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Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

theguardian.com

241–250 of 667 posts

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#241

Electric cars are perfectly pleasant to own as a second car or if you very rarely take long road trips. If it's very cold or very hot, if you drive to the mountains or rural areas for pleasure, range anxiety is a serious problem. Waiting for a re-charge is ok if you have access to Tesla supercharger speeds. Forcing this lifestyle change on everyone is absolutely insane. The climate imperative is poor reasoning becaus…

For me, the only thing keeping me from going to 100% electric for my household is that nobody seems to offer an EV with 200 miles of range with AWD and clearance for a rough forest road with potholes. Until then, we're sticking to a short range EV for the city and a crossover for the mountains.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#243
post #231

I just got a Renault Zoe 2020 last December and it's been great. Commuting to work and going to the shops is just as comfortable as with a combustion engine. No gas station visits and even with the high cost of electricity in Germany (0,3€/kWh) it's still worth it. Only when driving longer distances (>250km) you need to plan ahead for charging and trips take longer (1-3 hours).

I'd go with "more comfortable" when you're talking about a car that can heat the cabin almost instantly, rather than waiting for the combustion engine to heat the coolant enough to trip the bi-metallic thermostat, thereby routing tepid coolant into the heater core in the cabin, and then blowing a fan over it. :)

Takes literally 3 minutes on my car at -10C. If you have issues with cold climates maybe buy a car built in and for cold climates. Like Swedish cars.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#244
post #223
post #3

The UK plan for no ICE vehicles to be sold by 2030 is fairly ambitious. I'm seeing more and more electric vehicles on the roads, but I think some regular customers will be disappointed by how poor the infrastructure is. Not only that electric chargers aren't as prevalent as they need to be, but the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city), but an even bigger problem is the h…

> no ICE vehicles Even with chargers everywhere there will be a problem: we'll have to produce a lot more electricity. And when we start reading about possible blackouts in some countries in Europe due to environmental decisions 2030 feels like not far enough. Solar and wind won't be enough. Nuclear suffers from NIMBY. So what? We'll produce electricity from oil, coal and gaz? Awesome way to move the emission problem…

Solar, wind and geothermal are definitively enough. Also, remember that the goal is not to eliminate ICE cars in 2030, just not produce any new ones.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#245
The tipping point might be for new car sales, but I'd be more interested in second hand market which is the vast majority of car sale transactions.

I personally would not buy a new car with my current finanical situation, even though i'm well paid, because i'd never have the sort of cash on hand to buy one and I try to avoid debt.

And so like many I'll be still buying used cars for the foreseeable, which will likely remain ICE cars.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#246
My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon.

This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week!

Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news? Are they from another planet where electricity delivery is not a problem that architects have to deal with in building design?

Mind you, I got the exact same dumbfounded stare from people when talking to cafe managers and gym owners about the impending COVID lockdowns back in February 2020: "Lock...down...? You think so? Really? Here?" (Don't think IT is spared from this, I get the same vacant expression when I talk to network engineers about IPv4 exhaustion and the need for IPv6.)

On a more practical note, I have business idea that might interest the YC News crowd: The main problem raised by building managers I spoke to was that it was "too hard" to solve charge-back and the like. Wiring is "easy", that's just a matter of calling out contractor, but organising the billing of the tenant and then splitting the revenue between the various parties involved is more work for them than it is worth, because it is complex to set up but initially there may be only a couple of electric cars generating very little revenue. An "electric charging billing" cloud service that manages everything with low overheads might sell well...

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#247
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to wrap my head around this as well. You look at the repeated rolling brown-outs that seem to happen in places like California every few years, and I wonder how throwing 10s of millions of cars that all need to charge at extremely high rates is going to be absorbed. Sure, SOME of those people might also install things like solar panels and batteries, but I just don't see how the math works right now.

Simple: most people charge at night. Sure, fast charging will add some day-time demand, but it's not much. Cheap night-time pricing keeps the charging demand off-peak. More even demand curves make generation more economical. It becomes trivial to upgrade distribution where needed.

I still don't see how that works when you're talking EVERYONE charging. Here's a quick example from New England in 2010:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=830

During "peak" hours they're using roughly 17Gw total, and during off-peak, it's at 15Gw so we've only got 2Gw total to buffer electric cars charging.

Feel free to tell me how my math is wrong, but let's assume worst case scenario: a tesla charger lists 11.5kW max draw. There are roughly 14m people in New England, if we assume even half of them were charging overnight, that's 86Gw of power draw. Even if you back that off to 25% of the population and half the power draw from the charger, you're at 21.5Gw of power, which is 10x what is available, and more than the total power usage during peak hours.

If someone else has some different math I'm all ears but I don't know how we're going to more than double the total power capacity in 10 years - even if you assume we can get there with renewables, the backend infrastructure can't handle it.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#248

Maybe in the UK, but not where I am. It was -26 this morning. Batteries don't handle such temperatures well. And the nearest civilian airport is 400km away. I haven't seen a single all-electric car in my town since I moved here over a year ago.

What percentage of the world's car owning population lives in a place with a restriction like that? Few enough that it would be fine to let you keep your ICE/hybrid vehicles with almost no impact on climate is my guess. If I had to guess, you live in Canada which is a country of extremes like what you mention. The solution for Canada probably isn't to prohibit ICE vehicles, but to disincentivize them heavily where th…

> What percentage of the world's car owning population lives in a place with a restriction like that?

Interior USA?

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#249

Mass adoption won't happen until charging infrastructure improves dramatically. As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them…

It's frustrating when chargers don't work, I was using them frequently for a while when I was taking a child to and from doctors appointments multiple times a week and encountered a few.

That being said, I never got stranded and there was always a charger I could use. This was in metro Atlanta in 2017, the situation only got better since then.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#250
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been mapping Michigan gas stations on OpenStreetMap so I have some data ready at hand here. Wayne County, which is essentially all part of the Detroit metro area, has more than 800 retail fuel establishments licensed by the state of Michigan. (I don't think my point particularly rests on how the Detroit metro is defined; Detroit itself has 349 gas stations)

Well, OK, but I'm not sure that really reflects the subject under discussion (a recognized place with a sign or whatever where you know you can drive in and fill up). I mean, to be glib: I have no Detroit-area GIS experience whatsoever, but I can type "gas station" into a Google Maps search for the area and count how many flags I see. And it's absolutely not 800. Indeed, it looks like 40 or so. Surely there are techn…

There are thousands of gas stations in michigan. no way there are 40 in detroit. Google maps doesnt show every single one
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