Still want an EV? (NO POLITICS)

[yankeejoe]

No way. A Porsche Panamera Hybrid is as far as i would go.

[BlkGS]

Originally Posted by yankeejoe

No way. A Porsche Panamera Hybrid is as far as i would go.

I'd take a Taycan Turismo wagon thing at a steep discount.ike a Turbo S for $60k.

[UPSROD]

Originally Posted by M5Rick

Oh diddums.

Well, isn't that a classic British response!

[eugenebmw]

Originally Posted by kyriian

Like EVs, different stroke for different folks. I don't find big horsepower all that interesting, nor do I find big heavy boats all that interesting. But that's just me preferring to wrung out every 100 horsepower available in a MX5 as fun. But you do you

Porsche is coming with its Boxster EV, certainly things are going to get interesting on that front though.

Can't agree more. In the 90, i have a first gen. MX5 and it only has 90 horse. It is a very fun car to drive not because of the power but as a whole car. Now all my cars has more than 500 horse. Do I still miss the MX5, yes I do

[M5Rick]

Originally Posted by eugenebmw

Can't agree more. In the 90, i have a first gen. MX5 and it only has 90 horse. It is a very fun car to drive not because of the power but as a whole car. Now all my cars has more than 500 horse. Do I still miss the MX5, yes I do

Had one myself, a 2003 mk 2.5 1.8 vvt auto yes auto! Best damn go kart of a car on the road and quite rare from Northern Ireland,a UK car. Had it 2 years and sold it for more than I paid for it.

[Schn3ll]

It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention but word on the street is that the Porsche supercar “Mission X” a planned EV has been axed. They showed this car to prospective buyers and it was universally disliked, no one is spending $1M+ on an EV.

Rimac has been on sale for 2.5 years and have only sold 1/3 of their planned Nevera production and have launched a track version of the car to help drum up more interest.

Should be a mission X announcement soon.

[M5Rick]

Originally Posted by Schn3ll

It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention but word on the street is that the Porsche supercar “Mission X” a planned EV has been axed. They showed this car to prospective buyers and it was universally disliked, no one is spending $1M+ on an EV.

Rimac has been on sale for 2.5 years and have only sold 1/3 of their planned Nevera production and have launched a track version of the car to help drum up more interest.

Should be a mission X announcement soon.

P car hq should take a sobriety and mental capacity test for making an EV that costs over $1M in the first place.

[eugenebmw]

Originally Posted by M5Rick

P car hq should take a sobriety and mental capacity test for making an EV that costs over $1M in the first place.

[eugenebmw]

Is it just a Canada thing?? Let's sink in my American and European friends

Motor Mouth: I witnessed firsthand why we desperately need more EV chargers
Peak loads during holiday season will be the make or break of our transition to electric vehicles

What did you do this Labour Day Monday? Did you, like so many, hit the road on Canada’s busiest travel weekend and brave traffic jams that make normal rush hours look like a hike in a provincial park at midnight on New Year’s Eve? Worse yet, were you stuck in the stupidity that was the Montreal-Toronto corridor this past Monday, wondering if lounging lakeside at the cottage was worth the resultant misery?

Well, I was there too. Except that I had it worse. While you were comfortably ensconced in an air-conditioned, but admittedly immobile, automobile, I was baking in the unusually warm weather in the parking lot of a gas station. Actually, four gas stations, from Mallorytown to Trenton along that busy Montreal-Toronto corridor. I was counting cars. It’s the third time I’ve done this. It’s quite easy. Stand around trying not to make a roadblock of yourself — because you really don’t want to get in the way of a barely competent 2012 Honda Accord owner who, five deep in a lineup, has spotted any empty pump kitty-corner to where they’ve been stuck immobile for the last 10 minutes — and wielding a handy-dandy lap clicker. Thank you, Amazon.

As to why I would count cars, it’s simple. I was trying to understand the load on our current refuelling infrastructure on its worst day. Never mind filling-up on a lonely wintery Tuesday at 11:00 p.m.; I wanted to see what gas stations look like at their worst so that I glean if only a tiny scintilla of knowledge into what our infrastructure will need to be if we really do transition fully to battery-powered vehicles. It wasn’t pretty. There were lineups. Cursing, too. Some overly-wrought gesticulation, not just a few irate trailer-towers cut off by a quickly-interjecting Civic and, most surprising to me — ‘because I had only heard of such thing — some energetic calisthenics, including what I am pretty sure was a new world record for the most Jumping Jacks at a gas station.

As for the number or cars being fuelled, that was consistent. On the low end, stations with 10 pumps (I wasn’t counting the two full-serve stations as they were relatively unused), were putting through about 90 cars an hour. At the high-end, some, like the Ingleside ONroute, were through-putting 100 cars per hour. That works out to about six minutes per car. As rapid as that may seem, previous car-counting escapades saw that average as low as four minutes. Obviously, people are a lot more eager to leave the big city than return.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t take an engineering degree to understand that charging 100 EVs an hour at current charging speed would be a nightmare. Even a 60% charge — say from 20% to 80% SoC — at today’s roadside average charging speed of 100 kW is going to take 50 charging points per station to service 100 cars in an hour. That’s a lot, far beyond what we’re planning let alone what is even remotely available today. And a doomsday scenario for the mobility we now take for granted.

EV advocates dismiss this nightmare with two diversions. The first is that, they claim, while ICE drivers never fill up before leaving on a trip, BEV owners always leave home with a full battery. The second is that while all the people in ONroute stations are indeed between Toronto and Montreal, not all are doing The Full Monty. Thus, an EV with a full battery before leaving home wouldn’t need to stop at all.

Now, the concept that all BEVs drivers are ready to go at all times with a full battery, their lives so thoroughly planned out that they would never be caught short of charge before a trip, is not only nonsensical but also, you gotta say, kinda sad. Far worse though, is the concept that ICE owners always leave home without tanking-up. This, for anyone who knows Canadian drivers, is plainly nonsensical. At all four locations I checked, ONroute was charging a premium of 7 cents a litre over the closest city/town. With the collective Canadian angst over the price of gasoline — service stations regularly invite lineups if they discount their gas even three cents compared with the competitor — it beggars belief that many Canadians leave without filling up knowing that they will have an expensive “splash and dash” just a few kilometres down the road.

Nonetheless, Motor Mouth will discount the number of EVs seeking ions by some 40% compared with the number of cars observed looking for fossil fuels. Even then — and assuming some rapid progress in charging technology — the picture isn’t exactly rosy. For one thing, having multiple chargers working simultaneously generally degrades peak output all along the chain. The resolution of that problem — the ideal would be one transformer per charging port — is expensive and not nearly common.

Nor are better batteries a likely solution. As we see, the fastest charging cars — Porsche’s Taycan, Lotus’s new Emeya SUV and Rimac’s Nevera — are all mondo expensive. Even in a technologically-advance future, inexpensive EVs — which, if there is to be a real ZEV revolution — will be the majority of the battery-electrics on the road. This is but a guestimate, but getting to a universal, repeatable and reliable 12-minute 20% to 80% charge is going to require an average charging speed of somewhere around 250 kilowatt-hours. Don’t be fooled by DC fast chargers labelled 350-kWh and higher. That’s their peak power output under ideal circumstances. Averaging 250-kWh for multiple cars at the same charging station will be an incredible feat if it gets done. It’s probably more than double current average charging speeds.

That still — when you factor in the same three or so minutes for getting out of the car, plugging in the charger unit and futzing with credit card/app — is but four cars an hour, which means we’re going to need some 15 high-powered chargers, which, at current pricing is anything to judge by, are going to cost round about a quarter million a throw. Factor my contention that the opening day of Labour Day driving is worse than Monday and you might need as many as 24 of those high-powered chargers to keep up with the demand satisfied by an ONroute station with more than 12 pumps.

Besides the high cost of such stations, there’s also the question of their total power demand. Twenty-four high-powered DC fast chargers all pulling 250-kW — again to be able to power the requisite number of chargers — would require six-megawatts. That’s enough to power a city of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people. And again, this calculation is based on 40% fewer EVs requiring “fill-ups” than ICEs. If that proves untrue, the demand might be even more untenable.

And for those still clinging to the stupidity that Labour Day is an anomaly and therefore not worth considering, remember that we don’t build infrastructure — especially electrical infrastructure —for “average” days, but peak demand. ONroute doesn’t have 12 pumps at its roadside stations because of average demand. They’re there because on a few days — precious few really — they are needed lest all their roadside stations become the battlegrounds that all gas lineups devolve into.

And we still haven’t factored in trucks. Chargepoint just announced it is rolling out huge 1.2-megawatt chargers, necessary to make battery-powered 18-wheelers (somewhat) competitive with diesel over the long haul. Pity poor Walcott, Iowa, then, whose local truck stop — supposedly the world’s largest — has no less than 15 diesel pumps which can each refuel an 18-wheeler some four times faster than Chargepoint’s Megawatt Charging System. Do the math and it would appear that Iowa is going to be getting a new nuclear plant in the near future. The point I am making is that we seem woefully unprepared for the electrical loads, grid upgrades and charging station infrastructure if we really are serious about our 2035 deadline to go all ZEV.

EV proponents have long talked about systems that will mitigate those loads. For instance, charging in off-peak hours is promoted as reducing our average consumption. Most recently, there’s been talk of using car-to-grid capacity to suck power out of our cars when the grid can’t cope (though I can’t, for the life of me, believe that Canadian will trust utilities, of all companies, to recompense us for the energy they “steal” the juice out of our batteries).

But those all solve off-peak times, when it is in fact quite easy for everyone not to use our electricity-sucking devices (not just battery-powered cars but also other energy-heavy devices like air conditioners). What happens when, as we just did last weekend, everyone jumps in their cars at the same time to take a long road trip?

Indeed, when you go through all the possible solutions, there are only three that make even the remotest sense. We could, though it would be very expensive, up the grid’s peak power capability, build a whole bunch of new substations and outfit our service stations with enough hyper-expensive DC fast chargers to cope with the load. We could also try to “educate” people to take their holiday trips at different times to spread that load, though I struggle to remember the last time any nation all decided to do the right thing. Or, in the solution that is probably the most expedient, you could simply “encourage” — political-speak for “punish with taxes” — people to drive less.

Indeed, the easiest, most practical solution to the problem of peak charging loads — if you’re a rabid environmentalist in charge of, say, Canada’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change — is to simply have fewer cars on the road. We are only now starting to hear that the conversion to electric is but the beginning of the transformation to greener, cleaner roads, and that, yes, car ownership will eventually have to be curtailed.

In other words, when it comes to reducing our tailpipe emissions, beware politicians bearing EVs.

[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by UPSROD

Really sick of seeing this thread every time I go on the E9X site!

I'm not. I think it is a great thread. Lots of good discussion mostly.

[theEZV]

My dad (69 years old) just got a new Model 3 last week. It's the first nicer/more expensive new car he's ever bought. Seems to be enjoying it.

[BlkGS]

Originally Posted by theEZV

My dad (69 years old) just got a new Model 3 last week. It's the first nicer/more expensive new car he's ever bought. Seems to be enjoying it.

Happy for him, but man, I don't think anyone would call a Model 3 a "nicer" car, lol. They're not even that expensive, they're like, Camry money.

[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by BlkGS

Happy for him, but man, I don't think anyone would call a Model 3 a "nicer" car, lol. They're not even that expensive, they're like, Camry money.

After the rebates and "fuel savings"...

[M5Rick]

I don't get when people say I'm buying a new car that is economical and saves fuel or a new EV when the chain of thought is saving a few dollars/pounds/euros on running expenses and blindly shelling out 60-70 thousand whatever without a second thought.

[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by M5Rick

I don't get when people say I'm buying a new car that is economical and saves fuel or a new EV when the chain of thought is saving a few dollars/pounds/euros on running expenses and blindly shelling out 60-70 thousand whatever without a second thought.

I've still yet to calculate a financial comparison between same-class EV vs. ICEV where the payback is less than 80,000 miles based on US fuel prices. The delta in the battery cost represents a lot of free gasoline.

[theEZV]

Originally Posted by BlkGS

Happy for him, but man, I don't think anyone would call a Model 3 a "nicer" car, lol. They're not even that expensive, they're like, Camry money.

Haha, true. Coming from a 2012 G37x with 90k miles that my mom spent the better part of a decade beating up, it definitely feels nicer.

[RM7]

Originally Posted by M5Rick

I don't get when people say I'm buying a new car that is economical and saves fuel or a new EV when the chain of thought is saving a few dollars/pounds/euros on running expenses and blindly shelling out 60-70 thousand whatever without a second thought.

They were going to buy a new car anyway.

[M5Rick]

Originally Posted by eugenebmw

Is it just a Canada thing?? Let's sink in my American and European friends

Motor Mouth: I witnessed firsthand why we desperately need more EV chargers
Peak loads during holiday season will be the make or break of our transition to electric vehicles

What did you do this Labour Day Monday? Did you, like so many, hit the road on Canada’s busiest travel weekend and brave traffic jams that make normal rush hours look like a hike in a provincial park at midnight on New Year’s Eve? Worse yet, were you stuck in the stupidity that was the Montreal-Toronto corridor this past Monday, wondering if lounging lakeside at the cottage was worth the resultant misery?

Well, I was there too. Except that I had it worse. While you were comfortably ensconced in an air-conditioned, but admittedly immobile, automobile, I was baking in the unusually warm weather in the parking lot of a gas station. Actually, four gas stations, from Mallorytown to Trenton along that busy Montreal-Toronto corridor. I was counting cars. It’s the third time I’ve done this. It’s quite easy. Stand around trying not to make a roadblock of yourself — because you really don’t want to get in the way of a barely competent 2012 Honda Accord owner who, five deep in a lineup, has spotted any empty pump kitty-corner to where they’ve been stuck immobile for the last 10 minutes — and wielding a handy-dandy lap clicker. Thank you, Amazon.

As to why I would count cars, it’s simple. I was trying to understand the load on our current refuelling infrastructure on its worst day. Never mind filling-up on a lonely wintery Tuesday at 11:00 p.m.; I wanted to see what gas stations look like at their worst so that I glean if only a tiny scintilla of knowledge into what our infrastructure will need to be if we really do transition fully to battery-powered vehicles. It wasn’t pretty. There were lineups. Cursing, too. Some overly-wrought gesticulation, not just a few irate trailer-towers cut off by a quickly-interjecting Civic and, most surprising to me — ‘because I had only heard of such thing — some energetic calisthenics, including what I am pretty sure was a new world record for the most Jumping Jacks at a gas station.

As for the number or cars being fuelled, that was consistent. On the low end, stations with 10 pumps (I wasn’t counting the two full-serve stations as they were relatively unused), were putting through about 90 cars an hour. At the high-end, some, like the Ingleside ONroute, were through-putting 100 cars per hour. That works out to about six minutes per car. As rapid as that may seem, previous car-counting escapades saw that average as low as four minutes. Obviously, people are a lot more eager to leave the big city than return.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t take an engineering degree to understand that charging 100 EVs an hour at current charging speed would be a nightmare. Even a 60% charge — say from 20% to 80% SoC — at today’s roadside average charging speed of 100 kW is going to take 50 charging points per station to service 100 cars in an hour. That’s a lot, far beyond what we’re planning let alone what is even remotely available today. And a doomsday scenario for the mobility we now take for granted.

EV advocates dismiss this nightmare with two diversions. The first is that, they claim, while ICE drivers never fill up before leaving on a trip, BEV owners always leave home with a full battery. The second is that while all the people in ONroute stations are indeed between Toronto and Montreal, not all are doing The Full Monty. Thus, an EV with a full battery before leaving home wouldn’t need to stop at all.

Now, the concept that all BEVs drivers are ready to go at all times with a full battery, their lives so thoroughly planned out that they would never be caught short of charge before a trip, is not only nonsensical but also, you gotta say, kinda sad. Far worse though, is the concept that ICE owners always leave home without tanking-up. This, for anyone who knows Canadian drivers, is plainly nonsensical. At all four locations I checked, ONroute was charging a premium of 7 cents a litre over the closest city/town. With the collective Canadian angst over the price of gasoline — service stations regularly invite lineups if they discount their gas even three cents compared with the competitor — it beggars belief that many Canadians leave without filling up knowing that they will have an expensive “splash and dash” just a few kilometres down the road.

Nonetheless, Motor Mouth will discount the number of EVs seeking ions by some 40% compared with the number of cars observed looking for fossil fuels. Even then — and assuming some rapid progress in charging technology — the picture isn’t exactly rosy. For one thing, having multiple chargers working simultaneously generally degrades peak output all along the chain. The resolution of that problem — the ideal would be one transformer per charging port — is expensive and not nearly common.

Nor are better batteries a likely solution. As we see, the fastest charging cars — Porsche’s Taycan, Lotus’s new Emeya SUV and Rimac’s Nevera — are all mondo expensive. Even in a technologically-advance future, inexpensive EVs — which, if there is to be a real ZEV revolution — will be the majority of the battery-electrics on the road. This is but a guestimate, but getting to a universal, repeatable and reliable 12-minute 20% to 80% charge is going to require an average charging speed of somewhere around 250 kilowatt-hours. Don’t be fooled by DC fast chargers labelled 350-kWh and higher. That’s their peak power output under ideal circumstances. Averaging 250-kWh for multiple cars at the same charging station will be an incredible feat if it gets done. It’s probably more than double current average charging speeds.

That still — when you factor in the same three or so minutes for getting out of the car, plugging in the charger unit and futzing with credit card/app — is but four cars an hour, which means we’re going to need some 15 high-powered chargers, which, at current pricing is anything to judge by, are going to cost round about a quarter million a throw. Factor my contention that the opening day of Labour Day driving is worse than Monday and you might need as many as 24 of those high-powered chargers to keep up with the demand satisfied by an ONroute station with more than 12 pumps.

Besides the high cost of such stations, there’s also the question of their total power demand. Twenty-four high-powered DC fast chargers all pulling 250-kW — again to be able to power the requisite number of chargers — would require six-megawatts. That’s enough to power a city of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people. And again, this calculation is based on 40% fewer EVs requiring “fill-ups” than ICEs. If that proves untrue, the demand might be even more untenable.

And for those still clinging to the stupidity that Labour Day is an anomaly and therefore not worth considering, remember that we don’t build infrastructure — especially electrical infrastructure —for “average” days, but peak demand. ONroute doesn’t have 12 pumps at its roadside stations because of average demand. They’re there because on a few days — precious few really — they are needed lest all their roadside stations become the battlegrounds that all gas lineups devolve into.

And we still haven’t factored in trucks. Chargepoint just announced it is rolling out huge 1.2-megawatt chargers, necessary to make battery-powered 18-wheelers (somewhat) competitive with diesel over the long haul. Pity poor Walcott, Iowa, then, whose local truck stop — supposedly the world’s largest — has no less than 15 diesel pumps which can each refuel an 18-wheeler some four times faster than Chargepoint’s Megawatt Charging System. Do the math and it would appear that Iowa is going to be getting a new nuclear plant in the near future. The point I am making is that we seem woefully unprepared for the electrical loads, grid upgrades and charging station infrastructure if we really are serious about our 2035 deadline to go all ZEV.

EV proponents have long talked about systems that will mitigate those loads. For instance, charging in off-peak hours is promoted as reducing our average consumption. Most recently, there’s been talk of using car-to-grid capacity to suck power out of our cars when the grid can’t cope (though I can’t, for the life of me, believe that Canadian will trust utilities, of all companies, to recompense us for the energy they “steal” the juice out of our batteries).

But those all solve off-peak times, when it is in fact quite easy for everyone not to use our electricity-sucking devices (not just battery-powered cars but also other energy-heavy devices like air conditioners). What happens when, as we just did last weekend, everyone jumps in their cars at the same time to take a long road trip?

Indeed, when you go through all the possible solutions, there are only three that make even the remotest sense. We could, though it would be very expensive, up the grid’s peak power capability, build a whole bunch of new substations and outfit our service stations with enough hyper-expensive DC fast chargers to cope with the load. We could also try to “educate” people to take their holiday trips at different times to spread that load, though I struggle to remember the last time any nation all decided to do the right thing. Or, in the solution that is probably the most expedient, you could simply “encourage” — political-speak for “punish with taxes” — people to drive less.

Indeed, the easiest, most practical solution to the problem of peak charging loads — if you’re a rabid environmentalist in charge of, say, Canada’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change — is to simply have fewer cars on the road. We are only now starting to hear that the conversion to electric is but the beginning of the transformation to greener, cleaner roads, and that, yes, car ownership will eventually have to be curtailed.

In other words, when it comes to reducing our tailpipe emissions, beware politicians bearing EVs.

Blind faith

[eugenebmw]

Originally Posted by M5Rick

Blind faith

Worse. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb and blind

[Straykiwi]

Originally Posted by eugenebmw

Worse. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb and blind

Continuation bias. It leads to a complete lack of critical thinking, which should start with robustly questioning ones own beliefs.

I am indifferent to EVs, I do not currently own one but will in the future - as a town car it makes an awful lot of sense. But right now with the stupid retail price gouging for new EVs, the lack of ubiquity and reliability in the charging network, the rapidly and wildly fluctuating power prices (in my country fuel prices tend to change at worst once a day, not hourly like electricity does) and question marks regarding the second hand viability of used EVs the numbers simply didn't add up. I have no doubt that one day it will, but that day is not today.

[M5Rick]

MacMaster got a letter from Porsche

[gblansten]

Originally Posted by M5Rick

MacMaster got a letter from Porsche

It is refreshing to see him post a thumbnail where he doesn't look like he is in GI distress or that he caught a finger in a doorjamb.