Our cars are long in the tooth and we decided to buy a new car this year, a Plug-in Hybrid SUV. We looked at EVs and decided against them for the time being mostly because of the difficulties in charging when traveling long distances. I’m sure this will change long-term, particularly as more Tesla charging stations open up to non-Tesla vehicles. It’s just not there yet and we’re not willing to spend hours at a charging station every few hundred miles or risk getting to a charge station that doesn’t work.
With the plugin hybrid we can do all of our in town errands using just electric. Traveling is easy with the hybrid mode.
We will also probably get an electric car in the next year or two. I’m waiting for more options and cheaper prices. With these two cars, we think we can do everything we need while minimizing our dependence on gas.
There is no doubt that within a decade EVs will be the dominant new car buy. But there’s probably not a Ford EV in our immediate future.
We’re currently the proud owner of a 2014 Outback that’s given us trouble-free service for going on 10 years. With the type of travel we do in a semi-rural area it gets near 30mpg, and infrequent longer trips 32mpg or better. Our driving requirements are fairly minimal as reflected by the fact that we’ve only put about 29k miles on it over the years. Our gastank refills are measured in months, not days of weeks.
At 83 plus years-old, it’s probably destined to be my Forever Car, but my wife is a decade and a half younger and she’ll almost surely replace it with an EV of some type when the time comes. Sheesh, perhaps by that time they’ll have vehicles running on nuclear fusion technology.
I have had one since 2015 and spent a grand total of $700 on maintenance and gas in that timeframe, excluding tires. I will never own an ICE vehicle again as my daily driver. I am looking toward the Audi A6 eTron as my next car once it comes out…
We bought a Volvo XC-40 Recharge EV in Feb 22 and love it. It’s the best car of the twenty cars I have owned in my lifetime. We use it for all the local (less than 200 mi roundtrip) driving we do. We have a 2017 Santa Fe gas car we use for longer trips.
I’d go all EV when, and if, they come out with a nice three-row SUV EV with a 500 mi + range.
Once you get used to driving an EV, a gas car seems old and clunky in comparison and is not nearly as much fun to drive. And maintenance is virtually nonexistent, for two years all I need to do is add windshield washer fluid and check the tire pressure… if it warns me it’s low.
I didn’t opt for a hybrid because I felt with so many moving parts and two drive systems that maintenance would be a problem.
I also suspect a battery “failure” will most likely be a reduction in performance rather than a total failure where the car stops working. If the reduced performance doesn’t bother you, you’ll be able to milk it for a long time before needing to do anything.
I doubt that acceleration or usable power-to-road performance will be affected due to battery KWH capacity degradation. It’ll probably be reflected in decreased range and/or not reaching a 100% charge. I’d be surprised if the battery bus voltage is the same as the voltage delivered to the drive motors. It’s probably stepped down to compensate for aging battery perfofrmance.
The most noticeable degradation will be in range. If the acceleration degrades it will most likely be a don’t care. The XC-40 EV is rated at 4.7 seconds 0-60 compared to 8.5 seconds for its gas equivalent. If it degrades 20% it’s still under 6 seconds. Still more acceleration than I need.
I’m disappointed we’re doing batteries instead of fuel cell. I like my ICE as I like doing business more with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia than China
Of course I prefer drill baby drill, I guess I’d be more fond of EVs if we were dependent on nuclear power
In a few generations your progeny will have a good idea of how your energy philosophy worked out. I think it’s a long shot that it works out well, my advice is… don’t include it in your memoirs.
I agree with your post. The charging network is just not developing/growing fast enough for most people to make the jump to all electric.
I have been driving a Chevy Volt Plug-in Hyb for 6+ years now. I love it and am able to experience electric driving without the “range anxiety” of current pure electric cars. On longer drives I can choose to use the gas engine and not worry about the big battery. Tesla drivers have a little less of a problem because of their extensive charging network.
How have insurance premiums been affected when you switched to Hybrid or fully electric? I know Tesla has started its own insurance company to bring that cost down.
We got a Hyundai Tucson Plugin Hybrid and the insurance went up about 25%. We replaced a 2005 Honda CRV. When we were looking at a Tesla Model Y we were quoted insurance rates of 2.5 to 3 times what we were paying for the Honda.
We don’t know what the long-term solutions will be. But right now we do know that if we keep adding CO2 to our atmosphere we’ll make our earth uninhabitable for humans.
The decision to continue the unlimited use of fossil fuels is a death wish, it’s effects are relatively subtle and slow right now, but as it gradually progresses and picks up speed maybe the problem will attract enough attention for us to get serious about solving it.
I think the question “What were they thinking?” will see a lot of use fifty to a hundred from now
Science%20in%20the%20atmosphere.): Greenhouse gas allows much of the sun’s radiant heat to pass thru the outer layers of earth’s atmosphere but drastically slows the process of outbound heat radiation by the absorption of the heat by the additional CO2’s molecules. The balance of cooling vs inbound radiant heat is tilted toward a warmer total temperature for the space in which we exist. It’s not complicated and the increased temperatures we’ve seen track very closely with the increase of greenhouse gases present in our atmosphere.
History: We can measure dated samples of both our air and temperature by analyzing ice samples from from our higher latitudes. Past ice-ages have occurred many times in our history and paleoclimate experts warn us that the current warming trend is happening much more rapidly than past ice ages and warming periods have occurred.
Agreed.
The predictions are based upon models and any model requires data inputs. The data must be accurate and must therefore be from the same time period the earth has existed. How long have we been cataloging the history of temperature change in comparison to earth’s existence.
Additional info… especially the last four paragraphs.
The most important thing to remember about climate models which are used to project future global warming is that they were “tuned” with the assumption I started this article with: that the climate system is in a natural state of energy balance, and that there is no long-term climate change unless humans cause it.
This is an arbitrary and illogical assumption. The climate system is an example of a “nonlinear dynamical system”, which means it can change all by itself. For example, slow changes in the rate of vertical overturning of the world’s oceans can cause global warming (or global cooling) with no “external forcing” of the climate system whatsoever.
