RandomEar
Senior Member
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2022
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The range problem is essentially solved for high end EVs like the Lucid Air. It will solve itself in the very near future for midrange EVs and the low end ones will follow later. I'd like to point to recent technological progress to support that argument.I'll never understand why people make these clearly false, unsubstantiated blanket statements.
EVs are much worse than ICE cars at two essential things: range, and charge time. I can "charge" an ICE vehicle, from 0% to 100%, in about one minute. It's easy to get a 500 miles range in an ICE vehicle. I recently drove a VW Passat that had a range of over 1000km (621miles).
Worse, those two things have a horrible synergy, making an EV a pain in the *** for long distance travel.
The charging is still an argument for long range travel, but not most other scenarios. For daily commutes, you don't actively look after charging an EV - you plug it in after coming home and forget about it. For long trips, it currently storngly depends on the car how often you will have to stop. If you want to drive 1000 km in one trip and have a recent Tesla model 3 LR, you can do it with 3 stops of around 17-20 minutes for charging (or 2 stops, but longer in total). That would prolong your total trip by roughly one hour. On an approximately 11 hour long trip, that's really not a big difference.
I like to stretch my legs at the very least every 3 hours when driving long distance. Therefore, I would stop 3-4 times for at least 15 minutes anyway, even whe using an ICE. And this is not accounting for any meals, which may take longer than 15 minutes. Using a decent long range EV wouldn't make my trip one minute longer than an ICE car already today. But I understand that people are different and some just like to "get it done" when it comes to long drives.
EV's are significantly less likely to catch fire. Like, "order of magnitude less likely". People are used to burning ICE cars, it's not newsworthy anymore and therefore greatly underreported in the media, which distorts the general perception.Then, compared to ICE cars, there are other small issues where EVs do worse: greater weight, substantial difference in behaviour between normal and very cold weather, higher susceptibility to fire (due to an impact or even spontaneous).
@OP if you want a green energy economy, you need lots of nuclear power plants. Lots and lots. You can paint them green, too.