42 ms·

Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

137 points by timbray 5y ago

Hamuko 5y ago
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to. I have my doubts that everyone can switch over to a (prices starting at) $70,000 electric car like the author can.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  New Nissan Leafs are extremely affordable. Range is more limited, but they still have DC fast charging options.
  - thebruce87m 5y ago
    Are Nissan doing proper thermal management of the batteries yet? I don’t like “fast” charging that isn’t fast because the battery is too hot.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    VW was running a promo for a 3-year ID.4 lease for like $175/month. That's cheaper than a Civic.
    - karlding 5y ago
      You can get the 2022 Nissan Leaf for an 24 month lease at $89/month with $1,449 due at signing [0]. That's effectively like $149/month. [0] https://carsdirect.com/deals-articles/2022-nissan-leaf-gets-ultra-cheap-89-mo-lease-deal https://carsdirect.com/deals-articles/2022-nissan-leaf-gets-...
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I leased a Bolt for about the same for 3 years, paid it up front for $6K (for the high mileage options; was closer to $5K for 12K mi/year). Bolts have routinely been available for this price, or outright sale for $23-25K after discounts & such. They're momentarily more expensive now because the refresh was just released, and the car market is currently insane.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 Nissan Leaf: $32.6k. These are reasonable numbers. If you're buying a new sedan, electric is the way to go.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    Reasonable numbers...if you can afford it. Saying $40k is "reasonable" depends on how much you earn. That is 20-25% more than US median annual gross income...it is a lot of money. Also, most people who are unable to buy this kind of car aren't polluting a great deal anyway. A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes. I have an ICE car, it cost something like $4k, it does 50+ mpg, I haven't taken a plane or boat in something like two decades, I do at most 5k miles in my car per year...sorry, I don't really think I should be forced to buy a car that costs 10x, probably pollutes about the same amount, and is only being suggested because some rich person had a "come to Jesus" moment (after polluting as much in a year as much as I do in a decade). It is the worst kind of puritanical grandstanding.
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      It's also very close to the average price paid for a new car in the US: $39k. > A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes. This is true, I'm not really into Tesla for the environmental aspect, I like them because they're fun appliances that break less.
      - hogFeast 5y ago
        Average for a new car. A lot of people can't drive at all. A lot of people buy used cars. It is funny because I find it hard to imagine a wealthy person in my own country not being aware of this...in the US, the wealthy seem to live on another planet. Okay, maybe. But lots of ICE manufacturers have 10-year warranties...they don't break down a lot. I also think that whilst a car is a "fun appliance" for some people, for most people it is how they earn money. They can't live closer to their work because property is too expensive. It is practical, it is how they feed their kids, not fun. Making everyone pay the luxury price because people without your "fun appliance" are morally inferior is...questionable.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  It is definitely true that not all people's driving needs can be met by electric cars quite yet, but prices start quite a bit lower than $70k
- feifan 5y ago
  IIRC, the average price of a car last year in the US was around $41k. There are many options whose MSRP is under that price, e.g. https://www.myev.com/research/buyers-sellers-advice/comparing-all-electric-cars-priced-under-40-000 https://www.myev.com/research/buyers-sellers-advice/comparin...
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Once again, the "average" fallacy. In normal circumstances, the average is rarely the statistic you want to quote (and definitely not unless it is accompanied by standard deviation values). Median is the correct way to identify "the typical" [0]. You're in luck though. The median appears to be about $38k, so the difference in this case is not that great. [0] there's the old joke about (Gates|Bezos|Musk|...) walks into a bar, and the bartender says "hey! thanks, on average we're all millionaires in here now!"
    - albertgoeswoof 5y ago
      That’s the average new car, the median purchase price of all cars will be much lower
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        The median price I cited was for new cars.
    - swift532 5y ago
      To illustrate the point even more, if it's an average sized bar they'd still be billionaires on average.
- bluesquared 5y ago
  People who are financing brand new cars are either wealthy enough or uneducated enough to not worry about a $40k+ MSRP. I've frequently championed my Chevy Bolt. Caveat being the recent recall on the battery fires, but ignoring that...My 2017 Bolt, bought used with ~35k miles was ~$16k USD. 238 mile advertised range, 50kW "DC Fast Charging". My Bolt (and I believe all of the new ones) still have the pathetic 50kW "fast charging" which is pretty shortsighted, but I still think a used Bolt is the best entry into the EV world. Another point I'd like to make is that even with the slow "fast charging" on some of these EVs, the use case of long road trips is very infrequent, and often biased online by users presenting their edge case commutes or 'frequent' roadtrips. According to https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips 95% of trips are < 30 miles.
  - gorkish 5y ago
    I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it again. By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US. I am increasingly finding that I don't even bother to plan the drives anymore or micromanage the charging-- this is a significant difference from when I first started doing >1k mile trips in the car 4 years ago. I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.
    - timbray 5y ago
      The public charging tech is improving steadily. You might want to give the Bolt another try at fast-charging. Look for a high-power charger, like 200kW or higher.
      - dogsgobork 5y ago
        The issue is that Bolts are limited to 50kw of charging, even if the charger can offer more power.
- adflux 5y ago
  How about having the luxury to even park or charge your electric car near your house or place of work? So often a very important factor forgotten by more well off EV drivers who are wondering why people still buy ICE cars
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    At least in the US, a significant majority of people live in single family homes. So home infrastructure is an issue, but at the current rates of adoption we have a ways to go before it becomes a hard limit. And who knows, at the rates range and charging speeds have increased over the past few years, we might be pretty close to apartment dwellers being able to buy one and use it exactly like their ICEV -- charge it up once a week.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  In the UK at least, I think the thing with electric cars isn't so much the price (leafs are pretty cheap-ish, seems like a perfectly good A->B car) but that you basically need land or a safe area to be able to charge them. That's what makes them a toy for the rich at the moment.
  - aix1 5y ago
    Yeah. If I had a car here in London, I'd keep it on the street (prefer to use the garage as a workshop). There's a public charging point within a minute's walk. However, the parking space it's next to isn't reserved for EVs and so there's always some non-electric car parked there, rendering the charger useless. I suppose I could run a charging cable from the house onto the street (across the pavement), but that doesn't seem like an ideal long-term solution. There's a process for an EV owner to ask the council to install a public charging point close to their house, but I've no idea how well that process works. And again, if they don't reserve the adjacent parking space for EVs, it'll likely also be quite useless.
- cleansingfire 5y ago
  I just splurged and bought a very used Prius for $3,400, when my $400 car was stolen. I can't afford an EV. Many oriole can't. That dictate just ensures fewer people will be able to afford a car. Which might work with decent public transport.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Median new car in the US is over 38k, give it time and plenty of cheap EV’s will be around. Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 base model Nissan Leaf: $32.6k. Considering even with a Prius most people would still be paying ~1,000$/year on gas, old EV’s will likely be more affordable.
    - cleansingfire 5y ago
      Sure, and I look forward to it. The quote was "everyone... now" but I agree with your modified sentiment.
  - tetha 5y ago
    Mh, but you're on used cars, so you are a cycle or two behind. So yeah, you can't afford a new EV. But let's wait for until there are used EVs.
    - Yeroc 5y ago
      It'll be interesting to see what the used car market for EVs looks like once they age out where the battery packs start degrading. Not sure they'll have the same long-term value that quality ICEs do today.
sparrish 5y ago
1000 Miles in two days is a pretty lazy pace of a drive. I imagine that's because it takes so long to recharge. 750 miles a day is my usual but 1000 a day is doable.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  I've done 1k in a day in my Tesla, it's not really a big deal. You stop every few hours to plug in for a half hour or so.
- pbourke 5y ago
  Assuming that there is only one driver, 750 miles is 12.5hrs and 1000 miles is 16.6hrs at 60mph average. Both of those are above the 11 of 24hrs that a commercial truck driver is permitted to be on the road in the US. Say what you want about regulations, but I take that as an upper limit to how long one can safely operate a motor vehicle. I try to stay under 8hrs per day for long trips with around 7 being my target average.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    Until we get self-driving cars. Or a better network of trains. Not sure which is more plausible.
- drewg123 5y ago
  I did a ~965mi trip regularly in my Model X 100D during the pandemic when I was not comfortable flying. The trip is about 18hrs door-to-door, with about 14hrs driving and ~4hrs charging. Autopilot is very helpful in reducing fatigue, as are the required frequent stops. The charging time was somewhat inflated, because my friend does not have destination charging at her downtown condo building. That meant that on the outbound leg, I needed to stop at a close by, but slow, urban supercharger and top my car up. And on the return leg, I was not starting with a 100% charge. This was especially frustrating, because there are chargers in the garage they share w/a hotel, but the chargers are for hotel guests only...
hogFeast 5y ago
Wait until the author finds out how the batteries are made. EDIT: just to be clear, I am not a "climate change denier"...although always interested to have lots of random people attempt to diagnose me. I worked in equity research, I have seen mountains of reports on this topic: lithium and cobalt production are terrible for the environment (ignoring issues with forced labour and human cost at mines, most people who mine this stuff won't make it 50), this is why Tesla is acting (onshoring production, attempting to alter their supply chain, focusing on increasing battery life)...but if you buy one today, the effect on the environment is going to be pretty negligible...relative to people taking their PJ every two days, relative to coal-powered electricity, and even relative to ICE cars with good MPG. This has nothing to do with my views on climate change, and everything to do with how electric batteries are produced. And personally (I will take my turn diagnosis), my view is that people buy the car, and then go about judging other people...because people, particularly wealthy people in my experience, like judging other people...climate change is a way for wealthy people to feel less guilty about being wealthy when they drive past a homeless person in a tent. If you are concerned about climate change: there are still coal mines in the US, still coal mines in China, coal consumption isn't going to peak until 2030...it is just madness to suggest what we really need is for poor people to go out and buy a $40k car because wealthy people said so.
- feifan 5y ago
  You're making a stock-vs-flows comparison: a battery is manufactured ~once for the lifetime of a car and then produces ~zero emissions per marginal mile driven. Combustion engines produce emissions for every mile driven (and require some emissions to produce as well).
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    No, I am not. I didn't mention a flow. You seem to be assuming I said something I did not. The battery has a life of ~120k miles, constructing the battery (and often, but not always, the electricity used to charge it) is so polluting that ICE cars will typically pollute less over that same period of usage. That is what I am saying: nothing about stocks or flows. The difference in pollution is, if it exists, very marginal. EDIT: I will add, look at how cobalt is mined...it is a slave commodity from the Congo, no rules, no environmental laws...same for many other constituents of the battery.
emilecantin 5y ago
I did a similar roadtrip back in 2015 (!) in my ex-boss's Tesla Model S: we traveled from Montréal to Atlanta for a weekend conference (JSConf, IIRC). We were driving continuously, switching drivers every time we hit a charger (we were 4 in the car). I think it took us about 24h to do the trip. My main takeaway from the experience is that charging wasn't actually "painful" at all. On the contrary, it was a welcome break every time. Most times we even exceeded the charging time the car was asking for, because we found something interesting to do (like eating dinner in a nice restaurant). When I was on the marked earlier this year, I really wanted to get an EV, but there aren't any that comfortably seat 6 (I have 4 kids). We ended up with a PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica), and I love it. Next car is going to be an EV, though.
- Cd00d 5y ago
  I thought the reason the Tesla Model S sits 7 is because Elon had 5 kids at the time of the design. Maybe your kids are all too big for those rear-facing seats?
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Model X you mean. There's no way 7 can fit in an S (and be safe!).
    - Kirby64 5y ago
      No, he means Model S. It was an option (that is currently discontinued) that put 'jump seats' where the trunk would be. Not useful for anything except younger kiddos, but could be fine for younger kids. Sort of like the 7 seater option for the Model Y, yeah it technically exists but it sounds uncomfortable... See: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-discontinues-two-colors-raises-price-model-s-jump-seats/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-discontinues-two-colors-rais...
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        I did not know that.
aakour 5y ago
I'm from Helsinki but live in Berlin, and drive between the two somewhat regularly. For this trip you essentially have two options - either via Denmark and Sweden, or Poland and the Baltics. You need to take a ferry to reach Finland regardless of which route you pick. The experience and emissions differ pretty dramatically. Intuitively you might think the total emissions would be lower for the Baltic route because of the significantly shorter ferry trip, but this is more than negated by how dirty the grid is in Poland and Estonia. Polish electricity production is about 100x as polluting as Swedish electricity. The Nordic route also wins in terms of infrastructure. There are plenty of Superchargers as well as non-Tesla charging stations, located at highway rest stops with good services. Making the 1000km+ drive in one day isn't a big deal at all, and I find that plugging the car in for the time it takes to go to the restroom and grab some food is enough to continue the trip.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Isn't there a ferry from Finland to Germany or at least Poland? ... What would be really nice on that route would be a sleeper service, once that tunnel between Finland and Estonia and rail Baltica is built.
  - aakour 5y ago
    Yeah, there's a ferry from Rostock to Helsinki. However I'm trying to reduce my travel-related emissions, and after crunching the numbers have concluded that the best option would be ferry+train via Sweden, with electric car via Sweden a close second (per head, assuming two people or more in the car). Fingers crossed for that tunnel and a direct overnight train connection!
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      How did you work out the emissions of the ferry routes?
      - aakour 5y ago
        I used the numbers from the Finnish state research centre VTT (http://lipasto.vtt.fi/yksikkopaastot/tavaraliikennee/vesiliikennee/roroe.htm http://lipasto.vtt.fi/yksikkopaastot/tavaraliikennee/vesilii...)
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
From the end of TFA: >And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [ ... ] There’s no excuse not to. Admirable sentiments, but can anyone point definitively to the net gain/loss in CO2 terms of actually ditching a fossil fuel based car and replacing it with a new EV? And how does that look if the FF car is something like a Honda Fit (good mileage, lower than typical emissions)? I'd be willing to dump our Fit for some sort of EV, but I'm really not convinced that it's helping climate change to do so. Change my mind?
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  Sure, here is one such full lifecycle study: https://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2018-63%20Lifecycle%20Analysis%20of%20Electric%20Vehicles_Kukreja.pdf https://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2018-63%20Lifecyc...
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    Conclusion: > [EV and ICE vehicles were] comparatively analyzed by dividing into five categories: raw material production, vehicle manufacture, transportation, operation, and decommissioning. The analysis [...] revealed that electric vehicles have a markedly lower impact in both categories, especially in regions with clean power sources like British Columbia. This conclusion is reached after consideration of the higher environmental burdens of raw material production and decommissioning inherent to electric vehicles. The significantly lower impacts from the operation stage had the strongest effect on the results. Sensitivity analysis showed that a longer lifespan shifted the efficiency balance further toward the electric vehicle.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    That's great, but it's biased in several ways that make it not relevant to my lifestyle. 1. I'm never going to live in Vancouver, so my electricity is probably never going to be near as clean, even though it is relatively low carbon by US standards. 2. I'm never going to own a Ford Focus - my car gets much higher mileage, around 50 mpg, which is a big reduction in CO2. There are a few different options with similar mileage, too. 3. I'm never going to own a clown-car Mitsubishi EV; at present, I think the plausible choices are a Nissan Leaf, a Chevy Bolt, or a Kia/Hyundai (I forget the models). I don't know these would increase the CO2 from manufacturing a lot, but it wouldn't surprise me.
ortusdux 5y ago
Also, charging by the minute seems wrong .... a Porsche Taycan is going to get a whole lot more range out of each minute than a five-year-old Nissan Leaf, so why should they pay less for the same amount of range? Hmmmm. Bear in mind that at home with the Level 2 charger in the carport, charging feels close to free. You are primarily paying rent to take up a charging spot vs. buying electricity. If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  IIRC the primary reason there are any chargers with bill by the minute is that in some jurisdictions it is illegal for any entity other than the electric utility to sell power by the kWh.
  - theluketaylor 5y ago
    In Canada where this trip took place it’s currently illegal to sell electricity via DC fast charger because Measurement Canada has not defined the standard to which your charger has to measure against to ensure fair dispensing. They are really dragging their heels and it’s super annoying. Even utility like BC or Quebec Hydro can’t sell by the kWh and either have to give it away from free or charge by time. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/lm04949.html https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/lm04949.html
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      Again the feds encroaching on state powers.
      - notatoad 5y ago
        in canada, all governmental power belongs to the federal government. provinces only have authority when it is granted to them by the federal government. there is no such thing as the feds encroaching on "state powers" because provinces are not states.
golemiprague 5y ago
For many people around the world the distance is not the issue, it is actually the overnight charging. In many countries people mostly live in apartment buildings and have to park in the street or if they have a parking spot it usually doesn't have any dedicated electricity near by, especially not something that can be charged per resident.
carcostthrow 5y ago
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to. Isn't there? Right now for me to own a Ford Mach E, a Tesla Model 3 or a RAV4 Prime is $3400 to $3700 per year for comprehensive insurance, $1400 a year for liability only. My SUV right now costs $1100 a year to insure comprehensive, but even a 2021 Acura NSX or Jaguar F-Pace is only $1400 for the same level of insurance that I have right now. I only spend about $1200 a year on gasoline for the SUV and another $200 for regular maintenance. So right out the gate, assuming electricity is free and tire rotations are free, I'm already looking at least $900/yr increase in operating expense. And then there's the upfront; the above is on top of the $10,000 to $20,000 more I'd have to spend to buy an EV vs a comparably sized and equipped ICE. And an additional $1500 to $2000 to have my garage accommodate charging a car, assuming main panel doesn't need upgrading and only installing a 240V circuit. Right now it's a detached garage with a single 120v to it, so it's retrenching and installation of new conduit and wire, installing a new sub panel in the garage, and rewiring everything. Not going to count the cost of a level 2 DC charger (Chevrolet and Kia are offering one as an incentive for purchase). Main uncertainty is whether or not the main panel would need to be upgraded. If I didn't have a garage, I'd also have to be super concerned about charging stations though. You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit. A nearby truck depot gets the copper wire cut from the trucks battery systems sitting there overnight every few months. So... yeah. There's my excuse. Money.
- bobsil1 5y ago
  My Bolt lease is $75/mo.
  - carcostthrow 5y ago
    US vs Canada I assume. Last time I looked at the Bolt Premier some years ago the dealer would not budge off of the $50,000+ price. And for that price I was sitting in the most uncomfortable seats I've ever sat in for a personal vehicle; thin, hard and not well sculpted for my back. The only positive I recall was the excellent throttle response.
238475235243 5y ago
Genuinely baffled why anyone buys anything but a Tesla. It's cheaper, autopilot is pretty great, has a vastly better charging network, charges vastly quicker... I guess it means you can write blog posts about bad experiences with an electric car...
- drewg123 5y ago
  I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've read so many horror stories about bad experiences with non-Tesla fast charging. One of the YouTubers I follow (Out of Spec Motoring) frequently takes road trips in non-Tesla EVs and vlogs about them. As a Tesla owner, I frequently watch his vlogs and feel a huge amount of schadenfreude. His trips are much more "interesting" than my own experiences road tripping using the Tesla network. He frequently encounters slow charge rates, failed chargers, and even entire stations being offline. In fact, he talks about how Electrify America shut down its entire network in the I95 corridor for upgrades, leaving non-Teslas stranded. I've got about 36K on my Model X, about 50% of which came from road trips on the east coast. I've encountered 2 failed chargers, and had to wait to charge once.
  - elif 5y ago
    Agree. I've driven nissan leaf for the last 5 years and just added tesla y. Non-tesla chargers in my city are blocked by careless ICE drivers about 20-25% of the time, and the rates some of them charge are more expensive than gasoline. the Y on the other hand, its like impossible to run out of juice, and not even a problem i have to think about unless i really want to. For non-tesla drivers: it navigates you where to go for charging when you need it, optimizing your route for the fastest charging experience.
- clouddrover 5y ago
  > Genuinely baffled why anyone buys anything but a Tesla. Price, practicality, exterior styling, interior styling. All the usual reasons. > has a vastly better charging network, charges vastly quicker As a driver you should be demanding an open charging standard so all cars can charge at all chargers. Why meekly settle for less? Here are three EVs charging faster than a Tesla Model 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU Amusingly, Teslas charge faster on CCS chargers than on Tesla's proprietary chargers: https://insideevs.com/news/507489/tesla-model3-charging-faster-ccs2/ https://insideevs.com/news/507489/tesla-model3-charging-fast... But the good news is Tesla will supposedly open their chargers to all EVs soon, mostly to get the benefit of government subsidies. Governments aren't going to fund chargers that only charge one brand: https://insideevs.com/news/521623/tesla-superchargers-open-other-2021/ https://insideevs.com/news/521623/tesla-superchargers-open-o... They'll probably start in Europe first because Teslas already use the CCS Type 2 Combo inlet in Europe.
mikewarot 5y ago
I drove 2000 km in a single day, on a number of occasions, when I was younger. I don't see how anyone could do it in less than 3 days with this many charge stops. I had no idea the range of electric cars was so short. I expected that they'd do better at cruising speed on the highways, because the mpg in my car goes up as I get up to 70 MPH. Apparently a Tesla Model 3 is only good for 289 miles at that speed before giving up the ghost. 13*40 --> 520 miles is what I'd expect to get out of our car.
- linsomniac 5y ago
  Electric cars tend to be the opposite as far as highway vs city MPGs. Range at 80MPH is far worse than at lower speeds because of air resistance. On the other end of the spectrum, around town they do better because of regeneration capturing a lot of the stop and go that kills gas car range.
wstrange 5y ago
If my math is correct, driving 1,725km in a Prius (assume 6L/100KM - which is fairly conservative) would cost about $135 CDN in fuel - (approx. $1.30 per litre). Not much more than $120 spent on charging. For a car that is much less expensive than the Jaguar. Environmental considerations aside, this is a tough sell for most consumers.
- laurencerowe 5y ago
  For most long trips are rare so if 90% of your miles are charged from home (for much less than the cost of gas) you’d prefer charging outside of home to be more easily available even if it comes out more expensive than gas for that particular trip.
- elif 5y ago
  Even if you set aside environmental considerations (which is mental) the gas is only a tiny portion of the value proposition of EVs. In 5 years of used leaf driving i've visited 0 gas stations, 0 repair shops, 0 emissions inspectors. It's the burden of all that mess that you get to avoid, not a just $0.15 on the dollar savings.
jmpman 5y ago
I just did a 2 day 2000 mile trip in my long range model 3. Total charging costs were around $100, which didn’t include two stops where the superchargers were free (network connectivity problems?). Required a total of 13 supercharging stops. Each stop was between 20min to 45min. I started off completely full, and charged overnight at a Tesla destination charger, (so, 14 stops?). Roughly half the cost of the article’s reported charging costs. At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked. What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that. At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert. Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.
- drewg123 5y ago
  I've done multiple ~1000mi road trips in my Model X, and I've peed in a lot of bushes too. A lot of the newer chargers (at least on the east coast) are located at WaWa's, and have 24hr restrooms. But the chargers at malls are a pain. Either the mall is closed, and you need to pee in the bushes, or the mall is open and the traffic is terrible and the chargers are ICE'ed in. There is one charger in Hardee SC thats in the parking lot of a police station. I was a bit nervous to use the bushes there..
  - 1-6 5y ago
    I wonder if the smell of urine is a thing around superchargers.
alvah 5y ago
"In this context, there’s another number there that I think is really interesting: The “km/c-h”, how far you can get on an hour’s charge. For this particular car on this selection of chargers, it was over 200km (124 miles) per charge-hour. I think that’s enough? Maybe in the lower regions of enough, but there." So at 110km/h, less than 2 hours of driving for every hour spent charging? In what world is that close to "enough"? My next car will likely be an EV, but the evangelists hand-waving away limitations like this do nobody any favors.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Exactly right. EVs are perfect for day-to-day commutes and what not where it's drive a distance, let it sit for several hours (while at work or at home at night), lather-rinse-repeat. Long distance continuous driving would be brutal with an hour pitstop every couple of hours.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    This is the insight that I need. I'm all about EVs, but my fam and I will go on at least 1 500 road trip each year, and we don't stop for sleep (unless we have to).
    - mwint 5y ago
      Assuming you're saying "one 500-mile road trip" per year, I don't think you should let that stop you. That's one or two 10-80% charging stops max for any Tesla. I'd play with https://abetterrouteplanner.com https://abetterrouteplanner.com and test your potential road trips with the type of car you're interested in. It'll plan out where you'd need to stop, for how long, etc. Pretty cool way to alleviate (or confirm) your fears.
      - timbray 5y ago
        ABetterRoutePlanner is cool but in my experience extremely optimistic and doesn't include fallbacks for blocked/broken chargers.
senkora 5y ago
There’s this documentary I really enjoyed watching called “Long Way Up” where Ewan McGregor (plus another actor I was not familiar with) rode from Tierra del Fuego to Los Angeles on electric motorcycles. They talk a lot about the pros/cons of going electric, and there are issues with like cold temperatures affecting battery performance at the start. But I also found that I just really enjoyed the show even excluding that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up
- chrischen 5y ago
  They had those problems but also had basically a support convoy following them that ran on gas.
  - senkora 5y ago
    Yep, it definitely would not have been possible without that.
nreilly 5y ago
I’ve done 1300km in two days in an EV comfortably along the east coast of Australia. ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving, charge overnight at the hotel, ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving and arrive at destination. Same in reverse. Cost was only charging at home to 100% before departing (under $10) at both ends. The supercharging was free. The autopilot makes a huge difference to driver fatigue, and keeps paying attention when you’re distracted by kids in the back (saving me from at least one accident). It really has made it more of a difficult choice between flying and driving across the major cities on the east coast of Australia. Going further west is possible, but will just take a bit more planning.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
An interesting anecdote, but I've never understood why anyone would willingly drive a car (electric or otherwise) such a long distance. The longest I've ever driven in a single trip was a bit over 750 km, and I think I slept for 16 hours straight after I arrived. The next time I took that same trip, I rode the train instead.
- mig39 5y ago
  As someone who has driven across Canada on numerous occasions, it's a special kind of zen. I did BC to Newfoundland by myself, and 16-hour driving days were normal. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    Miles and miles of miles and miles.
- linsomniac 5y ago
  Different people react differently to long car trips. I can drive the 1,800 miles to my wife's family in one shot, especially given time to nap while charging and the driver automation taking up the slack for being tired. I can then have a normal nights sleep and be fine. My wife, on the other hand, being a passenger for such a trip, she arrives and then is wasted for 2 days. But if you really want to be miserable on a trip... Take a train. My wife and son did that same trip by train a few years ago and: was delayed a solid day by flooding, lost power, had to suffer with malfunctioning toilets for part of the trip, and it cost more than flying or driving (counting hotels).
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    You probably are a danger to others on the road, yourself and your family. More than 8 hours behind the wheel in a single day is irresponsible.
    - C19is20 5y ago
jacquesm 5y ago
> And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now Except of course there aren't nearly enough electric vehicles to make this a possibility, and if they did the grid capacity wouldn't be there.
- paganel 5y ago
  About a week or so ago the Greek PM (I think it was the PM) strongly advised his fellow Greek compatriots to use less air conditioning because the electrical grid was very close to collapsing. No way one can add a few million EVs to that grid. And Greece is a EU member with a resonably well functioning economy (ignoring the financial crisis from a decade ago), I fail to see how poorer countries will be able to make all this work.
  - carcostthrow 5y ago
    Could go either way. Where I live we also had issues with the grid getting close to capacity due to air conditioning. That said, someone mentioned to me once that it's about 7 years from the time a power company to notify the government of intention to build a power plant to completion. At least for natural gas plants. So it's plausible for the necessary capacity to be built over the next 15 years.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  It varies from country to country. If your grid is at the brink of collapse, it might be a challenge. Here in Germany, even changing all cars to electric would increase the total electricity consumption by less than 20%, not counting in the elektricity savings by no longer providing gasoline. This would probably doable by todays grid and the transition to electric cars will take 15 years even in the best circumstances, just by comparing the 45 million cars owned with the 3 million cars sold every year. Enough time to do adjustments to the grid where needed. One also needs to consider how much electric cars can be beneficial for the grid. With charging of parked cars remotely controlled, they can help with stabilizing the grid. An electric car in Germany uses about 8kWh/day - that is probably less that the AC unit now use in Greece. And if Greece doesn't have ample solar yet, it would be about time to change that urgently.
tobyhinloopen 5y ago
These charge speeds are quite low. Are the chargers bad, or is the car just slow? I feel like my XC40 P8 charges much faster
isodude 5y ago
As an aside FIAT 500 all electric has charging stations in their infotainment system. No need for PlugShare.
rad_gruchalski 5y ago
There are many people driving from London to Warsaw on a semi-regular basis. That a 1000+ mile drive. It can be done in 19 hours with a ferry crossing. I’ve done it myself a number of times. Relaxing drive takes 22 hours. There is no reason this should take twice as long.
dgudkov 5y ago
TL;DR Total trip time: 17h42m. Driving time: 11h18m (64% of the total trip time). Charging time: 6h24m (36% of the total trip time).
omega3 5y ago
Is there an website where I can see what a long distance trip plan for a electric vehicle would be, how long it would take including the charging times?
- zejn 5y ago
  Yes, https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ https://abetterrouteplanner.com/
zejn 5y ago
One could generalize Tim Bray's "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now." into "everyone should stop burning stuff ASAP". Burning stuff is the largest source of CO2 emissions. The two largest sources of direct personal CO2 emissions are transportation and heating and/or cooling our homes. For personal transportation, EVs are a great replacement for ICE. They allow you to stop burning fuel directly and instead buy electricity. They're improving really fast, to a degree they're getting usable even for 1000 mile trips. And they use less energy, about a third of an ICE. For heating and cooling homes there's heat pump, which uses electricity to pump the heat either into the house when in heating mode or pumping heat out of home when in cooling mode. No more dealing with soot, ash, and chimneys, and they're so efficient that you get more heat if professionals burn gas in power plants to power your heat pump than you would get if you burned the gas directly. Both these allow you to drastically reduce your direct CO2 footprint, also known as scope 1 emissions. A lot of electricity is produced by burning stuff, that's where it makes sense to get solar panels to try to produce most of your consumption or at least offset your use. Those are a modern miracle - getting 20% of sun's energy into usable form is far better than photosynthesis, which gets few percent at most. While Tim says "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles now", I acknowledge that it's logistically impossible to replace all the vehicles overnight. But the car market in the USA sells about 4 million of new cars every year, and those really should be electric if at all possible. Buying an ICE is essentially buying a 10-year subscription to fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.

137 points by timbray 5y ago

>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to. I have my doubts that everyone can switch over to a (prices starting at) $70,000 electric car like the author can.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
New Nissan Leafs are extremely affordable. Range is more limited, but they still have DC fast charging options.
- thebruce87m 5y ago
  Are Nissan doing proper thermal management of the batteries yet? I don’t like “fast” charging that isn’t fast because the battery is too hot.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  VW was running a promo for a 3-year ID.4 lease for like $175/month. That's cheaper than a Civic.
  - karlding 5y ago
    You can get the 2022 Nissan Leaf for an 24 month lease at $89/month with $1,449 due at signing [0]. That's effectively like $149/month. [0] https://carsdirect.com/deals-articles/2022-nissan-leaf-gets-ultra-cheap-89-mo-lease-deal https://carsdirect.com/deals-articles/2022-nissan-leaf-gets-...
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I leased a Bolt for about the same for 3 years, paid it up front for $6K (for the high mileage options; was closer to $5K for 12K mi/year). Bolts have routinely been available for this price, or outright sale for $23-25K after discounts & such. They're momentarily more expensive now because the refresh was just released, and the car market is currently insane.
rpmisms 5y ago
Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 Nissan Leaf: $32.6k. These are reasonable numbers. If you're buying a new sedan, electric is the way to go.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  Reasonable numbers...if you can afford it. Saying $40k is "reasonable" depends on how much you earn. That is 20-25% more than US median annual gross income...it is a lot of money. Also, most people who are unable to buy this kind of car aren't polluting a great deal anyway. A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes. I have an ICE car, it cost something like $4k, it does 50+ mpg, I haven't taken a plane or boat in something like two decades, I do at most 5k miles in my car per year...sorry, I don't really think I should be forced to buy a car that costs 10x, probably pollutes about the same amount, and is only being suggested because some rich person had a "come to Jesus" moment (after polluting as much in a year as much as I do in a decade). It is the worst kind of puritanical grandstanding.
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    It's also very close to the average price paid for a new car in the US: $39k. > A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes. This is true, I'm not really into Tesla for the environmental aspect, I like them because they're fun appliances that break less.
    - hogFeast 5y ago
      Average for a new car. A lot of people can't drive at all. A lot of people buy used cars. It is funny because I find it hard to imagine a wealthy person in my own country not being aware of this...in the US, the wealthy seem to live on another planet. Okay, maybe. But lots of ICE manufacturers have 10-year warranties...they don't break down a lot. I also think that whilst a car is a "fun appliance" for some people, for most people it is how they earn money. They can't live closer to their work because property is too expensive. It is practical, it is how they feed their kids, not fun. Making everyone pay the luxury price because people without your "fun appliance" are morally inferior is...questionable.
gameswithgo 5y ago
It is definitely true that not all people's driving needs can be met by electric cars quite yet, but prices start quite a bit lower than $70k
feifan 5y ago
IIRC, the average price of a car last year in the US was around $41k. There are many options whose MSRP is under that price, e.g. https://www.myev.com/research/buyers-sellers-advice/comparing-all-electric-cars-priced-under-40-000 https://www.myev.com/research/buyers-sellers-advice/comparin...
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Once again, the "average" fallacy. In normal circumstances, the average is rarely the statistic you want to quote (and definitely not unless it is accompanied by standard deviation values). Median is the correct way to identify "the typical" [0]. You're in luck though. The median appears to be about $38k, so the difference in this case is not that great. [0] there's the old joke about (Gates|Bezos|Musk|...) walks into a bar, and the bartender says "hey! thanks, on average we're all millionaires in here now!"
  - albertgoeswoof 5y ago
    That’s the average new car, the median purchase price of all cars will be much lower
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      The median price I cited was for new cars.
  - swift532 5y ago
    To illustrate the point even more, if it's an average sized bar they'd still be billionaires on average.
bluesquared 5y ago
People who are financing brand new cars are either wealthy enough or uneducated enough to not worry about a $40k+ MSRP. I've frequently championed my Chevy Bolt. Caveat being the recent recall on the battery fires, but ignoring that...My 2017 Bolt, bought used with ~35k miles was ~$16k USD. 238 mile advertised range, 50kW "DC Fast Charging". My Bolt (and I believe all of the new ones) still have the pathetic 50kW "fast charging" which is pretty shortsighted, but I still think a used Bolt is the best entry into the EV world. Another point I'd like to make is that even with the slow "fast charging" on some of these EVs, the use case of long road trips is very infrequent, and often biased online by users presenting their edge case commutes or 'frequent' roadtrips. According to https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips 95% of trips are < 30 miles.
- gorkish 5y ago
  I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it again. By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US. I am increasingly finding that I don't even bother to plan the drives anymore or micromanage the charging-- this is a significant difference from when I first started doing >1k mile trips in the car 4 years ago. I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.
  - timbray 5y ago
    The public charging tech is improving steadily. You might want to give the Bolt another try at fast-charging. Look for a high-power charger, like 200kW or higher.
    - dogsgobork 5y ago
      The issue is that Bolts are limited to 50kw of charging, even if the charger can offer more power.
adflux 5y ago
How about having the luxury to even park or charge your electric car near your house or place of work? So often a very important factor forgotten by more well off EV drivers who are wondering why people still buy ICE cars
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  At least in the US, a significant majority of people live in single family homes. So home infrastructure is an issue, but at the current rates of adoption we have a ways to go before it becomes a hard limit. And who knows, at the rates range and charging speeds have increased over the past few years, we might be pretty close to apartment dwellers being able to buy one and use it exactly like their ICEV -- charge it up once a week.
mhh__ 5y ago
In the UK at least, I think the thing with electric cars isn't so much the price (leafs are pretty cheap-ish, seems like a perfectly good A->B car) but that you basically need land or a safe area to be able to charge them. That's what makes them a toy for the rich at the moment.
- aix1 5y ago
  Yeah. If I had a car here in London, I'd keep it on the street (prefer to use the garage as a workshop). There's a public charging point within a minute's walk. However, the parking space it's next to isn't reserved for EVs and so there's always some non-electric car parked there, rendering the charger useless. I suppose I could run a charging cable from the house onto the street (across the pavement), but that doesn't seem like an ideal long-term solution. There's a process for an EV owner to ask the council to install a public charging point close to their house, but I've no idea how well that process works. And again, if they don't reserve the adjacent parking space for EVs, it'll likely also be quite useless.
cleansingfire 5y ago
I just splurged and bought a very used Prius for $3,400, when my $400 car was stolen. I can't afford an EV. Many oriole can't. That dictate just ensures fewer people will be able to afford a car. Which might work with decent public transport.
- Retric 5y ago
  Median new car in the US is over 38k, give it time and plenty of cheap EV’s will be around. Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 base model Nissan Leaf: $32.6k. Considering even with a Prius most people would still be paying ~1,000$/year on gas, old EV’s will likely be more affordable.
  - cleansingfire 5y ago
    Sure, and I look forward to it. The quote was "everyone... now" but I agree with your modified sentiment.
- tetha 5y ago
  Mh, but you're on used cars, so you are a cycle or two behind. So yeah, you can't afford a new EV. But let's wait for until there are used EVs.
  - Yeroc 5y ago
    It'll be interesting to see what the used car market for EVs looks like once they age out where the battery packs start degrading. Not sure they'll have the same long-term value that quality ICEs do today.

sparrish 5y ago

1000 Miles in two days is a pretty lazy pace of a drive. I imagine that's because it takes so long to recharge. 750 miles a day is my usual but 1000 a day is doable.

rpmisms 5y ago
I've done 1k in a day in my Tesla, it's not really a big deal. You stop every few hours to plug in for a half hour or so.
pbourke 5y ago
Assuming that there is only one driver, 750 miles is 12.5hrs and 1000 miles is 16.6hrs at 60mph average. Both of those are above the 11 of 24hrs that a commercial truck driver is permitted to be on the road in the US. Say what you want about regulations, but I take that as an upper limit to how long one can safely operate a motor vehicle. I try to stay under 8hrs per day for long trips with around 7 being my target average.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Until we get self-driving cars. Or a better network of trains. Not sure which is more plausible.
drewg123 5y ago
I did a ~965mi trip regularly in my Model X 100D during the pandemic when I was not comfortable flying. The trip is about 18hrs door-to-door, with about 14hrs driving and ~4hrs charging. Autopilot is very helpful in reducing fatigue, as are the required frequent stops. The charging time was somewhat inflated, because my friend does not have destination charging at her downtown condo building. That meant that on the outbound leg, I needed to stop at a close by, but slow, urban supercharger and top my car up. And on the return leg, I was not starting with a 100% charge. This was especially frustrating, because there are chargers in the garage they share w/a hotel, but the chargers are for hotel guests only...

hogFeast 5y ago

Wait until the author finds out how the batteries are made. EDIT: just to be clear, I am not a "climate change denier"...although always interested to have lots of random people attempt to diagnose me. I worked in equity research, I have seen mountains of reports on this topic: lithium and cobalt production are terrible for the environment (ignoring issues with forced labour and human cost at mines, most people who mine this stuff won't make it 50), this is why Tesla is acting (onshoring production, attempting to alter their supply chain, focusing on increasing battery life)...but if you buy one today, the effect on the environment is going to be pretty negligible...relative to people taking their PJ every two days, relative to coal-powered electricity, and even relative to ICE cars with good MPG. This has nothing to do with my views on climate change, and everything to do with how electric batteries are produced. And personally (I will take my turn diagnosis), my view is that people buy the car, and then go about judging other people...because people, particularly wealthy people in my experience, like judging other people...climate change is a way for wealthy people to feel less guilty about being wealthy when they drive past a homeless person in a tent. If you are concerned about climate change: there are still coal mines in the US, still coal mines in China, coal consumption isn't going to peak until 2030...it is just madness to suggest what we really need is for poor people to go out and buy a $40k car because wealthy people said so.

feifan 5y ago
You're making a stock-vs-flows comparison: a battery is manufactured ~once for the lifetime of a car and then produces ~zero emissions per marginal mile driven. Combustion engines produce emissions for every mile driven (and require some emissions to produce as well).
- hogFeast 5y ago
  No, I am not. I didn't mention a flow. You seem to be assuming I said something I did not. The battery has a life of ~120k miles, constructing the battery (and often, but not always, the electricity used to charge it) is so polluting that ICE cars will typically pollute less over that same period of usage. That is what I am saying: nothing about stocks or flows. The difference in pollution is, if it exists, very marginal. EDIT: I will add, look at how cobalt is mined...it is a slave commodity from the Congo, no rules, no environmental laws...same for many other constituents of the battery.

emilecantin 5y ago

I did a similar roadtrip back in 2015 (!) in my ex-boss's Tesla Model S: we traveled from Montréal to Atlanta for a weekend conference (JSConf, IIRC). We were driving continuously, switching drivers every time we hit a charger (we were 4 in the car). I think it took us about 24h to do the trip. My main takeaway from the experience is that charging wasn't actually "painful" at all. On the contrary, it was a welcome break every time. Most times we even exceeded the charging time the car was asking for, because we found something interesting to do (like eating dinner in a nice restaurant). When I was on the marked earlier this year, I really wanted to get an EV, but there aren't any that comfortably seat 6 (I have 4 kids). We ended up with a PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica), and I love it. Next car is going to be an EV, though.

Cd00d 5y ago
I thought the reason the Tesla Model S sits 7 is because Elon had 5 kids at the time of the design. Maybe your kids are all too big for those rear-facing seats?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Model X you mean. There's no way 7 can fit in an S (and be safe!).
  - Kirby64 5y ago
    No, he means Model S. It was an option (that is currently discontinued) that put 'jump seats' where the trunk would be. Not useful for anything except younger kiddos, but could be fine for younger kids. Sort of like the 7 seater option for the Model Y, yeah it technically exists but it sounds uncomfortable... See: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-discontinues-two-colors-raises-price-model-s-jump-seats/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-discontinues-two-colors-rais...
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      I did not know that.

aakour 5y ago

I'm from Helsinki but live in Berlin, and drive between the two somewhat regularly. For this trip you essentially have two options - either via Denmark and Sweden, or Poland and the Baltics. You need to take a ferry to reach Finland regardless of which route you pick. The experience and emissions differ pretty dramatically. Intuitively you might think the total emissions would be lower for the Baltic route because of the significantly shorter ferry trip, but this is more than negated by how dirty the grid is in Poland and Estonia. Polish electricity production is about 100x as polluting as Swedish electricity. The Nordic route also wins in terms of infrastructure. There are plenty of Superchargers as well as non-Tesla charging stations, located at highway rest stops with good services. Making the 1000km+ drive in one day isn't a big deal at all, and I find that plugging the car in for the time it takes to go to the restroom and grab some food is enough to continue the trip.

ant6n 5y ago
Isn't there a ferry from Finland to Germany or at least Poland? ... What would be really nice on that route would be a sleeper service, once that tunnel between Finland and Estonia and rail Baltica is built.
- aakour 5y ago
  Yeah, there's a ferry from Rostock to Helsinki. However I'm trying to reduce my travel-related emissions, and after crunching the numbers have concluded that the best option would be ferry+train via Sweden, with electric car via Sweden a close second (per head, assuming two people or more in the car). Fingers crossed for that tunnel and a direct overnight train connection!
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    How did you work out the emissions of the ferry routes?
    - aakour 5y ago
      I used the numbers from the Finnish state research centre VTT (http://lipasto.vtt.fi/yksikkopaastot/tavaraliikennee/vesiliikennee/roroe.htm http://lipasto.vtt.fi/yksikkopaastot/tavaraliikennee/vesilii...)

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

From the end of TFA: >And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [ ... ] There’s no excuse not to. Admirable sentiments, but can anyone point definitively to the net gain/loss in CO2 terms of actually ditching a fossil fuel based car and replacing it with a new EV? And how does that look if the FF car is something like a Honda Fit (good mileage, lower than typical emissions)? I'd be willing to dump our Fit for some sort of EV, but I'm really not convinced that it's helping climate change to do so. Change my mind?

gameswithgo 5y ago
Sure, here is one such full lifecycle study: https://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2018-63%20Lifecycle%20Analysis%20of%20Electric%20Vehicles_Kukreja.pdf https://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2018-63%20Lifecyc...
- lucb1e 5y ago
  Conclusion: > [EV and ICE vehicles were] comparatively analyzed by dividing into five categories: raw material production, vehicle manufacture, transportation, operation, and decommissioning. The analysis [...] revealed that electric vehicles have a markedly lower impact in both categories, especially in regions with clean power sources like British Columbia. This conclusion is reached after consideration of the higher environmental burdens of raw material production and decommissioning inherent to electric vehicles. The significantly lower impacts from the operation stage had the strongest effect on the results. Sensitivity analysis showed that a longer lifespan shifted the efficiency balance further toward the electric vehicle.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- perl4ever 5y ago
  That's great, but it's biased in several ways that make it not relevant to my lifestyle. 1. I'm never going to live in Vancouver, so my electricity is probably never going to be near as clean, even though it is relatively low carbon by US standards. 2. I'm never going to own a Ford Focus - my car gets much higher mileage, around 50 mpg, which is a big reduction in CO2. There are a few different options with similar mileage, too. 3. I'm never going to own a clown-car Mitsubishi EV; at present, I think the plausible choices are a Nissan Leaf, a Chevy Bolt, or a Kia/Hyundai (I forget the models). I don't know these would increase the CO2 from manufacturing a lot, but it wouldn't surprise me.

ortusdux 5y ago

Also, charging by the minute seems wrong .... a Porsche Taycan is going to get a whole lot more range out of each minute than a five-year-old Nissan Leaf, so why should they pay less for the same amount of range? Hmmmm. Bear in mind that at home with the Level 2 charger in the carport, charging feels close to free. You are primarily paying rent to take up a charging spot vs. buying electricity. If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.

rootusrootus 5y ago
IIRC the primary reason there are any chargers with bill by the minute is that in some jurisdictions it is illegal for any entity other than the electric utility to sell power by the kWh.
- theluketaylor 5y ago
  In Canada where this trip took place it’s currently illegal to sell electricity via DC fast charger because Measurement Canada has not defined the standard to which your charger has to measure against to ensure fair dispensing. They are really dragging their heels and it’s super annoying. Even utility like BC or Quebec Hydro can’t sell by the kWh and either have to give it away from free or charge by time. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/lm04949.html https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/lm04949.html
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Again the feds encroaching on state powers.
    - notatoad 5y ago
      in canada, all governmental power belongs to the federal government. provinces only have authority when it is granted to them by the federal government. there is no such thing as the feds encroaching on "state powers" because provinces are not states.

golemiprague 5y ago

For many people around the world the distance is not the issue, it is actually the overnight charging. In many countries people mostly live in apartment buildings and have to park in the street or if they have a parking spot it usually doesn't have any dedicated electricity near by, especially not something that can be charged per resident.

carcostthrow 5y ago

>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to. Isn't there? Right now for me to own a Ford Mach E, a Tesla Model 3 or a RAV4 Prime is $3400 to $3700 per year for comprehensive insurance, $1400 a year for liability only. My SUV right now costs $1100 a year to insure comprehensive, but even a 2021 Acura NSX or Jaguar F-Pace is only $1400 for the same level of insurance that I have right now. I only spend about $1200 a year on gasoline for the SUV and another $200 for regular maintenance. So right out the gate, assuming electricity is free and tire rotations are free, I'm already looking at least $900/yr increase in operating expense. And then there's the upfront; the above is on top of the $10,000 to $20,000 more I'd have to spend to buy an EV vs a comparably sized and equipped ICE. And an additional $1500 to $2000 to have my garage accommodate charging a car, assuming main panel doesn't need upgrading and only installing a 240V circuit. Right now it's a detached garage with a single 120v to it, so it's retrenching and installation of new conduit and wire, installing a new sub panel in the garage, and rewiring everything. Not going to count the cost of a level 2 DC charger (Chevrolet and Kia are offering one as an incentive for purchase). Main uncertainty is whether or not the main panel would need to be upgraded. If I didn't have a garage, I'd also have to be super concerned about charging stations though. You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit. A nearby truck depot gets the copper wire cut from the trucks battery systems sitting there overnight every few months. So... yeah. There's my excuse. Money.

bobsil1 5y ago
My Bolt lease is $75/mo.
- carcostthrow 5y ago
  US vs Canada I assume. Last time I looked at the Bolt Premier some years ago the dealer would not budge off of the $50,000+ price. And for that price I was sitting in the most uncomfortable seats I've ever sat in for a personal vehicle; thin, hard and not well sculpted for my back. The only positive I recall was the excellent throttle response.

238475235243 5y ago

Genuinely baffled why anyone buys anything but a Tesla. It's cheaper, autopilot is pretty great, has a vastly better charging network, charges vastly quicker... I guess it means you can write blog posts about bad experiences with an electric car...

drewg123 5y ago
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've read so many horror stories about bad experiences with non-Tesla fast charging. One of the YouTubers I follow (Out of Spec Motoring) frequently takes road trips in non-Tesla EVs and vlogs about them. As a Tesla owner, I frequently watch his vlogs and feel a huge amount of schadenfreude. His trips are much more "interesting" than my own experiences road tripping using the Tesla network. He frequently encounters slow charge rates, failed chargers, and even entire stations being offline. In fact, he talks about how Electrify America shut down its entire network in the I95 corridor for upgrades, leaving non-Teslas stranded. I've got about 36K on my Model X, about 50% of which came from road trips on the east coast. I've encountered 2 failed chargers, and had to wait to charge once.
- elif 5y ago
  Agree. I've driven nissan leaf for the last 5 years and just added tesla y. Non-tesla chargers in my city are blocked by careless ICE drivers about 20-25% of the time, and the rates some of them charge are more expensive than gasoline. the Y on the other hand, its like impossible to run out of juice, and not even a problem i have to think about unless i really want to. For non-tesla drivers: it navigates you where to go for charging when you need it, optimizing your route for the fastest charging experience.
clouddrover 5y ago
> Genuinely baffled why anyone buys anything but a Tesla. Price, practicality, exterior styling, interior styling. All the usual reasons. > has a vastly better charging network, charges vastly quicker As a driver you should be demanding an open charging standard so all cars can charge at all chargers. Why meekly settle for less? Here are three EVs charging faster than a Tesla Model 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU Amusingly, Teslas charge faster on CCS chargers than on Tesla's proprietary chargers: https://insideevs.com/news/507489/tesla-model3-charging-faster-ccs2/ https://insideevs.com/news/507489/tesla-model3-charging-fast... But the good news is Tesla will supposedly open their chargers to all EVs soon, mostly to get the benefit of government subsidies. Governments aren't going to fund chargers that only charge one brand: https://insideevs.com/news/521623/tesla-superchargers-open-other-2021/ https://insideevs.com/news/521623/tesla-superchargers-open-o... They'll probably start in Europe first because Teslas already use the CCS Type 2 Combo inlet in Europe.

mikewarot 5y ago

I drove 2000 km in a single day, on a number of occasions, when I was younger. I don't see how anyone could do it in less than 3 days with this many charge stops. I had no idea the range of electric cars was so short. I expected that they'd do better at cruising speed on the highways, because the mpg in my car goes up as I get up to 70 MPH. Apparently a Tesla Model 3 is only good for 289 miles at that speed before giving up the ghost. 13*40 --> 520 miles is what I'd expect to get out of our car.

linsomniac 5y ago
Electric cars tend to be the opposite as far as highway vs city MPGs. Range at 80MPH is far worse than at lower speeds because of air resistance. On the other end of the spectrum, around town they do better because of regeneration capturing a lot of the stop and go that kills gas car range.

wstrange 5y ago

If my math is correct, driving 1,725km in a Prius (assume 6L/100KM - which is fairly conservative) would cost about $135 CDN in fuel - (approx. $1.30 per litre). Not much more than $120 spent on charging. For a car that is much less expensive than the Jaguar. Environmental considerations aside, this is a tough sell for most consumers.

laurencerowe 5y ago
For most long trips are rare so if 90% of your miles are charged from home (for much less than the cost of gas) you’d prefer charging outside of home to be more easily available even if it comes out more expensive than gas for that particular trip.
elif 5y ago
Even if you set aside environmental considerations (which is mental) the gas is only a tiny portion of the value proposition of EVs. In 5 years of used leaf driving i've visited 0 gas stations, 0 repair shops, 0 emissions inspectors. It's the burden of all that mess that you get to avoid, not a just $0.15 on the dollar savings.

jmpman 5y ago

I just did a 2 day 2000 mile trip in my long range model 3. Total charging costs were around $100, which didn’t include two stops where the superchargers were free (network connectivity problems?). Required a total of 13 supercharging stops. Each stop was between 20min to 45min. I started off completely full, and charged overnight at a Tesla destination charger, (so, 14 stops?). Roughly half the cost of the article’s reported charging costs. At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked. What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that. At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert. Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.

drewg123 5y ago
I've done multiple ~1000mi road trips in my Model X, and I've peed in a lot of bushes too. A lot of the newer chargers (at least on the east coast) are located at WaWa's, and have 24hr restrooms. But the chargers at malls are a pain. Either the mall is closed, and you need to pee in the bushes, or the mall is open and the traffic is terrible and the chargers are ICE'ed in. There is one charger in Hardee SC thats in the parking lot of a police station. I was a bit nervous to use the bushes there..
- 1-6 5y ago
  I wonder if the smell of urine is a thing around superchargers.

alvah 5y ago

"In this context, there’s another number there that I think is really interesting: The “km/c-h”, how far you can get on an hour’s charge. For this particular car on this selection of chargers, it was over 200km (124 miles) per charge-hour. I think that’s enough? Maybe in the lower regions of enough, but there." So at 110km/h, less than 2 hours of driving for every hour spent charging? In what world is that close to "enough"? My next car will likely be an EV, but the evangelists hand-waving away limitations like this do nobody any favors.

dylan604 5y ago
Exactly right. EVs are perfect for day-to-day commutes and what not where it's drive a distance, let it sit for several hours (while at work or at home at night), lather-rinse-repeat. Long distance continuous driving would be brutal with an hour pitstop every couple of hours.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  This is the insight that I need. I'm all about EVs, but my fam and I will go on at least 1 500 road trip each year, and we don't stop for sleep (unless we have to).
  - mwint 5y ago
    Assuming you're saying "one 500-mile road trip" per year, I don't think you should let that stop you. That's one or two 10-80% charging stops max for any Tesla. I'd play with https://abetterrouteplanner.com https://abetterrouteplanner.com and test your potential road trips with the type of car you're interested in. It'll plan out where you'd need to stop, for how long, etc. Pretty cool way to alleviate (or confirm) your fears.
    - timbray 5y ago
      ABetterRoutePlanner is cool but in my experience extremely optimistic and doesn't include fallbacks for blocked/broken chargers.

senkora 5y ago

There’s this documentary I really enjoyed watching called “Long Way Up” where Ewan McGregor (plus another actor I was not familiar with) rode from Tierra del Fuego to Los Angeles on electric motorcycles. They talk a lot about the pros/cons of going electric, and there are issues with like cold temperatures affecting battery performance at the start. But I also found that I just really enjoyed the show even excluding that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up

chrischen 5y ago
They had those problems but also had basically a support convoy following them that ran on gas.
- senkora 5y ago
  Yep, it definitely would not have been possible without that.

nreilly 5y ago

I’ve done 1300km in two days in an EV comfortably along the east coast of Australia. ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving, charge overnight at the hotel, ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving and arrive at destination. Same in reverse. Cost was only charging at home to 100% before departing (under $10) at both ends. The supercharging was free. The autopilot makes a huge difference to driver fatigue, and keeps paying attention when you’re distracted by kids in the back (saving me from at least one accident). It really has made it more of a difficult choice between flying and driving across the major cities on the east coast of Australia. Going further west is possible, but will just take a bit more planning.

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

An interesting anecdote, but I've never understood why anyone would willingly drive a car (electric or otherwise) such a long distance. The longest I've ever driven in a single trip was a bit over 750 km, and I think I slept for 16 hours straight after I arrived. The next time I took that same trip, I rode the train instead.

mig39 5y ago
As someone who has driven across Canada on numerous occasions, it's a special kind of zen. I did BC to Newfoundland by myself, and 16-hour driving days were normal. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
- linsomniac 5y ago
  Miles and miles of miles and miles.
linsomniac 5y ago
Different people react differently to long car trips. I can drive the 1,800 miles to my wife's family in one shot, especially given time to nap while charging and the driver automation taking up the slack for being tired. I can then have a normal nights sleep and be fine. My wife, on the other hand, being a passenger for such a trip, she arrives and then is wasted for 2 days. But if you really want to be miserable on a trip... Take a train. My wife and son did that same trip by train a few years ago and: was delayed a solid day by flooding, lost power, had to suffer with malfunctioning toilets for part of the trip, and it cost more than flying or driving (counting hotels).
- jacquesm 5y ago
  You probably are a danger to others on the road, yourself and your family. More than 8 hours behind the wheel in a single day is irresponsible.
  - C19is20 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

> And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now Except of course there aren't nearly enough electric vehicles to make this a possibility, and if they did the grid capacity wouldn't be there.

paganel 5y ago
About a week or so ago the Greek PM (I think it was the PM) strongly advised his fellow Greek compatriots to use less air conditioning because the electrical grid was very close to collapsing. No way one can add a few million EVs to that grid. And Greece is a EU member with a resonably well functioning economy (ignoring the financial crisis from a decade ago), I fail to see how poorer countries will be able to make all this work.
- carcostthrow 5y ago
  Could go either way. Where I live we also had issues with the grid getting close to capacity due to air conditioning. That said, someone mentioned to me once that it's about 7 years from the time a power company to notify the government of intention to build a power plant to completion. At least for natural gas plants. So it's plausible for the necessary capacity to be built over the next 15 years.
_ph_ 5y ago
It varies from country to country. If your grid is at the brink of collapse, it might be a challenge. Here in Germany, even changing all cars to electric would increase the total electricity consumption by less than 20%, not counting in the elektricity savings by no longer providing gasoline. This would probably doable by todays grid and the transition to electric cars will take 15 years even in the best circumstances, just by comparing the 45 million cars owned with the 3 million cars sold every year. Enough time to do adjustments to the grid where needed. One also needs to consider how much electric cars can be beneficial for the grid. With charging of parked cars remotely controlled, they can help with stabilizing the grid. An electric car in Germany uses about 8kWh/day - that is probably less that the AC unit now use in Greece. And if Greece doesn't have ample solar yet, it would be about time to change that urgently.

tobyhinloopen 5y ago

These charge speeds are quite low. Are the chargers bad, or is the car just slow? I feel like my XC40 P8 charges much faster

isodude 5y ago

As an aside FIAT 500 all electric has charging stations in their infotainment system. No need for PlugShare.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago

There are many people driving from London to Warsaw on a semi-regular basis. That a 1000+ mile drive. It can be done in 19 hours with a ferry crossing. I’ve done it myself a number of times. Relaxing drive takes 22 hours. There is no reason this should take twice as long.

dgudkov 5y ago

TL;DR Total trip time: 17h42m. Driving time: 11h18m (64% of the total trip time). Charging time: 6h24m (36% of the total trip time).

omega3 5y ago

Is there an website where I can see what a long distance trip plan for a electric vehicle would be, how long it would take including the charging times?

zejn 5y ago
Yes, https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

zejn 5y ago

One could generalize Tim Bray's "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now." into "everyone should stop burning stuff ASAP". Burning stuff is the largest source of CO2 emissions. The two largest sources of direct personal CO2 emissions are transportation and heating and/or cooling our homes. For personal transportation, EVs are a great replacement for ICE. They allow you to stop burning fuel directly and instead buy electricity. They're improving really fast, to a degree they're getting usable even for 1000 mile trips. And they use less energy, about a third of an ICE. For heating and cooling homes there's heat pump, which uses electricity to pump the heat either into the house when in heating mode or pumping heat out of home when in cooling mode. No more dealing with soot, ash, and chimneys, and they're so efficient that you get more heat if professionals burn gas in power plants to power your heat pump than you would get if you burned the gas directly. Both these allow you to drastically reduce your direct CO2 footprint, also known as scope 1 emissions. A lot of electricity is produced by burning stuff, that's where it makes sense to get solar panels to try to produce most of your consumption or at least offset your use. Those are a modern miracle - getting 20% of sun's energy into usable form is far better than photosynthesis, which gets few percent at most. While Tim says "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles now", I acknowledge that it's logistically impossible to replace all the vehicles overnight. But the car market in the USA sells about 4 million of new cars every year, and those really should be electric if at all possible. Buying an ICE is essentially buying a 10-year subscription to fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.