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The rate at which new technologies get accepted into the mainstream never fails to confuse people. For the longest time, cell phones appeared to be the exclusive domain of yuppies, bankers and drug dealers. And then, suddenly, my mum had one. (No, she doesn't sell drugs.)
Could we see a similar rapid adoption for electric vehicles?
The LA Times reports that Q1 electric car (EV) sales are up 91% in California. Sales of Plug-In Hybrids (PHEV) are up 54% too. This is, of course, only one quarter, from one state, so let's not get too excited. And the actual number of units sold—13,804 EVs and 10,466 PHEVs—is still tiny compared to the 506,745 cars and light trucks sold in the state during the same period. But anyone who knows anything about math can tell you that it doesn't take long for a 91% growth rate to start making serious inroads into a particular market. (Electric car sales in Norway have already reached as high as 37% of new passenger vehicles.)
It's possible the muscle memory developed for cellphones could help with EV adoption, too: plug in the phone at night, plug in the car at night.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:53PM (2 children)
The Leaf's original 80 miles is perfect for most of Europe/Asia, but in the US where commutes are often 20 to 30 miles, it doesn't provide a lot of margin for a round-trip with a swing by a store or two.
Most people will indeed not want to reply on topping up at the office. I wouldn't want to be trapped there if I got an urgent call five minutes after arriving.
As far as the grid is concerned, given the US latitude, all new buildings should be built with solar, with the burden on the builder to prove why individual projects can't. At the current panel costs (installers being the most expensive part of the process), making it standard wouldn't raise house prices by much. Other countries (Australia) have already done that.
Every time I go down to the coast, I am amazed that there aren't individual wind turbines in people's yards. The big ones are more efficient, but people with that much wind could easily profit even from a small vertical axis generator.
With enough distributed intelligence, plugging your car into the grid could be a stabilizing factor for renewables. You get a discount if you agree to allow the network to discharge n% during a peak demand time, where you set n based on your commute needs. Hard to write the legalese in an individualistic country like the US, but technically feasible.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday May 26 2017, @07:06AM (1 child)
I'm sorry?
What makes you think that Europe has smaller commutes than the US? Is this one of those anecdotal things that Americans think are true?
Most people who live in London (high population density) has commutes on the order of 20-30 miles too. Round trip, that's 40-60. But there are people who regularly commute from Oxford to London and similar.
Nobody can afford to live inside London itself (central London), so everyone commutes and almost all the commutes are miles and miles. And that's the BEST CASE. Outside of the cities, it is a case of commuting to the nearest town which might well be 30+ miles away.
In places like Italy and Spain it can be even worse. Sure, there are village cultures still, but nobody can afford to live in the city center and you commute 20 miles from the suburbs or not at all.
The problem is, though, as you point out: There's no safety margin. My ICE car has a safety margin of 50 miles of fuel at all times. Because it warns me if it goes lower than that. And sometimes you can use all that trying to find a refuelling station even for conventional fuels, on major motorways. God knows where you'd find the electric points on any long journey without pre-planning.
Sacrificing what little safety margin there is, to let the grid "balance", is also not something that most people want or even care about. Again, what happens when you have to drive to hospital overnight? You're stuffed. Just because you don't need it MOST days doesn't mean you can just remove the capacity of it.
The thing that worries people about electric cars is not that they're damaging the environment (those people buy them). It's that they will be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no recourse to refuel their car. With ICE, you can get a lift to a nearby station, fuel up a can, and then carry on your journey. With electric car, you're into being towed (risky itself in some electric cars if you don't know the procedure) to somewhere you can charge (which may not be nearby, or even known to supply electric power to the guy picking you up). And, no, you can necessarily just plug it in.
Until range is solved, which means energy storage increases of at least two-fold, people aren't going to go for them. That may well come, I'd expect it to as the technology matures and invests in itself, but it's not there yet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday May 26 2017, @10:28AM
Note: In the UK overall, around 60% of people commute by car, but in London that's closer to 30%. The majority use some combination of train and tube (RAC survey, 2013 - I suspect car usage has gone down since then, as the congestion charge has gone up).
In 2014 the average commute was around 15km (11-17km for average commutes in different parts of the UK). Sorry for the Torygraph link, but they have some reasonable graphics of the OSN survey. That's not too far off the US averages, but it's easy for a car with a 100 mile range to manage a round trip and a few side trips. [telegraph.co.uk]
sudo mod me up