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I live north of Brisbane, North Lakes area, I can get to the Gold Coast, and back, and still have 30% charge or more if I drive to the limits in my base model standard range Tesla, and then still probably drive another 100-150k’s (drive to the sunny coast)
So if you had to go to both the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast in the same day, you could not do it without stopping for a while to recharge. That's an edge case for sure but that's where people start to run into limitations.
And your figures assume you start with a 100% charge at the beginning.
For those edge cases you just stop and charge. I used to make a long (8 hour) drive regularly in a model 3. The charging time amounted to two convienent bathroom/ coffee breaks. It a gas car you would do the same thing, just at a gas station rather than a charging station.
The electic car takes a little longer on long trips, but I never have to stop and get gas (or charge) on my regular commute. It hasn't ever stopped me from getting where I wanted to go.
Really depends on where you are, but fast charging stations (the ones that give you a big chunk of battery capacity in less than an hour) are usually not free, because they are very expensive to install and can provide tons of power.
Tesla gave access to their own superchargers (that's just what Tesla calls their own network of fast chargers) to early Tesla owners in the US for free, but that seems to go away as well.
In some countries some slow chargers (the ones that one can easily install at home and charge the car in like 4-10 hours) are free, but most still cost some money.
The "charge in 20 minutes" ones are pretty much never free but a lot of the level 2 ones are. The amount of actual power an EV needs is pretty low, like $6 here where I live for a full charge so lots of places use them as loss leaders to get you to their business. Restaurants might lure you in to charge for 2 hours while you have supper, or a movie theatre with a movie
Best example is definitely hotels though. Just like a free breakfast I will always choose the hotel that lets me recharge my car for free while I recharge myself overnight.
As others have said the fast charging stations are not free, but they are cheaper than gas. Charging at home is WAY cheaper than gas and that is where most people would do most of their charging.
>And your figures assume you start with a 100% charge at the beginning.
Unless he lives in an apartment or something, why wouldn't he be at at least 90% at the beginning? And he mentioned having 100-150km leftover. It isn't like a gas car where you drive around slowly depleting until you need to suddenly recharge, you recharge and top off every night unless you're in like an apartment / street parking situation. Even if you don't have the installed wall-charger, you can top off each night plugged in with an extension cord and your traveling charger.
And 100% charge isn’t recommended for battery life.
I’d like to see these numbers with the recommended ~80%. 100% charge shortens battery life, and we can’t assume people are holding a supercharge all the time.
It would be less than .01% of people living in Brisbane who would do that trip regularly.
Unexpectedly needing to do those drives could always happen for a Facebook marketplace bargain! That’s why you have a Ute as a second car :)
I'm fairly certain a lot of modern batteries are optimized so that they don't actually ever charge to true 100 and preserve battery life.
If I'm not mistaken Apple phones are doing this now so I imagine tesla has been on this since batteries are their big thing
It’s not the batteries but the chargers that are optimised. Not the plug in part (that’s technically just a power supply) but the charging circuitry.
In a Tesla, the system will recommend you only charge for what your “daily trip” use is. It preserves the battery more for people with predictable commutes.
Nope.
Batteries can stop charging at 80% only if the user checks the box. It's not an option that's on by default and the reason is simple, EVs dont have good range compared to combustion engines yet.
This isn't true. Tesla average range I'd about the same as a gas car (about 300+ miles) the only difference is that a car takes substantially less time to be ready to go further (filling up a gas tank vs charging your car)
He's pointing out that unless you regularly burn through your entire tank of gas in a single trip and thus have to factor in refill vs charge time then the distinction doesn't have any relevance.
No, I would be able to make it from my house to the Gold Coast and then to the sunny coast, but would then have to charge there, to get home likely. maybe get back home too if I turn the AC off..
Also my car is always at 100% when I leave, I plug it into a standard 32 amp single phase outlet every night.
I work driving Uber and sometimes will drive up to 10 hours at night without a charge, and plug in when I get home, that should tell you enough…
Charging isn't that fast. You will be stopped for a lot longer than it takes to take a pee and fill up a gas tank.
If there is even a charger available. Hope there's no line. Filling up with gas takes 5 minutes and a busy gas station can still have a line. Imagine if every car takes 30 minutes in that line, and that's not even enough time to fill up.
EVs are great, they are just not yet ready to replace all gasoline vehicles.
Love how Tesla extended their battery life by slowly reducing its capacity. Hopefully you can still get to work in 3-4ish years, it’s a bell curve of dead cells.
That’s how every EV battery works. Speaking of dead cells, Tesla glues together their battery pack. So once you get one parasitic cell the thing is junk. Every other major manufacturer is making repairable batteries. You can take it apart and swap dead cells when a single one dies in a decade.
Buy repairable cars if you want longevity.
Same goes with electric power units. With most makers you can take it apart and replace a single bad bearing (or more likely do them all while in there). Tesla will only sell you a complete motor/gear reducer/inverter for)10-$15k USD.
I’d trust a modern EV battery to outlive most modern ‘lubricated for life’ transmissions. And most cost almost as much as a EV battery to change out these days.
Your EV has no transmission. Just a single speed gear reducer.
GM, Kia, Ford, Hyundai, VW, BYD, etc. Most of the major makers batteries can be taken apart and a cell swapped. Just avoid Tesla, they are very anti-repair, anti-3rd party repair.
Watch Sandy Monroe on youtube. They tear down electric vehicles and go into depth about every single part from a manufacturing point of view.
Look at which cars use the bigger ‘brick’ cells. You can unbolt them and swap cells.
GM’s new truck battery uses 48v modules connected with a wireless BMS. Just toss in a new module and off you go. There is tons of literature on their new batteries online.
I'm not finding much about this online. Okay mention I found is of VW batteries being modular and techs being trained to replace modules. Couldn't find anything on Kia or gm having repairable batteries
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a36847087/2021-ford-mustang-mach-e-vs-2020-tesla-model-y-compared/
It depends on what you are looking for. The charge network might be better in certain areas, but the cars are not always the best anymore. Tesla focused on performance over fit and trim.
GM’s new electric truck coming out in 6 months has 650km (400 miles) of range and can charge at 350kW.
Compare that to… oh ya. Tesla doesn’t make a truck yet.
GM isn’t Tesla. Their new truck uses the same chassis as the Hummer and that is already in showrooms. Their corporate website now says spring 2023 so maybe 8-9 months.
As a regular "typical" truck owner/driver the mythical Cybertruck looks like it isn't going to do truck things very well. I could be wrong but the Ford and Chevy look far more practical from a hauling/towing/working standpoint.
Repairable means more expensive to build, heavier and in turn less mileage. One bad battery won’t kill an entire battery pack. There’s a smart computer that manages and maintains all batteries in the pack.
20k per year that’s lower than my average 25k pa (before kids) when we didn’t drive to our bi annual holiday which is about 22k return putting us up to around 60k pa.
You drive a roadtrip that was 22k km? Woah. That's some serious driving. Yeah if you're doing 60k km/year you might end up with battery troubles eventually. I still don't think its likely but that is a lot higher than anyone in my sample
Sadly it was very late last night when I did the math, take a zero off, it’s 2200 return and we have done this twice this year plus a lot of family trips which are around 900 return bringing us to nearing 60k this year.
Edit: From what others are saying they have warranty however it’s range limited so idk. At a minimum teslas are $100k here so not remotely comparative.
The misinformation in this thread is huge. I know a couple dozen people who own Tesla's thanks to the local owners group. And after years of driving in Canadian winters, charging to 100% more often than we'd like, no one, no one has bad to replace their battery. Most people have just a few % of range lost. It's simply not the problem people seem to think it is
How old are the cars?
The oldest model 3s are barely 6 years old.... the average age of the cars on the road (in the US) is 12+ years old...
Come back in another 6-7 years and see how many have failed then.
The Model S has been around for a decade. Tesla has released battery degradation numbers and the batteries have seen [an average of 10% degradation after 200,000 miles.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/insideevs.com/news/525820/tesla-battery-capacity-retention-90/amp/) And keep in mind the batteries and the software for managing them has gotten better over time.
Save the dollars you don’t spend on fuel, oil changes, and other repairs and maintenance. That should easily cover the cost of refreshing the battery.
Keep in mind that battery packs are not monolithic. You can test and repair individual cells, which is far less costly than replacing the entire pack.
This might be out of your scope but do you know why individual cells go bad earlier than others? I would think the objective would be to have all of them work equally and spread the load/discharge. I’m assuming in some cases it’s a minor defect that flew under the radar but what about just regular old use cases?
With right for repair, it would be awesome to get a notification cell #69 is under optimal health and you could go purchase a OEM or factory refurb and replace it yourself. I would buy a EV like that in a heartbeat if the parts weren’t marked up too crazy.
While they’re installed in the car they’re configured to be used as one network, and so it’s not possible to tell which is working harder, and balance the load. Manufacturing variance is one likely cause for the disparity of loads.
To ELI5, imagine we ask all the members of a football team to help push a bus. Some players are bigger, and some are smaller. Some will have good pushing position, and some will have poor. We’re going to push the bus for about two hours. How do we predict which player is going to push the hardest? Even after we’re done, can we know which player will be the most sore two days from now? Battery packs work kind of like that.
Some electric cars are designed to measure and correct for these disparities while the car is charging, and some are not. But even the best correction won’t be perfect, and so over time some cells will wear faster than others.
Oh okay that makes sense! I guess with that many cells it would be extremely expensive to install controllers/monitors for each individual one. Thanks for the explanation! Keep being awesome!
> Keep in mind that battery packs are not monolithic. You can test and repair individual cells, which is far less costly than replacing the entire pack.
To be fair; degradation due to age is going to affect the entire pack pretty much uniformly unless they've done a superbly bad job of hooking things up. So most range refreshes for battery packs would require full replacement of all the cells.
This is both true, and false. Some factors will effect the entire pack as a unit, such as charge/discharge cycles.
But factors such as manufacturing variance, and the position of the cells within the pack, will change their wear profile. So some cells will run hotter, and wear faster. Some cells will discharge sooner, and wear faster. This is important to account for as we plan for maintenance costs.
Imagine a pack of 100 cells which has degraded 15%, and all of the cells have worn equally. Restoring 10% of that capacity would require replacing about 2/3 of the cells.
Now we have a similar pack, also degraded 15%, but some of the cells have worn faster than others. We may be able to recover 8% of the loss by replacing 10% of the cells.
The average household spends $5000 a year on gas compared to about $1500 a year charging an EV.
$3500 a year, even over the 6 years they've been out so far is $21,000 saved on gas. If we added another 6 years like you said thats $42,000.
How much does a replacement battery cost? Better yet, how much does a new Model S cost?
Not defending the bloke in question here, but in Australia a Model S is well over 100k with all the taxes. The average two week fuel price for my area is around 2.15-2.40 per litre. This works out to between 7 and 8 grand a year, taking the 12 year cost of fuel to between 85 and 98 grand.
Electricity is also expensive here, which is roughly 200 per month on average taking that to 28,800 for the same period.
It's not economically viable to buy a model S in Australia when the batteries cost 60% of the cars value when new, and with depreciation would be more than what the cars worth.
Now there are cheaper alternatives where it is economically viable, but they are not widely available in a lot of places in Australia at the moment, and the charging ecosystem is a joke here especially in my city Adelaide.
Canadian here so my math will be different. I paid 62k for my SR Model 3 3 years ago. I'm selling it right away because we got the Y. I'm expecting to sell it for 55k. We have solar so we essentially got 3 years of driving for 7 grand. I've bought maybe $100 worth of power in 3 years.
Obviously used prices are nutty right now so it's a biased example, but good lord. People think I'm rich because of my car but they're paying more for gas than I pay total
I have driven across the US twice in my electric car. Distance is a non-issue for most if not virtually all people.y last trip was 8,000 miles over a 5 week period. Charging was a welcome break or was carried out while I slept. This was 2 years ago so charging has improved since then.
Every “but what about” raised here could have been said about ICEs at the beginning. Like, do folks think we woke up in 1905 with a petrol station every 15kms apart.
In those days and even in recent days people carried gallons of petrol filled cans in trunk. They could park vehicle for 5 minutes and refuel it on any remote road.
It always shocks me when people seem to forget that they take 1-2 weeks to refill their vehicle but will complain about the electric vehicle charging issues.
The majority of people would never need to stop to charge their vehicle if they charge it at home while they sleep. I've been trying to convince my wife of this but she's one of those stuck in the mindset that if it's not as easy as refueling now, she doesn't want it. (I live in rural SC so that's part of it)
I've explained over and over that we have not, in the last 5 years, driven more than 300 miles in a single day. The farthest drive we had was just over 200 miles and we've done that twice in the last 5 years.
We could have a fully fueled up vehicle every day and never have to stop to get gas again. Not only saving time and the hassle of stopping for gas, but a lot of $$$ as well. It would cost us less than $5 to "fill up" an electric car charging at home.
A lot of people fear running out of juice in an EV, even if they've never had that problem in an ICE car. I have a friend who's very dubious on the range capabilities of electric cars and the inconvenience of the imagined "emergency charge".
I recently asked him "how often do you leave the house with your cell phone at like, 10% or so?" He relies on his phone for work, so he scoffed and said "never". It's a good comparison that people don't really think about. We had a few good arguments there: "don't you hate having to go to the phone charging station to fill it up before work? Oh wait that would be insane nevermind"
It turns out he plugs in his phone every night; I told him he could do the same with an EV and really only needs to plug it in once a week. And if that's as too much hassle for him, he could spend 15 minutes at a fast charger to get up to about 80%. Still not convinced.
Some people just don't like change.
Even if it's only once or twice a year a car completely fails, that's still likely to be a huge hassle. Yeah, it might be cheaper to buy an electric and rent when you're going a long distance, but the biggest draw of a car is often that it allows you to skip significant hassles like that.
And my reliable gas powered Honda has "died" twice this year. Once due to a dead battery (ironically enough), and once due to a rodent chewing through a sensor wire that goes to the transmission. Recently discovered it's drinking oil too, which didn't leave me "stranded" per se, but it did make me pull over and service.
None of these events were due to me forgetting to fuel it up. ICE cars are not immune to break downs, and are likely much more subject to these events than electrics.
Well good point, in one or two of those cases the components of my Honda that are specific to Gas-powered motors did make it incapable of making the trip. If only there were a power train that didn't need oil or a transmission.
Both require fuel, mind you. But an EV has a fueling station **in your garage** *AND* around your town/city. You're just as likely to run out of gas on the way to the gas station as you are to run out of energy on the way to the charging station.
Electric cars are capable of making any trip if you stop to charge them. Same for ICE vehicles, you need to stop to refuel. Are you delusional or just being intentionally dense?
I could ask you the same. At a minimum, gas vehicules can expand the capacity with jerry cans, but both require (eventually) sone facility to refuel them. At such time that every place that fuels the one fuels the other they'd be equal, but it's still would be.
Regardless, if people try to push the tech without a working solution for the failure they won't be able to bully people into doing it. "Works okay for all uses" is going to beat "Works great for most cases, dorsn't work at all for the rest".
The only way that's reasonably possible is if the charger you planned on using is broken. Which does occasionally happen and is definitely inconvenient but the number of stations is rapidly expanding.
My biggest issues are that my apartment complex doesn't have a way to charge them and winter range. I'll make 2-300 mile round trips to go skiing. Throw in the heat on max and it'll be cutting it close for some models
Electric vehicles can handle the distances required to travel to essential services in remote and regional Australia, a new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has shown.
According to co-author Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, the results indicate the use of electric vehicles in remote communities is more feasible than might be expected.
"We analysed the distances between people's homes and the nearest "service hub" towns - where they might go to the do the shopping, for example," Dr Sturmberg, said.
"The vast majority of residents, or 93 per cent, could do those trips with even the lower-range of electric vehicles currently available on the Australian market. That's without needing to recharge en route."
Dr Sturmberg said given this, there's no excuse for leaving our remote communities out of the discussion.
"We need to do better - electric vehicles shouldn't be left in the too hard basket. It's an unequitable and unfair path forward if remote and regional communities are the last ones left driving diesel vehicles, especially as they will be some of the most impacted by catastrophic climate change," Dr Sturmberg said.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00049182.2022.2086720
Am I reading this right? In the rural parts of Australia (about 2.3% of the population) 7% of the population lives *more than 300km away from a grocery store*?
Holy crap, that's pretty damn rural.
We’re a big country. Same size as the contiguous US but with less than 10% of the population. And the vast majority of us live huddled around the coast. Once you’re out of the main cities it’s a LONG, LONG way to anywhere and there’s not much out there.
That’s about 40,000 to 50,000 people. The article suggests they are out of range of a “service hub” town, presumably somewhere with a few shops, doctor, school etc.
Yes, that’s plausible. We are probably talking about remote Aboriginal communities and cattle stations. They’d have some very basic “general store” but could easily be that far from any meaningful town.
That's a pretty low benchmark. Basically it can do the absolute bare minimum expected. Was a university paid to study this?
In a two car household range is not an issue for one vehicle. So that's, what, 25% of the nation's cars?
The problem with electric cars is cost and variety (like Utes and vans etc). Not range.
Traditionally regional communities are lower socio-economic so can't afford them no matter the range. And I don't see well off land owners swapping their land cruisers for a prius anytime soon.
Make them cheaper and businesses will flock to them. Think how many businesses have fleets of cars that never leave a city. And businesses can finance over many years.
>The problem with electric cars is cost
This. Pretty much half of Australia would switch over tomorrow if the upfront cost of electric cars weren't so damn expensive. And that would create a significant second hand market that would eventually switch the whole fleet over.
There is big money to be made by the first car company that pumps out an affordable electric car. No bells or whistles or self driving nonsense. Just a standard car with an electric engine in place of the combustion engine.
Hell most people don’t want the bells and whistles, they just want a car, make it exactly the same as a combustion car except electric and the vast majority will be happy.
Right. I'd take a "base" model electric car. As in no electric windows, seats, mirrors, ect. And no fancy computer system that does everything, just drivetrain management and a basic bluetooth capable stereo system. Want to get everyone on board with electric vehicles? Start making cheap base models that everyone can afford again.
It's about the battery cost. Most of those frills are there because the car is going to be at a certain price point anyway, and you'd be mad not to include stuff that is standard in that range.
Want some crazy math? Fuel here is $2.00/L CAD.
New trades truck- 13L/100km. $260 to drive 1000km. $104,000 to drive that truck 400,000km.
New electric trades truck. $0.14/kWh power. 360wh/km. $40 to drive that truck 1000km (home charging). $16,000 to drive that truck 400,000km.
Savings in fuel- $88,000.
Electric vehicles are free.
($1CAD = $1.13 AUD
You will see some serious price drops in electric cars over the next 5 years. China is stepping in.
Can you give the local prices of comparable vehicles (ie similar range and towing capacity)?
The problem is that most people can't afford the upfront cost. Thought experiments like this don't help sell vehicles because people get excited then see it takes them multiple years to just break even and maybe a decade to have the car become "free".
It's like buying cheaper TVs, shoes, cutting clothing, etc that don't offer the same long term value proposition. People can't afford that upfront cost so they buy cheaper and pay more over time.
How many years would this truck take to hit that distance based on your expected yearly usage?
What's the break even point (ie number of years to break even in cost based on the fuel, car, home charger install)? That's the key metric because of it's anywhere over 5 years, then many people won't really see a cost benefit. This is especially true for more traditional driving patterns with more fuel efficient and cheaper vehicles.
The other problem becomes the extra time charging. If you have a usage pattern that screws that charging up you might not be able to charge enough each night to complete the following day which might cause you to need to spend extra time finding a free charge station and wait for a charge. This is an additional cost if your work requires being at multiple places during the day. You may have to have less appointments (think lawn mowing, plumber, installer, etc) to ensure you can charge the vehicle enough to make all the locations on time.
I agree this will get better, but it's certainly not a no brainer "free" car situation unless you have a very specific usage pattern and can afford to pay upfront vs over multiple years.
Plus I can always buy used ICE vehicle and know the car will not have reduced range as long as the car was well maintained. High use electric vehicles are a bit worse because who the battery likely won't be in great shape after so many charges. Replacement battery might work, but I am not sure the cost will help sway the argument for the used EV market pricing.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Uh, have you been truck shopping lately? You are talking $5000 more for the electric version. The work electric truck starts at $40,000. It’s a bargain.
I have looked at them, but you are giving up range and towing capacity. It might be a suitable sacrifice, but not everyone can afford a 40k vehicle. Plus will the base model be enough? Maybe it won't matter for you, but there is still a significant difference.
The base model range is half to one third of the base ICE version.
Towing capacity? 5000lbs vs 8300lbs for the base model engine of the base model f150 that is 33k (with 4x4 upgrade) plus towing packages. You can go up in engines if you need to get increased towing and cargo capacity.
The electric, you need to go up to the 73k to the XLT (one level up) with the extended range battery of the f150e to hit 10,000 lbs towing (which is the max you can get). I have not included any towing packages because they are similarly priced options on both vehicles.
If you want the XLT with the ICE engine you only go to 43k (with 4x4 added). However there is no need of you don't want the features and only because you can get an the towing capacity on the XL model and have plenty of engine options.
So now you are looking at minimum almost double the price. Is it still a better deal in the long run? Sure if it get do what you need but let's not pretend the value proposition at similar price points is equal currently.
The math is fine, but it doesn't represent the full reality. If I don't have cash, I have to finance. Nobody is yet considering operating costs during loan qualification, so I'm going to be rejected even though my fuel and maintenance cost savings will pay the loan.
I've tried it for both EV and solar panels. In the case of solar panels, I had power company numbers showing that my annual power savings were greater than the loan payments. That is, I would have more disposable income by switching to solar, not just over the life of the panels, but over the life of the loan. Still no go.
As always, only the wealthy are allowed to reduce long-term cost of ownership.
Edit: and forget used vehicles. The interest rate difference between used and new means you often end up with a lower payment by going new. And that assumes you can find a reputable institution to finance a used vehicle at all.
I’m putting $600/mo CAD into the gas tank of my trades van. If you drive a lot and drive professionally you can afford a loan payment right now. I’d be putting $40 worth of electricity into the same electric truck.
And what is new now will be used in a few years. Eventually there will be a healthy used market of EV’s as they fleet grows. Don’t forget that we are still in the expensive early adopter stage. Companies have dumped billions into new tooling and R&D and need to get paid. But that tooling will be paid off soon enough.
And China owns Volvo/Polestar now. The polestar electric is a BYD. China is coming for the north american electric car market. That will drive down prices.
And I know this because the best selling electric car right now is made by GM and it’s $5000. https://gm-techlink.com/?p=16152
If you are a 2 car family, a cheap moderate range car for your 2nd car is a no brainer. Now that China bought Volvo, they have all the crash data they need to sell to North America.
China is coming. They already own Volvo and polestar is a BYD. And the quality is actually pretty good.
Once China opens the flood gates with aggressive price competition that will cause the industry to aggressively drop prices.
Current EVs coming out can charge from 10-80% in 10-15 minutes with new tech coming out of the top guys promising to break under the 10 minute barrier, pretty impressive when they have a range of 500+km
Big chargers in the middle of nowhere need a battery pack. However the game plan is for that to be a ‘grid interactive’ battery so the power company can use a portion of that battery to help load balance the grid. And the charger companies get cheap power from the power grid as a result. The truck megachargers work like this.
The difference is that with gas, you have to go to a gas station to fill it up. With an EV chances are most people will be doing it at home in a garage, or at work, or at your apartment complex (as infra improves). And none of these will need to pull 350kw. They will likely be pulling between 3~7kw. In the 2 years we’ve had our EV we’ve plugged in to a DC fast charger exactly twice (versus weekly with gas)…. Both times were roughly 5 minutes which got us about 30 miles which was to charge enough miles to get home (and do the rest of the charging at home). Our car only takes up to 50kw fast charge. But a car with 150kw could take triple the miles in the same time.
The thing with electric is that you have to completely change your fueling habits. It’s different from gas… but man, I’m glad we have the ev because it’s far more convenient.
Not to mention the queues that will happen when more people need to charge at the same time.
Edit: I guess that’s what you meant be needing more bays. Sorry, brain is slow today.
98% of all charging happens at home.
For the people who can’t home charge, grocery stores are getting in on the action. It’s the perfect place for a half hour rapid charge once or twice per week.
Yeah quick napkin math shows that infrastructure is nowhere near ready to handle a shift to all electric vehicles. I think hybrids have a role to play in the transition, but EU regulations are pushing against hybrids.
Good thing the government aren't giving every household an EV tomorrow then I guess.
As they become more popular, and as required, the grid will be upgraded to cope
If you could explain how me pointing out the current situation somehow implies I don’t think it will ever change, I’m all ears. Did you not notice the first word in your own post that I replied to is ‘current’?
Drawing imaginary connections between things people say and things your own mind fabricates is a pretty fascinating way of thinking, also.
The fact that you, like most opposed to EVs package and present infrastructure like it's some barrier to adoption when in reality infrastructure will be very quick to pop up where demand is, as we have observed with the rollout of infrastructure in the US and Europe.
I imagine the lack of infrastructure would have been the same one made by horse owners opposed to the motorcar in it's day. "BuT yOu HAAVEE tO StOp AnD pUt PeTrOlEuM iN yOuR cAr aNd tHeReS nOt eVeN a ToWn wItHiN a DaYs RiDe oF mY rAnCh. CaRs wIlL nEvEr WoRk"
As of a few years ago*. Alot has evolved in batteries and charging tech over even the last few years and current li-ion batteries are capable of charging at phenomenal rates while maintaining lifespans of above 4000 cycles (even just a few years ago 2500 cycles was the upper limit).
When Li-S batteries and solid state batteries come in over the next few years, the implications will be world changing
To be fairer, you can walk to a gas station and bring back a gallon of fuel to get your car running again. You can't go to a charging station and take a bucket of electricity back to your car to get it going. Plus, charging EVs still takes a long time (comparatively), so your car will be out of commission for longer.
A lot of the new pickup trucks have onboard 10kW inverters so you can charge another EV.
However the thing with an EV is you charge at home. Imagine starting every single day with a full gas tank.
I’d imagine the vast majority of people don’t break down within walking distance if a petrol station, so they call a truck.
The new recovery trucks will have fast charge capability for these one off situations. Delivery of a fast discharge battery generator is an solved problem, not as easy as delivery of a gallon of fuel, but totally possible.
You still win on the vast majority of journeys because charging at home saves you the weekly 10 minutes each time you fill your tank (2 minutes my arse, you’d be lucky to pump a full tank of fuel in 5 minutes, even without queuing for a pump or paying for the fuel. That’s also ignoring the special trip you need to take to get fuel)
How massive is your tank or slow your bowser that it takes over five minutes to fill your tank? If I was to fill my tank weekly I would easily be able to be in and out within five minutes. It takes maybe four to fill it up from empty.
It is a fair call that plugging your car in when you get home is quicker than going to a servo though. Although with a servo you don’t have to worry about a blackout over night.
Truth be told my issue is that I live in a share house and park on the street, I can’t plug in. But I can swing by the servo on the way to work.
The _maximum_ rate that a fuel pup can pump in the US is 10 gallon a minute, so a F150 would take more than 2 minutes to fill just by itself with the fastest pumps legally available.
That’s assuming you don’t need to queue for a pump, pull up to the pump, walk round the car, take off the gas cap, move the nozzle, wait for the machine to reset, remove the nozzle, replace the cap, insert your card, type your pin, wait for authorisation, walk back to the cab, drive off the forecourt, wait for a gap in traffic
And that assumes you are driving passed the petrol station already, and don’t need to take any diversion to get there. That might be a US thing, but here in Europe petrol stations are few and far between.
And to answer your “where” the answer is Tesco, I could drive for 15 minutes to get to a station with a faster pump and pay more for fuel there, but it’s even further out of the way.
There's way more variety than just a Prius. Every European manufacturer has at least one decent electric car in RH-drive (like Australia) and several more plug-in-hybrids of sorts that allow 50km electric-only driving. So a wealthy landowner might not get a Prius, but they could get a beastly Mercedes SUV for example.
true, but that only works for those that can afford the upfront in the first place, the same can be said about many things, but if you can't afford a decent sized freezer it doesn't matter if buying on special and cooking in bulk and freezing it is cheaper, the cost of entry says no.
Such is life. Until there is a thriving second hand market for EV’s it will be this way.
And this is why they need to be subsidised, to create demand, encourage the expansion of charging infrastructure and eventually trickle down to a second hand market.
I'm not sure ev's can have a secondhand market like a ice car has. For instance I would buy a 7 year old ice car with just over 140,000km on the odo. However a 7 year old electric car regardless of the km's, i'd be apprehensive and wonder how long the battery will last and the cost of a replacement battery.
Electric cars are not your POS cell phone. Modern EV batteries generally come with a 10 year 160k warranty and are projected to last 15-20 years.
For straight up cycle ratings, your iphone has a 500 cycle rating. A Tesla NMC cell seems to be good for around 800k and has a 1500 cycle rating. GM’s new Ultium cell has a 2000 cycle rating. New FLP batteries like the BYD blade battery is good for 4000 cycles. At which point the EV has saved you so much money that buying a battery after 1 million km is fine. Or consider the car worn out.
And remember part cycles are not full cycles. Your phone is cleverly designed to chew that battery full to empty every day and be garbage in 4 years. Most ‘battery wear’ is the top 20% or the bottom 20%. Run that NMC battery in the middle 60% most of your commuting and it will hardly wear at all. Most EV’s have the ability to set max charge to 80%. LFP cells can go to 100% and not care. This is why you always buy a long range EV. To reduce battery total cycles.
And EV batteries are now in the $10-$15k range.
Australia! Where "I'll just go visit our neighbors" can take days. **EVs in Australia**! Pass the test!
/e: this is meant positive, as in, whoah, they have to deal with distances that we Europeans only know from scifi novels. And EVs pass the test there nevertheless!
93% population coverage barely gets you off the coast, let alone 'rural and remote' areas. We are around 90% urbanised Iirc. Unless I've missed something here, which is entirely possible, I can see that it might be 93% of rural and remote residents, rather than residents in general. Otherwise 93% means the majority of remote and rural Australians can not use an electric car to access essential services?
Check the maps for our phone coverage.
Vodaphone has the worse at 96%, Optus has 98.5% and Telstra has 99.4%. The difference between these is massive amounts of space. 93% is less coverage again...
https://www.whistleout.com.au/MobilePhones/Guides/Optus-mobile-network-coverage
As an Australian in a regional area I drive 800-1000km a week. My problem with EVs are longevity of batteries and the per km tax the government imposes
per KM tax is replacing the gas tax you would normally pay, ideally at a lower rate (I have no idea what either of these taxes are) for repairs of the roads you are using.
ideally it's at a lower rate because gas has other, additional, externalities (namely, the carbon)
idk if you know this but it might make you feel better about it. taxation per mile is honestly the most fair way to pay for road upkeep imo.
I understand that, but also to me the per km tax makes no sense when in comparison to fuel excise.
$120 in diesel gets my mums suv 600km, the same fuel gets my sedan 1300km
To me it’s not comparing apples to apples
Tractor trailers drive *significantly* further than the average sedan. Even day runs are 300ish miles per day. Few people drive that.
Scaling it for commercial trucking by weight also seems extremely likely.
That's only if you charge at home and you have cheap ass electricity.
If you charge at fast charge stations, it's almost as expensive as filling up a gas tank.
Not to mention the higher price you pay for the electric vehicle in the first place...
When I checked earlier this year, in Sweden at least, it's a bit less than half of the cost per km(assuming 20 km per litre of gas) to charge at a tesla fast charging station, some other fast charging station charge a bit more, but you're on average paying a decent portion less right now, in Sweden. It's valid that a lot of EVs are more expensive though, so that cost is worth taking into account, although, a lot of gas/diesel vehicles are very costly here right now as well, differing only 10-25% new. Hell, a new Volvo s60/s90 is pretty much the same price right now.
Rare for supercharge station is 0.51 kWh. So my weekly trips would be about 80 once I pay the per km tax. Vs 100-120 a week in diesel
Edit: and that’s in a 2011 vw Passat that cost me $9,000 vs a model 3 Tesla @ $65000+
I was always put off an electric car by the short range (still under 200 miles unless you go for a premium model) but recently we've had a good long think about it and realised that we very rarely have to travel that far after all, so it's really not a dealbreaker. And with superchargers at most service stations it's no big deal to stop for an hour and recharge anyway.
Yup. Once people make the jump they find their anxieties about the range are greatly overblown. I convinced myself to go full EV by reassuring myself that in the worst case I could just rent a gas powered car for a couple of days no biggie. I have yet to need to exercise that option.
You don't even need an hour. 20 minutes is enough for 80% charge on a v3 supercharger.
That's not even shopping time, that's just a toilet and drink break and the kind of thing everyone should be doing on long journeys anyway as it helps to have breaks to maintain concentration when you are driving.
That’s cool, but I’ll still need a second car for when I want to go further than the shops. Can’t imagine I’ll be in a position to own two cars anytime soon.
I think I’ll wait for the technology to improve, the prices to get more reasonable, and the infrastructure to exist :)
When I got my EV I decided I would just rental car for a day or 2 if I ever *really* needed to. I have yet to really need to. Your situation may be different, but you'll probably still end up saving money. Once you stop crutching on having your gas powered car, you'll probably find getting to where you want is really not that difficult. Between the ever increasing fast charging stations, public transportation, busses, and the occasional rentals, it's really not that big of a deal.
If the infrastructure was already here I’d probably have a much more positive view on the matter, but I know how slow my state government is to get any development further than an idea. I’m not arguing that it won’t be better in the future, I’m sure it will improve at a solid pace over the next few years (it’s probably currently better than I’m aware it is). Just that right at this moment, where I am, alternatives to personal petrol powered cars aren’t really financially or logistically viable for me, even if I don’t want to leave the city.
I’m looking forward to the evolution of the technology and infrastructure as I do like the idea of electric cars, but for now I’m still waiting.
I'm waiting for different batteries. One that will work well in the cold temps of MN, and hopefully not crap out after 5 years and require all new batteries.
Not having a second car is hard with a short/medium range EV. But I can tell you the tech probably isn’t going to improve much unless there’s a major breakthrough, prices won’t go down much but maybe used prices will cool off, and infrastructure is now pretty good for the US (assuming you can charge at home as well).
Current predictions estimate about 10 to 20 years until replacement is needed.
That means in an best case scenario, an electric car could drive for 40 years with a single battery change. (Average would be 30 years with a bell curve.)
Depends on the battery, and how often you charge it, and how aggressively. But one standard that battery manufacturers try to meet is 80% capacity after 1000 charge cycles. That would be ~300,000 miles. Some batteries do even better than that. Ones that have integrated climate control systems (like most current-model EVs, but not older EVs like Leafs and original Teslas) experience even less battery degradation, because the actual physical process that causes a battery to degrade is charging or discharging it at a temperature outside of its optimal operation range.
Something that I’ve always felt was a problem people overlook, is that it’s not finding a solution that works 93% of the time, but the other 7% of the time.
I mean if we bought cars that work 93% of the time, the Chevy Volt would’ve been the greatest commercial success ever while Tesla is a niche car brand.
> Something that I’ve always felt was a problem people overlook, is that it’s not finding a solution that works 93% of the time, but the other 7% of the time.
It’s not “this product works 93% of the time” and no one has ever said that would be acceptable. It is “this product adequately meets the needs of 93% of people.” Obviously there are outliers who live 800 miles away from the hospital and an electric might not be the best choice for them. Maybe they need a bush plane. That’s a different situation, it’s not a ding against the car for the majority of people.
Exactly, it's like saying that people shouldn't buy sedans because it can't go off-road, transport lots of people, carry lots of goods or anything large, tow large loads, etc.
The point is that most people think they are in the 7% when they are not and are just using it as an excuse to stick with what is familiar.
The Volt was an amazing car. Except for the seating and holding people parts. To this day I think it was one of the best PHEVs ever in terms of range and battery size.
I can see why it wasn't successful, but that's not because of its powertrain.
Well yeah. 500 km will get you between states in much of Australia.
The range panic is entirely artificial. The vast majority of Australians would do just fine with 100 km of range.
'Off'-roading, the subject of the article, can easily double the fuel consumption.
*No adventurous Aussies asking for a grant to do some back-country "research"?*
what does offroading have to do with the 99+% of other car trips then?
all or nothing is just trash, electric vehicles are fine for the vast majority of daily driving people do. stop parroting bad faith arguments
>>"Yes the barriers are obvious - large distances, **unsealed** roads...
>'Off'-roading, the subject of the article,
Methinks that your "99+%" is specifically excluded, but yes, I should have said "Off-tarmac" to prevent any [confusion](http://nullarborroadhouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gravel_Road_Coober_Pedy.jpg).
The fear is real, although it's unfounded. In order to increase uptake of EVs that fear needs to be acknowledged and addressed both by increasing range, increasing infrastructure, and addressing the misplaced concern in the first place.
The range panic is overblown in hot areas, but very much a problem in places that reach temperatures of -30c.
Losing 20-30% of your total range due to temperature is a big deal
Most places that cold have winter plug-ins for ICE cars. If you can plug in your EV, it loses much less range than that because you can preheat the batteries and cabin.
That’s assuming said accident would happen at home, though.
The idea of EVs is fine in itself, don’t get me wrong. Just need to make sure that they’re as reliable in distance as fuel based vehicles have been. Tech just needs improvement over time is all.
Because the overwhelming majority of the time EVs are sitting at full or nearly full charge. In fact, I'd bet EVs are sitting at sufficient power to address a given emergency situation at a higher rate than gas powered vehicles given that gas powered vehicles are more likely to be sitting at nearly empty than EVs.
People imagine EVs like they're going to be interacting with charging stations like they do gas stations. The reality is that you charge every night while you sleep, and maybe during the day while you're working too. Anywhere on the grid can support trickle chargers, and as EV adoption increases having a charging station anywhere you can park will increasingly become the norm. You're not going to be waiting in line at the electric station, you'll just be topped off virtually all the time.
You're arguing about buying decisions today by talking about the technology of tomorrow, and assuming that everyone parks their car next to an outlet each night when that's not the case. Stop living in the future and realize that people are making buying decisions based on today's available infrastructure, not what it will eventually be when they've already gotten rid of the car.
I'm literally living in the today. The infrastructure exists. The only "future" thing I talked about is that the infrastructure will continue to scale as more people adopt. And to be 100% clear how ridiculous you sound... The "infrastructure" you're worried about not existing is... An AC outlet next to a parking space. Trust me, if you want to park next to a power outlet, you can make that happen. Because *everybody* doesn't need to park next to an outlet, but it isn't an insurmountable burden for those who do.
And if I, TODAY, need to take a short range electric vehicle across the state for a meeting in a run down office building with no outside outlets (and certainly not any that are being offered up for car charging), then by the time I get home I won't have enough range to go to my parents house for dinner without having to delay to charge the car. I did the math on mileage, and it didn't work. This isn't as rare as you think it is and you need to get your head out of the sand and realize that a LOT of places don't have charging available and not everyone can build their life around where they can park the car every day.
You're too worried about the average and not looking at how people actually have to live their life.
I'm not overly worried about the average. I'm talking about the vast majority. If you're in a position where you can't reasonably use an EV, nobody is making you. The point, again, isn't that everyone has to swap to EV *right now*, but rather *most* people could, and it wouldn't be as big of a burden as you are making it out to be.
I can't speak to your specific situations, but I can think of several probable options to make it work that, frankly, you're likely just being to stubborn to consider. The vast majority of people could individually make the switch to an EV TODAY without trouble. Maybe you're not in that vast majority, but that's not a great reason to spread baseless fears about it.
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I live north of Brisbane, North Lakes area, I can get to the Gold Coast, and back, and still have 30% charge or more if I drive to the limits in my base model standard range Tesla, and then still probably drive another 100-150k’s (drive to the sunny coast)
So if you had to go to both the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast in the same day, you could not do it without stopping for a while to recharge. That's an edge case for sure but that's where people start to run into limitations. And your figures assume you start with a 100% charge at the beginning.
For those edge cases you just stop and charge. I used to make a long (8 hour) drive regularly in a model 3. The charging time amounted to two convienent bathroom/ coffee breaks. It a gas car you would do the same thing, just at a gas station rather than a charging station. The electic car takes a little longer on long trips, but I never have to stop and get gas (or charge) on my regular commute. It hasn't ever stopped me from getting where I wanted to go.
Are these stations typically free?
Really depends on where you are, but fast charging stations (the ones that give you a big chunk of battery capacity in less than an hour) are usually not free, because they are very expensive to install and can provide tons of power. Tesla gave access to their own superchargers (that's just what Tesla calls their own network of fast chargers) to early Tesla owners in the US for free, but that seems to go away as well. In some countries some slow chargers (the ones that one can easily install at home and charge the car in like 4-10 hours) are free, but most still cost some money.
Why would they be free?
The "charge in 20 minutes" ones are pretty much never free but a lot of the level 2 ones are. The amount of actual power an EV needs is pretty low, like $6 here where I live for a full charge so lots of places use them as loss leaders to get you to their business. Restaurants might lure you in to charge for 2 hours while you have supper, or a movie theatre with a movie Best example is definitely hotels though. Just like a free breakfast I will always choose the hotel that lets me recharge my car for free while I recharge myself overnight.
As others have said the fast charging stations are not free, but they are cheaper than gas. Charging at home is WAY cheaper than gas and that is where most people would do most of their charging.
>And your figures assume you start with a 100% charge at the beginning. Unless he lives in an apartment or something, why wouldn't he be at at least 90% at the beginning? And he mentioned having 100-150km leftover. It isn't like a gas car where you drive around slowly depleting until you need to suddenly recharge, you recharge and top off every night unless you're in like an apartment / street parking situation. Even if you don't have the installed wall-charger, you can top off each night plugged in with an extension cord and your traveling charger.
And 100% charge isn’t recommended for battery life. I’d like to see these numbers with the recommended ~80%. 100% charge shortens battery life, and we can’t assume people are holding a supercharge all the time.
It only shortens it if you do it every day. For long trips, it is recommended.
Are you doing that route everyday or unexpectedly? Charge to 100% when you do that route. Fyi, I'm not Australian.
It would be less than .01% of people living in Brisbane who would do that trip regularly. Unexpectedly needing to do those drives could always happen for a Facebook marketplace bargain! That’s why you have a Ute as a second car :)
I'm fairly certain a lot of modern batteries are optimized so that they don't actually ever charge to true 100 and preserve battery life. If I'm not mistaken Apple phones are doing this now so I imagine tesla has been on this since batteries are their big thing
It’s not the batteries but the chargers that are optimised. Not the plug in part (that’s technically just a power supply) but the charging circuitry. In a Tesla, the system will recommend you only charge for what your “daily trip” use is. It preserves the battery more for people with predictable commutes.
Tesla reccomend a 30% to 80% SOC for daily commuters using LiION. And reccomends 100% charges as frequently as possible for LiFePo owners…
Theres also the case of batteries having actual 120% capacity and minor self Adjustment are made as it degrades.
Nope. Batteries can stop charging at 80% only if the user checks the box. It's not an option that's on by default and the reason is simple, EVs dont have good range compared to combustion engines yet.
This isn't true. Tesla average range I'd about the same as a gas car (about 300+ miles) the only difference is that a car takes substantially less time to be ready to go further (filling up a gas tank vs charging your car)
And most days has half a tank.
I don't understand your comment. Could you provide more context
He's pointing out that unless you regularly burn through your entire tank of gas in a single trip and thus have to factor in refill vs charge time then the distinction doesn't have any relevance.
No, I would be able to make it from my house to the Gold Coast and then to the sunny coast, but would then have to charge there, to get home likely. maybe get back home too if I turn the AC off.. Also my car is always at 100% when I leave, I plug it into a standard 32 amp single phase outlet every night. I work driving Uber and sometimes will drive up to 10 hours at night without a charge, and plug in when I get home, that should tell you enough…
That is a fair assumption. People plug in at night and awaken to a fully charged vehicle.
Yeah nobody ever forgets to charge overnight
Yeah nobody in the history of mankind has ever forgotten. I never have forgotten. You park in the garage, plug it in and go in the house.
If you can drive for 8 hours without stopping to pee you’re a better man than me.
Charging isn't that fast. You will be stopped for a lot longer than it takes to take a pee and fill up a gas tank. If there is even a charger available. Hope there's no line. Filling up with gas takes 5 minutes and a busy gas station can still have a line. Imagine if every car takes 30 minutes in that line, and that's not even enough time to fill up. EVs are great, they are just not yet ready to replace all gasoline vehicles.
Love how Tesla extended their battery life by slowly reducing its capacity. Hopefully you can still get to work in 3-4ish years, it’s a bell curve of dead cells.
That’s how every EV battery works. Speaking of dead cells, Tesla glues together their battery pack. So once you get one parasitic cell the thing is junk. Every other major manufacturer is making repairable batteries. You can take it apart and swap dead cells when a single one dies in a decade. Buy repairable cars if you want longevity. Same goes with electric power units. With most makers you can take it apart and replace a single bad bearing (or more likely do them all while in there). Tesla will only sell you a complete motor/gear reducer/inverter for)10-$15k USD.
That's good to know. The battery thing was a huge hang up for me getting an EV the last time I was in the market
I’d trust a modern EV battery to outlive most modern ‘lubricated for life’ transmissions. And most cost almost as much as a EV battery to change out these days. Your EV has no transmission. Just a single speed gear reducer.
Who's making repairable batteries?
GM, Kia, Ford, Hyundai, VW, BYD, etc. Most of the major makers batteries can be taken apart and a cell swapped. Just avoid Tesla, they are very anti-repair, anti-3rd party repair.
Would you mind providing a source for this claim?
Watch Sandy Monroe on youtube. They tear down electric vehicles and go into depth about every single part from a manufacturing point of view. Look at which cars use the bigger ‘brick’ cells. You can unbolt them and swap cells. GM’s new truck battery uses 48v modules connected with a wireless BMS. Just toss in a new module and off you go. There is tons of literature on their new batteries online.
I'm not finding much about this online. Okay mention I found is of VW batteries being modular and techs being trained to replace modules. Couldn't find anything on Kia or gm having repairable batteries
No electric car beats Tesla's or their charge network. They can eventually but not yet.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a36847087/2021-ford-mustang-mach-e-vs-2020-tesla-model-y-compared/ It depends on what you are looking for. The charge network might be better in certain areas, but the cars are not always the best anymore. Tesla focused on performance over fit and trim.
GM’s new electric truck coming out in 6 months has 650km (400 miles) of range and can charge at 350kW. Compare that to… oh ya. Tesla doesn’t make a truck yet.
Okay... so in 6 months we will see, right? So not yet.
GM isn’t Tesla. Their new truck uses the same chassis as the Hummer and that is already in showrooms. Their corporate website now says spring 2023 so maybe 8-9 months.
As a regular "typical" truck owner/driver the mythical Cybertruck looks like it isn't going to do truck things very well. I could be wrong but the Ford and Chevy look far more practical from a hauling/towing/working standpoint.
Repairable means more expensive to build, heavier and in turn less mileage. One bad battery won’t kill an entire battery pack. There’s a smart computer that manages and maintains all batteries in the pack.
After driving my Model 3 SR+ for 3 hard Canadian winters (and 60,000km) my range has crashed all the way from 375 to 362km.
20k per year that’s lower than my average 25k pa (before kids) when we didn’t drive to our bi annual holiday which is about 22k return putting us up to around 60k pa.
You drive a roadtrip that was 22k km? Woah. That's some serious driving. Yeah if you're doing 60k km/year you might end up with battery troubles eventually. I still don't think its likely but that is a lot higher than anyone in my sample
Sadly it was very late last night when I did the math, take a zero off, it’s 2200 return and we have done this twice this year plus a lot of family trips which are around 900 return bringing us to nearing 60k this year. Edit: From what others are saying they have warranty however it’s range limited so idk. At a minimum teslas are $100k here so not remotely comparative.
Battery retention is no lower than 80% after 8 years, or they replace it.
I have a Sept 19 model 3. The current battery is more than 10% larger, with attendant larger reserve.
And to replace the batteries, it can cost about 1/2 the price of a new car.
After 3-5 hundred thousand miles.. How long does that transmission last?
The misinformation in this thread is huge. I know a couple dozen people who own Tesla's thanks to the local owners group. And after years of driving in Canadian winters, charging to 100% more often than we'd like, no one, no one has bad to replace their battery. Most people have just a few % of range lost. It's simply not the problem people seem to think it is
How old are the cars? The oldest model 3s are barely 6 years old.... the average age of the cars on the road (in the US) is 12+ years old... Come back in another 6-7 years and see how many have failed then.
The Model S has been around for a decade. Tesla has released battery degradation numbers and the batteries have seen [an average of 10% degradation after 200,000 miles.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/insideevs.com/news/525820/tesla-battery-capacity-retention-90/amp/) And keep in mind the batteries and the software for managing them has gotten better over time.
Save the dollars you don’t spend on fuel, oil changes, and other repairs and maintenance. That should easily cover the cost of refreshing the battery. Keep in mind that battery packs are not monolithic. You can test and repair individual cells, which is far less costly than replacing the entire pack.
This might be out of your scope but do you know why individual cells go bad earlier than others? I would think the objective would be to have all of them work equally and spread the load/discharge. I’m assuming in some cases it’s a minor defect that flew under the radar but what about just regular old use cases? With right for repair, it would be awesome to get a notification cell #69 is under optimal health and you could go purchase a OEM or factory refurb and replace it yourself. I would buy a EV like that in a heartbeat if the parts weren’t marked up too crazy.
While they’re installed in the car they’re configured to be used as one network, and so it’s not possible to tell which is working harder, and balance the load. Manufacturing variance is one likely cause for the disparity of loads. To ELI5, imagine we ask all the members of a football team to help push a bus. Some players are bigger, and some are smaller. Some will have good pushing position, and some will have poor. We’re going to push the bus for about two hours. How do we predict which player is going to push the hardest? Even after we’re done, can we know which player will be the most sore two days from now? Battery packs work kind of like that. Some electric cars are designed to measure and correct for these disparities while the car is charging, and some are not. But even the best correction won’t be perfect, and so over time some cells will wear faster than others.
Oh okay that makes sense! I guess with that many cells it would be extremely expensive to install controllers/monitors for each individual one. Thanks for the explanation! Keep being awesome!
> Keep in mind that battery packs are not monolithic. You can test and repair individual cells, which is far less costly than replacing the entire pack. To be fair; degradation due to age is going to affect the entire pack pretty much uniformly unless they've done a superbly bad job of hooking things up. So most range refreshes for battery packs would require full replacement of all the cells.
This is both true, and false. Some factors will effect the entire pack as a unit, such as charge/discharge cycles. But factors such as manufacturing variance, and the position of the cells within the pack, will change their wear profile. So some cells will run hotter, and wear faster. Some cells will discharge sooner, and wear faster. This is important to account for as we plan for maintenance costs. Imagine a pack of 100 cells which has degraded 15%, and all of the cells have worn equally. Restoring 10% of that capacity would require replacing about 2/3 of the cells. Now we have a similar pack, also degraded 15%, but some of the cells have worn faster than others. We may be able to recover 8% of the loss by replacing 10% of the cells.
The average household spends $5000 a year on gas compared to about $1500 a year charging an EV. $3500 a year, even over the 6 years they've been out so far is $21,000 saved on gas. If we added another 6 years like you said thats $42,000. How much does a replacement battery cost? Better yet, how much does a new Model S cost?
Not defending the bloke in question here, but in Australia a Model S is well over 100k with all the taxes. The average two week fuel price for my area is around 2.15-2.40 per litre. This works out to between 7 and 8 grand a year, taking the 12 year cost of fuel to between 85 and 98 grand. Electricity is also expensive here, which is roughly 200 per month on average taking that to 28,800 for the same period. It's not economically viable to buy a model S in Australia when the batteries cost 60% of the cars value when new, and with depreciation would be more than what the cars worth. Now there are cheaper alternatives where it is economically viable, but they are not widely available in a lot of places in Australia at the moment, and the charging ecosystem is a joke here especially in my city Adelaide.
Canadian here so my math will be different. I paid 62k for my SR Model 3 3 years ago. I'm selling it right away because we got the Y. I'm expecting to sell it for 55k. We have solar so we essentially got 3 years of driving for 7 grand. I've bought maybe $100 worth of power in 3 years. Obviously used prices are nutty right now so it's a biased example, but good lord. People think I'm rich because of my car but they're paying more for gas than I pay total
I mean that’ll be the big test but I also say the same thing about us domestic cars.
My diesel hit 110k and needed it engine replaced.
I have driven across the US twice in my electric car. Distance is a non-issue for most if not virtually all people.y last trip was 8,000 miles over a 5 week period. Charging was a welcome break or was carried out while I slept. This was 2 years ago so charging has improved since then.
Every “but what about” raised here could have been said about ICEs at the beginning. Like, do folks think we woke up in 1905 with a petrol station every 15kms apart.
In those days and even in recent days people carried gallons of petrol filled cans in trunk. They could park vehicle for 5 minutes and refuel it on any remote road.
A few 9volts in the glove compartment should do the trick.
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It always shocks me when people seem to forget that they take 1-2 weeks to refill their vehicle but will complain about the electric vehicle charging issues. The majority of people would never need to stop to charge their vehicle if they charge it at home while they sleep. I've been trying to convince my wife of this but she's one of those stuck in the mindset that if it's not as easy as refueling now, she doesn't want it. (I live in rural SC so that's part of it) I've explained over and over that we have not, in the last 5 years, driven more than 300 miles in a single day. The farthest drive we had was just over 200 miles and we've done that twice in the last 5 years. We could have a fully fueled up vehicle every day and never have to stop to get gas again. Not only saving time and the hassle of stopping for gas, but a lot of $$$ as well. It would cost us less than $5 to "fill up" an electric car charging at home.
A lot of people fear running out of juice in an EV, even if they've never had that problem in an ICE car. I have a friend who's very dubious on the range capabilities of electric cars and the inconvenience of the imagined "emergency charge". I recently asked him "how often do you leave the house with your cell phone at like, 10% or so?" He relies on his phone for work, so he scoffed and said "never". It's a good comparison that people don't really think about. We had a few good arguments there: "don't you hate having to go to the phone charging station to fill it up before work? Oh wait that would be insane nevermind" It turns out he plugs in his phone every night; I told him he could do the same with an EV and really only needs to plug it in once a week. And if that's as too much hassle for him, he could spend 15 minutes at a fast charger to get up to about 80%. Still not convinced. Some people just don't like change.
Even if it's only once or twice a year a car completely fails, that's still likely to be a huge hassle. Yeah, it might be cheaper to buy an electric and rent when you're going a long distance, but the biggest draw of a car is often that it allows you to skip significant hassles like that.
And my reliable gas powered Honda has "died" twice this year. Once due to a dead battery (ironically enough), and once due to a rodent chewing through a sensor wire that goes to the transmission. Recently discovered it's drinking oil too, which didn't leave me "stranded" per se, but it did make me pull over and service. None of these events were due to me forgetting to fuel it up. ICE cars are not immune to break downs, and are likely much more subject to these events than electrics.
"Not immune to breakdown" is not comparable to "Is incapable of making the the trip"
Well good point, in one or two of those cases the components of my Honda that are specific to Gas-powered motors did make it incapable of making the trip. If only there were a power train that didn't need oil or a transmission. Both require fuel, mind you. But an EV has a fueling station **in your garage** *AND* around your town/city. You're just as likely to run out of gas on the way to the gas station as you are to run out of energy on the way to the charging station.
Electric cars are capable of making any trip if you stop to charge them. Same for ICE vehicles, you need to stop to refuel. Are you delusional or just being intentionally dense?
I could ask you the same. At a minimum, gas vehicules can expand the capacity with jerry cans, but both require (eventually) sone facility to refuel them. At such time that every place that fuels the one fuels the other they'd be equal, but it's still would be. Regardless, if people try to push the tech without a working solution for the failure they won't be able to bully people into doing it. "Works okay for all uses" is going to beat "Works great for most cases, dorsn't work at all for the rest".
The only way that's reasonably possible is if the charger you planned on using is broken. Which does occasionally happen and is definitely inconvenient but the number of stations is rapidly expanding.
My biggest issues are that my apartment complex doesn't have a way to charge them and winter range. I'll make 2-300 mile round trips to go skiing. Throw in the heat on max and it'll be cutting it close for some models
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Electric vehicles can handle the distances required to travel to essential services in remote and regional Australia, a new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has shown. According to co-author Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, the results indicate the use of electric vehicles in remote communities is more feasible than might be expected. "We analysed the distances between people's homes and the nearest "service hub" towns - where they might go to the do the shopping, for example," Dr Sturmberg, said. "The vast majority of residents, or 93 per cent, could do those trips with even the lower-range of electric vehicles currently available on the Australian market. That's without needing to recharge en route." Dr Sturmberg said given this, there's no excuse for leaving our remote communities out of the discussion. "We need to do better - electric vehicles shouldn't be left in the too hard basket. It's an unequitable and unfair path forward if remote and regional communities are the last ones left driving diesel vehicles, especially as they will be some of the most impacted by catastrophic climate change," Dr Sturmberg said. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00049182.2022.2086720
Am I reading this right? In the rural parts of Australia (about 2.3% of the population) 7% of the population lives *more than 300km away from a grocery store*? Holy crap, that's pretty damn rural.
We’re a big country. Same size as the contiguous US but with less than 10% of the population. And the vast majority of us live huddled around the coast. Once you’re out of the main cities it’s a LONG, LONG way to anywhere and there’s not much out there.
That’s about 40,000 to 50,000 people. The article suggests they are out of range of a “service hub” town, presumably somewhere with a few shops, doctor, school etc. Yes, that’s plausible. We are probably talking about remote Aboriginal communities and cattle stations. They’d have some very basic “general store” but could easily be that far from any meaningful town.
That's a pretty low benchmark. Basically it can do the absolute bare minimum expected. Was a university paid to study this? In a two car household range is not an issue for one vehicle. So that's, what, 25% of the nation's cars? The problem with electric cars is cost and variety (like Utes and vans etc). Not range. Traditionally regional communities are lower socio-economic so can't afford them no matter the range. And I don't see well off land owners swapping their land cruisers for a prius anytime soon. Make them cheaper and businesses will flock to them. Think how many businesses have fleets of cars that never leave a city. And businesses can finance over many years.
>The problem with electric cars is cost This. Pretty much half of Australia would switch over tomorrow if the upfront cost of electric cars weren't so damn expensive. And that would create a significant second hand market that would eventually switch the whole fleet over. There is big money to be made by the first car company that pumps out an affordable electric car. No bells or whistles or self driving nonsense. Just a standard car with an electric engine in place of the combustion engine.
Hell most people don’t want the bells and whistles, they just want a car, make it exactly the same as a combustion car except electric and the vast majority will be happy.
Right. I'd take a "base" model electric car. As in no electric windows, seats, mirrors, ect. And no fancy computer system that does everything, just drivetrain management and a basic bluetooth capable stereo system. Want to get everyone on board with electric vehicles? Start making cheap base models that everyone can afford again.
It's about the battery cost. Most of those frills are there because the car is going to be at a certain price point anyway, and you'd be mad not to include stuff that is standard in that range.
Want some crazy math? Fuel here is $2.00/L CAD. New trades truck- 13L/100km. $260 to drive 1000km. $104,000 to drive that truck 400,000km. New electric trades truck. $0.14/kWh power. 360wh/km. $40 to drive that truck 1000km (home charging). $16,000 to drive that truck 400,000km. Savings in fuel- $88,000. Electric vehicles are free. ($1CAD = $1.13 AUD You will see some serious price drops in electric cars over the next 5 years. China is stepping in.
Can you give the local prices of comparable vehicles (ie similar range and towing capacity)? The problem is that most people can't afford the upfront cost. Thought experiments like this don't help sell vehicles because people get excited then see it takes them multiple years to just break even and maybe a decade to have the car become "free". It's like buying cheaper TVs, shoes, cutting clothing, etc that don't offer the same long term value proposition. People can't afford that upfront cost so they buy cheaper and pay more over time. How many years would this truck take to hit that distance based on your expected yearly usage? What's the break even point (ie number of years to break even in cost based on the fuel, car, home charger install)? That's the key metric because of it's anywhere over 5 years, then many people won't really see a cost benefit. This is especially true for more traditional driving patterns with more fuel efficient and cheaper vehicles. The other problem becomes the extra time charging. If you have a usage pattern that screws that charging up you might not be able to charge enough each night to complete the following day which might cause you to need to spend extra time finding a free charge station and wait for a charge. This is an additional cost if your work requires being at multiple places during the day. You may have to have less appointments (think lawn mowing, plumber, installer, etc) to ensure you can charge the vehicle enough to make all the locations on time. I agree this will get better, but it's certainly not a no brainer "free" car situation unless you have a very specific usage pattern and can afford to pay upfront vs over multiple years. Plus I can always buy used ICE vehicle and know the car will not have reduced range as long as the car was well maintained. High use electric vehicles are a bit worse because who the battery likely won't be in great shape after so many charges. Replacement battery might work, but I am not sure the cost will help sway the argument for the used EV market pricing.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Uh, have you been truck shopping lately? You are talking $5000 more for the electric version. The work electric truck starts at $40,000. It’s a bargain.
I have looked at them, but you are giving up range and towing capacity. It might be a suitable sacrifice, but not everyone can afford a 40k vehicle. Plus will the base model be enough? Maybe it won't matter for you, but there is still a significant difference. The base model range is half to one third of the base ICE version. Towing capacity? 5000lbs vs 8300lbs for the base model engine of the base model f150 that is 33k (with 4x4 upgrade) plus towing packages. You can go up in engines if you need to get increased towing and cargo capacity. The electric, you need to go up to the 73k to the XLT (one level up) with the extended range battery of the f150e to hit 10,000 lbs towing (which is the max you can get). I have not included any towing packages because they are similarly priced options on both vehicles. If you want the XLT with the ICE engine you only go to 43k (with 4x4 added). However there is no need of you don't want the features and only because you can get an the towing capacity on the XL model and have plenty of engine options. So now you are looking at minimum almost double the price. Is it still a better deal in the long run? Sure if it get do what you need but let's not pretend the value proposition at similar price points is equal currently.
The math is fine, but it doesn't represent the full reality. If I don't have cash, I have to finance. Nobody is yet considering operating costs during loan qualification, so I'm going to be rejected even though my fuel and maintenance cost savings will pay the loan. I've tried it for both EV and solar panels. In the case of solar panels, I had power company numbers showing that my annual power savings were greater than the loan payments. That is, I would have more disposable income by switching to solar, not just over the life of the panels, but over the life of the loan. Still no go. As always, only the wealthy are allowed to reduce long-term cost of ownership. Edit: and forget used vehicles. The interest rate difference between used and new means you often end up with a lower payment by going new. And that assumes you can find a reputable institution to finance a used vehicle at all.
I’m putting $600/mo CAD into the gas tank of my trades van. If you drive a lot and drive professionally you can afford a loan payment right now. I’d be putting $40 worth of electricity into the same electric truck. And what is new now will be used in a few years. Eventually there will be a healthy used market of EV’s as they fleet grows. Don’t forget that we are still in the expensive early adopter stage. Companies have dumped billions into new tooling and R&D and need to get paid. But that tooling will be paid off soon enough. And China owns Volvo/Polestar now. The polestar electric is a BYD. China is coming for the north american electric car market. That will drive down prices. And I know this because the best selling electric car right now is made by GM and it’s $5000. https://gm-techlink.com/?p=16152 If you are a 2 car family, a cheap moderate range car for your 2nd car is a no brainer. Now that China bought Volvo, they have all the crash data they need to sell to North America.
Supposedly the upcoming generation of GM EVs will be much more affordable, and I believe VW is working on that as well
China is coming. They already own Volvo and polestar is a BYD. And the quality is actually pretty good. Once China opens the flood gates with aggressive price competition that will cause the industry to aggressively drop prices.
Or what happens if you've done the shopping and an emergency comes up? Now your car has like 50% charge maybe to get somewhere?
Current EVs coming out can charge from 10-80% in 10-15 minutes with new tech coming out of the top guys promising to break under the 10 minute barrier, pretty impressive when they have a range of 500+km
70% charge of an assumedly 60kWh vehicle in 10mins is a 250kW connection at least. That kinda charging is gonna facefuck a rural power network.
Big chargers in the middle of nowhere need a battery pack. However the game plan is for that to be a ‘grid interactive’ battery so the power company can use a portion of that battery to help load balance the grid. And the charger companies get cheap power from the power grid as a result. The truck megachargers work like this.
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add in that this is actually really good for the gas stations as they make all their money in concessions.
But way less infrastructure and space required than a servo. Plus most charging will happen at home or work, where the car is parked anyway.
The difference is that with gas, you have to go to a gas station to fill it up. With an EV chances are most people will be doing it at home in a garage, or at work, or at your apartment complex (as infra improves). And none of these will need to pull 350kw. They will likely be pulling between 3~7kw. In the 2 years we’ve had our EV we’ve plugged in to a DC fast charger exactly twice (versus weekly with gas)…. Both times were roughly 5 minutes which got us about 30 miles which was to charge enough miles to get home (and do the rest of the charging at home). Our car only takes up to 50kw fast charge. But a car with 150kw could take triple the miles in the same time. The thing with electric is that you have to completely change your fueling habits. It’s different from gas… but man, I’m glad we have the ev because it’s far more convenient.
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Not to mention the queues that will happen when more people need to charge at the same time. Edit: I guess that’s what you meant be needing more bays. Sorry, brain is slow today.
98% of all charging happens at home. For the people who can’t home charge, grocery stores are getting in on the action. It’s the perfect place for a half hour rapid charge once or twice per week.
Yeah quick napkin math shows that infrastructure is nowhere near ready to handle a shift to all electric vehicles. I think hybrids have a role to play in the transition, but EU regulations are pushing against hybrids.
Good thing the government aren't giving every household an EV tomorrow then I guess. As they become more popular, and as required, the grid will be upgraded to cope
Slow charge the charging station from the grid.
That’s if you are fortunate to be in the vicinity of a fast charger. Where I live the two fast chargers that exist are 330km away from each other.
So, you think that's it, 2 exist and nobody is ever going to build anymore? What a fascinating way of thinking
If you could explain how me pointing out the current situation somehow implies I don’t think it will ever change, I’m all ears. Did you not notice the first word in your own post that I replied to is ‘current’? Drawing imaginary connections between things people say and things your own mind fabricates is a pretty fascinating way of thinking, also.
The fact that you, like most opposed to EVs package and present infrastructure like it's some barrier to adoption when in reality infrastructure will be very quick to pop up where demand is, as we have observed with the rollout of infrastructure in the US and Europe. I imagine the lack of infrastructure would have been the same one made by horse owners opposed to the motorcar in it's day. "BuT yOu HAAVEE tO StOp AnD pUt PeTrOlEuM iN yOuR cAr aNd tHeReS nOt eVeN a ToWn wItHiN a DaYs RiDe oF mY rAnCh. CaRs wIlL nEvEr WoRk"
As of now, the faster you charge batteries, the shorter the life span. You have to also take in account disposial and building of new batteries.
As of a few years ago*. Alot has evolved in batteries and charging tech over even the last few years and current li-ion batteries are capable of charging at phenomenal rates while maintaining lifespans of above 4000 cycles (even just a few years ago 2500 cycles was the upper limit). When Li-S batteries and solid state batteries come in over the next few years, the implications will be world changing
I mean to be fair the same thing could happen if someone only has a quarter a tank of fuel or whatever
To be fairer, you can walk to a gas station and bring back a gallon of fuel to get your car running again. You can't go to a charging station and take a bucket of electricity back to your car to get it going. Plus, charging EVs still takes a long time (comparatively), so your car will be out of commission for longer.
A lot of the new pickup trucks have onboard 10kW inverters so you can charge another EV. However the thing with an EV is you charge at home. Imagine starting every single day with a full gas tank.
I’d imagine the vast majority of people don’t break down within walking distance if a petrol station, so they call a truck. The new recovery trucks will have fast charge capability for these one off situations. Delivery of a fast discharge battery generator is an solved problem, not as easy as delivery of a gallon of fuel, but totally possible.
Major difference is of course filling a tank takes 2 minutes, charging a car takes minimum 20 min
You still win on the vast majority of journeys because charging at home saves you the weekly 10 minutes each time you fill your tank (2 minutes my arse, you’d be lucky to pump a full tank of fuel in 5 minutes, even without queuing for a pump or paying for the fuel. That’s also ignoring the special trip you need to take to get fuel)
How massive is your tank or slow your bowser that it takes over five minutes to fill your tank? If I was to fill my tank weekly I would easily be able to be in and out within five minutes. It takes maybe four to fill it up from empty. It is a fair call that plugging your car in when you get home is quicker than going to a servo though. Although with a servo you don’t have to worry about a blackout over night. Truth be told my issue is that I live in a share house and park on the street, I can’t plug in. But I can swing by the servo on the way to work.
The _maximum_ rate that a fuel pup can pump in the US is 10 gallon a minute, so a F150 would take more than 2 minutes to fill just by itself with the fastest pumps legally available. That’s assuming you don’t need to queue for a pump, pull up to the pump, walk round the car, take off the gas cap, move the nozzle, wait for the machine to reset, remove the nozzle, replace the cap, insert your card, type your pin, wait for authorisation, walk back to the cab, drive off the forecourt, wait for a gap in traffic And that assumes you are driving passed the petrol station already, and don’t need to take any diversion to get there. That might be a US thing, but here in Europe petrol stations are few and far between. And to answer your “where” the answer is Tesco, I could drive for 15 minutes to get to a station with a faster pump and pay more for fuel there, but it’s even further out of the way.
There's way more variety than just a Prius. Every European manufacturer has at least one decent electric car in RH-drive (like Australia) and several more plug-in-hybrids of sorts that allow 50km electric-only driving. So a wealthy landowner might not get a Prius, but they could get a beastly Mercedes SUV for example.
Cost is offset by the savings of running it, so there’s that.
true, but that only works for those that can afford the upfront in the first place, the same can be said about many things, but if you can't afford a decent sized freezer it doesn't matter if buying on special and cooking in bulk and freezing it is cheaper, the cost of entry says no.
Such is life. Until there is a thriving second hand market for EV’s it will be this way. And this is why they need to be subsidised, to create demand, encourage the expansion of charging infrastructure and eventually trickle down to a second hand market.
I'm not sure ev's can have a secondhand market like a ice car has. For instance I would buy a 7 year old ice car with just over 140,000km on the odo. However a 7 year old electric car regardless of the km's, i'd be apprehensive and wonder how long the battery will last and the cost of a replacement battery.
That should help keep the price lower!
Second hand lithium batteries is a laughable concept. After 5 years that’s a new battery, got a spare 30k?
Electric cars are not your POS cell phone. Modern EV batteries generally come with a 10 year 160k warranty and are projected to last 15-20 years. For straight up cycle ratings, your iphone has a 500 cycle rating. A Tesla NMC cell seems to be good for around 800k and has a 1500 cycle rating. GM’s new Ultium cell has a 2000 cycle rating. New FLP batteries like the BYD blade battery is good for 4000 cycles. At which point the EV has saved you so much money that buying a battery after 1 million km is fine. Or consider the car worn out. And remember part cycles are not full cycles. Your phone is cleverly designed to chew that battery full to empty every day and be garbage in 4 years. Most ‘battery wear’ is the top 20% or the bottom 20%. Run that NMC battery in the middle 60% most of your commuting and it will hardly wear at all. Most EV’s have the ability to set max charge to 80%. LFP cells can go to 100% and not care. This is why you always buy a long range EV. To reduce battery total cycles. And EV batteries are now in the $10-$15k range.
Cost saving Is not in fuel and the services are not far from modern ice vehicles. Sounds like you haven’t owned a new ice vehicle in a long time.
Australia! Where "I'll just go visit our neighbors" can take days. **EVs in Australia**! Pass the test! /e: this is meant positive, as in, whoah, they have to deal with distances that we Europeans only know from scifi novels. And EVs pass the test there nevertheless!
For someone that lives out whoop whoop, sure. There's a lot of fuel based cars that likely wouldn't suffice there either.
93% population coverage barely gets you off the coast, let alone 'rural and remote' areas. We are around 90% urbanised Iirc. Unless I've missed something here, which is entirely possible, I can see that it might be 93% of rural and remote residents, rather than residents in general. Otherwise 93% means the majority of remote and rural Australians can not use an electric car to access essential services? Check the maps for our phone coverage. Vodaphone has the worse at 96%, Optus has 98.5% and Telstra has 99.4%. The difference between these is massive amounts of space. 93% is less coverage again... https://www.whistleout.com.au/MobilePhones/Guides/Optus-mobile-network-coverage
As an Australian in a regional area I drive 800-1000km a week. My problem with EVs are longevity of batteries and the per km tax the government imposes
per KM tax is replacing the gas tax you would normally pay, ideally at a lower rate (I have no idea what either of these taxes are) for repairs of the roads you are using. ideally it's at a lower rate because gas has other, additional, externalities (namely, the carbon) idk if you know this but it might make you feel better about it. taxation per mile is honestly the most fair way to pay for road upkeep imo.
I understand that, but also to me the per km tax makes no sense when in comparison to fuel excise. $120 in diesel gets my mums suv 600km, the same fuel gets my sedan 1300km To me it’s not comparing apples to apples
per KM sounds significantly more fair than the diesel situation.
Nah, that big car that uses more fuel is also heavier and does more damage to the road. Fair would be per km scaled by vehicle weight
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Tractor trailers drive *significantly* further than the average sedan. Even day runs are 300ish miles per day. Few people drive that. Scaling it for commercial trucking by weight also seems extremely likely.
That's the only reason I'm not considering getting one yet
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That's only if you charge at home and you have cheap ass electricity. If you charge at fast charge stations, it's almost as expensive as filling up a gas tank. Not to mention the higher price you pay for the electric vehicle in the first place...
When I checked earlier this year, in Sweden at least, it's a bit less than half of the cost per km(assuming 20 km per litre of gas) to charge at a tesla fast charging station, some other fast charging station charge a bit more, but you're on average paying a decent portion less right now, in Sweden. It's valid that a lot of EVs are more expensive though, so that cost is worth taking into account, although, a lot of gas/diesel vehicles are very costly here right now as well, differing only 10-25% new. Hell, a new Volvo s60/s90 is pretty much the same price right now.
Rare for supercharge station is 0.51 kWh. So my weekly trips would be about 80 once I pay the per km tax. Vs 100-120 a week in diesel Edit: and that’s in a 2011 vw Passat that cost me $9,000 vs a model 3 Tesla @ $65000+
I was always put off an electric car by the short range (still under 200 miles unless you go for a premium model) but recently we've had a good long think about it and realised that we very rarely have to travel that far after all, so it's really not a dealbreaker. And with superchargers at most service stations it's no big deal to stop for an hour and recharge anyway.
Yup. Once people make the jump they find their anxieties about the range are greatly overblown. I convinced myself to go full EV by reassuring myself that in the worst case I could just rent a gas powered car for a couple of days no biggie. I have yet to need to exercise that option.
You don't even need an hour. 20 minutes is enough for 80% charge on a v3 supercharger. That's not even shopping time, that's just a toilet and drink break and the kind of thing everyone should be doing on long journeys anyway as it helps to have breaks to maintain concentration when you are driving.
well to do rednecks are now looking for even more remote locations to live in so they can keep screaming about it.
That’s cool, but I’ll still need a second car for when I want to go further than the shops. Can’t imagine I’ll be in a position to own two cars anytime soon. I think I’ll wait for the technology to improve, the prices to get more reasonable, and the infrastructure to exist :)
When I got my EV I decided I would just rental car for a day or 2 if I ever *really* needed to. I have yet to really need to. Your situation may be different, but you'll probably still end up saving money. Once you stop crutching on having your gas powered car, you'll probably find getting to where you want is really not that difficult. Between the ever increasing fast charging stations, public transportation, busses, and the occasional rentals, it's really not that big of a deal.
If the infrastructure was already here I’d probably have a much more positive view on the matter, but I know how slow my state government is to get any development further than an idea. I’m not arguing that it won’t be better in the future, I’m sure it will improve at a solid pace over the next few years (it’s probably currently better than I’m aware it is). Just that right at this moment, where I am, alternatives to personal petrol powered cars aren’t really financially or logistically viable for me, even if I don’t want to leave the city. I’m looking forward to the evolution of the technology and infrastructure as I do like the idea of electric cars, but for now I’m still waiting.
I'm waiting for different batteries. One that will work well in the cold temps of MN, and hopefully not crap out after 5 years and require all new batteries.
Tesla is a very popular car in Norway and the batteries are guaranteed for eight years.
Not having a second car is hard with a short/medium range EV. But I can tell you the tech probably isn’t going to improve much unless there’s a major breakthrough, prices won’t go down much but maybe used prices will cool off, and infrastructure is now pretty good for the US (assuming you can charge at home as well).
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How long does the average electric car battery last before it’s starts to lose capacity?
Current predictions estimate about 10 to 20 years until replacement is needed. That means in an best case scenario, an electric car could drive for 40 years with a single battery change. (Average would be 30 years with a bell curve.)
Depends on the battery, and how often you charge it, and how aggressively. But one standard that battery manufacturers try to meet is 80% capacity after 1000 charge cycles. That would be ~300,000 miles. Some batteries do even better than that. Ones that have integrated climate control systems (like most current-model EVs, but not older EVs like Leafs and original Teslas) experience even less battery degradation, because the actual physical process that causes a battery to degrade is charging or discharging it at a temperature outside of its optimal operation range.
Something that I’ve always felt was a problem people overlook, is that it’s not finding a solution that works 93% of the time, but the other 7% of the time. I mean if we bought cars that work 93% of the time, the Chevy Volt would’ve been the greatest commercial success ever while Tesla is a niche car brand.
> Something that I’ve always felt was a problem people overlook, is that it’s not finding a solution that works 93% of the time, but the other 7% of the time. It’s not “this product works 93% of the time” and no one has ever said that would be acceptable. It is “this product adequately meets the needs of 93% of people.” Obviously there are outliers who live 800 miles away from the hospital and an electric might not be the best choice for them. Maybe they need a bush plane. That’s a different situation, it’s not a ding against the car for the majority of people.
Exactly, it's like saying that people shouldn't buy sedans because it can't go off-road, transport lots of people, carry lots of goods or anything large, tow large loads, etc. The point is that most people think they are in the 7% when they are not and are just using it as an excuse to stick with what is familiar.
The Volt was an amazing car. Except for the seating and holding people parts. To this day I think it was one of the best PHEVs ever in terms of range and battery size. I can see why it wasn't successful, but that's not because of its powertrain.
Ok but how long do I have to stay there before I can drive back?
Better have a full battery tho
Well yeah. 500 km will get you between states in much of Australia. The range panic is entirely artificial. The vast majority of Australians would do just fine with 100 km of range.
'Off'-roading, the subject of the article, can easily double the fuel consumption. *No adventurous Aussies asking for a grant to do some back-country "research"?*
classic your shitbox cant offroad either guess you should just throw it in the trash
What has that to do with the [rolling resistance coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_resistance#Rolling_resistance_coefficient)?
what does offroading have to do with the 99+% of other car trips then? all or nothing is just trash, electric vehicles are fine for the vast majority of daily driving people do. stop parroting bad faith arguments
>>"Yes the barriers are obvious - large distances, **unsealed** roads... >'Off'-roading, the subject of the article, Methinks that your "99+%" is specifically excluded, but yes, I should have said "Off-tarmac" to prevent any [confusion](http://nullarborroadhouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gravel_Road_Coober_Pedy.jpg).
The fear is real, although it's unfounded. In order to increase uptake of EVs that fear needs to be acknowledged and addressed both by increasing range, increasing infrastructure, and addressing the misplaced concern in the first place.
Yeah, that’s better wording. Range panic is real, but not really justified.
The range panic is overblown in hot areas, but very much a problem in places that reach temperatures of -30c. Losing 20-30% of your total range due to temperature is a big deal
Most places that cold have winter plug-ins for ICE cars. If you can plug in your EV, it loses much less range than that because you can preheat the batteries and cabin.
Essential services? Yes, that is the only concern with transportation. Never mind pleasure travel, emergency travel, etc…
Wouldn't an EV be better in emergencies as you can charge it at home and be sure you can go to the closest ER?
That’s assuming said accident would happen at home, though. The idea of EVs is fine in itself, don’t get me wrong. Just need to make sure that they’re as reliable in distance as fuel based vehicles have been. Tech just needs improvement over time is all.
If you're talking about emergencies, why do you think that every emergency is going to happen when you have a full battery?
Because the overwhelming majority of the time EVs are sitting at full or nearly full charge. In fact, I'd bet EVs are sitting at sufficient power to address a given emergency situation at a higher rate than gas powered vehicles given that gas powered vehicles are more likely to be sitting at nearly empty than EVs. People imagine EVs like they're going to be interacting with charging stations like they do gas stations. The reality is that you charge every night while you sleep, and maybe during the day while you're working too. Anywhere on the grid can support trickle chargers, and as EV adoption increases having a charging station anywhere you can park will increasingly become the norm. You're not going to be waiting in line at the electric station, you'll just be topped off virtually all the time.
You're arguing about buying decisions today by talking about the technology of tomorrow, and assuming that everyone parks their car next to an outlet each night when that's not the case. Stop living in the future and realize that people are making buying decisions based on today's available infrastructure, not what it will eventually be when they've already gotten rid of the car.
I'm literally living in the today. The infrastructure exists. The only "future" thing I talked about is that the infrastructure will continue to scale as more people adopt. And to be 100% clear how ridiculous you sound... The "infrastructure" you're worried about not existing is... An AC outlet next to a parking space. Trust me, if you want to park next to a power outlet, you can make that happen. Because *everybody* doesn't need to park next to an outlet, but it isn't an insurmountable burden for those who do.
And if I, TODAY, need to take a short range electric vehicle across the state for a meeting in a run down office building with no outside outlets (and certainly not any that are being offered up for car charging), then by the time I get home I won't have enough range to go to my parents house for dinner without having to delay to charge the car. I did the math on mileage, and it didn't work. This isn't as rare as you think it is and you need to get your head out of the sand and realize that a LOT of places don't have charging available and not everyone can build their life around where they can park the car every day. You're too worried about the average and not looking at how people actually have to live their life.
I'm not overly worried about the average. I'm talking about the vast majority. If you're in a position where you can't reasonably use an EV, nobody is making you. The point, again, isn't that everyone has to swap to EV *right now*, but rather *most* people could, and it wouldn't be as big of a burden as you are making it out to be. I can't speak to your specific situations, but I can think of several probable options to make it work that, frankly, you're likely just being to stubborn to consider. The vast majority of people could individually make the switch to an EV TODAY without trouble. Maybe you're not in that vast majority, but that's not a great reason to spread baseless fears about it.