From the article: “About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service appointments.”
Nah. The world’s burning; going back to build more fires ain’t the way.
(Edited as I no can grammar)
Unfortunately EVs aren’t in a place where they can be used by everyone. I owned a Model 3 LR and never got anywhere near the range it claimed. It was constantly recalculating my next stop to charge.
On long drives the range is a real problem. A 9 hour drive turned into 12 because I had to stop every 2 hours to charge for 20 minutes. I actually had to turn around go backwards an hour because it decided I couldn’t make it to the next charger. This wasn’t during extreme cold or heat… it was beautiful outside I was doing the speed limit without the AC on.
The range issues plus the dozens of phantom braking incidents on that trip caused me to trade it in for an ICE car as soon as I got back home. EVs are great for around town daily driving, but if you ever take long trips they are not ready yet. I want to own an EV and will certainly have one as my next car, but today is not that day.
I would agree that it’s infrastructure that is not in a place where EVs make sense for everyone. The US is firmly behind in the race on this point, likely hampered by a battle of plug formats between CCS and Tesla. I’ve a 58kWh (useable) VW ID.3 hatchback - perfect for Europe or just 2 people, which we are. Had it for 2.5 years now, and the difference in charging infrastructure has changed radically. In March of 2021, driving from Amsterdam to Frankfurt or Paris, I did have to plan charge stops - but now, I don’t even think about it. Everything’s CCS, available nearly everywhere on the highway or in smaller towns (at least 50kW charging).
Just did a trip to the midlands to see my brother a few weeks ago (another ID.3 owner) and he’s got a bank of CCS Tesla chargers next to his Pizza Hut and an Ionity not far from there. On the trip I had choices between FastNed, Ionity and Tesla…never thought if I’d make it, only if I could possibly go farther before charging.
Yeah, that’s a Tesla complaint I hear a lot. Don’t have that particular issue in the ID, although if the mapping database isn’t updated the car can slow down where it expects to have a exit lane or roadworks, but the swarm filtering that VW employs usually filters those exits out after a few weeks. Complete braking though? That’s scary.
Correct, and with better batteries or cheaper electricity, we can move forward. The current state of EVs is not useful for all people. Personally, I’m 5 years away from never needing a car again. In the meantime, I must commute.
Again, nothing is useful to ALL people. The EV is far less polluting than the car, easier to drive, easier and cheaper to live with over time…but it doesn’t mean you go back to burning dinosaur juice (and all the pollution you need to create and ship it locally) as a solution for everyone.
Lithium mining is very bad for the planet. ICEs are bad, but battery EVs are also horrible.
The solution is trains
For most people, including most city dwellers, trains are indeed the correct solution.
US rural settlements were built on train lines before cars destroyed that.
For most long range travel, trains are the solution.
And bikes or PEVs for short range travel.
PEVs are kind of a trap though.
ICE cars are not just problematic because of their emissions, they do much worse things with their infrastructure requirements. Roads and parking that can support everyone driving their car alone everywhere results in sprawl. That makes everyone not in a car have to get in a car as well, and also increases infrastructure costs for other services, since they have to service a much larger area.
Cars have their place, but in an ideal world, a regular family regardless of where they live shouldn’t need one. It’s not a personal mobility solution. Taxies and stuff make sense, everyone sitting in their own car doesn’t.
And this is not even counting that car accidents are a leading cause of fatalities because we give a licence to everyone with a pulse.
PEVs (personal electric vehicles) aren’t cars. They’re ebikes and escooters and EUCs and things like that. Things you can carry up a flight of stairs or onto a train. They are most at home in bicycle infrastructure.
I stand corrected.
While I was living in a city with an expansive but terrible quality public transit system, I owned a foldable electric bike. I used it to commute, I kept it under my office desk and charged it off the office mains while working. It had like 30 kilometres of range, which I used like 12 of, so I even had some distance to play with and visit a friend after work.
If it was raining, I could get on the bus with it. It was cool as hell.
I moved since, now I commute by tram.
What happens to lithium after it’s mined? What happens to oil after it’s mined?
There’s no comparing how much worse ICEs are compared to EVs.
The problem is no what happens to lithium afterwards. The problem is what the environmental cost of getting the lithium out of the earth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electric-cost-lithium-mining-decarbonasation-salt-flats-chile
But once it’s out, it’s out. It can then be recycled and reused “forever”.
You extract oil once and burn it once; then that carbon is stuck in the atmosphere “forever”. Now you have to extract more oil and do it all over again.
That’s the big difference, EVs don’t consume lithium; they borrow it.
That’s not how recycling works.
Most recycling today is PR anyway. Recycled stuff gets dumped into some poor third world country.
lithium and cobalt are highly recyclable. The problem is not recycling them the problem is getting all the recyclable batteries into the circular manufacturing process.
There’s at least one company recycling EV batteries already, and that’s even with the small amount of end-of-life batteries out there (most are still on the road): https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/heres-what-redwood-learned-in-its-first-year-of-ev-battery-recycling/
That’s definitely the case for low/zero value materials like plastics. But the materials in EV batteries are way too valuable to just throw away.