Posted on 08/22/2024 8:00:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
With the number of Teslas I see on the road, in parking lots, and in driveways here in Central Texas, I think the Texas number might be a bit low on this graphic.
Unless I missed it, Wyoming is not on the list. My daughter who lives in Wyoming told me she has only noticed one EV and it had Colo. plates.
It amazes me how many more people up north (where it’s freezing cold) have EV’s than in the south. It seems that EV’s are one of those products that are bought with little thought to if it’s practical for their situation.
So even in collectivist CA, only 3% drive an EV.
And the numbers nationwide are going to fall, as EV owners will not be repeating buying.
I would think it takes more energy to cool than to heat a vehicle. They may take heat from the motors to warm the compartment, but that is just a guess.
I see a handful of Teslas in my town. But I ain’t in Austin, Dallas, or Houston. The ones I know of are doctors. Virtue signaling.
Whether it takes more energy or not is not the main issue (I think it's probably about the same amount of energy for both).
To heat the car, it takes... heat. And for an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, you've already got a ton of heat available for free. Waste heat. Heat that has to be removed from the engine to keep it from melting; this is done by the engines... wait for it... cooling system.
That heat is literally free. You've got to get rid of way more of it than is required to heat the passenger spaces of the car. You can keep the passengers toasty warm by just diverting 15 or 20% of the waste heat that would have been dissipated by the radiator into a little separate radiator that warms the air that goes into the passenger space.
To cool air takes energy, but not heat. It takes mechanical power, shaft power. Shaft power you get from ... heat. But to turn heat into shaft power, you've got to deal with Maxwell's Demon, Carnot's Equation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, things like that.
Net result: in order to generate a horsepower of shaft power (to spin the A/C compressor), you need to generate three or four (maybe even five) horsepower of heat, that you still have to throw away using the radiator. And don't you dare let any of that get into the passenger spaces.
So you get the heat for free, and you've got to pay several times over - in terms of fuel usage - for the cool.
In an electric vehicle, you've got to pay several times over for both. You don't get nearly enough heat to keep the passengers warm in the winter from waste heat generated by the energy. That waste heat went into a lake near the distant electricity generating plant that made the juice to charge the EV battery. It's just wasted. You don't get to take advantage of it at all.
To get the cool, you've still got to spin the A/C compressor shaft, but you're doing that with electric power from the battery. Small potatoes next to what the drive motor(s) are using, but still nothing to sneeze at.
Would be interesting to see a breakdown of ownership by race...
So aside from Left Coasters, hardly anybody else wants these things.
Someone in Cheyenne had one and blogged about the adventures of trying to use it around the state. Took them 12 hours to get to Lander. It seems an absurdity to have an electric vehicle in a cold, no-big-cities, large-distances state like Montana or Wyoming.
I have some anecdotal evidence regarding the money involved, courtesy of an old college friend who works as a building engineer in a Dallas high-rise office building. His building leases office space to several federal agencies (apparently, the nearby federal building is full to capacity), and the agencies have been trying to get the General Services Administration to install EV chargers in the garage. Just two Level-2, 240v, 50 amp double-port chargers, installed ... maybe 30 feet from a breaker panel with plenty of remaining capacity. So, just a straight run of conduit and wiring, two new circuit breakers, the charging stations (about $9K each), plus permits, insurance, labor, etc.
The bid estimate from GSA came in a bit under $150,000.00.
👍
Here in the Orlando area, Teslas can be most reliably found in the parking lots at Whole Foods and other grocery stores in affluent areas and in parking slots used by college faculties and medical doctors.
I used to play in a big band that had a regular Monday night gig. After every gig, I had to take one of the sax players four miles down the road so that he could reclaim his Tesla from a government charging station.
The REAL WAY to do this survey is to list the rate of ownership of ONLY electric vehicles, no gasoline vehicles. In other words, if a family owns 1 of each, they’re not counted, as the EV only exists for that family to be able to Virtue Signal. But if a family owns 1, 2, or more EVs, but no gasoline cars, then they have, actually, ‘transitioned’ to EVs.
“The bid estimate from GSA came in a bit under $150,000.00.”
Union boys.
I know, it sounds crazy, cold fusion suddenly pops up to revolutionize electric power generation -- and Musk is the big winner as the first to ride the wave. Yet Musk seems to have a plan that assumes Tesla and his solar cell business will soon come up roses and be bulletproof in a business sense. I surmise that is part of why Musk moved on Twitter and into political issues -- and aligned with Trump no less.
I see loads of Teslas around here, but most of them are sitting unpurchased in a Tesla dealership lot.
You do know a ton on EV numbers about EVs are false
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