To be blunt, I doubt there’s enough of them to matter.

Driving with .5cm (about a fifth of an inch) of rain on the road at 100km, tires 20cm wide might displace 100,000 kg of water every hour, per tire.

My math might be wrong and the skim of water that’s on the road in a rainstorm might, typically, be less than .5cm.

Still, it seems like a lot of work and it’s all going to come out of the battery.

While not a “whim,” we have been known to drive beyond the Volt’s nominal AER range on very short notice; 150 to 200 miles on as little as 10 minutes’ notice. Since it’s something we can do and think little of, it’s hard to recast is as a “luxury.”

I’d be delighted to buy an EV with 100-mile range but, as a multi-car family, one of the vehicles will probably continue to be a high-mpg gasser.

I hear this a lot in regards to EV’s.

It’s bollocks.

Total crap. Bad argument.

You know why? Because nobody just drives 400 miles on a whim. People drive 50 miles on a whim, but any trip longer than that is typically a planned journey.

And for those, rent it. Or join ZipCar. A rental is cheaper than buying and running a vehicle that far exceeds your normal requirements simply so you have the capacity in reserve. I’ve run the numbers; running an EV most of the time and then taking a 1200 mile round trip twice a year is cheaper than owning a gasser.

So own an EV, rent gassers for long journeys, or buy both in one with a RE-EV. But a 400 mile trip you maybe take twice a year is not a convincing argument against EVs and EV ownership.

Would someone please call Rico Wagoner quick, these folks may have the Laetrile for Chebby Volt which Rico had been looking for very long time.

The US DOT already shows that the US had about 1.2 vehicles per licensed driver in 2004 ( http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908125.html ). I suspect that amongst suburban living commuters that ratio is higher and will go higher still. In that case, an electric only commuter car might find a real market. In our circle of friends people are already allocating their family fleet to users and uses based on fuel economy.

Day charging is more expensive, and people don’t want to depend on their employer to provide them with power. It really cramps one’s job prospects to have to ask your employer “do you provide charging stations for my car?”

But it could…

How is someone that lives in-town going to charge their car? Will they run an extension cord from the 5th floor to the 3rd sub-level of the parking garage?

Not at all. The “modern” building would have multiple charging stations hanging on the wall. Those charging stations could have card readers that a resident swipes a card through to unlock the charging station and bill their “account”. Or maybe the cost to charge would be so low that the owner allows them to charge for free like some owners provide free water or free cable.

Right there is a futuristic business: managing these charging stations. You install them, service them, and bill the electric car owner for the power with a little profit for you and the building owner. Send me a little money for the idea.

I can’t see the people in Boston’s back bay area running cords out to the street, assuming they’re lucky enough to park in front of their building.

Again not a big deal. Install charging stations that look like parking meters. Once your car is attached to the meter, the charging cable would be locked into the car and the meter to eliminate theft. A shot range communicator (like Wi-Fi) could connect your car to your home computer to advise you of the battery charge and alert you to any tampering. Sort of an alarm system.

You might say that ownership would not be practical until the infrastructure existed. It’s the chicken vs the egg logic. EVs are not for everyone.

Folks who have to park on the street might be be some of the last people to adopt EVs. To me – a suburban guy – I can imagine even owning any vehicle in that environment b/c I could not work on it, could not protect it, could not wash it. I guess it is all about what you are used to.

Charging at work would work well if the fast charge batteries come to market. 30 mins and your car is charged. Of maybe the system that a company in Israel wants to put into use where you buy the EV and lease the battery and you can stop at drive through shops where they swap the battery for you in minutes would be better. I don’t like the idea of leasing anything but that’s just me.

And if more than four people at the office try to charge their car, do they have to take turns to get close to an outlet? I’m sure the owner of the office building or parking garage won’t appreciate paying for all the electricity for these freeloaders.

No, they could use that as a method to attract employees – see, you can charge your car at work at no cost or at a minimum cost and we’ve got a dozen parking spots with chargers. Just like health insurance is a perk.

Another idea would be carport style covered parking with solar on the rooftop assisting the electric bill for charging the employee vehicles. I’ll bet as EVs reach the grid that price for electricity will climb a little and solar will become more popular. TODAY you can have an EV and rooftop solar that charges the car. Your house makes power during the day and sells it back to the power company and then you buy it back at night for a net cost of zero to charge your car. The only thing is that they don’t sell that at Lowe’s Hardware and the local GM dealer so people aren’t looking to buy that. As soon as there are a few in the neighborhood or family that do, sales will take off because people are basically “sheeple”.

The other day I said:
Everyone I know with one or two exceptions COULD use an EV for daily transportation with recharging at work with existing (1997) technology.

I meant: to say they could drive to work and home again WITHOUT charging at work with current technology – well, 1997 technology (Rav4-EV).

If you mean to imply lower speeds, then perhaps. But regenerative braking doesn’t recover all the kinetic energy of the vehicle during braking, the conversion isn’t 100% efficient. Some of the energy used to accelerate the car will be irretrievably lost on braking.

Overall, range might even be worse in stop-and-go.

And if more than four people at the office try to charge their car, do they have to take turns to get close to an outlet? I’m sure the owner of the office building or parking garage won’t appreciate paying for all the electricity for these freeloaders.

So really, the first mass adoptions of EV’s will have to be in suburbia, where lots of people have individual garages, commutes are long(er) and speeds are high(er) and a round trip (plus errands at lunch) can be made without needing a recharge.

I’m sure that eventually, the infrastructure will develop for people to plug their car in at the mall or big-box discount retailer so they can shop while waiting 15 minutes to 4 hours for their EV to recharge.

Well, it is sort of an illusion. The electricity is generated by a process that has efficiency limits as well. An old coal fired plant may run at 36%, while the most modern natural gas powered combined cycle plant may run at 60%. What makes the electric vehicle look efficient is that it gets to outsource part of its in-efficiency.

That would be Scotts Valley to Los Gatos. Or Half Moon Bay to San Mateo. Or, slightly more than Orinda to Oakland. All very plausible commutes.

Of course, during commute hours these routes may see significant stop-and-go. Which would help.

Tom.

It may also be somewhat inconvenient but, once one owns one, I think they’ll be happy enough with the operating cost to keep it.

I think an EV really makes for just about an ideal second car and the only “families” I know with just one car are single people living alone. And some of them have two.

But few will pay a great deal for a compromised vehicle. 40-mile range? Seats only two? Better be cheap.

—

bfg9k, check this out.

And think “rent,” rather than “buy.”

The 13-mile range commute includes 3% hill climbing. That corresponds to a 2000 feet climb. So that would be quite an extreme commute: to the top of a mountain!
However, it does demonstrate the difficulty of mountain climbing in EV mode.

And you get to regeneratively charge the whole way down.

Seriously, EV’s will be a good solution for a large number (majority?) of commuters. It does not have to be suitable for all drivers at all times. The ICE is not – it is very wasteful and polluting in stop and go traffic.

I could easily live with an EV for my daily commute and a hybrid for the big family car to go long ranges. Or I could just attach an engine trailer to my EV for range extension.

I also have a beef with the 300 mile range requirement. While thinking your car can take you hundreds of miles on a moment’s notice is sort of liberating, a rental ICE car could do the same thing.

Cars are usually a multi-year commitment. If someone commits to an electric vehicle and oil gets cheap again how much aggravation will they be willing to put up with on a daily basis to recharge and pay attention to the charge levels? You might bring a gallon of gas to a dry car, are we going to have electric tow trucks that charge up your car for a fee when you miscalculate?

80% to 30% is 50% charge depletion of 16kWh. That’s 4.8kWh still remaining in the battery. In conservative driving (assuming 300 or so Wh/mile) that’s still enough to let the car crawl another 16 miles to a gas or charging station.

In the situation you described, the customer had no gas to power the range extender, but he would still have access to the reserve battery power (which, btw, contrary to your state, DOES actually get partially utilized during the up and down SOC “hills” of the charge-sustaining/series hybrid mode, which maintains the battery at AVERAGE of 30%SOC).

I think it would be highly unlikely GM would let the car just go dead with the reserve battery power still there. In LA freeway traffic where sometimes there are no spots to pull over, that’s a safety issue that trumps the longevity issue.

My point was to show the extremes, although at a steady 70mph without a grade, you’re still looking at an AER of some 26-28 miles.

Sorry, you’re wrong. The Volt’s battery range of use is strictly limited between 30% SOC and 80% SOC (for longevity’s sake). Under no scenario will you be able to draw down more than this 50% range of the battery. That’s what the range-extending ICE gen-set is for.

I’m not saying these scenarios are likely, but I am saying that they would play out like this (more or less) under the circumstances as described.

I think that depends on what you use that vehicle for. I drove a gasoline powered four cylinder that will go 300 miles per tank and 125 miles per hour (but not 300 miles per tank at the same time). I have never had it past 110 mph and never NEEDED to go faster than about 80mph. Even then I’d get a ticket.

My car goes months without ever leaving a 50 mile radius of my home. Really the only time it leaves is if we make the conscious effort to take it rather than our four-door roomier CUV.

FWIW this CUV has AWD and it gets used about once a year MAYBE. In fact right now it’s been over a year since the last time I needed AWD and that was only b/c I chose to cross a very steep field.

sean362880: Today, you could drive any well maintained ICE for days on end, stopping only a few minutes every 400 miles for fuel. That’s the miracle of internal combustion and the kind of performance we should demand from a car, and I’m sorry, but an EV just doesn’t cut it. Even a fast charging battery would take 1/2 hour to charge, and would only drive less than 100 miles at highway speeds.

YOU need a liquid fueled vehicle. Everyone I know with one or two exceptions COULD use an EV for daily transportation with recharging at work with existing (1997) technology. I haven’t needed a vehicle that would travel for day on end with only refuels. Well, we did go to Florida a couple years ago and we took the compact so we could put the top down but I could have just as easily taken the CUV or rented something.

Alot of people I know already use a large vehicle for one spouse and out of town trips while using a smaller compact for the other spouse and only commuting and city driving. These same people could change from a gas powered compact to an EV – especially a plug-in hybrid like the Volt where if they needed to they could drive out of town.

We have a small 2-door compact and a 4 door CUV. I have a trailer. Do I need two tow-capable vehicles just b/c I have a utility trailer? No, I leave the compact car parked and drive the CUV for that trip.

I did some simple math. $3.72 at 17mpg for 200K miles is $43,764. At $4.00 that’s $47,058. A 34 mpg compact costs half that to drive. I’m not even taking into account the cost of the larger vehicle’s larger tires, larger brakes, 6 quart oil changes vs 4-quarts, shocks, everything.

Funny how the cost to drive a large vehicle about matches the projected cost of a Volt if you used it on electric power only. What’s it cost to recharge – a dollar? Two? My daily commute would cost $5 a day.

Go ahead and tell me with all the advances in battery tech in the past decade that if there were a million EVs running around there wouldn’t be some additional advances…

EVs are not for everyone. But for a huge number of us they would be perfect. There would be a line of early adopters ready to buy if they were available at $25K and more after the neighbors, family and friends drove it a little. I think gasoline powered cars would within a decade or fifteen years become like those hude 70s/80s station wagons – not a bad idea but eclipsed by better products. (Stuff that handles and gets some mileage to boot, not necessarily SUVs).

The logic of this article is confusing. “cheaper, long-range EVs and quick-charging batteries”. The A123 cells being developed for the volt are already fast-charge. I’ve charged them myself from dead to 100% in fifteen minutes. At the same instance, it seems strange for a site that’s argued against the volt from a battery price perspective to do an about face and argue in favor of MORE batteries. Especially with little evidence for those Nissan batteries being cheaper once the same economies of scale are applied to the competing chemistries in the Volt.

Second, a lot of the scenarios described in the article seem to be indicative of poor planning on the part of the owner more than anything else.

Thirdly, the extra heavy weight of the ICE will probably be negligible. The GM family 0 engines weight about 182-200 pounds on average, which according to GM’s data would probably reduce range by only a mile or two. As another poster pointed out, it’s all about the aero.

Thirdly- the first scenario is just preposterous. The car would never just go dead for one simple reason – the forty mile range is reached at 50%charge depletion. In theory one could go another 40 miles, albeit at the expense of deep-cycling. That’s inherent to the design of the car. I mean c’mon TTAC, that’s basic information that’s been out there for over a year. I know this was an editorial, but it’s hard to take stuff on the rest of the site seriously when that’s the underlying sentiment. Call me biased, but so are you.