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>With current battery tech and infrastructure, EV is a 50 mile technology. It has nothing to do with battery tech itself, doesn't matter how light or dense the battery is. The limit is infrastructure. 50 miles is about what you can charge with a level 1 charger overnight.

The vast majority of first-time EV buyers also install a 240v charging station, which typically costs about $1200 including labour and will fully charge most cars overnight. Frankly, you'd be mad to spend $40,000 on a new EV but hamstring it by cheaping out on charging.

> The problem with more batteries is charge time. It's not good enough right now.

It's already good enough for most users, assuming you have reasonable access to suitable rapid chargers on your route. Very few people drive continuously for three or four hours, stop to refuel and immediately return to their car - human biological functions are a meaningful factor. You might be surprised at how long it actually takes you to refuel, pay for your fuel, visit the restroom, buy a coffee and stretch your legs, especially if you've got kids in tow. Rapid-charging an EV does take longer than refuelling a car, but you can do other stuff while it's charging.

Most ICE car owners only infrequently take long journeys. Most EV owners who do take longer journeys find that charging times only add a few minutes to the duration of their journey and are not a significant inconvenience. Charge times do remain a major obstacle for people who drive substantial distances for professional reasons, but they represent a small minority of car buyers.

> Most ICE car owners only infrequently take long journeys.

Sure, but when I do take a longer journey, I don't want to have to hire a car or something. I can see an EV currently being good for 90% of my journeys, but what about the ~8 journeys a year in the ~200 mile range, with the last 30 or so generally on steep/winding roads trying to find a cottage in the middle of nowhere? How practical is that currently?

Edit: making the numbers a bit more realistic

>How practical is that currently?

That really depends on the quality of EV charging infrastructure in your area. Here in the UK, it's pretty trivial - aside from mid-Wales and the Scottish highlands, there's blanket coverage of EV rapid chargers. It's no big deal to stop at a motorway service station or a supermarket and get a quick top-up on a rapid charger. It's the same story in most of western Europe.

You don't really have to plan your journeys more than you would in an ICE car, because the sat nav system is aware of range and charging points and will re-route you to a charger well before there's a risk of running out. Long journeys are very slightly less convenient, but that's balanced out by the day-to-day convenience of charging at home and waking up every morning with a full charge.

In much of the US it's more of a challenge, simply because you'll struggle to find a rapid charger en route if you're going anywhere rural; that's a political issue as much as anything.

It's worth noting that the range of affordable EVs has been increasing drastically over the past few years. The Nissan Leaf launched in 2011 with an EPA range of 73 miles. The 2018 model does 151 miles per charge and Nissan have just launched a 62kWh model with 226 miles of range. The Chevy Bolt, the Hyundai Kona and the Kia Niro all do about 240 miles per charge. That trend is continuing apace, nibbling away at the long journeys issue.

The inexorable increase of range will help matters, but the US really needs to make a serious commitment to infrastructure. Public rapid chargers aren't hugely expensive to install or maintain, but you need government investment to break the chicken-and-egg problem - there aren't enough charging points because nobody has an EV because there aren't enough charging points.

> How practical is that currently?

It's not, but it could be. There are no fundamental technical barriers to overcome, just social ones.

I don't see any significant social barriers - it's just a matter of infrastructure. Drivers need to be able to depend on the availability of reliable chargers.

Public infrastructure is a social issue. It's one thing for a private company to set up a network of gas stations, it's another for an entire country to agree on gasoline standards and regulation so every car can use them. Electric cars will need similar standards, Tesla won't be able to do it on its own.

> You might be surprised at how long it actually takes you

It takes 15 to 20 minutes. I know because I watch the GPS and I check the ETA number after a stop.

Will 20 minutes be enough for 3 hours of driving?

Maybe with the new 150KWh charger and a compatible car like the Audi eTron. Could be worth looking at in five years when this becomes more widespread.

> a 240v charging station, which typically costs about $1200 including labour

or buy a L2 charger that plugs into their 220 dryer outlet for $250

We already have cars with 200+ mile range. So even now you're talking 4+ hours driving. That to me is a 'shift' and I'd be looking to get some lunch or something, which can be done at the same time as charging. So that's 8+ hours a day driving. I don't know about you but that's enough driving for me.

And on a road trip I'd expect to be stopping, and looking at stuff.

  EV is a 50 mile technology

Sssshhhh, don't tell Tesla or Hyundai that.

PHEV is a solution looking for a problem. You only add a little bit more range versus a plain ICE, and that's at the expense of lugging around an extra motor and battery array. The whole carpool lane eligibility for hybrids is a crutch and the only selling distinction for PHEVs. (If you're driving far enough for a carpool lane to even matter, you're going beyond your battery range on the trip... so you're ultimately releasing as much carbon.)

> If you're driving far enough for a carpool lane to even matter, you're going beyond your battery range on the trip... so you're ultimately releasing as much carbon.)

I’d be surprised to see this is actually true, but I guess it depends on where you live. There are some cities where a long commute time can be significantly cut by an HOV/carpool lane, even if the number of miles traveled isn’t that great. If you have a 40 mile commute then the Volt can run on electric for pretty much the whole thing, but that’s plenty long enough to save significant time bypassing traffic in a dedicated lane.

   If you have a 40 mile commute then the Volt can run on electric for pretty much the whole thing

... assuming that charging is always available at work/school and you don't go anywhere else either way.

Even half the trip as electric is halved carbon emissions from the car, so I don’t understand the statement that carbon emissions between a PHEV and a ICE are the same in the end (which is what I understand you to be saying by “so you're ultimately releasing as much carbon”)

You could also say that having large batteries is a solution looking for a problem. If 95% of your driving is under 50 miles a day, then you are lugging around 150 miles worth of extra batteries (to get that 200 mile range) that still need a long charge cycle, where you could easily replace that 150 miles of batteries with an ICE that will get you unlimited miles with a 5-minute fuling stop in between. And still end up saving you on gas during 95% of your other driving.

Most people drive more than X miles on Y% of their trips. For any given (X, Y) where Y is non-trivial — and 5% is non-trivial for most people — you can augment an X-mile battery limit by adding public charging stations. However the smaller X is, the more numerous and densely spaced those stations will have to be, which is deeply challenging given the layout of roads, and the cost of building charging stations. (This leaves aside the relative annoyance of making many brief stops vs. occasional longer stops.)

Manufacturers like Tesla control both “X” and the charging station layout, and have limited influence over “Y” except insofar as it affects their ability to sell cars. Presumably they’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that they can’t support a reasonable customer base on small values like X=50.

Plug-in hybrids have not been a commercial success. If you take away the artificial carpool-lane eligibility, they almost vanish from individual purchase as a category (only taxi and commercial fleet demand would remain relevant).

300 miles is still no where close to what some ICE cars get. I can go about 600 miles on a tank - and I have before without stopping.

I want an EV badly but I just can’t do my regular Portland to LA drives in them right now.

I'm impressed that you can concentrate that long. That's got to be over 8 hours of driving non-stop. No toilet breaks.

I think most people would need to stop a couple of times on route. I doubt EVs will ever be suitable for you.

Usually I do stop a few times, but recently decided to just power through it. Last time I didn't even realize how much time had passed until the gas light came on.

6-8 hours is about what I can do on a plane without getting up too so it's not too bad for me. Truckers do it all the time too so it's not that rare.

Edit:

If electric can get to 400+ miles (already there almost) I'll be sold. That's enough for me to do the entire trip with only adding an extra stop if I drove nonstop. When I calculated with the 200-300 mile range a year or so ago it would have been too much waiting around for a charge.

You don't have to concentrate when flying. What's the legal limit in the US for truck drivers without a break? In the EU its 4.5 hours https://www.gov.uk/drivers-hours/eu-rules

I fly when it's cheaper (not counting my time). If I can find flights ~100-150/rt then that's a possible solution, but adding a rental car + parking at airport often makes it just cheaper to drive. And besides, I enjoy it.

Per DOT rules, truckers here are allowed up to 8 hours non stop, with a mandatory 30 minute break if they go over. They can drive up to 11 hours in a 14 hour window.

https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/sites/fmcsa.dot.gov/files/docs/Dri...

It seems most manufacturers, GM included, disagree with that and are mostly betting on full electric at this point. To the point where they are shutting down everything else (GM, Ford). And the ones that aren't (yet) are dealing with some serious challenges in the market. Battery production is indeed the limit. Or put differently, all EV manufacturers seem to be having the "problem" of their products being a very easy sell despite the cost, limitations, etc. For a lot of manufacturers that's not exactly something they are used to.

PHEVs are something that some manufacturers market to extend the runway of their legacy technology while they figure out how to get to fully electric. There are a lot of manufacturers that have stopped talking about that now that they have fully electric vehicles coming to the market. They'll be around for a while of course.

GM seems to have concluded that it makes no sense whatsoever to keep on subsidizing volt sales at a loss and the product simply makes no sense at its real price. The only reason they are keeping the bolt around (which has the same problem) is to have something to sell while they figure out how to build EVs properly so that they can make a profit. Buying a phev of course makes a lot of sense in the same way that an ICE car is still a sensible purchase. It's just that EVs dropping in price is making Phev related investments not a solid long term plan for most manufacturers. They'll milk it while they can but at this point they need to be mostly investing in EVs in order to stay in business long term.

Most EVs right now are indeed on the expensive side. This is a problem for manufacturers because expensive ICE cars used to be how they made money. That segment has been seriously impacted by Tesla coming out of nowhere and taking a huge portion of that market. That's why they are all scrambling to get in on that action. They have no other choice. The net effect of this will be that economies of scale will kick in and production of cheap and mid range EVs is where the action is going to be next.

You seem to insist range anxiety is a thing. It's not much of an issue for most drivers. It's a lot less dramatic than running out of fuel. Running out of fuel can cause all sorts of issues with cars. E.g. with a Diesel you can't just refuel the car and get going again. Running out of battery on the other hand is fixed by ... plugging it in. Worst case you have to call somebody to get you towed (or plugged into a mobile battery). And the car will tell you this is about to happen long before it happens. Only if you ignore all the warnings that you are about to run out of power and fail to address that, will you run out of power.

In any case, taking a 30 minute break after a long drive is a pretty good idea and probably something you should do regardless of your fuel/electricity needs. So, not the end of the world. Also, most people don't drive that far that often. So, having a lot of anxiety on this front is kind of irrational. Some people do drive this much of course. In that case they'll still love electric because of the fuel bills and indeed may spend a bit more on something with a bigger battery and higher charging capacity.

> how to extend the range to something everyone is used to, like 200-300 miles for road trips? There's two options, more batteries or an ICE engine.

quick-change batteries would work for now

I think it comes down to the fact that batteries are big and heavy, so they end up being pretty integral to the structure of the car. A strong quick release /engage mechanism for that sounds rather difficult to do. Especially where the car can't flex when full of people/stuff during the swap.

Tesla tried battery swap and abandoned it. If even early adopter Tesla customers won't accept this idea, it's very unlikely the mainstream will.

I suspect it would have to be imposed on the market through regulation and standardization. Otherwise you'll see endless quibbling on the swappable module specs, or 30 different types which would make it impractical to stock a replacement station.

of course it needs to be done right

The lost route IMO was modular batteries. Say your Model S has a bank replacable modules instead of a single monolith. These can be pulled and swapped with pre-charged cells in minutes. This also allows older packs to be pulled from circulation, removing the fear of aging batteries causing depreciation on the vehicle.

Why would you ever not want to swap the whole battery? They've demonstrated that a whole battery swap can be done in minutes. And the whole battery discharges/ages at the same rate, so there'd be no point in only swapping some of the modules.

It's also quite unsafe to run lithium ion batteries in series with different levels of wear / charge state, the old ones can easily be pushed too hard and fail (spectacularly).

I figure that if you have different-size cars with different battery capacities (and shapes of their battery cavities), then "Car X needs 10 battery modules, car Y needs 13" is simpler (in one sense) to manage than "I have car X, do you have any of the batteries made to fit in it? No, you only have Car-Y-shaped batteries? Whoops."

The angle I was considering was size and weight. If you can keep the modules light enough to carry by hand, it means a lot less equipment for each swap facility.