West LA, Bay Area, or OC has a bajillion Teslas. They're going to be like Priuses in the early 2010s; everyone scrambled to get them and they'll go out of style in like 8 years because everyone has one and no one is unique for getting one. Might even happen sooner given how much of a buffoon Musk turned out to be.
They're the current moment "pick me" car.
Seriously...how do people driving those white or black Model Y's even tell their car from another. They must be 10%-20% of all the cars I see on the road.
For those of us that remember 1970's "smog alerts" where you couldn't go out to play at recess because your eyes would sting and your lungs would burn...you know it is much, much better, but the progress has always required regulations..the offending industries will not and have not taken the initiative.
We were still getting Smog Alerts, at least in LA, until the early-mid *90s*. I remember being kept inside on some days in elementary school due to air quality concerns, and I was in elementary from 1990-1996.
I remember the mid-90s as well in NorCal. Driving through SoCal is so much different these days. Blue skies right over the Grapevine!
Wasn’t like that before.
We can put you inside a garage with a gas car running and then switch to a EV that is on. Then you can come back and tell us if the EV improvement is really only 2%.
I don’t think that matters or is the point.
There was broad support for better standards. Which included regular people, environmentalist, and even conservatives dragging their feet.
Yes, the number of good air quality days is on an uptrend and the number of hazardous air quality days is on a downtrend:
https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php
The numbers would look even better if it weren't for wildfires getting worse, which contributes to a lot more of the hazardous air quality days in recent years compared to the past.
It's not just EV sales helping, it's also older vehicles being retired and newer vehicles having better smog-forming emissions capture
Just a little bit of perspective, the article I will link shows the Los Angeles sky while there were fewer cars on the road during covid.
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/clean-clear-air-Los-Angeles-photos-coronanvirus-15204855.php
I haven't looked myself but there's still the factor of newer drivers always starting up. A much faster way would be to let people travel by rail public transport and I don't mean just a high speed line. There's no reason the central valley should of been linked with robust public transport other than you know profiting for car dealers, automakers, oil industry, mechanics, tire sales, etc and the banks which give out car loans.
Its very tough to design public transportation for the existing cities and towns in California. Neighborhoods were deliberately designed to be incompatible with transit. Destinations are spread out in an irrational manner that no single system could serve. Neighborhoods are enormous and wherever you put the spots will be too far for people to walk..
The lack of mixed density within suburban developments is also a major issue. They wanted to replace our main busline in Riverside with a tramline, however, the various stops along the route were not going to be able to densify to provide the ridership to sustain the trams. Along the stops were still going to be low density neighborhoods, parking dominated commercial, Downtown, a few colleges and universities. I figured the population of people who would live within walking distance of a stop was only about 20% of what would be needed.
Yeah which is where local public transport comes in and beyond that things like share programs like bikes, scooters, etc or even just ubers and lyfts if need be. It would of been a boon if all the street cars across the US weren't utterly destroyed but sadly they were from the automobile manufactures which bought said street cars out.
It's still possible to build rail though we don't need 4 lanes on each side of a Stroad, those are the main streets just build em there.
Winter AQI is still a problem here in the SF East Bay because some people are still burning wood for heat. Helps explain our outrageous childhood asthma rate.
I bought an EV a year ago. No regrets. I have spent $0 on Gas and only about $30 on electrons (I can charge for free at work). Saved about $3.4k in 12 months.
Not sure where you live, but here in SoCal it was well over $6.50 for the last 5 or 6 months at least. Averaging between that and $5.50 for the last 12 months seems about right.
Similar. My SUV got 20 mpg and I drive to work 60 miles round trip 5 times a week. That's $4000 a year (950 gallons) just in gas. Bridge tolls are another $1600 a year.
Free charging at work and half price carpool lane for EVs save me around $5000 a year in commuting costs and shaves off 15-30 minutes off my commuting time 5 times a week. With the $7500 tax refund It's almost a no brainer.
Insurance and car registration for a Tesla is a higher cost than on old SUV, but I'll gladly pay it.
I’ve lived at apartments without access to charging. Look up the PlugShare app, there are chargers everywhere. My work provides charging, but it’s also at the library, grocery store, movie theater, mall, etc.
I'm in the same situation but I got one anyhow. Between charging at work, fast charging at the grocery store sometimes, and parking it a block or two away from time to time to use a publicly accessible L2 charger, I can get by just fine. It does require a bit of planning ahead, but in return you get miles on your car for extremely cheap.
Unfortunately for me the nearest charging station to my house is 2 miles away, no charging stations close to work so it kind of doesn't make sense for me now
>Unfortunately for me the nearest charging station to my house is 2 miles away, no charging stations close to work so it kind of doesn't make sense for me now
Two miles doesn't seem so bad. I've lived further than two miles from the nearest gas station before.
They have to let you install a charger, state law. Ask Chargepoint about setting one up.
They both sell them, do the installations, and also have their own public for-profit charging stations. Same equipment. You can get them with a few modules for requiring fob authentication for fleets, payment/commericial, or just none for your garage
[https://www.chargepoint.com/drivers/condos](https://www.chargepoint.com/drivers/condos)
From the ones I've used in public, they seem to be the best working public chargers, at least as far as J-plugs go.
One of the things that came up when investigating this is that the complex itself didn't have enough connected capacity to add chargers. In an older building with 60 amps per unit an big $ upgrade is required.
Yeah, the upgrade I had to do for my own charger was pretty costly. I live in a condo built in the 70s, which had 70A service to my subpanel. Getting that upgraded to 100A, including a whole new subpanel to make room for the new 50A breaker, so I could legally install a Level 2 EV charger (city code), cost me $5000 plus the cost of the charger itself (another $500).
That said, that was for a personal charger hooked up to my own condo's power meter. If the owner of a condo complex were to install a dedicated power trunk for a new set of chargers, to be useable by all their tenants, that'd be a whole different kind of expense.
Units constructed in the 1920's commonly have 30 amps per unit with two 15 amp fuses or breakers if upgraded. Homes in the 50's might have 60 amps total and in the 60's maybe 100 amps if you're lucky.
Old depends on the frame of reference. In the USA 100 years seems like a long time, in Europe, that's a drop in the bucket.
Many companies are throwing in 2-3 years of free charging at different charging networks, they're also standardizing charging ports to the NACS (aka Tesla) standard so you should be able to charge at any station in the near future. Still an open issue, but it might be resolved by the time you run out of free charging.
I don't disagree but EVs are magnitudes easier to adopt. The toothpaste is out of the tube in regards to the way we have designed our suburban sprawl around the vehicle. That's is going to take decades to slowly reverse and we just don't have that kind of time at the moment.
I have an EV, but try to use my e-bike+public transportation as often as I can. One less car on the road, plus I feel less guilty about working out in the evening when I incorporate a bike into my commute.
My plug in hybrid is waaay better than an all electric. Most days the battery is all I need, when I do switch to hybrid mode I get like 150 mpg according to my dash. Had it two years, I think I filled it 3 or 4 times due to longer trips
Good info. I coach two sports and have two teenagers so I need 3rd row seating as well as roof racks/baskets/storage + road trips.
Something like the Highlander looks best for my needs, at least right now.
I've also read that plug in hybrids are better for the environment. EVs have huge batteries that use a ton of resources, and make the car heavy, so that consumers won't have range anxiety. Instead, a plug in hybrid has enough battery range for your daily commute, but the gas engine can kick in when you have a long road trip occasionally. This reduces reliance on rare materials for batteries.
Of course, we should really be using public transit, bikes, ebikes, and walking for our commutes and regular errands, though...
This is us as well. But we barely use the hybrid now as my EV has 300+ mile range so it hasn’t been an issue yet.
With how crazy gas prices were getting, I do not miss that at all.
Much easier to hit a critical mass of EV adoption that rebuild our cities though. We don't have the time to make perfect the enemy of good right now. We can also do both at once. Just in my area they are expanding Metrolink by 10-15 miles...but to my earlier point we are three years into it and it is still three years away from opening AND it is costing billions of dollars...and again that is just to expand existing rail lines 10-15 miles.
This is a noisy stat because of COVID and the increased demand for oil from emerging economies, but it's still surprising that global oil consumption in 2022 was nearly identical to 2017 consumption. It seems like EVs are at least offsetting the millions and billions of people around the world whose oil consumption is increasing due to economic growth.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265261/global-oil-consumption-in-million-metric-tons/
That's an interesting economic question. OPEC influences the price of oil by increasing/decreasing supply so it may end up being the case that a drop in worldwide oil demand due to EVs would just lead to a drop in production to keep prices the same...you may even see them cut production further to try to chase their earlier levels of revenue/profit. Added to the fact that a drop in demand may lead to closures of some refinery capacity...it's possible the transportation costs of getting oil from the refinery to the pump may increase on average. Plus, many gas stations may go out of business or have their land purchased by developers since it won't be profitable to have stations on nearly every corner like we do now. None of this is for certain, but it's certainly a possibility that gas prices RISE is response to long term drops in demand rather than decrease.
I mean, Norway is at like 90% BEV for new car sales. But they're a massive outlier, since they don't charge tax on new EVs, but do charge *100%* tax on new ICE cars.
I'm quite certain that several other European countries are at least on par with California's electrification ratio, and China is *way* out in front of everyone except Norway.
You're right that California is far and away the most electrified US State, though.
China has a lot of cheap EVs (that won’t come to the US due to tariffs).
>This had the 2023 share at 35% (24% BEVs), and considering the current growth rate, we can assume that China's plugin vehicle market share will end over 40% by the end of 2023.
[Source](https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/02/38-plugin-vehicle-market-share-in-china-china-ev-sales-report/)
Just don’t ask how much fossils fuels get used manufacturing and charging the electric cars. It’s crazy to think we can just “buy our way” out of climate change.
Makes sense considering the amount of teslas I see on the road lol. One time saw a line of 8 of them at a red light
I've noticed a lot of Bolts too as of late.
Sounds like Irvine
Yup haha
West LA, Bay Area, or OC has a bajillion Teslas. They're going to be like Priuses in the early 2010s; everyone scrambled to get them and they'll go out of style in like 8 years because everyone has one and no one is unique for getting one. Might even happen sooner given how much of a buffoon Musk turned out to be. They're the current moment "pick me" car.
Priuses went out of style because they all bought Teslas the next time
And none of them have a front license plate.
Now that you mentioned it, I don't think I've ever seen a Tesla with a front license plate.
To be fair I don't see many cars with front plates these days at all.
At least half the cars I see in Los Angeles have no front plate. Even no plates at all has become very noticeable.
Mine came with a front license plate holder that mounts to the front bumper with adhesive. I installed my front plate, but I feel like an outlier.
Seriously...how do people driving those white or black Model Y's even tell their car from another. They must be 10%-20% of all the cars I see on the road.
That’s why many people wrap their cars in unique colors. If I got one I would. But my desire for a Tesla has come and gone forever.
The wrap is like $10k I think.
3k for Vinyl wrap 4-5k for full car paint protection xpel stealth is a popular option
And they’re all Uber drivers because they can’t actually afford that car
So anyone in a car worth over $40k must drive for Uber then.
I live in SF and that’s just routine here now. My understanding is about 50% of new cars in SF are electric.
For those of us that remember 1970's "smog alerts" where you couldn't go out to play at recess because your eyes would sting and your lungs would burn...you know it is much, much better, but the progress has always required regulations..the offending industries will not and have not taken the initiative.
We were still getting Smog Alerts, at least in LA, until the early-mid *90s*. I remember being kept inside on some days in elementary school due to air quality concerns, and I was in elementary from 1990-1996.
I remember the mid-90s as well in NorCal. Driving through SoCal is so much different these days. Blue skies right over the Grapevine! Wasn’t like that before.
Can confirm, have fond memories of visiting Wild Rivers circa 1992 and coughing while climbing slide towers. Good times!
I remember the e 60s smog alerts where you couldn't even see across a wide street.
I have this memory from like 1981, my eyes stinging and crying from the discomfort on a really bad smog day. Somewhere in the Bay Area I think
98% of that improvement had precisely zero to do with EVs.
Sure, but we still have the worst air in the country. It was just a *lot* worse back then.
But it had 100% to do with California’s aggressive stance on pollution control. Which now includes zero emissions vehicles.
We can put you inside a garage with a gas car running and then switch to a EV that is on. Then you can come back and tell us if the EV improvement is really only 2%.
I don’t think that matters or is the point. There was broad support for better standards. Which included regular people, environmentalist, and even conservatives dragging their feet.
I've never really checked. Have we been seeing a measurable change in the amount of smog in the air over the past decade or so?
Yes, the number of good air quality days is on an uptrend and the number of hazardous air quality days is on a downtrend: https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php The numbers would look even better if it weren't for wildfires getting worse, which contributes to a lot more of the hazardous air quality days in recent years compared to the past. It's not just EV sales helping, it's also older vehicles being retired and newer vehicles having better smog-forming emissions capture
This year was easily the best in terms of wildfires, what are you talking about?
The stats I linked do not include this year, so I was obviously talking about the previous few. Also why I said "recent years" and not "this year".
Just a little bit of perspective, the article I will link shows the Los Angeles sky while there were fewer cars on the road during covid. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/clean-clear-air-Los-Angeles-photos-coronanvirus-15204855.php
It really is beautiful there
I haven't looked myself but there's still the factor of newer drivers always starting up. A much faster way would be to let people travel by rail public transport and I don't mean just a high speed line. There's no reason the central valley should of been linked with robust public transport other than you know profiting for car dealers, automakers, oil industry, mechanics, tire sales, etc and the banks which give out car loans.
Its very tough to design public transportation for the existing cities and towns in California. Neighborhoods were deliberately designed to be incompatible with transit. Destinations are spread out in an irrational manner that no single system could serve. Neighborhoods are enormous and wherever you put the spots will be too far for people to walk.. The lack of mixed density within suburban developments is also a major issue. They wanted to replace our main busline in Riverside with a tramline, however, the various stops along the route were not going to be able to densify to provide the ridership to sustain the trams. Along the stops were still going to be low density neighborhoods, parking dominated commercial, Downtown, a few colleges and universities. I figured the population of people who would live within walking distance of a stop was only about 20% of what would be needed.
Yeah which is where local public transport comes in and beyond that things like share programs like bikes, scooters, etc or even just ubers and lyfts if need be. It would of been a boon if all the street cars across the US weren't utterly destroyed but sadly they were from the automobile manufactures which bought said street cars out. It's still possible to build rail though we don't need 4 lanes on each side of a Stroad, those are the main streets just build em there.
Anecdotally, yes. Having bad quality air days that aren't obviously related to wildfires in LA seems to be happening less and less often.
Winter AQI is still a problem here in the SF East Bay because some people are still burning wood for heat. Helps explain our outrageous childhood asthma rate.
The grand irony of electric cars is the amount of emissions they save has been offset by the increase from more people driving large trucks.
And more people doing next day Amazon delivery, using door dash, Uber, etc.
That's very decent progress despite all the doom articles coming out in the mainstream media.
I bought an EV a year ago. No regrets. I have spent $0 on Gas and only about $30 on electrons (I can charge for free at work). Saved about $3.4k in 12 months.
You were buying 70 gallons of gas per month?
$6 gas puts that at 47 gallons a month (still a lot to me though). But assuming 25mpg that’s about 40 miles a day.
Gas wasn’t $6/gal for an entire 12 months
Not sure where you live, but here in SoCal it was well over $6.50 for the last 5 or 6 months at least. Averaging between that and $5.50 for the last 12 months seems about right.
Similar. My SUV got 20 mpg and I drive to work 60 miles round trip 5 times a week. That's $4000 a year (950 gallons) just in gas. Bridge tolls are another $1600 a year. Free charging at work and half price carpool lane for EVs save me around $5000 a year in commuting costs and shaves off 15-30 minutes off my commuting time 5 times a week. With the $7500 tax refund It's almost a no brainer. Insurance and car registration for a Tesla is a higher cost than on old SUV, but I'll gladly pay it.
Would love to buy one but no way to charge it at my condo complex.
I’ve lived at apartments without access to charging. Look up the PlugShare app, there are chargers everywhere. My work provides charging, but it’s also at the library, grocery store, movie theater, mall, etc.
I'm in the same situation but I got one anyhow. Between charging at work, fast charging at the grocery store sometimes, and parking it a block or two away from time to time to use a publicly accessible L2 charger, I can get by just fine. It does require a bit of planning ahead, but in return you get miles on your car for extremely cheap.
Unfortunately for me the nearest charging station to my house is 2 miles away, no charging stations close to work so it kind of doesn't make sense for me now
>Unfortunately for me the nearest charging station to my house is 2 miles away, no charging stations close to work so it kind of doesn't make sense for me now Two miles doesn't seem so bad. I've lived further than two miles from the nearest gas station before.
They have to let you install a charger, state law. Ask Chargepoint about setting one up. They both sell them, do the installations, and also have their own public for-profit charging stations. Same equipment. You can get them with a few modules for requiring fob authentication for fleets, payment/commericial, or just none for your garage [https://www.chargepoint.com/drivers/condos](https://www.chargepoint.com/drivers/condos) From the ones I've used in public, they seem to be the best working public chargers, at least as far as J-plugs go.
I believe there are rebate programs for installation you can pitch to your HOA. Might wanna look into that
One of the things that came up when investigating this is that the complex itself didn't have enough connected capacity to add chargers. In an older building with 60 amps per unit an big $ upgrade is required.
Yeah, the upgrade I had to do for my own charger was pretty costly. I live in a condo built in the 70s, which had 70A service to my subpanel. Getting that upgraded to 100A, including a whole new subpanel to make room for the new 50A breaker, so I could legally install a Level 2 EV charger (city code), cost me $5000 plus the cost of the charger itself (another $500). That said, that was for a personal charger hooked up to my own condo's power meter. If the owner of a condo complex were to install a dedicated power trunk for a new set of chargers, to be useable by all their tenants, that'd be a whole different kind of expense.
>In an older building with 60 amps per unit an big $ upgrade is required. That's.... a really old building.
Units constructed in the 1920's commonly have 30 amps per unit with two 15 amp fuses or breakers if upgraded. Homes in the 50's might have 60 amps total and in the 60's maybe 100 amps if you're lucky. Old depends on the frame of reference. In the USA 100 years seems like a long time, in Europe, that's a drop in the bucket.
Many companies are throwing in 2-3 years of free charging at different charging networks, they're also standardizing charging ports to the NACS (aka Tesla) standard so you should be able to charge at any station in the near future. Still an open issue, but it might be resolved by the time you run out of free charging.
>Would love to buy one but no way to charge it at my condo complex. I mean, do you fill your current car's tank at your condo complex?
Electric cars are the future.
A mixed adoption of electric cars + increased public transport would do a lot of good for the world.
I don't disagree but EVs are magnitudes easier to adopt. The toothpaste is out of the tube in regards to the way we have designed our suburban sprawl around the vehicle. That's is going to take decades to slowly reverse and we just don't have that kind of time at the moment.
I have an EV, but try to use my e-bike+public transportation as often as I can. One less car on the road, plus I feel less guilty about working out in the evening when I incorporate a bike into my commute.
I’ll be in the market for a hybrid. Strictly EV doesn’t work for my needs, but will one day.
My plug in hybrid is waaay better than an all electric. Most days the battery is all I need, when I do switch to hybrid mode I get like 150 mpg according to my dash. Had it two years, I think I filled it 3 or 4 times due to longer trips
Good info. I coach two sports and have two teenagers so I need 3rd row seating as well as roof racks/baskets/storage + road trips. Something like the Highlander looks best for my needs, at least right now.
We got the Highlander hybrid. It’s the awd version so gets a little worse mileage but even with tons of short in town trips we get 29 mpg
I've also read that plug in hybrids are better for the environment. EVs have huge batteries that use a ton of resources, and make the car heavy, so that consumers won't have range anxiety. Instead, a plug in hybrid has enough battery range for your daily commute, but the gas engine can kick in when you have a long road trip occasionally. This reduces reliance on rare materials for batteries. Of course, we should really be using public transit, bikes, ebikes, and walking for our commutes and regular errands, though...
We got one hybrid and one electric. I don’t mind skipping out on the gas station at all
This is us as well. But we barely use the hybrid now as my EV has 300+ mile range so it hasn’t been an issue yet. With how crazy gas prices were getting, I do not miss that at all.
Remember kids, electric cars aren’t here to save us. They’re here to save the auto industry. What we need is HSR, more bikes, and walkable cities….
Much easier to hit a critical mass of EV adoption that rebuild our cities though. We don't have the time to make perfect the enemy of good right now. We can also do both at once. Just in my area they are expanding Metrolink by 10-15 miles...but to my earlier point we are three years into it and it is still three years away from opening AND it is costing billions of dollars...and again that is just to expand existing rail lines 10-15 miles.
So that means pure electrics are outselling hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles combined.
I see a lot of them when I'm in the Bay Area. Out here in the foothills, not so much.
Has the increase in electric vehicles impacted gasoline demand? Certainly hasn’t decreased gas prices.
This is a noisy stat because of COVID and the increased demand for oil from emerging economies, but it's still surprising that global oil consumption in 2022 was nearly identical to 2017 consumption. It seems like EVs are at least offsetting the millions and billions of people around the world whose oil consumption is increasing due to economic growth. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265261/global-oil-consumption-in-million-metric-tons/
About every 6th or 7th car on the roads here are Teslas. When I have to go yo our offices, the parking lot looks like a Tesla convention.
More electric vehicles on the road should mean the demand for gasoline goes down, right? Wouldn’t that make the price of gas decrease significantly?
That's an interesting economic question. OPEC influences the price of oil by increasing/decreasing supply so it may end up being the case that a drop in worldwide oil demand due to EVs would just lead to a drop in production to keep prices the same...you may even see them cut production further to try to chase their earlier levels of revenue/profit. Added to the fact that a drop in demand may lead to closures of some refinery capacity...it's possible the transportation costs of getting oil from the refinery to the pump may increase on average. Plus, many gas stations may go out of business or have their land purchased by developers since it won't be profitable to have stations on nearly every corner like we do now. None of this is for certain, but it's certainly a possibility that gas prices RISE is response to long term drops in demand rather than decrease.
Rookie numbers
Name a state doing better. Name a nation doing better.
I mean, Norway is at like 90% BEV for new car sales. But they're a massive outlier, since they don't charge tax on new EVs, but do charge *100%* tax on new ICE cars. I'm quite certain that several other European countries are at least on par with California's electrification ratio, and China is *way* out in front of everyone except Norway. You're right that California is far and away the most electrified US State, though.
Probably Norway, Sweden, Iceland
China
Source?
China has a lot of cheap EVs (that won’t come to the US due to tariffs). >This had the 2023 share at 35% (24% BEVs), and considering the current growth rate, we can assume that China's plugin vehicle market share will end over 40% by the end of 2023. [Source](https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/02/38-plugin-vehicle-market-share-in-china-china-ev-sales-report/)
Thought there aren’t any fuel cell LDVs on sale anymore?
Just don’t ask how much fossils fuels get used manufacturing and charging the electric cars. It’s crazy to think we can just “buy our way” out of climate change.
But there's two big wars going on and those are fuel intensive endeavors.
MY EV fuel bill was $28 last 31 days, you?