Essay by Eric Worrall
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t curse these silly electric cars under my breath once or twice.”
‘Brutal:’ EV Road Trip Features Bundling Up in Winter Clothes to Avoid Running Heater
ALANA MASTRANGELO
17 Apr 202311A Business Insider reporter learned how “brutal” a road trip in an electric vehicle (EV) can be when he was forced to bundle up instead of using the heater in his car to try to maximize his range. After the trip he commented, “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t curse these silly electric cars under my breath once or twice.”
Business Insider’s Tim Levin drove the new Toyota bZ4X electric SUV from New York City to Washington, DC and back, and discovered that he was forced to spend roughly a quarter of his time charging his electric vehicle. But it got worse from there.
“I hit the road back to New York on a chilly morning with 176 miles of range. When I went to turn on the heat, the indicated range plummeted to 125 miles,” Levin wrote.
Therefore, Levin had to make a decision: stay warm and charge twice, or turn off the heat — given the effect that it has on the vehicle’s battery life and range — and deal with the cold. He chose the latter.
…
Read more: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/04/17/brutal-ev-road-trip-features-bundling-up-in-winter-clothes-to-avoid-running-heater/
What a miserable experience.
Australian drivers also experienced their share of EV woes recently;
In Australia EV owners were forced to queue at Gundagai, while returning from an Easter holiday;Easter weekend photo sparks concern over Australia’s electric vehicle future
10/04/2023
A lengthy queue at an electric vehicle charging hub in Gundagai on Good Friday has given a glimpse into Australia’s EV future “unless we get some urgent planning underway”.
Matthew Bailes, who was driving from Melbourne to Sydney in his Tesla, snapped a photo of the situation.
“It was a 15 minute wait,” he told Tony Jones, filling in for Neil Mitchell.
…
Read more (includes a radio interview): https://www.3aw.com.au/easter-weekend-photo-shows-australias-ev-future-unless-we-get-urgent-planning-underway/
At least Gundagai wasn’t a freezing cold trail of misery like Tim Levin’s New York to Washington DC trip, that comes later in the season in Gundagai.
What can I say? The only way to make EVs work in a remote town like Gundagai without massive wait time inconvenience is large subsidies, to fund enough chargers to prevent queues during busy periods like holiday peaks. And probably onsite diesel generators to provide the electricity, if EVs ever become a significant presence on the roads.
Or maybe EVs could tow a diesel generator on a trailer, to provide a continuous popup charge during long trips.
Easy solution here. Duh!
Its been suggested, but everyone knows what happens when you put two cars on the same track!
In a recent trip, we stopped at a fast food establishment. They had 6 charging stations. Evidently so you could recharge the vehicle and your self at the same time.
Except that if it takes a half hour to order and eat a cheeseburger and fries, the car is only about 10% charged or less.
If the food was delivered at the speed of the charging, it couldn’t be called fast food anymore.
Apart from the range, and battery charging issues. Have any of these people considered the future with EVs? In the UK, there are about 30M+ cars, and around 2-3M HGVs. Imagine, if by 2050, they were all BEVs (I know, impossible). Charging at 10KW/vehicle (cars), and who knows what for an HGV. At some point, every vehicle could be plugged in and charging, that’s going to be somewhere around 400GWs.
Wonder where they’ll get the leccy from?
Also, when their beloved Teslamobile coughs its last, where will they get a replacement from?
“Sorry sir, Lithium, is no longer available, will NiCad do?”
The UK gets through about 100,000 tonnes of motor fuels per day on average. The usage is remarkably even across the year normally, with only quite modest peaks for extra miles at holiday times, and less mileage at weekends. As an order of magnitude it’s about 4PJ a day, but if we allow for the greater motor efficiency of electric power offset partly by higher vehicle weight it might require ~1.5PJ a day of electricity, or over 0.4TWh. On the basis of overnight charging for 8 hours that would use 50GW. Reality is that only a fraction of the vehicle population would continue to run, much of it in taxi mode. That’s probably why the CCC scenarios only allow for about 100TWh a year for transport.
Don’t forget that 50% of the energy is lost in a battery charge/discharge cycle, so double your estimate of electric power generation capacity needed. Or realize that, since the government and watermelons aren’t pushing for increased generation capacity, it’s only a small fraction of the vehicle population that would continue to run, without any electricity left over to run taxis for the masses. The elites get large cars, taxis, and air travel – probably by exempting themselves from the fossil fuel bans. You get rickshaws and trains, but _your_ trains will only run when there’s sun or wind to supply them with electricity.
Well, he could always put a little propane tree stand heater in there like the Amish sometimes use to keep their buggies warm in winter!
That sounds like verboten technology to me!
For the amish? no, propane heaters are not verboten technology.
For the green zealots of the church of man-made global warming? yeah, that would be very much verboten
One the coldest most miserable trips I ever took was a 15 hour drive from Chico Ca to San Diego during a winter cold snap. The vehicle was a 1961 Datsun Pickup with a cruising speed of 55mph, and no it had no heater.
I’m not a fan of EVs, though I can see the attraction for city dwellers. I do ride motorcycles, and I know what cold is – even on a pleasant spring day in the low 60’s a long motorcycle ride can be miserable. No matter how much windproof gear and insulation I wear, the rush of wind slowly but surely bleed my core bodily warmth till I’m verging on hypothermia, and then I have to stop and drink vast amounts of hot tea and coffee at one hour intervals.
Electrically heated garments are a game changer for me. I use an electric vest, connected via a pigtail to the bike, that pulls 40W on its highest setting. I usually have it on the medium 25W setting, and even my tiny Yamaha Wr250 has the excess generator capacity to run it easily. Now I stay out all day even when the high might be in the 40’s. Basically, I can ride all year in some degree of comfort and safety.
I would think EV folks would use simple electric garments. Instead of heating the large interior volume of the cab to something like comfort, a simple electric vest under a light sweater or jacket would make the situation comfortable enough to not have to run the cab heater. Pigtailed garments for motorcycling aren’t cheap, and you’d need a beefier connection than a USB. But you can buy relatively effective battery powered vests for under one hundred dollars – I have one I use for my stargazing late at night.
In the motorcycle touring world there is a fairly vast array of garments and controllers (Trollers). I wonder when Tesla and the others will see the opportunity to extend profits by marketing their own heated garments with the Troller being a phone app? Or has this already happened?
I have the same on my XT250..100watt vest and 10 watt gloves.Would not be able to ride most months otherwise.
However, I think the point of an enclosed cab in a car is you don’t have to bundle up. Sometimes I don’t want to bother with all my protective gear, jacket boots pants helmet earplugs and just jump in the truck in my shorts instead.
Hey, with electrically heated garments, even riding a horse in Winter could be comfortable. We all can go back to riding horses or mules. They know how to find their way home even in darkness or poor visibility. That is the epitome of sustainable transportation.
And think of all the jobs created to shovel the mountains of manure!
What happens when there is a shutdown on an Interstate and there is a 50 mile line of EVs depleting their batteries? How in the world would you ever recover from this?? Or how long and how many people freeze to death if in the winter?
Or, people are trying to evacuate southern Florida with an approaching hurricane and there is a queue at the charging stations, and time is of the essence.
Or evacuating from any natural disaster situation anywhere (Floods, Forest fires, Earthquakes, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, “super-storms”, Massive snow storms, etc.) that also happens to knock out the power lines that supplies the electricity to the charging stations? and your EV currently only has a few miles worth of charge left? It’s possible to get gasoline out of a gas stations tanks without electricity. It’s impossible to get electricity out of a charging station without electricity!
Salute!
The south Florida evacuation is already a nightmare, but with too many EV’s it would be armageddon! Think road rage x ten! Or worse.
It would not be temperature killing folks, it would be actual physical violence.
Gums sends…
Imagine if the situation were reversed.
What if Henry Ford and his pal Tom Edison were successful in making BEVs the standard for the last 100 years and the nation was now experiencing the driver inconveniences and the devastating impact on our electric grid from a national fleet of mainly electric vehicles
Then someone announced that they had dug out Damiler’s designs for an ICE and made remarkable improvements that would relieve the nation of the problems being experienced with BEVs.
Would governments subsidize the more favorable alternative?
Nobody selected the “standard”. There was vicious competition, meaning EVERYONE selected the standard propulsion by purchasing their preference. The EVs were preferred by women because they didn’t like the hand crank starter. Once electric starters were added to ICE cars, EV sales plummeted. EVs were still built, and bought, just not to the masses. No legislation prohibited or limited EVs.
The grid impact is exaggerated. Most EVs would charge at homes overnight. It’s super easy to program them to begin charging 8PM, or any time. Grid power load typically dips overnight; and wind energy peaks. This seems like a complementary arrangement to me. This would also help us reduce load variances thus increasing base load. I know it’s counter intuitive, but I expect this effect would be beneficial.
I see the “problems” with BEVs is people entering situations incompatible with the operational characteristics of their vehicle. Burning Man attendees felt very virtuous when they arrived riding their EVs. That feeling may have recoiled just a bit on the way home.
For those who ventured through frozen, desolate tundra, I suggest Darwin is watching. The fittest amongst us know battery discharge energy is substantially reduced with temperature. Even more fit people would know the human and other heating systems require much more energy to power as the temperature drops. The fittest of all would have known these issues would have an exponential relationship to range. Those smart enough would not be caught in the very uncomfortable position, where your very survival is a risk. Perhaps it’s time to cull a few.
Nobody selected the “standard”.
That’s the point I was trying to make.
The “selection” today is purely political and does not stand up economically, or to rational science re Global Warming.
“Nobody selected the “standard””.
That’s the point, “nobody” selected it because “everybody” (ie the market) choose their preferences and the overwhelming majority chose ICE over EV for all the same reasons that still exist today (range, cost, refueling time, etc). Forget everything else you wrote after that opening line, as the opener says it all. But now, the government is trying to select the standard, rather than letting the market decide. That’s the whole point.
large subsidies, to fund enough chargers
Make sure that those subsidies come exclusively from taxes on earnings of the legislative dingbats who’ve been Promising and Guaranteeing us a heavenly nirvana of all-electric power, and are playing Genghis Khan in the ‘retirement’ of all our reliable power sources.
It’s ironic that the eight charging stations in the photo at the top could have taken care of all those vehicles if they were gas pumps and the cars ICE or hybrid vehicles and done so in only a few minutes for each vehicle.
One of the definite downsides to EVs – you need a hell of a lot more charging stations to ‘fuel’ the equivalent number of ICE/hybrid vehicles on a small number of gas pumps.
This is really a great little story. I think it’s also interesting that the “problems” solving is also another tale of the LEFT that will eventually eat their own.
“You, know the thing… ” Where they divide people into groups (sexual identification, color, race etc) until they have all these groups competing with each other to be the group de jur.
Well now, EVs need energy… and when the LEFT succeed in getting the EV side of the equation to engulf the fossil fuel drivers while attacking energy, the energy paucity problem will affect them too.
EVs are city cars, period. Well suited for that application but not for travel beyond a single charge.
OMG, he had to wait 15 minutes to charge. How long did it take to charge.
Here in urban Southern California, I see people regularly queuing for 30 minutes or more at the Costco gas station to save money on the gas. But, of course, once they get to the pump, it takes less than 5 minutes to fill up. And people regularly queue up at the Tesla charging station in a local shopping center. And it has about 20 chargers.
I haven’t had to do that since the Arab Oil Embargo and we could only fill up on alternate days. It is a distinct possibility that if the demand exceeds the supply of electricity, some sort of similar controls will be imposed.
I’ll buy a nice mid-size ICE pickup truck before the new EPA fantasy fuel milage rules kick in. Hopefully, that will be never if the Republican party can ever get its act together for more than 15 minutes.
I live in a rural area. I can’t imagine the expense of rewiring the countryside to accommodate EV charging and other net-zero demands. Many truck owners in this area drive pickup trucks because of need. None of them are interested in EV trucks. They simply can’t haul anything for an reasonable difference.
Second pass, Rich’s semi-comic video about picking up a Rivian and driving it long distance (to avoid dealer markup) home on the heavily populated East Coast (where charging stations are said to be common) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosf7CeSGyA
Rich is the same guy who brought the Chevy LS-powered Tesla conversion to the world.
Do not forget that all of those people in the queue are likely getting hot charges, which radically diminishes battery life, by up to 50%. Yeah, all good if you do not mind replacing the battery every 3 to 4 years. My Mazda RX-2 gasoline Wankel engine went 250,000 miles and the engine was fine, just the body falling apart. We have million-mile diesel engines in our buses and they want us to use EV buses that cannot do an entire bus route without charging. This means you would need four or five times the bus fleet because most of them would be charging (if not burning in place) at any given time.
I keep reading about not using the heater in an EV to save power, but what about the air-conditioning? How about driving an EV in the southeast US in August?
Very few cars had A/C when I was a child. Maybe that becomes a thing again?
The reason A/C isn’t mentioned is because it’s a moot point. A/C draws power from the engine thus reducing milage, it doesn’t matter if the car is ICE or EV the reduction happens in either case.
In a modern ICE vehicle, running A/C doesn’t meaningfully reduce mileage.
On the other hand:
In an EV, A/C greatly reduces mileage/range (cabin heating in the winter and A/C cooling in summer inflict an enormous draw on precious battery capacity.. https://www.sae.org/news/2018/05/new-bev-thermal-optimization-studies ).
Re: “Can you save gas by driving without A/C?”
“As much as we’d like to deliver a definite “yes!” or even a “no!” to this question, it’s more complicated than that. That’s because you need to consider your vehicle’s specific configuration and the type of AC compressor it uses.
“At a very high level, there may be a slight gas savings with the AC off and windows up,” Bennett says. “However, the savings would be minor and not realized by most consumers.”
(Source: https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/does-car-air-conditioner-save-gas-fact-or-fiction/ )
— ICE vehicles made and will keep America (and everywhere) GREAT!
— EV’s are inefficient, not-fit-for-purpose, JUNK. The End.
At least while he waited he could have gone and seen the dog on the tuckerbox!
Would a car with two batteries, one connected to the generator, the other to the motor, automatically switched at full charge, count as an EV wrt EU law?
A local town just bought a EV street sweeper for $650K, paid
with a $500K grant from DEQ which was from the VW emissions settlement.
Their old diesel unit was an ’06 and was said to be in good shape. They might want
to keep the old unit around for a while IMO, just in case. I bet they could have
bought a couple of new ICE units for the price of this one.
I’m waiting for the EV power boat regs to come out, should be amusing to see how
they say to charge an off shore boat 100 miles out.
If EVs suffer decreased ranges by running their heaters in the relatively benign winter conditions between New York and Washington, can anyone imagine what the figures would be in the Upper Midwest or almost any place in Canada when temperatures hover around highs of zero F. or lower? And what sort of of range reduction would be experienced when driving with the A/C running at 90F? It’s becoming increasingly evident that EVs may be suitable essentially for little more than short range urban commuting, while long hauling is reserved for gas/diesel types.
“Or maybe EVs could tow a diesel generator on a trailer, to provide a continuous popup charge during long trips” Or, maybe, forget the electric motor vehicle and just drive a diesel car. Why is this so hard to figure out?
Indexes of progress that have been used frequently for our quality of life, are labor-saving devices that save us time and make things more convenient. It would seem that EVs fail on both points.
The way to deal with charging is to make standard removable batteries so that a discharged battery can be removed by a machine and a charged battery can be inserted. An alternative that nobody is talking about is the boron car where boron is burned in a turbine car, the ash is saved and then put near a nuclear reactor to drive off the oxygen and turn it back into boron. Burning boron requires a high oxygen concentration but oxygen is the only triplet atmospheric gas so it is preferentially attracted to a transition metal like cobalt in a ceramic or polymer which would concentrate the oxygen in the air. Since cobalt is in short supply, other transition metals could be tried.
It was a 15 minute wait? With a “long queue”, I would expect much more than 15 minutes. That’s about the time it takes one car on a very fast charger.
Any motorcyclist can testify to how fast vehicles, including motorcycles, lose heat to wind chill temperatures at highway speeds.
Business Insider reporter was lucky to not have inclement weather, weather that requires heating the vehicle’s glass to prevent ice buildup or fogging.
A sleet/freezing rain storm would’ve immobilized them.
If they’d tried the drive in areas that experience seriously cold weather, they’d be harshly crippled for time and warmth as more heat requires greater draw on the battery.
Waiting inside the car during charging likely requires heating the car while charging.