President Biden on the Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Boom in America (LIVE) at 1:45 pm.
Speaking of which…
My beloved Honda CRV is 18 years old this year, and I am doing the equivalent of thinking about forming a committee to consider the possibly of creating a commission with an eye toward maybe getting an EV or hybrid in 2023 or 2024. I want something that would be about the size and would ride about as tall as my CRV, so I don’t want any kind of regular 2 or 4-door vehicle like a Prius.
Any thoughts on that would be greatly appreciated.
Open thread.
Eric K
I thought Honda made a Hybrid CRV, that would seem an obvious choice if you love the CRV already.
If not the Hyundai Tucson seems to be what your describing.
FastEdD
Whatever you pick for a car, make sure it is at least the second model year, so they work the bugs out. This is especially true for EV’s!
pacem appellant
My 2019 Nissan Leaf gets about 250 miles on a full charge. It seats four comfortably (or you can squeeze three smaller humans in back, though my kids are getting big enough to count as full-sized humans now).
When the lease is up, I actually want to swap it for a Mini Cooper EV, but I might just keep the Leaf for the mileage. It’s incredible. I can get from my hometown (around Palo Alto, CA) to San Francisco, and back, and still have half a battery. And that’s with A/C!
The Moar You Know
The only EV version of a CRV (or any other CUV) is a Tesla Model Y. Hybrid is a shitshow, two drivetrains just means twice as much to go wrong.
The new GM Equinox is what I’m looking for, but won’t be out until at least 2023.
I won’t buy a Hyundai, but you might. Have a look at those. I think they have an EV CUV as well.
I have cargo and dog hauling requirements, so a sedan will not work for me.
Kropacetic
Not very literate in cars and I’m a congenitally single male with no family so never needed anything more than the tiniest model of Prius. So no help here.
But thanks for the speech. I’ll listen on my commute.
Anonymous At Work
When your car can legally drive itself (16 years), you should be looking. When it can legally vote, you should be pricing a replacement (RIP last of the GOOD Ford Tauruses). I don’t want to contemplate a car that can buy its own booze (Futurama, anyone?) or rent another car (illegal all states except Nevada).
I bailed at 18 years and bought a car for gas mileage and reliability as the only factors. I imagine in 10-15 years, we’ll have the infrastructure to make EVs easy and wanted a car to last about that long.
Jeffro
Love the electric car boom!
Don’t love that there are electric Hummer/Humvees on the way…defeats the purpose
Anyway, one of our next two cars will be a (non-Tesla) electric car. But for now, we’re doing the next-best environmentally-friendly thing and making our current cars last a good long time.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Eric K: I got a hybrid CRV in 2021 on a special offer from my local Honda dealer (replacing my 2018 ICE CRV, which replaced my 2003 CRV). I had wanted to get a hybrid in 2018 but Honda didn’t offer one at that point. A Toyota RAV-4 would have been the obvious solution, but I am a Honda girl, so I was stuck. I’m a little disappointed in it as a hybrid since it isn’t a plug-in, has no spare tire because of the space the battery takes up, and can’t run on EV power for too long, or when the engine is under load. BUT it does get noticeably better gas mileage and is a step in the right direction. And otherwise, is identical to the regular CRV.
Baud
I’m looking at the Chevy Bolt. Pretty inexpensive for an EV. 250 mile range.
Matt McIrvin
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6 (essentially the same car with different body styling) might be about what you’re looking for. I haven’t driven them but they look nice for a vehicle in that category.
(I prefer sedans myself–the one I’m drooling over is the Ioniq 6, which is a car car instead of a crossover SUV.)
Fair Economist
Don’t rush to buy an EV. There is a flood of EVs on the way from a bunch of companies, especially Ford and GM. Prices will drop sharply as they arrive, choices will expand, and quality will improve (as Tesla is one of the worst). If you are looking for an SUV, Chevy has the Blazer coming out next year.
Edit: the Chevy Bolt is the one good deal right now, if a subcompact is good for you.
Kristine
@Anonymous At Work:
Well, my ’02 Forester is almost there. Just over 175K, so hoping it plugs along for a few more years.
Still in planning stages for the next car–I would ideally like to move past hybrid to full electric, so following this thread with interest.
Omnes Omnibus
Electric cars won’t save us. ::ducks::
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Holding my breath that we don’t repeat the discussion from a few days ago. I’d rather discuss KCIII’s redecoration plans for the Palace.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: lol
lldoty
I adore my Hyundai Kona. It’s a like a mini SUV. Very comfortable, great safety features, good range, back folds down for good schlepping of big items. We belt our 3 dogs (ranging 10-40 lbs) very comfortably into back seat.
Anonymous At Work
@Kristine: The MPG started dropping fast, newer cars got better MPG than mine in top condition, but 2.5 years ago, there wasn’t enough infrastructure to contemplate EV, especially charging and unexpected repairs. Right now, I’d rate it as “iffy, depending on where you live.” My main concern would be fleeing a hurricane (I’m in Florida) needing to recharge in someplace like “Raccoon’s Scrotum, Alabama” on my way to relocate with family.
Anonymous At Work
@Omnes Omnibus: Neither will ducks. Down here in Florida, you see them biding their time for the moment when they switch to carnivore and ally with the alligators and iguanas.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@zhena gogolia: Ooooh, han’t read about that! I’m getting curious to see how CIII will approach kinging. He seems to have started well, given everything.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Perhaps the VW I.4?
Martin
I’ll refrain, because I like you Watergirl.
WaterGirl
@FastEdD: That seems smart!
Omnes Omnibus
@Anonymous At Work: They are related to geese. Geese are the British soccer hooligans of the avian world.
WaterGirl
@pacem appellant: That looks like a sedan, though, right?
Kropacetic
@Omnes Omnibus: Electric cars alone won’t save us. They can be part of a whole solution.
My personal preferred solution would involve a lot fewer people in individual vehicles, but I haven’t worked out a practical way to achieve that given our current existing infrastructure. The world can’t stop for idealized solutions.
WaterGirl
@The Moar You Know: I forgot to say “no Teslas!” I do not wish to support the arrogant entitled prick.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Despite cars being evil, some people still need them.
Ruckus
The US does not have the range of EVs of Europe or several other areas. There are a few reasons for this, one is that a lot of our cars are made here and changing a factory from gas to EV would put a rather large strain on the budgets of mfgs and Covid already did that to them so many of them aren’t going gang busters at the moment. That said, Chevy has one car, doing a pickup, Ford has the Mustang and a F pickup, Hyundai has the Ionic 5 and the Kona, Kia has the EV6 and the Nero EV, and that doesn’t count the very expensive cars, Porsche Taycan, Jaguar E Pace, Cadillac Lyriq and of course Tesla.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropacetic: I was referring back to a thread from the weekend. If you missed it, it was probably for the best.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Frantically searching the bylaws and fine print in John’s comment policy to see if your comment can be considered ban-able. :-)
*not intended as a factual statement
Matt McIrvin
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I think the right way to think about hybrids is that they’re gasoline-powered cars, but very efficient ones (I drive a hybrid Sonata). A typical hybrid has a much smaller battery than a true EV, that it uses over short time scales for its efficiency-boosting hybrid tricks, and making it a plug-in would get you only marginal gains. The top-end Sonata has a solar panel on the roof that charges the battery when it’s parked, but it’s really just a gimmick–only gets you a couple free miles of travel a day.
There’s a different type of plug-in hybrid like the old Chevy Volt that are primarily EVs with ICE range extension, but they haven’t done well in the US and I think once EV batteries got good enough, people rejected them in favor of pure EVs, which are more efficient and less complex and fiddly.
trollhattan
If I were shopping, I’d begin at our local Mini dealer.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Dare I ask… are you against hybrids and electric vehicles?
Kropacetic
@Omnes Omnibus: Aww, man, I love a good verbal altercation.
CindyH
@WaterGirl: amen
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I just bought VW bus with a nuclear reactor.
You can go atleast 20 years without having to top off the core.
WaterGirl
@Martin: In case it makes you feel better, unless I’m with a group, I do my long-distance traveling by train.
pacem appellant
@WaterGirl: It’s much roomier than a sedan. Let me find a picture online.
https://images.app.goo.gl/vuioUVaodkjKJZxQ9
JPL
@Baud: That is nice looking.
zhena gogolia
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I just made it up, but it’s probably something that will appear on the front page of the NYT tomorrow, unless they have some bad news for Biden they’d rather highlight.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: Of course electric cars won’t save us. However, I am a firm believer that better is better than worse, and it’s not worth dumping on better cars just because they’re not the transportation revolution. That’s what the transit stuff in the infrastructure bill was for…
zhena gogolia
@Kropacetic: “good” is the operative word here
JPL
Do you still have to replace the battery every three years or so?
trollhattan
@Baud: Have driven the Bolt via Zipcar and found them to be an ideal city vee-hick-el. No extended highway time so can’t comment, but approaching 300 mi range they’re suited for it, I’d say, as long as the ride isn’t “nervous” (sometimes a thing with short wheelbase).
One of those “bigger on the inside than outside” designs, so not as tiny as I had imagined it at first glance.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
I love my 2014 Ford Fusion hybrid. It looks good, has a lot of power and I only change the oil and wiper blades.
I’m at 160,000 miles, and it still averages at 45-50 MPG
pacem appellant
@trollhattan: This is my dream car (see my comment above).
But the range will never beat my 2019 Nissan Leaf Plus. I leased it before the pandemic, then never drove for two years. Now the lease is coming up, and I’ve barely put any miles on it, though I’ve finally driven it to SF a couple times, and to Oakland, and back! without needed a recharge.
pacem appellant
If anybody has money to burn on a really fancy EV, the Rivian R1T (and R1S, the SUV version) are pretty friggin’ cool. (I work for Rivian. I do not drive one).
CaseyL
@pacem appellant: Your Leaf has a 250-mile range?? I thought they couldn’t go further than 75 miles on a charge, so I haven’t seriously considered a Leaf even though I quite like them otherwise.
WaterGirl – I suggest waiting a year, provided your current wheels last that long. For one, never ever buy something its first model year: there are always bugs to work out, and that’s triply true for new tech. For another, everyone and their cousins are coming out with EVs, and the compromises you need to make now you might not need to in a year – and we might even have plenty of charging stations all over the country by then (Thanks, Joe!). Me, I plan to drive my 2008 Scion until it just can’t no more, and then see what’s out there.
Dagaetch
I got a Hyundai Tucson plug-in hybrid this summer and love it. On the current tank of gas I’m at 90mpg; hoping to average 100 before I have to fill up again. There are some decent EV options that might work for you – the upcoming refresh of the Kia Niro EV looks promising – but personally, I decided that nervousness about the charging infrastructure, and feeling like most prices were too high on EVs, meant that I would wait until the next new car in a decade or so to go full EV. If you can wait 2-3 years, that’s probably enough. Maybe a lease in the short term?
Kropacetic
@zhena gogolia: Individual standards vary. I may take a look. If it doesn’t scratch that itch, it may appease my masochism.
JPL
Since my son is a list to buy a Rivian, I assumed that electric cars were out of my price range, but apparently not. Especially with the rebate.
My Honda Accord is fourteen years, but I don’t drive often. The mileage is under 50,000.
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus: Hahaha….
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: There’s a widespread belief among transit and cycling advocates that EVs are bad because people will think switching to EVs is good enough, and they’re a distraction from their preferred solutions of transit, cycling, walkable neighborhoods, and a general massive overhaul of how we use land. Electric cars are cars, still need sprawling parking lots and highways, etc., and will never be as efficient as collective or low-power means of transportation.
But I think that in a country like the US we need to be pushing on multiple fronts at the same time. Realistically, most people in the United States are not going to uproot themselves and migrate to cities where they can live greener just for environmental reasons.
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin: I think of hybrids as bridge technology, helping transition us from ICE to an EV fleet. They seem ludicrously complex, but that’s the perspective of doing one’s own maintenance, another “hobby” rapidly sunsetting.
A plug-in hybrid with, say, 50-mile range and then 60+ mpg after than sounds attractive from simply the owner-operator perspective. Would prefer to ditch the engine-transmission entirely, along with the fluids and cooling system and exhaust and fuel tank and catalyst theft and Costco filling station queue and biennial emissions recert, etc.
VOR
My 2002 Honda CR-V was totaled in Fall 2021. I looked hard at EVs. Tesla Model Y had an 11 month wait list. VW ID.4 also had an 11 month wait list. I was hearing horror stories about Ford dealerships slapping extra fees onto Mach Es. The Hyundai and Kia weren’t shipping. The Subaru/Toyota SUV still isn’t shipping, AFAIK. The Ford F-150 Lightning looked great, but had a multi-year waiting list.
So I decided to lease an ICE car for another 3 years and hope the market is better in 2024.
Kelly
@Anonymous At Work: We replaced our 2001 Toyota 4Runner last year after it had 2 mysterious electrical failures after 20 years of flawless service. Really thought it might last the rest of my life. Fortunately the failures were in our driveway. Went out to start it and it was totally dead. Fiddled around found nothing wrong then tried again and it was fine. Twice. We need something to pull our pop trailer and bought a 2018 Highlander. Gave the 4Runner to my stepson who is a hobby mechanic and always admired it. He is confident he can figure it out if it fails again. It has been flawless since.
JPL
OT
Quinnipiac Poll of Georgia: Governor Gov. Brian Kemp (R) 50% Stacey Abrams (D) 48%
Senate Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) 52% Herschel Walker (R) 46
The poll was likely voters and for Warnock 96 percent said their mind is made up.
Kemp is a little less than that
Fake Irishman
@WaterGirl:
Martin has gone in at length about how he thinks that electric vehicles are ultimately self defeating because they encourage more driving and they are heavier and do more damage to roads and that we just don’t have enough lithium for batteries in big vehicles.
FWIW I’m in the Matt McIrvin camp of electric vehicles won’t save us but they are a very useful practical tool in the tool kit to significantly cut emissions (some of the concerns of Martin regarding excess weight and not cutting driving have some merit for safety, public health and emissions, but I think he overplays them a bit. )
andy
i guess if you own your own home and garage and drive mostly locally then you can trickle charge it overnight and drive in the daytime. when i was in the market for a used toyota i considered a prius but i just don’t drive enough to justify having a hybrid, and for me owning an electric is out of the question because i rent.
Shane in SLC
A friend of mine recently bought a Kia EV6 and she loves it. It’s got me thinking harder about an electric car too. I also just read a review of a Rivian (sp?) that sounded great…
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Were you lowering your head or did you notice a flock?
You are right, EVs are not saviors. They are however a hell of a lot better if you need personal transportation than an ICE car and if your home, or apt has solar panels you will be lowering your cost of electricity so, with the cost of gasoline being (around me) over $4.50/gal they would be far cheaper to drive.
eclare
@JPL: Thank you! Still worried about Warnock, but those are the best numbers I’ve seen in a while.
JPL
@eclare: 9/14/22 – Georgia Governor’s Race: Too Close To Call, Quinnipiac University Georgia Poll Finds; Georgia Senate Race: Warnock Leads Walker 52% – 46% | Quinnipiac University Poll
geg6
I’m very interested in getting an EV for my next car (at least 4 years down the road). However, I am utterly confuzzled as to how you charge the things. And no, I’m not going to read some technical article or car magazine article about it. So…
1) Do you have to install a charging station at your home and how ridiculously pricey is that?
2) If not that, what do you do when there is only one charging station in the entire county?
3) How long does charging take?
4) How pricey is it compared to gas?
5) What if you live in a place that has actual winter? I only have a carport (well, we have a double-bay garage, but my John has made it so there is no room for actual cars in it), so will the cold interfere with keeping a charge?
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: The batteries in the Leaf got way, way better. Most of the EVs on the market now have enough of a range that if you have a decent place to plug in, and you’re not planning an extended road trip, you really won’t have to worry about it day to day.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
I encountered a lady in the store a few weeks back. A nurse I think. Electric vehicles came up and she complained about how expensive it would be to replace a battery for example (she threw out the number $14,000, no idea if that’s accurate) and that we’ll “r*pe the Earth” for rare earth metals.
I just nodded my head and moved on
The Castle
@The Moar You Know:
I don’t know why you think hybrid drivetrains are a shitshow. According to Consumer Reports, the Toyota Prius, the best selling hybrid of all time, is either the most reliable or 2nd most reliable car/truck on the road (I can’t remember which). Even the battery pack, which was thought to only be good for 8-10 years/100,000 miles, seems to last longer than that.
JPL
OT
From the poll results
Fifty percent of likely voters have a favorable opinion of Raphael Warnock, while 44 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him.
Forty percent of likely voters have a favorable opinion of Herschel Walker, while 51 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him.
schrodingers_cat
@geg6: You plug into an outlet just like you do a computer. How fast it charges depends on the outlet.
Matt McIrvin
@Fake Irishman: I suspect that people way overplay the Jevons paradox, where greater efficiency actually makes things worse by encouraging overuse, because it seems irresistibly clever and counterintuitive.
Most of the driving people do (pre-COVID, at least, but probably still true) is their work commute, and the limiting factor there is usually not how much you spend on gasoline.
ian
Despite Omnes’ best intentions, this thread is not nearly as much fun as the last electric car thread.
Somewhat related, here is an interesting read
Wyoming Carbon Capture Project Will Be Largest In Country, But Will Raise Energy Costs
Geminid
@JPL: The differential between Kemp and Walker may diminish by November, but ticket splitting by Republican voters could still affect the outcome of their two races.
Georgians really need a good Governor, though, and I think Abrams could be a great one. I hope she can pull it off.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@JPL:
Wow, good for Warnock and Abrams
trollhattan
@ian: We’re missing the gal who thinks people in the US and Holland are basically the same.
Fake Irishman
@Fake Irishman:
Also, why don’t you just go test drive a Bolt and see what you think? It’s more of an CUV than a compact (I drive a Hyundai Ioniq hybrid and my fil drives a bolt) at least you’ll have a baseline.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
There’s also the Kia EV6 or the Chevy Bolt, WG. Lots of options to choose from
Avalie
Just bought a 2022 Kia Niro plug-in hybrid. Both 2022 and 2023 models have EV, PHEV, and hybrid options. Love it so far and have only filled up once since buying it in early July. Takes several hours to charge without dedicated in-home charger (regular 120V outlet). But if you have 240V outlet is faster. About $750-1000 to install in-home charger are the quotes I have gotten.
rikyrah
They were having a ‘Preparedness’ Fair in the plaza outside of my work building. Bunch of government agencies were giving out brochures and other goodies.
AARP was there too.
And, …..the local health department…
GIVING AWAY THE MEGA BOOSTER SHOT.
Filled out the application online on my phone. Got my Pfizer and went about my merry way. Even got a new vaccination card.
Thank you, Joe Biden. You and your Administration made this happen. And, I won’t ever forget.
Matt McIrvin
@geg6: I am wondering about these issues myself for when we inevitably try to buy an EV down the road, as we don’t even have a carport, just a driveway.
I think what you actually need to do depends on the model of car. I know a Tesla can charge straight from a regular 110v outlet or a 220v washing-machine outlet… but charging from the 110v outlet is really slow, like, only a few miles of range per hour. So if you drive the thing a long way every day, that might be a problem.
Some other models of car might require you to use some kind of external charger that can power off the wall, but I think things are changing rapidly.
Kelly
Before my 4Runner failed I’d been trying to talk my wife into replacing her Pontiac Vibe (really a Toyota) with an electric car. We can plug one in our garage and 90% of our trips are less than 60 miles. The main panel is in the garage so wiring a 220v plug for faster charging is trivial.
The feature she is unwilling to give up is the front passenger seat back folds forward giving her an 8 foot cargo capacity and she thinks it might last the rest of her life.
eclare
Doesn’t Raven have a Niro and love it?
Emily B.
My partner has a newish Hyundai Ioniq 5. It’s fun to drive—lots of pickup and handles well. Range is about 250-300 miles, depending on speed, AC use, and the number of hills you climb. Able to charge quickly (from 20 percent to 80 percent in under 20 minutes) at a Level 3 charger, which makes long trips possible.
Negatives: There’s a very real learning curve, although some of that comes from the level of computerization and automation you get with any new car today. My partner ended up turning off most of the driver assistance features. And we are still getting used to how wiiiiide the car is—even though we appreciate the interior room, does the car really need to be so fat?
The existing EV tax credit made the car affordable in our case, but I’m not sure the Ioniq 5 will be eligible for the new rebates under the Inflation Reduction Act. Something to check into.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@geg6:
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s an issue for me personally too. I park far away from the house on the driveway and can’t practically park any closer
eclare
@rikyrah: Yay! I have an appt for the Moderna omicron booster on Saturday.
Dan B
@JPL: The latest word is that EV’s batteries will outlast the car.
Battery technology is evolving and newer versions are being delivered in Europe. No cobalt is the first step and other wild tech is showing promise.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: I know. But within the car space there are good and bad decisions and I’m out of step with the national trends. I still need a car too, but I don’t need to rely on a car for everything that I do. And that’s the problem – when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We try to solve everything with our car, because we are generally unwilling to expend the effort to promote the alternative. It’s one thing to tell Pete and Joe to build mass transit, etc. but we gotta actually use it. If you aren’t willing to use it, even if it’s a little inconvenient, there’s no point demanding it.
Cars are this negative feedback loop. We invest in a nice car, because it’s nice, and then we feel like we need to use the car more, because it’s nice and because it was a big investment. In the process we create more problems that only a car can solve because the problem was created by the car. It’s hard for most people to break out of that thinking. It’s culturally reinforced so heavily in the US that it’s nearly inescapable.
Put another way, my plug in hybrid has lower emissions than almost every EV on the road because of how I use it. I still need it – I needed it when my dad got sick and I had to run to the next state. I’ll need it tonight meeting friends for dinner in an area too dangerous to bike to. But I didn’t need it this morning to get groceries. I won’t need it tomorrow for my eye appointment, or to go to the hardware store. And because I don’t use it for everything, I don’t feel compelled to invest so much in it. I have internalized other costs besides the fuel – its environmental impact, its social impact.
My issue is that we think of the car as a perfect proxy for transportation, when we should look at a new car purchase instead as ‘what’s my best way of solving all of these transportation needs, and what role does the car play’. When you think of it that way, you often find that the car either kind of sucks or is *really* expensive – but you have to step out of it and look at it very objectively, which is admittedly hard. For instance, for the upcost from my current car to one that could haul lumber (woodworking is a hobby of mine) I could have lumber delivered every weekend for the expected life of the vehicle and still come out ahead. It makes no sense to buy that vehicle. It’s objectively worse in every way, other than there’s this cultural pressure that a woodworker needs a pickup truck. It’s really a problem of ‘can I change my thinking’ and not invent justifications for buying something because it would feel nice but is socially harmful. (I can save my money for nice things that are socially beneficial or at least neutral.)
Dagaetch
@geg6: 1) have to? no. You can charge from public chargers, it will just cost a bit more money. You can trickle charge from a regular 110v outlet that most houses/garages already have, it will go very slowly but if you don’t drive much that fine. Or installing a 240v outlet is an option; prices are dependent on your individual setup.
2) that might be an issue, but hopefully more charging stations will be built!
3) Depends on the car. Most of the newer ones can go from 10-80% in an hour or less. Some of them can give you ~100 miles of range in 10 minutes of charge.
4) depends on the price of electricity in your area :). Where I am, I figured the break-even was something like $3.80/gallon; when gas is more expensive than that, electric was cheaper. But it’s really dependent.
5) Keeping a charge, no. It will impact total range, the car will be less efficient in colder temps. If it’s below freezing, expect a 20% drop in available range with current technology.
Hope that helps!
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: No single thing will “save us,” so that’s pretty meaningless.
They’re part of the infrastructure needed to utilize lower carbon energy in transportation.
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): One of my customers has a Tesla he parks in their large driveway. They paid an electrical contractor who ran a 220v line 80 feet from the house and mounted a receptacle on a post.
It cost, though. Maybe the next Infrastructure bill will subsidize such installations.
Hoodie
Really depends on where you live, your driving cycle, etc. If you live in an apartment, EV or plug in hybrid could be problematic. If you drive in a sparsely populated area and/or one without a lot of interstate highways, charging can be a problem, so a regular hybrid might be more appropriate and would certainly be cheaper. EVs are a great concept, beyond reducing emissions, they theoretically offer a lot less maintenance and greater reliability once you get rid of the internal combustion engine. However, I’m afraid the auto industry is so performance oriented that a lot of the benefits will be vitiated. For example, people do not need pickups that go 0-60 in under 6 seconds. I hate to think what that might lead to once the coal-rolling set gets past their culture war animus against EVs.
Matt McIrvin
@The Castle: Just intuitively, a hybrid car has all the complexity of a conventional drivetrain, AND an electric drive and an Li-Ion battery, AND a whole lot of extra software that does amazingly complex and subtle things on the fly to hand off power from one to the other (which works differently for every manufacturer). There’s a lot that could go wrong.
Whether that actually makes the thing less reliable or not is going to depend on the engineering details. So far, the biggest problem I had with mine was when a truck slammed into it, which was not its fault. But it’s still pretty new, newer still when you consider all the smashed parts they had to replace.
Bupalos
@Avalie: Installation of a charger will be covered under eletrification rebates in 2023. Although that’s state-administered so could take some months to be up and running.
trollhattan
@rikyrah: Gotta get it. That and the flu jab. Been nice, not getting sick the last two winters and I want to go for three.
JPL
@Geminid: Kemp is running on the strength of the state’s economy. Walker is running on how the economy is in turmoil.
I thought Walker’s favorability was high considering he threatens people with harm.
NeenerNeener
Toyota makes the RAV-4 as a hybrid, and possibly even a fully electric one as well. Choices were limited when I traded my CRV for a Kia Niro plug in hybrid back in 2018, but the available options now are much better. The Chevy Equinox coming out next year is supposed to be around 30 grand. I’ll believe that when I see it. Also Chevy has sols so many EVs that you don’t get rebate money from the Feds for buying one anymore.
Dan B
@CaseyL: Our entry level 2019 Leaf gets 150 miles. We drove to the ocean north of Ocean Shores on Labor Day. We stopped in Tumwater for Tortas and Burritos because we hadn’t plugged it in the night before. We were on our way in half an hour. We drove 65+ mph except in the jam from Nisqually to Olympia. One nice aspect is they use no power when stopped.
JPL
@Dan B: Whoa! That is great news.
Geminid
@Bupalos: I think the commenter was being ironic. That notion was asserted in a comment on a post last Saturday. We went ’round and ’round on it, to the frustration of many. I thought it was a good discussion myself.
Old School
Today in the “Who Could Have Predicted?” category:
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: Yes. My ::ducks:: was in there for a reason.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
You must hate how trucks and SUVs have taken over the market over the last 10 years
Another Scott
I’m in a similar boat about thinking about getting an EV in a year or three. My 2004 TDI Jetta Wagon has been pretty good, but getting off fossil fuel is something that I need to contribute toward.
The VW ID4 and Kia EV6 were on my list for deeper investigation. But both are bigger than I’d like. The EV6 has a more modern DC electrical system (800V) so it can charge faster, at the cost of wearing the battery out faster and home charging is always going to be AC and overnight so it’s not clear that it’s worth being the pioneer there yet. (DC fast charging is 3x or more expensive than charging at home.) The EV6 apparently has a better interior, and if one wants to live with it long term that can be important.
I saw an ID4 recently and a Mustang Mach e was a few cars behind it. The Mach e is a little smaller and might come closer to what I’m looking for. I like that the EPA calls it a “wagon”, also too. ;-) But Ford is new to EVs and waiting a year or three probably makes sense.
It’s still crazy trying to buy something new(er) now. Yeah, over 1M/month new cars are still being sold, but who wants to pay over list and who wants to pay as much as the new list price for something 1-3 years old? Waiting makes sense, especially (as I understand it) the tax rebates aren’t going to expire the way they previously did.
Good luck with your choices!
Cheers,
Scott.
JPL
@Geminid: I think Warnock’s numbers among females will grow once they realize that Walker doesn’t believe in exceptions to the abortion laws. Never mind if you’re raped, but I remember what it was like before Roe. You would have to carry to term, even if the child was dead.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Geminid:
I don’t think my folks would go for that lol
CPL
I live in NC and recently put a deposit on one of these!
https://vinfastauto.us/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI66a91vqU-gIVehXUAR31Dw0kEAAYASAAEgLfKfD_BwE
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: A big advantage of current hybrids is that that they do not have the complexity of a conventional drive train, just electric motors at the driving wheels. This has been a feature of diesel train locomotives for decades.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I do and I am not anti-car.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: There are a bunch of new tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (as I understand it) that don’t actually apply to the vast majority of EVs made today, because they have ‘made in the US’ riders that require more bits to be American than is currently the case for these cars. The point being to build the US EV industry.
raven
Our KIA Niro Hybrid is 4 years old and has 26,000 miles on it. The 100,000 mile 10 year warranty was the seller for us.
FastEdD
@geg6: 1.) No you don’t have to install a charger at your home, but it helps. It isn’t that pricey depending on your situation. If you have one in your garage, it does increase the resale value of your home. A charger costs $500-$700. Install is $500-$1500 based on whether you need to run a conduit.
2.) Tesla charging networks are all over the place, non-Tesla chargers are scattered, but getting better.
3.) If you are in a hurry and on the road DC fast chargers take 30-45 minutes for a “full tank.” Easy, if you are on a road trip and need to grab a bite to eat. Home chargers at level 2 take overnight, which is also easy, considering you leave home each morning with a “full tank.”
4.) Charging an EV is about 1/4 the cost of gas, plus an EV has only a couple hundred moving parts, unlike a gas car which has tens of thousands of things to go wrong.
5.) Charging at home can be a problem if you don’t have the right situation. I would imagine some places would attract renters if they offered charging as an amenity.
Violet
I have a Toyota RAV4 Prime. It’s a plug-in hybrid that has a range of about 40 miles on electric and about 35-40 mpg when in hybrid mode. I’ve only filled the tank a few times as the range usually covers my daily needs. Obviously, driving less or not at all is better but we can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
Eyeroller
When it was appropriate to have two cars, we bought a 2019 Leaf (just before the Plus came out, not sure we’d have paid extra anyway since it was the “commuting car”). It has a range of about 150 miles on a full charge. I had a 240V/50A circuit installed in the garage (unlike most people where I live, we always actually used the garage for the cars). Now that there’s just me I don’t need two cars, but I am still afraid to have a BEV as my only vehicle in case I need to take a long trip. I would like to trade in both my Leaf and my Outback for a PHEV (a range of 30-40 miles would cover nearly all my trips) but hardly any are available where I live.
Bupalos
@Matt McIrvin:
Have to disagree strongly with this. Most plugins are in the 20-40 miles all electric range, if your daily driving habit falls in there, it’s better than a full EV. And if you’re daily commute or errand running is more like 100, it’s still a pretty significant increase in efficiency over a regular hybrid. Though as always, you need to think about where the electricity is coming from too.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s such a shame, too. They’re all very boring looking imo and they’re killing sports cars and sedans.
Oh but go on Reddit, and it’s:
“You can’t tell people what to buy!”
And:
“It’s not 2008 anymore, they’re more fuel efficient!”
Like, I get all of that. People have their own preferences and needs. Of course they can choose whatever. It still sucks from an environment and car enthusiast perspective
Geminid
@JPL: Also, independent PACs will spend heavily to shine a harsh light on Walker’s alarming past. Senator Warnock might may show some mercy, but his allies won’t.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: This is definitely not true of my Hyundai hybrid.
What mine has is a more or less conventional front-wheel drivetrain, with a six-speed automatic gearbox, but with a big disc-shaped electric motor/generator inline with that. There are separate clutches so they can engage or disengage separately, for combinations of conventional drive, electric drive, regenerative braking, and even the two motors pushing together if they can get the speeds to match exactly.
And then there’s a second, smaller electric motor called the hybrid starter/generator (HSG) that is connected directly to the engine via a belt drive; that works like a starter motor and alternator on steroids, with the ability to spin the internal combustion engine up on the fly to any desired RPM, so it doesn’t waste power getting itself moving at low speeds (ICEs are very inefficient that way). And it can also generate electric energy directly from the engine.
Other systems work differently. Toyota uses some kind of planetary gear system to mix ICE and electric power in a continuously varying way. Honda’s is, I think, more radical, with the transmission running on electric drive most of the time and the ICE mostly charging the battery, except sometimes when the car is running at high speed. Hyundai’s is the closest to a conventional car mechanically. Interestingly they all seem to be able to squeeze roughly comparable efficiency out of their very different systems, with the MPG mostly depending on other things like how big the car is.
Zzyzx
@The Castle: I’m on my second Prius now. The first one I drove for 160k miles and only then was it starting to need repairs. Prius 2 is on 80k and so far so good *knock on wood*
That’s one of the things I like about it.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: I was looking pretty seriously at a plugin-hybrid for a while. It seems, in principle, ideal for us – we’re about 11 miles from work. So one could be quasi-all electric for commuting and still be able to use it for longer trips like a “real” car. What could be better?
But then I thought about the real-life practicality of it. Do I really want to charge it up nearly every night (most of the PHEVs only have ~ 30 mile range all electric)? Probably not. And if one isn’t doing that, then it’s basically an expensive hybrid that is heavier, more complicated, and more expensive than a regular hybrid.
Plus, can one buy a new one now if one really wants to??
I’ve been looking at electric bikes too, especially for when I’m not commuting any more. One with a big basket for groceries sounds appealing, but for just regular trips that would be a huge pain. So, 2 different types of electric bikes. And finding somewhere to put them (we don’t have a garage)…
It’s a complicated multi-variate optimization problem!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay
@geg6:
1) Do you have to install a charging station at your home and how ridiculously pricey is that?
For a fast charge, yes. Prices vary from included with the car to moderately expensive, depending on existing household wiring and the breaker panel. Most models can be slowly recharged with an extension cord and a 10amp wall outlet.
2) If not that, what do you do when there is only one charging station in the entire county?
See above, but in 4 years when you are looking to but there might be 2 fast charging stations in your county.
3) How long does charging take?
Depends on how low you have taken the battery. At worst, you are looking at 8 hours with an extention cord, 2 hours with a fast charger.
4) How pricey is it compared to gas?
Depends on your electricity rates. Here in BC, compared to gas, it’s the equivalent of $0.08 per litre vs. $2.98.
5) What if you live in a place that has actual winter? I only have a carport (well, we have a double-bay garage, but my John has made it so there is no room for actual cars in it), so will the cold interfere with keeping a charge?
The biggest issue in winter, is heating the inside of the car, which because it’s electric heat drops the range fairly significantly.
Bupalos
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve been following this and manufacturers are making huge, urgent investments in US assembly and free-trade zone acquisition of battery components and chemicals.
I’m not sure whether Manchin thought he was was sabotaging EV rollout with these requirements, but if so, it isn’t going to work. And a year from now there are going to be a lot of Ohio workers that have the kind of policy-generated jobs that have been promised forever. Huge GM battery facilities coming in a half hour east and west of me.
Dan B
@geg6: We charge off regular power. It does 100 miles worth on 110 in 8 hours.
Level 2 chargers cost $500, or more if your existing panel doesn’t have 2 empty slots.
Charging is slower in very cold temperatures unless the car has thermal management that heats, or more commonly, cools the battery.
Charging the battery to 80% is fast. From 80 to 100% it’s typically slow. Our 150 mile range Leaf gets to 120 mile range from 20% in less than 1/2 hour.
Maintenance: In 6 years we’ve had the car(s) in the shop three times for tire rotation. -Twice for being hit by other cars.. grrrr!
We despise driving ICE vehicles. We hated driving our compact pickup after one week of leasing our first 85 mile range Leaf.
We have been known to startle (frighten) friends with the torque / acceleration of our dowdy-for-an-EV Leaf. It’s great for merging on freeway on ramps or getting across the intersection before the light rail barrels through.
Scout211
I will be in the market for a new sedan in about 3 years. What do any of you know plus or minus about plug-in hybrids, like the Honda Clarity?
ETA: Silly me, I see that many of you have been discussing plug-in hybrids but “PHEV” didn’t compute.
So, nevermind. 🙄
Bupalos
For low/moderate income (up to 80% of area median) this kind of electrification project will be free next your. For up to 150% of median it will be 50% off.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: I’ve lived in situations where I was biking everywhere and it was wonderful. Here, I’m terrified at the prospect. Thought about getting a bicycle–with my spiffy new knee it would work–but the neighborhood is just not built for it; I’d be riding around on roads that usually don’t even have designated bike lanes, full of actively hostile drivers. This is one of the big infrastructure problems we have to deal with.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
Strange as it sounds, here in LA we have a pretty good electric train/subway system that is being added to on a regular basis, we have diesel/electric trains as well and a metric ton of buses, some electric. I travel 45 miles to the VA and my dentist is about 1/2 mile away from there so I can drive that 90 miles in anywhere from 90 minutes to 4 hrs. Or I can take the electric train system and a bus and that takes about 3 1/2 hrs total round trip but traffic is not a time issue. I take the public transportation. It’s far cheaper than $4.50-$5.00 gas and I have a car that gets great milage. Did a trip to San Diego last weekend 240 miles RT and got an average of 41 mpg. It goes down in heavy traffic to about 24 mpg.
Bupalos
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You could run a line and charger out there.
Pretty much anything you want to do with replacing fossil fuel with electricity next year (for people not making upper class money) is going to be 50 or 100% off.
Mai Naem mobile
@WaterGirl: they don’t have it out yet but soon – you should take a look at the Nissan Aria. Ofcourse its the first year and they’ve had supply chain issues hence the late date. Its supposed to be the size of the Nissan Rogue(Sport?) which would make it about the size of a CRV. The Ford Mach E looks nice too.
Cameron
@Dan B: Yeah, I like this latest about MIT: https://medium.com/predict/mits-new-battery-will-change-the-world-f922d79e758e, although I’m fascinated with the research on hemp batteries (don’t know how far along that actually is). Don’t have a personal stake in this, since I use public transit.
The Moar You Know
@Matt McIrvin: This is where I’m at: roads are an obscenity and EVs just mean a cheaper way of pursuing a failed way of life that is incredibly destructive to the environment.
However, unlike most of the folks promulgating this point of view, I know that the changes they are asking people to make are flat-out not gonna happen, not in liberal/civilized Europe, never mind America. So you do the best with the system you have in place, and that’s using EVs.
ETA: also, as a retired racing cyclist, I recognize there are a slew of people, a flat-out majority of the populace who are not physically capable of using a bicycle for anything, much less any kind of daily transport. It’s a very ableist point of view and they need to stop pursuing it as a cure-all for transport and the environment. It is not.
RepubAnon
@lldoty: My Kia Niro EV is similar in size. Great car, 270+ max range- about 220 miles useable range while keeping a reserve in case public chargers are not working. Love that car!
Drove from SF to Oregon a while back – chargers at restaurants made the 45 min charging stops about what I’d need in a gas car anyway. Eyeing a Kia EV6 at some point for longer range.
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): There’s no practical reason to get an electric car soon anyway. By the middle of this decade charging infrastructure will be built out more, and the selection of vehicles will be much better. And if gasoline prices rise steadily, your parents may want to go electric themselves.
Vehicle fleets will go electric first. U PS envisions a fleet of vans that will be largely electric, with hybrids for the longer routes.
School bus fleets will start going electric too. The Infrastructure bill provides funds to switch 20% of the nation’s school buses to electric this decade. They all don’t neccesarily have to be new buses, either. Cummins Engines has an electric drive train package that can be retrofitted to buses and medium sized trucks.
I’m not exactly sure how the Infrastructure bill will accomplish this. Maybe it will just make financing easier. Electric buses will cost less over their service life than their diesel counterparts, so the changeover is not a matter of cost but of financing. This is true generally of many components of the clean energy transition.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Kropacetic: I do the majority of my local trips by bicycle, or walking. With the right setup you can get a week’s worth of groceries on a bike. I live in the inner ring suburbs of DC where population densities are high and I have like 4 full service grocery stores and multiple farmers markets within 2 miles of my house.
Honestly most places within 5 miles, given a safe route, I could get to just as fast (or nearly enough so that it makes not much practical difference) by bike as by car. And it’s pretty hilly where I live.
Kind of feel that the bicycle should be the primary transportation mode in dense urban areas. For longer trips there’s no substitute for cars in a lot of cases but if people could take bikes for shorter trips it’d make a big difference. Unfortunately that requires investment in bike specific infrastructure. DC has been absolutely fantastic about installing a lot of that but the Maryland suburbs not so much. So there are places I could easily bike to but I don’t because I’m afraid taking the bicycle would get me killed Hoping the burbs make headway in getting bike infrastructure in place. With an e-bike I could get just about anywhere within 10 miles, which is pretty much as far as I’m going on most days, quickly and non-sweatily.
RepubAnon
@Bupalos: It depends on your house. If you have a garage with a electric dryer, you can probably charge your car from the dryer’s outlet. If your panel will support adding a 220v 50amp breaker, installation shouldn’t be too expensive.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: My town just made all of its buses free, which is fantastic–but they’ve got like a 30-minute headway, so actually using them requires a lot of planning.
And there’s a commuter-rail station within walking distance–but… it’s designed as a park-and-ride, with the only walkable route going through suburban-street-design bottlenecks that make it several times as long as it ought to be. It’s less than a half-mile from my house but the walk is more like a mile and a half.
And there’s no rail link between North Station and South Station in Boston, so unless your destination downtown is actually in the North Station neighborhood, add at least another half hour to get wherever it is. If it’s near South Station, it’s actually faster for me to drive 15 minutes in the complete opposite direction to a park-and-ride in Salem, NH, an actual different state, where I can catch a bus downtown.
There are all these theoretically fixable things making it less attractive but they’d require unbuilding all these prior commitments.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Get a bike.
Emily B.
@geg6: I’ve been surprised by the number of public chargers available, at least in the Northeast. The PlugShare app is helpful for finding chargers. My partner lives within walking distance of one Level 2 charger, so he can drop off the car, walk home, and pick up the car later while he’s walking the dog; we have also plugged in while shopping, eating at restaurants, or running errands.
We’ve gotten as much as 60 miles on a 2-hour Level 2 charge. High-speed or Level 3 charges can give you up to about 200 miles in 20 minutes, but they are not recommended for everyday use.
It seems to me that the price of Level 3 charging is slightly less than the price of gas currently. The price of Level 2 charging is MUCH less. Some Level 2 chargers are actually free—for now.
Bupalos
@JPL: Even now they’re generally warranted to 8 or 10 years, against a certain percentage of decline. Something like 85% capacity? It’s actually federal law I think.
Prometheus Shrugged
@Martin: What you say is all true, but will probably never be how the average consumer behaves or thinks about the issue. This is why most of my colleagues treat the EV industry as the market-driven push toward electrification and total decarbonization (the ultimate objective).
For my own sake, I have never been a car guy. However, I ordered a Rivian in 2020 for its ability to haul both kids and dogs on occasionally rough roads. I am still waiting. In the interim, we purchased a Mustang Mach E for our daily use. Our total miles driven (in Southern California) haven’t increased over our multi-year pre COVID averages. And because we rely mostly on our rooftop solar for charging and can program for optimal charging times, I’ve come out slightly ahead in the carbon footprint calculation over our hybrid. (Ford C-Max).
I will add that we’ve not had any problems with the Mach-E over the past year, except for having to take it in for recall service (we didn’t experience the problem that prompted the recall, but had the service done anyway). The main issue we’ve encountered with using the Mach-E away from home range (~270 miles) is the horribly unreliable charging network (Electrify America). But I’m sure this problem will diminish once more non-Tesla EVs hit the market.
eclare
@Bupalos: Ford is building a huge battery/assembly factory about an hour north of Memphis. Investment of $5.6B. Sounds like they mean it too, not like Foxconn, etc.
Omnes Omnibus
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: I have a bike.
Kayla Rudbek
@trollhattan: Mr. Rudbek and I were on vacation in Maine last month, and we saw a small family that had driven up to Acadia from the DC metro area in a Bolt. I would seriously consider a Bolt as our next car; we currently have a Honda Fit and a Prius. The Prius (aka the Blond Tardis, often has problems with the dashboard lights and speedometer and odometer going dark) is about 7 years away from being eligible for antique plates, and I fear that Mr. Rudbek is going to take it as a challenge to keep the car running until we can get the antique plates.
My current criteria for a travel car: 1) fit the folding tandem 2) fit the folding kayak 3) clothes for over a week (regular and athletic) 4) camping equipment 5) fit the footlocker for the telescope.
Another Scott
@Jay: Lots of new EVs have heat pumps these days, so heating and cooling isn’t quite the huge power sink that it used to be. But winter still kills the range – batteries like to operate in certain temperature ranges (it’s chemistry).
I thought Car and Driver’s 40,000 mile test of a Tesla Model 3 was interesting. They’re lead-foots but their range was nothing like what Tesla claimed. And range gets killed in the winter. Lots of things to consider in the real world (and to be fair all cars and all EVs have similar issues).
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@geg6:
Most of them you can plug into 110 but that can take 20 hrs to fully charge. Next is what’s called a wall box, which uses 220v, you won’t have one of those if you live in an apartment in all likelihood. Takes about 9 hrs to fully charge most EVs. However the last apartment building put in 5 charging stations in the underground parking garage that would charge in about 2 hrs or less, possibly in less than an hour. Now here in SoCal there are a number of charging stations, including the city work yard where I live, which has 2 chargers, they take about 1-2 hrs to charge. Last time I checked, most of the fastish chargers cost $.39/KW, so about $20-30 per charge depending on battery capacity/how much charge is left. That’s better than the $45-50 I pay here for a full tank of gas in my economy car. You will likely use a bit more in winter because the car will heat the battery for better charging/discharging.
raven
Geminid
@Jay: Air conditioning could suck up a lot of power too. I heard a car mechanic with a syndicated show posit a scenario with electric cars backed up at the Holland tunnel on a sweltering July day.
The transition to electric will be gradual, though, and I think these problems will be worked out. Cars may have transponders that lets a station a mile from a tunnel know their charge level. Drivers would then face a hefty fine if they don’t pull into the charging station before the tunnel.
Gravenstone
@pacem appellant: Actually saw one of those in the wild about a month ago. Drove right in front of me as I waited to turn onto the crossroad near my hovel. I can only assume it belongs to someone residing on or visiting the small lake to my north.
trollhattan
Just to be safe, have you checked all the woodpiles and manhole covers for Scott Walker?
Matt McIrvin
@The Moar You Know: Yes, cycling advocacy unfortunately does have this really ugly undercurrent of ableism/ageism/fat-phobia that surfaces on occasion. Most people would be healthier if they biked everywhere, but also it takes a certain threshold level of physical ability to even consider that. I could not have done it for the few years before the surgery I got in 2021.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
This is OT, I know, but I have to ask:
Why does it seem like the US Treasury has tried to kill off the US Savings Bonds program for the last 20 years when they’ve provided cheaper borrowing costs for them historically compared to the marketable treasuries they issue?
Treasury Killing Off U.S. Savings Bonds?
The death of U.S. savings bonds
Geminid
@raven: The EU seems to want to lean heavily into hydrogen power as a component of their future energy economy. And I noticed that California’s law ending sale of ICE vehicles after 2035 allows hydrogen powered vehicles
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Matt McIrvin:
Cyclists have their own subculture and slang online. They hate cars and refer to motorists as “cagers” on online cycling forums
cain
@Matt McIrvin: It won’t save us – it’s not going to fix congestion or remove highways and so forth. The U.S. fundamental problem is that we have a lot of sprawl and it almost always requires a car. You have things like malls that are also problematic, we need to actually have small neighborhood stores that you can walk to.
But at least, we can try to fix the emissions – and once we have autonomous cars, we could move the population towards an “on demand” model. As well, as we encourage remote work we can continue to reduce our dependence on cars.
The key is getting good city planners working together to address these concerns.
raven
@Matt McIrvin: arrogant bunch of motherfuckers.
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Replacement batteries can be expensive, although this number seems high.
Improvements with respect to battery technology, along with speed and availability of charging, are key issues if EV does become the new standard.
Barbara
@geg6: Here are my answers to your questions, hopefully to supplement Jay’s response:
1) Do you have to install a charging station at your home and how ridiculously pricey is that?
We do have a charging station, and it cost around $1000 to install, however, my husband successfully installed another charging station at his brother’s house on his own because he has sufficient knowledge of how electricity works.
2) If not that, what do you do when there is only one charging station in the entire county?
We always charge at home when we are at home, but you could use any power set up, it would just be slower. This is really more of a “range” issue than a charging issue — if your daily commute requires you to recharge in order to get back home, I agree, that could be problematic. Also, consider that many vehicles could actually use RV chargers, which we did on a cross-country trip. They weren’t listed as EV charging stations, but we confirmed that they were suitable and called them in advance.
3) How long does charging take?
Totally depends on the charger. The J-1772 that has been the standard for some time charges between 18-22 miles per hour, but there are newer public chargers that charge at twice that rate, and Tesla superchargers are in the range of 150-200 miles per hour. They are definitely working to upgrade this aspect of EVs, because uptake really depends on it.
4) How pricey is it compared to gas?
We don’t really compare anymore, but when we bought the car, we likened the expense to getting around 100 miles per gallon.
5) What if you live in a place that has actual winter? I only have a carport (well, we have a double-bay garage, but my John has made it so there is no room for actual cars in it), so will the cold interfere with keeping a charge?
We have actual winter and we don’t have a garage. Just consider that Norway is one of the biggest per capita purchasers of Teslas, and they definitely have winter. There are tips and tricks for getting the most out of your battery in the cold. For one thing, you can keep it plugged in when you are at home, and you can make sure it is actively charging when you warm up for your morning commute. We’ve driven the Tesla to Vermont and Canada in the winter, and the bitter cold does make a difference, although Tesla (and likely others) have subsequently tried to address this issue through various technology upgrades. If it’s just driving locally, I doubt if you would even really notice the difference that much.
HinTN
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I looked very seriously at that vehicle and probably would have endured the wait from order to delivery if the charging infrastructure in the southeast was more well developed. Of course I would have installed a Level 2 charger at home for the 90% local use but… I love my 2022 Hybrid RAV4 for the ability to travel at will.
raven
@Geminid: Ah, good to know!
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: I’ve been driving my hybrid with an MPG meter showing on the dash, and whenever there’s a serious heat wave, the air conditioning takes a really obvious toll on the efficiency by draining the battery faster. (It’s actually not that bad on merely warm days.)
The Moar You Know
@Matt McIrvin: I was one of those obnoxious people, until I had an accident that has left me able, thankfully, to do most things, but one of the things I absolutely can’t do anymore is ride a bike. I had a LOT of time flat on my back in a hospital bed to reflect on just exactly how much of a dick I’d been about it.
Sometimes learning is painful and hard.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
@raven:
Unicycles or bust.
evodevo
My partime farmer neighbor, who retired from the shop floor at Toyota, just got herself an F150 hybrid (whatever they are called), so yes, America is turning toward electric in some form… Also, the headlines in the local G’town Ky paper announced that the Avalon will no longer be made at our local Toyota plant…they are turning toward more Rav4’s
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The people in a cycling forum on line are probably not typical of most recreational and commuting cyclists.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Huh. I thought the newer hybrids used motors at the drive wheels. They might before too long. It’s a simpler system, or at least it seems like it would be.
Another Scott
@Baud: There are at least a couple of older kids around us that have single center wheel electric “skateboard” type things. They’re pretty skilled on them, but I’ve never seen them anywhere other than the subdivision roads.
Maybe one of these.
I never see them wearing helmets or gloves though… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@JPL: That sounds even better!
lowtechcyclist
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
I want to send that statement back through a wormhole in time to ~1969 just to blow more than a few minds.
patrick II
Ford F150 Electric pick up truck. Put a large Biden Harris sign on the back. You will meet lots of new people.
RobertS
@CaseyL: The newer models have much more range than the early versions. I’ve got an SL+ that easily manages 200 miles. I charge it at home about once a week.
O. Felix Culpa
@Matt McIrvin:
We just moved to the city, to be closer to Ms. O’s office, which is now a 6-minute commute compared to 66+ minutes. That enabled us to go down to one car, a 2016 RAV4 hybrid (which gets ok but not great mileage, but still better than our erstwhile pickup). We also walk to stores etc. as much as possible, and I’ll sometimes ride the bus with the dodgy passengers, but Albuquerque does not lend itself to a car-free existence.
And NO to bike-riding. Not safe enough. Color me risk-averse, but I’d like to be around for a few more years.
ETA: I’ve been looking at EVs, but not ready to pull the trigger yet. Our car still runs fine and we’re in a rental, so no accommodation for charging.
Gravenstone
@Geminid: Just poking around online, looks like the cost to install a level 2 charger ranges from $1500-3000 (labor and hardware).
cain
@Hoodie: One of the things that Tesla did was prove that you can build charging stations – that was probably Tesla’s greatest achievement – being able to drive long distance with an EV.
RobertS
@Barbara: One of the things I really like about my Leaf is that I can set it to pre-warm on winter days while its plugged in. I set the thermostat to 68F about 30 minutes before I leave and its warm, de-iced, and ready to go.
WaterGirl
@Martin:
My car guy yells at me because I don’t drive mine enough. (Not really yelling, maybe scolding is a better word.)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well yeah, that goes without saying. They’re going to be the more hard core of the enthusiasts
cain
@FastEdD:
I took a road trip from Portland to SFO. It usually takes about 9 hours, but it took about 3 hours longer because of 45 minutes of charging. Conveniently, each charger was set next to a bar. :)
RobertS
@Gravenstone: It varies and depends on the car. You basically need for somebody to install a dryer / RV plug in a convenient spot. I’ve installed one myself, and paid a few hundred to an electrician to have it done elsewhere.
My car came with the hardware ( the EVSE ), so I just needed the plug. So while you could spend 1500-3k, thats not a given.
Barbara
@Gravenstone: When we installed one, I think Tesla actually had a deal with a company that provided a lower rate. That seems expensive to me, but we don’t have a charging station as such, just a compatible hook up that charges around 25 miles per hour.
VOR
@Another Scott: Here is an article from 2017 about a taxi company who put 300k miles on a Tesla in a little over two years. They compared their actual maintenance and fuel costs to ICE vehicles in the same luxury class and found it comparable. This was 5 years ago. At that time, Tesla bundled unlimited use of their charging network, which I do not think is still true.
There are some maintenance items which simply don’t exist on an EV. No muffler. No exhaust. No need to change the oil. Brakes tend to last longer due to regenerative braking.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@HinTN:
Hopefully that will be further built out in the next decade or so like Geminid mentioned up thread
RobertS
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The term ‘Cagers’ is more of a motorcycle thing. I know many, many cyclists and I’ve never heard anybody use that. I have heard it from Motorcyclists.
Barbara
@RobertS: Right, this is what we did, but I have seen actual charging stations that people install in their garage with the cord built in so they don’t have to use the portable cord you get with the car. That would be quite a bit more expensive I expect.
Brachiator
@Baud:
A young guy at an office I once worked at would sometimes ride his unicycle to work and park it at his desk. He was quite proficient with it.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
One point that Atrios has been hammering on for years is that we don’t need to move everyone into the cities. Because a lot of people actually want to live in cities, but the cities they want to live in have become unaffordable because of a lack of housing: basically too many restrictions on dense residential building even close to heavily traveled corridors.
If we had enough housing in the cities to have room for all the people who wanted to live there, that would be a huge step forward all by itself, both environmentally and in terms of lifestyle.
I’d point out that a side effect would be less demand for suburban housing further and further out from the cities, and probably way less deforestation to make room for new exurban housing. All this without forcing a single person to move into the city that didn’t want to move into the city.
I think that’s a reasonable goal, in terms of its being a Good Thing if one could make it so by waving a magic wand. But unfortunately there’s no magic wand, it’s still an extremely difficult goal, and your initial point that we need to be moving forward on multiple fronts is absolutely correct.
WaterGirl
@CPL: handsome!
Dan B
@Cameron: Very cool battery! This plus the sand battery and the CO2 battery (see YouTube) give us great and inexpensive energy storage options that can be rapidly scaled up. Fossil fuel companies should be paying attention because their demise is inevitable. They’re going the way of dinosaurs since their minds seem fossilized.
Dan B
@Ruckus: We get 100 miles on 110v in 8 hours. 20 hours must be 250 miles eq. charge.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: But that means the solution isn’t cutting down on cars or switching to EVs. It is housing policy. The other things would come as knock on effects.
Geminid
@raven: One of the more interesting stories I’ve found while looking up “clean energy news” was about a large electrical co-op based in Valentia, Ireland. Valentia is on Ireland’s west coast, and they have plenty of offshore wind but are distant from large energy markets. The co-op projects a large offshore wind generation complex that will produce hydrogen by electrolysis. I guess they’ll pipe it to one location and load tankers similar to the ones that carry liquified natural gas now. The cooperative seemed pretty serious about the project.
One challenging part of decarbonising the economy is the industries that require a lot of heat: steelmaking, brickmaking, concrete production and the like. Hydrogen could be a solution here. There is a lot of scepticism about hydrogen but as I said, the EU is planning on using it a lot and I guess authorities are relying on the advice of good scientists and engineers.
Ruckus
@Martin:
As everyone’s problems and solutions are going to be mildly to wildly different I truly believe that there will always be a need for relatively individual transportation, IOW cars or car like devices. For example I have over 1/2 million miles on motorcycles, which use far less gas and take up far less road. (And DO NOT need to be fucking loud!) But like everything else they have a downside. The biggest issue I see with current US available EVs are that they are more for the luxury/larger car people, who will pay the money. People like me that do not need a huge car or several hundred HP will purchase smaller EVs. The 2023 KIA EV Nero looks great, is about the right size and has decent range, better than my current car around town and not quite as good as my current car on long trips, for which I mostly can take a train and likely would anyway, even as it takes longer.
I think that many of us do not have the luxury that you do about where you live and where you need to go most of the time, like my last 3 yrs of work that was a mile walk each direction. Never wasted any gas, unless I had to go somewhere else before or after.
Brachiator
Breaking transportation related story from USA Today
Dan B
@Geminid: We haven’t noticed much difference in range with AC in our Leaf. We’ve driven 100+ miles in 90° heat but didn’t do any calculation.
eclare
@WaterGirl: I have had my car for four years and have around 8k miles on it. I am also a Honda CRV fan.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: Performance car people can be rather positive about hydrogen power. Apparently, it replicates the power delivery, etc., of an ICE engine in a way that pleases them.
El Muneco
@Another Scott: I’ve seen a unicyclist riding down the (non-arterial, 25mph) street outside my apartment. Quite well-armored, which is a good thing as he faceplanted within a block and was kind of lucky the first car that came along saw the cycle first and stopped.
WaterGirl
@eclare: Mine still has the built-in card table and cooler, which I love.
Sister Golden Bear
@geg6: You can plug and an EV in at home varies — although how fast it charges. 110v is pretty slow, but doable if you’re just doing limited driving around town. If you’ve got an unused 220v dryer outlet that works better. In either case, you can always top off as needed at a charger station. (In CA, 180 miles costs me about $1,000.)
Key thing to remember is it’s more like a phone — you plug it in whenever you’re home, so it’s usually mostly/fully charged.
Home chargers cost a couple hundred, but the bigger expense is having an electrician install it, especially if they need to add a 220v line.
As far as EV vs. hybrids, they both have their uses. Hybrids are better for long trips. Gas stations are much faster than charging stations — although many of the latter are near coffeehouses, shopping centers, malls, etc. Hybrids are definitely better for remoter areas with few chargers. I’ve taken my Tesla across the Sierras, but there’s definitely places there where I’d rent a hybrid to visit.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: I’d add that if I were a two-car household, I’d get an EV for local/shorter (2-3 hour trips), and a hybrid that can be used for longer trips.
ETA, charging again varies by charger, but a full-charge at a charging station generally has never taken more than 45 minutes. Chargers slow down towards the end to protect the battery, so charging to 70-80% takes about a half hour.
raven
@Geminid: I always wonder about harnessing the power of the oceans.
trollhattan
@El Muneco: Google Portland Unipiper. Peak Portland.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Aren’t the electric one’s really fast?
lowtechcyclist
@geg6:
Just as an aside, I’ve been noticing what a common thing this seems to be. Many of the houses in my neighborhood have garages, but most of them have enough cars parked out front to suggest that they’re really using the garage in lieu of a basement.
Geminid
@Dan B: Advances in materials research will have a big impact on the clean energy transition, with batteries and in other ways. That’s one reason I am sceptical of those who argue that mining resources will not keep up with demand. They may have have an ideological axe to grind. “Degrowth” straregies are very atractive to some on the left, and they may be shaping their critique of the clean energy transition to that end.
Battery recycling could play a big role also in conserving essential materials.
topclimber
@Brachiator: If rail freight is at risk, Biden will probably have to invoke the Taft-Hartley cooling off period so that the sides can come to a deal without f–ing up the midterms.
I think TH still is in effect–allowing President to declare a national emergency for 60(?) days while negotiations continue.
Ken
Mississippi, for example, will need a couple of years to figure out how to spend five million dollars installing a charging station in Brett Favre’s garage.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
There are also lots of people who do not want to live in dense cities on top of one another.
And issues of housing costs are complex. When I visited relatives in Texas, I noticed that there is lots of building in Dallas, which does not look to be particularly crowded. But there is also a lot of building in suburban areas. There is enough land that housing is not especially dense. And deforestation is not an issue. And even though housing costs are less than some other states, there is not enough affordable housing.
Sister Golden Bear
@raven: Yes, they can be. My Tesla 3 (a comparatively slow Tesla) can out accelerate the vast majority of cars on the road. But the acceleration is different than an ICE vehicle, due to the electric motor, so that might be why car buffs prefer hydrogen, which I assume accelerates through various gas like an ICE car.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Range, charging, and cold weather are the complaints.
Ken
Is that because unicyclists are either proficient or in a full-body cast? Like the old saying, “there are bold mushroom hunters, and there are old mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters.”
Nora
@lowtechcyclist: We have what is supposedly a two car garage that is really a six motorcycle garage. I hear you.
zhena gogolia
@Ken: Yeah, I’m trying to imagine an inept unicycle rider.
KRK
Does anyone have any experience with mice in a hybrid or EV? They’re inevitable for my situation and I know that the level of damage they do to ICE vehicles varies widely from brand to brand and the appeal (to mice) of the materials used (insulation, wire coatings, etc). In my VW they’re just a nuisance but have never done any major damage. I worry that they’d destroy an EV.
Dan B
@Geminid: We’re excited about the technologies that can be rapidly deployed and entertained about the wild and wooly ones that will take decades.
geg6
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I’m with you. I cannot tell you how much I despise SUVs. Just despise them.
surfk9
Just put in a 220V 50A service for my new Airstream $2450 Not cheap but worth it. A lot of the expense was the fact that my panel was on the other side of the house.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ken: All mushrooms are edible. Once.
Dan B
@KRK: My partner (car nut / gearhead) says that EV’s are as susceptible as any vehicle and could be even more attractive if they are warmed by charging at night. Our cats keep mice and bigger rodents away from our car and deposit the careless ones on the kitchen carpet – uck!
eclare
@Nora: Consider yourself lucky. My cousin’s wife used to complain about their motorcycle kitchen (no garage).
geg6
@Emily B.:
I’ve already checked in my county. There is exactly one charging station. The app says there are two, but I went to where they said there was another one and there wasn’t. I just wanted to see what the options were here.
Geminid
@raven: There was an interesting ocean energy story last year. Orbital Marine energy installed a tidal electric generator in the Fall of Waress, a channel near Orkney Island. The generator looks somewhat like an airplane, with a long central “fuselage” with two wings with propellers on them. The wings slant downwards so that the central portion is above water and the propellers are below. The unit weighs 680 metric tons and will generate 2 Megawatts of power for at least 15 years.
The generator took 18 months to assemble in Dundee Scotland, formerly a shipbuilding center. The barge used to transport the turbine was the first new vessel lauched from Dundee in forty years.
The Japanes “Karyu” generator was already being tested when Orbital’s placed its generator off of Orkney.. The Karyu weighs 330 tons. It isn’t powered by tides but rather the Kuroshio Current, the Pacific’s strongest current. Both turbines are expected to be just the first of their kinds.
Martin
@WaterGirl: No. I’m against a national transportation policy that is primarily centered on cars, to the extent that we massively subsidize them over all other forms of transport.
I get that you need a car. I need a car. The issue isn’t ICE vs EV. The issue is ICE vs EV + bike, EV + train, EV + bus + train + bike, etc.
The most expensive form of transport is cars. Roughly speaking about $20/hr of operation. That doesn’t include the massive taxpayer spend on roads, parking, etc.
My issue with EVs is that is should be the 3rd item to be incentivized because right now we’re putting the majority of our transportation spending into cars, and EVs address the most visible emission source in cars – the gas – but they continue to make the emissions from road paving and wear, tire and brake particulate emissions, etc. We should start with public transit – that should get the most spending. Then should be micromobility/walking. Bikes, scooters, etc. Last should be cars.
There are two problems with EVs:
Here’s my concern: If you buy an EV today, there is going to be some future expense that you don’t yet know about which will be incurred to recover the lost road maintenance revenue. That may apply to gas powered car buyers as well. Somehow that ledger is going to have to at least sort of balance. Additionally, if you have an expectation that EV charging infrastructure will be built, that might be misplaced. On holiday weekends, the wait in Kettleman City where Tesla has 40 chargers, a way station between LA and SF, is often 4 hours. If you look at the volume of traffic on these longer routes where you can’t rely on charging at home at the endpoints (consider Denver to Grand Junction, or Omaha, etc) you need a pretty massive volume of charging infrastructure to accommodate it – more than we have in terms of gas stations. And if we continue the growth of EV sales, and continue the lack of EV infrastructure, we’re going to have some holiday calamities coming up that I think a lot of EV owners haven’t fully internalized. I’m more in favor of owning a plug-in hybrid which you use as rarely as possible than an EV which you use as often as possible. I think it leaves you with better transportation options when you actually need them, and a better emissions footprint because you use alternatives to the car whenever possible. Save $10K on the EV and put it into solar panels so when you do plug in, you aren’t touching the grid.
More broadly, if you look at international EV sales, they paint a picture that if you look at through the US lens you get the wrong trend. Internationally, EV sales are zooming, but the size of EVs are shrinking. Sales are shifting toward city cars, not SUVs. The US is the exception. With smaller cars, EVs make a LOT more sense. You break out of the Tsiolkovsky rocket paradox where increasing amounts of your motive energy is dedicated to just moving the batteries, and then the structural steel to support the batteries, etc. as your vehicle gets larger. Increased energy density helps a lot with this, which is why gasoline was such an attractive solution. But the alternative is to lower weight. My bike only has 30% of the range of a Tesla, but it has 1/200th the size of battery.
The flip side of the EV trend *in the US* is that the heavier vehicles feed into this pernicious problem whereby we engage in an arms race against every other person in society, because the best way to survive being hit by a 9100lb Hummer is to add mass to your own vehicle. So we’re being asked to trade our personal safety for the welfare of everyone else. Pedestrians now make up 20% of all traffic fatalities, and rising pretty rapidly. This is a terrible social policy, akin to demanding that everyone carry a gun to disincentive everyone else from using their gun.
So we have this stacking of bad social and environmental policy, and then subsidizing people to invest into it. It’s terrible. I don’t fault people for looking after their transportation needs, but it needs to be fought against, and the only way to do that is to not buy further into it.
I get regular pushback from people that say ‘but I can’t ride a bike’. Yeah, I know. Lots of people can’t. Lots of people can’t drive either, but our constant investment into cars and only cars shuts them out of society.
Liberals like to ‘vote with their dollars’, and I do that too. At least look with clear eyes what you are voting for with this very large purchase. 60% of all trips are 6 miles or less. 2% are 100 miles or more. We spend a LOT more money to secure that 2% than the 60%. Even better, buy a city car (if you can find one in the US) and just rent a car if you need to do the long trip. I don’t know your situation, I just think people need to take a much higher level view of their transportation situation, what they want it to look like in the future, what they are *really* buying with that money, and considering if that’s the best way to go.
Kdaug
@Kropacetic: My personal preferred solution would involve a lot fewer people
Barbara
@geg6: Not sure which county you’re in or what source you have, but if it’s Beaver, there are at least 5 noted in Plugshare, though they are not exact about county borders. Two are dealerships so not necessarily available. There’s a fast charger at the Dunkin Donuts in Aliquippa, and a few more in some public buildings. You can get Plugshare data on your computer.
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): More than you can imagine.
There’s a lot of evidence that the rise of rugged individualism in the US is because we never get to interact with each other person to person. That our civic health requires a certain degree of seeing each other eye to eye, being challenged in person when we’re rude or inconsiderate, and not all shielded off from each other in these big steel boxes. I agree they’re useful, but they’re making us hate each other.
But they’re also economic poison. You want more small businesses – return to walkable cities where cars aren’t allowed. The local donut shop can’t afford to secure an extra ¼ acre to meet the city’s parking minimum and earn zero revenue from it.
At some point you just have to fight against it.
Chris T.
@Baud:
The Bolt seems to be a nice small car, with emphasis on the small. I, alas, am not small, by any measure, and wasn’t even before I got fat and old. I simply don’t fit in one. I need a big vehicle for my big butt (and shoulders etc).
J R in WV
Where we live a 4×4 or all wheel drive vehicle is a requirement. We have a Mazda SUV that is pretty satisfactory, tho it could get better fuel mileage. Neighbors traded their Prius in for a hybrid Rav4 which they like really well; it gets great fuel mileage!! They also have a Ram PU truck for garden/construction projects around the farm.
I want a PU truck but can’t justify it at my age and degree of decrepitude.
Will go for a electric vehicle next time. But it will be all wheel drive, a must in our location.
SeattleDem
We have about 200K miles on our 2008 Prius, and decided to get something new before we need major repairs. Repairs to date are oil changes, new oil cap, new 12-volt battery, new windshield wipers, headlights, and tires. Granted that living in Seattle means no salt on the roads and rare freezing, so cars here just last longer. The worry about main battery replacement seems misplaced. The rest of the car will be too old to put up with before the brakes or battery need to be replaced. Also, no clutch, the engine never lugs or red-lines and only runs about half the time, so I ‘m not surprised that it still runs fine. Right now, I use it as my pickup because it holds so much and I have the racks to carry kayaks, bikes, and construction lumber.
We added a Model 3 Tesla because I wanted the all wheel drive and 350 mile range that comes with dual motor. We started by plugging it in at night with an extension cord to 110. It was fine though it might take 8-10 hours after a long trip, but I don’t like putting that much juice through an extension cord. We wired in a 220 outlet in the garage ($800 for a licensed electrician who also ran two 110 circuits to our new decks in the same visit).
Costs for the electric car are in the range of 230 watt-hours per mile, so figuring Seattle electricity is 11 cents per kilowatt hour, we’re paying 2 1/2 cents per mile for “fuel.” Our Prius averaged about 45 mpg so gas would have to be $1.12/gallon to break even between the two. Fast chargers are all over in this area, but they run 35 – 45 cents per kilowatt hour, so I don’t bother.
Timill
@Chris T.: You should try it out; you might be surprised.
One of my stepsons drives a Smart 2door. Or rather, since he’s ~450 lbs, wears it.
Chris T.
@geg6:
You don’t have to. You will want to.
Prices vary a lot. You basically need an electric dryer outlet. If you already have one in the garage, you can get a JuiceBox style charger with the same 240-volt plug for about $500. There are cheaper models but if I were to replace the plug-in unit I have (not a JuiceBox, it was the manufacturer’s model in 2012 when I got my first plug-in hybrid and I’ve just kept it going since then) I’d probably go with one of the JuiceBox models on Amazon.
The cost to run an electric dryer style outlet varies. I had one added in Oakland, and the electrician put in the box for the solar panels at the same time (though the solar panels themselves went in multiple months later) and the whole thing cost about $1200 in 2014, if I recall correctly.
You can plug in to a regular 120 volt outlet. Charging this way is slow.
Depends on the the kWh you need to stuff into the vehicle (which depends on your e-mileage and average drive) and the “bigness of the hose”. That’s why you want to install a home charger: the 120 volt “convenience charger” feels like using an eyedropper to fill a glass of water.
Let me put it this way: my old plug-in hybrid had a 20 kWh battery. Charging from nothing to full, with the dinky 120V “convenience charger”, would take 13 to 14 hours. Charging with the manufacturer’s 240V charger would take about 4 hours, or 3x faster.
All of these are slow compared to modern chargers (the one I have plugs into a 30 amp dryer outlet and I had a 50 amp outlet put in so I could upgrade if and when my old box dies so I can speed things up by another factor of almost 2).
My 100%-EV has a really big battery and a full charge on my old-style charger takes more than 12 hours, but I almost never come home with an “empty tank”. On average it takes about an hour or two, and even with most longer trips it’s easily done by the next morning. So the “tank” is full every morning.
Cheap. How much cheaper depends on the prices of electricity and gas where you live. In Utah I had electric for $.12/kWh and gasoline under $3 per gallon. EV was only a little cheaper. In California I had electric for $.50/kWh (!) before the solar panels, $.09/kWh at night afterward, and gasoline at $4.50 to $6, so EV was a fuck-ton cheaper once the solar panels were up. In far north Washington state I’m back to $.12/kWh and $4-ish for gasoline so the EV isn’t as much cheaper, but it’s still cheaper.
I got my first plug-in hybrid in Utah. 20F winter days weren’t a problem, but that was a plug-in hybrid. The all-EV has only been in mostly-milder climates but we had some deep freeze temperatures in Jan/Feb this year, during construction on the house when the garage wasn’t available.
The 12 volt batteries gave out. The EV battery was fine! (We have a gasoline car and the full-EV.) Range went down noticeably, from >200 miles to about 180 miles, in 20-degree weather. The EV has a nice feature though: you can program it to warm the interior while it’s plugged in, so that if you have a regular daily commute, you can climb into a warm car that’s still at 100% charge.
Chris T.
@Timill: I did try it out. I climbed into the driver’s seat. I literally could not sit in the seat, only on it.
WaterGirl
@Chris T.: What is the distinction?
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
One of the things that gets me is that we’ve had big electric motors for a rather long time, over the lifetime of any one alive today. We’ve had the concepts of controlling those motors as well. Now non lead acid batteries have been around a lot shorter timeframe but we still have over 3 decades of building and using them. And very few trains are actually propelled by internal combustion. Diesel trains just use the diesel motor to drive a generator, the wheels go round by electric motors. The trains I take in LA use overhead lines with over 2000V to drive the motors, as does the subway, but it uses a side rail as there is extremely small risk of pedestrians in a subway tunnel. And the trains that connect to the subway do go underground with overhead wires, so it’s possible. And electric cars and trucks and buses were used a 100 yrs ago because gasoline was not widely available as it is today but often electricity was. In my lifetime I can remember electric buses in LA, with overhead wires. A lot of the complexity of EVs today is the computer systems and the charging hookups because of the voltages that make possible faster charging and more efficient motors.
Jaybird
We have had a Volvo XC40 recharge for about a year and love, love, love it.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
People WANT a lot of things; sometimes they’re harmful. If the survival of the biosphere requires people to live in dense cities on top of one another, then fuck ’em; I don’t care what they want.
But as a practical matter, we’re not going to relocate them all overnight.
Chris T.
@WaterGirl:
Between sitting “in” vs “on” the seat?
The one I tried out (in early 2019 I think) had a sort of U shaped seat bottom. My butt—which despite its size is mostly muscle, really; even now I can still leg-press over 800 pounds—perched uncomfortably on the pokey upper edges of the U with no part of it in the bottom.
This is, as you might imagine, tolerable for a few minutes. With a 30+ minute commute (getting anywhere in the SFBay Area takes 30+ minutes) it just was not going to happen.
MisterForkbeard
@Gravenstone: The labor is really cheap IF you already have the infrastructure in place. It’s literally just bolting the fucker to the wall and plugging it in.
Most L2 chargers take the same kind of plug as a major appliance (NEMA 14-50 is common), and the chargers themselves only cost $200-900 depending on features.
It gets expensive if you have to run a new line or install a new plug. That’s where the higher cost comes in.
Andrew S.
Plug-In America has a nifty website that lists all of the current and near-future hybrids, plug-in hybrids and EV’s. I’d highly recommend using the ‘shopping assistant’ feature to get an idea of what’s out there: https://plugstar.com/
Chris T.
@Ruckus:
Fun fact: in the late 1800s, the useful part of the refined crude oil was the kerosene. Naptha could be sold as a solvent, but it was mostly a waste by-product. See https://www.britannica.com/technology/petroleum-refining for more. So, people were looking for a way to dispose of this nasty proto-gasoline stuff. Oh, look, instead of paying to have it hauled away as toxic waste, we can sell it for use in transportation devices!
(This is a theme that gets repeated throughout history: product X, whatever X may be—at this time, it was whale oil—is getting expensive / rare / whatever. New product Y can be made to replace X. Making product Y produces huge quantities of waste byproduct Z. Oh hey, look, with just a little minor fiddling, we can sell Z or a derivative! Product Z, or its derivative, takes over the economy and product X is forgotten and its replacement Y is just a minor thing.)
Martin
@Barbara: This sort of inadvertently speaks to what I raise above. You’re describing 1-5 chargers being available in a county. We’re currently around 600,000 EVs being sold annually. You look at large distance arteries like I-5 here in California (where most trips are longer than even a 300 mile range, because people are driving LA to SF, etc.) needing to handle 10,000 passenger cars an hour and do the math on how many chargers that amounts to and we’re way, way off track. You can’t sustain EV sales on the infrastructure provided by a random charger at a Dunkin Donuts.
It’s a solvable problem, it’s just not getting solved, and I don’t see any viable plans being offered to solve it.
Martin
Yeah, ⅔ of the country already lives in a city. We don’t need to necessarily increase that. The problem is that the ⅔ of the people that live in cities *still* need a car. If we eliminated that, and eliminated ⅔ of the 280 million gas powered cars and just converted the remaining 90 million to EVs, we’d probably be fine. And there’s a bit happening serendipitously around the US, but nothing coordinated. There’s no plan. And time is running short.
Another way of looking at this – there’s 100 million households in the US. If we could get things down to 1 car per household (city or country) and have the rest of the home occupants travel in other ways, that too would be fine.
Los Angeles has enough land area dedicated to car parking that you could fit Manhattan, Paris, and Barcelona just in the space LA has allocated for parking. Imagine if that could be housing and green space what that would do for everything from housing costs to air quality.
Martin
@Martin: Sorry, that should be 10,000 per day. Still, big number.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: A big problem with burning hydrogen (as opposed to using it in a fuel cell) is that (because real combustion is more than hydrogen + oxygen = heat + water because air is 78% nitrogen) the formation of NOx (which causes smog) can be quite intense. (VW’s cheating “Clean Diesels” failed the EPA NOx emissions standards.) Of course, the source of the hydrogen needs to be low-carbon, also too, or one is just shifting the problem rather than solving it.
Fuel cells are great on spacecraft, but kinda spendy elsewhere.
Cheers,
Scott.
JaneE
If you can wait a year or two, Toyota and Subaru have teamed up for an EV small SUV. Range is supposed to be about 250 miles. Toyota makes hybrids for the Rav4 and Highlander – which may or may not be the right size for you. I don’t know about their other vehicles, but have had 3 Prius cars and the hybrid engine never had a problem that I was aware of. They use the same setup for all their hybrids.
Lucid is supposed to be coming out with an SUV model, but getting one would be years from now.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus:
They still run electric trolley buses in other cities–they’re still running in Cambridge and Watertown. But the MBTA is planning to rip out the wires and replace them eventually with battery electric buses, which I think is foolish though I understand their reasoning (has to do with a construction project that would supposedly involve temporarily ripping out the wires anyway, and NIMBY types are always complaining about having to look at them). But trolley buses are superior to battery buses in many ways–less problematic manufacturing, less weight and complexity, etc.
They have them in Seattle too. Modern ones tend to have a small battery in them so they can go a short distance without continuous power, so they can do things like lowering and raising the pantograph to transfer between disconnected sections of wire. That can actually make the wires less obtrusive by removing the need for complicated interchanges suspended over major intersections.
Electric cars were an interesting niche category in the early 20th century–my impression is, they were sold as women’s cars. They had lower speeds and shorter ranges than internal-combustion-engine cars, which actually made men of the time more comfortable with their wives driving them, but they were also less smelly and generally troublesome. But the “women’s car” association was probably one of the things that eventually killed them, and the fact that as highway speeds generally increased they couldn’t keep up for anything other than in-town driving.
WaterGirl
@Chris T.: oh, ugh. ridiculous design.
WaterGirl
@JaneE:
That’s intriguing.
Chris T.
@WaterGirl: It’s fine for smaller butts, which nestle down into the seat and are then held to prevent sideways sliding motions.
It’s just another variation on the usual “one size fits none” problem, really. Women are probably more used to this than men since women’s torsos start out with more variables (bust + waist + hip = 3) than men’s (chest = 1 or sometimes chest + neck = 2). Weightlifter / bodybuilder men discover this too, though, eventually.
(I had to move up a couple of sizes on pants to fit my thighs into them. There’s nothing quite like having 28-inch thighs with a 34-inch waist.)
WaterGirl
@Chris T.: Now that I have heard the more detailed description, I know that I have travelled in cars with seats like that and they are fucking awful. Unless you are 12 or are built like a boy.