On Aug 29, 2014, at 10:27 AM, EVDL Administrator via EV <[email protected]> wrote:
> IIRC, the average person thinks that he needs about 150 miles of EV range. > He doesn't really, but that's his perception. That depends on your definition of, "need." Sure, 90% of trips are under 150 miles -- but just think of everywhere you might want to go and everything you might want to do that's 80 miles away. Especially on the West Coast, and most especially in those "flyover" states, an awful lot of stuff fits in that 80- or even 100-mile radius. The usual suggestion is to rent or use some other means of travel for those trips -- or even to cast aspersions on the character of the person for wanting to be so wasteful as to travel in the first place. In reality, that takes those day trips from something you might do on the spur of the moment after breakfast on a Saturday morning to something that requires extra planning, extra expense, extra hassle...and all that adds up. Now, is the extra cost one pays for a gasoline vehicle really worth the convenience of that type of freedom? Clearly, for so many people, the answer is a resounding, "YES!" BEVs make awesome commuter cars, but they're not going to be replacements for gasoline cars until you can put 500 miles a day on one in arbitrary directions with no more concern for getting stranded than you might have for running out of gas. As an example...it's half past noon here in Tempe as I type. I could, if I wanted, hop in the car right now and drive up to Flagstaff, eat an early dinner, then drive around until I found a motel with vacancy, spend the night there, and be at the Grand Canyon before sunrise tomorrow morning with the camera already set up on the tripod. And maybe I'd decide on a whim to spend Sunday at Monument Valley? That's not remotely possible even with an 85 kWh Tesla -- but it's not even something to think twice about with my '68 VW Westfalia. For many, even if they don't <i>actually</i> do that sort of thing, they're not going to consider an EV (at least as a primary car) until it offers that as a possibility. And that's the great thing about the Volt: it does both. For most people, it's basically a pure BEV -- but they can still hop in it on a Friday afternoon, spend the evening and night in Flagstaff and the rest of the weekend at the Grand Canyon, and be back home Sunday evening and still drive electrically to work Monday morning. Do BEVs represent the long-range future of vehicles? No doubt. But it's even more certain that PHEVs represent the immediate future of EVs -- especially considering how many non-plugin hybrids are already on the road and how relatively straightforward it is to retrofit them for at least enough plugin electric range to make it to the grocery store and back. For new models, manufacturers just have to start adding plugs...and imagine how much gas we'd save even if only the first five miles of every commute was all electric _and_ what that would do to public perception of EVs. Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140829/894eb228/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
