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Electric and hybrid electric vehicles are in the fast lane to wider adoption, according to a new study by University of Michigan researchers.
The researchers analyzed the present status of electric vehicles in the U.S., their life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, and progress toward lifting barriers to broader acceptance. The study is a literature and technical review that synthesizes and analyzes recent findings from many sources.
"We feel that within the next decade, electric vehicles are positioned to be more suitable for most drivers to use on a daily basis," said Brandon Schoettle, project manager at the U-M Transportation Research Institute. "That's due to recent improvements such as longer driving ranges, faster recharging times and lower vehicle prices."
[...] Schoettle and colleague Michael Sivak, a research professor at UMTRI, found that sales of plug-in electric vehicles in the U.S. have increased by more than 700 percent since 2011.
[...] Other key findings include:
- Availability: The number of individual electric vehicle models that consumers can choose from has increased rapidly, nearly doubling from 13 in model year 2016 to 23 in 2017. Recent price trends make plug-in hybrid vehicles more affordable and more similar in price to the average internal combustion engine vehicle.
- Charging infrastructure: The number of public charging stations has grown rapidly since 2010, with approximately 16,000 now available across the U.S., supplying approximately 35,000 individual connections (for comparison, there are roughly 112,000 gas stations).
- Driving range: The driving distance between charges of battery electric vehicles continues to improve. The range of all electric vehicles has increased to an average of 110 miles. Several studies the researchers cite estimate that a range of 120 miles can cover 99 percent of household vehicle trips.
- Fuel prices Compared to gasoline, electricity prices have been low and stable over the past decade or more, and they're projected to remain that way over the next several decades.
Getting Americans to give up their cars for public transportation may be a tough sell, but if the study is right getting them to switch to electric cars won't be.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday June 25 2017, @06:07AM (1 child)
I've run out of gas lots of times when I was younger (personally broke, gas gauge also broke).
Your EV thinking is being dominated by your ICE experience. With an ICE, you drive till you need gas and go get it. With an EV, you just plug it in when you get home and you never - ever - even think about needing fuel. You have a full tank every time you leave the house.
What is different with an EV, is that you think about where you are going and how far away it is. With a short range car like my Leaf, if I have to go to some place 100 miles away, I know I'm going to be using an ICE vehicle. And I hate it -- the noise, the vibration, and then my wife always leaves me an empty tank it seems, and so in addition to having to make a long drive, I'm forced to suffer the stench and expense of gas stations.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 25 2017, @12:24PM
Sorry, I don't buy it. This is all wallpapering over a serious flaw. I can't help but notice how much discussion there is over complex charging issues.
What is wrong with a little inconvenience? Well, I'll get to that.
And you ended up owning an ICE anyway.
One thing that is missed with all this discussion is that the point of being able to just hop into your waiting ICE vehicle and do several hundred to several thousand miles of travel, cheap, is a post-scarcity characteristic. Gas (and for that matter the ICE vehicle itself) is cheap enough that the cost of travel is limited solely by how much time and effort you're willing to devote to such travel rather than the physical costs of transportation. Electric vehicles make this situation worse. They make what is already a cheap part of travel even cheaper at the cost of making the expensive parts which actually limit how much you can travel even more expensive.
Personally, I think ICE will always beat electric when it comes to energy storage. It has higher energy density (keep in mind that the vehicle never has to carry the oxidizer, which is more by mass than the fuel, and never has to carry the resulting reaction products), never degrades over time, and the gas tank is a simple technology to implement. The only thing holding ICE back is its relative inefficiency. But the thing is, we can greatly improve on that, using the same technologies that electric cars use. For example, a very efficient diesel or turbine engine which strictly generates electricity for electric motors at the wheels. You could then remove a good portion of the mass of a normal ICE vehicle (its transmission system) as well as the similar overhead of an electric vehicle (the battery pack).
I think why this hasn't been attempted yet is that high efficiency burning and variable power are to large part mutually incompatible. We see that with normal ICE vehicles which can generate power well beyond the levels that are most efficient for the engine, resulting in the expected ICE trade-off between power and efficiency. Another is that gas burning has been deemed evil by many of the parties most interested in energy efficiency of travel (including some regulators) which when combined with the newness of electric vehicle technology has resulted in a strong disincentive to put such a vehicle together.