[twblalock]

I'm impressed that the American car companies have embraced electric technology so quickly.

I'm also disappointed that the Japanese companies are falling behind. The Prius was a very innovative car when it was first released 20 years ago (that's right, the first Prius was a 1997 model!), but it is falling behind. The Nissan Leaf is just not competitive anymore, and I see no sign of a newer version of it with better range.

However, these new electric cars are mostly of interest to homeowners. People who park on the street have no realistic way to charge their cars at their homes, and all but the newest luxury apartments lack charging stations. Relying on public charging infrastructure is not realistic, and relying on charging at work is unwise -- it will limit your next job opportunity to companies that also have charging stations, unless you are willing to replace your car. Even relying on charging at an apartment is unwise, because it will limit where you can move to.

So, I guess electric car ownership is effectively another perk of home ownership.

[aphextron]

> The Nissan Leaf is just not competitive anymore, and I see no sign of a newer version of it with better range.

Depends on your needs. My Leaf has been incredible. I paid $5k for an older one off lease and it gets me round trip to work/school/running errands for essentially zero marginal cost. People are stuck in an ICE mindset where they can't imagine a car being useful with less than 400 miles range. But the reality is that you never end up using a full charge, and charging is available everywhere (in cities) now. I can guarantee that there will be a class of ultra cheap EV's that stick to the 100-150 mile range as it is all most urban dwellers need on a day-to-day basis. If the price/kWh of lithium ion batteries continues falling at it's current rate, we'll see sub $20k ~150 mile range EV's for sale within 5 years.

>People who park on the street have no realistic way to charge their cars at their homes, and all but the newest luxury apartments lack charging stations. Relying on public charging infrastructure is not realistic, and relying on charging at work is unwise -- it will limit your next job opportunity to companies that also have charging stations, unless you are willing to replace your car. Even relying on charging at an apartment is unwise, because it will limit where you can move to.

Not really. I live in a tiny Bay Area apartment and street park my Leaf. Charging has never been a problem. My office has level 2, there's a level 2 across the street from me, and there's two level 3's on the way home if I need a quick top off. Granted we have better infrastructure than most, and I'll admit there's definitely some getting used to how it all works, but I'll never go back to an ICE.

[thinkling]

This is all well and good if you're in a two-car household, but we only have one car and we do pretty regularly do longer road trips, e.g. to go skiing. Even with a 240mi Bolt those trips could be awkward.

[5ilv3r]

This reminds me of a car sales strategy I heard a long time ago. Don't sell people the car they need for the life they have, sell them the car for the life they want. That's one way you end up with huge pickup trucks being grocery getters and such. They were sold on the idea of owning horses and pulling them around, but that isn't the life they have...

The same ideas work well to discourage EV ownership.

[thinkling]

While you bring up an interesting point, I'm not sure why my comment reminded you of it--the lifestyle that makes it awkward for me to drive an EV is the lifestyle I actually already have.

AWD is something that everybody thinks they need while much of the time FWD + snow tires is equally good or better in normal snowy conditions. I was willing to give up AWD because I'd only need it about 1% of the time and I'm comfortable with FWD+snow tires. I wasn't willing to add the hassle of charging the car to a day trip to go skiing.

[takk309]

I live in a rural area that exemplifies what you are saying. The grocery store parking lot is full of trucks and SUVs that, at most, see a bit of snow on the plowed roads in the winter. At the same time I own two vehicles, a Ford F-150 and a Nissan Xterra. I use both for a lot more than grocery getting. I own three horses and tow a trailer regularly. The Xterra is used for camping and climbing trips that require a bit of off roading on a regular basis. All that being said, I would love to have an electric for commuting and short trips. I live 10 miles from work, I don't need much range.

[strange_quark]

Then get a PHEV. I've had my Volt for almost a year now and although I don't drive a ton, I've managed to get about 80% of my driving done on pure electric. The other 20% is road trips where I still get ~40-45 mpg.

[thinkling]

See my other comments--I drive a Volt too. :-)

[Gibbon1]

Random thought of mine is charging becomes less of an issue when the cars range is several multiples of daily use. If say your electric car has 200 miles of range and you drive it 40 miles a day, then it needs to be charged once every 5 days. Which is in line with the US average of 12,000 miles a year. Or 230 miles a week which is about the range of a Bolt or Tesla.

Other random thought. Someone that has charging at work, does not need to charge their car at home. Which emphasizes the idea that an electric car owner just needs charging to somewhat ubiquitous. Charger at work, charger at the store, charger at a parking lot, coffee shop, etc.

[aphextron]

>Random thought of mine is charging becomes less of an issue when the cars range is several multiples of daily use. If say your electric car has 200 miles of range and you drive it 40 miles a day, then it needs to be charged once every 5 days. Which is in line with the US average of 12,000 miles a year. Or 230 miles a week which is about the range of a Bolt or Tesla.

The reason this line of thinking doesn't line up with reality is because of how lithium ion batteries work. Storing your car at a full charge will increase the rate of battery degradation as much as 5x. Similarly, discharging to (or near to) 0% State of Charge is stressful to the battery because you are causing voltage imbalances among the individual cells within each pack. The reality is that most EV drivers keep their cars between 20-80% at all times. This is optimal for battery health and it ends up being the most practical charging pattern for daily use as well.

With gas cars, you are forced to think in terms of "time between fill ups", but with an EV you are constantly "filling up" anywhere you go because it's so seamless to park and charge.

[sien]

The 2018 Nissan Leaf has a 400km range and has charge times like a Tesla.

http://www.caradvice.com.au/581046/2018-nissan-leaf-revealed...

[jansanchez]

> Nissan claims the new Leaf’s 40 kWh battery will provide 150 miles of range under EPA testing and 400km (248.5 miles) under the Japanese JC08 cycle

From: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/5/16254460/nissan-leaf-2018-...

[graycat]

For the 400 km, is the A/C or heater on, or the headlights, the speed nice and slow, not much cargo, and heavy use by the driver of pedals?

I still want a 20 gallon gas tank and a lot of filling stations.

[mrlyc]

> People who park on the street have no realistic way to charge their cars at their homes

Perhaps there could be combined parking meters and charging stations. You would pay a certain amount of money if you just wanted to park and you would pay more if you wanted to charge your car too.

[WorldMaker]

Those are slowly beginning to pop up in more places. It possibly the most common charger style you see popping up in garages and streets in major cities.

Something I find interesting: There are cities investigating adding chargers that blend in to lamp posts (especially historic lamp posts where adding meters would be unwanted in a historic neighborhood).

[stevenwoo]

These are in a lot of municipal parking lots for the cities/towns that fill the land between San Jose and San Francisco. At the coast haven't seen any in the smaller rural towns only 30 miles away.

[r00fus]

That's an amazing idea.

Also imagine solar covered parking which could be a good moneymaker (sell energy and/or sell preferred parking spots).

[KGIII]

I wonder how viable covering parking lots would be in areas where you get a lot of snow. At some point, you will have to find a way to remove it - sometimes even a bunch of ice.

But, it has a bonus of keeping the precipitation that would land on your vehicle. That might just be its best feature.

[foxfired]

They are embracing it now, that's mostly because Tesla has been testing the grounds for the rest.

Don't forget that GM had not only terminated all leases then went out of their way to crush all their EV1s[1]. Like a public execution to show that electric cars are bad.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

[WorldMaker]

The Chevy Volt has been around for as long as Tesla (Roadster) has been available to the public.

Revenge of the Electric Car [2] is a great follow-up to Who Killed the Electric Car.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Electric_Car

[thinkling]

To be clear, I think the Volt is relevant because it's a plug-in series-hybrid that drives like an EV: it drives on battery power while available, and then uses the engine mostly as a generator. It came out in 2011 and I would imagine that it gave GM a great testbed to learn more about electric drivetrains (than they knew from the EV1) before putting out the Bolt.

[WorldMaker]

> So, I guess electric car ownership is effectively another perk of home ownership.

It's another chicken-and-egg bootstrapping problem, though. If everyone had electric cars, there would be more market demand for electrified street parking, and there would be more demand for electric parking spaces in apartment complexes. At some point it becomes less of a market differentiator (luxury apartments use it to stay competitive) and increasingly a market force (every apartment needs it to stay relevant).

Given the pace that the car manufacturers seem to be moving, that transition likely needs to start happening sooner rather than later. (2023 is six years from now.)

[DennisP]

Fortunately it's a chicken-and-egg problem where all the homeowners already have eggs.

[protomyth]

GM was headed to fuel cell cars (even talking about how you could power your home at one point) and put a lot of money into electric after their first attempts were deemed unacceptable. Its been a slow burn for them.

[Slimbo]

In London street lamps are being converted into EV charge stations for kerbside charging:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/london-street-lamps...

[KGIII]

I think you will see good electrics coming from Japan. The e-class racing teams have been doing great work, as have their f-class. They are certainly capable of holding their own. They also have some good hybrids that will make their way to personal vehicles.

[bovermyer]

I don't know that this is true. To compare, would you expect every house to have a gas station built in?

Granted, a full electric charge doesn't last as long as a full tank of gas, but that's going to be decreasingly relevant as battery technology improves.

[thinkling]

What matters isn't how long the charge lasts, but how long it takes, and how awkward that is when you really need a charge.

If I remember right, the stats for the Bolt were that (when empty) it can charge 100mi of range in 30 minutes, but after that the charge rate falls off quickly, and a full charge actually takes much longer than you'd expect.

If you get unlucky and get to a charge point but the charger is occupied, you're going to be waiting up to 30 mins to get a 30 min charge, taking an hour to gain 100mi range. If I'm on a longer drive, that's just not something I want to put up with.

Imagine going skiing at a place that's 100mi away. It's winter, so you're running the heater in the car, and the ski resort is inherently uphill from where you live, so you use more than 50% of the car's range to get there. When you get to the ski resort, early arrivers have already filled up the chargers. So now you have to park somewhere else (possibly a shuttle ride away from the lifts), and come back off the mountain at lunch see if a charger is available, fetch your car, maybe hang around until the others actually move their cars off the chargers, etc. Ugh. Sorry, but I don't want to be the early adopter in that situation, and I'm wondering if there will be enough chargers to make the problem disappear once EV adoption is high. Range extenders in the car make a lot of sense to me.

[graycat]

Fiction? Just what is it you have against fiction? Fiction can be fun! Besides, we're talking way out there, and between now and then can be some delays, etc.

We had electric cars way back there, likely before the Model T. The problem is the same -- the batteries. Long ago a Ford executive said, "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car.". We're still waiting for that good battery. We also hoped for a good capacitor from EEStore, and we're still waiting for that, too. And we tried steam engines and gas turbine engines.

For my car, the problems have been corrosion and the transmission, not the engine. Otherwise the problems have been suspension bushings and springs past their fatigue life. Engines? Mostly fine. Currently a big problem is that it's > $1000 in labor to remove the dashboard to replace the lights that burned out.

Mostly those Tesla batteries solve a problem I don't have and give me new problems I don't have and won't be able to solve.

[twblalock]

> To compare, would you expect every house to have a gas station built in?

If I could get a full charge at a charging station in the amount of time it takes to fill up a gas tank, it would not be a problem to drive to a charging station the same way I drive to gas stations now. But a full charge on an electric car takes hours, even with fast charging.