this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Some of the criticism is perfectly valid, frankly. I'm hyped for EVs but there's a lot of work to be done before they're really competitive. Glossing over glaring issues isn't doing anyone any favors.
Aging wheels did a great video on the charging station problem. He drove a Polaris and a Tesla on the same route and demonstrated really well how unreliable charging stations are, unless you have a Tesla. This guy loves electric cars and has been reluctant to actually recommend any.
That problem is going to be addressed as American manufacturers adopt Tesla as a standard, but that won't happen for two model years at least.
And in the long run, they won't address climate change in any meaningful way either. We've just exchanged one resource disaster for another, and there's far less rare earth minerals than there is oil. And we'll still need oil. The only way we're doing that is by massively overhauling every city and going away from any individualized transportation larger than a bike.
Honestly it's the other way around. Most of the downsides are vastly overstated in my experience, and people don't really grasp how nice it is to never visit a gas station and always have a full tank to start the day, until they are living it. If you have the ability to charge at home and aren't making 1000 mile trips very often, there is basically no reason to not have an EV.
The first question I always get about my EV is "how long does it take to charge?" Most people can't wrap their head around the concept of waking up every day with a full battery.
And also that they are probably stopping for around 20 minutes every 300 miles on road trips anyway. A certain 450 mile trip I have make several times per year for two decades takes me about 20-30 minutes longer in an EV vs my previous 35mpg vehicle. There are just a bunch of these small cognitive blindspots people have about their own driving habits that you see repeated over and over again.
We must stop all EV development until they're good enough to serve the small percentage of people who drive 700 miles at once, pee in a bottle, and eat sandwiches they prepared ahead of time. Think of all the bottle urinators being left behind.
Seriously, I don't think there's a good reason to have ranges much over 400 miles. If you work out a highway speed of 70mph, charge to 80% at each stop (which is significantly faster than going to 100%), and add some margin for cold days, then about 400 miles is around the max you need considering you'll want a break, anyway.
If there's battery improvements to throw on top of that, then use them to reduce weight, not increase range.
Those people should drive cars that run on biodiesel.
Or EVs with biodiesel range extender generators
I have said for ages that a company like U-Haul should rent tow-behind or even overhead gas or even biodiesel engines to power EVs for longer trips.
Have you ever road tripped with an EV? It's not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. Stopping once every couple hours for 15 minutes and charging while you pee, eat, etc isn't bad at all. It's not like a gas station where you're supposed to stay at the pump. I can't imagine towing a trailer just to get around that. Would you tow a trailer full of gasoline to extend the range of a car with a gas engine? Of course not.
This assumes you can find adequate charger coverage, and that the chargers are actually functioning when you get there... Which, if you're in a Tesla, you'll probably be fine, but most others is going to be highly dependant on the infrastructure where you're going, and at least in a lot of the US, that's not as well built out as it should be.
That will, however, change, and probably fast once there's enough people driving EVs
I'd say it depends on the EV. The Leaf S can only go 149 miles before needing to recharge. Giving it an engine to help it along is just turning it into a hybrid.
Good point, I wouldn't recommend road tripping in a Leaf. Still probably easier to just rent a car.
Yep. I stop for 20 or so minutes every 200 or so miles, and honestly I'm stretching it to go that long because my wife and kid want to stop even more often. I spend basically 0 extra time road tripping in my EV unless it's a holiday weekend and the charger is packed.
"About as long as I'm charging my phone, and at around the same time: while I sleep, so who cares? It's full when I wake up."
The ability to charge at home is a big hurdle for most people, basically if you live in an apartment that's something you can't do.
I mostly agree with you, but there is barrier to entry cost.
I dunno man, the 5 minutes a week at a gas station doesn't really seem like that much of an inconvenience. Especially if you live in a state that taxes EVs more than gas cars, my home state taxes EVs so heavily that it's more expensive, even with fuel costs considered.
Winter and summer conditions are also an issue where I live, temps from very cold to very hot, sometimes within the same week, and the fact that most of the people who live around me who can afford an EV, are in fact taking routine road trips. Often to go camping where EV support is pretty minimal. Meaning at minimum, 1 car cannot be an EV.
Like, I get it. I've been trying to convince my wife to let me buy a sprinter van EV. Because you can't get a decent pick up truck EV for a reasonable price. And even if you could you're locked in to one of those giant 4 door monstrosities with a minimum sized bed.
We're not even going to talk about the horrifying lack of an affordable station wagon EV, at least in the US (Peugeot's got one coming in Europe at least), honestly that's the biggest crime here.
The biggest complaint I have about the current lot of EVs is that they're almost all trucks and SUVs. The manufacturers focused on the most profitable market segment first. Then, they make almost no units of the base model that's advertised for ~$45k. Only one's available are the top trims that go for $60k or $75k. Maybe more. Then they wonder why nobody is buying their EVs.
I want a hot hatch EV. Mustang Mach-E kinda is, but not quite right (and you'll get plenty of sneering comments from Mustang fans of yore). Hyundai has some stuff, but also not quite right. My wife has the Mini EV, and that's fun to drive, but its range is limited (and also FWD, which Mini will always do for historical reasons). VW apparently has a version of the Golf GTI coming out in a few years. So I'm sitting here waiting.
That's my biggest complaint as someone driving a 14 year old Honda Fit, I just want a barebones hot hatch EV without all the fancy computer stuff, a car that's a car and not trying to be a spaceship with bells and whistles. And I know a lot of people with EVs, we have free charging stations at my workplace, but I barely drive (once a week in office, errands, live in country and get everything delivered) so why would I spend over 60k in Canadian dollars for shittier version of what I already have. I could lease but that's another monthly bill, I'm only paying like $120/mo to keep my current car on the road and that includes gas and insurance, I can maintain my car myself with incredibly cheap scrap parts as well. Also any EV I could afford, I'd have to rent utility vans to do half my errands with or keep a second vehicle, and like you say with the Mini EV the range isn't quite there. I wired my shop/garage with service for an EV charger so I'm ready for it, I just can't justify it with the current offerings.
Here in Indiana, where it can get into the minuses for a month or more in the winter, it can be a huge fucking inconvenience.
Well, except for reasons not to have any car at all, of course.
Was the cost benefit worth it? How much more did you pay for the EV? Did you do it to reduce your carbon footprint and if so have you evaluated how dirty your local grid is (the remote combustion fallacy of EVs)?
I think the bigger issue with EVs (at least in the USA) is that there's a huge gap between what EV's actually are and what EV industry players are claiming EV's are and can be. It makes EV conversations divisive and ripe for misinformation.
This idea that batteries should ever be used in trucking and heavy machinery (before massive boosts to battery capacity and sustainability/recycling) is a total crock of shit. The idea that you're doing the environment or yourself a favor by buying an electrified SUV or truck is a crock of shit. Buying a vehicle with 250mi+ of range using today's battery tech is bad for the environment.
Small to medium sized commuter vehicles and delivery vans/fleet vehicles with < 50kWh batteries are prime EV candidates. EV buyers need to charge at home and drivers need to change their behavior, not chase 300 miles of range at the expense of the environment.
Everything else is better off with a hybrid engine for the very distant foreseeable future.
Instead, buyers are unloading perfectly good ICE vehicles for EV's with 100kWh+ batteries and companies like Tesla are destroying the credibility of the EV industry with their stupid stunts and ridiculous EV semi claims. Others are making a bad problem worse by ratcheting up the consumerism and disposability of vehicles in the EV space by building premium vehicles that are inevitable purchased as a second or third car, completely negating any environmental benefit of the vehicle.
These buyers and industry players are making EV's easy targets for an anti-EV crowd which wants to undermine the truly green and sustainable aspects of an automotive technology shift.
Pretty much all of the arguments against EVs from the right are solvable. There are arguments against them that are also unique from the left, but I've seen too many leftists adopt some of the bullshit arguments from the right.
Charging does need to improve. Believe me, I drove a Mini EV from Madison to Chicago once, and it was a nightmare to find two working stations along the way. But this is solvable with time. At least, it is when you're presenting it honestly, and not "haha EVs suck ROOOOLLL COOAAAALLLL!"
They're a huge facet to fixing climate change. Mining issues are not part of climate change. Burning petroleum is.
The problems with lithium mining do exist (and in ways that are less hypocritical for the left to point out than the right), but it's also not permanent. There's an interesting string technique that, assuming it can be scaled up, can use far less land and open up more reserves (that being the amount of lithium that can be economically mined, which people often mistake for the amount of lithium actually there). Even if it doesn't, oceanic methods of extraction are being ramped up already, and there's more lithium available there then we'd have a use for.
All that's even assuming we stay on lithium batteries, or that we won't reduce the amount of lithium per kwh.
Now, there's another set of arguments--the kind conservatives would never touch--which get into how cars are bad for society regardless of what they run on. They take up tons of space just sitting there, they enable urban sprawl, they hit pedestrians and animals, and are all around an inefficient way to move your moist meat flesh around. These are why I did an e-bike conversion recently and am looking to heavily reduce my car reliance.
But we're stuck with them to a certain extent. There are decisions literally set in concrete about where people live and where they work. Even with the most radical government imaginable, we could not rip our cities up and lay new concrete without releasing so much CO2 that we might as well drive ICE cars for an additional decade.
Getting rid of cars is not on the table, at least not in any reasonable timeframe. That said, what can we do to get American cities from <5% bike commuters to 25%? That alone would be massive.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only valid argument against electric cars (and combustion ones, of course) -- but boy, is it a doozy!
Something I don't think is really talked about in tandem but should be is the "tech" side of things. There's a massive race to go as proprietary as possible none of this crap is easily serviceable by people. The tech that they put in most of these cars is cheap garbage. I don't want some tablet with what is probably a fork of Android controlling my vehicle. First I know support for it is going to go out the window and I don't want to have to think about software security for my damn car.
Then you have these companies that are putting features that are in the car behind subscriptions because the car can now support subscription model. I don't want always online DRM for the DLC for my goddamn car.
He chose a fairly slow charging CCS car vs a Tesla. That video was super slanted.
Half the stations he stopped at with the polestar didn't work properly. That's not slant, it's bad stations.
This thread and Lemmy as a whole is filled with EV zealots. Don't bother. I'm a fan of the tech but mention anything slightly critical of the state of EVs today or the viability or sustainability of the current EV strategy from a country or auto maker and you get flooded with downvotes and called an oil shill.
Even this article is a bit slanted. CNBC running a story about EV stock piling up is not anti-EV propaganda. It's a literal fact, not to mention CNBC's cable programming has been shilling Tesla and luxury EV makers for years.
Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone's house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.
A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don't involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.
Newsflash — Tesla is opening its stations to all EVs. Guess that solves the “unless you have a Tesla” problem.