why don’t you drive an EV?

After a great deal of sturm und drang (we hadn’t had a car for over a decade prior), my family leased a Bolt EV in late 2018. With the exception of having massive transmission / transaxle issues about a year in (all taken care of under warranty) it’s been great. Well, we also have to make sure to get the right street parking spot in order to charge it at home, but that’s only been a problem once.

Who else drives electric? If not, why not, or how soon do you anticipate you will be able to switch?

at the time of our last car purchase (v much due to situation out of my control) we couldn't afford an EV and there weren't chargers in my building. Now it's two years later, EVs are cheaper, and there are chargers, but I'm stuck w the car we got >:(

but I will switch at the first opportunity

Last summer I bought a RAV-4 hybrid. It’s the bees knees. I wanted an EV, but I’m a renter with a difficult landlord who wouldn’t let me consider plugging in. Still, I get ~40 mpg, which ain’t nothin.

“ass hat landlord” was not a rationale I had considered before.

The weirdest thing btw is the sloshing sound that the battery pack makes shortly after I plug it in. I assume it has something to do with the thermoregulation of the battery cells. Or perhaps the whole thing is like the mop in fantasia.

I don't own a car, but if I did, I would buy electric. The only thing that would make me think twice is remembering a friend's experience during the California wildfires last year. The Tesla was pretty much useless for getting them out of an evacuation zone due to power outages: they ended up leaving it behind. Vicious cycle, yeah.

i would like an EV or hybrid, but my main use for a car these days (besides a v short commute to work that can also be done by bike but not by public transportation) is stuff like camping/covering long distances in the fifth largest state in america aka not conducive to EV at least until there's a an e-truck with good mileage and ground clearance (aka the rivian, which i cannot afford)

ideally i'd take one of these fellas to work: https://www.urbanarrow.com/en/shorty

and have a not-often used truck for trips outta town

I've got a hybrid Fusion, supposedly gets 42 city/40 highway but the average MPG is more like 35, which is pathetic for a hybrid. though maybe the cold has something to do with that.

will probably be getting a full EV as my next car, whenever that happens

The NHTSA mandates that reversing an EV or hybrid produce a certain amount of noise at certain frequencies to alert pedestrians that there’s an otherwise silent car in motion. For this reason, whenever I back out of my parking spot, some MIDI noisemaker under my hood produces a shriek that sounds like an army of mosquitos.

Supposedly the best thing for EVs in really cold weather is to have them plugged in all the time.

I was stlil under the impression new non-luxury cars are like ~$15k. I am very wrong.

I don't drive an EV because I don't own a car and the car share doesn't do EVs yet. I'm busy building a charging network and trying to covert uber drivers to electric right now.

specific user such as imago

is ~40mpg considered.....good.... in the states

Miles are like twice as long as kilometers. Think of it that way.

here is a picture of the most popular car in america

https://i.imgur.com/vlOVuV7.png

^^ also twice as long as a kilometer.

Coming down a two-lane one-way the other day, one of those trucks tried to get past me, but had to slow down because a Hummer was parked in a space next to his lane. Good times.

da big boys

Gas drops below $1.50 and everyone gets frisky.

lotta litres in a gallon

ballpark 100 liters per

I’m still impressed that they doubled the number of doors on pickup trucks at some point and I barely noticed.

We got a Nissan Leaf last January and we’re very pleased with it. It was a scary step but there has been no downside so far. We still have a minivan for longer trips or hauling stuff.

You know who drives the Tesla on our block? The Pentecostals.

I know, right? Like you didn't think they could be even bigger assholes, but there you go.

our regular car lease is up in 2021 so starting to look around now

got my eye on this https://www.caranddriver.com/kia/soul-ev, successor to https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a26144426/2019-kia-niro-ev-driven/ from which i steal this:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/niroev-sidebar-edit-1556807455.png?crop=0.757xw:0.714xh;0.136xw,0.133xh&resize=768:*

also this one i guess but i think we want to the cargo https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/05/another-competent-korean-car-the-kia-niro-ev-reviewed/

If the Kia EVs were available in the dc area we probably would’ve gotten one of those instead.

Meanwhile Ford has apparently been hard at work building an unlistenable banshee that only runs for 45 minutes on a single charge

https://jalopnik.com/my-brain-cant-process-the-noise-the-seven-motor-ford-mu-1844483324

Yay for crazy R&D though

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/kia-denies-report-that-the-soul-ev-is-cancelled-for-america/

we have to change cars next november (lease runs out). this was top of my list. looks like it's not going to be an option :(

was really hoping a 3 year lease was going to get us to a world where there were more options for family sized evs.

The good news is it’s not like you can go anywhere

I’ve been driving Hyundai ioniqs around recently. That’s a nice mid-size family car. Enough room in the rear seats and a good sized hatchback boot. Slightly lacklustre DC Fast charging performance is compensated for being a really efficient car. (More km/kWh)

Supposedly the best thing for EVs in really cold weather is to have them plugged in all the time.

(Roy Scheider voice) you're gonna need a longer extension cord

why don’t you drive an EV?

Because we have a rock-solid old Subaru that seems destined to make it to the age of 30, but if it dies eventually, I'm thinking we'll go EV.

BTW we recently learned that the Chevy Bolt is apparently designed such that the box for a 55” flatscreen TV fits PERFECTLY in the back with the seats folded down. Like somebody had to have made a CAD volume with just those measurements and made sure it would fit.

https://www.carboncounter.com/

i'm actually considering getting rid of my car, as i am fully remote now

at least the pandemic has brought on a few good things

loooool https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/03/29/vw-volkswagen-name-change-voltswagen-electric-cars-tesla-competiton/7048576002/

*looks at calendar* uh premature 4/1 still seems more likely.

haha apparenty nope

We know, 66 is an unusual age to change your name, but we’ve always been young at heart. Introducing Voltswagen. Similar to Volkswagen, but with a renewed focus on electric driving. Starting with our all-new, all-electric SUV the ID.4 - available today. #Voltswagen #ID4 pic.twitter.com/pKQKlZDCQ7

— Voltswagen (@VW) March 30, 2021

lot of americans taking the opportunity to get priggish about VW's history while the most prominent car company in the US *right now* is run by a space fascist eugenicist.

would definitely drive an EV voltswagen microbus while wearing my patagonia baggies, grateful dead shirt, and merrell hydro mocs, for peak west coast awfulness, but it will cost around my annual salary so unfortunately it will only be a terrible dream

well apparently it *was* an april fools joke but now everyone is talking about their involvement with the National Socialist German Workers' Party so good job i guess?

Is buying a new electric car every few years better for the environment than maintaining an old car? I may have a bias as my car was built in 1973.

making an EV is marginally worse for the environment than making a regular car and much worse than making no car.

https://tnmt.com/infographics/carbon-emissions-by-transport-type/

making and then driving an EV is probably better than a clunker after a few years, but it's going to depend on how much you drive, etc.

I’m not buying a non peer reviewed study with that disclaimer attached.

Try this one that uses the Argonne GREET lifecycle emissions model.

https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/the-climate-change-mitigation-potential-of-electric-vehicles-as-a-function-of-renewable-energy

No car is definitely better but if you have to use a car it’s considerable better to use an EV

the disclaimer is pretty clear that it's back of the envelope, and nothing more than back of the envelope can be said in response to a vague question about whether to replace an existing ICE car.

but fwiw the abstract of that paper says:

"The lifecycle EV carbon emissions for a vehicle powered by the 2016 US grid is 30.82 metric tons... An average internal combustion engine vehicle (25.4 miles per gallon) is responsible for 68.38 metric tons of carbon dioxide over its lifetime"

which is almost exactly consistent with the back of the envelope calculation which says an ICE car produces about twice as much CO2 as an EV if you amortize manufacturing costs. and it's a whizzy infographic that doesn't cost $5 too.

Is buying a new electric car every few years better for the environment than maintaining an old car? I may have a bias as my car was built in 1973.

― Peter Greenaway's Fleetwood Mac (S-), Tuesday, March 30, 2021 8:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

old cars - basically anything pre-90s iirc - are significantly worse for the environment in terms of emissions than regular ICE cars

No doubt. I barely ever drive anyway so I guess it's a moot point.

Actually I'm not even sure why I felt the need to reply to this thread, but hey, ILX right?

otm

wonder how EVs would shake out if we were to be hit by The Big One solar flare coronal mass ejaculation whatever from the nyer article

a lot of ppl would go nyer nyer nyer

https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/325193/volvo-cars-partners-with-and-invests-in-breathe-for-next-generation-fast-charging

a rare vote of confidence in the UK tech sector

There's a youtube guy I sometimes check in on who focuses entirely on the Hyundai Ioniq. I caught up with one of his most recent videos, and while he still likes his car after 2 years his videos really emphasize all sorts of bullshit big and small that I can't believe remain issues. For example, lack of a rear wiper (which is finally being remedied, but still, wtf?) or the fact that the car's map to charging stations is only updated every six months or so (by his estimate missing the addition of 22k+ new charger locations over those same six months), or the fact that the brake light goes on whenever you take your foot off the accelerator, which is by design, but which must be maddening to those around you. This stuff might be unique to this car, but, like, why are any of these seemingly easy to fix issues still even, well, issues? The downside of making cars but particularly EVs more like driving computers is that features seems to be pushed out before it's ready for prime time, with constantly promised fixes and patches always on the way, just like computers. But my computer doesn't cost $30k+.

the brake light going on sounds like that's by design - i assume he has regen braking turned on?

I think so, but I think it's related to an overcorrection to the old software, where people were basically able to coast to a complete stop without the brake lights ever coming on. The youtube guy thinks the light should be related to actual deceleration rather than the regen amount, but he understands why it is the way it is. Does regen foot-off-the-pedal braking light up the brake lights in all cars that use it?

US flailing around:

China's EV industry is causing US automakers to sweat. Why? Because it is cranking out high-quality, reasonably sized, affordable EVs. US automakers' bad decisions *once again* require the US gov't to shelter them from competition.https://t.co/vLdbj5YL7g

— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 18, 2024

Vs Australia thinking outside the box:

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) says that EV drivers in Australia could earn $12,000 a year by allowing the grid to draw from their batteries. Five years of that & you've basically paid off the car! https://t.co/2m08Wfac3r

— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 17, 2024

the fact that the brake light goes on whenever you take your foot off the accelerator, which is by design, but which must be maddening to those around you.

This is absolutely related to the regen. First off in a petrol car you can absolutely have brake lights go on without the brakes enshrining because there’s always a bit of free play in the brake pedal before the pads hit the rotors. Similarly you want the lights to go on before the regen brakes engage because it’s the safest way - much better than the lights going on after you start braking, you always want to do right side fail in cars.

Much more maddening in the Ioniq is that they clearly have to run out a big supply of flappy paddle steering wheels (for racing style manual gear changes - another stupid feature no drivers actually use). The flappy paddles are used to set the regen, and the regen needs to be reset every time you get in the car; there’s no memory of the last setting. I can’t think of a circumstance in an EV where you wouldn’t want maximum regen, because that’s energy going back into the battery extending your range.

I realize 1 pedal driving in an EV drive is not what most people are used to, but it takes about 5 minutes to get used to it (OK, maybe not the BMW i3 which drove like a dogem and took a lot of getting used to).

Now to the ARENA thing. Anyway that tweet is a bad reading on an even worse press release.

ARENA - Australian renewables energy agency - was founded to fund research into renewables and grid integration of renewables. It used to be staffed by some really knowledgeable and competent people but the last two liberal prime ministers eviscerated it by suggesting it should start funding gas exploration and other nonsense. It’s now staffed by children who are not ‘there for a long time, only for a good time’ basically just for the CV points on whatever political greasy pole they are climbing (there’s a very funny episode of utopia on this). There’s no institutional memory there - to the extent that I’ve been in meetings where they’ve prosposed ideas to fund and I’ve had to ask ‘how is this different from the thing you funded three years ago? Let me show you the report on your website’.

Anyway this person who made or could make $12k from V2G - I believe they were part of a trial funded by ARENA whose knowledge sharing wrapped up a few months ago. The press office is ignoring the conclusions of the report - which certainly don’t say that every driver can make 12k a year. The authors (I know one of them, Laura Jones at ANU) have all sat through at least the first half hour of Econ 101 and learnt about supply and demand.

Yes one person has extrapolated a few good wins putting their car on Amber (the infuriating Australian Griddy, remember them) and having the car play in the wholesale electricity market.

The problem here is that the commodity being traded is flexibility and lots of people are pulling supply into the market, GWh of new batteries going in all providing the same thing that car is - so maybe a few people get 2 or 3 years of good earning from v2g but then the market gets stabilized by the big batteries and the supernormal returns evaporate.

But to get that return you need to buy $5k worth of V2G charger in the garage for maybe another $3k in install costs. (The chargers in the trial were more like 10k but prices are coming down and should probably normalize around the 3k or so battery inverters cost). But remember also that V2G tech in the car adds cost there as well.

Then of course is the main problem with this. If you want to Hoover up all these money making opportunities your car has to be plugged in, at home.

Having run some of this style of ARENA pilot with home batteries; I can say that the median participant is a cashed-up retired engineer who probably makes it to the hardware store or the golf club a couple of times a week. Basically someone who has an expensive car but doesn’t drive a lot.

For most people, even though their car sits idle 97% of the time, it is not always at home - it’s a work or the shops or wherever. So you are likely to miss a substantial number of these money making opportunities by just getting on with your life.

Tesla are actually vehermently anti v2g - it adds costs as above and they think cars should be utilized more and I agree on that point. Now where we disagree is what they ought to be doing, Tesla say mowing down pedestrians being robot taxis, but let’s get real, put your car or Turo or similar and let someone else use it.

the brake light goes on whenever you take your foot off the accelerator

^^ preferable to a few models that screwed this up in the other direction, so that depending on how you've set the regenerative braking you might decelerate very rapidly without any brake light going on at all

xp is it also a concern that doing this constantly is going to affect the life of a battery ed?

OTM. That BMW i3 I mentioned had super aggressive regen and I always worried about someone running into the back of me.

Actually BMW just announced a new (I think axial flux) EV motor. The cool thing about it is how efficient it is but of course BMW are marketing it on it ability o coast. Yet another example of focussing on something they think people want but have no idea about and actually is less good for customers in the long run. Costing actually implies engine braking, you don’t generally wack the car in neutral and let the car roll down the highway.

I had a Mercedes plug in hybrid tester for a couple of days that coasted like this - basically no friction other than air resistance and bearings. It was super weird and felt ludicrously dangerous. An engine or motor would bring a car to a stop if you take your foot off by this felt like it would just roll till it hit something.

There’s a dead person switch angle in this as well.

it is an interesting problem that one pedal driving is breaking when off the accelerator but its breaking slower than people usually do when using the break pedal, its signaling something slightly different, guess people will just have to get used to it, or maybe they should make another light

i've long been of the opinion that cars need more lights. at the very least hazards need their own color - in many situations it takes too long to figure out if somebody's got their hazards on or just left their turn signal on

reasonable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lZ9n2bxWA

^^ That dude -- IMO one of the most weirdly, ludicrously charming and informative people on YouTube -- has a whole video about the regen / brake light issue on his car! Love that dude. He has genuinely transformed the way I use my microwave and dishwasher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YW7x9U5TQ

yeah hes one of the absolute best youtubers

did not realize he had weighed in on break light discourse, will review and report back

i like him on bsky. he is angry in the most charming way.

i bought my fancy xmas lights based on a tip from him and they are delightful.

It's kind of weird to dunk on the US for govt support of industry in the face of competition from a country that has significantly greater government support of industry xp

wow i am obsessed with this channel. checking all my smoke detectors now to make sure they’re photoelectrix

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ev-maker-lucid-group-rallies-on-heavy-volume-after-1b-private-placement-22de7d44

would be funny if lucid ends up being successful as they are >60% owned by the saudis. i hate it when the saudis bonesaw a dissident journalist but i love it when they provide me with a luxury EV

life is full of beautiful contradictions

I saw a used 2013 VW E-Golf that could be $1000 after used EV rebate/incentives. I wonder if the longevity of EVs and oversupply might eventually lead to people getting paid to own one.

in soviet america, car pays you

Not sure I'd trust the battery in that thing....

If you don’t need to go far every day and can charge at home an e-golf for 1000 bucks will be fine. Test it and if it’s got more than enough range for an average day. They weren’t great just a compliance car, but it’s also unlikely to have done big miles or have been flogged so the normal car stuff won’t have a lot of wear on it.

For 1000 bucks if you get a year out of it great, you’d loose way more in depreciation on anything more expensive. Think of it as a rental of indeterminate length. When it craps out, costs too much to fix, or won’t pass the roadworthy, flog it to someone for 500 or scrap it. This is the way of $1000 cars, ICE or EV.

The bonus with this is it isn’t actually a 1000 dollar car, it’s a more expensive car you’re getting an incentive on.

If you get an e-Golf, try to buy one of the later ones which had enhanced battery packs with longer range, I recall 2017 was the first year for these. Average range went from about 85 miles to 125 miles per recharge (based on US EPA test methods). I drive the gasoline/petrol version of this car, and other than long range the e-Golf has all the goodness found in other Golfs, like loads of room for people and stuff despite the small outside dimensions; quiet, and comfortable to drive. I like how "normal" it is compared to some EVs.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01303-z

Study on EV ownership in Norway, which reveals that ...

Intriguingly, more than half of the households owning battery electric vehicles had three or more of these vehicles in 2022, indicating an unbalanced ownership distribution concentrating on the wealthiest.

Wait, wut? That can't be right, can it? The wealthiest owning EVs, that I can buy (if you pardon the wordplay), but three or more? Maybe something was lost in translation.

half of wealthy ev owning households had three of them, not unusual for a rich couple to have an extra car or maybe they have children who drive the third one, it does seem a little high but maybe thats down to the vagaries of ev ownership, theyve got an extra lying around in case one is out of batteries

That’s wild, I can’t think of any family I know who owns three cars. Are there more multigenerational households in Norway?

there prob are i think that sort of thing is more common in europe, maybe theres some other class of car norwegians are more likely to have like a city car or a truck of excursions to the arctic, maybe they bought early evs that no one wants now so they just kept them idk

fwiw

Most U.S. households (91.7%) had at least one vehicle in 2022 (the latest data available), and 22.1% of households had three or more vehicles.

without clicking but hardly covers eg ski plow or bikes or whatever

its passenger battery electric vehicles

unclear imo i reckon theyre counting scooters and idk ski lifts

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-03/hertz-htz-selling-electric-cars-ends-its-failed-tesla-bet
https://archive.ph/uyTuG

In the field, everything started looking different from what was on the spreadsheets. Unlike EV owners comfortable with the idea of charging a car battery at home and on the road, business travelers and vacationers suffered from range anxiety and didn’t want the hassle or worry of having to find a charger in the wild. Rudy Gardner, who as president of Teamsters Local 922 represents Hertz workers at Washington, DC’s Dulles and Reagan National airports, says travelers after a long flight would arrive at those Hertz locations to find that Teslas were the only vehicles available. “People didn’t want to charge them,” he says. “At the end of the night that’s all we had left, so they’d go to Avis.”

Lack of demand was such a problem that Scherr started a program where Hertz agreed to share certain data on EV rentals with cities such as Atlanta, Denver and New York so they’d install more charging stations. Other deals gave customers who rented Teslas for three days an extra day free or offered free charging to anyone who returned an EV with at least a 30% full battery. The company even made symbolic efforts, like donating an EV to a New York technical school for mechanics to learn how to repair it. None of it made a difference.

There were other charging issues, too. While the company had installed its own charging network as part of the electrification push that started in 2021, some older airports, such as New Jersey’s Newark, don’t get enough power from the electricity grid or lack the infrastructure to support the number of so-called Superchargers that Hertz needed to get EVs back on the road in a half-hour or less. Once a Tesla was returned to those locations, Hertz employees often had to drive them for miles to find a Supercharger, which added yet more expense.

Early in 2023, another warning light flashed. Delays due to repair were increasing across Hertz’s entire fleet, and collision costs were jumping, too, but initially neither Scherr nor anyone else could explain why. It wasn’t for at least another quarter that his team broke down the aggregate data and showed the board that the culprit in both cases were Teslas. With electric motors and drivetrains, Teslas were indeed cheaper to maintain than a traditional car, as Wagner and O’Hara predicted in their financial models. The problem was how often they crashed. Newbie Tesla drivers who weren’t used to the car’s instantaneous acceleration and immediate braking were running into obstacles or getting rear-ended, sometimes even before they left the rental lot. Hertz’s Teslas got into accidents four times more often than the company’s other vehicles. Unlike major automakers, Tesla doesn’t have an extensive network of franchised dealers to help with service and repair, leaving owners subject to the company’s availability and schedule. Some of Hertz’s Teslas were idled for extended periods as a result. “They couldn’t get parts, even simple things like an outside mirror,” says Alex Rojas, the business agent representing Hertz workers for Teamsters Local 222 in Salt Lake City. “They just sat there for weeks not getting rented and not making money.”
When Hertz was able to get its Teslas fixed, the costs were exorbitant compared with those of repairing other makes. A radar assembly for the Autopilot driver-assist system can cost $1,500 to replace and as much as $3,000 to calibrate. Many Teslas had to be junked altogether, because a crash could result in a permanent misalignment of the body panels or because the risk of battery damage made them uninsurable. That, combined with the higher rate of accidents than on Hertz’s other vehicles, led to a spike in repair bills. In 2023, Hertz reported the cost of operating its vehicles was $5.5 billion, up 13% from the previous year and 39% from 2021, partly because of collision and damage.

Interesting, thanks. A guy from a car rental place in the UK told me they only rented out Teslas to people who'd driven them before... this was a couple of years ago.

wondering now what exactly happens to "junked" Teslas, do they just go straight in a landfill or is there any kind of recycling/reclamation?

saved in a warehouse to be ferried to mars for the colonists to drive

The problem was how often they crashed. Newbie Tesla drivers who weren’t used to the car’s instantaneous acceleration and immediate braking were running into obstacles or getting rear-ended,

ridiculous that a car run on software hasnt isnt tuned to not do this stuff, you could have a performance drive mode if you want it to be like that but normally its just not desirable behavior

wondering now what exactly happens to "junked" Teslas, do they just go straight in a landfill or is there any kind of recycling/reclamation?

― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Thursday, April 4, 2024 8:51 AM (thirteen minutes ago)

https://www.wired.com/story/why-teslas-totaled-in-the-us-are-mysteriously-reincarnated-in-ukraine/

ty!

kid in the neighborhood has a tesla and let me drive it once, there is a 'dummy' mode that limits the accel xp

just seems insane that hertz went all-in on EVs without doing some sort of pilot program first

the dummy mode should be the standard mode tho is the thing

we are tesla showroom dummies

It seems insane that *EVs* went all in on EVs without a stable and widely available charging infrastructure. At least in the US.