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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.
Electric vehicles are expensive and most people only buy a new vehicle every X years while electric vehicles have only been (easily) available for the last few years.
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1) Range - short range compared to 250 or 300 miles of ICE cars.
2) Price - Why do EVs cost 2x or more compared to ICE cars when EVs have fewer amount of hardware components?
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Think about it: If a person doesn't have the security of a home to charge a vehicle at, why would they take a risk on the unlikely chance that they can charge a vehicle when they are out and about like at Whole Foods or IKEA. Furthermore homeowners don't have to relocate to find new jobs, and if you own electric car it's a hassle to move it across country or even across the state. Finally renters don't have the sense of security that allows them to take foolish risks like owning a vehicle that is severely limited in range.
But then consider homeowners: They are strapped with debts and many of them cannot afford luxuries because they bought homes at inflated prices due to speculation in the housing market.
"It turns out car buyers don't want their EVs to look different from regular cars." Of course. Who wants to roll around town looking like the "before" picture in a testosterone replacement ad? You want to sell EV's? Make them perform like sports sedans with equivalent range. That's why Tesla is working and the Volt is not. And don't even get me started on the Leaf.
The problem is that the overall experience is more of a PITA than just shoving fuel in the tank. Obviously this assumes you ignore externalities, but that's the norm so it's a safe assumption. Once more of these issues are ironed out then there will be less anxiety and more purchases.
It seems like 2016 is the year of EVs with more than 200 miles of range (more than one or two of them anyway) so perhaps this will be a big uptake year, but more infrastructure will more or less "always" be required.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're too expensive. Even hybrid vehicles cost more than the regular gas powered versions.
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.
Price: battery powered vehicles that look like time machines or toys are still priced at the luxury vehicle level. the ones that look normal or respectable, tesla, are still commanding BMW dollars. Hell, even decent electric motorcycles start at 17k. if you want me to buy one, stop crashing the economy and start supporting a living wage.
Range: most of these cars excel in stop and go traffic, with parking garages equipped with Chademo charge stations that dont cost anything. for the rest of america outside of Los Angeles and New York, we dont have this and our commute isnt as gridlocked as you may think.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've only witnessed one beautiful electric car, the Tesla's.
The Volt looks kind of nice.
Beyond this however, everyone these days are living check to check, broke as hell, and lots of bad credit because of it. Good luck getting financed on a 60000 car if you want a nice looking one, or a 30000 car if you want anything hybrid or electric.
And then there's repairs. A buddy of mine had one of the original Prius. He sold it because the battery died, which was at the time a 2500$ replacement part. Because the car had about 150k on it and considering this was just the battery, and not the engine, trans, or other wear parts, it made more sense to get a new car. Back to the broke situation, he ended up getting an SUV; it got 'only 10mpg less', but still more mpg than my 4banger.
Here's to hoping Tesla's gigafactory venture helps turn this situation around.
Range. Really the main issue for me, living in a rural area. It's a long drive to work, stores, etc. I hate cities and wouldn't trade living in the country for anything, but an electric vehicle won't cut it as a primary (only) vehicle yet.
Believe it or not there are people living outside of Calif :) Outside of range and expense, heat on a 2 hour drive in Minnesota in January. I doubt you would get far
Preening Progressive Prius pricks
Verbally hurl stones & sticks
But my old diesel's paid & plucky
Does the job while economy sucky
Guess they'll have to pass a law
Prying key from cold, dead paw
Don't need green overlords smug
Bossing about as the fascist thug
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Those are the main two. Let's take a look at my work week that starts tomorrow.
I leave home in a pickup truck and drive 267 miles to a motel. Assuming the motel has a recharging station, I guess I could recharge overnight before going to work Monday morning, but what are they going to charge to sell that electricity?
Assuming they have a recharging station and the cost is reasonable, I can work Monday through Friday as usual, putting about 100 miles per day on the vehicle.
What about Friday? After a day's work how do I recharge fast enough to make it home? Sure, I'd have some miles left after working to make a little ways up the road, but what then? Stay in another motel Friday night to recharge my vehicle? That makes it pointless to even try to make it home for the weekend.
Ideally an electric-powered work truck like mine would have at least a 300 mile range, and recharging would take 15 minutes or less. If we get the technology to that point, then my company would consider replacing our fleet.
Every inch a Golf, works in New England. Charger by Bosch installed in your house for mere hundreds. What's not to like?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Price. Range. Recharge time. Recharge stations!
Next dumb question, please!
It is laughable when an article discussing why people do or don't buy EVs completely ignores the cost factors.
1. As others have said, electric vehicles are relatively expensive. Most Americans cannot afford to spend $30,000+ on a new car and since most electric vehicles are new or relatively new and were sold for high prices initially, they remain mostly out of reach financially.
2. Electric cars have limited range and fewer refueling options that take too long to complete. So unless you're driving a $60,000+ model S and have a super charging station nearby, and even then I understand that it takes 30 minutes or so to get a nearly full charge, you're out of luck. Compare this with a gasoline powered automobile or hybrid where fuel is plentiful, ubiquitous, relatively inexpensive (at least here in the United States) and can be filled up in 5 minutes or less.
3. Batteries wear out and are costly to replace. As electric vehicles age, their batteries degrade which means either replacement ($$$) or further reduction in range in a vehicle that was already hurting in that category. This would be especially prevalent in the used electric car market where the buyer is much more price sensitive than those buying new. The prospect of a $3000+ battery replacement soon after buying a used electric car is a very clear disincentive to buying a used electric car. If the owner does the battery replacement before selling, they're going to want to get their money back out which means a higher price for the used car. Either way, it's a big turn off for the typical used car buyer.
Electric vehicles right now are toys for rich people, not daily drivers for the average working class American.
Price. They are too expensive.
If the batteries need to be replaced you might as well buy a new car. Too expensive to replace. Some people keep their cars for more than 8 years.
I don't know where you work but the place I work at doesn't have electric outlets in the park. If I have an office park to begin with. This is Europe we don't have a lot of space.
Until gasoline includes a fee to cleanup the CO2 released, EVs will be more expensive. But then, any environmental cleanup effort is going to cost money. I don't expect everyone to be able to afford this. I *hope* that anyone with extra cash does something to fight climate change, especially the fossil fuel industry since they've made billions (trillions?) putting us in our current situation. Otherwise, we're hosed.
That being said, I'm not sure the battery technology is good enough. It sounds as if in 3-5 years we would see significantly better batteries. Outside of that, an EV would fit my life (and 10 mile commute) fairly well.
I'm currently looking into replacing my gas furnace with a heat pump, powered by a combination of solar-, wind-, and hydro-generated electricity. This will cost less than half the price of a Volt/Prius/etc and will probably reduce my CO2 emissions by 3 tons, as opposed to the 2 tons I would save if I bought an EV. Other benefits: no battery and less CO2 released during manufacturing. The negative is that my winter heating costs will double.
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.
The big thing is cost (which will go down over time with improvements in battery technology), but you also have to figure out charging as well.
The Tesla Model S has a 85 kWh battery bank. The average price for power is 10 cents per kWH in Maryland (even solar). So that's $1.20 to "fill up the tank" in raw power alone. Plus, it's not a quick fill-up.
That's not economical for a gas station. A rest stop or a restaurant (even a Royal Farm)? Drop in the bucket. So you'll have to dot rest stops with charging stations, seating and a lunch counter all over the place.... instead of gas stations. Well, that's a shift in thinking. And something the gas/oil companies aren't ready for.
--
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No, t turns out most people don't want an EV to be FUNCTIONALLY DIFFERENT than the cars they know. Plugging it in every night is fine- until the night you forget, or the kids knock the plug out. Then you have no car the next day.
A car, for most people, is not something that you can realistically be only one day away from not having the use of, which there is some risk of with an EV, much greater at any rate than a normal car. That's why hybrids sell OK while real EV cars generally have not.
I'll put a side chiding in for super funky dash boards of some EV cars I've been in that are vastly too large for the space the car has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nah. The average time it takes the owner to recharge is about 15 seconds, you plug it in, walk away. When you come back- it's fully charged.
Slightly less cynically, most users average 30 miles per day. On a ~3kW 240 volt charger (which is available in most places) that will only take about 3 hours to top up; but you don't really care, because almost certainly you won't be waiting for it, and you may well not need to recharge every day; it's like a cell phone. And most home chargers can do it faster than that.
Recharge stations depend where you are. But pretty much any wall socket that is anywhere near a road is a recharge station at a pinch.
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"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I commute by bike and my 8 year old truck has only 30k miles on it, but I need to be able to tow a boat or a generator trailer, and don't want two cars. Simple as that.
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This despite the prevalence of outlets at home and work, ...
I've never worked anywhere, in my 30 years in the workforce, that had any outlets (free or pay) in or even near the parking lot. Perhaps that will change over time as EVs become more prevalent, but I don't see any evidence of that now around where I live and work in Virginia Beach. (inb4: YMMV)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=GA
I suspect that switching from my petrol-powered car to an electric vehicle would actually increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions I generate.
I just drove 1000 miles over the past 3 days. Yesterday was 500 miles hauling a 3000 lb. camper. There is currently no electric vehicle available to do that. Plus, I commute 45 miles to and from work each day. What do I do if there's a power outage at my home, but no problems where I work (It's happened before), and my car isn't charged up enough? I can't even telecommute if that's the case, and none of my friends or coworkers live close by so that I could hitch a ride with them. There's too many issues that come up like that which most people haven't even considered. Let them be curiosities for the rich until somebody figures out how to address these problems.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I am sure that lots of people still think about this - or pretend they will do it, anyway, but whether or not they actually roadtrip frequently the idea that they can't with an EV is a negative.
That, and plenty of folks live 50 or more miles out of the nearest urban center, or in other areas where a 100+ mile round trip is quite common. Current-model LEAFs won't even get you there and back again, unless you can be certain of a charging station in the urban area for the return trip. With that sort of hassle, even home-filtered biodiesel sounds like a more attractive option.
It is great that more affordable EVs with longer range are on the horizon. But that isn't really solving the bigger problem, which is the impression that range sucks, and will continue to suck. I'm not even sure that impression is all that wrong. 200 or even 300 miles ain't squat.
semantics are everything!
A middle-of-the-road EV like a Nissan Leaf would cover 98% of my driving. I can afford one easily. I could afford a Model S if I put my mind to it. I've even looked in to buying an old banger and converting it myself.
The problem is I have nowhere to plug one in. I live in an apartment building and there is no wiring in the parkade. Nor is there any requirement (or incentive) to retrofit the building. I've talked to the building management, but we've never come up with any answers.
New buildings must have EV support. Old ones don't.
...laura
Averages are tricky: on average, my car is sitting still and empty, yet what I care about is when its moving and not empty. Same with ranges: what happens the handful of times per month I need more range ? Do I need to double travel time because of recharges ? To budget hiring another car ? To stop traveling ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
it's that wages aren't coming close to matching real inflation. By "real" I mean inflation of necessities (food, shelter and in this case transportation). It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years. Also when I was a kid I could get a pretty nice beater for a grand. Work part time over a summer and you had a car you could putz around in. That same kind of beater is $3-$5k now...
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_after_ gov't subsidies. It's also a tiny little car that does poorly in crashes. Why in hells name would I spend that kind of money? I could buy a Versa or an egg (excuse me, the Yaris) for $10k less and get the same features. There's no way in hell that car is going to save me $10k over the course of it's life. It doesn't help that it's a Chevy...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm at the end of a 3yr lease of a 2012 Nissan Leaf. I love it and would get another one if I lived in the City. The price is cheap: $15k TTL used or $2500/$100 for new lease. Performance is great. 4door Hatchback is practical. The 75mile range (hwy) can be a deal breaker for those in the country or even the suburbs. (Since I telecommute and recently bought a rural acreage, I'm replacing my Leaf with a hybrid pickup.) My wife drives a lot more miles for work and she drives a Chevy Volt. We replaced her end-of-lease 2012 Volt with a used Volt ($20k TTL). The Volt gets 30 miles on battery and 38 mpg when you need to drive further. Same good qualities as the Leaf.
Well no fucking shit. I've been saying this since the first one I saw that looked like crap. They don't just look "different", they look bad. If I was a conspiracy nut, I'd think they were butt ugly on purpose to keep people buying traditional cars.
If the automakers really want to sell more EVs, they need to remove the cost and risk of the battery pack from the purchase price. Leasing or renting the battery would replace the huge up-front lump with an on-going monthly cost more akin to fuel expenditures.
Removing the economic risk of losing the vehicle if the battery craps out would also enable a resale market for the vehicles.
Corporations can be more easily structured and financed for this kind of investment and risk than individuals and households. Still, the biggest benefit would be from reducing the pucker factor of battery cost and failure.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Yep. My gas vehicles go three hundred miles, require all of five minutes to "recharge," and "charging" stations are EVERYWHERE. Especially out here in Fly Over Land where people often put a hundred miles a day on their cars just to go to work and back, electrics are just science fiction. I think the nearest large city to me (the capital of the state) has three charging stations. Natural-gas-powered pickups, however, are thick upon the ground.
I have a company car, meaning I have to visit customers in differnt parts of my country.
some of the reasons why I find electrical cars for the moment nothing more then a gadget
- the complete lack of a charger facility comparable to the service of a gasonline tankstation ( 10 minutes stop and my car can drive the whole week)
- Mechanics. The nearest mechanic capable of working on an electric cara is living about 30 km from my home. Most of time, my car is in the neighbourhood of my home.
It's not i'm not willing to drive an electrical car, but for now they cannot be serviced as a normal car.
However for my next one, I will for sure evaluet an hybride one (think Toyota). For both the serviceability I require and the use I made of a car, this seems to fit.
Depends on what you mean by cost.
If you're in the market for a new or newish car, an EV does not cost more then a similar gasoline-powered vehicle; and has much lower total costs of ownership because it's really easy to spend $1,000 a year on gasoline. But the vast majority of people in the EV price range (ie: willing to spend $20k-$25k on a sedan), don't even consider it. Most people who want a $50k sporty-type fun car don't consider Teslas. And they probably should, because the competition would cost thousands more a year in gasoline.
I strongly suspect that with gas prices consistently above $2.50, the total cost of ownership of an EV and cares that cost tens of thousands less is actually quite comparable.
What baffles me is why the Chevy Volt hasn't sold better. It is electric for 95% of all metro area needs (and 85% of US people live in a metro area), plus 275 miles gas tank range for trips out of town. Easily 90% reduction in gasoline usage for 99% of all owners. Not expensive compared to other vehicles I see people commuting in solo, esp with a tax credit.
Yet not even close to a success.
When there is a sub-$18000 vehicle comparable to what the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla used to be when they graced the top "value" rankings for small sedans, then I'll look at them seriously as my "only" car.
Oh, and I will be taking a close look at things like range (300 miles between charges), ease of charging (20 minutes or less to juice up enough to get me to the next charging station when traveling, and convenient overnight charging while at home), lifetime cost of ownership, suitability for traveling long distances in mostly-rural roads where charging stations may be few and far between, etc. etc. If it can't do that, then I will have to discount its value by the price of two weeks a year of renting cars during my vacations.
Now, if I was in a 2-car family, then I would be happy to consider a second vehicle that was suitable for 95%-99% of my driving even if it wasn't suitable as an "only" car. This opens the door to cars that only have a 100-300 mile range and cars that aren't easy to keep charged up when outside of urban areas.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Forget programmers. We need to encourage kids to go into battery technology (joking). Although batteries have gotten better, their pace seems stubbornly slow when you consider that we've tried making electric cars since the nineteenth century:
1. Price. The reason for the high price of electric cars has got to be the batteries. An electric car can throw out many of the parts a gas car has, including the transmission. Yet they still cost more. It's got to be the batteries.
2. Range. Electric cars need much more range than gas cars to really catch on, because they have fewer places to recharge. When an electric car has a range of 500 miles and sells for 25% less than the gas-powered equivalent, then it will catch on.
Electrics are only good for commuting. If I go on a long distance drive then I want to be able to stop for 5 minutes to get gas and keep going. With an electric... even if the charging stations are everywhere you're talking about stopping every 200 to 300 miles to charge for six hours.
So what is the idea? Have two cars? Or a hybrid that is expensive because it has a piston engine, an electric motor, a battery, and a gas tank?
The only two situations where I see electric cars working is in a two parent household where one of the two owns an electric and the other has a gas car. Then when they go on trips they take the gas car while the electric is purely for commuting. Alternatively if you're rich you could just buy two cars even though you only need one.
To make electric work I think we either need to get that nano capacitor idea working so that cars can charge in a couple minutes rather than hours OR we need a battery exchange system.
I don't see battery exchanges happening... ever. Which means we're going to have gas cars be the primary work horse until we get capacitors with energy densities similar to batteries.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What sort of an idiot makes a car where the battery cannot be changed at a service station?
What sort of idiot thinks it'd be a great idea for someone to exchange their brand-new but discharged $20,000 battery for an old, worn-down battery that's been recharged at that station, and is now worth about $5,000 because it's near the end of its life, or worse, has bad cells and is on the brink of outright failure?
Whose bright idea was it to force consumers to plug their cars in for charging?
Maybe someone who realized people who commute every day would rather recharge at home, which takes no extra time at all, than waste time taking a separate trip to a service station?
Human industrialized society that has mature around the automobile has long had access to long range and near instantaneous restoring of full range capabilities.
To put that in more simple and concrete terms the average gasoline vehicle travels about 300-350 miles on a tank of fuel (about 5-7 hours) then can completely refuel from 0 range to 100% range in about 3 minutes at any commodity fuel station, or they can carry extra fuel in containers for very long or rural trips.
Until electric vehicles use batteries that are either: universal, interchangeable and can be swapped out in 5 minutes or they care capable of simply accepting a full charge in place in less than about 10 minutes then purely electric vehicles are doomed to be a niche market in modern society. At least until petrol fuel prices rise to make the hassles of recharging more tolerable.
We could also eliminate the charrging/range issue if people would give up the notion they need to own their own cars. IF there were simply a car club/service that you would use a car until the battery was close to depleted then drop it off at a charging center and step in to a new one, it would resolve the range issue as well. I don't see people, at least in the US, doing that any time soon.
So I'll end this the way I end all posts about electric and hybrid vehicles: switch to diesel electric instead of gasoline electric and you'll be on to something. Diesel-electric is the standard for every other transportation mode and use that isn't pure petrol or nuclear: ship, submarine, train, mining, etc. The efficiency if diesel engines is highly attuned to the constant-rate engine speed that diesel electric requires and wold probably increase hybrid vehicle range and efficiency by 2-3x.
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The problem with biofuels is you need to grow them somewhere and if they're normal plants (as opposed to algae) then this is going to be either on farmland so reducing the amount of food that can be grown in whatever area it is, or by clearing some sort of virgin enviroment which will probably be rainforest.
Right now you could have the choice between a 20,000$ electric vehicle or a 11,000$ gas vehicle. Lets say the gas vehicle gets 33 mpg, and gasoline costs 3$. Then for 9,000$, you get 3000 gallons of gasoline, and at 33mpg, you get nearly 100,000 miles of free fuel. The price point where electric vehicles start to even make sense for an economical sense is somewhere around $15,000.
God spoke to me
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.
Show me an electric 4x4 truck under $50K that is as good or better than the gas ones and I'll take one tomorrow. The End.
Until recently, production electric cars cost way too much, even when you figure you're saving most of the cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car. (A 50-mpg Prius will use about $20k in gas over 200-250k miles; a 20mpg minivan will use about $50k, so I guess you can justify that Tesla if you were going to buy a gas-guzzler and didn't need the space.) Hobbyist electric cars can cost a lot less, if you want to do all the labor to retrofit a very used car with electric motors and batteries, but I don't.
But even now that prices are coming down, the range on the lower-cost cars isn't enough for me. It's fine for going to the grocery store, but my office is 40 miles away, and so is The City, so on the days I'm not telecommuting or want to go into the city for something, I need a guaranteed range of over 100 miles so I'm not worried about having to coast home on electron vapors or stop for half an hour at a charging station if there wasn't one near my destination. Battery range declines as the batteries get older, so that means I'd probably need a 150-mile range when it's new to be sure I can get to work when it's older.
Maybe a couple of years from now it'll make sense to buy an electric car; we'll see how long my wife's car lasts, and whether it's worth getting an electric when we need to replace it. The real cost includes adding an extra electric meter and 240v power to my garage space and the cost of storing the stuff that's currently in my garage, because Silicon Valley real estate is too expensive to actually use a garage for putting cars in...
Unfortunately, most lower-cost electric today talk about monthly lease prices, and hide all the other costs; one of the ones that was advertised on the radio did mention something around $5K up-front and 25 cents a mile if you drive over 10,000 miles a year - the reason I'd be buying an electric car is to make my commuting cheaper, and my gasoline car currently costs about 25 cents a mile (10 cents amortizing the purchase price over 200k miles, 15 cents for gas.)
Bill Stewart
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I haven't bought a new car in my life and probably never will, the vast majority are not the kind of people who have cash to splash on new and shiny cars... Currently that's all that electric cars are.
.. as much as I like EVs, I like my current condo more. As of right now, there is no way for the couple hundred cars parked in my condo's underground to get charged. The changes to the building's electrical grid to make charging possible are absolutely cost prohibitive. So, no EV for me my neighbours and other millions of people in a similar situation.
Not everyone lives, or wants to live, in a detached house in the suburbia.
Let's say I buy an electric car and drive it for five years. By then, it will be about time to replace the batteries. Buying a new set of batteries would cost about as much as I could get for a five year old car. So, I would get almost nothing on the resale. Or I could try to sell it with the old batteries for almost nothing and the new owner would have to get a new set installed.
Unless the car comes with a voucher for a brand new set of batteries and installation, that I can redeem before I sell the thing, it just looks like a pose-lose proposition for me.
Depends on what you mean by cost.
Total cost of ownership. A big portion of the market cares about that. And just because someone can afford it, or may buy a car in a similar price range, doesn't make an EV a good choice. And 'quite comparable" doesn't cut it for many people, with the sacrifice of range & therefore flexibility.
EVs are best for 2+ car families, with a garage and adequate parking space, with one person working relatively close to home. There are a lot of people in that category, but it is a subset of the entire market.
"It turns out car buyers don't want their EVs to look different from regular cars."
Lexus nailed it with this one. The only thing that distinguishes their hybrids (visually) is a lower-case 'h' at the end of the model number.
People don't like electric cars because:
1. They are expensive.
2. They have limited range.
3. They are environmentally disastrous.
Leave it to the halfwits at Ars to completely miss the point.
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These studies are usually just wastes of time, intending to push one agenda or another. (EG. Electric car sales are sure slow... Let's list a bunch of minor reasons while ignoring the main ones, since these are ones we can get paid as consultants to help address!)
If electric cars cost a lot LESS than traditional cars, then you'd see a massive uptake. When they cost even "a similar price" (which is generally not the case yet), people will compare and contrast them vs. the traditional options before buying. When they cost MORE and the only way to get the price back into the same realm as equivalent traditional cars is via tax credits, people tend to choose other options.
I'd love to own an electric car someday, but the only ones I'd consider somewhat affordable today are electric versions of cheap econobox cars with corners cut all over the place to hit the desired price point (Nissan Leaf for example). Everyone loves the Tesla ... but they don't love the price tag.
It's a huge subset.
I have never met a family where Mom did not have her own car, and I work in retail. My coworkers are not wealthy people. The secondary car is frequently a POS that's barely running, but it exists. As long as the commute is less then 100 miles (and almost all of them are) an EV would be fine. Probably superior to the POS, because said POS's problems are almost all directly related to the complexity of the machinery required to get a gasoline engine to start, and it's tendency to wear out after 100k miles.
Even in one-car families (which are almost universally also single-parent families) saving $1,000 a year on gas pays for a lot of car rentals to see grandma 400 miles away.
Price, cheaper to lease than ICE equivalent (Chevy Spark EV) Range, meets 95% of my needs, I rent a vehicle 3-4 times a year for the other trips Recharge time, every morning it has a full "tank" and a stop at a fast DC charger takes 10 minutes to recharge Oh, there also happen to be recharge stations all over town but 90% of the time I just plug it in when I'm home and don't bother recharging elsewhere
I'm not rich, or poor, but happen to find leasing a brand new vehicle with $0 in repair/maintenance costs over 3 years other than tires for $80/mo to be an example of excellent money skills.
I'll never pay a dime to replace the batteries in my EV.
> Price.
I bought my 2015 GM Volt last week for $26K.
> Range.
40 miles electric. 300 miles+ gas at 37MPG.
> Recharge time.
Charges overnight at my home.
> Recharge stations!
Plenty where I live.
> Next dumb question, please!
Next dumb comment please.
Lots of posts here positing rational reasons why electric cars aren't more popular: mpg (equivalent), price, distance from fueling stations, etc etc.
All of which (mistakenly, imho) assumes rational consumer behaviour.
It's inertia, money and marketing that are holding electric vehicles back. They're unfamiliar, and the incumbents are so, so, monied, and so, so powerful, that gaining any kind of traction at all is crazy difficult.
It's a huge subset.
If it makes you feel better to describe it that way.. power to you. But I'd be generous to say it is even 40% of the applicable market. Add the fact that you can only get a subset of the market segment for various reasons, and it is, with no doubts, a limiting factor today.
The whole "rental car" fallback is so tired. People want to drive their own cars. They don't want to rent one. Yes, there are some exceptions, but it is small group. And saying the use case is one long trip per year is really reaching as well. That's an even smaller segment of the market.
No, not double, even with a Nissan leaf, on very long journeys with fast charging, it's about 50% longer, not double (like 11 hours versus 7) and travel comfort is better if anything (cabin preheat). On journeys only slightly beyond maximum range there's far less difference, and there's hardly any difference with a Tesla at all, ever.
Obviously if you need to do a lot of long journeys, frequently, a Nissan Leaf is probably not the right car, but it can do it if you need to do that occasionally with no problem, provided there's fast chargers on your route anyway.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I don't know, but a wild possibility is that his/her needs have changed over the years. Mine sure have, so I don't have a hard time believing someone else might also....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
1) Costs. A car costs about $35k - $40k new. IF you qualify for the rebate, you get that back (it is not automatic, you have to have certain tax levels). So they are not cheap.
2) Most people only have one car per adult (over 18). This is so they can go to work, etc. Most people need this car so they can do all tasks needed (the jack of all trades sort of thing) which includes road trips to grandma's 2 states over. If you are married it becomes much easier to have a pet car that has limited ...
3) Range. Cars need to get you from point A to B, and range is key. If you don't work some place where you can recharge, you cannot top the tank at work. They you are stuck with the range you have. If you live in a place with cold weather winters, your range decreases by as much as 15%. Your 100 mile range now is 85 (not including the heater having to be run) just from the physics of the battery.
4) People have different needs on different days. I work as a consultant, and a college professor. When I consult, I drive 20 miles a day to work or so. When I teach, I drive 40 miles one way to teach. I cannot consult and teach on the same day with most modern electric cars (outside the volt or tesla). I would have to drive to work, drive home, pick up my other car, and drive to teach. Not going to happen.
5) They are picking shitty bodies/designs. I don't drive a chevy cruze, or a sedan at all. I drive a crossover due to its ride height and utility and size (I am a big dude). I don't fit in tiny sedan cars. If they put the guts of volt in a crossover, it would be a hit. GM sells more trucks and SUV/crossovers than they do cars. Same with Ford. Same with Chrysler. It is not what the masses want. I would love to own a volt. I have been following it since 2007 when it was first announced. However when I first sat in it after waiting 4 years, I don't fit. Too small of a driver cockpit.
6) People are uneducated about what a car can do. Many people just don't know how to deal with the simple way that things work as they don't become educated about the cars they purchase. You cannot believe the comments I have seen on several EV boards about cars.
7) People are stuck in their ways. Gas is good and electric is bad. I have an electric but have to rent a car to drive to grandma's two states over for christmas. Okay. But it is not my vehicle ... wahhhh ... wahhhh. They are stuck in their ways and don't want to change.
8) Cars are not available everywhere. I don't live in California. I live in Indiana. I don't get a Kia Soul EV. I don't get a Toyota Rav4 EV. These are only sold in California for CARB compliance reasons. The manufacturers don't want to have to deal with them so they allow those cars to be sold out of that state.
Dude, 40% is roughly the share of the market enjoyed by light trucks. EVs share could not possibly be higher then 35%, because that's roughly the percent buying cars cars, as opposed to trucks/SUVs/crossovers/etc.
The question they're trying to figure out is why that 35% or so that belongs to the kinds of vehicles EVs can replace is not going EV. Which means you're basically answering the question "Why aren't Android smartphones dominating iOS?" with a long-ass explanation about how great Windows XP is for spreadsheets. Just as it doesn't take a genius to figure out that smartphones are not going to replace desktops for office work, it does not take a genius to figure out why the 40% of the market buying pickups do not want a Prius. The debate is why people will not switch from a Taurus or Accord to a Volt or Prius.
As for long trips, two points:
1) Everybody thinks they make a lot of long trips. Almost nobody actually does. My family's vacation spots were Piqua OH, and Southhampton, ON. Before I checked I would have thought both broke the 250-mile limit from Detroit. Neither does. Piqua isn't close (180ish according to google), and Southhampton is only 240. But they took forever, and severely taxed everyone's sanity because we were in an Accord and there were four of us.
Thus I sincerely question the sanity of anyone who claims that he spends more then 250 miles in the same car as his four-year-old, on multiple trips a year. Note the "car," explicitly referencing a four-door sedan or smaller. The kind of vehicle that does not have a TV screen on the back console because nobody can see the back console. As I mentioned above nobody has ever wondered why a family that needs a Minivan does not switch over to a Leaf.
2) Hybrids have gas tanks. The 250-mile range you see on something like a Volt means that after 250 miles you stop at a gas station and fill up, not that after 250 miles you stop at a hotel and plug it in overnight.
You are working hard to explain/rationalize why the market is not doing what you think it should do. I see you are passionate about EVs. But the market is speaking, and your explanations don't reflect what the market is telling you. You seem to want to ignore/dispute those points that give explanations for the actual market behavior, but you don't offer any your self other than "they just don't get it and here's why". If your rationalizations worked for the greater market, more cars would be selling.
As the product evolves to meet the needs of larger slices of the market, it will sell more.
I have similar issues:
- Towing several tons (travel trailer or 23 foot trailerable-with-extreme-trailer deep-keel coastal-water-ocean-capable sailboat) up and down mountains and cross-country.
- Going to/from the ranch - over 250 miles one way (over the Altamont grade, across the central valley, and through a pass in the Sierras) - with the last 0.7 miles sometimes hubcap-deep mud.
- Carrying ranch groceries for several months and/or other supplies or equipment from the nearest supermarket etc. - 27 miles away.
and so on.
- Off-roading to visit ghost towns and other historic sites in the Nevada Desert - where "running out of gas" - in the absence of cell phone service - might mean your skeletons are discovered in a couple years.
On the other hand, for trips about 3/4 of the year and NOT towing, a plug-in hybrid or an all-electric vehicle with sufficient range, serious regenerative braking, and adequate cargo capacity for two week's groceries and luggage for two, would be ideal. Charge it up at each end (off a windmill/solar at the Nevada end) to start full, use regenerative braking on the downslopes to power across the valley or up the next up slope. For a hybrid: Top off the batteries while cruising the central valley and use batteries plus engine to avoid being a creeping traffic hazard on the mountain roads.
My cycle would be almost identical to a Silicon Valley worker who mostly commutes 25 miles each way and occasionally vacations at the Lake Tahoe ski resorts or Reno or camps in the Sierras. A single vehicle that could do both - rather than needing two vehicles to accommodate the use pattern - would be ideal.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Tires last 90k km.
Think of the built in resistance that already exists. Condominium and rental apartments are frequently next to impossible to convert so that owners or renter can easily recharge their electric cars. I don't have data on the subject but maybe one half of all housing in the US is rental, condominium, dormitory or military post housing. That means a hard uphill for electrics taking a huge market share. And the sick part is that we all really need to go electric.
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Infrastructure, maybe. But not the type you're thinking of.
The habits of drivers of electric cars have been studied extensively and here are some of the findings:
Yes the infrastructure is missing, but it's not charging stations. It's homes with garages. City dwellers aren't going to buy electric cars. The suburbs are and they'll charge at home thank you very much. Pull in for the night, plug it in, leave the next morning with a full charge. No need to go sit on the side of the road at some gas station for 30min to 8hrs, sharing charge points, waiting for other electric car owners for their 30min to 8hr charge.
Look the studies up, some were done by mini, others by other car companies. I've seen charging stations in my state that were installed 5-10 years ago at great cost (several million $) that have never been used and are now completely incompatible with charging standards. The last thing we need is for retards to go spending other people's money to build more of those.
Liberty.
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Your arguments about EVs seems to be based partly on misperceptions about their capabilities (the Volt's gas tank is only 9 Gallons, but it exists, which means you can drive it thousands of miles without charging if you want, you just have to stop at the gas station every 9 gallons instead of every 13), and partly based on people's misperception of what they need in a car (250 mile trips are not common).
Which sounds a lot like the small-car market in the late 70s, right before foreign cars started to dominate. The old guard in Detroit were convinced car buyers wanted symbolic, hard-to-measure shit like beautiful design and fun driving, and that a tiny Japanese car designed to not have this shit would move zero units. Then their customers got used to the idea that Honda made real cars, and anyone who wanted a sensible car went Japanese.
EVs are the sensible cars of the next 20 years, and if battery tech keeps getting 10-20% better year-on-year it's not gonna be a decade before everything else switches over.
Well, 100+% still counts as significant in my book.
They have a four-banger, full size van that gets over 25 MPG with a diesel.
There's your problem.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
1.) Horrible aesthetic design.
2.) Lack of charging stations unless you're in or near a big city (the only ones around here are at big car dealerships, and none currently at any of the Interstate rest stops).
3.) Short maximum distance coupled with long charge times makes any kind of long-distance road trip a nightmare.
4.) Trading my gasoline bill for a huge increase in my electric bill and realizing I'm not actually saving any money.
5.) Costs more than a comparable gasoline-powered vehicle.
40 miles electric. 300 miles+ gas at 37MPG.
So you don't actually have an electric car. Bzzt! Disqualified!
I will not buy a car that takes longer to recharge than it does to drive off that charge. That's absurd.
-Styopa
There you go again... starting off with 'my misconceptions'. You'd make a great salesman. I clearly was talking about EV's, not hybrids. Could you not figure that out?
Just because you can rationalize why the market SHOULD be stronger, doesn't mean it really should be. History is littered with those who think they were smarter than everyone else on stuff like this, end the end, a very small few actually were.
Instead of pining on why the market SHOULD be stronger for EVs, try a little critical thinking. You are the one who can't explain what is really happening. Doesn't that tell you something?
I'm only assuming you're using the same terminology as the original article. They talk about Hybrids as one of four categories of Electric Vehicle. If you want to specifically change the subject from Electric Vehicles (including hybrids) to just pure Electrics you can do so, but don't expect the rest of us to be psychic.
As for your explanations, most of them are verifiably wrong. This is not unusual. If markets actually had perfect information at all times prices would be a lot more stable. When people have taken a single test drive in a Prius they will know that range is not an issue. Since the number of people who have taken a test drive/ridden in a friend's car/etc. is not gonna get smaller it follows that if the market is truly choosing non-EVs (including Hybrids) because the market thinks that range is an issue, then in the relatively near future the market will change it's mind.
Right now electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are in the slow-start phase of growth. Technology is still new and costs a lot, and charging infrastructure is not yet 100% here.
However, we have made an amazing amount of progress already. I bought a Tesla about a month ago and I already have 5000 miles on its odometer, mostly from road trips. Most of the road trips required no planning at all thanks to the supercharger network ( http://supercharge.info/ ) that is already available. Some road trips required a bit more planning (checking for available Tesla destination charging or slow-chargers in hotels) but so far I had no problems with reaching a desired destination. And most of this infrastructure has been built during the last 3 years!
In 5 years once there are several affordable competing models with 300 miles of range and several supercharger networks, the real question for many people will be: "Why should I buy a gasoline car?"
Despite what frequently crosses lips, most people care almost exclusively about Numero Uno. Cars changed the way people live. Electric cars, not so much. It is just that simple.
People certainly don't have to take a test drive in an EV to know if range is an issue. Its is quite easy to use the specs and make that determination.
........ so good day to you.
You are still on the "they just don't get it" track. I see you will remain stubbornly stuck there and not apply any critical thinking
You do not make the battery owned - make it leased.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If you can do a whole week's worth of driving on a single tank of gasoline then you can almost certainly do just fine with an EV unless, of course, you are doing all those miles in a single day which may be the case. I do not own an EV. I can not own one realistically. I would if I could. I can afford one. I can not afford the limited range due to my physical proximity to a real town - never mind a true urban center. (It is about 180 miles for me to get to Farmington, ME and back again. In the winter I need heat and in the summer I want AC. I will want other features as well which make an even 200 mile range EV unrealistic for me.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
...so until there's a lot of used electric cars available...
I think this is the key point. The characteristics of electric vehicles make them ideal for "secondary" cars - the one you use to run about town in for commuting, errands etc. We spend more on our primary vehicle because that's the one which has to be reliable enough to go long distances when we go on trips. However EVs are a terrible fit for this usage since they have limited range, limited recharge stations and slow recharging.
The budget we have for our secondary car is far less and we will typically buy second hand because reliability is less of an issue if you are only going short distances. While this would be a good fit for an EV there is little to no second hand market in these and, even if there were, the battery packs from several years ago had far shorter lives which is a concern for a used car.
I know I'm late to the party, but we go operate in en economy where convenience for a lot of money. I'm not going to even think about buying an electric vehicle until the price reflects the fact that they are 1/2 as convenience as a gas vehicle. Who is going to compensate me for time and effort getting a new filling station in my home, as well as having to worry about range every time I use the vehicle? Who is going to compensate me with the fact that I must go to other places with a fillinf station, and that I might be stuck there for awhile if it is being used by someone else? The price of the car certainly doesn't reflect that versus a gas car.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Speaking of stubbornly stuck...
As I've said before in most of the EVs I'm actually talking about range is not an issue at all because they have a gas tank. People think it's an issue because they haven't gotten into the car and seen the gas gauge.
As I've said before in most of the EVs I'm actually talking about range is not an issue at all because they have a gas tank.
NO THEY DON'T. Hybrids Electric Vehicles (HEVs) have gas tanks, Electric Vehicles (EVs) don't. If you want to tout your technology you'd better be more precise in what you are talking about to start with.
I personally think EVs are a great technology, than that they are evolving more and more to meet the greater market need, but are not yet to the point where they do meet the needs of the larger market segments. And the real world data from the market reflects that. I can accept that there is something to learn about the product itself from what the market tells us, you clearly don't think so. And you rely on conflating EVs with HEVs to make you points. I have clearly been discussing EVs all along, even told you that, and you still conflate because you know your arguments don't stand when talking about EVs. So, as I said, good day.
Dude, per the original article:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
I think the National Academy of Science is a pretty good source for an appeal to authority, don't you?
Like I said, I was clearly not talking about HEVs. Why you could not catch on to the obvious is not something I care to debate. I perfectly understand there are different classes of vehicles, again you are just stating the obvious, but that does not require one to only discuss all of them as a whole. Your inability to separate them in this discussion is your problem, not mine. I know exactly which vehicles I am talking about, and I have explicitly told you.
If you want to discuss the market issues with HEV's, that is a different debate and there are a different, but overlapping, set of reasons for lagging sales. It would be stupid to conflate that discussion with a discussion of pure EVs.
The propaganda :
"We desperately need to reduce vehicle carbon emissions in order to avoid turning the planet into a hellscape, and that means turning to cars with some kind of energy storage other than hydrocarbons we've dug up from the ground and then distilled."
The final paragraph :
"The report calls for stable federal funding for improving the energy density of batteries, as well as making batteries safer and more durable. It also calls for more research to understand the role of public charging infrastructure versus in-home or workplace charging, financial incentives to purchase PEVs (as well as research into what sorts of consumer incentives actually work), and the incorporation of charging infrastructure into building codes, among other recommendations."
The Reality :
The NAS and IPCC have issued warnings about global warming / climate change, but they've also warned that political exploitation can be counterproductive.
Major global and national agreements have been established with regard to temperature and emission limits. The agreements are law, they are funded, and they are moving forward.
Note the severe logical disconnect in the article -- switching to EVs relocates emissions, yet the opening paragraph seems to imply that EVs magically eliminate emissions.
Imagine if these pseudoscience tech journals got rid of green weenie authors and explored the attributes of the final paragraph in a reasoned, scientific way. People would learn so much more about the issues.
They would understand that EVs relocate emissions elsewhere. They would know that it can take a community decades to plan, fund, and replace power plants -- and that there are no reasonable zero emission power plant options available. They would know a lot more about the battery energy density issue, high battery costs, and projected improvements.
They would know that GHG emissions are expected to peak in the 2030's and start dropping afterward. They would know that it will take decades, or perhaps centuries, for these gases to half-life out of the atmosphere. They would know that the industrial revolution also had great benefits to society, in addition to unintended, negative consequences.
A lot of our best and brightest people have come up with the 2 C limit and the 2030's peak emissions schedule. They developed these policies because they are considered reasonable and doable. Denigrating their efforts with low quality, low information, political exploitative pseudoscience doesn't help anything.
Wasting a lot of money on EVs might actually be a bad thing. We might be better off spending that money on insulation or irrigation improvements. A stronger focus on energy, food, and water might be far more productive than buying a massive lithium battery and parking it in your driveway.
In radio control car racing, I've seen the power shift from gas/nitro motors to electrics in short order. Had everything to do with brushless motors and lithium polymer batteries. Full size electric cars will have their day, just not yet. *
My wife just bought a Hyundai Sonata hybrid. It looks just like a "regular" Toyota, not a Prius. She loves it. Amazingly, the batteries come with a lifetime guarantee. It didn't hurt that Hyundai was giving a $5,000 factory rebate on the 2015 model. Bought it for the gas mileage/not to "save the environment."
Presumably a static generator could be made significantly more efficient than a small vehicle-mounted ICE so why not prop up the growing "Supercharger" infrastructure with some generator-backed systems at existing gas stations? The fuel is already on-site and I'd expect that an enterprising company could knock out diesel-powered fast charge units for a decent price.
Secondly if customers are put off the idea of an EV by range issues then perhaps there is an opportunity for Chevy (or VW or whoever) to partner with car clubs or rental companies to provide subsidized rentals (say 4 per year with a 1500-mile per trip limit) to EV customers.
Seems like what we need are some practical solutions to get over the initial adoption hurdles (cost, range, charging) to the point where purchase volume can help to drive real innovation and investment in infrastructure.
Pure-EV solutions might not be for everyone now (and may never be for that matter) but I'm sure there are pragmatic ways to get us up from the current 1%.
To my mind things like subsidies for EVs are exactly the type of thing that governments should be doing to drive adoption. While the "tax fossil fuels until the market produces an alternative" idea has some merit (sort of) it doesn't take into account the fact that the poorest people, and the people most likely to take a job a long way from their home, are the people who would be hit hardest and earliest. Just as Electric Vehicles aren't the right solution for every driver, Free Market Economics aren't the right solution for every problem.
The Stonecutters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I guess you are somewhere in CA Bay area if you are talking about some fast chargers on your route. As much as I want to get EV, there no serious charging network for cars like Leaf in the whole country. And Nissan don't even pretend it is suitable for road trips, it is marketed as "charge at home" car. Most of these fast chargers are in Nissan dealerships in the middle of nowhere, the may have like only one or to spots to charge and closed on non-business hours. It is a joke for a road trip, especially if you consider that 100 miles is theoretical range, in practice it may be 60 miles in new car with A/C or heater on at highway speed, or less after few years, and worst is that it is unpredictable, bad weather may leave you stranded. And it barely pays off even for commuting only, with around $15k extra price premium. And don't tell me about renting for road trips, I tried to do that in practice and it doesn't work very well - rental cars are not available at certain peak days when you need them most, and most rental stations don't work on Sundays or at night.
Tesla Model S may be better EV, they have half decent fast charging network, but it is $70-100k car with $1000/mo lease payment and interior not really matching competing $100k cars if you are in the market for $100k cars.
In America at least, electric vehicles have the stigma of lacking in acceleration and power -- and historically this was true. Americans like their vehicles to be Bad Ass(tm), mighty machines whose roar you can hear from miles away. Despite the fact that Tesla vehicles, for example, have plenty of 'get up and go', it will take a while for the reality to displace the conventional wisdom.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I switched from a hybrid to a gas a year ago, because the hybrid was very underpowered, and the warranty on the battery these days isn't good enough. When my Civic Hybrid's battery died, I was faced with paying $3200 for a replacement for a 9 year old Civic, and of course that made very little sense. Newer cars come with much shorter warranties, and I didn't want to sign up to potentially pay thousands to replace a battery after only 3 years.
I'm in the UK; it has a half decent; but not fully decent infrastructure, some parts of the country don't have very much public charging infrastructure.
Obviously, if you don't have much public infrastructure around you, you shouldn't get the Leaf.
Nissan Leafs don't seem to lose much range; it's still a relatively new car, but so far it seems that there's very little degradation of the batteries; the idea that range plummets after a 'few years' is clearly bullshit.
Indeed, the second hand value seems to have gone up recently for vehicles of the same age.
The rule of thumb that Leaf drivers use is 70 mile range at 70 mph; note that the A/C or heating makes very little difference; unless you're stuck for hours in a traffic jam; which is pretty damn rare, but even then you have the choice of how much to use the A/C; it's not like you're going to be unexpectedly stranded, the car keeps you informed of the situation.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"In the US typical distances are much longer than in UK. I don't think infrastructure for such short range cars like Leaf is even practical outside few metro areas. Who would want to stop for half an hour after every hour of highway driving.
Loss of battery capacity over charge cycles and years is well known fact. It is well researched for specific battery chemistry and it would be BS to claim it doesn't exist. It may be less in temperate climates like UK or it can by catastrophic in Arizona sun due to lack of liquid cooling as some earlier Leaf owners have learned.
And no, A/C is not optional in the South. You can't turn off A/C in typical Florida summer afternoon when it is 35 C outside, 100% humidity and heavy showers, and some speed lover has crashed on highway ahead of you, creating 2 hour jam. If you turn off A/C, windows get covered with condensation in a minute.
As I have already pointed out, even in the US, the average daily mileage is only 30; and most people don't suddenly jump into their car and drive for days on any regular basis.
And there's very little problem with a 2 hour jam. It's a 7+ hour jam that does for your range.
I'm not saying that batteries don't degrade, only it takes more than a 'few years'. The batteries are expected to last 10 years/100,000-150,000 miles or more without significant degradation, and there's no evidence that this won't be achieved.
The other thing I haven't mentioned- cost. Yes, electric cars are fairly expensive right now, but they batteries are getting exponentially cheaper every year. Fossil cars, are NOT getting cheaper. We're right about at the crossing point now; electric cars are going to be cheaper- and second hand cars are becoming more and more available and more and more cost-effective, and they're cheaper to run. Pretty soon everyone will preferentially run an electric car, because it's cheaper.
I mean, sure, electric cars are better for only 99% of most people's journeys.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"This argument about average trip length is well known and there is no need to repeat it. It doesn't fly - you still need to make your 1% of trips some way, or extend your trip in unplanned direction sometimes. It is big hassle to plan carefully your every trip, and it is big hassle or not possible to get rental car on random Sunday for example, when most rental shops are closed. Why would you buy new car and live with all these restrictions? Some people may save big on commuting costs, but currently it takes very long time or may never come if you total your car. Gas price here is $2.60/gallon and nobody expects another commodity market bubble any time soon. These are obvious reasons why people don't buy restricted range cars like Leaf.
The batteries are expected to last 10 years/100,000-150,000 miles or more without significant degradation - how you define "significant"? Tesla for example do not provide any warranty for degradation, and I think they know what they are doing. Quote: The Battery, like all lithium-ion batteries, will experience gradual energy or power loss with time and use. Loss of Battery energy or power over time or due to or resulting from Battery usage, is NOT covered under this Battery Limited Warranty.
Nissan has started provide capacity warranty just now:
p, the lithium-ion battery is also warranted against capacity loss below nine bars of capacity as shown on the vehicle’s battery capacity level gauge for a period of 60 months or 60,000 miles. What is "9 bars" here? Now it is 70%, but if Nissan updates their software at any time and it becomes 50% as they got too many warranty claims, it may be OK for them. Not so for buyer, and you want some resale value after 5 years/60,000 miles, but at 70% battery capacity your Leaf may be worth very little.
Nissan had well known issues with overheating Leaf batteries loosing capacity in Arizona. Supposedly they use better batteries in newer cars, but there is still no liquid cooling. You can read about battery calendar life here: http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/Battery_Capacity_Loss. Obviously it is significant, for example at 90 F it goes to 70% capacity in about 5 years. That is for ideal 60% charge level. And in the US South, garages are NOT air-conditioned, and temperature in summer reaches much more than 100 F outside. Next, any battery has degradation because of charge-recharge cycles. When battery is small, you are forced to use 0% to 100% recharge cycle too frequently. You can expect around 1200 cycles from it before it looses 20% or so, or around 120 000 miles if cycle is 100 miles, then you need to replace it as it may not have enough range for your needs anymore. That is just because of charge cycles. This matches Leaf owner experience, e.g.:
http://ecomento.com/2015/03/03/nissan-leaf-ev-review-4-years-70000-miles/. UK car (no high temperatures) with 70,000 miles and 4 years has 80% capacity left.
Sure, not everybody lives in South and not everybody drives in 0%-100% charge pattern, but again, it is too much planning and risk for average car buyer. And Nissan attitude to their initial battery problems was not encouraging at all. What if you change job or house next month and will need to commute a bit over your Leaf's range? Buy a new car again when your extra EV price premium was expected to pay off in 10 years only maybe?
Yes, when battery prices will go down and when lower prices will reach end user, it will be different story. Not today yet.
Hybrids don't have a range problem, and they also aren't the subject of the article... LOTS of people have hybrids today; you don't notice them as much because they look just like their non-hybrid models. Pure EVs aren't selling well because they cost (a lot) more (in some cases 2x), have crap range (100-200mi vs 500-700mi), and take forever to recharge (hrs vs. mins.)
For the record, I make numerous 200+mi trips per year: 223mi 3-4x, 209mi 2x, 536mi 1x. Last year included a trip to Sebring FL (752mi)
The article explicitly defines electric vehicle to include hybrids and three other forms of Plug-in Electric Vehicle, only two of which are the Battery-powered EV you are talking about:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
So my Appeal to Authority is backed by none other then a paper published by National Academy of Science, which I will now conflate with al of science because I'm that guy.
Neener-neener-neener.
the article explicitly defines "EV" to include four types of vehicle, only two of which are the battery-powered vehicles you';re talking about:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
So my appeal to authority is backed by a National Academy of Sciences paper, which I will now conflate with science itself because I'm that guy.
Neener-neener-neener.
As I understand it, your situation is that you get stuck in traffic jams every day, in 35C weather for 6 hours, which would mean the A/C would flatten the battery, you're probably going to change jobs so you 100% definitely will have to sell the car, even though you don't have a new job yet, you have no fast chargers on any freeways you may be doing long distances on, you do high mileage, which you apparently think means the battery pack will wear out, but simultaneously, you think that the vehicle won't pay for itself because electric vehicles only pay for themselves on high mileages which you aren't going to be doing. In addition, your car is uninsured, so you may crash it and lose all the economic value in the battery. You also live in the south, where the batteries age more quickly. Oh and Nissan are going to fraudulently reprogram their battery indicator, and the courts are totally going to let them get away with it.
Makes sense!
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I guess you are married to your Leaf and it makes you don't understand why only 30,000 new car buyers out few millions in the US got Leaf, even with hefty subsidies. For everybody else the reasons are obvious.
And yes, 35C weather is normal here in Florida for the whole summer, and it has mostly oceanic climate unlike e.g. Arizona. In my garage I will have maybe 45C in afternoon. Leaf is complete junk in such conditions. Nobody wants junk for new car price plus premium. It may make sense for few people to lease it if somebody subsidies lease, and that is all.
I checked into it. The premature failure of the battery in hot climates was an issue with the 2011, 2012 models, but Nissan reformulated the battery chemistry and the 2013 version doesn't really have the issue (the degradation happens at 1/3 the rate).
They also extended the warranty to cover back to the 2011 models, and if it happens they replace the battery back to full charge state.
Even when they do wear out, they're selling replacement batteries at (what seems to be) slightly below cost. The batteries are getting cheaper all the time anyway (8% per annum), and provided you do a reasonable mileage, the Leaf is still cheaper and more reliable than using a hybrid.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Yes, but their warranty extension came too late and who can trust them after all that? You can hear a lot from 2011 Leaf owners that they will not buy anything from Nissan again. Battery cost with installation and tax is $6000+ now and who knows how much Nissan will be charging later. Warranty is just 70% capacity after 5 years/60 000 miles. The range will be pathetic at 70%. You may be paying a lot for gas in UK and your math may be different, but the numbers just don't add up here in the US, it doesn't pay off soon enough.
Well, it's still a better car in most ways. People don't only buy the cheapest car.
Is your car already air conditioned when you get into it? The Leaf lets you set that. You're literally more comfortable in a Leaf than you would be in most cars. And the difference in running costs is not extreme. And yes, the equation in the UK is different, gas is more expensive, and there's more charging stations. But America will catch up, and the Leaf/electric cars are getting ever cheaper.
But no single car is right for everyone; but I do find the extremely common hatred amusing.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"My car starts getting airconditioned in few seconds after engine is on. Sure, it is nice to be able to do it few seconds earlier, while it is still in the garage with garage doors closed. But it is not the most important thing and it doesn't make a luxury car out of Leaf.
I did seriously considered Leaf, but it's range is pathetic and it's fast charging network is a joke for most of the country. I'm not kind of a person who don't drive more than 25 miles from home.
Leaf and other economy EVs will get cheaper, but it is not going to take US market as it is - it is too limited, more like econobox for city driving, and most people in the US need to do more than local city driving at least sometimes. Tesla Model 3 and their charging network looks much more promising (hopefully, when/if it will be out and perform as expected in reality, not just fanboy dreams).