Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
People keep talking about how as electric cars become cheaper, more people will use them. But what they keep ignoring is that they are totally useless for long trips.
The Climate Spokeswoman for the UK PM Boris Johnson, Allegra Stratton, recently let the cat out of the bag when she revealed why even she doesn’t use an EV (electric vehicle):
“Net-zero is the glide path. What we have to be doing more quickly – the science is clear – we have to be changing our carbon emissions output right now so that we can stop temperature increase by 2030.
She explained that she doesn’t want to stop to charge her car when she visits elderly relatives “200,250 miles away”.
She claimed that she visits family around the UK, including Scotland, north Wales, the Lake District and Gloucester.
Because of this, she said: “They’re all journeys that I think would be at least one quite long stop to charge.”
(Gotta admit, I have to admire the otherworldly idiocy of anyone who seriously claims that we can “stop temperature increase by 2030”. Here’s why that is ungrounded madness … but I digress.)
Now, here in Nowherica, 250 miles is considered an easy morning’s commute … a map of Texas versus Europe shows why.
So I got to thinking … just how long a charging stop would that be to go another 250 miles? Me, I drive a 2016 Ram Ecodiesel pickup truck with about a 500 mile range, although the new ones have about a 1,000 mile range. And I can “recharge” it for another 500 miles in about five minutes at the pump.
Looking for information on this question, I see that the figure in question is called “RPH”, which stands for “Range Per Hour”. This is how many miles of range you get per hour of charging. I find a site called How Long Does It Take To Charge An Electric Car that says:
Range per hour varies depending on how efficient your car is. Small full battery electric cars (e.g. Renault Zoe) are the most efficient and get 30 miles of range per hour charging at 7kW. The biggest full battery electric cars (e.g. Audi e-tron Quattro) are heavier and get ~20 miles of range per hour at 7kW.
YIKES! That’s the charge rate for the standard commercial chargers. I can see why the UK Climate Spokesbabe doesn’t want to drive an EV. If you’re stopping to recharge your Audi e-tron for another 250 miles, instead of the five minutes it takes me to recharge my diesel pickup, it will take you twelve and a half hours to recharge.
But heck, don’t worry. Here’s Edmund King, the head of the UK Automobile Association. He says that drivers should take a break after 200 miles of driving.
“Drivers covering long distances should take regular breaks to maintain safety, so this is the ideal time to charge the car. Range anxiety will continue to decrease with more chargers and improved range on new models.”
Well, that makes perfect sense. Just stop for a quick ten-hour lunch, and you’re ready for your next 200 miles. And Elon Musk, winner of the Olympic Gold Medal For Getting The Most US Taxpayer Subsidies, makes much the same point regarding the new “long-range” Tesla Model S:
Musk said that he doesn’t see a need for an electric vehicle with a range of more than 400 miles:
“What we are seeing is that once you have a range above 400 miles, more range doesn’t really matter. There are essentially zero trips above 400 miles where the driver doesn’t need to stop for restroom, food, coffee, etc. anyway.”
The comment was criticized for not accounting for the fact that a 400-mile range is closer to 250-300 miles in colder climates and depending on the conditions.
Heck, yes, I often need to stop for ten hours for restroom, food, and coffee …
Call me crazy, but with the Tesla Model S going for a cool $74,490 including ten-hour restroom breaks, I reckon I’m gonna stick with my Ram Ecodiesel.
w.
… h/t to the irrepressible James Delingpole for a couple of quotes …
[UPDATE] Several commenters have pointed out that there are faster chargers out there, that can charge at 100 or even 200 miles or range per hour. This would cut the charge time in the middle of a 600-mile trip down to thre or even one and a half hours … in theory, of course. In practice, the numbers somehow never seem to match up to theory.
But heck, yes, I often need to stop for a couple hours for restroom, food, and coffee …
Many of us live in fly-over country. A 300-500 mile day trip is not all that unusual. EV’s are not practical.
If the liberals get their way, all of us will be forced to live in cities.
Not all 200 miles are created equal. Two hundred miles in stop-n-go traffic are far more taxing than the same distance on a high speed expressway. Also, are passengers always incapable of sharing the driving load?
I would like to read opinions on driving endurance by any lurking OTR lorry drivers.
The longest I ever drove in one stint was 18 hours. By the time I got home, I was using my left foot for the accelerator pedal!
More typically, now that I’m older, is 12 hours the first day when fresh, and 10 hours per day each subsequent day. So, with gas and food stops, about 600 miles per day.
I spent a lot of my working life as a service engineer .Part of my work was to deliver technical parts to wherever they were needed as quick as possible .
I have driven over 4 million miles , and done over a 1000 miles in a day many hundreds of times when I was not on a tacho
Endurance driving is something that becomes a lot easier with practice .[ You would not run a Marathon without a lot of practice building up to it ]
So there is no way an EV could do that sort of work , which was keeping businesses working , and sometimes keeping the essential infrastructure of the country going .
In southern Michigan, thousands of people go “Up North” every weekend. Anybody stopping in 200 miles for an hour of rest would be laughed out of the state.
In the brave, new GND world, trips will be planned around windy, sunny days. No travel on cloudy, windless days when the grid goes dark.
Just like it is for planning a boating trip, when the weather is rarely as god as it was when you first planned the trip. Many boat owners rarely invite friends with several days prior notice! Weather unpredictability is not the friend of pre-planning!
The most important commodity in the world is time.We all only have so much of it.
So here’s another way to frame up the issues:
For easy math, let’s say that current average gas price is $US3/gal (substitute in the price that applies for your situation).
Say you have a 20 gallon tank that gets your 400 mile range.
To fill this tank, it will be $US60.
If you have an EV that can go 400 mi & takes 10 hrs to charge these bateries, this is the equivalent of $US6/hour for your time to charge. So, ask yourself, is your time worth more than $US6/hr ?
If your answer is yes, your should continue to drive an ICE for any longer trips. The EV maybe Ok for around town when you charge it overnight when you are sleeping, but it will make little sense for longer trips until charging time comes way down.
Jeff – at the end of Biden’s presidency, the full tank will be $500.
“It will make little sense for longer trips
untilunless charging time comes way down.”You forget the cost of lodging and meals when you add a day or two to your trip. I know they usually cost me far more than a tank of gasoline.
People complained about oil dependence from Opec. Then for a short time the US became oil independent, fuel prices went down, the country prospered. Now under this administration US back to getting more dependent on foreign oil. Fuel prices up, commodity prices increasing.
If switching over to electric then will be dependent on China for rare earth metals. So from Opec to China dependency as mining and oil production not allowed in western society.
Not good for western security.
“Not good for western security.”
That’s the Democrats for you.
Remind me again Tom who the president was who said in a summit in Helsinki he thought Putin was telling the truth contrary to the advice of his secret service?
That’s leftwing propaganda, Simon. I can’t help it if you believe it.
The practical solution, at least for larger vehicles, is a hybrid. We own a MY 2007 Ford hybrid Escape with AWD and class 1 tow hitch. Modeled on the Prius architecture. It does 32 city and 28 hwy at 70mph with AC on. Range is about 380 miles. Traction Battery still going strong after 14 years, because floats between about 45% to 55% of full charge, never less, never more—unlike EVs. $3000 premium over the equivalent V6 (at an average about 20mpg) was $3k, paid off by hybrid tax credit day one. We have saved over $4k since, because not only does the hybrid use 1/3 less gallons, it uses regular while the directly comparable V6 was premium gas. In our neck of the woods, the price difference is at least $1/gallon.
To save the planet, we have to abandon all luxuries to the elected and endlessly re-elected royalty.
We just got a new Ford hybrid, Just wow, perfectly smooth. The wizbang computer crap in the thing is over the top though. 17 buttons on the steering wheel but the one to cycle the wipers isn’t there, and a touch screen for all sorts of stuff. They put this crap in the car just because they can, not because anyone wants it. Oh! great gas mileage.
I know what you mean. 🙂
I’ve got:
1) Horn button (on the steering wheel)
2) Window up / down controls (on the door panel)
3) Mirror adjustment control (on the door panel)
4) Blinkers / headlight high & low beam (on the steering column stalk)
5) Windshield wiper/washer control (on the steering column stalk)
6) Fan speed control knob (on the dashboard)
7) Temperature knob (on the dashboard)
8) Rear window defrost button (on the dashboard)
9) Stick-shift
10) Clutch pedal
11) Brake pedal
12) Gas pedal
That’s it. No whiz-bang touch-screen computer crap, no heads-up display, no lane change warning, no cruise control, not even a radio. I intentionally purchased a vehicle without all the stuff that typically breaks and is expensive to get fixed.
When I drive, I focus on driving. Not on fiddling with buttons and knobs and touch screens.
Oh… and no A/C… if I want to cool down, I can roll down the windows. Yeah, I’m old school. I just wish cars nowadays had those wind-wing windows like the old-style cars had… guess that’s not ‘aerodynamic’, though. They’d rather consume 10 times more energy running an A/C compressor than pushing air through a window slanted into the wind. LOL
“What 1950’s monstrosity did you buy?”, you may be asking… no, it’s a modern Hyundai… you can order them without all the extra stuff that breaks. If I could have, I would have done away with the mirror controls and electric windows, too, but that wasn’t an option.
Does that allow sufficient virtue-signaling for a dedicated Greenie?
Nope. But I’m not a Greenie. Just a Harvard MBA that can run the numbers.
The big uncertainty back in 2007 was actual battery life. Figured we could afford the then experiment. Turns out we won financially, bigly. Have had dealer offers to sell our Escape multiple times. No dice.
If EV’s do become more popular, they will become the authors of their own demise:
The more EV’s becomes significant in market share, the more they will become uneconomical, not to mention that they will raise the cost of electricity for everyone (Cue the screaming from those on fixed incomes and their advocates).
On the plus side, truckers in the US won’t need to carry a doctored second set of logs.
Those days of having more than one log book are pretty much over. Over 90% of the drivers out there are now on E-logs.
All I can say is that the 500-mile road trip is in the Constitootion. It is the eternal right of every ‘Murican. You could look it up.
Now, in 1969 when I was 22, I used to drive my ’65 Mustang fastback from Seattle to LA. Nonstop. 1200 miles. And back, in a weekend. But we were men back then. Real Men.
There is a school of thought that EV’s will not overcome all the obvious obstacles, and that is the desired outcome … a population without autonomy.
“ they are totally useless for long trips”
Willy, you have no idea.
EVs are excellent for long trips!
When your battery is empty, just catch the next lorry and hook it up!
The recuperation fills your battery in 100 miles or so
nobody believes?
this guy drove his Tesla from Moscow to Venice and back that way:
(in Russian)
“The comment was criticized for not accounting for the fact that a 400-mile range is closer to 250-300 miles in colder climates and depending on the conditions.”
Heard second hand accounts of Tesla 3 getting about 180 miles per charge during a consistent stretch of single-digit highs. If you are in the lake-effect areas of Western Michigan it’s common to need to run your defroster at close to full blast every time there’s a strong lake-effect setup. Have to believe that Great Britain encounters similar humidity issues.
Millions of people in Canada and the US live in climates where -20 C for months is common, and -40 (C or F, take your pick) for days or even weeks is an annual occurrence. You’ll need to run that defroster and heater at full blast AND take into account reduced capacity of the battery due to the cold.
Before you can recharge that battery, you first have to warm it up to 32F (0C). That will take both time and energy.
Spoken like a true entitled urbanite; no-one should do things that Musk doesn’t like.
400 miles is roughly 6-7 hours driving on interstates 7.5 hours driving at 55 on scenic routes.
I don’t hang around restrooms for 6 minutes, let alone ten hours.
After 7 hours driving, there are another 3 to 6 hours driving before I start thinking about stopping for the night.
Which brings us to my preference for stopping overnight in tent camping campsites. Long trips interspersed with off-road trips with gear and tools that Musk also disbelieves.
Musk must have never packed a lunch and eaten in the car. If you have more than one driver, a 400 mile trip is just getting started. My wife and I have gone on driving trips to destinations 800 to 900 miles away. Drive out on Friday, return on Sunday or Monday.
Much as I love internal combustion, and my daily driver options bounce back and forth between a couple Fau-Acht German things and a Duramax Silverado, we (and particularly my wife) routinely do 650-mile trips in her Tesla Model 3.
In areas where Tesla’s troweled Supercharger sites across the landscape, you leave the house fully charged, do a couple 30 minute charges enroute, and you’re at your destination with about 30 miles left. The Tesla mapping software plans your charge stops based on Supercharger availability and minimum total charging time, not maximizing miles between charges.
At home it’s a 220V welding outlet and 32A charge rate, in daily commute/kiddie carpool use it gets charged at home every 2-3 days.
In a bit over 19 months and 30K miles of ownership it’s never been back to Tesla for anything. We bought it because it’s cute and it’s fun (3.2 seconds 0-60, and quicker than any M or AMG until you’re knocking on triple digits), not because of any enviro nonsense, but it’s a blast to drive and it’s been painless to own.
Might be possible if you have Superchargers. But in most of the country, those simply don’t exist.
w.
This is true, you don’t find a Supercharger site in Ely, NV yet.
Of course there’s no gas stations between the Utah border and Ely, either. ‘Next services 193 miles’.
If cost is no object, then destroying those very expensive batteries by super charging them isn’t a problem.
Agreed, if you’re supercharging at full rate to 80%+ capacity routinely you’re not gonna be happy with your battery life.
Says everything really. Quote We bought it because it’s cute and it’s fun (3.2 seconds 0-60, and quicker than any M or AMG until you’re knocking on triple digits), not because of any enviro nonsense, but it’s a blast to drive and it’s been painless to own.
And because they have three other (fossil fuel powered) vehicles they can actually rely on.
As an “only car,” it wouldn’t look so tempting, no matter how “cute” or “fun.”
As Leo pointed, lets play the game properly.
The chargers Willis is talking about (7kW) are what you’d have fitted at your home.
You can get more powerful ones but it all gets a bit crazy.
At home there is No Problemo,
I read somewhere on the BBC very recently, that The Average UK Adult (average ffs) spends 6 (six) hours per day Just Watching TV.
Holy Cow People, Get A Life
While out and about, you’d obviously want a faster charger and they are to be found.
But then, you run into problems with the battery cells themselves.
I’m a bit familiar, learning gently, with the classic 18650 cell
They are rated at 3,7 volts and typically about 2,300 mAh
Cursory searching will tell you that it is safe to charge Lithiums at 1C
IOW, you can pump 2.3 Amps into an 18650 to charge it and that will obviously means it takes an hour to charge.
It don’t matter if your Tesla battery contains 7,000 such cells, apart from that you’d need to find one and half million amps – IF they were all in parallel which they ain’t.
Each cell inside the battery pack has to ‘follow the rules’
All is takes is just one to go AWOL and you have a 3-day fire on your hands, backyard, bus station, motorway……
The Lithiums can be charged at 2C, meaning it would only take 30 mins to charge your battery BUT, that is THE absolute limit and it destroys the life cycle capacity of your battery.
But even charging at 1C you have to be very carefull and is why almost every Lithium battery pack me and you will ever see, use, come across will have a temperature sensor attached to it.
They always have 3 wires, even the little diddy one in your phone, Sat Nav, media player, cordless tools etc etc
Peta of Newark wrote:
“Each cell inside the battery pack has to ‘follow the rules’
All is takes is just one to go AWOL and you have a 3-day fire on your hands, backyard, bus station, motorway……”
And therein lies the problem… the more cells you’ve got in a battery pack, the higher the probability that one or more of them is going to misbehave over any given time span, taking some unknown number of other cells with them as they melt down in a cascading failure.
A similar analogy:
If you’ve got one exhaust fan in your facility, and that fan motor dies once every 3 years on average, then you know that once every 3 years, you’re going to be replacing a fan motor.
If you’ve got 300 such fans, you’re going to be replacing ~100 motors every year.
The MTBF for each motor is 3 years, but as you increase the number of fan motors, you have a higher incidence of failures overall.
Same with batteries… except if one battery goes, it tends to take the rest with it. The manufacturing process isn’t perfect, so the more batteries you’ve got in a pack, the more likely you got at least one bum cell that’s going to pop off and spoil the whole batch.
I met a guy a while back who drove a Chevy Bolt from Topanga Cyn Calif to Albuquerque a distance of approx 750 miles. He said it took him 4 days, stopping to charge with 110. I used to live in Topanga (Santa Monica Mtns not far from the beach) and traveled to Albuq to see my mother. It took 11-13 hrs, long day but very doable.
In the Coachella Valley of Ca (La Quinta) i knew a guy at the gym who swore by his Tesla. One time he said he was going to his lawyers daughters wedding in Santa Barbara; he was going to meet with his lawyer and travel with him. Why don’t you go in your Tesla? Of course it didn’t have the range to make it in reasonable time.
My son-in-law’s friend had to hitch a ride to a golf outing because his wonderful Tesla couldn’t make it all the way on one charge. It was less than 300 miles.
“stopping to charge with 110”.
No EV will ever charge at a reasonable rate from a 15-20A 110V source. We plugged our Model 3 into 110V once just to see what time the car would calculate for a charge. To go from 50% to 80% would have been 18 hours. No thank you.
We plug our Model 3 into a 220V 40A wall outlet, we don’t have or need the Tesla wall charger unless we decide to put one outside. The top rate on the portable charger is 32A. That’ll get the car from 20% to 80% (our normal ‘cap’) in 5-6 hours.
A Supercharger would do that in an hour or so but, as noted elsewhere, regular direct-DC high-rate Supercharging will do bad things to battery life. That said, our Model 3 goes SF-San Diego four or five times a year (650 miles) on two 30 minute Supercharger stops each way. My wife doesn’t particularly like to charge (nor fill up with gas) after dark but then given that she’s usually as close to triple digits on I-5 as she can get, that’s rarely a problem…
I have a 2017 Fiat Tipo it could be my last vehicle the way things are going.
It isn’t just the enormous expense of an EV or the charging time fiasco, there’s the absurd low traffic neighbourhood schemes which effectively close roads – it hasn’t impressed ambulance and fire crews.
Then there are the insane cycle lanes, again blocking many turnings and making it impossible for an ambulance or a fire engine to get through traffic.
The greens really know how to screw things up
The electric car is a 150 year old failed solution still desperately looking for a problem.
It is such an impossible concept that it will never catch on except in some niches.
What would you do if your gasoline car leaked half a gallon of fuel every night? Yes you would take it to get repaired.
EV’s, through self discharge, leak the equivalent in electric energy. It boggles the mind why people would accept such nonsense.
One electric vehicle did work
The milk float
But milk is now cheaper in supermarkets so they went extinct
What about the root beer float?
https://news.yahoo.com/one-mans-road-trip-across-152619231.html
The remarks by the UK climate spokesperson sound canned and automated, like they could be handled by a drone or online robot. It’s too bad they’re wrong on all counts from science to China scale ignorance. Since they are well past the times of checking their statements, they might as well automate the ignorance and let the gullible British public set up their own automated listening and canned responses. Carbon tax payments could also be automated deductions from bank accounts in exchange for turning down the volume of bad science and 24/7 media ad buys.
Are the Brits ready for car battery fires and structure fires at night? I guess it depends on the cladding they put on the buildings.
As if
To paraphrase Audi,
Katastrophe durch Ideologie
Perhaps it is just me, but why are there not solar cells covering every square inch of an EV?
Cost
Weight
Aerodynamics
Very little potential energy generation.
Do the math.
Even if you were driving in full sunlight all the time, I doubt those solar cells would be able to collect enough energy to compensate for their weight and the additional aerodynamic drag.
If the sun is over head, then only the cells on the hood, trunk and on top of the passenger compartment will be generating any power.
If the sun is in on either side, only that side will be generating power, the cells on the top will not be generating much power because of the angle at which the sun is hitting them.
If the sun is ahead or behind the car, there’s very little surface area on which to mount solar cells.
Remember solar cells generate the most power when sunlight is striking them perpendicular to their surface. As the angle of incidence decreases, the amount of power drops, fairly quickly.
Driving at night, dusk or dawn, and during periods of heavy clouds, the amount of energy the cells provide will be little to none.
On the other hand the extra weight and aerodynamic drag caused by the cells will be felt whenever the car is in use.
Ok, so you take the fam on a vacation to Yellowstone. ASSUMING there is a charging station every 200 miles (BIG assumption), once you get there, that’s your nightly stop. Hmm. I’ll bet the motels will charge a MINT because what are you going to do? Drive to the next town? PFFT! Restaurants too….hey, $20 burgers for the kids! Basically, any business that caters to travelers will have you by the ba**s if there’s a charging station nearby. Guess I need to start looking at real estate……
Stick with me here:
Because I know folks with the same last name, I recently read that C. W. McCall (known for the “Convoy” song) was a name used by the real Bill Fries. I like road/traveling songs and Bill Fries also did “Wolf Creek Pass.”
So late last night I listened to that and watched a couple of videos thanks to cameras in folks’ vehicles as they traversed Wolf Creek Pass.
I think I’d like to be in a big, well provisioned, vehicle if I were to make that run. Bucket list, maybe.
Willis, on my longer trips I find a gas & P stop to take about 7 minutes, not 5. There must be faster pumps in CA and the restrooms must be closer.