More Than 500,000 Full Electric Cars Sold So Far This Year In Europe (theguardian.com) 314
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Carmakers have sold more than 500,000 battery electric cars in Europe during 2020, a milestone in the automotive industry's move away from fossil fuels. Sales of all plug-in cars, including hybrids, have surpassed 1m during the year in the UK and the largest 17 European markets, according to data collated by Schmidt Automotive Research. During the whole of last year only 354,000 battery electric sales were recorded across the region.
In the UK, the sale of new cars that run solely on petrol or diesel will be banned in 2030 -- although new hybrids will be legal until 2035. Other countries including France and Norway have also introduced plans to ban new internal combustion engines over varying timeframes. However, the car industry still faces a steep uphill journey away from fossil fuels. Total UK and European new car sales in the year to October were 13.3m, the vast majority of which had petrol and diesel engines, which are expected to be more profitable than battery cars until about 2024.
British consumers bought more than 75,000 electric cars in the year to October, well over double the sales in the previous year, plus another 50,000 plug-in hybrids, but the UK market share of battery electric cars was still only 5.5%. Data for the whole of November will be published on Friday. None of the 10 most popular cars in the UK in 2020 have been electric, although some are available as hybrid or plug-in hybrid models, such as the Mercedes A-Class.
In the UK, the sale of new cars that run solely on petrol or diesel will be banned in 2030 -- although new hybrids will be legal until 2035. Other countries including France and Norway have also introduced plans to ban new internal combustion engines over varying timeframes. However, the car industry still faces a steep uphill journey away from fossil fuels. Total UK and European new car sales in the year to October were 13.3m, the vast majority of which had petrol and diesel engines, which are expected to be more profitable than battery cars until about 2024.
British consumers bought more than 75,000 electric cars in the year to October, well over double the sales in the previous year, plus another 50,000 plug-in hybrids, but the UK market share of battery electric cars was still only 5.5%. Data for the whole of November will be published on Friday. None of the 10 most popular cars in the UK in 2020 have been electric, although some are available as hybrid or plug-in hybrid models, such as the Mercedes A-Class.
500,000 Full Electric Cars Sold So Far (Score:5, Funny)
And how many empty ones?
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We don't know yet, the buyers haven't finished charging them.
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So far this year? (Score:3)
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Maybe they're expecting a Christmas rush...
Re: So far this year? (Score:3)
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There are plenty of electric cars under the Christmas Tree. The new owners of them just don't know it yet so there may be a bump when they're unwrapped and taken out of the box.
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Expectation is 600k by end of year.
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So far this year? It's December.
In particular, it's December 2020. There is still time for locusts, nuclear war and alien invasion.
Paid for with oil profits (Score:2)
Norway leads Europe in electric vehicle sales, in absolute numbers, and by an order of magnitude in domestic market share.
All made possible by government subsidies and personal wealth, both funded by oil exports, and guilt from that.
Like Alfred Nobel funding his peace prize from the family weapons factory and dynamite.
Hopefully, soon, fleet buyers and ordinary people will be able to buy these cars without subsidy. A carbon tax could help.
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carbon taxes are a subsidy.
500,000 electric cars out of 313 million, essentially zero electric cars in Europe. What a farce. People will buy them when they're good enough.
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carbon taxes are a subsidy.
Letting people emit carbon without paying for the damage (externalities [wikipedia.org]) is effectively a subsidy.
One way or another, we subsidise most transport and energy.
Re: Paid for with oil profits (Score:2)
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People talk about carbon taxes as if subsidies are something they don't support, yet their gas prices are largely a function of the fact that the fossil fuel industry takes the biggest slice of subsidies on the planet:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publica... [imf.org]
And is largely given a free pass from having to pay for the massive costs involved in reducing the damage they cause.
Biggest problem with EVs (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is most acute in cites which incidentally are the best places to drive an electric car.
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In countries with high levels of EV adoption car parks are wired up for EV charging. Every space has at least a 3kW charge point, often 7kW shared between a 2-3 bays.
Streets get posts all along them, RFID based, charged back to your home electricity bill.
Re:Biggest problem with EVs (Score:5, Interesting)
This works very well because;
- Street lights are everywhere
- Street lights are next to the road, where anyone can park to charge
- Street lights & their supporting electrical infrastructure generally has a lot of spare capacity for the demands of high-power electrical devices. This might seem unexpected, but it pretty much comes down to; the electrical infrastructure was built to support old-fashioned inefficient light fittings that have since been replaced, leaving some head room in the underlying infrastructure. The LED replacements use around 35% less energy - that's energy that can be used to charge cars instead without needing to upgrade the entire electrical infrastructure.
They're still rolling it out, most streets only have a handful of charging locations so far - but given most the city is still using petrol/diesel at the moment, that seems reasonable.
Re:Biggest problem with EVs (Score:4, Interesting)
The city I live in (London) has no on-street parking - it's illegal.
Almost everybody has private or allocated parking.
There are eight street lights in my road, and approximately 50+ cars.
The entire row of street lights do not have the backend power capacity to supply even one electric car. You're tallking complete retro-fit of every streetlight, times by about 10. Imagine the roadworks, upheaval, substation upgrade, etc. necessary to support that.
My suburb of 100,000 people (if you're British, you'll have heard of it) has precisely 12 charging spaces in the entire town. Three are in a library or government building that closes overnight. Half are just a simple 13A wall plug (slow-charge). Some of the rest are private spaces for company employees.
There is a LONG, LONG road to go before anyone gets close to having the infrastructure for everyone to have an electric car.
P.S. I live in an apartment (flat!). The allocated private parking spaces are in darkness because the land owner ran no utility power and so refuses to provide even a single 5W LED lamp to stop you falling over in the dark when you go between your car and flat. And you think he's going to stump up for dozens of car chargers in the private spaces?
P.P.S. it's illegal for me to trail a cable out of my flat to charge my theoretical electric car, as it crosses a public pavement and would dangle down across someone's front garden, window and the only entrance/exit to their property.
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London is addressing the problem of power distribution:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/... [bbc.co.uk]
As other have mentioned, street light conversion is an option if supported by this infrastructure going into place.
In the future, driveways and street parking with access to charging will influence house and rental prices. I'd want somewhere with decent internet access, preferably a home working office, and somewhere to charge my car. If I lived (now) without the latter, or the scope for it, I'd be considering moving b
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If everyone has private or allocated parking then it seems pretty straight forward to get those spots wired up.
Remember when Cable & Wireless installed cable TV back in the day? Had the pavements up, cables to every house in the street. Well you can get cables out to the side of the road as well. There's lots of trunking there already, upgrades are possible.
It's all perfectly doable and a worthwhile investment since the infrastructure will be good for many decades.
Landlords will either install charging
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If I could afford to move to Richmond, then I really wouldn't worry about where I'm gonna charge my electric car.
And Tesco's installed those chargers mainly for their own delivery vehicles to stay refrigerated. It's incidental that they installed a few extra for green credentials while they were there.
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the LED replacements use around 35% less energy
No. The do not use 35% less.
They use less than 35% of the original energy. Actually: something around 7%.
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Re:Biggest problem with EVs (Score:4, Interesting)
Only one quarter of the UK's cars are parked on the street. Dedicated bollards and lamp-post chargers are being installed and the cost is under £5k because it's 3 or 7kW, not more. And obviously chargers are also being installed in shop car parks, work car parks, etc etc too. Electricity is ubiquitous. It will take years to build the infrastructure, but it will take years to move to 80+% adoption, so it's fine.
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What if you live in an apartment?
You apply to the local government to have a charging spot put in your street. I don't understand is this not a thing in America? Are your governments that backwards that you can't get charging infrastructure installed with ease?
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Not everybody has a place to plug it in. What if you live in an apartment?
I don't see this as a hurdle for adopting low emission vehicles. I see this as the fundamental reason why some people will have battery powered electrical vehicles and some will have hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles.
For a long time in Europe the diesel powered cars have coexisted with petrol and liquefied gas powered cars, which have completely different optimal use profiles and efficiency. The same can happen with non-ICE options.
Also it will not be the first time that the guy who owns a big house and h
Brexit has already started I see (Score:2)
I love the way UK and Europe is already separated in the figures despite the EU != Europe as a definition and the UK is still in the EU until the end of the year.
Funny every map I have of Europe shows the UK as part of it and it will still be there in 2021. Even Russia and that's never been part of the EU.
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It is not listed by the EU as a member: https://europa.eu/european-uni... [europa.eu]
And it is not listed by the UK as a member: https://www.gov.uk/eu-eea [www.gov.uk]
The UK + EU relationship right now is in a transition period where the UK is not part of the EU but is still bound by some EU laws/standards/conventions. In Jan 2021, that agreement will end and be replaced by whatever the politicians are currently arguing over.
You're correct to say that the EU !
Capitalists dream is my nightmare (Score:2)
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I'm not saying that won't happen, but if it does, then another charging station will open up the street which is different.
In the USA I can foresee charging stations being added to rest areas. And hopefully, more rest areas being created...
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Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, the best of the ICE vehicles can go 500k miles or more if regularly maintained. Some of the diesels can go to 1M miles
Cool, the best ones. And what's the average in practice?
Re:On EV's... (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried to get 200k out of my last car but only made it to 180k before it needed its 2nd transmission, also the engine wasn't achieving full compression on all cylinders so we're talking over $10k of repairs, after putting in $5,000 of repairs over the previous year, on a car worth only scrap value.
The frame was still good so it's still conceivable that it could go over 500k miles, but at some point you have to cut your losses.
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I think the about half the cars I had in the past I got rid of mostly because it was everything but the engine that was failing. And when the engine had problems it was sometimes caused by other (exhaust and coolant). So just because the engine is doing great does not mean the rest of the auto is fine, or that the owner isn't interesting in finally upgrading.
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Can't tell if you're talking about ICE or EV. EV batteries typically have an 8 year / 100,000 mile warranty, so if you're talking about ICE, then it's essentially identical.
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Japanese engineering, American craftsmanship.
Re: On EV's... (Score:2)
I have a 14 year old Chevy Colorado (pickup truck) with 240K mi on it. I have to keep putting money into it to keep it going, but generally the parts aren't expensive (it's the labor that is expensive where I live). I do some of the work myself, but when a specialized tool is needed it isn't worthwhile to do myself.
Despite spending $1000/yr on average for maintenance and repairs, it's still way cheaper to keep it running than to get a new truck. I use 4WD and I use it hard, to the point that things break an
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Cool, the best ones. And what's the average in practice?
The average falls somewhere in-between sufficient and more-than-enough.
Honestly people with EV range anxiety who don't regularly commute to some remote area of the desert are simply stupid. If you live in any major city you don't need a gasoline car, and it would be cheaper to simply hire one on the odd occasion where you do.
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The average in the US is 17 years and 200k miles [wikipedia.org].
That includes attrition due to accidents. After 10 years or so, almost any accident will total the car.
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You know, I hear this all the time. What about the battery ? What if the battery fails ? Environmental cost of changing the battery, etc, etc.
But there's a small problem with that: Batteries don't fail. Of all the naysayers, none seems to be able to give me one example of batteries failing in EV's under normal driving conditions, and all the dire predictions about EV batteries filling up landfills haven't come true yet.
You can still buy a used first generation Chevrolet Volt today. Virtually all of them sti
Chevy Volt's 38 mile range (Score:4, Informative)
But there's a small problem with that: Batteries don't fail. Of all the naysayers, none seems to be able to give me one example of batteries failing in EV's under normal driving conditions
Nice try, but factually incorrect. Batteries are subject to stress from the recharging/discharging cycle and lose their ability to hold a charge as the number of recharge cycles increases. The "battery" in the Chevy Volt is actually 288 individual cells arranged into nine modules. Battery life is decreased any time the battery is near the extremes of either full or empty, so the engineers limit the battery to only operate in the charge window of 20% - 80%. Temperature also has a big effect on battery performance, enough that the Volt has a special battery cooling system that runs down the middle of each module to maintain the temperature inside each module. GM estimated that the average battery pack would degrade by 10%-30% during the eight years they warranty the battery.
A new battery pack in the first generation Chevy Volt has a range of 38 miles, then it switches to internal combustion mode. After 10 years, that might degrade to 25 miles. I couldn't even get to work and back with that range. And once I got home, it takes 12 hours to recharge the battery, unless I have a special 240v outlet installed in my garage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://www.greencarcongress.c... [greencarcongress.com]
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If we say 10 years equates to ~250,000km of driving, an average Tesla would've lost less than 10% [electrek.co] of its capacity. If a Volt actually lost the ~30% over 10 years, it implies that the owner was doing tons of driving, or that the Volt battery pack is pretty mediocre compared to what can be achieved with modern battery technology (which wouldn't be surprising, given that the first Volts were manufactured a decade ago).
Re:Chevy Volt's 38 mile range (Score:4, Informative)
I see what you did there - you took the date from the 2011 Volt instead of the more recent 2016 one [thecarconnection.com]. The more recent one has a 85 km range; if you need more than that for commuting, you need a new home, not a new car.
Even if the battery was insufficient, the whole point of PHEV is to use battery for short range with an ICE backup. So it's not a problem if the car has to start the engine coming home, that's how it is supposed to work.
And what is the problem charging 9-12 hours, which is the value given for the new model? You can charge at work (that's a solid 8 hours available) and overnight. Connecting a plug is way faster than driving all the way to a gas station and back. If for whatever reason you are in a hurry, that's why the ICE is there.
I have owner an EV the last 4 years and I still have to see battery degradation.
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Last year, there was a story about Tesloop [slashdot.org] having Teslas with well over 300k miles on them and little to no degradation. And, all of this without a single oil change or transmission service.
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Nearly all other developed parts of the World where Teslas are sold are countries with functioning Governments and Disaster Preparedness plans rather than the US "You are on your own" approach.
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So we are all supposed to buy cars based on climate characteristics and the infrastructure in Florida?
It's been a long time since I saw a hurricane in France so excuse me if I put your comment in the "Marginal anecdote - ignore" box.
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Dude, this is a case of your friend being an idiot and forgetting to charge his car ahead of a hurricane. These are always announced several days if not weeks ahead. Miami to West Palm Beach is about 100 km, which is one fourth of a Model S' range.
Of course he would have made it, had he planned ahead. The same would have happened if he forgot to fill gas.
And by the way there are dozens of Tesla Superchargers [google.com] between Miami and West Palm Beach.
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1. While the best of ICE vehicles may go 500k or 1m miles, the average age of a car at scrap is 8 to 12 years and, for example, a mileage of just over 100k in the UK. At that kind of mileage, an EV battery will have a state of health above 90%, and be able to be re-used in secondary applications for years to come
2. If you want to know how long the batteries will last in practice, run the numbers on degradation. Here's some numbers on the Zoe range. NB, the battery design has improved further since the Zoe 4
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the average age of a car at scrap is 8 to 12 years
Not bad. The average age here in the Netherlands is over 18 years; around 20% of all cars on the road are older than 15 years. On average they go around 200-250k km before being scrapped. Might have something to do with the high price of new cars (21% VAT and a special tax can can be as much as 100% of the factory price).
But even compared to those numbers, EVs do pretty well. Tesla guarantee their Model S/X battery for 240k km / 8 years, and by all accounts, the battery life should well exceed the li
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18 years! Wow
In addition to the factors you mentioned, I'm pretty sure there must be a normal distribution curve for how the batteries do, with some unlucky owners ending up with a crappy battery and others ending up with one that's really good, and the vast majority somewhere in the middle.
(I've been in many a Model S and even the occasional X) travelling from Schipol into Amsterdam. Not had a 3 yet, but looking forward to that when business travel resumes.
Acessory (Score:2)
An useful acessory for those :
https://www.chargehanger.com/ [chargehanger.com]
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" However, the best of the ICE vehicles can go 500k miles or more if regularly maintained"
The best E-vehicles can go 500 miles with no maintenance whatsoever.
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Vehicles get about 200,000 miles before they are sold as scrap. In that reguard, all vehicles are expensive throw-away items. Very few 500,000 mile cars and 1,000,000 diesels are on the road.
If a car is $30,000 new and sold for scrap in 15 years, that is $2,000 a year in depreciation. Add tag ($50-$500), fuel ($1500), insurance ($1200), oil/tires/12V battery ($500) and well, owning a car is expensive.
Lets say that an EV needs a new battery at 150,000 miles and the battery is $10K. How big a deal is that rea
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Right at the moment, batteries and range are less of a problem than lack of refueling infrastructure. EVs will rule because whatever power source runs the economy of the future will use electricity as its "currency" but in their current state they are still city cars.
Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a time I used to try persuade people with reasons why EVs would work out. But, that was back then. Now there are enough people who have been convinced to make it a viable product with its own market segment. We dont have to persuade skeptics. You like ICE? Fine, go ahead buy and drive one.
Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Informative)
A multiday cross country/continent trip with lots of non-city driving.
Or even 1 day driving to get somewhere that is further than MOST EV can go on a single charge, especially when the overnight or rest is does NOT have recharging stations.
Meh. I just did a road trip from California to Tennessee in a Model X. You have to stop and eat meals and use the restroom anyway. If you eat while you charge, you're really not losing as much time as you think.
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you're really not losing as much time as you think.
Plus, you save time when driving locally. If you spend 10 minutes filling your gas tank every two weeks, that is four hours per year at the gas station. I can connect my EV to the charger in my garage in 10 seconds.
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That's not an issue unless you regularly drive out your full range. That in turn is not an issue for most people unless they own a Gen 1 Leaf. Most EVs have ample range now.
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At least in California, renters have a legal right to add charging infrastructure (CA Civil Code section 1947.6 [ca.gov]). The owner can dictate location and stuff, but they generally cannot refuse.
Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, you very well can. From the bill:
But honestly, this is a problem that solves itself. The higher the percentage of the population that owns EVs, the more of their potential renter base a landlord ill lose out on by not having a charging station. The smaller your candidate pool - just like is caused by the lack of any desired amenity - the lower the rent you can charge, in proportion to how desired your amenity is. At high penetration rates, landlords would be idiots to not install charging stations.
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Once a critical point is reached in some place, may be Norway, Iceland or UK, solutions will be found, and it will be adapted all over the world.
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The higher the percentage of the population that owns EVs, the more of their potential renter base a landlord ill lose out on by not having a charging station. The smaller your candidate pool - just like is caused by the lack of any desired amenity - the lower the rent you can charge, in proportion to how desired your amenity is. At high penetration rates, landlords would be idiots to not install charging stations.
Most of my friends who have apartments have to street park. "Parking spaces" is an amenity that's a century old and is still in the 'pending' column for a whole lot of apartment buildings, and would be useful for both ICE and EV vehicles.
Once landlords are deemed idiots for not having parking spaces, then we can talk about them being idiots for not having charging posts in those parking spaces.
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So you wait. 90% of the people can not use motorcycles
There are electric motorcycles.
You can even get an electric Harley-Davidson [harley-davidson.com].
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Amazing! Please share with the rest of the world the design for your portal gun that instantaneously teleports your car to a gas station, already decelerated, already pulled up to a pump, with you already standing outside, already having entered your credit card, then fast-forwards time through the filling process, and then when your done, instantly teleports you back into your car and teleports the car back to here it normally would have had to start detouring to the gas station, already back up at speed.
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I can put the gas pump nozzle in my car in 10 seconds - what's your point?
You have a gas station at your house? Do tell.
What you actually need to do is drive to the gas station which in an average case requires a detour from where you would otherwise normally drive to get to it, possibly wait for a free pump, then wait while the pump fills your tank, then a drive back to where you would normally be.
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Re:On EV's... (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently my wife ordered one, which I mentioned to a neighbor. He immediately informed me that there is no way an EV would work for him as he regularly has to pull a trailer with several horses in it. He didn't feel obligated to mention that when she bought her Toyota Camry, which won't pull his horse trailer very well either.
But for some reason when EVs are brought up the discussion immediately goes to edge cases where they aren't good fits. Are there off roading EVs? Well no, but her Camry is a terrible rock crawler too yet they've sold a million of them because they work really well for a very large number of people who's drives are mostly 100 miles or less and the most they haul is a few bags of groceries so they have no need of something that will pull a horse trailer over the Rubicon.
So if you do those sorts of things, no, and EV is probably not going to be the best choice for you. But it is kind of on you to figure that out, not people who've figured out that EVs work for them (I actually think you already know the answers here, you are just virtue signaling). Elon Musk is not going to come to your house and personally answer your questions about EVs and walk through all possible variations of what you might want to do with a vehicle so he can explain to you the pros and cons.
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Meh. I just did a road trip from California to Tennessee in a Model X. You have to stop and eat meals and use the restroom anyway. If you eat while you charge, you're really not losing as much time as you think.
Bt you had to pre-search for charger installations before the trip, didn't you, just as we had to do for gas stations circa 1920?
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At any given time 99.99% chance there is one supercharger within range.
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2030. 10 years from now. That means we have 10 years to install charging infrastructure at hotels, etc. Not to mention improved battery performance...
What's interesting is what will happen to gas stations. Okay, 2030, no more ICE cars. But you've got many many many years of ICE cars out there burning gasoline. How long will it be, though, until there just isn't enough demand to keep those gas stations open? At what point will you be complaining about how far you have to drive just to get a tank of ga
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Gas is cheap because raising gas taxes is unpopular.
But once the majority switches to EVs, the politics will shift, and taxing the smelly polluting cars will be a political winner. As the taxes go up, more people will dump their smoke-spewers, increasing the popularity of taxing them even more.
So the demise of stinky-cars may happen sooner than you think.
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Fixed costs are not going away, and as the sale volume drops, the profits will drop, but gasoline prices will stabilize at some price, probably 1 $/gal before taxes. Initially it will reduce EV adoption.
Reduced profits, mean less capital investment, maintenance gets deferred and slowly the infrastructure will fail. See how smaller railroads without trunk routes failed. Slowly, trac
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And that action would be incredibly regressive in harm to the poorest folks of society, that often buy and depend on the older used car market.
Or...are you planning a govt. purchase of free EV cars to the poor? Are you going to spot them free home chargers? Free charging stations in the projects?
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Yes, and not just that: it's 2030 *in the UK* where driving distances aren't cross-continental but are instead puny 200 to 300 miles for a really long trip.
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Americans think that a hundred years is a long time. Europeans think that 100 miles is a long way.
Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Interesting)
Plug-in hybrids are not banned, and they have internal combustion engines for when you are out of charge. It's a nice mix; all electric for the short commute every day, plus gasoline for when you need the longer trip. Mine doesn't even that a huge range so I will be running on gas after going to my doctor and back, but still the vast majority of time it is running on battery. Other plug-in hybrids have a much longer range.
Also in Europe, driving 200 miles is a major event, whereas in the US it's relatively common. Even before EVs I knew people who'd rent a car for going on vacation and stick with the tiny putt-putt for the commute, or use the trains (mass transit in Europe actually works).
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A multiday cross country/continent trip with lots of non-city driving.
I bet it can be done, but...
I still wonder why they don't rent battery-trailers yet. A trailer with extra battery plus extra luggage space would seem to solve that problem.
Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Insightful)
I still wonder why they don't rent battery-trailers yet.
I have an EV with a 240-mile range. Newer EVs have up to 400-mile ranges.
Nobody will rent the trailer because taking a 30-minute break after 4 to 6 hours of driving isn't a big deal.
The "range problem" only exists in the imagination of people who don't own EVs.
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Because it really is not needed.
This solution would be purely for long distance driving. However, several points goes against it:
* It is really not needed. We are doing a 10 hour trip for Christmas, and we need to charge for an extra 55 minutes during that trip. Who cares? I do not care enough to drag a trailer, thats for sure. Actually, we hope to get food for most of the charging time. making the point even more moot. Its not like we didn't do breaks when we had an ICE car, btw.
* Dragging a trailer increa
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A multiday cross country/continent trip with lots of non-city driving.
I bet it can be done, but...
I still wonder why they don't rent battery-trailers yet. A trailer with extra battery plus extra luggage space would seem to solve that problem.
There's generally a lower max speed limit when driving with a trailer, this is regulated at the national level. 80km/h seems to be the most common with others at 70 and 90. (All EU, no idea for US).
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We were concerned with shoveling tons and tons of petro dollars into Saudi Arabia. Even after 9-11, when there is a groundswell of backlash against the petrol vehicles, the oil companies and the government owned by them did nothing. Did you care about the security concern we had?
Injecting our money into the countries that called us Great Satan did not concern you. Why would it concern me if you can't drive from New York to San Francisco in 42 hours?
I guarantee you, we will not only ban new
Re:On EV's... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm strictly IC, but to claim EVs have a "charging problem" is like saying that the typical automobile has a "can't go 500 miles without refueling" problem - it's imposing a use case that is atypical for the purchaser.
For the typical use case of EVs, they are bought for average daytime trips - a commute, or errands. The battery pack exceeds the requirement. For those with the occasional longer trip, they either stick with IC, go hybrid, rent a car, plan stops around recharging, or use an alternative form of transportation.
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Beautifully put and very fair-minded of you. Thanks
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You're asking for Better Place, and that went tits up years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Since there are 313 million ICE cars in Europe, 500,000 electric cars is essentially zero electric cars. They aren't good enough yet, and there is essentially no place to charge them. The question is what kind of wear-the-nails dipshit is buying this overpriced underperforming status symbols right now.
Someday they'll be good enough and people will want to buy them, but that day is not today.
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See my post above. I live in a town of 100,000 people, there are 12 "public" charging slots. There is no infrastructure available to me whatsoever. I can't even charge at home, or force my landlord to install chargers, or actually charge my car in any legal way except driving it into town, fighting with 99,999 other people over 12 slots, then leaving it plugged in for 8 hours.
You're absolutely ignorant if you think that people just "aren't getting on board" because they haven't gone out and bought an ele
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It's not 500k EV installed base, you muppet. It's 500k EVs sold this year cf about 19m ICE cars sold this year.
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It's 5.5%+ of new cars, up from about 3% the year before