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German government expands subsidies for electric cars

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Re: German government expands subsidies for electric cars

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, when they add these types of charging stations, they will make the grid ready. Secondly, grid has a lot of capacity. Its like motorways, most of the time its under utilised. Only during peak time that it is full capacity. Think of the grid in a similar way. Its mostly under utilised except for peak time. All we need to do is make use of it outside peak time (with batteries) and suddenly we have double or tri…

What about all the people getting from/to work roughly at the same time and plugging their cars. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup for example, and that's just tea pots > All we need to do is make use of it outside peak time Seems like a huge thing to overcome to me.

Just because they plug in at the same time doesn't mean they all need to draw power. In fact a lot of chargers now are set to charge late at night to take advantage of the lower off-peak prices.

Re: German government expands subsidies for electric cars

#152
post #64

Not electric motorcycles? They are electric AND require less energy to move from point A to B.

They probably require a lot more doctor time to move from point A to point B though.

Cars make everyone require a lot more doctor time in the form of treatments for asthma, bronchitis and obesity. Not to mention in the form of making driving so boring that drivers fill the time with texting and cause accidents, killing cyclists in the process.

Re: German government expands subsidies for electric cars

#153
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it adds about 5 miles per hour for model 3. So after charging overnight it would be at least 50 miles of range added. And this is enough for many.

Which is still very slow, as I said above. The fact that you can get a tenth of the battery charge after a full night is not fast by any measure. Consider that our driving habits have been formed around getting hundreds of Km/mi worth of range in minutes. And if a gas pump would only fill 6 liters at a time nobody in the world would say “well it’s still more than most people need”.

The conversation completely changes as you're not going to a gas station to fill up, you're parking your car at home or plugging it in while you shop. You have fast charging on the highway which, at least for the more powerful ones, can fill you up to 80% in 40 minutes.

Re: German government expands subsidies for electric cars

#154
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 48k EUR I can buy a decent Porsche Panamera, for example. https://www.autoscout24.de/angebote/porsche-panamera-4-s-ind... For 20k EUR I get a decent Mercedes C 220: https://www.autoscout24.de/angebote/mercedes-benz-c-220-c-kl... or a decent E350 with 40k km (similar to the one I bought, see below): https://www.autoscout24.de/angebote/mercedes-benz-e-350-t-cd... etc. The only people buying new cars in Germany are…

The only issue I have with this is that you can't really buy used EVs yet. I'm interested in buying an EV but it's like smartphones in 2008 - the rate of improvement is high so it makes sense to buy new.

You can buy used EVs, but for example, used teslas are in the 40k EUR range, which is quite expensive.

I'm not sure why they are so expensive, but I can imagine that if you have to retrofit the battery system for 20-30k EUR before reselling them, then that's going to drive their price up quite a bit.

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