Another piece of FUD. I hear this one quite often, both in editorials and from consumers unfamiliar with the EV lifestyle. Once again, this is one of those false equivalences caused by trying to equate driving an EV and driving a gasoline-powered vehicle. This is a way of thinking that is only altered by actually living the EV lifestyle. That being said, I’m going to try to alter your perceptions a bit with logic and (very little) math. Wish me luck…
First, let’s understand exactly what a driving range of 500 miles looks like:
I understand that not all of you are blessed with living in Texas (or the western U.S.), where distances between cities and sizes of states are on a different scale, so the Texas map may mean little to you, so here’s another example:
Admittedly, roads are not straight lines, but this may begin to illustrate my point.
When people say they need 500 miles of range before considering a plug-in vehicle, I usually ask questions like:
- “How many miles do you drive a year?”
- “How many miles do you commute per day, round trip?”
- “How often do you take drives over 100 miles?”
The first two questions are usually key to disproving this notion of required range. Here’s an example:
“How many miles do you drive a year?” Around 12,000.
“How many miles do you commute per day, round trip?” 29 miles.
Let’s be conservative about this. There are 52 weeks in a year, but let’s take out 2 weeks for vacation, where we may not drive our car at all. With 50 weeks per year and 5 workdays per week, that’s 250 commutes per year (50 X 5). That’s 7,250 miles per year, just commuting. (250 commutes X 29 miles per commute, round trip) Any other errands (driving to lunch, grocery shopping on the way home, etc) are not included in this total.
That leaves 4,750 miles to be driven on weekends (12,000 per year – 7,250 commute miles) and for weekday non-commute driving. Again, using only 50 weekends per year, that means we could drive an average of 95 miles per weekend (4,750 weekend miles ÷ 50 weekends), if we have zero non-commute driving, during the work week. In other words, if we only used our car for commuting and once-a-month long road trips, those monthly road trips would be 396 miles long (4,750 weekend miles ÷ 12 months per year). Assuming we are actually driving to somewhere and staying for at least a few hours (not just going for a drive and ending up at home again) we would be driving 198 miles each way. This is within the average range of many electric vehicles, currently available (pun intended). With DC fast charging, the battery would be full again in just 2 to 3 hours, while we visited our destination/friends.
Pretty quickly, it becomes obvious that most of us really don’t drive long distances very often at all. So, should we start considering plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles?
My family drives three plug-in hybrids and has no exclusively gasoline-powered vehicles. We’re doing just fine, thank you.
In my case, I regularly have to drive to Austin (189 miles, one way), for my work with TxETRA. My 80 year-old mom lives in Houston (263 miles, one way). Due to these circumstances, I opted to stay in the hybrid world, when I leased my last vehicle. I leased a 2018 Chevy Volt, which has 53 miles of electric range and a total range (gasoline & electric) of 440 miles. If I arrive in Austin and get a call that my mom needs me in Houston, I don’t have to stop to charge. I just fill the gas tank and go. However, the vast majority of my driving, is completely electric. I have a 32 mile daily commute, round trip. My Volt’s 53 mile range easily handles my daily requirements. I only have to run on gasoline, when I go on longer trips outside the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex. When I’m running on gasoline, I am getting around 43 MPG. When I’m running on electricity, it’s about the dollar equivalent of 100 MPG. Either way, it’s a lot better than the average car, in the U.S., getting 24.7 MPG! I just went on a week-long vacation, in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, which was a 1,700+ mile trip, in my Volt. In my opinion, with the state of today’s charging infrastructure, plug-in hybrids with at least 45 miles of range per charge, are the optimal vehicle. Of course, DC fast-charging infrastructure is being built out quickly and I fully expect my next vehicle to be 100% electric.
There’s one other thing to think about, when arguing that EVs need to have a 500 mile range. Again, you’ll have to stop thinking like a gasoline vehicle driver. To increase the range of a gasoline-powered vehicle, you just have to increase the size of the gas tank. It’s just a shell, so the cost of this component change isn’t very costly. You’re just limited by how much room the vehicle has, in which the gas tank can expand. Why not have a gasoline-powered car with 2,500 miles of range? Then we could drive across country without having to stop to fill up! If our theoretical vehicle got 25 MPG, we’d only need a 100 gallon gas tank. Of course, the gasoline required to fill that tank would weigh 600 pounds, affecting mileage and perhaps forcing us to leave some family members behind, due to vehicle weight limitations.
You can see this would not be a workable solution to extend the range of a gasoline-powered vehicle. The same is true for an EV.
An EV with 250 miles of range will usually have a 60 kWh battery pack, weighing about 1,000 pounds (much more heavy than a full, 100 gallon gas tank). Unlike a gas tank, full or almost empty, an EV’s “tank” always weights about the same. Doubling the range would, with today’s battery technology, double the weight, affecting your mileage every single day you drive, not just on long road trips. The battery pack in an EV costs over $100 per kWh of storage capacity (although this cost is falling as economies of scale and new technologies become available). Using the $100/kWh price, a 250 mile range battery would cost $6,000 (much more expensive than a gas tank) and a 500 mile battery would cost $12,000. Yes, you can wait for prices to fall, new technologies to be invented, etc, but you’ll be missing out on all the fuels savings and all the fun. (more on that another time…)
Once the public has a better understanding of this, I expect there to actually be demand for EVs with less range, if they can be had at a lower price. If we took the 250 mile range battery discussed and halved its range to 125 miles, the cost of the EV could be reduced over $3,000 dollars, making it more affordable to younger, less affluent buyers. This reduced range EV would still be perfect for those commuting up to 80 to 100 miles daily, round trip!
But you don’t have to make a total commitment to make the move to electric! According to statista.com, the average U.S. family owns 2 light-duty vehicles (i.e. not 3/4 ton or 1 ton pickups, which are quite common in Texas). Based on that statistic, even an EV with much less than a 250 mile range, could replace one of your vehicles, for daily commuting/errands and you’d still have a backup gasoline vehicle for long trips.
I will warn you though, once you start living the EV lifestyle, and really understand that world, you’re very likely to switch exclusively to plug-in vehicles, although one of those might be a hybrid.
In the Volt world, we called the acquisition of any Volt, after your first one, “ReVolting.” It is very, very common.
