Electric vehicles are being driven about half the distance of conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, according to new a new paper from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). That means policymakers may be underestimating the costs of going fully electric, according to the authors.
The study combined hourly electric meter readings with address-level EV registration records in California, and found the purchase of an EV raised a household's electricity consumption by just 2.9 kWh/day — indicating an average EV is driven about 5,300 miles annually. According to EPIC, that's less than half of the U.S. fleet average.
There are several possible reasons EVs are driven less. "Perhaps most pessimistic for electrification would be if EVs are viewed by drivers as complements to gasoline cars, as opposed to substitutes," David Rapson, an associate professor in the University of California Davis economics department and a co-author of the paper, said in an email.
For years, automakers stalled progress on climate change and cleaning up our air. Consumers interested in electric vehicles often struggle to find them on dealer lots, in part because manufacturers don’t make or distribute enough of them.
Automakers spend a tiny fraction of their ad budgets on their plug-in products. When Donald Trump came into office, Toyota, GM, and other major automakers like Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler) asked his administration to weaken Obama-era greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards for cars — which had been our government’s most ambitious program to reduce planet-warming emissions. Until recently, they also supported the Trump administration’s attack on California’s authority to protect its residents from vehicle pollution, which was the foundation of 14 other states’ authority to do the same.
Advocates for public transportation often promote practical advantages: affordability, accessibility, environmental friendliness, reduced traffic jams.
In New York, there’s an anti-loitering statute that has come to be known colloquially as the “Walking While Trans” ban. Advocates say that the law, which is ostensibly meant to target sex workers, allows officers to arbitrarily arrest and detain New Yorkers for simply walking around or standing on the street. It allows police to decide, for instance, that a woman’s skirt is too short, or that she’s been lingering too long on one street corner, and to apprehend her based on suspicion that she’s “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” Trans women — and particularly trans women of color — are disproportionately targeted this way, activists say. “Whether you are ho-ing or not ho-ing, even if you look like you might be trans, you are going to jail,” Tiffaney Grissom, a trans woman from the Bronx who has been arrested multiple times under the law, told The Village Voice in 2016.
I’ve long been fascinated by the role of safety devices and greater risk taking.
Study after study has shown that if people normally act a “danger level of 2”, they’ll notch up their danger level to “danger level of 3” or “danger level of 3 1/2” if a safety device is designed to keep the device safe up to a “danger level of 4”.
This obviously undercuts many of the benefits of the safety device, when increased safety margins are just used to promote more dangerous behavior. Often redundancy encourages bad practices, even if it’s designed to increase safety.
General Motors plans to completely phase out vehicles using internal combustion engines by 2035, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra announced Thursday. The automaker will go completely carbon neutral at all facilities worldwide by 2035.
Barra has frequently touted GM's plan for “an all-electric future,” recently increasing to 30 the number of pure battery-electric vehicles it will launch by the middle of this decade, but this marks the first time the largest Detroit automaker has set a hard target for completely phasing out gas and diesel engines for all light-duty vehicles, including pickups and SUVs.
I think Americans will like electric cars. They'll have good acceleration, with rocket-like starts onto the freeway if the drivers want to really wallop the accelerator. Battery packs are big and heavy, which necessitates larger, higher profile, longer vehicles. The demand for larger ranges and bigger battery packs might actually bring back some of the 220-inch behemoths that once ruled the road in 1950s and 1960s, especially for people who don't live in cities and have to parallel park.
It's unclear if there will be much of a push for efficiency standards with the new vehicles, especially right away, as electricity is so cheap and plentiful as gasoline once was, and the tailpipes for generating plants tends to be located outside of cities, so localized pollution is a lot less of an issue.