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Pace of electric car adoption has markedly slowed in the US
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- Title
- America's plan to replace gas guzzlers with electric cars was doomed from the start
- Published
- Jan 4 2024
- Word count
- 1859 words
I am still not really seeing practical EV's. I want to be able to buy an EV from reputable car maker that meets my basic needs. I am a Toyota fan and would be keen to see a basic Camry or Corolla type car at a reasonable price with good range. I don't need a massive screen, 0-60 in two seconds, auto pilot etc. I need a car that will doo 500kms at highway speed that I can charge from my solar. Seems way to many cars are over optioned which blows out the price.
Right? I just want a dumb EV. I know it can be done I build RC cars - throttle, servo, ESC - it's an electric car. Yes safety features, I know, but I don't need a display that uses fifty cameras to 'show' me everything around the car.
I think a more real reason though is lack of charging infrastructure at apartments. Of all things, high density housing should be required to provide access to charging to speed adoption.
What sold me on my electric VW golf is that it is the dumbest vehicle I have seen in years. The thing doesn't even have cruise control. I was astounded when I saw how they weren't trying to add a billion other features to the car that I did not want or need.
The eGolf is such a great car. Our family had 2 at one point, then we sold one for an ID4 (growing family). Later on, we needed to sell either the eGolf or ID4 to get our next EV, we ended up selling the newer and "better" ID4 and keeping the eGolf because we like it that much. It's too bad they stopped making the eGolf.
I do hope this becomes reality and makes it to the US market: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a44974983/vw-id-gti-concept-revealed/
Totally agree. Back when I bought my EV I test drove the eGolf and it was clear that the fit and finish of that car was several steps higher than the competition in the same category. It was just slightly out of my price range but I still wish I could've bought one. Super simple, set up exactly like a gas Golf, and it just did what it's supposed to do without fuss. I loved it.
Honestly, I'd be completely behind something like the Nimbus Halo I linked above, if they can successfully manufacture it at 1/3 of passenger car cost. You don't need a vast number of cameras if you have old-fashioned sight lines. It doesn't require dedicated charging infrastructure. And it requires far less land allocation to parking. Safety is another matter, simply on the basis of much lower mass than other vehicles, but the maneuverability might make accident avoidance easier.
If these become available in my country I would love to rent one. I would need a better idea of how much space is in that "backseat" and how to get in and out, but assuming you could fit a small adult or a medium-large cat carrier, it would be extremely useful for me to have occasional use of it.
It'd be great if companies like Zipcar could offer electric vehicles. At the moment, that would probably mess up the charging infrastructure rather than help.
In many places (though far from all) landlords are mandated to work with renters to install charging infrastructure upon request.
I've never heard of this. The landlords I've had would rather quietly get rid of you by not renewing your lease, if you ask for something like this.
Where is this required?
In Colorado it's the law that the landlord has to allow you to install an EV charger if you pay for it yourself and a licensed electrician does the work. There's not much incentive for the landlord to say no in the first place because it's the renter paying to improve the property. And if they get rid of you by not renewing your lease, they have to work to find someone else and they're still left with the installed charger, so I don't see how not renewing benefits the landlord.
I'm renting a house right now and was able to get a charger installed in the garage with no fuss by checking with the landlord first and then hiring an electrician for about $350 in labor costs.
I luckily have a garage for my unit so I'm able to do level 1 charging from an existing outlet.
I know that it's in the law books for the state of California and that at least 2-3 other states have simelar laws.
That being said, just because something is in the law books doesn't mean that it's well enforced; I can see landlords finding technicalities to avoid it or be forced to do it via a court order.
Also the "work with" in my statement was a bit vague; the law in CA says that landlords can stick the tennants with the bill, so it's not exactly a perfect solution.
In my experience landlords pretty much do what they want unless it puts tenant safety at risk. Sometimes they'll even ignore that.
When you need a good reference to get a new place to live, people will swallow a lot.
Where I live (BC) your landlord can’t really kick you out for something like that. Or, at least not without paying a penalty of something like 2 months rent.
I came across a first-person perspective just the other day (though, the article itself is from last may) relating to this exact scenario in a Vancouver condo building.
This is something we're currently struggling with. There is no EV charging in my building so we rely on city charging based on availability.
about a third of the cars in our building are EVs, mostly teslas. It would make sense if they could add charging blocks to our parking spaces (and charge a monthly use fee) or add stations in the back of the building where overflow parking is so we don't have to leave our cars so far away overnight to get a full charge.
It's been a struggle with this building since they moved to remote administration in 2022. we can't even get them to add more trash bins to the common areas.
Edit after writing: This derailed into more of an anti-Toyota rant and might be off topic. I’m still going to post it, though, as many Toyota fans (not saying it’s you) aren’t aware of the company’s, I want to say, anti-future behavior in this regard.
Unfortunately, Toyota in particular blew it by oversleeping EV adoption HARD (if I recall correctly they didn’t have a pure EV until like… 2017? This might be wrong), and then trying to make it up with vaporware hydrogen cars.
Sure, hydrogen-based propulsion is nice* and might have their use in trucks, boats, or even planes, but in consumer vehicles it was never going to see widespread adoption. Imagine complaining about having to replace every single gas station with high voltage electric cables, but then seeing no issue with doing the same for hydrogen, a gas (in comparison) tremendously difficult to store.
*Side note: Apart from weight savings, I feel like their main value proposition had been fast fueling/charging… And with the way (EV) battery technology seems to be headed, it probably won’t take long until that isn’t even considered an issue anymore. I think the more expensive cars today already to like 80% charge capacity in 15ish minutes. Toyota really bet on the wrong horse with that one…
There's a deep reason for this.
The short version is: Japan has a historically bad electric grid. They run two different grid frequencies and two different grid voltages on the same island. They don't interconnect between islands. They don't import electricity at all. Each of those many sub-grids gets most of it's power from natural gas turbine plants, which burn imported natural gas delivered by tanker ships - and some old nuke plants, with which they've been having some trouble recently.
This extremely insular infrastructure is completely, irrecoverably inadequate to charge anywhere close to 100M electric vehicles. It is very likely the Japanese government has communicated to Toyota that this will not change.
But given all the natural gas infrastructure in place (and all the knowledge already being domestic - pretty much all those gas turbines, floating gas terminals, gas liquifiers, ect. are Japanese designed and built), running vehicles on gas might have sounded like a solution.
This all has been analyzed in great detail, if you're interested. Google will find it.
I have a hard time believing this is a real problem when Nissan was practically pioneering EVs among the big manufacturers. Toyota is also a giant multinational corporation who sells cars across the globe so it’s not like they only make cars for the Japanese market that just happen to be popular overseas.
They actually might think of it that way.
And if most of the direction-defining R&D is done in Japan, and they came to the conclusion that hydrogen will be competitive with battery electric vehicles, they might have deluded themselves into believing the rest of the industry would follow them. Major strategic mistake, and now they'll have to play catch-up for a while.
And by the way, I'm not convinced hydrogen is completely dead. It's not only the Japanese still holding onto it, the Germans also haven't given up entirely yet. Bosch and Siemens are also still pouring billions into the tech. If they overcome some of the technical difficulties around storage, they might make a comeback via trucking. And if trucking justifies building the refueling infrastructure, cars might actually follow pretty quickly...
It's not the full extent of the situation. The other thing is that if hydrogen replaces natural gas, then:
a BEV will be hydrogen >>hydrogen power plant >>battery >> run car
But a hydrogen car would be:
hydrogen >> trucked to hydrogen fuel station and pumped into car >> run car
In other words, a BEV on a hydrogen grid would be the worst of both worlds, so a hydrogen car makes more sense even if the grid is rock solid.
That is a pretty big “if” that I do not see happening within the next 100 years at least. Right now hydrogen is either produced through a chemical process involving petrochemicals or via electrolysis, which is very inefficient.
Oh shit, I completely forgot to mention: this was Toyota's logic, for Japan, and not something I personally agree with.
I have never heard of electrolysis being very inefficient, but admittedly I haven't studied that much. Can you please link me?
I was under the impression it was efficient but still not done because petrochemicals were cheaper than renewable electricity.
I don’t have a study to give you, but I am referring to the efficiency of creating hydrogen and then converting it to electricity is very low in comparison to storing it in a battery.
That being said things are changing fairly rapidly in that front; there are new processes being invented which will vastly improve hydrogen production via electrolysis, and I have no doubt that fuel cells will improve as well. But it’s going to take some time for them to finish their development, come to market, and become widespread.
Beyond that there are also practical inefficiencies involved, especially in regards to storage - hydrogen is a gas, but we compress it to a liquid form to transport it and that is energy-intensive and brings logistical issues.
There was a great comment on Tildes about this, unfortunately the user has since deleted their account.
Yeah, I remember there was someone really knowledgeable about this topic, as they'd worked in this industry in Japan. There were multiple exemplary comments and threads, and I actually saved some of their comments. Alas, they're not there anymore.
If anyone wants to see previous discussion surrounding hydrogen surrounding hydrogen in Japan, see this thread Japan to invest $107 billion in hydrogen supply over fifteen years
Oh my. Reading that thread is such a tease. All the child comments are praising the deleted parent comment. I WANT TO SEE IT.
But do you really honnestly need 500+ km range? Most commute are way under 100 km daily, or we can take a bus or train (and chill instead of being stuck in traffic) if the commute is longer (or move closer?).
Sure, it'd be nice to have more range occasionally, but having a livable planet is also nice to have.
Frugality is the name of the game when it comes to the environment.
500km is not necessary for most days. But factor in lifetime range reduction and winter temperature reduction. Assuming a range reduction of 2.3% per year and in year 6 I need to take a recharge break if I drive to Colorado Spring and back. If I'm driving around Colorado Springs then in Year 3 I should consider finding a place to recharge. This is an admittedly rare occurrence but is the longest drive I do a couple times a year. I don't have good numbers for cold weather effects, but I see estimated between 20-40% depending on temperature. We are in at low 20F most days in the winter mornings. Taking 30% as an approximation, that means in year 3 my "500 km" range is more like 300 km in the winter.
Now, this isn't going to prevent an EV purchase for me. But if we lower the starting range these numbers start getting more annoying to contemplate. If I start with a 300-350km range, then by year 3 I can't visit my sister 60 miles away in the winter without a way to recharge (she doesn't have a way for me to do it).
Which is all to say: there are solutions. But we introduce a new variable to travel, it isn't just "is the tank full" but "wow this drive that used to have plenty of overhead now stretches my range to its limit."
The rest of your points are dependent on other factors:
I'd love the transit point to be solved, but they aren't something I can fix myself. I'll move on from my current job but finances necessitate staying a bit longer unless something great comes my way.
See, this is the million dollar problem with environmentalism: almost everyone agrees we have to do something, do it hard and do it fast, but no one wants to do anything if it inconviniences them in any way, or even just changes their routine slightly... Vegans think everyone else should stop eating meat, cyclist think everyone else should stop using cars, citydwellers think everyone should accept to live in a flat, ect... If we're ever to acheive being carbon neutral (2 tonnes CO2 equivalent per personne per year, as opposed to the current 10 in europe, and 14 in the US), we'll probably have to do all of those things and then some. But everyone is just staring at everyone else and adjusting their effort to just barely what's socially acceptable in their social circle.
No one individual is to blame, obviously, but unfortunately, the current norm sucks and we should strive to do much much more than the current norm, in the hope to nudge it a little.
Have you contacted your elected official about installing some public transport for your trip or in general? (wouldn't you be much more motivated to do so if you desperately needed it because you had no car?) have you tried coordinating with collegues and neighbors for some carsharing? how hard would it be to pack a regular wall charger (the kind that slowly charges the car overnight but can plug in a regular wall plug) and to stay the night at your sisters, or to go there twice as long and half as frequently?
I know it's way easier for me to declare you could do all those things than it is to actually do them. I'm sure you could think of plenty of sacrifices I'm not making myself which seem obvious low hanging fruit to you.
think of it this way: could you look at a guy in a third world country (or let's make it a little girl, maximum pathos) and explain to him that he shouldn't eat because his farm is flooded but you really really need to be able to visit your sister easely in the winter.
Is it unfair of me to put this responsability on you instead of all the others who don't give a shit?
Sure!
Is anything I said false?
I trully don't want you to feel guilty, or angry, that doesn't help anyone, I want everyone to start acting, not just agreeing (being politically active IRL is also acting, posting on reddit or Tildes much less so).
I would be very thankfull if you'd help me by saying which part of this post were convincing, and which part were just bad. (I may even delete this post if it's universally considered especially counterproductive)
The problem is that to actually fix climate change, we will need to drammatically change how society and it's logistics works. The vegans, cyclists, and citydwellers are right, to a point, but we can't make those changes because they would break society. I own a car because I don't have a choice. If I don't own a car I can't work. I can't take public transportation because it's too slow, and it's too slow because the city is badly planned and built around cars - we're not going to demolish it to build a new one any time soon. If I were to choose not to own a car, I wouldn't be able to work, which means I wouldn't have money, which basically would remove me from society.
I think this is an extremely productive line of discussion and I agree whole heartedly. The intent of my above post is to articulate the frictions in many people's thought processes and why I think people cite 500km as the range they'd like to see. I want to see EVs to succeed and when we replace our current daily use vehicles they will be EVs.
What we're up against is basic psychology that one's lived experience is weighted significantly higher than anyone else's or abstracted (read: proven, measurable, but ultimately unexperienced by from subject's POV). Explicitly: yes, could I carpool with coworkers; but I have no interest in adding 40 more minutes (20 minutes to pick up and then 20 minutes to drop off coworkers) onto the 10.5 hours currently spent working/commuting. I'm much more likely to find a job that removes commute from the equation entirely.
I don't want to make this overly personal; not because I am not willing to account for my decisions but because it's easy to go back and forth on my unique circumstances and anyone you find will have their own excuse.
You've just said what I've been struggling to articulate in my own comments. I don't know how to change other people's individualistic mindset when it comes to topics like these, but I do try to live my own ideas of how to improve the world.
For example, I've said in prior comments that ebikes+public transport could be the paradigm shift we need rather than just replacing our ICE cars with EVs, and I'm carless & building an ebike. An unrelated example is I disagree with proposed UK laws to weaken encryption, and I've written to my representative about it twice.
Fundamentally I'm trying to "be the change you want to see in the world", and I'm willing to sacrifice some luxuries if it helps everyone, but it seems most people aren't there yet.
This also doesn't really mention emergency situations. Every few years we have a bad day in the winter when there is either way too much snowfall or ice + snow and a large accident completely blocks the highway for anywhere from 4 to 12 hours without any way to get out.
In days like that I always top off my tank before departing further than 50 km away, and my 15 years old extra cheap car could reliably run and keep me comfortably warm overnight and then drive me home with petrol to spare because the maximum range for a full tank is about 750 km and the efficiency is not worse in the winter (sometimes on the contrary because I drive slower).
With an EV I'd be screwed. I will not buy an EV unless the capacity for average cars is much better than now.
I would definitely consider an EV as my commuter, but I anticipate having an ICE vehicle as well for the forseeable future, for the reasons you described plus many of my hobbies require a lengthy drive through TX Hill Country (where there are very few charging stations), until I get out to West TX where there are virtually no charging stations. While out overlanding (or driving around the wilderness in general) having an EV is simply a non-starter, since you just cannot risk running out of battery while in the middle of nowhere. With an ICE, you can either carry spare gasoline, or a friend can bring you some should it be necessary
If you need to regularly drive 500km in a day, then an EV probably isn't for you yet. However, for most drivers that's a rare scenario.
In the real world you're going to be charging that EV overnight. You'll leave home every morning with an 80% charge. When you're making a longer drive you'll charge up to 100% before you leave and plan your route around public charging stations.
500km is over 5 hours of driving at highway speeds. From a health perspective, forgetting everything else, you should be stopping more often than that to stretch and use the restroom.
I went from a Corolla to a Chevy Bolt and frankly there isn't a single thing I prefer about the Corolla.
Not OP, but I live in an apartment with two chargers total for a few hundred tenants. If I were to get an EV, there's no way I'd be able to charge there more than once a week.
I have an older truck and tbh, the only thing that would make me want a new vehicle would be a practical EV. This cycle of people getting new cars every three years seems so incredibly wasteful.
A car is such a large investment that people are willing to pay for the optionality of 5 - 7 passenger seating, substantial cargo space, and 300+ km range, even though half of trips only require something like this.
There are many other strategies for reducing transit CO2 emissions besides subsidizing oversize personal vehicles. Leading with this one represents a failure of policy imagination and salesmanship, as well as a capitulation to entrenched auto industry interests.
I mean, 50% of use cases is pretty high. I'd say for me personally I need about a 60/40 split of needing that cargo space, and about a 10/90 split of long/short trips.
A minivan-sized EV that only gets about 100 mile effective range would cover 99% of my use-cases. But it needs to cost less than $25,000.
The Nimbus looks cool but is maybe a touch too small. Eyeballing the photos I’m not sure I’d be able to do a full grocery trip with it.
That said I absolutely do not need anything large. Something in the vein of the Fiat 500e or an electric version of the Honda Fit/Jazz at largest would be plenty.
Nimbus looks a bit too small. Maybe a 1980's civic-sized car should be fine for almost everyone. But I think a big thing against small car sales in the US is that you have to share the road with all the Canyoneros and Monster Trucks. Nobody wants to be squished so we have sort of a prisoner's dilemma.
I realize this is meant to be an example of a very small car, but 3 wheel cars always make me think of the this.
You also need a special driver's license endorsement to drive a 3 wheel vehicle where I live because driving one is so different than driving a 2 or 4 wheel vehicle.
I own a Honda Fit. Aside from the road noise, I love this car. It's easy to park, I can carry a lot of stuff in it, and I get a size discount on ferries. The only thing I need to do that I can't is bring home full sized pieces of wood from the hardware store, which wasn't ever an issue when I rented.
A guy in my local EV group just posted stats for his latest Tesla road trip: 9100 kms with 62 charges, with 20.6 hrs spent charging at a cost of $1157
I just drove 10% of that distance yesterday on a 920 km road trip so I can make a pretty accurate comparison.
In 920 km he would have already charged SIX times, I stopped for gas TWICE.
In 920 km he would have charged for 2 HOURS. I was stopped at the pumps for a total of 20 MINUTES to refuel including a longer stop the second time to get snacks. My trip was 10.5 hours, a very long day, his would have been 1.6 hours LONGER.
He spent about $115.70 for 910 km worth of electricity, I spent $119.08 in gas and Im driving a very low 20 mpg SUV and I still have half a tank left.
Which begs the question, if you're going to travel why the heck would you want to drive an EV, even a nice Tesla? Unless your idea of a good trip is spending a LOT more time parked at a charge station and waiting for your car.
EVs do what they do well - they are great city and short trip vehicles (I have one for that) and very convenient when you can park them at home and charge at night. They are currently pain-in-the-butt vehicles for road trips.
I'm guessing he included his overnight charges in some of these figures? I'm not sure your comparison, at least the time-based one, holds if that's the case. Six charges in 920km implies a range of ~150km, which seems very low.
I mean, real-life range is always significantly less than sticker range.
Sticker range generally presumes driving optimally on a flat surface. Looks like the Model 3 is somewhere on the order of 450 km.
I'd expect average IRL range to then be about 250km, assuming driving speed limit on average terrian like a typical driver. If you're speeding, I'd expect it much lower on the order of 150km or less.
(Sorry switching to Imperial because I don't want to do all the math)
You can see it real easy with combustion engines. At 55mph, my car gets about 37mpg. At 65mph, it gets more like 32mpg. At 70mph , it's closer to 25mpg.
I'm betting Mr.Tesla drives at 80mph.
I actually asked a friend who owns a Tesla -- apparently Tesla's route finder will optimize for charging time and it's faster to stop more frequently than to max out your range so maybe it's correct after all?
Tesla's routing does not optimize for time. It does a balance of time and simplicity.
But for reference, I drove ~560 miles one day in August in my Tesla. I left just before 6 am and arrived just before 4 pm. I used a more optimized route than my car gave me. I charged 5 times for a total of 76 minutes. That's total time at the location; it may be longer than I was actually plugged in.
On that day, including the charging I did that evening, I paid $81. In a car getting 25 mpg, you would use about 22 gallons. The national average price a few days later was $3.84. That's $84.48, but you'd probably only have to stop once between home and your destination.
So I spent slightly less than I may have spent on gas on this trip. Of course I only use superchargers on road trips, otherwise I'm paying less than half of the price and driving more efficiently. Remember that a road trip is an EV's least efficient driving and it's being compared to an ICEV's most efficient driving.
I've had my Tesla for over 4 years now, and taken it regularly on 500+ mile (800 km) trips. Knoxville to DC starts with me charged to 100% at home, and then I only charge twice on the way there, ending at a hotel I can charge overnight at. I have driven this route many times and it is very consist with the ABRP calculation.
This is 788 km total for a cost of $32 at superchargers (not counting the initial home charging and the hotel charging, which is usually included in the hotel price) with 51 minutes charging.
So a little more painful on roadtrips, kind of (less cost but a little more time) and with substantially lower costs for the bulk of my driving (commuting and around town).
And that's not even getting into the nice driving that is autopilot on highways. Driving used to make me tired, even with cruise control. Driving with autopilot (and possibly other good lane keeping with traffic aware cruise control vehicles) does not make me tired.
And in addition to the higher time and operating costs are the increased cost of the initial car purchase itself. Electric vehicles are simply more expensive up front than their ICE equivalents, all other things considered equal. Some external factors like tax subsidies narrow that gap, but people justify the higher price of EVs by saying that they'll save money on gas, when that's not always the case. And when it is the case, it takes a significant amount of time/miles to break even.
My buddy took his Rivian on a vacation to the mountains, and said that his whole trip had to be planned around the availability of chargers out there. His wife was not happy. That sounds like a nightmare for something that should be relaxing.
I'm wondering if it doesn't just make sense to rent a vehicle for vacations. Use the EV for what it's good at and factor in the cost of a rental for going into the mountains...
That said I've taken my car everywhere with me, and I like that it has been part of my adventures
From a practical sense, that seems reasonable in terms of convenience. From a financial perspective, I guess it depends on how often you take those kinds of trips. For us, it's at least once a month either to the mountains or the beach, both of which are out of round-trip range of an EV and neither of which have convenient electric charging options. That extra cost would sting on top of an already more-expensive vehicle.
If you don't go on long trips often, then perhaps a rental makes sense for when you do.
The rental thing reminds me of a trip we took last year to Arizona. We landed late at night to pick up our rental car, but all they had left was electric vehicles that nobody wanted. We knew that we were driving a lot that week (over 1k miles visiting 3 national parks), so we explained it to the guy in the booth and they ended up renting us some fancy Alfa Romeo SUV at our economy booked rate. But it was an interesting observation to us that nobody wanted the electric cars to rent, which ties back into the original article about Americans' hesitance around EVs.
First, it makes sense that if you need a vehicle every month that does something an EV doesn't do well, it totally makes sense not to get one now.
To your other point, I think the exact reason you'd want to own an EV and rent a gas vehicle or hybrid for infrequent vacation is the same reason that the rental company had a bunch of EVs -- they're great for people's normal daily lives, not for rental situations like travel or vacations.
Whoa, that's a long trip. For people with European sensibilities, it's roughly equivalent (+/- 10 km) to a Milano -> Brussels trip. I might take the plane or a train with such long distances.
As a curiosity as an EV driver, I planned this route (Italy to Belgium) with ABRP. This app is reliable in my experience; maybe a little conservative. Maybe it isn't so bad as you estimated ?
My experience with long driving is a 500 km drive from Switzerland to Southern France each year. I've been doing this for a quite a while now (more than 15 years), and compared to an ICE vehicle I'm only adding 10-20 minutes or so (we're often making break to change driver anyway). Since this is something I'm only doing once a year, I find this an acceptable trade-of.
910km/570mi is not an uncommon or particularly long round-trip distance in the US, many (most?) people do that multiple times a year, often times even longer distances.
That's about what I drive to go visit my inlaws 2-3x per year, and we'll usually do at least a couple other trips of similar length or longer for vacations each year.
Long range driving is a legitimate concern for many, many people in the US, despite the protestations of some EV evangelists. EVs are fantastic for a lot of day-to-day use cases, but until infrastructure is more ubiquitous and charging is faster or quick standardized battery swaps are a thing, many of us will need to have at least one gas vehicle available as a practical matter.
Considering a typical EV range is ~250 miles and cars exist on the market with ranges of up to 500 miles, taking a 500-mile journey with an EV is far from unrealistic in the overwhelming majority of places in the country, especially places that people drive to in statistically higher numbers (to, from, and through population centers and along interstate highways). A trip with a round-trip distance of 500 miles (250 in each direction) is extremely feasible using current infrastructure.
People who drive extremely long distances on a regular basis constantly overestimate how common this use-case is. It is not true that "most" Americans drive multiple 500-mile trips per year, though you can argue that "many" people do. You may take such trips many times per year, and you may interact with people on the internet who do, but it is simply not reflected by the data.
In a year, 99.2% of trips are under 100 miles in length. This data is taken from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics "Daily Travel" dataset. In any particular month you might see 40 million (generously) trips above 500 miles taken, but I wouldn't take that at face value. You can be sure that a very large portion of Americans have absolutely no desire or ability to travel very long distances in a gas car. People above the age of 55 (40% of the population) almost universally do not take such intense road trips, for example; and many working-age people do not have schedules that allow such things. Thus it is fair to assume that a very large portion of these 40 million trips per year are repeat long-distance drivers, either month-to-month or year-to-year; so even extrapolating across multiple years, it would not be accurate to say that a majority of the population frequently engages in such trips.
If such trips are not frequent, there is little reason to expect that they are not at least vaguely planned. Long-distance trip drivers will know where they're starting, where they're going, approximately what route they're taking, and will almost universally have a preference for following interstate highways. But even if they plan relatively poorly, there is almost nowhere in the US where, if you are following an interstate highway with an EV of a typical range, it is realistic to run out of fuel. See the Alternative Fuels Data Center from the Department of Energy. Possible? Theoretically. No different than a gas car.
Europeans need to remember that the USA is about the size of all of Europe. With slightly more than half the population.
Texas, the largest continental state, is about 695,000 sqkm. Larger than every other European country other than Russia and Turkey.
Rhode Island, the smallest state, is about 4k sqkm, about double the size of Luxembourg.
The size of the continents is irrelevant. Only distance to relatives/friends matter, most people live closer to their family rather than far away.
I've done roadtrips throughout Europe, it's not just a US thing no matter how much they would like it to be.
Fact of the matter is that most people will drive to work for a distance no further than an hour (hour and a half tops) for 99% of their driving, and once in a blue moon they may spring for something further away. An EV should be balanced against the 99%, not that one off you may not have the range. You're literally better off renting an ICE car if you really need to drive such distances once or twice a year.
I live 1 hour drive from my workplace, thankfully I'm full remote these days.
It's about 170km round trip. There's plenty of folks that make similiar trips whom can't remote.
My closest family is 100km away. I have other family I like more that lives over 400km away... we see each other lik 2x a year. Farthest family I'd like to see, but haven't in 7 years, is over 800km. Closest friend is 120km away. Most live over 300km. Public transport is so bad it would take 2-3 days to get to anybody farther than 100km. So I not only need to coordinate 3 different public transports, I need to find housing for 4.
The primary reason for all this sprawl is the lack of job stability in any given area. Many of my family and friends have moved these distances because thats what happens when you're desperate for a job during an economic downturn, and there's no social safety net. It didn't happen all at once, it happened gradually over 20 years.
But if I visit anybody, or commute to work, more than 20 times a year, it's cheaper for me to own a car than to rent cars. Less than 2x a month.
We live 5km to the public school my Kindergardener attended. They won't bus anybody closer than 8km. My workplace doesn't like me taking 40 minute breaks in the middle of the day to bike down and pick them up...they can't bike 5km yet and after one accident it takes awhile to pedal that far with a bad knee. A car drops that round trip to 10 minutes.
You misunderstood. What I mean to say is to own an EV or PHEV, and rent ICE for these super long trips.
Don't take this the wrong way, there's no intention to put you on the spot but similar stories are fairly consistently the reason people worry about the range of EVs. But it's unreasonable. That family you haven't seen in 7 years... You aren't going to them in an ICE either. Why is it so important to have the capability of range but not actually use it?
My point wrt my 7 years family is explaining why it's reasonable to have hybrids and ICE over pure EV.... there are probably people whom do prioritize seeing that long distance family more than I do and they'll probably fly, which is even worse. I do see the other family members, the ones in the 400km range at least 2x a year. I can deal with charging on the way, but really can't deal with lack of space to hold 4 people's stuff for 4-day weekend...especially when I needed to pack baby stuff. Even then, the only reason I don't have an hybrid or EV anymore is because there's no hybrid or EV on the market that is:
Here's what I did find: A Subaru Outback. It costs about the same as the RAV4 Hybrid, my prior car (not the plug in, which costs closer to $35k). The RAV4 was great while my children were small enough for rear-facing car seats. But the Outback only gets 10 mpg less than my RAV4 Hybrid in IRL driving despite being full ICE. It's got more legroom and headroom for both me and my backseat passengers. It can fit the stroller and everything we need for a weekend trip away without strapping on a roof rack which kills efficiency in any vehicle. It sits lower to the ground than almost every other vehicle that does all those other things, and costs about $20k less than the next closest thing that does.
I owned and loved my Prius for my pre-child life. I test drove the Leaf, other hybrid Subarus, and the EV Golf when I went to upgrade. I really, really wanted to believe they would meet my needs, because it was affordable and would have been great about 40% of the time and tolerable 30% of the time. But the cargo or backseat space was literally unusable in all of them.
If I was only 5'5", and my kids weren't going to be 6' tall inside of 5 years, I could have probably gotten by. But I remember the hell of being a 6' child sitting behind a 6'2" driver in a small car for an hour, and I'm trying to break the abuse cycle.
Give me the VW all-electric van for under $25k, and I'll buy it today.
That all sounds reasonable to expect from a decent family car and those are good reasons not to go for an EV. Not because it's an EV, but because it doesn't match your use-case. That's perfectly fine.
I just keep hearing that range argument all around me and it's moot for most drivers.
I stg other Americans say shit like this as though it's somehow news to Europeans. Europeans can and do take roadtrips across Europe too -- my wife drove from Oslo to southern France a couple years before we met. Driving long distances is not a foreign concept to Europeans. Plenty of them haven't done long road trips and don't want to, but this is also extremely true in the US.
Yes, but if their sense of scale is anything like mine, when I hear 'country', I think in relative terms to mine immediately.
Feel free to correct me, but I doubt most Europeans think of the USA as more akin to the EU than to any given country.
And due to the nature of the US being a single country, there are huge numbers of families with immediate members that spread wide and far in way that I bet Europeans do not.
I think you overestimate the degree to which families living hundreds of miles apart is the norm in the US (I don't deny it isn't uncommon, but I think you ignore how relatively common it is to live quite close to your family) and underestimate how many people move to other countries within the EU with large geographic distances. After all, that's a major part of what the Schengen agreement is for -- heck, my own German visa is based on me being married to a Norwegian who lives here. I'd bet living far apart may be more common in the US, but it's absolutely not something that's foreign to Europeans. Europe is not a bunch of little boxes where people never leave their home country.
The US is only more akin to the EU than a given European country in terms of size, which I reckon almost all Europeans would happily acknowledge, since they are not unfamiliar with the concept of countries being different sizes.
What frustrates me is when Americans, almost always ones who don't live outside the US, act like Europeans are somehow unaware of America's size or otherwise unable to fathom America's amazing uniqueness. I promise you, things are not as radically different as you think and Europeans are capable of understanding that there are differences between different countries in terms of size, culture, and infrastructure.
I think you're over-/underestimating in the opposite direction. Sure, anyone can move anywhere in the Schengen Zone. But not many people from Bordeaux or Lisbon are going to decide to move to Gdansk with such huge language and cultural barriers. My high school and college friends are scattered all across the country. I have family in Virginia and Iowa and California. And most people I talk to are very similar, with their immediate families spread out too...maybe parents in Houston and sister in Jacksonville. It's not just common for people to move across the country, it's utterly mundane for American family members to be all across the country. For example, I've read that only 36% of Floridians were actually born in Florida. That's a state with 22 million people. 600,000 people moved to Texas in 2020 when you weren't even supposed to be moving around!
According to Pew, "as of 2015, nearly 20 million people, or about 4% of the EU’s birth population, lived in a European country in which they were not born." But as of 2020, 42% of Americans live in a state where they were not born, with 30% having been born in a different state. Almost half of our population doesn't currently live where they were born. That number was as high as 70% in the past!
Take that along with the fact that very few Western Europeans are moving to Eastern Europe, whereas there are no barriers to stop Americans from moving all the way across the US, and you start to see that it will be much more common for Americans to drive all the way across the Midwest to visit family (or go down some slides in Wisconsin) than for Europeans to drive similar distances. Even the distances quoted by Europeans in these comments as being really far are essentially nothing. I know plenty of people who consider 6-hour drives to see family a distance that is great because you can go visit them any weekend you want. It's just very normal here.
I'd like to point out in case you missed it that I myself am American, I was born and raised in Ohio. I myself had family that lived far away for my entire life! And if I hadn't moved to Europe, I'd almost definitely be living in a different state than the one I grew up in, absent an inability to do so for financial reasons.
My point in my earlier comments was not supposed to be that EU residents have exactly the same ratios of families living far away -- I think I did try to acknowledge this in my earlier comments but probably not as clearly as I should have. Even if families in Europe were exactly as spread out as they are in the US, there would still be a number of factors that make the situations different -- gas prices, passenger train infrastructure, cheap plane tickets. And there are obvious factors regarding language and culture that do make it more difficult for Europeans to move as far away from their families as often as Americans do. While I do definitely dispute that 6 hours is considered a reasonable weekend drive for most Americans, I do definitely agree that there are differences in many Americans' perspectives on long drives like that compared to their European counterparts.
What my comments were more directed at was a tendency I've noticed among fellow Americans to exaggerate what differences exist to farcical levels to make a point (usually a point about how some good thing that is widespread in Europe is impossible to implement in the US). These comments are almost always from Americans who live in the US and have not lived in Europe. There's also a tendency to behave as though Europeans are somehow ignorant of the US's scale or other "unique" features, presenting an honestly kind of demeaning view of Europeans as somehow incredibly naïve about the US in a way that simply isn't particularly accurate. In my experience it tends to make Americans (both those doing that behavior and others by extension) look ignorant and it thus frustrates me when I see it online. But I think in my frustration about this I probably didn't make it clear enough in my comments that I do indeed recognize that there are big differences between the US and Europe in terms of both this issue and others.
But yeah tl;dr I agree with almost everything you said in this comment overall, but the person I replied to earlier worded their comments in a way that belies an attitude Americans tend to have towards Europeans that I find particularly frustrating, so that's where my replies came from more than anything else.
Gotcha. You would hate /r/AskAnAmerican then. It feels like almost every post comes back to the same topic of how Europeans never understand the scale of America and how every single European always wants to visit NYC, Miami, the Grand Canyon, and San Francisco in the same weekend and how every single German person who ever lived is going to die in Death Valley. The only good thing I can say about it is that at least they just consider it to be a misunderstanding rather than due to Europeans being complete idiots in the way that everything else on reddit comes down to Americans being the dumbest, worst people in the world...other than the Gypsies, of course. Can't forget about the Europeans totally not being racist against the Roma.
Oh yeah the racism against Roma thing is straight-up not an exaggeration. That part is just true.
You don’t have to own a car to make long trips. Car rentals are very much a thing. If you are going by yourself a bus ticket will cost roughly the same as gas would have cost, so there is yet another option for you. Depending on where you are going trains may be another option, though train lines tend to suck in the US.
Fast charging is actually pretty ubiquitous these days in most of the US, and since NACS is now essentially the only standard and is backwards compatible with CCS, the available chargers will soon more than double for a large number of EV owners. They may not be quite as convenient as gas, but EV road trips are very much doable outside of some very sparsely populated areas.
I remember talk a few years ago about swappable batteries so you wouldn't need to wait on charges - like how propane tanks work. Did that never materialize?
Taiwan has some swappable battery motorbikes but I'm not sure how popular they are. It makes sense for motorbikes when you can just have a wall of cells, swap yours out and away you go.
With cars you need mechanisation, because you're never removing that by hand, which would make it prohibitively expensive for most cases.
There is a Spanish company called Silence who makes motorbikes with swappable batteries. They actually have a really nice design that has a telescoping handle and wheels, so it transports kind of like particularly heavy luggage and is supposed to be fairly easy to swap. Last time I checked they were working on a microcar that had two bays for the exact same batteries they use on their bikes.
Swappable batteries have a lot of problems you'd have to deal with to get working. So many, in fact, I don't think it's really worth listing them all. The biggest problems are logistical and economic in nature.
Yes, NIO is doing it in China: https://youtu.be/-5BPL4Nm1q0
It is intriguing, but my guess is that its not going to be easy to implement in North America.
Since it seems to be proprietary, I'd wager the only company that has a big enough market share individually to set something like that up even in some parts of North America would be Tesla.
Likely. Unless all manufacturers settle on a standard for battery configurations.
I wish auto makers would embrace more PHEV options for those of us who do need the range for frequent weekend trips, but still do a good chunk of local daily driving. They make a lot of sense - smaller batteries, lighter cars, longer range, lower charging times, etc. You're able to maximize your battery usage for daily driving, but still don't have to deal with the pains that come with a BEV (poor range, exacerbated by insufficient and unreliable charging infrastructure).
It would actually be cool if they designed the PHEV batteries to be modular, so that you could customize how much capacity you want based on your daily driving needs. If your driving is on the smaller end, you could save some money and weight by having fewer battery modules compared to the needs of a longer commute.
The last time I checked, there were far more PHEV options on the market than there are for EVs. The last time I looked at Ford’s website they had something like 6 hybrid options and only one fully electric option.
I suspect that may be different outside of the US market though.
When I look at the Electric & Hybrid section on their (US) site, I see three EVs, three traditional hybrids, and one PHEV.
That’s quite a change! It would’ve been maybe one year ago - two at the most. Maybe I’m remembering the manufacturer, wrong it. It could’ve been Kia or Subaru I guess.
Any case I would agree that if a manufacturer has a hybrid model they should allow for a basic plug-in option for them since it seems like a relatively trivial addition.
I'm talking specifically Plugin Hybrids, where your daily driving is all-electric and you charge overnight. Not traditional hybrids which tend to have minimal battery capacity, and can only be charged by regenerative braking. Ford only has 1 option in this category currently, the Escape, which will be discontinued after next year.
Toyota is still leading in that area. You can get most of their lineup in hybrid versions (they had a hybrid Camry and Sienna a long time ago) and the new Prius is actually a cool car. The 2024 Prius puts down almost 200 horsepower (0-60 in 7 seconds on the four wheel drive model) and gets 57mpg.
I'm talking specifically Plugin Hybrid, where your first 50ish miles are all electric and then switches to gas, not just Hybrid which can only be charged by regenerative braking. Toyota only has 2 PHEV models - the Rav4 and the Prius.
In the realm of cars, 4 years ago is not that long...the first hybrid Sienna was only in 2020. And with how expensive they are, it's damn hard to afford one.
Looking at the used market, I see 2,017 hybrid Siennas available nationwide that have less than 100,000 miles.
The cheapest one is $27,000 before tax, and is more than 500 miles away from me. Has just shy of 80,000 miles on it. If I filter within 100 miles of me, it's basically the same car but for $32,000. It gets 35 combined city/highway.
My 2021 ICE Subaru Outback gets 29 combined city/highway. I paid $26,000, tax included, for one that had 40,000 miles on it. So for 6 mpg savings, heck call it 10 because IRL is always a touch worse than sticker, it costs over $6,000 more, with about 4 years less use for me on it.
I use about 380 gallons of gas per year in my Subaru. The Sienna would be 280, a savings of 100 gallons. $350 ish in gas savings annually. Except the Sienna, assuming it lasts 80,000 miles more (to 150k miles) over 8 years, costs $750 more per year. Not counted the added interest to amortize a larger loan.
The Subaru would end that 8 years at 120,000 miles. And if there's one thing I know about cars, even very solid Toyotas, is that after about 100,000 miles, maintainence costs also start going up dramatically as things start wearing out.
So roughly, I spit out (based on EPA estimates) 3.5 more tons of CO2 over 8 years. As much as I'd love to eliminate that, the $6,000 extra up front is too damn high of a cost.
Hybrids, PHEVs, and EVs all need to drop about $10k in price if we want to see serious adoption quickly.
Who can afford or needs a new car?
The average age of my fleet (3 cars) is 18.7 years, one is a project, but the other two are used frequently. Thankfully, I can do any work on them myself, but even that can be a struggle at times due to finances, which is still cheaper than a new car payment and the cost of insurance on a new car.
I have a little Honda Fit that would be a good candidate for an EV replacement, as it mostly stays close to home, but why spend that money when this 11-year old car does the job cheaply and efficiently? The last things I needed to do to it were front brakes, which was less than $300 and that was six months ago; we can barely afford preschool at $400 a month for half days, how am I supposed to take on another loan for that amount?
I was thinking this as well. Interest rates and CoL are high right now in the US. I certainly don't have budget to replace my perfectly fine (but ancient) Subaru with a new EV, regardless of my desire to do so.
I can/do. My new car almost tripled my gas mileage, is way more comfortable to drive than the vehicle it replaced and I can afford it so why not?
Admittedly I went with a hybrid rather than an electric, but if I was in a position where I felt confident in my home charging situation for the next 4-8 years I would definitely have considered electric. The car I ended up buying was in the neighborhood of a Model 3 (not that I would actually buy a Tesla) so I don't think cost of electric would have been a major concern.
I think this article is really understating just how expensive EV's are in the US and how much of a factor that is contributing to its "slowing". I also think some of it has to do with the new NACS adoption. Why buy an EV now when a new model, with a better charging standard, is coming out in 2024? Before anyone says there will most likely be the option to upgrade or have backwards compatibility - I am aware that is a possibility but I am not sure the average consumer in the US knows that.
I know this is just my experience but I have been looking to replace my wife's very old car. I wanted a simple EV for just going around town, nothing huge or super fancy. Doesn't even need to have a super large battery for distance or anything. Cheapest new EV is still like 45K MSRP - if you can even find one being sold at MSRP. Good luck. Further, 45K is well beyond what I can afford. I honestly am puzzled at who can afford any of these cars?! I make a great salary and still can't reasonably afford them. Used EVs are not much better. Very tempted to get a used Nissan Leaf instead since they are dirt cheap, but the batteries are awful.
You may want to take a look at the used market again. They're probably hard to find due to high demand, but most used Bolts and Leafs should be selling for less than $25,000 since the $4,500 tax credit (given as a refund rather than a credit, so not as good as the credit for new vehicles) can't be applied to used purchases above that price. So for a used 2020 Bolt for example, a dealer will price it at $24,999 even if it's basically brand new because otherwise they couldn't move the cars. My wife and I were looking in the early fall as saw 2018 bolts selling for $14-$18 that looked to be in great shape. We managed to find a refurbished 2020 Bolt with a brand new battery for ~$23k (that was apart of the recall).
I haven't looked recently, but now may still be a great time to shop the used market and find relatively recent used EVs with a decent amount of battery life ahead of them.
I wonder how much of the slow adoption rate is due to how many EVs are still not using NACS even though everyone knows it is the new standard. If I wanted a new EV right now I wouldn't get an EV that I have to use an adapter for, knowing the next model-year will likely have the "correct" connector by default.
Range anxiety is real but I think the vast majority of people over-estimate the amount of times it will ever effect them. I think the bigger problem is not everyone has a place they can conveniently charge at home. If I didn't have a garage I wouldn't consider getting an EV.
In addition to these:
At the end of the day though I think electric cars are more of a bandaid solution. I don't even want a car at all, I'd much rather live somewhere like Manhattan with good public transit, but that option is too expensive.
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News outlets keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
I don't care if the rate of acceleration is decreasing. If the numbers are accelerating, then you cannot say fewer people are buying them.
There's some weird things in this article for sure. Also what's with the offhand claim that EVs "cause more air pollution"? I don't see any way that could possibly be true.
I think at least part of it is in reference to them being heavier on average and therefore having higher tyre wear.
Exact quote from the article:
Also peak torque at all speeds = more teensy particles of rubber being sanded off the tires and spread through the air.
Imagine driving an ICE car and barely peeling out every time you accelerate from a stop. EVs can do this more frequently and easily because the motors are electric and can provide the same level of torque at all speeds. ICE cars conform to a power curve where peak torque is not instantaneous.
Just to be clear most manufacturers do not give you peak torque at all speeds, this would be unnecessary. Power curves are built into the software to both save energy and make the cars more drivable. Figured I would mention it.
Yeah, that's why I said can, but at the same time I think those curves are designed more with safety and performance in mind than tire lifespan.
....at least that's what I would do if I wanted to sell more tires 😈
Every EV I have driven has had a power curve artificially applied. Though to be honest my current car has a much more dramatic curve, and I’m not too happy about that.
I don't know if it is the case nor if it is what the article is referring to. I have been told that the manufacturing and disposal of EV batteries causes a lot of pollution. Assuming that is true, at the least it is pollution that would be easier to control. It could be captured at the source, versus trying to get CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Have you seen the mining and refining processes? It is disastrous to the environment. Hopefully sodium batteries will really take hold and replace lithium. There's a lot less environmental impact on mining sodium. Also sodium is not as volatile as lithium. Large Li-ion batteries scare me. I've seen too many fires from them.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but gas cars drive using the power of explosion juice being set on fire. And, it turns out, Electric cars are less likely to catch fire than gas cars. In fact, EV fires are 'much, much' less likely.
They aren't projected to. They'll complement lithium batteries, and hedge against lithium battery material costs going too high, and they'll be a whole lot more popular in some regional niches like India, but broadly speaking most car batteries will be lithium.
Li-Ion fires are bad, but IMO we're 5ish years away from solid state batteries, which solve the problem entirely - thermal runaway is driven by the liquid electrolyte feeding out, which just can't happen with lithium glass.
Air pollution though? And, lithium extraction andining is worse than that for gasolene and diesel?
I mean, rate of acceleration decreasing means that eventually new sales will stop. Calculus can provide us with a prediction of when that might happen, although I'm far enough removed from it, and too tired to work my way through it correctly.
Anybody currently doing calculus derivatives here that could solve this?
There are other factors, like wages being relatively stagnant compared to car price increases, which solving might "fix" the problem.
I'm not sure what you're asking us to solve. But of course if da/dt becomes negative, acceleration becomes deceleration. That's obvious. But if you were my passenger and we were sitting at a stoplight and I floored it and then eased up slightly when we got to 25 mph, you wouldn't say "we're driving slower now." You would say "what the hell? Why'd you start so fast?"
Solving for time.
Rate of accelleration is dropping YoY. So we project that out to see, if accelleration drop continues, when do sales plateau?
And how far below hybrids/gas cars when that happens.
But it's an econ problem, not a physics problem. The quantity of interest would be rate of change in EVs as a proportion of all cars sold.
Here' what we know:
p(2023_Q4) = 300000 (number of EVs sold)
v(2023_Q4) > 0 (more people bought EVs than the previous measurements)
a(2023_Q4) < 0 (the increase was a smaller increase than previous measurements)
We don't have a model for a(t). You could assume a linear model but there's no reason to think that it is as simple as tossing a ball in the air. For all we know a(2024_Q1) > 0 (unlikely based on changes in tax rebate programs).
Calculus was basically invented for physics, but is really just the math of rates of change and accumulation, so it it applies very well to economics too.
Options trading math is pretty much all calculus with statistics added in for extra fun. You've got various calculations for Δstock price/Δt, Δoption/Δunderlying (prices), and then various second and third derivatives of those (like the relationship between displacement, velocity and acceleration time graphs). It's actually really interesting from a physics-calculus-math perspective, even if one doesn't find the stock market too interesting.
Yes I know, I have my PhD in mathematics and taught calculus for 7 years. My point was that without much more work there isn't enough data here to do anything interesting.
Ah fair enough, you obviously know way more than me with a PhD. Sorry about that 😅
No worries! It's impossible to know who you're engaging on the internet. It is a fun thought experiment. I was just trying to underscore the effort/payoff given the data we have immediately on hand.
Physics is just applied math. Yes, the example is using distance/speed, but distance subs out with sales. So what we're missing, is a few historical datapoints, which this article was light on.
Here's an article that has a bit more depth, and has a nice chart.
In prior years EV sales were seeing exponential growth, and if we cease to see exponential growth, that's a problem. Much of our policy targets are presuming that exponential growth to continue to meet climate goals.
See my reply to Plik below. My point wasn't that other data doesn't exist, my point is that in the article of discussion not enough data is available to model anything with any remote expectation of accuracy.
IF you want to scrape more data you could model something, but I don't know that the effort is worth what will be a pretty basic model. For something remotely accurate we'd need to estimate correlations between policy, fuel prices, economic conditions, tax rebates, etc. So what you'd really need to model is a manifold, there are some good methods in topological data analysis but this isn't just a "integrate acceleration" problem (read: physics problem).
The thing is, I was originally commenting on this remark.
I realize now that was more of a commentary on the wording choice than why knowing the decreasing rate of accelleration is important.
And I'll agree that more digging would be needed to find the numbers. But it's not that hard, I certainly found some in cursory searching, some from the very same news source, and is probably what the authors should have done to provide proper context for why it is indeed the problem.
Glad to hear there was just some miscommunication...I was very confused by what points you were trying to make.
I can't really imagine an EV being very practical in the states, apart from inside cities?
But then you're probably using public transport.
Despite what Americans will tell you, the United States is not an uninhabited wilderness. There is a general lack of charging infrastructure and various other hurdles to physically using an electric vehicle, but the "practicality" of the vehicles themselves is largely a psychological concern over hypothetical cross-continental trips.
Considering 81% of the population lives in relatively urbanized areas (where charging infrastructure is more plentiful), and 91% of trips are less than 30 miles, there is little reason to automatically doubt the practicality of the technology per se. If you have a specific remark about the charging infrastructure, sure, that's probably valid. There are a thousand different problems with the systems, especially their small quantity, but for most users this is a quality of life issue and not an existential one; the system is bad, not unusable.
There are parts of the US where very few people live, where average travel distances are significantly above average, where many homes are off-grid, and where municipal infrastructure is minimal. But most Americans, including most ICE car owners, do not live in these places.
While I completely support a push to more eco-friendly modes of transportation, I think the 9% of outliers in the statistics are the reasons most Americans do not jump on getting an electric car.
For my personal example. I am fortunate to live in an extremely walkable city, and I get a majority of my groceries via walking or bicycling, and the times I use the car to make big grocery trips, it is less than 5 miles away. A majority of my transportation purposes would be perfect for an electric car. My partner and I have discussed getting an electric car multiple times due to how little we use our ICE car and the majority of our transportation needs.
Despite the majority of our daily transportation use cases, my mother, my best friends, and my other family all live around or over 30 miles away in various directions. I visit these various friends and family around once a week. Meanwhile, my partner's family is several states away, and it's a one-night roadtrip, but would be a hassle with an electric car, considering current electric car charging infrastructure.
Those 9% of cases where trips are greater than 30 miles are probably what is causing a reluctance to adopt an all-electric vehicle in America.
To be honest, one of my main concerns is the idea of getting stranded somewhere in an electric car due to running out of fuel. At least with an ICE, any person could help out by bringing over a canister of gasoline. What do you do with an electric car that has run out of fuel? I assume one has to pay for a tow truck.
Yes, range anxiety for long-distance trips is the biggest cause of reluctance for most car-buyers. It is generally illogical, unreasonable, and frivolous when you consider the average EV range (easily 250+ miles and as much as 500 miles) and the actual density of charging infrastructure in the United States.
Even just looking at NACS chargers, most of the country is not over 50 miles from a charger. The worst case I can find east of the Mississippi is Annapolis MO, which is about 90 miles from Cape Girardeau, MO. The very worst case I can find is Hays, Montana, which is about 195 miles from Great Falls, Montana. That is a remarkably insignificant edge case for most car owners, who have likely never heard of Hays. Even considering the considerable operational failure rate of charging stations from certain manufacturers, the number of dedicated charging stations is more than sufficient even for the majority of long-distance travel. I would also emphasize that most long-distance travel happens on interstate highways, which have many EV charging stations even in western states.
If you live in or frequently travel to Hays, Montana, then EV range anxiety is quite reasonable, especially given its colder climate. But someone who lives on eastern Long Island (for example), only leaves Long Island a few times per year, rarely leaves the northeast, and literally never crosses the Mississippi does not have to concern themselves over range anxiety. The same applies to pretty much everywhere east of the Mississippi as well as the majority of the west. Cases like that comprise a very significant portion of ICE car owners in the United States, especially people above 55 (40% of the population).
My parents, who were regular drivers but never owned electric vehicles, went at least 30 years (by my count) without driving more than 755.9 miles between a part of the country that would (today) have a lot of charging infrastructure and a part of the country that would (today) have... only slightly less charging infrastructure. Actually it was probably half that because their road trips were always multi-day. This included many multi-state trips. If they had taken such a trip today, it would be pretty hard to get stranded, even in the cold (with battery efficiency reduced by like 30%). Technically possible. But I fail to see how it would be enormously more likely than running out of gas.
This is a reasonable concern which could be generally resolved with a spare low-voltage portable battery pack. I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that most EVs come with a very small L1 portable battery pack/charger that you can use to get a few extra miles if you're truly stranded. Portable batteries offering 50 miles of range apparently aren't unheard of. It might take a while to charge, but if you're in a place where you can't call a tow truck, they would work.
I think you would have to do a rather poor job of planning a trip to be in this situation in most parts of the country though. Electric vehicles can pretty much universally be charged from a normal outlet. Anywhere that has electrical power can therefore theoretically charge a vehicle, even if it's not officially an EV charging station. If one were to knowingly take a trip to a part of the country without any electrical services (such as eastern Alaska or central Montana) and knowingly not bring a portable charger in case of emergency, I don't really have a response. That's not much different than driving an ICE to the middle of the Nevada desert, running out of fuel, and wondering where all the gas stations are.
I think we need more, faster, and better charging stations everywhere in the country, but there is a certain point where we are being unrealistic with ourselves. I can't change someone else's opinion about their transportation needs, but I can at least recognize when my own, even hypothetical ones, are not actually needs but irrational fears. And I think it would be a good practice for more people to attempt to do the same when this question comes up.
To some extent those irrational fears can be eliminated with more infrastructure, but there will always be some people who have some fear about some hypothetical situation involving driving 3000 miles specifically in rural Alaska that would literally never materialize. There is a point where it is simply not useful to recognize range anxiety as a legitimate concern in the United States. We are not at that point yet for every edge case, but with EVs with 500-mile ranges on the market, we are getting pretty darn close.
If you're referring to the amount of time it takes to charge an EV, that is a reasonable concern. IMO travel time is a much more reasonable concern than anxiety about getting stranded somewhere. Travel time is partially a function of vehicle charging time, which is partially a function of battery range. The data is emphatically opposed to the notion that most people take regular enough 500+ mile journeys for this to be a major concern, but I understand that it is still a concern for some people.
A multi-state roadtrip is generally something that should be accomplished by train (even an auto train where you can bring your car along) considering the poor energy efficiency of cars. But of course we all know what the state of the passenger rail industry in the United States is, so that usually doesn't solve the time problem. It could potentially be less of a hassle though, even if it takes longer.
Edit: in your particular case it sounds like a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle would be a perfectly great option...?
I once had "range anxiety" to the point I had to pull out the PlugShare app and find a hotel that happened to have a level 2 charger (the kind I installed in my house) because my car was lying about its remaining range despite me dropping down to 55 mph and turning off all HVAC when I figured out what was going on. I usually think you have to be a bit of an idiot to not make it to your next destination, but my car was very wrong, to the point where I almost got stuck in the middle of southeastern Illinois. I think when I left the previous charger, my car told me I'd arrive with probably around 15% left, maybe a bit less, and I ended up having to stop for over an hour at a random hotel in frickin Mattoon, Illinois, 32 miles from my next supercharger, because my car lied about its charge or how fast it was using it. That was very frustrating.
Considering EVs are relatively new and niche, I'm amazed how fast the charging infrastructure has been made. There's work to do, sure, but I dread to think how long it took to build enough fuel stations for cars a hundred years ago.
Indeed, especially because the federal government has not, until very recently (with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022), been seriously interested in supporting the installation of more EV charging stations.
That legislation is just now beginning to result in more EV chargers being installed nationwide. (That means all we see so far has lacked any particularly centralized planning and has still managed to be pretty great.) The goal is another 500,000 federally funded charging ports nationwide at even greater density: 50 miles distance max. Honestly, the vast majority of places in the US already meet this criteria; the legislation aims to go far beyond that and also increase density even in areas that currently have decent infrastructure. And since we've now settled on a continent-wide standard port (NACS), compatibility issues will not be a problem.
While the EV charging network in the US has many problems, it is far from unusable and will rapidly improve within the next five years.
Yeah, my partner has lamented over the now-discontinued Chevy Bolt or Volt or whatever it was. I'm not sure now why he isn't interested in finding a different type of plug-in hybrid. Maybe there aren't enough options, or the features of current options are not as nice as what the bolt/volt/whatever had. Lately he has been no longer interested in a plug-in hybrid and now purely wants an EV, but I would still prefer a hybrid if we had to get a new car.
We currently have a 10-year-old Prius and it's in very good condition, so we don't have much of a need to get a new car. (Reduce, reuse, recycle.) We occasionally think about new cars/EVs, mainly because then we could give our Prius to my mom whose car is quite worn down at this point.
I think if you live in a walkable city or can cycle, you've already partly answered the question. Why get an EV if you can ride?
EVs to me fall into this weird category where you need to live somewhere with enough distance between work and daily errands that cycling is a hassle, but not so little distance that cycling is more convenient. So basically suburbia. However, if you are doing the typical home-work commute, you are probably going to want charging stations at work just for peace of mind, but then how many companies are willing to install charging stations for their employees? How many employees are going to want to waste their breaks checking to see if the limited number of charging stations are available?
I think ICEs have the huge benefit of giving peace of mind. You basically have zero worry that needs
to be allotted to planning your daily driving, and even if you do get low on gas, it is incredibly easy to find a gas station.
tl;dr: I can't think of many places in the US given the options of ICE, EV, or bicycle where I'd choose EV over the other two.
To my knowledge there has never been a full-sized EV with a range of less than 60 miles, which is double of that average commute number. Nowadays EVs are being made with 300-500 miles of range, which could last you all week without needing to charge once. Why would you need to bother with charging at work? Do you worry about running out of gas when you are working?
And even if you are running low on power when you get to work it’s the same situation as with an ICE; you just “refuel” at a charging station.
Yeah. I guess my experience is just weird. I've never lived anywhere a bicycle wasn't good enough except Texas. Thus I am having trouble imagining situations where the distances are great enough that I'd want a vehicle over a bicycle...and the only places that come to mind are the DFW metroplex or Bay Area/LA, both places I'd rather go for a regular old ICE car (or honestly, motorcycle).
Could someone with the required privileges please update the title to
Pace of electric car adoption has markedly slowed in the USto better reflect the actual situation?See also the discussion in updawg's comment: https://tildes.net/~transport/1db0/fewer_people_are_buying_electric_cars_in_the_us#comment-bnbu
Done!
Thanks!