Electric cars do not make sense to own if you are not also owning a garage where you can charge them overnight. Also, if you are unwilling to add 1+ hour(s) to your travel time on longer distances.
Is this opinion based on experience or speculation? I had a house with garage and it was nice, but I moved to an apt with street parking. I had feared it would be a pain, and I'd be lying if I said it was as convenient, but it really hasn't been very difficult. Moving the car every two weeks for street cleaning has been worse.
As for long distances, I haven't found that to be a big issue. Of course, I have a Tesla which has a very good charging network - and that's the point. For any brand other than Tesla, you're probably right. It amazes me that the legacy car companies each of which are multiples of Tesla's size don't seem to be able to come up with a solution that doesn't involve getting taxpayers involved.
It's speculation on the part of the buyer. Why introduce more anxiety when you can just go with what you already know?
If every gas station supported CCS it would be less of an issue, but usually you need to find a station nearby and wait for 20-40 minutes if it's CCS or 6-8 hours if it's level 2.
20 minutes every 2 - 3 hours of rare long distance driving is acceptable, considering I save 4 hours of petrol station visits per yer vs my old diesel. Not to mention the fuel cost savings.
Oh I'm not referring to road trips here, they've been mostly fine in my EV. The issue is for people without a garage or a readily accessible charger then can use. My brother lives in Brighton, MA, and to charge his car he'd need to go out of his way to find a CCS charger and then sit there for 40 minutes about once a week. It just removes an EV as an option unless he moves elsewhere.
Depends how fast your car charges. 2017 Model S 75D charges for 30-40m every ~90 minutes of driving.
It's not as bad as it sounds, or I'm lying to myself, but having the 90 minute planned stops makes a cross country trip seem a lot closer ... even though it's doing the opposite.
Electric micromobility (e.g., e-bikes and scooters) probably makes more sense for more people right now. Keep an ICE vehicle for long-distance travel. But use your relatively cheap e-bike---that you can charge on a standard AC plug, even in an apartment---for short-distance chores and grocery runs.
Of course, people who live in car-only suburbs need not apply.
Rains a lot. Pretty cold. Snows. Lots of bikes. But really nice biking infrastructure — of the kind that’s hard to imagine in places like North America.
The population density is a bit of a factor. Like I live in a region in the US that is about the same size as Netherlands by area and has about 1/50th the population. And then if you go out west the difference gets starker than that.
Of course higher density parts of the US also don't really match up with the infrastructure that exists in Netherlands, but it's not unreasonable to expect the infrastructure in a given area to scale with the number of people in that area.
I did a 3000km trip 4 times (twice each way) during the pandemic. Charging added 15 minutes to the trip. Everybody has to eat/sleep/bathroom, and that can happen at the same time as charging.
You’re using a very unusual definition there. 3000 km is a long way and fueling up an ICE vehicle would take at least three full tanks, each one of which takes about ten minutes. Ignore sleeping, eating, and bathroom (I used to drive 1500 km in one day, three fuel stops, bathroom with that, no food - you won’t die if you don’t eat for a day). There’s no way you charged every 500 km and only paid a 15 minute penalty. Simply stopping and getting back on the highway costs about 5 minutes.
15 minutes more than it would have taken if we used a gas car. I was driving with the family. Regular stops would have been required no matter what car I had. Certainly 2 25 year olds driving in shifts with steel bladders could have made the trip quicker.
I did trip from London, UK to Southern Italy, Brindisi in Enyaq. By Google maps it should take 2 days (24 hours of driving, so 12 hours in 2 drivers/day). Charging dragged it on 4 days and we were charging on Ionity/Enel. So your 15 minutes is some kind of a sick joke.
A doubling of travel time is harsh. But I'm wondering how you managed to charge so inefficiently (time wise). Could it be, that you traveled with the smallest Škoda Enyaq which only supports up to 50kW of charging rate?
I checked your route with abetterrouteplanner.com using two different Enyaq models. One with 50kW charging and one with 100kW+. Here are the travel times:
- Enyaq iV 50 (50kW charging): 33 hours
- Enyaq iV 80 (100kW charging): 26 hours
- Google Maps (w/o charging time): 22,5 hours
I think you just had the wrong car model for this kind of trip.
I have Enyaq iv80. Charging rate means nothing when there are chargers in France which just won't give you juice because reasons. So then you need to slowly crawl to another charger like a clown to have even chance to get there.
Additionally it was during December, so cold weather reduced range even more, therefore your estimation would be correct but for summer time.
My experience riding over 37k km in less than a year all around Europe with my Tesla Model Y hasn't been any like it (many trips, including from The Hague to Malmö, The Hague to Berlin, The Hague to Budapest passing by Vienna, and more trips than I can count to Belgium, twice to Switzerland, and also all the way South to Barcelona).
I think your car model isn't very appropriate for long distance travels, as most EVs. But there are some EVs out there that definitely can do it, especially all Teslas.
That is part of the problem though. With petrol, you can hop into anyone old car, and go where you want, as much as you want. With 5 minute stops every few hundred miles
That's ridiculous. My trip was from Ottawa Canada to Saskatoon. It goes through some seriously unpopulated territory, unlike yours. It does follow major highways, so there are Tesla superchargers along the route every 100-150 km or so. We'd stay at a hotel with charging overnight so start at 100%, drive for 2.5 hours and then bathroom/charge for 15-20 mins, drive another 2.5 and eat/charge for 40 or so, repeat the morning pattern in the afternoon, and then drive for another couple after supper before stopping at a hotel to charge while sleeping.
So you're not charging back up to 100% until the overnight stop?
When I think about how I would do a long trip in an EV, I envision getting a full charge, because first, that's what I currently do with gasoline, and second, I want as much range as possible to account for unplanned detours and/or other unexpected issues.
Once or twice we did hit 100% because supper took longer than expected, but otherwise you never charge to 100%.
A critical component is the trip computer that knows about upcoming construction and charger status. On our first trip the Sault Ste Marie charger was down, and Sault Ste Marie <-> WaWa is the longest stretch between chargers because of a huge provincial park. But the car warned us about it and told us to make sure we were above 90% at Blind River.
AFAIK the charging rate slows down as the battery gets fuller. That's why all the fast charging metrics are like "30 minutes to charge to 60%" rather than "60 minutes to charge to 100%". So on a trip where you want to spend as little time charging, you want to stop charging before 100%.
Canada has some good charging infrastructure. If you are driving a Tesla, even better, super chargers are the gold standard for EV charging, everything else is kind of unreliable.
I just watched this Tom Scott video this morning about a Chinese company that created a "pod" where you can replace the battery instead of charging it.
There have been several attempts to make battery swapping for cars a thing. This includes Tesla's attempt and another company that went bankrupt. For some reason, it does not seem to work out and they all stop trying it.
I bet the reason it doesn't work out is greed and that everyone is doing their own incompatible system. Gas/petrol would also not work out if every car brand had their own unique & incompatible composition of fuel.
This is something that governments could solve. Commission a decent swappable battery form-factor and offer tax rebates & incentives to both buyers of compatible vehicles (thus incentivizes manufacturers to make those vehicles) as well as gas stations to adopt the system.
It doesn't have to be perfect performance-wise, if battery swaps take 5 minutes and every gas station supports it, it'll still be good even if the effective range of such battery is half of a custom proprietary one's.
Over 60% of homes in America are single family homes so it sounds like carmakers can sell plenty of EVs.
There are 1.88 vehicles per household in the US so it seems like many American households could have one of those vehicles be an EV while the other is gasoline for longer trips if they need that functionality so badly.
The range anxiety thing is so overblown, too. Driving 300 miles at 60mph average is 5 full hours of driving. That’s so much.
If you assume that EVs are barely doing 200 miles of real condition range that’s still over 3 hours of driving before you need to stop at all.
And then if you are going much longer than 500 miles it starts to make more sense to fly in the US. For a family of four you can’t make a trip from Ohio to Orlando make financial sense in a car, like, at all. The airfare is too low and the car travel time is too high.
Not if the municipality is installing enough low speed but cheap charging spots in the street parking. That’s working in some European countries at least
As for long distances, I haven't found that to be a big issue. Of course, I have a Tesla which has a very good charging network - and that's the point. For any brand other than Tesla, you're probably right. It amazes me that the legacy car companies each of which are multiples of Tesla's size don't seem to be able to come up with a solution that doesn't involve getting taxpayers involved.