The Potential Pitfalls of Electric Cars

Three problems.

On my first trip in my Prime, the place I stopped for food was not in a city in which there was a supercharger station. Second, on my most recent trip, the supercharger station in the city where we did stop was located two miles from the town's restaurants. That's a long walk each way. Finally, on my first trip, the gap between lunch and dinner was 5 1/2 hours and 300 miles with no charger at the destination either, with an additional 210 miles to drive the next day. No current ev can go 510 miles so that means I'd have had to stop and just watch my car charge for an hour sometime between lunch and dinner, making me bored and late for dinner.

 

You and Eeyore have a lot in common

 

Work place charging is worthwhile for PHEV and low range BEV, but a modern BEV only needs home charging for daily drives.
Charging on trips is mostly OK now in a Tesla, although improvements in speed and availability are always welcome.

I'm reasonably sure that the next generation of DC chargers and cars will allow 320 kW (800 Volts, 400 Amps) charging from 20-80% which pretty much puts the entire issue to rest.

 

You don't seem to understand anything about anything.

I've been on 6 out of town trips since I got my Prime and I've carefully analyzed all of them for how they would have gone in a 100d. 4 of the 6 would have encountered substantial delays (an hour or more), 1 would have been impossible, and 1 would have been marginal but likely successful if nothing went wrong.

if you call that mostly ok, you'e nuts.

 

Driving back from the eclipse, I stopped in Pittsburg TN for dinner at a Cracker Barrel. Their fast DC charger was CHAdeMO and I was in a CCS, BMW i3-REx. There was a J1772, L2, Blink charger which I used while eating dinner and letting the sun set.

The L2 charger in that hour added ~15 miles and I was 50 miles from home.

I know there are corridors where long range EV travel works but I don’t live there.

Bob Wilson

 

Today we have two choices that I am aware of for EV cars with at least 200 miles of range...Tesla and the Chevy Bolt.

I absolutely agree that if you can afford and can acquire one of these, daily driving (starting from home) is covered well.
For trips though, it seems like there is still a ways to go with the vehicles and infrastructure.

Yes, a 320KW charger (and cars that can use it) would be better but a quick scan around New England, the only chargers I see are either Tesla's at 72 or 120KW or the others which are usually either the 60WH or 44KW variety. 320KW charging doesn't appear to be the infrastructure that is being built at the moment...Maybe in a few years it will start to show-up but then how long until they are common enough?

Then, you need a car that can utilize these higher power chargers. For the cars in production today, those chargers will not help.
Tesla currently claims about 130-170 miles of range off a 30 minute charge...Chevy claims 90 miles from a 30 minute charge.
On trips, that still feels like a good bit of charge time vs. drive time. And that's assuming you find the fast DC chargers.

A good day of travel (400 miles) would involve something on the order of 60-90 minutes of charge time assuming you left with a relatively full battery...More charge time would be needed on subsequent days assuming you didn't happen to have a supercharger at your hotel and couldn't start with a full charge.

Things are advancing but I think we have at least another generation or so of both vehicles and charging infrastructure before trips become relatively painless. Trips are not frequent for most people and they are certainly possible today with a little patience.

 

Closer to 45 minutes in a Tesla Model 3 SR, about 10 minutes in the LR model.

I don't know what the range distribution of 'long trip' is for the EV interested populace or how frequent. My 'long trips' are 250 miles to my destination, so I have a few minutes stop en-route in a SR model. The charging happens well within the time we stop nowadays anyway. For truly long trips I prefer to work instead of drive, and then fly.

 

400 miles is an afternoon (300 between lunch and diner, 100 after dinner). 600 is an average day of travel I've done too many times to count (Denver to KC, Denver to Page). I've done over 1,000 (Denver to Reno) and I know people who have done 1200.

 

I should have added that key to making this work is that charging stations not only need to be close to where we are driving long distances but other services like a variety of food vendors need to be conveniently available as well. that means within a few hundred feet or a minutes walk. Chargers at a car dealership or across a busy highway from restaurants are kind of useless.

I like to fly for longer trips too, but for many years with a wife and 2 kids, flying to grandparents was an expensive trip. Driving 800 miles was cheaper.

 

As has been said soooo many times before...EV vehicles do not work NOW for everyone as a direct replacement for gas, diesel, hybrid or even PHEV vehicles. Whether it's infrastructure, time, money, freedom, convenience...or just plain unwillingness to change. Neither side is right, neither side is wrong. It's just a choice people.

 

Lee, once again, there are zero problems with what was said.
No one is saying that an EV will work for you.
What is being said is that they will work for many people.

That number may be 10% of auto buyers, or it may be 90%. But just because it won’t work for you doesn’t mean that it won’t work for anyone. You simply can’t rationally hold that position. Since obviously, there are at least a few people for whom it does work.

 

"Mostly OK" sounds like 90%, not 10%. I still believe the number of people for whom a current ev is fine as their only car for every trip is single digits in percent. Likewise, I think the number is in the 90s as a second car or an in-town only car. Heck, my Prime's ev-only range is fine for more than 95% of my in-town trips and a first-gen Leaf would be fine for 100% of those. But a lot of people go to out-of-the-way places and those are tough because you need enough range for the round trip, not just the trip. Maybe the charging network will improve to cover all locations or maybe a battery breakthrough will happen so we can all have a 450-600 mile range in ev's with 10 minute recharge.

 

People also vote with their wallets as in December 2017:
http://www.hybridcars.com/december-2017-dashboard/

• 0.94% - BEV take rate
• 0.64% - plug-in hybrid take rate
• range: 0.94% - 1.45%, BEV users plus 80% of the plug-in miles

My 80% EV of plug-in hybrid miles comes from our 2017 Prime that has ~2,000 mi hybrid out of ~10,000 mi total.

Bob Wilson

 

And the EPA tests don't factor in the use of the A/C compressor for defrosting, nor does it account for preconditioning of the car and cabin from grid energy. If you feel the need for a more accurate figure reflecting wintr driving, you are free to conduct your on study.

I brought up the UCS study because of a comment about EVs likely being as dirty as an ICE car. That is only true for a minority portion of the US. The distribution of sources for electricity don't always follow state borders, but it is about 7 to 8 states worth of area, plus one Hawaiian island in which EVs are the equivalent to a 40mpg or lower ICE car. The rest of the country is better with an EV, and much of it matches or surpasses a hybrid like the Prius.

Their figures could be lower if the effect of winter on a BEV was factored in, though a good part of the country doesn't have to deal with a cold winter, but then the UCS figures were based on the older Leaf and Tesla, and ignore the more efficient BEV choices now available.

That is something those criticizing BEVs for long trip capability today tend to forget. They also don't consider most US households own more than one car. A larger portion of households could make a short range BEV like a Leaf work as one of their cars, with the other being the one used for trips. This alone can allow BEVs to have a large impact on our transportation emissions without the real need for chargers besides for home.

Longer range BEVs just increase the number of households that can switch one daily driver to an electric. Then for those in which long trips are frequent, a PHEV is an option as the fast charging infrastructure grows.

 

Exactly.

And as for replacing the second car with a BEV, that is something of a YMMV but a lot closer for most of the populace than is widely realized. If gasoline was more expensive, we would see less intransigence. Just ask Norway

 

The problem with having a second conventional car for trips is that it's much dirtier than either a low-range EV or a PHEV. I know several people who drive a Leaf to and from work and a pickup truck (20mpg) on trips. They also have to use that second car for 100% of the second person's travel around town. PHEVs alleviate this problem - they're clean around town and efficient on trips.

 

The thing to keep in mind is that ICE has very little room to get cleaner in the future. At the end of the day it has to burn hydrocarbons to produce locomotive power. EVs have a choice and a clear path to cleaner locomotive power production. That is the main thing to keep in mind through this whole thread. We can discuss use cases, current infrastructure and state of the art till the cows come home, but in the end EVs have a path to a cleaner future and ICEs do not. This is where I fail to see the pitfalls of the electric car and only see pitfalls in the ICE for the longer term future.

 

Assuming there's a battery breakthrough, EV's will be terrific in the future. But we don't know when or even if that will happen.