Any GTAM'ers own an electric vehicle? | Page 63 | GTAMotorcycle.com

Any GTAM'ers own an electric vehicle?

Quebec is also the home of the mileage rollback, lots of pick-up trucks i know of head to Quebec with 300000k and come back with 50.

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Quebec is also the home of the mileage rollback, lots of pick-up trucks i know of head to Quebec with 300000k and come back with 50.

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There's increasingly an electronic paper trail of mileages that is hard to evade - OnStar for example keeps track of mileages every time the car phones home to the GM mothership, so any major discrepancy would show up there, as well as service records, etc.

I think a lot of due diligence would certainly be well advised before buying anything from Quebec, but there are lots of legitimate dealers and sellers there - not everyone is a write off rebuilder - I think most of those get shipped OUT of Quebec again before being resold anyways, last I'd heard?
 
In case anyone cares, my cousin just came by to visit. He is an electrician and told me that charger installs are a big part of the work he is doing now. If anyone is looking for someone to do an install, pm me.
Fwiw, I asked about a ballpark price, he said that they all vary.

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Chatting with the wife over coffee today and discussing the practicalities of EV's. Right now dependent relatives make them difficult due to range issues unless they are kept 100% charged. My wife could go a week on a charge if it was work and shopping only but dependents create complications.

It keeps coming back to ICE's recharging the tank in 5 minutes just about anywhere when a dependent has a problem. People with problems don't want to hear explanations. Try to explain Kirchoff's or Ohms law to someone who has trouble putting batteries into a flashlight.

I also wonder if an airhead was given an EV if they would have problems. The range is there but one has to understand the drive / charge time ratios. Some people can't count on their fingers.

Until the range / charge issues match the fill up speed and convenience, people with low math understanding will have problems regardless of usage meters.

A person who pays cash for groceries understands that sometimes you have to ignore certain aisles because as they shop they mentally keep track of what they have now and what they'll need tomorrow. Similarly an EV driver may presently have to avoid side-trips available to ICE drivers.
 
Here was our long weekend worth of driving in a nutshell.

fukctheoilcompanies.jpg


Aside from a few liters burned in the bikes today when the wife and I went out for an hour, we burned absolutely zero gas in either of our cars this weekend.

Screwing the oil companies back, one electric kilometer at a time.
 
Chatting with the wife over coffee today and discussing the practicalities of EV's. Right now dependent relatives make them difficult due to range issues unless they are kept 100% charged. My wife could go a week on a charge if it was work and shopping only but dependents create complications.

But they recharge overnight, so they will be kept 100% charged. You always leave home with a full charge. Unless you need to go over 383 kms in one day (in the example of the Bolt), there are no range issues. Most (not all) drivers never exceed 383 km in a day even with a few curve balls thrown into the mix.
 
But they recharge overnight, so they will be kept 100% charged. You always leave home with a full charge. Unless you need to go over 383 kms in one day (in the example of the Bolt), there are no range issues. Most (not all) drivers never exceed 383 km in a day even with a few curve balls thrown into the mix.

The thing is...people still fret about range anxiety with ANY electric car. You could have one that goes 1000KM and someone out there would fret about the one theoretical day 5 years from now when they might need to drive 1001 kilometers.

This is the thing with the Volt - almost every time someone asks me about the car and it's electric range they immediately comment about the 55-70KM range being really short. I then ask them how many KM they drive in a day - about 80% of the people I ask, when presented with that question, soon realize that they drive that (or often significantly less) every day, so the Volt would be a PERFECT fit for them.

But range anxiety issues remain strong for pure EV's because a lot of people just don't even understand their own driving habits, or they read stories online about how "impractical" an EV is, or how the batteries need to be replaced in 5 years (Hello, simply go back earlier in this thread!), etc etc.

Then theres the "But your EV is as environmentally harmful as a huge pickup truck!" people. Don't even get me started on them - more "I believe everthing I read online" people.

But anyways.

Want a great example about people knowing very little about their own vehicles or driving habits? Ask 25 people how many kilometers their vehicle will go on a tank of gas and how many times they can drive back and forth to work on that amount of gas. I'd bet 20 people wouldn't even know - "I just put gas in it when it needs it!" is the typical answer.
 
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The thing is...people still fret about range anxiety with ANY electric car. You could have one that goes 1000KM and someone out there would fret about the one theoretical day 5 years from now when they might need to drive 1001 kilometers.

Fair enough, I'm one of those geeks who tracks every drop of gasoline that's ever gone into my car/bike. If nothing else, I know when it's time to change the spark plugs. However consider this. If you were to drive 383 kms every day, for 5 days a week, for the entire year, you would be driving 99,580 km! So looking at things conservatively, if you drive less than 90,000 km a year, a modern full EV (Chevy Bolt, 2018 Nissan Leaf tba soon, Tesla Model 3) will probably work for you and is worth taking a closer look. Screw the gas companies.
 
I totally agree, but EV's still carry the baggage of much misinformation and fear. Again, go back to the first few pages of this very thread.

Tesla is certainly changing peoples attitudes about electric cars and the Big3 will benefit from it with their own offerings, but Tesla could also completely sour the EV market IF the model3 turns into a turd in some fashion.

It's interesting times, but in the end those of us who have taken the dive are getting the last laugh. Look at this weekend's stats I just posted above for example. Our old Chrysler 300 would have burned about 40L of gas to accomplish those 300KM's (it was a lot of city driving mixed with some secondary highway), which at the $1.20/L average right now would have been just short of $50 in gas. Instead it cost us about $4-$5 in electricity.

Even a Prius (for the certain individual who likes to exclaim that they're a better choice because there's no "silly plugin nonsense", all while having a Model3 on reservation himself, oh the irony) would have used around 15L or gas, or $18, so we are still operating at roughly 1/4 the cost of a Prius, and we don't have to suffer the indignity of driving an uncomfortable slug of a Prius.

FWIW I also religiously track fuel purchases/economy via an app in my iPhone. I have data for every kilometer of every vehicle we've ever owned in the last 7 years or so.
 
But they recharge overnight, so they will be kept 100% charged. You always leave home with a full charge. Unless you need to go over 383 kms in one day (in the example of the Bolt), there are no range issues. Most (not all) drivers never exceed 383 km in a day even with a few curve balls thrown into the mix.

It's not 383 km a day, in many cases it's slightly more than 383 km before you get home. Driving an EV up to many cottages can easily eat up 250 km, if you don't have a 220V plug there (expensive for the use it gets and/or not your cottage), you gain back <160km/day plugged in. So it takes a day and a half to get back to full without using it during the weekend. If your destination is 350 km away and you arrive friday night, you can't leave until sunday night (assuming your car has been charging the entire time) if you want to make it home. There are few if any fast charging stations along routes north of the 401. Want to go camping in algonquin, too bad, you can't get there and back.

Simplifying this to you begin every day fully charged is not realistic for most people unless you are sleeping in your own house.
 
Even at a level 1 (standard 120V receptacle at 12amps) you get ~150KM back for every 24 hours of charging.

So using the cottage example, you arrive Friday night at 7PM, so by Saturday night at 7PM you have 150KM back in the battery. By the time you depart Sunday afternoon, at say 4PM, you have about another 125KM of range - for a total of 275KM.

Even if your cottage is 300KM away (which is highly unlikely for most people) you'd still have ~80KM left upon arrival, and with the 275KM you can recover charging while there you are leaving with well over 300KM (nearly a full charge again, for that matter) of range for the trip home.

Seems totally viable to me. For someone with a cottage 100-200KM away, it's a total non issue IMHO.

And the Algonquin example is a great example of looking for a scenario that fulfils a desired outcome. For most people a pure EV is unlikely to be their only car at this stage of the technology, and a savvy owner would gladly rent an ICE car for such a trip maybe once a summer as the savings from just one weekend of EV ownership (Look at my example above) would pay for a good portion of the rental for that one weekend.
 
Actually Algonquin is totally doable. There's a Level 3 DC charger in Gravenhurst. Stop for under an hour there charging (1 hr DC = 290 km) and you can totally do Algonquin and back to Gravenhurst (240 km roundtrip), then back home. The charging network is being expanded all the time.
 
My cottage is north of Belleville off 506 and I will be able to get there easily on a single charge. 2 days of charging (I'm never there less than 2 days ever) and I'm back to the city with no issues. At 3 hours out of Toronto, that's further away than most who have cottages along Georgian Bay or in the Kawarthas.
 
Actually Algonquin is totally doable. There's a Level 3 DC charger in Gravenhurst. Stop for under an hour there charging (1 hr DC = 290 km) and you can totally do Algonquin and back to Gravenhurst (240 km roundtrip), then back home. The charging network is being expanded all the time.

I thought Gravenhurst was supercharger? Can non-teslas pay to use supercharger stations?
 
It's not 383 km a day, in many cases it's slightly more than 383 km before you get home. Driving an EV up to many cottages can easily eat up 250 km, if you don't have a 220V plug there (expensive for the use it gets and/or not your cottage), you gain back <160km/day plugged in. So it takes a day and a half to get back to full without using it during the weekend. If your destination is 350 km away and you arrive friday night, you can't leave until sunday night (assuming your car has been charging the entire time) if you want to make it home. There are few if any fast charging stations along routes north of the 401. Want to go camping in algonquin, too bad, you can't get there and back.

Simplifying this to you begin every day fully charged is not realistic for most people unless you are sleeping in your own house.

Arrive at cottage with a few Kms left in the battery and then find out you have to go into town for something next morning. You lose kms and charge time.

Like I said if one diligently takes advantage of every charging moment only a few people would have problems.

How much power does the heater draw when a Barrie commuter is doing zero KPH on the 400 for an hour due to a whiteout road closer?

A person can make an EV work by using common sense or they can screw it up by treating it like an ICE.
 
Look. A lot of folks going camping don't take the grocery getter. They need the "big" vehicle to pack up the family and gear.

The reality is, for a very large majority of commuters, the Volt/Bolt are real world viable options right now.

My wife was suggesting I mention EV to my work fleet manager.

The issue is work hasn't found and agreed upon how employees could submit for electricity consumed for work.

While I expressed, I'm ok with accepting the expense myself, they said not all employees would.

Our next personal vehicle will likely be EV. The wife digs them now.

And a lot was from this thread.

Cheers!


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@nakkers I wonder if they could just give out a certain $ amount per month? Even if it is more than the employee is using in electricity, it would be less than what they are paying in gas.

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