EVS IRL: EVs In Real Life

09/06/2024

It seems in the US, some EVs are already significantly cheaper than their gas powered equivalents - if you are leasing them (because the lower maintenance costs are built in)

“Darwinian” competition and a slew of new models helped electric cars with at least 300 miles of range reach another milestone in price parity.

14/05/2024

100% US tariff on Chinese electric vehicles?! US automakers have some remarkable pull.. Hope Canada doesn't follow their lead...

Via The Economist: "On May 14th... , the White House decided to raise tariffs on, among other things, Chinese semiconductors and solar cells from 25% to 50%... and lithium-ion batteries from 7.5% to 25%. It hit electric vehicles with the biggest increase of all, *quadrupling the tariff rate on China-made electric vehicles (evs) from 25% to 100%*"

26/04/2024

Canadians deserve to be offered a "good enough" EV. Why pay more than 35K if you don't need a bigger car?

Will the Fiat 500e get the attention and support it deserves?

19/04/2024

Good to see General Motors bringing full vehicle to Home functionality into the mainstream by model year 2026. Handy for regions where electricity supply can be erratic. Hopefully it can also be adopted for vehicle to grid applications where the benefits are even greater. https://news.gm.com/newsroom.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2023/aug/0808-v2h.html

08/04/2024

This is discouraging. Of all of the things Elon Musk is trying to accomplish at the moment, arguably this was the most important. Hopefully, others will accelerate their plans to fill this gap...

08/04/2024

I predicted that the limited capacity of our EV charging network would be demonstrated last year on the May holiday but turns out it is today our network's capacity was finally... er... eclipsed... Fortunately my car is stuck well inside the totality zone (but annoyingly distant from the rest of my family!)

20/02/2024

The big carmakers seem to be feigning surprise and horror because of entirely predictable policy decisions that were telegraphed well in advance.

Across Europe and Canada, EV sales were subsidized not because governments wanted to promote luxury vehicle sales but because the idea was car makers would learn as Tesla said they were doing to master the technology at small volumes then mass produce EVs aimed at the mass market. By that time they would be cheap enough to make that the subsidies wouldn't be needed.

They were also clearly warned that they only had a limited time remaining to legally sell ICE vehicles.

Unfortunately, they took the subsidies, failed to adequately invest and after a few years of pretending to be following the path set out they are now clearly hoping to push the deadlines to phase out EVs back and build barriers against the Chinese car makers who took electrification seriously. Perhaps now they are realizing they need a plan B?

16/02/2024

I suspect it is still early days to know for sure the cost/benefit of EVs vs ICE vehicles in terms of repairability, but this article provides some useful fine-grained detail to explain what's behind recent news articles claiming EVs cost way more to repair

It's time to debunk the widely circulated idea that Teslas are being written off en masse after relatively minor accidents; and debunk, too, the idea that EVs and their batteries are leading to runaway repair costs.

27/01/2024

Better city and provincial regulations could do a lot to help EV owners at a near-zero cost to taxpayers. Here are some examples of good practice from the US (and of less good practice from Toronto)...

We could learn some lessons from EV-friendly cities and states

24/01/2024

The problems EV owners in Chicago had in the recent cold snap have been getting a lot of attention. There's no denying that extreme cold (-23C) can make EV use much harder, but this piece gives a fuller picture of why things went so badly wrong. There's plenty of evidence EVs are still a viable means of getting around in very cold countries (eg Norway!) as long as the infrastructure is well-maintained and drivers know what to expect and how to cope.

Teslas are having trouble charging in the extreme cold, but there's a myriad of factors that contribute to the problem. Let us help explain.

24/01/2024

Tempted to go drive my EV around town just to show I can 🙄

21/12/2023

If you aren't in one of the "big three" provinces but want a decent range of EVs available, you should press your premier to add an EV sales mandate where you are or they'll remain hard to come by.

When a federal sales mandate was first mooted in March 2022, I said at the time that even as it was welcome overall it could be bad for…

07/12/2023

My latest idea, inspired in part by the Little Free Library movement - let's help individuals and small organizations who want to offer fellow EV owners a charge in time of need but aren't sure how to start. It's technically easy to set up - just use PlugShare - and at just $1 an hour charging costs very little but when I thought about making that offer myself, I couldn't find anything online to help me think through what to offer or to avoid potential pitfalls.

I am just floating this idea so I'd love to hear what you think and get suggestions on what might work. If you want to take up the banner and run with it (or know an organization that already has), even better!

Little Free Libraries make it easy to share books. Could Little Free ‘Lectrons boost sharing of under-used home and business EV chargers?

04/12/2023

Here's a startling dataset I didn't realize existed - every car sold across Canada from May 2019 to Oct 2023 (so far) where there was an application for federal subsidy. Includes model, brand, province of purchase and of purchaser... even the dealer's postcode! Of course Teslas and some other brands dropped in and out of the subsidizable category and it doesn't count second hand sales (like my Nissan Leaf brought in from California in 2020).

Since the launch of the iZEV Program on May 1, 2019, Transport Canada has been producing statistics on consumer uptake under the program for the following variables:

04/12/2023

I live in this province so of course I took part. One of the topic areas it mentions is EV promotion - I put together my own thoughts on the subject and am sharing them in this Google Doc. Hope it prompts discussion and might be some use as a "model answer"? https://docs.google.com/document/d/12rw2qJwLcWxxDu2dG5IpaG7G_lWKda7pzfge7djz3uk/edit?usp=sharing

The Honourable Bernard Davis, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, today announced the launch of the public engagement process for two new provincial Climate Change Action Plans for the 2025 – 2030 period. The Department of Environment and Climate Change... Read More about Provincial Govern...

11/10/2023

The closer you look the more interesting this is. My first thought was that this was made it up. In fact though it seems to have been partially true... in 2015. It seems Tesla was having trouble keeping up with demand at this high profile stop and they did put in diesel generation for a while. But the journalists who dug up this genuinely interesting fact and those who copy-paste the story leave out that it is not happening any more, that the charging station was only ever partly powered by diesel and that even if it was it would still be marginally better for the planet than putting that diesel into ICE vehicles.

05/10/2023

As winter approaches, an extended interview with a Canadian tire manufacturer about EV tires... The short takeaway is that it is all tradeoffs so there's no "perfect" EV tire ( and the spokesman is keen to point out you don't *need* EV-specific tires at all.)

Host Andrew McCredie talks with tire expert Steve Bourassa about why you should install EV tires on your EV, and what you should look for in an EV tire

02/10/2023

I was looking again at the calculator https://takechargenl.ca/evs/fuel-savings-calculator/ provided by TakeCHARGE NL and I thought it wouldn't be that hard for carmakers to enable a rough "gas savings" and "co2 savings" meter on the dashboard. (The calculation below for my car and its current mileage is an oversimplification since my three trips between NL and ON used more expensive fast charging). They could even add the difference in routine maintenance costs - if I had a Tucson (the rough equivalent) it would have cost me an additional $1000 in scheduled maintenance so far according to this https://www.automoblog.net/research/maintenance/hyundai-maintenance-cost/.

Prices keep changing, but when I bought my car it was about $9200 more than its gas equivalent after rebate. At this rate I expect to cross over into "profit" on my car less than five years after I bought it.

For more on this issue take a look at this earlier post https://evirl.medium.com/who-can-afford-a-50k-electric-car-think-of-it-as-a-32k-car-5634e58d4fb2