Featured Gen 5 Prius now further delayed to the model year 2024

Ah geez...



Et tu, VDub?

 

Try going to northern Maine. The last SuperChargher on I-95 is at Medway, Maine. After that, there is none on the US side. Be prepared to cross the border to Canada with vaccination proof and negative PCR testing results, if you want to explore further north. If you have to stay on the US side and try to get to the northernmost part of Maine, the round trip from the last supercharger station at Medway would be close to 300 miles. That being said, I am starting to see out-of-state Tesla on the road more and more. So far I may have spotted a half dozen or so this summer. So people are making the trip somehow. I concluded that either they are planing the trip to stay at a place with the destination charger with L2, or at the RV campground with 240v hookup, or they must have a vacation house somewhere nearby.

BTW I don't know how expensive the SuperCharger rate is, but our regular electricity rate is at $0.21/kWh. Until very recently, buying gas was cheaper than charging PP at home. The break-even point for me is the gas price of $2.85/gal. We may not see the gas price go below that line anytime soon. But for the foreseeable future, PHEV is a better car to own in our location than a BEV. Still, I would like to switch my PP to pure BEV to be used exclusively around town.

 

From Van Buren, Maine, I see one within walking distance. The next are 85 and 99 miles away. But they are all in Canada. The nearest in the U.S. is 135 miles away.

And Van Buren isn't the most remote part of Maine.

 

Looks like about the most remote part of New England from the Supercharger map! But even you can indeed take a trip right now from your location in Van Buren, even staying on the US side of the border with a current EV, or did I miss something (not being sarcastic, just wanting to understand)? EV range for me is nominally 325, and even in awful conditions, I can count on over 200, and it looks like that would get me to the Medway charger with no anxiety, which is what looks like the closest US charger. All you need to do in get to that first supercharger- from there, they just hand you off from one charger to the next, until you get where you are going. And in the northeast, you guys have an embarrassment of chargers. You guys can even skip some there are so many around. I just came back from visiting Big Bend in West Texas (probably as big as NE by itself) and there are a whopping 3. I know because I used them all. THREE for all of West Texas (OK, slight exaggeration but not much). So don't tell me you can't make EV's work in the Northeast of this country.
I just plotted a trip for you from Van Buren to Miami, FL in case you want to see some sunshine, with abetterrouteplanner.com using my Model Y as the basis. No issues and you have many choices of superchargers along the way.

If you are a visitor to rural Maine, then yes, looks like you will need to be able to charge at your overnight destination. It is really more availability of those destination chargers that will open up the more rural areas to EV exploration. It's encouraging to hear you folks have seen some of that already. My West Texas trip could not have worked as far as I was from the I-10 chargers without calling ahead and verifying I had good charge setups at the two overnight spots I stayed at. I have read elsewhere that booking.com now has "EV charging" as a filter option for your results.

Also, it is definitely worth comparing electricity costs. Supercharging is the most expensive way to charge my Tesla, and here in Texas, it comes out just slightly cheaper per mile than my Prius, with home charging being way cheaper. But our brittle Texas electric grid only costs about $0.10 per kWh, so the comparison is going to differ a lot for you guys with $0.20 or more per kWh.

 

Note that currently, Teslas are the only BEVs that can make it to Northern Maine, say Van Buren. AFAIK, the SuperCharger can not be used by other BEVs. Very few CCS and CHAdeMO chargers for other brands. But even for Tesla, I have a bigger problem. There is no Tesla dealer or service center in the state of Maine. Purchasing a car that can not be serviced locally is a complete deal-breaker for me.

 

First, yes, right now only in Scandinavia (as part of a trial for network sharing) can you charge non-Teslas at the Supercharger network. But given that Tesla is outselling all other EV's by a huge margin, that may be less of an issue. And they have stated they will open the network to others, and as I mentioned are making a trial of it already. A quick look online shows Maine's only Electrify America (a competing fastcharge network from VW as many here probably know) charger is in Portland - so you'd have to make it there somehow, but it would get you started into their network which is also country-spanning, albeit with a lot more holes in it than Tesla's in the less-populated spaces.
Also, I also totally understand on the service center front. I honestly doubt I would have dived in if there weren't a Tesla service center here in Austin (a second one just opened on the other side of town - yay!) Even though they do have mobile service folks that handle some repairs at your site, it'd be a mighty big leap of faith to say "I'll buy this car and I have no idea how long it will take to get it serviced if something goes wrong". My innate conservatism would have outweighed my climate activism and engineer-toyism in that case, even with my Prius as a hot-swappable fallback .
My point with these posts is not to say "every person should buy an EV now", but to let folks know that to a very large extent, the SC network is already here and operates incredibly well (Tesla quotes over 99.9% uptime over all the stalls), and is allowing coast-to-coast and Canada-to-Mexico trips right now for probably 80% of the country. Tesla has also publicly stated a goal of tripling of the network in the next 2 years, and all of this independent of what Congress decides to do in the next few weeks, which could conceivably add hundreds of thousands of new chargers in the next few years. Tesla also continue to add service centers, although I have my doubts that northern Maine is at the top of the priority list - one might expect that they are following population density first. That is unfortunately probably right up there with far West Texas

 

Not everywhere.

SE New Mexico Tesla:

SE New Mexico CCS:


Looks like that hole is about to be plugged in CCS, but not in Tesla.

 

Ah the effects of customer base, money and expected traffic.

So I guess government might need to play some role in the charge infrastructure?

 

That is fantastic.The more the merrier. For those who couldn't tell, I believe those "wrench" icons mean a charger being constructed but not yet finished.

Debatable to many, but IMHO the G-men would almost certainly help more than hurt. I do hope they require the recipients of any eventual federal funds to put serious thought into where the chargers will go; "let's replace all the gas stations" is a pretty bad fit since most of us charge mostly at home. Many articles written about this placement decision process in the green press. "Let's put a bunch on major thoroughfares and at apartment complexes" would be a lot better, to make a simple example.
If the government had stepped in even 5 years ago and set a charging standard for the US, we would not be facing 2 different networks now in terms of hardware (really 3, but Chademo seems to have finally lost out and may die off).
I suppose some folks might say that is 2 different plug standards (CCS and Tesla) means more CCS-to-Tesla and vice-versa adapters sold, so yay more economic activity, but I'm not a fan of that level of avoidable pain.

 

On Tesla’s site, the wrench icons are for service centers.
Tesla doesn’t tend to list superchargers until they are up and running on that page.

I do agree, more chargers of any useful type are a good thing

 

Thought they put in grey markers for Superchargers being built on their map.

 

They do, but they are gray lightning bolts (there's one on the map I posted at the top-right). On PlugShare, the wrench icons I showed are "coming soon". I took a screenshot of one of them:

 

A great mountain is being spewed about the ‘open’ SuperChargers, 10 of them in the Netherlands. Regardless of either bull or bear, it doesn’t impress me. Yet some analysts are treating it as ‘the second coming.’

The big losers are EA and 3d party, fast DC chargers. The threat of an open SuperCharger network just dried up any capital investment. Worse, the other EV makers have to fit in a Tesla sized charge lane. Their legacy EVs are SOL or needing a kit-recall.

As for Tesla SuperCharger support … what a headache. Non-Tesla EVs were treated as unloved, brats by EA and now those EV makers will try to throw their tantrums at Tesla. This is not good news except to document the waste of CCS-1/CCS-2 standards. Larger than needed plug/socket whose integration remains often hobbled by violation than conformance.

It is all risk with no significant reward.

Bob Wilson

ps. “
See How Non-Tesla EVs Block Tesla Superchargers Now
Only some non-Tesla EVs are compatible due to the specific layout and short cables.”

 

Change the title of this thread?

 

Haha yeah...I was looking forward to discussion about the new Prius. No such luck.

 

With regard to Prius, that's unlikely. It will get the spotlight some other time.

My expectation is to get detail about bZ4X for this market. If reservations are to begin December 15th, that tends to make sense.

 

I've been following that. The only news for people interested in Toyota Hybrids that I know of is the reveal of the Mazda CX-50 SUV that will be built at the new Toyota/Mazda plant in Alabama starting in January. The CX-50 is expected to be offered in a standard ICE version and with a Toyota supplied hybrid drivetrain that is rumored to be a plug in, probably taken from the Rav4 Prime. The hybrid version is not likely to arrive until later 2022.

I think the arrival of the 5th gen Prius is to far away for Toyota to announce any details yet.

The CX-50 reveal will be Nov 17th or 18th.

 

Interesting...I guess we will find out! But yeah...most likely Toyota will be pushing the bZ4X.

Personally, I'm not even considering buying another vehicle until I hear what the 'next gen' Prius will bring.

 

Reservations for the USA? this December? If so - non CARB states as well? iirc from history - it sure didn't go that way
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