I can not see me ever buying an electric where I live. Hybrid possibly. My closest charging are Tesla chargers about 10 miles away. after that the next closest is easy 20+.
Terrain here is either up or down very little level driving. Being 350 pounds I doubt that the 330 miles or what ever they claim to get would apply to me in it, add some more stuff and another person and probably game over. Also they do not look like they would be easy to get in and out of for me.
I did watch a few videos on the Rivian not sure how they charge, or how any of it actually works, but they would be more my style.
Is a charger a charger, meaning if I bought a Rivian or another brand electric can I charge it at a Tesla station or do I need to find another way if I am away from home?
What is the cost to charge at different places? I never looked at the Tesla station, do you just swipe a credit card?
edit to add.
Living where it snows a lot, curious as to how the electronics hold up to the wet and the salt in the winter. I see what it does to the under side of vehicles now.
I guess my other thought is as the number of electric vehicles increase on the road, how will that work with the grid. In a lot of areas the grid seems to be insufficient currently, I doubt it will be built up to handle the added load easily and quickly. Power plants closing and around me coal is king, they are trying to put coal fired plants out of business. Taking power plants out and increasing the demand seems like what we are going through now with fuel and gas prices.
Not sure there is a winning outcome for consumers of either electric or petroleum fueled vehicles.
Seems like a good solution would be garbage incinerators to produce electricity instead of land fills or dumping it in the ocean. Although the air scrubbers could make that cost prohibitive.
edit to ask
I live where it snows a lot in the winter, how do the electronics handle the wet and more importantly the salt used on the roads.
I hope I can answer some of this for you. My closest charging stations are probably 15 minutes away or so, but pretty much everything is where I live. I would imagine unless you’re doing long trips the vast majority of charging would be done with a level 2 charger at home. The nice thing about the up and down driving is that on the way down you get some regeneration. Your weight won’t make a big deal to the car’s mileage, the amount of climate control you use has much greater effect. I haven’t been in a Tesla, but they aren’t necessarily what I am looking at anyways because from an initial quality standpoint they rate poorly. I do believe Tesla seems to have superior battery chemistry though.
Charger wise there is basically Tesla and then everybody else at this point. Tesla is looking to open up their chargers to non-Tesla folks in the near future and with the legislation going on in Europe I believe Tesla is going to have to change the connector they use there which might lead them to do the same one everywhere. My car only supports AC charging and uses the J1772 plug. The plug that allows AC or DC fast charging is called CCS and basically part of the CCS plug is the J1772 so you can use either. So, until Tesla opens it up you wouldn’t be able to use the closest charging station with a non-Tesla. Cost wise to charge at a station you’re typically looking at $.30-.60 a kWh so depending on how many kWh’s your battery holds it could run from $11-45. Average cost per kWh at home is $.12. Most charging stations seem to be owned by one of a few companies and typically you just sign up for an app on your phone that you tie to a payment method and when you get to a station you open your app and point it at the charger and away you go.
We use a lot of salt on the roads here in Ohio as well and it doesn’t make electric cars rust anymore then ones running on gas. The battery cells are all packed and protected from the elements as well as protected from collisions.
Power wise the huge push is obviously for renewables, but the big issue at this point is they need to work on more grid level storage. Solar panels, like I have on my house, and wind are great when it is sunny and it is windy, but those aren’t necessarily always there. I know when I installed solar the payback was pretty quick as long as I didn’t add batteries and so that is what I did. So now I still get to experience power outages when the grid is down, but my project will only take 8 years to break even. If I would have added batteries it would have taken potentially 25 years.
Car wise I am really interested in the Fisker Ocean when it comes to my next one.