56 ms·

The electric motor's dominance is inevitable, despite the best efforts of politicians. Hard to beat 95% efficiency and 100% torque at stall.

hoseja 6y ago
Maybe when the charging speeds are in the megawatt range (equivalent of pumping gas).
- LarvaFX 6y ago
  Car charges overnight. Not wasting any more time on trips to the gas station. On longer trips, charge while eating.
  - layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
    Most people don’t live in houses with garages where they can charge their car.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Chargers will get cheap and public when electric cars become common. In the same way street lights are pretty much everywhere today. You could imagine a special type of paving stone that has a magsafe socket in, and you just pull a wire from your parked car to the kerb.
      - lstodd 6y ago
        No way. People can't get lousy fiber pulled to their houses and you're talking about multimegawatt electricity supply.
        londons_explore 6y ago
        I'm talking about slow chargers - the kind that are 60 amps or so AC. The kind that require no expensive electronics in the charger. The kind that'll take 12 hours for a full charge. Fast DC chargers will always cost more due to the need for expensive power electronics.
        lstodd 6y ago
        Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid. 1 MW would be enough for just ~150 chargers. And where would you get that megawatt at night? More base load, which means nuclear or fossil which means less niche for solar because no one would shut down such amount of base load generation each day. Besides 60 amps isn't exactly cheap in electronics. It might not require active cooling for the cable and the battery, that's true.
        Reason077 6y ago
        > "Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid." Only if every car in your neighbourhood is plugged in and pulling 7 kW at the same time. Smart charging solves this, by reducing charging during demand peaks (ie: 6pm when everyone is arriving home from work and plugging in at the same time), and increasing it later in the night when more capacity is available.
        lstodd 6y ago
        However you slice it, you have to deliver say 40KWh to that many cars overnight, or they fail to charge and thus are useless. So the grid has to handle that and even if you can get rid of extreme peaks with "smartness", you can't lower the cables and switches ratings much.
        Reason077 6y ago
        First of all, the average car does not need 40 kWh every day. The average driver in the USA drives 13,500 miles per year (far more than the average driver in the UK/Europe!) That's about 37 miles per day, so about 12.5 kWh per night on average at ~3 miles per kWh. And remember, those who are driving long distance are probably going to be using fast chargers on-route, so their domestic charging demand will be lower. Secondly, even if they did need 40 kWh every night, that only equates to 4 kW over a 10 hour charging cycle. Easily manageable by avoiding the typical late afternoon / early evening peaks. Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM.
      - Reason077 6y ago
        Ubitricity already have a pretty nice kerb-side charging solution, including sockets which integrate into existing street light poles: https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ These are quite widely deployed in a few London boroughs.
        dfgdghdf 6y ago
        Great, so we can turn London into a parking lot for electric cars. The solution for urban centres is to have fewer (but electric) cars.
        Reason077 6y ago
        No, these aren't adding any additional parking spaces. Just allowing cars to be charged at existing ones. (I totally agree about fewer cars, but remaining ones must be electric. And electric cars need charging infrastructure.)
    - trengorilla 6y ago
      Yet.
  - randunel 6y ago
    Not good enough for many of my friends, I'm afraid. It would definitely not be an option for me, I drive 1200km in roughly 12h - 14h each night, for 2w long tours: - Heviz to Saint Tropez 1200km - Empuriabrava to Malaga 1100km - Porto to Andorra 1100km - Krakow to Bucharest 1200km - other shorter trips (700km-800km) ----- - business trip Bucharest to Leipzig 1600km (I go much farther without passengers) - Leizig to London 1200km (slow ferry) - etc I drive a diesel and it's just excellent for my family's holidaying, we would be wasting considerable time charging, reducing the overall time to enjoy the tour's destinations.
    - wastedhours 6y ago
      I mean, impressive mileage - but you must definitely be an outlier with those numbers in single trips I'd imagine. Also, if you're only do those kinds of numbers a few weeks a year, you could have an electric car for 50 weeks of the year and then hire a diesel one for the longer stints? That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time. (I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
      - bluGill 6y ago
        The fixed costs of owning two cars means that it rarely works out. Rental cars can work, but again the math rarely works out because it is so expensive to rent a large car.
        jfk13 6y ago
        I also worry that in the hypothetical world where most people just own a small electric for local daily use, and rent a large diesel (or whatever) for the family holiday, demand for those larger, longer-range vehicles will be extremely seasonal. It may not be viable to maintain a large fleet of family-vacation-type vehicles just to satisfy the demand for summer holidays in August and ski trips in February.
- adammunich 6y ago
  The latest DC fast charging standard goes up to 400kW, it's only a matter of time.
- yholio 6y ago
  I think battery swap can be made to work and solve all these problems with the right economic structure that does not yet exist. You have a battery pack that you own and maintain carefully, and you absolutely do not want to rent it out to anyone. So you use it day to day transport and charge slowly overnight, perfect to prolong life. When time comes to make a long, cross country trip, you visit a swap center and deposit your battery, and switch to rented batteries for the duration of the trip, while paying a charge+rent fee. When you come back from the trip, your own battery is waiting for you at the same station, charged and stored in good conditions. Or, you can make the first leg of the journey on your own battery, then have it shipped back to a station near your home before you return; by necessity the network will have to perform rebalancing anyway for the rental stock. I know Tesla demoed battery swap, but they were only interested in the associated subsidy and not keen on it because it requires a large stock of batteries that they had no capacity to produce in large quantities at the time. When safe and cheap batteries are available in quantity, they will pretty much be forced to revisit this model or face tough competition from charge networks that can handle swap.
  - klondike_ 6y ago
    Battery swapping isn't practical with modern electric car design. In most EVs today, the battery is part of the structural frame of the car and can't be removed easily. DC fast charging seems like a much more practical solution for the occasional cross country trip
    - yholio 6y ago
      That seems more like a practical engineering decision since battery swap is not yet widespread. There doesn't seem to be anything fundamental that prevents it and in fact Tesla retrofitted the idea for vehicles that were not initially designed with swap in mind. It's either that fast charging attains exceptional safe speeds (i.e less than 5 minutes), or that competitive pressures will force electrics to embrace swap. The current status quo of waiting an hour for a full charge cannot stand on the long term; the lost productivity is so large that it completely dwarfs the costs of implementing the swap networks, so somebody is bound to package it in a consumer friendly product and pocket the profits.
- adrianN 6y ago
  The average car spends 23h a day parked somewhere. You just need to equip a largeish fraction of the parking spots with a charger. You don't need high currents, because most people drive less than 30kWh (~150km) a day, so a normal 220V 16A plug is more than sufficient. The only issue are long roadtrips, where high current chargers are needed, but they already exist. In 20 minutes you can recharge more than you can drive in two hours. You're supposed to take breaks anyway.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    That makes things worse. Right now there are many fast fill gas pumps in my little city. If everyone is charging at home there is less demand and so those pumps go away - even for the rare long distance trip where the slow recharge isn't an option. 95% of the time you are correct, it would be just fine to charge in my garage and who cares if it takes 12 hours as the car isn't moving anyway. However a couple times a year I - like most people - take a longer trip and depends on the infrastructure that allows me to refill my car in a few minutes and get on my way.
    - hedora 6y ago
      I recently drove a long way (24 driving hours) through multiple states in the southwestern US (deserts, scrubland, etc). There was a Tesla charging station within walking distance of most of the places we stopped for gas, food or lodging. I don’t think the trip would have taken any additional planning with an EV.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map With that said, electrical infrastructure is ubiquitous. You can install EV chargers anywhere there is power.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        When I'm in some unknown location I'm not going to hire an electrician to put in a charging station where I happen to need one. I depend on one being there. However as I already said charge at home means refueling places become uneconomical and they out out of business meaning that even though it isn't hard to put a charging station anywhere that doesn't mean they will exist. Of course what I'm lacking is knowing how much this will affect things long term. Right no charging stations are being installed on hope they are worth it, if this turns out to be false owners will start to tear them out.
nickff 6y ago
Electric is great when specific energy is not a factor; you're quoting vanity metrics.
smnrchrds 6y ago
As a person living in Canada, whenever I hear about advances in the auto sector, I say to myself, "Great! My grandchildren will be so lucky when the technology makes it here in 50 years or so". Electric vehicles? The range is an issue even in warm climates. Canada is so spread out that more range is needed and so cold that the range you get is lower. Self-driving vehicles? The gap between driving in Arizona and driving in a snowy Edmonton road is night and day.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- Mvandenbergh 6y ago
  The majority of the Canadian population lives in a small number of urban areas. The fact that the distance between towns in Alberta is massive is not relevant to the "average" driving behaviour of Canadians because the modal drive is a commute between Guelph and Toronto or something of that sort. It doesn't matter if the 5% of the population keeps driving non-EV vehicles for many decades to come for performance reasons. Let them! Cumulative emissions are all that matter.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    I am not sure if average is a good number to judge things by. I don't think many Calgarians could be convinced to buy a vehicle which makes a one-day distance to Vancouver into a two-day distance. I know this is counter to what any logistics expert would suggest, but people rarely buy based on average, they buy based on peak. So sure, if an average person in an average year makes 250 short trips (daily commute), 30 medium trips (weekends), and 10 long trips (visiting family in another province for Christmas and Thanksgiving, going on a vacation, long weekend trip, etc.), they will probably buy the vehicle that they can use for all of the above, not just the 250 short commutes. Case in point: sale of small cars and sedans in North America has been in decline compared with trucks and SUVs. People want an everything car, not a most-things car. Also, wile a large percentage of the population of Canada lives in Toronto and Montreal regions, where cities are closer together, this does not mean that is 95% of the population. Calgary alone has a population of more than 1.3 million people. It is very common to need to make a short trip to Edmonton [0], which is considered close by Canadian standards. But even then, it is a 600 km round-trip in a road that tends to be snowy quite often. Population distribution in Western Canada is much more spread out than the East. And the cumulative population is way more than 5%. [0] For example for concerts. Calgary and Edmonton are big enough to get good musical acts. But they are not big or far away enough for touring musicians to visit both cities. If You live in Calgary and your favourite musician is having their concert in Edmonton, that's a day trip you will most likely take.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
noelwelsh 6y ago
It's amazing how any time this comes up someone has to pile in "but I drive 1000km a day so it will never work". Buddy, there are allowed to outliers. It just has to work for most people most of the time. Anyway, some actual data. Most cars spend the vast majority of their time going exactly nowhere: https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility#a5 https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility#a5 The average trip is 8 miles (same source, both in the UK. You can find data for your country. Might also look at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261516309067 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019126151...) Plenty of time to charge from a domestic charger, and no range issue with current electric cars (which have >200 mile range).
- Infinitesimus 6y ago
  I think for most people, it is the desire for: 1. One do-everything car (short and long trips without pre-planning) 2. Living in an apartment so no overnight charging. Even with 200mi range, you have to ensure there are chargers en route because they are still sparse and it still takes a long time to charge the car. Gas vehicles still win because in most places, you can expect a gas station within 50 miles and the time penalty is 5 mins vs hours. Sparse city charging infrastructure also mean makes charging much harder. We're getting better but imo electric cars in the US at least are still limited to wealthier folks with houses that have charging stations and some city dwellers in nice apartment complexes. I hope we see a good sub 30k electric car soon to shake things up.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    The way fixed costs work few people drive enough to make owning two cars for different purposes worth it. The big SUV might be only needed a few times a year, but it is cheaper to pay for it all year long than to also pay for a small car. Rental cars are expensive enough that they are out. For a while I did make a tiny car and a SUV work, but I had to drive ~100 miles a day for work and even then it just barely worked out.
- forinti 6y ago
  Only cars as big/heavy as golf carts should really be allowed inside cities. That would drastically reduce pollution (both air and noise) and also all but eliminate fatalities and injuries.
GuB-42 6y ago
Electric motors are better and it has been the case for more than a century. The real problem is powering them. Batteries have a terrible energy density compared to hydrocarbon fuels and charge slowly, fuel cells don't seem to take off, and using an internal combustion engine to power an electric engine doesn't really solve anything. In fact, the simple fact that powering an electric engine with an ICE may be a good idea speak volume about both the superiority of electric engines and the difficulty of powering them. So yes, the electric motor's dominance is inevitable, but we are not there yet. Battery technology is just starting to become viable, but electric cars are still heavy and expensive, have limited range and we don't really have a good, universal charging infrastructure yet. It is not because of "the best efforts of politicians", it is because it is technology that is just starting to become viable.
- Devils-Avocado 6y ago
  No, the real problem is that that the externalities of Internal Combustion Engines - noise and air pollution - are fully absorbed by society and not adequately captured with fuel taxes. Increase fuel taxes to the level necessary for carbon neutrality and ICE vehicles look immediately unappealing.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    That doesn't make batteries better, it just makes ICE worse. Battery research is improving, but at the end of the day we are just trading fossil fuels for massive mines- especially cobalt and nickel (with today's tech, who knows tomorrow). At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      > That doesn't make batteries better, it just makes ICE worse. This doesn't mean anything. Better is always relative.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Lithium is evaporated from brine ponds, and cobalt is actively being phased out in battery chemistries because of its role as a conflict mineral. Battery storage for all use cases is objectively better than burning a fossil fuels. > At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere. There is no evidence we can scale this up besides planting trees and hoping for the best.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
You're not gonna see people climbing trees with electric chainsaws for a long time. With current battery tech power to weight is still a decent way off from ICE, especially in applications where weight is optimized for. Sure, most stuff will be electric but ICE will stick around for a long time. Niches with a high cost of labor tend to amplify viability differences. Electric is just easier and once it's viable people switch to it but don't expect it to completely dominate overnight.
- hedora 6y ago
  This electric chainsaw beats out gas for limbs and small trees in my experience: https://egopowerplus.com/16-inch-chain-saw/ https://egopowerplus.com/16-inch-chain-saw/ If you need more than a 16” bar, then, yeah, you’ll end up with a gas chainsaw, but the weight of battery + electric motor is less than ICE + gasoline at this size. Also, electric is much, quieter, less smelly, less maintenance, avoids trips to the gas station, etc.

hoseja 6y ago

Maybe when the charging speeds are in the megawatt range (equivalent of pumping gas).

LarvaFX 6y ago
Car charges overnight. Not wasting any more time on trips to the gas station. On longer trips, charge while eating.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  Most people don’t live in houses with garages where they can charge their car.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Chargers will get cheap and public when electric cars become common. In the same way street lights are pretty much everywhere today. You could imagine a special type of paving stone that has a magsafe socket in, and you just pull a wire from your parked car to the kerb.
    - lstodd 6y ago
      No way. People can't get lousy fiber pulled to their houses and you're talking about multimegawatt electricity supply.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        I'm talking about slow chargers - the kind that are 60 amps or so AC. The kind that require no expensive electronics in the charger. The kind that'll take 12 hours for a full charge. Fast DC chargers will always cost more due to the need for expensive power electronics.
        lstodd 6y ago
        Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid. 1 MW would be enough for just ~150 chargers. And where would you get that megawatt at night? More base load, which means nuclear or fossil which means less niche for solar because no one would shut down such amount of base load generation each day. Besides 60 amps isn't exactly cheap in electronics. It might not require active cooling for the cable and the battery, that's true.
        Reason077 6y ago
        > "Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid." Only if every car in your neighbourhood is plugged in and pulling 7 kW at the same time. Smart charging solves this, by reducing charging during demand peaks (ie: 6pm when everyone is arriving home from work and plugging in at the same time), and increasing it later in the night when more capacity is available.
        lstodd 6y ago
        However you slice it, you have to deliver say 40KWh to that many cars overnight, or they fail to charge and thus are useless. So the grid has to handle that and even if you can get rid of extreme peaks with "smartness", you can't lower the cables and switches ratings much.
        Reason077 6y ago
        First of all, the average car does not need 40 kWh every day. The average driver in the USA drives 13,500 miles per year (far more than the average driver in the UK/Europe!) That's about 37 miles per day, so about 12.5 kWh per night on average at ~3 miles per kWh. And remember, those who are driving long distance are probably going to be using fast chargers on-route, so their domestic charging demand will be lower. Secondly, even if they did need 40 kWh every night, that only equates to 4 kW over a 10 hour charging cycle. Easily manageable by avoiding the typical late afternoon / early evening peaks. Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      Ubitricity already have a pretty nice kerb-side charging solution, including sockets which integrate into existing street light poles: https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ These are quite widely deployed in a few London boroughs.
      - dfgdghdf 6y ago
        Great, so we can turn London into a parking lot for electric cars. The solution for urban centres is to have fewer (but electric) cars.
        Reason077 6y ago
        No, these aren't adding any additional parking spaces. Just allowing cars to be charged at existing ones. (I totally agree about fewer cars, but remaining ones must be electric. And electric cars need charging infrastructure.)
  - trengorilla 6y ago
    Yet.
- randunel 6y ago
  Not good enough for many of my friends, I'm afraid. It would definitely not be an option for me, I drive 1200km in roughly 12h - 14h each night, for 2w long tours: - Heviz to Saint Tropez 1200km - Empuriabrava to Malaga 1100km - Porto to Andorra 1100km - Krakow to Bucharest 1200km - other shorter trips (700km-800km) ----- - business trip Bucharest to Leipzig 1600km (I go much farther without passengers) - Leizig to London 1200km (slow ferry) - etc I drive a diesel and it's just excellent for my family's holidaying, we would be wasting considerable time charging, reducing the overall time to enjoy the tour's destinations.
  - wastedhours 6y ago
    I mean, impressive mileage - but you must definitely be an outlier with those numbers in single trips I'd imagine. Also, if you're only do those kinds of numbers a few weeks a year, you could have an electric car for 50 weeks of the year and then hire a diesel one for the longer stints? That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time. (I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
    - bluGill 6y ago
      The fixed costs of owning two cars means that it rarely works out. Rental cars can work, but again the math rarely works out because it is so expensive to rent a large car.
      - jfk13 6y ago
        I also worry that in the hypothetical world where most people just own a small electric for local daily use, and rent a large diesel (or whatever) for the family holiday, demand for those larger, longer-range vehicles will be extremely seasonal. It may not be viable to maintain a large fleet of family-vacation-type vehicles just to satisfy the demand for summer holidays in August and ski trips in February.
adammunich 6y ago
The latest DC fast charging standard goes up to 400kW, it's only a matter of time.
yholio 6y ago
I think battery swap can be made to work and solve all these problems with the right economic structure that does not yet exist. You have a battery pack that you own and maintain carefully, and you absolutely do not want to rent it out to anyone. So you use it day to day transport and charge slowly overnight, perfect to prolong life. When time comes to make a long, cross country trip, you visit a swap center and deposit your battery, and switch to rented batteries for the duration of the trip, while paying a charge+rent fee. When you come back from the trip, your own battery is waiting for you at the same station, charged and stored in good conditions. Or, you can make the first leg of the journey on your own battery, then have it shipped back to a station near your home before you return; by necessity the network will have to perform rebalancing anyway for the rental stock. I know Tesla demoed battery swap, but they were only interested in the associated subsidy and not keen on it because it requires a large stock of batteries that they had no capacity to produce in large quantities at the time. When safe and cheap batteries are available in quantity, they will pretty much be forced to revisit this model or face tough competition from charge networks that can handle swap.
- klondike_ 6y ago
  Battery swapping isn't practical with modern electric car design. In most EVs today, the battery is part of the structural frame of the car and can't be removed easily. DC fast charging seems like a much more practical solution for the occasional cross country trip
  - yholio 6y ago
    That seems more like a practical engineering decision since battery swap is not yet widespread. There doesn't seem to be anything fundamental that prevents it and in fact Tesla retrofitted the idea for vehicles that were not initially designed with swap in mind. It's either that fast charging attains exceptional safe speeds (i.e less than 5 minutes), or that competitive pressures will force electrics to embrace swap. The current status quo of waiting an hour for a full charge cannot stand on the long term; the lost productivity is so large that it completely dwarfs the costs of implementing the swap networks, so somebody is bound to package it in a consumer friendly product and pocket the profits.
adrianN 6y ago
The average car spends 23h a day parked somewhere. You just need to equip a largeish fraction of the parking spots with a charger. You don't need high currents, because most people drive less than 30kWh (~150km) a day, so a normal 220V 16A plug is more than sufficient. The only issue are long roadtrips, where high current chargers are needed, but they already exist. In 20 minutes you can recharge more than you can drive in two hours. You're supposed to take breaks anyway.
- bluGill 6y ago
  That makes things worse. Right now there are many fast fill gas pumps in my little city. If everyone is charging at home there is less demand and so those pumps go away - even for the rare long distance trip where the slow recharge isn't an option. 95% of the time you are correct, it would be just fine to charge in my garage and who cares if it takes 12 hours as the car isn't moving anyway. However a couple times a year I - like most people - take a longer trip and depends on the infrastructure that allows me to refill my car in a few minutes and get on my way.
  - hedora 6y ago
    I recently drove a long way (24 driving hours) through multiple states in the southwestern US (deserts, scrubland, etc). There was a Tesla charging station within walking distance of most of the places we stopped for gas, food or lodging. I don’t think the trip would have taken any additional planning with an EV.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map With that said, electrical infrastructure is ubiquitous. You can install EV chargers anywhere there is power.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      When I'm in some unknown location I'm not going to hire an electrician to put in a charging station where I happen to need one. I depend on one being there. However as I already said charge at home means refueling places become uneconomical and they out out of business meaning that even though it isn't hard to put a charging station anywhere that doesn't mean they will exist. Of course what I'm lacking is knowing how much this will affect things long term. Right no charging stations are being installed on hope they are worth it, if this turns out to be false owners will start to tear them out.

nickff 6y ago

Electric is great when specific energy is not a factor; you're quoting vanity metrics.

smnrchrds 6y ago

As a person living in Canada, whenever I hear about advances in the auto sector, I say to myself, "Great! My grandchildren will be so lucky when the technology makes it here in 50 years or so". Electric vehicles? The range is an issue even in warm climates. Canada is so spread out that more range is needed and so cold that the range you get is lower. Self-driving vehicles? The gap between driving in Arizona and driving in a snowy Edmonton road is night and day.

pjc50 6y ago
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
The majority of the Canadian population lives in a small number of urban areas. The fact that the distance between towns in Alberta is massive is not relevant to the "average" driving behaviour of Canadians because the modal drive is a commute between Guelph and Toronto or something of that sort. It doesn't matter if the 5% of the population keeps driving non-EV vehicles for many decades to come for performance reasons. Let them! Cumulative emissions are all that matter.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  I am not sure if average is a good number to judge things by. I don't think many Calgarians could be convinced to buy a vehicle which makes a one-day distance to Vancouver into a two-day distance. I know this is counter to what any logistics expert would suggest, but people rarely buy based on average, they buy based on peak. So sure, if an average person in an average year makes 250 short trips (daily commute), 30 medium trips (weekends), and 10 long trips (visiting family in another province for Christmas and Thanksgiving, going on a vacation, long weekend trip, etc.), they will probably buy the vehicle that they can use for all of the above, not just the 250 short commutes. Case in point: sale of small cars and sedans in North America has been in decline compared with trucks and SUVs. People want an everything car, not a most-things car. Also, wile a large percentage of the population of Canada lives in Toronto and Montreal regions, where cities are closer together, this does not mean that is 95% of the population. Calgary alone has a population of more than 1.3 million people. It is very common to need to make a short trip to Edmonton [0], which is considered close by Canadian standards. But even then, it is a 600 km round-trip in a road that tends to be snowy quite often. Population distribution in Western Canada is much more spread out than the East. And the cumulative population is way more than 5%. [0] For example for concerts. Calgary and Edmonton are big enough to get good musical acts. But they are not big or far away enough for touring musicians to visit both cities. If You live in Calgary and your favourite musician is having their concert in Edmonton, that's a day trip you will most likely take.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

noelwelsh 6y ago

It's amazing how any time this comes up someone has to pile in "but I drive 1000km a day so it will never work". Buddy, there are allowed to outliers. It just has to work for most people most of the time. Anyway, some actual data. Most cars spend the vast majority of their time going exactly nowhere: https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility#a5 https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility#a5 The average trip is 8 miles (same source, both in the UK. You can find data for your country. Might also look at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261516309067 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019126151...) Plenty of time to charge from a domestic charger, and no range issue with current electric cars (which have >200 mile range).

Infinitesimus 6y ago
I think for most people, it is the desire for: 1. One do-everything car (short and long trips without pre-planning) 2. Living in an apartment so no overnight charging. Even with 200mi range, you have to ensure there are chargers en route because they are still sparse and it still takes a long time to charge the car. Gas vehicles still win because in most places, you can expect a gas station within 50 miles and the time penalty is 5 mins vs hours. Sparse city charging infrastructure also mean makes charging much harder. We're getting better but imo electric cars in the US at least are still limited to wealthier folks with houses that have charging stations and some city dwellers in nice apartment complexes. I hope we see a good sub 30k electric car soon to shake things up.
- bluGill 6y ago
  The way fixed costs work few people drive enough to make owning two cars for different purposes worth it. The big SUV might be only needed a few times a year, but it is cheaper to pay for it all year long than to also pay for a small car. Rental cars are expensive enough that they are out. For a while I did make a tiny car and a SUV work, but I had to drive ~100 miles a day for work and even then it just barely worked out.
forinti 6y ago
Only cars as big/heavy as golf carts should really be allowed inside cities. That would drastically reduce pollution (both air and noise) and also all but eliminate fatalities and injuries.

GuB-42 6y ago

Electric motors are better and it has been the case for more than a century. The real problem is powering them. Batteries have a terrible energy density compared to hydrocarbon fuels and charge slowly, fuel cells don't seem to take off, and using an internal combustion engine to power an electric engine doesn't really solve anything. In fact, the simple fact that powering an electric engine with an ICE may be a good idea speak volume about both the superiority of electric engines and the difficulty of powering them. So yes, the electric motor's dominance is inevitable, but we are not there yet. Battery technology is just starting to become viable, but electric cars are still heavy and expensive, have limited range and we don't really have a good, universal charging infrastructure yet. It is not because of "the best efforts of politicians", it is because it is technology that is just starting to become viable.

Devils-Avocado 6y ago
No, the real problem is that that the externalities of Internal Combustion Engines - noise and air pollution - are fully absorbed by society and not adequately captured with fuel taxes. Increase fuel taxes to the level necessary for carbon neutrality and ICE vehicles look immediately unappealing.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  That doesn't make batteries better, it just makes ICE worse. Battery research is improving, but at the end of the day we are just trading fossil fuels for massive mines- especially cobalt and nickel (with today's tech, who knows tomorrow). At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    > That doesn't make batteries better, it just makes ICE worse. This doesn't mean anything. Better is always relative.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Lithium is evaporated from brine ponds, and cobalt is actively being phased out in battery chemistries because of its role as a conflict mineral. Battery storage for all use cases is objectively better than burning a fossil fuels. > At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere. There is no evidence we can scale this up besides planting trees and hoping for the best.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

You're not gonna see people climbing trees with electric chainsaws for a long time. With current battery tech power to weight is still a decent way off from ICE, especially in applications where weight is optimized for. Sure, most stuff will be electric but ICE will stick around for a long time. Niches with a high cost of labor tend to amplify viability differences. Electric is just easier and once it's viable people switch to it but don't expect it to completely dominate overnight.

hedora 6y ago
This electric chainsaw beats out gas for limbs and small trees in my experience: https://egopowerplus.com/16-inch-chain-saw/ https://egopowerplus.com/16-inch-chain-saw/ If you need more than a 16” bar, then, yeah, you’ll end up with a gas chainsaw, but the weight of battery + electric motor is less than ICE + gasoline at this size. Also, electric is much, quieter, less smelly, less maintenance, avoids trips to the gas station, etc.