President Joe Biden is taking fresh steps to help keep gas prices from climbing. For Republicans to see this as “disgusting” and “disgraceful” is bizarre.
President Joe Biden is taking fresh steps to help keep gas prices from climbing. For Republicans to see this as “disgusting” and “disgraceful” is bizarre.
We are being devastated by the higher gas prices. People don’t have the money nor the infrastructure is given to move to EV. Even if one does have money for EV, charging stations are extremely rare and you WILL find yourself stranded if you attempt any long drive unless you have a “old” combustion engine car or an hybrid both affected by the higher prices.
You don’t want higher prices on gas with 0 attempt to actually make EV viable, trust me.
The “extreme” rarity you claim for charging stations is a myth, possibly propagated by the petrol industry. Plugshare offers accurate information regarding the location of charging stations (https://www.plugshare.com/). And the cool thing about that is there are both commercial and home/ office stations, with more coming online all the time. It’s kinda good that EM bobbled the supercharger thing, so it encourages more groups to start providing chargers. The great thing about Plugshare and ABRP (abetterrouteplanner.com/) is that it makes it very easy to see and plan for your next charge. Tho’ I do agree that the way to go is make the E-charging cheaper, not to make the petrol more expensive, yet.
Hm, there’s no public charging within 100 miles of me. But there is within what I assume is max range at Montana winter temperatures (~150 miles?) .
Thank you for posting this. I’m absolutely not in the position to buy a new car right now. But, it doesn’t seem like traveling across the state would be very difficult if I did purchase an EV. (I have to drive up to five hours one way for certain medical care)
LoL, and I would never suggest buying a new car. They lose too much value just driving off the lot, and in the first 2 years. I’m not sure what the current ‘sweet spot’ is, but unless one is ‘fuck you rich’ I couldn’t understand why buying a new car makes sense.
Thanks for showing me where I live there is a singular small gas station within multiple kilometers with a couple EV charging stations 😂 I only find many if I go to a bigger city. In fact I do see them when I go to the city, and always empty.
E-charging is even more expensive then petrol here, so even hybrids that can charge people that own then never do so as going with just petrol is so much cheaper for how it lasts on the road.
I hate to tell you most people aren’t traveling more than 300 miles a day and most ev have ranges in excess of that.
Your trying to poke holes in Swiss cheese and claim it’s less tasty because of it.
Like 99.9% will be less than 300/d. And one can charge at home, with a 120v or 240v cable. It takes longer than a DCFC, but functionally one arrives home, plugs in, and forgets about it till one needs to drive somewhere. Home charging is being about 1x/wk, for my family. And as much as I like my EV, I frequently remind myself that every hour driving is an hour that I’m not biking.
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I’m way more worried about where the energy is coming from and what the true cost of storage is, rather than where I get it from. Every conversion/storage has an energy and materials cost. As bad as petrol burning is, I have to imagine coal burning + transfer loss has to be about as bad. Not to mention the nature of lithium cells.
We don’t need more charging stations to make EV viable, we need more nuclear power plants and cleaner battery tech first.
At worst it is about a wash. Combined cycle power plants are very efficient, much more efficient than even the best ICE engines. You pay for that efficiency with space and equipment weight which is why you don’t see that in vehicles. Even with transmission losses and power train losses in EVs your miles per unit of burnt fuel is about as good or better. Mix some green energy in there and you are coming out positive.
And short of some absurd level of intervention from a conservative government, the grid is only going to get greener in the future, so an EV bought now will become progressively less carbon intensive over time.
What you are saying is that you should invest in infrastructure for electric cars instead of subsidising the oil industry again?
Again? They never stopped.
Bullshit. My wife and I did a two week road trip up/down 2/3 of the east coast in our Tesla last year, and not once did we have a problem charging. Half the hotels we stayed in had level 2 chargers that didn’t cost us anything to use, and Teslas SuperCharger network was perfectly reliable. We also found more than one parking garage with free chargers while parked.
Now that NACS has been adopted as the open SAE J3400 standard and most EV manufacturers have announced support for it, the rollout of more third party fast chargers should start ramping up soon. And with Tesla open up Superchargers to other EVs it’s getting easier and easier to charge.
Your EV experience was significantly different from mine.
I recently did a 5 day trip from London to Scotland in a non-Tesla ev and we frequently had trouble with charging. Finding charging stations that worked was a challenge, they were often offline or just wouldn’t charge our car for some reason, or were the slowest chargers that took hours.
We were pretty caution with our range so it usually wasn’t a problem to find another one within 20 minutes or so, but it was definitely a little stress inducing and was pretty painful overall.
A bonus is that we stayed a little longer in places we wouldn’t have while the car charged and saw some neat things.
Good for you
Desperately hanging on to old things is not a long term solution. Petition your government to facilitate a decrease on the reliance of oil, not to help you keep it the same.
The tech is not there though. Most of the USA is rural. It needs to be heavily adopted in the large cities first before trying a one size fits all and rip off the bandaid approach.
And that is exactly why technological development should be supported, rather than using that money to desperately keep the old ways. Pouring money into temporarily subsidizing a finite resource at the expense of investments into the future is ultimate short-term thinking. Is it really so bad if fuel prices creep up over time? This of course assumes that this money would be used for more productive ways otherwise, which is not a safe bet.
If you stop the subsidizes, it’s not going to creep up slowly, its going to shock the entire system. We have plenty of funds that can be used for EV adoption.
Desperately hanging on old things is what has been done in my country, Italy, for decades. Most of the population is conservative.
Not that our money even allow moving on. Most cars I see on the road are 15+ years old.
In Italy the combination of solar panels on your roof in combination with an EV should imply that you pay very little in electricity and fuel bills. There should be a decent group of households for which such an investment pays off.
And on the other side of the same coin you have suburbanites driving 2 ton vehicles that drive 20 miles to the gallon.
So higher gas prices will primarily require a lot of people to abandon the “who cares about mileage” mindset and start driving actually normal vehicles.
Also plenty of EVs have 300+ mile ranges and that will suffice for 95% of travel in the US too. Insert proper plug in hybrids in the mix that do 50 miles electric and probably range anxiety is something of the past.
Remaining on the teet of big oil means big oil will keep sucking up corporate welfare while devastating our planet.
Also public transport needs to improve. Dedicated buslanes to bypass traffic jams in big cities means that each bus takes dozens of cars off the road.
Not much can be done if what most people can afford is a 15+ years old used car.
Also what I’ve seen from dedicated bus lanes in my city is them just being used by cars and bikes as overtake lane or as a sidewalk extention from pedestrians. Also trains need to be much more than once an hour or worse.
Cost is a factor for sure… that is where the government can step in. Mandate more affordable vehicles. In the Netherlands the subsidies on new EVs where now limited to 50k sticker price set to be reduced again. To guide the market.
And buslanes should just be more intensively used then… but it starts by showing that public transport is a viable alternative.
Train infra in the US is just hub and spoke… the interconnects are missing between the suburbs.
I guarantee most of the complainers drive around dumbass pickup trucks as their everyday vehicle, filling up at $250 every 2 weeks. I have problems feeling sorry for them.
LoL, our power company has a ‘pilot program’ for EV charging overnight, the price drops to $0.03/kW as a way of encouraging off peak charging. A decent sized EV battery has 77kWh. 77x 0.03 = $2.10 for a full charge. Just sayin’.
Most people that do not drive EVs vastly underestimate how much they can save in fuel and maintenance costs.
A good point. Apparently this is the case. Mechanically speaking they are much simple vehicles, even if they have all the fancy bells and whistles. I so would love to see a Toyota Hi-Lux EV, with manual windows, and the simplest most basic, just move shit around in 3D. Simple, light weight, and efficient. BYD is attempting to drive things (pun intended) in that direction.
Pickup trucks are rare in Europe
The infrastructure is much better in the US than you’re suggesting. I’ve taken numerous long road trips in my EV (and it’s not a Tesla, so not using the supercharger network) and I’ve never once been stranded or even had to wait longer than a 10-15 minutes before I’m able to plug in and charge on the rare time the chargers are busy, and I’m talking 2000+ mile trips. Could it be better? Absolutely. But it’s nowhere near as bad as you are trying to make it.
You are assuming I live in the US. i am not, I am in Italy and this comment thread was about European infrastructures
Well considering you were responding to someone who was specifically speaking about the US and you didn’t specify that, yeah I think that is a reasonable assumption.
One could argue this was true a few years ago, but EVs are more viable now.