I want an electric car, but they are too expensive still, especially since we don't tend to buy new... we need to wait until the new price is cheap enough that the used price will be in our budget. Then I'd be happy to.

Though I'm not going to lie, I find that the more appliances (all appliances... cars, dishwashers, whatever) have complicated little electrical programs to fiddle with, the more likely they are to go askew. I don't want automatic everything. Though I'm happy for it to run on a charged battery.

1: This is possibly the best time to introduce an electric vehicle that isn't the $$$ Te$la.

2: Your vehicle spends twenty hours a day INERT. This is more than enough time to recharge a commuter vehicle.

You can visualize the job at hand using the units, "horsepower-hour". If you expend x energy getting to and from work or some other errand in a few minutes, then your intelligent charger can work at a lower rate for hours to top you off. There is a chart of energy use at this link - be sure to note the gray lines indicating wasted energy. That's largest as a percentage in transportation.

For another eye-opener, step on down to the corner gas station and watch the tankers arrive. You'll find that the Racetrac gets six a day.

American transportation policy is shot through with grifters. Whether you notice the governmental shenanigans in GM ownership, Federal loan guarantees or just the "put anything on there, just pay us" of the DOT's lighting standards people, stupidity abounds. That's why our lovely hostess can buy a Kawasaki ZX-14, which can run a 9-second 1/4 mile, and drive it on the street, but not a Kawasaki Mule, roll cage and 5-point seatbelts included.

For another fun example of this look up the covid stimulus laws. Congress ordered the treasury to pay people x dollars today based on how much money they will make in the future. Time travel required by statutory mandate. Whee.

And that goes for both the 'Trump' stimulus and the 'Biden' stimulus. Writing impossible laws isn't a partisan practice.

Like a lot of people, politicians often don't understand what goes on behind the scenes, before the product makes it to market.

Working in a wide variety of industries has taught me that there are many things the consumer never sees - things that go on to bring a product to market, launch an airplane, ship products overseas, sell gift cards, or make loans. And there are a great many things people in those industries are doing to protect consumers and the industries themselves that consumers never see.

To them, the product simply appears and its absence on the shelf is a simple matter of "make more." Witness the toilet paper shortage in the early days of the pandemic. People did not understand that the shortage was due to a sudden shift in demand from commercial toilet paper to residential; and that factories had to be retooled to meet that shift. In other words, people were using the bathroom at home now, not at work, and the toilet paper on a giant roll that the office manager buys for the office would not fit your home roll holder.

So, politicians simply place demands on industry and expect compliance, not understanding that several behind-the-scenes shifts must take place to enable that compliance.

When we're experiencing rotating brown-outs to accommodate the massive shift to home charging of electric vehicles, perhaps only then will the consumers and the politicians understand the demands that are placed on the electrical grid by mandating such a shift.

✓ Conan the Grammarian at April 12, 2021 5:58 AM

But as so often happens, Conan is generous with the man/woman on the street. It's not just that they 'often don't understand,' it's that they're willfully, self-importantly naive. Consumers & everyday people think they have a God-given claim on being correct about things of which they know little. Viral science! International politics! Race relations! FINANCE! And the millenia of history for each... Sexuality! Psychology! Nutrition!

Those type of money trees don't grow well in the northern states.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.carscoops.com/2021/01/how-much-worse-is-a-tesla-model-3s-range-over-2000-miles-in-the-winter/amp/

Electric vehicles. A huge tax on people who are bad at math.

I’ve been pretty unimpressed with both the life cycle costs and the disposal and replacement issues with the batteries.

I’m one of those people who lives in a rural area. My vehicles are usually going a minimum of a hundred miles round trip when I pull out of the driveway, and I am really concerned about the overly generous estimates of travel distance when you need to run either a heater or an air conditioner, which is most of the time where I live.
There are days when I use both.

If you don’t care about comfort, just buy a golf cart, and save yourself 40k.

Some of my friends have elected to buy the fancy solar charging systems and the big expensive batteries for their RV’s.
Compared to an onboard propane generator is it seriously almost double the cost. Those thousand dollar batteries only last for ten years, and you need four of them to run your AC for an hour or two. Propane generator, 2500 dollars plus about 2 bucks an hour for fuel. Should run for at least 20 years, with minimal service for a few months a year usage.
Back up gasoline generator which I bought for 700 dollars used five years ago, costs about a dollar an hour to operate for fuel.

My friend drove from minneapolis to chicago with a tesla. Three times they had to stop for charge up and each time was 45 min to an hour charging. So the trip took 10 hrs. They were exhausted.

Few people have yet had to replace the full battery pack in their elec car. It might be $5000 to $8000.

A typical politician is like gov cuomo who has denied permits for gas pipelines (and fracking) but when this meant that the utility company said they could not hook up more people to gas, he threatened them. It used to be that the promises of politicians were mundane (new highways, prosperity blah blah) but now they want to change the weather and right the wrongs of slavery.

Any time "renewables" which means wind and solar get over 5% of elec power, the grid becomes unstable. In spite of Elon Musk's promises, grid scale batteries simply do not exist and enough rare earth metals to make them do not exist even if it were possible to make such batteries. Back up batteries need to be able to charge and discharge rapidly at the scale of megawatts. It is nuts.

"enough rare earth metals to make them do not exist" ~CC

Well, they do exist. But it is pretty much illegal to produce them in this nation. China has a near monopoly on rare earth element production not because of any miracle of geography. They just don't care about pollution.

Despite the name rare earth elements aren't rare at all.

"To them, the product simply appears and its absence on the shelf is a simple matter of "make more.""

Life is just like an Avengers movie - lots of magical thinking. If you've never learned anything, how would you know?

"When we're experiencing rotating brown-outs to accommodate the massive shift to home charging of electric vehicles, perhaps only then will the consumers and the politicians understand the demands that are placed on the electrical grid by mandating such a shift.

I urge you to notice that a car charger will not draw more than your home A/C at worst, and intelligent charging can top off a commuter car with existing supply. Here's how:

Traveling at 60MPH, a car uses ~20HP (if gasoline powered, it can discard ~75HP as heat). For a simple single acceleration, this means it runs a little more than an hour to get 60 miles. That's a little more than 20 horsepower-hours. 746 watts = 1 HP; to recharge fully, a bit more than 2200 watts will need to be applied for 7 hours. That's about half of your water heater's draw.
Please note that the battery is not fully discharged, and that it is not unusable if it is not fully charged.
Heh. At the average residential electrical rate of just under 12¢/KWH, your trip cost just about $1.80 directly, less than half that of your compact, 30MPG car.

There are a lot of people thinking they're not riding around in a golf cart, no matter what. Well, there's two things about that.
1: Smog laws killed cars until they were developed further - now, you can buy a Corvette that will smoke a Super Bee and still get ~25MPG. So development is not over.
2: A 150HP electric motor makes ~600 ft-lbs of torque. George Jetson's little bubble-maker they ain't.

Just how big do you think you need an electric motor to be?

(Nod to the Hummer crew with big belt buckles and tiny packages.)

Like student loan debt relief, this is yet another attempt by the UMC to extract even more from the poor, and yet another attempt by the upper class to extract more from the whole pyramid below them.

Like COVID bailouts, this is a giveaway to the rich. The Democrats are the party of the rich.

Remember, they taught all the girls in college [who have become our new managerial class] to believe the apex fallacy is life - i.e., that when Sheryl Sandberg makes a billion, everyone with ovaries somehow benefits. So, whenever the woke billionaires take another trillion out of the middle and working and poor, those with like opinions who are trying to figure out how to pay the rent also win by proxy (though they still can't pay the rent or find employment or do own anything but must live as a perpetual installment payer).

I urge you to notice that a car charger will not draw more than your home A/C at worst....

Yes, and when everybody in the customer base is running that home A/C, it stresses the system.

Personally, I like the idea of an electric car with fewer mechanical linkages; that an electric motor driving each wheel is more efficient and effective than a mechanical differential.

My major concern is that by mandating exclusive electric cars and "sustainable" energy production at the same time, without the necessary advances in both, our politicians are setting us up for disaster - for higher demand on a grid that cannot handle it.

"At the average residential electrical rate of just under 12¢/KWH, your trip cost just about $1.80 directly, less than half that of your compact, 30MPG car." ~Rad

Assuming 100k miles for the life of a car, 30 mpg, and $2.50/gal that is only ~$8k for fuel over the lifespan of a car. The difference in base cost of the car of gas vs. electric is usually over $10k.

Trip costs aren't significant in this calculation.

Also, Rad, stop claiming people are making arguments they aren't. Amy isn't demanding electric vehicles be banned by law. She is saying gas vehicles shouldn't be banned by law. Let people buy what they want. Stop trying to force your preferences on the rest of us.

"Also, Rad, stop claiming people are making arguments they aren't. Amy isn't demanding electric vehicles be banned by law. She is saying gas vehicles shouldn't be banned by law. Let people buy what they want. Stop trying to force your preferences on the rest of us."

Wow. Read for comprehension. Not shown above. Ironic at that.

You've made this argument supporting using the government to make gas powered cars illegal multiple times Rad. Knock it off.

There are a lot of people/families who have two cars, and therefore one can be a commuter vehicle, and one a hauler/long distance. But there are also a lot of single people/smaller households that can't have two cars.

So, like we buy kitchens to do Thanksgiving in comfort (i.e. not having to do half our prep in the living room and bring in multiple appliances and coolers), single car households buy for their biggest routine usage. A Costco run or a long road trip every three months - you buy for that usage, not a SmartCar.

There are a lot of people/families who have two cars, and therefore one can be a commuter vehicle, and one a hauler/long distance. But there are also a lot of single people/smaller households that can't have two cars.

So, like we buy kitchens to do Thanksgiving in comfort (i.e. not having to do half our prep in the living room and bring in multiple appliances and coolers), single car households buy for their biggest routine usage. A Costco run or a long road trip every three months - you buy for that usage, not a SmartCar.

Janie4 at April 14, 2021 12:10 PM

Can you imagine trying to evacuate from a hurricane, or drive out of a severe winter storm where you can’t stop in an electric car?
An electric car is a toy. Suitable for only the most causal of non emergency use.

My parents regularly drive their Tesla from Boston to DC... I guess it's not THAT long but it's a bit of a haul

The as yet unrealized problem with electric vehicles is people don't realize those batteries have a very finite life and cost thousands and thousands of $ to replace. It will be like buying a ICE car with a blown engine AND transmission.

The used market is going to be non-existent, and the trade-in values are going to be incredibly low. Why anyone would own, rather than lease, makes no sense to me. (Oh, wait. Yeah, I remember, it's because the tax credits mean that all the poor working schmucks are subsidizing your rich ass in all that highway virtue signalling.)

Can you imagine trying to evacuate from a hurricane, or drive out of a severe winter storm where you can’t stop in an electric car? ~ Isab at April 14, 2021 5:35 PM

I lay in15-20 gallons of gasoline every year for running the generator and an evacuation gas supply in emergencies. I can’t store an extra EV battery like that.