On Sep 28, 2015, at 9:12 PM, rayfellow via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
> The difference in per mile costs for an efficient EV vs a > heavy user is still not all that much. This is a _very_ significant part of the equation. My parents recently bought a Leaf. They love it, can't stop talking about it. And they literally can't tell the difference in their electric bills since they bought it. In computer programming, it's known as premature optimization. If you have a choice of writing code that's quick and easy for the programmer to write and later update and maintain, but runs 1000 times slower than some sophisticated but difficult-to-understand alternative, which do you write? First, you write the quick-and-easy code. And you don't ever look at it again until and unless performance is a problem. Even if the easy way is 1000 times slower...if it takes ten seconds to execute rather than 0.01 seconds...well, if it's something that a single person executes once every four months, why spend hours of expensive programmer time saving a low-paid end user half a minute spread out over the course of a year? If it's part of the inner event loop of an high-performance video game, sure; you squeeze every last CPU cycle out of it. But, within rounding, that represents 0% of the computer code written on a daily basis. So it is with electric vehicles. You've got one vehicle that gets ten miles per kWh, another that gets "only" three miles per kWh. The one is three times as expensive to charge up, so somebody's got to notice, right? Not when the difference in cost to drive 30 miles for your commute is 30 miles / (10 - 3 miles / kWh) * 10¢ / kWh = 43¢ -- not even enough to buy a stamp these days! Now, consider that a significant fraction of EV owners have rooftop solar, and thus their ongoing marginal cost per kWh is literally zero...and why should such people even pretend to care about efficiency? On the list of things that matter in an electric vehicle, efficiency isn't even on the list. Indirectly, perhaps, in terms of range and the cost of the battery to support the desired range...but make an affordable EV with a 400 mile range and efficiency even as bad as an entire kWh / mile, and you won't be able to make them fast enough to meet demand. Cheers, 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/20150928/27ef2d7e/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
