WetEV
Well-known member
SteveInSeattle said:I love my Leaf, but I think of it only as an in-town commuter car. The whole issue of QC not working and reading about people's experience convinces me that road trips are a nice novelty but are very impractical.
Mostly agree, as of now. With one QC in Skykomish, about 2 EVs like a Leaf per hour can cross the pass, and maybe one more per hour using the L2 chargers and waiting around a lot. Compare with the number of ICE cars crossing the pass. Hard to see how EV traffic can scale. How many QC stations would be needed? MTBF will clearly improve, but that takes time. Getting places to put them all, getting power installed... Yet the trip there and back was reasonable, and not much bother. Practical, as long as only a few go that way.
Traffic over Stevens pass is thousands of cars per day. I've looked a bit, and found some numbers for a peak day of 6043 cars for November 29, 2005 (source not clear if that is only one way or total) per day. Assuming steady traffic for 12 hours and none for the other 12 hours, that is 504 cars per hour, which requires 252 QC stations. Exactly how this would fit in the valley near Skykomish isn't clear to me. Even if the traffic is exactly at the same rate for the whole 24 hours, that is still 126 QC stations near Skykomish.
There is a lot of unknowns about how an electric car future might look. However, until people start to do things, the best way to do them is often very hard to see. Experience can teach us lessons hard to learn in other ways. In 10 years, the QC stations may be seen as bad ideas, or the first ancestors of the wonderful QC stations that replaced them, or something in between.
I'm mostly driving a Leaf as a commuter, with a few trips off to do other things, mostly not needing to charge anywhere but home. This was a trip to get out of that rut, and see what a long trip would be like. I'll probably do more such trips, at least until the line at the QC station gets too long.