A good EV will get about 3 miles per kWhr. So 20kwh recharged over night will get you 60 miles per day. IMHO EVs need MUCH larger batteries to facilitate longer range driving or deviations from a daily routine, but that doesn't change the typical energy usage much.
For something like a Standard Range Tesla Model 3 where you have around 260 miles of range when charged to full you don't really need to make any different life decisions w.r.t daily routine or even longer distance travel. I think the main problem is affordability right now there. But EVs that satisfy basically all of someone's need have been in the market for years.
Though the real change needs to be in using cars for daily needs in the first place.
Charging infrastructure is a bit of an issue if you can't easily charge at home or work consistently. Tesla supercharger network is good for long trips though, other brands lack there and you do need to change your long distance travel a bit.
I mean, this is completely false if you are someone who doesn’t mind a little discomfort (which seems to becoming rapidly uncommon).
When I was in my early 20s many Fridays saw me leaving for an all-night 500+ mile drive(one drive I did several times was 900 miles) to visit my friends at university.
Even recently, when I go backpacking I typically drive non-stop many hundreds of miles.
People have run this experiment. A 1,000 mile road trip in a Tesla is about 8% slower than a gas car.[1] That's 90 minutes over 19 hours of driving, and the difference would have been smaller had they charged the car overnight. Battery and charging technology is only getting better, so that gap will narrow over time.
Also consider that if most of your driving is not road trips, EVs save time compared to gas cars. You plug the car in when you get home and wake up with a full tank, so to speak.
How much longer range driving do you personally need?
I drove a 2018 Chevy Bolt EV 12,000 miles per year on average for four years (totaled it this past Memorial Day weekend). Never got stranded/ran out of juice. Plenty of fast charging (55kW doesn't even reach 1 C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate) so I can basically fast charge with no concern for my long-term battery health), plenty of slow charging (1kW on my home 120V EVSE), 60kWh was more than enough for trips to Montréal, Vermont, and Chicago (from Philadelphia) over those four years.
As someone that often travels across texas. I need a lot more range, but its a unique case. It doesn't help that I also need a van and Fords E-Transit line can barely push 130 miles on a charge when its partially loaded down.
Even looking at long range teslas they don't have enough juice to make it past stretches of chargerless road going from Texas to Colorado to visit friends, even before the losses from having to drive uphill.
That doesn't sound right. I drove from Sacramento (elevation 30 feet), over the sierras (7200 feet or so), across many mountain ranges in Nevada, through Utah, and through most of Wyoming and came nowhere close to running out of power.
Literally I packed the car, hit the listen button, and said "Navigate to Denver, Colorado".
Is any route from Texas to Colorado really have less charging than Wyoming (the least populated state)? I found 20+ superchargers between Houston and Denver. Even with a family of 3, dog, packed car, and bikes on the back I had no problems with Sacramento -> Denver, only in the most deserted stretches of Wyoming did I need anywhere close to half of my range.
I looked for the sparsest charging and it does indeed look like it's Wyoming, it's 360 miles from east to west and has 5 super chargers on 80. Judging by eye the longest stretch is Rock Springs WY to Rawlins WY and that's only 108 miles.
Even on Secondary highways that don't show up at the state level maps there's charger stations in Wichita Falls TX, Childress TX, Amarillo TX, Clayton NM, and Trinidad CO. From there Salida (West 147 miles) or Colorado Springs (North 130 miles) will get you to the rest of the state. Salida to Montrose (130 miles) gets you to west slope. Keep in mind elevation doesn't hurt that much, and while I have gotten a bit worried when I'm at under 60% climbing to a 14k foot peak, I was very surprised to end up with over 80% once I descended again.
This is all just using the Telsa charging network, there's many other places to charge as well.
The route from Dallas, TX to Trinidad, CO is the particular one I'm aware of that lacks charging stations. Things could have changed because its been like a year or two since I last made the trip, but it was well known as one of the tougher routes for EVs to conquer, particularly the stretch of it in New Mexico.
Looks like Dallas (with 10 ish chargers) to Henrietta (134 miles), 127 miles to Childress, 117 miles to Amarillo, 132 miles to Clayton, and 104 miles to Trinidad. Depending on which Tesla you have you could likely skip half of those stops or so. The model 3 LR has a range of 358 miles, but most like to keep 10-15% in reserve.
One nice thing about EVs is that they are crazy efficient, so most of the losses are wind resistance, which is the square of speed. So you get 1.3x the range going from 75 mph to 65 mph. Another 1.4x going from 65 mph to 55 mph. So if things are dire you can extend the range significantly. The record is around 600 miles range if you have the patience for driving at 20-30mph.
While driving the car watches your progress and gives update coaching you about how much battery you'll have at the next charger or destination, and things like "staying below X MPH will get you there with 15% battery left".
Trust me I wish it did. I really like the styling of the new Bolt. I tested one out at the local chevy dealer during the whole battery replacement fiasco's beginnings.
I've driven a Nissan LEAF for 8 winters in New England. On a 50+ mile average, I've never seen worse than 3.3mi/kWh and almost always see 3.6-3.8 in the winter and 3.9-4.1 in the summer. (The car has a heat pump cabin heater, seat heaters, and steering wheel heat.)
If I saw 3.0, I'd be looking for the flat tire or a checkered flag.
Yeah our Chevy Bolt averages 4.5 miles/kWh, with mostly city driving including about 15% energy used for heating/cooling (20% during 8 months of winter/summer, 5% during 4 months of fall/spring)
It charges while driving at about 5 miles of range per hour at best i.e. at noon, without clouds, near the equator.
In other words if you drive it faster than 5 mph in ideal conditions you're losing energy. If you drive it at 40 mph the solar panels are basically irrelevant. The panels are only really useful while the car is parked. This is the case for all "solar powered" electric cars.
Well sure, but it's also reducing the amps being drawn from the battery which should make it run cooler and last longer. Though again the effect isn't that large I guess.
Makes me wonder if the next invention would be battery packs that you can put into your car for long trips, so your car stays light for the majority of the time, when you just need it for in-city commute. Ideally the battery packs would be shared so the "gas" station of the future has them ready for you to rent. Obviously the issue is high demand during weekends and school vacation times, and much lower demand otherwise...
It's possible for that to be a thing, but batteries are pretty heavy. Moving hundreds of pounds in and out of your car could be a rather aggravating chore just to avoid a few stops. There's also issues of standardization. You'd need a common battery form factor and connectors and voltage, and you might have to deal with fluid connections too since most EV batteries use liquid cooling.
I think the better long-term solution is electrified roads. (There are some pilot projects in Sweden that use rails embedded in slots in the road surface. The underside of a car or truck has a device that makes electrical contact.) With the right infrastructure it should be possible to drive non-stop from, say, Seattle to New York with a battery pack that's only good for a hundred miles or so.
I think giant batteries on EVs the same way I think about pontoons on commercial airliners: if, like Pan Am, you need to rely on existing port and harbor infrastructure because the airports you want to use haven't been built yet, sea planes make a lot of sense. But now that we have modern airports they don't.
A few years ago there was a company building test cars with aluminum air batteries. Aluminum air batteries have something like 4x as much energy for a given volume as lithium ion, and they were getting over 1000 miles of range.
The downside of aluminum air batteries is that they are not rechargeable, so the idea would be to design the cars so that the batteries can quickly be swapped. The discharged battery can be recycled.
I don't recall that at all. It was true for Tzero, the vehicle from AC Propulsion that inspired the Roadster (and provided the very initial, but broken electronics). Tesla has never promoted hybrid propulsion.
That’s possible. I remember an interview with Eberhard back in the day, I think before Musk, where he described the trailer and also the concept of plugging the cars into the grid during the day to contribute energy to the grid.
