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Who has or is planning to get an electric car / EV Talk
- Thread starter PracticalMac
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Same for me when I lived in Boston. It is actually a negative to own a car having to deal with parking, the rules for parking, and, especially, trying to find a spot on the street during the winter. And insurance, and all of the little dings and dents you get because of driving and parking in close quarters.
It you are waiting for an EV with 600-700 mile range you’ll be waiting awhile.
But unless you drive 600 miles in one trip regularly you don’t need it. Having a charger at home means you leave the house with a full tank every morning. The weight you’d need to carry in batteries for 600 miles of range would make for a pretty inefficient car.
I’ve always seen an electric car and home solar as a package deal. Instead of getting a $50k EV, consider a $25-$30k EV and a ~$15-20k home solar setup. Or a fancier EV + home solar if you can afford it.
It’s not the right solution for everyone, but with some planning and commitment it’s a great option for many looking at EVs
It’s not the right solution for everyone, but with some planning and commitment it’s a great option for many looking at EVs
Indeed. Or if you’re very lucky just charge at work. I’ve paid less than £50 in ‘fuel’ since I bought my EV in May.
I was paying £150-£200 a month before.
The vehicles that I've owned since the 1980s have ranged from 400 to 700 Miles. I had a 1982 Audi 4000S which had an 16 gallon tank and about 40 MPG on the 5-speed manual. The diesel got 50 MPG. I would be comfortable with 450 miles range.
I do not have a garage and it gets very cold and icy here. So charging a vehicle at home would be somewhat challenging as the driveways are limited common property. There are no EVs in my housing development (I'm a runner so I see everything). I assume that there's a good reason for that. People do drive $100K cars so it's not like folks can't afford EVs.
I'd love to have enough land for that just to be off the grid. This would work in areas with a lot of sun but we have very short days in the winter and a lot of them are overcast. I see solar farms going up all over the place but these are commercial operations.
If you don’t own a garage and a driveway it’s difficult agreed. But I’d never buy a property like that tbh. But I don’t live in a big city thank goodness.
We have properties in Singapore and New Hampshire and we moved here a long time ago for work. The location in NH is incredibly convenient to mountains, beaches, hiking and world-class universities and medical care. One of the big problems in our state is the lack of housing for all of the people that want to move here.
We have a quarter share of a home in a Boston suburb that was built in the 1920s and it does have a driveway and garage but the house probably needs a ton of electrical work as the number of circuits would be considered tiny for a modern home. I suspect that it's going to wind up as a teardown.
But EV sales penetration is still very small so the vast majority have made the same decision that I've made.
The alarmist view is that the recent storm proved that our infrastructure won't be able to handle future power consumption by EVs. But it's worth keeping in mind that the 'American way' is to wait for near disaster then address whatever the issue may be. Since this recent storm, some state governments are addressing this issue as we speak. Anyone remember Last year's headline "Texas governor signs bills to improve power grid after deadly winter storm". It's the way we do things .. Not to worry.
There are multiple factors here: supply and the ability to withstand disasters. I'm all for adding nuclear power plants but it's very hard to build a new one. Grid capacity will increase if there's more need but it may not be a smooth ride. Reliability comes from redundancy, trimming back trees or even going underground for utilities. We have underground utilities in my neighborhood so we don't have local tree issues and it's really nice. But most places can't afford underground utilities.
We've had a shortage of cars the past few years and that is ending. Discounts are coming back to new car sales. The car shortage had a side-effect of higher car rental prices and rental shortages. So, if you got into an accident, securing alternate transportation might have been difficult. So that's a worry if you don't want to wind up with transportation challenges when a teenage driver hits you because they were texting on their phone (has happened to me a few times).
We bought our project home three years ago. Apart from the kitchen we had one single socket in each room.
But a complete rewire was completed in the first few months.
Making decisions on a jointly owned home is far more difficult than one that you own outright as the other parties have a say in what happens to it. It wouldn't make sense to do this if it does become a teardown.
There’s more demand on our grid than ever and we are being warned that blackouts could be coming back to us. This is why the drive to build 63 nuclear power stations across the UK is important, and not just for the electric car future.
That's a stunning number of new nuclear plants.
Workers have begun loading radioactive fuel into a new nuclear reactor in Georgia, utilities said Friday, putting the first new American nuclear reactor built in decades on a path to begin generating electricity in coming months.
America is building its first nuclear power plant in decades. Workers just started stocking it with radioactive fuel
Georgia’s Plant Vogtle is expected to reach commercial operation by the end of March.
So this will be the first nuclear reactor installed in over 30 years. A second is under construction at that site. These reactors were approved in 2012. There are no other nuclear reactors under construction in the United States. We have a nuclear reactor in our state and it has been operating since 1990. There is a second pad for another reactor and New England would benefit from more supply but I'd guess that it would take a long time for permitting. The existing reactor received the construction permit 14 years before it started operation.
Other countries build them like it's nothing. It seems near impossible to build them in the United States.
The current average price for a new EV for 2023 is 64,300. How is anyone going to afford that? EV's should not have been pushed so hard and so fast. We should have focused on Hybrids and taken longer for EV. Sould have been all new cars need to be Hybrid by 2035. All electric by 2050.
Average price isn't necessarily reflective of the affordability of vehicles. There are luxury EVs that probably pull the mean price up. It could also be that more affluent buyers go for EVs. What would be interesting is the percentage of EV owners that also own an ICE vehicle.
I do think that Hybrid is a nice transition though many don't like the idea of duplicate systems. I'd prefer a hybrid where it's practical to drive with electricity the vast majority of the time. Say a range of 50-100 miles. Hybrids use the EV system as more of a buffer than an EV.
By buying an EV that costs less than average? It doesn't sound like you understand what "average" means. For example, you can get a Bolt for $26K and that's just MSRP, not counting any incentives/credits. New cars in general cost just shy of $50,000. How does anyone afford that? Although, to answer how anyone (of the non-rich variety) affords high prices, the answer is "by having 7+ year car payments". That's what all those people do who buy pick-ups only to just use them as commuter vehicles.
Correct. They should have been pushed harder and faster. That way the current progress in reducing battery prices would have started sooner and average prices would already be lower.
Nah. Meanwhile in Norway, 65% of new vehicles were BEVs last year, and it's looking like 2022 will be 80%, with hybrids being another 10% and gas/diesel being the remaining 10%. Hyundai just stopped selling gas cars there as of today. Volkswagen will do the same next year. Maybe someone should tell Norway that "EVs don't work in the cold blah blah blah"....
The main problem with a hybrid is you have a heavy ICE to carry around which makes the battery inefficient. You also have a heavy battery to carry around which makes the ICE inefficient.
Add the complexity of the systems working together, it really is the worst of both worlds.
Pure BEV is the future. 7 more years until they stop selling new Hybrids and ICE cars here in the UK.
I’m hoping we get there sooner.
I suspect it will take a little longer in the states with all those oil companies running the show.
IDK, I live in a rural environment by choice, and drive a SUV w/a super-charged Hemi, which is of course no longer available. Obviously I haven't drunk the man made climate change koolaid, or I'm just full of complete apathy and honestly don't care/believe the narrative. It always works, it has a big gas tank, I'm very happy with it.
W/ EVs only have one, and got it not because I care about the great benefits of electric cars, but, it's a really fun toy with ludicrous acceleration
Would I drive it on a long trip or use it much when it's -15 - 20f outside? Nope, but that's what the SUV is for.
There is a lot of super cool hardware arriving Any Minute Now in the EV space that interests me. Tesla's Cybertruck, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I've wanted to buy one since they were arriving by next Tuesday for sure in 2019 <-- that pre-dates COVID as an excuse, or WW III starting. Still no Cybertruck. Hummer SUV looks incredibly cool too, but... its just a spec sheet. They'll happily take my deposit and deliver a vehicle in 2024*
*probably, the fine print goes on to detail their inability to control unforeseen world events, so maybe 2025, or 2026?
There just isn't anything even vaguely interesting in that space at the moment which I have any great faith in. Nothing I want to buy actually exists as anything other than hype, prototypes, and spec sheets.
W/ EVs only have one, and got it not because I care about the great benefits of electric cars, but, it's a really fun toy with ludicrous acceleration
Would I drive it on a long trip or use it much when it's -15 - 20f outside? Nope, but that's what the SUV is for.There is a lot of super cool hardware arriving Any Minute Now in the EV space that interests me. Tesla's Cybertruck, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I've wanted to buy one since they were arriving by next Tuesday for sure in 2019 <-- that pre-dates COVID as an excuse, or WW III starting. Still no Cybertruck. Hummer SUV looks incredibly cool too, but... its just a spec sheet. They'll happily take my deposit and deliver a vehicle in 2024*
*probably, the fine print goes on to detail their inability to control unforeseen world events, so maybe 2025, or 2026?
There just isn't anything even vaguely interesting in that space at the moment which I have any great faith in. Nothing I want to buy actually exists as anything other than hype, prototypes, and spec sheets.
That's a stunning number of new nuclear plants.
Workers have begun loading radioactive fuel into a new nuclear reactor in Georgia, utilities said Friday, putting the first new American nuclear reactor built in decades on a path to begin generating electricity in coming months.
America is building its first nuclear power plant in decades. Workers just started stocking it with radioactive fuel
Georgia’s Plant Vogtle is expected to reach commercial operation by the end of March.fortune.com
So this will be the first nuclear reactor installed in over 30 years. A second is under construction at that site. These reactors were approved in 2012. There are no other nuclear reactors under construction in the United States. We have a nuclear reactor in our state and it has been operating since 1990. There is a second pad for another reactor and New England would benefit from more supply but I'd guess that it would take a long time for permitting. The existing reactor received the construction permit 14 years before it started operation.
Other countries build them like it's nothing. It seems near impossible to build them in the United States.
It’s either 63 or 64 planned by EDF. Not Hinckley Point sized obviously lol. They will be mini single reactor versions. I was shocked myself in the seminar when I found this out but I don’t think people realise just how unstable the national grid is at the moment. Wind, tidal etc just isn’t going to cut it.
I hope they extend it another ten years as we are nowhere near ready for so many EV’s on our roads as the infrastructure isn’t good enough, and neither is the technology. I couldn’t afford an EV to the standard I am used to with an ICE car either. I know most will probably have to lease as they’ll have no choice, but based on right now and what I’ve seen over the last 7 years, I’m not convinced.
We may get a hybrid in the meantime as I know from experience they are a really good introduction and there’s the failsafe on longer trips. We’ve had them as pool cars where I work for years and they’ve been reliable.
I think you’d be surprised how things will develop over the next seven years. Look how they have over the last seven years.
But we need more lightweight fuel efficient EV’s not the huge heavy SUV’s the car companies are mostly turning out at the moment.