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[McTraveller]

So my shiny new EV is actually now scheduled for delivery in a few more weeks*.

I'm curious if there are any others here that have made the transition to full EV.  Figure if so, we have a thread to discuss impressions, impact on life, etc.

For example, both my mother and my mother-in-law are skeptical of full electric.

I'm tempted to take the EV on the pending Thanksgiving trip.  Would be interesting - it could very well be snowing that time of year on the route.  It's 210 miles one way; my EV sticker range is 274 miles, but I have no real-world experience yet to know if it's conservative like the gasoline stickers, especially given EVs do better in stop-and-go than on highway.

There's a fast charging station 100 miles from my home on the route we'd take, but not really anything at the destination (although maps I've seen indicate there are a few L2 stations close to where we're staying, so I could potentially top it up a little).  So I'm thinking it might be worth a stop 100 miles in, then if I don't do much incidental driving while at the destination, I should have the 220 miles I'd need to get back to the fast charging station to top up for the 100 miles home.

I'd like to hear if anyone else has done a similar trip.  I'm not worried about taking a 45 minute break to recover 100 or 200 miles; I'll have my wife and 2 kids in the car, so that's like nothing to stop for food and restroom.  How busy are charge stations? Stuff like that...

Spoiler: * (click to show/hide)

 No, it's not a Tesla; I abhor the design language** of the tablet display, among other things.  As mentioned elsewhere, it's a Kia EV6. Actually looks like a car! Has a reasonable dash!

Spoiler: ** (click to show/hide)

I feel dirty for using the phrase "design language" 

[Rolan7]

Congratulations!  I'm a bit interested.  I hope my 2004 manual Toyota hatchback keep running forever, I'm rather attached to it after having slept in the back a few times.  But EV are probably the future!

[Vector]

I still can't figure out how to get in and out of a Tesla, which has made me hate them. I'm not dumb. I'm ~getting a PhD~.

The damn cars are hard to open up from the inside or the outside. Also Elon Musk can bite me.

[Telgin]

I fully planned for my next car to be electric, but I'll have to wear this one out first.  It's a 2011 Toyota Camry, and my brother's Camry lasted him 20 years so I've probably got at least another 10 in this one.

Anyway, I'll have to do research on the subject more when the time comes to get a new car.  I'm very leery of Tesla for a few reasons, even if they're the big name in EVs.  My original fears from a few years ago that the company simply would collapse and you'd be stuck with something that couldn't be maintained have mostly vanished, but I keep hearing bad things about them regardless.  Not even getting into my feelings on Elon Musk, I keep hearing that the cars have surprisingly shoddy construction, that there is DRM style features locked out of the car if you don't pay for them, and that there are "problems" if it loses internet connectivity.  I don't even have examples of the last one there so it may not be true, but if it's true, it's like the ultimate culmination of how the Internet of Things is kind of a bad idea in practice.  Not everything needs a wireless connection to the internet that makes it vulnerable to hacks or renders it useless if the internet goes down.  Kind of like the doorbells and Roombas that stopped working because AWS died briefly that time.

No idea if other companies that provide electric vehicles are any better, but I can hope that by the time I buy another car there will be reasonable alternatives that aren't terrible.

[McTraveller]

That's a lot of why I went with a "traditional" OEM for my vehicle - less focus on "disruption" and way less... hubris.

My current vehicle is 12 years old, and is in great mechanical shape except its air conditioning leaks coolant.  Plus it's something I can tangibly do to help the economy and environment.  It's kind of amazing to think that I have basically one more tank of gasoline to buy for my vehicle.

The engineering parts of my brain are getting excited...I'm very interested for first-hand information about energy per mile, as a function of season, if I'm running HVAC (will be especially relevant as we are approaching winter), etc.  I'm also curious about how much time it really takes to charge, as a function of starting point vs. ending point, etc.  My wife's probably going to get annoyed as I'll likely resurrect my "mileage book" I used to keep for my ICE vehicle.

[None]

I'm counting on my camry lasting too long too, but I'm a little less confident in it since it got rear-ended. Body shop said there was only cosmetic damage, but I hear every revolution of the wheels...

Ideologically I'd love to have an EV, petty me would prefer to have a manual transmission car, and pragmatic me would prefer to live in a city where a car is not a necessity. For now I'm stuck with the camry until I don't need it and my brother buys it from me. My folks have made it clear that this last bit is non-negotiable. :U

RE: Tesla - from what I've read, their cars are notoriously difficult (and expensive!) to maintain and parts fail out much quicker than any of the competition- they've got real low reliability scores. Now that there's appetite for EVs, I'm pretty sure any of the alternatives will be reasonable and/or not terrible.

[McTraveller]

Wow, was looking at route planning - public EV chargers are surprisingly expensive!  They seem to run between $0.31 and $0.45 a kW-hr.  This is something like a range of 6.7 to 12.9 miles/$ (depending on if you pick 3 or 4 miles/kW-hr).  My wife's gasoline car get about 7.8 miles/$ with gasoline at $4.50/gallon.  When gasoline was "only" $3 a gallon, her car was getting 11.7 miles/$, which is probably better than the EVs would get, plus the much shorter fill-up time!

Of course, my wife's car gets about 35 miles/gallon on the highway.  I suppose if you're driving my car or a modern truck and getting only 25 miles/gallon, it's more attractive.

Now, at my house - electricity runs me about $0.16 a kW-hr (and it might be lower; I can get on a time-of-day plan to get cheaper rates overnight), so this is probably at least 18.75 miles/$.  Gasoline for my wife's car would have to drop back down to $1.87/gallon, or $1.33 for my car, to make it more cost effective than "charging at home".

[Duuvian]

When a new form of infrastructure is adapted, it is often the case that start up capital  costs drive the cost to consumers high. A good example is the cable television industry and cable laying expenses. Initially it seemed doomed, but federal subsidies encouraged the laying of wires and made it more accessible in both location availability and cost. It's a good idea in such circumstances to subsidize, though care must be taken not to allow it's regression into a lucrative structure that does not compel lower consumer prices, due to lobbying, that was not taken with cable laying.

I am curious who owns the charging stations you've mentioned and if the start-ups are being bought up or established by companies with a stake in other forms of energy generation or vehicle fuels. This is a good thing when it's adapted, but such things have happened in the past in order to stifle development in protection of older capital investments.

Also, would establishing federal or state charging stations at rest stops be a way to control prices?

Is it possible to buy an attachment that allows a commonly owned extension cord to plug in from a common residential style outlet? If it's possible but not yet in production, there is an idea that someone could make some money from. Compatibility with Non-Propriety chargers would be a good idea and could be mandated as a standard if proprietary chargers impose incompatibility. I don't have the knowledge of how electrical batteries work to say whether a generic compatibility with an extension cord -> wall outlet is feasible or not. If it is, a comparable theme may be the mandate to Apple to stop using it's proprietary charge plug to sell more of their proprietary charge plug rather than the more widespread USB.

[McTraveller]

The only company with a "proprietary" charge port is Tesla. Everyone else uses J1772,CCS or CHAdeMO connectors (and I can't recall off the top of my head the interoperability between J1772/CCS/CHAdeMo).  Tesla does sell adapters so a Tesla can charge at a non-Tesla charger, and I think there are adapters so non-Teslas can charge on Tesla's networks.

Many EVs do come with an on-board charger that can accept "home" power - but it's terribly slow; in the US most circuits are only 15 amps, which at 120V means a whopping 1.5kW charging rate - good for emergencies but not much else.  I bought a Level 2 charger to install in my house - it's wired to 240V with a 60A breaker; it's rated for 11.5kW charging - basically overnight.

But the charging networks - there are quite a few competing networks, and I think they are using their revenue to build out capital, rather than provide cheap service.  Given that residential power is available in many states around $0.12-$0.18/kW-hr, networks charging $0.30 or $0.40 seems... pretty high to be honest, given those networks can probably get power at "wholesale" prices.  Granted fast-DC chargers are 200-350kW, which is pretty fast when the batteries can handle it (battery charging is quite nonlinear- they can pull massive power when "in the middle" but the closer they are to 100% charge, the slower they can accept energy; the last 10% of charge can take I think as long as the previous 50% or something like that.

I don't expect point-of-sale prices to ever drop, even for those networks that "make their own power", because why would they? They just have to compete with gasoline, and aside from refueling time, they do that currently.

As a consumer, I'd definitely like prices to be lower...I wonder if the nature of electricity can allow for more differentiation between networks, giving some the ability to charge less than others. After all, electrons are even more fungible than gasoline and don't require refineries or anything.

[Cthulhu]

I'd be interested in getting one at some point.  I agree that the tesla dashboard is an abomination, if I'm driving a moving vehicle I should not have to look away from the road to operate the dashboard controls, whoever thought that was a good idea is a god damn menace. 

Maybe in the future when they have fluid displays that can context-sensitively extrude buttons, but for now just give me a dashboard with knobs and buttons I can memorize and operate without looking away from my mentally intensive high-risk tasks please.

[McTraveller]

My skills of a photographer* aren't great, but the gasoline-free transport has arrived.  Put a whole 27 miles on it so far, using roughly 10% battery without even having made sense of all the settings and operating modes. Puts a "useful" range (with 10% reserve) of about 240 miles...  Gonna have a learning curve!

Spoiler: shiny (click to show/hide)

*channeling Strongbad

[Loud Whispers]

Looks pretty gud, how does it handle

[McTraveller]

So far I'm still in that goofy "oh it's new I have to be careful" phase, and it's notably physically larger than my previous car and I'm not used to its physical boundaries, so I've not yet tried to push it yet.

I can say that between it being super quiet and having massive torque, it will sneak up on high speeds.

There are a few places around my house that will be good measures of its handling: we've got a good roundabout, one y-intersection that in one direction I used to navigate without braking (maybe a 30 degree turn, could do it at 45mph), and another one that is a good hard-right followed by hard-left I also used to be able to take hard enough my kids would go "do the fast turn!"

Although my new car is at least 500kg more massive than my previous, all that mass is "in the floorboards" being a battery, so should have a nice low CG.  Tires are definitely not specced like my old one; I ran W-rated summers on my previous, and stock on the new are H-rated all-season.  I had a set of spare winter tires before, I don't see an M+S rating on my new stock, so I may have to decide to get another set again.. although I'm somewhat annoyed because old were 17" and new is 19" which turns into $$$.

New car does have a 118mph governor though; old one had none.

[Loud Whispers]

One of the amusing things I heard was criticism that the electric cars were too quiet, because pedestrians weren't looking before they crossed car roads and they weren't looking because they were used to cars being noisy. The obvious counterpoint to this is that you also can't hear anything when there's 300 cars going BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR together

[Il Palazzo]

Clearly, the solution is to mandate every EV to constantly have the ice cream van jingle blaring at high volume. We must protect the children.

Btw, I think most of the car noise above very low speeds comes from the tires rolling on the road surface.