.
EVs already have enough battery capacity for 90% of trips with a simple at home charger that you plug into your regular wall socket. We need to radically scale up production, not wait for some uncertain future. Maybe solid state batteries will match current batteries in cost in half a decade, maybe not. Until then we are ravaging the environment for no reason at all when we already have a perfectly good solution with no downsides.
A couple hundred miles is hardly "cross-country". If you're in the San Francisco, just drive to Monterey and back, and Google Maps tells me you'll log some 240mi (assuming you don't hit traffic or diversions)...
If you're driving a 240 mi round trip, at the half way point you will be taking time away from the car on whatever business brought you there in the first place.
In that time your car will be sitting idle and it can be topping up ready for the return trip.
For example you could be visiting friends, your mother, taking your girl out for dinner or going to a business meeting.
> assuming they have free charging spots
Why does it have to be a free charging station?
Now, you obviously need to use something like google maps to plan your trip, to make sure the place you're going to has a charging station.
But I was commenting on your 'San Francisco to Monterey' trip.
And as time goes on as more charging options become available, those '240mi round trip' options will also grow.
I think he means unoccupied.
> Now, you obviously need to use something like google maps to plan your trip, to make sure the place you're going to has a charging station.
What if the place you're going doesn't have a charger? I run into this issue a lot. I got on a trip that only requires one charge in between but, if I'm going to a family members house, they don't have a dc fast charger at their house. That means, even though my car is sitting in their driveway for a few hours, I still need to stop for 45 minutes on my way home.
For me, personally, all the little caveats of driving an EV work out okay. In the situation I described, I'm okay with hitting a charger on my way home and spending the time waiting. I've taken it on a couple 2 or 3 stop trips (depending on how long you want to stop) and it's not really a big deal. I'm planning a trip next month where the drive will be two days with a total of 3-4 stops on each leg. I'm generally an early adopter and I kinda just think it's cool so I like it. But I don't have a family and I have some free time.
However, when I talk to people about it, I always mention it and I would never flat out recommend and EV to someone because of the charging situation. I think an EV would make a great second car for just about any family or couple but having it as your main and only car has drawbacks.
"Free charging spots" -> not free as in beer, but free as in available
The example was to Monterey, a trip I do (did) very often to take the kid to the aquarium.
Parking on the street, there's no charging to be had, so no, car isn't topping up.
I never took the electric car to Monterey, I'd be stranded.
So don't talk about the environment and say full EV is better than PHEV. Make other arguments if you want, but don't use climate change for your position, the math is clear, one Tesla = four PHEVs and 95% of trips are under 30 miles.
That gives you 20%-80% of your quick and safe usage of your battery.
Also rated at 50 miles is more like 30 highway in real life. Adding all these things up makes 80mi as low as you want to go for normal US cities. In Europe it wouldn’t be an issue perhaps.
A broken-in real-world Leaf won’t finish a 60mi highway round trip without making you sweat towards the end. And that’s for perfectly planned trips, but a crash that makes you take a detour could put you in a risky situation. I’ve had to tow my GF more than once because something unexpected happened and she just simply ran out of juice. Not because of poor planning, but because life just happened that way.
This doesn't follow at all. Range anxiety is not being able (or worrying about cutting too close) to make it while out on the road. If you stay so close to home that you can go back and charge that's not the scenario.
Like when I took (pre-pandemic) our Fiat 500e to work and whether I can run an errand after work depends on the lottery of whether I can get a charger spot at the office.
Or having to come up with elaborate schemes to get the car to the dealer because it's too far on one charge.
The car is awesome for short errands near home but anything farther out becomes a project to manage.
According to a cursory google search the Fiat 500e has a range of 320km. Make that 250 due to overstated advertising if you want. Surely this has to be enough to ride your car to and back from work and pick up a bunch of groceries on the way? How long is your commute?
In rural places 50 mile trips are normal. It's not unusual to drive 90 miles each way in a day. And chances are you won't find an EV charger on either end.
And in rural areas you have single phase electric, slowing down charges. And in the same places, power goes out for days at a time most years.
If you think the US is ready to go EV-only you live in an urban bubble. In much of the US, EV's are still wildly impractical.
In the country you may need to go 500 miles with no electricity when power is out for a week. Only a fool would buy an EV in sparse areas where long outages happen (most of rural US)
Rural areas off the grid usually have some way of getting their own electricity, like solar or small hydro. These places typically also lack roads so Tesla charging isn’t much of an issue.
America is greater than 80% urban, not as urban as Canada and Australia, but urban enough that even if rural dwellers had vastly different electric resources, there would still be a huge market for EVs. If anything, urban users have a disadvantage because many of them don’t have their own parking in residence to charge overnight, which is not really a problem in rural America.
I can't say I have ever experienced a situation where I could not drive a short distance and pick up gas. Even when I was without power for days, there was no issue getting gas.
Our longest outage was a bit over a week. Several days was normal.
And backup power is never enough to charge EV. You would need to run typical 120v 1500w generator for days.
We used our gas car for backup power. Many others did too. Idle and hook an inverter to battery and it will do 1000w output for a couple days.
Rural is a bad sell for EV's because they don't have 80kw supply needed for charging stations or reliable enough electric.
A fair amount of city drivers do not have a dedicated off street parking space where they can install a charger. There are basically zero street parking spots in any American city with charging. It is not going to be possible to retrofit most multistory garages to have even a significant minority of spots with chargers.
I live and work in fairly new multistory buildings, and there aren’t many EV spots. My coworkers with EVs move their cars around constantly in hope of getting their one hour ration of charging in the office garage.
So screw everyone not having either their nice American suburban home or their nice luxury apartment complex with a parking spot and a charger for each flat ?
No, it's the practical and realistic one. There is nothing wrong with a transitional strategy such as range extenders. Indeed, it will provide the strongest natural incentive to expand the charging networks - demand!
You can try to top down force things all you want - good luck with that. It's far more effective to figure out how to get people to naturally go - or heck willingly run to - where you need them to be then beat them over the head and lecture them about how stupid/wrong/wasteful they are. Yeah, people just love to engage with folks berating them for how bad they are (i.e. keep the overheated ravaging rhetoric to a minimum if you want normal people to engage with you).
Compromise - it works. If you play a zero sum game you more often than not will get zero results.
>EVs already have enough battery capacity for 90% of trips
Until it's 100% it's irrelevant for all but the most devout faithful. No one in their right mind buys a partial solution to their pressing problems. Which is why range extenders are brilliant. Fill up with a tank of gas or plug in at a reduced cost with an offset of it requiring more time? I get to make the choice? Brilliant!
But! The charge rate on batteries is directly proportional to their capacity (given same battery tech). So a tesla 20 kwh pack would charge 10-80% about as fast as a 100 kwh battery. So I think series-evs would mostly charge at home as a result and get gas while out and about if they need range.
Actually, it is a good thing that range limits and recharge durations require breaks - it is recommended to do regular breaks, generally between 15m/2h (per http://drivingergonomics.lboro.ac.uk/faq.html) to 15m/3h (https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/safety/tired-drivers).
I'm not sure if this is just a random correlation or actual causation, but Tesla's accident rate is way lower than generic even without Autopilot (1/1.79M miles driven vs 1/0.479M miles driven, per https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...).
One clear example that makes a huge difference in accident rates is the age of the driver. The average Tesla owner was 54 in 2018 vs 38 for car owners in general [1]. Teenagers are involved in 2-4 times more accidents per miles driven than drivers over the age of 30 [2], so by having a very low percentage of drivers under the age of 30 relative to other brands, you can already expect to see a significant difference in accident rates.
Further, the article you quote says that Tesla's numbers "includes any activation of active restraints (airbags/pretensioners) which is crashes over 12mph.", whereas my link [2] is for any police reported crash, which would include fender-benders and other low speed accidents.
I suspect that if you could correct for these factors, you'd find that Tesla's aren't statistically safer than other comparable cars.
[1] https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demograph... [2] https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
I guess cost is an issue, but there will be a good percentage of buyers who would surely opt for such an addon.
For how long?
If the car has only worked a couple of years I'm not exactly shocked if it's still working well... for any car.
Especially in the west when you had so many cars struggling with the long climbs, my volt just was cruising by them with ease.
This was especially when they are bought for large fleets - which makes some sense to me, after all, when it is your companies car, not yours, and its on the company's dime when you either fill up the gas once a week or charge it every night, why do the thing that is more annoying?
EDIT: It is no longer a rumor - thanks to another commenter I lost who linked to this: https://www.thedrive.com/news/40168/2022-mazda-mx-30-ev-the-...
While others may be content waiting around for sufficient charging infrastructure or blaming the customer I'm not. If I go EV it will be one with a range extender. Or I'll just keep my gassers until the infrastructure catches up.
It took 50 years for the highway network and gas station infrastructure to build out for gas powered cars - we have just begun to start with EVs and range extenders are the perfect transitional key that will generate the need for the charging networks while still providing practical ways for people to as effortlessly get around as they do with their gas car today.
You can't make the users experience worse than moan and complain people aren't flocking to your bright, shiny new thing. And that's the big problem with electric only cars right now - there is no good solution for longer trips where you need more energy quickly. I don't care if the majority of peoples trips fit well within an all electric car's operating parameters - the outliers must be addressed too.
EVs don’t do that. In an EV, you drive for a few hundred miles at best, then you spend 30-60 minutes at a supercharger if you’re lucky; or at least several hours at a “normal speed” charger if you’re not. At which point, you can proceed cautiously forward after much delay, always checking your EV’s estimated range remaining — and mapping out when and where the next charger session will have to be.
Because of the above dynamic, EV range figures can be a bit misleading. “Effective daily maximum range” is a better metric, i.e. how far one tank of fuel gets you multiplied by how many tanks of fuel you can go through in a day of driving. EVs need to have a far larger range than their ICE counterparts for true equivalence here, to offset the drastically higher downtime of seeking out chargers and using them extensively.
In addition, independent charger networks are really hit or miss: those handy EV charging station locator apps often times display out-of-date information; the chargers are difficult to find; and the particular charger you end up with exhibits mechanical and/or payment issues not infrequently. Tesla’s supercharger stations are also a magnet for criminals — got the feeling I was being cased once at the Austin supercharger. (“The future is already here—It's just not very evenly distributed”)
For people who have access to a regular, dedicated charging outlet at home, or at work, an EV could make perfectly good sense. Still love EVs, and I agree they’re the future — but they’re the future moreso than the present for many, oweing mainly to these infrastructural issues.
The leading edge of EV’s (Model S Long Range) now have over 400 miles (300+ to 80%). I-95 for example in NJ and CT have 250kW peak Superchargers spaced every 20-30 miles or so. Its not quite the same as ICE still but it is getting very close. I can imagine the technology will be there in 2-3 years and it doesn’t require any sort of solid state battery technology.
If you are lucky!
EVs should target the regular commuter market. I was really surprised that Tesla invested in the supercharger network. I get the idea, but in the US, do people really go on such long drives regularly?
Meaning basically never.
So that's 0.3%.
Now ask what the marginal cost of a electric car that can drive 500 miles without stopping vs one that goes have the distance. What's that $20,000? For 16 trips? That's $1250 a trip.
From an accounting point of view that's insane. You should buy the lower range cheaper car and fly.
Your heart is a relatively small part of your overall biomass.
So why don't you just do without it?
>From an accounting point of view that's insane. You should buy the lower range cheaper car and fly.
Even more presumptuous. What are you supposed to do on the other end of that plane flight to get around? Rent a car? Bum off of friends/family?
I once thought it would be cost effective to buy an EV and just rent when I needed to take longer trips - until I did the math. Rental cars get very expensive very quickly!
When everyone else is having the same thoughts. What happens if you don't get a rental car? No trip? Yeah, that's going to go over well...
At least on the west coast (distances are longer) that's quite common. San Francisco to Los Angeles is ~400 miles. A day trip is ~800 miles, done it often.
San Francisco to Portland is ~600 miles, done that very often as well.
Millions of cars on the road happen for a reason. Just because you rarely go on such trips doesn't mean for some they aren't more frequent for others. Heck just to go to my favorite German restaurant or go for my favorite crab cakes that could be a 300 mile round trip. I would do either without a second thought with my current cars and until EVs can get to the same level of comfort for people they will remain a niche vehicle.
That's the practical reality. You can hop up and down with your arguments around moral superiority and god help any idiot who tries to force change via legislation. Want to see a real revolution real fast? Just poke that bear.
Cars = freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom of expression, economic freedom (choice of jobs, supplies, living location, etc.). EV proponents can acknowledge this and work to rationally solve the issues (with transitional tech like range extenders), or continue to insist everyone else is doing it wrong and remain a niche.
Until most of the fervor around EVs graduates from cult status to being at least a touch pragmatic there won't be significant change. Screaming louder about how the environment is being ravaged (right or wrong) isn't going to move the needle either. You convince people by solving their problems, meeting their needs and doing so in a rational manner.
It really isn't that hard - until you roll up your sleeves and really start to work through things. Until we all are willing to do that it's just wish casting.
But as it happens, we’d drive 500 miles from Atlanta to St Louis every winter to visit our grandparents when we were growing up. I’m sure lots of people have relatives or friends they could visit who live about that far away.
Alternatively, Birmingham to Orange Beach is a bit shy of 300 miles one way. Atlanta to various popular beach vacation spots in Florida and South Carolina is roughly comparable. Beach vacation territory, IOW, is commonly several hundred miles one way.
I believe, though, it's only a matter of time before charging stations reach parity with gas stations. It's already possible to take a road trip by major highways with a Tesla.
For a full transition to EVs, the charger network is going to need enough capacity to handle large emergencies like hurricane evacuations. A typical gas station with 4-8 pumps can keep a lot of cars moving in that sort of situation, and it doesn’t feel like electric charging stations will be able to handle that load anytime soon.
And that's the real resistance here - freedom. EV enthusiasts do themselves zero favors when they try to pretend that it's not a real issue.
You are driving EV cars wrong.
> EVs don’t do that. In an EV, you drive for a few hundred miles at best, then you spend 30-60 minutes at a supercharger if you’re lucky
If you do this, you will have a terrible experience! EVs charge ultra fast when the battery is low. You are supposed to drive them down to say 10%, then charge up to around 50% repeatedly. This takes.. 10 minutes. You drive for 200 miles or so, stop for 10 minutes, repeat. It's pretty reasonable to take a 10 minute break every 2.5 hours. On an 8 hour (500 mile) drive, you will charge for 30 minutes or so. You should start using abetterrouteplanner.com
I bet, that when you go on a 500 mile drive, you are stopping that often to use the facilities and get some food already. Nothing changes.
> Because of the above dynamic, EV range figures can be a bit misleading
The corrected dynamic shows that EV range figures are spot on and you lose no time on long drives.
> Tesla’s supercharger stations are also a magnet for criminals — got the feeling I was being cased once at the Austin supercharger. (“The future is already here—It's just not very evenly distributed”)
I have exactly the opposite experience. In my city Tesla chargers are all in good malls, with plenty of people around, and lots of things to do. I've been to far shadier gas stations.
> For people who have access to a regular, dedicated charging outlet at home, or at work, an EV could make perfectly good sense
For sure. A charger at home is necessary. We had a few months between buying the car and getting the charger installed and the change was just astounding.
It's entirely personal, but I don't like to drive for more than 2.5 hours at a stretch, I find my eyes start to lose a bit of focus and it feels dangerous to me.
Like the gas station? Here in Norway most gas station chains are building out chargers, and a lot of them have charging stations right next to them already.
After all, gas stations still want to rake in on those snacks and drinks...
Pointing the obvious is just silly.
Just as silly as pretending it's not an issue either :p
That's why range extenders are the perfect compromise and I'm excited to see the Mazda solution. A rotary is the perfect engine for a range extender - small, lightweight, few moving parts - and at a fixed speed many of the issues with seals won't be an issue at all. Should be an incredible solution and perfect transitional vehicle.
I'm not sure why you're basing this off the assumption current EV's have 500 miles of range... (10->50% of 500 miles would be those 200 miles you're driving)
With actual EV's being more like 250-300, 10->50% is only 100-120 miles. Which leads me to...
> It's pretty reasonable to take a 10 minute break every 2.5 hours.
That's more like a 10 minute break every 90 minutes, and not very reasonable for trips taking 5-10 hours.
Certainly not. For example on a cross country trip the year before the pandemic I drove my regular car. 400 miles between fuel stops, 5-10 minute stop to fill up and hit the bathroom, ready for another 400 miles. Very easy to do over 1000 miles per day with no worries.
With my Fiat 500e, it's 80 to 90 miles then stop for 3-5 hours to charge. I plan very hard to never be stuck farther than 40 miles from home with that car.
For short errands in town though, it's absolutely perfect!
Luckily I can own multiple cars, right tool for each job. But if I could only have one, it would not be electric.
Maybe an electric vehicle on it's current form isn't going to work for you with a regular 1000 mile per day trip, but you're at least 15 years off _new_ petrol vehicle sales being banned, so second hand ones are around for another 25 at least.
As an aside, this individualist respond of "well i can't do a 1000 mile road trip in one sitting" is why these vehicles are being phased out by legislation, because people won't even consider the _smallest_ changes to their driving habits without being forced to.
Plus the sheer nerd excitement of watching my car drink 250KW on the app while I ate a meal. There’s nothing technically exciting about gas stations.
These long road trips infact make me feel guily about driving an ICE car, that I had to make a tiny mess in the atmosphere for one tiny ape to get this amazing feeling.
I highly doubt this is most people. I can do 200miles at best before I need a 10-15 minutes break. For woman/kids you are looking at 100 miles per break and more minutes per break.
Charging batteries is a SIGNIFICANT time sync. You can justify it however you like, but it's still there.
I'm not doing a theoretical comparison, these are cars I can afford and actually own right now.
> you should be comparing to an Ev actually meant to drive 200+ miles, teslas, mache, taycan
I can't responsibly afford a tesla, mache or taycan, so not going to compare those.
I can easily afford a sub-20K regular car though and it lets me do 1000+ mile day road trips.
I assume that also includes tours through the Australian outback or the Siberian winter?
I can refuel an ICE car everywhere within minutes with just a canister. No need for a dedicated refueling spot aka gas station.
Yes, I frequently take my Toyota Carrolla across the Sahara in June. Until they make an EV that can do that in one trip, they're utterly useless to everyone everywhere under any circumstances.
And that's why EVs as currently pitched will NEVER take off. Heck you probably lost the majority of readers of this site, many of which probably have pretty pro-EV leanings when you start blaming the user.
If you are trying to win someone over to your side, telling them they are doing it wrong is NOT a great way to keep them engaged or convince them.
For example - you could point out that sure, EVs don't work exactly the same way as gasoline cars, but for these trade offs you get these other benefits.
Not by hitting them over the head with "your doing it wrong". Good grief.
>I bet, that when you go on a 500 mile drive, you are stopping that often to use the facilities and get some food already. Nothing changes.
Granted I'm probably not most people, but I'm far from in a minority that when I'm doing a long drive I just go. The only time I stop is to get more fuel which I may combine with a meal, maybe not. And I've never had that take more than 30 minutes. I've crossed the US in three days more times than I care to admit and have maybe one more of those trips left to face. And that's leaving me some nice time to have dinner/sleep and a decent breakfast before setting back out. Someone really motivated could probably do it in two but I think it's important to get good sleep when on those kinds of drives. Waiting around 45 minutes every 200-300 miles is ludicrous.
While I don't relish those trips, I relish being at my destination more than I do the drive to get there so an EV would be a huge downgrade and handicap. And at least one, if not two more nights of hotel bills. No thanks!
That’s because the energy is transferred into the ICE car’s tank without changing its form and there is therefore no real theoretical limit on the refueling speed.
For EVs, energy is changing its form from electric to chemical energy and due to the heat losses during that transformation process, you cannot arbitrarily increase the refueling speed.
This conversion of energy during refueling is why I personally think that battery-electric cars are not the best solution for clean cars.
Yup - I used to think hydrogen fuel cells were ridiculously over complicated until you run into this aspect of battery driven electric vehicles. Now the allure of hydrogen makes sense - quick fill ups!
When did cars start getting 500 miles to tank? I owned various incarnations of the Honda Accord for almost 30 years and the best I ever got was just over 300 miles.
You can do the same in an EV, there have been plenty of times where I left the house and returned with more charge due to using hills and regenerative braking.
That being said, it's unusual and you wouldn't expect go get highway MPG ratings under regular use unless your regular use is strictly highway driving under optimal conditions.
In any case, my only point was that there are cars out there that can drive 500 miles on a single tank. The 9-3 I did it with is getting close to 20 years old. I'm sure there are older cars capable of the same.
They still have a bit of software ironing to do though, still feels like a beta sometimes, I’ve had to move from stall to stall 3-4 times out of 40 charges.
Also, yes, obviously, if you’re in Manhattan, you’ll find less chargers. But why are you using a car there?
Price for Electrify America in Florida:
Guest and Pass Members: $0.43/kWh
Pass+ Members: $0.31/kWh + $4 monthly fee
Price for Supercharger in the same area: $0.23/kWh
What regulations drove todays adoption of the car?
Good grief. How about good 'ol market forces? EVs with range extenders to bridge the shortcomings of today? If you have the time and for lower cost on a trip, plug in. If you need the speed/convenience of gas you pay for it - but most trips would convert to electric. Gas would be reserved for the edge cases. Cars will still fundamentally work like cars when people need them to, but you can also get the benefits of the EV lifestyle.
Compromise without having to compromise on utility. It's win-win.
Mass adoption of transitional technology will do more to galvanize support for vast charging networks far more quickly (by - here's the crazy thought - producing actual demand!) then trying to conjure them out of sheer will and regulation.
We have a BMW i3, and while there's a decent amount of CCS chargers around here in Norway, every other seems to be from a different company.
I exaggerate, but it truly is a pain to deal with, especially since they all have different prices and price structures. For
example our i3 can only handle 50kW charging, what happens when I plug it into a 150kW charger? Depends on who owns the charger, some charge per kWh delivered, some per minute. So for some it's gonna be OK, for others it's gonna cost more than filling up a gas tank.
That's because it's a 50 kW charger. It's displayed right on the screen as the image in the article shows:
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...
Also the lack of charging means I could not drive an EV to visit family members, only destination charging available at hotels where I wouldn’t be staying.
Obviously the supercharging network is constantly growing and it’s all still new, but in my neck of the woods its still pretty tough to have.
Assuming you mean the US, the 150th-largest city is Salem, Oregon, which has 174K people. [1] If that's the size of your city, and it's not in a part of the country that tends to buy Teslas, I'm slightly impressed that you have even have one supercharger.
How would the author's experience have been different if the car was in their driveway fully charged in the morning?
Do most people go to bed at night with no idea what they'll be doing the following day or no consideration for how much fuel is in their vehicle?
First, it doesn't matter that most journeys are short and that the overwhelming majority of drivers will make between zero and two really long range trips a year (yes, even in the US). People size their long term capital purchases based on their perception of the limiting case, not the average. Consumer willingness to rent a longer range vehicle for special occasions will also depend on how convenient that experience is. Many Americans drive long-distance in the Thanksgiving to Christmas window which would require enough long range capacity to be reliably available for all those people every year. Again, we have to size for the extremes of the system. Also, car rental may be logistically challenging (and is certainly currently inconvenient) in most of the rural areas where people are most likely to need long distance driving regularly.
Second, the amount of time that a driver will need to find an available charger is very much non-linear in the number and density of chargers. We know quite a lot about this dynamic from studies of parking. Once your parking capacity in a given area is filled by more than about 80%, the time taken to find a spot very rapidly increases from nearly zero to many minutes. I'm sure there are theoretical computer science problems which are analogous. (actually would love to hear if anyone knows of any since most of the infrastructure world has historically just looked at this empirically). The same dynamic happens with chargers. Like with parking, better information provision shifts that transition point. With perfect information.
Third, the stress induced by charger unavailability is also not linear in likely time required to find a charger.
This is particularly an issue for people who do not have off-street parking but do have cars. Admittedly this is much rare in the US but it is about a third of drivers in the UK and I imagine not uncommon in other European countries. That's because people need this as their default charger essentially every day so any inconvenience is substantially multiplied. Our thinking on public on-street charging for these cases is that you're much better off spending money on a lot of slow trickle chargers and absolutely saturating a neighbourhood with them rather than buying fewer 22kW fast chargers. Two reasons for that.
First, 22kW is a sort of "Inconvenient Valley" for public charging in domestic areas. It's not so fast that you can stay near your car but big enough that you never have enough of them to make it ok to just leave your car plugged in. That means that effective use requires coming home, plugging in and then realising as you get ready for bed that you should move your car so one of your neighbours can also come outside and use the charger. Faster 43-50kW chargers are much better in this context because they can be "cycled" a few times in the evening before everyone goes to bed. Otherwise you might as well just save the money and get many more slow chargers fed off lamp-posts to do overnight charging.
Second, You can reduce charger anxiety much more effectively by having an excess of slow chargers (even if that means that a fully empty battery is not fully charged by morning) than by having a lower probability of finding a higher power charger. That's because the slow charger effectively guarantees that you won't run out. Again, this is non-linear. An EV works just the same all the way down to zero charge but driver anxiety will start ramping at 15% or so.
What all of this means is that if charger build-out strategies go right, we will find that the transition from inconvenient to "why did we ever worry about this?" will happen faster than you might think.
In China for example, domestic EV startups are trying to come up with standards on swappable batteries. If the ideas work, it could be a separation of car companies, and battery subscription companies. The former sells cars without battery and the latter rents batteries from gas stations.
Not many people have a 50 amp, 220V circuit lying around to dedicate to charging. If they do there's already a welder plugged into it.
https://www.evconnect.com/blog/ev-infrastructure-tax-credits...
It's 174 billion for EV which is absolutely what we need. But there is no way we can do it without paying to upgrade people's houses. Unless rapid charging gets a lot quicker.
I'm looking at getting a car for the first time in over a decade. I would love an electric, but our building is 110 years old. To upgrade my units power box thing alone was quoted 12k.
I'm not sure how to get a quote for the outside building or if it's even feasible to do EV here. But it will be a lot more than that.
I'm not aware of any North American chargers that do this... https://dccelectric.com/ sort of solves the problem with a big relay, so charging either runs at 100% or 0%.
How could you even trust such a station?
This is for safety and the health of the battery. It is not widely advertised and many people don't know that the fastest levels of charging (tesla supercharge and similar) actually damage the battery a very slight amount, and will reduce overall battery life span, cycle depth ability and health if used very often. It's healthier for your battery to charge at a medium speed overnight.
It’s true that, at least with the S and X, excessive Supercharging will cause the battery to throttle peak charge currents for the remainder of the battery’s life, the Model 3 and Y chemistry doesn’t seem to exhibit the same throttling.