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Are You Clamoring for an Electric Car?
(With my apologies to Gary McVey, prepare for one of my incendiary posts.)
Is a Tesla or a Chevy Bolt, or a Nissan Leaf on your Christmas list this year? Can you hardly wait to ditch that gas-guzzler in the driveway and replace it with a vehicle that you can “fill up” from an installation in your garage, at a lot less than a tank of Regular?
Well, if that’s what you see in your future, so do most of the world’s car manufacturers. There probably isn’t a car manufacturer who isn’t working on designing and building an electric car, either purpose-designed or just replacing the internal-combustion engine in a model they already build with a big battery. General Motors has already announced their coming “All-electric future.” The European Union is mandating more and more strict emissions rules for vehicles sold there, and their carmakers like BMW, Renault, Daimler, Fiat, and Volvo are all touting their electric vehicles.
But you might wish to wait a moment before you go all-in on electric, especially if you live in the United States outside of a central large city. First, let’s check out the price of that electric car versus its gas-powered brother. The Nissan Leaf retails for about $30,000. Its near twin, the Nissan Versa, costs about $19,000. An electric Chevy Bolt will set you back about $36,000. Its similar brother, the Cruze, is about $17,000. See a pattern developing here? In the past, you could rely on a nice Federal tax credit for your electric car, to help mitigate that huge price differential, but not anymore. Most carmakers have sold enough cars that they don’t earn any tax credit now. So, it looks like GM’s All-Electric Future will be a lot more expensive than its Internal Combustion Present.
That nice home charger in the garage will set you back another $700 or so. However, unlike the five-minute fill-up of your gas-powered ride, it will take you up to 3-4 hours to recharge that electric car. And the “range” of an electric car is a lot smaller than the range of miles you can get from a tank of gas. So, you’ll probably want to forget those long road-trips in your new electric car. And if you get caught in an unexpected traffic jam, that electric car’s range might just shrink. If you get caught with your battery down in the middle of a busy street or freeway, it might be pretty embarrassing to have AAA send a truck to hoist it up and carry it to the nearest charging station. And there’s no guarantee that there will even be a nearby charging station! They are still pretty few around the country today.
Also, what about that wildfire in your area, when the police or highway patrol comes to your house and tells you to evacuate? What? Your electric car is out of charge? It won’t get you very far when you need to evacuate? Too bad, it becomes a hunk of junk when the fire reaches your house, and you really can’t carry much on your back. Then, what about that power failure in the next thunderstorm? Your car needs a charge? Impossible with no power! That’s especially worrying when you are a rural resident, where you are already far from most services.
Now, I’ll bet that new electric car might not seem like such a good investment. And electric cars are so new, there’s really not much of a market for used ones. And big Li-ion batteries don’t last forever, and eventually need to be replaced, at a cost far above that of an internal-combustion engine. So your electric car might not be worth very much when its battery wears out, and you might be out one-third the price of the car for a new one. Oh, and batteries don’t perform very well in the cold, so if you live in a northern state like Minnesota, your car will need to be kept indoors so its battery doesn’t freeze or get drained by the cold weather. And beware of the company parking lot while you’re at work — your car might not run when you come out to go home at the end of the day.
My own viewpoint is that I will never, ever, buy or drive an electric car. I appreciate being able to get in my gas-powered car, and go wherever I want, whenever I want, with no “range anxiety.” I like long car trips, without the worry of how long I have left before my car dies. Gas stations are everywhere, and if you keep a full or close to full tank, you can even drive around during a power outage. And when you are forced to evacuate, you can fill up the trunk with your goods and just drive away. I’m betting that most Americans aren’t clamoring for an electric car, and that GM’s future might not be so prosperous if it expects most Americans to want one.
An electric car will not be in my future.
Published in Economics
I am willing to bet vegan
You win.
Sure. From most consumers’ point of view, the important thing is minimizing the time and expense of maintenance and repairs.
Up until 2002 we bought only American-branded cars. My free trade ideology said I had nothing against buying “foreign” cars, but I just didn’t. Here in Michigan a lot of friends, neighbors, and relatives are connected with the auto industry, and I just sort of gravitated to American cars.
In 2002 I was scheduled for January surgery a hundred miles down I-94. I didn’t want Mrs R to have to deal with an unreliable car in case there were complications and she needed to drive alone back and forth, so we bought our first Toyota, a used car. She never had to make that trip alone, but the time spent dealing with repair shops dropped immediately, and we never went back to American cars.
If electric cars can drop that time even further, including the time spent on regularly scheduled maintenance, that would make them very attractive, never mind their other limitations. If they can’t, then they are not nearly so interesting. I don’t have any investment decisions riding on it now, so we’ll just wait and see.
This has been becoming the Bain of my technical profession the last 15 years or so as these type of components are making their way in the Spacecraft architecture. High heat density solid state components that have semi acceptable duty cycles/life span in a terrestrial environment which become a design nightmare when buried in a electronics box deep inside a spacecraft with no convective means to distribute and remove the heat.
We have come to expect 7 to 10 year live spans for our orbital infrastructure, and the general thought process is that monolith solid state components are more reliable, yet they come to my design door step (orbital thermal control) and will die a early ignominious deaths unless we greatly derate (like 50%) what the manufacturer of the device thinks is prudent for terrestrial applications, and use pricy dispersive technologies (eg heat pipes, super conductive fibers embedded in their mounting structures, etc…)
Hey, man! She’s paid for those single-use carbon offsets!!
No wonder she’s perpetually grumpy!
In China’s Shenzhen, so called city of the future, and I believe as a perk for employees who can afford the electric cars the BYD company makes, they cover the roofs of their buildings with solar panels (they have 365 days of sun) to make EV charging powered by solar. See video starting at 17:10.
I have no expertise on the technical side but I’m fully on board with the notion that EVs are ridiculous from a utility perspective. But I think there’s a decent counterargument on the style issue:
Millions of Americans already put utility as a very low priority when it comes to buying cars. Sure, we make up excuses as to why we absolutely need that Suburban, that F350, or that AWD option – but in reality we just like having fancy cars and are willing to part with our disposable cash to do so.
Even in left-leaning urban areas like the Bay Area or the Colorado Front Range, SUVs still outnumber EVs on generic 30-mile congestion-filled commutes. For a two-car family with an extra $20K to burn on their commuter car, I’d say an EV makes at least as much (non-)sense as an SUV does.
I’ll admit this was news to me. Now that we have a decent amount of real-world experience with EVs, has this actually been a relevant issue with the mass-produced EVs to date?
The hell with that I want my Atomic Car.
You weren’t paying that in gas.
Most of that was taxes.
You have an incentive now, but the taxes are going to follow you.
Dude. Way beyond that. Pure Level 5 Vegan I’m sure….
There’s utility in SUVs beyond driving off-road. I drive one to a) sit up higher and have a better view of the road and b) to increase my odds in the event of an accident. I prefer being in a bigger, heavier vehicle when I’m engaged in the most dangerous activity of my day — driving the roads on Colorado’s Front Range with all the other nut cases out there.
However, I have entered the Mini Cooper EV giveaway sweepstakes on the shopping site not-to-be-named. Not because it’s an EV, but because I’ve always wanted a toy Mini Cooper. It’s not rational given my argument for an SUV, I know. But, it’s free!!! And it’s got my name on it, so don’t even think of entering!
If you want another reason for the Mini, here is the last picture I took of Linda’s Mini at the bone yard. She suffered a small fracture on her left heel and fracture of her right hand, neither of which are going to require any alignment surgery. I estimate the closing speed of this near head on crash was 75 to 80 mph. (Linda was doing 25 the other girl admitted to the police going 50).
The young lady in the other car (at 2003 Acura Integra) had a compound fracture of her right leg. I suspect that she will be taking a bit longer to recover.
Wow, G. That’s scary! I’m glad Linda’s okay. Just think how much scarier that might have been if a lithium-ion battery had been involved! When I get my Mini, I may never leave the neighborhood in it.
She was in a “neighborhood” the speed limit was 30 mph.
A lot of people in the industry want to curse the individual who came up with that phrase (he does exist, but I forgot his name). As long as a meter exists, it will be used to charge customers.
But it is possible. I remember when I was stationed in Connecticut, there was a toll bridge several miles north of Groton. It’s toll was only ten cents. Once the bridge was paid off, the state actually got rid of the toll. Why? Two reasons:
First, the cost of collecting the toll had become just as expensive than the revenue brought in.
Two, raising the toll would have made drivers avoid the bridge altogether by driving a few miles north to a bridge in Norwich, something many drivers did anyway (even though they probably burned more than ten cents worth of gas).
I like to drive the heaviest vehicle I can reasonably find. The curb weight of my 3 vehicles range from 4,500 to 6,000 pounds. A mini may be well engineered, but, “you canna change the laws of physics!”
Virtually every toll road and bridge was built with this promise, but the state was, in the end, almost never willing to relinquish the power. Think of all the NYC bridges and tolls, the New Jersey Tollpike, etc.
Toll roads are the poster child for why government can never be trusted.
You can say whatever you want but the proof is in the pudding: the two top motor sports events in the world, which are the 24 Hours of LeMans and the Monaco Grand Prix are won by hybrids. And have been for many years.
The key here is hybrid. Combining the best of all technologies. It is still early days. Some of you Luddites will be dead and gone by the time hybrid vehicles are the norm rather than the exception. But that time is coming.
I remember claiming boldly that the digital camera would never replace the 35mm film camera. This was before the advent of the digital SLR, but after most people had a digital point and shoot. I have Nikon D90 in my closet that takes better photos than my Leica M2 (though I love that M2!), and my Galaxy S10 takes better photos than my Nikon. So…
Some of the toll roads in Kentucky and the D-FW Turnpike (I-30) are the only two instances I can think of where toll roads were un-tolled after their bonds were paid off. Annoying, but the most annoying ones are where you’re paying the toll, but the money from that obviously isn’t going into maintaining the road you’re driving on (from the ones I’ve been on, the northern extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Oklahoma Turnpike between OKC and the Texas state line are the worst examples of toll roads that seem to have worse surfaces than the nearby free limited access highways).
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that hybrids are bad or inherently non-competitive.
I won’t drive a hybrid, but that is because I care about the planet, and the planet is starved for CO2. The more I make the more life results!
The DFW turnpike tolls were at first retained after they were paid off, because “we’ll use the money to pay for maintenance”. Eventually the tolls were dropped, I’m guessing (been way too long to recall clearly) because of public outcry, so now folks that have never driven it in their lives pay for maintenance on it every year.
iWe: Greening the planet!
No.
The feds used to pressure states to drop tolls, or at least promise to drop them, if they wanted the roads to be part of the Interstate highway system, since the funding formula for Interstates was 90-10 federal dollars (IIRC, regular U.S. highways had a 50-50 state/federal funding plan). That seemed to go by the wayside around the time of the Clinton Administration — I know the N.Y. State Thruway bonds from the 1950s were paid off in the ’90s, but the only change around that time was EZ Pass.
Thank God for Linda that she and the other driver weren’t in cars like the old Corvair and VW that had the gas tanks in the front. EV batteries are heavy, but they carry the battery under the floor of the car, which is closer to ideal from a handling point of view because of the center of gravity.
The big problem with EVs right now is the ‘zap’ factor for fire, EMS and other first responders to accident sites. The tools needed to essentially ‘ground’ electric vehicles involved in accidents are working their way down to smaller and smaller-populated areas, as EVs become more common, but it’s still a concern that someone responding to a crash who touches metal that’s now conducting electricity from the damaged battery is in for a rude (and literal) jolt.
WC, if you do win that Mini, it will definitely NOT be “free”. You will be liable for a bunch of taxes that you should plan to save for now. Winners are always liable for all relevant taxes, which can include sales and excise taxes in their state and income taxes on your Federal return. Then you have to license it in your state so there’s that, and insurance. No Free Lunch (or Mini either). Minis are also pretty expensive for their size.
Perhaps, but they are densely packed and absorb prodigious amounts of kinetic energy…….. verified.