Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Electric Vehicle nightmare
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Old 12-05-2023, 02:56 PM
lawgolfer lawgolfer is offline
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An honest answer by an EV owner!

An EV used for short distances, say 100 miles/day, is an excellent idea. This is particularly so in an urban setting. The owner should have a garage where the EV can be charged overnight. An alternative would be an owner who has a sufficient number of charging stations at his/her place of work available for charging during the work day.

As for using an EV to travel for any distance, they are not, and never will be, practical. If you doubt this, read about the experiences of professional drivers in road tests of EV's in the automobile magazines. The true believers will tell you that in a short time there will be thousands of charging stations across the country. The fact is there can never be enough operable charging stations to service a number of EV's comparable to the number of IC's used in everyday travel.

One fact that believers never discuss is that charging stations are being concentrated in single locations, unlike gasoline stations. Automobile drivers do not all stop at single locations. IC drivers go varying distances before refueling. The result is that the number of IC's stopping to refuel are staggered over many miles and locations. By concentrating EV chargers in large numbers sufficient to fuel hundreds of thousand of EV's every day there will be massive traffic jams at the charging stations. I have had believers tell me, "Oh well, there will be stations placed every mile or so along the highways". Good luck with that! The "range anxiety" of finding an available charger will increase exponentially. Also, I can't imagine that many men, and fewer women, will be willing to trust their safety to sitting for 30 minutes alongside a highway to get a 50% charge allowing them to drive 100 miles and repeat the process.

People who do not regularly drive on our Interstate Highways have no concept of the staggering number of vehicles of all kinds using the roadways. There will never be an infrastructure sufficient to, conveniently, and, quickly, refuel the same number of EV's. I just read on Google that there were 290.8 million vehicles of all kinds registered in the US as of 2022. Anyone who believes these can be replaced by EV's and that a functional transportation system will exist, is living in a fantasy world.

My comments only address the feasibility of replacing the nation's fleet of IC's with EV's. The separate problem of providing enough electricity to fuel 290.8 million IV's is mind-boggling, particularly as the true believers are, likely, to be the same people who oppose nuclear power plants. Please don't tell me we can cover the deserts with wind towers and solar panels. That fight is already taking place between the true believers and the friends of the desert, a variant of the friends of the forest.

If you want a good laugh, search for a video of the EV's, lined up, hoping to charge their Tesla's, at the Madonna Inn, or any other charging station, on Interstate 5 in California at Thanksgiving or Christmas, to be able to make it to S.F. or L.A.