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from the new-choice-for-range-anxiety dept.
From Consumer Reports last week, August 03, 2017:
https://www.consumerreports.org/2017-chevrolet-bolt/chevrolet-bolt-sets-electric-vehicle-range-record/
The Bolt is estimated to reach 238 miles by the Environmental Protection Agency. In our testing, electric vehicles tend to fall short of their EPA-estimated range, including the:
o 2016 Tesla Model S 75D, 235 miles achieved vs. 259-mile EPA estimate.
o 2016 Tesla Model X 90D, 230 miles achieved vs. 257-mile EPA estimate.In our electric-vehicle range test, we put the Bolt head to head against our 2016 Tesla Model S 75D. The Tesla ran out of juice at 235 miles, while the Bolt motored on for another 15 miles. ( https://www.consumerreports.org/cars-how-consumer-reports-tests-cars/ Learn how Consumer Reports tests cars.)
Tesla has upgraded the Model X 90D to a longer-range 100D. A new Tesla Model S or X 100D would probably beat the Bolt's range, but you'd have to pay $100,000 or more for one of those cars. CR has not yet tested the range on those versions.
CR's electric-vehicle range test involves some mixed driving, but much of it is done by driving a constant 65 mph on a highway. If you were to meander on country roads at 45 mph, you might get even more range. To ensure repeatability, the CR tests are done with the air conditioning and heater off. Hard acceleration and running the HVAC system can cut the range significantly, as can driving in very cold temperatures.
I'm not surprised that Chevy's "factory rating" was conservative, under these conditions. GM has everything to gain by satisfied customers and word of mouth advertising...since they have chosen to not run a big advert blitz with the Bolt. Is it surprising that Tesla doesn't meet their published range numbers?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday August 09 2017, @07:38PM (14 children)
Bottom line is four hours of Interstate driving and you are done for the day. Which is OK since you will be starting out early and knocking off before it gets hot since the stated range is windows up and AC off. Assuming you have carefully planned things so there will be a charging station right where you needed it, and assuming that online map that SAID there was a charger there is accurate and it is still there, still working and unoccupied. Until that changes electric cars are second cars only, and only for people who don't have a big "other" car since most people don't like taking a big truck / SUV on their vacation drive because of the expense.
So you get an inferior car for a premium price, even after the government subsidizes the sticker price, and supposedly smart people can't figure out why they aren't flying out of showrooms. Obviously they aren't as smart as we are supposed to believe.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:05PM (2 children)
Spoken like a true Exxon stockholder. I drive more that 25 miles a day MAYBE 4 times a year. Any electric vehicle would work well for me.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:54AM
And I bet you live in a big city where you can walk or get public transportation anywhere you would want to go... For the rest of us, 25+ miles a day is an everyday occurrence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:32PM
I drive 25 miles to work, each way, every day. My company is moving in the near future, and that will increase to 35 miles each way. There are many examples of people who drive MUCH more than 25 miles a day. My BIL drives 100 miles each way to work every day due to SF Bay Area housing prices and the location of jobs in his profession.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:33PM
That's a lot of daily driving!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:47PM (4 children)
Not many people need to regularly drive more than 4 hours at a time. The people who do shouldn't get this car (or any electric). Your complaint is like saying how cars suck at carrying bricks and 2x4s around. Get a truck if hauling is your use-case.
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(Score: 3, Disagree) by jmorris on Wednesday August 09 2017, @10:01PM (3 children)
You miss the point. It isn't about needing to commute four hours, it isn't about driving four hours on a "regular" basis. It is about knowing you are on a short leash, you CAN'T take off on a day trip to a spot a hundred miles away without worrying about working charging into your schedule. You CAN'T take that car on your vacation without careful planning and short hops. If you are so wealthy that you always fly on vacation, great, you are in the small target audience for this product. You can't own one of those cars unless you are resolved to make every trip out of town revolve around the charging problem. You don't pull off the Interstate and top up the car, drain your bladder and get going again. If an electric is your only car you will probably have to rent a real car for any trip out of town.
And normal people of average intellect figure this out pretty quick, long before a sales weasel manages to convince them to sign upon the line that is dotted, and they decide to pass. And until the battery problem gets solved electric cars are a niche product mostly bought as virtue signaling by coastal elites.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @11:56PM
> you CAN'T take off on a day trip to a spot a hundred miles away without worrying about working charging into your schedule.
250 miles/2 = 125 miles
125 miles > 100 miles
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday August 10 2017, @01:53AM
You are missing the point. Your car really sucks at carrying around a load of lumber. It is limiting your lifestyle. Any kind of construction project will require careful planning and many trips back and forth to the store. You should upgrade to a superior vehicle, a truck.
Or maybe people have different lifestyles and travel requirements. Heck, some people don't even own a vehicle.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:19PM
Must be nice to be wealthy enough to be able to drop everything and flee the country at a moment's notice, but why not just rent a private jet or something?
The rest of us need at least a month's planning to get time off and set up all the arrangements anyway, so tossing in some fuel/rental planning isn't particularly difficult.
Having said that...I'd love an electric, but it's utterly impossible at the moment. Nowhere to charge it, and it would seriously screw up my driving style -- I'm one of those people that tends to do 8-10 hour drives as close to non-stop as possible. Usually I'll stop for fuel and a bathroom every 4 hours, but I'm not sitting down to eat or anything. And there's some EV chargers in the northern half of that route, but I don't recall seeing any on, for example, I-80 the entire way through Pennsylvania. So not only do you need to stop for longer to charge, you also need to drive far off your route to get to a charger, and you become dependent on your navigation system never failing. And it would probably add a second day to the trip in each direction. But I can't afford one yet anyway...by the time I can I'm hoping the infrastructure will be in place.
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:03PM (3 children)
Geez jmorris, give it a rest. Holy straw man arguments. So an electric car won't work ideally in for what is for most of us an edge case. Who cares? You also failed to mention the fast chargers that are available in locations convenient to most people driving > 4 hours per day. So maybe you stop for 40 minutes instead of 15, but then again the trip costs $15 in electricity instead of $80 in gas, plus the extra wear & tear on an ICE vehicle.
Yeah, maybe for a lot of people an electric is a good second car at the moment. Count me in that category. I do need a vehicle that can pull a trailer and haul stuff as I have a farm. But I don't need to drive that vehicle every day. I can put 90% of my driving on pretty much any electric vehicle on the market right now, relegating a larger, less efficient and more expensive-to-operate vehicle for those edge cases. The farthest I regularly drive in a day (and by regularly, I mean 1-2x per year) is 500-550km, easily within range of a Bolt if I want to make one "charge to 80%" stop on the way. Or, like you said, just drive the other vehicle for that trip and save hundreds per month in gas charges with all the shorter drives we do every day.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday August 09 2017, @11:52PM (2 children)
Not really, and definitely not really if more than a tiny fraction of vehicles are electric. A 6 pump gas station can serve 30+ cars in half an hour. A six outlet fast charging station can't even fully charge 6 in that time. I'm not siding with jmorris though, chargers will continue to improve, and charging capacity will grow as adoption grows. Maybe its too early for most people to switch today, but that will change over time.
I recently paid $8,500 for a used Jetta with 29k miles on it. I can pay for OODLES of gas beforce I break even on what it would have cost me for an electric.
And what do you mean 'extra wear & tear' on an ICE vehicle
These days ICE cars don't usually fail due to the engine -- if you stay on the maintenance schedule and do the seals and belts/chains every 100,000 miles or whatever the rest of the car will usually fall apart before the engine goes. The wear and tear on the interior, the switches, the electrical system, the door hinges and latches, the suspension, the wheel bearings, the power locks/windows/sunroof, the wiper motors, and the climatecontrol fans bearings get noisy or seize up, etc...some of that accumulates and then the brakes or tires need replacing and you take stock. The repairs are twice or more what the car is worth... and that's what kills a modern car and sends it to the wrecker. It's not the timing belt and camshaft.
All that other stuff that 'falls apart' over time is just as much part of your electric car as an ICE one. And the EV has its own battery situation that is a big 'unknown' service item as it ages.
Yeah the 4 hour road trip he illustrates isn't the edge case that ruins the electric car. What ruins the electric car for most of us is that we don't have a private garage to charge it in at night. Own your own home with a 2 car garage... great; you and I can make an electric work for you at least as a 2nd car. Renting a basement suite and parking on the street? Not so much. In an apartment or a condo with an underground lot -- does it have charging at your spot? None of mine did. Does your place of employment provide spots you can charge in? None of mine ever did. What are they supposed to do plan to spend 1hr a week at a charging station?
My parents neighbor has an electric car -- he has a 2 car garage. He parked at one of the free spots down by the public library rather than use his own electricity when he'd go for starbucks. You should have seen him when a couple more EVs moved into the neighborhood and the library spot started getting taken up by others. LOL he was livid that he had to charge his own car. And THAT is my current impression of a lot of EV owners -- wealthy people, who can afford the car in the first place, who then feel entitled to free electricity and the best parking spots at the mall as some sort of public recognition of how special they are ... while people who actually are in a lot more economic need can't afford one, and even if they could, would have no place to reliably charge it even if they got one.
Me personally, I like electric cars -- I think its going to happen and I am looking forward to owning one, at some point. But the pro-electric crowd is just as off-their-meds as the anti-electric crowd. The infrastructure to support them just isn't there yet. and the technology is still maturing -- it is happening, and its happening fast, but its not here yet.
The subsidies are going to go away for them to become mainstream, and the tax regime is going to shift so capture the 'lost revenue' from fuel taxes so they are going to get more expensive to purchase and operate. Meanwhile the demand fall of gasoline may well lead to fuel price reductions, those factors could combine to making them a lot more competitive with eachother in the medium term.
Plus cars last; the average age of a car on the road right now is over 11 years. They could ban ICE sales tomorrow (which they wont) and more than half the cars on the road would still be ICE 10 years from now. 58 million cars in the US are over 15 years old. 14 million of those cars are over 25 years old. Change isn't going to happen overnight.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:27PM (1 child)
The engine might not fail, but I've spent over $3k on my exhaust system already this year, and my check engine light just came back on earlier this week. They've replaced the purge solenoids, gas cap, filters, the entire gas tank, the exhaust manifold...some of those more than once...and there's still problems in that system somewhere. Those parts can't fail on an EV because they don't exist.
That car just passed 100k miles earlier this year, and I get most service done well before the recommended mileage...
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday August 10 2017, @08:39PM
That sucks. I don't deny it can happen.
True enough, but the EV has plenty of its own parts that can fail. At 100,000 miles, if you owned a leaf and lived in Arizona ... you're probably down to about 70-75% of your original range and dropping, and the 6k battery pack is out of warranty.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:31AM
If you devote more than than 60 minutes of your day to a commute, you may benefit immeasurably by looking for an alternative job or living arrangement that lets you devote more of your time to important, productive, or enjoyable activities.able. Life is short, don't spend it in traffic.