Car and Driver flawed analysis

Fewer and fewer places every year.
As of the 2018 grid data:

This comes from the following article
Are Electric Vehicles Really Better for the Climate? Yes. Here’s Why - Union of Concerned Scientists


All the issues you mention are exactly why Toyota should be building BEVs.
The advantages of the pure electric drivetrain are immense. The performance aspects are basically a side effect.

 

If Tesla didn't take the premium performance route, they wouldn't be around today.

When the Model S went on pre-order, there was a 40, 60, and 85 kWH battery options. The 60 kWh had a range of 208 miles, so the 40 kWh would have one suitable for your your suburban life. No one wanted it. So few orders were put in that Tesla canceled it, and sold those that wanted it a software locked 60kWh car. The cost savings of lower capacity is countered by the additional designing and certification required. Which is why there isn't a Model 3 with a third battery option anymore.

The 120 miles of range in an Ioniq Electric is plenty for many people, but Hyundai put in a bigger battery for higher price. As did Nissan with the Leaf. People don't need the range, but they have concerns over range for weather and the unexpected.

The Model 3 LR AWD is rated 134mpge to the Prius Prime's 133mpge on electric.

The Prius bests the Model 3 on just one Hawaiian island. It might in two regions of the US, but it is close enough to be YMMV.

These figures are based on the Model 3, old Ioniq Electric, and Prius Prime.

 

That's a pretty map, but rather meaningless without an explanation of what it represents and how the numbers were obtained. It appears to be from the site linked in post 21. If so, it's fudged just a touch.

How is it tweaked? It does not use the average pollution of an EV if used in each states. It uses instead the average pollution of the cars that were sold in the area in which they were sold. With 45% of the sales in California (lot's of hydro and wind there) that makes it look like a new EV driving in Virginia will still cause less pollution than a gas car that gets 80 MPG. In fact adding EVs in the appalachian area would produce significantly more pollution than many gas cars in the same area.

It says:

 

Something I had not thought of before. When are most cars charged? Overnight I'd presume. So what generation facilities are being run then as opposed to the day? Industry and business are running low demand at night. So the utility is running only their most efficient units during the time of car charging I presume. (I get a discount in terms of lower rates at night and some other non-peak times because of that.) So the power consumed by an EV may be cleaner than average. I think of my situation where I'm 25 miles from a big Nuke. Pretty clean once built. Does the map and the data it is taken from take that into account?

 

That's really hard to quantify. Some places, like northern Calif, have hydroelectric plants that they can fall back on. It's a complex issue to figure out the exact mixture to use during off peak hours. If you are not careful you can deplete the reservoir to the point where it can't contribute enough power the next day when the demand is high. I'd assume that the North Carolina baseline power is from the nuclear plant, but that's not always the case.

Dan

 

You are stretching to see that bias. The 88mpg(CO2 equivalent) figure is an average of plug in fleet that was on the roads when the analysis was done. Of course it will use where the cars are to calculate that average; a car in California won't be charging in Virginia. Registration location would be better, but sales is close enough for the purpose of this figure.

The sales data isn't used for figuring MPG CO2 equivalent for each grid region. "For electric vehicles, the calculation includes both power plant emissions and emissions from the production of coal, natural gas and other fuels power plants use. Our analysis relies on emissions estimates for gasoline and fuels production from Argonne National Laboratory (using the GREET2019 model) and power plant emissions data released by the US EPA. The data, released in January 2020, tallied the emissions from US power plants during 2018." It is the CO2 emissions from making the electricity, compared to an average efficiency rating of plug ins available at the time for the first map at the link. The map I posted was for the most efficient plug ins. For the MPG equivalent figure, they used the CO2 from burning a gallon of gasoline, plus the CO2 emissions for producing it.

An in depth detail of their methods is in this report, Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave | Union of Concerned Scientists

It depends on what power plants are in used for the region.

In short, charging EVs at night is good, because there is excess production available then. That could make the electricity made then cleaner than what it otherwise would be though having plants operating at a more efficient point. That doesn't mean the electricity is cleaner than on average though. There isn't solar available, and wind won't be for the entire night. Natural gas turbines are more efficient than steam plants, but steam plants have stay running all the time. If nuclear, GHG isn't a concern, but many steam plants are coal fired. So charging EVs at night could mean more coal burned during the night than otherwise. The good news is that coal generation continues to drop on the US grid.

Natural gas turbines are more efficient at higher loads, but they can be turned off when not needed. That ability, with fast start up, is why these are generally referred to as peaker plants. When steam is part of the regional grid, EV charging won't result in them turning on as the first option.

Charging EVs at night could mean making use of wind power that would be turned off; there are periods where production is higher than demand then. Traditional hydro has a seasonal balancing act. Rivers need precipitation to keep flowing, and dry years might mean a hydro plant has to turn down output. So turning up output for night charging may not be something to depend on.

Steam plants, which include nuclear and most coal ones in the US, can't fully shut down at night. Start up from shut down takes some time for one thing, but more importantly, there is the concern of damage during when starting up a cold plant. Thermal expansion of contraction cycles will loosen parts, maybe even break them out right. Then there is the risk of steam condensing in pipes, and getting a water hammer when things start running again.

So utilities run them at an idle speed at night to keep them hot. This isn't fuel efficient, and they one of the least efficient plants to start, but cheaper than potential issues of shutting down. More demand from EV charging will improve efficiency. There is a catch to this, which has more impact with coal plants. For cost reasons, the utility may opt to generate from a coal plant, than use something cleaner. IIRC, Texas utilities chose to run coal over using wind, because of the need to have the coal plants running to some degree.