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Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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This is a bit surprising to me tbh, Europe seems like the perfect place for little 100 mile range EV’s to kick ass. Over here in North America I can see hybrids being the current hot ticket because people regularly drive hundreds of miles for trips and work. Seems less common there but I may be wrong
It’s an issue of charging. Europe has cities that are very old. Streets are narrower than North America. Many apartments don’t have underground parking. Cars are parked on the street. There’s nowhere to plugin the EV overnight.
Definitely this. And it can be very difficult to connect your meter to your parking spot.
In France if you have a parking spot, you have a legal right to get a plug there even if you're renting.
It doesn't fix the problem for people with no parking who do only street parking, but people who can't afford a parking spot rarely buy a shiny new EV to start with.
People still go on holiday once or twice a year, snd many travel by car and always prefer their own car over rental. A 100 mile range EV being good for 95% of your use cases doesn't help you much with the other 5%.
People need to hire vehicles occasionally rather than buy more polluting vehicles against some rare edge case
I'm not saying they shouldn't rent a car for these occasions, I'm just saying that's probably the reason why hybrids are more popular.
Or we need to try to accommodate the needs that people actually have rather than telling them they should change what they need. That's somewhat more likely to actually work.
I mostly agree with your statement. If you want people to switch to alternatives, the alternative needs to be better than the status quo in some way.
Rent one for holidays or better go by train. And no i think most fly.
Going by train in some countries is a huge pain in the butt though (Germany for example).
Cagers have this argument of "but what if I want to do this cross country trip to bumfucknowhere" ... Similar to when asked why they can't give up their car "what if I want to transport a washing machine" ... As if those people load up their cars with 5 tons of bulky cargo and be driving around the world on a daily basis and there not being any other ways to handle such edge cases.
To be fair, this could be an argument. I don't have a car now, and when I do buy it - the usecase would be long road trips to where public transport is bad or carrying cargo to my vacation house. Only half of that would be easily doable with an EV's range. For city commutes, public transport is preferred, and trips to the vacation house without cargo could be made on electric trains faster.
What’s a cager? I can’t give up my car because I can’t bike to work, buses go way too fast on the highway which is dangerous and illegal, and I don’t earn enough to buy an EV or to relocate near my job.
You must understand that poor people can’t live in the EV utopia right now. Car makers will have to sell small and cheap EVs.
https://i.imgur.com/SFA23uL.png
I was buying new (used) car half a year ago. There were two reasons why I ended with ICE again.
Price. EV, even used ones, are so damn expensive it's just not for normal people. Everyone is saying how they lose value instantly and so on, but when I look at the market, even the cheapest ones (over 10 years old Nissan Leaf that will do less than 80 km on battery at summer) are ridiculously priced compared to ICE of the same age and similar specs. At least that's what it is in my country.
Chargers. I live in an appartement without garage, parking on the street. No way to charge it with "cheap household electricity" over night. There are I believe 3 chargers in my ~15k town and every single one is ridiculously overpriced. 1 kWh there costs almost as half a litre of gas. Considering fuel/electricity consumption, this is making the cost per km of both options virtually identical for me.
Everyone around me is very EV-skeptical and old fashioned. I'm not and I'm cheering for EVs. So I really wanted to switch, but hell it wasn't making any sense yet.
Batteries are expensive, range causes anxiety, a small battery is possible in a hybrid thus price is lower
Yeah and new plug in hybrids get like 50 miles or so of range. So most people can use that for work commutes and everyday stuff, etc, but still have the gas engine for their long road trips
Except people don't plug in their hybrids and run them on fossil fuels. Hybrids are yet another way the FF industry keeps itself going while pretending things are being fixed
Since the study was from Europe I'm going to assume that the primary thing holding people back from plugging in is that they can't. Many, if not most, of them will live in multi-tenant dwellings and most of those dwellings likely don't have the infrastructure to make it possible.
It's the same problem that apartment dwellers here in the US have, there's nowhere convenient to recharge.
Yeah infra is the issue. Which is stupid as providing simple (16A) socket per car would be sufficient solution for most cars. You come back from work or your commute and just plug the car to slow charger. Over night you are charged enough for next day.
I would argue that 45% electric driving is still significant. Company cars not being used similarly likely has a deeper issue
Nah. Anxiety is something you have for first month owning your first EV. Once you adjust to the different way of using the car you realize you drive the same way as petroleum car. One important thing is being able to charge at home IMO. Even from just a socket (16A) is sufficient for most daily cases.
Charging at home is only for those who live in houses though. Or at least have some indoor parking spot.
That's undoubtedly perk of having a house, parking or dedicated spot. But even without those at least here in NL infrastructure as is is pretty good even for those without didcated charging spot. I thin what should be easily done is slow charging spot on every parting spot. Cost wise it's not much and pulling max 2.5kw should not be much of an issue for the grid. In that way every car would have a dedicated charging to fill up over night if needed. Cost of such implementation wouldn't be to big either.
That's cool. But I doubt every place they park on the street or in counts as an official "parking spot".
Not everyone, but is majority is covered its fine (probably half of it would do the job). Usually parking places or places where you are allowed to park a car are marked so actually shouldn't be an issue.