I hate software controlled cars, which is funny because I drive a Tesla Model 3, probably one of the most software controlled cars in existence.

The reason I hate them is the second guessing of the driver. Some engineer ( or his manager ) decided it doesn't make sense to allow me to depress both the brake and accelerator at the same time. Why would you want to? Well, one reason I hit often is because I'm trying to dry the brakes off. But, the car won't let me, instead putting up a modal error message ( without even an override option ). There are similar nannies for trying to get out of the car when it isn't in park, or trying to change between forward and reverse when the car is rolling more than a couple miles per hour.

It's not just an electric car thing, though. It's a "modern car" thing.

Automatics will ignore you if you try to command such a low gear that you'll over-rev the engine ( to be fair, those types of nannies predate software controlled vehicles by many decades ).

And that brings me to the subject people are discussing... Manuals and the feeling of control and connectedness... One of the advantages of a manual is that it will do what you command, when you command it, no matter how crazy. It you decide to see what will happen if you put the car in reverse at 40 mph... it will let you find out! ( and you'll feel like a fool when the shop gives you the repair estimate ).

If you're someone who predominantly thinks of automobiles as a way to get from a to b, and especially if you have an automatic ( ignoring dual clutch ) then you probably like the protection that the nannies provide.

But if you're commenting here about how modern ( non dual clutch ) transmissions are pretty much as good as a manual... Well, you just don't get it, and nothing I say will likely convince you. If you don't know how to toe-and-heel, double clutch, etc, well then... sigh.... please just accept that you're missing a whole aspect of driving that is hard to explain and you'll just probably never understand. But please don't be arrogant enough to think you understand the situation enough to comment intelligently.

I do have to say that electric cars have saved me from a choice I thought I might have to make on my next car... Full manual vs dual clutch. Because you really can't argue with a high performance dual clutch system in a modern sports car for going fast... And yet, I love having a clutch. There are all kinds of subtleties in learning to use a clutch which again, give you a connectedness and control over the car that nothing else can touch, including dual clutch systems... ( I cringe that modern cars have rev matching systems! ).

The original article that we're all commenting on is a pathetic attempt at journalism by someone who knows very little about the subject they're trying to write about. They missed the key points by a mile.

Some of the reader comments have been pretty good, though...

Yeah, I agree with you. I've been driving BEV for 11 years now, but I've had hot hatches and similar up until 6 years ago... I had a 2005 Subaru STi that is still my first or second favorite car. It was a blast to drive, and very analog... No traction control or stability augmentation, but the 3 LSDs and the driver controlled center differential let you take it right up to ( and actually pretty far past ) the limits of adhesion on all four wheels, and yet feel perfectly in control.

The 2017 Focus RS and Subaru STi that replaced it didn't feel at all the same. I especially didn't like the non-linear way traction / stability systems would jump in when pushing the limits. Mostly some hard braking on one or two corners that was so sudden and extreme that it was impossible to play with... once those systems activated, the fun was pretty much over. ( Of course, you could turn those systems off, but that was something I was always reluctant to do on the public streets and highways ).

The ( performance ) Tesla Model 3 has a very similar feeling when you're not in track mode. I agree with the statement that that's just how modern cars drive. And I don't turn on track mode on the public streets for multiple reasons. So, I still miss the 2005 STi for the fun of flinging it around in snow etc...

I agree though, with the people who mention that EVs don't feel like automatics. I absolutely hate driving automatics, indeed will go to considerable trouble to avoid them, but the two BEVs I've had don't feel like automatics. They feel more like a manual with one gear, despite not having a clutch. It's a combination of never shifting at the wrong time or into the wrong gear ( because they don't shift ) and the regen feeling a lot like the engine braking of a manual.

Here's a real life trip, but calculated in a non-Performance Model 3, from my house to my buddy's house in Jackson TN (2023 Model 3 LongRange... 295 Wh/mi).

It's 17.4 hours of driving, plus 2.5 hours charging, on a 1,230 mile drive. By your calculations, a gas car would take 40 minutes at gas stations. Electricity cost is $105, vs about $150 for a car that gets 25 mpg. An ICE car getting 35 mpg would cost the same as the Model 3...

I personally don't do this trip straight through... a full day in the car is simply too long for me, so I usually stop at a hotel in Virginia. Now, by stopping at a hotel I can charge the car overnight, which eliminates one charge, which brings it down to 2 hours of charging the BEV, vs 40 minutes refueling the ICE car.

That's it, if you're one of those people who likes to Cannonball the drive, driving straight through without any stops to use the bathroom, or grab a bite to eat...

If, like me, you need a couple stops for food and comfort, then things are even a little better, because of course the car can be charging while you eat or use the facilities. If you figure a stop for one meal on day 1, and one meal on day 2, you knock the "sitting waiting for the car to charge" time down to about an hour on a 1,230 mile drive.

On the subject of how long a recharge time is, and you supposed 30 minutes for a charge, but the average on this trip is actually 19 minutes (this trip, 14+21+21+27+27+7+13+23) but that's if we don't do the overnight hotel stop, or stop for food or restrooms.

You mentioned the Leaf only getting 4.1 miles per kWh... That's really terrible! My Honda Fit EV got that with regular driving, but if I hyper-mile'd it (going 30-35 on back roads) I could reliably get 6 miles per kWh (in warm weather). It was a great little car, but with only 19 kWh, it didn't have much range, and no DC charging capability... It made it a great little commuter car, but road trips were impossible...

Anyway, on a 17.4 hour drive, you're adding between 1 to 2 hours depending on whether you're one of those "pee in a bottle so you don't have to stop" people, or trying to get there without killing yourself... For me, that's not an excessive amount of additional time, but some people won't allow for any extra time at all. Different people, different strokes.

Thanks for the pointer to that article... I hadn't read that... I've owned (plenty of) gas cars, one PHEV, and two BEVs... I feel like I have some experience with them...

The survey they did misses the mark slightly for me:

I guess I'd like to know the weighting of stuff like this... I'm less concerned if trim is rattling, than I am about whether the car is able to transport me to work and back. And some of it is indeed surprising (and makes me wonder about the validity of at least the headline)... For instance, Hybrid's being much more reliable than PHEVs (which were the worst, and that mirrors my experience with my PHEV)... But I think the key is:

Yeah... BEVs are generally new models... and thus are still suffering from the sorts of issues that occur with any new model... It would be nice to see the same study corrected for the "newness" of the cars... i.e. compare a 1 year old BEV to a 1 year old hybrid, and also try to correct for overall reliability... I'm not surprised to find a Toyota much more reliable than say, a GM product... but if the GM product is a BEV and the Toyota product is a hybrid... well I think that says more about the manufacturer than the particular vehicle.

And to be fair, the article called out many of these points - I think it was a well written article. The headline, on the other hand, seems to be misleading...

Anyway, interesting read.

The article I read said explicitly that's where the energy was going - especially heating during the cold months. Remember, the start/stop inefficiencies of an ICE truck are 80% recuperated by a BEV, so there's a huge efficiency gain for a vehicle that stops often. 1.34 kWh / mile is worse than a Ford F150 towing a 5,000 pound load (and most of that is aerodynamics). The NGDV is rated to spend a lot of time at 65 mph, but if you think of the average delivery route, it'll spend a lot more time at 25 mph where the aerodynamic drag is negligible.

Something still sounds off - if there's 100 delivery trucks, it's a very large post office. A post office that size needs significant power for sorters, etc. At night when the workers go home, all that power is available to charge trucks. Also, if you're serving an area that needs 100 delivery trucks, it's not a little rural post office, it sounds like a fairly metropolitan area with business etc. So, there's going to be plenty of capacity available...

Maybe you saw 100 vehicles 90 of which were junked and just sitting around to be used as spares?

I got the 7.5 trucks / post office by taking the actual number of trucks in the USPS fleet and dividing by the number of post offices in the US...

And again, because of the way the duck curve works, the demand on the grid drops off tremendously by 9-10 pm the load on the grid is way down, and there's plenty available for charging BEVs...

Care to mention the name of the town/city where you saw 100 delivery trucks?

It's certainly not a terrible idea, and I've seen a couple Prius with that. I think sitting all day in the sun may get you something like 4-7 miles which isn't a lot, but would actually cover 25% of the average person's commute...

We have a couple stores around here (REI) that have parking lot structures that mount solar panels above your car, so your car stays cool, and the panels generate electricity (but you can't plug in - it runs the store)...

I mean, at least here in the US without "truth in advertising" laws, every company exaggerates capabilities.

My Performance Model 3 has a lifetime average of .270 kWh/mile, so that gives me 194 miles of useful range if I live within your 10%-80% range. That's typically averaging 70 mph on the highway. Keep in mind that my car is less efficient, being the performance variant, because it has the larger sticky extreme performance summer tires on it. My daughter's RWD Model 3 gets much better mileage. So, yeah, they exaggerate, but it's not nearly as much as people might imagine from your post...

(and like Teun says, you can Supercharge past 80%, it just slows down a lot, so why would you unless you're about to cross a stretch of road with few chargers).

There are two main classes of BEV drivers... Those that have charging at home (or work) and those who don't.

If you have charging at home or work, you don't wait for the car to charge, you plug in and do other stuff while it charges.

If you're someone who doesn't have charging at home or work, you probably hit a DC fast charger a couple times a week. If you drive the national average (30 miles a day), you could charge for 12 minutes (if my math is correct, assuming a ramp from 225kW to 80kW over those 12 minutes) twice a week... That assumes you run the battery between 20% and 60%... Realistically in the winter you probably end up hitting the charger 3 times a week for 12 minutes...

People who live where off street charging is unavailable account for 30% of the drivers in the USA, the last time I checked. It's higher in Europe. It's probably the biggest obstacle to universal adoption of BEVs there is... the pathway to solving price, range, etc. is pretty clear. But where you charge if you don't own a detached home... that's harder to solve. There are solutions, but nobody seems to be working on them right now, so I think in the near future apartment dwellers will be hitting the DC charger a couple/few times a week until this gets addressed.

Of course it's true that we can make a tradeoff between battery capacity and the spacing of chargers, I think it's unlikely that we'll add significantly more range to electric cars/SUVs (trucks might be another story because of the towing dilemma). EVs already carry a weight penalty in order to have ~300 miles of range. That decreases efficiency, increases tire and road wear, and initial cost of the vehicle. It makes more sense to reduce the range somewhat (say, 225-250 miles of range) and instead build out the infrastructure in places where it's lacking. At least with a Tesla, the infrastructure is already okay on both coasts, and near the major population centers. Where it is lacking is in the rural middle and along the rural boarders of the country. To have complete adoption, we need to fill in those areas.

Well, when it happens, if it's all that spectacular, it'll be adopted quickly. But it's certainly not true that it's a prerequisite for BEVs to be adopted in large numbers.

LFP batteries already address that (non-issue) and address the cost issue as well... Which goes to illustrate that there will be new chemistries appearing regularly for the next few decades that will solve/address shortcomings with current chemistries. BEVs are a new technology, with rapid improvements coming quickly, while ICE is a mature industry with very small improvements left to be made. BEVs will continue to improve rapidly over the next couple decades, while ICE won't.

The difference between my 2013 electric car and my 2018 electric car is huge. The 2013 car had some serious limitations. My 2018 BEV... I just get in it and drive. It works fine as a car, no improvement required. That doesn't mean there won't be improvements, just that it's already perfectly usable for daily transportation.

My car has a rated range of 333 miles... it actually comes in closer to 280 miles lifetime average. I'm a pretty typical east coast driver, and I only have to charge on the road about once a month. The rest of the time 280 miles is sufficient for an entire day of driving without having to stop and charge. Adding cost and weight to get more range than that doesn't make sense for a passenger car. (again, trucks are a little different).

My car already charges in 10 minutes. When I do go on a trip that requires DC fast charging, I usually try to hit a charger at 15-20% SOC. At a V3 Supercharger, I regularly average 225kW for the first 10 minutes, giving me about 150 additional miles. While lots of people purport to drive 24 hours without stop, I personally think a 10 minute break every couple hours is welcome.

My 2013 car was 1/2 the size (Honda Fit EV) and I loved it. It only had a 19kWh battery, which was its achilles heel. Half the weight probably won't happen for a very very long time. There aren't any chemistries on the horizon that will substantially reduce the weight as far as I know. However, like I said above, reducing the size of the battery pack by 25% is doable if you have an expansive charging network.

As for 1/2 the cost, that's already around the corner. I doubt that's more than 5 years away at this point. China will push that metric hard...

I'm already seeing them succeed in the USA. They were 9% of US new car sales this year. Around the Boston area they're everywhere (and we have expensive electricity here!). While there will always be some people who's daily routine won't fit the BEV, for the vast majority of people the current BEVs can work well, and as mentioned above, they're improving quickly. My daughter just bought a 2023 Tesla Model 3, and the improvements compared to my 2018 Model 3 are substantial.

I'm assuming from the tone of your posting that you're against EVs and just trying to propose a straw-man argument for why BEVs won't be popular for a long time. The reality is that if you buy a Tesla, they work very well as an automobile. If you bought a non-Tesla and do frequent long road trips, then your experience might not be so good, which is the point for why we need to build out a comprehensive and reliable charging network.

Call your local power company and ask them for an estimate on dropping a 2.8 megawatt service to your home/business.

See what the lead time is...

You forgot Hydro which is funny because it's the 2nd biggest renewable source (at 6% of US total energy), but it's certainly true that Gas fired plants with be with us for a while. However, the statement "until then, your electric car is coal powered" is hyperbole and is rapidly shrinking: The U.S. is on track to close half of its coal-fired generation capacity by 2026, just 15 years after it reached its peak in 2011.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pbs.org%2Fnewshour%2Fs....

There's a good table here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eia.gov%2Ftools%2Ffaqs...

Prices on solar + wind have dropped so fast recently, that it's cheaper to add solar and/or wind than it is to add a gas plant: New onshore wind now costs about $46 per megawatt-hour, while large-scale solar plants cost $45 per megawatt-hour. In comparison, new coal-fired plants cost $74 per MWh, while gas plants are $81 per MWh. (Bloomberg).

Finally, grandparent is correct that EVs running on electricity generated by Natural Gas are more efficient than ICE vehicles, even when the electricity is powered by natural gas (and, I think it's about breakeven when produced by coal).

(that's the EU, but the same is true in the US)

Elon wouldn't get too specific about the $25,000 Tesla in his recent talk with Sandy Monroe, but he hinted at them starting to appear (or at least be announced?) in about a year. (I think I remember him saying it would be at the Austin plant, which surprised me, I assumed it would be at the China factory).

We're only 11 years into the first "real" production electric vehicle (the Model S). We're only 5 years into the Model 3... In all that time, only one car company was seriously working (and spending big money) toward electric vehicles. Now almost every legacy OEM is shelling out big money (billions) to produce electric vehicles.

It's really pessimistic (and almost certainly incorrect) to think that we're a decade or more away from entry level battery electric vehicles. Things are moving incredibly quickly at this point...

It's also the case that the way you get to produce viable inexpensive vehicles is to produce them in volume. You can't sit still and wait for the pricing to come down, because it won't. (or, you'll be out of business by the time it does). You have to jump in, learn some hard lessons, get your supply chain and factories in shape, and sell a product people want at a high volume before you can produce vehicles at an "economy" price point...

You also have to be nimble and willing to take risks... something that arguably Tesla is and everybody else is not... It will be a shock when the first legacy OEMs go bankrupt - I'm thinking Mazda and Subaru will be the first (and probably be bought by Toyota)... And if GM doesn't get their act together, they might not be far behind.

Yeah, I'm pro EV, been driving them for 10 years now, but I think that's a very optimistic statement. However, the car after your next one will almost certainly be electric. Maybe hydrogen (which is still electric) if a miracle occurs, but ICE will be dead by then (15-25 years from now).

As someone way above mentioned, it depends on whether you're driving a Tesla or not. If you're not, and have to rely on the likes of EVGo or EA, yeah, longer trips are possibly going to be a challenge, depending on where you travel.

If you have a Tesla, it's not an issue except for some of the really empty parts of the USA. It's a 20 hour drive from my home near Boston to my buddy's home in Memphis TN, and I've had no problems with the Superchargers. They're reliable, situated right by the highways I use to get there... it all works fine.

The difference is that Tesla recognized that they needed a reliable DC charging network if their cars were going to be popular, so they built out a reliable network.

None of the other OEMs have needed a reliable charging network... indeed it's still in their best interest to make charging unreliable and inconvenient so that people stick with ICE vehicles as long as possible. At some point we'll reach a tipping point where the legacy OEMs need BEVs to just work, but we still haven't reached that point yet. I'll credit Jim Farley with seeing the light, but the legacy OEMs are all walking a tightrope trying to not go bankrupt while transitioning to electric vehicles...