I like the model that you swap your low charge battery with a fully charged one. That would require some new technology.
But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything.
Where I’m from almost every roadside McDonalds has fast charging. And almost every road trip I’ve taken where I’ve had to fast charge we’ve taken the kids to a McDonalds for a short break and finished charging long before we were finished eating and doing bathroom breaks.
I haven’t really owned an ICE. (Used my parents cars quite a lot though). Our first car was EV 9 years ago. But I’m fairly sure ICE would be significantly less convenient for us than EV. Especially with the newer one we recently got that has a more reasonable battery size, which we’ve never even had to fast charge once. Even on road trips. We never go anywhere we don’t need/want to go anyway. So having to go to a gas station just to fill the car with gas would be a significant inconvenience.
You wouldn’t want a phone that you’d have to take to a phone station to fill with phone juice would you? Even if it lasted longer on a fill-up (say two weeks)
Plus it just seems like a stupid idea given that I have far less than 100% confidence in automatic cutoffs especially given the potentially serious consequences of a failure.
I have to say I've never seen such a sign. Admittedly I don't read every sign on the pump so who knows.
I nearly always walk inside to the store while the tank fills.
Also, people often start the pump and get back into the car while it fills. When it’s full, they get out of the vehicle which generates static electricity (often in winter months where it’s dry and wool or other clothing increases this) and has the risk of discharging on the handle, sparking a fire.
An excellent example of a point with no actual statistics behind it.
It's a jobs program, not a safety program.
Fact is, this practice is universal, at least in the US where latches are provided on the pump handles.
Fact is, 99.99999% of the time, it's fine.
Of course, it should go without saying that nobody should walk away from the pump for much longer than it takes to fill the tank, if only because it's a douchy move to tie up a gas pump for longer than you need it. But if shutoff failures were anywhere near as common as you seem to think, the latches would be prohibited everywhere.
Lung cancer is extremely rare, regardless of your risk factors. Yet people are still told not to smoke because of the risk increase over it.
A temporary oversight, I'm sure.
It would be a pain for a 16 year old to be able to drive but not to dispense fuel.
I’m sure it’s nice to have a car that is always ready to go, and I don’t think EVs are bad, but let’s not pretend that gasoline or diesel fuel isn’t really easy for most people, most of the time. The only time I ever had to go out of my way regularly for gas was in college, and they wouldn’t have had charging points in the mass parking lots anyway.
I have had an electric car for eight years now. I think I may have missed plugging it in twice, as I got distracted by unloading. Neither time a big problem as my regular commute is 15-20% charge. As I step out of the car I walk past the cable. It takes 5 seconds to plug it in.
My small solar panel installation on the garage deliver 4 MWh in a year, which is about what the car uses. Albeit not exactly when the car needs it, but that is covered by my share of the wind power co-op I am part of, and of course the rest of the grid. Cheaper than gas (by a lot), no cancerous fumes and less climate emissions. Not going back from that.
That's probably a US (or maybe some other places) thing but you certainly can do that here in Estonia. I do it all the time - start the pumping and then go inside to the gas station to buy a drink or whatever. Especially with the in-app payment for gas it's great.
Never heard of anyone having an accident with it either...
You don't need to do much of anything because the fillup takes like 2-3 minutes max.
It's enough time to go buy a bottle of water or something at the attached convenience store, but then you're done and ready to go.
I drive a lot, and I’ve ran into a situation only once where I had to find a charging station away from home. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people worry.
• DC fast chargers can add 100 miles of range in 10 minutes.
Do you have a low electricity rate?
A petrol car would use around 0.03 gallons per mile (33 mpg). At $ 4 per gallon that's $ 0.12 per mile.
A Tesla model S does around 0.3 kWh per mile. So to get to the same cost per mile your electricity price would have to be below $ 0.40 per kwh.
In a lot of places electricity isn't (much) below $ 0.40 per kwh.
ref: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
$0.40/kwh is an absurd embarrassment for the local government. Move or vote them out.
Where in the world is this?!
Here in my corner of Silicon Valley, electricity is never below that price! Thanks PG&E.
Off-peak rate (starts at midnight) is 44.2 c/kWh which is as cheap as it gets.
(Peak rate in the afternoon after 3pm is 71.3 c/kWhw)
However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.
What I however still don't understand is why this isn't at least offered in niches where it would make even more sense, like electric buses. If you have a fleet of these buses, minimizing the charging downtime should be a priority, right? Plus, in a bus it should be easier to find a suitable place for the battery pack where it can be accessed easily.
For a variety of reasons, you don’t really want to have to fill up on either diesel or electrons while away from the depot, if you can avoid it. So what you really want from electrification is a battery that lasts all day.
So battery swapping doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard since it would require multiple returns to depot during the day, or new swapping depots being built, or relying on someone else’s infrastructure. Of course all of this is possible but not ideal.
Tangentially, the overnight charging model introduces other problems - a large depot might have 100+ buses, all of which are charging simultaneously in one place. That’s a lot of electrons, and it is causing us a lot of trouble planning for it. And since the buses are charging at night, we can’t use solar to offset battery storage and in any case it’s not reliable enough - the buses have to run regardless of weather - setting aside the obvious commercial issues, in many cases it’s a safety issue too (eg school buses).
This is why H2 fuel cells have been viewed as potentially a better solution to BEVs in our industry, but H2 has its own (plentiful) problems and we appear to be shifting focus back to BEVs now and using H2 for energy storage and transport… that’s another story.
I'm sure there was some investment in chargers, reconfiguring the depot etc, but it's evidently not insurmountable.
Urban bus operations are just one aspect of the bus industry. I imagine it’s much easier for a municipal-owned bus company in a dense urban area to negotiate with the power company than it is for us.
Just one idiot sabotaging batteries is enough to collapse the whole business.
1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. People won't want to swap it for some random battery, and you risk an illicit market for swapped out "good" batteries. Sure, if swapping is very common, then batteries are fungible and maybe it all evens out. I doubt it, though.
2. Batteries are large, heavy, and not necessarily centrally placed. You'd need some sort of winch/harness/crane system, which is dangerous and expensive to automate. Even if you figure it out, swappable batteries might be a negative design constraint for electric cars (e.g. "what if we want to put battery cells throughout the body of the car?").
I also like the model, but how could it be made to work well?
What if it has a number of smaller ones that can easily be swapped out by one person?
Or maybe one big unswappable battery, and 1-3 smaller swappable ones?
It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) did before it failed 10 years ago.
Obviously, a swappable battery is something you rent.
Car manufacturers would love to charge us a monthly fee. They are currently trying all sorts of schemes to do it.
But a swappable battery might justify a monthly fee.
I spend way more time fueling my ICE than my EV. It's a pain to have to go out of my way to a fueling station. It's far less convenient than just plugging in every few days at home or at the office.
BEVs don't have to be plugged in like cellphones. In city driving one full charge can suffice for a whole week of commuting and errands.
In the Netherlands it's crazy, something like 3-4x the price of home charging and close to 10x what you would "loose" on using your own solar power instead of selling it to the grid.
For most hybrids using a fast charger is over 2x more expensive per mile than using petrol.
I recently drove to the airport in a bit of a rush in a small 4-cylinder car. Drove straight up to pump that was basically touching the road I was on, tapped credit card, authorized for $100 and opened cap at same time. Stuffed the pump in and held it at max flow. 45l of gas later, cap back on, pump away and moving again.
I don’t think it would be possible to be faster.
Total time stopped: 7 minutes.
I'd love to know how much range you're adding to your ICE vehicle after pumping gas for 1-2 minutes.
Competent charging networks also accept contactless cards or even automatically bill your account when you plug in.
And then it's also assuming there is a gas station on your current route, and that it's one with a decent price and not more expensive than other stations around. A lot of the trips I take don't go past a decently priced gas station, the few I routinely do pass are often 5-6¢/gal more than others. At 22 gallons that's over a dollar more.
And also assuming you never get gas at a place like Sam's Club or Costco, which offer some big discounts but often have lines.
It doesn't help the comparison to lie about the time. If you have a smaller gas tank and the pump can fill at it's maximum speed, you can fill in 1-2 minutes from the moment you put the nozzle in. As a practical matter, you're rarely getting in and out of a gas station in under 5 minutes, and only then if it's completely empty when you arrive. When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic.
Most EVs only need a "fill up" on a road trip, and AAA puts the average road trip refueling stop at 15 minutes. The technology in place today is adequate to do the same with EVs, and it only gets better every year. Battery swapping was a cute idea for a while but kinda pointless now.
Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle. 10 seconds to plug in when you arrive home, full every morning. Imagine trying to sell someone on the idea of going the other direction "Hey, buy this fancy car, it's great, but you have to take it to a dedicated location periodically just to keep it fueled up."
Blimey! Lord only knows where you live that it can take that long. I can count on one hand the number of times it's taken anything like 10 minutes over the years and they were during crises!
In reality, even if I have to wait for a free pump, my car is at 100% range in 5 mins when I pay at the pump by using my credit card.
I want my car filled to the brim any time I go to the petrol station (gas station to our friends over in the colonies :D). That's just how I roll. And I know many others who are the same. I also know some that just put in £10-£15 at a time, mainly due to finance constraints tbh.
To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel.
As a consumer, if I have to join a queue for hours [0] then to hell with that! However, with my diesel, it's literally 5 minutes once a week and I'm full up.
In addition, I run my car until 50 - 100 miles left in the tank and I don't get bent out of shape when the light comes on at < 50 miles. In an EV I'd shit bricks if that happened. I'd have to change my behaviour to many smaller topups.
The simple fact is that we have a chicken and egg scenario with EV's vs charging points/charging time at this time and I don't see it changing any time soon.
Anecdote: I just remember something I saw 3 weeks ago. I was in a town near where I live. I parked up to walk to a shop about 2 mins away and I walked past a girl at a charging station staring at the big charger thingy while on her phone. I couldn't hear what she was saying but I could see that the charging flap on her car was open. I was in the shop for about 10 minutes and came back the same way and she was still there, this time poking away at her phone and the cable still wasn't in her car but the charging flap was still open. No idea what the problem was but it caught my attention. Anyway, just thought I'd share.
Edit: Something else to mention - Many people round where I live are in Victorian flats with almost no parking nearby. It's not umcommon to park streets away from where you actually live... they'll not buy electric for the most part.
[0] - https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/video-massive-line-of-e...
It takes me 0 minutes to fill my EV. Plug in at night and full in the morning (and pre-heated / de-iced on an automatic schedule too). Going somewhere else and standing for 5 minutes once a week isn’t something I’d rush back to.
Edit: My anecdote is about my mum filling up the car with petrol instead of diesel because the handle of the pump was black. You don’t want to know how long we waited for that.
Of course, many living in flats won't have a car so that's moot but walk up any street with Victorian 4 floor flats and you'll not see a single parking space available outside them: they're all taken, all the time, but not necessarily by the people that live immediately next to them.
Even if they do manage to park right outside their flat, they won't be trailing a cable from their window :D
For me, EV's do not make sense for a significant portion of the people driving in the UK. Perhaps the majority. I don't have numbers to back that up but my argument about flats still stands.
What I do think makes sense is hybrids (assuming cost parity!). Put a small 30-mile battery in new cars. Let it charge from braking. Use it only when going from 0 - 30 or even just below 30 only and I bet you'd significantly reduce your fuel bills (and carbon if that's part of your reasoning for purchase).
I drive a 9 yo Hyundai diesel so I have a cheap car anyway.
They are not for everyone but there is plenty of room for growth. It costs me 3p/mile to run it too saving me about £100/month.
Self charging hybrids are a waste of time. My Hyundai i20 1.1 diesel got 60mpg while my colleagues hybrid got 50. Plug-in hybrids are slightly better, but you’ve got additional complexity and all the maintenance of an ICE. Plus you are cycling the small battery more. 1,000 cycles on a 250 mile battery is 250,000 miles - on a 30 mile battery it’s 30,000.
You have a driveway (I assume) so you can make use of it but would you still buy one if you had a flat?
Still can't overcome the fact that (compared to ice cars and spec being somewhat equal) EV's are way more expensive to buy, more expensive to insure [0], more expensive to repair [0] (especially after a bump/crash), have less resale value than ICE cars, burn forever if set on fire.
ICE cars are not going away any time soon and gov trying to ram it down our throats will just cost billions and will turn people off (I don't want one, for instance). The car industry is pushing back too... reality is setting in.
For me, if I had to pick the primary reason why I think they're dead is price. My car, for example, was an 8 yo Hyundai Santa Fe 2.2 Diesel with 80k on it when I bought it. I paid 11k for it 2 years ago. I own it outright. It's 10 years old now and you wouldn't know it.
I've paid £900 for tyres, tracking and aircon recharge and about £160 a month on fuel since I bought it. It's had 2 MOT's too but didn't have to get anything fixed.
You just can't get equivalent EV's for that kind of money and for many, that kills them stone dead.
[0] - https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/361588/why-electric-car-i...
> The results reveal that the cost of insuring these electric cars is indeed higher, but the difference is not as substantial as the headlines would suggest. The EV was actually cheaper to cover for one of our drivers.
Your £160/month on fuel over 2 years is £3,840. An EV charged on octopus would be at least a quarter of that, maybe less. So let’s say £960 - almost a £3k difference.
You can absolutely get second hand EVs for £11k - this seems to be at odds with your statement about low resale values too. The low residuals angle is being pushed hard at the moment but when I go looking all I see is standard depreciation on new vehicles.
The “burn forever” thing seems to be getting pushed a LOT lately too. Strange when they are 20x less likely to catch fire in the first place and car fires are already pretty rare. https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-ti...
If I change it to Diesel I get over 11k cars available. 171 Santa Fe models.
The range on those MG's is about 180 miles too: 3 times this year I've driven to Aberdeen - I'd run out of juice on the way in the EV. I get just over 400 in my diesel.
The energy density of batteries isn't comparable to ICE cars.
An 11k EV is not a patch on a 11k diesel.
For long distance travel it’s a bit more complicated and you have to get your calculator out.
A quick look using ABRP suggests that a trip from Newcastle ( not sure where you’re coming from but that’s 380 miles) to Aberdeen in a MG ZS EV Long Range would require 1.5 hours of charge along the way, turning a 6 hour drive into 7.5. If you’re stopping anyway (I would) then it might not be a lot of additional time.
If you do that journey a lot, it might not be worth it. A few times a year it might be worth the compromise considering fuel costs saving the rest of the time.
If you filling up your diesel takes 10 minutes a fortnight then that’s 4 hours a year too. More if it’s out of your way. You save that if you charge an EV at home but spend it on long journeys.
You can also take the train or rent a car with the fuel savings and probably still be saving overall.
So it really depends. They are not a drop in replacement for every scenario but in some circumstances they do have benefits.
>all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle.
Depends on how readily you have access to a charging port at home/work. if you have no garage to park in and charge overnight with, you're pretty much stuck at some public space for 30 minutes minimum (assuming fast charging).
Right; as the article puts it,
> The majority of today’s American EV owners charge at home, but more than 20 percent of US households don’t have access to consistent off-street parking where they can plug in overnight. The public charging network, meanwhile, can be spotty, and drivers have complained that chargers aren’t always well maintained or even functioning.
Although, that said, it's possible that getting 80% of cars to be EVs would be a big win already; assuming the number really is 20% that may not be a big problem.
I'm willing to believe that it takes 15-20 minutes to fill your pickup, but that's a far outlier. If I was guessing, I'd say that your tank is a factor larger than most cars, and I'd also say that I can't remember the vapor pressure sensor malfunctioning like that and that's also skewing your data.
15-20 minutes seems crazy unless it's a huge tank in the bed of the truck. And I've not had a vapor issue with them either, they fill at full speed.
Well yes if you have a huge pickup that can take a while. I have 35 gallon tank on the pickup and it does take a while (never measured it so not sure how many minutes).
But on our regular cars, it takes less than 2 minutes to fill the tank.
> Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle.
Well the EV driver spends less "CPU time" (using computer analogy) since they plug it in and go do something else. But the wall-clock-time is orders of magnitude higher so if the battery is empty and you need to go somewhere, it's not happening very soon.