Toyota and Lexus Still Hating on Plug-Ins and EVs

US Department of transportation (DOT) Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). I'm looking at these trips over 500 miles in a day that might be impracticle in a long range BEV. Getting it back on topic, if you accept the charging statistics, how long will it take to build public hydrogen stations for Fcv to take these trips.

I'll leave out the problems of using averages in this way, but is only 87 miles per day on average. How many of those people will drive more than 500 miles in a day in their personal cars in a given year? It turns out less than 1% for non work trips in a personal vehicle. Yes I simply multiplied by 5 to get my 5% considering they may during the ownership of the car.

I think you are getting hung up with the term long.

My job requires me to take super commutes. A super commute is more than 50 miles one way. According to BTS this is only 0.5% of commutes, but many like mine are occasional. When mine are over 100 miles I typically fly.

Only 0.09% of trips to work, are trips over 200 miles in light vehicle (car, truck, or suv). 87% of these trips are done by men. The percent of the population commuting in a personal vehicle for these over 200 mile trips are very small.

Now when you consider that a 500 mile in a day pleasure drive should take over 7 hours going 70 mph, adding an extra hour to plug-in doesn't seem so bad. There are of course some that want to drive on pleasure trips in their personal vehicle more than 500 miles in a day, but this is really not a large percentage of the population. Do you really think that this is a high percentage of perspective bev drivers? How would a fuel cell vehicle help here, given the lack of infrastructure and the large cost per station? A phev would be a help for those that could cover their daily miles electrically, then use the ice on long trips.

 

Did not read this!

Tesla Battery Range in Sub-Zero and Snowy Conditions - TESLARATI.com

Losses: Charging, vampire, cold weather, etc....

Compare Side-by-Side

 

So you live near an airport served by SouthWest. The nearest to us are Birmingham and Nashville, both nearly 120 miles from Huntsville:

In reality, drivers are in a weighted, normal distribution:

• Green curve - the average driver 13,000 miles per year used by 2000 writers proving gas had to hit $3/gal before a Prius made economic sense.
• Red curve - in reality there is a flatter curve and even if 13,000 is the 'average', the high-side has a larger tail while the left is limited by the 0 miles 'drivers' or potential car owners

I used to get so pissed at the innumerology of these analysis that never did a sensitivity study showing 'road warriors', those driving over 15,000 miles per year made out like bandits with a Prius even at lower fuel prices.

I've got a chart that shows as the average distance per day increases, the Prius MPG found in Fuelly goes up and peaks around 70 miles per day. It then takes a slight dip to a local minimum around 120 miles per day and climbs again at about 140 miles per day:

• 70 miles/day -> ~35 mile commutes at optimum Prius profile
• 120 miles/day -> ~60 mile commutes, a lot of high speed, still better than shorter commutes. Two warm-up cycles, recommend taking a lunch break to sustain heat before evening commute.
• 140 miles/day -> day-job, a lot of trips with the car warmed up

Bob Wilson

 

Mine is 16.7 miles so I guess I'm joe average. My Energi fits me well as it allows me nearly 100% EV driving on a daily basis and use the ICE for out of town trips.

I no longer need to resort to hypermile-ish methods to eek out a few more mpg's, worrying about cold starts and short trips, etc; I just get in and drive. Even so, I still average about 4.5 miles/kWhr which at my 10.5c electric rate costs me about 45 cents per 16 mile commute.
Even at today's cheap gas prices, that's nearly 1/2 the cost even when I was trying to hypermile in my previous hybrids.

 

Hmmm, I thought statements such as;
"For me the cost of..."
"For me the cost of..."
"For this driver..."
was pretty clear

 

very clear, just yankin' yer chain.

 

I do take long trips, but I take far more short trips. I rarely take 1000+ mile trips that Austingreen cleared up as his 5% number.

Of my near 15000 annual miles, 2400 were long trips. Two 600 mile one way vacations. Everything else was commuting, errands, and then short trips within the range a Tesla. Some wouldn't have been possible with the other BEVs, but will be with the next generation Leaf and new Bolt.

Those that do drive many long trips, and want to plug in, are going to get a PHV. Which will also negate the BEV's long recharge time. These are the real threat to the FCV.

He said moped, and it was in response to your post on a scooter getting twice the EPA of a Prius on Fuelly. Low speed scooters get great economy, and an electric one should be better than the ICE model in energy efficiency. They just don't have much space for batteries.

It is when you need to do highway speeds that the Prius beats an ICE scooter. Their cDs are horrible. If not for their tiny frontal area, they would be fighting more air resistance on the highway than a semi. Which is why, in addition to tiny batteries, that electric motorcycles have short ranges at speed.

 

Yes, it is difficult to drive to places like singapore that I need to visit for work. As mentioned I have a number of super commutes most years (one way to work over 50 miles) that makes me an outlier for a typical worker. Only 0.1% of one way trips to work are over 200 miles, 5% of these like mine are done primarily by airplane.

absolutely, and really even though those
um. I didn't really discuss average, but yes many people are far from the average of 3 trips a day of only 29 miles combined. Here is the summery of the latest survey, but you need to hit the second link to drill down and see distributions.

http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf
NHTS Home Page

So
1) Absolutely the distribution is different than the average and their are plenty of 20,000+ mile drivers in the US that will save 1333+ gallons over 5 years in a prius versus a 30 mpg car. These drivers would typically be better served with a hybrid than a plug-in.

2) GM drilled down into its separate volt data, and found 97% of trips would be covered by a car that had 50 mile range. Combined with the BTS data that would be 33 trips a year out of 1100. Volt drivers averaged charging a little more than once a day. I eyeballed there data and those trips would cover 25%-30% of yearly miles.

3) Tesla contends that with super chargers most buyers will be happy with 200-400 mile range.

I look at those numbers and can see the grid could easily handle these drivers.

That leaves me questioning unless costs can fall greatly (technical breakthroughs), why would people pay for a hydrogen network to take long trips. The plug-in technology today seems more expesnive than ice technology unsubsidized, but it looks like that may not be the case only 10 years from now, with simple manufacturing advances. Fuel cells still need some technology. I don't understand how an engineer would not see fast charging as a fairly straightforward engineering problem.

 

i can't argue with tesla's thinking on that. they'll captivate the market at $25,000. a piece.

 

Because he wasn't talking as an engineer.

 

Tesla has no product on the drawing board at $25,000. Did you mean $35,000?
I'd agree with you, just wanted to be clear.

I see Nissan taking the majority of the $25,000 EV market. When the second gen Leaf comes out, the shorter range Leaf should drop into the mid $20s.

 

He was responding to my post, where tesla has recently stated that they believe long range bevs should have range between 200-400 miles.

Certainly In a decade Nissan, Ford, or gm, or maybe all of them may be shooting for a 200 mile car that costs $25,000. Right now its a race to see who can go under $35K first ;-) I was talking about there being no technical barriers to that, simply manufacturing challenges.

Until then some bev owners use the brute force method.
650-Mile Road Trip In A Nissan LEAF - Video

Tesla will release their roadster upgrade in august, which they claim will give the roadster 340 mile range. Of course this is an expensive upgrade, but those that just 5 years ago claimed no one can make a 300 mile electric car, will have to stop arguing the model S only goes 265.

 

i'm talking after incentives. tesla doesn't have to build all their cars to be hi tech performance beasts. we will eventually need a vanilla top 5 sales ev to move the general public.

 

I agree we need an EV in that price bracket, it just won't be a Tesla, except possible for the first few Model 3 buyers.

The Tesla Model 3 is going after the BMW 3 series market, not the Camry market.
As for incentives, I wouldn't plan on those being available for Tesla after the first year of Model 3 sales. Unless incentives get extended, which I am doubtful of and don't think is needed.

Nissan and GM are going to be gunning for the Camry market.

I don't know what Toyota plans to do from 2018-2025.

 

agreed. that's what i'm thinking, 10-20 years out.

 

deleted

 

0.5%? really? Do we have 440 million commuters in USA? (BTW the right answer is 128.3 Million)

Commuting in the U.S. is hellish — but at least it’s not getting worse - The Washington Post

 

And the solar panels smell better.

 

+1

I think I did use the wrong word, it should have been 0.5% of trips not commutes, its more like 1% of drivers commute over 50 miles each way, and less than 2% of workers. From the link above, and included here again. There were between 208M and 213M drivers in 2009 with 1.88 drivers per household, of which there are 1.34 workers per household, with 0.99 cars per driver,
http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf
Note there are really more car than this, but many of them just sit, and are not driven weekly.

From your link

That gives 1.08% of drivers, or 1.7% of your workers figures, and could easily fit in the bts's 0.5% of trips because drivers on average take 21 trips a week, if these 1.08% of drivers have 10 trips over 50 miles in a week we get 0.5% trips over 50 miles. I would say these 1.08% of drivers would not really choose a 200 mile bev or a 50 mile phev, but if hydrogen cost much more than gasoline which is does today, why not serve this 1% with diesel and hybrid vehicles? Do we need a whole new fueling network for 1%?

But fine let's say my estimating using bts data is really low and its really 15% not 5% that care about going 500 mile in a day, and say all of them are part of the 60% of drivers that live in single family homes. We still have 45% that can probably add a plug in the dwelling, and be well served by a terribly slow 30 minute to 80% occasional quick charge. How many of these fine folks do you think wil consider that charging is too slow and want to pay to build hydrogen for these trips? I mean that was the point of toyota's chief fuel cell engineer. How many of the group that is going over 500 miles will buy a fcv and hope the government builds the infrastructure to get it where they want to go?

Where did the 15% come from in this story problem? Its the number NREL switched to for ueling costs if we build hydrogen. The old figure was 50%, but that seems crazy high when we look how low even hybrid penetration is in our fleet.

 

This read ... is it talking distance? or time. For example - on So Cal's 405 fwy - a typical 90 minute trip during drive time may easily get you down the road less than 40 miles. And 40 miles is way longer than most folk commute.
Even @ a paltry EV range efficiency of 2 miles per kWh, you'd be able to recharge 40 miles of plugin driving during a 9hr work day, even if you only recharge at a rate of 2.5kW's.
Similarly, even an 80 mile one-way plugin commute at a more likely range efficiency of 3 miles per kWh can recharge in under 8hr's if charging @ a rate of just 3.5kW's. Again this hyper focuses on the uber-minority within an uber-minority ..... the <1% plugin driver regularly making the <1% long commute. Surprise surprise - just like motorcycles or 2 seater cars - 100% of everyone won't be able to find the same kind of transportation to be ideal.
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