I drove an electric vehicle, and here is my impression

[pbrower2a]

(03-11-2022, 06:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(03-10-2022, 04:40 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I never thought that I would get to drive such a car, but I can start by telling you the circumstances. One of my tires had a blow-out while I was driving 70 on a rural Interstate. I had to drive to a safe place to park, call a tow truck, call my insurance company, and get a ride back home. This I thought might be my only chance to experience such a car. I am not going to give the manufacturer or make, so I will not be spamming.  There are obvious eccentricities by the conventions of the vehicles that I have known, and one of those is that there is no real car key. The key fob starts the car by a something resembling a remote control. This could work on gas buggies, too, and I might expect that innovation to become the norm on the last such cars to be built. This said, the big questions are how it handles.

First, the electric car is much quieter. On the gas-powered car one can often get some idea of one's speed from the road engine noise. Road noise remains, but engine noise is practically nil. Be careful; it is easy to speed in such a car or to drive too slow for freeway conditions. Until you get accustomed to the car, avoid the cruise control because the car operates differently. The ride is smoother because of fewer vibrations.

Now for a practical consideration: if you are prone to make very long trips in one day -- let us say from Detroit-area suburbs to the area with this bridge





or from southern California to the area around this bridge



you will not get to do so on one full charge. I doubt that I would want to drive the car across country (or even halfway across) unless going two hundred miles in a day, which defeats one purpose of the private vehicle. Charging takes time -- more than literally fueling up. If you are spending less on fuel but more on motel stays you defeat one of the purposes of a private auto.

I don't think recharging takes so much time that it makes extra motel stays necessary. But I hope electric car recharging will get faster and distances travelled on a charge longer. There are already differences depending on the car make.

If we really want to convert to electric cars, subsidies should be offered to poorer people so they can buy them. I don't see much future for gasoline-powered cars. Other kinds of renewable-energy cars may be invented or further developed, but electric cars have the momentum right now.

I'm tempted to believe that the next time that we have a nasty downturn we will have a parallel to "Cash for Clunkers", this time with the expectation that people turn in their old "gas buggies" for a highly-subsidized purchase of an electric vehicle. Not another gas buggy!

So far, electric cars seem to get no smaller than SUV's, and a tendency is to build bigger vehicles (such as pick-ups) with electric motors. "Cash for clunkers" was intended to get people out of old gas-guzzling vehicles and into smaller cars. Of course many of the cars turned in were cars with a couple of wheels in the vehicle graveyard, so to speak, but the purposes were to reduce gas consumption and revive the troubled auto industry. 

The bugs will go... and ideally, charging will be faster.