Electric vehicles are currently best for stuff closer to home, with a PHEV or regular gas vehicle for longer distances. Hopefully that changes soon, with more manufactures using fast chargers or doing like Nio does with the ES8 battery swap (5 minutes).
I’ve always thought battery swap would be the best solution to long charging times. If it could be done at the cell level and standardized, we could have a Texaco station with a battery lane. But it’s going to take a decade or more for full standardization if we ever get it. For scale: remember even the Betamax lasted 10 years.
Standardization would be best, but Nio appears to be able to deal with their own packs for the time being - and it takes about 5 minutes to drop out the old pack for a new one.
Couple of common misconceptions about electric vehicles here.
Firstly, the Tesla model S can charge much faster than you listed. What you listed was what's called L2 charging in the EV world. It's slower than Tesla's Super charger that can charge 200miles in 15min. Nissan has a similar technology with ChaDeMo. I'm not going to argue that it's equivalent to filling up with gas however my brother-in-law who frequently travels between western states here for work owns a model 3 with 300+miles range and has never been stranded even when going into the boonies. EV chargers are getting much more popular and tend to be at food places etc. so, what he does is just plan his trips in advance and takes breaks every 200-300 miles or so to eat/bathroom breaks etc. which really isn't as inconvenient as it seems.
So my point is the technology is here to charge these much faster. I'm not sure if Ford is going to have any sort of fast charging tech for the F-150 but it exists.
Second is the battery life. Usually what that 10years 100,000 miles means is 80% of its originally capacity. Not that the car/truck is going to be useless in 10 years. Depending on the cooling technology and battery chemistry and how aggressively and often they are charged they could last much longer. Estimates on water cooled batteries with current technology have them lasting 150,000 to 200,000 miles with Tesla shooting for a million mile battery in the coming years.
I'm not going to argue that electric is ready to replace all of our cars yet but I think we are very close and the F-150 is a really exciting step in the right direction and shows that with the right charging and battery tech (which again is pretty much here already even if Ford chose not to use it) EVs can have superior specs to the Gas equivalents not to mention how much cheaper they are to drive with less brake maintenance (they use engine breaking to generate power), no oil changes, and much cheaper than gas to drive.
Good article overall just some clarifying points I feel are important.
Thanks for the clarification on the battery charging.
My point about a 10-year-old car was more to the point that the it might not make sense to make a big repair investment due to the value of the depreciated vehicle.
I’m still learning about EVs so I appreciate the information.
I did my EV research a few years ago. I settled on a Kia Niro PHEV. I get about 25-30 miles of battery per trip to work, which is within 6 or 7 miles of my round trip. Charging on my home L2 charger takes a few hours. I wouldn’t quite recommend a full BEV for a one car family yet. But we (America) are getting close in infrastructure.
My next car might be another Kia...I am very interested in the new EV6. It has many of the features of the F150 Lightning. I think EVs are growing up beyond the Tesla novelty stage. I might even do a post titled “Beyond Tesla.”
Yeah, I agree that they aren't quite there to be your only car. That being said I think mass adoption is getting very close and I think for very good reasons. In many ways EVs are just a more simple and superior technology to traditional ICE technology and the downsides are getting fewer and fewer as battery capacity, price and charging technology get better. There is just so much less to go wrong with them and they are very fun to drive (even the little ones).
Yeah, it's hard to calculate the long term cost of ownership considering how new these are. That being said I'm going to bet it's going to be lower and the reason why is how much more simple an electric car is. It's basically just a battery connected to electric motors. You don't have fuel pumps, belts, injectors, transmissions etc. that might break or need to be replaced with normal wear and tear over the years. They also don't require things like oil changes. Also the battery replacements will continue to get cheaper as they make more of them. Nissan's batteries started at 15,000 and are now closer to 5,000 now in only about 5 years. Also power is much more stable than gas price wise and last I heard EVs when compared to gas in an Apples to Apples way get about 100-150MPG equivalent. My Nissan Leaf that we drive around town all day costs me about $10/month of power. So, the math needs to include all those factors.
I feel like we are in the early model T stage of EVs moving quickly into the mass adoption stage. People are seeing them around, but they still don't really understand what they are and are still considered a luxury item and an oddity.
Again, good article and I hope I'm not coming across as too arrogant of the subject. I've just owned an electric for the past 4 years now and have learned a lot during that time. (and probably still have some misunderstandings myself)
Electric vehicles are currently best for stuff closer to home, with a PHEV or regular gas vehicle for longer distances. Hopefully that changes soon, with more manufactures using fast chargers or doing like Nio does with the ES8 battery swap (5 minutes).
I’ve always thought battery swap would be the best solution to long charging times. If it could be done at the cell level and standardized, we could have a Texaco station with a battery lane. But it’s going to take a decade or more for full standardization if we ever get it. For scale: remember even the Betamax lasted 10 years.
Standardization would be best, but Nio appears to be able to deal with their own packs for the time being - and it takes about 5 minutes to drop out the old pack for a new one.
Couple of common misconceptions about electric vehicles here.
Firstly, the Tesla model S can charge much faster than you listed. What you listed was what's called L2 charging in the EV world. It's slower than Tesla's Super charger that can charge 200miles in 15min. Nissan has a similar technology with ChaDeMo. I'm not going to argue that it's equivalent to filling up with gas however my brother-in-law who frequently travels between western states here for work owns a model 3 with 300+miles range and has never been stranded even when going into the boonies. EV chargers are getting much more popular and tend to be at food places etc. so, what he does is just plan his trips in advance and takes breaks every 200-300 miles or so to eat/bathroom breaks etc. which really isn't as inconvenient as it seems.
So my point is the technology is here to charge these much faster. I'm not sure if Ford is going to have any sort of fast charging tech for the F-150 but it exists.
Second is the battery life. Usually what that 10years 100,000 miles means is 80% of its originally capacity. Not that the car/truck is going to be useless in 10 years. Depending on the cooling technology and battery chemistry and how aggressively and often they are charged they could last much longer. Estimates on water cooled batteries with current technology have them lasting 150,000 to 200,000 miles with Tesla shooting for a million mile battery in the coming years.
I'm not going to argue that electric is ready to replace all of our cars yet but I think we are very close and the F-150 is a really exciting step in the right direction and shows that with the right charging and battery tech (which again is pretty much here already even if Ford chose not to use it) EVs can have superior specs to the Gas equivalents not to mention how much cheaper they are to drive with less brake maintenance (they use engine breaking to generate power), no oil changes, and much cheaper than gas to drive.
Good article overall just some clarifying points I feel are important.
Thanks for the clarification on the battery charging.
My point about a 10-year-old car was more to the point that the it might not make sense to make a big repair investment due to the value of the depreciated vehicle.
I’m still learning about EVs so I appreciate the information.
I did my EV research a few years ago. I settled on a Kia Niro PHEV. I get about 25-30 miles of battery per trip to work, which is within 6 or 7 miles of my round trip. Charging on my home L2 charger takes a few hours. I wouldn’t quite recommend a full BEV for a one car family yet. But we (America) are getting close in infrastructure.
My next car might be another Kia...I am very interested in the new EV6. It has many of the features of the F150 Lightning. I think EVs are growing up beyond the Tesla novelty stage. I might even do a post titled “Beyond Tesla.”
Yeah, I agree that they aren't quite there to be your only car. That being said I think mass adoption is getting very close and I think for very good reasons. In many ways EVs are just a more simple and superior technology to traditional ICE technology and the downsides are getting fewer and fewer as battery capacity, price and charging technology get better. There is just so much less to go wrong with them and they are very fun to drive (even the little ones).
Yeah, it's hard to calculate the long term cost of ownership considering how new these are. That being said I'm going to bet it's going to be lower and the reason why is how much more simple an electric car is. It's basically just a battery connected to electric motors. You don't have fuel pumps, belts, injectors, transmissions etc. that might break or need to be replaced with normal wear and tear over the years. They also don't require things like oil changes. Also the battery replacements will continue to get cheaper as they make more of them. Nissan's batteries started at 15,000 and are now closer to 5,000 now in only about 5 years. Also power is much more stable than gas price wise and last I heard EVs when compared to gas in an Apples to Apples way get about 100-150MPG equivalent. My Nissan Leaf that we drive around town all day costs me about $10/month of power. So, the math needs to include all those factors.
I feel like we are in the early model T stage of EVs moving quickly into the mass adoption stage. People are seeing them around, but they still don't really understand what they are and are still considered a luxury item and an oddity.
Again, good article and I hope I'm not coming across as too arrogant of the subject. I've just owned an electric for the past 4 years now and have learned a lot during that time. (and probably still have some misunderstandings myself)
"It should be, but will it?"
Of course not.