Is the Obsession with EV Range All Wrong? (msn.com) 613
"The obsession with EV range is all wrong," argues a new article in the Washington Post's Climate section. "This year, one EV on the market — the sleek $140,000 Lucid Air Grand Touring — boasts a whopping 516-mile range. Toyota recently announced that it had achieved a breakthrough with solid-state battery technology, saying it will soon be able to produce electric cars that can go 746 miles on a single charge.
"But some analysts say that all that range — and all that battery — misses the point, and wastes resources." Only 5% of trips in the U.S. are longer than 30 miles. The vast majority of big batteries will never be used — particularly if the owner has a place to plug in their car every day... Those batteries are massive, in every sense of the word: the battery on the electric F-150 Lightning, which allows the car to go more than 300 miles on a single charge, weighs a whopping 1,800 pounds.
But is all that necessary? Americans drive a lot, but most of our trips are not very long. According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1% of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60% of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day. And there is evidence that much smaller batteries could do the lion's share of the work. In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87% of all driving days in the United States. Providing Nissan Leafs to everyone whose driving fit that pattern, the researchers found, would cut 61% of U.S. gasoline consumption by personal vehicles...
So most of the time, drivers are lugging around giant batteries but only using 10 to 15% of their actual power. And those big batteries require mining a lot of metals, damaging the environment and workers' health... In a report by researchers at the University of California at Davis, the Climate and Community Project, and Providence College, experts found that simply switching to smaller EV batteries — batteries that could give a small car a range of 125 miles or so — could cut lithium demand by 42%...
The article notes that the upcoming Dodge Ram 1500 REV, with a range of about 500 miles, will need a battery "roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid..."
"For those who need to take frequent long road trips and don't want to have to plug in, a plug-in hybrid can be a good option. But for most Americans, an EV with medium range will do just fine."
"But some analysts say that all that range — and all that battery — misses the point, and wastes resources." Only 5% of trips in the U.S. are longer than 30 miles. The vast majority of big batteries will never be used — particularly if the owner has a place to plug in their car every day... Those batteries are massive, in every sense of the word: the battery on the electric F-150 Lightning, which allows the car to go more than 300 miles on a single charge, weighs a whopping 1,800 pounds.
But is all that necessary? Americans drive a lot, but most of our trips are not very long. According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1% of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60% of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day. And there is evidence that much smaller batteries could do the lion's share of the work. In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87% of all driving days in the United States. Providing Nissan Leafs to everyone whose driving fit that pattern, the researchers found, would cut 61% of U.S. gasoline consumption by personal vehicles...
So most of the time, drivers are lugging around giant batteries but only using 10 to 15% of their actual power. And those big batteries require mining a lot of metals, damaging the environment and workers' health... In a report by researchers at the University of California at Davis, the Climate and Community Project, and Providence College, experts found that simply switching to smaller EV batteries — batteries that could give a small car a range of 125 miles or so — could cut lithium demand by 42%...
The article notes that the upcoming Dodge Ram 1500 REV, with a range of about 500 miles, will need a battery "roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid..."
"For those who need to take frequent long road trips and don't want to have to plug in, a plug-in hybrid can be a good option. But for most Americans, an EV with medium range will do just fine."
Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:4, Insightful)
You need a car to be capable of doing what you need 100% of the time or more if youâ(TM)re helping out friends and family.
95% of the year is still 15 days - the rental of an EV with large capacity will be on the order of $500-1000/day, if you already invest $75k in an EV, you shouldnâ(TM)t need to invest another $15k annually in rentals.
Same reason people get bigger houses, do they need them, not at the time of purchase, but once they have kids they need the space for about 20 years. That means for 2/3 of its lifetime you live in a house thatâ(TM)s bigger than what you need, what a waste, we should forcibly move people out of there and into the gulag.
Itâ(TM)s why people have trucks and minivans, can I rent them, sure, but every other weekend or monthly rental of a truck or minivan isnâ(TM)t cheap or practical.
Re: Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know where you get your rental prices. A more typical car rental cost is $100 to $150 per day. So maybe $2k per year.
How much less would your EV cost, if it had a battery 1/2 the size?
Balance those values, and see where you land.
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A car rental of a $15k car is $100. Also depends on the time you rent it, weekends and vacation weeks are more expensive as the demand is higher. I’ve rented rather low cost minivans at $250/day and trucks at $50/4 hours. A 75k EV will be significantly higher, especially if as this article wants, every weekend everyone should rent.
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Re: Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:4, Informative)
Not really, no. With my current gas burner, I can make short trips, or long trips. I can drive across the USA if I want to, because I know worst case, I'll have to stop for gas and take 5 minutes to refill my 320 mile "battery".
With a 100 mile battery, I can't even make it to the nearest Micro Center and back without stopping for a 30 minute charge-- And even then, I'm going to have to carefully plan my route around available charge points.
A 200 mile battery, however, I can make the full round trip in one go.
I agree with the article, however, in that 500+ mile range for an EV is a niche product, at best.
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Just about EVERYONE thinks they plan well...
And keep in mind the touting touting this "planning" are also the same folks who can't seem to do their own financial planning (massive student loans that don't pay for them selves anyone?)
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You're European though. You have the advantage of better education and better infrastructure.
Re: Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't ignore the "pain in the arse" factor when it comes to rental cars.
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Man, services are bad where you live.
Here, in my 3rd world, arse-of-the-EU country, I can rent a car pretty much any moment, with a wide selection available (from tiny two-seaters to luxury cars to
vans to buses), with options to either go to dealer's location or have it brought to an address of choice, or at the airport, at a time of my choosing. Prices start from €50 per day, right now, when demand is highest due to holiday season. Usually, prices start at around half that.
Re:Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:5, Insightful)
I think moderate range batteries are acceptable, in the 200 to 300 mile range. Sizing a battery for that 30 miles/day figure is a bad idea though: Running without margin is a recipe for disaster at worst and annoyance at best, and the data needs examining.
My own personal driving habits: I average pretty close to that 30 miles per day over a week, but that's because I work from home and about 4 days a week I drive less than 10 miles. The other three days though, I drive 60 miles.
My battery size allows me to recharge roughly once a week, instead of every night; this saves wear and tear on my plug and charging equipment since I'm doing far fewer cycles.
This whole "EVs aren't perfect, therefore they're bad" mentality is baffling to me. They are better than merely "good enough" - why the ire?
I think people also forget that used EV batteries are much more able to be re-purposed for stationary power and other uses compared to used ICE components, which really have no other use.
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Other advantages of longer EV range (Score:4, Insightful)
There are other advantages to longer EV range besides the obvious one of less "range anxiety" on longer trips.
A larger battery will last longer. Some EV and especially Tesla enthusiast may dispute my numbers, but take 400 full charge/discharge cycles as a baseline. Tesla claims are in the thousands, but 400 is pretty much the experience with laptop computers. Furthermore, the battery warranties on EVs are in the 400-cycle territory.
400 cycles at 250 mile range gives a 100,000 mile lifetime for the battery, depending on whether end-of-life of a battery is a noticable drop in capacity or whether it is the battery just plain quitting. 100,000 miles may also be the expectation for the lifetime of a gas-engine car before it needs major engine or transmission repairs. Toyotas and Hondas are said to be good past 200,000 miles, but 100,000 miles seems what is said to be the trouble-free lifetime of a Hyundai or a Chrysler these days.
400 cycles at 50 mile range is a mere 20,000 miles. So a larger battery gives a much longer-lasting car.
Now you may say that a 50-mile range battery costs much less to replace than a 250-mile range battery. But who is replacing their EV battery rather than "just getting rid of the car"? And who does major engine or transmission repairs on a gas engine car?
The other advantage of a longer range battery, as Tesla discovered, is tons more acceleration. A big battery can be discharged at much higher amperage than a smaller one, and this is the secret sauce to Teslas being high-performance vehicles, or at least "quick off the line."
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Re:Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people live in a family that owns multiple cars. If you have 2 cars, and you don't take road trip vacations separate from your spouse, then it should usually make sense to have one of your cars be a low range electric. If you both work then you'll still have one of you commuting in the gas guzzler, but it's better than both of you doing that.
Re:Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:5, Informative)
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This is exactly what we do. The Mach E is a great runabout, but charging infrastructure still sucks enough that we take the gas guzzler (about 5.26 US gallons / 100 miles) for long trips or to pull a tent trailer.
And of course, being Americans, our gas is cheap and so that abysmal mileage isn't all the expensive if you're not considering externalities.
We had a Fusion Energi a few years ago. While it was an awesome car, Michigan winters made its electric-only range useless to me, about 14 miles in winter. I'
Plug-in hybrid [Re:Its not about what you need 60] (Score:3)
I'd probably consider a PHEV again if I had 100 miles of electric range which would cover most of my use, saving the gasoline for road trips.
Why do you need so long electric range, if you have a gas engine that seamlessly switches in when you need it? With no range anxiety, even forty or fifty miles should be more than enough that you're mostly using electric, but kicking the IC engine in now and then.
I've always been bewildered the plug-in hybrids didn't really catch on. They seem a perfect solution for many people who mostly have short trips, but occasionally go longer.
(I do have to say that the Toyota sales near us didn't have any of the pl
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I think the argument against hybrids is you get less efficiencies with both (ICE/EV) systems thanks to extra weight, complexity and potential maintenance.
Since you have a smaller battery, a plug-in hybrid should weight less than a long-range EV. Complexity, you're right, more complex to have both. Maintenance, mostly right: since you use the gas engine much less, you might have to do less frequent maintenance on it, but you still will have more maintenance than a pure EV.
Different strokes... [Re:Its not about what yo...] (Score:5, Insightful)
You need a car to be capable of doing what you need 100% of the time
This will apparently be hard for you to believe, but not everybody drives long distances every month or two.
Different people have different needs. Not all people need that 300+ miles of range between charges. Turns out that when the average car in the US is driven 37 miles per day, there are many people for whom a car with a hundred mile range would be just fine.
Re:Its not about what you need 60% of the time (Score:4, Insightful)
You need a car to be capable of doing what you need 100% of the time or more if you're helping out friends and family. 95% of the year is still 15 days -
Wait-- you have "friends and family" who ask you to drive over five hundred miles to "help them out", and ask this of you fifteen days a year?
I have to think your friends and family are using you.
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Itâ(TM)s why people have trucks and minivans
No it's not. Marketing is why people have trucks and minivans. Ever consider why trucks and minivans are somehow uniquely American (in that everyone owns one) and yet the entire world is full of people with families and people who have to do things with trucks?
The nextdoor neighbour is a family of 5. They have a single compact. What are you doing so wrong that this doesn't work for you?
Somehow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Somehow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If people were capable of making sensible choices, that would indeed be a breaking news.
Especially on the topic of climate change, most people are only capable of thinking very short-term, as in "hey, I need to go on vacation next month, so I need a car with a range of 500 miles!". So yeah, maybe listening to actual scientists and researchers, and letting them decide what is good for you, would be the sensible choice.
The alternative? Not much different, except that physical limits will be applied to you the hard way.
Same as when you are on a 20 miles hike with your family, and you only 3 liters of water: you can either listen to the adults and restrict everyone accordingly to what is best (maybe a bit more water for the kids for instance, as they are the weaker ones; maybe not as much to the elderly if at some point you realize you really won't have enough for everybody; tough choices), or you can drink all the water in the first 2 miles, and die of thirst before reaching your destination.
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The fact that you can't understand how this example is actually a good one when talking about climate change just shows how clueless you are about what is happening.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource. In the example I gave (hike with a finite amount of water), water is a finite resource. This is a good first-order approximation of what will happen. EVs and the obsession with it is like people talking about a water-divining rod on your hike: that may divert your attention, they may find a trickle of water to
Re: Somehow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Iâ(TM)m happy not to tell you how to do it, so long as you pay me the full cost of the externalities of doing it the current way that i now am forced to bear.
No (Score:3, Informative)
The extended range model 3 I rented a few weeks back required daily or every other day charging cycles just to stay comfortably charged. After 2 weeks I loved driving it but was 100% ready to be able to just fill my gas tank anywhere and not worry.
I was constantly having to be strategic with my routes and plans to ensure I could visit a super charger at reasonable time.
Loved the car, it's EXACTLY like all the electric RC cars I've driven. It's a rocket out of the hole, nimble as hell and its constantly needing more battery. In my hobby, I can swap the battery - I can't do that to get to work in a hurry when I'm late.
If current EV ranges are enough for your daily drive, you aren't really making a serious carbon impact in your gas guzzler either.
Battery capacity and in home charge rates that rival super-charger speeds are required before this moves beyond tech demo, which is where it is now.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
If current EV ranges are enough for your daily drive, you aren't really making a serious carbon impact in your gas guzzler either.
I don't think that's true for city and urban driving. City MPG is always less than highway MPG for a reason. For an EV, the stop-and-go traffic doesn't result in as much wasted energy. In major metropolitan areas, there are other benefits to driving an electric vehicle, like less smog and other aerosols.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
>>> City MPG is always less than highway MPG
Only for ICE vehicles. They expend chemical energy to create kinetic energy, then throw it away as heat every time they touch the brakes.
EV's, on the other hand, expend chemical energy to create kinetic energy, then recycle most of the kinetic energy back to chemical energy when they slow to a stop.
Tesla Model 3 - 141 city, 127 highway ( https://www.fueleconomy.gov/fe... [fueleconomy.gov] )
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In my hobby, I can swap the battery - I can't do that to get to work in a hurry when I'm late.
It's unfortunate that the ideas around swapping out batteries on EVs never seem to have gained much traction. A lot of the fundamental problems -- slow charging times, carrying heavy batteries around when you don't need them, battery performance and therefore vehicle range degrading significantly over time -- just go away if your EVs are designed with standard spaces and connectors for batteries and "filling up" means exchanging one or more of your current batteries that are depleted with as many new ones a
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Silicon(-carbide) is cheap, most of the cost for a home charger will be the ridiculous fees from electricians ... the US being the land of the codes and artificial labor restrictions doesn't much help there.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have five drivers in my house, so one day I will need at least five chargers because there aren't going to be ICEs any more and I'm not switching around cars in my driveway like it's a valet service.
I think you are being a bit silly here. My wife and I are currently sharing a single charger for two EVs and it's no big deal.
I have a two car garage with a small circuit panel.
Well, other people have similar problems and the companies making chargers are also solving those similar problems. For example, if
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It's unusual situations that I am concerned about. No I don't need to rush to the hospital every day, but it has happened and will happen again.
If the nearest hospital is 300 miles away, you might want to consider a different kind of transportation, like a biplane or a helicopter. That's just not a realistic concern with EVs unless you're in rural Alaska or something. You don't let it run down to the point where you couldn't make that kind of trip, but that's doesn't require it to be charged to 100% every day, or even 50%, realistically, unless you're so far in the middle of nowhere that you really should consider getting your pilot's license.
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With all five of them owning their own cars? Yes.
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I'm just trying to think of any way an EV may not work for me so I can be prepared and make a decision.
Your current habits are based around ICE based vehicles, electric cars are different and if you attempt to replicate your life exactly as is without taking advantage of the differences, you'll get all the disadvantages with none of the advantages.
Unless you're going on a road trip, you never need to go and fill up an electric car. And some models can power your house if the power goes out.
Of the five vehic
Re-thinking storage (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why slide-in batteries are vital: Particularly as a second battery. Don't carry it and get some extra luggage space, or install for long trips. Trailers, also need to be designed with a battery tray and an armoured cable: For even longer trips, or so city run-abouts with large engines can be re-purposed for overnight journeys.
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Reliability nightmare. It will have to compete with extreme fast charging for pure electrical solutions (which will require liquid connections for forced heating/cooling of the pack, also probably local storage at the charger). At 10C a swap wouldn't be significantly faster than a charge.
Slide in yes, trailers NO! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why?
1: Because I don't want a load of halfwits on the roadwho think servicing a vehicle is optional dragging around a half ton trailer on their annual trip to the coast which probably hadn't moved for 3 months before that and hasn't been serviced for years.
2: They probably can't reverse a trailer for shit.
3: In an accident that trailer battery will be very vulnerable unless you wrap it in another few hundred kilos of armour.
It comes back to infrastructure and money (Score:2)
The only place EV owners are guaranteed a charge is in their own home (with one catch, below). There are constant reports of chargers being offline, needing multiple apps for different networks, idiots blocking chargers, etc. Most apartment buildings don't have chargers.
Americans can't plan to charge along the route. The full range (plus a healthy margin of error) is needed.
PHEVs are great, but they cost $10K more than the regular hybrid, and have poor availability. If you can get a 5.99% interest rate, tha
Re: It comes back to infrastructure and money (Score:2)
>Americans can't plan to charge along the route. The full range (plus a healthy margin of error) is needed.
That's simply not true, nor is it reasonable. I've had EVs for 10 years. There were no DC fast chargers when I had my first EV, but by the time I bought my second EV in 2018 the Supercharger network was starting to be built out. I got a car with 270 miles of range, but my next one could be 200... The DC fast charge network has expanded to where I'd be comfortable with only 200 miles, even with winte
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Americans can't plan to charge along the route. The full range (plus a healthy margin of error) is needed.
Why is that? Aren't they capable of using a route planner?
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Aren't they capable of using a route planner?
It turns out they aren't. Many Americans, especially senior citizens, learn new mobile phone apps with great difficulty.
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Re: It comes back to infrastructure and money (Score:2)
Excuses, excuses... Where I live it's super easy to install personal charger, a lot of people has two cars and drive less then 100km daily and Governor offers big incentives making EVs cheaper than gasoline cars. Perfect conditions to have one EV yet in my apartment building I'm the only one with an EV. People will always find execuses not to change their ways.
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Americans can't plan to charge along the route.
Why? Because they are dumber than most other countries? People with EVs in Norway manage to do that. People in France too.
The US of A, the place where excuses are king.
Re: It comes back to infrastructure and money (Score:2)
That's a well known fact, actually. For the same reason Americans can't have roundabouts or use metric system.
Re:It comes back to infrastructure and money (Score:4, Informative)
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That, and people are saying that "availability, infrastructure & services" aren't guaranteed to "catch up with demand" by the time bans on the sale of new vehicles with an internal combustion engine come into effect.
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But the range changes with the season and usage (Score:4, Informative)
Before deciding you don't need much range, keep in mind that cold weather (I live in the Northeast) saps 25 percent of the battery's range. Then if you use the heater (or in the summer, the air conditioner), you lose another 25 percent. So that 30-mile range (just for example) may end up being only 15 miles. Most people don't need 300 miles (which can become a still-comfortable 150 mile range in the dead of winter), but crunch the numbers carefully before you buy an EV so you don't end up trying to be *too* efficient and end up with a too-small battery.
I still believe that hybrids are the way to go for now. EVs aren't ready for prime-time yet, in my opinion.
Re: But the range changes with the season and usag (Score:5, Interesting)
>cold weather (I live in the Northeast) saps 25 percent of the battery's range. Then if you use the heater (or in the summer, the air conditioner), you lose another 25 percent.
I think you're overstating and double counting the range loss. I lose about 20-25% in winter, which is due to the combined effects of temperature and running the heat. Also, I have an older Tesla with resistive heat, I expect heat pump cars do even better.
The range loss is real, but you don't need to overstate it. Also, it doesn't affect me much. On short trips I still make it home and have a fully charged battery in the morning. On longer trips, I just have to stop slightly more frequently than in summer. It doesn't end up being the big deal that people are trying to make it be...
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Capability vs usage (Score:2)
Much of our interaction with energy sources is about capability, not usage. We have laptops batteries that last many hours even though most people leave them plugged in or rarely drain the battery. Natural gas distribution companies pay transmission companies for peak capability, as that's just as important as actual usage. We have 15-amp circuits and outlets (in the US) throughout our houses despite rarely needing all that power in an outlet.
Lots of range is great for an EV, but if it were up to me I'd rat
Re: Capability vs usage (Score:2)
Except I quite often have to unplug my laptop for an hour or more because a meeting is taking longer than expected but I never had to suddenly drive 800km in a day.
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Who wants to charge all the time? (Score:3)
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As for your suggestion that people fly everywhere, a lot of times people need to transport things like pets. And anyway driving is far less expensive a
Personal vehicles (Score:3, Interesting)
The obsession with personal vehicles is all wrong. We razed our city centers, replacing them with parking lots, and dismantled our inter-city rail system. Now we wonder how come we can't conveniently take the train, and why so many downtowns are ghost towns... And yes, trains are safer and faster than electric vehicles, don't get stuck in traffic, and don't need batteries.
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This is why we should be doing PRT. It can come right through your neighborhood on-demand and you get your own car. You could even reasonably own your own vehicle if you just didn't want to share.
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They're a lot less convenient, though.
No, it's just a lot less convenient in your city with your current infrastructure. Here's what public transport looks like for me:
a) Gets into the city in the same time outside of peak hour
b) Gets into the city in half the time during peak hour.
c) Costs 1/10th of parking and less than the fuel.
d) Allows me to get shitfaced in the pub.
e) It's my time, not my car's time. I can play a game on my Steamdeck, read the paper, talk shit on Slashdot, and do countless things that would be illegal in a car.
e) An actua
Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)
>"Is the Obsession with EV Range All Wrong?"
Yes and no. It stemmed from the lack of charging locations and how long those charging sessions lasted. Yes, most trips are short. But when you need the long trip, you don't exactly want to stop every hour to find a charger. On the flip side, there are now a lot more chargers, and they are getting faster. So "range anxiety" should start going down. But they are real concerns and still are for many areas. And for those who can't charge at home (apartment/condo or on-street parking), being stuck with little range is downright impossibly annoying.
What consumers want now are more CHOICES. I have been ready to buy an electric car for years, but hate the models, styles, and prices. I want a car, not an SUV or truck. I want something fast (not insane) and not as heavy (which hurts performance in many ways) and not "self driving". I want something that has real controls and dash and looks and feels like a luxury Japanese sport sedan. There are zero choices for me, with the Lucid being the closest, but it is too expensive (and no dealerships reasonably near). One way to bring prices and weight down would be to have a smaller battery, and for me that would be fine, because I almost never take trips more than 200 miles round-trip.
The more cars sold, the more demand for chargers and the more chargers will be built, which then stimulates more cars purchased. It is going to take time for this market to develop.
>"Toyota recently announced that it had achieved a breakthrough with solid-state battery technology"
And nobody cares. They have been saying that for years and years. Meanwhile they offer exactly ZERO electric vehicles... much less cars. Same with same with Honda/Acura. And Nissan has only the Leaf with nothing from Infiniti.
>"In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87% of all driving days in the United States."
But it is a Leaf. Only so many people want a tiny car with anemic performance. But they have been improving that model (more power and range), the 200 mile version is now $37k. Yet, a similar Versa is only $19k.
>"The article notes that the upcoming Dodge Ram 1500 REV, with a range of about 500 miles, will need a battery "roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid..."
You can't compare a hybrid to an EV, nor a tiny vehicle to a huge one, nor a luxury one to a low-end one. They are not the same thing at all and I am tired of such comparisons. Hybrid is all the complexity of having two complete power trains. It obliterates one of the key advantages of EV- very tiny maintenance, along with other advantages. But yeah, 500 mile range is pretty excessive now. The article fails to mention the RAM will also have the choice of a 350 mile battery.
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- Extreme cold can take 25% of battery range away
These two facts are enough to give me range anxiety.
Know Your Audience. (Score:2)
"But is all that necessary?"
Necessity has little to do with it when you realize the market for targeting master procrastinators is worth billions.
Let's stop pretending that maximizing laziness, isn't the primary marketing goal for the 1,000-mile car. EV batteries will be treated much like smartphone batteries for the Insta-Go-Now Generation far too busy to stop for charging. Make a car that needs a charge once a month, and you'll sell millions.
You'll also still sell roadside assistance for dead batteries too. Know your audience.
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master procrastinators
Or masterpators for brevity.
Masturbators for previ-what again? Oh sorry. Silly werd semantics.
You need range, because charging sucks (Score:2)
People want an electric car with long range because they don't want to have to stop and charge at inconvenient times. They don't want to have to rely on finding chargers along the way that may or may not work, may or may not be fast, and may or may not be occupied already. Or may or may not even be present, if they are away from major highways or urban areas.
The current state of electric car charging sucks. Anything less than fast (>100kW) charging is useless if you have to wait for it - i.e. if it's any
Recharge anxiety (Score:4, Interesting)
I've argued for a long time that the barrier to entry into this product isn't so much *range* anxiety anymore, it's *recharge* anxiety. I don't care that a BEV's range is a little less than a liquid fueled vehicle. I care that when that range runs out, I need to be cognizant of where I am and what I'm doing for the next 8-12 hours (~1 hour if I can find a level 3 charger). My time is valuable to me, and any transit system (public or private) needs to treat it that way for me to consider using it.
That said, there is a limit to how little range I would accept. The first-gen Leafs that could barely do an hour round trip without the hassle of planning in a stop? Just owning one car is a stretch, so unless the Leaf and all its fixed costs (registration, insurance, etc.) were free, that's a hard pass. I don't spec out my car around getting from A to B, even if that's 80% of my trips. Ten years from now when the battery is near its end of life, in mid winter, I want to make it to waypoint C.
if the powers that be (Score:2)
Most of the time (Score:5, Interesting)
For the last 30 years, I've typically had a 30-45 minute commute that was around 20 km. You can do the math and see how low the average speed for those trips is.
If the auto industry hadn't successfully lobbied to have anything electric either have to be fully freeway capable or limited to the speed of a cyclist... I and hundreds of thousands of people around me could have been taking those daily round trips on slightly over-built golf carts limited to 60 km/h that took all night to charge up for the next day, and for half the cost of a combustion engine car. And that vehicle would also have been overkill for a trip to the local shopping mall, my doctor, whatever.
But no, it was either restricted to below 32 km/h or prohibitively expensive to ensure it met all the standards of a car that might be doing 120 km/h down the highway.
A car that does 95% of what I need it to do still means I wouldn't have a car for the other 5% of my trips - which is fine if the 95% car is inexpensive. I'll just have a golf carts for me and the kids and one regular car for long family trips. If it's not, if it costs, say $40k, I'm going to need my cars to cover 100% of my automotive needs.
Re: (Score:3)
Okay, Mr. I-Know-Better-Than-You hotshot... I live in a rural area. The nearest grocery store is 15 miles away. The nearest Wal-Mart is 30 miles. Heaven forbid I might want to go to a Lowes or Home Depot. They're 130 miles away.
I do own an EV. It does fine for the short 30 mile round trip to the store, or even the more extravagant 60 mile round trip into the "big city" which has the Wal-Mart. I did have to install a level 2 charger at home, though, because the level 1 just wasn't able to top it off as
A low range electric car makes a great 2nd car (Score:4, Insightful)
Tons of batteries for TONS OF CAR (Score:2)
Manufacturers would rather push heavy and expensive huge cars that literally need more than a ton of batteries instead of just building something that is actually fit for purpose if we're discussing short trips in the city or around. Even for the smallest models they're just replacing the motor and some other small bits leaving the same 1-2 tons car COMPLETE WITH A REGULAR LEAD-ACID BATTERY. Yes, in a 100% electric car with half a ton or more of Lithium batteries (FYI also Teslas used to come with lead aci
What obsession? (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a couple of products on the market that can achieve a certain range doesn't make this an obsession. That's just catering to a subset of consumers.
Besides, range is a lot more useful than having a car that can pass the speed limit by 2x or can speed from 0 to 100 in 5 seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
Having a couple of products on the market that can achieve a certain range doesn't make this an obsession. That's just catering to a subset of consumers.
Subset? Feel free to point me in the direction of those mindful consumers who never procrastinate and always make time to charge their life-saving electronic devices smartly and wisely, every day.
Meanwhile, expect every EV marketing department to follow suit with pimping EV range as THE metric to beat. Clearly they know their audience of consumers who ain't got time for that, and want to charge an EV once a month while sleeping off a hangover.
weight (Score:2)
The article is onto something, but gets it wrong (Score:2)
But anyway, the average is somewhat misleading. If you are doing 20 trips per week, one each workday to, one back from workplace, three to and three back from a supermarket, one to, one between them and one back from two errands, and one very long trip on the weekend, then maybe 19 of your trips are shorter than 30 miles, but each second weekend, you go on a ver
Addressing the wrong problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The key problem is that charging the battery still takes a very long time compared to filling up gas. If you can address that problem and if "power stations" become as common as gas stations are, the total range of the car becomes indeed secondary.
Until then, it is a concern. Because yes, I only need to travel 500 miles in about 10% of my travels. But these are also the travels when I can't stop for 30 minutes in between and wait for the damn battery to get charged.
Re: (Score:3)
You can't stop for 30 minutes in a 500 mile trip? That's a little hard to believe but even if true, everyone else is going to need to stop for food and a restroom break. Or just to get out of the car and walk around.
Longtime EV owner mostly agree (Score:3)
I've had EVs for 10 years now. My first EV had 85 miles of rated range, you could stretch it to 100 if you drove slow. There were no DC fast chargers, so it wasn't able to road trip. Still, for commuting and running of errands it was good for all my needs excepting on average one trip per month ( so I used my Subaru for those trips ).
Fast forward to 2018 and my Model 3, with 270 miles of highway range. I'm not afraid to road trip it anywhere in the country. If we had as many fast chargers as we do gas stations, I'd be happy with 180-200 miles of range, but in 2018 270 was a pretty reasonable range. There are many more DC chargers now, so smaller is now more practical, and that will continue to improve.
You can always concoct some crazy scenario and convince yourself you need some crazy big battery, but the article is basically correct. You should right size the battery to be big enough to not be inconvenient, but smaller saves money and weight, and is environmentally more sustainable.
Also, for those who propose plug in hybrids, we bought a Volt in 2016 which my daughter still drives, but frankly we all think it's a sub-par experience compared to the BEV... If you do lots of road trips, it turns into a ICE after you empty the battery, and remains that way for the remainder of the trip because it can't DC fast charge. I much prefer using the Tesla Model 3 for road trips...
Unfortunately, until you own your first BEV and get some real experience, it's natural to want a larger battery. Given that most drivers still haven't had their "first EV" experience, that means a huge number of people are out there thinking they need a gigantic battery...
My final bit of advice to someone considering buying a BEV - pay less attention to the range, and more to the typical charging speeds. If your car can charge at 150-250 kW on a road trip, you'll be in good shape. A car with a huge battery that can only charge at 80 kW will not be a good road trip car... You'll spend too much time waiting for the car to charge...
Bullshit stat (Score:5, Insightful)
sofa king stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
the battery on the electric F-150 Lightning, which allows the car to go more than 300 miles on a single charge, weighs a whopping 1,800 pounds. [...]
The article notes that the upcoming Dodge Ram 1500 REV, with a range of about 500 miles, will need a battery "roughly equivalent in terms of resources to 16 batteries for the Prius Prime plug-in hybrid..."
People say a lot of stupid things about EVs, and make a lot of stupid comparisons, and whoever wrote this article was really, really stupid. Even though a majority of truck owners will never tow or even haul anything heavy, a truck still has to be able to do those things at least poorly or nobody will buy it. 300 miles of unladen range equates to about 150 miles towing a boat. And most chargers are not pull-through, so you're also in the position of having to unhook (where?) and then hook up again.
Even stupid people can say true things, and it's true that cars don't need so much range. But trucks? They need it.
Re: (Score:3)
This article kind of pissed me off and my first instinct was to jump in and rage-post. But I read through a bunch of the responses and there is really a lot of thoughtful and useful stuff here. Having read it, I'll try to post something useful instead of raging.
Full disclosure: I live in Montana. You can drive 650+ miles and you're still in the same state (Plentywood to Lima). Does range matter here? Yes it does. I've personally started a vehicle (with an internal combustion engine) when the temperatu
No (Score:2)
No fucking shit (Score:2)
Vehicles are like electricity grids (Score:3)
Just because you don't always need to turn on a light at night doesn't mean you don't need it. Similarly you buy vehicles because of your longest trips, not your daily average. I visit my elderly parents on a regular basis 800km and there's no regular airline public transport where they live. A long range tesla 3 can do it with a single supplementary charge in about 8 hours, after visiting for a weekend I can drive home after charging using their home power. I used to do it in a petrol powered car which took about 7.5 hours. A long range slide in battery or a battery trailer might work for me but other options don't.
Similarly power grids need to meet peak capacity not average capacity, the combination of unreliable renewables with batteries backup requires lots of capacity. One day of power losses and suddenly you have lots of angry voters on your hands. I find the viewpoint of the energy frugalists frustrating, there's the no meat, public transport... but every last one I've spoken too has been on multiple overseas trips where every flight is equal to 5 years of a paleo beef diet.
The bottom line is that we need nuclear and lots of innovation. Planes require liquid fuels, road freight requires liquid fuels and the only way to make this happen is lots of cheap energy 24x7.
Please note that both hydrogen and ammonia are not suitable.
I think some company should market... (Score:3)
Modular batteries (Score:3)
All we need is to cut the one giant battery under the car into bays for smaller standardized battery modules and let people decide how many they need.
If they did that more people could afford to buy EVs. They wouldn't weigh so much reducing road and tire wear. If one module failed the owner is more likely to be able to afford to have it replaced so as not to instantly total the vehicle. As more range is needed more modules are installed.
Re: (Score:3)
More urban thinking (Score:3)
This whole scheme only works for urbanites already making enough to afford a long range EV. For 50% of the country they don't even make enough to afford a new car of any kind, EV or ICE. 60% can't afford an EV. A large percentage of this group live outside of the dense urban environment that practical for short range EVs. These people also make 3 or 4 trips a year well over 400 miles one way to visit family or vacation spots. The current EV market is out of reach and totally impractical for these people.
It's not just about length of trip (Score:3)
It's dependent on the number of trips. Often I'll have a bunch of short trips, no one trip totalling more than the 30 miles but the entire day's travel can add up to 120+ miles and there won't be time in between trips to recharge (or at least I won't know until I get there, so I have to plan for the worst case).
It also depends on where you live. In the north-east trips are a lot shorter. Out on the west coast, even in-city trips can run 50-60 miles easily. In the plains states I'd imagine trips can top 100 miles without breaking a sweat. In Nevada it varies a lot, Vegas and Reno you may only go 20 miles in a day but outside those two urban areas you can rack up 150 miles just going to the grocery store and the hair dresser.
Statistics is a bitch. The average (mean) is a deceptive measure. It's only accurate if you're measuring something with a normal distribution, and travel distance is nowhere near that. It's got at least 2 peaks, probably more, one at the very short end and one much higher than 30 miles. The result is like rolling a die with 3 faces marked '1' and 3 faces marked '6'. The average roll may be 3.5 the same as a regular d6, but the distribution of results won't be anything alike.
I demand five nines! 99.999% of trips successful. (Score:3)
The obvious (Score:2, Funny)
That seems too obvious though, I must be missing some limitation there.
If you need to put a range-extending battery pack in your trunk to do a road-trip, where are you going to put your luggage?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Duh, in the truck-extending module, of course.
Re: (Score:2)
If heavy duty trucks start running on liquid hydrogen or renewable methane with fuel cells, you might get range extenders for consumer cars to run on them too. High power density fuel cells would become cheap (much cheaper than a micro-turbine, certainly more quiet).
More convenient than a battery pack.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Extremely heavy for the level of range extension, relatively slow to "refuel".
That last problem can be fixed, but the fix will come with other problems. Mechanical replacement and spares aren't free. The infrastructure needed for extreme fast charging isn't free. Everything is a compromise.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
It is at most 200kg more than an ICE car. 1600kg or 1800kg does not matter much - moreover with so much power the EV is much more agile anyway.
Have you really tried some long trips with Tesla? My experience is with Model 3 LR. The "refuel" on each stop takes at most 20 minutes, that is about the time to go with my wife to a restroom and back. That is on 250kW chargers, with 150kW chargers it can get 25 minutes and few times I did wait some 3 minutes before continuing.
The infrastructure for charging is cheaper than all the needlessly dense gas stations everywhere.
Hydrogen is solution in search of a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on what kind of truck... The smaller 4 cylinder no longer made type (Mazda B2200, Ford Ranger) or the stupidly popular 150/250/350 size "real" trucks?
If the former, I'd argue. If the latter, I'm all in agreement.