YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation::When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the … [continued]
YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation::When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the … [continued]
Some of the criticism is perfectly valid, frankly. I’m hyped for EVs but there’s a lot of work to be done before they’re really competitive. Glossing over glaring issues isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Aging wheels did a great video on the charging station problem. He drove a Polaris and a Tesla on the same route and demonstrated really well how unreliable charging stations are, unless you have a Tesla. This guy loves electric cars and has been reluctant to actually recommend any.
That problem is going to be addressed as American manufacturers adopt Tesla as a standard, but that won’t happen for two model years at least.
And in the long run, they won’t address climate change in any meaningful way either. We’ve just exchanged one resource disaster for another, and there’s far less rare earth minerals than there is oil. And we’ll still need oil. The only way we’re doing that is by massively overhauling every city and going away from any individualized transportation larger than a bike.
Honestly it’s the other way around. Most of the downsides are vastly overstated in my experience, and people don’t really grasp how nice it is to never visit a gas station and always have a full tank to start the day, until they are living it. If you have the ability to charge at home and aren’t making 1000 mile trips very often, there is basically no reason to not have an EV.
The first question I always get about my EV is “how long does it take to charge?” Most people can’t wrap their head around the concept of waking up every day with a full battery.
And also that they are probably stopping for around 20 minutes every 300 miles on road trips anyway. A certain 450 mile trip I have make several times per year for two decades takes me about 20-30 minutes longer in an EV vs my previous 35mpg vehicle. There are just a bunch of these small cognitive blindspots people have about their own driving habits that you see repeated over and over again.
I dunno man, the 5 minutes a week at a gas station doesn’t really seem like that much of an inconvenience. Especially if you live in a state that taxes EVs more than gas cars, my home state taxes EVs so heavily that it’s more expensive, even with fuel costs considered.
Winter and summer conditions are also an issue where I live, temps from very cold to very hot, sometimes within the same week, and the fact that most of the people who live around me who can afford an EV, are in fact taking routine road trips. Often to go camping where EV support is pretty minimal. Meaning at minimum, 1 car cannot be an EV.
Like, I get it. I’ve been trying to convince my wife to let me buy a sprinter van EV. Because you can’t get a decent pick up truck EV for a reasonable price. And even if you could you’re locked in to one of those giant 4 door monstrosities with a minimum sized bed.
We’re not even going to talk about the horrifying lack of an affordable station wagon EV, at least in the US (Peugeot’s got one coming in Europe at least), honestly that’s the biggest crime here.
Here in Indiana, where it can get into the minuses for a month or more in the winter, it can be a huge fucking inconvenience.
Well, except for reasons not to have any car at all, of course.
Was the cost benefit worth it? How much more did you pay for the EV? Did you do it to reduce your carbon footprint and if so have you evaluated how dirty your local grid is (the remote combustion fallacy of EVs)?
I think the bigger issue with EVs (at least in the USA) is that there’s a huge gap between what EV’s actually are and what EV industry players are claiming EV’s are and can be. It makes EV conversations divisive and ripe for misinformation.
This idea that batteries should ever be used in trucking and heavy machinery (before massive boosts to battery capacity and sustainability/recycling) is a total crock of shit. The idea that you’re doing the environment or yourself a favor by buying an electrified SUV or truck is a crock of shit. Buying a vehicle with 250mi+ of range using today’s battery tech is bad for the environment.
Small to medium sized commuter vehicles and delivery vans/fleet vehicles with < 50kWh batteries are prime EV candidates. EV buyers need to charge at home and drivers need to change their behavior, not chase 300 miles of range at the expense of the environment.
Everything else is better off with a hybrid engine for the very distant foreseeable future.
Instead, buyers are unloading perfectly good ICE vehicles for EV’s with 100kWh+ batteries and companies like Tesla are destroying the credibility of the EV industry with their stupid stunts and ridiculous EV semi claims. Others are making a bad problem worse by ratcheting up the consumerism and disposability of vehicles in the EV space by building premium vehicles that are inevitable purchased as a second or third car, completely negating any environmental benefit of the vehicle.
These buyers and industry players are making EV’s easy targets for an anti-EV crowd which wants to undermine the truly green and sustainable aspects of an automotive technology shift.
Something I don’t think is really talked about in tandem but should be is the “tech” side of things. There’s a massive race to go as proprietary as possible none of this crap is easily serviceable by people. The tech that they put in most of these cars is cheap garbage. I don’t want some tablet with what is probably a fork of Android controlling my vehicle. First I know support for it is going to go out the window and I don’t want to have to think about software security for my damn car.
Then you have these companies that are putting features that are in the car behind subscriptions because the car can now support subscription model. I don’t want always online DRM for the DLC for my goddamn car.
Newsflash — Tesla is opening its stations to all EVs. Guess that solves the “unless you have a Tesla” problem.
Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.
A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.