I blame the French... We could have had it all properly and use grave... But no, too big... One of the few ugly bits of SI system. In general otherwise it all just works together so nicely.
Then again it's not only weird unit we have, dB is the other one. Ofc, units are nicer to handle, but still... Not that bell isn't weird unit anyway.
I agree that bel is a weird unit. To be fair, it's not "in" SI, but just "accepted for use with". I'd also argue that candela and mole are weird for other reasons, and they're SI for real.
I did not know that we were, again, to blame. But at least we have the one and only official and beautiful kilogramme and meter prototype in Sèvres, near Paris.
And, again the French way, it is not possible to see them!
They may call the kilogram the base unit, but in practice no one talks about millikilograms (just "grams") or microkilograms (just "milligrams"). The gram might be formally defined in terms of a 1 kg physical mass, but for the purpose of SI prefixes the gram is the real base unit and there is nothing wrong with saying 1 Mg instead of 1000 kg.
This isaid, the mass base unit in SI is really the kg, even if g would be natural (and indeed people will say 1 g instead of 1 millikilogram).
I was always annoyed by kg being the base unit (and I had to drag this suffering throughout my PhD in physics) but this thread opened my eyes on the possibility to use "compensating" prefixes on the kg (millikilogram to say gram) - it is a shame I did not think about that before to drive everyone crazy :)
Kilometer works fine for everyday purposes, from fractions of it to orders of magnitude larger, i.e. both 0.1km and 7230km are understandable.
Once you are in the realm of science and engineering, you are more likely to encounter scientific notation anyways, e.g. 2.99 x 10^8 m instead of 299 Mm.
Powerbanks are rated that way because batteries are rated that way. For phones it _kind of_ makes sense, as the capacities are closer to the 2.8-3.5 Ah range, and that difference is fairly substantial. (No comment on why processors are measured in GHz rather than MHz).
If you want to pick a gripe why do we measure capacity in charge per unit of time times hour, rather than MJ?
They're marketed that way because big numbers sound good. Lead acid batteries are generally rated in Ah, even if it's just a small stand-by battery with 1.2 Ah.
On the other hand, ratings within a group of products are usually done without a prefix change. Perhaps because of defective sorting algorithms, which would e.g. place a 1.7 kV device at the end of the list, while putting a 1500 V device first. That's probably why you see e.g. 4700 µF instead of 4.7 mF as well, though sometimes the latter is used.
> If you want to pick a gripe why do we measure capacity in charge per unit of time times hour, rather than MJ?
They're equivalent, it's just that writing Wh makes it very clear that you can divide this figure by some discharge power and get the approximate discharge duration. OTOH, an EE likely knows [power W] * [time s] = [energy J] anyway.
Listing capacity in Wh rather than MJ is fine, but many batteries are rated in amp-hours which isn't very helpful unless you also know the voltage. This is particularly annoying when it comes to "smart batteries" such as this USB power pack[0] where you have specs listing "10000 mAh" and "5 volts", but the actual capacity is around 37 Wh because they measured amp-hours at the internal battery and the battery voltage isn't exposed to the user. (Yes, the product description halfway down the page does say "10000mAh/3.7V" in small print if you know to go looking for it, but this isn't noted anywhere in the title or the "About this item" section at the top.)
Almost all robot vacuums just tell only mAh without V on specsheet. It's useless but it seems that 14.4V is de facto standard. I wonder some crap manufacturer may tell only mAh meanwhile using 7.2V battery.
If you want to get even crazier, what about fuel economy? Using miles per gallon (or km/l) can also be simplified to reciprocal area, so 40 mpg is just 1.7e7 m^-2. For an electric car you can change 250 miles per 100 kWh to the more perfect representation 0.001 s^2 /(kg m).
... or Wh instead of J. Add it to the list of energy units.
Some say "but Wh is easier to understand". My counter-guess is that the people who have a hard time understanding J don't actually need to. They just need to compare one value to another, and then the unit doesn't matter (had we used J to start with).
I always ignore this stuff, concept vehicles rarely, if ever make it to production. It's pretty easy to build 1 prototype, but really hard to scale that up.
Maybe in the present there is some rush for batteries but in general this automakers buy the parts from others, they offer a project for component X to 3 different factories and then they chose a winner. The other 2 factories though sometimes will still make the market and sell it so customers always have the option to use an "official" replacement or other compatible one.
> Mercedes claims that their car will use less than 0.1 kWh per km, at normal highway driving speeds.
I guess you will still need a class leading battery capacity to get anywhere near this, and will still be really physically challenging to squeeze 100kWh of cells into a small sedan.
There already are Tesla Model S with 100 kWh battery packs and also many other cars with such a pack, so this should be a solved problem.
On the other hand, Tesla Model S consumes about double compared with what Mercedes claims for their future prototype, so there is where Mercedes hopes to improve over what already exists.
As an aside, I've been considering an EV as there are some tempting government rebates where I live. One aspect I keep thinking about is battery longevity. Sure you might get 1k km out of a brand new battery but what about in 5-10 years? After all, my phone's simple battery is basically done within 5 years and replacing a car's battery sounds like it would be very expensive.
> Sure you might get 1k km out of a brand new battery but what about in 5-10 years? After all, my phone's simple battery is basically done within 5 years and replacing a car's battery sounds like it would be very expensive.
Yep, don't buy into super duper larger batteries.
A bigger battery will last longer in cycle life, sure, but the vehicles itself may well be much more expensive.
If your EV will survive long enough to see a battery replacement, then a larger battery will be still a worse option economically.
Affordability is one thing, but it also sounds like a colossal waste of resources to dispense with these batteries in volume. Gas engines last decades with good maintenance and can be rebuilt. The idea that the modern EV is basically toast (cost prohibitive to repair like all modern electronics) after 5-10 years is not the green future we are trying to work toward.
It would be interesting to understand the true environmental impact of EVs.
You don't necessarily need to have structural battery to be firmly attached to something, nor have it to be housed in some inaccessible compartment.
At least, the battery case can support its own weight. This alone can shave up to 100kg from the battery, and make the whole task of engineering it that much easier.
This is what all that "blade battery" things is about.
Another idea is that if your battery chemistry is not prone to bursting in flames like gasoline, the battery can become a decent crash energy absorber.
This way instead of having to add weight to protect the battery, you can use the battery instead to reduce the weight of existing crash protection structures.
> The idea that the modern EV is basically toast (cost prohibitive to repair like all modern electronics) after 5-10 years is not the green future we are trying to work toward.
The current "unrepairability" of today's EV's is nothing inherent to them.
There is nothing that prevents Tesla's service centres to repair their cars, say, after collision damage, which they currently refuse to take beyond the most trivial cases.
The same goes for other EV brands who say you must scrap your car after borderline cosmetic damage.
- Electric motors are inherently more robust than IC engines, and can too be rebuilt with ease if you fry them (which should never really happen when thermal protection, and cooling work as they should.)
- Electronics is the least likely part of the electric vehicle to break, and is, again, mostly trivial to repair, or replace.
- Cells are the only wear element besides a simple gearbox, and brakes.
Seems like few people rebuild gas engines in their cars when they become "a few decades old", apart from a _very_ small minority that like retro car stuff.
If the battery pack was the only thing needing replacement in EVs and they are possible or even easy to remove/replace, it sounds like it could be done quite easily and still give you a useful vehicle.
The batteries are replaceable, so the body of the car won't go to waste.
As for the battery, there's still plenty of useful things it can do. Just because it's not useful for a car, doesn't mean it dead. The most obvious use case right now is grid-scale energy storage. There you just need lots and lots of joules of storage, you're not really worried about space or weight (at least compared to car batteries), so it's perfectly viable to take thousands of scrap car batteries with only 60-70% of their original capacity and use them for grid storage.
Additionally in grid storage you can be much kinder to your batteries, further extending their life well beyond what they could do in car.
At the end of all that, break down the battery and recover the materials. Admittedly we don't have any cost effective ways of doing that today, but as demand for battery raw materials increases, the finical viability of recycling also increases.
>The idea that the modern EV is basically toast (cost prohibitive to repair like all modern electronics) after 5-10 years is not the green future we are trying to work toward.
A 1000km vehicle that lost 90% of its range still has 100km left. I don't see how that vehicle is toast.
Automotive batteries have enough reserve they take more like 10yr to degrade. And the degradation is like 10-20%, not 60+% like you get with an end of life laptop battery. The duty cycle that a larger battery charging at home or at work will see is also highly conducive to long life.
Its different if you have a charger at home. This is not a Tesla, however it is a realistic view of the current status for some people and some models if we talk about the car experience:
Cannot comment on the main point of your question. Battery duration. Somebody should include that in depreciation
calculations concerning car resell value.
This is assuming that the deterioration rate is linear, I have no idea if that is true. But if these numbers are accurate the longevity is better than expected. Scrapping these batteries in volume is another challenge.
I imagine in 10 years today's battery tech will be obsolete. I am still on the fence about getting into an EV, it still appears to be an early adopter technology.
Thanks for posting the information. Very interesting.
I am not a Tesla owner so sorry if this is a stupid question: Are the values you posted the ones listed from the car dashboard ? How do those compare with the effective/real range ?
The display shows the current drivable distance based on the energy remaining in the battery.
The amount displayed represents an average based on driving style, changes in elevation, windspeed, ambient temperature. For example, if the drivable distance indicates 200 miles, and I drive that distance on a level road at 65 mph in still air at 70 degrees F, I can go 200 miles.
If I drive it at 85 mph, I'd get about 160 miles.
If I drive it at 55 mph, I'd expect 210-220.
Up hill into the mountains has a significant decrease, and driving downhill can actually restore energy, depending on the rate of decline and driving speed, thanks to the regenerative braking.
I do think the calculation could be more accurate if neural nets were used to learn a specific driver's style, combined with driving destination in the navigation system, ambient temperature, air conditioning drain, etc.
Not the poster, but in my Model Y the ratio of actual miles driven to miles of range decrease shown on the screen is about 0.8 on long trips. So I typically assume my actual range will be 80% of what the car thinks when I start a trip. This probably has more to do with my driving style and air conditioner use than anything else.
Tesla cars are initially sold with an 8-year or X km warranty that the battery will hold at least 70% of the design energy. (The X km is between 160000 and 240000 km, depending on the size of the battery.)
Also, my personal expectation is that a larger capacity means the wear is distributed across a larger number of cells, leading to increased life expectancy. This assumption fits with the warranty policy of Tesla.
Range deterioration is an issue for uncooled batteries in hot climates. For example, gen 1 Nissan leafs were suffering in Arizona. But most everyone else uses active cool, which really slows the degradation. You can't really apply small battery (cellphone) logic to something as large as a car battery.
Some cars/brands have much worse battery life. The Nissan Leaf is notoriously awful for this, unless they've fixed it. Tesla is great, and the Chevy Bolt (which I own one, love it) retains most of its battery life over time.
> After all, my phone's simple battery is basically done within 5 years
It's a design parameter for the battery and its management system. Basically lithium ion battery lifetime is a function of what you cap the charge at. If the battery design sets the "100%" point in the BMS close to the chemistry's max capacity, you will get a low number of charge cycles. Phones have a shorter design lifetime than cars and make more aggressive compromises towards lower size and weight.
When you get right down to it the obsessive range anxiety doesn’t make a lot of sense. How often are you going on road trips? Actually I’d guess it’s so infrequent that renting would be fine. This sounds crotchety, but it’s a bit of a recurring pattern that I see that presents problems for adopting more efficient standards: everybody needs a pickup because they haul or tow once or twice a year, or long range in case they suddenly decide they want to drive cross-country, even though they never do that, etc.
I don't understand the strawman you are trying to construct. Obviously pickup trucks and long range EVs are not for you if you don't need them. That's a non statement.
Of course, there are lots of people who do need those things. There are lots of people in the world living in lots of environments that look different than yours.
I don’t really think it’s a straw man. If you look into it the vast majority of pickups are used to tow or haul once per year or less. People aren’t actually buying them for practical reasons.
Do you have a source? Have you spent time in the Midwestern, Sourthern, or Northeastern parts of the USA? Or is it that you live in the Bay Area, and the few people that own trucks in the Bay Area don't use them much?
> And they might also protest that trucks provide capabilities that other vehicles lack. But, as it turns out, a significant portion of truck owners never use their trucks for these capabilities. According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
well, you are right, I got that number wrong. I would guess that few of these couldn't also be achieved by, say, minivan with the seats down, given how few trucks have full-size beds (another hint they're not for work).
I have a truck without a full suze bed and use it for (personal) work at least once a week throughout the year, daily during logging and snow plowing season.
I might consider an electric truck, except that even new gas trucks are way outside my budget. It'll be at least a decade or two before even used electric trucks are reasonably priced.
There are increasingly more and more chargers everywhere now. Especially 100kw+ rapid chargers are getting more and more common. A lot of the petrol stations here in London now also have multiple 100kw+ chargers.
Even when looking at non-exotica every-day vehicles like current-gen nissan leaf you get ~200 miles of range, and can recharge 240mph (more than 4 miles per minute) [1] More recent cars getting launched now (and again, not necessarily exotic brands, but even Hyundai and VW) have even faster charging rates.
So even a 15 minute break for the toilet and getting a takeout coffee will give you 60 miles of range. Stop for 45mins for lunch? Add 180 miles of charge, or 3 more hours of driving at 60 when you might want to stop again for a toilet break or to stretch your legs.
If you truly need to drive for 7 or 8 hours (400-500 miles at 60) without any kind of significant breaks on a regular basis, then I'd argue that you are probably taking quite a risk to your safety (and those around you - both inside and outside your car) due to tiredness.
That's great, but the USA is an entirely different story.
> If you truly need to drive for 7 or 8 hours (400-500 miles at 60) without any kind of significant breaks on a regular basis, then I'd argue that you are probably taking quite a risk to your safety (and those around you - both inside and outside your car) due to tiredness.
I've done 350~ mile trips pretty often (about 5 1/2-6 hours) and I usually only stop for 10-15 min to go to the bathroom and fuel up. Driving for a few more hours isn't really that bad, and very common in countries with 10x the square mileage of yours.
It probably depends where in the country you are. Here in New Mexico, I make > 4 hour drives at least twice a month, and most people I know have similar driving habits.
I think you'll be amazed at what modern electric cars can do.
The Tesla Model 3 can easily add 100 miles in 10-15 mins if its battery is 30% or lower. That isn't theoretical performance, that's actual real-world performance that I've seen. That plus the ~250 miles of range the Model 3 LR has (again real-world range, without making any effort to conserve energy) means you can realistically to your ~350 mile trip with little to no change to total trip duration.
Now the Model 3 may be a premium vehicle, but EV development is only just getting started. Within the next few year we'll be seeing cars with similar performance for half the price. That tied with the rapid expansion of 150kw and 250kw chargers means that in the next 5 years, doing your theoretical road trip, with only one 10-15min break, will be possible in almost any new ~$30k electric car.
And there are very few actual electrics on the road. I don't think it will be sustainable at all at scale. The time to charge simply is too long for any form of quick charging to exist widespread, and quick charging won't really work with an existing gas station model. They wont be able to service too many cars to make money on incidental purchases.
Yup, the gas station model is not going to work for that. IMO EVs have a very specific niche: commuters from suburbs/surrounding areas. For nearly every other situation EVs are poorly suited. For rural areas where heavy equipment is king, EVs range and utility just isn't there and probably won't be for a long time. For dense urban areas, public transport and personal vehicles (such as eBikes) are better for most people.
In the US most people don't really have an option for public transport or bikes and won't for a long time. What you call a "very specific niche" is the majority of American drivers.
I don’t know why you would stick with the gas station model, it’s completely unnecessary for EVs.
An EV charger requires minimal infrastructure compared to a gas pump, and zero attendances. That means that supermarkets etc can just convert normal parking spaces to chargers. Reducing the need for quick charging because people will shop while they charge.
On highways you can install huge 350kw chargers that can add hundreds of miles in the time it takes you to go to the loo and again chargers are incredibly cheap to install and require so little infrastructure compared to a gas pump.
The cost of a 4 pump gas station is about $500k[0], the cost of a 4 “pump” supercharger station is around $100k[1]. That’s 5x cheaper, and far easier to expand because you’re not dealing with flammable liquids.
Size of the country has no impact on this - people become tired and distracted during long drives.
At least here in Europe there are laws (for commercial drivers) about how long you are allowed to drive for, and when you must take breaks, e.g.:
> "you must not drive more than: 9 hours in a day - this can be extended to 10 hours twice a week"
> "a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving"
Perhaps the US has zero laws in this regard, but these sort of rules exist due to lots of lessons learned by tired drivers killing people. Sure these are for commercial drivers, but I'd argue that if you are doing this sort of long-distance driving frequently (i.e. not just once or twice a year) then you are no different from a commercial driver and shouldn't assume these common sense laws don't apply.
The US has similar laws, you must take a 30 minute break after 8 consecutive hours of driving and you can only drive 11 hours in a day. The point I was trying to make has nothing to do with how long you can drive safely in a day. 8 hours is still within safe limits according to our government.
> Size of the country has no impact on this - people become tired and distracted during long drives.
But size of the country (and more importantly, density) has a massive impact on how far people drive and how frequently.
Long distance driving in a sparsely populated country is quite different to long distance driving in a densely populated one. Driving the length of the UK means passing by 3 or 4 major cities. The road gets wider, motorways merge, traffic gets heavy, maybe there's a traffic jam or traffic lights, the drivers are mostly local and get more aggressive. It becomes mentally taxing.
Driving long distance when there's nothing around (eg the M6 between Preston and Glasgow) is so much simpler. You can definitely drive longer when you're not constantly negotiating city-adjacent traffic.
> people become tired and distracted during long drives
You can have multiple drivers sharing the same vehicle. This is a common occurrence in both commercial and non-commercial situations (e.g. a family trip with two adults alternating driving and rest periods). With 3-4 drivers on hand, either traveling with the vehicle or trading off along the way, a vehicle can be operated continually without any safety concerns, making the EV with its limited endurance and long recharge times the weakest link.
Your argument about tiredness is how we end up down the slippery slope every single time with government regulating away our rights. Human freedom is more important than being safe 100% of the time, whether your assertion is true or untrue.
I don't need anyone telling me I'm being unsafe and then restricting my freedoms because of that.
I'm looking forward to my upcoming beach vacation where I will drive 6.5 hours without many breaks, and it'll be as uninteresting to do so as spending those 6.5 hours doing anything else.
What about my freedom not to be plowed into by some half-asleep yahoo? Really you can cast an argument for anything at all in terms of freedom if you want.
Yeah you tell that to families of all the people killed by drivers who fall asleep at the wheel. I'm sure they'll be really glad you're fighting for their rights to inflict that pain on others.
Reminds me both of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITP93pqtdQ and the all too common headscratcher: is it a comment from a real libertarian idiot or a case of poe's law?
An ill fitting suit isn't a personality, but bad tailoring.
Re toasters, I just recalled that at a previous office, we had a toaster that was confiscated by building management, as we indeed lacked a proper license to use it in the building. But I guess that's ok, as this was mandated by the leasing contractual agreements, rather than being action that is overseen by elected officials.
Charging speed depends on the car. My Bolt (and the current Bolt and Bolt EUV) max charges at 50kw. In actuality, it's between 15 and 34kw (depending on weather).
If I have to fast charge, it's over an hour to get to 80%.
An hour to get to 80% of the 2017-2019 Bolt's 238 mile advertised capacity isn't far from the numbers in the comment you replied to. That's 60 minutes to get 190 miles, compared to the comment's 45 minutes for 180 miles (4 miles/minute vs 3 miles/minute).
> Even when looking at non-exotica every-day vehicles like current-gen nissan leaf you get ~200 miles of range, and can recharge 240mph (more than 4 miles per minute).
You also can only fast charge the Nissan leaf once per day max because of the battery cooling issues. That's also assuming you come across two working fast chargers in a day, which is far from guaranteed.
Non-supercharging infrastructure is pretty unreliable.
> Charging an EV takes significantly more time than filling up a gas tank.
Not if you use HVDC superchargers. I've taken several cross-country trips in a Tesla and it's not an issue. It takes 20 minutes to recharge and I do so about every 150 miles. Time enough to get out, stretch, pee, buy a snack, get back in your air-conditioned car (climate controls are fully functional while charging), check your email, and then it's time to go.
That's true today. But within 2 years, almost all mainstream EVs will charge quickly. I base this on the experience Tesla, Ford and VW customers are rapidly gaining with HVDC charging and the speed at which Electrify America is getting built out. In two years the only market for EVs that don't have a fast-charge option will be ultra low-cost urban commuter cars. And even then I'm doubtful; cars that can only charge with HVDC might even be cheaper since they don't need an onboard AC/DC converter. Couple that with economies of scale and the car companies might just decide slow-charging cars don't make sense to build.
I go camping and hiking quite often. I also live in Canada, so everything is quite far away. As much as I want an EV as my next car, they are going to need at least comparable average ICE range as well at least reasonable charging network support for it to be a reasonable purchase, at least for someone like me.
The point here is not that we can’t find someone whose unusual usage pattern absolutely necessitates the range, or that we can’t think of occasional situations where it would be useful for the average person. What I want to challenge is the assumption that everyone needs a capability that most will infrequently avail themselves of.
> What I want to challenge is the assumption that everyone needs a capability that most will infrequently avail themselves of.
You are the only person asserting that. Nobody is saying that everyone should buy a long range EV. But there is a market of people who actually do need it, which is why they are being developed.
I believe range is important for a lot of people because if they live somewhere like an apartment where they can’t charge easily or at all then they are going to have to go to a station somewhere. Very inconvenient if you have to do that everyday instead of once a week.
I think we'll see this issues solved by on-street charging, at work charging, or at shop charging.
Here in the UK there are significant incentives for employers to put in car chargers, and councils in cities and towns are installing on street charging at a hell of a rate. In addition we now have big grocers providing free car charging in their car parks to provide a competitive advantage.
So in short, people may not be able to charge at home. But in the near future they'll be able to charge at every destination, so really won't need at-home charging any more (not to mention destination chargers are frequently used as loss-leaders and thus free to use). After all, what's the point of having a car if it's just gonna sit in your drive way 24/7.
Why this is unusual? If you're a parent weekend trips are pretty common, at least from what i can observe. And when i bought new car and initially it had way lower range this was quite anxiety for me, because i don't want to be looking for gas stations on my way, rather fill up before weekend and don't bother.
I think by "unusual" the parent post meant "atypical".
I'm a parent with weekend trips and the EV's fine, but if I were in a remote location with concerns about charging availability I'd definitely feel more range anxiety.
You should go plug in hybrid if you your 'normal' driving can be done in a 30 mile range. If most of your miles are on your property (and it isn't the size of a West Texas Ranch), you might could run a significant amount of miles on electrons and use gas for getting to town.
Unfortunately renting a car is kind of an awful experience. These days they’re even sold out sometimes. Prices fluctuate 3x or more, you often have to wait in long lines, stress about turning down insurance, not sure about vehicle quality.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. I’ve found it both affordable and pretty hassle-free. I most recently rented a car a few weeks ago in Los Angeles.
1600km (one way) a few times every year to visit parents. Flying actually takes longer (flights+ferries don't line up and the cost is far higher). Nearest costco is 465km. So a monthly 1000km shopping trip is normal. Not everyone lives in the bay area with every store imaginable within a few miles. Many people live in places like Alberta or Iowa, the places your food comes from.
And I would be one of them. I might live in an big apartment building in a city of over 10,000 but we do not have an airport. We do not have a costco. We have car dealers, but not the honda dealer I need for my recalled airbag (nearest is 400km away). And my particular urban area is not where my parents live. Urban or not, I still have to drive considerable distances for nearly everything.
Your reference says that's an "Urban Place" and that "Urban Areas" are bigger. The post you responded to linked to something that said 220 million live in 486 "urbanized areas". Since there are many more than 486 towns above 2500 people, I think the 80% number refers to "Urban Places" and not "Urban Areas."
EDIT - it seems the number of what we'd normally call urban is around 70% with about 10% in "Urbanized Clusters" which seem to be "Urban Places" that we think of as suburbs??
And that's fine, keep your ICE car. The point is, you're not the majority. Look at google maps, it's millions of people in suburbs, two cars in the driveway, driving to the grocery store and to work is the majority of the reason they use it. They think they need range, but really, you could convert a lot of those two-car household into having 50% EV.
From a purely carbon-reducing standpoint, such people shouldn't get an EV until their house is already festooned with solar panels. The carbon saved by driving an EV is less than the carbon saved by putting solar panels on the roof. If there are no panels installed, that 50% EV in the driveway is just virtue signaling.
That really depends on where you live. Nuclear isn't so bad. And my power company is building giant seas of solar farms, constantly getting bigger. What would be the point of me replacing that with my own?
For people who commute regularly they can consume as much or more power from driving as their house does daily. For many people solar isn't an option for practical reasons (e.g. trees) and others have HOA restrictions. Also a used EV can often be had for far cheaper than any solar install.
In Georgia, the state offered rebates one year on EV leases that when combined with the Federal rebate made the 2 year lease of a Nissan Leaf cost nothing. When those 2 year leases expired many people opted not to purchase the vehicle resulting in a glut of Leafs on the market that had low miles for $5-15k. I bought one in 2017 and used it as a daily driver for a 50 mile commute for 3 years before we moved.
The last 3 homes I owned in Georgia would not have been suitable for solar. They all had 40-60ft tall pines on at least 3 sides in both my yard and neighbors that would have limited production significantly. The roof lines on two of those homes would have only permitted only about 4Kwh systems and even without the shade they'd never come close to the consumption of the home.
Also in Georgia the power companies are unregulated and so I had the choice of purchasing power from an EMC and the option of paying a few cents more per kilowatt to invest in the Co-Op's solar farms. And being a Co-Op, they also paid out annual dividends on both regular and solar power.
>> When those 2 year leases expired many people opted not to purchase the vehicle
THAT is truly wasteful. Using a new product and then tossing it aside when it isn't shiny anymore. It creates a glut of used cars which depreciates all use cars... eventually resulting in many perfectly good vehicles being scrapped before their time = huge carbon emissions. The 'three Rs' start with Reduce and Reuse for a reason.
I believe the point was that it's more wasteful than continuing to drive a perfectly serviceable older vehicle, not that leasing is inherently any more wasteful than trading in for a new late-model vehicle every year or two.
Well, in most cases buying out a lease is an unwise financial decision. Encouraging people to lease with subsidies and then driving down the cost of second-hand EVs doesn't seem like a bad way to go if your goal is to spur adoption.
In any change there are always winners and losers. It does strike me that some people here are in for a lot of pain when the inevitable change comes along.
Of course, you can always think of someone losing out in any shift, but I can’t see how the current course is sustainable. For the people who do need longer range we’ll have some combination of carve outs and specialty EVs, I imagine.
I walk to work (when not working from home) and only use my car for long trips to regional areas (visiting family and outdoor activities). I’d love to buy an EV but unfortunately current range limitations make them the perfect commuter car but an inferior weekend/holiday driver. I am excited by any company that wants to invest in increased range.
I live in the midwest. There's 300-600 miles between major cities, which I visit multiple times per year. Couple that with the winter months where EV batteries lose some significant percentage of range there's little chance I, or many people, could own an EV as an only vehicle anytime soon.
I'm just tired of "commuter" EVs that don't have enough range for my 30-minute commute (17 miles each way).
I'd need at least a 60 mile range to be able to get to the farthest reaches of the nearest city and back. That seems to put me in Tesla territory, and the price doesn't make sense for the purpose.
Don't know where you're getting those figures from. A cheap little Renault Zoe will do ~200 miles. The VW ID.4 has similar range. A Nissan Leaf will do ~150 real world miles.
I can't think of any modern EV that does less that ~150 real world miles on single charge. Except for those go-karts like the Renault Twizy, but that isn't a car.
I think in general you are correct, however infrastructure is still hit and miss right now, so you really need to plan ahead (including contingencies).
I rented an EV through a car sharing app the other week, and the first place I went to charge only had slow chargers. I stayed as I needed to grab lunch, but it added only maybe 10km of range. Later on the trip I stopped somewhere else I knew had fast and slow chargers but all the fast chargers were out of service. I only needed another 20km of range, so I just waited a hour while making a few phone calls, no big deal, but if I'd planned to fully recharge the car it would have been painful.
For commuting it's a different story as you can find out where all the chargers are on your route, and you'll learn which are most reliable and least busy. I have seen a few Teslas in my country with plates from the other side of Europe, so I guess it can work...
That's pretty much the only reason I drive. I average 15,000km a year on my motorcycle alone. I drive maybe 500km a year in the city.
My case is atypical, but the case of people driving home to see their family is not. Driving 600km in a day would be difficult if it requires a mid-day charge and a parking space near a charger at night. Yet that's the distance I cover to visit my grandparents. In winter.
The reality is that it's acceptable for the majority of people. Many families could replace both vehicles with an EV, most families could replace one vehicle with an EV.
The sentiment that's perpetuated that "it wouldn't work for me" needs to die. Yes there are people and scenarios where it wouldn't work, and unfortunately those boundary conditions are being touted vocally and negatively shaping public sentiment.
If public sentiment were to shift strongly in favor of EV transition, it would still take decades and companies would actively start looking for solutions to the boundary conditions but as long as a vocal minority is online saying "this will never work for me" then there's always going to be push back slowing or stifling adoption.
Everyone who feels the urge to standup and say "no, this won't work for me" either needs to engage in find a solution that will or just sit down and shut up.
That's a little more forceful but I think you're exactly right. Every time someone proposes anything to ameliorate the situation at all we have to hear from fifty people who specifically need a daily allotment of 100 disposable plastic straws and no car but a Hummer will do for them. There's always _someone_ who's being inconvenienced so we can't do anything but just keep doing the same thing over and over even though we know it's not sustainable.
Yes, it's very much intentional. I've grown tied if being nice and trying to have thoughtful conversations with naysayers who have no interest in honest discussion.
If there's one thing this neverending coronavirus crisis had demonstrated to me it's that occasionally we need a stronger hand to push aside everyone's petty wants and preferences.
Rental companies generally seem to frown on taking their cars off paved roads.
Of the 12k on my car, 9-10k of that was road trips around California. It’s easy to rack up miles if you’re into outdoor recreation. 500-600 mile range would be great, 400 mile range a minimum. 300 mile range is not practical at all. I’m assuming we’re talking advertised ranges, if it got 350 under taxing driving conditions and ac use or freezing weather that would be acceptable.
When fast charging takes over an hour (Chevy bolt fast charges at 50kw, less in actual use), you do really have to plan trips.
A majority of EV owners don't have L2 charging at home, and a short 30 mile weekend trip (60 both ways) is more than a L1 charger can replenish overnight. Way more if you use AC or drive when in cold weather.
I can easily drive more than I can daily charge with errands or driving the kids to class/camp.
If you use 230 V instead of 110 V, and three-phase instead of split-phase, the lowest charging tier becomes 3 kW (instead of 110 V @ 15 A = something like 1.5 kW), and pretty much anyone who has a car hole can easily install a 11 or 22 kW charger. This might make a pretty big difference in the end for all the house-owning people.
The American decision to use intentionally limited, low-tier electricity grids as a cudgel to enforce zoning shows yet another facet of externalities.
It's easy if you have the $$$. Personally, I don't want to spend a few thousand to buy a charger and have an electrician run a 240v plug to my detached garage.
On my old house, there wasn't enough capacity to add another 240v breaker.
not everyone owns a house with charging. my apartment doesn’t have chargers. i care about range because i don’t want to waste a few hours charging my car somewhere.
my gas car i just spend 10 mins filling up gas every few weeks
It's not the frequency, it's the notion that one will have purchased a "bad" vehicle. Here, "bad" means that you need to rent another car[1] in order to go on a road trip. People buy cars for convenience, and renting a car to use instead of the car you own is not convenient. It's not odd to expect a new car to be as functional as one's current car over the course of a single year.
1 - The last time I rented a vehicle for a road trip (we had an extra guest, so wouldn't fit in my car), the total cost was ~$1,000. If we needed to rent a car twice in a year due to owning a range-limited EV, that would effectively add ~$167/mo to the cost of ownership of the EV.
Yes, of course, that's what is in their heads. But it is a strange notion of "convenience" to be locked into certain patterns of living and purchase just to make sure we can easily do something we do very occasionally. I'm not sure where you rented, but from what I've seen a typical car rental is $40/day. It'd have to be long road trips before that really added up.
$40 is almost surely a pre-pandemic number, as rental cars have mostly doubled or more since. Go see what a car costs in Southern California, or Albuquerque, for example. Further, that price is without any insurance, and likely a small car, while plenty of people going on a road trip need a much larger car to fit the whole family + luggage + extras like camping equipment, the dog, etc.
Not so. I actually rented a car in LA a few weeks ago, which is why I had the figure in mind. See for yourself: https://i.imgur.com/aWL365O.png
Vans appear to be slightly more expensive but not outrageously so (and honestly it's not at all uncommon to get a free upgrade when you book the economy car).
As for insurance, why would our hypothetical family need to get insurance? Surely they already have it, if they have a car that they drive.
$411 for a 7-day rental (the cheapest total in your screenshot) is quite a bit more than $40/day, last I checked. Further, there's simply no way to fit a family and luggage into a Kia Rio-sized car. Cheap/free upgrade? Sure, but not economy to van/SUV, more like economy to intermediate.
I'll grant you that insurance isn't necessary (or even advisable), however plenty of people feel more secure getting the (very expensive) protection given the risk of driving an unfamiliar car to likely unfamiliar locations.
Still, glad to see prices coming down. I paid $80/day for 3 days in June and $75 (after a discount) in July.
This is great pricing if your party is 2-3 people. However, that doesn't describe many American living situations. In our case, we would need a larger vehicle for a trip. Expedia is currently quoting me $700-$1,100 for the week you searched for a non-luxury vehicle like a Nissan Pathfinder. This doesn't include insurance or other add-ons, which I typically decline.
(It's outside my risk tolerance to reserve an economy car and gamble that I will arrive at the airport to be delighted by a complementary upgrade to a vehicle large enough to transport my party.)
> But it is a strange notion of "convenience" to be locked into certain patterns of living and purchase just to make sure we can easily do something we do very occasionally.
Tech folks can make this argument, but it's a well-studied phenomenon that technologies have trouble gaining wide adoption until they are seen as credible replacements for existing usage patterns. Can either seek to convince millions of people to change their behavior (and show them why) or improve the product to better fit existing patterns. Which is easier depends on the characteristics of the product category.
My take is EVs are so similar to ICE vehicles that they will have to fairly closely approximate ICE capabilities to get to (say) 50% penetration. And that likely means they will need to support the fairly common (in America) use case of driving a half day (4-5 hours) in the hot summer, laden with weight, without adding too much drama for charging.
In theory you are right but renting infrastructure sucks across the board. There are so many things that would make more sense to rent vs own but the cost and inconvenience of renting makes it difficult to do.
Right now a week rental car in some areas will run you 700$. Plus it’s super inconvenient plus you might not be able to get a vehicle you want. Did you know you aren’t allowed to tow with a rental car for example?
Another example I checked my local REI and the only thing still left to rent out for this weekend is hiking poles. And that’s considering REI charges like 20% of retail per rental
I once commuted on a motorcycle with the range of my daily commute (about 120 miles). Despite how ubiquitous gas stations are, and how fast I could swipe by VISA and pump 2 gallons, it was still incredibly annoying.
Those daily 4 minute pit stops were infuriating, I can't imaging having to spend half an hour at a EV charging station twice a week.
Over the last 18 months or so, between remote work and lockdown, journeys of 350+ miles with minimal stops (< 30 minutes total) probably make up about ¾ of the trips and 90%+ of the miles on my vehicle. A typical pre-COVID year would see about half a dozen trips like that (one way) mixed with commuting and trips around town—with the longer trips still making up a majority of the total miles driven. As I see it, at least in my situation, the ability to handle a 350+ mile trip smoothly and efficiently with at most one stop of 30 minutes or less is a basic requirement for any vehicle I would be willing to consider. Anything short of that would be a significant downgrade in practical terms from my current vehicle—an inexpensive, decade-old non-hybrid Honda Fit Sport which still manages 35 MPG on the highway.
Ecologically speaking, if I'm not using the EV for these longer trips then the environmental benefit of switching would be practically nil. Most of the miles driven would still be in a gas-burning vehicle. The same goes for a PHEV. We need to acknowledge that the shorter range and longer "refueling" times of EVs are significant practical issues standing in the way of EV adoption, and not ignore or downplay them. Fortunately we're finally starting to see some pure EVs with the necessary range, and also making some progress on building out suitable charging infrastructure. Now if we could just address the proliferation of brand-specific and member-only charging networks…
No, renting would not be fine. People take vacations and long day trips, often at the same time as everyone else. The rental supply simply can't satisfy that amount of demand. It doesn't matter if hauling cargo or driving long distances is infrequent or even a small percentage of miles driven - it is a core use case for vehicles. Otherwise, people would simply not be able to do the things they do on holidays.
I would like to see a citation that very many of these are by car... and satisfying vacation demand is, anyway, a pretty substantial part of what the entire car rental industry already exists for. All those people at the airport didn't take their cars with them.
Yes there is enough rental capacity for air travelers. But there are substantially more vacationers traveling by car. There isn’t enough rental capacity for them and it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep rental capacity around for the surge of demand around holidays. Current rental capacity works because it is matched up to flight capacity, which is stable and predictable.
I have my doubts that this is true among several axes: 1) do more people really travel by car? 2) how could air travel not be highly seasonal when school breaks generally line up? Hotels are certainly priced like it's seasonal. Don't they already have that problem? 3) If the scenario we were talking about became more commonplace, wouldn't we expect capacity to increase to meet demand?
> While it doesn’t sound like the automaker plans to release a production version of the vehicle, it did confirm that it will use it as a platform to develop its new electric architectures...
I knew it. What is it with these EVcompanies and their pre-announcements? Why do that? Why not just start talking about the damned thing when, you know, it's actually ready to test drive and buy? Is every car maker that desperate for attention?
Oh, that's right. Because these vehicles aren't necessities. They're fashion accessories. I totally forget this isn't about transportation. It's about buying the thing that makes you look good.
Concept cars are not a new thing. Nor are they something that just "EVcompanies" do. The reason they do it pre-exists the modern electric vehicle. I remember seeing concept cars (from Chrysler?) at the Mall of America decades ago. And concept cars from all sorts of companies at the Detroit Auto Show.
Some of the things they announced about some of those cars eventually made it into production cars. Many of them were never anything but a concept in a concept car, both of which never saw the light of day.
I recently bought an EV with a 220-ish mile range, but that's really a 160ish mile range given fast charge craps out at 80%.
I drove it ~900 miles and I had to recharge seven times. This added 3.5 to 4 hours to the trip. I'd say the first 2 of those were good for my mental health but the remaining 90 minutes were spent at broken charging stations with low charging rates or just broken.
Love the car, hate the current charging infrastructure. And the anxiety induced when power drops below 20% and you're approaching the next charger sucks, doubly so when you get there and it's broken and now you have to find another fast charger before you run out of juice.
There's fancy route planning software (ABRP for example) that will try to minimize charging times and total travel time but it seems to make the assumption that you will always hit a perfectly functional fast charger and it doesn't seem to take weather into account.
I was averaging 3 to 3.5 miles per kWh until I approached the Bay area in 100+ degree weather and it dropped to 2 miles per kWh.
Fortunately having been burned many times already (every single Fred Meyer seemed to have a broken charger for example but the navigation software kept directing me to them), I had instituted a hard rule to always charge to 80%. So I made it to Richmond and the next charger before I ran out of power. America's clean electrical future remains a work in progress.
So what you really seem to need is about ~400 miles of range which translates to ~300 miles of range at an 80% charge or so. I think we're getting there.
These experiences really sucks, and show where Tesla has a significant edge over the competition. Their superchargers always work, and their built in routing is great.
It's such a shame that other manufactures have taken the "oh we make cars, we can't fix the infrastructure" approach to EVs, which is so short sighted. Really hope they quickly figure out that they need to invest in EV infrastructure, not just EV R&D. With a bit of luck Tesla Model 2 will hit its price point, then the old auto manufactures are going to have a really bad time selling EVs.
If Elon Musk follows through on opening up the supercharger network to all EVs, it will be profitable for him and a gamechanger for all EVs.
When I'm traveling, time is money, and I'm happy to pay for the charge. Electrify America saved my butt on my recent odyssey by mostly providing 100 kWh fast charges, but the semi-broken fast chargers in Grants Pass and Albany, Oregon both cost me an unnecessary additional hour delivering only 33 kWh apiece.
Not that you should have to, but have you tried a fuel efficient style of driving? I've been able to extend my gasoline + other's hybrids MPG quite a bit from it.
Driving at ~50 mph IMO is not a practical driving style for a long trip on ~70 mph highways. But I do mostly set the adaptive cruise control and let it do the mileage management. When I drive around town I get between 4 and 5 miles per kWh doing exactly what you suggest.
I don't hate this idea, but GP already added 3.5 - 4 hours to their trip just in charging. You really do have to start taking this stuff into account.
I visit my parents who are ~200 miles away several times a year. The drive, during the day, averages 4 - 4.5 hours without stopping. At night it can come down to about 3 hours, but that's not always practical or - if I'm too tired - safe.
Factoring in a charge along the way, assuming everything works, and I don't need to queue for a charger, would add 30 - 45 minutes. I'd have to do this because my parents live in a flat with no charging facilities onsite.
Fuel efficient driving might add another 30 - 60 minutes to the journey, so suddenly we're into maybe a 5 - 6 hour drive each way even for the night driving option. Bearing in mind I'm often only able to go and visit them for a weekend, and that's a lot of time being sucked up just getting there and back.
Shoddy charging infrastructure here in the UK is one of the main reasons I went plug-in hybrid in the end. I can charge at home overnight and do the journey to the office and back (not that I'm doing that very often) on electricity alone, and then the petrol engine is good for longer trips. Also, the car's pretty quick in "power" mode because it uses both electric and petrol together.
(I'd also observe that fuel efficient driving can be aggravating for other road users and may not be practical or safe on some types/classifications of road.)
On the flip side, I wish EV makers would advertise range at higher speeds.
Hell, I wish ICE car makers would advertise MPG at higher speeds.
Every weekend I head up around 200 miles away, and it's on an empty mountain pass with a 80MPH speed limit.
In town, my sports sedan gets the same fuel economy as my old Tacoma, but on that trip the Tacoma consumes over 50% more if driven even remotely comparably (80+). The sports sedan has surprisingly little variance between 70-90MPH.
While the truck's aerodynamics aren't helping, I've experienced the same in other "fuel-efficient" vehicles, where the fuel economy falls off a cliff once you go above 60MPH. A Chevy Aveo I owned was actually one of the worst offenders, you'd get on the highway and get SUV-tier fuel mileage.
Its a trade-off with engine power. A small, low power engine is really efficient around town at low speeds (and scores well on EPA tests). But to drive at 80 mph, you have to put significant load on that tiny engine, making it really inefficient.
A more powerful engine consumes more gas in general, but is operating in a much more efficient range at 80mph because it is not under much load.
Almost every EV post ends up with a discussion about broken chargers but I wonder why are they broken so often? How much maintenance do they need? I had use of a friend's Leaf for a couple of months and was disappointed in how frequently I came across broken chargers. Luckily there was usually at least one in the bank of chargers that still worked and my travel habits only required 30-40 minutes of charging to extend the range enough for me to get home but it still gave me anxiety that one day every charger would be out of service and I'd be looking for an extension cord and someone who'd let me use a 110v outlet.
The Department of Energy gave a resort town in my state a grant to add a bunch of charging stations. The thought was that people from the city would be more willing to use their EV to travel to the resort town if there were plenty of chargers. But after a year almost all of them were broken. On review sites, there were also complaints about ICE vehicles sitting in the EV charging spots all day and no one would do anything about it. Even the chargers outside City Hall were broken. Most (all?) EVs won't allow you to drive off while they're plugged into a charger, so I doubt it's vehicle collisions, at least not EVs, causing the charging stations to need frequent maintenance.
Compare the construction of your average EV charger to, for example, a gas pump. Gas pump nozzles are covered and shaded, they are heavy, all the important parts are steel, theyre designed to make it nearly impossible to leave a cable on the ground, and they're way way over engineered because the public interacts with them.
The average EV charger is an uncovered exposed pedestal made out of unreinforced nylon with a barely thought out cable retention or ux incentive to return cables. Like so much in tech its all about image and not engineering and user experience design fundamentals and it shows.
Misaligned incentives. Other charging networks buy station hardware from outside vendors who optimize for lowest price point. Tesla designs all the hardware in house.
Tesla should make a trailer with a huge battery in it for those with range anxiety for camping trips etc. You could haul your gear and never charge that way.
While they're at it, I'd like the opposite as well - most of my day-to-day driving is 20-30 miles and it'd be nice to not lug around a 200 mile battery for those trips.
To put this in perspective, a Tesla Model Y uses (per EPA rating) 270 WH per mile. Mercedes is targeting 166 or less. That would be a big accomplishment but I'm skeptical about what compromises will be needed to make it happen.
The way M-B is and my cynicism about marketing I expect this car to be an utterly impractical concept car.
Something like the Sunracer. Holds one person and you have to lie down in it. $1M carbon fiber chassis, etc.. uses a battery they can't make in production or something. 100 km/h top speed.
I just love how the tesla fanboys forget that some of the charging station where they get their "clean" energy run on diesel generators.
Is tesla really making any profit from charging stations or are there as a support network?
Anyone has numbers on this?
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadhttps://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...
I think power is the only metric unit I've seen where the common unit also often follows metric notations. 1 kW, MW, GW, TW.
Yeah, I do this a ton myself. I apologize.
The fact that kg is the base unit does not make much sense except for historical reasons when the choice was made. A very bad choice if you ask me.
Then again it's not only weird unit we have, dB is the other one. Ofc, units are nicer to handle, but still... Not that bell isn't weird unit anyway.
And, again the French way, it is not possible to see them!
This isaid, the mass base unit in SI is really the kg, even if g would be natural (and indeed people will say 1 g instead of 1 millikilogram).
I was always annoyed by kg being the base unit (and I had to drag this suffering throughout my PhD in physics) but this thread opened my eyes on the possibility to use "compensating" prefixes on the kg (millikilogram to say gram) - it is a shame I did not think about that before to drive everyone crazy :)
You might just not recognize them as such.
Ampere, Volt, Ohm, Tesla, Newton, Pascal, Hertz, Joule, ... are all SI units or directly derived from SI units and used with SI-prefixes regularily.
Once you are in the realm of science and engineering, you are more likely to encounter scientific notation anyways, e.g. 2.99 x 10^8 m instead of 299 Mm.
If you want to pick a gripe why do we measure capacity in charge per unit of time times hour, rather than MJ?
On the other hand, ratings within a group of products are usually done without a prefix change. Perhaps because of defective sorting algorithms, which would e.g. place a 1.7 kV device at the end of the list, while putting a 1500 V device first. That's probably why you see e.g. 4700 µF instead of 4.7 mF as well, though sometimes the latter is used.
> If you want to pick a gripe why do we measure capacity in charge per unit of time times hour, rather than MJ?
They're equivalent, it's just that writing Wh makes it very clear that you can divide this figure by some discharge power and get the approximate discharge duration. OTOH, an EE likely knows [power W] * [time s] = [energy J] anyway.
[0] Example: https://www.amazon.com/10000mAh-Portable-Charger-Stylish-Com...
If you want to get even crazier, what about fuel economy? Using miles per gallon (or km/l) can also be simplified to reciprocal area, so 40 mpg is just 1.7e7 m^-2. For an electric car you can change 250 miles per 100 kWh to the more perfect representation 0.001 s^2 /(kg m).
Some say "but Wh is easier to understand". My counter-guess is that the people who have a hard time understanding J don't actually need to. They just need to compare one value to another, and then the unit doesn't matter (had we used J to start with).
I've heard all kind of fishy things about them, including completely out of this world claims of energy density advances.
Yet, I have yet to see a single real world use of their battery tech, which they claimed to have for the last 3 years.
On the net, I've seen the claim of them being caught faking their capacity test video with the most poor editing tricks.
P.S. The Mercedes may have well just been scammed: https://www.businessinsider.com/mercedes-new-battery-partner..., https://www.electrive.com/2021/02/23/problems-mounting-for-d..., https://www.electrive.com/2021/07/12/farasis-battery-product..., https://carbuzz.com/news/mercedes-ev-production-has-just-hit...
They claim unique chemistry, unique cell packaging, unique proprietary circuitry inside their cells, and unique cooling solution.
I doubt they were going for a multi-vendor option here from the start, but they may well be forced too once Farsis will crash, and burn.
From what they say, a battery of 100 kWh is supposed to be used for this range and such battery packs already exist.
Mercedes claims that their car will use less than 0.1 kWh per km, at normal highway driving speeds.
So it seems that they rely on advances in motor efficiency and regenerative braking efficiency and in a low drag coefficient.
I guess you will still need a class leading battery capacity to get anywhere near this, and will still be really physically challenging to squeeze 100kWh of cells into a small sedan.
On the other hand, Tesla Model S consumes about double compared with what Mercedes claims for their future prototype, so there is where Mercedes hopes to improve over what already exists.
And models S is a full sized sedan, not a compact car by any extend.
They do have a deal on supposedly breakthrough battery technology but also a world of snack oil and hype.
https://egear.asia/cheapest-electric-cars-china/
Yep, don't buy into super duper larger batteries.
A bigger battery will last longer in cycle life, sure, but the vehicles itself may well be much more expensive.
If your EV will survive long enough to see a battery replacement, then a larger battery will be still a worse option economically.
It would be interesting to understand the true environmental impact of EVs.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/352330/teslas-new-low-co...
I know they tend to exaggerate but even if its only half that then it will be better than the average ICE car.
At least, the battery case can support its own weight. This alone can shave up to 100kg from the battery, and make the whole task of engineering it that much easier.
This is what all that "blade battery" things is about.
Another idea is that if your battery chemistry is not prone to bursting in flames like gasoline, the battery can become a decent crash energy absorber.
This way instead of having to add weight to protect the battery, you can use the battery instead to reduce the weight of existing crash protection structures.
The current "unrepairability" of today's EV's is nothing inherent to them.
There is nothing that prevents Tesla's service centres to repair their cars, say, after collision damage, which they currently refuse to take beyond the most trivial cases.
The same goes for other EV brands who say you must scrap your car after borderline cosmetic damage.
- Electric motors are inherently more robust than IC engines, and can too be rebuilt with ease if you fry them (which should never really happen when thermal protection, and cooling work as they should.)
- Electronics is the least likely part of the electric vehicle to break, and is, again, mostly trivial to repair, or replace.
- Cells are the only wear element besides a simple gearbox, and brakes.
As for the battery, there's still plenty of useful things it can do. Just because it's not useful for a car, doesn't mean it dead. The most obvious use case right now is grid-scale energy storage. There you just need lots and lots of joules of storage, you're not really worried about space or weight (at least compared to car batteries), so it's perfectly viable to take thousands of scrap car batteries with only 60-70% of their original capacity and use them for grid storage.
Additionally in grid storage you can be much kinder to your batteries, further extending their life well beyond what they could do in car.
At the end of all that, break down the battery and recover the materials. Admittedly we don't have any cost effective ways of doing that today, but as demand for battery raw materials increases, the finical viability of recycling also increases.
A 1000km vehicle that lost 90% of its range still has 100km left. I don't see how that vehicle is toast.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27970913
Cannot comment on the main point of your question. Battery duration. Somebody should include that in depreciation calculations concerning car resell value.
EVs typically come with a configurable maximum charge limit (e.g. 80% or 90%) which avoids a lot of battery wear.
Initial range: 315/500 m/km
Updated Range: 325/520 m/km
Current Range*: 302/483 m/km
*(maximum charge I see when recharging over night)
Using the 325 as a starting point, that's 7% decrease in range after 85k/136k m/km.
Using 30% decrease as the point where you'd upgrade the battery, and prorating from 7%, you'd drive 360,000/577,000 m/km before needing to replace it.
At 18,000/29,000 m/km average annual driving distance, you'd drive 20 years before needing to replace the battery.
I imagine in 10 years today's battery tech will be obsolete. I am still on the fence about getting into an EV, it still appears to be an early adopter technology.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-tesla-model-3-survey...
What's your basis for this? Battery tech has largely been incrementalist for the past decade, are there specific breakthroughs you're watching?
I am not a Tesla owner so sorry if this is a stupid question: Are the values you posted the ones listed from the car dashboard ? How do those compare with the effective/real range ?
The amount displayed represents an average based on driving style, changes in elevation, windspeed, ambient temperature. For example, if the drivable distance indicates 200 miles, and I drive that distance on a level road at 65 mph in still air at 70 degrees F, I can go 200 miles.
If I drive it at 85 mph, I'd get about 160 miles.
If I drive it at 55 mph, I'd expect 210-220.
Up hill into the mountains has a significant decrease, and driving downhill can actually restore energy, depending on the rate of decline and driving speed, thanks to the regenerative braking.
I do think the calculation could be more accurate if neural nets were used to learn a specific driver's style, combined with driving destination in the navigation system, ambient temperature, air conditioning drain, etc.
Also, my personal expectation is that a larger capacity means the wear is distributed across a larger number of cells, leading to increased life expectancy. This assumption fits with the warranty policy of Tesla.
It's a design parameter for the battery and its management system. Basically lithium ion battery lifetime is a function of what you cap the charge at. If the battery design sets the "100%" point in the BMS close to the chemistry's max capacity, you will get a low number of charge cycles. Phones have a shorter design lifetime than cars and make more aggressive compromises towards lower size and weight.
This means a simple trip like going upstate for the weekend would be hindered by needing to know where and when to charge the car.
If the entire trip could be done on a single charge, that is a lot of freedom.
Of course, there are lots of people who do need those things. There are lots of people in the world living in lots of environments that look different than yours.
> And they might also protest that trucks provide capabilities that other vehicles lack. But, as it turns out, a significant portion of truck owners never use their trucks for these capabilities. According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
contradicts
>> the vast majority of pickups are used to tow or haul once per year or less.
According to your article, 65% of trucks are used for hauling multiple times every year.
I might consider an electric truck, except that even new gas trucks are way outside my budget. It'll be at least a decade or two before even used electric trucks are reasonably priced.
Even when looking at non-exotica every-day vehicles like current-gen nissan leaf you get ~200 miles of range, and can recharge 240mph (more than 4 miles per minute) [1] More recent cars getting launched now (and again, not necessarily exotic brands, but even Hyundai and VW) have even faster charging rates.
So even a 15 minute break for the toilet and getting a takeout coffee will give you 60 miles of range. Stop for 45mins for lunch? Add 180 miles of charge, or 3 more hours of driving at 60 when you might want to stop again for a toilet break or to stretch your legs.
If you truly need to drive for 7 or 8 hours (400-500 miles at 60) without any kind of significant breaks on a regular basis, then I'd argue that you are probably taking quite a risk to your safety (and those around you - both inside and outside your car) due to tiredness.
1 - https://ev-database.uk/car/1144/Nissan-Leaf-eplus
> If you truly need to drive for 7 or 8 hours (400-500 miles at 60) without any kind of significant breaks on a regular basis, then I'd argue that you are probably taking quite a risk to your safety (and those around you - both inside and outside your car) due to tiredness.
I've done 350~ mile trips pretty often (about 5 1/2-6 hours) and I usually only stop for 10-15 min to go to the bathroom and fuel up. Driving for a few more hours isn't really that bad, and very common in countries with 10x the square mileage of yours.
The Tesla Model 3 can easily add 100 miles in 10-15 mins if its battery is 30% or lower. That isn't theoretical performance, that's actual real-world performance that I've seen. That plus the ~250 miles of range the Model 3 LR has (again real-world range, without making any effort to conserve energy) means you can realistically to your ~350 mile trip with little to no change to total trip duration.
Now the Model 3 may be a premium vehicle, but EV development is only just getting started. Within the next few year we'll be seeing cars with similar performance for half the price. That tied with the rapid expansion of 150kw and 250kw chargers means that in the next 5 years, doing your theoretical road trip, with only one 10-15min break, will be possible in almost any new ~$30k electric car.
An EV charger requires minimal infrastructure compared to a gas pump, and zero attendances. That means that supermarkets etc can just convert normal parking spaces to chargers. Reducing the need for quick charging because people will shop while they charge.
On highways you can install huge 350kw chargers that can add hundreds of miles in the time it takes you to go to the loo and again chargers are incredibly cheap to install and require so little infrastructure compared to a gas pump.
The cost of a 4 pump gas station is about $500k[0], the cost of a 4 “pump” supercharger station is around $100k[1]. That’s 5x cheaper, and far easier to expand because you’re not dealing with flammable liquids.
[0] https://www.commtank.com/services/gas-station-construction-c... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/inside-teslas-supercharger...
At least here in Europe there are laws (for commercial drivers) about how long you are allowed to drive for, and when you must take breaks, e.g.:
> "you must not drive more than: 9 hours in a day - this can be extended to 10 hours twice a week"
> "a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving"
Perhaps the US has zero laws in this regard, but these sort of rules exist due to lots of lessons learned by tired drivers killing people. Sure these are for commercial drivers, but I'd argue that if you are doing this sort of long-distance driving frequently (i.e. not just once or twice a year) then you are no different from a commercial driver and shouldn't assume these common sense laws don't apply.
> Size of the country has no impact on this - people become tired and distracted during long drives.
But size of the country (and more importantly, density) has a massive impact on how far people drive and how frequently.
Driving long distance when there's nothing around (eg the M6 between Preston and Glasgow) is so much simpler. You can definitely drive longer when you're not constantly negotiating city-adjacent traffic.
You can have multiple drivers sharing the same vehicle. This is a common occurrence in both commercial and non-commercial situations (e.g. a family trip with two adults alternating driving and rest periods). With 3-4 drivers on hand, either traveling with the vehicle or trading off along the way, a vehicle can be operated continually without any safety concerns, making the EV with its limited endurance and long recharge times the weakest link.
I don't need anyone telling me I'm being unsafe and then restricting my freedoms because of that.
I'm looking forward to my upcoming beach vacation where I will drive 6.5 hours without many breaks, and it'll be as uninteresting to do so as spending those 6.5 hours doing anything else.
Re toasters, I just recalled that at a previous office, we had a toaster that was confiscated by building management, as we indeed lacked a proper license to use it in the building. But I guess that's ok, as this was mandated by the leasing contractual agreements, rather than being action that is overseen by elected officials.
If I have to fast charge, it's over an hour to get to 80%.
You also can only fast charge the Nissan leaf once per day max because of the battery cooling issues. That's also assuming you come across two working fast chargers in a day, which is far from guaranteed.
Non-supercharging infrastructure is pretty unreliable.
That sounds terrible to a Canadian. 15 minutes every hour?
Not if you use HVDC superchargers. I've taken several cross-country trips in a Tesla and it's not an issue. It takes 20 minutes to recharge and I do so about every 150 miles. Time enough to get out, stretch, pee, buy a snack, get back in your air-conditioned car (climate controls are fully functional while charging), check your email, and then it's time to go.
Tesla = 250kW
Bolt/Bolt EUV = 50kw Kona EV = 75kw (almost an hour to 80%) Leaf = 100kw
Which country?
When I go on a road trip it's for more than a week, renting would basically double the cost of my trip.
You are the only person asserting that. Nobody is saying that everyone should buy a long range EV. But there is a market of people who actually do need it, which is why they are being developed.
Here in the UK there are significant incentives for employers to put in car chargers, and councils in cities and towns are installing on street charging at a hell of a rate. In addition we now have big grocers providing free car charging in their car parks to provide a competitive advantage.
So in short, people may not be able to charge at home. But in the near future they'll be able to charge at every destination, so really won't need at-home charging any more (not to mention destination chargers are frequently used as loss-leaders and thus free to use). After all, what's the point of having a car if it's just gonna sit in your drive way 24/7.
I'm a parent with weekend trips and the EV's fine, but if I were in a remote location with concerns about charging availability I'd definitely feel more range anxiety.
1600km (one way) a few times every year to visit parents. Flying actually takes longer (flights+ferries don't line up and the cost is far higher). Nearest costco is 465km. So a monthly 1000km shopping trip is normal. Not everyone lives in the bay area with every store imaginable within a few miles. Many people live in places like Alberta or Iowa, the places your food comes from.
[1] https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch12GARM.pdf
EDIT - it seems the number of what we'd normally call urban is around 70% with about 10% in "Urbanized Clusters" which seem to be "Urban Places" that we think of as suburbs??
For people who commute regularly they can consume as much or more power from driving as their house does daily. For many people solar isn't an option for practical reasons (e.g. trees) and others have HOA restrictions. Also a used EV can often be had for far cheaper than any solar install.
In Georgia, the state offered rebates one year on EV leases that when combined with the Federal rebate made the 2 year lease of a Nissan Leaf cost nothing. When those 2 year leases expired many people opted not to purchase the vehicle resulting in a glut of Leafs on the market that had low miles for $5-15k. I bought one in 2017 and used it as a daily driver for a 50 mile commute for 3 years before we moved.
The last 3 homes I owned in Georgia would not have been suitable for solar. They all had 40-60ft tall pines on at least 3 sides in both my yard and neighbors that would have limited production significantly. The roof lines on two of those homes would have only permitted only about 4Kwh systems and even without the shade they'd never come close to the consumption of the home.
Also in Georgia the power companies are unregulated and so I had the choice of purchasing power from an EMC and the option of paying a few cents more per kilowatt to invest in the Co-Op's solar farms. And being a Co-Op, they also paid out annual dividends on both regular and solar power.
THAT is truly wasteful. Using a new product and then tossing it aside when it isn't shiny anymore. It creates a glut of used cars which depreciates all use cars... eventually resulting in many perfectly good vehicles being scrapped before their time = huge carbon emissions. The 'three Rs' start with Reduce and Reuse for a reason.
In any change there are always winners and losers. It does strike me that some people here are in for a lot of pain when the inevitable change comes along.
You have longer times of recharge (20-240 minutes) vs a 35 seconds gasoline splash and go
Unless the US goes full Norway and decides to ban Gas cars in city centres , then you'd be getting an inferior product at a higher price point
That's the hard truth
I'd need at least a 60 mile range to be able to get to the farthest reaches of the nearest city and back. That seems to put me in Tesla territory, and the price doesn't make sense for the purpose.
I can't think of any modern EV that does less that ~150 real world miles on single charge. Except for those go-karts like the Renault Twizy, but that isn't a car.
I rented an EV through a car sharing app the other week, and the first place I went to charge only had slow chargers. I stayed as I needed to grab lunch, but it added only maybe 10km of range. Later on the trip I stopped somewhere else I knew had fast and slow chargers but all the fast chargers were out of service. I only needed another 20km of range, so I just waited a hour while making a few phone calls, no big deal, but if I'd planned to fully recharge the car it would have been painful.
For commuting it's a different story as you can find out where all the chargers are on your route, and you'll learn which are most reliable and least busy. I have seen a few Teslas in my country with plates from the other side of Europe, so I guess it can work...
My case is atypical, but the case of people driving home to see their family is not. Driving 600km in a day would be difficult if it requires a mid-day charge and a parking space near a charger at night. Yet that's the distance I cover to visit my grandparents. In winter.
I regularly did a (570mi)918km trip (Atlanta to Jelico and back) in one day in my Tesla Model 3. It took 2-3 stops totally about an hour charge time.
It doesn't really suit my needs (I venture further out), but I concede that plenty of people would be just fine with this.
The reality is that it's acceptable for the majority of people. Many families could replace both vehicles with an EV, most families could replace one vehicle with an EV.
The sentiment that's perpetuated that "it wouldn't work for me" needs to die. Yes there are people and scenarios where it wouldn't work, and unfortunately those boundary conditions are being touted vocally and negatively shaping public sentiment.
If public sentiment were to shift strongly in favor of EV transition, it would still take decades and companies would actively start looking for solutions to the boundary conditions but as long as a vocal minority is online saying "this will never work for me" then there's always going to be push back slowing or stifling adoption.
Everyone who feels the urge to standup and say "no, this won't work for me" either needs to engage in find a solution that will or just sit down and shut up.
Yes, it's very much intentional. I've grown tied if being nice and trying to have thoughtful conversations with naysayers who have no interest in honest discussion.
Of the 12k on my car, 9-10k of that was road trips around California. It’s easy to rack up miles if you’re into outdoor recreation. 500-600 mile range would be great, 400 mile range a minimum. 300 mile range is not practical at all. I’m assuming we’re talking advertised ranges, if it got 350 under taxing driving conditions and ac use or freezing weather that would be acceptable.
A majority of EV owners don't have L2 charging at home, and a short 30 mile weekend trip (60 both ways) is more than a L1 charger can replenish overnight. Way more if you use AC or drive when in cold weather.
I can easily drive more than I can daily charge with errands or driving the kids to class/camp.
The American decision to use intentionally limited, low-tier electricity grids as a cudgel to enforce zoning shows yet another facet of externalities.
On my old house, there wasn't enough capacity to add another 240v breaker.
Once per weekend, on average. So far, this makes EVs a non starter for me.
my gas car i just spend 10 mins filling up gas every few weeks
It's not the frequency, it's the notion that one will have purchased a "bad" vehicle. Here, "bad" means that you need to rent another car[1] in order to go on a road trip. People buy cars for convenience, and renting a car to use instead of the car you own is not convenient. It's not odd to expect a new car to be as functional as one's current car over the course of a single year.
1 - The last time I rented a vehicle for a road trip (we had an extra guest, so wouldn't fit in my car), the total cost was ~$1,000. If we needed to rent a car twice in a year due to owning a range-limited EV, that would effectively add ~$167/mo to the cost of ownership of the EV.
Vans appear to be slightly more expensive but not outrageously so (and honestly it's not at all uncommon to get a free upgrade when you book the economy car).
As for insurance, why would our hypothetical family need to get insurance? Surely they already have it, if they have a car that they drive.
I'll grant you that insurance isn't necessary (or even advisable), however plenty of people feel more secure getting the (very expensive) protection given the risk of driving an unfamiliar car to likely unfamiliar locations.
Still, glad to see prices coming down. I paid $80/day for 3 days in June and $75 (after a discount) in July.
(It's outside my risk tolerance to reserve an economy car and gamble that I will arrive at the airport to be delighted by a complementary upgrade to a vehicle large enough to transport my party.)
Tech folks can make this argument, but it's a well-studied phenomenon that technologies have trouble gaining wide adoption until they are seen as credible replacements for existing usage patterns. Can either seek to convince millions of people to change their behavior (and show them why) or improve the product to better fit existing patterns. Which is easier depends on the characteristics of the product category.
My take is EVs are so similar to ICE vehicles that they will have to fairly closely approximate ICE capabilities to get to (say) 50% penetration. And that likely means they will need to support the fairly common (in America) use case of driving a half day (4-5 hours) in the hot summer, laden with weight, without adding too much drama for charging.
Another example I checked my local REI and the only thing still left to rent out for this weekend is hiking poles. And that’s considering REI charges like 20% of retail per rental
I once commuted on a motorcycle with the range of my daily commute (about 120 miles). Despite how ubiquitous gas stations are, and how fast I could swipe by VISA and pump 2 gallons, it was still incredibly annoying.
Those daily 4 minute pit stops were infuriating, I can't imaging having to spend half an hour at a EV charging station twice a week.
Over the last 18 months or so, between remote work and lockdown, journeys of 350+ miles with minimal stops (< 30 minutes total) probably make up about ¾ of the trips and 90%+ of the miles on my vehicle. A typical pre-COVID year would see about half a dozen trips like that (one way) mixed with commuting and trips around town—with the longer trips still making up a majority of the total miles driven. As I see it, at least in my situation, the ability to handle a 350+ mile trip smoothly and efficiently with at most one stop of 30 minutes or less is a basic requirement for any vehicle I would be willing to consider. Anything short of that would be a significant downgrade in practical terms from my current vehicle—an inexpensive, decade-old non-hybrid Honda Fit Sport which still manages 35 MPG on the highway.
Ecologically speaking, if I'm not using the EV for these longer trips then the environmental benefit of switching would be practically nil. Most of the miles driven would still be in a gas-burning vehicle. The same goes for a PHEV. We need to acknowledge that the shorter range and longer "refueling" times of EVs are significant practical issues standing in the way of EV adoption, and not ignore or downplay them. Fortunately we're finally starting to see some pure EVs with the necessary range, and also making some progress on building out suitable charging infrastructure. Now if we could just address the proliferation of brand-specific and member-only charging networks…
I knew it. What is it with these EVcompanies and their pre-announcements? Why do that? Why not just start talking about the damned thing when, you know, it's actually ready to test drive and buy? Is every car maker that desperate for attention?
Oh, that's right. Because these vehicles aren't necessities. They're fashion accessories. I totally forget this isn't about transportation. It's about buying the thing that makes you look good.
Now there's an entire thread on HN talking about Mercedes. Job accomplished.
Some of the things they announced about some of those cars eventually made it into production cars. Many of them were never anything but a concept in a concept car, both of which never saw the light of day.
I drove it ~900 miles and I had to recharge seven times. This added 3.5 to 4 hours to the trip. I'd say the first 2 of those were good for my mental health but the remaining 90 minutes were spent at broken charging stations with low charging rates or just broken.
Love the car, hate the current charging infrastructure. And the anxiety induced when power drops below 20% and you're approaching the next charger sucks, doubly so when you get there and it's broken and now you have to find another fast charger before you run out of juice.
There's fancy route planning software (ABRP for example) that will try to minimize charging times and total travel time but it seems to make the assumption that you will always hit a perfectly functional fast charger and it doesn't seem to take weather into account.
I was averaging 3 to 3.5 miles per kWh until I approached the Bay area in 100+ degree weather and it dropped to 2 miles per kWh.
Fortunately having been burned many times already (every single Fred Meyer seemed to have a broken charger for example but the navigation software kept directing me to them), I had instituted a hard rule to always charge to 80%. So I made it to Richmond and the next charger before I ran out of power. America's clean electrical future remains a work in progress.
So what you really seem to need is about ~400 miles of range which translates to ~300 miles of range at an 80% charge or so. I think we're getting there.
It's such a shame that other manufactures have taken the "oh we make cars, we can't fix the infrastructure" approach to EVs, which is so short sighted. Really hope they quickly figure out that they need to invest in EV infrastructure, not just EV R&D. With a bit of luck Tesla Model 2 will hit its price point, then the old auto manufactures are going to have a really bad time selling EVs.
When I'm traveling, time is money, and I'm happy to pay for the charge. Electrify America saved my butt on my recent odyssey by mostly providing 100 kWh fast charges, but the semi-broken fast chargers in Grants Pass and Albany, Oregon both cost me an unnecessary additional hour delivering only 33 kWh apiece.
https://electrek.co/2021/07/26/elon-musk-explains-tesla-open...
You are not happy to pay for gas that is a lot quicker?
I visit my parents who are ~200 miles away several times a year. The drive, during the day, averages 4 - 4.5 hours without stopping. At night it can come down to about 3 hours, but that's not always practical or - if I'm too tired - safe.
Factoring in a charge along the way, assuming everything works, and I don't need to queue for a charger, would add 30 - 45 minutes. I'd have to do this because my parents live in a flat with no charging facilities onsite.
Fuel efficient driving might add another 30 - 60 minutes to the journey, so suddenly we're into maybe a 5 - 6 hour drive each way even for the night driving option. Bearing in mind I'm often only able to go and visit them for a weekend, and that's a lot of time being sucked up just getting there and back.
Shoddy charging infrastructure here in the UK is one of the main reasons I went plug-in hybrid in the end. I can charge at home overnight and do the journey to the office and back (not that I'm doing that very often) on electricity alone, and then the petrol engine is good for longer trips. Also, the car's pretty quick in "power" mode because it uses both electric and petrol together.
(I'd also observe that fuel efficient driving can be aggravating for other road users and may not be practical or safe on some types/classifications of road.)
Hell, I wish ICE car makers would advertise MPG at higher speeds.
Every weekend I head up around 200 miles away, and it's on an empty mountain pass with a 80MPH speed limit.
In town, my sports sedan gets the same fuel economy as my old Tacoma, but on that trip the Tacoma consumes over 50% more if driven even remotely comparably (80+). The sports sedan has surprisingly little variance between 70-90MPH.
While the truck's aerodynamics aren't helping, I've experienced the same in other "fuel-efficient" vehicles, where the fuel economy falls off a cliff once you go above 60MPH. A Chevy Aveo I owned was actually one of the worst offenders, you'd get on the highway and get SUV-tier fuel mileage.
A more powerful engine consumes more gas in general, but is operating in a much more efficient range at 80mph because it is not under much load.
I wonder if they design specifically for that speed, as it's the speed on most highways in america (someone correct me if not true)
The Department of Energy gave a resort town in my state a grant to add a bunch of charging stations. The thought was that people from the city would be more willing to use their EV to travel to the resort town if there were plenty of chargers. But after a year almost all of them were broken. On review sites, there were also complaints about ICE vehicles sitting in the EV charging spots all day and no one would do anything about it. Even the chargers outside City Hall were broken. Most (all?) EVs won't allow you to drive off while they're plugged into a charger, so I doubt it's vehicle collisions, at least not EVs, causing the charging stations to need frequent maintenance.
The average EV charger is an uncovered exposed pedestal made out of unreinforced nylon with a barely thought out cable retention or ux incentive to return cables. Like so much in tech its all about image and not engineering and user experience design fundamentals and it shows.
Should of bought a Tesla. Competition is cheaper for a reason.
While they're at it, I'd like the opposite as well - most of my day-to-day driving is 20-30 miles and it'd be nice to not lug around a 200 mile battery for those trips.
Something like the Sunracer. Holds one person and you have to lie down in it. $1M carbon fiber chassis, etc.. uses a battery they can't make in production or something. 100 km/h top speed.
https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...
https://www.carscoops.com/2021/07/vws-262-mpg-xl1-was-the-pe...