Replies

There are lots of anti EV folks in kneejerk mode about blah blah government intrusion this or that.

There are a lot of folks on “the fence” about “it’s not there yet, but it will be. Just wait.”

So here are some items not mentioned in the thread above.

Oil consumption is rising. The insertion of EVs into society is not having much effect on it. The reason is

The people who buy these were never driving long distances to begin with. They would not have bought the EV if they were. Therefore, them not driving a gasoline car does not save much gasoline, because they weren’t consuming much pre EV.

The limits on charging are not engineering. They are physics. You can only force so many amperes into a battery so fast. The limit is generally always the conductors along the path of flow. They heat up. To avoid melting and fire, you slow the flow. This could be engineering only if you had superconductors in the entire infrastructure that do not heat up. People quote the battery capacities in miles, or kilowatt-hours — but what they mean is ampere hours. Because:

A watt is a volt-ampere. If you quote a battery as 100 kilowatt-hours, which Tesla does, then you get to ampere hours by knowing the voltage of the battery. It is about 400V. So a 100 KwHr battery at 400V has a capacity of 250 Ampere Hours.

Forget how long it takes to drain it. To replace that you have to flow 250 Amperes (at 450ish Volts, needs to be above the battery voltage to flow) in 1 hour. 250 Amps is a lot to ask of the cables and charger so drop that down to, say, 125 Amperes **and now 2 hours**. Even 125 is a lot so another divide by 2 to 75 amperes — and so on. This is why it is hours and hours to recharge. The cables will melt otherwise.
The battery terminals ditto.

My point is, this is not engineering. This is physics. You have to have entirely new superconducting materials for this to not eat the time of people who have lives to live. And if they are non paperwork sort of workers, that time is not just out of their lives, it is time out of their $$/hour work of plumbing or construction or . . . even truck driving. The driver isn’t making money if he’s sitting and waiting.

I spend less time in a year waiting on our EV to charge than I used to spend waiting on gas fill-ups.

But that's because I had to spend time for gas fill-ups even for local driving. The EV charges at home for local driving (and the first leg of a trip) without me having to stand around waiting for it.

I still have an ICE pickup I occasionally drive for pickup chores or times my wife and I need 2 cars to run separate errands for the day. And I'll use the ICE pickup if I go on a long trip without my wife. She wants to stop every 200 miles and walk around for 10-15 minutes anyway, which is conducive to charging the EV on trips. I'd rather go 350-400 miles before stopping for a pee break and gas fill up (ICE is better for trips I'd take without my wife, which hasn't happened since we got the EV but I'm sure it will).

Last but not least are hotel reservations or cabin reservations on a trip. If we stop at a hotel that has a complementary charger, it saves me from having to "fill up" the next morning like I would if I had an ICE car. The same with if we rent a cabin to stay at a state park while on a road trip and they let us use a nearby RV spot for free to charge the EV. So trips with those options make us lean more to taking the EV. Basically, on those trips we don't just "get by" with an EV -- having an EV is more convenient than an ICE car. But trips with few charging options mean we take the ICE pickup. By having one of each car type we get to choose what's best for the occasion. After we decide on a trip to take and make our hotel/cabin reservations and look at the various fast charging options, we know which car is best for the task.