Let’s take a look at owning a plug-in electric car. The first thing that comes to mind is your freedom from the gas pump. You never have to care about the price of gasoline or diesel again! As the owner of a full size 4WD pickup truck with a very large V8 engine, I can see where that would have a lot of appeal. So how much would a plug in electric actually help this situation?
Standard equipment for the plug-ins currently available includes a cable which you plug in to standard house current. If you’ve depleted your battery, you are looking at as much as 20 hours to recharge it. This would be a situation where you’ve run it down somewhere to the point that it could not be driven and you’ve had it towed home. Let’s assume you didn’t do that, and the car made it into your garage. To be fair, we’ll say that it is discharged to the point that it takes 16 hours to charge back up. To put that in perspective, if you’ve arrived home at 6 p.m. and plugged in your charger, the battery won’t be fully charged until 10 a.m. the next morning. If you have to be at work at 7, that could be a problem. I suppose you could unplug it and drive on a partial charge, but I would imagine that the owner’s manuals do not recommend that practice. I haven’t read any of them, but that’s a pretty standard recommendation on any battery powered device.
There is a way around the 20 hour wait however. For an additional $700 to $1200, plus the cost of installation, you can have a Level 2 charger installed in your house. Commonly referred to as “charging docks”, these chargers require a dedicated 240 volt 30 amp circuit to operate. In most places, installation will require the services of a licensed electrician. Be sure to check any local codes and ordinances before you buy one of these. If you live in an older home or in a rural area, you may need to upgrade your electrical panel to install one of these devices. This will pump up the cost considerably. Once installed however, this charger will top off your electric “tank” in about 8 hours.
Ok, you’ve laid down $30,000 for the car, another $1200 for a charger and $1200 more to have it installed so you’re ready to start saving all that gas money right? Well, let’s talk about my truck for a minute. I spend about $40 a week for gas for it, more or less depending on if we do much driving on weekends. Through the summer, it’s considerably less, as my wife is out of school and I work at home. If we use $40 per week for an example, the costs associated with the charger bought gas for me for over a year at current prices. For people that already have small cars and spend say, $12 a week for gas, that’s 4 years of fuel, just in the charger! But you’re saving gas money, remember?
I mentioned earlier that you were free from the gas pump with one of these. True enough, but if it’s your only means of transportation, you’re on a pretty short leash with one of them. Published specifications say you can get up to 100 miles per charge. That specification assumes you are driving in perfect weather on flat terrain at 35 mph. I would bet that around where I live, you’d see that drop off sharply. There is very little flat terrain in this part of Arkansas, and if you live around here or have watched the news lately you’ve seen that the weather is far from perfect. We commonly range from temperatures in the teens in winter to triple digit heat in summer. My wife has a 34 mile round trip commute to work, and I dare say that factoring in the distance, terrain and weather, it would tax the abilities of most of the electrics out there to make that trip every day. She certainly couldn’t make it two days in a row without a recharge. Add trips to the market, pharmacy and all the other things you have to do to make life livable and you are now out of range. You see, they don’t advertise that you can’t get that 100 miles per charge if you have to spend time on a freeway at 70 mph. Highway speeds sap your battery very quickly. These things are in-town, residential speed commuter cars.
One of the things you see in any argument online about owning these things is what happens when there’s a disaster that knocks the power out. Neither side of the online battles that I have read has any common sense. For one, if the power fails, you can’t recharge. That’s a given. If the disaster happens while you are at home that might not be a big deal, depending on what caused it. But what if you need to evacuate? If it’s a manmade disaster like a chemical spill for instance, your little electric car can probably get you to safety. But what happens if you just made your 40 mile commute, got home, plugged your car in, turned on the tv and discovered that there’s a category 5 hurricane headed your way and the governor has ordered everyone to move inland by 200 miles? After you wait the 8 hours to recharge, it’s gonna take anywhere from 2 to 5 days to go that far in your electric car. Bad news if the hurricane is 12 hours away. But if the power is out you can’t pump gasoline or diesel either, you argue. True, but you can pump it with a hand cranked pump or pour it from a gas can! The 5 gallon can you have in the garage for the lawnmower, if full, will get you a good long way down the road in whatever sort of gasoline powered car you happen to have. Your electric might get you to the refugee center, but you’re going without any of your stuff.
Laying the disaster scenarios aside, these things are good for the environment, right? Well, depends on how deep you look. Most people prefer to turn a blind eye to the damage done to Mother Earth to make the batteries for these things. It requires digging gigantic holes in the ground, and consuming monstrous amounts of fossil fuels and electricity to mine, refine, ship and fabricate the minerals required as well as all the waste products generated in the process. All that happens in other countries so we choose not to see it. We also choose to ignore the dangers these vehicles create in the event of a crash. All this high current wiring running through the car bodies poses a hazard to rescue workers and the equipment they use to extract victims from crashes.
Do we need an alternative to fossil fuel powered cars? Absolutely we do. Is the plug in electric the answer to that question? No, I don’t think so. I think they have their uses. If the purchase price comes down in the under $15,000 range, I could see them serving folk who live within 20 miles of where they work and can drive at residential speeds to get there as a second car just for that purpose. As a solitary means of transportation, they are not going to be practical. They will be fashionable for a while, but I think you’ll see a great many of them on the “pre-owned” market that are less than a year old. The market for these is going to be a small niche. In these days of “gotta have it now” and do it as cheap as possible, these cars will never succeed. We complain if a web-page takes a half second to open, so how will we tolerate waiting 20 hours to recharge the car? Can you imagine the reaction in the business world if some corporate executive called across town to another branch to have someone come over for a meeting or to repair a critical piece of equipment and he gets told “sorry boss, it will be four more hours before my car is charged enough to drive again.” That would go over like a lead balloon. Speaking of corporations, how many companies do you suppose would be willing to put charging docks in the parking lots for the employee’s use? Not many I’ll wager, unless there was some huge tax incentive to do so. Even then, it would be more trouble than most companies would be willing to endure.
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