Poll: Do you have, or plan to get, an electric car?

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Do you have an electric car or plan to get one?

  • Yes

  • No

  • I plan to

  • Over my dead body

Results are only viewable after voting.
Oh, it's a Jeep joke...

Took me a minute, as my last jeep didn't really give us any major mechanical issues, except for once and it was resolved the next morning so we could drive it over to the east coast.

Current jeep is still young. It's ok so far.

I prefer GM/Chevy vehicles, but jeeps have been an acceptable compromise since I married into a Chrysler family.

Looking forward to the 4xe lineup.
 
Haven't owned any jeeps myself, they are pretty rare here, but friends had a grand voyager, not only did it turn like an oiltanker and used about as much gas, but it broke down at least once per year. It actually was worse than most french cars, without the benefit of cheap parts.
 
My last jeep got terrible mileage. My current Jeep gets as good of mileage in the summer as my last Bonneville did, and in the winter it's almost as bad as the last jeep.

That stinks that your friend's jeep broke down that often.
 
My Jeep, a 2017 Wrangler Unlimited, gets about 18-20 mpg. Not the best, but hey, I can go just about anywhere - roads are optional.

The Grand Voyager was a Plymouth van. The way you describe it, Karnynb, it must have been pre 1984? Those had a turning radius of about a thousand feet. (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration)
 
Saw this on a local road during Monterey Car Week - ZIPPY!
PXL_20210815_221616881.jpg
 
Apple_Jacker said:
So I need to buy a new weed whacker... anyone have any experience with electric (battery powered) weed whackers?
Click to expand...

I have a Dewalt 20V one. Just got it this spring, but I really like it.

I think the head is a little smaller diameter than my Stihl gasser was. But other than that it's fine.

No real comment on battery life. I only trim for 10 minutes every time, if that. My mom has the same one and I think can get 20 or 30 minutes out of hers.

I'm gonna sell my Stihl, if that tells you anything!
 
NickTheGreat said:
I have a Dewalt 20V one. Just got it this spring, but I really like it.

I think the head is a little smaller diameter than my Stihl gasser was. But other than that it's fine.

No real comment on battery life. I only trim for 10 minutes every time, if that. My mom has the same one and I think can get 20 or 30 minutes out of hers.

I'm gonna sell my Stihl, if that tells you anything!
Click to expand...
Yikes. I'm usually trimming for anywhere between 1 to 2 hours. I've seen that they offer higher voltage models too though.
 
I really wanted my next car to be an electric. But since it looks like I’ll have better selection & range if I wait until 2025 (also, we might become expats in 2023). I think I’m going to buy a used convertible in the meantime & hand the keys to my ‘09 Prius to my kid next year.
 
AzOr said:
A quick summary of the upcoming bi-directional tech that’s just around the corner.
In the article they drop a new (to me) acronym; V2G vehicle-to-grid.
Exciting stuff. I think an ev is still a couple of years away for me. However, we are installing solar panels soon.
Click to expand...

At first I thought this would be a great idea but anything that cycles the car battery reduces it’s lifespan. Being connected to the grid is essentially having a huge battery and much cheaper then using your own storage. Grid tie solar is the way to go unless you live in Texas.
 
Bilsch said:
At first I thought this would be a great idea but anything that cycles the car battery reduces it’s lifespan. Being connected to the grid is essentially having a huge battery and much cheaper then using your own storage. Grid tie solar is the way to go unless you live in Texas.
Click to expand...
That brings up an interesting point about charging. I recently bought my son's Prius Hybrid since their growing family has outgrown it. It's 5 years old and came with the lower capacity battery pack. I'm getting around 100 miles of local driving between charging cycles. Deep cycle batteries perform better if they are mostly discharged between or before charging. It that true for EVs and Hybrids? In other words, should I be plugging in after every short trip around town?
 
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I think the idea is to have a V2G setup if you live in an area w frequent outages.
I’m the next year or so, we are having solar panels installed at our house. I asked one of the contractors about having a power wall, or similar installed for when an outage occurs. These battery banks are expensive. Anywhere from 10-15k and maybe more.

We will be tied to the grid but that doesn’t help us during an a outage.

In the last year we have had two outages for a total of approx 72 hrs w/o electricity.
I don’t think this necessarily warrants a bi-directional charger setup. However, if in a few years we purchase an ev (my wife really wants the new Mach-E) and the price of the chargers are reasonable, it’s something to consider.

My in-laws live in rural Oregon and they have had about 14 days w/o electricity in the last year.
 
AzOr said:
I think the idea is to have a V2G setup if you live in an area w frequent outages.
I’m the next year or so, we are having solar panels installed at our house. I asked one of the contractors about having a power wall, or similar installed for when an outage occurs. These battery banks are expensive. Anywhere from 10-15k and maybe more.

We will be tied to the grid but that doesn’t help us during an a outage.

In the last year we have had two outages for a total of approx 72 hrs w/o electricity.
I don’t think this necessarily warrants a bi-directional charger setup. However, if in a few years we purchase an ev (my wife really wants the new Mach-E) and the price of the chargers are reasonable, it’s something to consider.

My in-laws live in rural Oregon and they have had about 14 days w/o electricity in the last year.
Click to expand...

As I understand it V2G assumes continual or frequent usage of the cars battery to prop up the grid and is what I would never do to my EV.

But using the cars battery as backup in power outages.. heck yea that is the best idea ever!
 
Brooothru said:
That brings up an interesting point about charging. I recently bought my son's Prius Hybrid since their growing family has outgrown it. It's 5 years old and came with the lower capacity battery pack. I'm getting around 100 miles of local driving between charging cycles. Deep cycle batteries perform better if they are mostly discharged between or before charging. It that true for EVs and Hybrids? In other words, should I be plugging in after every short trip around town?
Click to expand...

Lithium ion batteries don't like being either fully charged or discharged and last longest when kept somewhere in the middle. They also do not need nor respond well to conditioning or float like lead acid. There are scads of websites that have great info on the proper care and feeding of BEV.
 
RE V2G:
Bilsch said:
At first I thought this would be a great idea but anything that cycles the car battery reduces it’s lifespan.
Click to expand...

Tiptoeing towards the mantra of "everything is for sale at the right price"... what if you could plug your car in and put a quantity and price limit on your car's battery life/ energy reserve, such as "I'm willing to sell some of my car's ~70kWh of electricity, up to 10kWh, but only if the price is above $1/kWh?" That $10 of payment only costs ~$1 to recharge in off-peak hours (even better if you have solar) and might be worth the extra battery wear.

Turning $1 into $10 isn't crazy at that scale, but imagining millions of people/ cars doing the same sort of bidding against power fluctuations/ brown-outs/ black-outs or stabilizing renewable energy peaks and troughs and it seems like there could be some real synergy achieved from V2G...

Adding in that some of the plants in Texas went down specifically because the grid had become destabilized so they shut down to prevent damage to themselves, causing a snowball effect. It might have only taken a few thousand EVs propping up the first part so those plants never had to shut down at all.
 
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I drive for Uber/Lyft and would like to get a hybrid. Was talking to my pastor's SIL. He usually drives a Tesla, however he was driving a Prius today. He said he drove from Atlanta to Chattanooga and barely used any electricity.
Not to mention Uber/Lyft frovide drivers a bonus for driving hybrid/ EVs
 
Newsman said:
I drive for Uber/Lyft and would like to get a hybrid. Was talking to my pastor's SIL. He usually drives a Tesla, however he was driving a Prius today. He said he drove from Atlanta to Chattanooga and barely used any electricity.
Not to mention Uber/Lyft frovide drivers a bonus for driving hybrid/ EVs
Click to expand...

I recently bought my son's 2017 Prius hybrid, since they're expecting #3 offspring any day now and had to "up" their ride a bit to accommodate 3 kinder in tow. When they bought it new it came with the "small" battery bank and were a little disappointed that my daughter-in-law who drove 100 miles per day/4 times a week to her D.C. beltway job with NASA wasn't getting a round trip in EV-mode only. I suspect the 80+ MPH average speed of the flow of traffic had her expending the battery bank quickly and forcing hybrid mode use of the IC engine. Still, 58 equivalent MPG kept her fuel bill lower than most of her fellow speeders.

The car had about 52,000 miles on it when I bought it from them. I use it mostly as a daily driver around town to run errands, seldom in excess of 50 MPH. I get well under 100 miles (roughly 3 or 4 days driving) per charge before the IC kicks in nearly full time, but the car sleeps in the garage next to a 120V20A circuit, so an occasional top-off of the battery bank isn't a big deal. The battery bank should still have a lot of service life left, but I'm starting to suspect that the internal cells may be getting unbalanced and the stronger cells are picking up the slack for some weaker ones in the bank.

But based on your Pastor's SIL's experience, if he made it from, say, Marietta to even the southeast side of Chattanooga without using much battery, he wasn't driving it in EV-mode only and probably has an 8Kwh battery bank. My experience on that stretch of I-75 is a constant reminder that y'all Bubbas down there watch waaaay too much NASCAR.
 
Last edited:
Newsman said:
I drive for Uber/Lyft and would like to get a hybrid. Was talking to my pastor's SIL. He usually drives a Tesla, however he was driving a Prius today. He said he drove from Atlanta to Chattanooga and barely used any electricity.
Not to mention Uber/Lyft frovide drivers a bonus for driving hybrid/ EVs
Click to expand...

That's a tricky situation. If I was an Uber/Lyft driver looking for a new to me vehicle to drive for that, I think I'd look for a hybrid to get me through the next couple of years until we start seeing some of today's EVs hit the used market. Something like the Bolt EUV or the ID4 would probably work great, but they aren't exactly cheap.

But I think I'd really look into how many miles I put on in a day on the days I bring in the most money, and what kind of EV bonus the company provides.
 
Bilsch said:
As I understand it V2G assumes continual or frequent usage of the cars battery to prop up the grid and is what I would never do to my EV.

But using the cars battery as backup in power outages.. heck yea that is the best idea ever!
Click to expand...
I'm a little confused. Wouldn't the same issue of deep cycling of a car's battery in V2G be the same (bad) as feeding the grid from a Power Wall? I'd assume an AC inverter downstream of the Power Wall is continually draining the Power Wall to feed the grid as well as household loads, creating a continuous charge/discharge cycle that would shorten the service life of the battery pack. Do home systems (with battery backups) that power the grid have some sort of relay and separate inverter to tap "excess" DC from solar arrays so as to not deplete storage batteries?
 
Brooothru said:
I'm a little confused. Wouldn't the same issue of deep cycling of a car's battery in V2G be the same (bad) as feeding the grid from a Power Wall? I'd assume an AC inverter downstream of the Power Wall is continually draining the Power Wall to feed the grid as well as household loads, creating a continuous charge/discharge cycle that would shorten the service life of the battery pack. Do home systems (with battery backups) that power the grid have some sort of relay and separate inverter to tap "excess" DC from solar arrays so as to not deplete storage batteries?
Click to expand...

All batteries have a maximum number of charge/discharge cycles before they wear out so in the case of V2G there is no sense wasting the battery life of your expensive BEV propping up the grid for someone else to use. Unless of course they are paying you enough for that grid support service to compensate for wear and tear. That may come in the future but for now it's a losing proposition for the car owner.

Powerwalls aren't any different from other home battery backup systems in that power from them only goes to your own house’s consumption and not into the grid from the batteries. The only power that does flow back into the grid from your house would be any excess solar power you are generating beyond what your batteries need to charge and what your house is actively consuming. It is important to point out here that battery banks in houses which are already grid connected are only intended for backup use. The simple reason being, the grid is already your battery.

For those that don't know the details of these systems, allow me explain.
In almost all cases, solar systems will be gridtied which means being interconnected to the power grid through your solar inverter. With this system type the power company will have already installed what is known as a netmeter which simply means your electric meter can run both forward and backward. During a good sunny day any excess solar generation beyond what your house is using will flow backward through the meter and into the grid. Conversely when the sun is down you will get that same number of kilowatts back for essentially no charge. Of course the power company won't provide the connection for free but instead charge roughly $5-$10 a month for the luxury of being interconnected. What is important to understand is.. the simple function of taking your excess power and then giving it back to you later is what a battery does. However in this case, the grid can do it at a MUCH cheaper price then owning your own batteries.

When you have a household battery bank and an interconnection to the grid, you should always be pulling off the grid or solar for your daily uses and NOT the battery. For one thing there is an efficiency loss associated with AC/DC conversion for charging /discharging the battery so that is wasted power. But most importantly the expense of the batteries and their limited number of cycles is the main cost disadvantage. Some people who own Tesla powerwalls actually have set them up as the primary source of electrons and save the grid as backup power for when the battery in depleted. Unfortunately that is a colossally stupid thing to do especially when you are already paying the grid interconnection fee.

There is one exception though, when you have a power company that offers time of use or time variable pricing. Depending on battery costs and the difference in price from peak and off peak power, it might work out to be less expensive to charge your battery bank at night from the grid and then use that cheaper power the next day but it would have to be a pretty wide price spread.
 
Last edited:
Bilsch said:
All batteries have a maximum number of charge/discharge cycles before they wear out so in the case of V2G there is no sense wasting the battery life of your expensive BEV propping up the grid for someone else to use. Unless of course they are paying you enough for that grid support service to compensate for wear and tear. That may come in the future but for now it's a losing proposition for the car owner.

Powerwalls aren't any different from other home battery backup systems in that power from them only goes to your own house’s consumption and not into the grid from the batteries. The only power that does flow back into the grid from your house would be any excess solar power you are generating beyond what your batteries need to charge and what your house is actively consuming. It is important to point out here that battery banks in houses which are already grid connected are only intended for backup use. The simple reason being, the grid is already your battery.

For those that don't know the details of these systems, allow me explain.
In almost all cases, solar systems will be gridtied which means being interconnected to the power grid through your solar inverter. With this system type the power company will have already installed what is known as a netmeter which simply means your electric meter can run both forward and backward. During a good sunny day any excess solar generation beyond what your house is using will flow backward through the meter and into the grid. Conversely when the sun is down you will get that same number of kilowatts back for essentially no charge. Of course the power company won't provide the connection for free but instead charge roughly $5-$10 a month for the luxury of being interconnected. What is important to understand is.. the simple function of taking your excess power and then giving it back to you later is what a battery does. However in this case, the grid can do it at a MUCH cheaper price then owning your own batteries.

When you have a household battery bank and an interconnection to the grid, you should always be pulling off the grid or solar for your daily uses and NOT the battery. For one thing there is an efficiency loss associated with AC/DC conversion for charging /discharging the battery so that is wasted power. But most importantly the expense of the batteries and their limited number of cycles is the main cost disadvantage. Some people who own Tesla powerwalls have actually have set them up as the primary source of electrons and save the grid as backup power for when the battery in depleted. Unfortunately that is a colossally stupid thing to do especially when you are already paying the grid interconnection fee.

There is one exception though, when you have a power company that offers time of use or time variable pricing. Depending on battery costs and the difference in price from peak and off peak power, it might work out to be less expensive to charge your battery bank at night from the grid and then use that cheaper power then next day but it would have to be a pretty wide price spread.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the comprehensive post. That's exactly the information I was trying to resolve, condensed into a four paragraph post, no less! I probably descended into three hours of internet rabbit hole chases yesterday trying to confirm what I had intuitively believed to be true, but couldn't find a direct answer. My renewed interest in solar for our home has been motivated by the looming necessity to replace an aging roof, and looking into solar roofing tile arrays as a possible win/win. A battery backup would also get us through the occasional outages, which are sadly becoming more frequent as development in our area becomes more dense, putting strain on the existing grid. Tesla makes roofing tiles but only sells them with a PowerWall 2+, and their performance reviews on installation delays and long term viability have been, at best, mixed.

They're quite pricey as well. The cost of a PowerWall has gone up significantly rather than down like one would expect after new technology starts to become more mainstream. I'm estimating at least $40,000 for a tiled array and 13.5Kwh battery backup for our sized house. But after running the numbers and taking into consideration the tax credits and energy exchange with Potomoc Edison, plus a new roof, that number falls to around $22K net. Not to mention, helping to make a cleaner planet for my grandchildren. That's probably the best inheritance I could leave them.
 
Apple_Jacker said:
So I need to buy a new weed whacker... anyone have any experience with electric (battery powered) weed whackers?
Click to expand...
I've been using a Black and Decker GrassHog from Home Depot for 10 years. Still working great. both batteries have since crapped out but i got a new one on Amazon pretty cheap. using a Ryobi lawn mower all summer. loving it. not sure on longevity
 
WESBREW said:
I've been using a Black and Decker GrassHog from Home Depot for 10 years. Still working great. both batteries have since crapped out but i got a new one on Amazon pretty cheap. using a Ryobi lawn mower all summer. loving it. not sure on longevity
Click to expand...

Think I saw that mower on This Old House.

Have you shared your experience with it over here?

Kent88 said:
Check this thread out:
Battery Powered Lawn Equipment
Click to expand...
 
WESBREW said:
I've been using a Black and Decker GrassHog from Home Depot for 10 years. Still working great. both batteries have since crapped out but i got a new one on Amazon pretty cheap. using a Ryobi lawn mower all summer. loving it. not sure on longevity
Click to expand...

I ended up going with an Echo gas trimmer for now. Most likely the last gas one I ever buy
 
Brooothru said:
Thank you for the comprehensive post. That's exactly the information I was trying to resolve, condensed into a four paragraph post, no less! I probably descended into three hours of internet rabbit hole chases yesterday trying to confirm what I had intuitively believed to be true, but couldn't find a direct answer. My renewed interest in solar for our home has been motivated by the looming necessity to replace an aging roof, and looking into solar roofing tile arrays as a possible win/win. A battery backup would also get us through the occasional outages, which are sadly becoming more frequent as development in our area becomes more dense, putting strain on the existing grid. Tesla makes roofing tiles but only sells them with a PowerWall 2+, and their performance reviews on installation delays and long term viability have been, at best, mixed.

They're quite pricey as well. The cost of a PowerWall has gone up significantly rather than down like one would expect after new technology starts to become more mainstream. I'm estimating at least $40,000 for a tiled array and 13.5Kwh battery backup for our sized house. But after running the numbers and taking into consideration the tax credits and energy exchange with Potomoc Edison, plus a new roof, that number falls to around $22K net. Not to mention, helping to make a cleaner planet for my grandchildren. That's probably the best inheritance I could leave them.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, why are you looking for a solar roof tile, rather than a traditional roof with a solar array above?
 
betarhoalphadelta said:
Out of curiosity, why are you looking for a solar roof tile, rather than a traditional roof with a solar array above?
Click to expand...
Basically, since we have to replace the conventional roof before installing a solar panel array, we'd be covering the cost of a conventional re-roof with the tax credits, plus getting solar, H2G, and battery backup. The net savings comes from the new roof being "paid" for with the tax credits from solar roofing tiles. Free lunch.
 
day_trippr said:
Appearance, most likely...
Click to expand...

Not only do they look good but are made from thick tempered glass and are basically indestructible. Most houses in my hood have had their roofs replaced 3 times in the past 8 years from horrendous hailstorms. I only wish the Tesla ones were available 5 years ago when I re-roofed with hail proof shingles because the cost is roughly similar. Lastly, out my way, what you save on insurance premiums with hardened roofing is not a trivial amount.
 
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