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Cars (all fuels and electric)

And of course that your car is parked at home during the hours where you get the most sunshine!

Which is true for almost nobody, necessitating batteries. Plus a real car for emergencies, unplanned travel, peace of mind etc.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 18 Dec 19:12

Nobody charges at peak hours at home, and night electricity is cheap.

And if you let the provider decide exactly when to charge at night

How well EVs work is a pretty binary thing. If you can (a) charge at home overnight and (b) do not drive more most days than you can charge, it is cheap and convenient. If either of the two things are not true, it is expensive and infuriating.

Last Edited by Cobalt at 18 Dec 19:25
Biggin Hill

Which is true for almost nobody, necessitating batteries. Plus a real car for emergencies, unplanned travel, peace of mind etc.

So in your area ‘almost nobody’ works from home it seems. That’s not what I’m seeing in Europe. Also, doesn’t seem like many people here need a ‘real car’ for the reasons you mention, so that’s a cultural thing. And even if they do, I guess the range of today’s EV’s covers such needs, at least over here. Or they hire a car for a long trip for the summer holidays.

Just came back to visit my daughter who lives abroad with her family in a suburb of newly built homes. Almost 100% young couples with kids. Most work from home and while walking around I could see mostly one car per household, majority electric and being charged by solar. My daughter seems to manage to cover her mileage almost 100% through solar and makes a bit of a sport of it. If not enough, charging by night at reduced rates and good to balance the grid. I don’t think her neighborhood is just one data point and I’m happy to see things move in that direction.

Son Alberti LEJF, Son Bonet LESB, Mallorca, Spain

@aart, the reason people use a car in the daytime and therefore aren’t stationary and charging the car on solar is because people travel in daylight to see things wherever they go, aided by the fact that their eyes work better in daylight and they aren’t asleep in daylight hours. That makes charging a vehicle in the daytime problematic, and batteries are the only solution if you want to use solar energy to charge at night. Working from home or not has nothing to do with it.

Charging an EV while at work is the norm here, if that’s what you want to do, and commuting to work is therefore one of the few things a solar powered EV can do without compromise, assuming the company has enough solar panels. One wonders if working/charging at work, living where you can’t charge and not traveling otherwise is part of some people’s confining EV ideology. It’s certainly not part of my ideology, and I have no interest either in living in a tiny house on what was not long ago open land, with only one car, paying taxes and making babies the world doesn’t need while going nowhere and seeing nothing. Instead I average about 37,000 km per year driving 3 cars and 9 motorcycles, only 13,000 of which is covered on my (recently lengthened) regular commute to work, which BTW is concerned with large, noisy pieces of machinery that oddly enough have no place at my home. 90% of that total distance is covered in daylight, just like my flying.

Other than being good for commuting, EVs can also serve the limited needs of those who live and use them to travel around a small island, using fossil fuel powered vehicles when they want to leave the island and go further afield. I don’t live on an island either and won’t be buying an EV myself, but I will similarly travel about 10,000 km within the next 15 hrs, kerosene powered.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 18 Dec 21:44
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