I pay zero for my fueling because I do it at work or a local free level 2 charger where I'll drop it off then walk home and do other things for a few hours and come back. I'm in an apartment btw.
It's not the same as pulling up to a gas station but it's just about as easy, the cars handle better and it's a smoother ride.
You might have to be a little cheap to bother to logistically coordinate free charging, but when I drove a gas car I never got free fuel. It's pretty remarkable that it's an option.
Also they're way cheaper to maintain. I literally do not know where I'd even take my EV to get it repaired because its never happened. I'm on year 5 of EV driving btw.
People believing in FUD over EVs, I have given up on. Whatever, be wrong, it's fine. Also, I don't like Teslas. There's lots of great options on the market, Hyundai and Kia's lineup are fine choices. I'm considering an Ioniq 6 myself, probably mid-next year just to make sure there's no issues.
I haven't had to pay for fuel in half a decade. Theoretical abstractions and rhetorical slights of hand don't change that.
You can do whatever the heck you want.
>people don't appreciate the new patterns you use with an EV
The pattern you describe is not available.
Some work from home and there's no charger at the office and so they can't do what I do.
This is like if I said I charge my smartphone on my nightstand when I go to sleep and you say "aha, what about people without nightstands! Checkmate!"
A diversity of exacting detail doesn't make something infeasible. We still all say eat meals or communicate with words despite vast differences in how these things look and operate among all of humanity
Again it's not my personal responsibility to itemize all theoretical dimensions here.
And then not seem to understand why they wouldn’t…
It's that you can't define one system in another's terms.
Someone who lives in say Tokyo would probably see private car ownership as incredibly expensive and inconvenient while someone living in rural Montana probably can't conceive of how to live their life using public transit.
An inability to imagine new ways is inherent to any system change. I'm sure people can adapt just like I'm sure someone from Montana can get used to using trains if they went to Tokyo.
I don't know all the patterns but I've got faith that people can modify their behaviors as required by at least this amount.
But I get it. You can't really see it until you do it and then it's obvious and easy.
Read me bitch about it over 4 years ago https://kristopolous.medium.com/authorizing-a-charge-with-oc...
I had a bunch of conversations after that with people at greenlots, chargepoint, evgo, blink, and flo about bringing sanity into things ... The industry is smaller than you think here and my impact is nonzero. Near zero, but certainly nonzero!
A Bolt to be insured to the exact same level is $$4200 a year. A Tesla Model 3 would ring me $5700 a year. A Porsche Taycan is $7300 a year. None of these are as expensive as the NSX.
And the cost for me to install the additional circuits to the garage went up significantly since my last quote; it's now $2500 to run an additional circuit into the garage. I don't know what it would cost to upgrade the mains panel as well if it's needed (I have only a 100A) but I've heard it's averaging about $5000 or so.
So yeah... not exactly FUD at least from where I'm standing.
My costs went down so substantially when I switched to electric they are for all intents and purposes, effectively 0
Sorry if you can't figure it out.
>Sorry if you can't figure it out.
I'm honestly not sure if you're genuinely sorry if it's not working out for me, or if you're snarking.
The garage is detached one fed by a single 120V circuit buried in PVC conduit, and it is enough for everything in there at the moment. But if a car's charging at the same time say someone open's the garage door, it's going to trip the breaker.
So at least I'd have to pull a second circuit dedicated for charging. To do that, the old conduit needs to come out and be replaced with one that is up to code for handling either more then one circuit, or can handle a 240V circuit. The cost of digging the old one out and installing a new one is a very substantial portion of that quote.
Now granted this was a quote for a full 240V circuit with a subpanel; the quote last year was around $2000 ish. Inflation rate, increasing labor costs, and continuing supply chain issues caused the jump. I didn't get a chance to ask what the quote was for just a second 120V circuit though.
The mains upgrade cost is just what I've heard second hand from others upgrading their 100A service to 200A. I haven't gotten a quote for myself but it doesn't sound wrong to me. Just filing the paper work for the permit from the is a $160 fee. The permit itself IIRC is an additional $200 or $300. I suspect the electrician would have to get the utility involved as well to disconnect and upgrade the main lines coming from the street to the house to accommodate the increased possible amperage.
I pay $1200 a year to insure my Tesla Model S at the max liability coverage, with comprehensive and collision. Admittedly, I've filed that I drive a max of 6k miles a year and I have the highest deductible set on both comprehensive and collision, but I have strong doubts it'd quintuple in price to insure if I went and set those to more typical settings.
From what I understand the older you are the less you pay.
Also if the issue here were age, I assume that GP would also pay more for an ICE car.
Doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone else.
The range expectations are also completely crazy - driving more than 2 hours without a break is just unsafe and advised against. I wonder when the GP even goes to the bathroom.
Filling my (non economical, okay mileage) car takes ~5 minutes. I get ~300mi range from it. 30 minutes waiting for my car to charge up to 1/4-1/2 the mileage is a hard sell for some folks, depending on their workflow. I unfortunately can't run 240 at home, don't have ability to charge at work, and often find myself places that don't have many chargers in the area.
For many, EV totally works. But to say it's 20 vs 30 minutes is a little silly, IMO.
Not to mention that many people drive more than 2 hours without a break. I get that it's advised against, but I still want that ability in my car without being forced to stop.
Your median wait to “fill up” an ev for many/most people is 0 minutes, because they do it at home.
> Not to mention that many people drive more than 2 hours without a break.
This is standard in teslas, it’s standard in the Ioniq 6, and it will be standard in most mass market EVs in the near future (there may be a niche market for local-only cars).
EVs are only an issue for two types of folks:
1. Folks who can’t charge at home/work, and don’t have a natural place to charge while they are doing something else. Imho, this is an infrastructure issue that will be solved.
2. Folks who frequently take long road trips in a cannonball run style. Even this will be solvable with advance in battery tech (rumors are that Tesla have this tech in hand). 500-600 mile ranges with reasonable battery weight will be a thing.
My Tacoma only has 380 mile range and I still get range anxiety sometimes with finding gas. RAV4 Prime with 600 mile range is the dream, but you can't buy them unless you pay $10k markup.
Driving a lot + urban (not suburban) living makes electric cars a tough sell.
Quite frankly, many people can't buy a RAV4 Prime at any price regardless of markups due to availability. My local dealer just quoted me a wait time of up to 18 months for a non-pluggable RAV4 Hybrid because there are simply no chips to go around.
I'll grant that going to the Olympic national forest is 122 miles one way, so some range issues there for sure.
> AV4 Prime with 600 mile range is the dream,
Boise is 500 miles one way!
The entire point of living in Seattle is to that nature is insanely close by. (Sure as heck isn't for the friendly faces on the street or the affordable tasty food!)
This isn't an important use case for a lot of people, but's it's much more important to me than commuting :)
There are many more of these "destination chargers" in the US than fast DC chargers.
This car covers 99.99% of your current car usage. If you want that extra .01% (driving all day without stopping), you can rent a polluting vehicle in 5 mins on your phone.
Lots of hills. Hills everywhere. Going to the grocery store a mile away involves more elevation changes than people living in Florida go through in a year. Seriously, tons of hills in every direction.
Driving around the city, my current compact ICE, 1.6L turbo, tiny hatchback, gets around 22 miles to the gallon.
My other car, ICE, subcompact, 2L engine, 140 horse power, barely hits 20 MPG.
For my city's topography, EVs make a ton of sense.
> For my city's topography, EVs make a ton of sense.
I thought your conclusion would be the opposite. Hills kill EV range.
I've had a few Fiat 500e EVs, with a flatland range of about 90 miles. But commuting here involves some good hills (~2000ft elevation change) so the true range was more like 40 miles. Which was just about barely enough to get to work. Good thing there was free charging at the office.
It sounds like your source is your personal experience? EVs are far better than ICEs at navigating hills, because the moment you can no longer coast and must apply friction braking (either through your brake pedal or engine gearing) you lose 100% of the energy going to friction. In comparison, EVs typically recover the majority of the breaking energy (mine recovers 70-80%). This is the same reason that both EVs and hybrids substantially outperform ICEs in city driving - lots of application of friction brakes.
In addition, EVs tend to have a better coefficient of drag, so if you were tempted to go higher speeds down a hill, you'll find EVs get substantially better efficiency than ICEs there too.
I'm struggling to think of a hill-traversing scenario that doesn't overwhelmingly favor EVs for efficiency both in theory and practice.
Perhaps I misunderstood your complaint, and your concern is just the range and not the efficiency? In which case, I would offer that a 90m range EV is a local transportation vehicle not designed for that kind of travel. That kind of range is fairly niche nowadays, and I expect will eventually be largely phased out.
With the Fiat, it would use up about 30-40 miles of indicated range to go uphill less than 10 miles. But it would only recover 2-3 miles on the downhill side.
> is a local transportation vehicle not designed for that kind of travel
This is local travel, it's just that the area is hilly so going anywhere is going to inevitably involve hills.
> Perhaps I misunderstood your complaint, and your concern is just the range and not the efficiency?
To be fair, that's precisely what I said: Hills kill EV range.
Yeah, if you aren't riding the brakes, I agree with you that it sounds related to the Fiat. 35mi of range for 20mi of hills seems off.
> To be fair, that's precisely what I said: Hills kill EV range
Sure, but efficiency is a factor in range. What I'm saying is that, unless your EV range is so small that it can't get up the hill in the first place, hills shouldn't have a substantive impact on its range (much less so than an ICE).
I don't know a lot about the Fiat, so perhaps something strange is going on with its regen breaking. For example, with its smaller battery capacity, it's likely to have a lower max regen limit. Perhaps you're driving in cold weather and it poorly regens under those conditions. It looks like the Fiat does blended braking, so perhaps your using more of the friction brakes than you expect. Etc.
While I have not driven some of the most recent EVs and have no doubt they are better, the above statement surely contradicts physical reality.
It takes more energy to go up a hill than to drive on flat ground, so it is inevitable that a trip uphill will drain available range far faster than driving on flat ground.
Yes, but real world trips that involve hills tend to be somewhat balanced (round trips rather necessarily so) and it takes less energy to go down a hill than to drive on flat ground (and, while some of that advantage is wasted by excess speed from gravitational acceleration, regenerative braking can get a lot of that back, too.) So, the range impact on a trip with an uphill component will often not be substantive if you have enough energy to handle the uphill portion itself, if you have a car and driving pattern that uses things like regenerative braking efficiently.
All I can say is that didn't match my experience as an EV owner (leaser) at all.
At 100% battery, indicated range was 90 miles and on level ground that estimate was just about right.
But on the commute over a hill, 30 miles, I'd arrive at work with only ~10 miles left. So it used up 80 miles of indicated range to travel only 30 miles! Due to the uphill portion. Recovery on the downhill is minimal as mentioned in earlier post, just a couple miles of indicated range.
People like your parents are edge cases, although even their daily medical trip is just about feasible with an EV today. The number of people living in very rural West Texas or southwest are relatively small (and the mountain west is rapidly urbanizing unfortunately).
EVs don't have to meet every use case just like an ICE diesel pickup truck or a steel crusier bicycle wouldn't fit everyone's transportation needs today.
But they definitely can already meet the majority of Americans driving patterns today.