Just say no.
They seem like they’re fun to drive, but I would never want to rely on one as primary transportation, or for road trips.
22 thoughts on “Battery-Powered Cars”
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Just say no.
They seem like they’re fun to drive, but I would never want to rely on one as primary transportation, or for road trips.
Comments are closed.
Meh, seems like a hit piece to me. “Batteries catch fire” and gas doesn’t? Just know what you are getting.
I live on an island about 50 miles across. I have the best solar power available in the US. If I don’t have an electric car, I am a moron.
If you live in Alaska and own an electric car, you better check the tradeoff more carefully.
(And, man, these electric cars are SO fun to drive. Acceleration you wouldn’t believe, from the lowest end models!)
“Meh, seems like a hit piece to me. “Batteries catch fire” and gas doesn’t?”
Not spontaneously in an intact properly designed gas tank that isn’t already engulfed in flames from another source.
The story I hear is that a lithium battery fire can require an order of magnitude more water and time to put out than a gas-tank fire.
Also, it appears that some battery fires “just happen”, although perhaps the car being in a minor collision could create conditions for a fire to break out hours later? A tank where the gasoline just spontaneously catches fire in a parked car would be a major scandal for an automobile maker.
An analogy is that the Messerschmitt Komet rocket plane with methanol/hydrazine fuel and peroxide oxidiser was a fire and explosion hazard, but so too were the gasoline tanks on a Bf 109 piston engined fighter?
But hey, that doesn’t stop drawing the moral equivalency between lithium batteries and gas tanks.
Most of the car and e-bike fires “just happen”. No Pinto maneuvers required.
I am fixated on my analogy to the Messerschmitt Komet rocket interceptor.
Just think, a fuel-cell car powered by hydrazine and hydrogen peroxide. And filling station pumps where the selector buttons allow you to pump “C-stoff” and “T-stoff.”
Just think, a fuel-cell car powered by hydrazine and hydrogen peroxide. And filling station pumps where the selector buttons allow you to pump “C-stoff” and “T-stoff.”
“N-stoff”, windshield remover however, no thanks…
I am glad Surber is enjoying his Old Man Yells at Car years.
This does make me think the proverbial Someone should install outlets for emergency charging at safe spots along the roads. I am not an electrician but it shouldn’t be expensive to tap into the wires which power streetlamps.
Let’s think about this.
A Bing search turns up 80 watts as the power consumption of a typical streetlight. A highly efficient electric car may average 4 miles on a kilowatt-hour of charge. In round numbers, it would take 3 hours tapped into a street-light circuit to gain a mile of range.
What kind of power is needed for a fast-charge to get some meaningful added range on a long-distance trip? 100 kilowatts? Each charging stand having enough power to run 1200 streetlights?
The charging infrastructure problem is that the substitute for a gasoline pump is a an electric outlet supplying 100 kilowatts DC. Whereas you can top off your tank in maybe 5 minutes, you will need to be hooked up to the charging outlet for at least 5 times as long?
I “get” that at least homeowners will install 240 V AC charging points capable of topping of an EV battery overnight, and for those EV owners, charging outlets will only be needed on long-distance trips. But something tells me that a built-out EV charging infrastructure will cost multiples of our existing gasoline filling stations.
In the immortal words of Barbie, “Math class is tough.”
I suppose the easier solution would be for drivers to simply charge the car when it suggests.
A lot of traffic is “stop and go”. We’ve lately engineered IC vehicles to actually shut off the engine during the stops, and rely on relatively new systems to instantly re-start the engine on demand. Those systems require a really good battery (starter, ignition, etc) to change over from “stop” to “go”, anyhow. So, for such a use-case a hybrid with a bigger battery and regenerative brakes, etc, makes a lot of sense.
The Ford Maverick mini-truck with a hybrid standard (2022) made so much sense Ford literally could not build enough of them. 2022 orders rolled into 23 and 23 orders into 2024 — and the 2024 models have now made the “hybrid” configuration a (more expensive) option rather than the standard.
The constraint is batteries. And while twenty or forty year old Ford trucks with gasoline engines are still on the road — as the TV commercials so frequently boasted — it’s unlikely any hybrid’s battery will last out a decade. Nor can such components be swapped out cheaply.
The lowest quintile of automotive consumers, relying on a plentiful used car supply market, are going to suffer the worst in an EV or Hybrid environment.
Hybrids are a lot more complex, though, and thus less reliable all else equal (which it isn’t, but anyway). So the difference in maintenance costs also needs to be factored in. Hybrids do solve the range issue, though.
A battery powered car is so simple that they are crazy reliable. You can buy an ancient EV and expect it to not fail for a long time.
The real solution for this is obvious, of course. Buy an EV, and tow behind you one of those construction site electric generators!
Hybrids preserve most of the vices of ICE vehicles without providing the full benefits of BEVs. They made sense, to a degree, in the era before BEV charging infrastructure was as available as it is now, but “range anxiety” is much less a thing these days than it once was. So hybrid sales are flat or declining in most auto markets. Lowest-quintile auto buyers will soon be finding as many hybrid “bargains” as they used to find exclusively in the ranks of ICE vehicles. A decade or so from now, current-generation BEVs will also be available to lowest-quintile buyers too. Longer loan terms to keep the monthly payments down will be made possible by the greater remaining useful life in a decade-old BEV compared to an otherwise comparable ICE vehicle.
According to a Tesla owners club forum, a member claims that on a standard 110VAC/15A outlet you’ll get 3 miles of range per hour of charging time. If you are packing a Honda portable generator in the trunk, an expensive model I looked at holds 1 gallon of gas and will generate up to 2200 Watts, enough to charge your Tesla at 120VAC/15A for up to 8 hours on a single tank of gas. Which if you went the full 8 hours would get you 24 miles of range or by my estimate, 24 MPG. 🙂
For his science fair project, my son made a solar powered emergency car charger. (It charged a battery, which then charged the car)
It was only 8 (daylight) hours per mile of charge. As you can imagine, the product orders came flying in!
For most people who can charge an EV at home, 3 mi. of range per charge hour is just fine. In towns and small cities, few have round-trip commutes exceeding 20 mi. per day. Nor is shopping usually done in a radius of more than a few miles from home. A 10-hour overnight charge would yield 30 mi. of range. So such users would typically start every day with a fully-charged battery. That would make occasional unplanned lengthier-than-normal excursions no problem unless a total of 200 or more miles were involved.
It wouldn’t work for me with a 120mi daily commute. But my employer does generously provide ample charging for BEVs. Most folks that own Teslas that I know have Tier 2 charging systems at home. Thats 240VAC/60A. With that you can fully charge after 8 hours. Depending upon your model Tesla and I presume to some extent its age that gets you 200 to 310 miles of range on an overnight charge.
I like my Tesla Model 3 “long range”, and in the circumstances that generally prevail in coastal SoCal, I have no hesitation taking on a 200-250 mile trip without worrying about charging (that’s why I got the “long range” option; scare quotes because I know perfectly well it’s not long range compared to an equivalent ICE car). My daily round-trip commute is a little over 30 miles, so I can get through the week without charging, although I usually recharge when the battery drops to about 50% state of charge. I have a Level 2 “wall connector” (the actual charger is part of the car) in my garage on a 60 amp 240VAC circuit, which allows 48 amps continuous charging; at $0.15 per kWh super-off-peak rates, it’s around 65-70% cheaper than the ICE car it replaced. Fun to drive, plus carpool lane stickers; there are things I don’t like, but I knew I wouldn’t like those things before I bought it, and decided the trade off was worth it. And I haven’t changed my mind.
But…I’m just about in the optimal situation for a BEV like the M3LR: I don’t have to worry about losing 1/3rd of the range due to cold weather, I can charge overnight in my garage on cheap power, there are lots of Superchargers around if I need them, I don’t have to haul around substantial loads, I don’t have to make trips of more than about 200 miles per day often and there are multiple places within a 5 mile radius where I can rent an ICE vehicle if needed…easy peasy. For me. I suspect well over half the US will have a significant reduction in standard of living if they went exclusively to BEVs.
The current trajectory of our government’s pushing BEVs will be a near-disaster for lots of people. But sadly, I think that’s what they want; crush us into oblivion.
I think most Americans would experience a net increase in their standard of living if they went exclusively to BEVs. Most forms of ICE vehicle routine maintenance disappear upon switching to a BEV. Tires will still wear out and wiper blades and the windshield washer fluid will still be concerns, as will brake fluid and friction material, though to a considerably lesser degree given regenerative braking. But most everything else goes away. No more Jiffy-Lube. No more Midas. No more Tune-Up Masters. No more Aamco. No more complicated, heavy and expensive engines with sub-100,000-mile lifespans even when “properly” maintained.
“They,” in any case, don’t want you to have a BEV any more than they have ever wanted you to have an ICE vehicle. “They” want you exclusively on shanks mare or public transit as you shuttle between your pod-like “apartment” and your McJob with nothing to eat but mealy-worm and locust “burgers.”
I think battery life and cost to replace is still a major factor in total cost of ownership. Now maybe companies like Tesla will offer special trade-in incentives to make that more palatable. I’m not convinced the traditional car companies are there yet. So I presume if you buy one of theirs you’ll take a hit on an expensive trade in for at least the first generation of their models.
Not trying to knock EV drivers but I’ve noticed none of them really do anything.
I am a fan of having different vehicles for different purposes but a lot of people can’t afford a fleet. There are any number of cars one could buy just for commuting that are cheaper overall but economics isn’t why people buy EVs.
Most people fall into two baskets, they think they are cool or they think are making mother nature happy and less likely to murder everyone but what this shows is there is plenty of demand in the market for the market to work. There aren’t any good reasons to force EVs on the populace.
You’re correct that there is no reason to force EVs on the populace – the populace are snapping up EVs as fast as they can be had. But forcing people to do things is what the government does, so it will, as usual, continue trying to force things that require no force.
The appeal of EVs, though, goes far beyond the decidedly limited markets for “cool” and “trendy” and “green.” Economics is precisely why a lot of people are going EV in an era of six-bucks-a-gallon-and-up gasoline.
There are also a non-trivial number of people who like EVs for their intrinsic neck-snapping acceleration and other sporty handling characteristics deriving from low centers of gravity and more equal front-to-back weight distribution.
A look at sales trends suggests that even the U.S. auto market could well be half EV by decade’s end and higher than that in most other nations.
I’ve been seeing reports that EV inventories on dealer lots are growing at an alarming rate. And Ford over the past year lost about $66k for every EV sold. What cannot be sustained will not be.