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His viewpoint is from a European (English?) person. All those arguments may make sense to him and I can see where people who live in a city, or never drive more than 350 miles on a trip, or live where space is at a premium (they have been filling up all the available space for over 1600 years or more), or have all day to fill up (charge) a car for a day trip, etc, etc. But my word! We live in a country where it takes a 350 mile trip to go from just Dallas to Joplin. Many of us live on our own home on our own couple of acres (or more). It is a different world completely besides that, we still love our cars with their internal combustion engines too much. There is no need to mock us.
Space in Europe vs. space in the U.S. are completely different worlds. H*ll even in different parts of the US are different. I’m currently shopping for apartment space for our college kid in NYC. Different world from the SF Bay Area. And Texas different yet again.
I had a business trip one time from Tokyo to Dallas and it blew my mind to go from hyper-dense to hyper-spacious in less than a day.
I’m not giving up pistons anytime soon, but it was funny to me to hear a different perspective.
Gas powered made a lot more sense 100 years ago than it does today. But electric is still not the way to go across the board...
So In turn gas powered still makes the most sense overall... let's see if electric can truly conquer it in every facet that makes fuel vehicles still dominant.
Originally Posted by cfair
Space in Europe vs. space in the U.S. are completely different worlds. H*ll even in different parts of the US are different. I’m currently shopping for apartment space for our college kid in NYC. Different world from the SF Bay Area. And Texas different yet again.
Phil,
That’s a fun infographic. Good perspective. I live in a quiet un-dense place, but went to 35 countries or so for work for 25 years 2 weeks each month.
I feel like I’ve seen both sides of the population density coin. Tokyo to Dallas, India to Colorado, you name it. I choose low density quiet to live. But it sure is fun to visit high density noisy places now & then. I’m in NYC this week having some fun, but can’t wait to get home to my quiet SF suburb.
Beyond the humor, I’m waiting for battery energy density to get high enough to solve my electric car range anxiety. With my 455’s I _love_ the fact that I can gas up and go 350-500 miles on a tank of gasoline.
If I had to live with current electric cars, I’d go batsh*t crazy stressing over the charge level. As I do on my phone, iPad, laptop - even as all these device have gotten way better… At least with Oldsmobiles all I worry about is overheating at idle in traffic!
And since the 80’s I’ve had battery anxiety when all those early laptops lasted just long enough to get me into a project on an airplane, but never more than 45 minutes…I guess I’m just deeply scarred from those old days of never-quite-enough-juice batteries.
Anyway no offense to anyone, just trying to pass along some humor in these times when it’s more scarce than it should be.
There is room for both. For city folk, and electric that needs a charge once or twice a week, fine. The rest of us. that have longer drives or live where the charging range drops like a rock when cold. hard pass.
Problem is. the areas that these make some sense, everyone is mostly in apartments with street parking or a parking lot. So no way to charge it at home. So unless cities are going to rip up all the parking meters and install parking meters/chargers. and apartment parking install drive in like parking with instead of a specker for the movie it is a cord to plug in your ev. It can't even work in metro areas.
I'm sure those in a country that they can drive from one end to the other on one charge it might make it worth it.
Only way ev's work for more people is if they standardize the battery pack and make it swapable like your cordless power tool. Roll up to a fueling station and swap batteries pay the fee and drive off. Even then, where they going to store all those packs to make that business model worth it. A ev fuel station would have to be a huge warehouse and I'd guess most areas would not want that type of large fire risk that can't be stopped anywhere near anything else.