On Aug 29, 2014, at 1:50 PM, Dennis Miles <[email protected]> wrote:
> 85% of driven trip miles were under 39 miles. Also, > 99% of driven trip miles were less than 100 miles , leaving only 1% of > trip miles being over 100 miles. Those statistics seem quite reasonable. What's _not_ reasonable is your interpretation of what they mean. Let's say those statistics apply to a not-atypical person who might make, say, fifteen trips per week. That's two trips five days a week for commuting to and from work, and another five trips for things like grocery shopping or social functions or taking the kids to soccer practice or whatever. In reality, it's probably a lot more once we add in lunch trips at work and doctor's appointments and picking the kids up from school and all the other things people use cars for, but we'll be conservative and go with fifteen trips per week. Eighty-five percent of fifteen works out to a bit over twice a week that this person needs more than 40 miles of range -- a statistic that passes the "sniff" test, at least for me. A car limited to a 40 mile range is simply a non-starter for that person -- especially if, as is so common, the need for such range is unpredictable. (And, of course, you've got to get back and have some reserves, so you need about a 100-mile range to be able to make a 40-mile trip, unless you can really count on rapid charging at the destination, something we're a long way from. Even the Leaf doesn't come close to cutting it for this person, with only five EPA miles of "Murphy" factor.) Fifteen trips a week is 780 trips a year. One percent of that is about eight trips a year...or one such trip every six weeks. Again, a car limited to a 100 mile range is a complete non-starter for this person, again particularly if the long-distance trips happen with minimal predictability. Maybe I've misinterpreted your definition of "trip," such that the daily commute is one trip, not two. Take my figures and divide them in half or double them as appropriate; every week this person is making at least one over-40-mile trip, and it's a few months between hundred-mile trips. This is nowhere near enough to meaningfully change the analysis. It makes a great soundbite to say that only 1% of trips are over 100 miles...but that betrays either ignorance of the true scale of car use or a less-than-honest distortion of that scale. Again, I'm all in favor of EVs of all types. For two-car families, it almost seems criminal to not have at least one EV, ideally a BEV. It seems similarly irresponsible to buy a new car that isn't at least a PHEV, or to refrain from converting all but the wimpiest of hybrids into plugins. What I won't do is pretend that BEVs are reasonable as the exclusive option for any but a negligibly small fraction of the driving public -- and I think this pretense of yours may well do more harm to the EV cause than anything else an individual can do. b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140829/581f18be/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
