You were offered a Porsche Taycan Turbo S as a loaner??? a $175000 car that'll get you from 0-60 in about 2.8 seconds...and you said no...

Where is this amazingly irresponsible dealer giving these cars out as loaners?

Find it hard to believe...kind of like a lot of other posts on here!
Every EV thread on here turns into the Twilight Zone!

 

If I calculate out my solar panel cost and how much the utilities pay me each month for power, I pay 2.3c/kwh... Now its even cheaper to charge your car

 

 

where else .. the porsche dealer of course

 

seems there is a youtube video for everything.. it's common sense 70kwh battery with 10 kwh powerwall battery.. how long you think that's going to charge.. but anyway.. well here you go sir

 

https://electrek.co/2020/05/27/tesla...ing-model-s-x/

 

Will I ever buy an electric F150? Probably not since I'm older. I would like the torque; that's the only thing I miss with my 5.0L.

I think the unspoken issues that are going to hit with the EV craze is the mining of lithium and the disposal of over 18 million EV battery packs per year in the near future. The issues from emissions from ICE have largely been solved. New 15L diesels emit fewer particulates then the tires on the semis. CO2 is not the problem it's made out to be; life needs CO2. The earth is the greenest it's been in centuries. If you investigate the energy balance of the current amount of energy used to power all of the vehicles on the road today compared to the amount of electricity being produced you will find that there isn't enough electricity available to convert to 100% EV. Heck, California can't even buy enough electricity to keep the lights on now. How will they be able to charge all of the cars and trucks.

I'm all for pollution controls and elimination. I grew up in Pittsburgh when the steel mills were still going and the sky was never blue. I just don't think CO2 is a pollutant. I don't think fracking is bad if done properly. I love running my 5.0L up to 6K rpm's racing down the road. I just wish I had more road available.

 

This thread is like watching Fox news...

 

How about some not so old information? Instead of relying on the videos of others, do your own investigation. Here's two very important maps for your consideration. The first shows the strength of the sun in generatable kilowatt hours across the nation, the second shows average percentage of sky cloud coverage.




According to these maps, people in the southwest, where you find a lot of these successful off-grid solar only installations hail from, get just under 2.5x more solar energy than I get in northern Kentucky. If you add in population density, you find the southwest gets 2x more solar energy than something like 70% of the total US population.

I can add in to this some personal experience from using quality solar panels for wilderness packing and camping. The southwest is great for solar, but most of the rest of the country isn't. After running several different solar panels on my pack from 2013-2018 (7+ day long trips), I moved back to just carrying a Li-Ion pack as the solar panels offered no benefit over battery packs and weighed more.

The payoff for my home would take almost the life of the system, about 17 years, and adds only 70% of the cost of the system to the home's value. The only advantage to go solar on a permanent structure is to have power when the utility goes out, but I'm still left without a/c or heat unless I triple the cost of the system. I'd also need to buy a house twice as large to have room for the panels I'd need. Another reality of going off-grid is most of the population does not have the space to do so.


The government absolutely will not subsidize gas stations (although they may indirectly if they subsidize oil companies that transition to EV charging). Most of the money they will be spending will be for infrastructure upgrades that will be required to get power to where it's needed. IOW, the subsidies will go to the utility companies (which means most of it will go to investors, yah!).

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Currently, EV mfg's are heavily investing to provide their own charging networks. 100 years from now all the EV 'refill' stations might be owned by car manufacturers, or they may decide at some point to divest from it entirely. Battery packs are currently custom for most vehicles, but this may eventually settle out to a few battery mfg's offering 10-15 different pack sizes to all car manufacturers. This is truly an interesting time, being able to witness the birth and development of a very ubiquitous, fledgling technology.


The battery pack disposal issue is being mitigated. VW just opened an operation where they grind packs down and recapture all of the rare elements in the packs, and it's cost effective. The question remains whether or not future chemistries will be able to be handled in the same manner, but I have faith we will largely prevail as, at least theoretically, we should be able to efficiently separate back out most elements that are currently being tested for future battery chemistries.

I did a college english paper on C02 emissions. The year was 1994, and the C02 awareness was just starting to gain solid traction with the average citizen. While my investigation was not thesis level, I got interested and did a lot of delving into the science. What I found was similar: C02 is an important part of the life cycle on earth. I also found that human C02 emissions were only 10% of total emissions at that time, with Volcanoes emitting 200 million tons Vs the human emission of about 20 million tons.

Now, while indeed vehicles and some industries are a lot cleaner now than they were decades ago, there has also been population growth, industry growth, new materials, and new manufacturing processes. Here are the emissions by the beginning of the last five decades, in millions of tons:

1980: 19.37
1990: 22.70
2000: 25.12
2010: 33.13
2019: 36.44

The 2000-2019 numbers show that we have made significant reductions in emissions, but also that emissions continue to increase. While I do not believe that human emissions are the sole cause of a changing global climate, I do believe we are exacerbating the situation and should do everything we can afford to help mitigate the increasing average temperature. It's not like we don't have another planet close by that demonstrates what happens when you reach a tipping point with greenhouse gases, and we don't have a solid grasp of what that point would be for our planet.

 

Ignoring the concerns of range and charging speeds that many of us have voiced here, discussion of adoption rates of EVs conveniently overlooks several key societal statistics that may be an impediment to embracing EV's on a larger scale within the foreseeable future: 1) Renters vs Home Owners, 2) Household Density (i.e. number of vehicles per household), 3) Household Income.

Most of us here appear to have the wherewithal to afford an EV, but that's not the case for a vast number of US households.

Home Ownership
According to iProperty, 65.8% own their own home in the US; in uber expensive California, only 54.8% do. That means a significant number are renters. As a prior home renter myself, we are extremely limited to what we can and cannot change in a rental house; which would definitely require an approved professional to install an EV charger if such a modification were to be authorized by the property owner. It's anyone's guess of how many owners would authorize such a modification to their properties; government incentives (i.e. financial) would probably need to kick in.

Apartments vs Single-Family Homes
But what about those who live in apartments? Statistics are hard to come by, but a posting on Quora estimated 20% of the US population lives in apartments. The apartment I once lived in had an abundance of parking, including a 3-story parking garage. But in my observation of apartments and high-density housing, most of them do not offer enough parking spots within the housing complexes themselves; the public streets are clogged with cars all around them. If the majority of these apartment dwellers would switch to EV, who would pay for the installation of chargers in practically all the parking spots on-site? Do you think apartment owners would gleefully open their checkbooks? What about those parking on public streets? Do you think municipalities would themselves pay to install EV chargers along public streets to solely serve private/business-owned apartments? Would you be willing to raise your local taxes to support such a measure? Maybe a cottage industry of apartment EV charging station installations will arise (Electrify America?), but they will have to recoup their initial infrastructure cost and maintenance by charging customers to use their charging stations. Again, government incentives (money) may be key.

Military Bases
Let's not forget the military: with 1.3 million active duty personnel, and having myself lived in the old-school open squad-bays long ago (now replaced with stylized apartments, at least at Camp Pendleton), and later in single-family base housing, will the DOD take a chunk of their hard-fought legislated dollars to spend on installing EV chargers at all on-base housing? What about off-base military housing, which are now under Privatized Military Housing contracts: who do you think will pay to install and maintain EV chargers? We wouldn't mind raising federal taxes to pay for this, right?

Household Density
The average number of cars per household is 2. But the percentage of households with 3 or more cars is 35%. My gf and I have amongst us 4 cars, my cousin's family of five has 4 cars, my brother has 4, and my sister's family has 3 cars (one Tesla Model S). As mentioned earlier, 54.8% of Californians rent, probably due to the fact that the average home price in California is $717,930. Many houses on my street alone are rented (either whole house, or individual rooms) or have extended family living together: one neighbor has 8 cars, their neighbor has 6, and a house down the street has 6. Seems there will be quite a shortage of charging stations per household here if we were to convert to EV.

Household Income
The medium household income as of 2019 is $68,703, but 63% of the US is living paycheck-to-paycheck. Perhaps this is the reason why as of 2019, 85% of all car sales were used. There are other reasons for turning to used cars, such as avoiding the depreciation hit that comes with driving a new car off the lot. Many of the cars in my immediate family were bought used (surgeon, tax attorneys, allied health care professionals). This may not bode well for new EV sales as they begin to come online, nor even when they hit the secondary used car market because of the relatively short life expectancy of 8-10 years for EV batteries and their expensive replacement cost between $5k-$15k, excluding labor. Since the average ownership of new cars lasts about 6 years, that may not leave much battery life left in a used EV. Ergo, the cost of owning an EV presently may not be reasonably affordable to the vast majority of Americans.

For all the spirited debates and pigeonholing going on within this thread, I believe the barriers to EV acceptance rates actually go beyond simply range, availability of charging stations and charging speeds, but also percolating down to something a little more basic and easy to understand: money.