Why do "some groups" bad mouth EVs?

[Flyct]

As a 5 time Leaf owner and a current 2x Tesla owner I constantly get negative comments about EVs from certain politically leaning uninformed people. It drives me crazy

For Example, comments I've heard just this year:
I wouldn't by an EV because of how much the battery cost to replace every 3 years.
I wouldn't own an electric car because the battery takes up al the room in the trunk
I don't want my electric bill to more than double, I'm already paying $300 per month.
Did you hear about the Tesla that caught fire after it drove through a flood.
What happens if there is a hurricane and you have to evacuate from Miami and get stuck in traffic and run out of charge?
I drive from Miami to Connecticut once a year and I will run out of range n a Tesla.
A friend of a friend bought an electric car and he sold it 6 months later because the range degraded to 1/2 original range.

Are you getting the same comments?

 

[Toby]

Are you getting the same comments?

Not personally but I have seen them. Those who post them are showing off for their friends.

 

[LeftieBiker]

It is the Right's version of "virtue signaling". The "virtue" in this case is mindlessly repeating corporate propaganda from Fox "News" that's about 5 years old.

 

[Drew21]

It's just part of the cycle of having something scary, which we'll define as new, different, or (more commonly) completely fabricated to scream at folks about so that those same folks are too distracted to pay attention to real issues in the world.

Just off the top of my head we've got:

- Migrant caravans.
- Ladies, their lady parts, and what they might do with them if rich old white men don't get to decide for them.
- GUNS (more specifically, how you don't have enough of them to defend yourself from the feral hogs and/or migrant caravans due to arrive any day now).
- People of a different skin color, social status, religion, or sexual orientation than you (see "Ladies" above).
- UFOs! (please buy more guns).

I keep hoping we'll circle back around to a full investigation of the true cost of the automobile. Think of all the poor child laborers who lost their poop-scooping job when automobiles replaced horses in our towns and cities.

Imagine the beauty of a world where children as young as 4 can seize their future independence in their tiny, stinky hands. Now, my friends, imagine what they must have felt like when that future was stolen from them... by the automobile.

For maximum effect, read the previous paragraph really fast while sweating profusely (=pretend to be Rep. Jim Jordan).

 

[WetEV]

I don't want my electric bill to more than double, I'm already paying $300 per month.

This one might make sense, if the person drives a lot of miles. At national average of $0.16 per kWh, that's just 62.5 kWh per day, or about 190 miles at 3 miles per kWh. Even less in high electric cost areas.

Of course, the gas stations might miss the fellow a bit.

 

[LeftieBiker]

The most effective lies have a grain of truth (like exceptional situations) embedded in them.

 

[knightmb]

As someone who has helped over a dozen friends and family buy a EVs over the last decade, I get those all the time. As already commented here, you only find those negative ones on right-leaning news sites. Anything on the positive side but not true like, the Leaf can drive 400 miles on a single charge, is one of those technical ones that is only true in the most extreme ideal example, but I never hear or read about those being repeated by any left-leaning new sites. While all the rumors have a small grain of truth, many are blown way out of proportion to fit a narrative.

Instead, when approached by friend or family members (most recently about all EVs catching fire when getting wet), depending on what type of EV they own, I'll point them towards some real data and research.

To add to the list though, what I've read or heard over the year to add to your list:

• The power grid will fail if everyone is driving EVs
• Power production to charge the EV produces more pollution than just buying gas and burning it in the ICE vehicle
• If you are driving in winter and get stuck, you'll freeze to death in an hour because you'll run out of power to heat the cabin
• The batteries are just throw into the dump when they reach end of life
• The batteries can not be recycled
• EVs can't survive a crash because they are heavier
• A EV caught on fire last month in the news, must mean all of them can catch on fire just as easily (ignores 500 ICE fires daily :lol: )
• A EV gets less mileage the faster it goes, but my ICE gets better mileage the faster I go :roll:
• EVs will lose all charge if they sit for more than a few days if you don't use them
• EVs cost more in maintenance because all the electronics and whatever stuff have to be updated every week :lol:
• EVs will kill you if left on in a closed air space or garage because of the O3 (ozone) produced by the motor (when driving :roll: )
• EVs can electrocute you if forget to turn them off and touch the outside of the EV
• EVs take days to charge up no matter how much power you put into them
• EVs are slow because they only have 1 gear
• EVs are difficult to drive because of the extra weight and can't stop fast enough to avoid accidents
• The list goes on.... :roll:

As a 5 time Leaf owner and a current 2x Tesla owner I constantly get negative comments about EVs from certain politically leaning uninformed people. It drives me crazy

For Example, comments I've heard just this year:
I wouldn't by an EV because of how much the battery cost to replace every 3 years.
I wouldn't own an electric car because the battery takes up al the room in the trunk
I don't want my electric bill to more than double, I'm already paying $300 per month.
Did you hear about the Tesla that caught fire after it drove through a flood.
What happens if there is a hurricane and you have to evacuate from Miami and get stuck in traffic and run out of charge?
I drive from Miami to Connecticut once a year and I will run out of range n a Tesla.
A friend of a friend bought an electric car and he sold it 6 months later because the range degraded to 1/2 original range.

Are you getting the same comments?

 

[LeftieBiker]

Sometimes they come from personal bad experiences, not from evil 'news' sites. My housemate hated driving my 2013 SV, because she had bad range anxiety. Once we had to swap cars and she drove mine to work. I had the heat set for an easy trip, estimating 20% charge left. She got back with 30%, because she turned the heat off as soon as the car warmed up. Was she pleased at having 30% left? Nope. She was anxious. She used to say "I don't think that EV battery technology is appropriate for Upstate NY." Fast forward through many years of driving a Prius PHEV, plugging it in faithfully, buying it off lease, only to have it develop a sick motor. How does she feel about EVs now?

She drives a 62kwh Leaf. She loves it. What a difference another hundred miles of range makes.

 

[Oostenrijker]

I don't want my electric bill to more than double, I'm already paying $300 per month.

This one might make sense, if the person drives a lot of miles. At national average of $0.16 per kWh, that's just 62.5 kWh per day, or about 190 miles at 3 miles per kWh. Even less in high electric cost areas.

Of course, the gas stations might miss the fellow a bit.

What you only pay $ 0.16 for a kWh? I pay € 0,38 and only in the evening, it would go down to € 0,32 and still, driving electric is cheaper than gasoline. Because one liter of E10 is now going towards € 2,50 so that's getting way more expensive then driving electric.

At the public charger, I pay € 0,40 and some places in the Netherlands I pay a little less. Actually I countries like Germany, you need to pay more. So charging for € 0,29 at Aldi or Lidl, is like really cheap.

 

[Stanton]

It's just part of the cycle of having something scary, which we'll define as new, different, or (more commonly) completely fabricated to scream at folks about so that those same folks are too distracted to pay attention to real issues in the world.

^^^ THIS
In general, people don't like change.
Having said that, I have had countless positive experiences talking to people about my Leaf (and EV ownership) over the years.

 

[fester]

All the above plus of course Big Oil. Big Oil also did a successful "hit job" on EV's in the early 1900's...

 

[rogersleaf]

As someone who has helped over a dozen friends and family buy a EVs over the last decade, I get those all the time. As already commented here, you only find those negative ones on right-leaning news sites. Anything on the positive side but not true like, the Leaf can drive 400 miles on a single charge, is one of those technical ones that is only true in the most extreme ideal example, but I never hear or read about those being repeated by any left-leaning new sites. While all the rumors have a small grain of truth, many are blown way out of proportion to fit a narrative.

Instead, when approached by friend or family members (most recently about all EVs catching fire when getting wet), depending on what type of EV they own, I'll point them towards some real data and research.

To add to the list though, what I've read or heard over the year to add to your list:

• The power grid will fail if everyone is driving EVs
• Power production to charge the EV produces more pollution than just buying gas and burning it in the ICE vehicle
• If you are driving in winter and get stuck, you'll freeze to death in an hour because you'll run out of power to heat the cabin
• The batteries are just throw into the dump when they reach end of life
• The batteries can not be recycled
• EVs can't survive a crash because they are heavier
• A EV caught on fire last month in the news, must mean all of them can catch on fire just as easily (ignores 500 ICE fires daily :lol: )
• A EV gets less mileage the faster it goes, but my ICE gets better mileage the faster I go :roll:
• EVs will lose all charge if they sit for more than a few days if you don't use them
• EVs cost more in maintenance because all the electronics and whatever stuff have to be updated every week :lol:
• EVs will kill you if left on in a closed air space or garage because of the O3 (ozone) produced by the motor (when driving :roll: )
• EVs can electrocute you if forget to turn them off and touch the outside of the EV
• EVs take days to charge up no matter how much power you put into them
• EVs are slow because they only have 1 gear
• EVs are difficult to drive because of the extra weight and can't stop fast enough to avoid accidents
• The list goes on.... :roll:

As a 5 time Leaf owner and a current 2x Tesla owner I constantly get negative comments about EVs from certain politically leaning uninformed people. It drives me crazy

For Example, comments I've heard just this year:
I wouldn't by an EV because of how much the battery cost to replace every 3 years.
I wouldn't own an electric car because the battery takes up al the room in the trunk
I don't want my electric bill to more than double, I'm already paying $300 per month.
Did you hear about the Tesla that caught fire after it drove through a flood.
What happens if there is a hurricane and you have to evacuate from Miami and get stuck in traffic and run out of charge?
I drive from Miami to Connecticut once a year and I will run out of range n a Tesla.
A friend of a friend bought an electric car and he sold it 6 months later because the range degraded to 1/2 original range.

Are you getting the same comments?

You forgot to include that Cobalt is mined with soup spoons by 7-year-old child labor.

 

[Bombastinator2]

I’ve noticed a real right/left division which I think is actually a rural/urban division. EVs work a lot better for urban drivers. The raw distances are just shorter, and there’s more charging opportunity. If yo live 50 miles from ANYTHING Even a 300mi ev may not cut it. There were origionally the rolling coal people who got conned by the GOP into thinking that the dying coal towns could be saved. That was always complete BS but desperate people will believe even ridiculous stuff. That’s mostly gone but the opinions live on. This whole thing may change if technological innovations (as opposed to financial innovations which are just new ways to make money off people) in batteries bear fruit. An ev with an 1800mi range pretty much knock the rural problem on the head. There are people whose daily driving distances make electric cars a step down rather than up (for me it’s up. I won’t buy an ICE car again unless I have to. Charging overnight is just too nice) but I can see someone living in the boonies having an issue though with current stuff. Let’s see what happens when then next generation of batteries comes out. As it stand to own an EV currently you almost always have to own your own home, or at least have off street parking with a charger that is on YOUR electric meter and that’s just less than 50% of people. There are a lot of apartment buildings with NO off street parking and those just don’t work. The markup on those street chargers, at least in my area, is upwards of 400%, or whatever 18¢/kwh vs. 50¢/kwh is

 

[frontrangeleaf]

I’ve noticed a real right/left division which I think is actually a rural/urban division. EVs work a lot better for urban drivers. The raw distances are just shorter, and there’s more charging opportunity. If yo live 50 miles from ANYTHING Even a 300mi ev may not cut it. There were origionally the rolling coal people who got conned by the GOP into thinking that the dying coal towns could be saved. That was always complete BS but desperate people will believe even ridiculous stuff. That’s mostly gone but the opinions live on. This whole thing may change if technological innovations (as opposed to financial innovations which are just new ways to make money off people) in batteries bear fruit. An ev with an 1800mi range pretty much knock the rural problem on the head. There are people whose daily driving distances make electric cars a step down rather than up (for me it’s up. I won’t buy an ICE car again unless I have to. Charging overnight is just too nice) but I can see someone living in the boonies having an issue though with current stuff. Let’s see what happens when then next generation of batteries comes out. As it stand to own an EV currently you almost always have to own your own home, or at least have off street parking with a charger that is on YOUR electric meter and that’s just less than 50% of people. There are a lot of apartment buildings with NO off street parking and those just don’t work. The markup on those street chargers, at least in my area, is upwards of 400%, or whatever 18¢/kwh vs. 50¢/kwh is

Agree. I mostly work from our personal use case, as there really is a lot of variability. There are a lot of folks for whom I wouldn't recommend a BEV today. We use our Leaf as an "urban corridor runabout" by which I mean something more than a "city car" but not a general purpose vehicle either. And I think that line of thinking can be applied to almost any BEV available today based on our needs. YMMV. You also don't need to own everything per se. For some, a BEV combined with the occasional rental car might be a viable model.

That said, as a rough measure, I think energy density in both volumetric and mass terms needs to increase by about 3x in order for BEV's to become useful for some of the use cases that we keep our ICE cars around for, FWIW. Towing our camper for example, would be a non-starter, and we have a modest, single-axle travel trailer for two. Additional charging options won't solve that use case, as I'm not willing to charge every 100 miles or so. We tow through the Rocky Mountains. It's not practical. Pricing and charging speeds would need to improve in roughly the same proportion for some use cases as well, at least the ones I've thought about based on personal experience.

The good news in my mind is that a 3x improvement would bring utility across a threshold making BEVs more generally viable to a lot more people, and that it's not 10x or something beyond the pale. I think most of us have good odds of living to see that happen, and I'm not that young anymore.

The idea of an all-electric full-size pickup really makes no sense to me, but then, I'm not a pickup guy. If you need a big truck to do big truck stuff, there's really no adequate substitute. Setting aside all the folks who drive big trucks for quite different reasons, of course. A lot of these preferences are driven by "signaling" as noted above.

 

[knightmb]

The idea of an all-electric full-size pickup really makes no sense to me, but then, I'm not a pickup guy. If you need a big truck to do big truck stuff, there's really no adequate substitute. Setting aside all the folks who drive big trucks for quite different reasons, of course. A lot of these preferences are driven by "signaling" as noted above.

I thought the same thing too until a friend bought the F-150 Lightning and let me "tinker" around with all the stuff, drive it, etc. Most of the youtube videos I've seen where they do towing test on any EV truck, always push them to the max weight and hang a trailer out the back that sticks up so high, might as well be a parachute. Only to complain that they got half the range this way.

When I rode with my friend, he used his trailer to go pickup 4,000 lbs of concrete bags. The trailer sat low, within the air stream of the truck and he drove roads at speeds less than 55 mph most of the way and it barely made a dent in the range, no where near half.

I've towed with trucks plenty of time in my life and towing at max weight with a trailer that has the same aerodynamics of a brick do a lot more damage than just "half" your range, heck lucky to get 1/4 of the normal range.
Driving on the Interstate at high speeds, you can watch the gas gauge empty in real-time. 😲

 

[marshallinwash]

Setting aside all the folks who drive big trucks for quite different reasons, of course.

The what is happening around here. The trucks generally rarely tow anything. They are commuter vehicles, make runs to the dump and Ikea.

 

[frontrangeleaf]

We see a lot of folks towing giant 5th wheel campers in these parts, or other similar "toys". Definitely going to kill range no matter what you're driving. Diesel is best for those use cases. Our little Audi TDI gets 20 mpg towing our camper through the Rockies. It also makes 430 lb ft of torque right off idle and has giant brakes for the Autobahn. So no, it won't tow "Ohio" so to speak, but for our purposes, it's a perfect fit.

It's a different mind set. I don't really get the need to have a giant camper either, but if that's your thing, be happy.