Minor correction, but its really extremely important to the discussion:
"on all the metrics that journalists really care about"
Another important part is all the gas mfgrs ganging up on their advertising salesmen and telling them exactly how the review had better read if they want to continue to get highly profitable advertising.
Unless the only employment in the US is "taxi driver", I fail to see the issue...
This and the fact that apparently there's substantial power loss if you leave it overnight without plugging it in (say, you're staying at a hotel on a trip), and the dramatic range loss in cold weather (which much of the US is subject to), and you've got a vehicle that doesn't give people the level of reliability/confidence they want.
Not to mention, the car is more than just what gets you from home to work - much of the US lives in extremely large metro areas, particularly in the northeast where the NYT reporter was based. I have many coworkers here who drive hundreds of miles to see family on weekends, for holidays, etc. You have family scattered all the way across the northeast from Boston to NYC to DC to PA, and beyond. This level of social distribution is common in the region, and whatever car wants to succeed in this market needs to account for that.
But no, let's just all pretend that everyone pointing out the range problem is corrupt and in the pocket of Big Oil.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that as a nation, the US is morbidly dependent on the car. 160 miles for the school run and commute is utterly mad.
I think we'll be adopting and using electric vehicles in Europe long before they take off in the US - our cities, towns and villages are built around humans rather than cars, and we have a public transport infrastructure.
I think the main problem with adoption in the states is that your entire way of life is built around the capabilities and limitations of the ICE.
I have found that many Europeans do not understand how much space there is in an average American city. It is not that our lives are built around the ICE, it is that we generally have to travel larger distances. 160 miles for the school run and commute is a lot, but certainly not mad by American standards.
Population density of the US is roughly 34 people per square km. Compare to Germany (229), the UK (260), France (117). America is in the bottom 25% of the world's least-dense countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de....
People in the US tend to build everything farther apart, because we have so much more room. This was true before we had the ICE. We have always found some way of crossing large distances, because we have large distances to cross. Europeans see American car culture and get cause and effect backwards. I don't particularly like our car culture, but I understand it. We don't "build around cars" because we love our cars. We love our cars because they are a necessity given how much space we use.
Look at teen culture. For a teenager in the US, a driver's license is freedom in a very literal sense. They can't walk to their school if their school is 7 miles away (mine when I was in high school), or to the movies, to friends in another neighborhood, etc. Public transportation infrastructure will never be as nice as European cities because the costs rise proportionally with the area you have to cover. We just don't have the population density to make it profitable or even useful for most areas of the country.
160 miles is utterly mad in terms of time, also. As a balance between urban and rural driving, lets assume 45 miles per hour average, which might be optimistic on the coasts or pessimistic in civilized areas. Adding some realistic delays at each stop, that's about four hours, or about one sixth of each 24 hour day.
If you have a long enough commute, you are spending 80-90% of it on the freeway, traveling at 65-80mph. 120 miles at 75mph is only 1.6hr.
For example, I have a friend who lives in West, TX and commutes to north Austin for work. That's about 100 miles one way.
Much more typically you're looking at suburban feeders into urban centers. Even (in)famously suburban place like metro LA clock in at around ~200 people per square km[1], which isn't quite like the UK, but isn't far off.
The problem with American cities isn't how much space we use, it's how we use it. Meandering, twisting, turning streets present enormous transportation obstacles to anything that isn't a car, where grid-based layouts facilitate cycling and walking.
There is this curious, and somewhat crazy, notion that Europeans live all stacked up on each other in some imagined urban paradise (or hell, depending on who you ask), and Americans live in some sparsely-populated wilderness. Neither impression are true.
OK, let's get more specific. Here are some of the larger metro areas (bulk of the population, right?) for the US and for Europe:
New York metro area[1]: 720/km2
Chicago metro area[2]: 509/km2
Miami metro area[3]: 315/km2
Houston metro area[4]: 215/km2
Paris metro area[5]: 21,196/km2
London metro area[6]: 5,206/km2
Madrid metro area[7]: 1,267/km2
Instanbul metro area[8]: 2,593/km2
Or compare every urban area on the list in the UK[9] all of which have more than 2000 people per km2 and the list of the largest urban areas in Europe[10], again with 80% > 2000/km2--the top 10 > 5000/km2, with the largest urban areas in the US[11] where less than 5 have 2000+, and 95% have < 1500 people per km2.
America may not have invented the suburbs, but we do them like nobody else because we have tons of space. I live in Austin, TX. I can get on the road and be in the countryside in under 30 minutes--real countryside with no buildings in sight. Can you even do that in the UK? France? I have family in St. Louis. If I drive there from Austin, that's 1300km. Largeish cities I would hit are Dallas and Springfield, MO. I could go from Rotterdam to Andorra with the same distance and pass through Antwerp, Paris, Orleans, Toulouse, etc.
Even if we assumed the average American city is as dense as those in Europe (they aren't) we still have the fact that in most parts of America you have long stretches of empty freeway between major metro areas. Austin TX to Houston, for example, is a 260km (160mi). Atlanta, GA to anywhere of note is at least 160km(100mi). Even California: San Diago to LA, 160km(100mi); Sacramento to San Fransisco: 140km(90mi); San Fransisco to LA: almost 600 km. That's almost the same as London to Glasgow, and you traverse most of the UK. Further than Paris to Bordeaux, again you cross most of France.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_metropolitan_area
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_metropolitan_area
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris
[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_commuter_belt
[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid#Metropolitan_area
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul
[9]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_the_Unit...
[10]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_urban_areas_of_the_Euro...
[11]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_are...
Yes, totally. I live in a city of just shy of a million people in the UK, and I can see the countryside from my desk in the middle of it. It's a 15 minute walk out of town.
A big advantage of population density is that transportation is cheaper and you have less distance to travel to get out of the city - conversely in the US you have to drive through mile upon mile of suburban sprawl.
A further counter-argument is that there are plenty of countries far, far emptier than the US (Kaz, Ukraine, Belarus), which retain high-density minimal-sprawl cities due to having been built either before the advent of the car, or since, but with a view to retaining accessibility for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport.
Russia is sprawly, but they don't really do suburbs, they do massive industrial complexes on city outskirts, and have population centralised.
Different strokes for different folks.
Don't confuse aspirational desire with actual need or even claimed need.
For a good laugh, compare what SUV drivers actually need in an engineering analysis, with what they claim to need, with what the commercials focus on the product as providing, which is primarily driving offroad in an extreme manner at 90 MPH while carrying 9 people and 7 kayaks.
My wife got a masters degree a couple years ago, that was 2 hours away a couple times a week.
If we only had an electric car, either of these would require renting a gas car for the trip. Which could well be reasonable for a couple times a year, but probably not if we visited my parents more often (say, every month).
Of course this being the US we both have cars, and there wouldn't be any problem if only one of them was electric.
One side sees "this meet 90% of your needs."
The other side says "this doesn't meet all my needs."
In practice I really didn't care, although the bigger the vehicle the less comfortable I am on the road (high winds scare me in a tall vehicle, I know if a tall vehicle hits a curb in an accident its rollover time killing everyone unlike my little car, obviously I have to drive more carefully to avoid hitting things because its huge, very low performance by all measures compared to my 2dr sports car, in summary I hate driving big cars). In theory if I experienced the same limitation due to gas vs electric I'm told over and over that I'm supposed to experience extreme agony, although I suspect it would be OK.
The startup lesson is to glom onto existing limitation. Oh you can't take a road trip because it doesn't have those little car seat mounting bracket thingies. Not some spooky hidden techno stuff in the engine compartment. Keep it simple, "Oh you can't road trip because it can't hold a car seat". This is a simpler marketing message.
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/assets/images/20...
See graph on page 3: sports cars are far more hazardous to the driver than larger, lower performance vehicles.
"Of all major vehicle types, minivans have the lowest risk"
"sports cars have the highest combined risk, of all vehicle types studied"
And from another paper: "For automotive crash safety, the determining factor is size, not weight: larger vehicles have more crush space to absorb impacts. "
http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-Traffic_fatalities_vehicle_weight...
But if your car is dead because you didn't charge it, then you have few other options. So, in my case, I equate "range" with the need for frequent recharging. If the range is too low, I'm basically buying a car that needs to be charged every day if I don't want to risk getting stuck.
refuel time may be subject to physical constraints, but you could envisage a system where you exchange an empty for a full battery pack, much like you exchange a barbecue gas cannister instead of trying to fill it up yourself. this relies on the batteries being much more of a fungible commodity than they currently are.
a critical mass of charging stations is a chicken-egg problem; decent range mitigates this, but ultimately needs a lot of infrastructure investment without short-term revenue guarantees.
If your commute is 200 miles per day, you should be trying to fix the commute, not "fix" the car. Staring thru a windshield and waiting is a horrible way to go thru life.
I have a 5km daily commute that I split between biking (in the summer) and driving. I still could not get by with one car that only has a 200 mile range.
I like to go the cabin in the summer and to the mountains in the winter. In good weather I could make it to both one way, but not return. What if I wanted to go visit family in another city? You can charge it once you get there, but it is slow unless you have the special charger, and will restrict your ability to use the car while there.
These are not isolated or rare situations, there are things that people do all the time.
Tesla cars are intriguing and exciting, but there are still real problems with their mass acceptance. Trying to pass off these problems as trivial, corrupt or ignorant is, well, ignorant.
You imply in another of your replies that you appear to think it requires a 200 mile commute to have to worry about a 200 mile range. But that's not true. I live in Michigan. I have about a 30 mile commute, mostly highway. (Comments about how I should avoid that may be forwarded to /dev/null. I have my reasons and I've made my choice.) Tesla claims a 265 mile range. No problem, right? Well... dock some miles for that being a best-case marketing number, where I live in the real world. I need a round-trip, and can't count on being able to plug-in during the day. (Yes, that's easy now while plug-in stations are basically a gimmick. If electric cars take off, those stations will go poof. As it is they're nearly full up, and you know, one station is basically one car-day, not like a gas pump that serves dozens of cars per day.) Dock a significant percentage of the miles for the fact that yes, some days I have to go to work in 5 degree F weather. Dock some more miles for that fact that sometimes, not often, but often enough to plan on, my highway journey gets stuck for an hour in the aforementioned 5 degree weather, and I need to run the heater (or sometimes the AC on the other side). I'm forgetful, and I'd like to be able to go a day without plugging my car back in.
Suddenly the "265 mile" range doesn't seem so great anymore. It's at most barely adequate, with serious concerns of running out of juice on the highway at least once a year. By comparison, my average daily commute runs about a gallon and a half of gas. An electric car costs me much more than a non-electric and has a pay-back window in the multiple decades, ignoring battery replacement costs. No sale.
Of course, in an advocacy context it's easy to poo-poo all those concerns, or claim I'm overreacting. (For instance, "Be less forgetful." Yes, thank you, I've tried that. It works better to face the truth than try to simply deny it.) It won't matter, though, because I don't drive in an advocacy context, I drive in the real world, where "I get stuck in 5 degree weather" is not merely an abstract internet argument, but something that could be a real problem for me. Whereupon I will somehow stumble onto the local recharging station, only to discover that I'm 90th in line behind all the other people having the same problem because it simply isn't possible to recharge people as quickly as they can pump gas.
Put another order of magnitude on the battery efficiency, just for the sake of argument, and there's no problem anymore. Put a factor of 4 on there and I'm probably comfortable enough to consider it, though I'd still like a payback window of less than decades. As much as you might like to collapse my point to this, I'm not against electric cars, I would actually love to drive one that lived up to the hype. But as it stands right now, electric cars are just adequate for some of the less demanding use cases, and that's something that needs to be dealt with honestly, not by browbeating people into trying to pretend otherwise. It won't work; electric cars have to work in the real world, not people's heads.
I'm curious what you drive. Unless I am reading things wrong, you get about 40 mpg. That sounds really good... I'd look away from electric too. (30 mile commute * 2)/1.5 gal = 40m/gal
It's not very powerful. Stick 4 adults in the car and the efficiency noticeably drops, along with the performance. But it works for me.