Potentially Obvious Electric Car Design Flaw.

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The funny thing is, part of my Grandads job was to design and develop electric vehicles. He was a developments engineer which was a bit more then a designer, because he would have to also see the orocess through to development which designers often don't do, so basically it was a step up from a designer in the knowledge and the tasks he had to do. He worked for a few companies designing from car manufacturing companies, to industrial engineering works to a food processing company and even a fair!
The various designs were anything from a part to an entire large build which one item he designed was about the size of a ship.

He used to tell me that the key to electric vehicles was all in the gearing. Whilst not legal in the UK at the time (There were laws back then that all electric vehicles had to have large boards mounted on the roof or somewhere prominent to show that it was an electric vehicle. I seem to remember boards had to be 4ft x 8ft? If they were not they were large). He built an electric moped which could do 60 miles on a charge and touch 60mph and this was back in the 1960's. He used to get the 60 miles per charge even though he had to climb for two and a half miles up a hill of around 600ft where part of it had a 1 in 4 climb to get home. Unfortunately the company could not get the UK laws changed to allow the mopeds to be run on the road. Instead he designed the first electric vehicles that were small enough to be used in hospitals and factories etc., and the company started making them.

Do you never use a credit or debit/interac card anywhere?

Why would a company want to accept coins in a high tech vending machine in the year 2021? Why would they want the expense of sending someone around to collect the coins, count them, deposit them etc when they can just accept cards/electronic payment only and eliminate those costs while automating accounting?

It just doesn't make sense for tech companies installing chargers to go backwards in technology and accept coins as if they're the city bus in the year 1980. It's a waste of time & money, so it won't be done.

Some people just like to use “physical” money, rather than money that’s connected to something like a credit card.

I’m not that type....but that type has to be taken into account.

There are still a few people who don’t use cell phones.

Mountain Goat has said he refuses to buy/sell anything online because he's worried about getting scammed/defrauded/having his account details stolen etc.

Car chargers that take credit cards will process payments over cellular internet connections. They're pretty secure - about the same as using a credit or debit card anywhere.

Some parking meters here are credit card only.. so when I didn't have one, I'd have to park where they accepted cash. People who cannot, or will not, use digital payment technology of some sort simply won't be able to buy some products & services. Not going to be very many people in the entire world who buy something as expensive and high tech as a new electric car but don't regularly use credit/debit cards.

i am one of the primitives who does not have a cell phone, many people out in the sticks where i live, where there is no cell coverage to speak of, also don't have them. electric cars are not to be found out here due to the utter lack of fast public chargers. i found this out when shopping around for a nissan leaf which seem to be plentiful and cheap on the used market, and i found out why. the average national cost to install a home electric charger starts at about $1200 and more often than not is about twice that. that is a fair chunk of change for working class folk.

I am guessing it also depends how far one needs to travel on a charge. OK, with a petrol or diesel car one has this issue, but it does not take long to refuel, while one could be stuck for hours (Or a couple of hours for those fast chargers) if one gets caught out.

I had a rather amusing future thought about robbers who install extra batteries in their get away cars so they can travel further on a charge then the police can! (Though police can hand over like a relay with freshly charged cars so maybe not! ).
But yes. It depends on ones situation. Ideally a hybrid where the electrical side and the engine can be used totally independently would be a solution, so the batteries can be recharged and one gets soo far, but then one starts the engine and goes further? (And if both are used together it is in sports mode?)

for now, until amuuurica can get its act together, hybrids are the most practical solution in terms of maximizing fuel mileage and minimizing emissions, but in terms of their reliability, hybrids are fiendishly complex and outside of warranty are not a safe bet. buy new or next to new, otherwise you may be sorry. many horror stories about old priuses.

Hybrids are efficient in the right conditions. If one lives on relitively flat land with long straight roads or in a city enviroment, get a hybrid if you can afford one. BUT if one lives in a hilly enviroment, forget it. But a petrol or preferably a small diesel as a diesel has more grunt for hill climbing and yet one will get the best fuel efficiency.
If one lives in a city enviroment and one has miles and miles of built up areas, then get an electric car. They really come into their own with all the stop starting through traffic and the brisk acceleration one often needs to do to change lanes etc. It makes sense to go electric then.
And if one lives in the middle of no-where where it is miles and miles to a gas station and there is plenty of water and wood etc... Why not try to find (If you can get one or make or have one made) a steam car?
In the early years of motoring when steam cars were more popular, some of those steam cars were amazing. Less then 15 minutes to raise steam. Silent running and brisk acceleration. What more does one need!

Blabby,

At least you don't have to use the phone at the drug store, or call the operator to put through a call

$1200 certainly isn't nothing.. but for those that drive daily, is it Really that significant of an expense?

While I still had a car payment ($300/mo, it's paid off now.) by the time you added up insurance (cheap, maximum discount so $185/mo), gas (expensive here - the most I pumped into my 32mpg (US) car one Summer a few years ago was $550/mo) and then the cheapest daily parking where I was working at the time ($12 cash/day, better than the $18 early bird rate elsewhere and $25/day rates at the most convenient spots), and then throw in an oil change, it cost me over $1400/mo to drive my little econo car. Cheap months cost me around $900 or so. (Right NOW the car is paid for and I don't have a long commute and do have free parking so it's maybe $400/mo total approx since I'm hardly driving anywhere at all compared to normal.)

But anyways, driving a cheap car with a low payment here costs ~$1000/mo. $600ish to operate a paid for beater that gets good fuel economy if you're driving into town and back daily - more if you have to pay for parking.

So, $1200 to eliminate gas, oil, and mechanical maintenance expenses? Sounds like a good deal to me! Would pay itself off in as little as <2 months depending on how much you drive and how fuel efficient your car is or isn't. Heck, I know people who drive full size trucks/vans for work and have paid more than $1200/mo Just For Gas!

Understandably $1200 is not so easily absorbed by the not working class, or barely working/underpaid, but for the Average income earning working class? Even if they put it on a credit card it'd be paid off pretty quick.

I know a guy that bought a Tesla Model 3 base model rwd w/ the maximum $10K gov't rebate because it was WAY cheaper to own/operate than his other two cars were costing him, plus it's faster and more fun to drive, so even with a $800-900/mo car payment buying that car and paying to install a charger at home allowed him to get out of debt in record pace. (Mind you, he and his wife earn a combined ~3-5x my income - which gives them more options, of course.)

^^^no way could i afford to live where you live, that is astronomical cost of living you describe there.

But I haven’t even talked about real estate/rent prices yet! (Which are on fire.. this house has more than tripled in value in 13 years to ~$1.3-1.4M)

~No one can afford to live here - especially worker bees - and yet, here we are.. a couple Million of us or so.

And my second vehicle costs $75/mo for cheap insurance and takes 94 octane gas that I burn for fun going nowhere in particular. Only made possible by living cheap with family. Many people are struggling.

Car insurance prices for new drivers skyrocketed a year or so ago. I know one guy paying $500/mo insurance to drive an old Tacoma. But prices are set to drop 20% this year, something like that, because our government knows if they don’t reduce them people will revolt and elect a different party that will and they’ll lose their tax collection centre of a car insurance monopoly.

i get the impression that all of canada is more expensive to live in than where i am at now. my car insurance [basic liability only] is expensive for here because i'm a single old male, i pay about $225 every six months. my dad only paid half of that for full coverage because he was married. do you all have car tab taxes up there?

Every major city in Canada will be more expensive than where you are now, but it's a huge country and there are dirt cheap places to live in it.. just with no jobs/industry etc you'd have to be a subsistence farmer/hunter or something to survive.

Expensive? Expensive is what one of my friends is paying as a new driver driving a ~15 year old Toyota Tacoma.. ~$500/mo for insurance.

We don't have a thing here called a "car tab," so, whatever it is is not taxed.

down here we have to pay an annual tax on having a car, the evidence we paid the tax is we get sticky tabs with month/date we paid we have to stick onto the top right side of our license plates in the rear, if you are missing that tab and get pulled over [automated cameras check] you get a $250 haircut. the tabs [corrected for inflation] are far cheaper than they used to be 2 decades earlier, thanks to a local scam artist who rammed through [via citizen initiative ] $35 car tabs 'cause he got sick of paying $2000 for his fancy car every year.

We're issued those stickers with our insurance, and you have to be insured.. and a huge portion of our insurance premiums are all just straight up tax no matter which way you slice it, soooo, we pay that - just not as a separate line item called "tab tax." It's all just fkn tax. And once your car is insured, you get your insurance decal (stickers year/month & date number) that go on your rear plate. No decal/expired = can be fined for it.