, and supply chains aren’t scaling anywhere near fast enough to put a 300-mile range EV in every driveway in time to slow climate change.
And if they were scaling we would just accelerate climate change even more. New cars don’t slow climate change. Repair your old one, or take the bus, or use a bike.
I’m definitely no battery engineer, so correct me if I’m wrong, but… wouldn’t a 100-mile-range battery pack have a shorter life span than a 200-mile pack under the same usage since its charge/discharge cycles would be deeper in terms of %, and possibly more frequent because of the reduced range?
Yes, this is kind of true. But how you use the battery is also important. If you frequently DC fast charge your pack, it will wear out significantly faster than using Level 1 (120V AC) or Level 2 (240V AC) charging. This is because DCFC pushes the boundaries of how much current the battery can safely take in order to reduce the amount of time it takes to charge the car. It’s a balancing act between customer acceptability and limiting battery degradation.
@stopthatgirl7 Perhaps it’s time that people accepted that Toyota was right: We want a diversity of electrified vehicles. Hybrids, plug-in hybrids and fuel cell cars all have their role to play right now. It should not be a monoculture of BEVs.
No one is stopping any country or company from producing fuel cell cars. If Toyota is right, where are the fuel cell corollas?
I am not knocking fuel cell vehicles, I wish they were viable but after 20 years of R&D they still haven't solved the H2 storage problems, and it is starting to look like it will never be practical for a vehicle the form factor of a car.
Where were BEVs just 15 years ago? These things do not happen all at once. Most arguments against fuel cell cars are outdated and from people stuck in the past.
I read my first story about the coming fuel cell cars in 1996, and they were less than a decade from production then, but they never came.
Toyota, the builder of some of the best cars ever made, has spent decades and billions trying to make fuel cells work for cars. If a company with the engineering excellence of Toyota is struggling for so long...
BEVs are not on the road because they are better than fuel cells. If fuel cells could be practically made, they would beat BEVs in every aspect. Range, refuelling, environmental impact
But they don't.
BEVs are not better than fuel cells but they actually work for cars.
BEVs are over 100 years old. In fact, they're older than ICE cars. No one seems to notice that this is the longest development process of any technology in the industry.
Meanwhile, fuel cells are just coming into their own. Most of your arguments are just totally outdated and stuck in the past. You seem oblivious to the fact that FCEVs already exist and are being sold to the public right now. They're already a developed technology, just one that hasn't become popular yet. It is likely dismissing solar and wind energy just as they were taking off. It is just being closed-minded and short-sighted to say these things.
Meanwhile, fuel cells are just coming into their own.
Fuel cells were invented in 1839. What are you talking about? Fuel cells are also widely used in backup generation, and on-site power generation for large consumers of electricity. I’ve even visited an EV charging station powered by natural gas fuel cells.
The first real device we’d call a battery was from 1800. So a 38 year head start. The technology of fuel cells isn’t the issue with them, it’s the fuel part. Well, that and the catalyst plates. But that’s not exactly rocket science to rebuild a fuel cell when the catalysts need refurbishment.
Part of the advancement in fuel cell is our ability to produce hydrogen at a low cost.
That’s the only part, in fact, that needs advancement. And it’s in no way mirroring PV cells development path or cost decreases. Our most efficient, lowest cost form of abundant hydrogen is cracking it out of methane / natural gas. And that method will always be more expensive than just generating electricity from the methane because you need to generate high temperature steam as part of the process by burning some of the methane. The only other source of less expensive but not abundant enough hydrogen is as an industrial process byproduct. And that’s not even close to producing enough to meet current demands if we could magically capture it and had no refining costs to scrub out other wastes.
Then you are painfully stuck in the past. Your rhetoric is not just a repeat of anti-wind and anti-solar, it is purely climate doomerism. The same argument climate change deniers have continuously made. It's entirely based on the idea that nothing can replace fossil fuels. In reality, this is an infinite resource for all practical purposes. It's long-term cost will be approximately zero, not whatever number you wish it to be.
I guess I’ll just say that if you think we’re stopping climate change at this point, you live in a fantasy. It’s happening, we’ve already done irreversible damage, and the conversation we’re having now is how do we stop making it worse than the catastrophe it’s already guaranteed to be. We aren’t preventing head deaths or massive climate migrations, that shit’s happening no matter what we do.
As for me, I absolutely do not believe fossil fuels are our only way forward. I simply don’t believe in magic. The energy required to produce H2 gas isn’t free, the energy to compress and chill it isn’t free, the energy to truck it around or build and operate pipelines isn’t free. What I do believe is that renewable energy will continue to displace existing fossil fuels at an increasing pace. Their LCOE is exceptionally hard to beat with any system that destroys its energy source as part of its reaction. Nuclear is likely off the table due to cost and regulatory issues, but it’s perhaps our best bet for base loads.
You are misdirecting. You are effective saying that green hydrogen can never be as cheap as fossil-fuel based hydrogen, which is an absurd argument and is basically climate doomerism.
What you are fundamentally missing is the fact that this does not require limited resources. It's all made from stuff that is available everywhere. It is literally just combining wind, sunlight and water together to create a fuel that can nearly directly replace natural gas. These are basically infinite resources with basically infinite supply. The cost floor is zero because of that. It is exactly the same argument as wind or solar.
In fact, you are repeating the exact same anti-PV argument that fossil fuel people made: That the EROI of solar panels is permanently poor, or that efficiency is simply too low. Which in their minds meant it will never be cost effective. But they never noticed the fact that sunlight is an effectively infinite resource with a cost floor of zero. As a result it simply didn't matter what advantages fossil fuels had. A solar panel can just churn out energy at nearly zero cost, and ultimate that is what happened. Same thing with wind too. And anything that is just an extension of that idea will also have a cost floor of zero. As a result, it is merely a matter of when green hydrogen drops to nearly zero cost. Alternatives will not be able to beat that and therefore they will be displaced by it.
You are effective saying that green hydrogen can never be as cheap as fossil-fuel based hydrogen
No, I’m not even engaging in the boondoggle that is “green” versus all the other types of hydrogen. I’m telling you that producing hydrogen from electricity is nonsensical when you can just use the electricity.
and is basically climate doomerism.
No, it’s saying this is a stupid solution not that there’s no solution.
It’s all made from stuff that is available everywhere.
But Hydrogen, largely, is not freely available. It’s found bonded to other atoms, and those bonds require energy to break. The problem you face is that the amount of energy necessary to break those bonds is higher than the amount of energy you can get back out of the hydrogen.
The cost floor is zero because of that.
This is pure nonsense and fantasy. You do not have a supply of freely available hydrogen, which means your cost floor is the cost of breaking hydrogen out of its existing bonds. That’s like saying the cost floor to charge a battery is zero. It’s nonsense. You need to put energy into producing the hydrogen, plain and simple.
The rest of your comment is just nonsense. You’re attempting to put words in my mouth and inventing arguments I’m not having. So I’m not engaging with that in any way.
You are still missing the point then. You cannot use that electricity. It is going to be curtailed electricity and is basically lost in the production process.
Taking that unusable electricity making something out of it will drive the cost of hydrogen to basically zero. This is the fundamental reason why solar also became so cheap, despite PVs being "inefficient." You're simply taking something free and making something useful out of it.
Like I said from the beginning, you are just repeating the same anti-wind and anti-solar arguments of the past. You can insist that you didn't actually say that or claim that this is somehow different, but none of that is meaningful. It is just closed-minded nonsense regardless.
Because electricity is traditionally sent very short distances. It's too bad that this is going away. Your renewable energy resource may be thousands of miles away in the future.
PS: It was a pipeline that sent natural gas to your local gas turbine power plant. If electricity losses was always going to be 5%, why did that pipeline exist at all?
I have a photo of GM’s fuel cell test vehicle driving on the highway from 2009, some 14 years ago. Most of the arguments against fuel cells are the cost and complexity of hydrogen, and the logistics of getting it around any given country. Those are not outdated, they are absolutely as true today as they were 15 years ago.
GM made a BEV back in the 1990s. They did a lot of things long before they were ready. The point you are missing is that cost is rapidly coming down. An FCEV will be no more expensive than an ICE car to make. People who continue to repeat the "high-cost" argument are just stuck in the past. A total repeat of what people said of BEVs too.
Let’s grant your point about prices coming down, and let’s say that a fuel cell, a small battery, and the fuel tank(s) is the same price or even cheaper than a BEV. Let’s just take that as completely granted.
How about the cost of energy per kWh? Hydrogen is much more expensive than just buying the electricity. In Norway, right now, price of H2 is 195 NOK/kg or about $19.13 USD per kg. 1kg of H2 is 33.33 kWh, meaning it’s about $0.574 USD per kWh for hydrogen. Even the most expensive DCFC don’t sell for that price. Here in the US, the production costs alone, as reported by NREL, are well above the cost of traditional fuel and electricity based on using methane cracking with steam assuming we can make that commercially viable. Cracking the methane is much more expensive than just burning it to produce electricity, and that doesn’t account for increasing nuclear or renewable energy sources on the grid.
On a per-kWh basis, a hydrogen fueled car will necessarily be more expensive to refuel than a BEV, while battery costs continue to decrease just as fuel cell costs have.
the biggest hindrance to hydrogen is the cost to build a hydrogen station vs out in ev chargers. why would anyone build a hydrogen station when they could install many ev chargers for the same price. maybe trucking and busses, like greyhound not metro or school, could be a usecase for hydrogen going forward.
It's cheaper to install hydrogen stations than it is to build charging stations. That's because it cost 10x less to move hydrogen around compared to electricity.
it cost 10x less to move hydrogen around compared to electricity.
Moving electricity around only requires aluminum wire and transformers. Incredibly cheap. Moving hydrogen around requires either roads and trucks (already more expensive than high voltage AC transmission) or a pipeline that won’t leak hydrogen plus training for emergency response (also more expensive than high voltage AC).
But it isn’t just steel pipe. It’s steel pipe precision welded and leak checked, buried under ground, with lots of continual maintenance, pump stations to increase pressure, control systems, etc. More expensive even than natural gas piping, which is already difficult to get installed with municipalities frequently rejecting it for safety reasons.
We’ve been back and forth on this countless times over the years, you and I, but you keep coming back to these same points. None of which are correct. BEVs use existing infrastructure, and while they are NOT the best solution, they are the best solution people are going to choose. You’re flat out not going to get someone to pay more for hydrogen than they would for any any other fuel, producing the hydrogen isn’t as energy efficient as charging a battery, and installing an H2 station is significantly more expensive than installing even a DCFC station with four or six stalls and all the complimentary transformers necessary.
And yet that's the same idea as natural gas pipes. It is not any more expensive than natural gas pipes. In fact, natural gas pipelines are 10x cheaper than wires. This whole line of reasoning is just BEV propaganda. Wires are not magic and have huge costs associated with them.
In the end, an FCEV will be cheaper to own and by a huge margin. Hydrogen will be nearly free since it can be made from excess and unused electricity. The infrastructure will be cheaper by a huge margin too. People are just stuck in the past and are refusing to accept change. It is the same rhetoric as anti-wind and anti-solar. It is a doomed argument and its ridiculous to keep on repeating it.
It is not any more expensive than natural gas pipes.
It is, because hydrogen will leak more easily than methane.
In fact, natural gas pipelines are 10x cheaper than wires.
Well now I damand you cite your sources, because natural gas pipelines are 5x the price per installed mile compared to high voltage transmission lines. I mean, the amount of material alone should be sounding alarms in your head. And that’s from EIA. Even PG&E is citing $2M per mile to bury their high voltage transmission lines in California of all markets. Several markets in the US have absurdly low costs of under $300k per mile installed. So, yeah, I’m going to need to see a source that isn’t hydrogenhype.org or something.
In the end, an FCEV will be cheaper to own and by a huge margin.
My guess is in 20 years time, the cost of buying an FCEV and a BEV will be equivalent. The cost of fueling the two vehicles will still strongly favor BEVs, and the only advantage that FCEV will have is refuel time (5 instead of 30 minutes) and range per kg. Batteries are going to be heavy no matter what the futurism weirdos claim and hydrogen gas is more energy dense per kg no matter what we do.
You are simply regurgitating BEV propaganda by denying this. It's just all made-up bullshit from those people. Pipelines are radically cheaper than wires and that is undeniable.
Hell, if wires were really cheaper, why do natural gas pipelines exist at all? Just run gas turbines at a centralized locations and send the electricity to where it needs to go.
In the long-run, BEVs will end up being too expensive to be competitive. In fact, they're not competitive at all even now, and rely entirely on subsidies to be viable. The pathway to zero emissions will reveal these inconvenient facts and likely drive BEVs to a marginal niche. And if the future is not FCEVs, then it will be something like synfuel powered cars.
Let’s take a couple things you’ve said and compare them to the link you just provided me. You said that the cost of hydrogen pipelines was equally inexpensive as methane / natural gas. Yet in the abstract of your link,
The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines
Now how could nat gas be 11x cheaper than electricity but hydrogen is only 8x if they cost the same? That sounds like it’s 37.5% more expensive per MWh delivered. Interestingly, to deliver 1 MWh of hydrogen, you only need to deliver 30kg. Of course, the LCOE of that 30kg of hydrogen is hilarious compared to methane gas power plant.
And, of course, the very next paragraph dives into that.
The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels
That’s only true for DC, not for AC transmission lines which regularly move 900 - 2200 MW of power. Not that it’s even a point that matters much, since most power plants don’t produce 2200 MW of power at one location. We tend to distribute the generation for reliability reasons at the very least.
Now, are you ready for the kicker? I mean, are you really ready for me to just put the final nail in this coffin for you? What kind of electricity transmission are they comparing pipelines to in this link?
HVDC
And there it is. The cost of HVDC is overwhelmingly dominated by AC to DC and DC to AC conversion hardware, as noted by EIA in their reports. But, of course, if you compare to AC transmission as I mentioned above, this entire report is so upside down that it’s laughable. And that is why we have electric transmission lines rather than natural gas generators at every home and business in the entirety of the US. You should read the whole report, it’s really full of a lot of fun tidbits like this.
You basically picked the highest cost method of electricity transmission with the least adoption, and wondered why piping natural gas was cheaper. The fact that the into to the research said that electricity was hard to move at such high MW levels was the first clue that something was wrong here. That’s a rookie mistake for you.
You're just engaging in more obfuscation. 8x and 11x are pretty close to being 10x cheaper. It is sufficient for physicists or engineers to just say it is 10x as a first-order approximation.
No, I was building a case. And you very clearly do not understand what’s being talked about in that research. Claiming that AC transmission lines are as expensive to build as HVDC is absurd in every way. …baylor.edu/…/_13_EE392J_2_Spring11_AEP_Transmiss…
Even the EIA link I supplied shows that the conversion electronics are 60% of the cost of HVDC. Now you respond with Australia Pipeline & Gas Association? lmfao Dude. Come on.
If HVAC was really that much cheaper, there would never be HVDC connections in the first place.
Ok, now I know for a fact you don’t understand what you’re talking about. The only reason HVDC is a thing is to reduce transmission losses on very long runs. Something that we don’t really do in the US, and the most popular installations are in Europe where nations sell energy among EU members. The increased cost serves multiple purposes in that case- It reduces transmission losses as I said, but it also allows you to build more compact systems, and you get less capacitance issues in under ground and under water installations. It’s honestly crazy you’d even say that.
How about you actually read my link? I clearly stated that at long-distances, HVAC become inefficient and therefore costly. Your link is not comparing them to pipelines.
Making things up, got it. BTW, the luddites were correct. You might want to actually look up what their concerns were rather than just repeat bullshit. Like reading a gas company’s research that says piping gas is cheaper than running electricity. BTW, do you find it strange that nearly every structure in the US has electricity running to it, but not gas? Hmm. Makes you wonder. Well, makes me wonder. I’m sure you’ll just blame some climate change denial conspiracy.
Across all 111 planned new hydrogen fueling stations, an average hydrogen station has capacity of 1,240
kg/day (median capacity of 1,500 kg/day) and requires approximately $1.9 million in capital (median
capital cost of $1.9 million).
Most commercial enterprises look to install level two charging stations, which run on 240-volt power and provide a compromise between power and cost. A level two electric vehicle charging station costs around $2,500 for a non public facing and $5,500 for a public facing dual-port station—it can charge two cars simultaneously in eight to 10 hours.
As more drivers purchase plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), there is a growing need for a network of electric
vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) to provide power to those vehicles. PEV drivers will primarily charge
their vehicles using residential EVSE, but there is also a need for non-residential EVSE in workplace, public,
and fleet settings. This report provides information about the costs associated with purchasing, installing,
and owning non-residential EVSE. Cost information is compiled from various studies around the country, as
well as input from EVSE owners, manufacturers, installers, and utilities. The cost of a single port EVSE unit
ranges from $300-$1,500 for Level 1, $400-$6,500 for Level 2, and $10,000-$40,000 for DC fast charging.
Installation costs vary greatly from site to site with a ballpark cost range of $0-$3,000 for Level 1, $600-
$12,700 for Level 2, and $4,000-$51,000 for DC fast charging.
More stations more greater economies of scale. At some point this will be no more expensive than a gas station. Also, you have a much greater capacity per station compared to a charging station. It will pencil out to being cheaper than building the much greater number of charging stations. Not to mention maintenance. The cost of maintaining millions of charging stations will be a major challenge.
im no business major but even i can see its a no brainer to go with an 38 ev chargers vs 1 hydrogen station. and the same economies of scale will make it cheaper to build more ev stations cheaper. hydrogen may have a place, trucking and busses like greyhound might make sense for hydrogen but currently it makes no sense to build a hydrogen station for normal passenger vehicles.
Until you realize that 1 hydrogen station can refuel hundreds of cars per day. Economies of scale are in hydrogen's favor. BEV advocates are simply lying about the facts.
At 38x time the land area and far greater power consumption. And it does not scale very well either. Double the number of stations and everything doubles in cost. Nor are you getting a full 400 miles if you are assuming fast charging. You're looking at only a 80% max charge in that situation. Meanwhile, with hydrogen, you just need bigger tanks to support multiple stations. Everyone is fully refueled after 5 minutes consistently. It is the same idea as natural gas refueling stations. Once costs drop due to increases production and economies of scale, the hydrogen stations easily wins this argument in a walk.
Again, BEV advocates are simply lying. They are just trying to defend their car purchase. It is completely at odds with economics and physics.
ev chargers can be installed in existing parking lots negating a lot of that space issues. however if a gas station wants to serve both gas and hydrogen theirs only so much room for the tanks needed underground. and if you want bigger tanks thats even less room for other tanks.
have fun waiting for hydrogen, the rest of us are gonna leave you behind.
You will have to tear up all those parking spaces to put up chargers. Meanwhile, those gas stations already exist and it would just mean repurposing them for hydrogen.
Guys like you are just stuck in the past. You'll end up cheering on a dead end because you cannot conceive of progress in the car industry.
a trench a few feet deep vs digging deep enough to put a giant pressure vessel underground. which is harder? theres some work, sure, to install ev chargers but its much less, hince the price difference to install, to run copper wire in a conduit than it is to dig a hole for the pressure vessel to hold the hydrogen.
well when theres hydrogen stations around me ill admit i was wrong. til then i keep seeing more and more ev chargers. and they arent even at gas stations. and as we replace or renovate buildings itll be easier to add chargers. and yeah copper isnt cheap but you only need to run it once, vs have a truck keep resupplying you with hydrogen. and those truck drivers deserve a good wage. and then you need a gas station attendant, adding to the cost. and then theres is possible cleanup of soil contamination at said gas stations to even build a hydrogen pump. and then theres the fact it needs to be chilled and pressurized, again adding to the cost. vs electricity thats already there.
Same story as those who doubted BEVs. Also the same story as those who doubted solar power. Same as wind power before that. The facts don’t change just because “my idea is already here.” The facts clearly state that it will be cheaper to go with hydrogen stations that charging stations. So it is only a matter of when it will happen.
And there’s no clean up problem. Hydrogen has no contamination issues. This is you just making stuff up.
gasoline and diesel do though. youre mixing a cost to do something once, make and run a copper line, to a recurring cost, buying and delivering hydrogen. hydrogens time for passenger vehicles has passed. they were supposed to be the bridge to evs. well we have evs now. we do not need a bridge anymore.
also if the 145,000+ gas stations went to hydrogen itd be $242,417,200,000. way more than itd cost to add ev chargers everywhere. and that is one pump. now if they wanted two or three or four...
Hydrogen is not gasoline nor diesel. This is a ridiculous argument.
Hydrogen can be pipelined at 1/10 the cost of sending electricity via wires. If you actually paid attention to the conversation instead of spamming BEV propaganda, you’d notice that I said that already.
It will cost over a trillion dollars to put up enough charging stations for all cars. For hydrogen, it will be far less. Those are facts you cannot deny.
This is just BEV fanboyism run amok. The world will not head towards a BEV monoculture with zero alternatives. The fact that we’re even having this conversation shows how much brainwashing is going on. It is so extreme that it is evidence that BEVs are secretly in big trouble. Otherwise, why do BEV fans need to spam FUD and marketing propaganda like there is no tomorrow? It shows a type of insecurity that suggests BEV fans actually do not really believe their own claims.
and where do you think hydrogen pumps are gonna be installed? oh yeah, existing gas stations as that makes sense for the type of fuel it is which can very much have contamination issues. and how much will it take to run these hydrogen pipelines to these stations? cause they dont exist now. and that not even talking about producing hydrogen. we might get green hydrogen in the future but today the vast majority isnt. meanwhile theres plenty of electric wires already in place.
You are replacing gas stations with hydrogen stations. You are removing contamination issues. And again, it is far cheaper to put hydrogen pipelines than wires. The economics will drive adoption. People will choose the cheaper option over the more expensive one. You are just advocating the status quo and insisting that nothing can change.
so youre suggesting its cheaper to run pipeline than it is to tie into the existing electrical grid?
and that not even going into hydrogen like to leak from any hole it can find so those pipeline have to be perfect all the time.
im not saying things cant change, just that weve already moved on from what hydrogen was meant to be. theres no point to use electricity to produce hydrogen, in the cleanest form, only to eventually turn it back into electricity. when we can just use electricity from the beginning cutting out a lot of losses.
I'm not suggesting. I brought sources indication that this, in fact, is the case.
Most of your counterarguments are just fearmongering. As if engineers haven't already looked at these issues before making such claims. In reality, it is the cheaper idea by far. BEV fanatics are just spamming propaganda in order to deny these facts. It is frankly out-of-control and it is a sign of desperation.
Still doesn't make it any cheaper to get the pipeline from who knows where to the station. Much less building the station. And is shell and BP and whomever else gonna run their own pipelines or are they gonna be shared?
Where does the electricity for charging stations come from? BEV fans never answer this question honestly. They just pretend it will just be green electricity. In reality, this is an extremely hard problem. By the time you figure a way to guarantee green electricity, you'd realize that you're making hydrogen for energy storage already. So in truth, the solution will involve hydrogen no matter what.
Wind, solar, hydro, or hell even coal as it would still be cleaner than an ice vehicle. And no we don't need to store electric as hydrogen, we can store electricity as electricity it's called a battery.
You're not comparing to a ICE car. You're comparing it to a hydrogen car. A BEV running on dirty energy is going to be much worse than a hydrogen car on green energy.
Storing it in a battery would be incredibly expensive at scale. The point of hydrogen is that you can store large quantities of it.
They started selling fuel-cell cars last year. Both Toyota and Hyundai sell hydrogen-powered cars. www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/nexo and www.toyota.com/mirai/ So they do exist. They are actively on the road. You may purchase one at your convenience.
Last year? The Mirai went on sale in 2014, the Nexo in 2018. Just nobody buys them because there are no fueling stations, and there shouldn't be any for their horrible inefficiency anyway.
Not a Tesla apologist, but this article kind of contradicts itself.
They argue that Tesla is lying about vehicle range, but then saying that Tesla is guilty of normalizing building vehicles with oversized batteries which customers don’t need (because they only drive 40 miles a day) which is putting a strain on the battery supply chain.
Wouldn’t Tesla lying about range be them minimizing their impact on the battery supply chain?
And the rest of the article goes on to complain about the battery arms race which I agree with (anybody who can charge at home doesn’t need more than 100 mile range for their second vehicle), but that’s hardly Tesla’s fault. On every thread discussing EVs for the past 10 years, there’s always some petrolhead complaining that EVs aren’t able to easily complete the 15 hour, 900 mile, road trip they apparently drive every week. The market wanted a replacement for gas cars, Tesla did what they could to meet that demand.
Also, the articles linked about Tesla lying about range mostly discuss how all EVs fall short of EPA range when tested by Car and Driver. That suggests the blame lies with EPA testing, and Car and Driver even has a suggestions on what to change about the EPA’s methodology.
50% of Americans live in detached housing and could fairly easily get a home charging set up. Of those Americans who own more than one vehicle, I would assume that they rarely need to drive both vehicles over a long distance since I’m assuming that most families can fit into one car.
100 miles is more than enough for the average 30-40 mile American commute, but obviously not enough for a road trip.
Sorry for the oversimplification. I’m mostly reacting to many EV detractors who want to replace their 2-3 350 mile range ICE vehicles with what they see as equivalent 350 mile range EVs when the use case (as this article points out) is entirely different.
I personally own a 300 mile range EV, and I rarely use more than 20% of its battery in a day.
You also gotta remember things also get more complicated when it gets cold. Suddenly that 40mile commute can become problematic in sub zero temperatures. Maybe you could make the trip but now you can't do those after work errands or whatnot.
A commuter car with 125-150mile range might be more practical as a 2nd car.
Unless it's an LFP car you're not supposed to consistently use top/bottom 10-20% either reducing range if you dont want to shortern its lifespan, but LFP perform worse in cold weather so again, 100miles probably isn't enough for that use case for a substantial amount of people in colder climates
Edit: I checked a random website and it had 25 US states with a average winter temperature below freezing temperatures. Not considering other places like Canada or Europe either.
FWIW I also own a long range EV, but I would definitely consider a shorter range one for 2nd vehicle, and use the long range one for our trips. We wouldn't have a use for 2 long range ones.
But if they wanted to actually meet their claimed range, wouldn’t they need even bigger batteries?
If the point of cheating on range estimates is to trick consumers into accepting smaller batteries with lower range, is that not exactly what the author would like to see happen?
Even the article about getting fined in Korea is about them failing to advertise cold weather impact on performance, which again affects all EVs.
They go on to complain about how a software update reduced battery range. If you look into that update, it’s simply adding a diagnostic that detects a very real battery fault. People have taken apart packs with the BMS_u029 error and found dead cells that could catastrophically fail. It’s effectively a dead pack, and on a 10 year old car, I t’s unfortunate, but bound to happen to some people.
And the other software killing range issue was a single event where Tesla accidentally unlocked extra range on a battery that the user didn’t pay for. The software update “fixed the glitch,” but they ended up unfixing it for free anyway.
This article is a biased hit piece that fails to even address what its headline lays out.
The science says they are packing more batteries than the vehicle needs, but the consumers say otherwise.
All manufacturers, Tesla included, consistently find their long range versions significantly outselling the short range ones.
In Tesla’s case it got to the point where demand for short range versions was so low, it was cheaper in some cases to only make larger range versions and limit the range with software. Rather than maintaining multiple production lines.
In the late 90s GM’s made the first moderately popular modern production electric car in North America. The initial version had a 55 mi range on traditional lead acid batteries (when measured using the 2019 EPA standard protocol, it was advertised as having a 78 mi range using the protocol at the time). That was enough range to meet the daily driving needs of 98% of the population. They tried selling it with the message that’s enough for your needs, it didn’t sell well. Later versions used NiMH batteries and had almost twice that, it still wasn’t a big seller.
Both then and still today, the lowest range EVs from all manufactures, which have at least double the original EV1 range, consistently and significantly undersell the longer range models because consumers think they need to have hundreds of miles of range so that they can take the occasional unplanned road trip.
The need to significantly over-provision the range on an electric vehicle is due to consumer demand not misleading marketing.
People were literally lining up at dealers trying to buy the EV1. Their waitlists overflowed.
GM produced that car because of the California Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate (which yes, existed in the 90s). But they didn't quietly roll over and accept the mandate, they also, in parallel, mounted huge legal and astroturf battles against the law.
Which were successful. The law was killed. And what did GM do with their backstock of vehicles? Did they go down those waitlists and sell off the fleet? No, they packaged them onto car carriers with people literally camped out at dealers to buy them, watching and crushed them.
They had a successful plan to sell profitable EVs that people wanted. It wasn't nearly as profitable as selling ICE vehicles, but they knew the changing regulatory structure in CA would change that and hedged the bets. But also invested heavily in killing that regulatory change, and the moment they did, they intentionally killed the car to stop more consumers from having and liking them.
Wagoner has said the biggest mistake he ever made as [GM] chief executive was killing the EV1, GM's revolutionary electric car, and failing to direct more resources to hybrid gas-electric research.
PS: they joined the 2019 Trump lawsuit to fight new CA emission standards.
Yes people were lining up to buy the EV1, yes the wait lists did overflow, yes GM fought the California mandate in court, yes they crushed viable cars, yes they inadvertently proved a practical EV was possible and profitable and yet they undermined their own product and made it fail, all because ICE cars were more profitable for GM.
GM only made a little over a thousand EV1s in the entire four year production run. I couldn’t find records of just how long their wait lists actually were but one analyst I found estimated it at 20,000.
At the time GM was selling ~100,000 cars every month (never-mind trucks or other vehicles). One thing GM didn’t lie about was the vast majority of GMs customers at the time didn’t want an EV.
I don’t have a crystal ball, who knows what could have happened if GM was actually trying to make the EV work in the 90s. If they lobbied for a fast charger network, and tried to enlighten consumers about their range need’s instead of literally making it a rallying cry for why the ZEV mandate should be crushed. Who knows, maybe consumers today would think they need such massive batteries in their cars.
But both then and now consumers cited lack or range as their main hesitation to buying an EV. Despite the fact that all the data shows that less than 100 mi of range meets the daily needs of almost all people.
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