Category: Transportation

Anything related to transportation, including cars, traffic, other modes of transport, and so on.

Post #1613: How the Prius does its thing.

 

Introduction:  The U.S. market for gas-powered cars in 2005.

Source:  Analysis of US EPA gas mileage and vehicle specification data, 2005 model year.

Back in 2005, my wife needed a car.  And by that I mean, we were interested in a gasoline-powered passenger car.  Not a truck, crossover, van, SUV or the like.   And not a diesel.   We’d done that, and didn’t much like the drawbacks of the diesels of that era. A passenger sedan, in the parlance of the era.  Fueled by gasoline.

I was interested in buying something that was efficient.  But the raw MPG numbers were a jumble, driven largely by the size of the vehicle.  I didn’t really want to try to squeeze into some tiny econobox just because it got better mileage than a bigger car.  I was interested in identifying something that was efficient at converting gasoline into movement of passengers and luggage.  Not just the tiniest car I could fit into.

I took data from the EPA and calculated fuel efficiency in a way that put large and small cars on more-or-less equal footing.  Instead of looking at miles per gallon, I calculated cubic-foot-miles per gallon.  Where “cubic foot” is combined interior passenger and luggage room, measured in cubic feet.  Under this approach, a car that was twice as big, but got half the gas mileage, would count the same as a car that was half as big, but got twice the gas mileage.  They both used the same amount of gas to move a given volume of passengers and luggage.

My “cubic-foot-miles per gallon” for passenger cars is similar to the concept of ton-miles per gallon for freight vehicles.  For the simple reason that miles-per-gallon doesn’t tell you how much you were able to haul.  Trains, after all, burn a lot of diesel fuel per mile.  But they also move a lot of tonnage with that fuel.  In some sense, what matters isn’t the amount of fuel burned, it’s the usable carrying capacity that the fuel consumption provides.

The idea was to make this a two-step process.  First, I would separate out the vehicles that were efficient, regardless of size.  Then, from the lineup of vehicles that rose to the top of that listing, we could try to make an informed choice about what size of car we wanted to buy.  Given the choice of efficient vehicles on the market at that time.

Things did not quite turn out as planned.  I figured I’d get a “spectrum” of efficiencies, with a few dozen cars to choose from at the high end of the spectrum.

When I did that calculation– and so removed the variation that was driven merely by the size of the car — the data resolved into the amazingly simple picture, shown above.  For gasoline passenger cars, the 2005 American market consisted of three pieces:

  • The Prius
  • The Honda Civic Hybrid
  • Everything else.

The real eye-opener, to me, was the extent to which “everything else” was just that.   Basically, all non-hybrid cars were roughly equally inefficient.(!)  Sure, you had some muscle cars come in at the bottom of the heap.  But the point is that there wasn’t some nice, smooth distribution of cars in terms of their efficiency.  There was crowded mass of vehicles with little to distinguish one from another.  There was the Honda Civic Hybrid, poking up above that mass.  And there was the Prius, running about three times as efficiently as the average. 

The upshot is that if you wanted an efficient gas car in 2005, the decision was a no-brainer.   You bought a Prius.  The only other gas car that came close to it was the Honda Civic Hybrid, and that was just a bit too small for me.

The best way I know of to illustrate how different the Prius was from other offerings at the time is to ask this simple question:  In the 2005 car market, what was the most efficient gas-powered vehicle capable of moving six people?  The answer?  Two Priuses.  Every six-passenger sedan, van, or SUV got less than half the gas mileage of the Prius.  It was that far ahead of its time.

(As a footnote, I never put pickups, vans, or other special purpose vehicles (SUVs, etc.) on this graph because I couldn’t get the interior volume information.  The EPA showed the MPG for those vehicles, but in 2005, the EPA only tracked interior volumes of passenger cars.  And, as it turns out, that’s still the case.  They only note the interior volume of traditional passenger cars.)

Redo:  The U.S. market for gas-powered cars in 2022.

Now fast-forward to the 2022 model year, and ask the same question.  If you were interested in buying an efficient gas-powered car, what would your options be?  (I use 2022, not 2023, because the 2023 model year data from the U.S. EPA are not yet complete).

First, you have to acknowledge how much the market has changed.

In 2005, there were no electric vehicles (EVs) or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).  For passenger cars, 99% of the offerings were straight-up gas vehicles.  There were a couple of hybrids, and a couple of diesels.  Roughly speaking, 99% of the models offered were standard gas cars.

In 2022, here’s how the U.S. passenger car market shaped up.  (Recall, this is just cars, not pickups, vans, SUVs, and the like.)  In 2022, three-quarters of the offerings are still standard gas vehicles.  But more than one-quarter are  alternatives — hybrids, plug-in hybrids, or EVs.

Now let me ask the gas-car-efficiency question, for 2022.  I’m ignoring EVs, and for the PHEVs, I’m using just their gas-only mileage.  How do gas-powered cars shape up, in terms of my efficiency measure (cubic-foot-miles per gallon)?

 Source:  Analysis of US EPA gas mileage and vehicle specification data, 2022 model year.

Unlike 2005, the Prius now has quite a bit of company.  The 2022 Prius is slightly more efficient than the 2005 model, but now there are a couple of gas-powered cars that top it, and many that are nearly as efficient.

Unsurprisingly, everything at the top of the efficiency charts, for gas-powered cars, is a hybrid of some sort.  The entire cluster of gas sedans at the top consists of hybrids and PHEVs (where only the gas portion of the PHEV mileage has been counted.)

For the record, the two Prius-beaters on that graph are the Hyundai Ioniq and Ioniq Blue.  For reasons that must make sense to Hyundai, those are no longer being made as gas hybrid versions.   Hyundai discontinued those cars as of June 2022 (reference).

So, by the time we get to the 2024 model year, the Prius will be back at the top of the heap.  As it should be.  But now, at least, it has some close company.

Finally, I have to emphasize that this was for gas-powered vehicles.  On paper at least, there are many fully-electric (EV) and partially-electric (PHEV) cars that get MPG-equivalents in excess of the 54 MPG for the Prius Eco (highlighted in the chart above).  But here, I wanted to look at gas-powered cars, for comparison to my 2005 analysis. And I don’t want to get into what those MPGe numbers actually mean.  It’s not straightfoward.

How does the Prius achieve such efficiency?

You see a lot of bad information about how the Prius achieves its high efficiency, for a gas-powered car.  Some is just plain confused, some gets the orders-of-magnitude wrong.  Some explanations appear to violate basic physics, such as the law of conservation of energy.

To be clear, Toyota did optimize many aspects of the operation of that car.  If you look at a list of where energy gets dissipated in a typical car, the Prius addresses every area.

Source:  Energy.gov

Take wind resistance, for example.  Once you actually manage to get energy to the wheels of the car (Power to wheels line, above), about half of that energy gets dissipated as wind resistance.  If you want decent mileage, you need to keep that to a minimum.  The Prius has a “coefficient of drag” of 0.24, among the best ever measured for a mainstream U.S. passenger car (see the extensive list in Wikipedia.) By contrast, your basic brick-on-wheels design  — a Jeep Wrangler — has a coefficient of drag of about 0.45.  What people perceived in 2005 as the somewhat odd shape of the Prius was all about providing interior volume while minimizing air resistance.

There are other minor contributors.  The Prius comes with low-rolling-resistance tires.  It minimizes losses from braking by using regenerative (electrical) braking where possible.  It reduced the parasitic losses from (e.g.) air conditioning by employing a more efficient compressor design.  And so on.

But as you can see from the chart above, most of the energy wasted by a standard gas car is wasted by the engine.  As I understand it, the single largest driver of Prius efficiency — and the reason it had to be made as a hybrid in the first place — is that it uses a different type of gasoline engine.  It’s an Atkinson-cycle (or maybe Miller-cycle) engine, instead of a standard car Otto-cycle engine.

Why do I think the use of an Atkinson engine is key?  Well, here’s a list of the top 20 most-efficient gas cars offered in the U.S. in 2022, listing their specs and the type of engine they use.

Notice anything?

What was unique to the Prius in 2005 is now the standard way to achieve good fuel efficiency in a gas-powered car.  But, as explained below, in most cases, you have to add some secondary propulsion (electric motors) to get adequate on-road acceleration.

Here’s the explanation in brief.

The chemistry of gasoline dictates that you need a fairly “rich” gas-air mixture in an internal combustion engine.  If you make the mix too lean — too little gasoline relative to the air — the spark plug can’t ignite it and/or it burns poorly and/or it generates a lot of nitrous oxides.  To get reliable ignition and a clean burn, you more-or-less need to mix gas and oxygen in the ratio needed for complete combustion of the gas.  Too little gas in the mix and the engine stumbles and dies, or runs dirty.

But if you fill the engine cylinder with that relatively rich gas mix, you end up with more chemical energy in that cylinder than you can use.  Sure, you can compress it and ignite it.  But there’s so much energy that you’ve still got quite a bit of usable gas pressure left when the piston gets to the bottom of the cylinder.  (The number I see cited most often is that, under load, the gas pressure in the cylinder is still at five atmospheres when the piston hits the bottom of its range of motion.)  At that point — once the piston bottoms out — all you can do is open the exhaust valves and let all that potentially usable energy — that still-usable gas pressure — escape out the exhaust.

And that’s exactly what a standard Otto-cycle car engine does.  The intake stroke and power stroke are the same length, the valves open and close within a few degrees of the piston being at bottom dead center/top dead center.  At the end of each power stroke, there’s plenty of pressure left in the gas inside the cylinder.  And with each cycle, that energy gets tossed out the exhaust port.

This has been known for decades, i.e., that gas engines would run more efficiently if you could put a much leaner mixture into the cylinder.  The problem was getting that leaner mix to ignite and burn well.  Back in the 1970s, Honda tried to address this with its stratified-charge engine (reference).  That used two carburetors — one rich, one lean — and two intake valves.  It filled the top of the cylinder with a richer mixture that the spark plug could ignite.  And the rest of the cylinder with a leaner mixture that would itself be ignited by the rich mix at the top.  It was moderately successful, and I recall that the Honda CVCC with that engine was among the most fuel-efficient cars of its generation.

A better way to put less gasoline into the cylinder, and yet have it burn well, is to fill only part of the cylinder on the intake stroke.  Where I need to define “the cylinder” as the full length of the resulting power stroke.  That way, the air-to-fuel mix is correct for consistent ignition and clean burn.  You simply have less total fuel in the cylinder before you ignite it.

And that’s exactly what the modern Atkinson (or Miller) cycle engine does.  And it does that by closing the intake valve well after the piston hits bottom dead center.  This allows the piston to push out maybe 30% of the total air-fuel mix, then compress and explode what’s left.  As a result, you get both the right chemistry (the right air-to-fuel ratio) and the right amount of fuel to allow the resulting energy to be used efficiently.

In the Prius engine, more-or-less, the intake valve closes when the piston is 30% of the way up the bore.  (The engine has variable valve timing, so, well, that varies).  That works out to be, in effect, about a 10.5:1 compression ratio, and a 13.5:1 expansion (power stroke) ratio.

And so, while the standard Otto-cycle engine has nearly-identical compression and expansion (power stroke) ratios, the Atkinson-cycle engine has a much lower compression ratio, compared to its expansion (power stroke) ratio.  The whole point of which is to allow you to put the right fuel-air mix into the cylinder, just less of it.

But this comes at a cost.  With less fuel, and a longer expansion stroke, there’s less power with each power stroke.  And part of that power stroke now occurs at pressures much lower than you would get in an Otto-cycle engine.

As a result, the Atkinson engine is efficient, but it has a relatively poor power-to-weight ratio.  In the case of the Prius, the older 1.6 liter engine might have produced maybe 140 horsepower configured as run as a standard Otto-cycle engine.  But as an Atkinson-cycle engine, I think it barely broke 90 horsepower.

The result would have been a car with unacceptable on-road performance.  (Yeah, even for Prius drivers.)  So, the engineers at Toyota (and Ford) added electric motors, a big battery to run the motors, and so on.  And the hybrid was born.

To be clear, the electrical side of the modern hybrid is more-or-less a necessary evil.  It was something tacked on after the fact, to allow the engineers to replace the inefficient Otto-cycle engine with a more efficient, but less powerful, Atkinson-cycle engine.

So, now you know the primary source of Prius efficiency.  And you know why the 20 most efficient gas-powered cars offered in the U.S. all use Atkinson-cycle engines.

 

Post #1589: Correction to Post 1586

 

A local who has the Tea Party plates on his car took exception to my blanket statement that those plates mark environmentally insensitive individuals.  My claim that I’d never seen cars with (e.g.) greater than 30 MPG EPA rating, with Tea Party plates, is now wrong, courtesy of three outliers that he photographed and emailed to me.  I haven’t bothered to check the EPA ratings, but these at least aren’t low MPG trucks.

The gist of that prior posting still stands.  But as a matter of fact, there are some vehicles with Virginia Tea Party plates that do, probably, get over 30 MPG.  Contrary to what I said in that posting.  I don’t think that’s the norm, but mea culpa.

Still seeking a photo of that rarest of beasts, the Tea Party Prius.

As to why I call them the Tea Party plates, well, that’s what they are.

https://vatp.org/2010/11/13/va-tea-party-plates/

Three photos courtesy of an email correspondent:

Just to be clear — because I didn’t blur the plates or anything — it’s legal to photograph anything you can see from a public right-of-way.  At least here in Virginia.  Commercial use of such an image may fall under some different set of statutes.   But posting such an image with no claim to copyright and no intent to harass is fair use here in the Commonwealth.

Post G22-056, electric car math

 

You have no doubt read that “California is going to ban gas-powered cars”, starting a dozen years from now.

Which they actually are not, if you bother to read the details.  But that’s for another post.

This announcement out of California has been followed by the usual internet crap-storm of misinformation, disinformation, and ignorant opinion.

Of course nobody bothers to look up the facts first.

Or, God forbid, do a little math.

Let’s start with the math.  To answer the following question:

How many roads must a man drive down, before he crashes the grid?

If we magically converted all the passenger vehicles in the U.S. to electricity, today, roughly how much more electricity would we need to generate?

The answer requires just three bits of information.

  • How many miles do we drive now?
  • How much electricity do we generate now?
  • How far can you travel on one one kilowatt-hour of electricity?

Source:  Federal Highway Administration June 2022 Traffic Volume Trends report.

Point 1:  Americans drive about 3 trillion miles per year. This is vehicle miles, so it includes everything from passenger cars to 18-wheelers.  If you break it down further, you’ll find that 90 percent of that is light-duty vehicles, which corresponds roughly to passenger vehicles of all types, everything from cars to light (two-axle) trucks.  (Calculated from this source:  FHWA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics.)  In round numbers, then, the U.S. passenger vehicle fleet travels 3 trillion miles per year.

Source:  US Energy Information Administration.

Point 2:  America produces about 4 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.  (Plus a little rounding error for rooftop solar.)  Note that the share of carbon-free and carbon-light generation  (i.e., anything-but-coal) has mushroomed in the past decade.  This is why the carbon footprint of electrical generation in the U.S. has shrunk so much.  And that is why there’s the big push for electrical transportation.

In case you missed it, this started with the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.  Which, of course, the subsequent Republican President undid.  But at this point, market forces are the main driver behind this, with environmental concerns merely a nice fringe benefit. We’re going to get Obama’s clean grid whether we like it or not.

Source:  Electrek.co.

Point 3:  The average EV sold today gets about 3 miles per kilowatt-hour.  That’s based on citations from several non-official sources (like this one), and appears to be a sales-weighted average.

Source:  Fueleconomy.gov, 2022 model year, all cars that use electricity.

That average is interesting, given that the best of the best EVs have an EPA rating of 4 miles per KWH.  (My wife’s Prius Prime gets that, per the EPA, but we get well over five driving around town).  Even the godawful Hummer EV pictured above gets almost 2 miles per KWH.

This is, after all, America.  When it comes to cars, nothing exceeds like excess.  But compared to gas cars, the inherent efficiency of the electric platform seems to limit the amount of natural resources that you can squander hauling around tons of steel.  It compresses the roughly 5-to-1 efficiency difference across various gas vehicles down to a far more modest 2-to-1 difference.  Per the EPA, if you Hummer-size your EV, you only get to burn twice as much fuel as a Prius. 

So nyah.

Do the math and have a little common sense.

If we instantaneously converted the entire US passenger vehicle fleet to EVs, we’d need another trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, or roughly 25% more than we produce now.

That’s not rocket science.  To travel our 3 trillion annual miles, at 3 miles per KWH, we’d need 1 trillion KWH.  We make 4 trillion KWH now.  So, we’d need to produce 25% more electricity.

Common sense part 1.  We’re going to have decades to get that done, because electrification of the U.S. passenger fleet will proceed at a snail’s pace.  The U.S. has about 250 million passenger vehicles (Source:  FHWA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, all light-duty vehicles).  Each year, we buy around 17 million new vehicles per year (Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED system).

Even if every new passenger vehicle sold in the U.S. was an EV, it would take the better part of a decade to replace the existing stock of 250 million vehicles with EVs.  But back here in the real world, we just crossed point where 5% of current new-car sales are EVs.  Based on the experience of other countries who have electrified their passenger fleets, that figure is expected to reach 25% in 2025.  Beyond that, it’s hard to say what would happen next, because so few countries have exceeded that fraction.  (Source for all that information is Bloomberg).

When you run all that through a grinder, you’d have to guess that we have at least three decades to add that new electrical generation, probably more.  So we’d have to increase electrical generation by less than 1 percent per year, beyond the existing growth rate, to handle any remotely plausible increase in EV use in the U.S.A. That hardly strikes me as infeasible.

But wait, there’s more.

Probably the biggest joker in the deck here is night-time charging.

If we fully electrified all the existing passenger vehicle miles in the U.S., we’d need to produce 25% more electricity.  But that’s doesn’t mean 25% more generation capacity.  And that doesn’t mean 25% increase in the grid’s ability to delivery electricity.

How much new capacity we’d need would depend on the extent to which we can convince people to charge at night.  And, secondarily, the extend to which our electricity is generated by solar-with-no-storage (which is off-line at night by definition.)

Focus on the July peaks (in yellow) in the diagram above.  That’s how much electricity our existing system is capable of producing and delivering.

Any time we’re below those peaks, there’s spare capacity somewhere.  (Ignoring the issue of solar as a fraction of all generation.)  It may be relatively expensive to produce at those peaks, but it’s clearly feasible.  We do it every year.

And, as you can plainly see, any time other than summer, U.S. electrical demand is well below those peaks.  And in the summer, nighttime demand is well below those peaks.

The fact is, all we’d have to do is convince/require all/most EV users to charge at night, during the summer.  (Ideally, to charge at night all the time).  If that could be achieved, the additional electrical generating and delivery capacity would be minimal.

This isn’t a new idea.  The benefits of charging EVs at night has been around about as long as modern EVs have been.  It’s just that all the nay-sayers conveniently overlook it.

More to the point, all modern EVs come with the capability to schedule the charging time.  You can plug it in at any time, but you can tell it to charge only in the middle of the night.  So the opportunity for nighttime charging is a standard feature.  All we need is the common sense to put in a system that either enforces or strongly incentivizes it.

But but but …

But won’t EVs use up all the fuel we need to make electricity?  Comfort yourself with this thought:  The U.S. has about a century’s worth of natural gas, as “technically recoverable reserves”, given the current use rate (Source:  US EIA).

But won’t solar be so big a share of generation that nighttime charging is infeasible?  I don’t think we’re going to have to sweat that.  At present, solar accounts for about 0.1 trillion kilowatt-hours of electrical generation in the U.S. (Source:  US EIA).  Restated, solar accounts for about 2.5% of all the KWH produced in the U.S.  This probably will be an issue in sun belt states with high installed solar capacity.  It’s not really an issue for the U.S. as a whole.

Conclusion

Sure, parts of the grid may crash some time in the near future.  Think Texas in wintertime.

But that ain’t going to be due to EVs.  Not now, while EV charging is a drop in the bucket.  Not in the next decade, for sure, ditto.  And, if we have even the tiniest amount of common sense, not ever.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of mass conversion to electrical transport.  My greatest concern is that there’s no rational plan for disposing of all those big batteries.  Yet.  (The Feds had one at some point, but I haven’t seen anything about that in years.  Maybe that’s quietly proceeding.  Maybe that died with the Clean Power Plan.)  Plus, we need consumer acceptance.  And infrastructure for on-the-road charging.  And charging opportunities for other-than-single-family-home dwellings.  And, with the currently dominant battery chemistries, we’ll need metric craploads of exotic materials.

And so on.

Plenty of things to worry about.  But crashing the grid isn’t one of them.

Post #1563: Meanwhile, the price of gasoline continues to plummet

 

Just thought I’d say it, because nobody seems to be.  Below, the top graph is gas, bottom graph is crude oil.

People were stupid enough to blame the rise on the President.  But the President, praise the Lord, was not stupid enough to take credit for the fall.  Yet.  Though he did remark on it as being a good thing. Continue reading Post #1563: Meanwhile, the price of gasoline continues to plummet

Post #1548, the electric charging sequel

There ought to be a law.

Source:  myparkingsign.com

Yesterday I ranted about the disorderly situation for public car-charging stations.

You’d think that you could drive up, swipe your credit card, plug your car in, and buy some fuel at a known price.  Just like at the gas pump.  I mean, how hard could that be?  And you’d think that drivers of non-electric vehicles wouldn’t park in the car charging spaces, either by law or out of a sense of live-and-let-live.

But based on my recent experience, nothing written above is true.  My first experience with a public car charger was a machine with no instructions and no posted prices.  It had balky hardware and/or software  that gave us multiple false starts before we actually got the charger to work. Kind of.

And there was a proudly gas-guzzling truck parked in one of the two available charging spots despite a nearly empty parking lot.

But, on the bright side, apparently I’m not the only person to have run across a non-electric car blocking an EV charging spot.  To the point where laws are being enacted to prohibit that.

My wife pointed out this recent change in Virginia law.  As of today (July 1, 2022), in Virginia, it’s illegal for a non-electric car to park in a marked EV charging space:

"Parking at Electric Vehicle Charging Stations 

Parking vehicles not capable of receiving an electric charge in a space clearly marked for charging electric vehicles is now prohibited, and subject to a civil penalty of nor more than $25. (HB 450)

Source:  Fairfax County Government website.

And, she further notes that as of October 1, 2022 Maryland will so something similar:

Electric Vehicle (EV) Parking Space Regulation

Beginning October 1, 2022, individuals may not stop, stand, or park a vehicle in a designated EV charging space unless it is an EV that is actively charging. Violators may be subject to a fine of $100.

EV charging spaces must have signage that indicates the charging space is only for EV charging, day or time restrictions, states maximum violation fine, and is consistent with design and placement specifications in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways. EV charging spaces count toward the total minimum parking space requirements for zoning and parking laws.

Source:  U.S. Department of Energy

Thus, in Virginia and Maryland, it looks like EV charging spots have (or will soon have) the same sort of legal treatment as (e.g.) handicapped parking spots.  There’s a uniform state-wide requirement barring you from parking in those spots if you don’t qualify to use them.

But Delaware — where we tried to charge our car — appears to have no such laws on the books.   And, as far as I can tell, neither does the District of Columbia.

In those states, by contrast, any restriction on blocking the use of an EV charging station would be at the discretion of the owner of the property where that station is located.  In the same way that the owner of a parking lot can post “No parking, towing enforced” and tow away cars, presumably any rules against blocking access to EV charging spots would be privately enforced.

Shockingly expensive, to boot

The other big surprise to me was the cost of using these public charging stations.  Based on the few places in Ocean City MD where the hourly rates for charging were posted, our level-2 charging (240 volts) would have cost anywhere from $0.50 to maybe $1.25 per kilowatt-hour.  That compares to somewhere around $0.12 per KWH for residential energy use in Virginia (reference).

The lowest rate we observed — 50 cents per KWH — makes electricity as expensive a fuel as gasoline.  Based on the EPA ratings for the Prius Prime (for miles-per-gallon and miles-per-KWH), electricity at 50 cents per KWH costs as much per mile as gasoline at just over $5 per gallon.

(YMMV.  Literally.  Note that the standard of comparison above is the efficient Atkinson-engine Prius.  If, by contrast, you would otherwise be driving a standard (Otto-cycle) non-hybrid, your gasoline cost per mile would be higher.

Let me use the 2018 VW Golf as an example, because that came in an electric and standard gas model.  Fueleconomy.gov lists those as getting 28 KWH per 100 miles, or 3.6 gallons of gas per 100 miles.  Doing the math, $0.50 per KWH costs you the same as gasoline at $3.90 per gallon.  Or, if gas at $5 a gallon, you break even if you pay no more than $0.64 per KWH.)

But no matter how you slice it, the whole notion of big cost savings from electrical transport goes right out the door if you’re paying an appreciable fraction of a dollar per KWH.

So I’m left wondering whether the high prices observed in and around Ocean City, MD were merely a result of being in a resort town.  Or whether we were paying more because of the slow (level 2) rate-of-charge (which means we occupy the charging slot for a long time, to receive just a modest amount of electricity).  Or whether that’s the norm, suggesting that it really is that costly to deliver electricity to a car in that fashion?

It only took a bit of internet search to find that the 50-cents-per-KWH charge is not out of line with prices elsewhere.   And I’m starting to get some hints at some reasons this market is so screwy.

Electrify America runs a chain of charging stations, and they charge $0.43 per KWH for level-2 charging, per their website.

But that’s only in locations where they are allowed to charge per KWH.  Because, in some states, the only entity that can sell electricity is the public utility.  In those states, electric car chargers have to price by the minute, not by the KWH.  Electrify America charges $0.03 per minute for level 2 charging.  Because a Prius Prime charges at a rate of just about 3 KWH per hour (the actual rate varies over the course of the charge), with per-minute charging, that’s about $0.60 per KWH for a Prius Prime receiving a level-2 charge.

Blink charging quotes rates ranging from per $0.39 to $0.79 per KWH, per their website.  But, as with Electrify America, in states where they are not allowed to charge per KWH, they charge per minute, where the highest cited rate ($0.03 per half-minute) would cost about $1.20 per KWH for level-2 charging of a Prius Prime.

I think that’s enough to tell me that the pricing we observed in Ocean City is not out of line with prices elsewhere.  It’s also enough to tell me that more-or-less the entire fuel cost savings from electrical transport vanishes if your only charging option is a public charging station.  If your only access to charging is at five-to-ten-times the residential rate per KWH, chances are that your per-mile fuel cost for electrical transport exceeds that of the equivalent gas-powered transport.

 

 

Post #1458: Eco-bore

 

People Instagram a picture of what they had for lunch.  Or TikTok footage of themselves dancing solo.  Or unironically post a YouTube video on how to boil water.

Don’t even get me started on cat videos.

With that as context, I can post about the gas mileage in my wife’s Prius Prime.

Which was 67 MPG for the 145-mile trip back from Ocean City, MD this afternoon.  Not dogging it, either.  A chunk of that was flying down the Lexus lanes around DC, at 75 MPH and up.

Thus demonstrating that the 72 MPG on the way out to Ocean City (Post #1454) wasn’t the fluke I thought it was.

This, from a car that the EPA lists at 53 MPG on the highway.

On the one hand, MPG is not the smartest way to measure fuel consumption.  It exaggerates small differences.  In terms of gallons of fuel used, the difference between 53 (EPA), 67 (return trip), and 72 (outbound trip) MPG ain’t much.  Per 100 miles, it looks like this:

My incremental 27 tablespoons of savings (per 100 miles) on the outgoing trip pales compared to the eight trillion tablespoons of crude oil in the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve.

Yet it puts a smile on my face, no matter how much my savings is just so much pissing into the ocean.

Which, because I just came back from Ocean City, I will clearly state is simply a metaphor.

And yet …

And  yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.

Hey, we were on vacation.   Our favorite destination store (Made By Hand, Bethany Beach Del) now had an electric car charger out front.  We were driving a car that could use a recharge.  I’d never used a commercial charging station before.  We had a lot of free time.

Seemed like a series of matches made in heaven.

What a mess.

The plug that goes into the car is standard.  So the engineers did their job.

Beyond that, I’d say that pretty much every other profession involved in this industry has screwed up to a greater or lesser degree.

Let me start with the asshole with the proudly gas-guzzling pickup who occupied one of the two EV charging slots.  In an almost-empty parking lot.  Clearly parked there on purpose.  Clearly parked there to deny use of the EV charger.

It was one of those Dodges (now, hahahaha, Fiats!) that advertises the displacement and configuration of the engine (7.3 hemi?).  I doubt that the average knuckle-dragger who drives one of those as his grocery-getter even knows what hemi is short for, or the long and proud history behind that engine configuration.

But I can assure you, as an early Prius adopter, there are a lot of insecure people out there who are threatened by changes in the car market.  Just as it was common to be harassed (e.g., tailgated) driving a hybrid in 2005, it now seems some people are threatened by electricity-driven transport.  (And yeah, it was true, there was a lot of anonymous hate directed at hybrid drivers back in the day.)

Suffice it to say that the aim of the Hemi is the opposite that of the Prius Atkinson engine.  Which is to say, the Hemi was developed to have a high power-to-weight ratio, at the expense of poor fuel economy.  Which makes the Hemi driver the natural enemy of the Prius driver. 

So that much, at least, made sense.  The asshole needlessly denying revenues to the private-sector concern offering charging services drove a pickup with (no doubt) great acceleration and power, but fer-shit gas mileage.   And perhaps was not all that happy with $5/gallon gasoline.

And so he squatted in that precious EV charging space.  Not for any benefit to himself.  There were plenty of space in the lot.  Just to own the libs, I guess?  But he didn’t have the guts to straddle the line and block both spaces.  So both a gas-guzzler and a coward.  Because he did only what he had a legal right to do.

And so, it appears that the purveyors of this charging station just assumed that good will would keep those slots open.  Not only is there no legally-enforceable restriction on parking there, there’s not even any signage suggesting that gas-only cars should park elsewhere.

These stupid lib-tards assumed that people would simply cooperate.  In America?  That because there’s no benefit for a gas-only car to park there, they assumed gas-only cars would leave those spots free for the electrically-powered cars that could use them.

Ha ha ha.  Hemi ha ha.  Idiots.  There’s a whole piece of the political spectrum that takes pleasure in owning the lib-tards.  And the lib-tards didn’t even consider putting up signage to discourage that.  Because they were stupid enough to assume good will on the part of the average American.

Let alone towing non-EVs out of those recharging spaces.  Which is, apparently, what it will take in that resort destination, to keep those charger spots free.

And  yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.

OK, so ignoring the asshole in the black truck, blocking one EV charging space, we pulled into the space next to that.   And attempted to recharge the battery in my wife’s Prius Prime.

And we were faced with:

  • No indication of what recharging would cost.
  • Virtually zero instructions.
  • Malfunctioning credit-card reader.

But after numerous tries, it took my credit card, and let us do some level-2 charging (240 volts).

And yet, it still has not charged my credit card.  So … I guess that was free?

What?  When was the last time somebody required you to swipe a credit card, then didn’t charge you?  It’s hard even to characterize the degrees of incompetence involved in that.

But looking on the website for the parent company, the charging cost should have been more expensive than gasoline.  On a cost-per-mile basis. If they’d been competent enough actually to charge me what their website said was the rate for charging at one of their stations.  But instead, they let me charge, and then didn’t charge my credit card.

And that was true for most or possibly all the public charging stations in Ocean City, MD and environs.   Sure, you can recharge at a public station.  And per-mile, the resulting KWHs cost more than gasoline.   At least for my wife’s PHEV Prius Prime.

Anyway, I think I learned a lesson.  For now, at least.  I wanted a recharge so we could do our gadding-about-Ocean-City travel with a relatively low carbon footprint.

I now realize that the public-recharge market is such that this goal is not easily obtainable.  There’s just a whole lot of learning-curve, jerk-avoidance, cost-incurring turf that you have to negotiate.  All for the privilege of saving a few tablespoons of gasoline, in our otherwise efficient Prius.

On net, I’ll save the recharging for home, and run this as a straight-up gas vehicle when we’re on the road.

At some point, I suppose that whole public-charging market will straighten itself out.  But right now, it’s just not ready for Prime time.

 

 

Post #1454: 72 MPG, why I truly don’t give a 💩 about high gasoline prices in the U.S.

The context

Source:  Calculated from Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) data, series GASREGW (week, regular gasoline) and CPIAUCSL (CPI), accessed 6/26/2022.  This is the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular, in constant May 2022 dollars.

The price of gas appears to be peaking, at least for the short term.  Per the AAA, the price has fallen in the past week, in tandem with a drop in the price of oil.  Looks like the peak this time likely will be just under $5.02 per gallon of regular, as measured by the AAA on 6/14/2022. Continue reading Post #1454: 72 MPG, why I truly don’t give a 💩 about high gasoline prices in the U.S.