lance_s wrote: ↑February 19th, 2024, 8:31 pm
lance_s wrote: ↑February 18th, 2024, 9:37 am
One handicap with electric cars is driving range. Most drivers want a car that can go 400 - 500 km without "refuelling". My personal psychological barrier is Ottawa to Toronto non-stop, even though I don't make that trip probably more than once a year.
If the market would accept cars with a 200 km range, I think electric cars would come down a LOT in price.
The other issue for most of Canada and the northern US states is winter. It gets a LOT colder here than the populated areas of Norway. With petrol cars, heating the cabin comes from energy that would otherwise be wasted. With electric cars, every degree of cabin heat comes at the price of corresponding reduction in range.
Another thing about heating. If you're stuck in a blizzard in fossil fuel car and have a full jerry can, you can probably stay reasonably warm for at least 24 hours (provided you make sure the tailpipe stays clear). In an electric car you'd be a popsicle.
Just catching up with this thread. In answer to Rokker's question, I have an electric car. It has been in my garage for years. It is a 1998 Solectria Force. They only made 400 of them. I bought it around 2009 or 2010, I think. I got to drive it for around 2 weeks before a part went. The replacement part from the original manufacturer didn't work. A similar part from a different manufacturer needed an adapter, which I never got around to obtaining. I had enough experience with driving the car, though, to conclude it wasn't a good purchase. At the time, electricity was much cheaper than it is now, and it STILL only made economic sense if gas was above $4.50 a gallon. I suspect, though, that it needed a new battery pack (gel lead acid, NOT lithium). Also, in order to avoid burning out the charger, I would have had to eventually get 240 volts out to the garage. There was an adapter for 120, but apparently it cheated in some way that wore out some part of the charger prematurely. People who used the adapter exclusively apparently had a higher rate of failure of the charger.
The car had a major design flaw, however. Only one rear wheel was responsible for driving and regenerative braking. That means it was really only a summer car, both because of the effect of cold on the batteries and the crummy traction in an area that actually gets snow. Use either the electric heater or the "boost" mode for driving and you could watch your state of charge go down like it was a fast electric timer or something. Kinda like this:
Also, the regenerative braking cut out at something noticeable, like maybe 7 to 10 miles per hour? That meant that you still needed the conventional brake system, and it happened that the broken part was the vacuum switch that kept the vacuum reservoir empty. Without an engine, there is no vacuum manifold for the power assist on the brakes. And we are talking about a car with 13 lead-acid batteries in it.
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