I was thinking about power the other day and more specifically electric vehicles. It's not something I think about much because, at this stage, an electric vehicle (EV) is not something that would work for me; I drive a big four wheel drive truck as my personal vehicle and it runs on dinosaur juice, fossil fuels, and considering the purpose of use I have for my vehicle an EV variant won't work for me for many reasons - and it doesn't exist anyway.
So why was I thinking about electric vehicles?
I recently stayed in a hotel when travelling for work and made an observation that they had a single EV parking/power bay where an owner of an electric vehicle could park and charge. One single bay.
I asked at the hotel about how many rooms they had which turned out to be 200 in all and they were at capacity. That means that on any given night only 2% of the patrons staying at the hotel could charge their electric vehicle, 1 in 200. That's not very good odds especially considering this was in a regional town many hundreds of kilometres from a major city about at the mid-point between Adelaide and Melbourne. I think the lack of EV infrastructure doesn't bode well for a country that is looking to ramp up EV sales with marketing propaganda campaigns.
I'm not sure what it's like in your area but that's typical here; there's simply not enough EV charging infrastructure in place to accommodate the "expected" number of EV's, and I'm pretty sure there's not enough for what's on the road currently.
I noticed one of the manufacturers (Mercedes) are offering a complimentary home-charging install with certain vehicles but a charging bay at home isn't going to be much use when one isn't home and for those who travel...well, Australia is a mighty big place and with so little in the way of EV charging infrastructure...I wonder about the viability of it all.
I found some figures for vehicle sales today for the period of 1 October to 31 December 2023 and noticed that 82% were ICE vehicles (internal combustion engines) which is up almost 1,500 on the previous quarter and only 7.07% were BEV (battery electric vehicles) which is down by almost 1,200 on the previous quarter. Those figures are quite telling and I think an indication of the poor state of the EV infrastructure and the consumer's lack of confidence that it will improve anytime soon. (Source of these figures is the Australian Automobile Association.)
I'm a little dubious about the future of EV's, certainly in this country, and am inclined to think it's a convenient agenda that certain groups are pushing, a money-spinner also, that there's probably limited scope for it (in its current format) and the benefits to the environment are also negligible considering manufacturing and ultimately disposal of batteries, not to mention the roll-out of infrastructure. In my State, South Australia, one can get in a car and drive for 1,800 kilometres and still be in the same State, much of which is in country areas with little to nothing around. In other parts of Australia one can drive for days and see nothing and no one...so I wonder how electric vehicles will be viable or if they're simply impracticable. I wonder what your thoughts are and how you feel the EV Design and create your ideal life, tomorrow isn't promised - galenkp [Original and AI free]
juggernaut agenda will work in your location or generally. Do you feel it is viable or do you believe another path must be found to address the fast-dwindling supply of fossil fuels. Feel free to comment if you'd like to.
Image(s) in this post are my own