This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week!
Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news? Are they from another planet where electricity delivery is not a problem that architects have to deal with in building design?
Mind you, I got the exact same dumbfounded stare from people when talking to cafe managers and gym owners about the impending COVID lockdowns back in February 2020: "Lock...down...? You think so? Really? Here?" (Don't think IT is spared from this, I get the same vacant expression when I talk to network engineers about IPv4 exhaustion and the need for IPv6.)
On a more practical note, I have business idea that might interest the YC News crowd: The main problem raised by building managers I spoke to was that it was "too hard" to solve charge-back and the like. Wiring is "easy", that's just a matter of calling out contractor, but organising the billing of the tenant and then splitting the revenue between the various parties involved is more work for them than it is worth, because it is complex to set up but initially there may be only a couple of electric cars generating very little revenue. An "electric charging billing" cloud service that manages everything with low overheads might sell well...
Apartment managers will be dragged kicking and screaming into offering chargers for cars. The best way to get chargers into apartment buildings is going to be a local mandate that they have a charger per X units.
The answer to retro installs (which is always about money anyway) is to not force the hand of property owners, but make the install cost a no brainer with tax rebates and subsidies. Regulation in this regard would just cause negative effects I think, IF it ever passed a public vote (Cali maybe, but not much of the rest of the country).
The exception that definitely proves the rule. Until it's mandatory in new construction it won't even start to become normal.
I'm curious how street parking is supposed to work, that photo is hilarious but I imagine that on the streets of Boston where you'll get hit with a bat over trying to save a parking spot (or trying to use a saved parking spot, it's Boston in the winter).
I have the feeling you're going to see better adoption in suburbs and lower density urban areas first because the range doesn't need to be so high but it's also not impossible to have a consistent parking space (or garage or driveway) that you can invest in improving. I'd probably have to get a special variance from the city to install an outlet in the sidewalk...
https://up.codes/viewer/california/ca-green-code-2016/chapte...
I think the requirements should be higher, but this is a start.
A staggering amount of buildings are also NOT built to code. My smoke detector failed and isn't getting replaced for a whole week. My heater makes scraping noises every time it starts and maintainence thinks it's normal. Smack in the middle of Silicon Valley.
But this is the best of what I could afford. It's decent. It's clean. Everything else I saw at my budget was worse. One apartment I saw was $2400 for a 1-bedroom and had the toilet paper holder was bolted to the wall right above a red hot heating element recessed in the wall with a grill. Needless to say I didn't rent there.
Want an apartment that is built to code? It'll cost you $3000 or more.
This is an easy problem to solve.
Here in The Netherlands, we get charged about 0.33 euro per kWh (= 0.40 US$), and that's for overnight charging of cars, where you typically draw no more than 11 kW.
The construction industry is brutally competiive and cost-centric; things are included because they are required or because of customer demand, almost never just because they are a good idea.
Construction companies (on average) don't look further than the point of sale. It doesn't matter if a poorly chosen element of design in an apartment building will potentially affect thousands of people over the course of decades, the incentive/risk structure just doesn't exist to make forward thinking decisions.
Its basically got to be in the building code or (almost) no one will do it.
On the other hand if EVs gets serious mass adoption outside of Scandinavia, I bet upgradeability of building infrastructure will become a topic and companies will make money by selling some sort of upgrade solution for properties.
Neither the architect, nor the developer, nor the landlord are the beneficiaries of charger infrastructure. They aren't going to spend money on it until they absolutely have to.
Given the decade of record-low vacancy rates in coastal metros, if a lack of an electric charger is a deal-breaker for you, they will shrug their shoulders, and move on to the next applicant. To them, you are the product, not the customer - the customer is the bank that underwrites their loans, that they use to buy/build more properties, backed by cashflow from tenants.
They certainly aren't going to put dollars down today, to meet demand that will come a decade from now. The entire business model of being a residential landlord is spending every penny you have on acquiring more property to lease - not making long-term investments into existing property.
If you're looking for someone to blame, blame cheap availability of credit, or your local municipality for not updating their building codes to require electric chargers [1].
[1] The reason they haven't updated their building codes is because in my experience, 8 times out of 10, municipal politics is completely dominated by landlords and developers. Those groups of people are the most affected by municipal law, so they have a huge vested interest in making sure government is looking out for their financial interests.
They do read the news, but there's still plenty of news that EV is still largely powered by coal and also something about lithium mining (while never ever talking about other minig issues, particularly oil), therefore we should use hydrogen (which will need more electricity, but we skip over that) or synthetic fuels (which will need crazy amounts of electricity, but we won't mention that) and that'll be the future.
Of course you can read the other news, the ones that correctly point out that between EV, hydrogen and synfuels EV has the vast advantage of being much more efficient, and that will never change, because physics. But you can pick and choose your news, and if you would prefer the news that tell you nothing changes you may just decide to trust those.
There is legislation on your side in California now. It's even called "right to charge!"
They'll figure it out when start losing leases.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Workplaces (if they come back) will get charging first. More chargers will be added to apartments, fast charging will improve.
It turned out that in the building there were owners of units with two cars but only one space that wanted to rent unused parking spots. I didn't do this but there were posting where condo owners could find people to pay for the right to use otherwise unused parking.
All this seems a bit off topic, but couldn't electric chargers be handled the same way. Pay for the cost of a charger to be installed in one's designated parking spot and "resell" the improvement to the next condo owner. One could even allow others to use the charger while being reimbursed for the electricity. Of course being the owner of a unit in a condo building isn't the same as leasing an apartment and dealing with a large company that owns the apartment building.
It would be nice if they offered to pay.
I reported them to the police, but I haven't heard about them fining them and they don't stop using it.
A neighbour used the parking space once and my landlord that was passing by reported her and she got a fine.
What I can't stand about the police here in UK is that it's so inconsistent.
Having a charger I get charged for would be an absolute nightmare.
I do think apartment parking will eventually be retrofitted. The charging networks could easily have a apartment product—or license their network access to a manufacturer. So you would just use your charging network app or card as when charging around town. There are also products like Evercharge that split the power from a single circuit across several plugged in cars (optimizing power usage and reducing the need for conduits and wiring).
The various EV promoters have been tackling this issue for a while, something like the Electric Auto Association may have people or resources to help convince an apartment owner.
I wonder: shouldn’t a grid with lots of solar incentivize workplace charging (day-time use of peak generation), and a grid with wind majority incentivize home charging (night-time use of peak generation)? Maybe
In the UK planning guidelines say that charging stations have to be provided, have done for a while
110. Within this context, applications for development should: ... (e) be designed to enable charging of plug-in and other ultra-low emission vehicles in safe, accessible and convenient locations.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-planning-policy-framewo...
Locally planning permissions in my area (I'm a local councillor and have to view them all) for new houses have come with power for some years
The larger problem we'll see as we move away from petrol based cars is people in old terraces that park on narrow streets. The options are
1) Remove parking space to put in chargers 2) Remove footpath to put in chargers (won't pass muster in my council area at the moment, fortunatly) 3) Not do anything until after new petrol cars are banned and hope that something magically comes along
chargepoint, blink, evgo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_network
My (US-based) experience:
- chargepoint is a good service - people own the chargers, but they can be public or private.
- blink is a terrible service - people own the chargers but in my experience the fast public ones are always broken.
- evgo is a good service - they own the chargers but will install high-kw fast chargers and slow chargers at every location.
> With a growing number of Tesla cars on the road, a Wall Connector can pay for itself over time. Property managers will soon be able to set the price of charging sessions while Tesla handles payments automatically and securely – with no monthly fees. [1]
This is a model similar to what chargepoint offers, though I suspect it will have lower fees as their main goal is to sell more cars.
* [1] https://www.tesla.com/commercial-charging
* https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/02/tesla-launching-commerc...
As long as there is a free market to buy/sell addresses, we'll never run out of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrgH07lwfVM
There are some large drawbacks with the large structure needed to swap the batteries though. Not sure if it'll be that successful in places where people mostly have single family homes.
But this is far from the norm, unfortunately.
It does not destroy the Earth. It rearranges the furniture. Drastically
As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them would charge - yet they all showed available).
I don't even bother with L2 stations as I'm never in a place long enough to get any meaningful charge out of one - and I'm not going to go out of my way to a location that has one.
With all that said, taking a long trip is out of the question for me.
Every app shows different chargers and different status on whether they're occupied or not. Most are broken anyway. Some are on hotel or supermarket grounds so they're accessible only to some people, and even in the same network might have a different price because the owner of the land asks for a cut (yes, that's a thing). Some are inside a parking lot so you pay the parking on top of the charging. Some are on a free parking spot for EVs so someone will park there all day. Some charge per KWh, per minute, or a combination, plus maybe another one time fee.
Chargers need to be as ubiquitous as gas stations, and provide an experience that's just as frictionless. Drive in, pick a plug and start fast charging, get a maximum allotted time to charge, then pay like you'd do in any store, or better yet have the car talk to the charger and handle this for you (ISO 15118) and be on your way. Alternatively, to take advantage of how different electricity is from gas and maybe also use those cars as electricity storage, governments could invest to put charging points on every street parking, in every streetlight, etc.
You've got the provider for the actual charger (a handful of different providers), which needs to negotiate with the car via CCS. This can fail in umpteen different ways, as car manufacturers differ on how they implement CCS (Dunno how, but it happens).
Then you've got the software in the charging point, which needs to be customised for the brand you're selling under (another moving part).
And lastly, you have the back end system for the brand, which handles authentication, authorization (RFID or App) and billing - this is the bit that ultimately gives the charger the go-ahead to start feeding power to the connected car.
Any of these fails, no electricity for you.
For 22kW "slow" chargers this is a bit simpler as the actual charger is a lot less complex, it doesn't need to negotiate, it just needs to switch one relay.
Tesla is like Apple in this case, they take care of the whole stack. So as long as the charger has power, it'll work. Authentication and authorization are done by having the car negotiate with the charger directly via the charging cable, no dongles or apps needed.
Other charging stations are mostly installed in mall parking lots and so on by government mandate. The owners of the parking lots pay to get them installed and maintained--they are the customers. And since they're (mostly) satisfying a government tick box, there's not nearly as much incentive to keep functioning.
That is in California, did around ~40-50 charging sessions.
I got free supercharging for ordering an early Model 3 and didn't expect to use it, but it has been a lifesaver during covid when I suddenly lost access to work charging.
That being said, I never got stranded and there was always a charger I could use. This was in metro Atlanta in 2017, the situation only got better since then.
I think you'll be in the minority.
If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reasonable expectation that employers will install a charger per employee, or that employees will gamble every day to see if there is a charger open at work.
An EV cannot be your single car given the 2 main constraints: 1. Slow charging (>>5') 2. Lack of charging networks
#2 can be fixed with investments. #1 needs a technological advance that is not clear that will be commercially available soon.
I did not mention cost at all in the above comment, which is maybe the biggest factor currently limiting adoption, but I assume that eventually economies of scale will aleviate this.
The price of electric cars currently is a problem though, but everything is pointing in the right direction.
I noticed this in Amsterdam. Over a year period (late 2018 - late 2020), the street-parking-charging-stations went from virtually non-existent to about 2-3 in a 1KM radius and increasing.
I guess it's logistically easier to build such a charging network compared to say gas stations. They take very little space, about a square foot and ~1.5 meter tall.
If the the street has lights on it, they can be used to deliver power to EV cars easily. Adding Type2 plugs and kWh meters to street lights is not a technical issue, it's a political thing of who gets the money and who pays for the up-front costs.
230V/8A per car with smart load balancing will charge 100km of charge overnight. Up that to 12 amps and you've covered the majority of Europeans' daily commute.
Won't work for the US though, your two hour commutes are Mad Max -levels of madness =)
At the dawn of the 20th century, the electric car was the most popular type of car after steam-powered. Their range was limited of course, but they had many features that were improvements over Gasoline-powered cars. So, how was it that many cities around the world used electric cars and trucks more than any other type? Two ways: 1) fleets where you could drop off one car and pick up another, and 2) an easily-replaceable battery. Just drive to a service station and replace the battery and get back on your way. At least one company providing these services operated for 14 years.
Funny how tech people always look for a tech solution, and business people look for a business solution.
This doesn’t seem right - why is power usage on my bill cheaper at night and usually marked as ‘off peak’ usage or similar?
I wonder what’s the dynamic with the chargers in Norway, as I assume if the demand is there the charging stations will pop up.
This is a good opportunity for government to step in and mandate that all electric charging points also have the option to pay by contactless/android/apple pay, for example. I don't mind if I pay a few pence more, but I do mind having to find a website on my phone and sign up then wait for a fob to be posted to me.
This sidesteps the issues with network effects. You don't have to worry about building a charging network before electric cars become widespread, because the Government is sending a clear signal of when that transition will happen.
Will anyone believe that though? Given the propensity of virtually all governments worldwide to do less than promised and the overwhelming amount of infrastructure still needed, I don't take this date seriously at all.
Does "everybody" matter in this case? The reality for the manufacturers is that they need designs, standard, deals, factories, production lines ready years before 2030 if the ban actually happens. So it's really a question whether they believe the plan, or are they ready to call the bluff and go out of business if they're wrong.
That's not so far off. Even large cities in North America have no more than a few dozen gas stations (and the UK likely fewer still due to things like London's congestion pricing reducing vehicle count). Once-a-week-or-so fueling doesn't really require a huge amount of infrastructure. That's one of the reasons we're all addicted to driving in the first place, after all.
And charging stations are, of course, absolutely dirt cheap to build relative to fuel stations. They'll keep up with demand easily as the driving stock expands. The limit, if there is one, is going to be the electrical distribution infrastructure. High voltage lines into cities aren't as cheap as we'd want.
Really? A normal gas station can handle around 100 cars per hour using a handful of pumps and is refueled by daily deliveries from a big truck. Simple. An electric charge point capable of that will require a massive amount of electricity, electricity delivered over wires. Look into how much it costs to run such a service to a random location in a city. Look at the costs of putting up even a handful of towers capable of delivering a thousand amps peak load. Then look the additional real estate costs need to facilitate 100 cars/hour worth of charging points. Electric 'stations' are very much not drop-in replacements. We need a very different physical infrastructure (ie smaller charge points at every parking spot rather than central stations).
(I don't think my point particularly rests on how the Detroit metro is defined; Detroit itself has 349 gas stations)
That's quite funny reading from my chair. I live in a small town in Scandinavia (~50.000 people in all of the county) and a quick count at Google maps show me that apparently there are more gas-stations here (14 in a 5km radius from me - 5 inside the city limits itself) than in "large cities in North America".
I have a 7kw charger at my house, but the loop for our street is 21kw, which is typical here. It’s going to be a big problem to solve when it comes to it.
I wouldn’t mind if I had to charge at 3.3kw, but if every car is an EV the current grid just isn’t going to be able to carry enough juice.
Gas fillups take a few minutes at most - meaning no long lines.
Once charges are close to that speed I think EVs will really take off.
So until charging becomes as ubiquitous to where the country store has "two pumps" or such people are going to find situations where it does not work or only works on a good day.
hence the reason I am an advocate of range, range, and more range. Range that lets you make big round trips without charging are the goal. I know many say "they don't need range" or whatnot and can use a short range city car, well that same rule applies to ICE but you will see the market for those small lower end lower range ICE cars was never great so why would an EV market of the same be different?
Soon even low 200 mile range BEVs will be looked at similar to how many look at the sub 150 crowd today; Mini should have been ashamed to release their car; and 250-350 will be the norm (numbers in miles, so KM is 400 to 560)
You're not wrong (and I too am a "garage orphan"—neither a garage or even a driveway), but there are some options being developed. The YT channel Fully Charged featured two a while back:
* Street lamps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaEhBjt1ls
* Pop-up charger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frkw6aurVUY
I'm a bit skeptical.
Also, parking is going to be overhauled anyway, after decades of cars occupying every nook and cranny, there's a strong push to free the streets.
I remember the light bulb rules at a national level had to be rolled back when there just wasn't enough capacity to replace them all with non incandescent options.
Thankfully I charge my car at home and that’s enough for me about 99% of the time. There’s a fairly reliable CHADEMO pretty close by regardless, which helps.
The infrastructure in the UK has been really neglected though. They pushed hard early on, but since then they just let the L2’s fail for months then it’s a coin toss as to whether they fix them or just decommission them.
You really don't have the concerns about long-haul trips impacting range. Obviously there are point-charging concerns etc, but that's something you can throw small money at to fix. You don't really need to convince consumers they won't be stranded in the mountains and freeze to death.
The biggest concern has always been charging infrastructure. EVs are great for people with garages, but not so much for the people in cities with no dedicated parking spot.
Banning ICEs is probably the best mechanism to get society to solve this problem. Otherwise, most city-dwellers will just sit back and continue to drive ICE cars waiting for someone else to solve the charging issue.
Even with chargers everywhere there will be a problem: we'll have to produce a lot more electricity. And when we start reading about possible blackouts in some countries in Europe due to environmental decisions 2030 feels like not far enough.
Solar and wind won't be enough. Nuclear suffers from NIMBY. So what? We'll produce electricity from oil, coal and gaz? Awesome way to move the emission problem. Same method as moving production and recycling to Asia and Africa.
Yes, it's still better because you can move the electricity production to another source, but you can't move the petrol production the same way. If it buys time, it's still an approach to a better future even if it's not immediate.
New cars (electric or not) are pretty expensive. The average price of a new car in the US just topped $40k, which is out of reach of many car buyers. The people who buy new obviously tend to be well-off, and are often older. Then at some point down the road, those cars end up in the hands of (on average) younger, less-wealthy folks.
But younger folks might not want the same thing as older folks. One niche example is the manual transmission. Looking at a car like the Mazda Miata - something like a third of those are sold new with an automatic transmission. The buyers (again, maybe older) don't want to bother shifting their own gears, so they pay an extra $1k or so for an automatic. But when those cars are affordable used cars, and the market is younger car enthusiasts, Miatas with an automatic transmission are worth quite a bit less. The preferences of the new $30k convertible buyers aren't the same as the preferences of the used $5k convertible buyers, even though those $30k cars eventually become the $5k cars.
With electric cars I wonder if we'll see a similar divide. I know a few people (software engineers who own their own single family homes) who have bought new electric cars. Folks I know from less wealthy walks of life (daycare providers, teachers, grad students, etc) have not bought used electric cars. Surely that's at least partially because used electric cars don't exist in great numbers, but I also wonder if those folks (people who rent, or move often, etc) might be less enamored with a car where they don't know they'll be able to charge it at home, or a depleted battery pack means less range or costly repair, etc.
I'm hoping for an electric future and I want my next car to be electric ... I'm just really curious to see if/when middle- and lower-class Americans start adopting these in large numbers.
This has actually stopped me from buying a used EV in the last year, twice. Dealers aren't up front about used cars history in general, and, again from just the two I looked at, they are 1000% hiding any information they can regarding the battery packs.
This is the largest hurdle to the used car market (after the shortage of used EV's because of their novelty). People hesitate to buy used combustion cars, because of unknown mechanical issues that may pop up; but this can be alleviated by using a trusted mechanic to once-over the car. They ABSOLUTELY hesitate to buy used EV's because of the battery packs, and who can you go to in order to evaluate that? Nobody.
>I'm just really curious to see if/when middle- and lower-class Americans start adopting these in large numbers.
When they have no choice. I'm in this boat - I work in education and my spouse works in education. We are solidly middle- to lower-middle class. We can't afford most new cars. Used cars are pricey anymore as well. The only way we will upgrade to an EV is if we can find a trustworthy used model, or when we have no choice, because gas is $10/gallon.
That said, I'd not hesitate to buy a Honda with over 100K miles on the clock. But the point is that checking the state of a singular point of most likely failure (battery) is many orders easier to check than the state of an ICE.
The first leaf we looked at was already down to 80%, but the second was in perfect condition at two years old, and is still in perfect condition at age six.
https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/Ke7gb/s3/leaf-state-of-cha...
When I was buying my leaf, every posting had a picture of the range readout fully charged.
Going down a bit of a rabbithole there, but I'm still curious to see what the perceived desirability of used electric cars turns out to be for "average" Americans.
Probably some sort of aggressive or responsive driving mode. I mean, the reason I go with MTs is because I love how responsive it is. I still giggle when I'm driving around at 4000 RPMs and punch the throttle to get that instant thrust. Even with manual shifting modes on automatics, it's not the same because the torque converters mute this responsiveness.
I've never driven a Tesla or anything, but I expect that they aren't so hyper-responsive under normal driving conditions because it would be pretty fatiguing to drive. Adding that back I think is must have for me to go full EV and not keep around a Miata or WRX for fun driving.
That said, if you get a chance to drive a Tesla or similar, try it out! I did a test drive and liked it more than I thought I would. To me, the throttle response felt immediate and direct, reminiscent of driving a manual-shift car in the correct gear. You're just ALWAYS in the correct gear!
That being said, I suspect I'll probably do the same as you and keep a fun, old-fashioned ICE roadster in the garage for the occasional spin.
Every car I've owned except for a $300 beater in college was manual transmission (including a modified WRX STi) and my Model 3 Performance is much more responsive to the "throttle" than any of them. The speed of electricity is much higher than fuel pumps and gasoline. And the regenerative braking does a pretty good imitation of a manual transmission's compression braking when you lift.
Here's a quote from Car & Driver's review of the 2018 Model 3 P (which has since been made faster through software):
"This Model 3 needed only 1.4 seconds to leap from 30 to 50 mph and just 2.0 seconds to get from 50 to 70. Never mind other sports sedans—they're not competitive by this measure. This Tesla's mid-range acceleration tops the performance of 700-hp sports cars like the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and Porsche 911 GT2 RS, in which there's a moment's delay while automatic transmissions downshift and engines rev up. And the Tesla does it without drama beyond the alarming way it pushes you back into the seat as the car closes on any traffic ahead. There's no jerk and no roar—plant your foot on the accelerator and it simply goes."
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a23685454/2018-tesla-mo...
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a23685454/2018-tesla-mo...
https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/corvette
Smaller displacement ICE don't keep up. The Corvette has a dual clutch automatic, so no torque converter.
The lower ongoing costs of electric can justify a higher upfront price, but then you are paying more up front.
But I wonder if it would be possible and cost effective to test cells and combine the cells that are still good into a newer battery pack. Maybe by the manufacturer.
Or to just rate an existing one and give it a score so the consumer can have a clue.
The 3rd party battery industry will catch up when cars get old enough to have battery issues.
On the other hand, according to recent studies, EV batteries don't really degrade that much over time. Leaf is the exception, because the battery temperature management was utter shit.
Plus batteries are getting dirt cheap. As in - TCO is less than your tyres.
I haven't found this stat to be particularly compelling. Other than indicating that buyers of new cars are willing to spend money on extra features.
There are tons of cars at much more affordable prices. They are across the board safer, more reliable, more fuel efficient, and last longer than pretty much any historical vehicles. In 2006, the average vehicle life expectancy was about 8 years, 150k miles. Now it's 12+ years, 200k+ miles.
I actually am seeing lots of used EVs here in Portland. Mostly Nissan Leafs. They are dirt cheap to buy and nearly free to operate (especially given their terrible range). If you have a commute under 20 miles, you can't do better than an EV that's 5+ years old.
It isn’t a problem; clean, efficient ICE vehicles are being sold by EV buyers and replacing older, dirtier cars in a cascade which is exactly what you want. Trickle-down, basically.
One might think this to be the case, but the breakdown of new car buyers shows about the same % of buyers make <50k as those who make >100k (roughly 1/3rd in each cohort, but varies based on vehicle type). Sadly, many of those buyers will take out out a 72-84mo loan that they probably can't afford in order to pay for that new car.
They're so expensive. And the dealer pushes the 84+ month loan to bring the payment down. Like, I get that it's a $450/month payment, and that's supposed to sound reasonable (it isn't reasonable, at 3/4 the cost of our mortgage). But it's for 8 years! There's no way this truck is going to last that long. Who does this? Why?
There are also some electric cars being sold for the lower end of the market, mainly because auto manufacturers have to comply with CO2 legislation and they can't do that only by selling expensive PHEVs, much as they would prefer to. On top of that, with more and more charging stations being built in cities and on highways, range anxiety is not as much as it used to be. Pretty much all new BEVs can go 200km in a charge and charge reasonably fast.
I believe 2021 this trend will only accelerate, especially in the US with Biden coming in.
Right now it's kind of on the edge of being practical, mostly because of the batteries. They're expensive and bulky and they need to be fitted to cars that weren't designed for them. 200+ mile ranges aren't really realistic either, because you'd be adding too much mass that the car wasn't designed for. Conversion kits now seem to be a custom thing made in low volume for a handful of vehicles and usually cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 or so.
On the other hand, if a major manufacturer can buy batteries and motors and controllers at wholesale cost and engineer a conversion kit for their own cars, amortizing the engineering cost across thousands or hundreds of thousands of cars, then maybe you can get the cost down to something reasonable and have something where all the parts just bolt in perfectly and all the car systems work the way they're supposed to. Maybe it can be a simple as walking into a dealership and saying "I want my car to be converted to electric" and they say, "sure, just drop it off for a week and here's what it costs, etc..."
The other day I decided to change the oil in my Honda Element myself and crawled under the car. The gas tank is basically a big metal box stuck to the bottom, with a bar in front to keep it from getting scraped off by a rock. It looks a little ridiculous, like Honda designed a car and at the last moment realized "oh, we forgot about the gas tank; let's just stick it to the bottom." If gas cars are made this way, then maybe finding a spot for the batteries in a car that wasn't originally designed for them maybe isn't any worse.
I think that's okay. It employs mechanics, who are going to have less to do as low maintenance EVs replace high maintenance gas cars. It's scalable in the sense that someone just has to make a kit available and if someone wants it in their car they can hire their preferred mechanic to install it.
Considering that we currently have a $7500 federal tax credit for new EVs and some states add a couple thousand more, if that were extended to conversions as well as new vehicles it could cover most of the cost. If batteries get significantly cheaper such a subsidy could cover the whole cost.
https://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40
These don't include batteries or battery boxes. The former are expensive and the latter are generally a huge hassle to make.
CanEV makes motor-transmission adapter plates and couplers for a surprisingly wide range of cars.
https://canev.com/motor-adapters/
There's Zero-EV in the U.K. I only know about them because of a Youtube video series where they convert a Miata. Looks like they're selling a Porsche kit at the moment.
https://zero-ev.co.uk/electric-vehicle-conversion-kits/
There's probably some others I don't know about or have forgotten. I don't think anyone is doing this on a large scale.
Sure, SOME of those people might also install things like solar panels and batteries, but I just don't see how the math works right now.
Sure, fast charging will add some day-time demand, but it's not much. Cheap night-time pricing keeps the charging demand off-peak.
More even demand curves make generation more economical. It becomes trivial to upgrade distribution where needed.
- EV battery recharge resource is not infinite. Spending it on grid stabilization could be quite costly if you'll factor in cost of battery replacement. In the long run it could be cheaper to build mines for hydroelectric/compressed air storage.
- It will require huge capital investments. You have to equip every parking spot with inverters which can both charge EV and supply power from it to the grid and invest into upgrading grid to be smart enough to work in such conditions.
- What will happen on low-energy days? It's fine to drain most of power from hydroelectric storage or from stationary flow batteries, but you simply can not do it with EV. Imagine being told "sorry pal, you have to walk home today, power from your EV was used to stabilize the grid".
Will it offset the surge of electric usage caused by mass adoption of EVs? Probably not. But could it help? Very likely, and I think ideas like this need to be pursued.
Sure, solar panels and batteries help. Plus there's the possibility of using EVs as a distributed battery system, and lots of other clever ideas like that.
But it's not enough. We hit a record load this summer, and expect another record this year.
Add on the extra burden of regulation that enforces green energy production, and we're edging toward not being able to meet customers' needs. (Green energy is a worthy cause, don't get me wrong, but far more costly and time-consuming to build out the infrastructure.)
TLDR; We're struggling. Real bad.
(Edited to add: I should define "struggling." We strive to keep prices as low as possible, and also to fund low-income assistance programs. We keep having to raise prices, are looking at jacking them up even more this year, and are struggling to fund our low-income programs.
Our community is deeply hurting from these changes, and are making their voices heard.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro green energy. But the effects of green regulation needs to be seriously studied and the negative impacts mitigated.)
Of course there may be dysfunctional transmission organisations that have been able to hobble along without anyone noticing for a while that get caught by this, but that's just something that needed to be fixed anyway.
Will be interesting to see how increased electric vehicle ownership might happen for people without a garage or designated parking.
It's not like a phone or a normal gasser car, you don't and probably won't need to fill it to 100% all the time. 20%-80% doesn't take that long.
If massive amounts of people move to electric vehicles gas prices will fall. This will make combustion vehicles more attractive.
Also, government depends on all the taxes they put on combustion vehicles. As those revenues decline they may choose to get that money from electric vehicle drivers under the guise of 'congestion' taxes or such.
This isn't entirely true. The cost of gas has a hard floor due to the cost of extracting oil from the ground. Nobody is spending $40 a barrel to extract oil that's selling for $25 a barrel. So if oil demand falls and prices fall, many of the current sellers pull out of the market entirely.
On top of that, as the number of cars going to gas stations starts to drop, gas stations will get less profitable. As profits drop, stations start closing down. Eventually, enough stations close down and it becomes inconvenient to own and operate an ICE vehicle regardless of the cost of fuel.
In Washington, US, they increased the registration fee for electrics to make up for the shortfall in gas taxes that pay for road wear, congestion, etc. So that's already happening.
If gas prices fall any lower due to demand, then production capacity will probably disappear permanently, leading to shortages and a huge, long-term rise in price. Oil pumps aren't like taps that can be shut off and powered back on demand. They basically need to be operated continuously because restarting them is pretty expensive. And storing excess oil is also pretty expensive.
We also have to consider that low gas prices are due to volume. Refinement is still costly, and if the volume of gas falls by a large amount, that refinement costs gets distributed among the remaining volume. Refinement capacity is even more expensive to bring back online than pumps.
I predict gasoline production will death-spiral at some point. Gas stations will be culled as prices spike and volumes drop. I would expect this to happen in a relatively short timespan, over maybe 1-2 years for the bulk of it, then a long tail of persistent decline.
Besides that, it's not all about fuel costs. Electric vehicles are fun, and generally low-maintenance.
And that's before we get to the obviously anti-fossil fuel era we're entering, where they will increasingly hammer fuels like gasoline with taxes, driving the cost up around the globe. Even if somehow the market didn't drive the prices up from the economic efficiency change I described, the taxes will regardless and that's guaranteed to occur.
If I had to guess, you live in Canada which is a country of extremes like what you mention.
The solution for Canada probably isn't to prohibit ICE vehicles, but to disincentivize them heavily where they make less sense. So in the areas where extreme cold and long range is the use case, provide an exemption. Out here on Vancouver Island where the longest possible route is less than 500km and a cold day is one where there's frost on my car, there's really not a great reason for me to be buying a brand new ICE car 10 years from now. Same thing for when I lived in Vancouver and drove 5,000 km per year.
My point is that a huge majority of people live in circumstances where electric cars will be fine. We shouldn't let the corner cases (living in a place with extreme cold where driving 400km to the airport is routine) dictate what the rest of the world needs to do.
The EV will just start. You press a button and it turns on. In under 5 minutes it will be so hot inside that you need to take off your jacket.
Yes, range will suffer if you don't pre-heat the battery (by plugging in the car over night), but I still get 200km range off my car even when it's up to -30 outside.
How much more power would we need to produce to handle the demand if everyone had electric cars instead of gas cars? That power consumption would be added on top of all the power consumption we currently have.
Pretty much every single private parking spot in an apartment building will have a 8A plug for block heaters and cabin heaters (1,5-2,5kW load). They all trigger around 6 in the morning so the car is nice and warm for the 7:30 commute. Nothing melts, nothing breaks or starts smoking.
And even then people are panicking about EVs charging from 2100-0600 overnight. NOW they think everything will melt, break and be on fire.
it's the best car i've ever owned. the design is ugly, the generic silver is hideous, but i'm so emotionally attached to it. i don't drive my really nice (and newer) VW GTI anymore.
if you're thinking of getting an EV, you don't have to buy a tesla. the used leafs are just brilliant.
Newer (2018+) Leafs fixed this, but if you plan on buying used - make sure the range is confirmed.
All that said, I have a cheap EV (2017 Focus) and it's a blast to drive - not a Tesla but still a sleeper.
I love my frog-looking golf cart of a car. It’s also (between tax incentives and subsidised electricity) been essentially free to own and run - and is worth about the same now as what I paid for it years ago.
People need to check out what they’re missing.
I'm not driving much myself lately, but I'm really excited about the health impact of removing combustion engines from our cities.
In terms of tipping point, the other thing that is happening (besides battery cost dropping) is the massive ramp-up in production volume. Just a few years ago, Tesla producing more than 50K cars was news worthy. Last year they did half a million and they have a few more factories coming online this year. Also VW, GM, and other manufacturers are producing cars by the hundreds of thousands per year as well. Soon it will be millions. By mid this decade, the second hand EV market will also start ramping up. Right now a lot of people are still on their first EVs.
It's basically a supply constrained market: people are buying these things as soon as they get produced. Most of the popular EVs have waiting lists for getting them and would be selling more if they could produce more of them. These manufacturers are still learning how to produce and design efficiently. A lot of the cars on the market right now are still designed to come in both ICE, hybrid, and EV configurations. That makes them less efficient and more costly to make. It's just not optimal. A few years from now, that will stop being a thing. There will just be too many purposely designed EVs on the market that will be a better deal overall.
It's going to take a while for manufacturers to switch to producing EVs only. Production volume overall is something like 90M cars per year and only a few percent is EVs currently. Probably by the end of the decade it will be the other way around. There are billions of vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) it will take a while for those to disappear. That being said, it will be similar to horses disappearing from the streets early last century. Once it makes sense economically, people will switch as fast as they can (function of price and production volume).
The other problem is range vs time to charge. Members of my family frequently drive hundreds of miles a day from one end of the country to the other. There isn't an electric car that can match a diesel (or petrol) car's range. And then charging time adds an hour to a long journey. No one wants a 5 hour journey to become a 6 hour journey. If time isn't an issue, and we want to be 'green', why don't we just return to a horse and cart?
The all electric range is so nice to drive. But it makes me realize how loud the ICE is after that kicks in, which now annoys me. I’m excited for when electrics will get a 500 mi range. It will happen.
My ass gets numb after 200 and _I_ need to stop. =)
Don't know if the new regulation is just following the tech, if it's too little too late, etc...
But it's pretty obvious, looking at advertisement on French TV, that car dealers now have incentives to sell EV/hybrids.
Will they follow them as strongly as they (unfortunately) did with the SUVs ?
Frightening is the power of the sales department. Wonder if this will be "democratized" at some point.
Ford is introducing hybrid trucks which I predict will not only become the new default, but also beat the other manufactures to market. Rivian will not ship more than 1000 trucks in 2021, and the cybertruck, at this moment, is complete vaporware.
I only ever used one network, ChargePoint, and they sent you 2 RFID cards in the mail you could put in the car or on your keychain. You could swipe them on the charger or use your NFC equiped phone with their App. I accidentally swiped my phone once without opening the App and it opened up Google Pay and let me pay that way as well. There are a lot of free ChargePoint chargers, I encountered those mostly on government property.
Allegedly the larger networks are interoperable now to some extent but I've yet to use that. Since I moved to California I've only charged away from home once.
- Overall, the (US) electricity mix is lower-emitting than gasoline.
- The US electricity mix is trending greener. (Gasoline cars are also getting more efficient, but many of those changes also apply to electric cars)
- The electricity sector is easier to move than automobiles. We’ve already seen a couple of major shifts (coal->nat gas->renewables), while we’re still very slow on the first big paradigm shift for cars.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Anyway, it seems patently obvious that a massive coal power plant should be cleaner per unit of energy than a janky disposable ICE powerplant shoved under the hood of a cheap little mass-produced car.
I'm not sure it's entirely worth your time to engage with intellectually un-curious people not capable of thinking in shades of grey.
But the catch here is that when the politicians get their shit together and more to more renewable and less polluting methods of electricity production, suddenly ALL EVs in use will instantly become less polluting.
ICE cars don't mysteriously grow new particle filters or catalytic converters with a free OTA update. They pollute the same amount (or more) for their whole existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2yvsmDvxvA
rough summary: electricity costs become negligible when (~2030) solar, wind, and storage prices all drop to a certain threshold
**note: the concept of "superpower" introduced in the featured video (need citation)
I personally would not buy a new car with my current finanical situation, even though i'm well paid, because i'd never have the sort of cash on hand to buy one and I try to avoid debt.
And so like many I'll be still buying used cars for the foreseeable, which will likely remain ICE cars.
* Low range, combined with a lackluster charging infrastructure. I think from my list this is the closest issue to being resolved, if I could consistantly get 800km range (in real world usage, not "800km in the brochure but actually 400km in real life") it would be fine because (1) with such a long range the risk of having to recharge multiple time on a single journey is fairly small, thus reducing the inconvenience [assuming one can charge at home or work, otherwise recharging will always be a pain in the butt regardless of how you look at it] (2) it's enough to cross "charging station deserts", areas where inevitably there will be little to no charging infrastructure (see the charging stations on french highways for reference, recharging is just as expensive as refueling and the charging stations don't even work reliably).
* A large segment of the EV market is made of cars that remind me more of technological gadgets than proper vehicules. I have very little patience to deal with technology and I certainly don't want my car to be basically a software platform. I shouldn't get angry before bed time but I'm still going to mention the privacy aspect of it. Having SIM cards embedded in every car is bad enough already but at least with the more traditional "analog" cars you can give the manufacturer the benefit of the doubt that the SIM card is only activated in case of accident. Most EV cars lift the doubt by collecting analytics and installing software updates remotely. One day there will be a data breach and everywhere you've ever been with your car will be free for the general public to see. Even worse, a malicious actor gets a hold of the manufacturer's private key and can push arbitrary updates to your car.
* Most charging networks (I'm tempted to say "all" because I've never seen an instance where it wasn't the case, but again let's give the benefit of the doubt) are basically spying networks that require an account and a credit card to use. Someone (everybody once there's a data breach) knows everytime/everywhere you recharge your car, how much you used since your last charge, etc. Why can't we just pay cash for, say, $10 worth of electricity just as we do with ICE cars?
I believe the first point will be solved in a relatively near future because it's mostly a matter of improving the technology a bit (or paying more for a bigger battery). For the two last points however I only see things getting worse since the current trend is to go further and further in this "everything as a digital service" direction.
A "dumb" EV you charge at home could, in theory, leave fewer breadcrumbs than a petrol car you fill up with a credit card.
It's a tiny car that fits in a motorcycle parking spot, charges via a wall outlet, has AC, and is 15x safer than a motorcyle or scooter. Just preordered one.
I think not needing a supercharger will change everything.
This is as of 2018, and one would expect that the grid will continue to get cleaner as time goes on, which means the BEV options will get cleaner as well.
However the major power grids are no longer 100% fossil fuels.
Often do I find them parked on parking bays designated to electric car charging. This is such an annoyance when you have an electric car with limited range.
It's like Norway is actively trying to devalue its copious natural resources.
https://www.tesla.com/trips#/?v=MY_2020_LongRange&o=Austin,%...
There's a route planner that can do this built in to every Tesla.
If it's very cold or very hot, if you drive to the mountains or rural areas for pleasure, range anxiety is a serious problem. Waiting for a re-charge is ok if you have access to Tesla supercharger speeds. Forcing this lifestyle change on everyone is absolutely insane.
The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands. Renewables alone will not be able to keep up, so we will need to increase fuel based generation of electricity, which is less efficient as an overall usage of fuel for transportation versus an efficient hybrid vehicle.
[1] I often do this to arrive at a supercharger with a lower state of charge. This allows for charging lower on the curve, which allows for faster charging. I sometimes do this to avoid unpleasant chargers. My least favorite is the Savannah super charger, which is located several stoplights from the highway in an airport parking garage.
EVs without supercharger access are strict city cars.
The electrify america network sucks, non tesla range is mostly bad (with a small number of exceptions). Even with decent range, lack of supercharger access makes the car a non-starter.
I think Tesla's advantage here remains huge, I think legacy car companies are in trouble (and this is even ignoring their inability to write or ship software). The dealership model of legacy car companies will also be a big problem for them and will continue to hold them back.
That said, I think ultimately forcing the EV switch makes sense and with something like supercharging in place is viable. Battery capacity will continue to improve, charging rates will continue to improve. Pushing this shift makes sense.
It just might be that legacy car companies are too dumb to do it properly and will cede a lot of the market to Tesla (and maybe Apple).
Relatively centralized electricity generation can be converted to lower carbon generation. This is happening pretty rapidly in many places for economic reasons; renewable power generation is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel power generation.
Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distributed all over the world is effectively impossible.
> Renewables alone will not be able to keep up
Source please?
