Featured Why Hybrids Are Beating EVs In The U.S.

Yes, but just because gasoline is more expensive doesn't mean people will switch to EVs and PHEVs. They might switch to hybrids to save a little on fuel, but for or most people, gasoline represents a rather small amount of their total operating costs. At $5.65/gal (I suppose that's Canadian Dollars?) if a car gets 30mpg, that's $235 per month, much cheaper than the average car payment, and even cheaper than a lot of people's insurance payment. For a person making some $4,500 per month, that's nearly 5% of their income.

The reason I haven't gotten a PHEV or another EV to replace the one I sold is that it doesn't make much financial sense to get an $800/month car payment in order to save some $160/month.

 

I've got a buddy who's bleeding out about $150/wk on fuel in California.

He was doing great with a Honda Clarity pluggy car, but the lease ended and he didn't have anything lined up, and realized he had 6 days to get in a 10-month queue for pretty much any other pluggy car.

So now he's got an SUV that needs premium fuel? Really not sure how that one went down...

Well he's desperate to get back into a pluggy car and it's plain to see why.

People will react to high fuel prices. There were measurable shifts in the US auto market during the gasoline shortages in the 1970s, there will be others.

 

used is the way to go if you can't wait:

vehicledetails.xhtml

 

That's my idea of a good used car. Substantial savings from new, but not particularly used up.

The color's atrocious, but thems the breaks.

 

I largely agree with most of what you said.
But the wildfire statement is a bit suspect if you look at the data.

Here is a graph of acres burned each year since 1911. It happens to be from Oregon, but other western states are probably similar.
It is important to note that the US Forest service was founded in 1905 and in 1935 they made it a policy to extinguish any reported fire by 10am the day after the fire was reported. The fuel load of the forests has been increasing ever since. Perhaps this effect is more significant than dry conditions due to climate change

https://www.oregon.gov/odf/fire/documents/odf-century-fire-history-chart.pdf



Mike

 

The timber industry has made millions convincing people that problem with wildfire isn't because they clearcut all the elder thick barked trees with centuries of adaption to periodic wildfire patterns. It also isn't the fact that all the mono-crop regrowth clearcutting created is way more flammable and can't survive wildfire, which makes suppression during the worst fire weather essential.

Instead, they dishonestly argue (and you parrot) that the problem is fire suppression and they aren't logging or burning enough to keep up, but that's only true for low to moderate intensity fires, which usually self extinguish and don't burn very much acreage.

The truth is no amount of tree spacing or lack of fire suppression can protect a forest from a high intensity / catastrophic event. Also in some cases thinning the forest increases wind speed and when you double wind speed you quadruple the amount of energy released by the fires.

Catastrophic wildfire are weather driven not fuels driven because wind speed / oxygen combined with drought can incinerate whole landscapes. For example, compare your chart above with weather patterns for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which is a long-term ocean fluctuation of the Pacific Ocean. From ocean surface topography data, together with other ocean and atmospheric data, scientists can determine whether we are in a 'cool' phase or a 'warm' phase.



Wuerthner does the best job at disputing the myth of fire suppression:

"It was only after WW2 that fire suppression was possible. Armed with helicopters, air tankers, bulldozers, and smoke jumpers allowed humans to control smaller wildfires. However, these blazes typically burn a few acres and have little impact on the landscapes.

It is again well documented that 95-99% of wildfires are insignificant.

The problem is that we attack these fires and take credit for putting them out when, if we had done nothing, nearly all of them would have self-extinguished without burning a significant acreage.

In the 70-s and 80's, the Park Service at Yellowstone allowed 235 backcountry fires to burn without suppression. Of these fires, 222 went out alone without burning more than a few acres. Even the relatively few more significant blazes are all self-extinguished. About 76% of fires in Yellowstone never reach more than 0.1 hectares (0.25 acres) in size, and 92% of fires in Yellowstone never burn more than 40 hectares (100 acres).

Why did so few acres burn in Yellowstone between 1972 and 1987, and then suddenly, in 1988, a million and a half acres in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem were charred? Did fuel suddenly accumulate? The likely explanation is human carbon emissions contributed to a climate that grew hotter and drier with prolonged droughts.

Though modern fire suppression efforts have reduced the spread of small fires, they have done little to change the occurrence of large blazes, responsible for nearly all the acreage charred by wildfire annually. Several studies have shown that 1% of large and extreme wildfires are responsible for 90% of the total acreage of wildfires.

What drives large blazes isn’t fuel. You can have all the fuel in the world, but you will not get a significant blaze if you don’t have the right climate-weather conditions. The conditions that create large fires include severe drought, low humidity, high temperatures, and, most importantly, high winds." One Hundred Years of Fire Suppression Narrative Challenged

 

Lol... That whole video is more about fossil fool industry funded disinformation than an actual trend... Toyota caved in to the same corrupt bribes in late twenty teens and now all the other corporate loser are falling for the same planet destroying stupidity.

 

More like "availability catching up with demand"

 

Only insignificant if not near homes and other structures which always have fires suppressed (at least attempted).
(Too many people build in/near forests)
Certainly climate change is a factor...just not the only one.

Mike

 

Not too many years ago, the Paradise Ca fire disaster was attributed to faulty Electric utility equipment - coupled with lackadaisical care removing dry brush that had accumulated over several years, & low rainfall .... which isn't that uncommon in the area. Over 7 dozen people burned to death.
These are the victims of the Camp Fire
Much of California is considered arid, but for man-made irrigation in much of it. The utility company's remedy? Shut off all power now days during high winds, rather than better maintenance. What .... you thought executive's bonuses (in the millions) could better be used for better maintenance? Yea ... one of many reasons why we left california some 3yrs ago.
.

 

Did they ramp up maintenance as well?
I would imagine even if maintenance was suddenly perfect it would take years to correct the failures of the past.
The shutting off of the power would then be an interim solution that was immediate?

If they didn’t improve maintenance, they should be sued again.

 

Yeah, the most flammable thing in the forest are houses... But wood based home construction is the most profitable option if your economy is based on liquidating resources of stolen land or countries you take over with IMF loans.

But the whole routine of demonizing far less flammable vegetation as the cause of catastrophic wildfire, while it only takes a single ember and some wind on a house during an evacuation to burn the whole thing to ground is just plain stupid.

In my forestry work I've been a huge advocate for funding for roof mounted rapidly deployable foil fabric tent structures combined with roof irrigation systems. But those kind of changes require massive funding and all the corporate pigs eating out of the firefighting funding trough won't make room for that money to go anywhere else but to themselves.

What's more many of my friends in California, including my Dad, who ignored the defensible space rule of clearing vegetation around their house still had houses to come home to after a wildfire because coast live oaks that shade their homes caught the wind blown burning embers that would of landed on their roof had the tree canopy not been there. And Live oaks resprout like crazy even if the heat kills all their leaves!

 

Had to drive through Campfire on first day it happened... Electric company had 100 year old equipment that failed because quarterly profits were more important than financing upgrades.

However those 88 deaths weren't just the power company's fault, nor were they a vegetation management problem because the timber production zone (TPZ) around Paradise was intensively managed tree farms that had very little brush, just skid roads, stumps and young trees due to too much herbicide. The lack of vegetation management narrative is industry propaganda for the sole purpose of eliminating any/all limits on how much logging can be done.

As always, the real problem was the weather... When that fire started in early November the town of Paradise would of typically already had about 8 inches of rain. But that year an unprecedented drought meant it had near zero. And when you combine that with hot winds coming from the Northeast across US forest service lands that were deforested so they could no longer cool and moisten the air but heat it up and speed it up all you need was one spark and then you had an entire city burn to the ground even when there was only pavement for hundreds of feet around concrete buildings.

If you've ever used a cutting torch, you know if you turn the oxygen up high enough, even concrete can be made to burn.

 

There are many reasons why that grid was so dilapidated including greed, sloth, 'not in my backyard.' Texas shares many similar problems. Even my 50 year old home.

In 2016, I bought my first EV and need a 240 VAC, 50 A line to charge the car. But along the way:

• Needed better emergency power than 1 kW Prius driven inverter
  • $8,000 added natural gas fueled, 16 kW emergency generator
• Existing 100 A service was inadequate and service line sheath was sun damaged, falling apart
  • $8,000 replaced rotted service lines and cut tree limbs over service line

I'm not defending failed power grids. But I've realized power needs to blend local and regional service. This includes everyone from the utility company down to the individual owners. The system needs upgrading from technology that is 50 to 100 years old.

Bob Wilson

 

I don't live in the US but replaced our ICE with a Prius PHV/PHEV instead of a BEV (and instead of another full ICE) for several reasons:

1. We only want to own 1 car, which therefore needs for fill all our vehicle needs. (We could afford more, if desired.)
2. There was (and still is) too few charging stations in towns and in rural areas between cities
3. There are still far fewer charging stations outside major cities, which offer very cheap (or free) charging (refer to cost considerations below)
   
4. Even where available, charging takes too long (esp. for a Prius) to use for long trips
5. A PHV/PHEV required less capital expense

So, we drive EV when commuting to/from work in the city but use ICE outside the city.

In the US gasoline is very cheap and electric power relatively expensive, so the incentive based on cost alone is minimal. Additionally, I've been lead to believe a lot of US electric power is generated by coal power stations, so not only bad for the environment but also not easy to make electric power generation cheaper. So in the US there is little/no $ incentive, and in many areas minimal environmental benefit for EVs. But all the disadvantages remain e.g. higher capital cost, e.g. slower refueling rate once the battery is at 0%, e.g. less charging infrastructure, etc.

In other countries it can be different. Where I live ICE fuels (gasoline/petrol and diesel) are much more expensive, and electric power is comparatively low cost and mainly generated by renewables e.g. hydro power stations. For me there are 3 cost models for EV vs. ICE fueling:

1. If charging at home at a high domestic cost per kWh it costs 3 times more per km using ICE compared to EV - so EV preferred
   
2. My power supply company provides 3 hours of free charging per night, which allows me to cover all my EV power for commuting - again, EV much preferred. (Theoretically, we might even recover the purchase price in maybe 10 years.)
   
3. Away from home, however, most charging sites cost so much per kWh that it is only marginally cheaper to drive EV. So why bother when it also costs time to find the stations and then charge?

(Aside: Interesting that the number "3" appears 3 times here ...)

Further thoughts:

• When very heavily loaded (or when towing) driving for long distances predominantly using EV mode is hardly an issue. It stresses the battery too much and batteries become depleted too soon - leading to frequent slow (and expensive) charging sessions, and probably worse battery longevity.
• Our 2018 Prius PHV (Prime) has ChaDeMo charging, which takes only 15 to 20 minutes to charge from 0% to 80% i.e. equiv.17kW. Even at this "high" rate of charging we don't even try to do long trips by solely EV - the charging stops would be too frequent and the total time waiting too much. With a PHV/PHEV I imagine you'd need min.150km+ on a full battery and a charging rate of min.22kW on AC (or more for DC) for anyone to even consider this.

So, I'm not at all surprised that PHV/PHEV and hybrids are generally preferred compared to BEV. I can imagine this applies to many countries outside the US too.

 

Turn the clock back to 2016 and you've perfectly described the state of USA EVs:

If I didn't have a Tesla, I would revert to my BMW i3-REx.

Bob Wilson

 

What I don't understand is why there are so many YouTube videos lately about how cheap EV's are, especially here in Colorado.

Where I'm at (Colorado) there's a $5,000 credit on new EV's in addition to any federal tax credit. On top of that there's another $2,500 if the MSRP is less than $35,000. So a $30,000EV should cost $15,000 after federal and state incentives! But the Bolt is no longer in production, and no other car gets both the full federal and full state incentives. The cheapest EV is the 40KWh Nissan Leaf, but I'm not doing that again as 149 miles new means 56 miles in bad weather and battery near end-of-life according to my calculations, which wouldn't get me from charging station to charging station.

I did find a used Bolt for $11k. But it likely includes both State and Federal tax credits and I have no idea what condition it's in. Also a used Chevy Volt for $6,500 with no accidents reported.

Looking at my $50k/year median wage and the 20/4/10 rule I can afford $417 per month on all transport costs. With insurance over $130/month now (it went up again even shopping for lowest price) and $200/month for fuel at 40mpg, or around $60/month for electricity, that leaves me with around $4,500 target price for an ICEV (about $100/month) and a $10,000 target price for an EV after incentives (about $225/month) unless the insurance is more (was quoted around $200/month for a 2wd Tesla Model Y).

Financially, however, it makes the most sense to just keep driving my current car until it needs some sort of major repair that I can't afford.