From an enthusiast perspective, I have no issues with an electric powertrain. The concept has a lot of promise once the implementation matures. The current issues I have with electric _powertrains_ (not vehicles) are: Relatively short battery lifespan, high replacement cost. Unrealistic range estimates. I live in Germany and the range is pathetic when traveling at actual Autobahn speeds, which is further worsened during the times of year when heating or cooling is required. Poor high speed performance, except in higher price brackets.
The thing that these enthusiast-directed EV articles always seem to miss is this point.
> Most car companies are adopting use of modern operating systems in their new cars. Most companies seem to couple this generational leap in in-car systems to their EV launches. If you, like me, want the best UX of the in-car system the quickest, it’s an EV you need to get.
I'm not interested in an iPad on wheels. The ideal UX in a car should be as unobtrusive as possible. I should set my destination, select my playlist, and never have to interact with a touchscreen until I arrive at my destination. I have yet to see an EV that sticks to this philosophy. The new Porsche Taycan climate control vents are controlled via touchscreen, for example. This is insane.
As for the environmental aspect, well, I'm probably going to regret saying this openly. We live in a fully industrialized world. Unless we're all willing to go back to using wind power to transport cargo and carriages to transport people, while simultaneously getting the world population back to pre-industrial levels, it's a bit too late. I don't think you're going to be saving anything with your EV. The messaging around this topic is akin to a man who burned his house down and is now discussing smoke alarms. It's too late, my friend.
It's definitely not too late, this sort of defeatist attitude is not only wrong but dismissive of the dangers.
> I don't think you're going to be saving anything with your EV.
This is also dead wrong, a quick switch to EV will substantially reduce the amount of carbon pollution, no need for mass killings.
We simply need the government too provide right incentives to switch to cleaner and less energy usage
I'm not suggesting _nothing_ be done and we carry on as usual. But there are 7.6 billion people on this planet and nearly every single one of them either has, or is working towards a modern standard of living. You can't go from 600 million people in 1700 to 7.6 billion people in 2021 without severely harming your ecosystem.
11,000% more people, and each one of them uses _far_ more resources than their 1700 equivalent. They didn't travel except by muscle or by sail, they consumed locally produced food or food imported by sail and muscle power, and the most technologically advanced good available to the average person was an oil lamp.
There isn't an electric car, reusable bag, ethically produced wool sweater, or synthetic burger that can get you back to anywhere near that kind of resource usage.
As for the dangers, I'm aware of the worst case scenarios and the best case scenarios. They're all terrible. At worst, we die out, at best we end up struggling to maintain a comfortable existence due to shortages and a fragile ecosystem while reminiscing about the good old days. But we need to look at the problem clearly and realistically and work towards feasible, realistic _mitigations_ (solutions are impossible) rather than passing nonsense populist laws like banning plastic straws or electric car subsidies and hoping the next generation figures it out.
> This is also dead wrong, a quick switch to EV will substantially reduce the amount of carbon pollution, no need for mass killings. We simply need the government too provide right incentives to switch to cleaner and less energy usage
I'm not opposed to this, and I certainly don't advocate mass killings (see above re: realistic mitigations). I do realize that the lifetime emissions of an electric car are lower than most ICE vehicles. But again, this isn't a solution. You still need a lot of infrastructure and a lot of emissions to manufacture, install, maintain, and eventually replace that infrastructure. Sticking a solar panel on every roof and a wind turbine in every neighborhood isn't going to solve the fundamental problem of "organism is using resources in an unsustainable way".
A quick, forced switch to EVs is going to win the "carbon emissions" line-graph competition so we can all virtue-signal to each other about how well our countries are doing, but it's not going to get us out of the hole we dug, even when combined with _all_ the current popular emissions reductions proposals.
An even quicker switch to "drive less" will do as much good, and save you a load of money too! (As well as consuming significantly less of the world's resources)
I still can't get over the fact that every (haptic!) button is replaced by some touch screen interface. I think it is pretty normal to change the air conditioning while on the road. Now it is kind of dangerous to change it because I need to look for the touch button.
Yeah it looks nice, but until I get haptic feedback from a touchscreen, please don't remove buttons/knobs which are often used while driving.
… which is exactly what most power users are still doing with terminals and tooling that is as old as modern computing. Did he just inadvertently argue against his own point?
There are many great arguments for EVs, but this text missed the mark completely.
A more nerdy argument would be virtual memory addresses, automated testing, better compiler warnings, etc.
And jira I could interact with through vim/emacs if I really hated myself. Slack and zoom I mostly view as distractions from work.
It honestly would make sense for me to use my laptop for browser-based work and be entirely terminal-only with my workstation. Lots of people like us still exist in the workplace. I'm not even 40 yet.
However... I'd still argue if you have a car today that you own... Stretch ownership to another 5 years.
I'm currently on vacation in the lake District in the UK and the car I have is Volvo T8 twin engine. I can't charge this thing anywhere. Charging spots in hotels aren't available to non residents, the solitary charging spots in car parks are taken, and the cottage I'm in has a very strange weak circuit that I can't charge the car from. Anecdotally I've seen no Tesla's or Porsche Taycan, or even Leaf's... Those were left behind at the M6.
It feels like infrastructure has yet to really catch up to need. It will. But today, if you still own a hybrid, ICE, twin engine... Keep it a while longer.
By that time Polestar and the like will have incredible cars available for less than the current price. The wait will be worth it.
It will, but it isn't something that will likely happen in a short period of time. Civil engineering projects take several years to plan and execute. There's also the question of who will pay for it.
So math of getting to destination starts to work, then you get to destination charging and that is more tricky. The car wants 16KWh per 100km, and charging from power socket you can realistically pull 1.6-2KWh, so overnight you can expect to be able to charge 100km of range without much of infrastructure (without level 2 chargers I mean).
So my conclusion is that it's not plug-and-play just yet, but it nearly works, and benefits of electrics starts to outweigh the disadvantage of looking for a power socket.
Those who think otherwise forget that a large number of people in OECD countries don't own their own parking spots or have the legal right to run electricity or install their own chargers.
They also seem to greatly underestimate what it would cost to saturate street-side parking spots with car chargers.
Charging will eventually become convenient for people who don´t live in detached housing or happen to be in a small handful of forward-thinking towns or cities, but it's going to take a fair amount of time.
Second, they’re competing with bicycle parking and bicycle lanes. Spots are getting fewer because of this.
Third, cars are getting larger, leading to larger parking spots required, and therefore a lower spot density.
If your main use case is long trips though I agree, although service stations in the UK do have pretty good electric charging infrastructure.
My parents have just switched to electric and while its a slight change in how you operate (maybe stop for a coffee and let the dog stretch his legs while they are plugged into a fast charger for 20 mins) they seem pretty happy with it.
Petrol cars are significantly cheaper to buy.
Petrol cars refuel significantly faster than electronic cars recharge.
Petrol cars don't have a costly battery which degrades over time and pollutes.
- EVs have significantly lower Total Costs of Ownership
- To refuel your petrol car, you have to make an extra trip to the petrol station. While your EV is simply charged where it is parked overnight
- The extraction, refinement and transportation of petrol pollutes way more than that EV battery will
Ever drive to vacation by car? Or visit relatives a few hours away? Not all of our trips are inner-city or in a similarly small radius. So if you don't want 2 cars, electric is not an option.
> - EVs have significantly lower Total Costs of Ownership
Doesn't help with them being way more expensive in acquisition. There is also no used car market for them AFAIK. This will all change in the future but currently they are no option for many people just because of the price.
> - To refuel your petrol car, you have to make an extra trip to the petrol station. While your EV is simply charged where it is parked overnight
At least in theory.. in practice you maybe use a big garage shared with others and it does not have any sockets.
> - The extraction, refinement and transportation of petrol pollutes way more than that EV battery will
Nice claim but I doubt that. It's always hard to do these comparisons fairly but battery manufacturing and disposal is very dirty business.
I have yet to see an apartment building with more than a couple of charging stations, if they have any.
On the street where I currently live, half the houses don't have driveways. Assuming you can park in the same spot on the street every night, are you going to run an extension cord from the house to the street?
(It's not an "extra trip," it's a stop when I am going somewhere.)
It is the same lazy strategy as Coca-Cola making you feel guilty about not recycling the plastic they created or BP going on twitter asking people what is their 'climate pledge'.
If we are serious about this fight for survival then governments and Energy industry need to replace Coal and Natural Gas for something else non-hydrocarbon based ASAP and stop Oil & Gas Energy subsidies. Then there is moral ground to ask consumers to feel guilty about their ICE emissions.
It was a roll of the dice every morning whether I could go to work each day.
With an electric car, I sit in the car, press a button and it works. The cabin is hot within 5-10 minutes.
Compared to my diesel, which started blowing hot air to the cabin around the time I was already at the office :D
95%+ you charge at home or at work and a single fully charged battery is by far enough for daily use.
> Petrol cars are significantly cheaper to buy.
Life-time analysis of anything but very cheap cars this doesn't really hold up.
> Petrol cars refuel significantly faster than electronic cars recharge.
Not relevant most of the time. If you actually road trip long distances most experience reports suggest that even just going to the bathroom and eating is enough to recharge enough to get to the next stop.
Very few people use their petrol cars to do road-trips in a way where the natural stops are not enough.
> Petrol cars don't have a costly battery which degrades over time
Petrol cars have much higher maintenance cost and an engine that degrades over time. If you take minimal care of your battery it will hold up for multiple 100k miles and even after that it will have significant resale value.
> and pollutes.
Far less then petrol.
Less than 35% of people in the EU live in detached houses. A sizable percentage of these either rent or don't have enclosed parking.
My guess is that only about half of the population, once you factor in people who live in apartments but have separate enclosed parking spots, have the opportunity to charge an electric vehicle at home. This is probably optimistic.
However, once you consider that the ratio of apartments and alternative housing <-> detached houses increases in highly populated areas, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of people who live in an urban area, are able to spend 20-30K+ on an electric car, and have access to convenient overnight charging is significantly less than 50%.
What we don't like are cars plagued by build quality issues and that we're not even _allowed_ by the manufacturer to wrench on it ourselves (a quality we also strongly dislike about modern ICE cars as well). The black box nature is what makes it antithetical.
The rates that Teslas are getting totaled out for what should be repairable issues are also a hot issue for us.
Rich Rebuilds has gone over the headaches of this extensively and you'll notice the last year or so of his content has nothing to do with Teslas.
I recall a few people doing mod work on recovered teslas and building a working one from two broken vehicles, but then having various usage issues.
Your gut (more burnt calories), wallet (no vehicle expenses) and family (less commuting and more family time) will thank you.
Yeah, no, not all of us have enough money to have had as our first car a "Honda Civic type-R". Probably the title should read be more like: "If You're At Least Comfortably Middle-Class The Next Car You Buy Should Be Electric".
But of course all this push to EVs is a huge regressive tax applied to the less-off people which is constantly ignored from the public discourse, so this type of attitude does not surprise me at all.
I'm afraid until there's a healthy and predictable second hand EV market, you are quite right.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/motors/bangernomic...
(But don’t get me started on Toyota’s “self-charging hybrid nonsense”)
I don't think so. I bet you could make a reasonably performant ICE from scratch, yourself. By "scratch", let's say - from chunks of any homogenous material you want. You would have absolutely no chance of doing the same for an electric car (unless you made a lead-acid system with crude, mechanical switching for motor control, which was not considered performant in 1900).
The only way that such a statement can be made, is because the marvels of the modern, global component supply chain have completely obscured the amount of design and material complexity present in items we take for granted every day.
For a point of comparison, you can buy a high end Subaru Outback for that same price, and it’s a really, really nice car.
Easy just tax the rich more, tax carbon, subsidize EVs
"I'm not someone dorkily obsessed with an ordinary, everyday item. I'm a glamorous petrol head! Just like Jeremy and the boys."
Car. Nerd. :P
>old-school petrolheads screaming … that part of the fun is to be pat of the machine … It’s like the old-school nerds refusing to adopt graphical user interfaces in the 80s.
Give me bazaar-style composable UIs and I'll stop being an old-school nerd. Don't have any? Thought so!
I live in Munich, a big city in Germany. I know zero people who live in an apartment (like I do) who can reasonably use an EV. All the friends and acquaintances who own an EV have a house with a garage, and thus they have no problems charging (incidentally none of them reside IN the city with their houses, because they're not millionaires). I'd have to go the supermarket parking lot, which is the only charging spot in a 1km radius that I know of. I don't think (although I haven't asked) if the building owner would be up for putting up charging in our parking lot. I somehow doubt it.
I've yet to hear any even remotely sensible solution.
Exporting your CO2 emissions to other countries (in the form of battery manufacture) does not achieve this goal. If anything, it's worse, because other countries like China will happily burn brown coal to power their factories.
And if it really is so important to stop CO2 emissions, then I'm surprised the author of this article raved about the touchscreens and other electronic gadgets present in all EVs, as they are incredibly resource- and energy- intensive to manufacture (equivalent to the energy needed to drive 1000s of miles), and are not necessary. In fact, I'm surprised the author can tell us that we should enjoy the driving pleasure of EVs, which seems a completely luxurious thing in an article telling us we need to make significant changes to our lifestyle to save the environment.
Also - the author only managed 1000km in one year on an ebike? That's embarassing, and makes it hard to justify the manufacturing expense in energy and materials of the battery and motor. I've had to start driving to work on more days, as I don't have the energy now I have two kids, but I still manage 2,500km of commuting per year on a regular bike (which is older than me), and on a very hilly route.
This does not make sense. Battery manufacture is no way equivalent to ICE emissions.
How is it not? It takes a huge amount of energy to manufacture a battery pack (you spend about the first 1/3rd to 1/2 of an EV's life paying off the "CO2 debt"), and it generates all sorts of pollution in the process.
My personal choices (mostly, keep my house a bit colder, don't buy new electronics, and cycle to work as much as possible) probably do more good, and right now, than buying an EV ever will.
I also don't need to get my thrills out of driving a nice car. If we need to save the planet from CO2-induced death, then that is an absurd luxury that has no place.
Most my city driving is within the electric only range, so I basically never need to fill it up, but with a full charge and tank of gas it’s over 1,000km of range.
While I’ll be able to charge it at grocery store or wherever if a charging spot is available to basically get free range, and charge it at home whenever I want, I won’t be reliant on charging and can get the best of both worlds when I choose.
I intend to drive it over the next few years which gets close to the 2035 goalpost many countries have of deprecating ICE cars, and as electric and charging becomes cheaper and fewer people use gas at all I can pick what type of fuel to use (petrol or electric) based on what’s cheapest that week/month.
PHEV are also up to half the cost of comparable full electric.
I think if I never had to consider longer trips (2-4 hours of driving into the country) and I had access to a reliable at home charging I’d go electric tomorrow.
I feel like for the next 1-5 years PHEV makes more sense for my situation.
The section about noise though is right, idk why we torture our selves with noise pollution. And how did people ever start to think they're cool by making more noise. Theres very few engines that sound good, and even then like the article said theres only very few times they should be heard.
In general Im frustrated by this whole idea of fixing the climate by having individual consumers change their habits. We all know its pointless, we know what the big problems are and yet we still want all of us little people to pitch in. We really need to start going after the big polluters. Us little people will be doing plenty of "pitching in" after corporations punish us by passing their new costs on down to consumers.
I'm not really down with that either. Especially since the preferred policies center around 'nudges' which in practice are giveaways to wealthy and rubber hoses for the poor. Along with a Pollyanna hope that the magic of the market will deliver us a Unicorn without policy makers having to think hard and stick their necks out.
I'm probably like you, I'm not enthused about getting in my car and driving with all the other schmucks while watching for bicyclists and errant pedestrians.
I feel there is a need to reduce the need for cars. But that's a 50-100 year plan at this point. So we're stuck with cars and going electric is best worst option at this point.
For charging, EVs aren't an issue for me since I'd use mine for commute and the range of most of them is plenty sufficient enough I'd only need to recharge every week. For country driving I'd still be relatively ok if I had a trailer.
That trailer requirement is not for fun. Its not optional or a "nice thing to have". I'd expect a EV to be a real vehicle and not some entertainment or otherwise toy. I frankly don't care about EVs for status purposes such as a sports car used to impress. It would be replacing my current workhorse commute vehicle and frankly none of the current EVs are actual competitors yet in realistic ways.
Until the EV infrastructure is as universal and simple as gas-power, it’s not an option.
Also, basic practicalities: when I visit my parents there's no charging facility where they live so on at least some trips where the driving is more than just there and back I'd have to spend an hour driving somewhere, charging the car, and then driving back - time I'd rather spend with them given I'm often only with them for a day or two.
The charging network in India is next to non-existent but I was OK to risk it and figure out a way to get it installed in my apartment.
To compensate for the lack of charging network I need the range to be 700-800 KM so that I can use it for highway runs. But the ones that are available advertise somewhere between 300-400 KM which translates to 200-300 KM real world.
So I bit the bullet and bought an ICE car. I really hope the range improves in next 5 years. Otherwise electric cars are only viable to those who can afford a 2nd car in India.
Bottom line? The next car I buy is almost certain to have an internal combustion engine.
If you need a new car right now, it's still cheaper and probably more practical to buy a petrol car.
If you do not need a new car right now, I think trying to keep your current car for another 5+ years then buying an EV may make sense (probably including for the environment).
EV are taking off but it seems to me that they are still mostly bought by people with higher-than-average income and/or who are engaged on this issue.
I have to travel long distances for my job occasionally, and I don't get paid to wait at a charging station.
After that I don't really care too much and would love to buy electric.
But I don't see much in that space that fits that bill. (in my state/country anyhow)
