Posted on 10/17/2017 10:52:16 AM PDT by AngelesCrestHighway
So get a Tesla 3 with a 300+ mile range. You don’t work 24/7, you sleep. Every morning it’s all charged & ready to go ... you never have to “go to the gas/power station”.
"Government incentives for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles have been established by several national and local governments around the world as a financial incentives to plug-in electric vehicle vehicles to consumers. These mainly include tax exemptions and tax credits, and additional perks that range from access to bus lines to waivers on fees (charging, parking, tolls, etc.)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_incentives_for_plug-in_electric_vehicles
“... coal fired powerplants are going to drive the price of a Kilowatt hour up.”
Forget driving the price up (which it will)...we’ll be looking at brownouts!
“I invite you to make a trip on I-80 from San Fran to Chicago. See how far you get beteen ‘charging stations’ across Nevada-—Utah-—Wyoming—Nebraska, etc. I suggest you have food & blankets with you. It is a long way to the ‘next place’ all across those states.”
Tesla has free supercharging stations about every 100 miles.
20 minutes for 80% charge. Ya gotta get out some time to stretch & eat.
Enough to make owning an electric car not feasible. I’ve had to drive that far twice in the past 6 months. And both times, I’ve needed to shift about 700lb of stuff, to boot.
That is not true unless you have on older Tesla S with lifetime free charging or the very high end Tesla S that costs in excess of $100K. The model 3 will get somewhere around 4 free fill-ups per year and then charge a modest fee to use the super charging stations.
To the contrary, you have the option of powering the vehicle from assorted sources, including solar/wind or whatever you can power a generator with. Yes, you will own the batteries. Maintenance is way better too.
When Irma came through our area electricity was on but gas stations were dry!
Tesla is just starting to ramp up Model 3 production. Layoffs actually indicate the automated factory is largely complete, and mass production is commencing.
“That is not true unless you have on older Tesla S with lifetime free charging or the very high end Tesla S that costs in excess of $100K.”
Wrong.
uh, yeah.
brief summary of EV issues:
1. Range: abysmal, especially in climates that require air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter. AND the kind of states that have those extreme temperatures also tend to be the states with large geographic sizes where one has to drive LONG distances pretty much to anywhere, like the Rocky Mountain States and adjacent states.
2. Recharge time: again, abysmal, typical household recharging takes all night without large expenditures on fast-charging equipment and associated wiring, main panel upgrades, and even service entrance upgrades. Figure aboutt $5,000 per EV times 253,000,000 EVs = 12.5 trillion dollars for home charging system upgrades.
3. Recharge availability: once again, abysmal, requiring literally billions of recharge stations, since pretty much every car needs its own recharge station in every parking space. Total parking spaces in the U.S. are estimated at about 2 billion. Cost to build a pubic fast-charge station is about $60,000. Thus the necessary PUBLIC recharging infrastructure would cost roughly 120 trillion dollars.
Ultimately,though, the BIG issue is range anxiety, namely the product of abysmal range multiplied by abysmal charging station availability. Charging can be fixed for a measly dozen tens of trillions of dollars, but no amount of money is going advance battery technology beyond small, incremental improvements.
...Consume three times as much energy as the actual "average" household itself - 915 kwh/month of electricity. Numbers from Google.
So -
Better batteries with longer range and more charging stations, while necessary, have little to do with the problem.
Before any large scale replacement can happen, utilities need to ramp up residential electric production by at least threefold. AND, they need to figure out a way to get all of that electricity downstream to the consumer.
Ford and GM can spit out all of the electric cars they want. Won't matter, if they're plugged in and there's no juice.
Recycle the used batteries. Most of it can be reused. You’ll make a good buck selling it back.
So why wait 20 minutes to only get 80% to the next stop on a scale of diminishing returns? 16+ hours a day, drive through eats with dump and fills at the same time. I just remember too many cross countries with the 879 mile marker at Beaumont.
Not sure the details, but the 20 minute chargers are a thing. Common enough, too, that you can plan a drive across the country.
“Tesla has free supercharging stations about every 100 miles.”
The US has about 4,071,000 miles highways and roads. Are you saying that Tesla has installed 40,710 free supercharging stations?
>> I’m happily fully charged in less than 2 hours
>> with my level 2 clipper creek.
Don’t know what you’re driving, but I’ve had a Volt for a daily driver for over five years, and I frickin’ love it. It’s a joy to drive. Long charge times are not a factor for me... but I must say, saving 2/3 on my fuel expenses is kind of nice. I don’t care if charging takes a couple of hours. My car sits around doing nothing at least 20 hours a day, anyway.
Plus, if I have to go someplace a couple hundred miles away, or when I’m not charged up, I still have range extender, so no limits on that front. Nevertheless, I’ve found that about 91% of my driving for the past 5.5 years has been electrically powered. That’s money that I have NOT sent to OPEC. Hopefully that’s meant a Jihadi somewhere had to go without an IED or two.
And what fuels electricity for recharging?
“I can see a household with two cars, one electric for commuting to work and the other when you need a real car/truck.”
That’s what we did for 2 years. Leaf EV + Explorer SUV. Former for daily commute, latter for thousand-mile trips.
Intend to resume that life when the Tesla 3 comes out (twice the price of your Civic, but a lot nicer and the SUV is long paid off).
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