"Electric Vehicles are Actually Worse for the Environment than Internal Combustion Cars"

[Irving]

Wouldn't that be the case after driving any brand new car?

One of my favorite parts of my van is how it shakes at stop lights and how the lights fluctuate like the alternator is going out.

[ray1970]

Like the Harley Davidson of mini vans, heh Irving?

[Jer]

On Jer's / EV side. Looks like Porsche and BMW are testing a charging station in Germany thatll charge for 60 miles in 3 (three!) minutes:

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a2...g-bmw-porsche/

I think it'll still be a good decade or two before EV technology has progressed enough to make ICE vehicles obsolete , or at least antiques. And I personally am going to wait until then, or close to. I still want a Ford F-150 Roush Supercharged edition.

Something to keep in mind here is battery longevity. Tesla can do the same thing as far as charge rate but it does so at a cost of overall lifespan with the current technology. Early on Tesla erred on the side of slower performance in exchange for what they felt would be better life. They basically said that you would want to keep your battery set to stop charging at 70-85% and only use Superchargers when traveling as topping off your battery and rapid charging would shorten the expected life of your battery. Now that these things have been in the wild for more than 5 years we're getting some pretty significant data points that are saying otherwise. There's a limo service in LA and a Taxi service in Vegas and both use Tesla Model S's exclusively. Both charge 100% using the (free) Supercharger network and both charge to 100% at all times. So these should equal the harshest conditions possible and produce the most battery degradation of any real-world use. They have cars that are now over 400,000 miles, on the original battery packs & motors and seeing about 10% battery degradation. That's crazy. That means if you have a car that has 300 miles that even after nearly half a million miles of the harshest driving/charging conditions possible you still have 270 miles of range at max charge. This is why Tesla recently announced that charging to 80-90% daily was no big deal because the net effect at EOL is negligible at best. This is also why Tesla has stated they will bump the output of their Superchargers since it doesn't seem to have as much negative effect on the battery life as engineers initially predicted. It seems a though most new Teslas will drop nearly 10% within the first 50k or so miles and then basically maintain that figure for half a million miles or more. Bumping the Supercharger output may lower that at a slightly faster rate but at this point... who cares? I'm of the belief that Superchargers were never intended for daily use so if they can crank up the juice... go for it! When I'm traveling I personally would prefer the shortest stop times possible. That being said, even at today's charge rates I really didn't think that any of our charge stops were setting us back that much time wise.

That's all with tech we have readily available and produced today. Think when battery and charge tech breakthroughs start happening. It sounds like they've got some pretty promising stuff on the horizon already that could significantly decrease charge times, weight and cost to produce. That recent acquisition Tesla made will likely produce big advancements in all of those categories if what I'm reading about tech and patent portfolio are accurate.

[Jer]

What does this look like EV style?

It feels like "dont' be a dumbass that runs out of fuel" lulz

Over 25 years driving and I've never run out of gas so I don't a hobo's crap about a gas can so why should I care about the EV version?

[ray1970]

I don?t know if I?d take any data from a limousine service in Louisiana seriously.

[Jer]

Yes- Her situation does seem like a good candidate for an EV: Local operations area, garage parking, plenty of battery margin to accommodate "issues" (like stuck in traffic in a 10 degree blizzard, or the need to drive back home immediately upon getting work because your kid is barfing in the school nurses office) and the fact that you have another gas car as back-up.

Sitting in traffic with the heat going doesn't use as much juice as you might think.

Example: we actually camp in our Tesla Model S when we road trip last fall. Even though it looks like a Sedan it actually is a hatchback. This means that you can fold the back seats down flat and a queen size air mattress will fit nicely. You simply pull up to a charger (Super or other outlet) plug in, open the rear hatch, lay down the back seats, inflate your air mattress and then get inside and lay down. One press of a button on your Tesla app closes the hatch above you, another locks the doors and lastly you set the climate control to 70 degrees and go to sleep. We slept like babies. We stayed overnight in a parking lot in Oregon and one in Seattle and while it wasn't 15 degrees out it was fairly cold and not only did the cabin stay at exactly 70 degrees for over 8 hours but when we got up to leave we used less than 10 miles of range on the nights we didn't plug in while sleeping.

If you're in a situation where you think cold weather or traffic jams may be an issue you can put a Tesla in "range" mode which cuts the usage down by half. You can also utilize the seat heaters as they're direct heat and use much much less energy than the cabin heater does. I've found though that in most cases you end up having plenty of juice. There's only been a couple of times I felt the need to use all of these and in the end we had TONS of juice left so I definitely erred on the side of caution in those instances. Once you have one for a while though you learn the ins and most of this stuff becomes routine just like a lot of the things we do with ICE cars.

[Jer]

An EV makes sense for a large portion of the average car buyer, but the infrastructure isn't quite where it needs to be to support that though. I'd be shocked if EV's didn't outsell ICE equipped cars by 2030. My next vehicle will be a Tesla, but I'm keeping my Frontier for camping, hauling, and long road trips.

You would rather drive a Nissan Frontier for long road trips than a Tesla? Please elaborate.

[izzy]

Here are the articles I was talking about in terms of the batteries.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-electric-cars

and

https://www.ivl.se/english/startpage...roduction.html

Tesla was specifically one of the cars studied I don't buy that the batteries in their cars are clean at all. I've read that they do attempt to recycle them after use but that came from the telsa website so I wouldn't say I'm 100% sold.

You can look up lithium mines and see pretty quickly that they're destructive. Some of the pits they dig are so huge that it's not safe to fly a plane over them. Just googling "environmental impact of lithium mining" will bring up plenty of support for that point.

I have no skin in the game but I really don't think electric cars are any more "clean" than a gas burning ones.

[Jer]

Same picture but the guy is in shorts and sandals and carrying some sort of battery charger.

And a Starbucks Latte. lulz

[ChickNorris]

Oh, without a bunch of boring details, my commuting likely costs you more than it does me. And likely people who drive EVs might be impacted more by the cost of my commutes than those who drive ICEs since whatever electricity is used to charge those things doesn?t just magically appear out of thin air.


And by you, I don?t specifically mean you. You was used as a general term. I work in the energy industry so technically any cost associated with me doing my job are passed along to the end user.

Not sure if any of that makes sense but typing in a hurry because I?m working.

So, wrong pronoun.

; )