In California, Car Buyers Are Choosing Electric over Gasoline in Record Numbers

Can't speak for OP but my wife just bought a new Mach-E and I drove it for the first time yesterday. Smoothest ride I've ever had in a car, hands down.

* More reliable: They're much simpler and have many fewer moving parts.

* Lower maintenance: There's no need to keep a complicated engine with lots of moving parts properly lubricated.

* Much quieter: No sound, even when accelerating like a race car.

* More pleasant: You never again have to pump smelly, poisonous, explosive liquids.

* More storage: Two trunks!

* Better performance: Faster acceleration, smoother driving, better handling -- "grips the road" (most of the weight is underneath).

I could keep going...

They are better drives. The acceleration is really nice. Not having to put gas into it is also an advantage, but honestly I bought mine just because it was more fun to drive.

In my experience driving Tesla vehicles (Model S & Y):

- Super convenient to never go to a gas station during my every day routine driving.

- Single pedal driving takes less effort overall. I prefer it at least.

- Generally much better performance (acceleration, breaking) at the same price point. The car is so fun. Much more confident making yellow lights and overtaking compared to gas cars.

- Very smooth because no gear shifting. The S is particularly spooky because it sounds about the same in the car driving 60mph and 90mph so it’s really easy to go 90 without noticing if you’re expecting engine noise to hint you’re going fast.

- Less routine maintenance like oil change

- This could be common to all modern cars, but I love having infinity car keys to share with family and visitors since any phone can be a car key

- This could be common to all modern cars, but I love pre-air conditioning the car from the checkout line of the grocery store

- This could be common to all modern cars, but I like that I can leave my dog in the car and know she’ll be cool & comfortable, and people won’t worry about her because the car display shows “dog mode aircon is on!” on the large display.

My complaints, which are about trim and not the drive:

- No Apple CarPlay. Boo. The built in thingy is much better than the average automaker but Apple stuff is better still.

- No over door hand holds :(

- I prefer tactile controls to touchscreen for everything. I will be looking at non Tesla options in the future for this reason.

Not the Parent Author, but have been driving an EV since 2018:

Superior Qualities (in general):

- Less moving parts (less stuff to break)

- No oil changes

- No gas stops

- Lower center of mass = better stability and crash performance (moose test)etc

- Regenerative braking extends the life of your brake pads

- Lower total cost of ownership for comparable ICE platform

- Nearly 100% torque availability from zero RPM

- Full battery every morning if you remember to plug it in

- Reduced exposure to combustion byproducts

- Financial Subsidies and other Government incentives (HOV Lane access)

- You move the emissions from the consumer to the electricity producer who are more likely to have the funds to actually start working on viable greenhouse gas reduction strategies

Inferior Qualities:

- Heavier

- Take longer to "re-fuel" on road trips

- Regenerative braking and heavier vehicle reduces the life of your tires

- Eventually the HV battery will degrade to the point that it might not be practical for your use case

I'll add another feature I really like: preconditioning while still parked in my garage. Its super hot here in the summer. My garage will still be like 90F in the morning. I've set my car to cool itself down when its time to leave though and it does it all from the wall power so it doesn't even sacrifice any range. So while my ICE would still be >90F inside when I first hop in, my EV is 70F and ready to go. I can't do this with my ICE as it would emit tons of carbon monoxide.

They're also not nearly as wasteful energy-wise. As mentioned its stupid hot out here. Sometimes I need to park and wait for something such as drive up to go or waiting on my spouse to just run into a store to grab something quick or waiting out front of someone's house while I'm picking them up. I'm going to want to keep the AC running, because its like 110F at a high humidity outside with a bright sun beating down. In my ICE, its wasting tons of gas sitting there idling, probably less than 10% of the energy being consumed is actually going to cool the cabin. Most of it is just spinning metal around, pushing fluids through things, and throwing off tons of waste heat (I don't need any more heat, its already hot outside!). Meanwhile my EV could sit running the AC for a long time without making a pretty big dent in its energy usage. And when its sitting there running the AC and the radio, almost all the energy is being used running the AC and the stereo. This makes the per-minute cost of idling massively cheaper, a cost a lot of people don't think about.

I could itemize, but several people already did, so I'll add a different perspective.

Some products are so much better that, when you try them out, you realize there was a quantum leap there. Like when I tried a capacitive touchscreen phone: it was obvious Nokia style phones were deprecated.

Electric traction is just like that. Obviously better. Rent one for a couple of days, and I'm sure you'll reach the same conclusion.

Very little imho. All cars are becoming a nightmare to repair and are getting filled with more compute than anyone should need. Thus, I think they all sort of suck post 2018. I don't like carrying a smartphone and I certainly don't want to drive one.

In theory, EVs aren't overburdened with emissions standards and aren't really road-trip machines (can't put a marine gas tank in the trunk to increase range...) so they shouldn't be any more complicated than a small mobile robot or electric skateboard. Installing a back-up camera and OBD2 port off the bus at the factory doesn't require a small server farm and LTE connection.

All the other comments seem like people getting stoked about new thing is new and ohhh shiny automagic feature with dubious productivity benefit over time.

If people really wanted dependable, then I'd suggest something that a standard human can comprehend and wrench on (even if the failure rate per mile is a bit higher). Perhaps even something that can be fixed with parts created in a garage. If they wanted to minimize environmental footprint too, they can always buy a good steel frame cargo bicycle and durable weatherproof clothing.

I do get the speed and handling angle, however consider the age old question. Is it more fun to drive fast car slow, or slow car fast?

You can sell your bike and get an e-bike. If you bought a cheap bike, then just buy the e-bike.

However, make sure it's a reputable one that won't burst into flame whilst charging!

Hey, if you ride enough, the fitness would render an e-bike mostly superfluous.

I'm a big fan of either though, or really any non-car transit. The experience of the Netherlands show how possible, practical, and economical a combination of cycling, walking, and public transit can be. It used to be car-focused like most other countries, but a concerted effort changed that.

So many people balk at the cost of non-car infrastructure while ignoring the enormous cost of car infrastructure, as well as the attendant environmental, health, and social effects.

> I decided to go with the cheaper option.

Check this out, they're NL based. No relationship with them. One of my bike forum colleagues bought one after using several non electric bikes and is very happy with it. It's not overly expensive, it's slick, light, fast, has lights, belt drive, you can mount a rack, fenders, kickstand. The only downside is that the battery is not removable to charge indoors.

https://www.tenways.com/products/cgo600

The best part of NL is that it's so flat, you don't actually need an e-bike (unless you're over 60) and you get to exercise more as a bonus.

>>With the right infrastructure, at least!

That —the right infrastructure— is the key!

I live in the northeast US, and used to road bike very heavily both as off-season training for ski racing and also road bicycle racing. I had a few close calls at the time, but now, the traffic is so much heavier and more aggressive that I don't bike on the roads at all, only mtn biking (small exception for short road segments of a longer mtn bike ride in a very rural area).

I have a 5mi commute to work which would be perfect for an e-bike or e-scooter, but the way the cars behave, I feel like it is just playing Russian Roulette.

It's really sad, as either better infrastructure or a better trained/more considerate driver population would fix it, but neither is likely soon.

So, I'm stuck hauling two tons of steel to and fro every day just to get me and my laptop to work and to home...

This is my main rub, I live in one of these situations (like I'm sure a huge percentage of Americans do), and there's zero way I could own an EV. Are we all supposed to run the charging plug across the sidewalk? We've had kids mess with cars previously, undeterred by security cameras, so now we have to worry about them unplugging our cars in the middle of the night too?

I'm strongly in support of alternatives to ICE cars, but the idea of auto makers being able to sell only EVs in America by 2030 or whatever is an absolute farce.

You could add charging poles on the street.

Definitely.

I just bought an EV (Model Y) because I needed a new car (I would have waited longer if I could have), and I live in an apartment that doesn't have chargers. I work from home, so I don't have a commute, so it's not a deal breaker, but it's definitely not ideal. I live in Austin, which has a network of public chargers that you can use for only 4$ a month, so that helps, but still not ideal. With my ICE car, I can run it until the gas light goes on, and even then I know I can drive for 20 miles without worries, because there's invariably a gas station within < 5 miles away. With the EV right now, that's not the case. There are slow chargers nearby, but fast chargers are about 7 miles away.

In my situation, my worst case is that I have to go to a supercharger about once a week. I did this for the first time recently, another gripe I have is that the range I get out of the car (Model Y LR) is a lot lower than what I expected to get (~200 miles vs 330). At current gas prices, it's actually MORE expensive to charge the Tesla at a supercharger (0.38$/kWH @ 74KW capacity / 200 miles = 0.14$ a mile, than it was to fill up my Elantra at a gas station (3.50$ per gallon at 30MPG = 0.11$). If I lived in a house, obviously I would save a lot more money, since electricity prices are only like 0.11$/kWH I think.

It's an interesting problem. In dense urban environments, the infrastructure has a long way to go. However, I think this is probably the minority, since most people live in the suburbs or smaller cities in America. In those cases, they can simply charge at home, and they might have to visit a supercharger on road trips or odd cases. Therefore the demand for charging will be lower than it would be for gas cars.

Street charging at 10-30a wouldn't require much more infrastructure than existing street lights; most cars are parked on the street for hours at a time (depending on if parking near where the owner lives / works or "just visiting"). An hour at 16a / 240v is 10-15 miles of added range.

An AC charger is basically just a smart extension cord. A public AC charger is a smart extension cord plus a payment terminal or 3g backhaul to payment APIs and maybe power balancing (draw 30a if nothing else is charging; draw 5a if every other charger on the circuit is also charging). You could have a street with 20 of these things and it'd draw the same power as a normal house (IE it's not big infrastructure).

It wouldn't be perfect, but it's certainly possible.

The key to thinking about charging EVs is you can do it without the person attending to the process. Plug car in; walk away.

There's at least one automaker (Nio) with battery swaps as part of their regularly offered services.

There are a number of reasons why battery swapping is not feasible in the real world, among them: - Batteries age differently from one another, so swapping would only be fair if you had a similarly aged battery that had a similar number of miles & charge cycles on it - Batteries need to be taken care of (like not using the last 10% at each limit of the battery). some people take really good care of their batteries, others don't. I would never want some random battery swapped into my car, as I've taken really good care of my car's battery - Batteries are structurally built into the vehicle, and making them easily removable would make a lot of the engineering more difficult - Batteries could become commoditized so that they fit in any car, but right now there are tons of different shaped & sized batteries, so it would be really hard to build the tooling to support all these different cars & battery types

The weight is crazy (Model 3 long range is ~1000lbs), so you need a serious facility to swap.

They are relatively delicate, and flammable in a terrifying way, so you'd need to trust the facility more than e.g. your average oil & tire swap shop.

From an engineering POV they need a coolant loop w/ a pump, a high voltage connect to the charger, and usually also a connection to a DC-DC converter for the 12v systems on the car. So if you make it modular/removable, you need a (standardized) answer for how to do all of this.

The form factor of the battery is tied fairly strongly to the chassis generally, so if you force a standardization of it you limit manufacturer's options there.

Finally, probably the most important, is ownership model. The battery is the most expensive part in the car, by far. It basically is the car. Who owns it? What's the revenue model? How does insurance handle it? Will consumers accept a situation where they're getting random batteries shoved in affecting the performance etc. of their car?

It's just a whole thing. It's been attempted, and not succeeded is what I see.

Now, what I don't understand is why this isn't the model for EV shipping trucks. In that case they already have a highly modular, heavy duty platform and they already have to check into frequent weigh stations, and the operator rarely owns the truck. I don't understand why the shipping industry wouldn't pursue a model where a standardized set of pre-charged batteries aren't sitting on automated forklifts at weigh stations ready for swap during weigh-ins, with the fleet owners paying a fee for that maintenance...

Battery [edit changing to swapping]swapping is never going to work while people own the car and the battery. There will always be incentive to keep a battery that's healthy and dump a wonky battery back into the swapping pool.

I've got a natural gas grill with a $20 tank. The tanks all have a "do not refill past this date" stamp on them to keep people from using 30 year old rusty tanks. New tanks typically have a stamp that's 10 or more years in the future.

Some places swap the tanks rather than filling them. Whenever I took my tank to a "swap" place, the end-date is always closer to now than the one I gave them, to the point where you may start with a tank that's good to 2035 and if you swap it 8 times (over the course of 2 years) they'll refuse to take it because it will have expired.

A battery is practically the wear component of an EV drive train.

Imagine if every time you got gas it also quickly swapped out your transmission and engine with someone else's who may or may not have abused the hell out of that drivetrain previously. You buy a new EV, you go do a battery swap, the battery you got dies in a month. Who replaces the battery?

There's some talk about making battery leasing programs which could potentially be tied to battery swap stations, but I don't think I'd ever tie my refueling strategy to a $10k+ lease.

Battery swapping is just very impractical when we can just recharge them. One of the big positives of battery swapping is reducing the load on the grid for those extremely high power draws in fast recharging, but if we just build up batteries at the charging site it can help smooth those demands out more evenly making it easier for the grid to handle in the same way. Either way you're going to need a cache of batteries extra on site at the charging site.

I get by fine with 240v/20a charging (16a in reality).

Street charging, leveraging things like existing utility lines to street lights, isn't a huge lift. The individual chargers can balance the current they deliver among themselves if / when they share a common feed.

Similarly in large parking lots where people spend lots of time, you can put "low power" DC charging so people can charge while they're shopping.

The key to thinking about EV charging vs petrol charging is that you can and should do it without locking the operator to the vehicle -- plug in and walk away should be the expected interaction. DC fast charging like using petrol is useful in a very specific use case (long distance travel) but the requirement of "dump a gas tank of energy into an EV" is actually absurdly complex and requires huge power infrastructure. Around where I live many of the tesla superchargers have a natural gas fuel cell electric generator right next to them.

Remember: for L2 charging the charger is part of the car. The thing with the cord is mostly just a fancy on/off switch.

Wouldn’t the time-of-day effect be amplified with enough EVs? Everyone arrives home at 6pm after work and plugs in.

Depends on the building, the size and construction of the parking garage, and the amount of power that it is set up to draw. This can be easy or extremely expensive depending on the circumstances.

Right now gas stations operate in a cutthroat industry. The price is mounted on big signs visible from the street, and people will irrationally drive across town to save 10 cents per gallon.

Once 90% of gas stations go away, that dynamic will be gone. Few gas stations mean there won't be the same level of price competition, so they'll be able to survive on much less volume. And there will be always be some demand for gasoline from classic cars, et cetera.

IIRC I've read that gas stations don't make much on gas sales but mostly on other items you buy. If so, the dynamic may be different from the population model.

What's the likelihood that gas stations change to offering charging also/instead?

A non-trivial number of EV owners at my office get by without charging at home. Easier with a Tesla + Superchargers nearby (as a backup), but non-Tesla drivers do get by.

There's also the EV specific tax credits. New EV buyers which is what the article references are much higher income that average and are able to take better advantage.

To be clear, I'm not against EV's at all but think they can and should compete on equal footing.

Agree that it's gray, but the end consumer isn't seeing the benefit as directly as EV's. Given that they also consume fossil fuels for their electricity, it would be difficult to unwind full sticker price.

Way too much! But I'm not sure where you are going with that point. If suddenly lithium (batteries) were to become a necessary resource for the US, you can bet governments will be destabilized to prop up the lithium supply.

Right.

Somewhere cheaper, yes. Fewer orders of magnitude cheaper than I would wish. It’s not the only reason to buy an EV, just a recent and salient one.

California rebate is another $7500 (at most) on top of federal rebates.

ICEVs have been increasing in efficiency for 100 years. EVs have been for less than 20 years. If EVs are already halfway to being efficient enough for winter driving, imagine how efficient they could be in another 80 years.

Norway isn't very cold, its pretty temperate actually. Many parts of Canada and northern US states get much colder.

Garages in the Nordics are usually heated.

They are already convenience stores, no "pivot" is necessary.

Ehhh maybe? You’ve still got a gloomy outlook for your future and customers dealing with less convenient gas stations. Plus when all the gas stations are owned by a few major chains you might get more strategic level choices.

The current Fisker isn't that Fisker though they have the same founder

At 1500 miles a year I'd be seriously documenting what I need the vehicle for, and what other options are available, such as car share, taxi, rentals, or even that $19 pickup at Home Depot if one is near you.

I had a nightmare where all the lithium batteries in the USA were intentionally booby-trapped in their manufactury so that a preset radio signal would cause them to burst into flames! Something to do with China vs USA conflict over Taiwan. So I had to run around taking out all the batteries.

I think that's paranoid!8-)

Problem with EV car fires is putting them out!

Once auto and home insurance companies figure out the risks involved, they'll raise auto and home insurance prices accordingly. We'll see:

- EV fire in a condo - destroys entire condo building. Requires 4 hours of fire department coverage.

- ICE fire in a condo - partially burns a single unit. Put out in 20 minutes by fire department.

> And EV's catch fire at a rate less than 10% of gasoline cars.

The key here is where they catch fire, EVs may be much more likely to burst into flame while charging in your garage than a gas car, whereas gas cars are probably more likely to burst into flame whilst driving.