It’s a fact: New things can be scary. Here’s an excellent video debunking some of the more common myths about electric cars.
Electric cars are easily the most disruptive trend in the auto industry in decades, so maybe it’s not surprising that the issue is surrounded with so much confusion and disinformation. In the car enthusiast community, we can see an active disconnect: While the global automakers scramble to electrify their product lines, with scores of new EV models scheduled to launch in the next few years, many car buffs continue to insist that electric vehicles will never happen. Too late. Regardless of what you think about EVs, or whether they eventually triumph in the marketplace over all the alternatives, they are happening.
In the midst of all this confusion and uncertainty, myths are bound to arise. One of the more persistent canards, especially in social media, is that electric cars are actually more harmful to the environment than conventional internal combustion (ICE) automobiles. To address that point directly, here’s Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained with a video that dissects the central issues. Three things impressed us about this video: Jason’s familiarity with the technology, his engineering-based approach, and his willingness to bend over backward in the interest of balance and objectivity. Enjoy the video.
How do electric vehicles perform in extreme cold/snow/winter and extreme heat climates?
How will electric semi trucks perform climbing hills, while fully loaded?
How will charging electric vehicles affect “the grid” which we have previously and repeatedly been warned is antiquated and overloaded, and has the potential to fail?
How will charging a personal electric vehicle affect a homeowner’s electric bill ?
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen these questions addressed in any article.
That’s a lot of questions. I can tackle a few. My 2017 Tesla S has a battery capacity of 75 kw hours. Energy cost here is around 14 cents per kw hour, slightly more than the national average. Thus it costs around $10.50 to fully charge the battery, which provides around 230 miles of range. That’s about half what a comparable gasoline car would cost. Since I charge it at home at night in off-peak hours, there is no extra load on the power grid. You can find more info at the many websites for EVs.
Errr, IF every electric car owner plugs in in off peak then the offpeak will be busier than on peak!! very basic!!
And 230 miles? Probably about right so you have a very limited range of places you can go. Max 115 miles away!
Hybrid makes some sense as it is supposedly self charging, but having driven an hybrid Camry I know why they all drive slow,,, anything above around 95kmh and you are using petrol and as Top Gear proved a decade ago more than many cars!
So an expensive Taxi Pack and once Toymota has you hooked everything rockets in price.
I feel like I know more than I did, after watching the video. Of course, I knew nothing to begin with, and I’m sure I still don’t know enough to talk about this with any degree of confidence.
We own a 2015 Toyota Camry Hybrid – I absolutely love the car. My favorite thing about it is how utterly quiet it is – you can glide around at low speed and make nearly no noise. But, if you need to take off quickly, it will jump up to speed at a surprisingly quick rate.
Thanks for posting the video.
We forget about the carbon produced generating so called clean electricity with all the concrete and hi tech generators for windmills, the carbon used in photo electric cells for solar.
Hydro is probably the cleanest,, but still huge amounts of concrete and it needs large volumes of water which many places will never have. Pumped hydro is simply pumping water up and down a hill. so loses a LOT of output simply returning the water. And still requires a fair sized dam top and bottom .
Simply pumping water in an endless closed loop is probably not viable financially
As for electric cars,,, practicality? Not really as you have a set range, usually 25% less than the manufacturer claims. So interstate travel [and more so here in Oz] is unviable. So you have a city commuter car that always needs electricity availability. And most places are aware now how much electricity is required to charge an electric car. So your urban flexibility is lost as you must return home to charge.
As for people living in hidensity,, you cannot recharge parked in a car park or on the street so the car is no good.
And ofcourse every country in the world is going green with high carbon!! See above. And we have less volume with ever increasing costs. So with half??? the cars plugging in every night where will the electricity come from? Or will we have ever increasing blackouts as demand exceeds supply. And the extra supply is going to jack prices even higher. So an ever decreasing viability and subsidised by the majority to support the minority.
Thoughts: Why wasn’t the CAFE millage for auto makers used (36 mpg? ) when making comparisons? Not the worst vehicle he could find.
Electric motors use a lot of copper. And the cables from the batteries to the controls and motor are large. Why wasn’t the cost and pollution during the extraction and processing the copper considered?
How do totally electric vehicles provide cabin heat in the winter? Electric heat? Ouch. The hybrids run the gasoline engine more to produce heat.
In electric or hybrid vehicle how do have A/C in a place like Phoenix AZ? Doesn’t running the A/C reduce the vehicles range?
The video was biased, IMHO.
There is not enough capacity in the current electric grid to support 100% electric vehicles. Maybe in the future there will be, but at what cost? By the time you figure in the construction costs of new generating plants, the costs of producing the cars and recharging stations, you could have continued using gasoline powered vehicles much cheaper and had less emissions. If cities need them for air quality, fine, but us folks that live out in the rural areas of the US don’t have problems with that. As I see it, the problem is not the vehicles we have, it’s all the trees and greenery that has been lost to the asphalt and concrete jungles of the cities. Plantlife breathes and lives off of carbon and converts it to oxygen we were taught way back in grade school science classes. Maybe these promoters never learned that basic fact?
Your strategy assumes that climate change does not exist.