This has been an issue with electrics, you’re right about that, range. From what I hear, the newer Leafs are going to have well over 100 mile range. I don’t know where you live, but we’re starting to see electric charging stations pop up. Of all places, Wal Greens has installed some in some of their lots. I think this is just part of a shift. I currently drive a regular car, but I’m thinking that electric might be my next buy, since I’m guessing price will be coming down in the next few years.
I mean, there was an EV market prior to Tesla that got shut down. If anything, I think Tesla has gotten the issue back into the public eye, but other car companies are working on the issue, too, and because most car companies have deep pockets, and a variety of goods to market, it’s easier for them to absorb losses and take chances (the problem is getting them to do so).
Right, the two critical factors are range and recharge time.
You could have a recharger at every parking place in every shopping center, and it wouldn’t make a big difference if the time to get a useful charge was a minimum of five hours (exaggerating to make my point obvious to others).
The Teslas recharge enough to drive 100 miles in the amount of time it takes to get a cup of coffee or use the bathroom. The other (nominally) competing EVs do not!
Because of this, when you pull up to a Tesla Supercharger, you can usually find a slot without difficultly. I see open ones every day on the freeway. But when I pull up to a publicly accessible J1722 recharge point for other cars, 90% of the time it is occupied by someone who is going to be there for many, many hours. So I charge at home (I have three vehicles plugged into the wall every night) as do nearly all EV owners other than Tesla owners.
Nissan has made a big mistake in selling cars that only support slow recharge rates. My Nissan and Toyota both carry a long charge cable with a regular household plug, in the same way that I always carried a quart of oil and a pint of brake fluid in my gas cars, but having a high speed charger in the Nissan makes it a fundamentally more capable car.
Oh, BTW, if you finance buying a new Leaf, expect that it will be worth less than the amount you owe on it within the first year and probably until you get it paid off. That is just the reality of the vehicle.
This is not true, unless you live in Antarctica or the Himalayas. Round trip range is about 80 miles on our Leaf (which we never drive in “eco” mode because that’s not as fun) and more recent models are better. But 80 miles is still not enough for a very very large segment of the US population.
I don’t have any practical experience with recent models of the Leaf. If you’re just driving around town, they do pretty well. But my direct experience with a test drive and my friend’s experience with owning one indicate that it all goes out the window as soon as you do a rapid acceleration up to highway speeds, such as with an on-ramp. A quarter or more of the remaining range just goes “poof!” out the nonexistent tailpipe. Take one exit out to Home Depot, pick up a couple of bushels of anything (which is all that will fit), and take one exit back and you’re limping home.
Our 2013 Leaf has no trouble accelerating onto the highway, and unless it’s in “eco” mode it accelerates faster than most gas cars (torque is where the electric motor really shines).
But keep in mind that judging things by miles is a convenient fiction - if you are accelerating rapidly up a steep hill, yup, you’re going to see that battery level drop precipitously. In the same situation, your gas car will eat gas like crazy too - it’s a matter of supplying the same energy for the same maneuver - but your gas car has way longer range and refuels way quicker.
In my local area, the ground’s pretty flat, and the weather’s not extreme, so even though the Leaf does not have great range and takes a long time to charge, it’s a good option for us. It certainly does not replace a gas car like a Tesla can.
Edit: perhaps a better illustration - we drive a fully loaded Leaf with 3-4 passengers from Newark, DE to Dover, DE and then charge it for a day before returning. In one direction, this is not a big deal, even though it’s on a highway with traffic 65 to 70 mph all the way, there’s charge left over. In the other direction, going the same route but against the prevailing winds and going slightly uphill the whole hour and a half plus drive, we can barely make it, even though we use eco mode and don’t run the HVAC at all. Miles are a tricky thing, and having a computer GPS that understands topography is a very big deal.
I’m actually serious. None of my loved ones are going to have the resources or insane confidence to extend innovation like Elon Musk’s companies have. All such ventures are high risk, and of course they won’t all survive, but I am so glad that he is doing them.
You know, I would much prefer going to Mars on a spaceship managed by civil servants than one controlled by this Ambien and red wine gulping crazy man.
Musk does inspire (at least in me) concerns, but aerospace civil servants (if we mean NASA management) do have a spotty safety record; think Challenger and Columbia. (I used to have a newspaper clipping — long since disintegrated — stuck to my cubicle wall; the clipping was a cartoon illustration commenting on the Challenger disaster: if memory serves me, the drawn external tank and solid rockets appeared massive and were labeled with “cost”, “expediency”, and “schedule”. The Orbiter itself (shown as being incredibly tiny relative to the tank and rockets) was labeled with “safety”.) In the case of both the Challenger and Columbia, NASA management was aware of potentially serious issues, and came to decisions that appeared to be based on politics rather than engineering. That doesn’t mean I trust Musk more than NASA. I just don’t have great trust in either one (especially since Bridenstine now runs NASA).
Musk is pretty sane and balanced compared to the prior great heroes of American rocketry. I mean, Jack Parsons, Werner von Braun, even Goddard himself… this is not a group known for their boring conventionality!
That may well be, but Musk’s long-demonstrated zeal for pushing 60 hour work weeks (and, even more so, his business agenda) has me worried that safety may fall to the wayside.
