Featured Reasons behind the slowness of EVs adoption in US

and its most egregious example (but not picking on it) is hydrogen cars. And YES - there have been non-subsidized sales. If you make too much money, you can't get an electric car with subsidies, unless it's a hydrogen car. Similarly if you fall within alt minimum tax you can't get the credit. No need to rehash - just a correction.
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What place does that have in a discussion of plug-in vehicle adoption?

 

I'll answer that - no pure-hydrogen cars should have ever been produced. They should ALL have been plug-ins.

 

plugin is construed as electric. FC cars get plugged in too - with hydrogen. And they have a battery that the car draws from - and it refills battery too, w/ an alternate mode (not gasoline, but from hydrogen) - and it's battery drives it via electricity. And they're subsidized.
Thats all the point is ... hifhest subsidy - yet NOT coming out of its low volume -
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Only because at least in other forums, the fool-cell advocates have been pests.

Bob Wilson

 

I doubt very many of the population agree with you.

more than 800K people run out of gas each year

More than 800,000 drivers a year run out of fuel | Daily Mail Online

Oh...and that is just in the UK.

Mike

 

I think that plugin hybrids are great. But they are stepping stones to a future with lots of BEVs. Not every vehicle being electric, just many many of them.
The problem with the industry, as a whole, only doing PHEV and not both BEV and PHEV is that you never get the infrastructure required to go long distances. You end up relying on gas every time you want to drive more than an hour.
Yes, this makes it easy for the consumer. They can just at home, just using 110v overnight and they need no new infrastructure at all. If they forget to charge, no problem. This leads to no where but maybe a 10 or 20 percent overall reduction in oil usage from what it would have increased to. This is assuming we could get 25% or maybe 50% of light cars to be PHEV.

But with this plan we keep all the oil companies fully in business as usual. All the interstate gas station real estate stays as it is. A few local gas stations close down.

With the dual approacj of both PHEV and BEV we get some real changes this decade. Fast charging technologies. Fast charging locations on the interstates. L2 charging at work places. Uniformed or oblivious drivers see all this and maybe do some research. Some early adopters do long distance drives and write about them. Route planning software gets better and better. More people buy BEVs. The cycle accelerates.

Sure. Build all the PHEVs that you want. But don't pretend it is the fastest or only path to a highly electric future.

Mike

 

Most of the population think planes fall out of the sky if the engines stop working.

 

Automakers lived in the present for decades, promoting whatever was big at the moment. Now that there is a need to look forward, why must there be a comprehensive look to the long-term?

You're setting a dangerous precedent. Think about how unrealistic that can be. Automakers can spin whatever future they want with no accountability... and some have already exploited that opportunity. We've seen things get very messy in the past. There's reason for caution.

What do you really expect from an automaker touting a fully electric future, but still sells millions of guzzlers annually for years to come?

 

I found our BMW i3-REx, 72 mi EV and 80 mi gas, to be an excellent trainer for our next car, a Standard Range Plus Model 3. Lessons learned:

• Fast DC chargers - expensive, ~3-4x than gas and often unreliable.
• L2 chargers - often under powered as low as 16-24A.
• Dealer chargers - locked up at night, under powered, and often ICEd
• NEMA 14-50 - an unexpected, cheap, and under utilized charging

The BMW i3-REx short range in both gas and EV mode leads to a better understanding of route planning. Each mode, gas and EV, backed up the other leading to 'tickling the dragon' with a fail-safe. This in turn led to skills in range strategies.

Soon I'll replace not the BMW i3-REx but the Prius Prime PHEV. Absence of a fast DC charger means the Prius Prime will always be dependent on slow L2 chargers and if the EVSE is replaced, NEMA 14-50. Worse, the Prime, 25 mi EV range is no match for the 72 mi BMW i3-REx nor the 240 mi Standard Range Plus Model 3.

Bob Wilson

 

A German accent? <rim-shot>

Bob Wilson

 

Evidence of the desire to upgrade after getting a taste of EV is absolutely overwhelming. Whether it is the want to recharge faster or simply the need to plug in a second vehicle in the household, there will be pressure that naturally occurs simply from that first PHEV purchase. The owner will seek options, discovering incentives from local electricity providers for them to use more electricity.

Keep in mind of the potential. SAE-J1772 can deliver a charging-rate as high as 19.2 kW. Most households, even with EVs already touting large battery-packs, don't have anywhere near the 100-amp dedicated service to support that currently. So, there will very likely be upgrades for everyone in the years to come anyway.

Toyota is well aware of this power to build a customer base. Their focus on reliability & affordability now makes sense. Higher capacity can follow without consequence of not being available now or even being promoted now. Upgrades are already an expectation. We have come to expect continued improvement.

Know your audience.
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Technically true...the spec allows for this. However, I think that 99.9% of every unit actually shipped and installed (i.e. ChargePoint and others) is maxed out at around 6.6kw-7.6kw (32A on 40a breaker with 208v, maybe some are 220v/240v). You can't just change some setting and make all these faster chargers. All the wiring in the ground or conduits, all the circuit breakers, everything except the handle that plugs into the car has to be replaced in order to support faster charging.

Know your infrastructure.

Mike

 

One more note. There really isn't a use case for a 19kw charger.
There are only 3 major use cases.
a. Charging at home overnight (could also be overnight on a trip)
b. Charging at work
c. Charging while on a long trip

Cases a. and b. you have a few to many hours and normally you only need enough charge for your commute. The vast majority only need 50 miles to cover this...so enough time to charge 100 miles easily does this. 4 or 5 hours covers this with 2x safety margin.

For case c. Even the new Tesla Superchargerv3 is more than 10x the 19kw rate. This is still slower than refueling with gas. But should be good enough if there is always an available charger. At 19kw it will still take 4 hours to fully charge a 300 mile battery...probably longer due to full battery slowdown.

Perhaps 19kw is good for a destination charger...to allow more cars to charge per day. But that means someone has to switch the cable at 2am sometimes. No one wants to do that.

Know your sleepers

Mike

 

FCEVs do grouped in with plug ins as an ICE alternative.

I expect buying a BEV from them is more likely than a FCEV from someone touting an hydrogen future.

Then who is actually touting a fully electric future while selling ICE cars? Someone in China? VW and others are shifting investment to EVs from ICE, but haven't claimed to abandon the latter.

You forgot the charger in the car needs to be upgraded also.

Some BEVs in Europe have chargers to handle 19kW and higher AC rates. There are even some public chargers capable of delivering such rates, but they are getting phased out for DC ones.

 

We have a 25kW max charger at work and it gets used frequently by people who want to charge their Leafs in an hour so they can go to our other site or to the airport.

 

Doesn’t the first half of the sentence answer the question in the second?

As for manufacturers not planning for the future, and only trying to maximize profit of the moment, I agree in general. In general manufacturers don’t plan out more than a quarter, with a small amount of planning out a couple of years.

That is one reason I support, with my money, one of the few companies that thinks in longer terms.

 

The post was about household charging potential, at home upgrades, not commercial setups. And you're overlooking the quick, partial replenish opportunities.

Mid-Term is the future too. Sacrificing that for a long-term only vision could be fatal for legacy automakers.

 

A statement that I agree with John on! I don't want to agree, but unfortunately it's true. It's one reason Tesla will continue to put space between themselves and the competition. I believe it was a BMW exec that said the other day that legacy automakers have to balance protecting their current sales and assets with the advent of EV's. This is unfortunate and true.

 

Nearly no one will charge at 19.2kW at home, and you'd better hope it stays that way because if lots of people were doing that, the distribution system wouldn't come close to supporting it. Most of the time, 4 homes share approximately 25kW of transformer capacity.