Chevy will probably be the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in a year or two. They're #2 right now, and the Chevy Bolt comes out soon. The Bolt is a useful car, the price is affordable, it has more range than the Tesla Model 3, and the Chevrolet Division of General Motors has a track record of building large numbers of cars at low cost.
I think range anxiety is over-played because 1. people don't drive for long distances all the much anyway and 2. battery capacity improves 8% year on year, within 9 years it will have doubled and it will be a moot point.
But what about when you do want to drive a long distance? Unless you just want to drive in circles around a major metropolitan area where charging stations are plentiful it's going to require having a planned route/schedule and sticking to it. That's a huge decrease in utility compared to a vehicle you can fuel up anywhere. Unless chargers become close to as common as gas stations EV range will have to be greater than that of traditional vehicles.
Same thing you do when you own a sedan and want to go on a big camping trip or move to a new apartment. You rent a journey-approppriate car for the rare special case.
you would be surprised how many people do need long distance travel, and not just once or twice per year. for me and quite a few people I know, till electric cars can make at least 800km in single push of 130 kmh real traffic, they are useless as private cars. it will come, but maybe in 5-10 years.
I mean, doing 1500km travel (which i do 1-2x per year) would mean 4 hour drive, then couple of hours of forced wait, again drive and so on? completely useless
If you regularly drive more than 300km, then yes, ICE vehicles will remain your only option. But if you are a suburbanite or city-dweller who has a typical round trip commute of 70 miles or less[1] then in the very near future a Tesla Model 3 or equivalent will be the economically rational option for you to purchase.
I think about buying a EV in the same way as I would think about choosing the number of bedrooms in a hypothetical house purchase: do I overpay for a house with one extra bedroom, in the rare case I have relatives or friends once or twice a year, or do I offer to put them up in a nearby fancy hotel for that rare case? Similarly, do I buy the car that fits my needs for 95% of my day to day driving, is economical to run, and rent a car when I need the extra range, or do I overpay day to day for the rare edge case where I need that extra range?
Then again, plenty of people choose ridiculously oversized SUVs to drive their kids to school so we shouldn't expect drivers to suddenly become economically rational in their vehicle choice.
> you would be surprised how many people do need long distance travel, and not just once or twice per year.
> I mean, doing 1500km travel (which i do 1-2x per year)
which is it? Things you do once or twice per year are exactly what the GP is talking about. Rent a car that can.
Besides, I believe the Model S can go for about 400km at 130 km/h, so realistically you'd have two half-hour breaks at a supercharger. It's not so bad if you combine it with lunch / coffee. If you were to take the recommended driving breaks (at least 15 minutes every 2 hours) and increase the interval from 2 to 3 hours (because people who do 1500km pushes probably don't take as many breaks as they should), then you end up with 30 minutes more. That's not ideal, but not too bad either.
> Unless chargers become close to as common as gas stations [...]
If an EV supports 120V outlets, then chargers are already more common than gas stations by many orders of magnitude. Fast charging is a different story... But for long road trips, taking a break for a couple hours every 400 miles doesn't sound like a bad idea, and we already have ample rest stops along most highways.
Charging a 60 kWh battery in two hours requires average power of 30 kilowatts, i.e. about ten times more power than available from a regular household outlet. So you really need proper fast charging infrastructure.
Relative to the feed going into my house (not just a standard outlet), that doesn't seem too bad. People like to make it sound like electrical distribution is some giant hurdle... I don't see the problem.
What happens when thousands of people all get home from work at around the same time, and then plug in their cars? There's your problem, because most populations aren't going to be wanting brownouts.
The solution to overnight charging is potentially even more trivial: Smart grid-aware chargers (if Nest can do it, so can your car); surge pricing; eliminating individual car ownership in the coming autonomy craze.
People like to make it sound like cultural problems are insurmountable. Sometimes, that may be true. Other times... we just have to suck it up and realize: The future is already here, and it requires change. Personally... I'm excited to get away from a gasoline automotive economy -- at least electricity is agnostic as to the source of EMF.
(In fact, a whole bunch of car batteries hooked to the grid sounds a lot like distributed energy storage required to smooth demand curves...)
I'm sure if you're taking a long trip, you'll stop somewhere long enough to charge the battery. Anywhere where you park for a long time can have a charger. A hotel, restaurant, or theme park are examples of places where you will park long enough to charge.
And then you don't need to go out of your way to buy gas!
But, that considered: I see a lot of stories about developments in rapid charging. IMO, in about 5-10 years an EV will be able to charge to 90% capacity in 10 minutes.
That's about as long as I spend at a gas station when I drive long distances. (I usually go to the bathroom, stretch my legs, ect.)
They just need to be reminded that they can rent a car for long trips. Some car sellers even bundle in a gas-car rental stipend with the electric car purchase.
Range anxiety is enormously overrated. With an EV you wake up every single day with a 100% full charge. This is rarely mentioned for god knows why. Also, for the rare long range trips you drive your non EV.
that's assuming people have more than one car. a person can get a rental car, this is added mental task that you're asking a person to do. if you're requiring the user to think/work you're going to lose a lot of users.
That's the marketing angle that will be played, obviously for people here in a general socioeconomic sense there's no problem affording an EV and no problem getting a rental at the drop of a hat anywhere on the planet. Like claiming those airplane thingies will never catch on because people don't like renting cars and we are all familiar with suddenly having a transoceanic or cross continent travel dropped in our laps so we'll all be forced to live on houseboats or something. I mean, everybody travels all the time, so no body should be permitted to own a car that isn't for travelers, right?
The marketing push we can all look forward to is exhaustive explanation via legacy TV commercials and perhaps product placement on sitcoms, etc, that only poor people can't afford to rent a car for weird long trips and being poor isn't cool, so that'll kinda take care of itself.
i don't think it would get that far. we're living the intersecting of type of cars and ownership of cars. if it's a play on status i see Uber and such services dominating this marketing space. why rent and drive yourself, only the poor drive themselves.
This is a big problem in many European cities. Many people in cities (and just about all in city centres) don't live in a house, they live in a flat. And while the newer ones in very large cities often do, most older apartment buildings don't have parking garages. I think my neighbours would be mildly annoyed if I were to lay a 30m power cable from my third floor window to my (hypothetical) EV somewhere close to the house. Not to mention the strangulation issues for those nasty pedestrians on the sidewalk in between house and car.
Well you can down vote me all you want but it's not a UX problem that's been solved so far and it's a legitimate factor in range anxiety.
Unlike switching the lights off you have to get out of the car to plug it in.
If the car is going to beep before you get out then it's not a reminder for something I've forgotten,as with lights left on, it's just irritating UX noise, like the "don't forget your mobile phone" message. After a very short time I go blind to that.
If it's an alarm on a mobile/smart watch it's still a tedious chore to have to plug in a car when it's raining or I'm in a rush or I've parked in a spot without a charge point.
People _will_ forget to charge their cars, just as they forget to charge their phones and they will be late because of it.
If purely electric cars are to be brilliantly convenient everyday repacements for fossil fuels they'd be better with either some kind of induction charging, fast charging that doesn't take hours or hydrogen fuel cells.
If we had better ways of splitting hydrogen we could "fast charge" anywhere water and electricity is available.
But no, it's not a huge issue. New cars seem to come with apps nowadays, so as you said your car can just send you a notification to your phone if you haven't plugged it in five minutes after arriving back home. And maybe another one if it's still not plugged in before you go to bed.
Unavailability of charging (see sibling comment) is a bigger issue that won't be as easy to tackle. But reminding users to charge their car isn't what's hindering EV adoption. You can be late if you forget to fill up your petrol car, too. That can easily take ten minutes if there's a bit of a queue.
Yeah - the Bolt's going to be a nice car. I'm leasing a Spark EV now (more or less a prototype Bolt sold as a CARB compliance car) and it's a fun lil' car.
I also think that Tessa lead is overestimated due to the cult of personality around their CEO. Particularly around these parts. GM was making electric cars in yeh 90's.
