Here are a couple more samples from Nat Bullard's deck of climate-related charts. First up is EV production:
China has loads of cheap EVs, but tariffs keep them out of the US. That's obviously hurting the uptake of EVs in the US, but it's not the only thing. There's also charging infrastructure:
These are 2022 numbers, and presumably things are a little better now. Still, aside from Tesla chargers, the US has very little charging infrastructure compared to about 15,000 GWh of infrastructure in China. Much of this is due to the very slow rollout of the $7 billion federal charging network that was included as part of the bipartisan infrastructure act.
This is from 2022 but I doubt things are much better now:
I recently piloted a Ford F150 Lightning EV from my Berkeley home down Interstate 5 to Long Beach, a 400-mile trip. The truck? Great. The charging experience? Miserable.
The misery was meted out in several ways. Charging stations were hard to find. Maps that locate stations were not reliable. Paying for a charge with a credit card often proved troublesome, sometimes impossible. Worst of all, way too many chargers were broken or otherwise out of order. (“Unavailable” is the preferred industry euphemism.)
Running low on juice at the foot of the Grapevine, for example, I found a ChargePoint station off Interstate 5 at Frazier Mountain Park Road. The station comprised two chargers on the far weedy fringes of a nearly empty Jack in the Box parking lot. Only one of the two was what’s called a DC fast charger.
The fast charger wasn’t working. Its digital readout read “unavailable.”
I called the toll-free customer service number. Yep, the charger was unavailable. Why? Not sure.
The other charger, unoccupied, was the more common slow charging variety. I plugged in, eschewed Jack in the Box in favor of a sandwich at Subway, waited an hour and 15 minutes. In that time, I’d added nine miles of range. Pathetic, yes, but nine was enough to make it down Interstate 5 to where I found a ChargePoint fast charger that worked.
A charger that is operating properly should not provoke so much joy.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2022-09-22/boiling-point-californias-ev-charging-network-could-use-a-jolt-a-trip-down-i-5-shows-boiling-point
Just nine miles? That must have been a really slow charger. Under 2 kW? I get almost that much plugged into the 110 outlet in my garage.
The F-150 Lightning gets something like two and a fraction miles per kWh. It may be electric but it still isn’t energy efficient.
I didn’t realize it took so much power. But I guess it kind of makes sense. I get about four miles per kWh in my Tesla Model 3 which is a smaller vehicle. If I’m being conservative around town I can maybe coax 5. In the winter it might drop to 3.
I get from 5-10 miles per kWh on my Zero ^-^
Maps? Plugshare or ABRP.
Credit card is usually unavailable, tho. Gotta sign up for a stupid account.
Our charger is in our garage, and is powered by our solar panels. That doesn’t show up in Kevin’s chart. The only time we use a charging station is every other month we take a road trip to Vancouver. We stop at a huge Tesla charging station near the border and grab a sandwich at the deli next door.
Btw, Seattle owns its municipal electric utility and is installing curbside charging stations in neighborhoods with apartments.
The American Way: haphazard and ad hoc!
A couple points to be fair:
1) Last year on a dime basically the entire US EV industry decided to switch to Tesla charger technology, so I have to assume this has thrown massive wrinkles in the timetable to spend the charging infrastructure money. We should be happy they didn't build a bunch of useless charging stations a month after the infrastructure bill's rollout.
2) Many of China's affordable EVs amount to trikes and other types of vehicles that you would never see on U.S. streets.
The adoption of the Tesla standard will be huge. What's still mind boggling to me is how poorly the other networks maintain their chargers. I've been in the same position as iam4rman ... with chargers a necessity for travel, but the providers seeming to think of them as a convenience.
Kevin has written previously about the rise of EVs slowing/stalling in the US. I think this is partly why ... if you don't want/can't buy a Tesla then your options for leaving your region are severely limited. I tell people to wait until they can get a car with the Tesla charger.
Another miracle of American business management. Aside from Tesla the charging industry’s philosophy has been "Screw taking the time to design reliable easy to use chargers, forget spending any money on maintenance, let’s just build crap chargers and get them out there to nail down market share".
Too often lost in the discussion is that for local use, EV's are actually more convenient than IC cars. No more detouring out of your way to spend ten minutes filling your car up, just plug it in when you get home and by morning you have a full battery. Charging at home is also several times cheaper, as the rates at charging stations tend to mirror the price of gas more than the price of electricity.
Apparently there are a lot of people vandalizing charging stations too. Probably the same people who do the “rolling coal” thing.
I know I frequently see big aggro trucks parked in EV spaces where I live. I dunno if they vandalize the chargers, but there does seem to be some contingent who thinks it's funny to block chargers.
It's not all their fault. If we were obsessed with having small penises we would probably do stupid things too.
My local experience with ChargePoint has been fine. Of course I charge at stations in frequent use, by people who report problems when they experience them.
All the existing Ford Lightnings and Mach-e owners are going to be sent a NACS adapter. GM has also said they're going to provide an adapter.
Soon it just won't matter.
The NACS chargers will be CCS compatible, so any NACS capable car (2020 Tesla, 2025 Ford and agm, will also be able to use the 'old' CCS stations.
Tesla didn't just win, they became compatible with CCS, which made adopting their plug easier.
Many of China's affordable EVs amount to trikes and other types of vehicles that you would never see on U.S. streets.
Not according to the parking lot of my residential complex. People here mostly drive normal-looking cars. Also, the cutoff on Kevin's graph for the most affordable tier is 30,000 USD. That's about 210,000 rmb. One can certainly get a nice EV for that price in China that will be very far removed from anything resembling a "trikes."
America and Europe want to protect domestic producers. Fair enough. Maybe that policy is justified. Maybe not. But there's no way around forcing their consumers to pay a lot more for electric vehicles if they choose to effectively block the world's most efficient producer.
Americans - or is it Repulbicans? - have great difficulty with industrial policy. One of the pillars of Japanese ascendence in automobiles (and other area, but notably automobiles) was national policy to aid the development of the industry and create demand. Car buyers in Japan have paid more for their cars than they might otherwise, but the payback to the country has been tremendous.
We've been sitting on electric cars for decades. California tried to kickstart it in the 1990s. We let GM kill their groundbreaking car (and buy Hummer in the same stroke of the pen!). Solar panel production follows a similar line.
China is gobbling up all sorts of manufacturing industries, and their low costs of production (labor and regulation) are clearly a factor. But our absence of actual industrial policy leaves us exposed ... playing a game without a coach and with no practice sessions.
One of the pillars of Japanese ascendence in automobiles (and other area, but notably automobiles) was national policy to aid the development of the industry and create demand. Car buyers in Japan have paid more for their cars than they might otherwise, but the payback to the country has been tremendous.
Japan is not ascendant. Its per capita GDP has fallen below Britain and France, and is now something like 40% behind the United States.
I'll add: there's little evidence the "payback" to Japan from its various industrial policies has been positive on net, much less "tremendous." The Japanese are good at manufacturing, and it's pretty likely they'd have developed a decent car industry without high tariffs (their labor was much, much cheaper than that of the US in the early postwar years). Absent industrial policy, Japan would like have A) a pretty decent-sized automobile industry, albeit one that is smaller than today's; B) more foreign cars on its streets; C) slightly richer consumers on average (via lower car prices; D) other sectors that are more robust than today's (resources are finite; if you subsidize one sector, others mechanically suffer).
I think Japan gets tons of things right. They have a great healthcare system, wonderful public transit, tough, highly effective gun laws, and probably the smartest housing policies in the developed world.There's tons to love about Japan!
But Japanese economic policy ain't one of those lovable things. They've fallen behind. Pretty badly, actually: Japan is now poorer than South Korea and Taiwan, too (not just Western Europe or the States). And these aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet: low productivity translates (obviously) into things like wages, and material standard of living, which affect actual human beings.
US economic policy, on the other hand, has been excellent. America is the country you want to apply the adjective "ascendant" to. We're just the opposite of Japan: we run our economy skillfully, but we gets tons of other things (healthcare, guns, housing, transit) badly wrong, and we leave too many people behind because we don't engage in enough redistribution.
The payback was being able to afford to import oil. Japan had a pretty good balance of trade driven by its automotive exports and profits from its multinational automobile manufacturing.
The US is no stranger to industrial policy. The US had two massive road building booms, one in the early in the 20th century and one mid-century. The first built a long distance and local paved road system, original for bicycles, but providing a big benefit for the rising automotive industry. The mid-century one with its interstate highways and suburban development transformed the nation even further.
I dunno how relevant it is that China has more cheap models of EV than Europe and North America do. China's GDP per capita is 1/6 that of the US; there are all sorts of cheap everything in China that may or may not make sense to sell in the US.
US lagging on buildout of a charging network is a bigger deal, although people really do need to wrap their heads around the idea that we don't need gas station levels of charging infrastructure to accommodate widespread vehicle electrification. You can charge your EV at home, after all--good luck trying to fill up a car with gas in your own garage.
One issue with charging networks has been deciding who is going to be in the space of providing chargers. A lot of public utility commissions are really loathe to let utilties do it (while utilities would _love_ to buildout charging infrastructure and ratebase it in the process, ratepayer advocates and private chargers are less thrilled at that idea), but on the other hand, private chargers are unwilling to build charging unless they know that there will be demand, so they focus on the highest value installations with the quickest return.
(This is all further complicated by questions of how to set charging rates--a handful of chargers can be absorbed by the grid no problem, but lots and lots of chargers means a significant amount of very variable spikes in demand. Utilities have typically discouraged such spikes through demand charges, but for public policy reasons, we *don't* want that to happen for EV charging . . . )
Nonetheless, if we compare the median price to the median earnings, the mismatch means significantly fewer people are going to buy BEVs in America and Europe.
As the average age of passenger vehicles in the US increases -- now at 12.5 years old -- the rising disparity between median earnings and median price of BEVs will only make it harder for us to transition away from ICE.
We need a moonshot type program to slash the cost of BEVs, specifically, batteries. And it doesn't have to be a national goal; it could and should be a global goal.
i will likely get a used Nissan leaf soon and charge it front of my house with an extension cord. will work fine for my limited city driving, but I would not mind a new electric car for $25k and good charging infrastructure.
I purchased a 2018 Nissan Leaf with 42K miles last year for $12K. Since then, I've put 8K miles on it, all local, and I've spent a total of less than $200 in charging costs. I take advantage of all the Volta free charging stations near me. They're only Level II chargers, but given that I rarely drive more than 50 miles one way, my Leaf has a near full charge all the time. Two hours on the Volta charger will give me about 40% (60 miles). The rest of the time, i charge at home. Occasionally, I'll pay for fast charging - which is where most of my actual paid charging costs go.
I keep an ICE car for trips to SF, Vegas, and Mammoth, but I'll drive an EV 90% of the time for the foreseeable future.
And when your ICE ages out, you do what we do and rent a car for road trips, saving yourself tens of thousands of dollars.
I’ve had a Tesla for four years (since before we found out what a right wing troll the CEO is) and the Super Charger network is really good. Most of them are very fast and the incar navigation system makes them super easy to find. If you use the map to navigate to them the car will precondition the battery while you drive there so it charges faster.
I do sometimes try to use non Tesla chargers and while they are slower (maybe adding 25 miles of range per hour) they are often free. Of course they are also often out of order. Off the top of my head I’d guess maybe a third of the ones I’ve tried didn’t work. I have no worries making a long trip using Tesla chargers, and have gone from Minnesota to NYC to move my daughter out of her dorm with ease. But if I had to rely on third party chargers exclusively I’d be far more hesitant to wander so far from home.
At home btw I’ve done just fine for four years just plugging into a standard 110 outlet in my garage.
I don't think it's tariffs, primarily, that are keeping cheap Chinese EVs out of North America. There are many of the cheap Chinese EVs that Americans just won't buy; we see the same thing with small, cheap ICE vehicles. For instance, the VW Polo has never been sold in North America because there appears to be no market for it, and we don't see Kei cars from Japan.
In addition, we have safety and equipment standards that many of those Chinese models don't meet, so they can't be sold here. My guess is that the Chinese manufacturers just aren't willing to go to the expense of qualifying their vehicles for the US market when they can sell their whole production in other markets.
hopefully soon USA will have something like this one == https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/great-wall-motors-ora-03-chinese-car-first-drive-review/?lid=cjb9sw557jf3&eml=organic%3Aeml%3Abrz2&utm_source=braze&utm_medium=emaileditorial
A CTLC range of 310 is about 230 on the EPA cycle, which is about 170 miles at 70mph (depending on aerodynamics).
Kevin, why do you hate the UAW and want to see their jobs disappear? …
I don't know about China, but in the US and EU does the number of models say much? It was the forever policy of Volkswagen to have few models for the working-class market, but then make very many of each. The Renault Zoë EV is available in just two models.
They just put in a bank of Tesla chargers near our gym and those slots are always filled with people on their phones or sitting over at Subway/ColdStone. Every time we drive by in our hybrid, we remark about how glad we are that we don't have to wait on charging - ever.
This is why EVs ultimately will fail in the US. A country that has so little patience we need a drive through for donuts and coffee.
...because people wait their time charging when they would waste their time doing something else?
Art, that's just dumb.
This is why EVs ultimately will fail in the US. A country that has so little patience we need a drive through for donuts and coffee.
EVs won't "ultimately fail" in the US: we're cooking the fucking planet. ICEs are on the way out. EVs will indeed succeed, ultimately, even in foot-dragging America.
But electric vehicles will be phased in more slowly and less smoothly than in other countries, though, yes, mainly because of GOP/MAGA/Murdoch. In other words, there are lots of moving parts involving the transition to green technologies, and there's bound to be some friction. Which is why this is a prime example of an area that cries out for clearly defined policies implemented and enforced by robust government action. Which, of course, we can't have in America to the extent that's needed.
Normally we charge our ID4 overnight at home. When I do need to use one of the 12 or so Electrify America chargers that exist in all of San Francisco, I do Duolingo on my phone. The waiting time to charge really isn't a big deal, lack of working charging stations and the waiting time to get an available one is.
If charging stations were in every parking lot - there's lights in almost all of them, so what's the excuse? - it wouldn't even be an issue.
I passed a red ID4 in Felton this morning ^-^
Kevin's man-crush is running scared:
"CEO Elon Musk told analysts on a call that Chinese carmakers are “the most competitive car companies in the world” and “will have significant success outside of China.”
"The remarks come as BYD, backed by Warren Buffett, has not only conquered its home turf, but is also making inroads into other markets. It pledged in December to open a factory in Hungary, its first production plant for passenger cars in Europe.
". . . “Frankly, I think if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world,” Musk said."
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/24/business/tesla-earnings-sales-warning/index.html
Elmo talks like a libertarian but like all libertarians he's a hypocrite. He pretends to love the free market until a competitor starts kicking his butt; then, he runs to the government and begs for protection and hand-outs.
Elmo is totally a creation of big government. SpaceX makes most of its money from government contracts and Tesla was boosted by Obama-era subsidies for electric vehicles.
I'm all for you trashing him, but uhh, you insisted he ran to protectionism based on nothing.
Elmo is a complete psycho,
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1753590787130994745
China has a much more active category we would call 'Neighborhood EV' - non-highway vehicles,
They're not even counted as cars in Europe, they're classed as bicycles, so these statistics are apples to oranges.
China has shown the world the power of industrial policy. The world's reasoning is now that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.