Despair only limits future action – Simon Clark
==========
This is going to be a quick hit, but I know I got a little cranky in the last post with some of the persistent myths around EVs, so these two videos are a good at debunking those myths.
Join Quentin Willson and Dr. Euan McTurk as they explore the latest in electric vehicles battery advancements. As a consultant battery electrochemist who has been working on – and driving – EVs since 2009, Euan is one of the UK’s leading experts on EV batteries, and most definitely has his finger on the pulse when it comes to emerging battery technology.
During this enlightening discussion, Euan shares the real story on EV battery fires and talks about some of the new battery technologies to watch out for, including solid-state batteries with their impressive range and safety credentials. Could these go mainstream sooner than we think? Quentin and Euan also share views on the battery industry as a whole, and what governments and energy suppliers can do to help the transition to these cleaner technologies.
This one is from 8 months ago, but still relevant:
Wise to the lies? Bored of BS? Fed-up of FUD? Misinformation about Electric Vehicles and Clean Energy is at an all-time high. Vested interests have almost limitless funds with which to pollute public discourse, and it’s easy to feel powerless to prevent that.
With your help that can change. The Fully Charged SHOW and FairCharge are coming together to Stop BS and to combat this ‘*fear, uncertainty and doubt’ through *fast-turnaround infographic rebuttals*, *proactively placing spokespeople on mainstream media*, and *engaging with political influencers*
I have a couple of videos of people who have experience with EVs and cold weather, here’s one:
Max demonstrates the importance of battery pre-conditioning using his home charging station and charge scheduling with his Polestar 2 on a cold journey to the mountains from Colorado’s front range. Not all electric cars have this feature, but increasingly many do and it’s great for reducing the range hit of cold weather!
I love that he’s driving from Boulder, CO to Keystone, CO, which here, is a very typical weekend trip – up to the mountains to ski.
Here’s a longer, more wonky video from these guys on winter EV battery myths and charging tips.
I wish I could find where I bookmarked my MI guy, who has been driving EVs in winter for years. I’ll keep searching!
It’s not so much an issue on short daily commutes, but on those longer trips, you’ll need to take some extra steps in extreme cold. In normal cold weather, I have not noticed any range loss – but my car does stay in the garage when not in use. In other info I’ve seen – you can lose charge (less than 20-ish miles) if your car is outside in the cold overnight or while you’re at work. But even with that Polestar’s abismal range (what he’s driving in the video) – about 150 miles in winter weather – you will probably be fine for a typical day of driving. I will say, if you’re thinking of an EV – don’t skimp, get the heated seats because your cabin will take forever to warm.
Hope these three videos help dispel some common myths. If you click on the makers of the videos, you’ll find lots of informative videos on similar topics.
Finally, the next two installments in the Carbon Cowboy documentary:
USDA grazing specialist Doug Peterson has spent his entire career teaching reticent farmers and ranchers to focus on their soil health, even if, and especially if, that means adopting new ways to graze. Peterson walks the walk, practicing and experimenting new methods on his and his dad’s farm outside of Newtown, Missouri. Filmed near Newtown, Missouri
Michael Thompson, a young farmer in Kansas, is regenerating his soils with no-till, cover-crops practices coupled with Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing – giving his farm resilience during the severe 2011 and 2012 droughts. While his neighbors’ soils are washing down gullies and blowing away towards the east, Michael is building a farm he can leave to his children. His exemplary work was given the Kansas Farm Bureau Natural Resources Award. Filmed in Norton, Kansas
Climate scientist Michael E Mann & historian Timothy D Snyder define doomerism:
Doomerism is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.
It is how authoritarians win. Let’s try to fight the doom.
This is a doom and gloom free zone.
West of the Rockies
Dammit, TaMara, you’re mellowing our harsh.
Seriously, thanks for a message of optimism. I get tired of the “hope is not a strategy” approach. And, no, it’s not a strategy. But no one says it is the strategy. Hope is a mindset. Actual activity, such as GOTV, is the strategy.
TaMara
@West of the Rockies: I was really struggling this week with exhaustion with … everything. So I had to pull myself together, find some hopeful climate news and get over myself. We owe it to our kids and grandkids to get this right.
FastEdD
My old 1972 Vega didn’t have great range in the Minnesota winters but it started every morning and got me to work. Thankful for that. Traded it to a neighbor many years later for a case of beer. He only asked one question, “Does it start?” Yep. Sold.
Now I’m a genuine old fart with an EV with heated seats. Love them-they feel like sitting in a hot tub, and you don’t have to heat the whole cabin. Mmmm.
Chris T.
One note about module replacement (mentioned in the podcast at top): getting compatible modules is a problem right now. There’s a lot of big advances in battery chemistry, which is great, but it means that if you have an older battery—even from just eight or ten years ago—it might not be possible to replace a single module.
This is also a problem with car parts in general, except that many countries have laws that require at least 10 or 20 years of extra support for “old stuff”. (I suspect this is where the magic “25 years = classic car” timespan comes from.)
Joe Falco
“Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
We do, we do!”
JPL
My son is building an all electric home and has an electric car on order. When the time comes, I’m thinking of buying a hybrid. It would work better for me.
Hamlet of Melnibone
I feel like more people should consider plug-in hybrids. I recently bought a Kia Niro plug-in hybrid, and it has dramatically reduced the gas I use with basically no change to my behavior beyond just plugging it into a regular outlet in my garage. It has 20+ miles of all electric range, and most of my driving is short trips, so if I don’t go on a trip a tank of gas will last more than a month. I probably got gas 1/week before this, so I’m guessing it’s reduced my gas consumption by 80% or so. And if I have to go on a long trip, it’s just a regular car.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I bought a 2023 Bolt EV last September and immediately drove it 800 miles to Denver. Purchased it from a dealer back where I lived in Central Misery.
I belong to the main Chevy Bolt forum:
https://www.chevybolt.org/
I share the link not necessarily to promote the Bolt (but the 2023s are great cars) but there’s a ton of commentary and expertise there on all things EV. That includes a ton of what’s in the post above, topic wise.
Last year some folks drove three EVs from a spot around Golden to Vail and back and wanted to see if they could do it on one charge. The route is something GM’s apparently done for years when testing cars. It was a good indication of at least fair weather EV driving.
It’s a different paradigm, that’s for sure. But for driving around metro Denver like we do, or around the Front Range, it’s a dynamite car.
Melancholy Jaques
My sense (meaning no data) is that a portion of American men believe that EVs are an attack on their masculinity. They are beyond the reach of facts or reason.
The good news is that there are enough EVs on the road that people will soon see whether they are a better option for operation and maintenance.
Kent
@Hamlet of Melnibone: Plug-in hybrids make absolute sense for urban dwellers who don’t have access to nightly charging.
For someone like myself who has a garage where I can install any charging station I want, the advantages of plug-in hybrids are less. I currently have a non plug-in Prius that when it finally wears out (or I hand it down) I will replace with a pure EV and not a plug-in hybrid.
The big disadvantage to hybrids is that you are doing belt and suspenders and carrying around two completely separate propulsion systems which adds a lot of extra weight, complexity, cost, and maintenance. I still have to do all the same oil changes, transmission work, coolant work, etc. on my Prius as any ordinary gas car. And all the mechanical hassles I have had with it have been related to the gasoline system, including major hassles with the coolant and catalytic converter. Price a catalytic converter on a Prius if you want sticker shock.
A pure EV avoids all of that nonsense. If you have ready access to your own daily charging I see zero advantages to a plug-in hybrid unless you are always doing giant road trips into remote rural areas or something.
TaMara
@Hamlet of Melnibone: I have one, too. I really like it. And over the past 4 years I’ve gotten consistently 26 miles per charge and then about 189 mpg on a tank of gas. If I travel long distances, the hybrid engine gets about 55 mpg – even going up big mountain climbs.
@JPL: Consider a plug-in hybrid if you can – the only goal that’s going to solve the climate crisis is all-electric all the time. And at least for most trips, PHEV is electric.
ICE needs to go the way of the dinosaurs that fuel them. But for my needs, I still need the PHEV for long trips. Once we get to a range I’m comfortable with, bye-bye ICE.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kent:
This. Hybrids (also PHEVs) can be considered the worst of both worlds between EV and ICE vehicles.
People forget that the EV is a fundamental game changer when it comes to maintenance and consumables.
trollhattan
This seems on topic, “Cattle are drinking the Colorado River dry.
Balancing Western water demand and supply would alter the region’s landscape
Excerpt.
https://list.hcn.org/dm?id=9342F5964D1019DB381580ABCA2BB5E04FE0885A385AD923
Redshift
@Melancholy Jaques: It’s partly that (cars have been entangled with masculinity for nearly a hundred years) and it’s also the general conservative “freedom means no one should ever get to tell me what to do and nothing I like should ever change.” Like, they latched onto “fuel efficient cars are underpowered and clunky” back in the 70s, and would mindlessly parrot it for decades after it was no longer true, including about EVs.
TaMara
@trollhattan: Anytime the media promotes content like this without also exploring the options available to solve that problem – it’s just lazy. As noted in the EV video at top.
It’s super frustrating when there are plenty of solutions they could include in their coverage, but don’t
ETA: I should add that I had to listen to talking heads do the doom and gloom thing over the past couple of days because of that report
FastEdD
@Kent: Absolutely. 30,000 moving parts vs 300. If you have a home where you can charge, range isn’t as big a deal because you start every day with a full “tank.” Many EV’s like Ford, will have access to the Tesla Supercharging network, which makes long trips easier too.
And I am no fanboi of Elmo in any way whatsoever.
trollhattan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
My take as well. Don’t want a hybrid because it’s buying two cars in one: gasoline vehicle with all the associated maintenance, fueling, smog checks, wear/tear/replacement of a regular gas-guzzler plus, battery and motors to attend to.
They were great bridge technology for wringing lots of miles from that gallon of gas. Now we have legit EV options.
Am more or less EV ready, and our Ovlov SUV is getting up there in miles, but do not know what price-performance-amenity options we have in the EV world. Hopefully, Sven soldiers on for another year or two. That’s the spousal ride, mine has too few miles to ponder ditching, even if its mileage is comical. Once I stop the dreaded commute, that fact returns to irrelevance.
Other MJS
Thanks for this. Wingers love to post burning battery porn. God, guns, and gasoline made America great!
We love our plug-in hybrid, BTW.
Fair Economist
There is a huge propaganda effort to delay the adoption of EV cars. Like when one charging station broke down in Chicago last winter and the MSM reported it as “EVs can’t charge in the cold” – to the puzzlement of people in Minneapolis or Norway who were charging just fine.
Really, it’s gas cars that are hard to refuel. An EV can charge overnight anyplace with an appliance outlet.
Redshift
@trollhattan: My (liberal) relatives from Salt Lake City were visiting last weekend, and we were taking about how the Great Salt Lake is shrinking. They’re been lucky the past couple of years with rain and snow, but that’s just a blip because the GOP has done nothing to address the problem.
It’s the same situation with alfalfa and livestock, but the thing they said that I didn’t know is about 30% of the alfalfa is exported, so it’s not even local food!
trollhattan
@TaMara: I can’t lump High Country News as “the media.” They’ve been doing terrific work on the Intermountain West for decades and def know their stuff.
What remains in western water policy, practice, law is an out-of-proportion influence from ag, above all other uses and interests. This extends to federal lands (the ones the Bundys and their ilk declare to be personal property), which are given over to grazing and mining at effectively zero cost. If Social Security is a political third rail, the mining and grazing acts are their rural western equivalents.
Redshift
@Other MJS: And of course, our traditional gas-tanks-on-wheels never catch fire…
MagdaInBlack
@TaMara: I really love the “Carbon Cowboy” series. Thank you
HinTN
@Kent: The charging infrastructure in the South has to up its game before I can go EV. I looked seriously at the VW in early 2022 but settled for a hybrid RAV 4. Now there’s a ten bay Tesla charging station up the hill at the Piggly Wiggly. It’s coming.
TaMara
@trollhattan: Preach! Add corn subsidies to that and you’ve got the perfect gov’t climate crisis enablers.
The Carbon Cowboy folks have been “barn storming” having town meetings all across ag areas and one of the biggest hurdles for ranchers/farmers is losing subsidies when they move from inefficient practices to more climate friendly. It boggles the mind.
VFX Lurker
Thank you for posting this. My mechanic gave my aging 2002 Prius a clean bill of health last week, but I’m interested in replacing it with a small EV when the time comes. The 2023 Bolt is high on my list.
HinTN
@FastEdD:
Nor am I, but credit where it’s due. Tesla charging stations are fairly ubiquitous now. My neighbor drove his to Nantucket for vacation last summer. My internet here in the sticks comes from Starlink.
trollhattan
My occasional California-Texas electricity comparo, in which we continue to be boggled at the inroads solar and wind have made to generation, and gape at how fucking much more Texas consumes than California.
CAISO (on a cloudy day)
Demand: 21.6 GW
14.9 GW renewables, 68% of supply
2 GW natural gas, 10% of supply
2 GW large hydro, 9% of supply
2 GW nuclear, 10% of supply
.
ERCOT
Demand 46 GW
12 GW solar 25% of supply
6 GW wind, 13% of supply
18 GW natural gas, 39% of supply
15 GW coal, 15% of supply
4 GW nuclear, 8% of supply
Reckon if they put in LED bulbs and closed the front door, they could knock that back a little?
TaMara
@MagdaInBlack: They can cheer me up on the darkest days. I also have their first doc, Carbon Nation, which is full of people you’d never expect embracing climate solution technology all over the country.
Timill
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: People like testing EVs in Colorado, apparently:
Four Electric Trucks Go Head To Head Towing Over The Rockies
HinTN
@Redshift:
To Saudi Arabia, FFS. We’re shipping water to the desert.
trollhattan
@TaMara:
They are doing the lord’s work, truly. I hope California’s Central Valley have their own ah-ha moment, but we’re talking Very Large Entities, for the most part.
Hungry Joe
We have a 2020 Bolt and a 2015 Leaf. The Leaf’s range was about 95 miles when we got it, but has shrunk to 75 — which is fine: It’s our drive-around-town car. The Bolt still gets 260, give or take. The A/C drains 20 or 30 miles (from a full charge), and the heater … well, we never use it. Now, we’re in San Diego, so it never gets that cold, but even on the coldest of cold winter nights (39 degrees!) the seat warmer and a halfway decent jacket easily do the trick. Seat warmers don’t use much juice, either — the effect is negligible. And the warm-seat sensation is … nice.
For me, the biggest downside of owning EVs is that the windows are usually dirty: no gas station squeegee privileges. As for gas prices, I usually have no idea what they are — the pricing signs no longer have any meaning, and I stopped noticing them years ago.
MagdaInBlack
@TaMara: Many, many years go my husband ran the county conservation district “No-Till” program. Unfortunately, at that time “No-Till” meant dousing the field with Roundup to keep weeds down. Many arguments at the kitchen table about the heavy use of ag chemicals, me against, of course. (i’m completely convinced the ag chemicals he worked with so much are what killed him)
These videos you post are exactly the sort of farming and grazing I had in mind at that time, but of course, I knew nothing about ag production 😉
NotMax
Had to get my hybrid vehicle inspected this month. First inspection here when buying a new vehicle is good for two years; after that it is every year. Place I prefer to go does nothing else other than inspections, No appointment necessary (cash only, no credit cards).
Guy took the paperwork and had a scowl of disbelief when he asked how many miles on it (I don’t drive all that much anymore). Insisted I lean over so he could stick his head into the cabin to check for himself. 963 miles in two years.
;)
J. Arthur Crank
@trollhattan: The formatting is wonky, and I can’t make any sense out of those numbers.
CindyH
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: we also have a 2023 Chevy Bolt and love it – heated seats are awesome and heated steering wheel even better!
Doc Sardonic
Thanks for these TaMara. Although right now not in the market for an EV, it’s good to have the information, although in the land of the Florida Man, A/C use is what will sap your range. The 3 or 4 days here you would need the heater the heated seats work great. We have heated and cooled seats in our main vehicle and not having that feature is a deal breaker for me. My back kills me and on long drives use the heated and cooled seat like a heating pad and ice pack. Also too the heated steering wheel while rarely used is nice for arthritic hands.
NotMax
British road trip trio of EVs comparison.
;)
eclare
@HinTN:
Yep. It’s crazy.
Another Scott
@Kent: @comrade scotts agenda of rage: @FastEdD:
EV vs PHEV really, really depends on your particular use case and your circumstances.
I’ve mentioned before that I have a 2023 Kia Niro PHEV SX Touring. I like it a lot. Just had my first VA safety inspection yesterday at about 6900 miles. I use it for commuting, chores on the weekends, and one-two trips to NC a year.
I plug it in to a 120V outlet overnight (my 1963 vintage circuit breaker box needs to be replaced to enable 208V charging). I almost never use the gas engine during the week. But, I don’t have to stress about running out of range or finding a working public charger if I need to make an unexpected trip or get stuck in traffic for an extra hour or more.
It’s a great commuter car for me, and I can still take it on trips without issues. If I had an EV instead, I would be dragging around an extra 1000+ pounds in batteries that I don’t need 90+% of the time, wearing out expensive tires faster. (The Niro PHEV battery weighs 220 pounds and has a rated 29 mile range and I routinely get 42-44 miles in warm weather.)
On the engine wear-and-tear issues, in the Niro the engine almost never comes on unless the traction battery gets down to about 16%. My J’s 2015 Prius C can’t even back out of the driveway without the engine coming on. So, it depends on the car design and its age and so forth. I’m sure I’ve got less than 1000 miles on the ICE on the Niro, and thus it has all that much less wear and tear.
Yeah, Kia (and I assume the others) want the oil changed based on car mileage rather than ICE mileage and that’s wasteful. But it’s a small annoyance that I can handle by changing the oil myself. And at this rate, the engine is going to last much, much, much longer than the rest of the car.
I too thought that a hybrid/PHEV would be a maintenance nightmare. But they really aren’t these days. And getting more people in EV-ish cars and trucks quicker (batteries go 5-10x as far at the factory in a PHEV than in an EV) will help much, much more than having people wait for the perfect battery chemistry and 10 minute charging and all the rest.
YMMV. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
jonas
I just want to thank TaMara again for posting these Carbon Cowboy videos. They’re so inspriational and informative and show that there are folks out there in rural America who are trying to be good stewards of the climate, the land, and their animals. It’s also nice to see how rethinking their farming practices is not just good for the environment, but they make more money! You’d think this would be a no-brainer for all their neighbors, but apparently not.
Dan B
We’ve leased Nissan Leafs for years. The current version’s range is great. We can get to Portland on a single charge and the heated seats are wonderful. If I’m first in line at a traffic light I stomp on the pedal. I’m always across the intersection before ICE cars are across the first lane. And Leafs are considered to be pokey. The only maintenance is rotating tires except for the two times our first Leaf was totaled. The driver’s side was ripped open from stem to stern by a post vehicle while parked on the street. I don’t think dark colored cars are appropriate for Seattle.
trollhattan
@J. Arthur Crank:
Try refreshing. A quick edit blew up the list and I had to go into text and fix the code.
Seonachan
As someone in a household with a BEV and a PHEV, I’m going to disagree with some of the statements made here about the latter.
When we got our PHEV (a Honda Clarity), we’d already had a used Nissan Leaf for about a year as a commuter car, to which it was perfectly suited. The Clarity was for regular commuting plus road trips, which required a certain amount of room and range. This was 2018, when very few BEVs had long range, and those that did were either too small (Bolt) or too expensive (Tesla). The Clarity was a good fit for us, and still is. We top up the 7-gallon tank every 2-3 months or so but do about 80% of our driving on electricity. The battery fills up overnight from a regular 120 volt outlet, and after 6 years still goes 30-50 miles on a charge (vs ~35-55 when new).
Regarding the supposed downside, yes, it has two drivetrains to maintain, but the electric side doesn’t really need any maintenance, and the gas side gets little enough use that costs are minimal – an oil change once a year just about covers it. Nothing else has needed attention in 65k miles – because again, maybe 15k of that was on gas.
As for the argument that PHEVs are best suited to someone who can’t plug in regularly, I would say the opposite is true. Plugging in every day (assuming you drive it every day) is what keeps the EV use the highest and minimizes the wear on the ICE components. If you’re mostly running it on gas, you’re really just driving a regular hybrid that’s heavier than it needs to be.
Now, maybe today a BEV would be a better option for us – new PHEVs seem crazy expensive to me (even given the crazy baseline for all new cars), and there are more long-range BEV options than we had 6 years ago.
JeffH
Gotta say it’s disconcerting to hear Kryten from Red Dwarf narrating the start of that first video.
Also want to point out that the 2024 Polestar 2 got a hefty bump in range. I’ve had mine for 2 months and absolutely love it. The big test will be the road trip I’m taking in June, but so far with just running around town I’ve never come close to having issues with a drained battery. (Granted it helps that I have a garage where I could get a charger installed.)
trollhattan
@Doc Sardonic: A/C’s also the thing here–May through October–and is the more interesting point of inquiry WRT battery range.
“Your batter likes to be warm.” Nailed it!
Some winters we get frost, but that’s about the extent. Skiers have to deal with single-digit temps, but represent a small slice of car owners. IDK how common charge stations are in the Tahoe Basin, or if they keep them plowed clear through winter. Far-flung resorts perhaps are a bigger hurdle. I could see the Tesla drivers fighting over two stations.
Martin
No doom here, but no pollyanna either. A few points:
The only path to stability is through some degree of transit adoption. It doesn’t require getting rid of cars entirely, but it does require getting rid of a lot of them. Electrify most of the fleet, eliminate some of it. Most 2 car household would work just fine as 1 car + some transit. Make that car a small one. Safety doesn’t come from big vehicles, all it does is turn into an arm race of who is going to the be the vehicular assaulter and who is going to be the vehicular victim. A pedestrian now dies every 70 minutes in the US. Sure, you might make your kid a little safer in their big SUV, but you’re more likely to cause them to take someone else’s life. The only path to vehicle safety is lower speeds and lower mass. That’s slowly arriving via policy.
For people that have range need, don’t rule out a plug-in hybrid. 50% of all trips taken in the US are 5 miles or less, so for the majority of the trips that people take, you’ll never go off battery. It’s effectively an EV if you plug it in as reliably as you would an EV. And when you need to take a longer trip, you have that ability. We have a plug-in Prius and even with our few times a year drives up to see my son, the carbon footprint of the Prius will never reach that of a Model 3 the day it’s purchased because it only uses gas about 20 days a year, and uses battery the other 345. I’m not arguing that it’s better than an EV necessarily, but it’ll never hit the carbon footprint of an EV SUV – ever.
The US has a long history of this, btw. California pushed the federal government to adopt better mileages standards starting in the 1970s, and over time they arrived, and over that time more than doubled. But the realized MPG of the US fleet never improved. Every time we improved fuel economy, people bought bigger vehicles and gave all that economy back. And you’re seeing that same trend with EVs. People giving up their Priuses, because they were emission friendly for a large EV SUV thinking that it’s emission free – but it’s not. It’s only better in a single measure, and is worse in a lot of others.
What you’re starting to see now is the unravelling of the car economy – in a number of ways. Cities can no longer afford to subsidize car ownership, and are taking those funds back in way that a lot of car owners aren’t prepared for. Parking lots are unproductive land that could generate GDP and local taxes if put to better use. Streets that are pedestrianized see retail sales 50%-100% higher than before pedestrianization. NYC is introducing the first congestion tax in the US – up to $15 to drive into the city. Free parking will steadily be removed, retailers won’t be required to reserve ⅔ of their land area for cars – a substantial tax on goods and services. This steady undermining of the convenience subsidize for motorists will make car ownership not seem as convenient. In its place cities are increasing housing density to address the growing national housing shortfall in urban areas, replacing car convenience with transit and pedestrianization. Here in CA, the state mandate to build housing has led to multiple malls being bulldozed and a number of the survivors having much of their parking removed. And while I doubt it will pass, the fact that CA has introduced a speed limiter law for new cars is an ominous sign for where the relationship between municipalities and the auto industry is going. Where cars used to be viewed as a welcome and necessary component of the urban landscape, the auto industry has abused that relationship with bigger, faster vehicles that are increasingly dangerous and polluting. Cities can’t afford to have 30% of their population unable to work because they can’t afford one – from a local economy perspective, they have to solve this and it’s going to require taking dollars away from car infrastructure, because that’s the biggest pot of money a city has – usually more than cities spend on schools. The utility of that car in 5 years may not be as great as it is today. I don’t think people in the car market realize what’s happening. I think a lot are going to get caught out here.
The reality is that EVs could be great, but the US automakers aren’t interested in that. You could cut the mass of vehicles in half, cut their price in half, and really address the climate and affordability problems, but they cannot abide by lower revenues and profits. They’re in a race to the top, protected by regulations that keep small vehicles from being road legal in the US. They’re going to ride it until the industry collapses.
Martin
@Fair Economist: The issue is that Teslas doesn’t have battery heaters as a cost-cutting measure. Below a certain temperature LiIon batteries *cannot* charge. Automakers that reserve some batter capacity to run a small heater to keep the battery pack warm enough take a charge were fine. Tesla owners were not. It only affected Teslas.
Martin
@Martin: I will append to my comment some info about Norway, since it was mentioned upthread. Norway car sales are now about 90% EVs, but the government is trying to discourage their purchase because it’s pushing them off of their Paris target. This despite the fact that Norway is 99% renewables. They’re the bit of evidence to that EIA model. Norway is seeing a drop in transit usage in favor of EVs which is driving their emissions up – again, with 99% renewable electricity. Tailpipe emission are not the whole story. They’re not even half the story.
TaMara
@Another Scott: We should start a club, there seem to be a lot of us with those PHEV Niros :-)
delphinium
@jonas: Yes, I am really enjoying these too for the reasons you mentioned. Am hopeful as these practices become more widespread that other farmers/ranchers will begin to adopt them.
jonas
The big automakers I think are happy to make all the EVs the market will bear. Where you’re seeing the pushback is among *dealers*, who make a lot of their revenue not with car sales, but with up-sells on warranties, routine maintenance, oil changes, etc. and EVs don’t need any of that.
trollhattan
@Martin: Isn’t Norway’s biggest environmental and GHG impact by far, their petroleum industry? Fiddling with transportation for 5.5 million seems like small lefse by comparison.
trollhattan
@jonas: That’s a Big Deal. $200+/hour service charge makes far more revenue than sales. Hertz also got pissy about their EV fleet depreciating too fast, to the point their CEO is out.
This must mean used EVs are a bargain now?
Martin
No they aren’t. They wouldn’t have discontinued the Bolt if they were. There are no city cars being made in the US. None.
The dealers are just compounding the problem.
Kent
Perhaps. It is very location dependent to be sure. We live in Camas WA (Portland metro) and all our road trips are north to Seattle where one daughter lives (170 miles), Bend where another daughter lives (170 miles) or the occasional jaunt to the coast (round trip maybe 150 miles) or rarely vacation trips up to Vancouver/Victoria or points beyond in British Columbia. Youngest daughter will be starting at WSU Pullman next fall so we’ll start driving out there soon. But there is plenty of charging along I-84 and at the half way point in the Tri-Cities. So that’s not a problem.
The only places I can see ever really needing to charge away from home would be in Seattle. Bend, or Pullman. Most of the hotels in those places now have charging. Or if we stay at an AirB&B we can bring an extension cord.
So I don’t have any range anxiety. Lots of Teslas, Rivians, and other EVs in my neighborhood. EVs seem ideal for this location. Plus the cool but not cold climate is ideal for battery life
The cherry on top is that we have very cheap electricity. About 8 cents per kWh and it is mostly hydro and wind so clean as well. So going full EV makes sense in our situation.
cain
@Hungry Joe: cant wait till we go all electric on planes
Martin
I didn’t make it up. From their perspective the petroleum industry is purely for export. Its role in their climate inventory is a product of decisions made by other countries – for the most part they don’t use the petroleum for transportation or electricity, it’s only for export.
So their focus is on domestic policy and usage here. And it’s not just that at the vehicular level that they are looking at emissions policy. Norway recognized that EV subsidies only benefit the wealthy, so they increased income inequality. They took funds away from transit options that benefitted low-income citizens. They also recognize that car usage impacts urban planning and tax revenue. One reason why small US towns used to work, and now don’t is that they had a proper downtown. A series of 20′ storefronts meant that each store only needed to provide enough taxes to pay for 20′ or so of road infrastructure (as well as electricity, water, sewer, etc.) If the owners lived above the store (common) that taxation was even easier to collect. But when you shift to a suburban model with a store with a required parking lot, now your McDonalds needs to pay for 200′ of road/water/electricity/sewage infrastructure, with no housing above it. Your tax density is at least 10x worse than it was before. A town that could previously afford to pay for their infrastructure no longer can, not because of the fuel the car used, but because the car and car owners demanded a different form of urban planning – one that was wildly more expensive with no commensurate increase in tax rates.
In an interview with a former mayor of Amsterdam, the interviewer asked why residents of that city were so drawn to cycling. The mayor said they weren’t. They adopted cycling because they were forced to. In the 1970s the city was bankrupt due to its own expanded car infrastructure, and to stave off bankruptcy the city stopped building car infrastructure. But bike infrastructure was incredibly cheap, so they built that instead. Nobody there was more amenable to cycling than, say, Americans, but if you wanted to get to work, that was the fastest way to get there as road construction stopped. With time they realized they liked it, and they liked the social benefits of not being in a car, and eventually the culture changed – but it was totally forced. That change saved the city from bankruptcy and kept it solvent, and it allowed for a very different urban planning that was much better for low income residents, was able to better keep up with growth, and was overall better for the city economy.
Norway is aware of that history. They’re aware of the relationship between car dependency and planning and taxation and expenses. Sure, the EV eliminates (mostly) the tailpipe emissions, but again, that’s not the only variable to control for.
The reason why I was opposed to the EV subsidies in the IRA was that they would mainly help rich people, and reserved much less money for transit and other transportation solutions that would help low-income citizens. If you give automakers a $10K coupon for EVs, they’re going to shift their EV portfolio up the market by $10K. And that’s precisely what they did. Average EV price in the US is $54K. Average gas car price is $46K.
The climate benefit from that spending isn’t zero, but it’s about the worst return on investment you can do and still get a return. The biggest benefit of that was to shift manufacturing to the US, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not a climate benefit.
Geminid
@Martin: Are you seeing many electric transit buses where you live?
Martin
One of the big problems with charging infrastructure in the US is that it’s hard to make money off of it. One benefit of fast refueling of gas cars is that you can service a large number of vehicles in a small land footprint. If you are providing support between cities, this isn’t a big deal because odds are you can find cheap-ass land out the weeds, but in more urban areas that land is incredibly expensive, and EVs are still slow to charge. That means charging businesses need to ask a substantial overhead to cover the cost of land, and property tax because they typically need 10x more land per customer.
And it’s harder to charge consumers more for electricity because people have baseline to compare to. Most people know what their kWh electricity rate is, and $0.50kWh at the charging station feels really bad compared to $0.12 at home. People have no baseline for gasoline. Nobody knows what the markup is, but we mostly do for electricity.
Charging will get faster and this problem may resolve itself, but there will still be this tail of older, slower charging vehicles holding it back (fast charging adds a lot of cost to an EV, btw, so cheap EVs will be slow charging EVs for a while). And again, this impacts low-income citizens who are more likely to live in apartments that lack charging, rely on street parking at home which lack charging. As such, charging infrastructure is almost entirely tailored for higher income suburbanites that do daily charging in their garage and need to charge on the drive to Vegas, not on the drive to work. There’s a window where pairing charging with existing parking make sense – and a mandate for employers to install charging would help a LOT, but without that, it mostly resulting in Denny’s adding Superchargers again for those higher income suburbanites to drive to Vegas, because nobody spends an hour in Denny’s on the way to or from work.
CA determined it needed a million charging points by 2035. To put that in context, the state needs to add as much public charging capacity as has been built over the last decade, every year from now until 2035. The state offered a number of substantial incentives to get that built, but it hasn’t come close to the needed pace. The state just decided that it’ll need to be built from taxpayer money, that Caltrans will need to build and operate these, because so much of the charging landscape isn’t profitable and doesn’t yet have a path to profitability. This is again taking taxpayer money from transit to subsidize people who can afford a $55K EV.
J. Arthur Crank
@trollhattan: Ah, much better, thanks.
trollhattan
@Martin:
My overarching point is regardless of how the Norway population energy use dovetails with Paris accords, until they say “screw exporting petroleum for others to burn, overwhelming our puny GHG contribution” they’re just fiddling with the deck chairs and ignoring the hydrocarbon elephant in the room.
The US is evidently the world’s 3rd LPG exporter, “amusing” each time PG&E cranks up the NG rate on account of the latest spot price increase. Every president since Nixon marketed the notion of being “energy independent” and not subject to the whims of global pricing and supply. Joke has always been on us.
Martin
@Geminid: Not really. UCI deployed EV buses in 2018. These were the first ones made by BYD in their new factory in Palmdale. My son has some just showing up around Santa Cruz.
UCIs study showed that the EV buses paid for themselves in 3 years over the diesel buses they replaced, which is an insane ROI. But that lesson hasn’t been taken up by other cities. My city is just now starting to build out its own transit agency, because the county’s is wildly insufficient. But they too are starting out with diesel buses, because they don’t want to commit the additional up-front costs fearing that there won’t be enough rider adoption The UCI studies showed that adoption doubled from the diesel to the electric buses, because so many riders either got sick from the halting diesel bus transmission, which the EV bus didn’t suffer from, and from the fumes. There were additional benefits from transitioning from front-loading/unloading buses to front/rear loading, plus the electric buses can load closer to curb level because the batteries are on the roof (easier to cool) allowing the floor to be lower. If you want the bus to succeed, you have to make the investment. And it’s not a big investment. They’re adding an additional left turn lane to the intersection near my house, for an amount that would buy 7 electric buses and pay for their operating costs for 3 years.
There are mandates in CA for electric bus adoption, so it’s going to happen, but there is so little money for transit that few municipalities can make that transition, or can afford to have transit expertise on staff to even make an informed decision.
Geminid
@Martin: I think the cleaner air will hasten adoption of electric school buses. The Infrastructure Act encourages electric school buses, and the day after it was passed in November, 2021 Vice President visited a plant in North Carolina that produces them. Once parents see kids in the district next door breathing cleaner air they’ll want them in theirs. Since the electric buses cost less over their service life adoption is a matter of financing, not cost.
Martin
The EU is basically mandating that Norway keep extracting that. Oil that they don’t get from Norway they were going to get from Russia. That’s a decision that is external to Norway. Norway made the responsible decision and went renewable, and that’s all that matters here. If the EU pulled the plug entirely and Norways petro industry went to zero, they’ve already electrified. They’re fine.
But the emissions from the petro industry don’t count toward Norways inventory. They count toward the inventory of the nations that oil is exported to. So as far as Norways inventory is concerned, that industry mostly doesn’t exist.
You will see this everywhere. Iowa is not responsible for the emissions of trucks that are passing along I-70 provided their start and end aren’t in Iowa. Those emissions are split between the states that the trucks start and end in. In CA where we break down emission responsibility by city and county, same rules.
Norway is not punished for being the sovereign those oil fields sit on. So long as they don’t use the stuff, they aren’t responsible for the emissions.
Energy independence never had anything to do with the whims of the global market. It had everything to do with who controls the global market. The US needs to live with OPEC as a geopolitical economic cartel, Russia, etc. The point of energy independence is that the global market doesn’t always function as a market. That’s what we learned in 1974.
The benefit of renewables is that it’s really fucking hard to export, so the market is to some degree fixed. This is why you can get renewable wholesale prices hit $0 quite frequently, which is a whole other kind of problem to deal with.
Martin
@Geminid: Cost is the only policy driver in the US. We killed a million Americans during Covid because it was economically cheaper to kill old people than it was to save them by curtailing economic activity further.
You generally cannot make broad policy gains in the US without making the economic argument. Even policies like support for trans youth are increasingly coming down to the economic costs to regions that oppose trans health. Book bans will come down to the legal costs to continue or oppose the policy, not issues related to education or free speech.
Nobody gives a shit about clean air. Nobody gives a shit about the health and safety of kids. Either you find your way to the economic argument, or you stay with what you have.
Timill
@Martin:
The EU is basically mandating that Norway keep extracting that.
Um, how? You know Norway’s not in the EU, right? It has agreements, but it’s not a member.
Chris T.
@Another Scott:
Purely a side note, but: in North America at least, you only get 208V if you’re using two out of three phases in a wye arrangement. This is not common except in industrial or apartment settings.
(Of course, you can technically get any voltage you like via transformers, but I mean what most people mostly see in practice.)
BTW I forgot to mention in my note about module issues that what’s really needed here is a much stronger “right to repair” system-of-laws. We need this all throughout the USA, not just for EVs.
Geminid
@Martin: I think parents will care about the poor air quality in diesel school buses once they see the alternative. Right now they just accept the diesel pollution as a given.
Another Scott
@Chris T.: D’Oh. Thanks.
(We’ve got 208V and 225V at work, in alternating electrical closets. We recently got some new equipment with a compressor from Japan that runs on “200V”, so of course, not knowing that it wasn’t like stuff that we’re used to that easily runs on 208-230V, it was wired up to the 225V circuit and promptly failed. The joys of electricity! :-/ )
Cheers,
Scott.
BigJimSlade
@Martin: The Bolt, fortunately, should be coming back:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/24/general-motors-chevrolet-bolt-ev-ultium.html
Uncle Cosmo
I hope to join the ranks of Jackal Kia Niro PHEV owners this summer. I’ve had good luck with my last two Kias (a 2008 Spectra that was totaled in a spectacular crash that I walked away from without a scratch, and my current 2012 Forte that’s still fun to drive but gets crappy gas mileage in the city which is most of my driving). I’d be happy to consider an EV except I live in an interior-group row house sans carport or garage (so no way to run a charging cord that wouldn’t cross a sidewalk or block the alley) and the closest charging stations (indeed, the only ones I know of) are a 7 minute drive.
Question: What is the difference in curb weight between a PHEV and a hybrid? IOW, how much weight is added by including the hardware necessary to charge the hybrid battery from an external electric charger? I’d be very surprised if the plug-in charger was more than 10% of the curb weight, but I wonder if any of yinz know where to find figures for the Niro (or indeed for any hybrid vs EV model, I’m just trying to get a rough order of magnitude).
Uncle Cosmo
@Martin: At Yearly Kos (don’t think it was Netroots Nation yet) in Austin in 2008 I took in a presentation from a guy who argued that the “killer ap” for large-scale adoption of EVs was school buses, that parents would want their kids not to have to stand at the curb breathing diesel fumes while waiting to board the bus after school. Sounded persuasive at the time, but we see how far that got – here in the Bawlmer metro the yaller buses are still diesel, it’s the regular buses that are gradually being replaced by EV versions, as they should.
Seonachan
@Uncle Cosmo: Looking at some random 2024 models, the Kia Sportage PHEV is about 500 lbs heavier than the regular hybrid. The Prius Prime is less than 400 lbs heavier than the plain Prius. Different-sized batteries will be the biggest difference, so the longer the all-electric range, the more added weight.
Martin
@Geminid: Nah. Here in California not many kids ride the bus. Many cities have community schools – kids are close enough to walk or bike, but most get driven which is more polluting and dangerous, but it’s what parents choose because we develop cultural norms and we don’t work very hard as individuals to challenge those norms.
China has had electric buses for ages. Nobody saw that as an alternative, and they still don’t. We had electric streetcars and trolleys for over a century, and nobody is demanding they come back either. The power of cultural default is very strong, and Americans are, more than anything else, selfish. We aren’t even willing to wear a mask to save a person’s life. We won’t tolerate a slightly longer commute to save pedestrian lives. We won’t entertain alternate transit options to address climate change.
Read this thread back up to the top. There is no support even among this group for anything other than car status-quo. We’re all for addressing climate change, so long as we can keep relying on a 2-ton vehicle to buy a cheeseburger. We’re willing to change, but only so far. Past that point we’ll find all manner of excuse why we can’t take a bus, ride a bike, walk a mile. We’d rather believe that buying the EV is enough – we’ll consume our way out of this problem, even when all evidence is that EVs are like trying to take a hot air balloon to the moon. It gets you up high, sure – it feels like progress, but it can’t get you to the moon. It’s a dead end – one further down the road – but inevitably a dead end because the problem was never gasoline cars, the problem was cars.
We’ll get there, just as we did with Covid. It’ll come at a cost, though, just as it did (and continues to) with Covid.
As far as financing – most school districts don’t have the authority to finance. Cost smoothing is much easier to find for consumers than for public institutions. Bond measures often require public approval – a ballot initiative, etc. It’s incredibly common for public agencies to spend half a million a year to patch a system together than spend a million to solve it once and for all, because they have no vehicle for getting a million dollars. That’s why federal dollars and grants are so important because for a lot of places, that’s their only option.
Geminid
@Martin: Yes, most school districts don’t have money to finance electric school buses. But the federal government sure does, and I believe the Infrastructure bill has money to finance a lot school buses. And this is one of the Infrastructure bill initiatives that I think will be added to in Infrastrucure 2.0 legislation later this decade. Amtrak expansion is another.
And while it’s interesting to learn that California does not use school buses much, I will point out that the other states do and they are 6/7ths of the country.
Martin
@Geminid: My reasons for pointing out that CA doesn’t use many school buses wasn’t to argue that they aren’t useful to electrify, it was to point out that when parents have agency in getting their kids to school, they routinely choose the one that is least healthy. My argument is that if parents put the health of their kids foremost, and if CA parents are no different from parents in other states, there’s plenty of evidence that parents make choices around cultural norms – around what other parents do, what is expected, rather than what results in the best air quality or even safety for their kid.
Another Scott
@Uncle Cosmo: For the Kia Niro, it looks like the Hybrid SX Touring is 3071-3247 pounds, the PHEV SX Touring is 3336 pounds, and the EV is 3721 pounds. So, yeah, the weight delta is mostly the batteries.
The battery in my 2023 Niro PHEV weighs 220 pounds.
HTH a little! Happy hunting.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@Martin
Change can move at a pace snails would mock. 1905 was when portions of trackage of the LIRR were first converted to electric service. 119 years later there are still LIRR lines that are not fully electrified.
Uncle Cosmo
@Seonachan: , @Another Scott:
Very helpful, thanky kindly.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
I live in LA county and my car is going on 8 yrs old and has less than 18K on the odometer. For 6 of those years I walked to work if it wasn’t raining but that was only 1 mile each way. Otherwise it’s the store for food and whatever. And there is a store 1 mile away, that I normally walk to. If I need more than a knapsacks worth I drive to a larger store. I have a small solar charger that sits on the dash to keep the battery charged. And at my age I’m thinking of selling the car.
Geminid
@Martin: I am sure thdre is research out there on how kids ride buses snd how many go by car, state by state, but where I live most kids ride school buses and their parents will be glad when the County starts shifting over to electric school buses. They’re not demanding electric school buses now, but the buses are coming anyway and when they get here the kids, the parents and everyone else will know a good thing when they see it.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Here in eastern LA county I take the bus to the Metro electric train to travel across LA (over 45 miles) and then a bus for the last 3 miles on the other end. There and back is $2.25 for a senior. Driving might be 15-20 minutes faster but often is actually slower. The diesel bus on each end (a total of 12 miles for both ends both ways) costs more than the train there and back. And the cost of driving is just a tad more. One rather large tad. My car gets good milage but the round trip in the car is $15-18, depending on traffic. Which in LA is of course a fair amount. Aw the good old days. I remember crossing LA in the family car, mostly 2 lane roads. But I also remember the electric buses in downtown LA a lot of decades ago, which went away with diesel buses.
wjca
A bit of idle curiosity here. In the first half of the last century, the East Bay had an extensive electric rail system. (Key System).
What happened? It got bought up by a company which, when you dug in, was owned by GM and Phillips Petroleum. The new ownership essentially shut it down . . . and the beneficial owners were thus able to sell diesel buses to the transit agency which replaced it. (My mother used to wax eloquent on the subject.)
I’m wondering if something similar happened in LA.
NotMax
@wjca
See: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
;)
More seriously, the Los Angeles Times.
Kayla Rudbek
Apparently EVs are popular for pulling camping trailers https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/31/business/electric-vehicles-are-changing-how-america-goes-camping/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0qbTgSYg_AaoXPvC2krRFzZfbgrFbMjkcVQXWnHYrkG3A10jvioE53hAc_aem_AUoPTwLLXT7zHfvuZfYpgjR_R-B2Tcx-desfp4pb1qQN3HxMEhytKTCEuCCSR-21hDWcBb-7Dll_Jur-FN3uErf6