We drive a compact hybrid and average 55mpg. We have driven 600 miles on one tank of gas.
Seriously, who cares? It only matters if you hate going into petrol stations. (Which I do as it happens.)
My life with an EV, this week.
Sunday, got home in the evening on 32% battery following a number of relatively short journeys over the previous few days. Plugged the car in.
Monday, didn't go anywhere.
Tuesday, six miles. No need to plug in again, obviously.
Wednesday, 60 miles. Still no need to plug in.
Thursday, didn't go anywhere.
Friday, 30 miles. Down to about 38%. Plugged the car in, anticipating Saturday.
Saturday, 80 miles. Down to 43%. (It was mostly motorway - I was going
fast - and quite a cold day.) Plugged the car in again, anticipating Sunday which will probably be about 40 miles.
Do you see any visits to petrol stations there? No. Do you see any visits to public chargers there? Again no. Do you see any time spent hanging around? No.
It takes literally seconds to plug the car in, and ditto to unplug it. Maybe half a minute to do both. It's more hassle putting my phone on charge. I can go on like this indefinitely. 30 seconds maybe twice a week on average to charge the car. And this isn't a particularly long-range car. The number of times a year my daily drive exceeds the range of the car, the range I have when I wake up in the morning with no effort on my part, can be counted on the fingers of one finger, really. It hardly ever happens. It is indescribably painless.
Things are different on long journeys (I mean travelling to overnight stays) of course. Then I need to stop to charge. But even with a fairly short-range car I'm driving between two and four hours before I need to stop (depending on the weather, especially the ambient temperature, and the speed I'm going at). I do need to eat from time to time. Driving all day, fast on the motorway, I'll need to stop three times. Lunch, afternoon coffee and evening meal. If this was too onerous and I'd prefer to omit the coffee break, I should have spent a little (only a little) more on the longer-range model of my car. Then I'd only need to stop twice in a full day's driving. If you don't do that you're a danger on the road.
Who the
hell ever needs to drive for 600 miles without a break? What is the actual point? In a full day's driving with an average EV you'll typically only have to stop a couple of times for half an hour or so. You'd be doing that anyway, whatever you were driving. When you stop, again you spend literally seconds plugging the car in, then you go off to eat and use the facilities and so on, and when you're done, so is the car. Again there's no pointless hanging about.
There are EVs with a real world range of over 300 miles available. With something like that you'd literally only have to stop once in this very long day of driving. That's actually not long enough. It's almost pointless.
The obsession with how far you can drive an ICE car before you have to visit a petrol station is something that only started when EVs appeared. It's the most pathetic gotcha imaginable. How far can I drive my EV before I have to visit a petrol station? Forever, as it happens.
(Yes, I know. "I haven't got a drive, it would never work for me!" It may not work for you right now, but it will when the solutions for overnight charging for people without a drive have been comprehensively rolled out. "I couldn't afford your car!" Maybe not, at the moment. Though you might be surprised. EVs are too new for there to be a lot of steal-of-a-bargain used cars around as yet. But there will be. EVs are more durable than ICE cars by virtue of their simplicity and lack of moving parts. Just give it a few years.)
