Re: EVs are so impractical

> Tesla are currently selling 400 Model S electric cars per week

Yes, but that's California. Hardly representative of the real world.

Re: EVs are so impractical

So how many days a year do you do more than 100 miles - very few people answer more than 1 or 2 (I used to answer 250, because my commute was insane) - and you don't have a few hours in the middle (where the vehicle can pick up some more juice (e.g. at the office or the house of family/friends).

The "limited" range is rather nullified by the convenience of recharging when you park up for the night (yes I know not everyone has off road parking)

For the rare occasions you need longer range you might also want a larger vehicle (e.g. to take the whole family to the other end of the country for a holiday) so you can easily hire an appropriate vehicle. I've very rarely drvien a vehicle which is appropriate for the journey I'm taking - they are a compromise between the "long heavily laden" journey and a "nip to the supermarket".

The EV serves the bottom 99+% of those journeys really well, so you buy one in a form factor that serves those journeys well (and those are now covered *much* better than they were before.

Then on the couple of occasions a year when you need something outside those parameters you hire something for the day.

Re: EVs are so impractical

>> Tesla are currently selling 400 Model S electric cars per week

>Yes, but that's California. Hardly representative of the real world.

They may be based in California (as are companies like Apple) but their cars are currently selling well across the USA and there are lots in other countries with pre-orders waiting for some to be exported.

Re: EVs are so impractical

"Tesla are currently selling 400 Model S electric cars per week, despite them being as expensive as a BMW 5 or 7 series"

20,000 whole cars per year in the US market? Ford would sell way more F150s than that a week. Ford in Australia would consider 20,000 sales of a single model in a year to be an abject failure.

I don't buy that they can't make them faster - plenty of people in the US looking for work, plenty of factories in mothballs, and rivers of cash are flowing out the white house trying to get the economy going - Tesla could open a second facility in a heartbeat. The fact they haven't says a lot...

Re: EVs are so impractical

"I don't buy that they can't make them faster - plenty of people in the US looking for work, plenty of factories in mothballs, and rivers of cash are flowing out the white house trying to get the economy going - Tesla could open a second facility in a heartbeat. The fact they haven't says a lot..."

Setting up a modern auto factory is not a small task! It took 18 months to move from empty space to production at their current plant then another 6 months to ramp up to full capacity last month. If they started building a new line now I wouldn't expect to see production until the end of this year at the earliest. I suspect they will start on the new line towards the end of this year.

Re: EVs are so impractical

"So how many days a year do you do more than 100 miles"

At least 1 weekend a month, in January it was 3/4 weeks I was on hols) - holidays I'd rather not sacrifice

"you can easily hire an appropriate vehicle"

But you see I can buy an "appropriate vehicle" in the first place for probably thousands less than an electric car (depends on the car), and not have to call a hire car company anytime I want to take a spontaneous holiday.

You are right, for short commutes an electric car would be perfectly fine, but while you can still buy a car that does everything you need for thousands less electric cars wont take off in more dispersed populations like the US and Aus IMHO

Re: EVs are so impractical

"Setting up a modern auto factory is not a small task!"

So why haven't they started?

As I said there could not be a better/cheaper time to set up a new factory in the US, but they aren't doing it I assume because they don't think the sales will support it.

I wasn't suggesting they could snap their fingers and a factory appears, merely that the fact they were at capacity does not imply that they could sell dramatically larger numbers if it weren't for the factory limitation.

If that were the case they would have already started on another factory already given the 2 year time lag as you said.

Re: EVs are so impractical

Wrong metric - it's not % of journeys, it's % of calendar days.

For both hire and purchase you amortise the sunk costs over time, not journeys.

The only place you pay a hire car by distance is a taxi - except the meter still ticks if you're stationary, so not even then.

Personally, I need the long range for around 10 days a year, except I still need a vehicle at the other end which cranks it up to ~40 days. That's a lot of hire car charges!

Then there's the cost of the EV itself, which even with subsidy is higher than a new mid-sized people carrier - and unlike the people carrier the EV will be worth diddly-squat when I get rid of it, just like my laptop is worth nothing after a few years.

You what?

Never mind that induction charging is hopelessly inefficient, how much do you think it would cost to install that rail?

For an order-of-magnitude estimate, look up how much it costs per mile to electrify a section of the railway network. It's a lot more than that so add another zero, because you're digging up a road rather than stringing wires between poles.

Re: Distance needn't be a problem

Each battery pack would increase the overall weight of the vehicle. Isn't there a power to weight ratio that needs to be maintained for EV performance? Otherwise, an EV with 3 or 4 battery packs wouldn't have any more range than a lighter single-battery EV.