Is electric charging infrastructure feasible?

    As an example, we are traveling from Oregon to Montana, approximately 1000 miles, a trip which takes us approximately 16 hours driving time currently, a day and a half when figuring in restaurant, motel and pee stops. Now, let's use the numbers from the Chevy Bolt, basically 200 mile range, 2 hour recharging time, and .5 hours looking for the charging station, boiling down to roughly 6.5 hours per 200 miles conservatively. Take that 1000 miles and divide it by 200 mile range and that equals 5 legs. Now multiply those five legs by 6.5 hours and we get 32.5 hours driving time. When again adding in motel, restaurant, and pee stops we essentially went from a day and a half trip to now taking over three days. That simply is not practical.


    Another example, with our Jetta it takes approximately a gallon of fuel to drive me the 60 miles per day to and from work. Let's just round that to $3.00 per day. Figuring a given average cost of $0.08 per mile for the Bolt, this calculates out to approximately $4.80 per day.


    Shall we consider the purchase price of a new electric vehicle to being approximately double of a gasoline equivalent, or how about a towing vehicle? Naw, let's save that for a future discussion.


    So, unless one plans on only using an electric car for short trips zipping about town, it just does not make any economical sense, at least for us?


    Bill

    It's logical to buy the right equipment for the mission. As you've laid out, the Bolt is the wrong vehicle for consistent trips from Oregon to Montana. Lets say you have heavy cargo normally for that trip and I now compare the Jetta to a cargo van which makes it in one trip and the Jetta needs two. Electrics fit local missions better and are more logical in multi car households. Here's some stats below that show what real missions are for most drivers. Again this is NOT a political issue, nor is it logical to point out the "lack" of infrastructure in one thread and then point out the empty charging stations in another. I had owned a 2nd gen Volt for 4 years and almost never charged it anywhere but home. It got 65 miles on electric which covered better than 98% of my driving and would switch over to gas and get 43 mpg. No problem going from Oregon to Montana with a Volt. Just a matter of picking the right vehicles for your needs.


    "Using data obtained from the Department of Transport’s 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), Garrett Fitzgerald and Rob van Haaren analyzed the travel data of survey participants, concluding that 95 percent of the 748,918 recorded single-trip journeys by car were under 30 miles.

    More astonishingly, around 98 percent of all single-trip journeys were under 50 miles in length, with trips over 70 miles in length accounting for just one percent of all single-trip journeys.

    The average single-trip distance? Just 5.95 miles. And while rural respondents naturally traveled further on average than their urban counterparts, 95 percent of all rural-based trips were still under 50 miles."

    Have to agree with ^^Flybuddy, *most* trips would be perfectly feasible with an electric car you charge at home. Its the last 5-10% that get you.

    1. Long trips can become problematic.

    2. Batteries are large & heavy making hauling capacity a problem.

    3. Most families would be hard pressed to afford an extra vehicle for special duty.


    I drive an SUV when I'm not driving the Slingshot. I NEED an AWD SUV about 20-30 days a year. But when I DO need it, no other vehicle will do. In some cases (about 5-6 days a year) no other vehicle will get me down off the mountain to civilization. So... we have an SUV.


    The Slingshot is my "higher mileage" vehicle (30+ mpg). The SUV gets 24.5 mpg consistently, so this isn't a huge gain. For much of my life in California, an EV would have been a practical choice, they were just too darn expensive at the time.

    The smarter you get, the funnier I am.