We have moved to:
A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.
My minimum is, using only 60% of the battery (like you're supposed to), 100 freeway miles after 10 years of ownership. I won't use it like that regularly, but car that can't go 100 miles between stops isn't worth owning.
Doing the math, that works out to about 200-250 EPA range. I'll settle for the lower side of those numbers and stress the battery on long drives, but I'd rather not.
No I don't. I don't have a charger at my apartment and I'm not going to wait for a charge on a daily basis at a public charger for one of the more city focused EVs. I won't buy an EV that doesn't have the range of a "normal" car and I'm not alone on that.
I'm 70 miles from the slopes. There's no charging at the lots and the last thing I want to do after 6+ hours of skiing is to stop and wait for a charge on the way home. That means having to have at least 140 miles + some extra to get around done the next day before hitting up a charger.
The averages are one thing, but a car that meats an average need will have limitations on even frequently occurring exceptions. The average falls short of a round trip to the airport even. If a car can't get me to and from the airport in a single charge then I can't choose that car.
The article rightfully recognizes at the end that this really isn't an issue of reeducating the customer. This is a matter of providing a product that meets the customers expectations.
People need to seriously consider 40mi range PHEVs.
Toyota Prius Prime, Ford Escape PHEV, and others have "EV-mode" buttons that drive exclusively on electric now. Meaning you could keep the gasoline for "emergency use only", even as you enter highway speeds. (Older PHEVs would turn on the engine because they didn't have this mode-selector button).
All the complexity of a gas engine, plus the cost of a battery. Just so you can use the range once or twice a year? What happens when you don't use the gas engine for months and then go to start it with gelled gas? You're trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn't exist for 99%
All the complexity of a gas engine
Batteries are more complex. A 200lb battery is less complex than 1000lb or 2000lb battery.
What happens when you don’t use the gas engine for months and then go to start it with gelled gas?
If only computers existed and had timers that automatically burned off stale gasoline.
Also, just fill up 2 gallons or so to minimize the stale gasoline effect. You'll only be filling up once or twice a month with all the EV driving you'll be doing in practice.
You’re trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn’t exist for 99%
No. The 800+ to 1500+ extra lbs of battery you lug around with a full 300mi electric car is what's actually being wasted in practice.
Batteries are absolutely not more complex than an internal combustion car. They’re newer, but not more complex.
What do you mean with batteries will fail?
I mean just that.
The internal chemical structure of Li-ion is only designed to work for a limited number of charge/discharge cycles. As the chemistry is stressed out, the internal metals begin to form dendrites (or in more simple terms, spikes) internally.
We have reasonable estimates for how long this takes, but everyone's battery pack is different. And the process is invisible (you have to cut open & destroy a battery to figure out how much of these dendrites or whatever have formed). So the best we got are some computers slapped on the outside of the battery pack that measures temperature, voltage, current, and time to guestimate the effects from the outside.
As cells fail, modern BMS systems will reroute power away from degenerated cells. Its not that the problem was solved per se, its that modern battery packs have a bunch of extra cells waiting in reserve to pretend that nothing has happened to the end user. But this process eventually breaks enough cells that the whole pack fails and inevitably needs replacement.
Exactly when depends on how many cells were left in reserve, how much "fast charging" you do (which is extremely harsh on the internal chemicals), the temperature of the pack under use, and any aggressive driving you might do that heats up the pack more than usual.
Its... really complex. There's a lot of research going on right now to try to stop these dendrites from forming.
EDIT: In any case, Consumer Reports reliability surveys on various parts of say... a Toyota Prius Prime or other PHEVs. Go look at them all, see what parts fail. Its the battery.
Here's GM Volt. What's the problem? Oh, the EV Battery again, and looks like the EV Charger is also terrible cause GM must have messed that up too.
But yes, its the electrical parts that are more complex and prone to failure in almost all of these cars.
Here's Chrysler Pacifica. Oh boy, lots of parts of this vehicle is terrible. But as predicted, the EV Battery is among the worst of parts again.