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Why Electric Vehicles Aren't More Popular
An anonymous reader writes: Ars takes a look at a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences into the reasons why more people aren't driving electric vehicles. Of course infrastructure issues are a part of it — until charging stations are ubiquitous, the convenience factor for using a gas-powered car will weigh heavily on consumers's minds. (This despite the prevalence of outlets at home and work, where the vast majority of charging will be done even with better infrastructure.) But other reasons are much more tractable. Simply giving somebody experience with an EV tends to make the fog of mystery surrounding them dissipate, and the design of the car counts for a lot, too. It turns out car buyers don't want their EVs to look different from regular cars.
The fact is, that number 1 EV car, Tesla Model S, is selling all that they can produce, and they are currently selling to less than 1/5 of the world. (using google cache since site is already /.)
Why are their cars in such demand even though they do not waste money on advertisement:
1) It is a luxury car with extreme performance.
2) the constant update and electric dashboard captivates everybody that drives it.
3) the ownership issue is finally being realized and ppl are learning that the costs of the tesla is much lower on the backend.
4) the fastest superchargers are being built all over Europe, America, and parts of Asia. These allow for free charging with 150 MPC done within 20 minues and 220 MPC done within 60 minutes.
5) all of the innovation is in this car, as opposed to having little innovation.
6) most of all, ppl like the 250 MPC. The idea of only getting less than 100 MPC and not having a super fast charger around DOES bother a lot of ppl. And it should.
Chevy volt, nissan leaf, i3, etc are all pure POS in which the car sales have been going down, not up as expected. In general the leaf and i3 are too weird looking and offer equal or less performance to ICE cars BY DESIGN. Interestingly, all of the electric cars could EASILY blow away ICE cars. Why do they not? Because it would gut the sales of ICE so, none of the car companies want that. However, all can see where Tesla is headed. Basically, they will be a major car maker (as in top 5) within 10 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1) In an area which gets most of its electricity from fossil fuels, like DC Metro, the energy is still being mostly obtained from fossil fuels - including coal. So instead of directly using a fossil fuel, I'm using it with one degree of separation via electricity.
2) How long it lasts: Every X number of years, the battery has to be replaced at very significant cost.
3) How gracefully does the battery degrade: When the battery starts degrading, what does that do to performance?
4) Environmental impact of building and disposing of the battery: Are giant leach pits being left behind and aboriginals being looted?
5) Annual and lifetime carrying costs are hazy versus those of an oil burner.
Tesla cars sell great in Norway. And they, along with others living in Mn, speak volumes about how decent the car does in winter (for starters, the weight is balanced, not over the front wheels).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Model S may be in the same price range as other cars in its class but at ~$80K its way out of the ranger of your average person. Most people are looking in the $12-$30k new range. The battery packs alone are around $8-12k for all electric vehicles which is reflected in the price differences in ICE/Electric vehicles. A Ford focus for example runs about $17k in an ICE setup but even with government help runs $29k in electric. The issue of course appears to be the battery packs, they're just too expensive and probably have serious longevity issues (5-10 years). The best thing we can probably do at this point is a middle of the road solution, much smaller battery packs (7-25 miles) with a small gas engine that runs in an on/off fashion at its most efficient RPM range to keep the batteries above say 20%. That would be at least enough to take a big chunk out of our petroleum usage and begin moving us away from ICE engines to electric powertrains so that when we do find a battery technology that works the transition will be much easier.
Right now I feel the problem is a range/cost issue. You can lease an egolf for $200/month because your wife has a regular gas car. As a single person who makes 100+ mile trips with some frequency, I wouldn't be able to lease an egolf. I'd have to go with a higher range car, and even, for example, the cheapest Tesla model S is $600+/month to lease. And even then, I don't have a convenient place to charge it. At an apartment complex without a garage. Sometimes I have to park quite a ways away from my apartment, too far for an extension cord from the 240V outlet inside my apartment. Also, I'd have to run the cord out my apartment door and leave my place unlocked to charge my car.
My situation isn't all that uncommon either. An analogous situation applies to pretty much every single person who can't afford a nice house in the suburbs, both rural and urban.
Heck, I don't have access to outlets either at home or at work. My apartment in the city doesn't have a power outlet for on street parking. My office certainly doesn't have power outlets. The only viable option for me would be to hit up charging stations somewhere, and there aren't any where I could leave my car overnight and feel comfortable about it. Add to that a 1 hour commute each way, and electric cars simply aren't feasible for me until they have the same range as a gas car, they take as long as gas cars to refill the power source, and charging stations are as ubiquitous as gas stations.
I just bought a Ford C-Max Energi; but I bought it strictly for the green carpool-lane sticker.
In California, if you live in a big house, your marginal cost of electricity is shockingly high. For me, it's $0.33/kilowatt-hour.
My Energi goes 20 miles with a 8 kWh charge. That's $2.64 On gas, it gets about 35 mpg. If gas is $3.50 (current price) that's $2.20.
Now, during mid-day on a sunny day, I can charge it much cheaper on our solar panels (currently we are selling power back to PG&E, but at $0.11/kWh) and I do that. I also charge it at work, where it's 'free'; but I live 50 miles from work so I can't keep the car charged just at work. The 'free' power at work won't last forever, either.
You may ask "why not get a Tesla?" Good question. It turns out that there are (at my company) 3x the number of electric-ish cars as there are charging stations, so we have to swap them out after just a few hours. The Tesla would take all day to charge. Also, the Tesla is such a lumbering overpowered beast that it gets substantially less miles-per-kilowatt-hour.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The reason you haven't heard of the eGolf is two fold:
1) It's very new. VW only started selling them about 4 months ago
2) VW deliberately went out of their way to not make it look electric - there was no fan fare about this new fancy electric thingamabob, because it looks exactly like any other Golf.
First, the current price is actually about $27.5k, because the gvmnt gives you $7.5k cash in hand. Second, as someone who just leased an eGolf, you can get the base price down to about $26k before you even apply the gvmnt incentives if you're half good at arguing.
He also says he had to install a 240V socket it in his garage because apparently though you can charge it on 120V in a pinch, apparently it can cause damage to the batteries. That's according to Nissan.
This is incorrect. Charging on 120V doesn't do any damage to the batteries, in fact it's probably a little bit better for them. The problem with level 1 charging is that it's slow. Assuming the LEAF's battery is empty it takes about 21 hours to charge it to full on the 120V adapter included with the car.
I actually charged my car regularly on 120V and it wasn't as bad as you might think -- as long as I only needed to make one trip into town per day (from my house to the city is about a 40-mile round trip). The car was almost always fully-charged by morning, but if I went somewhere in the morning and came back home, there was no possibility of making a second trip in the afternoon or evening. Not without stopping off at the level 3 charger in town, anyway. Which I did from time to time -- it's free, and recharges the car from empty in about an hour, but it means having to kill an hour, and there isn't much of interest within walking distance of the charger.
So, I installed a 220V "level 2" charger. With it, the car recharges from empty in a little under four hours. In practice, that means that when I pull into the garage and plug in, it's generally full again in a couple of hours. Most of the time the flexibility that provides doesn't matter, but sometimes it's very handy. The level 2 charger cost me about $400. Was it worth it? Maybe, maybe not.
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