I bought a used 2013 Fiat 500e last year for $8k. It's perfect for my wife's commute (50mi roundtrip; comes home with 20% remaining charge). We plug it into household 120v overnight. It drives like a zippy little gocart.
It wouldn't be ideal for a one-car family, but as a commuter it's better and cheaper.
My own insecurities, but 20% remaining daily would definitely have me on a bit of an edge. Is it a smoothly linear battery consumption, or is it possible to drop from 16% to 4%, seemingly at random?
Using an overly simplistic 80% used for 50 files would imply .63 miles per battery percentage. Meaning she only has slack of 12.5 miles to empty the tank. Which is less concerning when you can rely on ubiquitous gas stations.
It's extremely linear, modulo speed. It is possible to project your arrival state of charge within 1-2% even for a destination two hours away across significant topography.
On flat land. Throw in hills and the number of projected range miles used by every real mile goes up very quickly.
I don't remember the specific numbers anymore, but we had two Fiat 500e cars and commuting over a mountain drained a lot of projected miles even though the climb was just a few miles.
And weather. My colleague has a Leaf, his range is cut by a 30-40% in winter, and he is saving on the heating too to save range, so it is double uncomfortable.
The Leaf is somewhat famous for having poor battery management; it's one reason we avoided them. I don't think a used Leaf could handle a 50mi roundtrip commute, especially with a 10yo battery.
The Fiat does have a range penalty for cold weather (it occasionally gets below freezing in the part of California I live in) and running the heater (one way; usually it's warm enough by the trip home). My wife still gets home with > 10%.
Keep in mind this is a 10yo car with an 80mi range; newer cars have bigger batteries.
> Commutes are extremely predictable, it's the same every day.
Tell that to my colleague, who due to an accident near a major junction, took over an hour to travel a key couple of miles on his commute home from work yesterday.
Some journeys are "predictably unpredictable" during rush hour.
Well, the good news about an EV is that if you're creeping along at barely any speed, the consumption is going to be way lower than a comparable gas car. Basically all you're using is AC/heat. A gas car comparably is much less efficient while idling.
I went back to look for my notes on this and this is what I experienced: The Fiat would use up about 30-40 miles of indicated range to go uphill less than 10 miles. But it would only regenerate 2-3 miles (of indicated range) on the downhill side.
EV batteries are very reliable at showing state of charge. Even if it says it has 1%, you can rely on having that whole 1% left.
In a cellphone you have just one cell, and the phone turned on can be pulling near its maximum power draw, so it's unstable and unpredictable.
In a BEV you have thousands of cells, so differences between individual cells average out, and you don't draw peak power unless you're racing (and the car is smart enough to not let you smoke tires at 1% battery).
You never let your ICE car get below a quarter tank? This is even easier to deal with than the ICE scenario where you find yourself low and still have to get yourself to the gas station. OP finds themselves low as they pull into their driveway/filling station.
A quarter tank of fuel leaves me with >80 miles of range remaining. That enables nearly any impromptu trip I am likely to engage, along with the ability to refill basically anywhere. Rolling the dice with ~13 miles available on a daily basis would make me uneasy. What if there is an accident that re-routes traffic? Some kind of hazard that has me stuck for hours? What if I want to go to the mall after work?
I want EVs to work, and my next car is quite likely to be one, but limited locations for quick re-fueling are a real concern of mine.
2) From a time when batteries were much worse than today
3) With low original range
4) Not including the extra 10-20 miles or so that most car makers add to the "0" point, similar to how a gas tank isn't quite empty when the display says it is.
I'm guessing OP bought it for relatively cheap and is saving $20-$30 a day running it like that. That's worth the taxi / tow / calling your spouse, when you get stuck twice a year.
> you can stop at a charger and top-up. It's a small battery, it doesn't take long
the problem is scaling.
gas takes on average less than a minute per car to top up the tank (gas pump emits ~0.5 liters per second, my car tank capacity is less than 30 liters), if a battery charge requires say 15 minutes (I actually don't know the real number, but I have a feeling that it's usually more than that) that's 15 times longer waiting times and 15 times less capacity per station.
We don't use the Fiat for road trips, but we often caravan with friends with Teslas. Every couple hours they stop at a supercharger station for 15 minutes. It's really not that bad; we stop as often just to keep our kiddo sane. The stations usually have interesting services next door.
Supercharger stations usually have dozens of spots; gas stations typically have maybe ten? An EV station just needs one parking spot per car, so they are much more space efficient than gas stations. The only real constraint is electrical infrastructure.
BTW it averages much more than 1m per car for fueling. Person gets out of the car, fishes around in their purse for the credit card, fiddles with the cryptic instructions on the pump, walks into store to piss and buy junk food... if you've had to wait at a busy station, you'd be acutely aware of just how long fueling actually takes. Humans are slow.
Most people in cities will be charging at home though, the big supercharging stations will be along the highways where people are driving for hours. And with how simple car chargers are, they can just be a part of supermarket parking lots, etc.
> Most people in cities will be charging at home though
That's exactly where the US and the rest of the World diverge.
In most of the rest of the World people in cities are precisely those who would not be charging at home, because it would be impossible.
Besides, my car is parked 5 minutes walking away from where my house is.
And I've been extremely lucky to find a parking spot so close.
If what you meant is that the cars will be charging at night while they are parked on the streets, think again.
On street chargers here won't be a common thing for the next 20 years, at least.
Not to say that it's impossible, but it's hardly a worthy switch, from the POV of users.
A much better solution would be drastically reducing the dependency from cars, instead of electrifying them and marketing them as the next cool thing, so that a lot more cars will be clogging and occupying a lot of parking space on our perfectly cyclable and perfectly walkable pavements and roads.
Once EVs are more common, it will make more sense for parking lot operators to offer charging services for more income.
You say that it will take over 20 years to roll out on-street charging, but somehow reducing the dependency on cars can be done quicker or easier?
I live in Japan, which is often touted as a very public transit-friendly society, but I have 2 kids and could not live without a car. Especially in the summer with 36C+ temperatures, or during typhoon season. Believing that we can have a future with zero cars seems very unrealistic.
Yep. I had range anxiety far, far more often with my old petrol car than I have with my new electric.
I've set my charge threshold to 70% now - so that's what I start with every single day -representing about 400km.
I'd have over 400km of range only with a relatively freshly filled car before. And from there it's easy enough to put off refiling until you absolutely HAVE to have more fuel.
The key point is "we plug it into household overnight". So basically impossible for anyone living in the apartments (most of the Europe at minimum). At least in the next decade, looking at electrification rates.
No. I own a car and I live in the apartment. Car is parked on the underground parking or can be parked around the building on the street spots. None of those are wired for charging and it would be incredibly expensive to do it now (I've also seen several new building in process of being build, just this winter, and there were no charging stations in the parkings too).
So my closest charging option is a station 25 minutes away from me (on bus). And that station has 10 posts, while in the surrounding area live maybe 50000 people, or so. Not very time friendly. Also because of the charging time it means that there is even no point to leave car at the station and take a bus home, because by the time I will get there I would need to go back immediately (25+25 minutes=50 min, and charging is about an hour or two).
Also price. People charging at home use a cheap electricity, while station charges really high prices. In the EU city I'm right now, the difference is x4.5 times. So while me and a rich guy in a private house are paying the same price for the petrol now, tomorrow when we both have EVs I will be literally subsidizing him indirectly, by forced to use much more expensive public charging.
I really want to own EV since early Tesla years, and often check news about the progress in this industry, but really don't see how can I do it.
It wouldn't be ideal for a one-car family, but as a commuter it's better and cheaper.