Did You Drive Less Than 200 Miles Today?
July 17th, 2007 | by Brian Carr |Thanks to sites like Digg and Hugg, recently I’ve seen several stories regarding the possible return of the electric car, I thought it might be worth it to do a quick sanity check to see if these vehicles would actually be viable for most of us.
It seems to me that the most common knock against the electric car is the fact that most of them can only go 200 to 250 miles - which is more than a round trip from New York to Philadelphia - between charges.
While I don’t think that most of us drive more than 200 miles each day, I figured it was safer to ask than to just assume.
So on that note, I recently put up a poll on Daily Fuel Economy Tip, which asked, “How many miles do you drive on an average day?” and it appears that, on an an average day, an electric car would probably be able to fit our needs.
Here are the results of the poll:
- 45% of people drive 25 miles or less per day
- 23% of people drive between 26 and 50 miles per day
- 20% of people drive between 51 and 75 miles per day
- 7% of people drive between 76 and 100 miles per day
- 5% of people drive more than 100 miles per day
By the looks of it, it appears that roughly 95% of us would have no problem traveling under 100 miles per day, let alone 200 miles per day.
This sounds like a pretty compelling argument for electric cars for a couple of reasons, namely:
- You probably wouldn’t have to worry about the infrastructure of setting up random “charging stations” because, for most people, they could make it through the day on one charge and simply recharge their car at night.
- Commuting to work is probably the largest factor in why most people drive so few miles each day. Last time I checked, if it’s just you (and maybe another passenger) you’re probably not going to need to drive a big sedan or SUV to get to work, and a smaller car would probably do just fine.
Hopefully the realization by both consumers and manufacturers that we really do most of our driving on a local level will help get electric cars and plug-in hybrids to the market that much quicker.
Popularity: 21% [?]
| Related Posts
|
12 Responses to “Did You Drive Less Than 200 Miles Today?”
By Greg on Jul 17, 2007 | Reply
On a typical day I don’t drive over 200 miles, but on some days within a 24 hour period I’ve put 1500 miles on the vehicle. People have to buy a car based on all of their driving needs, not just a typical day.
Still, as a commuter car or for urban fleets, they could make a lot of sense. Imagine how much quieter and cleaner downtowns could be with less gasoline fumes?
By Jiltedcitizen on Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
It’s not about what I drive in an average day….It’s about what I may drive to see my parents or friends.
By Ben Walsh on Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
1. I agree with the previous 2 posters.
2. There are a number of other issue with electric cars, including how fast they can go, how long they take to rechanrge, and how they can be recharged.
But are electric cars really the answer? The electricity that car is using is most likely coming from a coal burning power plant.
By Gordo on Jul 19, 2007 | Reply
A “plug in” car only makes sense if you are one of the tiny minority that has access to renewable energy (solar panels, wind, hydro, etc.). Electricity from the grid is probably one of the least efficient types of energy you could use for a car. I hope people aren’t planning to buy these plug in cars and charge them using electric from coal fired power plants - that is just plain stupid (wasteful, expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment).
But if you have wind/hydro/solar power, by all means, go for it, it makes total sense and I envy you because I’d love to do this myself. But right now my location is no good for wind energy (not legal in most redisential areas due to noise and asthetics), solar is still prohibitively expensive and I live in the northeast where I don’t get as much sun as other areas, and I do not have a river or stream to tap for hydro-electric power.
I have actually made my own biodiesel fuel from free waste vegetable oil collected from local restaurants. If I owned a disel I’d probably keep making my own, but its a LOT of stinky work and you never know when your supply of free oil might run out, plus diesel cars are a lot more expensive and VWs are less reliable than for example the Toyota I currently drive (which gets nearly 40MPG by the way and isn’t even a hybrid).
By Gordo on Jul 19, 2007 | Reply
Regarding the other comments - the plug in car would mostly just be used as a commuter car. You’d still have another vehicle capable of the greater distances required at times. Most American families have more than one car!
By Andy on Jul 19, 2007 | Reply
Chevrolet is developing their Volt, which is an electric car with an onboard gasoline powered range extender; it runs off of battery power, and when the batteries run low, it kicks on the gas engine long enough to recharge them. It can also be plugged in at home, so if your commute is short enough, it would (theoretically) never use gas. They are shooting for a range of 40 miles on battery power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt
By gnoble on Jul 20, 2007 | Reply
To Gordo
Actually, PHEVs make sense to everyone, even if you’re getting your electricity from a coal-fired plant. This is due to the fact that you’re reducing the number of sources of the CO2 emissions. Instead of monitoring everyone’s car in the state, you only have to monitor the handful of power plants. Plus the majority of these cars will be charging at night, when the load on the electricity grid is much lower. Not only that, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to fuel them as well, costing something like 5cents/km.
As per fueling stations, it really couldn’t be that hard to set up a fueling infrastructure. In Portland they have free parking spots downtown for PHEVs which include a plug-in for your car.
But I do agree w/ the others who stated that due the fact that these cars can’t go further than 250km in a charge, it will deter a lot of people from buying them. Look at the situation now where guys are buying SUVs just because they go camping one weekend a year and want to be able haul all their stuff. I’m not sure of charging times but I do remember hearing 3-4 hours for a complete charge. That makes traveling more than 500km in one super long day w/ these practically impossible - and that’s a huge deterrent to the average driver
By Concerned American :-) on Jul 23, 2007 | Reply
Alrighty then
Here goes.
There will never be a portable fuel that we can transport with our vehicle that will not require energy to make it. Fossil fuels which are the easiest to process and gather are obviously going to run out. There is no argument there. So you take it off the list. Fuel cells are clearly not going to be practical until the 100’s of billions of dollars being spent by Oil Tycoons on yachts every day instead of research into alternative fuels (and I bet that is something they are going to jump right up and do for us).
So what does that leave us?
Well, we have a vehicle of some kind that moves us around at our whim and fancy without restricting our desire and freedoms of where and when to go places (like a car). This vehicle then needs a portable fuel of some kind that we can create out of a renewable resource. The only renewable resources that I know of are the physical movements of the earth and the energy from the sun. Wind, Wave, Geothermal, Water, Gravity and Solar. These energy sources are virtually limitless and have enough headroom that we will never hit the ceiling on them so long as we actually use them.
So now we have a vehicle and a defined fuel for it, but how to get it into the car and how do we make it portable?
Well, since electricity is the only method of moving energy quickly and easily in and out of storage containers (heat and pressure being obviously ruled out and obsolete “steam engines”), we are left with only the method of how to create it and how to store it. Creating it is easy. We move the obscene amounts of money into alternative fuels that are presently being wasted and stolen from us everyday when we purchase oil. Once this research is complete the world is great and we have super batteries and super efficient zero emissions power generation, right?
Well sure, but how to get from here to there?
If you do the math and you are not so angry and prideful that you can’t sit and make logical sense for 5 minutes and put one and two together, then it is really obvious.
1. Build lots of electrical transportation vehicles and market and
sell them to people.
a. Build it yourself if you are handy enough.
b. If not – Write a letter to Ford, to your politician. Start a website. Demand that you be offered an electrical vehicle at a reasonable price with a reasonable range of use.
c. Do something to stop purchasing Oil every day (and the bullets that it buys the terrorists)
2. 90% of Americans eventually get won over and eventually start doing 95% of there necessary driving with these new practical vehicles.
a. Super Efficient Next Generation Hybrids.
b. Light Urban Commuter Vehicles (less weight, lower speed)
c. Neighborhood Vehicles (Don’t know much about them, but they are legal only on roads under 35 mph and are currently a division at the DMV.)
d. Pure Electric Vehicles (Light Duty for personal transport, Heavy Duty for Commercial use.)
e. (My favorite) Pure Electric Motorcycle (can’t ride it all year, but can commute 50 miles a day for about 75 cents and they are fun as heck)
3. Then, all Americans (including most of the 90% that now own a practical vehicle), continue to use a conventional vehicle for long range, entertainment and other driving needs.
4. Since only 10-15% of the driving is now done with conventional vehicles, 85% of the daily demand for convenience store type fuel sales is gone, which also means that it doesn’t need to be produced or transported either by the way, which reduces it even more)
5. The need to produce oil based fuels for personal use is now nearly eliminated, but the need to produce fuels for power plants and power generation is equally increased.
6. Big Oil has now seen that there is nothing they can do except find ways to make batteries more efficient, produce more efficient transportation for power generation fuels. R&D on Renewable energy.
7. And now the biggy – Obviously there needs to be something to fill the gap during this 25-30 year conversion process described above. Well, hmmmm…… God obviously placed uranium and plutonium on this planet for a reason. I wonder what it was? Oh yeah, a ZERO EMMISSIONS Virtually unlimited FREE power source from the earth. To be used before or after (preferably before) we have exhausted our supply of fossil fuels. All we have to do is figure out a way how to convert its energy and safely store the remains. Or better yet, use 97% of the Uranium instead of only 3% like they do now and virtually eliminate the need to find safe ways to store the waste.
Isn’t it convenient that the money to produce these technologies is already being generated by us every day when we buy oil? Now if we could just figure out a way to get them spend it on what the earth and humanity needs them to spend it on? Oh yeah….. There is….. Go to Step 1 above.
Good luck humanity and STOP BUYING OIL
Be the change that you so dearly want to see
By Gordo on Jul 24, 2007 | Reply
gnoble - there is a massive loss of efficiency converting most fuels (coal, natural gas, even nuclear) to electricity, sending it over the grid, and then charging a battery. Gasoline (while we still have it), or biofuels are much more efficient than using the grid to power cars.
As for total cost - I found a pretty neat calculator here:
http://www.ccds.charlotte.nc.us/~jarrett/EV/cost.php
When I entered my own real numbers, the gas car was 11% less expensive than the electric car when all ongoing costs are factored in. Note that I pay 15 cents per kWH for electricity, and my current car averages 38 MPG and I used $2.85 as the cost of a gallon of gas (which is my current price). I also do my own maintenance (oil changes, spark plugs, radiator fluid) which brings my gas car costs down. The other thing is I don’t know how accurate their costs are for the electric car or how accurate the watts per hour figure is. Electric car costs are pretty much fixed, and could be higher if you had a gas engine backup system.
I should note that when I bumbed the miles driven up to 15,000 it said the electric car was less expensive to operate. That actually did surprise me - but again I don’t know how accurate their assumed Watt Hr/mile number is, and that is pretty key (or for that matter, how expensive those batteries will really be to replace).
By Dan on Jul 30, 2007 | Reply
My big question with electric cars has always been how far they could go without needing a recharge. As for speed, they are making plenty of them these days that go plenty fast. I think for short-distance commuters it would make a lot of sense. Of course, people would need to have another means of travel for long distances. I think this is very valuable information. Thanks for sharing!