- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
From the article: “About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service appointments.”
My Tesla never ever got close to the advertised range. Usually 200 miles a charge. I went back to an ICE.
If you have no life a PHEV is the best of both worlds. I went all of COVID without ever getting gas because I was able to just use the battery. And PHEVs have been increasing in range too. I got mine in 2019 and it only has 26 miles range, but the RAV4 prime gets 42 now. Maybe there is even something better, haven’t really been paying attention cause I don’t need a new car.
Nah. The world’s burning; going back to build more fires ain’t the way.
(Edited as I no can grammar)
Unfortunately EVs aren’t in a place where they can be used by everyone. I owned a Model 3 LR and never got anywhere near the range it claimed. It was constantly recalculating my next stop to charge.
On long drives the range is a real problem. A 9 hour drive turned into 12 because I had to stop every 2 hours to charge for 20 minutes. I actually had to turn around go backwards an hour because it decided I couldn’t make it to the next charger. This wasn’t during extreme cold or heat… it was beautiful outside I was doing the speed limit without the AC on.
The range issues plus the dozens of phantom braking incidents on that trip caused me to trade it in for an ICE car as soon as I got back home. EVs are great for around town daily driving, but if you ever take long trips they are not ready yet. I want to own an EV and will certainly have one as my next car, but today is not that day.
I would agree that it’s infrastructure that is not in a place where EVs make sense for everyone. The US is firmly behind in the race on this point, likely hampered by a battle of plug formats between CCS and Tesla. I’ve a 58kWh (useable) VW ID.3 hatchback - perfect for Europe or just 2 people, which we are. Had it for 2.5 years now, and the difference in charging infrastructure has changed radically. In March of 2021, driving from Amsterdam to Frankfurt or Paris, I did have to plan charge stops - but now, I don’t even think about it. Everything’s CCS, available nearly everywhere on the highway or in smaller towns (at least 50kW charging).
Just did a trip to the midlands to see my brother a few weeks ago (another ID.3 owner) and he’s got a bank of CCS Tesla chargers next to his Pizza Hut and an Ionity not far from there. On the trip I had choices between FastNed, Ionity and Tesla…never thought if I’d make it, only if I could possibly go farther before charging.
Yeah, that’s a Tesla complaint I hear a lot. Don’t have that particular issue in the ID, although if the mapping database isn’t updated the car can slow down where it expects to have a exit lane or roadworks, but the swarm filtering that VW employs usually filters those exits out after a few weeks. Complete braking though? That’s scary.
In the US, people tend to drive a lot further than in Europe.
Every year, I make a few trips of hundreds of miles. My sister lives ~200 miles away (~320km) with an average highway speed of 70mph (112kph), and probably drive ~80mph most of the way (~125kph). In a gas/hybrid, I get there without having to stop and it takes 2.5-3hr. My parents live ~850 miles (~1350km) away, and my brother lives ~650 miles (~840km) away, and I try to visit one of them every year. We could fly, but I have three kids so we’d need to rent on the other side, which would be annoying and expensive.
Most of the time we drive <100 miles (160km) in a given day. Work is ~25 miles (40km) each way, and all of our shopping is within 5 miles from our house.
The problem is charging. My company doesn’t have charging, so an older Leaf won’t work for a commuter (there are stations nearby, but I’m not making a 20-30 min stop on my way home). I don’t want to spend a ton on a commuter, so that’s out (EVs with enough range are $20k+). Most of the space between my house and the rest of my family is empty, so even gas stations are few and far between (often 30-50 miles [50-80km] between stations, and those are towns with <1k people), and the charging stations that exist are often broken or slow charging only. So we can’t use an EV for a family car.
If my company gets EV charging (they’re talking about it), I can replace my commuter (hybrid getting >45mpg [~5.2 Liters/100km]). But for a family car, it’s going to run on gas until I can get >400 miles (640km) range, which would mean I could visit my parents or brother with 1-2 recharges, and my sister without a recharge. The current 200-250 miles (320-510km) range just isn’t going to work because I’d probably need to recharge even for a simple trip to my sister’s house.
I want an EV, but in the US, it only seems to work if you don’t need to do big road trips. Our rail infrastructure sucks (in the West where I live), flying is a huge violation of privacy (and super inconvenient), local transit (buses, subways) sucks in most areas, and cycling infrastructure doesn’t exist in most metros. If I lived slightly closer to work, a <100 mile (160km) range would work, but I’m worried about commuting in the winter (consistently <0C weather, so apparently range gets halved). Once I can get an EV to replace my commuter for <$10k, I’ll do it.
Correct, and with better batteries or cheaper electricity, we can move forward. The current state of EVs is not useful for all people. Personally, I’m 5 years away from never needing a car again. In the meantime, I must commute.
Again, nothing is useful to ALL people. The EV is far less polluting than the car, easier to drive, easier and cheaper to live with over time…but it doesn’t mean you go back to burning dinosaur juice (and all the pollution you need to create and ship it locally) as a solution for everyone.
Yup.
I need a cheap EV (<$10k) with >100 miles (160km) range to handle a 25mi (40km) commute year round (we’re consistently below freezing in the winter), and a long range family vehicle (minivan or SUV) that can go >400mi (640km) in the summer (100F, or ~38C, outside temp).
Current offerings either have too little range (e.g. older Leafs), cost too much and have excessive range (Bolt, Model 3, etc), or can’t fit my family (3 kids; carseat + booster) and don’t quite have enough range (need a replacement for our minivan).
The proper solution is a mix of better mass transit (so I wouldn’t need a commuter at all) and better battery tech. Even if charging stations were plentiful (they’re not), I don’t want to charge 3-4 times on one trip (e.g. visiting my parents is 850 miles, my brother is 650 miles, and we do one of those almost every year; both have crazy steep mountain passes at highway speeds).
In 5-10 years, I won’t need a commuter. In 101-15, I won’t need the family car. But for now, EVs are either too expensive or too inconvenient, or both.
Lithium mining is very bad for the planet. ICEs are bad, but battery EVs are also horrible.
The solution is trains
For most people, including most city dwellers, trains are indeed the correct solution.
US rural settlements were built on train lines before cars destroyed that.
For most long range travel, trains are the solution.
And bikes or PEVs for short range travel.
PEVs are kind of a trap though.
ICE cars are not just problematic because of their emissions, they do much worse things with their infrastructure requirements. Roads and parking that can support everyone driving their car alone everywhere results in sprawl. That makes everyone not in a car have to get in a car as well, and also increases infrastructure costs for other services, since they have to service a much larger area.
Cars have their place, but in an ideal world, a regular family regardless of where they live shouldn’t need one. It’s not a personal mobility solution. Taxies and stuff make sense, everyone sitting in their own car doesn’t.
And this is not even counting that car accidents are a leading cause of fatalities because we give a licence to everyone with a pulse.
PEVs (personal electric vehicles) aren’t cars. They’re ebikes and escooters and EUCs and things like that. Things you can carry up a flight of stairs or onto a train. They are most at home in bicycle infrastructure.
Exactly.
I have two sets of tracks in my city, one that’s used as a commuter rail, and the other which is currently unused but connects to a light rail network (about 10 miles away). That unused rail connects about 500k people, and eventually connects to a commuter rail in two places (one about 15 miles south w/ a university, another about 20 miles north w/ a hospital), and goes through a blue collar job areas, residential areas, and white collar job areas, with downtown areas for shopping shopping along the way. The existing rail goes by a major league stadium, shopping district, and later a hospital, with connections to other lines.
The commuter rail takes ~2 hours to get to my office because of awkward transfers. If they moved a bus line to that station, my commute would drop to ~1hr. Or if they extended the light rail on existing tracks, my commute would be ~1hr and I would use it for shopping and recreation as well.
But because they don’t do either, I drive ~30 min to get to work. I would take the train if it was only 1hr.
Instead of building out along this existing rail, they built a new light rail line that only connects one hipster community (maybe 100k people) that cost the same more or as extending the light rail to my area. I just don’t understand the priorities I guess.
What happens to lithium after it’s mined? What happens to oil after it’s mined?
There’s no comparing how much worse ICEs are compared to EVs.
The problem is no what happens to lithium afterwards. The problem is what the environmental cost of getting the lithium out of the earth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electric-cost-lithium-mining-decarbonasation-salt-flats-chile
But once it’s out, it’s out. It can then be recycled and reused “forever”.
You extract oil once and burn it once; then that carbon is stuck in the atmosphere “forever”. Now you have to extract more oil and do it all over again.
That’s the big difference, EVs don’t consume lithium; they borrow it.
That’s not how recycling works.
Most recycling today is PR anyway. Recycled stuff gets dumped into some poor third world country.
lithium and cobalt are highly recyclable. The problem is not recycling them the problem is getting all the recyclable batteries into the circular manufacturing process.
There’s at least one company recycling EV batteries already, and that’s even with the small amount of end-of-life batteries out there (most are still on the road): https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/heres-what-redwood-learned-in-its-first-year-of-ev-battery-recycling/
That’s definitely the case for low/zero value materials like plastics. But the materials in EV batteries are way too valuable to just throw away.
Good for you. EVs have a place in most households for quick trips and short errands. But that’s it. They have a huge set of issues that the anti ICE car brigade don’t wish to discuss. Face it, batteries are not a viable way to power the vehicles we all rely on and enjoy driving. Maybe as a second vehicle, yes but forget some big takeover. It’s so stupid.