Who Keeps Screwing Up the EV Experience?

The average daily commute in Murrka is under 30 miles. It's probably more in Canada and less in Europe.

The documentary movie Who Killed the Electric Car? released in 2006, tells the strange tale of the EV1, an electric car made by General Motors, leased  -- never sold -- from 1996 to 1999, then recalled and destroyed.

 

The subject of range anxiety -- the awful fear on the part of the driver of an electric vehicle that his machine will run out of juice at any moment and leave him stranded in the middle of high-speed Interstate traffic in the middle of a rainy night -- came up in Who Killed the Electric Car? but in a very different way than we're used to hearing about it today. Today, any EV with less than 200 miles of range per charge is judged by most reviewers to be very deficient, and those with 400 miles or more are received with great joy, even though great range is thus far only attained with a great quantity of batteries, meaning great weight and great expense. A few reviewers see through the hype about range and understand that most people will get by just fine with a range of 150 miles or less, and that most EV buyers are being sold a bunch of unnecessary batteries. Just as, traditionally, car buyers are sold huge engines which they never begin to need.

General Motors advertised a range of 70 to 90 miles for the EV1. Leasees reported a practical range of 50 or 60 miles. But none of the customers were complaining, or waiting until a newer model with longer range came out. On the contrary, demand for the EV1 far outstripped supply, the leasees were delighted with it, they wanted to buy the vehicles, they protested when the cars were recalled. Early on in the movie Ed Begley mocks the idea that the EV1 didn't go far enough on a charge, saying that it met the needs of "only about 90% or so of all drivers."

70 to 90 miles advertised range, 50 to 60 reported practical range.

It was GM who suggested that drivers of the EV1 were unsatisfied with its range. The earliest use of the phrase "range anxiety" I have been able to find is by a GM executive in Who Killed the Electric Car? claiming that EV1 drivers suffered from it, and that this was a major reason why the car was recalled. He referred to it as "so-called range anxiety," as if he himself had not invented the term with the intent of inserting the concept into consumers' minds. Some of the guys from Detroit are pretty slick.

There's also a scene in the movie where two former EV1 drivers talk about how big corporations will keep telling you things until you start to believe that they must be true. Such as that you want a nice big SUV.

Surely you've noticed how many car and SUV and truck commercials show vehicles driving through the western US desert and on highways twisting through California mountains, and say to the viewers, C'mon -- you know you want to get one of these and drive the tires off of it, drive it all day long every day. Until those of us who don't live out West forget that we don't, and those who would rather not drive all day every day start to believe that we would.

And now in 2021, here come a whole great big bunch of brand-new great-big all-electric SUV's with great big long ranges deriving from literal tons of batteries per vehicle. And you want one of those $90,000, 3-ton electric SUV's that can go way over 300 miles on a charge, don't you? You need one of those, because you're an Arizona rancher -- even if you're not. You need to drive 500 miles a day in a huge pickup through the frozen Yukon, to feed the mighty moose! You don't, of course, but you see so many of those damn commercials telling you what a rugged outdoorsman you are that it sort of feels as if you do. You must feed the majestic moose! If not you, who?!

It's sort of nice to see the President test-driving an electric prototype. Sort of. It'd be really nice to see him in an electric compact car and not just in an electric F-150.

Or Are They All Just Trolls?

Typical comments absolutely everywhere EV's are discussed: "Range, range, range, range, this Honda E looks nice and all, but I live in the Yukon 500 miles from the nearest electrical outlet." Then get a Tesla or a Lucid. "Space, space, space, I have to transport 500 kg of moose feed every day (living in the Yukon as I do)." Then get an SUV. 

 

It's amazing, the number of people commenting on EV's who live in the Yukon, know what I mean? Only about 35,000 people live in the Yukon, and still, somehow, they seem to make up 70-90% of the prospective EV buyers in the world, to judge from the number of people commenting about the Honda E and complaining about its lack of range. You know what, I bet a lot of them are also concerned about what we'll do with all of those EV batteries when they're worn out and all of those poor birds being killed by the wind turbines.

"Range Anxiety"? Range Insanity is What it Is!

Every single review of an EV talks about its range, a lot. And whether an EV can go 100 miles on a single charge, or 200, or 300, or 400, or more, the reviewer -- who is typically an EV enthusiast, not a hater! -- will almost always say that the range is not enough, that EV's need to be able to go still further between recharges before the mainstream public will dare to buy them. Don't wanna be stranded out there somewhere where they've never heard of electricity! However, almost no reviews of ICE vehicles mention how far they can go on a tank of gas or diesel. You know why? C'mon, you know why! Let's all sing it together in 5-part harmony: BECAUSE IT REALLY DOESN'T MATTER VERY MUCH! I mention that those EV reviews ALMOST always complain that the EV's range is not enough, that we need more, more, more! But it's only almost always, because now and then an unusually sensible reviewer will point out some relevant information such as that the average daily commute in the car-crazy, wide-open-spaces US is about 25 miles. 

But let's act as if this issue were really important, and do what very few do: point out how far various ICE vehicles can go on a tank of fuel. 

The coveted 2011 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport, 

 

$2 million or so if you can find one for sale, has a big gas tank: 26.4 gallons. However, its EPA city rating is 7 miles per gallon. That comes out to 184.8 miles. If an EV were released in 2020 costing $100,000 or more which got less than 200 miles on a charge, there would be widespread rioting. Fortunately they all get well over 200 miles, some more than twice that. Keep in mind, 7 miles per gallon is the EPA rating for the Veyron. The EPA rating entails fairly sedate driving habits. If you really opened it up, the Veyron would presumably get a lot less than 7 miles per gallon. A Car & Driver review of the Veyron said that if you drove it at its 264 mph top speed continuously, its tires, over $40,000 for a set of 4, would be used up in about 15 minutes, or 65 miles, but that was okay, because it would use a full, 26.4 gallon tank of gas in about 10 minutes, or 45 miles, but that too was okay because there's no place on Earth where you could safely drive at 264 mph for that long. 26.4 gallons in 45 miles is about 1.7 mph. If you drive a Veyron very sedately, that $40,000 set of tires might last as long as 1000 miles. I was bent double with laughter for a while at the thought of someone buying a Veyron and then driving it sedately. You might as well just keep it in plastic shrink wrap like a collectible toy, which is pretty much what it is. By the way, when you change the tires you have to change the wheels too, and that's another $60,000 or more.

When a 1970 Dodge Challenger was new, there were no EPA mileage tests. Owners report about 8 miles to the gallon for one of those gems in peak tune. The car has an 18 gallon gas tank. That works out to 144 miles. And of course, if you let a ICE car go a little, it'll get worse mileage than when it's running perfectly. Is the 1970 Dodge Challenger being constantly abused for its lack of driving range? Are its owners warned never to dare trying to drive one from LA to Vegas? Not to my knowledge.

The 1967 Chevrolet Camaro also has an 18 gallon gas tank. At its official 5.4 miles per gallon, it has a range of under 100 miles -- and less if you floor it, of course. Just as with the Bugatti, just as with all ICE vehicles and all EV's, you get less than the standard range if you drive 'em hard.

Gas Stations and Charging Stations

According to statista.com, as of December 2018 there were 20,021 public electric vehicle charging stations in the US, with a total of 57,187 charging outlets. That was over a year ago. I don't know what the current figures are, but I know they're much higher, because the news I follow is always full of headlines about new charging stations opening.

So that got me thinking about how many gas stations there must be in the US. I figured there had to be a million of them, but all the figures I see say that there are barely 100,000, and that the number is dropping.

What I haven't found anywhere is any total number of gas pumps in the US. If Mom and Pop gas stations with 4 pumps each are being put out of business by convenience stores with 16 pumps each, then the actual number of gas pumps could be rising while the number of gas stations drops. If the average is something like 8 pumps per gas station, that would make a total of roughly 1 million gas pumps in the US, and with over 250 million gas-burning vehicles, that makes over 250 vehicles per pump.

Let's compare this to the ratio of electric vehicles per public charging outlets. The US had 57,187 public charging outlets at the end of 2018. 250 electric vehicles per each one of those outlets would've made a total of 14,296,750. Were there 14 million EV's on the US roads in December 2018? Would've been nice, but no, the number was more like 1.2 million. Which means that there were less than 21 electric vehicles per charging station.

The whole point of this post has to do with something which afficianados of electric vehicles refer to as "range anxiety" -- the worry that you can't drive around very far or very freely in an electric vehicle because of the danger that you'll run out of electricity and be stranded and nothing can be done and oh my God it'll be so horrible. As people who know about EV's are constantly attemptinbg to point out to anyone who'll listen, range anxiety, like many other kinds of anxiety, is completely irrational. Yes, it's possible to run out of electricity in an electric vehicle, but it's also possible to run out of gas in an internal-combustion, and you'd have to be pretty careless to do either one.

And, actually, electric vehicles have a huge advantage over gasoline-burning vehicles in this regard. Most of us can't get gasoline anywhere in the US except at one of those 100,000 or so public gas stations. But there are a lot of ways to get electricity into an EV, including hooking them up to outlets which look like this:

There are a lot more than 57,000 of those outlets in the US, there are a lot more than a million of them, and every single electric vehicle can plug into every one of them. A lot of electric vehicles never or rarely have to visit public charging stations, because their owners just plug them in overnight every night, significantly lowering the average number of EV's which actually rely on that swiftly-increasing number of public charging stations. Becoming actually completely stranded in an EV in the US, with no access to electricity, would, I sincerely believe, be a lot harder than being stranded because your gas-burning car ran out of gas. To be completely stranded in an electric vehicle, you'd have to really work hard at it, and be exceptionally careless, and be way out in the boonies at the same time.

So, enough with range anxiety! Enough with worrying that you can't drive where you need to go in an electric vehicle! You can! If anything, there's quite an overkill in the charging infrastructure! That's the actual facts! Learn the facts, get an EV, or even better, take the electric train! That'd be even better for the environment. What electric train? Well, yeah, for that, you have to be in certain parts of the US, or in Europe or Japan or vast areas of the rest of the Earth. That's a good subject for another blog post. But for now, even in Murrka, there's just no rational reason to be afraid to drive an EV. Only irrational reasons.