The cost of EV’s is very understated just about everywhere…Yes it does make sense to install your own charger at home…The questions is what is that cost? There is no average cost as it depends on labor and any retrofitting in your home (i.e. if your home runs on 100A service then you will need an upgrade). What level charger are you going to install? (Level 1 can run up to $2500 or as low as under $1k; which is just for the unit). How much is your electricity costs? Are your electricity costs stable? What is the source of your electricity? What are teh current political climate in your area for electricity (Banning fossil fuels? Rely on renewables?) What happens if your entire neighborhood starts to do the same? Can the grid handle it? There are places in CA that wouldn’t allow you to charge you vehicle between certain hours. DO you have a SMART meter installed? If so the power company can shut you off as they can tell what devices you have plugged in (Appliances, vehicles, A/C, heat, etc.)
One must also consider the time it takes to recharge versus filling up a tank. Typically you can fill up a tank in less than 5 minutes (assuming less than 20 gallon’s to be conservative) as opposed to 45 minutes to go from ~15% to above 90% on an EV at a Tesla charger (This was my experience). That 40 minutes has a cost (assuming $40/hour that equates to a bit over $26.50; a gas fillup would be less than $3.50) and that should be added to the cost of the electricity.
Let’s now talk about end of life…how long will the batteries last? What will your range be in 3 years, 5 years? What is the resale of those vehicles at that point? It is cheaper to replace an ICE than a rack of batteries in an EV. It is also not possible to purchase remanufactured or used batteries to lessen the cost of repairs.
EVs are perfect for commuting where your daily mileage is low and you have the ability to charge either at home or there are enough charging stations close to you. Otherwise an EV doesn’t make sense for most American purposes unless they also have an ICE vehicle.
Searching on Google, I am unable to find anywhere in California (or in the US as a whole) that mandates restrictions on when you can charge your EV. There may be recommendations, but I can't find any mandates. There are utilities that have different rates at certain times of the day to encourage you to charge at specific times, but I can't find any cases where you are not allowed to charge at any time.
The US grid needs to be improved. If that became a non-political issue, then that is a solvable problem, but like so many things in current US politics, we can't have rational conversations about the issue. Home solar also helps the grid, but again, our polarized politics makes that a hot-button issue too.
The key for charging times is a blend between available range, efficiency, and charge speed (both of the charger and the vehicle). If you have an inefficient EV then you are fighting an uphill battle.
Take for example the electric Hummer, it has an inefficient shape, weighs a lot, and uses inefficient motors, so it has to employ a massive battery pack which in turn adds weight to make the vehicle even more inefficient. That massive battery pack takes a lot longer to charge to return the same travel distance as an EV that weighs a lot less, has a more efficient shape, and uses more efficient motors.
My wife's EV can add 290 miles of range from 14% to 80% in 30 minutes on a level 3 charger. Charging above 80% when stopping mid-trip for a top-up is counterproductive as batteries charge slower the closer you get to 100% (unless you are planning on spending more than 30 minutes at the charging location). So, what does that mean? We can easily do a 600-mile trip with only one charging stop of 30 minutes with at least 10% in reserve (charge it to 100% at home before we leave, and to 80% at the charge stop). Making a 30-minute stop half-way through a 8-hour trip is not an inconvenience to me, it's really more of necessity. That's also not a trip we would take very often, and I suspect not the typical frequent use scenario for most drivers. Before I got the long-range tank, that same 600-mile trip would take 3 fuel stops (including the first fill-up) in my Grenadier. 3 fill-ups in the Grenadier is probably not that far off from 30 minutes the way we do our fuel stops (bathroom breaks, arguing about whether I can buy a donut, cleaning bugs off the wind-shield, etc.).
The end-of-life arguments for EV's are proving to be far less problematic than predicted when EV's first started. First the rate at which high mileage Teslas are requiring battery changes is far less than anticipated. Secondly, it seems the tests used in labs to arrive at battery longevity predictions were flawed in the first place and real-world usage actually results in about a third more battery life than originally forecasted. See for example this article:
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2...teries-may-last-up-to-40-longer-than-expected
And your comment that these end-of-life issues are a concern in 3 to 5 years is not the case. The most current studies on real-world EV battery degradation have found that the
batteries degrade at 1.8% per year. So, a 5-year-old battery would still have 91% of its capacity, which is why EV's come with an 8-year / 100K mile battery warranty that guarantees at least 70% capacity (10 / 150K mile year in California). Some EV manufacturers provide even more.
There are many examples of Teslas with over 200,000 miles on the clock that have battery capacities performing in line with the 1.8% per year prediction, there are some that have exceeded 500K and I seem to recall there is at least one with over a million. I suspect that level of degraded battery performance is no worse (probably better) than what you can expect to experience in reduced performance from an ICE engine with the same age and mileage.
Outside of major recalls,
only 2.5% of EV's have required a battery replacement and the vast majority of those were done under warranty. So, the fear of some looming massive battery replacement expense on the horizon is overstated. It's no more likely than needing to replace the engine on an ICE, which costs about the same as replacing a battery pack on an EV when you include labor (and the price of EV batteries is going down, while ICE engine prices are going up).
Your closing statement that EV's don't fit everyone's use case is true. But I think there is a lot of misinformation about EV's that gets thrown about, often as a result of a political agenda.
When you look at the % of "made in America" by car manufacturers, Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and the EV products of legacy automotive manufacturers (Hyundai, Ford, GM, etc.) account for the majority of the most "made in America" of cars sold here. EV manufacturing in the US is responsible for over 240,000 US jobs. Sadly, my prediction is that won't last. We've given the Chinese a free pass to dominate the world EV market while crippling our domestic EV production and development, all in the name of politics.
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