Edward Niedermeyer (no known relation to Douglas) isn’t wrong.
Compared to the herculean task of building supply chains to sustain a broad domestic E.V. market, tackling this problem from the demand side almost seems easy. Proving that E.V.s can road trip may have been an important psychological hurdle for the technology to tackle, but it remains more psychological than real: the average American motorist drives about 40 miles per day and 95 percent of our car trips are 30 miles or shorter.
Whether it averages out at 95% or not is disputable, but irrelevant. Unless you’re a delivery person or taxi driver, the fact is that 50 miles per day will more than suffice to cover the ordinary daily travel needs of most Americans. Problem solved?
We haven’t so much overcome this psychological hurdle as thrown big batteries at it, which is having a paradoxical (if predictable) effect of actually entrenching it. Despite dramatic growth in median E.V. range, to 234 miles in 2021 from 90 miles in 2015, consumer demand for range is always one step ahead. Three hundred miles might have been a desirable figure for potential E.V. buyers in 2019, but come 2021 it was 341 miles, according to findings from Cox Automotive. We could cater endlessly to this desire for more range without ever satiating it: More is always more, but more is also never enough.
This is a great argument, and one that will fail every single time to change any mind not already on board. The problem isn’t whether the ordinary options are close enough to cover our ordinary needs, but whether it’s sufficient to keep us dry on a rainy day. There are two kinds of outliers, those which will we know are possible but are unlikely to ever happen to us or anyone we know.
Getting struck by lightning falls into this category. If someone sold a “don’t get struck by lightning rod” that only cost $29.99, you still wouldn’t buy it, and even if you did, you wouldn’t carry it around with you at all times because the likelihood of needing it is so minuscule that pretty much any ordinary person is willing to take the risk. Sure, it could happen, but I’m not losing sleep over it.
But need a car that can drive whenever and as far as I need it to drive? Ninety-five percent of the time, we don’t, but for 5% of the time, we will, or at least might. It’s almost a certainty that at some point, we will need something different than that uncharged paperweight in the street. And that’s why the argument fails. Saying that a 5% need is an outlier isn’t wrong, but a 5% need is still almost a certainty and few of us, in an emergency that we’re certain will happen, want to be caught short, unable to help ourselves or our families. Of course, we can always buy two cars, one for every day use and one for those days when we have an outlier need to drive farther, but there’s a bit of a financial problem with that easy solution.
For some American households that may mean owning a single plug-in hybrid. For others that may mean a 150-mile E.V. for weekday miles and a hybrid truck for weekend projects and outdoor activities. Still other households might be able to serve their mobility needs with a mix of e-bikes, public transit and an occasional rental car. All of these options are better at delivering short- and medium-term fleet electrification in an era of battery scarcity than simply waiting for batteries to become cheap enough for every American to own a 300-plus- mile E.V.
Those combinations will likely cover the majority of needs of New York Times readers, but they won’t work for the majority of Americans for a variety of reasons, both odd and banal. But it’s the fact that this guy smugly tells us how to completely change our lives to suit his EV prioritization long before they’re ready for prime time with a great many tech and feasibility issues far from resolved which can be somewhat overcome if we just sacrifice our world so he can have his that makes his method of argumentation such a failure. All he wants is your money and fantasy logistics, and your life can be misery so he can feel like a savior. Does that do it for you? Do you feel a sudden itch to rush out and buy a Tesla?
If your purpose is to persuade others to agree with you, and they already have a vested interest in not agreeing with you because they are doing things their way already and, frankly, are good enough with it, then it’s not enough to make excuses around the fringes. Most of us have, more or less, established ways by which our transportation needs are met. Assuming that we recognize climate change as a very real problem, we are not antagonistic toward EVs, even if we’re not entirely sold that they will save the planet from global warming as opposed to the many other, far more important changes that need to happen. But I digest.
Not only will it be necessary to persuade us that our existing problem is so serious that our undergoing myriad change is justified and meaningful, but that we won’t be asked to shoulder an unfair burden and that the change asked of us won’t result in almost certain catastrophe. The discussion doesn’t start from a neutral position, where we can just as easily go one way or the other, but from a position where we have an entire national infrastructure, and a whole lot of investment, in gas-powered cars. You have to convince us to break from that.
My wild speculation is that tech will advance, batteries will improve, prices will normalize and we will adapt to EVs over time as the norm when and if they provide us with an alternative that may not be better than, but won’t be worse than, what we have now. Until EVs are what we need them to be, no argument is going to get people to forget that their 5% need of a better vehicle than an EV is going to happen and they will not be left stranded by the roadside.
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I saw several videos this week of lithium batteries suddenly, unexpectedly, failing and catching fire and I leave the week much further from wanting an EV than how I entered it.
To put this into the context of this post, batteries catching fire remains an outlier event, but use EV cars enough and the potential of it happening looms large enough to be a serious consideration.
Interesting post, and I have no quarrel with your arguments. Sadly however such arguments are irrelevant. Our betters have decided that BEVs are required and are in the process of outlawing ICE vehicles. New York and California have already done so and the sale of ICE vehicles will not be permitted after 2035. The Federal government is considering such restrictions, perhaps as early as 2030. As an environmental engineer specializing in renewable energy I can tell you that our electric grid is in no way ready to provide charging for the wholesale adoption of BEVs, nor will it be ready by 2035. Nevertheless, we’re not going to have much choice.
I’ve had the same thought. It’s a conclusion a kindergartner could draw. California is having problems now with brownouts. As is. They’re gonna get worse as their contribution from renewables increases. Where is all this extra power gonna come from?
And I guess that loading the kids in the car and going off to see grandma in the next state over is gonna become impossible. Or loading your kid’s stuff off to a distant college.
Our betters in New York and Washington have completely lost any knowledge of how life works out here where the vast majority of us live. To them, we’re like one of those Amazonian tribes that has never interacted with society. They only get glimpses of us through the trees.
We ignore exponents at our peril.
We are now lowering the landing gear on a pandemic that had a steep exponential risk curve by age. This was mostly ignored with the result of trillions in money printing and hundreds of thousands of life years lost in the lowest risk group due to missed education. Additional second order effects are just becoming discussable.
The renewable fad requires a similar exponential factor. Adding capacity with intermittent renewables requires a 1 for 1 ratio of backup capacity with conventional sources. Add in the debt service in the form of subsidies for renewables that are hidden and will be paid for by more money printing and the exponential risk curve becomes apparent.
These costs are incurred before additional grid buildout or last mile costs to support charging stations are considered. Grid expansion for renewables (inverter based) requires additional investment as well as land usage requirements are exponentially higher with a tendency to be built significant distances (reactive losses) from demand.
Using averages and ignoring the tails is the route to perdtion. Yes, most people, most of the time, don’t need long range, and they can probably even just rent something if they do. The bigger problem is that when you make those long trips, you are MUCH more likely to do them in conditions that are not benign.
I used to live in DC, but I had to make regular trips to Pittsburgh and NY. Both about 250 miles away. When I got to the other end, I would ALWAYS need a car to get where I wanted, whether I flew, or took the train. The nominal time to drive is about 4 hrs. These days, the time to fly from DC to those locations is at least 3 hrs, door to door. The relative cost is no contest – one tank of gas plus some tolls vs an airplane ticket, plus parking or a taxi to the airport, on both ends. And in the car I could play what I wanted on the radio, snack on my mother’s fried garlic meatballs on the way back from Pittsburgh, and stop along the way, if I wanted to do any special shopping. I could also carry stuff in the car that I could not take on any public transportation.
The biggest problem is the weather. I did these trips all thru the year, including the heat of August which required major air conditioning, and in bad winter weather, which requires serious heat for both passenger comfort and for lights and keeping the windshield clear of condensation (on the inside) and ice (on the outside). Both during the day, and at night. In my small pickup truck, I could make a round trip to these destinations, in the summer and in the winter, starting with a full tank of gas. I did not have to refuel in either destination unless I did a lot of driving up there.
I doubt seriously if any EV will ever be able to do either of those trips, one way, under both hot summer and icy winter conditions. The winter conditions are especially dangerous, because the trip to Pittsburgh goes thru the mountains and there are long stretches with no gas stations or EV chargers. We had a preview of the future this past winter when a major storm dumped on the DC area, and a number of EVs got stuck on I-95 south, ran out of juice, and had to be rescued by trucks burning diesel.
People in cold climates are going to die, driving EV cars in the winter. There are not many now, but when they become common, it will happen. Here in Florida, if you have to evacuate for a hurricane, you are advised to carry some gas in a jerry can to deal with slow traffic. No one I know hauls a spare generator and fuel, or a windmill, to power their EV.
Ignoring the tails of this distribution is going to kill people, just like [Ed. Note: Deleted. Too far.]
While your arguments are cogent, they will be overtaken by the myriad other problems that will stop the world from replacing ICE with EVs. They don’t make sense now and they won’t make sense in the useful future. Not enough lithium, the batteries don’t last long enough over their life, there’s not enough electricity to charge them, the grid can’t take it as it is set up, and they will just remain a virtue-signalling paradise for influencers and mediawankers.
Why are most electric cars two or three times more powerful and expensive than the average car?? If they were producing millions of electric Camrys for $20k I’d tend to take them more seriously, but Teslas and upwards… nope.
Being a resident of the Detroit area( not that it matters) it puzzles me that the advances in more efficient, cleaner, less polluting of the good old combustible engine have been pushed by the wayside.
Seems to me that continuing research and improvements on the combustible should happen along with everything else.
The limits on improving IC cars are more apparent if you turn mpg upside down to gallons per mile or, equivalently, gallons per 100 miles. At 20 mpg it’s 5, at 25 mpg it’s 4, at 33 mpg it’s 3, at 50 mpg it’s 2. You have to get to 100 mpg to save another gallon. Not likely.
Right now, the issue is charging stations and charging time, not range. Most people have no idea what the range of their car is, but the gasoline infrastructure is dense enough that they don’t have to know.
Maybe they are thinking people can rent a car for the outlier trips. Interestingly, hybrids haven’t displaced traditional vehicles, so it probably isn’t just the range consideration. An important factor is likely the simple premise that people are resistant to change. Until EVs are indisputably a better option for the owner, people won’t switch.
One of the all time great driving songs. Volume up and pedal to the metal.
We might as well just say that for 95% of us who live in flyover country, EV’s are a non starter. You can’t tow with them and any significant load of cargo drags the range down by 75%. They just recently did a test between several EV pick up trucks, each of which touted close to 400 miles of range. They hooked up a 6,000 pound travel trailer to each of them and ran them on the same route… basically a level road. All of the vehicles made about 100 miles before needing to be charged back up. A task which takes at least an hour or so if not more. By contrast, my ICE truck, gets around 350 miles towing and 450 miles with no load. Takes about 20 minutes to fill up.
People will boast of accepting 95% success* when it comes to avoiding false prosecutions or political violence, but their E.V. battery goes dead just one time and they’re burning shit down.
*certain conditions apply
Recall that car and gas companies killed the trams in every city in America. This isn’t even a new phenomenon. You’re just a cranky old guy with no knowledge of history
To make EVs, you need rare earths.
70 plus percent of the rare earths come from China. While the U. S. has deposits of the minerals it would take 5-10 years to get a mine into production, and that doesn’t include environmental permitting.*
Mountain Pass, the only major rare earth mine in the U.S. is currently being rebuilt with Federal money to try and bypass China if it cuts off our current supply. Realistically, it will at least 3-4 years before it comes on line.
Those twits have no concept of manufacturing, supply chain, or the myriad of other requirements to make an electric vehicle. They seem to think that EVs are made by unicorns out of rainbows and clouds. Idiots. They must believe that their hamburger is manufactured in the grocery store.
They have no problem with using products where the raw materials are produced with slave/child labor.
I could go on for pages but most of the people that read this blog are intelligent enough to know what the real world is like. That shows in the previous responses to this post. (Yeah, yeah. Tummy rub. Deal with it.)
* The waste products are radioactive because of the presence of thorium and radium, which occur naturally in the rare-earth ore.
In answer to Niedermeyer’s question “When was the last time you drove 300 miles?” it was last week. Nothing unusual, just a day of errands – in Texas.
A solution that won’t result in certain catastrophe is going to look a lot different in places like Wyoming, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Oklahoma than it does in coastal states. People who live in these places understand that they are deplorables and hated by people like Niedermeyer. Namecalling is one thing, direct attacks on one’s ability to live and work is quite another.
Side note Ed Niedermayer is the son of Curbside Classic founder Paul Niedermayer who despite being a former hippie living in Eugene Oregon does not own an electric car.
Back on topic, Niedermayer the Younger is not completely wrong. We are going about electric cars all wrong because all of the attention and manufacturing is fixed on bigger faster more expensive vehicles while ignoring the more realistic and attainable good enough electric like a Nissan Leaf, which pre-Tesla had a solid niche as a moderately priced second car that could be purchased or leased without taking out a second mortgage. A further critique of electric super cars is that they are wasteful, a typical luxury EV that does 0-60 in 4 seconds contains enough copper and rare earth to build Build two Nissans and weighs as much as a Hummer H2 with concomitant damage to roads.
I am also highly critical of the monomania for battery vehicles to the exclusion of other technologies such as fuel cells and also excluding hybrids and range extenders. I see similar monomania in the demand that all electricity for these batteries come from solar or wind and the demand that nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams be eliminated. A suspicious sort might see a plot to drive down average standards of living and restrict mobility as cars become an expensive luxury restricted to the charging network.
My understanding is that the Lithium Ion battery works because of some fairly nasty chemical processes.
Much like the compact florescent bulb many years ago, did anyone think of what is going to happen when a few billion Lithium batteries need to be disposed of? Can they be recycled or rebuilt? How many times? Where do you put them when they must be disposed of?
My other point is that I see no evidence of a realistic total cost\total resources consumed estimate on the life cycle costs of an electric vehicle factoring into these decisions. I guess our lords and masters assume that you just put a charging station somewhere and the electricity magically appears. The whole EV debate appears to be based on “Oh, shiney..”.
Getting to the 5% our host brings up, batteries are affected by extremes of cold and heat. How many electric vehicles died on the road last winter? If you have to get someplace fast in crappy weather an EV is not my desired choice.
Hell, I bought our second car for the 1% of the driving we do.
People are going to be pretty darn unhappy when they find out there’s no resale market for their very expensive EVs because they’re at the end of their battery life.
As a corollary to this observation, what are the people who don’t buy new cars supposed to drive? There was a recent story about a nice old lady who bought a nice Chevy EV for $11k, but shortly after she bought it, the battery died. It was outside the warranty period, but the cost of the battery was quoted as $14k, if it had been available, but they no longer make the batteries any more.
What are the poor people, who buy nice used cars because they have the skills to take care of them going to do? Walk? Sounds to me like this will have a disproportionately negative effect on vulnerable minorities.
My father is an interesting data point in this conversation: he owns a Chevy Bolt and claims to love it. We took a family trip on Tuesday of about 80 total miles. We took the Bolt, a full charge of just shy of 300 miles, and he didn’t want to turn on the air because of the few miles of range it would eat up. If even the converted/EV owners still barely want to drive their EVs, that is a problem. I can see the marketing campaign now: “Chevy EVs. The people who buy our EVs sometimes are forced to drive them!”
Also all Bolts were recently recalled for a fire hazard. Obviously recalls happen to regular cars too, but telling people not to charge their car or even park it near the house, then taking 2 months to actually repair the thing does not instill confidence in battery powered cars.
Physician, Healy thyself!
Now that I have that that terrible (aka awesome) pun out if the way…the electric car advocates are doing themselves and their cause no favors by downplaying the arenas in American life where electric cars don’t currently fit and may never fit, barring an order-of-magnitude improvement in recharge times, cost per kilowatt-hour of storage, cold weather degradation, and recharging infrastructure.
I’m in perhaps the most BEV-friendly place in the US (coastal SoCal), with an EV-friendly commute, the ability to easily charge at home using cheap electricity in the wee hours (I’m resisting imposing on our host with a link to the Pretty Things’ classic “Midnight-to-Six Man”), and the outside temperature essentially never gets below 40 deg F and seldom gets below 50. So I have two BEVs and no gas cars (not even a Healy), and the extra up-front cost of the BEVs is more-than-covered by what I’m saving in fuel and maintenance costs. But back in the mid-south-west-central rural state I came from, in my dad’s far-flung construction business…a BEV would be a non-starter due to insufficient daily range and lack of charging infrastructure, and lots of below freezing low temps half the year that would cut the already-too-low range by at least another third. Even many people living in the general vicinity of my (for the sake of argument) slice of paradise would be a poor fit for BEVs – long commutes, inability to charge at home, much more extreme weather, and high cost of living leaving no room in the budget for an EV.
It’s time for the EV
pestsadvocates to eschew tunnel vision and wishful thinking and demands that everyone adhere to their specific vision no matter what, and start thinking about the art of the possible instead. Come to think of it, that would be a good plan for lots of what ails our country…Healey, with an “e.”
300 miles is, roughly speaking, 6 hours of driving. That limits any “out and back” trip to at most 3 hours away, assuming you just park the car when you get there. Suggesting a 3 hour radius is “good enough” is downright deplorable. That puts an impromptu trip to both of our parents out of reach. That would nix almost every hiking location i hit on a regular basis from my not-too-far-from-the-mountains location. I’m pretty certain I’m not likely to catch a charging station in the Smoky Mountains national park any time soon, and the prospect of adding a 45-50 minute “refueling stop” for a day hike is a hard pass for me.
And the permits to build the charging stations at the parks will be issued when hell freezes over.
I’m hoping for a Hanukkah-based solution.
amazing stuff to read here. thank you. (I try to guess the number of interesting comments that a post will get. I am not so good that this. My over/under line on “First Circuit Upholds Student Anonymity In Title IX Challenge” was way higher than 4 comments. Today, I picked 7 and got smoked by the Over.)
In any case, I am late to the party but will ante up nonetheless. I don’t think it’s so much that people in power are ignoring “tail” events, but rather they did not parse out the various tranches that are contained within the broad category, Car Ownership. Beyond “commute to work” and “go shopping”, etc, one of these is a variation on “buying an option to drive from NY to Boston right now because I feel like it.” This option is not part of EV ownership.
(Another tranche is “how owning this car makes me feel”, cf Healey, above. In that regard, I recall a 1979 Saturday Night Live bit, The Boulevard of Chicano Cars, with Gilda Radner teaching me that (from memory) “to be a Chicano is to drive a beeg car with beeg wheels low to the ground”, but dang, Google has memory-holed that almost completely.)
This discussion reminds me that there once was a consortium of major automobile manufacturers the were working on a standard battery pack that could be swapped out in a couple minutes. The theory was, drive in to a service station, swap out the depleted battery for a fully charged one, and drive off. The depleted battery was recharged and swapped into another vehicle. All for a fee of course. This was supposed to take place in about the same amount of time it takes to fill your fossil fueled vehicle. That initiative seems to have disappeared—
Based on the failed Tesla vs Top Gear lawsuit, reported range is only valid under certain driving conditions. Top Gear reported that the 200 mile range Tesla only had a 55 mile range when driven at speed under track conditions. Meeting 95% of driving needs is likely an optimistic evaluation.
Electric cars will replace gas cars, the electric grid will expand to meet the demand, and life will go on. Our limitless ingenuity will always allow us to conveniently produce the electrons that make our wheels go round and round. At minimal or no disruption to our daily lives. And as is the way with capitalism, at ever decreasing cost to the consumer. In short order, we’ll be discounting cars like we discount laptops, smartphones and TVs.