A lot of hyperbolic reporting but there’s a ton of off-peak excess overnight electricity capacity. This is also when you will tend to be charging because you are home and done driving for the day.
Many utilities already offer off peak rates generally. My utility offers incentives to install an EV charger which is networked and then gives you a rebate for charging overnight after 11pm. My EV charging is barely 30% of my wintertime electric use, driving 500-800 mi/month. This is in a home with oil heat. In summertime using AC in the home, my EV usage will shrink as a percent of usage.
Current solar prices keep dropping and incentives are pretty big there as well, so if you are a big EV driver you could put up some solar with a pretty quick break even of ~4 years or so. Finance it correctly and you won’t have any increase in your monthly outlays.
Biggest barrier right now is simply EV cost. I love my car but EVs are still only barely price competitive after incentives/gas savings if you are a small/midsize sedan shopper.
If you need something larger like a CUV/SUV/Van/Truck, EVs are only price competitive with a luxury brand/vehicle in the class.
> but EVs are still only barely price competitive after incentives/gas savings if you are a small/midsize sedan shopper.
Is this true if you also consider maintenance? EVs require much less maintenance - no oil changes, filters, no cooling system, no fuel system and associated pumps. Much less time wasted to service those things.
Sure, the costs are higher up-front for an EV but cost of ownership over the lifetime of the vehicle are much lower.
You’re right. You should be upvoted, not downvoted. And then there is the cost of accidents. I’ve had two people hit me (their fault in both cases) and both clearly expressed to me their intention to lie about the details of accident to avoid responsibility. They then followed through and lied to the insurance company, just as they said they would.
You might think I must live in a sketchy area to encounter such people. Well no. One was a specialist doctor at Stanford hospital and the other worked at Apple. But they both lied. My car defended me from severe financial costs these people could have inflicted on me. Thousands of dollars if you add up the two cases. And that’s in just a couple years of ownership. Both were caught on video and were held responsible despite their lies.
Of course it might seem that having cameras has nothing to do with being an EV. But some EVs do have a lot of cameras, and that’s part of the cost people complain about, but it’s also part of how the car has much lower total cost of ownership. It should be factored in when making cost comparisons, just like the lower maintenance costs you point out.
The way it does have to do with the car being an EV is that these cameras are backed by a massive battery, so they can be always on. ICE cars can’t come even close to doing that.
> You might think I must live in a sketchy area to encounter such people. Well no. One was a specialist doctor at Stanford hospital and the other worked at Apple. But they both lied
You must have been upper middle class for either too long or not long enough to not thing upper middle class folks can be sketchy as hell :-).
> Of course it might seem that having cameras has nothing to do with being an EV. But some EVs do have a lot of cameras, and that’s part of the cost people complain about, but it’s also part of how the car has much lower total cost of ownership. It should be factored in when making cost comparisons, just like the lower maintenance costs you point out.
Sorry to bore you. Its just, you know, we're living in the middle of history's largest income inequality[1]. Yes it is a problem for civil society and the rule of law when money and power get to elude justice and equal rights. People who unfairly abuse privilege are problematic, they are not 'the problem'. Not being held accountable is a privilege, and it is leads to highly anti-social behavior. It means laws exist only for lower classes. It means laws don't really exist, only power. Carry on, my beleaguered friend.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. But it is besides the point. OP was making generalizations regarding people of "privilege." I respectfully disagree. I feel that you find dishonest people in all walks of life. More importantly, I think this type of prejudice and "demonizing the other" is quite damaging to our society. "Privileged" is such a vague, subjective basket to throw people in. Who's privileged? Anybody who has something (physical or abstract) you don't? Let's attack ideas not people.
There is actually some interesting research on this.
Paul Piff had some findings that rich people are more likely to break rules to get ahead for example (he has a nice Ted talk btw). However, more recent research found that this is largely/likely due to wealth but being "primed" to think about money, i.e. if you think about money your less likely to help other etc..
I definitely concur there is a broad distribution of dishonest behavior and it can't be monopolized by a certain caste.
The practical issue I'm concerned with is around the ability of a minority of people to afford 6-8 figure legal and PR bills and avoid accountability for all manner of issues. When you can tie up courts for years to play financial triage and get the best reputation money can buy, you aren't likely to be held accountable.
I know a person who drove their car into a wall while drunk and high in college. Their parents paid $5000 to an attorney and their DUI charge was eventually dropped. Another friend's life took a different course when they got their DUI under similar circumstances but without an attorney, and despite their earnest efforts it's been hard to overcome within the job market.
I'm arguing that the defacto disparity of legal budgets is quite damaging to the fabric that holds our society together, which is equal treatment under blind justice. It means an equal distribution of dishonesty is punished disproportionately according to familial wealth.
I think you'll find this definition of privilege quite in line with OP's meaning:
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Priviledge
>A particular benefit, advantage, or Immunity enjoyed by a person or class of people that is not shared with others. A power of exemption against or beyond the law. It is not a right but, rather, exempts one from the performance of a duty, obligation, or liability.
I encourage people to read "The Life of Greece" by Will Durant. It resonates with our times.
They also had wealth inequality. Sometimes, it resulted in the poor and wealthy fighting. This fighting was often very brutal with each side putting the other to death. Once in awhile, an enlightened leader would come who would put into place a system for greater prosperity for all.
The suggestion that modern society has greater inequality than we had under feudalism is certainly the most laughably ridiculous thing I’ve heard today.
First, let me say I do think I interpreted that article's data incorrectly as the US at .81 Gini coeficient, when in reality its probably closer to ~.45. Medieval Europe was closer to 40, but definitely not the magnitude I took from my initial source.
There are several ways to look at inequality. The most simplistic way to so do is looking at relative wealthy by decile and comparing the ratio between the top and bottom. In feudal society, everybody was relatively poor, and the wealth gap may be on the order of 10-100X. In modern times, that ratio may be far larger and under a certain definition that would be mean higher inequality. I'll concede that this approach fails to capture the practical experience of the haves and have-nots over time, and having our's hit all-time highs isn't immoral if there is some baseline of sufficiency at the bottom. It also doesn't account for social mobility, which we exceptional at.
Still, we live in a novel time where orders of magnitude of wealth that haven't existed before. It is hard to fathom, and calls into question what is and isn't a de-facto privilege of enjoying.
Not commenting on the rest, just wanted to say something about you claim that "our" (I assume you mean US) mobilty is exceptional. That is an often repeated myth, and in fact part of the US "folklore" ("rags to riches").
Interesting, thanks for sharing. You're right about the folklore, and while there are some strong outliers that have done quite well in the US, but those would be hard to attribute to anything special about US education and support systems.
Although the ranking is named "social mobility" it isn't clear that that is what is measured; the report seems slightly confused.
The visual capitalist provides a definition of social mobility - children having a better life than their parents or being unconstrained by their socio-economic status. But the index they reference doesn't measure that. It measures more general Quality of Life metrics like prevalence of malnourishment or quality of the social safety net.
So while a high score reflects an easier life for the low end of the social ladder it doesn't actually measure their ability to move up it. I could on paper come up with a country that scored quite well on most of the index measures and had a rigid caste system where children could never outperform their parents and cannot escape their birth status.
Your additional suggestion that corruption in modern democracies is somehow comparable to the representation afforded to feudal peasants is only very slightly less laughably ridiculous than the parent comment about economic inequality.
I didn’t say anything about corruption, didn’t imply anything about corruption, and I am now clarifying that I am not referring to anything about corruption.
Children are fed lies about their role in this society and spend a lifetime acting surprised that their ideas never happen. We could also just stop doing that. Its not corrupt that we don't have a direct democracy, we just dont have a direct democracy. And the system we do have has different rules, which simply don't include the capability of “the proletariat” to have the same effect as immortal organizations with enough resources to maintain focus.
I didn’t say that. I was simply pointing out an exception: Poor people doesn’t know how to game the system and always follow the rule; while privileged do the opposite.
There is a lot of research from Paul Piff that you can Google. However, more recent research is a bit more nuanced and found that it has likely to do with a focus on money, a bit further up the thread I linked to a BBC article which gives a good overview.
I know very little on the subject, but Kevin Dutton seems to think psychopathy helps one succeed in certain fields and thus these fields have a higher proportion
From a non-american point of view, I don't understand how a racist comment like this can be tolerated.
Generalization like this is one of the reason why your country is so divided lately.
I never mentioned race. It didn’t enter the picture here [Edit: as far as I can tell but... the stuff can be subtle]. fwiw the doctor wasn’t white. Entitled, definitely. I do understand your point and would agree that white privilege is a thing.
> What's "white privilege"? A secret spell that a white dude from a trailer park can pronounce to summon wealth?
Unfortunately, it doesn't confer any mana. However, the white dude's stats for "culture fit" during interviews get buffed (+2 Luck), medical staff tend to believe him when he says he's in pain (+1 Health), and if he's ever in front of a judge, he gets a lighter sentence than those with darker complexions (+2 Charisma).
For me, being white in a mostly black HS but mostly white teachers & principle, "white privilege" ended up meaning I could skip out of study period to get a sandwich at a deli next to the school and come back and eat it, and the teacher would just smile and give a little laugh. Black kids got detentions for shouting in the hallway and all kinds of minor things that I also did, and never got detention for.
I'm an upper middle class white guy. I have no "privilege's" except being blamed for stuff by my skin color by those who claim to be fighting racism.
I have what's called "results" of hard work, good decisions and a healthy dose of luck to go from the poor kid of a single mother on government cheese and living on family couches to making a good salary at a good job. I earned my place - I wasn't "privileged" into it.
The only REAL privilege I have is being an American - and that's color blind. The top 1% globally make 30k/year and that's the vast majority of Americans. And I'm not ashamed of that... I'm proud of it - as I should be.
Any attempts to place race as a factor is done by what we love to call... racists.
I don’t like the term myself, but I think it is fair to acknowledge that plenty of people are disadvantaged due to their skin color, race, religion etc.
For instance I know I have more opportunities because I am white, belonging to western culture and culturally Christian (I am an atheist by celebrate Christmas and all that), than I would have had if I was black or muslim while living in the West.
But this is not uniform. My opportunities if I looked Asian would likely be very similar to looking white.
It isn’t a mystery that a culture favors people looking like themselves. Had I grown up in Japan I am sure I would have been at a disadvantage for not looking Japanese.
Disadvantage is due to far more than skin color, race, religion, etc... I think there are wide swaths of 'white' America that are disadvantaged as well.
Born into poverty is also a disadvantage. Having a handicap is a disadvantage. And I recognize that otherwise I would not be a social democrat.
And that is why I advocate social democratic policies such as reducing inequality. Giving everybody equal access to health care, education etc.
But the point is we should recognize the disadvantage somebody faces and seek to help rather than belittle it by saying “other people have problems too”
Stop the white adjacent bullshit. There is a substantial Asian underclass. Your opportunities if you looked Asian would only be very similar to whites if you were upper middle class Asian.
The difference is that some of those lower and lower middle class Asians who make it go up through the educational system (work hard and study culture).
That is why so many Asians defend magnet schools. How do you think many of them rose up from poverty?
The lower and lower middle class Asians don’t initially have the same networking opportunities or social access that whites do.
Also whites from disadvantaged backgrounds often face different difficulties.
Here is my vantage point of how the game is played. I went to a magnet high school.
The rich kids, irrespective of race, mostly didn’t have better grades. What they had was richer backgrounds and more opportunities (parents able and willing to pay for liberal arts colleges, willing and able to pay for them to go to medical or law school or pursue a PhD, willing and able to sacrifice the years to do so). There were some exceptions but it typically required whole family sacrifice and of course there was a gradient.
The poor kids didn’t have the knowledge or long term thinking. Decisions of what school to go to was based mostly on what was affordable. Decisions of what to do were limited to what major to take.
After school, the rich kids and to a lesser extent the middle class white kids have access to much stronger networks. These networks are the real difference maker. It lets you in on opportunities: jobs at hot startups, easier access to jobs, information on investment opportunities, getting promoted, etc...
It is these opportunities that have a huge multiplier effect.
If you are rich, you play the system. If you are poor, the system plays you. If you are white in the US, it’s easier for you to fit in but you can also fit in (speak right, dress right, think right) if you come from the same background/mindset.
One last thing, do you think that the rich and poor kids hung out together in high school?
I think this is quite a common reaction for someone white coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds and making it to a good wealth. This is quite an achievement, more than 40% of children born in the lowest wealth quartile stay there.
I believe it stems from the feeling that the talk of white privilege is taking something away from this achievement, so there is a counter reaction.
To that I say that yes breaking the circle of poverty is a great achievement, but acknowledging that others have factors that make it even more difficult does not take away from this achievement.
It's sad that you have a blind spot as to the benefits that have been afforded to you by society that others do not have. And, of course, since you cannot experience what life is like on the other side, you will continue to have this blind spot and deny that you have it.
I think one negative is that most of the debates about privilege are almost uniformly centered around gender and race. I.e., the features we can easily and quickly distinguish. (Ironically, the same reason why discrimination on those grounds is so pervasive).
I can’t look at you and tell if you grew up the child of a surgeon or a cashier. Or in a loving home or abusive one. With a trust fund or encumbered with debt. But I can make a fairly accurate guess at your gender or race.
What I think isn’t always articulated well is that people don’t feel like the totality of privilege and hurdles are taken into account in these discussions. We over simply our mental models and discussions to race and gender as if that was the totality of our life story and people naturally push back on this. (Not saying you are doing this) It doesn’t mean privilege doesn’t exist, just that it’s rarely as simple a picture as one tends to find in public dialogue and that’s why it makes some bristle
People focus on the white privileged males.... ignoring that the U.S. is full of uneducated, broke, white males with little going for them. The country is like 70% white... so of course on a numerical basis you're going to come across more well to do whites than other races.
But as a white male - the U.S. did repress the Japanese, American Indian, Muslim, Black, Jewish, Hispanic etc in large swaths, and numerous other minority races in localized areas.
and, around the world, those groups repress others. It's almost as if it's a human condition not limited to "white".
As a white male, I live in a country where I'm surrounded by successful people of all stripes - color, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc, etc, etc.
Do we have a perfect history as a country? no... but we also provide opportunity to all - and we have POC in EVERY level of society. From cops to Presidents.
(Hint: I never said Obama ended racism... in fact, I wouldn't say that because his policies and his party have made racism WORSE with their identity politics and making everything about race.)
Undoing the damage done by the war on drugs and reevaluating the prison system would go a long way to equalize the playing field, if we really must get side-tracked by racially charged arguments.
The real problem with America is poverty. We need to help all impoverished people. All of them.
It's sad that race is being blamed by those claiming to be against racism.
My benefits, as said before, are being American - and I embrace those benefits. Nothing to be ashamed of.
"life on the other side" I refuse to treat others as less because of their skin color. You might be racist but I'm not. I'm surrounded by successful people of all color (and sexs, religions, lifestyles, etc) who don't cry victimhood.
You will continue to be either a victim or treating "POC" as victims who aren't smart enough or good enough - IE treating people different based on their skin color. (IE: Liberals talk down to POC because they look down on them. You might want to check YOUR "priviledge" and how you treat others - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/white-liber...)
I refuse to treat minorities as if they aren't good enough... society shows that is a lie and, as I was raised, treating people differently based on skin color is racism.
You may be okay being a racist... I refuse to be one.
Completely agree. Most racism in the USA can be explained by poverty—of which "POC" are disproportionately represented. America's systemic racism is better described as systemic poverty combined abuse of the poor.
Yes, but the problems are interwoven. Poverty amplifies the problem of racism. But racism is what caused that poverty in the first place.
Now I do believe that more social democratic policies would benefit African-Americans a lot. But it would not completely eradicate the problems of racism and they would still be worse off than white.
The problem with only tackling racism and not inequality and poverty is that, even if you removed racism completely, African-Americans would still be stuck with being poor, simply for historical reasons.
Just like poor white people are likely to have kids which are poor.
> Poverty amplifies the problem of racism. But racism is what caused that poverty in the first place.
I partly agree, but I’d argue that it’s less complicated. I would rephrase thusly: Poverty IS the problem. And historical racism is the cause of a lot of that poverty.
> even if you removed racism completely, African-Americans would still be stuck with being poor, simply for historical reasons.
I agree in principle. The question is how you solve for systemic poverty. I think the first, most obvious step is to enact a very steep inheritance tax. That would be the most effective way to dampen generational capital inequality.
The second thing you could do is a generous UBI because that would dramatically benefit the systemically poor. The most effective way to lower income inequality is to raise the floor.
If one group of people are at a disadvantage due to racism and discrimination, then how do you suggest one compensates for that?
Do you shrug and go "though luck! It is what it is," or do you use legislation to try to compensate and level the playing-field?
And to play the devils advocate. Say I was a racist and I was very okay with it along with 150 million other Americans. And together we make life miserable for POC. How do you suggest dealing with us?
What's your suggestion? Reparations? Who gets them? People who were never slaves? Do descendants of union members - white people who freed the slaves - get credit and exemption from paying for it? And where you going to get the money? Taxes that hit the poor the hardest?
My action points? Stop treating minorities as victims and idiots unable to take care of themselves. Its called being a decent human being. Everyone - minorities included - already have opportunities for college and starting businesses and all that. It's called American Privilege's.
You must mean the privilege of being beaten by my father from the age of three after he came back from Vietnam. Or, the emotional abuse my mother handed out because she got pregnant in high school and blamed me for ruining her future? Or, could it be the privilege of being thrown out of the house after high school with the clothes on my back and $300 in my wallet. Maybe it was being taken advantage of the landlord that took my money for a room in his house, only to slip into the room at night to molest me, then throw me out after brushing off his advances. It must be all that privilege of being homeless, bathing out of a toilet bowl in a public bathroom.
But of course, I am a white male, so all misfortune in my life must be my own damn fault.
Racism is discrimination of a different race based on the belief that your own race is superior. Systemic racism doesn't exist in the United States. There are racists in the United States, but that doesn't mean institutions are inherently racist. Also, racial stereotyping isn't necessarily based on racism and not all bigots are racists. You can make an argument for systemic discrimination, but not on racial superiority.
You are right, but many feel that casting all into overly broad categories of privilege does invalidate their personal experience whether that was the intended aim or not
made up words like "systemic racism" doesn't make those terms real.
Nor does a party voting for Biden and Harris - creators of "systemically racist" laws and corrupt DAs that used those laws to jail innocent black men - have any moral position to talk about such made up words and expect to be taken seriously.
Those are just two ways to describe the same thing. It is impossible to grant equal privilege to everyone else without dismantling the systems of white privilege which are designed to prevent that from happening, and doing so would by definition remove privilege from white people.
You can dismantle privilege by tearing down existing systems or by building greater inclusivity into them. "Dismantling the systems of white privilege" is too vague to disambiguate this semantic dispute.
By analogy, you can force male-only clubs to close and you can force male-only clubs to be inviting to women. Either action would dismantle the systems of male privilege.
Ironically we've already been doing this for so long that at this point there are way more female only clubs/universities/organizations than there are male only.
Even Boy Scouts is now just Scouts and accepts everyone, but Girl Scouts is still girls only.
Indeed, though in some instances that’s as it should be. There are objectively rational reasons why women should have optional access to male-free spaces. There no objectively rational reasons for the converse.
(That said, I’m all for making all such restricted spaces as rare as possible. Any structural division, no matter how well intended, has a cost to society.)
I’d be interested in hearing more elaboration on the points about the double standard, particularly in the context of a society that values individual rights
Men are, as a statistical average, physically stronger. Men are statistically far more likely to rape a woman than the other way around. Setting aside any legal/criminal consequences, rape has substantially higher risk of long term, life altering consequences for the woman than for the man.
Now of course the better solution for this disparity would be to empower women with physical defence skills, e.g. Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And to somehow exorcise the male erotic fantasy out of mainstream female fashion/culture. But as desirable as those solutions are, we can't rely upon top-down social engineering being effective.
It's also important to point out that men being (on average) physically stronger doesn't equate to women being "weak". And having objectively more at risk does not make one "need protecting" in any special way. Such twisting of language is political gamesplaying—and not healthy discourse.
Since you seem to like statically facts, here is one. Here in Sweden, being Muslim and an immigrant is a higher statistical risk of becoming a rapist than being male. To put it in mathematical terms, the portion of all Muslim immigrants that was found guilty of rape was higher than the portion of all males for the same period.
The question that statistician and researchers have been asking if such statistics is at all meaningful in order to reduce crime.
>It's also important to point out that men being (on average) physically stronger doesn't equate to women being "weak".
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, but when you say “weak” are you still speaking in the physical sense? If so I can’t follow the above statement. Weak/strong are relative terms. If you’re willing to say one is statistically stronger than the other, you are implying the other is statistically weaker. To not seems to be the type of wordsmithing used to avoid precise use of language. The reason I specifically put the “individual rights” piece in my previous comment was because I was hoping there was a basis outside the aggregate “average” argument that seems oblivious to individual rights.
I think the BJJ argument can actually be dangerous. Yes, it’s good for anyone to know self defense. But the vast majority of women won’t become skillful enough to overcome the (statistical) innate size/strength disadvantage, particularly any man with training. They can if dedicated enough, but if they don’t it can lead to false confidence.
I think the real issue with the argument is that it only plays well because it’s using terms that are currently socially en vogue. Consider how it would come across instead of saying “men are statistically more likely to rape” you instead advocated for a double standard based on “people of X race are more likely to commit Y crime”. It can be statistically correct and still morally wrong to advocate for such policy because it lacks a nuanced view of the problem.
> I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, but when you say “weak” are you still speaking in the physical sense?
Obviously I was not—otherwise I would have been entertaining a direct logical contradiction.
I am speaking in the terms offered by the user klipt earlier in this conversation tree. This is how dangerous rhetoric is formed. To call someone "weak", no matter how much you qualify its meaning, inevitably leads to many other subjective connotations that I do not agree with.
> To not seems to be the type of wordsmithing used to avoid precise use of language.
On the contrary, it's the type of wordsmithing used to avoid intentional misapplication of language.
> I think the BJJ argument can actually be dangerous. Yes, it’s good for anyone to know self defense. But the vast majority of women won’t become skillful enough to overcome the (statistical) innate size/strength disadvantage, particularly any man with training. They can if dedicated enough, but if they don’t it can lead to false confidence.
I think it's borderline offensive to assume that the "vast majority of women" won't become "skillful enough".
I think it's borderline offensive to suggest that building up confidence is a dangerous idea. Even "false confidence" can increase one's actual physical power. And to say that a policy is dangerous because it won't be effective in all encounters is ridiculous.
It seems you misunderstand the purpose of having broad BJJ training. It's not just about increasing skill. It's not just about increasing confidence (which for many women might be itself sufficient to stop an attack). Rather it's about the culture that would arise among MEN in response to a society where women have more confidence—whether objectively justified or not.
> you instead advocated for a double standard...
I did no such thing and I consider it highly offensive for you to imply that I did.
>I think it's borderline offensive to assume that the "vast majority of women" won't become "skillful enough"
I think there’s some miscommunication here. The qualifier is that most wouldn’t become skilled enough to overcome the strength disadvantage. To be fair, the same would apply to men with the same strength disadvantage although that would be less likely due to the lower likelihood for the same strength disparity. Most people won’t spend enough time developing that skill. If I had to speak in broad terms, it would probably take a purple belt (maybe a strong blue belt) to overcome a large strength disadvantage with even a moderate amount of athletic ability. Most people won’t put in that time, irrespective of gender. If you disagree, join an mma/boxing gym (that actually spars) and see what percentage of people stick with it for 4-5 years. I would venture a guess that most people who flippantly advocate BJJ as a solution probably haven’t been in a real physical altercation and don’t know how it would go down. And no, sparring/rolling in the gym doesn’t generally equate to this type of altercation. I never claimed its not effective because it can’t handle every situation (because nothing can). BJJ is not worthless, it’s just pragmatically a low percentage solution.
I’m not quite sure why you’re taking so much as borderline/highly offensive but it rarely leads to providing clarity in discourse. Again, there is real danger with instilling false confidence (I.e. when confidence outstrips one’s abilities) whether you are offended or not. I’m not interested in placating someone at the expense of putting them at higher risk.
Your opinion makes a lot of sense now that you've analogised rape situations to a lucid, rules-based sparring competition. If I were to grant that rather weird analogy as valid, you would be completely right and I would most certainly be wrong.
Again, you have the wrong takeaway. I’m saying the opposite. Your logic seems to be jumping all over the place; on one hand you say BJJ will help, on the other you say it makes no sense because it’s not a good analogue.
BJJ is heavily ruled based and that’s why it doesn’t necessarily simulate real world altercations. Many people dabble in martial arts, never spar, and develop the false sense confidence im talking about: There’s a saying in BJJ, “punch a black belt in the face, they become a brown belt, punch them again they become a brown belt, punch them again...”
Sparring in a gym is absolutely not stimulating a real life scenario which is why is can easily lead to false confidence. But it can show you your skill level without endangering yourself too much.
The point of the sparring comment was to illustrate how much work it is to get competent at a martial art. Advocating that BJJ will prevent rape is ignoring how few people will spend the necessary time to get skillful as well as ignoring all the blind spots that rule-based martial arts introduce.
Advocating BJJ is fine. Making someone think it’s going to save them without also pointing out that it will take years to be effective isn’t. People who miss that second part have probably never trained or been in a real fight or are trying to drum up business for their martial arts school. Honestly, it comes across as the you regurgitated the comment about BJJ because you heard it somewhere and ran with it. Anyone who’s trained in BJJ knows the first year or so you become acutely aware of how helpless you actually are on the ground.
Even if you're right on average (this is not establishing a position on whether that's the case, but hypothetically if you are), there are exceptions. Not recognizing exceptions is an issue even in this scenario. There are places where being white isn't advantageous, not only places one may travel to, but where one calls home.
To be fair, the sentry mode on Teslas is great but if we are going to talk about cost of accidents & Tesla ... it’s mostly a negative story.
I’m an owner and fortunately avoided accidents so far, but the stories of people waiting on parts dealing with rentals for weeks or months are.. extensive. The cost of accidents is reflected in the fairly high insurance costs for Teslas. This may not be terribly different than a German luxury make you could be cross shopping in the price range, but it’s something to bear in mind.
>This may not be terribly different than a German luxury make you could be cross shopping in the price range, but it’s something to bear in mind.
Definitely seems higher. I just checked the price for insuring a 2019 Mercedes-Benz E-Class (hybrid). It was 1350 €/year or 2100 €/year if I choose the premium coverage options. For a 2019 Tesla Model 3, the same prices were 2030 €/year and 2670 €/year.
2019 Tesla Model S was even worse at 2400 €/year and 3260 €/year. Model S is definitely more expensive than an E-Class, so I also compared to a 2019 Mercedes-Benz S-Class (hybrid), which was about 16,000 € more expensive to buy than the Model S. Got 1920 €/year and 3060 €/year.
(Premium coverage options were parking coverage, glass insurance, better write-off compensation and temp car coverage.)
Those are.....insane insurance prices? Which country is this for? What kind of driver?
I got a new Volvo XC60 T8 last year(400bhp, £60k car), my fully comprehensive insurance as a 29 year old is...£400 a year. With their highest tier premium insurance option, with premium courtesy car, full EU cover, glass cover, full legal cover, 20 million euro liability cover....etc, full package basically.
Before that I had a Mercedes GLA45 AMG and my insurance was marginally more expensive, like £500 a year.
I can't believe any of the cars you listed would be more to insure than these two....so what gives? Why is it so expensive?
They're the quotes that I'm getting from my insurance company's website. For context, I am 27, live in Finland and don't have full bonuses.
Granted, the online prices usually suck compared to what you can get once you call (or get called by) an agent. If I tried buying my current insurance for my car it's giving me 1100 €/year whereas my actual price is 940 €/year.
A 2015 Mercedes-Benz GLA45 (49,000 €) would cost me 1380 €/year or 2040 €/year with all bells and whistles.
Tesla has their own insurance product[1] to try and lower what they think are inflated insurance costs on their cars. I don't know if they actually do offer better prices. It would be interesting to know.
I vaguely recall (could be wrong) Elon said the other companies are not adequately taking into account Tesla safety features. Possibly including the cameras I mentioned.
They do take the safety features into account, but notice I said “adequately.”
Whether Elon actually said it or not, I think it’s a good hypothesis.
I think it's much more likely that insurance companies have the long-developed expertise to assess the risks and actual claims experience of insuring whatever it is they insure. It's the primary thing that allows them to earn a profit. And so if they all think that Teslas are higher risks, they are probably right.
Also there might be real numbers on the costs. Like cost of repairs and during unavailability period cost of rental vehicle if such coverage is included. Specially later I have understood has at times been issue. So if you need to pay your customer to have rental vehicle for weeks or months while car is waiting for parts at shop it does have an effect on premiums. And it absolutely should.
But that hypothesis doesn't explain the large price difference between the companies, which in both cases are underwritten by other companies with long-developed expertise.
It could also be that Tesla is just willing to take a smaller profit out of the business, relative to others.
That doesn't really jive with the fact that the S-Class has cheaper insurance rates despite being a more expensive car and whose ownerbase typically consists of very rich people.
I imagine that's only available in the US. The page is in English and there's only an American phone number even when switching to the local Tesla site.
It say only California at the moment. They say they are expanding to other US states. If it catches on I imagine they will continue to expand it if its not illegal in other places.
Only available in California, according to their website, which means it effectively does not exist. This is a product that’s been “coming soon” to the rest of the US since April 2019. Unless you live in CA you should include the high insurance costs into your estimate of TCO for a Tesla and treat “Tesla insurance” as a PR stunt.
What's this madness of driving a car that you cannot afford to repair out of pocket?
I understand paying for mandatory liability insurance, since you might hit a Bugatti Veyron and do damage far surpassing your net worth. But I have no idea why would someone pay 10% of the vehicle cost per year to cover repairs to their own vehicle due to their own driving mistakes. How about... they drive a cheaper vehicle until they learn how to drive?
This is the worst fucking take I've read in a while.
>How about... they drive a cheaper vehicle until they learn how to drive?
I have insurance against fire, theft, vandalism and parking lot damage. Please do tell me how your awesome driving skills prevent these sorts of damage.
I'd also very much like to know how you live your life if you have the money to pay for your car to be repaired out of pocket in case of fire, theft or having a moose come through your windshield.
The part about driving skill is definitely just wrong, there are many reasons why cars get damaged. Though I agree that it's way better to drive cars that are cheap enough to repair or replace out of pocket.
Insurance companies make money by overpricing the actual risk. And they make a LOT of money. The expected value of an insurance contract is negative to the buyer. Coverage of tail risk (e.g. millions in liability), makes sense since you don't want to get bankrupted, but when there's a capped risk you can tolerate (e.g. value of car), avoiding the insurance statistically saves you money. Insurance companies pay their actuaries very well to guarantee this.
Plus, not having to deal with insurance companies makes car repair so much less stressful in my experience...
> The part about driving skill is definitely just wrong, there are many reasons why cars get damaged.
There is a long list for sure - but they are all very unlikely. The risk of having your car stolen can be mitigated with a 50$ GPS transmitter. Fire? What year is this, cars still spontaneously combust, or maybe do you live on an active volcano? A moose going though your window sounds like a life and death situation, having your car totaled and walking away safe and sound would be glorious.
If you were to purchase insurance for such risks, it would be negligible compared to the major source of insurance claims, trafic accidents. So you are are either paying for other's people accidents, and it makes no sense to continue to do so, or you are actually getting a positive value out of it because you are a bad driver, case in which it makes sense to try to improve your driving, while keeping the insurance.
All of my non-mechanical car damage has been either from someone else's driving or while the car was parked. The last one involved a guy who had a seizure at the wheel and barrelled through a red light in a truck. There wasn't any way to avoid it, fortunately it was a light swipe though.
My most expensive repair was in a parking lot where someone scraped and dented the entire side of my car trying to get into a space they really should not have. I'm under the impression most damage to cars happens in parking lots or street parking.
Still, as I wrote above, I still agree that insurance for the car isn't worth it, even though at some points it would have had positive value for me. In the long run it statistically won't.
For experienced and attentive drivers that tend to be hit by others, it's important to have proof of liability. The dashcam (preferably one that operates when the car is stopped) has saved me multiple times. Insurance companies control the claims process and setup rules that disadvantage the uninsured. Whenever I am in a trafic incident, I stop the car on the spot and take at least a bunch of photos with both vehicles involved from multiple angles, the damaged area and any debris , the general vicinity, lanes etc. The capacity of self delusion and/or outright lying of people is fantastic, I have had one claim the incident happened in a completely different intersection.
If you have such proofs and credibly convey the message that you know the law and are willing to sue, then all damage becomes fixable on someone else's insurance and you pay only normal wear and tear on your vehicle. In 200.000 Km, I only had a single fender bender that was my fault, around 200€ in damage - while insurance would have costed me in the 5000-10000€ range for the same period. Since I am an aggressive (within the limits of the law) driver, I was involved in a dozen or so minor accidents.
That's a good point. So more precisely, at any instant your current risk is capped. I think that's more important, since it defines your worst case outcome. You could keep buying new cars, and after the 20th one is stolen go bankrupt, but you probably wouldn't do that if you can't afford it, so bankruptcy isn't a possible outcome.
The capped instantaneous risk lets you go for the option with highest expected value without having some chance you'll get instantly bankrupted.
I don't think it works like that. If you're just talking about avoiding bankruptcy, well you could just buy a car and not replace it the first time if it's stolen/destroyed.
Presumably in this scenario you actually require a car. That said, insuring it will cover you for any number of losses in the year, whereas setting aside an amount of savings equal to the value of the car will cover you for only one loss.
You can't just be chasing the positive EV when the variance is potentially large. For example, if Warren Buffet offered to flip a coin with you for your net worth, plus $100 bonus if you win, the expected value is very slightly positive but I believe you'd be unwise to take bet that unless your current net worth was very low already.
The risk depends on your net worth and earning power, as you allude to. Your net worth might have low variance if the ratio between it and your car's cost is high.
This is the most precise way to phrase the original recommendation. Don't get insurance for things that are easy for you tolerate the variance on. That can be true if you buy a cheap car and are pretty well off. What's the actual chance your car gets stolen 3 times in a year? After the first 2 times maybe you could change the place you store your car, get a GPS tracker or something?
There were 6858 vehicles stolen in NYC in 2020 (nearly doubled 2019) [0].
There are roughly 2M cars registered in NYC [1].
That's a 1 in 300 yearly chance to have your car stolen at least once. If we assume events are uncorrelated, there's a 1 in 100000 chance of two or more thefts, and a 1 in 25000000 chance of three or more. The odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident in the next year is something like 1 in 8000 [2].
That aside, there's all sorts of optional coverage that most people definitely can tolerate the variance on without calculation.
> You can't just be chasing the positive EV when the variance is potentially large.
There are many investment strategies that are exactly this. Writing options is one example. Forgoing insurance, like option writing, isn't possible without sufficient collateral of your own. I recognize that this is not possible for everyone. There are some cheap cars that work fine though. The biggest takeaway is to second guess the sales pitch on premium insurance plans.
Your example is another instant bankruptcy case, with reward that doesn't come close to compensating the risk.
> I understand paying for mandatory liability insurance, since you might hit a Bugatti Veyron and do damage far surpassing your net worth.
The amount of mandatory liability coverage in most jurisdictions will be a rounding error to totalling a Veyron. E.g., in California the mandatory property damage coverage is $5,000, while the value of the Veyron is about $2 million. So, with mandatory liability coverage your still out of pocket, well, essentially $2 million.
There are a lot of reasons apparently why it might not turn out that way..
Frankly, I don't believe it's "fair" for somebody to be exposing everyone around them to such financial risk. IMHO if you purchase a 2m vehicle and drive it around on public roads, you need the insurance to close the gap between avg/state mandated coverage and what your losses might be. The laws should prob reflect that and limit the average consumers liability.
You probably don't want to think about the “financial risk” for wrongful death liability that lots of people expose other people to if the financial risk for property damage through improper driving that supercar owners expose people to seems unfair.
The value of a shiny new Veyron. Once it's driven off the dealership premises, its value begins a free fall to the ground. I'd be surprised if an average veyron is worth more than 300k.
But, even @ $300K instead of $2-3 Million, that’s still a huge multiple of the mandatory liability coverage in most jurisdictions, so carrying only the mandatory minimum wouldn’t do much for you if you cause one to be totalled.
>Only 450 Veyron were produced by hand up to 2015, selling at prices of at least EUR 1.16 million. These include various exclusive special models which are now sought-after collector's items. Their value has hardly fallen in recent years. More recent used vehicles achieved an average price of EUR 620,000 at international auctions and dealerships in 2011; two years later this had already gone up to EUR 730,000. Currently it’s virtually impossible to find a Veyron on the market for less than EUR 1.3 million, with certain models fetching even considerably higher prices
Trying to apply the same logic to a rare car of which there were under 500 units produced and even less now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NJmB1F2mdE) as you do to your economy car is just wrong.
I wouldn't bother insuring against crashing into a car thats so rare. Otherwise I'd have to insure myself first against bear attacks, lightning strikes and high energy cosmic particles.
As others have said, insurance covers far more than incapability accidents. However, the most important is that it gives you peace of mind -- you're essentially buying peace of mind, for a theoretically small fee (compared to average cost). It's somewhat rare to buy genuine peace of mind (instead of just inconvenience, that is more available).
Tangentially related, I also recommend a good offsite backup scheme (costs a little, but well worth it) versus "taking care of your devices/drives".
It's mandatory if you finance the car. And car loan rates are pretty low, so it often makes sense to take one (including the insurance) even if you could buy in cash.
Though if you have any financial assets to use as collateral, you can get cheaper leverage elsewhere. Then you don't need to buy an insurance contract with negative expected value, for a capped risk that you can tolerate out of pocket.
I borrowed for 6 years at 0.0% on my last car purchase. Even taking into account the portion of insurance that was surplus to the expected value of the insurance, that was about the cheapest money I could find.
I dont think you understand how insurance works in the states. If you get in an accident unless the other driver admits fault insurance companies negotiate and settle. If you aren't an insurance company they will stick you for the whole cost or the cost of litigation and time wasted will far out weigh the benefits of not buying insurance. Only time it makes sense to not insure is when you car value is close to the deductible.
Don't know about that last point. Gas cars have a starter battery and alternators which probably produce enough juice to power cameras, that don't take a lot of power.
While the car is running, certainly. But a 600WH starter battery (which is lead-acid and doesn't really like being run down) is no match for a 60,000WH lithium traction battery.
A typical four-camera 360° setup probably draws about 5-10 watts, more if it's performing motion-detection on the images. You'd be unwise to run that overnight on a typical starter battery, especially in winter. But it's a drop in the bucket for an EV.
(Personally I think this is an egregious amount of "vampire power" to waste if nothing's going on, but apparently a lot of things are going on.)
My two cases were indeed moving violations, but the cameras are there at all times if you choose to leave them on. Well until your battery drops too low, in which case the car prioritizes saving energy for driving. Some people turn them off at home if they feel the power usage is not a good tradeoff. For example if they have a secure garage with cameras already.
> But some EVs do have a lot of cameras, and that’s part of the cost people complain about
I’m still trying to figure out why EV owners rationalize the inclusion of basic consumer electronics to somehow add thousands upon thousands of dollars to the price
As an EV owner, I can say that the maintenance cost savings are being hyped up, at least if you buy a new car every 5 years. About 70% of the expenses I had for my recently sold ICE car are relevant for EVs, too: Yearly inspection (yes it’s cheaper with the EV, but still necessary for most brands; pollen filters need changing and AC needs cleaning), new brakes because they were rusty (a problem even worse for EVs), new tires and seasonal tire rotation, new 12V battery (every EV has one too), new wipers, and cleaning. You’ll probably spend a bit less time at the mechanic with an EV, but the difference won’t be that big.
If you keep your car for longer, an EV will require less expenses for moving parts, but it might offset this by requiring a new battery after 8-12 years (right now, batteries retail for $12k and more, let’s hope this goes down soon).
Given that, fuel savings are really great. With my old ICE car a round trip to the big city cost €10, while with my Ioniq it’s only €3 in summer, when charged at home (even though we pay €0.20/kWh). Maybe €4.50 in winter. So on average we’re looking at something like 60% savings in fuel costs even with our expensive middle european electricity plans.
Curious about brakes because of the things you mentioned brakes and tires cost the most. Original brake pads on my 2014 Subaru lasted me 85k miles, although I did change the fluid at about 40k. That was 5 years for me, so why are the brake issues worse for EVs?
Brakes can get rusty if they don't get engaged frequently enough b/c you're using the regenerative braking most of the time. I've read that a lot of newer EV's will periodically engage traditional brakes to help alleviate this issue though.
FWIW I just had my 2018 leaf inspected and at 22K miles they said the brakes looked good.
I thought drum brakes were considered inferior/cheap/old tech and that everyone switched to disc about 20 years ago? Edit - I should add that when buying a car in the early 2000s having disc was considered a nice feature like "rack and pinyon steering" which was frequently mentioned then too
Indeed! But since EVs rarely need the posterior brakes (if at all), low maintenance becomes more important than performance. Changing 2 disc brakes costs ~€500, and I‘d rather not pay that every few years.
I had a Neon in the late 1990s and it had disc front and drum rear brakes, I assumed it was just because it was a cheap car. That's super interesting how it just isn't as needed for EVs.
>so no waiting in line for 45 minutes every two years either
Pretty fucked up that you only check for air pollution and not actual road-worthiness.
Here all Teslas had an inspection failure rate after of 10.8% (61,000 km driven on average) in 2019 after three years of driving, which is quite bad. For comparison, Mercedes-Benz E-Class and BMW 5-series both had 7.1% (108,000 km and 91,000 km driven on average). This suggests to me that Tesla owners should really spend more time queuing at the shop and at an inspection center.
>Pretty fucked up that you only check for air pollution and not actual road-worthiness.
Pretty fucked up that some states waste everyone's time and money checking for actual road worthiness when that's basically a rounding error compared to all the other sources of danger on the roads.
IMO this is one of the few things CA does right. Obviously CARB is a corrupt money grab shithshow but the idea that you don't really care what people do so long as the cars aren't belching pollution is well thought out.
I get that not seeing shitboxes with rusty fenders makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside but mechanical failure simply isn't a common source of accidents compared to everything else and inspection programs can only do so much to address it.
They're told their cars need zero maintenance in the same way that Toyota owners who get their information from the internet think their cars have magically been engineered to defy the laws of physics.
Sure the fine print in the manual says there's a service schedule, but the pop culture trope says otherwise.
Yes, I think you’re vastly overestimating how much these things cost. A $15k car might need a $100/year in oil changes, and then like $500 in service every $30k miles or so. The most expensive part is probably replacing tires, which is common to the electric car as well.
All of the maintenance on ICE cars gets bad in that 120k miles+ range. But at that point you’ve had to replace the battery on your Tesla, which almost buys you another new $15k car.
Do you have a source for these numbers? According to AAA [0] (and my experience), the average cost of car maintenance is upwards of $1000/year.
Also its more than just oil that electric cars don't need replaaced. Electric cars don't have transmissions and rarely ever use the brakes two more leading causes of both regular maintenance and costly repairs of ICE cars.
Not OP, but I can pluralize his anecdata. I've had my car for 9 years (~120k miles - sat rarely driven for a couple years in the middle). The only maintenance I've had is oil changes (2 or 3 times a year, so $100 estimate seems accurate), brake pads (once or maybe twice? average annual cost maybe $50), engine air filter (like $10, once or twice a year), tires (similar with electric - cheaper for my car with 15" wheels). The only unexpected maintenance was an electric short in the windshield wiper (could happen just as easily to an electric. $100 labour and a $30 part from a scrap yard)
That seems massively excessive oil changing for your mileage.
Fun fact - the same car manufacturers tell British people to change their oil every 21k miles or 24 months, and tell American people to change their oil every 3k miles or 6 months. For literally the same car, being driven in potentially identical conditions.
Americans are just changing their oil needlessly! And they have a whole industry of ‘oil change shops’ you don’t get in many other countries to do the needless work! Bonkers!
I follow the manufacturer's suggested interval of 8000km. The same car supposedly has a longer interval in Japan (16000km), but using a different engine and definitely different operating conditions. It's just not enough of a cost or hassle for me to bother deviating from the recommendations.
I do happily ignore the oil change shop stickers that say it should be changed in 3 months/5000km.
Biggest part of their quote is tires, which apply to the electric cars as well.
1k a year is absolutely insane. That must scale up with expensive cars. A new battery, new brake pads, and and windshield wipers don’t even come near 1k and you don’t even have to replace any of those annually.
> But at that point you’ve had to replace the battery on your Tesla
This isn't true. Typically after 100k miles Teslas lose about 5-10% capacity. I suppose if you are bumping into that limit a lot, it might be a problem, but it would make far more sense to sell your current car and buy a new one at that point. You could get decent resale value out of it because lots of people would be perfectly happy with a Tesla with a 280 mile range versus 310 miles.
There are Teslas out there that have clocked over 300k miles and still have more than 70% of their rated range. Again, even if the current owner has an issue with ~200 miles range, selling a Tesla with a 200 mile range won't be a big problem.
Hard to say long term since EVs are so new. What might be the lifetime maintenance cost of a 30 year old EV with several battery pack changes? No stats exist on that yet.
While EVs are unarguably simpler, the gas cars do have 100+ years of effort into making them reliable. Gas cars today (and even back into the 90s) are so extremely reliable that basically no drivetrain work at all is needed well into the 200K mile range unless you get unlucky with a lemon.
The things that do tend to generate repair work are shared between the platforms. Electronics & wiring, controls, seats, power windows are in my experience the worst offenders. EVs have all that.
Our Fiat 500e's (two) have spent a lot more days in the dealer shop than any of my gas cars ever, FWIW.
It is kind of nice to not have to worry about oil changes! But a ~$50 oil change twice a year won't ever make up for the large cost difference of an EV.
So purely from a cost perspective (not talking about climate impact!), the EVs are not cheaper to own.
If you go to the source of that graphic, you can find more info. The Tesla’s are fairly high on the cost scale, particularly when comparing to other cars (as opposed to SUVs and trucks which typically have heavy duty components and more expensive maintenance)
If you don't live in the USA be sure to go into the settings as there are a number of defaults which may not match your life.
For me, at least, the price of petrol is about 2.5 what the default is and the default yearly distance driven is at least twice what I would do .
As far as I can tell the vehicle sticker prices in the US are about 0.6 to 0.8 what they would be here but you can't change that within the model anyway.
Brakes, don’t forget brakes. Regenerative braking puts less wear and tear onto discs and pads, turning them from wear parts to something that might last the lifetime of the vehicle
I’m also curious about resale. Batteries degrade and a good portion of the vehicle’s value is the battery. Right now the resale is quite good on EVs, but I don’t know if that’s attributable to the novelty of EVs or some other factor that won’t last ten years. Perhaps someone who knows more than I do could weigh in?
Tesla Model 3 has 100k miles warranty for battery with guarantee that battery will have at least 70% capacity remaining. Actual numbers indicate that degradation usually is significantly less - closer to 90% battery capacity at 100k miles: https://electrek.co/2020/06/06/tesla-battery-degradation-rep...
I suspect the fall off is non-linear. I would be curious to know how they fair in the next 100k miles.
I have never bought a car with less than 100k miles on it and I drive pretty nice cars. There are a whole lot of ice cars on the road with more than 100k miles because the last decade has produced very reliable ice vehicles with very replaceable parts.
I suspect that tesla modified the drop by giving you a battery which has a higher capacity than advertised and then borrowing from that extra capacity as the battery degrades. This works until it doesn’t and you run out of extra to borrow from. I wish the mechanics of how the battery is managed long term was more open.
The same article I linked discusses model X that had battery replaced under warranty at more than 300k km. The reason for the replacement was not battery degradation. Here's another article showing graph for up to 200k miles. Looks like Teslas holding capacity quite well even beyond 100k:
>Perhaps someone who knows more than I do could weigh in?
I'm pretty sure that's me, but take everything I say with a grain of salt.
>Right now the resale is quite good on EVs, but I don’t know if that’s attributable to the novelty of EVs or some other factor that won’t last ten years.
IMO it's because 1) the majority of EVs were produced recently (not surprising when the scale of production is increasing exponentially), plus 2) there's generally a lack of cheap ICE-comparable EV options to suck demand away from the used EV market.
Predicting the prices of used cars in 2030 is inherently a little political, so excuse me if I step on toes here.
EVs will be at price-parity with ICE cars by 2024 and will utterly crush them by 2030. As ICE cars are replaced by EVs, things could go one of two main ways:
1) the massive existing supply of ICE cars, plus the massive drop in petrol usage due to EV replacing ICE cars, will mean that second-hand ICE cars and petrol drop massively in price for a while. This causes people to reconsider their EV purchases and a stalling of EV adoption until the ICE-car surplus drains away. This keeps the ICE car infrastructure around for longer than otherwise.
2) (the political bit) ICE cars currently have a certain political protection due to their ubiquity - politicians are often unwilling to raise taxes on cars or petrol, even if it's warranted due to e.g. air pollution or climate destabilisation. A high enough popularity of EVs (e.g. once 30% of cars on the road are EVs) could change the political scene, resulting in a surge in support for getting rid of ICE cars entirely - people are encouraged to have their ICE cars junked in exchange for whatever incentives, and petrol doesn't drop enough to be a complete bargain. ICE cars are relatively rare and people aren't confident in their future, so they keep dropping. The faster they drop, the less political resistance to simply banning them outright. Eventually ICE cars are dead, or as good as.
That said, there are a TON of different factors that are hard to predict the impact of. For example:
* Regardless of scenario, the drop in ICE cars will reduce the revenue of petrol stations, resulting in more of them closing. Fewer petrol stations will exacerbate the switch to EVs, just like the rollout of superchargers and workplace/on-street chargers. It's entirely possible that once we hit e.g. 50% EVs, there's simply no money in petrol stations and several stations have to shut down, causing a feedback loop of fuel stations being less convenient and more expensive, encouraging more EV adoption.
* If petrol stations start closing then there might be a switch to buying fuel deliveries online, which will (IMO) likely result in 'boutique fuels' and customisation. I have no idea what effects that will have, honestly. Either way, the main reason I think this is viable is because this isn't new; when cars were first invented, petrol stations didn't exist and people bought their fuel at the local chemist in cans/bottles.
* It's unclear how far hydrogen will go, but if hydrogen vehicles are common then they may keep petrol stations around for longer than otherwise, as hydrogen stations will likely also be petrol stations. AFAICT Hydrogen vehicles will primarily be trucks, as basically nobody else needs the range that hydrogen offers and hydrogen requires far more up-front infrastructure investment, which requires scale.
* If EVs truly require less maintenance, then we might see a lot of mechanics out of jobs, and as a result we could see lower maintenance costs, making ICE cars comparably more appealing after the initial EV boom but before the surplus mechanics retrain and move into different sectors.
* There may be short-term resource squeezes on EV production - for instance, IIRC lithium mining takes ~7 years to set up a new mine (likely far less to scale up existing mines, mind you) and when you're scaling up exponentially, a small underestimation today will result in a large shortage in 7 years. A stalling of battery production could result in a spike of EV prices, which would encourage a second wind for ICE cars.
* Places that import a ton of energy, like Japan and Korea, might be sticking to fuel cars for a while longer than places with cheaper electricity. In particular, if Japan ever imports a ton of hydrogen, then directly fueling hydrogen cars would make far more sense than Battery EVs charged from a hydrogen-powered grid. If they adopt Hydrogen EVs, then that keeps the R&D ticking along to keep hydrogen in the game elsewhere.
* The politics for ICE cars are heavily tied to the climate - if there's any major political seachange for climate action, well, the reality on that is that ICE cars have zero future and need to be gotten rid of ASAP. So unified demand for a step-change on climate = ICE cars are flat-out dead by 2030.
Gas cars don't need a lot of maintenance. The oil is $40 every few months. Everything else is 100,000 miles if you even bother, or is the same with electric. Cars have improved a lot.
Note that there are a lot of myths drving up costs for no reason. A 3000 mile oil change isn't a treat for your engine. In some tests the least engine wear was 8000 miles on the oil. Changing the oil early lets a bit of dust in so is not a good thing if the oil is good. (Synthetic oil is a treat, but the car will be fine without)
That’s really only true for new cars. As an ICE car ages, the standard deviation for maintenance costs starts to go up quite quickly. Some cars will only need oil and gasoline until they fail, but some will suffer extremely expensive failures.
Get a used toyota corolla. It'll last for hundreds of thousands of miles with minimal issues if you maintain it (oil change, brakes, etc.) At the cost you'll pay, even if it does break down, it'll still be far, far less than the cheapest electric vehicles.
My car is currently 8 years and 150k miles with no issues. There was some leaks to fix, but nothing significant, only $300 for the entire work. I have a truck that is now 22 years old and also 150k miles, but it is a diesel and so you will probably say it doesn't count. My last car (sold only because my job let me take the bus) was at 260k miles and no issues (though I did change the timing belt on schedule).
Modern cars will generally last at least 300k miles today with few problems. When the finally die it is because the body is shot - something that has nothing to do with the power train. (I live in an area where winter means a lot of salt on the roads, my friends in warmer areas report cars lasting even longer).
Of course I probably shouldn't say this. People like you who trade in their almost new cars all the time because they are afraid they are a money pit keep people like me in nice cars for not much money.
> Modern cars will generally last at least 300k miles today with few problems.
That's not been my experience. I was a Honda loyalist and my first 4 cars were all Hondas and the reliability steadily decreased over the years. My first car, an 88, only ever needed regular maintenance and an alternator at 250k miles. My last Honda, an 07, was costing $2500 a year in maintenance when I got rid of it with 127k miles in 2015.
The three most reliable automobile manufacturers according to Consumer Reports Reliability Indexes, by a large margin, are Toyota, Honda, and Subaru.
A more fair comparison would be a higher end Camry, Avalon, or L Series Lexus.
The Corolla is a very simple car in every respect and inexpensive. Reliability goes down when systems get more complicated and expensive. That's why the Acura and Lexus equivalents of there Honda and Toyota counterparts are much less reliable.
Lexus was the most reliable automaker according to consumer reports for awhile. Mazda I think recently dethroned them but they are I think still above regular Toyota. Not sure what your source on this claim about Lexus being less reliable than Toyota...
My source is Consumer Reports. CR lists Lexus as a brand of the Toyota Motor Company, and yes Toyota is the most reliable automaker. But if you look at Brands, Toyota, Honda, and Subaru beat Lexus.
Mazda was never in the running. Mitsubishi has better ratings than them.
Has anyone ever factored in battery replacement cost? All of the things you mention (pumps, etc.) Break only after long usage (60-80-100k?)
Oil changes and filters are reasonably cheap, i guess $50 every 5-10k miles?
I would really want to see long term cost of ownership of ev once you include replacement battery.
Edit: of course the repairs add up as the car gets older for ic (because of things you mention), but i wonder how does that stack against battery itself.
Batteries typically degrade slowly over the life of the car. Not a ton of hard data since there aren't a lot of Teslas out there with 200-500k miles. The ones that have made it that far seem to retain about 90% capacity after 150k miles.
Besides better battery technology. A bigger battery means the discharge rate is lower. The amount of damage discharging does decreases as the discharge rate drops. I think there is a knee around C4-5. And of course the same amount loss in absolute terms is lower as a percentage with a bigger battery. Meaning losing 5kwh on a 30kwh battery is 0.83% vs 5 kwh on a 60kwh battery is only 92%.
Proper way to think of battery life is depreciation per mile. If a battery costs $8000 and lasts 200,000 miles, that's 4 cents a mile. If it only last 150,000 miles that's still only 5.3 cents/mile.
I was in the market recently for an EV but ended up buying ICE instead because of the price difference. The EV cost around 27k Euros, the ICE equivalent cost 17k Euros (both new). I really wanted the EV but even with maintenance costs and gas it would take many years to justify it.
Id want to see some figures there - it does depend on how long a battery pack lasts (and the recycling costs of disposing of dead battery packs) - you can swap out a ICE engine relatively easily and you can DIY it on your own driveway.
You should also consider lifespan. I'm a broken record on this but automotive gasoline engine is basically toast after 5000 to 8000 hours. That more than anything else defines the lifespan of a car.
Electric motors and fixed gears can go 25,000 to 50,000 hours before they need a rebuild. And they can be rebuilt multiple times. And the industry is talking about EV batteries that will last a million miles.
Factor that into the capital cost of owning an EV and it changes everything.
Now consider that the usual finance term for car is about a third it's expected life. Typical car lasts 15 years, typical finance is 5 years. If an EV's expected life is 30 years, vs 15 above. Then the reasonable finance term can double to 10 years.
Plus dual motor electric cars (most Teslas) can run on one motor. So in the unlikely event one of your motors fails you can still limp home without worry about blowing your head gaskets.
If you’re talking specifically about the drive train, that’s one thing. But the reliability of electrical components will likely not come close to approaching 30 years. That’s especially relevant in cars that combine everything into a single display and everything is electrically controlled. The old school vice grip solution to roll down windows won’t work with most new cars :-)
There are anecdotes of displays costing $7k, and designed for planned obsolescence after 5-7 years. Ironically, this is the same timeframe where the car depreciation makes a stronger case for buying a new vehicle rather than paying that kind of money on fixing an older one. Point being, I don’t think we can plan on a 30 year EV life anymore than we can count on using the same personal computer for decades.
> designed for planned obsolescence after 5-7 years
The big three tried that in the 1970's.
I have a thoery why it doesn't work. It's because resale value matters. Price out how much people are willing to pay for a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. Now look at the price of a used sprinter with a 150k miles on it vs a random Ford or Dodge van. It's about $20k vs under $10k
Companies that play the planned obsolesce game with EV's are going to find themselves in a quality vs price corner coffin. Because customers rightly perceive the companies cars as shoddy. The company can't charge enough to build quality cars. They get stuck just the way GM did 40 years ago. And is still stuck today.
So I didn’t want to give the company name because it’s just an anecdote, but it’s from a company that is usually in the top off people’s minds when asked about car manufacturers who are synonymous with quality.
I don’t think the Sprinter vs Transit example is a very illustrative one. Personally, I’d rather have a used Ford or Dodge simply because the life cycle cost of a Sprinter is insane where I live due to maintenance costs. They have similar base prices new but with any features the Sprinter quickly outpaces (ha) a similar American van in initial cost as well. I don’t think they are apples to apples.
It didn’t work for the Big Three because at the time, Japanese were trying to differentiate themselves and they did it on the quality front. I tend to think it was more about complacency than planned obsolescence.
I think people generally look at mechanical and electronics very differently. People often look at simplicity in mechanical designs as a feature, where I think the opposite is true in electronics. I’m skeptical that people will be buying EVs expecting to drive the same one for 30 years, but we’ll see.
> So I didn’t want to give the company name because it’s just an anecdote, but it’s from a company that is usually in the top off people’s minds when asked about car manufacturers who are synonymous with quality.
I’m sorry, I don’t think you asked an actual question. I know speculation is a hobby on forums but I don’t think the precise name adds much to the discussion in this case
You the one dismissing that a drive train that lasts two to three times longer than a conventional gasoline one will have no effect on cars lifespan. And thus no effect on capital expenses.
That seems to go against what I know about basic accounting.
You’re extrapolating a bit here. I do think it will have an effect of life cycle costs just not to the extent that cars will last that long or people will suddenly start keeping cars for 30 years. That goes against basic reliability theory as well as human behavior.
You have parts in an ICE vehicle that can last 30 years or longer. But the reliability of your vehicle is the totality of the overall reliability. The drivetrain is a major constituent so obviously iimproving reliability will increase the overall design life. But it won’t bring the other components up to the same. For example, my last car was replaced because the suspension was rotting from harsh winters. The drivetrain was still perfect, but it didn’t make sense to maintain/keep it considering the depreciated value of the car.
Besides that, many people look at cars as a status symbol rather than strictly on utilitarian means. I doubt many people will keep their EVs long, just like most don’t keep their perfectly working cell phones for a decade. The current stock price of TSLA seems to indicate most don’t think the market will shrink this much
I think our difference of opinion is based on, you have no experience owning cars older then 10 years. And I have experience with cars older than 20 years. So you aren't familiar with that breaks on older cars and what doesn't. Nor do you know how much it costs to fix the various things that break.
So for me imagining going from 20 year year old cars to 30 year old ones is not a stretch. Where for you it's going from 5 years to 30.
After some quick mental accounting, 9 of my last 11 vehicles (cars/trucks/vans/motorcycles) were over 10 years old when I bought them. One of the remaining was 7 years old at purchase. My current vehicles are 7 and 26 years old. I also realize yours and my car preferences are not representative of the general public.
I’ve worked as a controls engineer at an automotive assembly plant side-by-side with quality engineers. I’ve also worked as a reliability engineer.
> A lot of hyperbolic reporting but there’s a ton of off-peak excess overnight electricity capacity.
Looking at California's demand-profile it appears almost flat throughout the day (page 3 http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Combi...). I dont see an obvious reaon why other cities would follow a different profile, so no I dont think that assumption is correct. The problem is indeed cost, but more the cost of storing the energy created by green renwables to be used when the wind isnt blowing or the sun isnt shining. If anything electricity will become much more expensive and become cheaper not overnight but instead when the weather is great. Indeed this is whats happening in Germany as a result of their energiewende program
That was only in July and only due to the high AC required. Are you planning on recharging only 1 month of the year? How good are your batteries and where can i get them?
Summer months in most of the southern US are extremely hot (in Austin, 4-5 months of the year could have temps above 100F), so for example here is CA in August (see graph in article for demand): https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-californias...
Utilities can't design just for the average month, but the worst ones, and the worst hours of the worst days. Building new peak demand (peaker) plants is very expensive and most consumers probably don't see the actual market prices during those times. Shifting load by a very small percent could result in a decent cost savings and/or avoid building new capacity.
Smart grid is a buzzword but this is exactly what it's good for. Spreading peak usage out. For example, today I get a discount on my electric because my power company has the option to turn my AC off for X time during hot days to lower the grid's peak load. The tech is already here and a lot of EV charging will fit well into that model, especially commuters that don't need their whole range every day. Plenty of people would opt in to "at least one full charge every 3 days" type of plans.
Does California build extra infrastructure during summer and tears it down during winter, or why would the grid be unable to manage summer's peak demand during winter?
In terms of capacity planning it’s the peak annual demand that’s critical not the peak seasonal demand. January is effectively a minimum of 24GW vs a capacity for 50 GW.
In practice it’s a little more complex as maintenance cycles for example are lined based on seasonal demand, but that’s offset by much higher transmission losses when the temperatures are highest.
But California does not have a 50gw generating capacity. It imports electricity during the summer months to make up the load factor difference. So again I’m not sure how you’re planning on recharging millions of vehicles without increasing the overall load factor if you’re relying on vanishingly small gaps in the load factor demand throughout the day
Sharing power also takes infrastructure, as existing long distance power transmission has limits which cost money to maintain or increase.
Really, the US electric grid is designed to share power between states, that’s just part of capacity planning. Further, sharing power is a cost saving measure and happens as soon as importing power costs less than using a peaking power plant. It still requires someone to have built the generating capacity, but it’s much easier to add 1GW of base load capacity at a time when your selling some of that to a different state.
As to minor differences 50GW is 67% larger than 30 GW that’s a huge swing over the course of a day. At 0.5 KW per person in CA x 4 miles per kWh x 12 hours x 365 days, that’s 8,760 miles per year which is almost enough on it’s own. Suggesting at most a minimal capacity increase.
While true, the plus side is EVs are still a net CO2 win even when charged by dirty fuel.
As part of the same topic, I think we’re going to see PV-covered EV cars in the not too distant future; not because they don’t need charging (they’re about 10% of your instant needs on the move), but because adding PV reduces the pressure on the grid, and will significantly reduce the need to install power lines to sunlit car parks.
Home, multi-storey, and hotel/motel parking will still almost certainly still need power.
Right now? Houses sure, but I tried to get them in my last apartment, and the answer was “no” even though I owned my own flat. (Owning a flat != owning the building the flat is in).
But this is about what I expect soon-ish, and “soon-ish” both continues the cost decline of PV (including thin flexible panels that would make them suitable for more than just the Cybertruck), and also makes it likely that every roof suitable for PV will already have it (because exponential growth).
There’s some overhead to the charger-battery system to actually generate any sort of a charge. I’ve had the exact same assumption multiple times, and as soon as I do some research with the math breakdown.. its clear why we don’t see these in production yet.
With current efficiency PV systems, the math requires a fairly large surface like the entire flatbed of a Cybertruck to actually generate a meaningful charge.
This also requires the vehicle be parked somewhere its going to get a good amount of sun, excluding parking garages, a lot of urban areas, etc.
Ok, as you’ve done the maths: what charge do you get? Not the ~10% I got from a back-of-the-envelope calculation?
Model 3 is about 5m by 2m, and is apparently rated for 241 Wh/mile
4m * 2m * 1kw/m^2 * 50% * 20% = average power 800 W
(50% because the panels are flat, 20% because cell efficiency)
241 Wh/mile * 60 miles/day = average usage 602 W
I’m not sure what fraction of the day people drive for given that I’m not a driver, but I’m eyeballing 5-10%. I acknowledge professional drivers — taxis etc. — can’t possibly rely on PV alone, that PV can only supply a fraction of what they need (my 10% guesstimate), but I still think this should help with the general public. Or are my assumptions way off?
First you missed a decimal point or two here and scrambled the units of measure-
“ 241 Wh/mile * 60 miles/day = average usage 602 W”
The correct math is
241 Wh/mile * 60 miles/day = average usage 14,460Wh, or 14.46kWh
Further answer - The consensus from people who know this better than you & I, have these cars, and in some cases have tried.. is basically - it won’t charge much, and it’s way more expensive than the electricity it is going to generate.
Note there are AC-DC inverter losses of 10-20%. plus input->battery charge losses which are non-linear and very bad at the low end. For example a Tesla won’t even take a charge if the input is below the ~300-500W range in good weather. In cold weather say Northeast US winter, the floor is closer to a 1kW input as there is a heating system to get the battery put to temperature for charging that is going to eat almost all of that.
So just taking the parent example, even if we assume plastering the car in PV will generate 800W peak
1) This will probably not translate into any charge in winter weather, but possibly allow you to keep the car battery from being fully cold soaked, best case
2) In good weather you are probably looking at post-inverter input to charger at 700W, with charger losses meaning about 400-500W making it to the battery. So that is, in an efficient Tesla about 2 miles of range for every hour of peak sun. Depending on your location, orientation and time of year you might expect peak sun hours of 3-6 hours/day. So grand total 6-18mi/day of range added making a lot of happy assumptions and not moving your car during lunch. This amount of charge per day could be acquired in 1-2 minutes at a supercharger and worth about 30-75cents. Or charge at a L2 charger in your own garage in 12-36 minutes.
I don’t understand your math, I’m sorry. Why would you divide by 24 hours? There is not 24 hours of sun for your PV to capture and put into the car. Peak solar generation is 3-6hrs/day depending on region and time of year.
4m length * 2m width * 1kw/m^2 insolation * 50% loss due to the panel area being calculated by ground area and it not tracking the sun and therefore not getting peak output * 20% cell efficiency = average power 800 W
My BOTE calculation above should use 25% instead of 50% for day-night average of PV panels horizontal to the ground. Can’t edit now, though. 25% is the planet-wide average for day-night and seasonal variation because that’s the ratio of the surface area of the Earth to the area of a disk intersecting the same flux of sunlight at 1AU (4πr^2 : πr^2).
With that correction, that’s 400 watts average over 24 hours (as in: no not merely the peak at noon); which means 24 h * 400 W = 9.6 kWh per day.
If you drive 60 miles per day, and each mile consumes 241 Wh of energy, then you consume 14.41 kWh of energy per day.
> I think we’re going to see PV-covered EV cars in the not too distant future
They're already popping up in the development stage [0]. 12 km/hr peak solar charging sounds really quite good, and I like the overall design. The company was founded by students who won the World Solar Challenge [1] in 2015, it's pretty neat to see them taking that experience and running with it.
Right now yes, but solar is still getting cheaper. I’m expecting it at some vague point in the not too distant future, but not in a surprise tweet from Musk tomorrow.
But solar panels you can slap on a building roof or make into covered parking will always be cheaper than form factor panels installed in the roof of a vehicle. Other than super specific fringe use cases, there is just no reason to justify installing these expensive specialty panels in cars instead of installing them at homes/workplaces/retail centers and just charging EVs at those locations.
There is also the cost savings in scaling. The cost for a solar system comes down even more when a business can install a whole row of solar panel covered parking, either offer EV charging as a perk or charge for charging, and use the rest of the electricity to power normal electric operations. For the driver, buying the electricity as needed from home or work panels would always be cheaper per total watt usage than buying in-car roof panels, since again, the specialty nature of them means they will always be more expensive and less efficient than their stationary mounted counterparts. You can never scale up car roof solar because you can never install move than one car roof’s worth at a time. You also can’t ignore the inverter power loss that is much worse at the lower power a car roof system would have.
Then of course you have the downsides of long term sun damage to your vehicle to get that minimal charge, instead of protected under a solar panel covered parking or in a garage with solar mounted on top. You have the higher rate of damage by being installed on a moving vehicle instead of a stationary object on a building or parking structure roof. You have the lower rate of return, since panels are rated for 20-25 plus years and most vehicles don’t stay on the road that long. You have the downside of sub optimal charging angle and all the time the vehicle spends in a parking garage during the day, as opposed to a stationary panel that is pointed at the sun 365 days a year. At the end of the day, it will always be cheaper and more efficient to have stationary solar panels.
Given that most people charge their EVs overnight/during work anyway, car roof panels would only really provide value during “road trip” situations, where you are driving close to or beyond at full charge per day. Since you are only getting at best 10-15 additional miles over an entire day in the sun (and more realistically less than 10), it would do very little to reduce range anxiety. And that is not even calculating how much the additional weight of the panels would reduce range.
It sounds good on paper but it is highly unlikely to translate to a real world benefit.
I don't have access to that article but does it take into account the notion of marginal power? That any increased load is going to be disproportionally dirty?
It's not a given that increased load is going to be disproportionally dirty. Wind farm output typically peaks at night. Wind is a great match for night time battery energy vehicle charging and it has the lowest life cycle CO2 footprint of any electricity source:
I do like your emphasis on marginal effects. As renewables and BEVs grow it will be a balancing act to pick the most marginally effective resources for emissions abatement. California may soon reach a point where an additional dollar invested in solar doesn't abate as much CO2 as the same dollar invested in transmission, storage, or wind -- even if solar has the lowest instantaneous generation cost.
Is this generally true, or does it depend on geography (e.g. being near the coast)? Where I am in the midwest, it seems that the air normally gets very calm after sunset.
I think that it is generally true for land based turbines. Turbines are so tall that wind conditions at hub height can't be easily estimated by what we experience on the ground. Here's a somewhat dated study that shows hourly patterns for wind generation on the ERCOT grid in Texas, which has the largest wind fleet of any state:
"The Relationship between Wind Generation and Balancing-Energy Market Prices in ERCOT: 2007–2009"
See Figure 5. Hourly generation reaches a minimum from about 1:00 to 5:00 PM and reaches its maximum around 1:00 AM.
Offshore wind output changes less from short term day-night cycles, and generally achieves a higher capacity factor. It is also more expensive to build than onshore wind and no large projects have yet been built for the US, though several are on the drawing board.
They are a net CO2 win, but not enough of a win if you charge them on dirty fuel. So making sure we don't make people too relient on charging on dirty fuel is important.
Too bad California is shutting down its last nuclear power station in 2025 (which provides 10% of California's electricity) because upgrading its cooling system to meet new ocean water temperature regulations would cost on the order of $10 billion dollars.
I’m not sure that’s entirely true because you are only thinking of solar. I’d like to see daytime vs overnight generation source breakdown.
Remember that hydro power doesn’t care about time of day and wind is often able to generate more overnight than during the day.
Further time of use rates can be tweaked as usage & generation requires. Maybe with a lot of EVs in the future & solar installed we encourage people to charge mid-day at work or sunrise->commute start & commute end->sundown, this doesn’t work great in winter but also electric use is lower in winter so maybe it nets out.
In states like Illinois with a high percentage of base load coming from nuclear and wind, charging overnight is basically free. In fact, overnight, Illinois is a net exporter of electricity.
This assumes you only charge at home because you can, and only work first shift. A lot of people may wind up charging at work because that's the only place that could really make charging points accessible with no worries. At least 5% of people work third or swingshifts too, so thats a load that has to be compensated for.
You also need to worry about fleet vehicles charging, and other uses. So the off-peak capacity isn't always possible.
The average commute in the U.S. is 32 miles a day, pre pandemic. Which means that the load is distributed not only in 24 hours, but every 72 hours for even lower capacity batteries like the leaf.
> This assumes you only charge at home because you can, and only work first shift.
No it doesn’t?
Most charging can be done at night when power is both cheap and plentiful. The fact that only 5% of people work third shift is testament to this!
No one is pretending that ALL charging is at off-peak hours. But the fact is that not only can most charging be off-peak much of it will be. This is excellent news you should be happy about!
Depends how many wires they have but it's quite possible that "add a battery pack that charges when electricity is cheap" is cheaper than "pay for everyone to charge at peak rates".
> because you are home and done driving for the day
This is something I think about a lot, and it's also what prevented me from purchasing an EV recently -- I live in an apartment and park in a surface lot; street parking would be even less feasible for charging.
My question is to anyone who may know the answer: is there any research/modeling being done regarding the intersection of declining home ownership and increased EV adoption/feasibility?
Most of my peers can't afford a home but would prefer an electric vehicle. Workplace charging is often suggested as the answer, how does a shift to remote work change that? A lot of moving parts and I'm curious if someone more qualified than me has crunched the numbers.
I survived 3 years in Brooklyn with an EV and no garage charging.
Really depends on where you live, work and what your commute route looks like. An EV with 300mi of range can be treated like a gas car - stop to charge every week or two instead of gassing up.
I had a supercharger 1 mile away, and 3 more in a 20 minute radius. One urban supercharger was at a grocery/Target and another was at a Museum/Garden, so in those situations I’d park longer for a deep charge and make use of my time productively. I never ever just sat in my car for 20..30..60min like some people imagine you might.
> I had a supercharger 1 mile away, and 3 more in a 20 minute radius.
Its worth noting that regularly using superchargers is murder on your battery, long term. After 600 charge cycles with no fast charge, you will still have 90% battery capacity, as opposed to 80% capacity if using super charging 30% of the time. If you use super charging 50% of the time, you will reduce your capacity to 75% after only 300 charge cycles. [1]
Some european cities have light post chargers. And there exist small parking meter sized chargers. You don't need supercharger wattage when you're charging while working or parking at home.
But then you are driving a gas car. It's smelly and unresponsive.
It makes sense if you are really into gas cars or an eletric car doesn't work for you, but the charging problem for people living in apartments will be fixed eventually. It's already fixed in a few cities.
Not having children or pets won't really change our carbon emissions in the next ten to fifteen years, which is the time frame that matters if we want to stay below 2°. And unless you want to reduce the human population to zero, it's not a sustainable path to net zero emissions.
Thank you for this comment. The average commute is like 30 miles round trip (way less with covid and wfh). Modern EVs can get an effciency of around 250Wh/mi. This works out to about an additional 7.5kWh a day. This is roughly 25% of the average daily consumption of most households.
> This is also when you will tend to be charging because you are home and done driving for the day.
In absence of demand-based pricing and clever "when will you need the car again?"-UI (both are necessary to see an effective load spread) all the cars from evening rush hour will meet again for evening rush hour 2, the grid edition, during supper and immediately after. At the time of nighttime overcapacity most will already be on sustain trickle.
> Many utilities already offer off peak rates generally. My utility offers incentives to install an EV charger which is networked and then gives you a rebate for charging overnight after 11pm.
Where in the world are utilities offering this? I live in W. PA and every utility service out here laughed at me when I inquired about these kinds of things.
My only concern is that what happens with a mass adoption of both EV and intermittent power sources such as solar and wind. Solar will obviously not be there in the evening when everyone is plugging in their cars after the evening commute home.
I don't have and stats to say either way but it is a scenario that i'd like said stats for :)
The obvious solution is to put the chargers at the office. With a solar carpark roof, the power only travels a few feet in the ideal case, and you might not even need to upgrade the electrical service drop.
At least here in California it seems like the toughest times for the grid currently are around 7-9pm when they do the solar to fossil fuel transition (wind can be sporadic). I imagine that'll coincide with when a lot of cars are charging so hopefully we're able to step up our energy storage capacity
Nuclear is pretty constant (hard to stop and start like coal), if it is part of the mix then EVs can soak up output at night.
I live in the PNW, hydro is fairly flexible so we don’t get off peak discounts. California uses a lot of hydro also, I suspect they are using more of that rather than coal to fill in the gaps between solar
Natural gas is the preferred fossil fuel here. It spins up faster than coal, and as a result California has had to delay the decommissioning of nat gas plants as nuclear ones have been shut down.
This will probably flip once solar becomes our largest (or among the largest) electrical energy source.
I imagine a future where daytime power is primarily supplied by solar, and nighttime power by nuclear. And with wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. becoming ancillary energy sources.
Once Evs like the ones Volkswagen is producing hit the US market things will change. The ID.4, for instance, will bring a compact SUV form (that is highly regarded) for barely over $30,000 (less than a tricked out Honda CR-V). That will be huge.
110V on a 15A breaker will provide you with something like 30kWh in 10h over night charging. That's 120 miles in a Model 3. Not many people average more than that in their daily driving.
Overnight (morning of 1/30/2021), the Texas grid [1] received 20,000 MW (average) of wind generated energy. If all Texas cars, or 9 million, were Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), the wind turbines (at the 20,000MW rate) would end up supplying 46% of the electricity to those cars if they plugged in last night.
Now, last night was exceptionally windy. However, wind turbines generation is growing by about 10-20% annually. Accordingly, in a few years 20,000 MW overnight wind generation will become the Texas median production rate or even will fall among the lower percentiles of production.
The article that the NY Times references [2] shows how the 100% electric fleet demand compares to the current daily load profiles in Texas and California. The Texas grid, as depicted, shows a peak at 3PM -- for now. However, if there were 100% EVs, that peak would shift to 3AM. Then, in addition to the typically abundant wind energy, natural gas (peaked) generators could come online to easily deliver more power.
Something like 60-70% of Texas daily wind generation occurs between 9PM and 9AM, because of the diurnal wind patterns. This means that the usually strong nightly winds allows Texas to outproduce electricity at 3AM as compared to 3PM.
In contrast to the habits of California EV drivers, Texas drivers get 80-90% of their annual charge needs by plugging in overnight at their homes. So, the Texas grid is uniquely suited to host a rapidly growing EV fleet.
[EDIT] 9,000 MW would provide 1 kWh for 10 hrs for each car of 9,000,000 EV cars to get 30+ miles of range. So, yeah, last night the Texas grid could accommodate all of them.
It's really a shame the Chevy Volt didn't dominate like the Tesla. It's the perfect transition vehicle. I had a Smart Fortwo which was cute but had terrible range - followed by the Nissan Leaf which was better but had terrible battery life in the winter which has only been resolved recently.
Tesla Model 3's are nice, but if you're an economical driver the cost per mile is still way higher than a hybrid. Ugh.
EDIT: To clarify I'm referring to the total cost per mile, not just the cost to drive a mile - the Model 3 wins in that regard as far as I know. The problem is that the Model 3 costs tens of thousands of dollars more than the cheapest hybrids, so unless you're going to keep your Model 3 for like 300K miles it's not worth it on a purely economical basis.
If you compare to a gas car, again on a purely economical basis, it's even more lopsided. Factor in used vehicles and even more so. I ended up just buying a used Corolla in the end sadly since it was cheaper and from my understanding more environmentally friendly.
TLDR: If you want to be "environmentally friendly" that means minimizing driving. However, if you minimize driving it makes basically no sense, economically or environmentally to buy an electric car - you're better off buying a fuel efficient used vehicle. Please correct me if you believe I'm wrong in this thinking.
This is the barrier for me too— my family lives in a walkable, downtown community and our overall driving is 5-10k km/yr. It would be fun to have an EV, but from both a $$ and eco point of view, I think if you're already committed to a low car lifestyle, your best option for some time yet is to carry on buying lower-efficiency vehicles that are at least 4 years old.
This prevents an existing vehicle (for which the carbon cost to manufacture it is sunk) from being abandoned, but using it as a backup vehicle means it won't be driven more than a minimum, and having your gas be "expensive" on a per-km basis creates the proper incentives to avoid driving except where necessary.
We're in a similar situation. Can walk to everything we need so we only end up driving about 3500 miles (about 5KM) per year. I've got an old 98 Honda civic which "only" has about 130K miles on it (meaning it's good for at least another 70K miles) and still runs great. I can't justify the expense of an EV given these criteria, though I'm looking forward to getting one someday.
Just commit and sell the car, our driving was about double that and we do not miss it a bit now. Still drive about 1000 km/year in rentals, but we are trying to minimize that.. It's especially nice as a family to primarly transport yourself in other ways were you get to spend time together interacting freely instead of being stuck in a car.
Economically it's more or less the same, but a better quality of life.
We've thought about it. One of the main barriers is honestly the combo of a) out of town family and b) young children. Installing carseats and boosters in a rental is a giant pain, and the train/coach schedules aren't dense enough to permit a reliable day trip to a location that's a 60-90 minute drive away.
We do have another family in our circle are are carfree and they make it work with a combination of rentals and every now and then they borrow our car in exchange for babysitting and other favours.
Depends on the seats. We have seats that you just put in. They are held in place by the seatbelt. So there's a bit of extra carrying the seats, that's all. We bought them because they were top scoring in a crash safety test.
The real gap is with short-term car shares where you want to walk to the car, do your errand, and then walk home. Most carseats aren't great for being carried on foot or taken on public transit. So that leaves you with only doing rentals when the time period is long enough to make it "worth it" to bring the car home on either end of the trip for seats in/out.
My 2017 Volt is what took me to my 2018 Model 3. Now I can no longer see myself driving any car that is not electric. This from someone who loves the sound of a good muscle car even to this day.
GM's issue has always been they have played the compliance game while claiming otherwise. Even Ford is doing it now with the Mach E by limiting availability to 50k models, a number a third of the sales of vehicles they have cancelled for low unsustainable sales.
I never bought my TM3 to save money, buying any new car pretty much is a losing proposition. I bought it because it was cool. It was the closest I have even seen to those dream/concept cars from the seventies and eighties. All those cars with radical exteriors and even more radical interiors. Well someone built it.
Is it perfect. No. However as an EV is had my most important feature. Range. I could care less about its 0-60mph times. I want range. I want to drive to my friends in the boonies and back in all seasons without having to divert to charge. I want to be able to skip chargers because I have the range to do so.
Plus remember, every range number given should be hedged by multiplying it by 0.90 as no manufacturer suggests charging to 100% all the time.
On a side note : Do not buy FSD. Tesla will not let you transfer it to another Tesla and even right now trade ins to Tesla are hit and miss as they have been giving ZERO dollars on trade for the feature. You don't need it for lane keep assist or traffic aware cruise control. I don't care if you believe Tesla can or cannot deliver it, the simple matter here is they don't honor you by giving you anything for it on trade; something that Elon claims to be looking into
Mach-E started as a compliance EV and the realised that their compliance car might not sell at all and they would have to lose like 10-15k on each one of them, and potentially sell them in fairly large numbers compared to compliance cars of the past.
So they have a team inside Ford and they basically told them to go all out on the vehicle and they did a nice job. These guys however are still sort of separate from overall Ford and the car is basically designed to sell well and not lose them to much money. Ford has the issue that they simply don't have battery supply to scale their EV production.
They are getting batteries from LG in Europe right now but all new capacity is basically already reserved for all the Europeans. They simply can't copy the Model Y and sell 300k a year, specially because to match the Y in specs, they needed to put more battery into it.
I agree with your point on FSD. They said they would start to value it during trade in now, but even so, when you sell it privately, if the buyer doesn't want FSD its harder to sell, its limits the pool of people who want it.
About the start of the as compliance yes, but I don't have link right now. This was said in a video interview, maybe with Autoline? Not sure. But it was some of the top guys on that program.
The detailed economics is conjecture, based on different statements and some assumptions. Sorry, I didn't want to come across as this being certain knowledge. Maybe the lose on the Mach-E are still pretty bigger. Maybe they changed from the compliance because they wanted to have a flag ship for marketing.
This is just how I interpreted it, they wanted to sell a 'compliance car' that they could actually sell for a premium price and have premium options on.
Ah sorry, I mean specifically the economics discussed - loss per car for a compliance car, the need to produce more compliance cars, that the car is expected to lose money still.
I'd be quite interested in a peek behind the curtains with that much detail, but I don't think that much has been said publicly and I wonder if it's just the parent making inferences.
GM lost money on every Volt and loses money on every Bolt. Tesla is rumored to sell at a lost and make up for it by selling clean energy credits to the likes of Fiat Chrysler.
It's well known that all of Ford and GM's past EVs were compliance cars.
The details are important, though. The industry factors R&D in to gross margin, and typically reports of per unit losses include it.
If you spend $1bn to develop a car you sell 100k of break even, you just lost $10k per car. But that doesn't mean you're going to lose twice as much if you double the production.
If they were going to lose 10-15k per incremental unit, that's horrific and I'd love to know the details, that's why I'm asking.
I honestly don't know how to reconcile R&D costs but I dislike how they're applied per unit today. R&D is a sunk cost and the technology gained from it can be applied beyond the original scope. I get it because bean counters want to point fingers when it comes to penny pinching.
It's not as if GM goes back and adjusts the R&D % applied to the 97 Corvette when they sell an LS engine. The R&D cost of every subsequent vehicle that reuses something off the shelf is going to be cheaper.
I'm not defending the way they amortize, but if you don't take it in to account, it can lead to some poor conclusions.
Tesla R&D is so ridiculously efficient. I wouldn't be surprised if a Model 3 from scratch costs traditional auto companies an order of magnitude more to develop.
So the first EV models inevitably come out, amortizing a large amount of R&D over a limited run, and it looks like an absolute disaster for margins.
It doesn't necessarily mean things aren't going well - although it certainly can!
I always thought of the volt as twice the complexity, twice the responsibility.
You still have to keep track and change the oil, and the coolant. You still have a water pump and spark plugs and all this other stuff to keep track of.
"Analysis of real-world maintenance and repair cost data from thousands of CR members shows that BEV and PHEV owners are paying half as much as ICE owners are paying to repair and maintain their vehicles."
"The data were filtered to remove:
● Incomplete responses.
● Vehicles that reported traveling less than 2,000 miles in the past 12 months.
● Vehicles that reported traveling more than 60,000 miles in the past 12 months.
● Vehicles that reported maintenance costs of over $20,000 over the past 12 months.
● Vehicles with more than 200,000 total miles."
I do suspect that the ICE portion of the Volt could be a lot simpler than a regular gas powered vehicle since it's not directly connected to the wheels. A generator configured to run primarily with a fixed load size and in its peak efficiency zone is different from what you find in the typical gas car.
As mentioned the volt has the electric motor, gas motor and wheels all part of the same unit.
On the other hand, the bmw i3 is a serial hybrid. I think the two models are basically an EV and an EV+generator (range extender). One got more subsidies than the other.
What I wonder about is - what happens to the i3 when the electric battery is depleted and all you have is the generator? Can you maintain speed? Will you run out of battery first or run out of fuel?
I am on my second i3+rex. I love the things to pieces.
In the US the rex comes on when the main battery is down to 7% charge. (Europe or re-coding the car allows you to set when it comes on -- up to 75% I believe? I haven't coded either of mine) You can actually outrun the rex engine with the right combination of high speed, climbing grade, or cold weather. If it gets to 0% the car will literally shut down. A serious warning appears at 2% about this.
I've never had mine below 2.5% (there is a setting on the driver display that allows you to display this number). It takes uphill driving over 75mph in cold to really draw down those last few % and outrun the range extender.
The rex tank is 9L, so it adds about 70-100mi to the total range of the car depending on how you drive it. We add a few gallons a year to ours, as the EV itself is sufficient -- it's great for those surprises life throws you where you need another few miles.
For almost all normal use cases, the Volt gen 2 is a series hybrid. The engine only runs when the battery is depleted and it operates in a non-stressed, constant rpm mode where it is supplying charge to the EV motor that is buffered by the battery. There is a parallel hybrid mode but it is only triggered under extreme conditions.
2013 Volt owner. What you are saying is, on paper, true I guess. The actual situation of me and all my Volt friends is that the cars are VERY reliable. I have 128K miles (105K EV miles) so my engine has only 22K miles after 7 years. Besides tires, ONE oil change and a front-end CV issue -- I've spent zero on maintenance.
I have a PHEV (Ford C-Max Energi), and with low miles the oil change interval is two years, rather than my gas only vehicles with a one year interval. I may be a terrible person, but I don't really keep track of the other intervals; if something needs doing, it'll likely come up when in for the oil change or make a terrible noise.
Also, the just off lease C-max was very inexpensive, and gets huge gas mileage, so even if it explodes, whatever. It got me a carpool sticker for a year too.
Are any of these using pressurized systems, do they even have an open side? Complex systems like the Tesla do have pumps that could potentially go bad.
In practice, a PHEV like the Volt is more reliable and has less maintenance than an ICE vehicle. The engine in the Volt only runs in the rare cases where the battery charge is low. When it does run, it generally runs at a constant, low stress RPM while supplying power to the electric motor with buffering from the battery. This is generally acting like a series hybrid. (The parallel hybrid mode is only activated in some rare cases). The result is that the EV motor is used for most miles and the gas engine lives a rather pampered life.
The car also keeps track of gas miles and gives you an estimate for remaining oil life. Under typical usage, that results in an oil change every couple of years. I think that the spark plugs are 100K plugs so they will eventually need replacing but not often.
Way less effort than a a regular gas car. If you don't use the ICE very often, you only have to service it every 1-2 years. The electric system is very simple and requires almost no maintenance.
I've never had a vehicle that required less maintenance than my 2017 Volt. Up to 100k KM on it now and I've changed the oil once + tire swaps and some rust removal on the brakes because they don't get much use due to regen. That's all. But 88% of my travel is pure electric, so. The ICE only needs as much maintenance as you use it for.
Yep. I think a big reason why Teslas are so popular and other EVs (and to a lesser extent Hybrids like the Prius) are not is the styling. Teslas look like normal cars. The others look like caricatures.
It's subjective, but the styling of Volt, Bolt, Leaf, Prius, i3, id.3 are all turn-offs for me.
I'm assuming you haven't driven one. They are not slow. My wife uses one asa. commuter car and it's fantastic. We just went through a long research phase of hybrids and surprisingly ended up with a Volt. (Chevy isn't really on my radar otherwise.)
It's a compliance car, they only wanted to sell as many as they needed to. This is pretty standard procedure. The car is passable but unappealing in most regards beyond the power train so that it appeals to only a very small segment of the population.
You can get a 2018 year model (premier trim level w/ driver confidence 2 - the highest possible trim level combination) with 13,000 miles on it for $17k.
Due to living on dirt roads I passed on it, but it's a pretty good deal if you commute and can charge at your destination. 52 mile range all electric, 400 miles combined range.
Electric engines are much simpler and should last a lot longer than ICE, so that extra upfront cost will be divided over a lot more miles, and there will be a lot less maintenance expense.
If the electronics and computer industries are any guide the manufacturers will "recover" those savings through desupporting software / forced upgrades. Either that or go to a pure leasing model since the car's software driven propulsion is now completely proprietary protected IP that you won't be able to have fixed except through them.
The motor yes, but a gas tank lasts forever while a battery doesn't. Batteries have gotten a lot better, but I think you need to look at the whole car, not just the motor, to make a fair assessment of durability.
I do think that electric has a lower maintenance cost, even accounting for the battery, but it's not that low that i think you can make up a 30k price difference.
If you plan on keeping the car for 10 years and drive 1000km per month. The up front 30k are 3k per year or 250 per month. That's quite a lot of an additional fixed cost for not having moved yet.
you can replace a tesla battery pack for 12K (after the warranty expires at 120K miles or 8 years), which i would imagine is probably be close to/less than the maintenance costs of a ICE vehicle after 120K miles/8 years
You can get a four year old ICE car with 40K miles for ~$12K, so that’s probably too much to spend on maintaining a much older car (unless you’re sentimental about it).
Do you think they'll still be making the batteries for an 8 year old car then? Ideally you'd be able to swap a newer battery that is better in some way in then, and maybe even have it a little cheaper than it is today if battery tech continues to get better, gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.
If you really care about cost and that is your only measure, then of course a Model 3 isn't it.
However, you can get insane deal on some EV, like the Bolt. They are not close to Tesla in terms of many things, but if you just need to everyday driving, its perfectly reasonable.
You can’t gauge cost per mile without taking resale value into account, and tesla resale value is great, while the Volt? Not so much.... I’d bet if you owned each vehicle for 3-4 years then sold and actually did the math, the tesla would be ahead.
I find it unlikely that the depreciation on a $40K automobile is less than on a $30K one. If one is selling a car after only three years they should have leased it.
How is the cost per mile higher in a Model 3 than a hybrid? As far as I know the model 3 is basically the most energy efficient EV on the market, in terms of KWh per mile. The Model 3 is lighter, more aerodynamic, and has more efficient motors.
The parent has edited their comment, but the issue is that the sticker price on the Model 3 is still too high— you need to drive it for a super long time/distance to recoup those costs.
Apparent resale value, perhaps -- that is, what people ask for them. What they actually sell for is a different story. I am trying to sell my Model 3 Performance right now. After owning it for just over a year. It seems to have depreciated about a thousand bucks a month.
Partly because I'm a car spaz (I seem to buy a different one every couple years), and partly because I'm now fully remote with no expectation of going back to commuting, so I'm barely driving 50-100 miles a month. Having a nearly 60K car sitting in the garage doing nothing but depreciating is not a great plan. It's my third car, I don't really need it in any case.
It's definitely possible. It just depends on local gas and electricity prices.
For example, in CA current regular grade fuel is about $3.40/gal. A Prius gets 60mpg, which works out to 6c/mile.
For electricity, the average rate in CA is 24c/kWh. A model 3 uses 250 Wh/mile which works out to 6c/mile.
So exactly the same price per mile. A small change in either fuel price could advantage one or the other.
Of course you can take advantage of overnight lower EV charging rates, or drive to an area with cheaper gas, but at least with current average energy prices, there isn't a huge difference in per mile energy consumption costs.
The base Model 3 or the SR+ (probably) are pretty efficient.
But the dual motors are a bit more thirsty. My wife's Bolt weighs 500 pounds less and gets substantially better economy from every kWh than my Model 3 Performance does. Whether I drive like a jerk or not.
So long as EV charging doesn't contribute to net peak on the electric grid, then yes, the grid is up to the task.
The grid is designed to handle the peak hour of a ten-year period. Increasing that peak is very expensive. However, because most of the grid is fixed-cost. The marginal cost of generation is between 1/2 and 1/3 the cost of electricity.
California is moving to variable electricity prices (so-called Time of Use). Electricity is more expensive between 4-9 PM when it's more expensive to provide electricity. So, if people charge their EVs when it's less expensive to do so, we'll be fine. But regulators will need to continue to align electricity price with electricity cost.
We don't have variable pricing for residential usage where I live but you can get a meter for home EV charging installed that does do variable pricing. From 11pm-7am, the cost is a penny per kilowatt hour, so practically free. Outside of those hours, the cost is either seven cents or twenty cents per kwh depending on the time of day and season. A 20X difference in charging cost is a pretty good incentive to plan things out so the car can be charged overnight.
It will be interesting to see if there are any incentives for vehicle owners or manufacturers to adjust charging times across the grid. For example, all Tesla's in a time zone could communicate and decide which random hour they would begin charging that night so everyone doesn't hit at 2am. My iphone now doesn't charge immediately at night as it understands my typical schedule and just ensures the phone will be full when I wake up. I expect similar capabilities for electric vehicles.
We already have "demand pricing". I know of some companies who transitioned to electric vehicles (think skid loaders and other yard vehicles) who had to install their own battery systems and generators because by the time the vehicles needed to start charging, they were hit with way way higher than normal electrical prices.
I dont know the specifics- i.e. if not all of their vehicles could go a full day of charging- but only that yes, there are mechanisms in place to force those who can afford it to adapt.
Everyone else has to hope they can plug into a smart grid that only actually charges when the price drops.
We had time of use in Ontario, but recently got rid of it. It hurts the poor more than it saves electricity.
4-9pm might be the only time I have to do laundry and cook, two of the most energy intensive tasks, if I’m working a 9-5 job that requires me to be physically present. I can’t do it during the day and sometimes I can’t do it on the weekend because of other obligations. So now I’m landed with a “tax” that I have no ability to avoid.
And then you drive to Rodeo drive, where stores have their doors wide open in 100 degree heat, while their AC is on full blast, and wonder why the fuck you’re stuck paying the energy tax.
Are you sure that laundry and cooking are your most energy-intensive activities? I live in a house in Toronto and have TOU pricing. After measuring my appliances with a Kill A Watt, I determined that when averaged over an entire year, about 1/3 of my energy usage was for the refrigerator, 1/3 for the HVAC fan (almost entirely for 6 months of winter heating), and 1/3 for literally everything else discretionary (lights, cooking, electronics). I doubt that TOU pricing negatively affected you as much as you perceived.
The problem is that you measured energy usage for appliances that have non-discretionary use - ie. I don't get to decide when my fridge or HVAC turns on, that's a factor of the weather outside (for the most part...). Also, since fridges and HVAC fans run continuously, you end up with an averaged out price for energy.
Laundry energy use can't be amortized like a fridge can. They use an extreme amount of energy in short bursts. If you time your laundry incorrectly in a TOU setting, you absolutely will have a larger energy bill. I know this because I've been burned by it. 9c/kwH (low TOU) vs. 14c (high) is more than a 50% price increase for a load of laundry.
Why do you have to do your laundry between 4-9pm? I could see that if you used a shared space or laundromat but in those situations you aren't paying the power bill. Laundry is set it and forget it.
It is regressive but at least in CA the reason is to discourage use because demand exceeds grid capacity and results in rolling blackouts. The alternative is to plan blackouts for parts of the grid during high demand times. Solar and battery are incentivized so many homes use zero power during peak times or backfeed power onto the grid.
It's reasonably common for washing machines to have a timer delay function, isn't it? I set mine to run during the off peak time, finishing before I wake up.
I am a bit surprised by why such articles are written without taking at least a glance at other countries which have been through this. Over 50% of annually sold cars in Norway are electric. About 10% of the cars on the roads are now electric in Norway.
Most of the things the US is going to go through we have already been through.
You can look at how we dealt with things such as charging at apartments. I live in an apartment in Norway so this was indeed an issue when I first inquired about getting an EV. Eventually however they started doing upgrades allowing us to connect multiple chargers in the garages.
We have not experience problems with the grid but I am also of the impression that our grid is newer than what is common in the US. The biggest problem is the shared chargers. People get angry about inconsiderate drivers hogging a charging spot for too long.
Let me try to invert your point in the other direction. Imagine that, rather than having walkable cities, every Norwegian commuted alone by car for one hour every day. Imagine - and having lived in Scandinavia for many years, I know this is hard - that there is no grocery store within any reasonable biking or walking distance. Imagine an 8-hour drive is a normal weekend thing to do, because there is no working train infrastructure.
In this version of Norway, every single Norwegian would own at least one car. Generally you own multiple cars, because if your one car goes to the shop, you cannot leave your house - it would take hours to walk or bike to work!
This version of Norway, as you can imagine, has way, way way more cars. Specifically, roughly twice as many (~400 cars per 1000 Norwegians vs ~800 cars per 1000 Americans). And they drive, way, way way more miles per year.
When you combine the much higher number of vehicles in America with the much higher number of annual miles driven, the American challenge, in kWh added to the grid, is perhaps 4-5 times the size of the Norwegian one.
Not to mention that, in Norway there is a single grid maintained by a single operator working in lock-step with the national governments climate priorities. In America there are three grids managed by nine regional operators that all hate each other in various fascinating ways.
All to say. There are definitely lessons, but Americas relationship to cars makes the "Norway can ramp car sales to 50% BEV why can't you" argument misplaced. It's like arguing that since the US grid adds, per quarter, twice as many BEVs as the Norwegian grid adds per year, why can't Norway take some pointers from the US? Well, because that's a silly comparison.
I think you really misread my intention there. I was not trying to say Norway is better than America, or that your experience would be the same. I think you are reading a ton of stuff between the lines which is not there.
All I am saying is that it is useful to look at a country that is farther ahead in the transition process to get an idea of how your own reality will look in the future.
Don't build this up to something it isn't. I was not trying to make a pissing contest between the US an Norway ;-)
The comment you responded to is simply informing that you cannot compare Norway's with USA's EV experience because that's like comparing apples to oranges.
Or, if you will, that the Norwegian lessons aren't that useful to the USA. The differences are bigger than any similarity.
Yeah, but that is kind of irrelevant with respect to how the grid operates. Norway doesn't have 25% energy sitting there unused, ready for EVs. Quite the contrary, Norway uses pretty much all of its power. Norway's economy is built around it. We have a lot of really power hungry industry developed here over many years due to access to large amounts of cheap electric power.
In fact there is a battle over building wind turbines in Norway now, because we need them to cover higher future electricity demand from EVs. And of course nobody wants them in their backyard.
This change isn't happening overnight. Electrification is going to take at least 20 years, so we'll have time to figure things out. Even if all new cars are EVs in 15 years, a lot of people can't/ won't buy a new car which will drag out the transition.
Also, I know a lot of people who are buying EVs are also installing solar. While it's not a perfect match for a person with a 9-5 job, it is a fantastic solution for the growing number of remote workers. This is what I am doing personally.
I understand that a lot of people don't have places (or the money) where they can install solar so it's not a solution for everyone.
Peak energy demand is 4-9pm when people arrive home from work in the evening, turn on HVAC, start cooking, watch tv, and basically use power.
That is after solar production tapers off, so solar without batteries doesn't help the grid.
Most EVs and many chargers can be programmed to charge at set times. So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest.
This will actually help the grid because today power companies have to throttle up and down production to meet peak demand then overnight lull. By charging EVs at night it will allow production to remain pretty consistent.
Another factor no one seems to get is that people aren't going to charge nightly. This is like making the argument that our gasoline grid isn't capable of refueling every car simultaneously.
I think there is a lot more flex in EV charging than people give credit for. As an easy example, power companies could offer people discounts for putting their car charger on a digital control which only allows charging when there is surplus power. They do this with AC units.
> So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest.
As more and more solar comes online, this is becoming less true. It may be beneficial to charge during daylight hours in the summer time. A lot of this is regional too.
That's true, it might even become a necessity in order to save the grid from solar proliferation overloading the grid.
I think that battery is going to become as important as solar to the future grid. Battery allows you to timeshift demand and could allow power companies to operate plants at a constant rate rather than throttling up and down. As renewables displace fossils, batteries will play even more important a role.
We got solar + batteries in late November and it's been an interesting experience. We're on time-of-use billing to the batteries have allowed us to completely avoid peak charges.
"If every American switched over to an electric passenger vehicle, ... the United States could end up using roughly 25 percent more electricity than it does today." That's not so bad. With about 15-20 years of lead time, it just means adding 2% capacity per year.
On large scale building new power plants and transmission lines is pretty simple.
But I think the real challenge will be for the last km. It's a nice idea to add the charger to lamppost and so on. But how do we cope with increased demand there then? We are talking about dozens or hundreds of extra kilowatts of demand compared to current. And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Even bigger problem in places where people commute to, with potential of hundreds of kilowatts of extra demand in relatively short window of time...
Where I lived, virtually every big parking lot had charging stations. As big parking lots are generally wasted space anyways, why not work with them to be the place to charge? Just as I don't gas up at home, I can live with not charging at home, especially as charge times come down in the future.
Doesn't solve the issue of how electricity gets to those charging stations. Specially when there will be dozens of them in that big parking lot.
Grid basically works with electricity being produced in large plant, then it's voltage is raised for long distance transmission, at other end it is lowered in stages. And all of these stages have limited capacity of how much electricity can pass through them. And there isn't too much extra in these as that would cost more. So it's a big thing to build up...
True, but any consolidation helps the 'last x' problem, generally. Instead of worrying if every house can charge at once, you only have to worry about the shopping centers. It doesn't help at the power station level though of course.
> And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that.
Is this true? Distribution lines are obviously run with demand in mind, but I wouldn't be shocked if utilities ran last mile lines with copper that's twice as thick as it needed to be because they optimistically projected future demand, copper was cheap, and they didn't want to come back and run more lines.
This is maybe not the ideal place for this, but has the analysis been done to confirm that EVs are going to be a net positive for the environment? I have a lot of concerns stemming from the mining needed to secure the materials to make all these batteries. And the entire transportation sector is only responsible for 28% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US, according to the latest data I could find.
Expat from the grid. This is an opportunity to arbitrage energy - that is until the monopoly bans that activity. They're already banning solar panel arbitrage activities.
I actually think the biggest engineering issue is gone be truck stops. Large truck stops that have 100+ trucks wanting to charge at the same time is gone be an issue.
I don't have a good understanding of the grid, but I have heard that if more and more cars go from 400V to 800V+ that could cause issues in cities as well, but I don't understand it technically. How many cars will actually go to high voltage architecture is not clear yet.
EV cars will get there and so too the infrastructure but it isn't there yet.
Americans like big vehicles. This is solely lacking in the electric department. Americans also like convenience - no matter how many ways you try to slice and dice the argument it's less convenient right now.
When EVs get bigger (more utility) and have longer charge and shorter charging time, they will take off. It just isn't there yet.
They are ... the only one worth buying that makes sense is a Telsa in terms of being able to charge it on road trips. That can be tricky too if you want to make it to your 700 mile destination the quickest driving a car.
If you have a Volt or a Leaf can you use a Telsa charger?
It's the peak load that's the problem, which makes the obvious thing to put in local storage substations. They draw down during peak hours and refill during off peak.
Yeah, most people are recharging 20-30 miles of daily driving not the whole battery. As long as the car pulls its 10-15 kWh overnight before it leaves the garage in the morning EV owners aren't going to care when charging happens.
With managed charging / demand response and day ahead weather forecasting you'd rarely need to spin up a gas turbine. On the coasts wind is strongest at night, the distribution grid is at minimum load and cars are parked. Seems like a perfect match.
Given the shitshow that I've heard that highway is, you'd think someone would have developed an economical public transit option specifically for skiers / mountain rec. Whenever I look into this kind of thing when I plan ski vacations I find the bussing options outrageously priced (for example from Calgary to Banff or Kelowna to Revelstoke, etc.) and it ends up being more economical for a family to simply rent a car.
Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas, apparently. And much of the alps is accessed this way (tho in general European travel by rail is much more of a thing)
>Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas
I'm guessing you probably still needed transportation of some sort from the train stations to the mountains.
One of the issues with just having a bus is that a lot of ski resorts have multiple base areas and most of the lodging and eating options are off-mountain. Some are pretty self-contained but the layout for resorts in the northeast for example pretty much presupposes that you have a car if you're going for a weekend.
There are self-contained exceptions of course but many aren't.
A few ski area towns in Vermont actually still have their own local transit. I know at least Waitsfield (Sugarbush / Mt Elln
& Mad River Glen) and Stowe have that kind of thing, to get you from local hotels and restaurants and the like to the hill and back etc.
And I recall that Steamboat Springs Colorado has something like this; shuttles from airport, hotels, ski areas.
Though you could regenerate part of that on the way back down. As I understand it electric cars are well suited to Denver and other mountain regions as regenerative electric braking saves on brake pad wear.
You'd think so, but in practice my electric car is less efficient going over the mountains than driving a flat stretch.
So yes, they will be able to recover some energy on the way down and reduce wear on brakes, but they'll have to make sure their batteries are up to the task.
Regen isn't 100% efficient, but its a lot better than dumping the momentum as heat. The problem is that the horizontal distance alone from denver to many destinations like lake city is enough to drain a battery.
EDIT My mistake - not a duplicate... below linked article is categorized under business, this one is under climate, and content is different (though related, of course!)
I take issue with these headlines that say "X is now the cheapest energy in history!" when they mean "at noon on a sunny day in summer, completely ignoring any extra equipment and capacity needed at scale to deal with the fact that it is intermittent"
Hydrogen is not an energy source but rather an energy carrier, like a battery. If you want to use hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that can exchange cells at street stations you need extra energy clean-energy capacity to make the hydrogen. There are still plenty of hurdles.
The main challenge is not so much generating more energy but dealing with the notion of many TWH of battery capacity being plugged into the grid and leveraging that. Which at face value would be part of the solution except it isn't. That would be too easy. The real challenge is dealing with 2 orders magnitude of magnitude drop in price per kwh for the grid and the consequences that has for demand. Hint: it will sky rocket; the projected demand for charging cars is peanuts compared to that.
People have trouble dealing with exponentials; they lack the imagination. But the fact is, we're about to see an orders of magnitude shift in prices and capacity when it comes to energy production. If you are thinking in terms of the current supply and demand, you're basically off by magnitudes. Our very near future is this market being disrupted to the extreme.
An EV is basically a big battery with plenty of capacity for soaking up excess energy during off-peak hours and delivering back to the grid during peak hours. So, you could be deceived into thinking that the challenge is simply infrastructure for leveraging this capacity. People are actually working on this and it's not particularly hard from a technical point of view.
For reference, most grid battery being installed currently is still sub GWH. Anything over a few hundred MWH is considered news worthy. A Tesla has about 60kwh. A million of those is 60GWH; that's some serious capacity. There are about a quarter billion cars in the US; or about the equivalent of 12.5 TWH if we set the average EV battery to 50KWH and they would all be converted to electric. The US produces about 4000 TWH of energy every year (a bit over) currently; so 12.5 TWH of battery that can be charged/discharged in hours, is a lot of capacity. Arguably much more than actually needed (currently). So plug that in, and problem solved.
Of course, that's not the solution to this challenge but a very narrow tunnel vision of a hypothetical part of the solution (involving just car batteries). It will never happen because it won't be economical.
In reality, there will be mass deployment of wind, solar, and all sorts of grid energy storage that is probably a lot more cost effective than car optimized lithium ion batteries. Companies will be producing this as fast as they can for the foreseeable future and it will be like printing money in terms of business opportunity. Basically demand will be insatiable for the foreseeable future. The lower the prices get, the higher the demand and there is not enough supply as it is so prices are pretty good.
We have decades to crack this nut; so charging cars is going to be a complete and utter non issue by the time all those quarter billion cars have converted (2040-2050 timeframe). But the flip side is that operating the remaining ICE vehicles will have become uneconomical long before that (about 5 years from now). So, people will be buying EVs at a premium just to get in on the action of lowering their cost for the foreseeable future. If you can afford it; great but lots of people will be burning cash (quite literally) for some time to come because they can't.
Actually, when everybody finally has converted, energy prices will have dropped so low that the upside of renting out your car battery for grid support won't be worth the trouble unless you can do it at scale. It makes sense at today's prices but with a few decades of improvements in cost and efficiency it won't; not even close.
This is the bit people struggle with. Energy is expensive currently and people assume this will remain true. The lesson of the past decade is that solar went from being 100x more expensive to being the cheapest option. It's not done dropping in price unless you happen to suffer from extreme pessimism regarding scientific and industrial progress on this front in the next decades. This being HN, I assume you are not that foolish. IMHO the only debate worth having right now is on the number of orders of magnitude we are talking. I worry about being too conservative here.
With solar and wind, the cost of energy is basically a function of the purchase cost of the infrastructure and how long it will keep mining energy from the sun/atmosphere (for absolutely nothing whatsoever). Current equipment is rated for decades of use. So, as that stuff gets cheaper and better, the $ per kwh will continue dropping to the point where it is no longer interesting for consumers to worry about such mundane things as efficiency or price per kwh. When a GWH is basically a dollar, why bother renting out your car battery for pennies? It doesn't make sense. When the equipment needed to generate a lifetime supply of energy for the vehicle is a fraction of its purchase price, why even think of it as variable cost?
Charging a Tesla at grid prices currently costs you about the price of a cup of coffee (maybe plus a cheap lunch if you use a supercharger, which of course you won't most of the time). That's right now at rates that are basically reflecting the old expensive coal+gas+nuclear world we are still in. It's a hard sell as it is to spend a lot of time and energy monetizing that. Imagine that dropping by 100x. That's roughly what is going to play out over the next few decades. Any math involving today's prices is basically going to be wrong by orders of magintude.
That's the real challenge for grid suppliers: surviving in a world where most of their current infrastructure is obsolete and about 100x more expensive than the market rate for energy. It's going to be brutal if you are in that line of business unless you keep up. If your business is burning coal, your life is going to suck. But good riddance.
The challenge for grid operators is continuing to function in that world. It will involve aggressively investing in renewables + cheap storage + transport (aka. wires) just to stay in business. That's basically what they are doing. Some more so than others. Investors already moved their money.
>"energy too cheap to meter" was first promised in the 1950s. We never got it thought.
Thanks Greenpeace.
Looking back with hindsight a few container ships worth of radioactive waste seems like a much better problem to have than an atmosphere with too much CO2 in it.
> Charging a Tesla at grid prices currently costs you about the price of a cup of coffee
I think you’ve got your math a bit wrong - average cost of electricity in CA is .24/kWh, while my marginal cost for electricity is .42/kWh. That makes charging a tesla battery a $20-$40 proposition, not a $5 one.
Isn’t most residential charging done at 30amps? That’s enough to charge a car to full in a few hours and should be available in almost any house with 100 amp service a
that doesn’t use electric heat.
This reminds me of my elderly parent's home 50+ years old, original 100A service and wiring, glass fuses. Built in a time when electrical devices were; washer, dryer, fridge, stove, TV, furnace, lights. All 15A 120V except for the stove at 30A 240V. Probably four circuits for the entire house.
All homes on their street have electrical service entering from the opposite side of the driveway. So if they wanted a car charger the house would have to be rewired, service upgraded.
What lack of maintenance? The wires and panel work fine. The house is the same as it has been for years no electrical issues.
That "quick job" costs a lot of money probably $15K not to mention the labour and time involved. And to a garage that doesn't exist.
My point being adding modern things more power hungry like an EV are not easy for older homes. Renovating to update the entire electrical system is not cheap.
The lack of maintenance is updating the circuit panel first and wires second, I believe this is the _
$15k you're referencing. Cloth wiring, no grounds, no gfi around water, and fuses create for a very dangerous fire and electrocution hazard; any electrician or home inspector would have recommended changing it out 20 years ago; without electric cars being in the conversation.
You don't have to rewire the rest of the house to extend the 240 across the width of the house. 240 is the least integrated wiring. And every house (new and old) that needs a driveway or garage placement requires the same wiring change.
If you wanted, the cheapest option is to move the service point (no cost)
50yr ago is 1971. They weren't using cloth insulated wiring in 1971.
From the 1930s through whenever romex became common they used BX shielded cable which only relies on the cloth to provide color coding and UV shielding for the rubber that insulates the wire and the cable shielding acts as the ground.
>the lack of maintenance is updating the circuit panel first and wires second, I believe this is the _ $15k you're referencing.
Not fixing stuff that isn't broke isn't "lack of maintenence"
The vast majority of people do not live in the world of million dollar properties where half of everything gets renovated with each new owner.
15k? Are you buying cocaine for your electrician and his hookers, or are you hiring him to run a 240v outlet? Because the latter should cost about 1/10th of what you’re expecting..
I was commenting to the person above who seemingly wants my parents to rewire their entire home. And to do so every few years since apparently that's what proper maintenance means.
Insurance companies charge a significant premium for houses that still have fuses for a reason. We've learned a lot about electrical (fire) safety in the past few decades. cf knob and tube wiring.
Most likely you wouldn't have to rewire the branch circuits. A panel swap and new service entrance should run you about $3k (depending on location and inflation).
The grid in general has a lot of old wiring especially in earlier settled parts of the country. I grew up in a house built in 1940 and it wasn't especially old for my area. These are real costs that affect real people when discussing a massive paradigm shift like going mainly to EV and comments like yours perpetuate the idea that EV's are for a certain wealthy disconnected from reality virtue signalling crowd.
Cloth and/or ungrounded wiring is a electrocution and fire hazard and should be considered unsafe for anybody using basic electrics near any water source, much more if it has any load.
This warning should be more pronounced for elderly, children, or people who have not been accustomed to it.
This is not much different than the Lowndes Al homes that haven't had working septic in 30 years that are bringing back hookworm.
It depends on the car, using the charger that you connect on a classic household plug some do not really mind a bad grounding while some other will refuse to charge.
But it's not too difficult to fix that if you get a charger installed.
Yup - this is very common in southern California, for example. My mother-in-law and brother-in-law's homes are both in this situation. Ours would also have been except we were lucky that the previous owner was an EV early adopter and when he did a big remodeling project, he upgraded the service panel. (We then added solar when we moved in...)
Looks like your elderly parent home is fine. Just share the 30A 240V line between the stove and the car charger. You have hardware to share the load automatically, my not so young boss has that. And most EVs will charge at 32A max on 240V so you don't really need to get more amps.
It'd be wise to calculate for yourself. Existing and future green energy plants (solar/wind/water) won't be enough to charge 60% EV's in 10 years without nuclear or fossil backup, if all current oil-based traffic was now using EVs. But as soon as you start generating energy for EVs from fossil fuel, the CO² balance reverses due to an even lower efficiency factor than combustion in modern ICEs.
Either we accept nuclear energy as "clean" and massively stock up in this area (also investing massively in next generation nuclear, like fusion power), or we'll face a huge backlash in a few years. Or we invent a next-generation battery which is cheap enough (on resources) and improve upon existing energy storage by at least one order of magnitude.
We are only at the beginning of the S-curve of renewable adoption. The US is particularly well suited for this due to its large area.
Furthermore, you can capture the CO2 of a the fossil based electric plant way more easily than putting all this machinery into each and every car. Retrofitting filters etc. is also way easier than telling your voters to buy new cars with better filters.
Economy of scale is important, definitely. I'm just not so sure if the economy of scale favors energy storage (required for large-scale EVs) or ICEs right now, or in the forseeable future if we don't heavily invest in backup energy if renewables are not available.
The US is heavily dependent on air conditioning, for example. What would happen if the available energy was low in summer nights? Some kind of base energy backup needs to be there, and the energy cost of air conditioning alone is huge.
Many utilities already offer off peak rates generally. My utility offers incentives to install an EV charger which is networked and then gives you a rebate for charging overnight after 11pm. My EV charging is barely 30% of my wintertime electric use, driving 500-800 mi/month. This is in a home with oil heat. In summertime using AC in the home, my EV usage will shrink as a percent of usage.
Current solar prices keep dropping and incentives are pretty big there as well, so if you are a big EV driver you could put up some solar with a pretty quick break even of ~4 years or so. Finance it correctly and you won’t have any increase in your monthly outlays.
Biggest barrier right now is simply EV cost. I love my car but EVs are still only barely price competitive after incentives/gas savings if you are a small/midsize sedan shopper. If you need something larger like a CUV/SUV/Van/Truck, EVs are only price competitive with a luxury brand/vehicle in the class.