Let me guess: Ontario, Québec, BC? The provinces with the most urban and suburban areas.
Edit: Yep, exactly as predicted for the obviois reasons. Not exactly news.
Tl;dr: EVs are good for the climate. People with shorter distances to travel and more infrastructure like EVs, those who have less infrastructure or are required to travel more have mixed feelings.
The article goes a bit more in-depth than that. For example they show in my home region of metro Vancouver, the wealthy suburbs tend to have much higher rates of EV registrations than the core cities of Vancouver/burnaby/tricities/richmond/surrey or the less-wealthy suburban areas.
This data implies to me that beyond just infrastructure and travel requirements, cost is a major factor, perhaps overwhelmingly so. This too wouldn’t be groundbreaking news but it’s a different narrative to your conclusions here.
Speaks more to what I’m seeing in Halifax, too. We’ve been flooded with Teslas in the last couple of years, and it’s not beat up Civics they’re replacing.
cost is a major factor, perhaps
Related is the lack of availability of EV options at the lower price points.
Moat manufacturers have ICE cars at a variety of pricing levels, but so far EVs are not available that compete with the economy models of ICE cars.
Cost is a factor, but consider that if you live in the urban core, at least in some cities, it’s possible to simply not have a car. Vancouver from my recollection has pretty good transit and is fairly walkable in comparison to eg Houston.
Which comes back to cost doesn’t it.
Am I missing something? The only time the article mentions cost is in trying to explain why fewer women drive EVs. They say the reason its popular is that suburbs can home-charge whereas urban areas don’t have charging infrastructure for most residents.
Not that I think you’re wrong, but its not what the article says.
those who have less infrastructure or are required to travel more have mixed feelings.
Exactly. Up until recently I was driving 160km+ a day for work. Closest fast charge point to my house is a 20mins walk. I would have to charge my car twice a week, and that’s just not going to work for me.
Now that my daily commute is a 10mins bus ride from home, I barely need a car at all. My wife uses it twice a week, and every two weeks we take it out for a big shop. It does less travel in 2 months than it used to in a day.
driving 160km+ a day for work. Closest fast charge point to my house is
This seems like a case where charging at one’s house would make sense. You could easily recharge 160km of range overnight.
It would, but it’s street parking only, and uncontrolled. Some days I have to park 5 blocks away. It’s also not a great neighborhood, good chance it would be smashed up within a few weeks.
I can’t imagine that an EV works as well for someone in rural Saskatchewan with a 45 minute drive to the grocery store as well as it does for someone living in Toronto, Montreal. Mechanics who look askance at “the Asian cars” still are out there. Heck it might be a challenge just getting it to the community from an urban center.
I love my EV, and recognize it doesn’t work for everyone just yet (sometimes because of bad reasons that society accepts like “suburbia”).
Honestly 45 minutes is well within the range of most EVs. I would guess temperature and politics are more influential in the those areas.
My EV gets about 200km range in winter (my use case is up to 30 min trips primarily); 80km in 45 min, x2, is not far from the equivalent of 1/4 tank of “gas” in reserve, except there’s no Jerry can for an EV.
Then, convince someone who isn’t fully convinced of the superiority of fuel injection to go out in that. It’s always the “what if” fear of the unknown scenarios, and politics plays a role.
