>Average Joe does not care about global warming when purchasing a car
Don't know why you're being down voted for saying the truth. It's not your own opinion but it's still the wider truth no matter how uncomfortable it is.
Most consumers don't care about the environment when they buy something and businesses care even less about the environment.
He’s being downvoted because the formulation “have no place in average Joe's mind” is a bit ambiguous, it sounds like the poster’s opinion is, that it SHOULD NOT be the concern of the average joe, whereas I think he meant that it is unfortunately not.
Secondly, he may have because of regulations.
Thirdly, “problems are known” without even the slightest precision is pure trolling, that’s just not ok.
Because it doesn't add anything to the discussion, other than repeating the preceding comment. It's twelve words repeated twice. Regardless of who is right or wrong, it doesn't describe the average Joe, it doesn't look into who they are or where they come from, it doesn't do anything to convince one way or another who "average Joe" is. Basically, [citation needed].
I think it’s due to the big sweeping claim being made. Most people, even American conservatives, know that climate change is real and will make their lives worse. That doesn’t mean everyone is free to change the built environment around them to suit a lower-polluting lifestyle but that’s not the same as saying that they wouldn’t make other choices if they thought it was practical for them.
I don't see how it is uncomfortable. It would make me more uncomfortable if the anti-private transportation campaign started by the government and the media was working on the average Joe.
Average Joe is skeptical about electric cars - until they actually try driving one for the first time. Then Average Joe actually wants one but can't justify the price premium when compared to an ICE.
Pretty much everyone who has driven mine (Kia EV6) or my wife's (VW ID.4) says they are pleasantly surprised when driving. Personal computers, laptops, cell phones, smartphones, etc all have gone through the cycle of being expensive for early adopters but mainstream in due time, and I suspect EVs will have a similar lifecycle.
Kia and Hyundai have done an excellent job with the design of their newer cars. However they’ve done an incredibly poor job with vehicle security. My wife is an insurance broker, and several of the bigger insurance companies will not even insure those brands, for newer models, because theft is out of control. Too bad, because I really like their look.
EVs are a better experience if you have a place to charge at home and aren’t constantly going on road trips. I strongly believe that most Americans with an ice car would prefer an EV if the cost made sense.
And if you are that worried about range or having to look for chargers I feel like plug-in hybrids are a pretty attractive middle ground. Enough that I bought one!
Joe can get ICE car for X price with range Y but it does not even matter because he can "charge" his ICE car in minutes.
Or Joe can get BEV car for 2X price with range Y/2 (or even smaller fraction) which actually matters because charging of his BEV car takes 30 minutes and more (assuming that there is no queue on chargers) + stress with stupid applications.
Now add there fact, that cca 50% of Joes can't charge at home, because they are living in apartments and you can see why BEV is inferior product from Joe's perspective, because in Joe's mind he is paying more to get less.
And btw I own Skoda Enyaq and that car is massive PITA when you have no place to charge.
Sure, but the people who can charge at home are still convinced they need 600 miles of range. I charge at home so my charging time is 0 and it costs 1/5 of the price. There are 70 houses on my street with similar configurations to mine.
I also did 3 months without a home charger with no issues.
Most people don't live in houses like in the UK so they can't charge at home overnight.
If there's street parking then there needs to be street charging but nobody has really found a mass solution to that. The cities need to build that but they aren't.
If you don't have a charger at home or at work you're screwed.
Sure, I live in the UK so I know the living arrangements. Not sure what’s warranting the downvotes but my point is that there are lots of people who do have the opportunity to charge at home and save big time with fuel costs but are still convinced they need something that behaves exactly like the thing they have, and for a lot of people it doesn’t have to.
In EU long car trips are quite common especially in weekends or during winter and summer holiday season when everyone pack their family in their car and zerg-rushes south towards the Alps/Mediterranean, so everyone uses ICEs for such long journey.
Range anxiety is too big of an issue for EVs to become popular for that purpose and families usually own one car to serve all occasions.
Range anxiety is going the same way as peoples fear that electric cars were low powered and slow. The availability of chargers and cars that can give you 4-5 hours of drive time in 15 minutes is increasing every year.
That's not the reality in my EU world. Almost nobody either single or with family in my wider circle of acquaintances spread across 5 countries owns EVs. One guy's mom I know has one but also has an ICE for longer trips.
Yes, statistically sales of EVS are increasing but growth is highly uneven, it's still mostly wealthy people and wealthy countries with chargers at home and businesses fleets with chargers at work. In my working class neighborhood of apartment buildings I see exactly zero EVs parked on the streets and zero chargers(could this be a connection? /s)
And cheaper EVs don't usually support fast charging. Also EVs with half decent range and fast charging are still quite very expensive for the purchasing power of the average European. The best selling cars in the EU were almost all ICE and very affordable models to boot like the Dacia Sandero, well below the price of an EV with decent range.
Biased feel good articles just saying "things are getting so much better" gloss over too many painful realities and don't really mean anything if that doesn't match the reality you're seeing with your own eyes.
> Yes, statistically sales of EVS are increasing but growth is highly uneven
But the same thing happened when horses were replaced by ICE vehicles - cars started to be used by the rich in cities and then in the country over decades/generations as cars became cheaper and running a horse got more expensive. The takeup of EVs is happening at a much faster rate than ICE.
I think the truth is somewhere in between: yes, things are getting better, but it's happening much more slowly than EV supporters claim. I'm in the UK, in a populous suburb of the second biggest city, and I have literally one fast-charging point in a 20km radius. That's not enough to serve even 5% of drivers here, if we all switched to EVs tomorrow people would start fighting in the streets to get access to it.
I don't doubt we will get there eventually, but they will not be able to stop selling ICE cars by 2035; about 5 years from now there will be an uproar and the deadline will be pushed by at least another decade. The technology is getting better, the prices are getting lower, but infrastructure is nowhere near ready.
And to give an anecdotal counterpoint: I live in (relatively speaking because small country) the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands, I have 8+ charging stations (each with at least 2 chargers) in my small town and a fast charging point with 20+ chargers within a five minute highway drive.
Not that there aren't any problems, and there are definitely "dead zones" so to speak, but the situation you're describing isn't valid everywhere.
Yeah I'm sure small wealthy green and well developed countries like Netherlands, Switzerland or Denmark have built good EV infrastructure, but in most Europe it's not like that at all.
I live in Austria now and charging infrastructure is still very sparse in the city where people keep their cars parked and there's no signs of new chargers being built so I'm also skeptical on meeting the deadline.
Also considerig that most people have old beaters, those people won't be able to magically afford more expensive EVs with worse range.
So I think your parent is right and your situation in Benelux and the Nordics is the exception not the norm. If the infrastructure doesn't massively improve across the block and the price of EVs doesn't tank along with a range increase, there will be uproar in the less fortunate EU countries who depends on ICEs and the ICE deadline will have to be postponed again.
I'd be ready to bet good money that the situation I describe is much more common, across the whole continent, than the one you describe. Benelux and Nordics will always be ahead in this kind of thing, but you're also very much in the minority.
To be fair we didn’t have most of the existing infrastructure ten or even five years ago. Once the time is right it expands a lot faster than you expect it to.
>Once the time is right it expands a lot faster than you expect it to.
You clearly don't know my city leadership/country. Stuff only starts to move after the shit has already hit the fan and everyone ahs their pitchforks out.
Driving anywhere with an EV is no issue if you have unlimited time at your disposal to keep stopping to charge on route. But time is money. Your vacation time is limited.
How much time does it take to reach Portugal from the UK with an EV that has a realistic 200km range and 30 minute fast charge(if your you're lucky to find them on route) versus a diesel with a 800km range wich takes 3 minutes to fill up.
20 minutes of top up to last you 2-3 hours of driving (assuming 100km/h highway speed) is very ambitious/optimistic for the range most average EVs and the charging speed of most chargers.
And how many are working combined with how many have a sufficient connection to the grid to power all the chargers in the local cluster if all are being used at once (for reference see the hassle a recent pair of youtubers went through when doing a ICE vs EV "race" from John-o-Groats to Land's end[0][1].
Spoiler alert, most chargers were broken or had queues to use (so an hour to wait even before you got your '20 mins') or were gimped into low power delivery because all of the points were in use and the connection to the grid was only enough to serve one car at full power.
I'm not saying this all charging stations all over the country, all times of the year (this was on a weekend of a half term holiday) but even as a snapshot of where the UK is in getting the infrastructure up to speed, we are a long way behind the demand curve, and that's before you take into account all the people who haven't bought into EV's yet because of their reliance on public charging infrastructure (due to not living in a house with a driveway etc) which has been shown now to actually cost more per mile than an efficient ICE car in Diesel/Petrol when using public charging networks.
(In the video referenced above, Lee had to resort to using more expensive charging locations (due to unavailability of the planned ones for reasons listed above) and the final charging bill for the distance of the journey was nearly £260. The ICE (diesel) was £122[2]
The usual cry against the public charging situation is "should have bought a tesla" and "Home charging balances that out"
1. We don't have a monoculture of cars, not everyone wants or even LIKES Teslas
2. Home charging is fine if you happen to live in a house where that's viable, which is AFAIK less than 50% of householdes in the UK.
3. The home charging cost is typically (dependent on the tariff deal you have) anywhere from 8p to 30p per KWh. range varies on model, but the best EV's have an upper end in ideal conditions of around 4 miles/KWh so between 2-7.5p per mile in the Lands end run video, Geoff got around 13p per mile (mainly not using motorway filling stations so avoiding excessive costs.)
Since an EV is still a premium/luxury/early adopter product, the cost premium is usually at least £10000 more than an equivalent ICE car. In order to recoup the cost premium you need to do 90000 and 150000 miles before it earns it's difference back. For most cars (in the UK due to attrition from road conditions or other drivers inability to not write your car off) that's in excess of the operational life of the car (that being said both the cars in my household are north of those numbers, but they are definitely in a minority) let alone that fact that people now are all too keen to keep a car that long.
The numbers made sense a few years ago but until the prices start getting more realistic for ordinary people it's a gamble (Oh and now EVs are more expensive to insure too, further offsetting any running cost advantage)
Right now the only argument (for me at least - and I do have a driveway) for an EV is the environmental one but the production of them is far from perfect too (but it's still early days so who knows) There are much bigger wins to be had in industry and travel than getting me into an EV (like improving public transport to the point that it actually becomes more viable for starters)this all sounds like I'm anti EV and anti public transport, but I actually WANT to like them both (I never needed a car when I lived in Hamburg with an excellent interconnected public transport system)
>Spoiler alert, most chargers were broken or had queues to use
Right. At peak season(summer and winter holidays around Christmas and NYE) even gas stations have long ques for gasoline along the popular European highway routes like Austria, Italy, Croatia, etc. meaning a fill up can take 20+ minutes sometimes.
I can't imagine what it would be with EV charging spots at those times. You're out of juice, looking for a 30 minute quick charge and there's others already waiting in line for their 30 minute quick charge. You might as well spend the night there because you're getting home today.
Range anxiety and the lack of abundant charging infra is still a huge issue for most families when they choose not to go EV yet for their single do-it-all car. It seems to work for Nordics and Benelux countries that have high incomes and invested heavily in infrastructure, but most of the EU is still far behind.
> I can't imagine what it would be with EV charging spots at those times.
There will be a transition period when infrastructure is constrained. That’s true.
But in the long term I think this will be less of an issue than you’d think. Many people can charge at home and at their destination so that’ll reduce the number of people that need to charge along the way. EV batteries are getting bigger and cheaper, and can charge faster.
After we bought a new EV I practically don’t use fast charging anymore, even on our longer trips. If I do, I might just need a 10min top-up to get to our destination. Our old EV that was highly dependent on fast charging is now just used for local trips, so the new EV has reduced the impact on fast chargers.
Since fast chargers are easier to build than gas stations, and better at attracting customers (these days it’s customers with spending power I might add), there’s fast chargers in many more different kinds of locations than gas stations. Like, all the roadside McDonalds here in Norway have fast chargers now.
Some times we’ve also driven to a parking garage with a whole bucketload of slow/AC chargers where we’ve had an hour break, go to a cafe, do some shopping, etc. You can get a decent top-off in that time with a 22kW charger.
There’s just so many more ways of doing charging with EVs.
This is almost a solved problem in Norway already. Some cities are hitting 30-50% EVs on the road. Yes, Norway is wealthy(-ish), but when Norway did much of its roll-out, EVs were worse and more expensive, the fast chargers were worse and more expensive. There was a lot of learning to do that others can now just copy.
You forgot your links, but your EV vs ICE video was Geoff Buys Cars, who is very anti-EV. He specifically architects these videos to make EVs fail for clicks. That’s when he’s not doing his chemtrail videos…
A big part of his recent videos was how bad the depreciation was on a Porsche EV, and from what I can tell it was just normal new car depreciation and he was comparing it to a second hand diesel.
The usual cries are mostly right. Home charging for me is 3p/mile. Tesla have done the right thing where the car know the charger locations and calculates charge times and places. This should be standard in all EVs but isn’t, so you need ABRP to plan it. Not sure if the EV guy did that in the video since I refuse to give that guy clicks.
But this isn’t a representative journey really for most people.
The insurance thing seems to also have been clickbait, since I ran my details straight after seeing the headlines and was able to find insurance no problem. Insurance for non EVs seems to be up too.
>You forgot your links, but your EV vs ICE video was Geoff Buys Cars, who is very anti-EV
Oops yes I did. Had them all lined up then forgot the C/P them when I got a call. Yes, He is Anti-EV (or more specifically anti-"modern vehicle" - where cars are treated like information gathering devices that also happen to let you go from A to B) but that's just a requirement for having a more balanced presentation of things. There ARE downsides to EV ownership (currently) that need to be fixed before they can be mainstream, but if you only watch the fully charged show, then everything is roses. Sure Geoff leans heavily into conspiracy theories which hurts his credibility but the result of the 'race' was pretty crystal clear - The public EV infrastructure away from Tesla superchargers is not fit for purpose (right now) or even as cheap as running an ICE car
>He specifically architects these videos to make EVs fail for clicks
Of course he does. That's the Youtube game now. But Lee was a 100% EVangelist on his channel prior to the 'race'. Are you saying Lee engineered the fail too? his Pro-EV channel now seems to have significantly reversed course in that regard.
>Here is another one done with similar issues of cars sharing chargers
Cool. But Tesla is the outlier. We can't just handwave the infrastructure problems away by saying "shoulda bought a Tesla". That's not a long term solution. Cars are often more emotional than that. People buy what they like, and if we all liked the same thing the world would be a boring place.
>The usual cries are mostly right.
They may be right but the solutions they propose aren't viable for all people. We are talking about a technology shift that has to be applicable to ALL people (eventually).
As I said in my post, Not everyone wants or even likes a Tesla. I personally will never have one, for a multitude of reasons, including that I just don't like (most of) them. And I'm not the only one.
Home charging might be 3p/mile but generally only available to people with a driveway. That's probably less than 50% of households in the UK. There's a significant amount of terrace housing which if you're lucky you might have street parking in front of. So in that situation the only option is to wait for your local council to put charging options on your street furniture (given many councils are actually facing bankruptcy right now, I imagine it's not a priority right now) And that's even before we get onto mutli occupancy housing and blocks of flats.
I'm not saying this all isn't insurmountable but the speed it needs to happen isn't anywhere near the speed it's actually happening (I'm only seeing small scale trials for street charging appearing in my news feed but no great push from government to make it happen more widespread)
> But this isn’t a representative journey really for most people.
No, but when you might be a family with just one car, that has to do everything, sometimes you have to do long journeys up the country. They may even be somewhat unplanned ("Hey, your elderly father has taken a sudden turn, is in the hospital and may not make it through the night." while he's in Yorkshire and you're in Cornwall. Not Land's End to John o'Groats but still a significant journey that would cause problems for a lot of EV's)
The point is these problems exist. Similar problems exist for ICE cars but they have been mitigated down to minimal thanks to the maturity of the infrastructure. The EV infrastructure is still in it's infancy yet the EV ownership is in its adolescence. The infrastructure HAS to catch up, without the answer being "buy a Tesla"
>The insurance thing seems to also have been clickbait
Anecdata but I had a look on autotrader and a second hand Leaf is 10 insurance groups higher than a comparable second hand civic. Only one data point, I know, and isn't an actual quote but is a snapshot of similar things I've seen over the course of my recent research.
BTW I said before, I'm Anti EV but that was a typo I meant NOT anti EV and public transport. In fact I think an EV would suit my family extremely well. We have off street parking, our trips are > 99% local, my commute is only 10 miles and most of our typical driving is contained within a 30 mile radius of the house.
We do have regular planned trips to parental homes which are >200 miles away but happen infrequently enough to be workaround-able. The only reason we haven't is the cost - the purchase price isn't compatible with our finances right now (and some minor concerns with the battery chemistry stability...) and the cost saving numbers don't stack up.
Most Joe's cannot afford two separate fleets of cars in their household, for city commute and for long distance trips. Even for city commute, daily round trip of 30km doesn't mean that 200km range is acceptable unless the car costs maybe EUR 5k. No idea how much is it in miles or football fields.
This is probably a product of location. I live in Houston, Texas, and have made multiple long-distance trips in my EV, including cross-country.
As a side note, looking up km to mi or feet is super easy using Spotlight (or the equivalent in your OS of choice): Cmd+Space to bring it up, and typing "30km" shows me it's 18.64 miles. (it also tells me my EV has a range of 445km, which is much more than 200km)
You're intentionally arguing poorly for the average joe case in most of the US.
You can pack up 6 people in an SUV and take an 800 mile trip one-way for <$200 of gas. The same flight costs $1600. You do that trip as little as once a year and you more than erase the lifetime savings of EV and the car that's better for your use-case costs significantly less.
And this is the "disney vacation" case where you don't need anything. If you're going camping you're
not gonna take your gear
and bike on a plane.
EVs are fantastic, I love commuting on my e-bike because it's the path to realizing the gains of an EV for short commutes with the benefits of an ICE for everything else. But I'm also young, healthy, fit and abled and there seems to be little market in the space of inexpensive EV transport for people who aren't that.
6 charges, under 2 hours of charging on a 16 hour journey. Not ideal but considering ( IF you can charge at home ) you’re saving petrol station visits the rest of the year and your running costs are 3p/mile vs 10-15p/mile for ICE it CAN be worth it. Not for everyone. I think I’ve tempered my language well enough.
My newest vehicle is 12 years old, is paid for, can pull a (rented) trailer if needed, can fit my entire family plus dog and groceries, and has low insurance rates. The downside is that it gets 18/20 mpg. I’ve never bought a new vehicle, and probably won’t for some time. Any time I look at an EV I’m pretty much priced out of what I’m willing to pay for a vehicle any time I try to get feature parity.
Based on my calculations, it’s better for me to drive vehicles like the one I currently own into the ground vs buying a new EV, or even a hybrid.
Hopefully a Maverick hybrid or something similar will break that cycle.
In BMW in highway mode the turn lever activates high beam lights, so the drivers at least are trying to use the lever. Unfortunately also brake pedal activates high beam lights, so we cannot be 100% certain they are trying to use blinkers. Someone help this poor drivers.
Sure but when my ship eventually comes or retirement then I will need an M3 by then :).
All M3 sadly has been molested by boy racers here - first sign is the wrong sized rear tyres because they are so skint so never mind the maintenance needed.
I drove the new i4 m50 with nearly 600ft/lb of torque at my local bmw driving experience this summer. It's a bit heavy in turns, but the performance is there.
It seems to have range exceeding Teslas in real world driving slightly too.
Hopefully they make the M line look funny and performance castrated. The cars alone, floating in interplanet vacuum might be good, but on the roads every driver inside them is a life-threatening asshole.
> Until electric isn’t dependent on gas, I don’t see the benefit.
There is a benefit as soon as the CO2 emissions per kilometer are lower.
Let's say the carbon intensity of electricity production here in Belgium is 100 gram/kWh right now. (This number varies throughout the day, depending on how much is being produced by "green" sources versus fossil fuels. Not just in Belgium, but also in the countries we import from. You can track those numbers on electricity maps[1].)
I can drive more than 5km with one kilowatt-hour, so that means the carbon intensity of my driving is (100 gram/kWh)/(5km/kWh) = 20 gram/km.
The typical emissions of a gasoline car is somewhere between 100 and 200 gram/km. So even though the grid here is not perfectly "green", I am reducing the emissions per km significantly by driving an EV.
Those numbers, and the conclusion, may vary depending on your car and grid. In places where a lot of inefficient coal plants are used, the carbon intensity of electricity production can be extremely high at times. Examples include Poland, India and some US states. In those places it may be better to drive a (very efficient) gasoline car instead of an EV, unless you are careful about when you charge.
Electric production in a professionally-maintained power plant is more efficient than a car since vehicles have much more restrictive weight, cost, and safety constraints and the average driver is indifferent about maintenance or efficient operation. When something like 70+% of the total energy is being wasted you have a lot of room for competition.
The other thing to remember is lifetime usage: if you buy a new ICE today, it will likely be contributing to fossil fuel demand and emissions in 2043. If you buy an EV, it will be running on renewables for many periods already - note how many places are using software to optimize charging when the power supply is greenest – and each renewable power source which comes online will effectively upgrade your existing vehicle.
Would be incredibly stupid for German automakers to give up on their one of core competencies.
EVs unless forced by regulations, have no place in average Joe's mind. And it isn't irrational. Problems are known.