This is assuming that electrical cars are "filled up" the same way as gas cars are. This is very far away from being as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes.
I like the model that you swap your low charge battery with a fully charged one. That would require some new technology.
> and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes.
But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything.
Where I’m from almost every roadside McDonalds has fast charging. And almost every road trip I’ve taken where I’ve had to fast charge we’ve taken the kids to a McDonalds for a short break and finished charging long before we were finished eating and doing bathroom breaks.
I haven’t really owned an ICE. (Used my parents cars quite a lot though). Our first car was EV 9 years ago. But I’m fairly sure ICE would be significantly less convenient for us than EV. Especially with the newer one we recently got that has a more reasonable battery size, which we’ve never even had to fast charge once. Even on road trips. We never go anywhere we don’t need/want to go anyway. So having to go to a gas station just to fill the car with gas would be a significant inconvenience.
You wouldn’t want a phone that you’d have to take to a phone station to fill with phone juice would you? Even if it lasted longer on a fill-up (say two weeks)
I drive past a gas station every time I go to or from work. And if I could stop off there and get two weeks of charge out of my phone with a five-minute fill-up, I would, because that’s way better than having to remember to plug it in.
I’m sure it’s nice to have a car that is always ready to go, and I don’t think EVs are bad, but let’s not pretend that gasoline or diesel fuel isn’t really easy for most people, most of the time. The only time I ever had to go out of my way regularly for gas was in college, and they wouldn’t have had charging points in the mass parking lots anyway.
I have had an electric car for eight years now. I think I may have missed plugging it in twice, as I got distracted by unloading. Neither time a big problem as my regular commute is 15-20% charge. As I step out of the car I walk past the cable. It takes 5 seconds to plug it in.
My small solar panel installation on the garage deliver 4 MWh in a year, which is about what the car uses. Albeit not exactly when the car needs it, but that is covered by my share of the wind power co-op I am part of, and of course the rest of the grid. Cheaper than gas (by a lot), no cancerous fumes and less climate emissions. Not going back from that.
I don't have an EV but I've got the complete opposite view as you. Having my car always sitting around full and ready to go would be awesome. Leaving home in one direction, gas stations are plentiful and competitively priced. In the other direction, they are scarce and overpriced. Lately we've been doing a bunch of trips in the scarce direction, so I invariably end up digging into the cache of lawnmower/generator gas to solve the immediate problem, rather than going twenty minutes out of the way or paying the Dane-geld to fill up at an overpriced station. An EV would make it so I would never have to think about refueling, except for long trips for which I already have to think about rest stops.
> But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything.
That's probably a US (or maybe some other places) thing but you certainly can do that here in Estonia. I do it all the time - start the pumping and then go inside to the gas station to buy a drink or whatever. Especially with the in-app payment for gas it's great.
Never heard of anyone having an accident with it either...
The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America?
Plus it just seems like a stupid idea given that I have far less than 100% confidence in automatic cutoffs especially given the potentially serious consequences of a failure.
There are number of states in the US where this isn’t allowed, and the latch that holds the fill trigger open has been removed from the handle. Sure you can walk away, but the tank won’t keep filling.
There are other states where you're not even allowed to pump your own gas at all for "safety." (Two, although I understand that Oregon has walked it most of the way back.) Like prohibitions against unattended filling, these law have no statistical basis.
That isn't reality. It effectively never happens. Maybe once in your lifetime might see it happen to someone else, if you frequent stations with old pumps.
I don't think they're a bad idea and I appreciate them on a cold morning. But I have had them not shut off on a a couple of occasions and it's certainly a good idea to keep your eye on them. They're not failsafe.
It’s not hard to extrapolate that it’s a safety feature in case the auto-shutoff valve malfunctions and, when the tank is full, you’d end up with a dangerous and damaging fuel spill if someone isn’t standing there monitoring it. If you can’t walk away, the risk of this goes down a lot.
Also, people often start the pump and get back into the car while it fills. When it’s full, they get out of the vehicle which generates static electricity (often in winter months where it’s dry and wool or other clothing increases this) and has the risk of discharging on the handle, sparking a fire.
When it’s full, they get out of the vehicle which generates static electricity (often in winter months where it’s dry and wool or other clothing increases this) and has the risk of discharging on the handle, sparking a fire.
An excellent example of a point with no actual statistics behind it.
Its unsafe, and there are warning signs everywhere warning you to supervise the fuelling and not leave it unattended. You could walk away from a fuelling car... but the failure mode of burning down the whole gas station is so severe it seems a poor idea.
While the other replies about the legality of walking away for a short period may or may not be valid, GP was talking about leaving their car charging while they go get a short meal with their family. You could probably get away with leaving your car at the gas pump that long at some gas stations, but if wouldn’t be a very considerate thing to do.
Cite a single instance in which "something happened" when someone ducked into the 7-11 for a snack or a bathroom break while refueling. You'll have to dig for it, as such issues are vanishingly rare.
Fact is, this practice is universal, at least in the US where latches are provided on the pump handles.
Of course, it should go without saying that nobody should walk away from the pump for much longer than it takes to fill the tank, if only because it's a douchy move to tie up a gas pump for longer than you need it. But if shutoff failures were anywhere near as common as you seem to think, the latches would be prohibited everywhere.
Let's see. It looks like about a million people a year die of lung cancer, with about 90% of those attributed to smoking. But we still haven't seen any statistics on the number of burn victims and damaged/destroyed gas stations due to popping into the 7-11 for a Slurpee while the tank fills.
I can tell you from experience that leaving my EV to charge in my driveway overnight is way, way more convenient than stopping for gas (and paying a lot more for it).
I drive a lot, and I’ve ran into a situation only once where I had to find a charging station away from home. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people worry.
Nearly everywhere in the US is below $0.40/kWh. The average nationwide is $0.17/kWh. Only a handful of cities in California and Hawaii are over $0.40 (those places have the highest gas prices too). Most people will pay less than half as much to charge at home.
Forget it. Folks have been thinking about this battery swap thing for years and years, and it is not going to happen.
However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.
What I however still don't understand is why this isn't at least offered in niches where it would make even more sense, like electric buses. If you have a fleet of these buses, minimizing the charging downtime should be a priority, right? Plus, in a bus it should be easier to find a suitable place for the battery pack where it can be accessed easily.
I happen to work in the bus industry and the way we work, at least, is the buses are all out working by day and in the depot at night - there’s a lot less demand for bus ops during the night.
For a variety of reasons, you don’t really want to have to fill up on either diesel or electrons while away from the depot, if you can avoid it. So what you really want from electrification is a battery that lasts all day.
So battery swapping doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard since it would require multiple returns to depot during the day, or new swapping depots being built, or relying on someone else’s infrastructure. Of course all of this is possible but not ideal.
Tangentially, the overnight charging model introduces other problems - a large depot might have 100+ buses, all of which are charging simultaneously in one place. That’s a lot of electrons, and it is causing us a lot of trouble planning for it. And since the buses are charging at night, we can’t use solar to offset battery storage and in any case it’s not reliable enough - the buses have to run regardless of weather - setting aside the obvious commercial issues, in many cases it’s a safety issue too (eg school buses).
This is why H2 fuel cells have been viewed as potentially a better solution to BEVs in our industry, but H2 has its own (plentiful) problems and we appear to be shifting focus back to BEVs now and using H2 for energy storage and transport… that’s another story.
It’s not the cost of chargers or construction, or even the battery capacity, but the cost of transmission and delivery of the energy to charge them that has been the main problem.
Urban bus operations are just one aspect of the bus industry. I imagine it’s much easier for a municipal-owned bus company in a dense urban area to negotiate with the power company than it is for us.
I've heard that the issues with the "swap the battery" model are:
1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. People won't want to swap it for some random battery, and you risk an illicit market for swapped out "good" batteries. Sure, if swapping is very common, then batteries are fungible and maybe it all evens out. I doubt it, though.
2. Batteries are large, heavy, and not necessarily centrally placed. You'd need some sort of winch/harness/crane system, which is dangerous and expensive to automate. Even if you figure it out, swappable batteries might be a negative design constraint for electric cars (e.g. "what if we want to put battery cells throughout the body of the car?").
I also like the model, but how could it be made to work well?
It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) did before it failed 10 years ago.
You know what's really convenient? Never having to stop to fuel up for something like 90% of the miles I drive.
I spend way more time fueling my ICE than my EV. It's a pain to have to go out of my way to a fueling station. It's far less convenient than just plugging in every few days at home or at the office.
I’m actually confused about Norway, you see a lot of electric cars parked down the street but no one has a garage in Norway (in the city, at least), and I haven’t seen many cars actually plugged in. Where does everyone charge?
In the Netherlands it's crazy, something like 3-4x the price of home charging and close to 10x what you would "loose" on using your own solar power instead of selling it to the grid.
For most hybrids using a fast charger is over 2x more expensive per mile than using petrol.
Most people live outside the cities, so the more common scenario is having a house and a garage. If you live in an apartment building, there might be charging points. People parked on the street in the city streets have fewer options.
In the US as well. I have to admit however that I didn’t think of this as that much of a big deal before we bought a Tesla. The FUD about charging that’s out there is really effective. But then it turned out I can even charge it out of a common household outlet and there’s really no problem at all until you need to drive 300+ miles
> as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes.
I recently drove to the airport in a bit of a rush in a small 4-cylinder car. Drove straight up to pump that was basically touching the road I was on, tapped credit card, authorized for $100 and opened cap at same time. Stuffed the pump in and held it at max flow. 45l of gas later, cap back on, pump away and moving again.
I don’t think it would be possible to be faster.
Total time stopped: 7 minutes.
I'd love to know how much range you're adding to your ICE vehicle after pumping gas for 1-2 minutes.
All these people saying it takes a minute or two to get gas haven't paid attention to how long they actually spend entering the gas station, driving to the pump, getting out, negotiating payment, choosing fuel type, opening your tank, pumping, putting the handle back, hitting no on the receipt option, getting back in the car, leaving the pump, and entering traffic. Sometimes it'll take a minute just waiting for traffic to clear to pull out!
And then it's also assuming there is a gas station on your current route, and that it's one with a decent price and not more expensive than other stations around. A lot of the trips I take don't go past a decently priced gas station, the few I routinely do pass are often 5-6¢/gal more than others. At 22 gallons that's over a dollar more.
And also assuming you never get gas at a place like Sam's Club or Costco, which offer some big discounts but often have lines.
Yeah, my first thought on seeing the title question was "well, they charge slower than you can refill gas, so obviously you need more chargers than existing gas stations, though of course most people don't have gas stations at home so it's a kind of messy comparison".
It doesn't help the comparison to lie about the time. If you have a smaller gas tank and the pump can fill at it's maximum speed, you can fill in 1-2 minutes from the moment you put the nozzle in. As a practical matter, you're rarely getting in and out of a gas station in under 5 minutes, and only then if it's completely empty when you arrive. When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic.
Most EVs only need a "fill up" on a road trip, and AAA puts the average road trip refueling stop at 15 minutes. The technology in place today is adequate to do the same with EVs, and it only gets better every year. Battery swapping was a cute idea for a while but kinda pointless now.
Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle. 10 seconds to plug in when you arrive home, full every morning. Imagine trying to sell someone on the idea of going the other direction "Hey, buy this fancy car, it's great, but you have to take it to a dedicated location periodically just to keep it fueled up."
Blimey! Lord only knows where you live that it can take that long. I can count on one hand the number of times it's taken anything like 10 minutes over the years and they were during crises!
In reality, even if I have to wait for a free pump, my car is at 100% range in 5 mins when I pay at the pump by using my credit card.
I want my car filled to the brim any time I go to the petrol station (gas station to our friends over in the colonies :D). That's just how I roll. And I know many others who are the same. I also know some that just put in £10-£15 at a time, mainly due to finance constraints tbh.
To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel.
As a consumer, if I have to join a queue for hours [0] then to hell with that! However, with my diesel, it's literally 5 minutes once a week and I'm full up.
In addition, I run my car until 50 - 100 miles left in the tank and I don't get bent out of shape when the light comes on at < 50 miles. In an EV I'd shit bricks if that happened. I'd have to change my behaviour to many smaller topups.
The simple fact is that we have a chicken and egg scenario with EV's vs charging points/charging time at this time and I don't see it changing any time soon.
Anecdote: I just remember something I saw 3 weeks ago. I was in a town near where I live. I parked up to walk to a shop about 2 mins away and I walked past a girl at a charging station staring at the big charger thingy while on her phone. I couldn't hear what she was saying but I could see that the charging flap on her car was open. I was in the shop for about 10 minutes and came back the same way and she was still there, this time poking away at her phone and the cable still wasn't in her car but the charging flap was still open. No idea what the problem was but it caught my attention. Anyway, just thought I'd share.
Edit: Something else to mention - Many people round where I live are in Victorian flats with almost no parking nearby. It's not umcommon to park streets away from where you actually live... they'll not buy electric for the most part.
> To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel.
It takes me 0 minutes to fill my EV. Plug in at night and full in the morning (and pre-heated / de-iced on an automatic schedule too). Going somewhere else and standing for 5 minutes once a week isn’t something I’d rush back to.
Edit: My anecdote is about my mum filling up the car with petrol instead of diesel because the handle of the pump was black. You don’t want to know how long we waited for that.
The pre-heating/de-icing does sound nice, I'll give you that but EV's just do not work if you live in a flat and unfortunately in and around the cities in the UK there are millions living in flats.
Of course, many living in flats won't have a car so that's moot but walk up any street with Victorian 4 floor flats and you'll not see a single parking space available outside them: they're all taken, all the time, but not necessarily by the people that live immediately next to them.
Even if they do manage to park right outside their flat, they won't be trailing a cable from their window :D
For me, EV's do not make sense for a significant portion of the people driving in the UK. Perhaps the majority. I don't have numbers to back that up but my argument about flats still stands.
What I do think makes sense is hybrids (assuming cost parity!). Put a small 30-mile battery in new cars. Let it charge from braking. Use it only when going from 0 - 30 or even just below 30 only and I bet you'd significantly reduce your fuel bills (and carbon if that's part of your reasoning for purchase).
I drive a 9 yo Hyundai diesel so I have a cheap car anyway.
I’m in the UK. There are a million EVs already out there yet I’m the only one on my street of 100 houses with one. Each of those houses has a drive.
They are not for everyone but there is plenty of room for growth. It costs me 3p/mile to run it too saving me about £100/month.
Self charging hybrids are a waste of time. My Hyundai i20 1.1 diesel got 60mpg while my colleagues hybrid got 50. Plug-in hybrids are slightly better, but you’ve got additional complexity and all the maintenance of an ICE. Plus you are cycling the small battery more. 1,000 cycles on a 250 mile battery is 250,000 miles - on a 30 mile battery it’s 30,000.
> There are a million EVs already out there yet I’m the only one on my street of 100 houses with one
You have a driveway (I assume) so you can make use of it but would you still buy one if you had a flat?
Still can't overcome the fact that (compared to ice cars and spec being somewhat equal) EV's are way more expensive to buy, more expensive to insure [0], more expensive to repair [0] (especially after a bump/crash), have less resale value than ICE cars, burn forever if set on fire.
ICE cars are not going away any time soon and gov trying to ram it down our throats will just cost billions and will turn people off (I don't want one, for instance). The car industry is pushing back too... reality is setting in.
For me, if I had to pick the primary reason why I think they're dead is price. My car, for example, was an 8 yo Hyundai Santa Fe 2.2 Diesel with 80k on it when I bought it. I paid 11k for it 2 years ago. I own it outright. It's 10 years old now and you wouldn't know it.
I've paid £900 for tyres, tracking and aircon recharge and about £160 a month on fuel since I bought it. It's had 2 MOT's too but didn't have to get anything fixed.
You just can't get equivalent EV's for that kind of money and for many, that kills them stone dead.
> The results reveal that the cost of insuring these electric cars is indeed higher, but the difference is not as substantial as the headlines would suggest. The EV was actually cheaper to cover for one of our drivers.
Your £160/month on fuel over 2 years is £3,840. An EV charged on octopus would be at least a quarter of that, maybe less. So let’s say £960 - almost a £3k difference.
You can absolutely get second hand EVs for £11k - this seems to be at odds with your statement about low resale values too. The low residuals angle is being pushed hard at the moment but when I go looking all I see is standard depreciation on new vehicles.
I agree with your assessment of fuel prices and whatnot but I just checked Autotrader. I set 11k as the price, SUV body type and there are 63 electric cars to choose from. Over 40 are MG...
If I change it to Diesel I get over 11k cars available. 171 Santa Fe models.
The range on those MG's is about 180 miles too: 3 times this year I've driven to Aberdeen - I'd run out of juice on the way in the EV. I get just over 400 in my diesel.
The energy density of batteries isn't comparable to ICE cars.
You’re comparing older ICE vehicles with relatively new EVs. In a few years time you will have more choice of older EVs in the same age bracket as the ICE cars. The second hand market will be awash with Model Ys, Audi SUVs and more in a few years.
For long distance travel it’s a bit more complicated and you have to get your calculator out.
A quick look using ABRP suggests that a trip from Newcastle ( not sure where you’re coming from but that’s 380 miles) to Aberdeen in a MG ZS EV Long Range would require 1.5 hours of charge along the way, turning a 6 hour drive into 7.5. If you’re stopping anyway (I would) then it might not be a lot of additional time.
If you do that journey a lot, it might not be worth it. A few times a year it might be worth the compromise considering fuel costs saving the rest of the time.
If you filling up your diesel takes 10 minutes a fortnight then that’s 4 hours a year too. More if it’s out of your way. You save that if you charge an EV at home but spend it on long journeys.
You can also take the train or rent a car with the fuel savings and probably still be saving overall.
So it really depends. They are not a drop in replacement for every scenario but in some circumstances they do have benefits.
> When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic.
I'm willing to believe that it takes 15-20 minutes to fill your pickup, but that's a far outlier. If I was guessing, I'd say that your tank is a factor larger than most cars, and I'd also say that I can't remember the vapor pressure sensor malfunctioning like that and that's also skewing your data.
well I fill up a sedan (~13 gallons), So 2-3 minutes fits unless I'm in a long line. I'd only be spending 15+ minutes in a Costco line.
>all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle.
Depends on how readily you have access to a charging port at home/work. if you have no garage to park in and charge overnight with, you're pretty much stuck at some public space for 30 minutes minimum (assuming fast charging).
> Depends on how readily you have access to a charging port at home/work. if you have no garage to park in and charge overnight with, you're pretty much stuck at some public space for 30 minutes minimum (assuming fast charging).
Right; as the article puts it,
> The majority of today’s American EV owners charge at home, but more than 20 percent of US households don’t have access to consistent off-street parking where they can plug in overnight. The public charging network, meanwhile, can be spotty, and drivers have complained that chargers aren’t always well maintained or even functioning.
Although, that said, it's possible that getting 80% of cars to be EVs would be a big win already; assuming the number really is 20% that may not be a big problem.
> When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time
Well yes if you have a huge pickup that can take a while. I have 35 gallon tank on the pickup and it does take a while (never measured it so not sure how many minutes).
But on our regular cars, it takes less than 2 minutes to fill the tank.
> Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle.
Well the EV driver spends less "CPU time" (using computer analogy) since they plug it in and go do something else. But the wall-clock-time is orders of magnitude higher so if the battery is empty and you need to go somewhere, it's not happening very soon.
I like the model that you swap your low charge battery with a fully charged one. That would require some new technology.