this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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I suppose that makes me an idiot?
We go out of town every few months for a weekend, and when we go somewhere that doesn't have train service, I rent a car to make the trip. It's around $100 (not including fuel) for the two days depending on which model they have at the time. Even if we did this every month, it's a bit silly to suggest that it's cheaper to have bought a vehicle with double the range for these infrequent occurrences of long distance travel. Especially so considering the largest cost of manufacturing an electric vehicle by a hefty margin is the battery pack.
From this list of the 19 vehicles with over 450km range, 10 of them are trucks or SUVs so we can ignore them from this discussion. Of the 9 remaining, only 4 of them cost $60k CAD or below:
This year's Nissan Leaf can go 240km, at $28k. At your minimum, you're looking to spend double the money to get a car that can go double the range. For the extra $28k spent on an Ioniq 6 or Model 3 over the Leaf, you could rent a car for the weekend getaway every single month for the next two decades.
Some years ago, I wanted to know if an electric car would fit my lifestyle. I drove a gasoline sedan at the time. I decided to refuel my car at the end of every day, and take notes on the distance I had driven and where the needle was on the gas gauge. I did this for two months in the summer, when I knew I did most of my driving. The data I collected about my own habits showed me I didn't really drive a lot most days. There were only a handful of times I went over 100km in a day. The gas needle rarely dipped below three quarters full, and never below half.
There's about 12,000 gas stations in Canada, and nearly 9,000 charging stations - up 30% last year. If you're able to plug in for fifteen minutes or so at a destination you're already stopping at, that really helps with the longer distance issue. It's only getting easier to have a low range car as the years go by.
Regarding charging times
I wouldn't say batteries charge slower because of their smaller capacity. The lower charging speed is probably a cost saving measure which makes it incompatible with the fastest charging stations around. The Nissan Leaf will gain 190km of range in 40 minutes, or 5km per minute. Tesla's can get 280km in 15 minutes, or 18km per minute. That's about a 4x difference, but it costs so much more to get there.
The Leaf has a capacity that per kilowatt provides 6km of range. The Model 3 gets 7km per kilowatt. Is one extra kilometre per kilowatt worth buying the equivalent of two Nissan Leafs? Not to me it isn't.
In my view, driving out of town every other week is a poor argument for buying a vehicle with twice the range than it needs the other 339 days of the year.
Absolutely not. All the cars you list have decent to excellent range.
The argument was primarily used early on in marketing to try to sell cars that were basically only fit as city cars. Cars with LESS than 100km range.
Obviously they didn't sell well, and this was tried for years until Tesla came out with the model S.
Then the competition scrambled, and made semi real cars, but still with less than 200km range. For instance Nissan Leaf and Renault Fluence, Even BMW came out with an i3 model as recently as 2020 that had below 200km range, despite being quite expensive!
Today most even cheap EV cars have better than 200km range, and that may be more relevant, but the batteries have gotten cheaper, so I'm not sure it makes sense to make cars with below 300 km range anymore.
With Your Ioniq 6 the small version has 55 Kwh battery, which AFAIK is the lowest on your list with about 400km range. The models with the bigger77 kWh have about 600 km range. More than enough and would be absolutely fantastic for me.
The 400km is just short of what I want, which can usually be done with about 60 kWh battery.
AFAIK all the cars you list also have decent fast charging, something small battery cars like Stelantis have been behind on too. So if the battery isn't big enough for your trip, you are likely to spend way more time charging, than just the difference in battery size.
Despite there is truth in what you write, we see the FIAT 500 which is probably about the cheapest EV in Denmark currently, it doesn't sell probably because of its sub 300km range. The same is true for every other Stelantis EV that should be pretty popular if you look at how the brands have usually sold here.
I wouldn't call a single car you list short range, and even the shortest range on your list as far as I can tell, exceeds your daily needs by a factor 4.
Basically all your listed cars would be good enough. I could probably live with 400km instead of 450km if it was a good deal.
Obviously other people have other use cases, and maybe 300km is good enough for most, once they get used to it. It could even be less, if/when charging becomes as fast and easy as filling gas (gasoline).
So which of the Ioniq 6 was it? 53 or 77 kWh?
Edit PS:
Another reason for longer range than needed for daily use, is that on Motorway (highway with 130 km/h speedlimit) the range is shorter by as much as 30%, and in Winther it's also shorter by about as much. So in Winter on Motorway you risk having only half the rated range. That would require 3 charges for my longest monthly trip of about 500km. And compared to our ICE car, it would take more than an hour extra to make the drive, because your have to drive slower to not use too much battery, and you need to stop about 3 times 15 minutes for charging.