Since I think I was hailed by more-or-less name, in response to a not-me posting, and I haven't zeroed the system left logged in here yet...
The electrical grid in the US simply can't handle all EV vehicles. It's too old, poorly maintained, and strained.
Not really a big issue. You can play with the numbers how you want, but most methods end up with about a 25% increase in annual power consumption. However, the grid is sized for peak
power, so for the vast majority of the year, the surplus capacity is there to handle quite a bit of EV charging. The average US daily driving is on the order of 30 miles, which works out to around 10kWh on an electric vehicle - not a huge increase in capacity compared to typical electrical use. You can also, with workplace charging, charge them during the late morning and early afternoon, which for large parts of the year is peak solar production (and a bit of a lull in grid demand - afternoon loads haven't picked up yet, morning loads are over). Fleet vehicles and trucking add some demand, but that's going to be in places already generally sized for high demand, and if you look at demand charge rates, a warehouse operating during the day and charging during the night is actually going to be just fine. You pay separate for kWh and peak power delivery on an industrial demand rate schedule, so charging will probably help reduce average power costs per kWh for those facilities. And, again, you can do some daytime charging, depending on how the routes are set up.
Plus, since these changes are going to take 20 years to happen (we don't have the production capacity to replace all new vehicles with EVs today even if we wanted to), the power grid will be expanded out, distributed energy resources will help reduce peak demand on transmission lines, etc.
There are plenty of points of concern for EVs, but the power grid just isn't one. That 25% increase is about what one would expect anyway on the power grid, and various efficiency improvements have been reducing peak demand over time anyway, so... go do the math on cobalt or lithium if you want to find a useful tree to bark up. ;)
And that's not factoring in the very practical issue of all the older homes out there with less than 200 amp electric service. I CAN'T install a EV charger at my home without also upgrading my service, which would also mean replacing the electric box.
You can't spare 20A @ 240V? That's
more than enough to handle almost all regularly passenger EV driving (~100 miles of range in 8h of charging), and you can do it on 12AWG wire. Ignore the people who say that unless you can charge 300 miles in 8 hours, an EV is useless, and go look at how many miles you actually drive. Figure about 3 miles/kWh delivered, and math out how many hours at what rate you need to charge your car during downtime. Most people are home for more than 8 hours, and I know a number of people, ourselves included, who have done an awful lot of EV miles on 12A/120V before getting a 240V charging circuit installed. You don't need a 90A charger for most driving, unless you're
literally filling your current vehicle tank once or more a day. At that point, the cost delta between EV miles and gas miles is so great that you may as well upgrade the service, it'll be cheaper than $4/gal gas just about everywhere.
Then you have plenty of areas without dedicated parking, so how are those people going to install chargers if they don't have a garage or dedicated spot? And we certainly don't have widespread public charging options in place yet. (Apartment complexes, high rise housing, large chucks of any major city like NY, Chicago, San Fran, etc.)
My preferred solution, which I've written about in the past, is "Slow, Dumb Charging," in which you just have a bunch of unmetered 20A charging stalls scattered about, because it's cheaper to do that and add $15/mo to the parking spot rental or something than it is to put in the multi-thousand dollar, $50/unit/month management fee, revenue grade ChargePoint units that allow you to do cost recovery. The EVSE I installed at our church runs on donations, and it's literally cheaper to give the power away than to do a lot with trying to do billing for power. Though I've failed to get a solar array up there yet. Maybe this next year...
I'm not digging into rural areas because I don't know the specific issues, but I'm sure there's there's some serious problems to work out.
... no? If you have a grid connection, you can make an EV work fine for the bulk of daily driving, unless you're doing literally hundreds of miles a day of driving. And even then, you probably can make it work.
In most rural areas, having multiple vehicles is pretty common, so replacing one of them with a mid-range EV covers the bulk of driving trips into town and such while still leaving other vehicles for that which the EV might not handle (typically trailers or winter duty - there's nothing that can tow a serious trailer in the EV market yet, and nobody seems to be promising anything of the sort any time soon - 10k lb tow rating, with explicit support for a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch would be a good start there, and, yes, I know what the Cybertruck is rated, and no, I don't want to hang 14k off a receiver because I'm not dumb).
Keep the miles off the gassers, wear out the EV. Works fine.
I have no regrets buying my Tesla, though it had nothing to do with saving money or maximizing value of my old Subaru. It's just an insanely fun car to drive and it makes me happy.
o.O
*checks the forum he's on and scratches his head*
One of my parents made the really interesting suggestion that we consider leasing an EV rather than buying...
Yes, yes, leasing a new car is a great and exceedingly wise investment as opposed to the horrors of buying and having to suffer through not getting rid of the car in three years or whatever the lease term is...
The best part is that once you're done with your ancient, beat up, absolute crap pile three year old car, you can turn it in and do it all over again and make the wise decision to lease another one!
Seriously,
what the fuck happened to this forum? Leasing brand new cars? Did I stumble into Boggleheads, or "Tell Me How Wise My Luxury Clown Car Purchase Is dot com"?
Let me offer better advice.
If you typically drive 20-25 miles a day or less, buy a used Gen 1 Volt with lower miles, plug it in on 120V or 240V/20A (it won't charge past 13A), and worry about the replacement in 5-8 years.
If you drive 30-40 miles a day or less, buy a used Gen 2 Volt and do the same thing.
You can still drive them across country, they cover the bulk of your driving miles on battery, and if you don't have quite enough charge, no big deal, you've got a gas engine. Just plug them in at home and you're fine. And you've not gone through the stupidity of leasing a new car (sorry, sorry, the wise, enlightened financial decision to lease brand new technology that tracks you everywhere, but, hey, might change the UI randomly overnight before your morning commute).
Synonyk, you live in a rural area, don't you? Do you see a range problem?
...
Don't get me wrong, I think electric solutions are better than gasoline solutions. I'm pretty sure an EV isn't yet a good match for long drives in remote areas...
Our Gen 1 Volt averages around 200 miles per gallon of gas used in regular driving, which was the plan. It covers round trips into both towns we regularly go to on battery for most of the year, though uses a bit of gas in the winter (sometimes for heat, sometimes for range). We can do cross country trips on gas, and if we're doing 100 miles out to the middle of nowhere, we just burn some gas. It's about 33-34mpg on gas for longer trips, so not quite as good as a Prius, but all the electric miles mean we still use radically less gas.
We could do just about everything we do without trouble on a long range pure EV as well, I just don't care to spend the money on one yet. We'll probably get a battery-replaced Bolt at some point in the years to come once our kids need a car, but that's another 8 years off, so... I'll see. It works totally fine for us.
If you do live out in the real middle of nowhere, a long range BEV you can charge at home and do your long town trips in saves an awful lot of money over a gas or diesel solution as well.
Again, just not seeing the actual issue here.
In some ways a plugin hybrid is the worst - it has all the complexity of a gasoline engine + an electric engine + a special transfer case to marry the two!
Yeah, those Priuses, unreliable turds that are
constantly broken and demanding transmission parts!
(a very large rolleyes goes here)
The transmission in a typical PHEV or hybrid is rather a lot simpler than anything in a pure gas vehicle these days. A modern automatic, for fuel economy reasons, is typically 7-10 speeds, and an awful lot of clutches and bands to accomplish that. A hybrid or PHEV transmission is far fewer moving parts, far fewer wearing parts, and have repeatedly proven to be "not a problem in practice."
The "complexity" of a gasoline engine is a well established engineering practice, and most reasonable modern gas engines will do 200k+ miles on minimum maintenance - most will do further, but people are just dying for an excuse to "have to buy a new car" after that point, it seems, so it's rare to see too many over 300k, but most will do it if given the chance. A PHEV will generally put far fewer miles on them than it would as a pure gas car because of all the electric miles. If we put 200k miles on our Volt at the rate we burn fuel, that works out to around 1000 gallons of gas, or about 35k miles on the gas engine. It'll still have the cylinder honing marks at that point!
I can't imagine you'd be too terribly concerned about a new gas car blowing up before 50k miles, would you?
But with EV production limited by battery capacity, you can build 4-6 PHEVs for the batteries that go into a single long range electric, so it works out quite a bit better there.
I get that the supposed "complexity" of the PHEVs is a talking point about how the "simplicity" of a pure EV is worth leasing a brand new one (technology upgrades, you know), but if you look at Consumer Reports and such, the TCO for pure EVs and PHEVs is right about the same, and the reliability ends up overlapping as well. You get all the nice perks of electric in terms of reduced engine maintenance (we change the oil every 2 years, I expect to never need brake pads, etc), and still have quite a bit more capability as well. I can find gas stations in the middle of nowhere. I can't find DC fast chargers out there yet.
I put 307K on a 7.3 powerstroke, then sold it.
I have 115k on my 7.3. ;)