Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

You know what would be a lot more convincing, or at least valuable to the conversation?

If you provided some anecdotes about how you live, in an apartment, with a BEV as your only car, on a middling salary for a white collar worker (say $40-50K USD). Possibly some numbers/calculations based on your experience.

Putting people down for "anecdotes" and not having "imagination" gives the impression you might be basing your opinions on theoretical ideas.

but but.. the telsa pickup truck towing capacity is rumored to be 300,000 lbs.

Come now, that's not even close. That's comparing a BMW M4 2 door coup with a rear seat (rated for 4 adults) with a fullsize 5 door sedan (rated for 5 adults). The model S has around 3 times the cargo space (30 ft^3 s "8 to 11" ft^2 on the BMW).

A 5 series is much closer, 5 adults, 18 ft^3 cargo space, and even leads by a bit on passenger space (98 ft^3 vs 94 ft^3). The model S is AWD only, so to be fair lets add that to the BMW 5 series.

The BMW 550i xdrive "base curb weight" is 4,372, the Tesla S P100D is 4883, so 11.6%. Both cars have slower/lighter versions of course. The M550i has a 0-60 of 3.8 seconds, the Tesla 2.5 seconds.

They are both handle 5 passenger, have 4 doors (ignoring the heavier hatchback on the S), have AWD, are within 1 inch wheelbase and 0.6 inch in length. Having sat in both I'd say that feel relatively similarly sized, especially in the back seat (unlike the M4).

As for the m2 competition, I think the weight distribution can be partially attributed to it being a small 2 door with a token rear seat and tiny trunk than any strong statement about ICE vs electric. I'm not saying batteries (at least today) are not heavier, just that for comparably sized/marketed cars the difference is relatively low.

I think a common trap is to compare a large tesla that fits a family of 4+dog and to compare it to a high performance sports coup... because of the similar performance. Not because they are comparable cars for most uses.

The problem is there are more anecdotes than useful information. Apologies for getting a small bit of angry there. It's one of those cases where I've had a lot of different people pop up in my "mentions" with variations of the same anecdotes, and there's that imbalance in that even if it is the fiftieth time I've responded to the same anecdote, it can still be that person's first time thinking about it.

If you really want my anecdata, I do live in an apartment building with a tiny shared garage. I use a "range extended" EV (Generation 1, 2012 Volt) as my only car. I do my entire daily commute on a Level 1 charge, 8-12 hours charging each night for roughly 35-42 miles of charge depending on weather, entirely off of a boring, normal three-prong garage outlet. I have a dedicated parking space for my unit, but it's not entirely as convenient to the plug as I would like, but it's served me well enough now for 7-ish years. I've not yet convinced my building to install a Level 2 or higher charger, but as some of my neighbors start to talk about the idea of also buying EVs it could happen as a joint effort.

The only big maintenance issues I've had with my car in all this time have been related to its gas engine for range extending and partly related to how little I've wound up using it. (I used it a lot in the first couple of years for a dumb commute I wasn't happy with; on an average year since then I use a full tank of gas at most twice in that year for big road trips, with rare sips for weather or the car's own monthly maintenance cycle.) At this point, I do feel certain my next car when it comes time to replace the Volt will be entirely battery electric. A gas range extender made sense in 2012, but I'd strongly recommend against it in 2019, the range in BEVs is now good enough to cover 100% of my daily driving for two whole weeks between required charging, and I do have years of experience now that I can also easily cover ~140% of my daily miles in the evenings on the most boring of a Level 1 charger (110 volt, standard US three prong wall outlet), not even counting how long my car usually sits on the weekends, nor how much of a charge I could get if I could convince my office to give me even a boring old Level 1 plug while I'm parked at work.

There's this perspective that Chargers are something new and unique and need to be giant gas-station like things, and it just belies the fact of how ubiquitous our electric grid already is, just how many plug outlets we've placed throughout our cities. In my years of owning my car, I've found a small game of cataloging outdoor outlets and their rough distance to parking lots. (I've found parking spots to charge in at the back of hotels I've stayed at. The hotels didn't even know they had spots that could charge a car, and always had fun reactions if I asked to use those outlets.) Then that lead to a game of cataloging the nearest electric device to a parking spot. Do you realize how many parking lots have lots of bright shining lamps every so many feet? How many street lamps on the average street? Do you know how easy it would be to install a plug at the base of each and every one of those lamps?

(More interestingly, it was brought to my attention that the vast majority of parking lot lamps run in the US actually run at 220 volt A/C for reliability of the most common type of halogen lamps at the time a lot of parking lots were built. In theory we should be easily capable of adding Level 2 chargers near every parking lot lamp.)

We could argue middling salary multiple ways, and I'm not sure I'd fit some of your definitions, but I will offer as some evidence that I'm driving a 7-year old car, expect to keep it until at least 10-years old, and my previous car was 13-years old (and I had driven it for 10 of those) when I upgraded. I had to buy this car new to put my money where my mouth was on EV as the present in 2012, but it was a trade-off I felt important. For the most part I've saved on maintenance and gas more than enough to make up the difference from buying used, at least according to the last time I did a back-of-the-envelope check (which was an important check for my father, who is very adamant from experience about never buy a new car, always buy used).

So yeah, electric charging is already the past and present for me, I'm not just talking theoretically.

Yes, normal wall outlet. On the outside of buildings since forever for grounds keeping tools like electric leaf blowers. You see them all the time on buildings (and homes!) every so many feet in those little plastic boxes where they just flip up and are rarely with any sort of lock or key. When I've used such outlets in my travels, I've made sure to clear it with the Manager first before ever plugging in, which as I said was often a fun conversation. In my small assortment of times asking the question the majority of the time the answer, after a lot of confusion about what I was asking and sometimes which Manager I should talk to in a multi-Manager situation was "Sure, I don't see why not." A few times it was "No, I'm not sure we'd allow that," or "The person you could ask isn't in this week," and I respected that outcome.

In all the times I asked, paying for it never came up. Admittedly, when I was asking it was always a "nice to have it" request and at least to some degree I hit a sweet spot between "Hospitality companies want to agree to things that are easy for them to provide to make customers happy" and "this is new enough and uncommon enough a question that they aren't going have written policies on it yet". I was also making sure to only do it with businesses that I had an established customer relationship with (I'm staying in this hotel and/or Since I'm paying for parking here anyway). Much of the time the extra bit of electricity I was using was a drop in the bucket of the business' usual utility overhead, and/or a drop in the bucket compared to my existing expenditure (the cost of a hotel room, even the cost of parking).

(Aside rant: I think it's a scam to meter some Chargers at all. Chargers in some of the parking garages I've used or attempted to use had some outrageous surcharges to make it seem like metering was a useful value add to the process. Use something like $0.75 in electricity, tops, get a combo of $12+ in surcharges from three different middlemen [the garage, the charger company, a bonus kickback to the power company], all on top of $15-$30 parking fee just to get into the garage. You could easily cover $0.75 of electricity in that $30 parking fee.)