The EV debate; Electric or Internal Combustion vehicles?

Greg said:
Seems like driving an EV, adding solar panels and a battery bank to your house is logical combo. Drive the car with no cost by making your own electricity and have backup power for the home.
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My buddy in San Diego did this over the past few years. Full solar, battery bank and now fully EV for their 2 cars. Makes sense for him seeing as he hardly ever goes super long distances.....but he did meet us for a trip to Tahoe 2 years ago in his Kia and almost didn't make it. His mapped route didn't workout exactly like he thought and he rolled into an unplanned stop at 0% battery left 😲
 
Pike2350 said:
My buddy in San Diego did this over the past few years. Full solar, battery bank and now fully EV for their 2 cars. Makes sense for him seeing as he hardly ever goes super long distances.....but he did meet us for a trip to Tahoe 2 years ago in his Kia and almost didn't make it. His mapped route didn't workout exactly like he thought and he rolled into an unplanned stop at 0% battery left 😲
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Range anxiety is real... 🤣 I could see using an EV for commuting, running around town, etc....but roadtrips would be sketchy.
 
Greg said:
Range anxiety is real... 🤣 I could see using an EV for commuting, running around town, etc....but roadtrips would be sketchy.
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You just need to travel with @Agility Customs and you’ll get used to it. It seems like we’re rolling into truck stops on fumes about half the time 🤣

His Tesla situation is actually about as ideal as it gets with his wifey driving it from Tooele to SLC for work and charging there for free. If I had to do that I might feel a little different. I just don’t drive a lot.
 
I considered a cheap Fiat or Nissan leaf to commute to work with. But there is a reason they’re cheap the range sucks ass. They installed the EV charging stations at the airport in employee parking, was like okay couple grand for a used one and charge it at work, save some gas.

Yeah those damn parking spots are always taken with a few teslas sitting around for who knows how long just hoping someone steps off the employee shuttle and drives away.

Nixed that idea for me as neither one of those models would have the range to get me home after driving to the airport without being able to charge there.

I’ll stick to the $6 ish it takes me to drive to work and not have to go in early to try and score a charging station.
 
I've got more than enough 2 strokes to offset my EVs. 😜

Here's my take.
I've got 3 electric motorcycles and an electric Stacyc.

Pluses:
I have them purely for convenience, ease of use, and low maintenance.

Silent. This makes riding around the yard or our property zero annoyance to neighbors.
They are so quiet I can teach threshold braking because kids can *hear* when the tires lock. This is high level stuff for little kids.

They are incredibly easy to ride. Especially for kids and beginners. Smooth adjustable power from zero rpm up. The have incredible traction and are a fantastic training tool for me as well. I put my BIL on my emoto and took him for a 20+ mile ride in Warner Valley on some kinda hard stuff and while he's a decent MTB rider he has very little moto experience and he did pretty good!

They have zero maintenance except for lubing the chains. This is amazing as kid (race) bikes are very very high maintenance.

Incredible power to weight ratios.
This is hugely apparent for kid bikes. My youngest son rides an EE2 and my older sons
Rode PW50s- the weight is close to 40% less. That's huge! Especially when these bikes are 105% of the kids' body weight.

I can swap the battery in 5 seconds flat.

I really love running to the store or a quick errand on my electric motorcycle. It's a weird sensation to go that fast with no associated engine noise. The wind and chain slap is all you hear. Odd.

Downsides:
Lack of range. My bike has maybe a 24-30 mile range.
The middle son's electric bike (EE5) has a 12 mile range at full RACE pace (about 35 minutes) That's even at the 3rd power level (of 6). This has proved to be a problem on occasion when our desert races are 30 minutes + a lap. Once my kid came in on limp mode and went from top 5 in a national to 7th. That sucked.
We have to also own a gas bike for the races that we anticipate are longer.
Battery life is mostly load and rpm based.
Lower RPM & lower load riding = well over an hour.

When they make the batteries in the bigger bikes swappable- it'll be perfect.
Lower range in the cold. We got about 10%- 20% less riding in the cold (20°s) yesterday.

Charge times are about 1:1 on the smaller bikes and 1:2 on the adult bikes.

So this is an issue charging in the desert.
I've got a gas generator but I've have yet to need to use it (mostly because an hour is plenty long for kids to ride straight).

Conclusion:
I would love an EV to replace one of our daily drivers. To work and back, a few errands around town, the kid run, etc... under 100 mi/day and charge it at night.
Low maintenance, low cost/ mile. My brother bought a used, low spec Tesla for $22k with low miles. Traded in 7k a 15 yr old Infinity and got out at around 18k OTD. Seems like a no brainer for our situation. But I'd still want a gas truck and family sized SUV
 
Greg said:
Seems like driving an EV, adding solar panels and a battery bank to your house is logical combo. Drive the car with no cost by making your own electricity and have backup power for the home.
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Drive the car with no cost after a $20k investment in solar and batteries (That also have a life span and will need to be redone). While paying the fuel tax every year at registration. I still believe people spend more to drive and EV in the long run. I don’t think the Tax credits offset much of that.

But that just my take on how much I drive and use fuel. Which doesn’t always correlate with everyone else’s needs.👍🏼
 
TurboMinivan said:
The following may seem like a hot take, but it really is not. So many media sources and web sites (including the one the OP quoted) focus on the apparent lack of wide-spread charging infrastructure as a major hurdle which must be surmounted before EVs can go main stream.
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I didnt quote anyone, but @Cody is right... that's a AI generated discussion with talking points I wanted to discuss, for the sake of conversation. It's not perfect, but makes the point and gets the discussion going... and i didn't have to take an hour putting it together.

If I quote an article and share it, I do my best to share a link and give credit to the author.

I'm not really pro-EV, but I've driven a Model S and a Leaf. I've considered buying a EV as a commuter mostly for tax breaks and because I could also charge for free at work.
 
Trate D said:
Drive the car with no cost after a $20k investment in solar and batteries (That also have a life span and will need to be redone). While paying the fuel tax every year at registration. I still believe people spend more to drive and EV in the long run. I don’t think the Tax credits offset much of that.

But that just my take on how much I drive and use fuel. Which doesn’t always correlate with everyone else’s needs.👍🏼
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Totally agree, to make it happen and drive for "free" is a huge investment up front.
 
Stephen said:
I work in a field that is already seeing the affects of power needs for AI. Its pretty eye opening.
I was at an HPE conference over the summer where they talked about just for generative AI, the US will need to see a 30% increase in power generation by 2035. That's 10 years from now and no one thinks is possible for us to get there even if we stop retiring baseload coal and natural gas plants and remove most regulatory red tape on building new nuclear power. Its just not possible in that time frame.
Throw in the requirements for EV charging on the scale that states like California and New York envisage, and we're in complete fantasy land to think that our grid is ready for this.
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That's interesting, pretty crazy that AI will be drawing that much power!

I do agree that nuclear power and coal needs to be pushed hard to supply the country's upcoming energy needs. It would be nice to reduce our country's dependency on foreign oil along the way, as well... but that's a big ask.
 
We just plug ours into a level 1 charger at night. Plugs in a normal 110v outlet. Car picks up about 7 miles every hour, so 80-100 miles of charge overnight. She commutes to Draper 3 days per week, so it often can charge 22 hours a day.

We cap it at 80% charge, and with the 110v charger that's supposed to help preserve battery life. At 80% charge it's about 280 mile range. Little less in the cold months it seems. It's also a little more around town as you use more regenerative braking compared with straight freeway. Full charge is about 330 mile range.

I also like being able to take my dog on errands in the summer, because I csn just leave him in the car while I'm inside a store and he won't bake to death.

One thing I'm curious about is that vw/international harvester tech that uses a small gas generator to charge the battery and extend range. We decided against the plug in hybrid because we wanted the simplicity and lower maintenance of not having a motor with all those parts, and that vw tech seems to fall into that same category, but my question is if you were to find yourself stranded with a dead battery in that new scout, as long as you have fuel will the on board generator be able to charge it up? Can you just sit at camp and let the generator charge you up?
 
Cody said:
One thing I'm curious about is that vw/international harvester tech that uses a small gas generator to charge the battery and extend range. We decided against the plug in hybrid because we wanted the simplicity and lower maintenance of not having a motor with all those parts, and that vw tech seems to fall into that same category, but my question is if you were to find yourself stranded with a dead battery in that new scout, as long as you have fuel will the on board generator be able to charge it up? Can you just sit at camp and let the generator charge you up?
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I wanted to know this too, and I can't seem to find an answer in their promotional glurge. All I found is that the genny takes the range from 350 miles to 500 miles but otherwise they're pretty vague - does the genny have an onboard tank or do you gotta carry an external can? How many gallons of gas does it take to get that extra 150 miles? How long does it have to run? Can you drive while it's running? I have so many questions.

Not that it matters for me, those are gonna start at 50k and rapidly go up from there and I'm not dropping that kind of coin on unproven tech. But it'd be nice. I really do like the idea of rolling around dirt roads with just the sound of my tires to keep me company.
 
Kevin B. said:
I wanted to know this too, and I can't seem to find an answer in their promotional glurge. All I found is that the genny takes the range from 350 miles to 500 miles but otherwise they're pretty vague - does the genny have an onboard tank or do you gotta carry an external can? How many gallons of gas does it take to get that extra 150 miles? How long does it have to run? Can you drive while it's running? I have so many questions.
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It sounds similar to the BMW tech where it kicks in automatically at a certain point. It probably won't be able to drive strictly on genny juice, but it seems like a no brainer to be able to allow the generator to run for a couple hours to charge enough to get you somewhere.
Kevin B. said:
Not that it matters for me, those are gonna start at 50k and rapidly go up from there and I'm not dropping that kind of coin on unproven tech. But it'd be nice.
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I don't think you can get a new anything that isn't very bare bones for 50k anymore.
Kevin B. said:
I really do like the idea of rolling around dirt roads with just the sound of my tires to keep me company.
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I've been saying this for 20 years. I love the sound of a motor revving up, it's almost primal, but it would be so nice for the 95% of the time where the motor is just a background drone, to be able to hear the silence of being away from people.
 
Kevin B. said:
I wanted to know this too, and I can't seem to find an answer in their promotional glurge. All I found is that the genny takes the range from 350 miles to 500 miles but otherwise they're pretty vague - does the genny have an onboard tank or do you gotta carry an external can? How many gallons of gas does it take to get that extra 150 miles? How long does it have to run? Can you drive while it's running? I have so many questions.

Not that it matters for me, those are gonna start at 50k and rapidly go up from there and I'm not dropping that kind of coin on unproven tech. But it'd be nice. I really do like the idea of rolling around dirt roads with just the sound of my tires to keep me company.
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I've wondered about a hybrid with a small 2 cyl diesel engine, driving a good sized generator powering a large battery, with an electric motor moving the vehicle. It's complicated, but if the diesel engine could provide enough electricity to supplement the motor and batteries to drive without the engine running, you'd have a winner.

It would still rely on fossil fuel, but there's more BTU's in diesel and you could probably run it at lower RPM.
 
The Biden Admin's, and much of the world's goal, is to be 30% EV by 2030. Forgoing the fact that our electrical infrastructure could not absorb that demand increase (even if we began to build today for it) and it would take 100 years to mine the rare earth minerals needed for all the battries, there are a few simple issues most of the Neoliberal class do not want to discuss or accept:

#1 Most Americans cant afford a new vehicle
#2 Most Americans do not live in a domicle conducive to home charging (Apartments, Condos, houses without a garage, etc)
#3 The "used" market is basically a death knell to consumers as most EV vehicles need a new battery around 120-150k which are usually ~$10k (imagine how many ICE vehicles are on the road with more than that amount currently)
#4 In a world of rampant inflation, most house holds look to cut their vehicles costs first
#5 EV's are inherently more time consuming in their operation
 
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Cody said:
One thing I'm curious about is that vw/international harvester tech that uses a small gas generator to charge the battery and extend range. We decided against the plug in hybrid because we wanted the simplicity and lower maintenance of not having a motor with all those parts, and that vw tech seems to fall into that same category, but my question is if you were to find yourself stranded with a dead battery in that new scout, as long as you have fuel will the on board generator be able to charge it up? Can you just sit at camp and let the generator charge you up?
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Looks pretty interesting! I've heard about them, but I'm not familiar with the details.

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