Of course the car that costs pennies per mile, is allowed in the carpool lane, and has low maintenance costs will be the primary car.
Survey: Electric Cars Are Primary Cars, Often Powered by Solar
The first Nissan LEAF electric car in San Diego was delivered to Tom Franklin and family in late 2010. There are now more than 12,000 plug-in car drivers throughout California.
Earlier this year, the California Center for Sustainable Energy, based in San Diego, surveyed more than 1,400 plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners to determine everything from their access to charging infrastructure, general charging habits, and how often they use their vehicle. The survey was coordinated along with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and supports the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, which provides rebates ranging from $900 to $2,500 for the purchase or lease of a PEV.
“This is the largest plug-in electric vehicle owner survey ever taken in California,” said Mike Ferry, CCSE Transportation Program manager. “It’s still early in the development of a robust PEV marketplace, but California is firmly established as a national and worldwide leader in supporting advanced technology, zero-emission automotive transportation.” There are presently more than 12,000 plug-in electric vehicles in California, according to the CCSE’s press release. That constitutes approximately 35 percent of all PEV owners in the U.S.
The Survey Says...
The study found that California’s PEV owners are driving their vehicles an average of 26 miles per day. The majority said they recharge their electric vehicle overnight—during off-peak hours from 8pm to 8am—and 71-percent of surveyed owners reported having access to public or workplace charging stations. In a positive sign that EV usage doesn’t automatically equate to burning coal upstream or a certain meltdown of the grid (as some naysayers like to speculate), 39 percent of the state’s PEV owners have already invested in home solar energy systems. Another 31 percent says they’re considering a solar installation within the next year. The study estimates that California’s current electric vehicles save roughly 350,000 gallons of petroleum every month.
One critical revelation is that 85 percent of surveyed owners report using their plug-in car as their primary vehicle, and average 802 electric-powered miles per month. Who says a zero-emission vehicle has to be a second car?
The full report is available online here.
Comments
· Spec (not verified) · 2 years ago
· Travisty · 2 years ago
Leaf is my primary car (drive it to work everyday and only driven a gas car once since buying the Leaf in January this year) and have an oversized solar array on roof so the family's 2nd car can go EV in the near future and be solar powered as well =D
· indyflick · 2 years ago
LEAF as my primary car, check. Solar charged, check. Payments to Big Oil, no check!
· Iletric (not verified) · 2 years ago
It was supposed me my primary commuter vehicle as well. I was hoping it was going to deliver that 100-mile or so range as originally advertised. My commute is across 3 freeways at 84 miles round trip, so it did not work out. I am not willing to put-put at 60 mph on Californian freeways. So, since my wonderful employer, Sutter Health refused to accomodate me at L1 at 60 cents per day (I'd be happy to pay), it became my wife's primary transportation at a rate of 20k miles per year. Not too shabby. She's now a Leaf pro driver. Leaves the charging at night for me, though. That's all I get to do with the Leaf. It's mine on weekends and days off.
· Larry, Richmond VA (not verified) · 2 years ago
So 97% have a garage but 20% park their EV in the driveway. Hard to believe only 3% have no garage. But that means at least 13% have a garage and don't use it for their EV!
· smithjim1961 (not verified) · 2 years ago
I'm not an EV owner yet but I completely understand why a two car family could drive the EV much more than their ICE car. For more than twenty years my wife and I each had a our separate vehicles. She drove "her car" and I drove "my car". When we purchased our Honda Insight two years ago we decided that both cars would belong equally to each of us and we would always take the hybrid when both cars are not needed. When we both need to drive to different places at the same time the person who is taking the longer trip is the one who takes the hybrid. Since I'm retired, my Pontiac G6 does not get used very often and when it IS used it's the one used for the shortest distance of our two separate trips. This arrangement makes perfect sense when one vehicle is twice as efficient as the other. A side benefit of this arrangement is keeping the miles low on the Pontiac so it will have a greater trade-in value when it's paid off at which time I will trade it in for an EV.
· Anonymous (not verified) · 2 years ago
The Leaf is our primary car! My husband takes public transportation to work every day. I use the Leaf every day. Occasionally, we drive the gas vehicle (Nissan Murano) for long distance vacation/college trips. Our Murano should still be in great condition when it's 10 years old! We LOVE our Leaf and it has been a better vehicle than we even expected! Not only is it gas-free .... it's a great zippy car to drive and handles really well! Thanks Nissan for being the innovators! For all the naysayers .... drive one! You just might change your mind!
· world2steven · 2 years ago
Let’s be realistic about the full cost of LEAF ownership. If you have a recumbent bicycle and were hoping to haul it around in your LEAF, it CAN be done – but you are not going to want to. (The front wheel of a bicycle makes a lousy traveling companion.) If you having a low-mileage but aging Prius, you are not going to want to give it up for what you can get for it – even if you have had to call AAA several times for a jump because you just don’t drive it anymore. And if you had enough PV you were breaking even on your power bills before you got your LEAF, it is going to cost you to get back to that break-even point again. And then there is that old two-car carport that no longer cuts it.
· gorr · 2 years ago
These are not representative people as 97% of them have a garage and a big driveway and a second or third gasoline car. These were just the past green wannabe so-cal resident listening political statements about air pollution since the seventies and they will go back to gasoline or hydrogen in the future as their leaf battery will get destroyed by the heat and numerous charge/discharge cycles.
In the real world 80% of car drivers do not have a garage and a second gasoline car and also there is a lot that have a real winter where they need the heater, etc, etc.
· Dan · 2 years ago
@gorr - The survey doesn't say the respondents are typical. They're obviously atypical since only 0.01% of the US population drive EVs or PHEVs (at best). These people are doing the best they can to live according to their values of reducing pollution and dependence on fossil fuels. And, speaking for myself, feel a certain duty to use any disposable income we might have in ways that will encourage a better future, not squander it.
You're right that many typical car drivers don't have a garage, home, or backup gasoline vehicle that would make owning an EV convenient for them at this time. But instead of criticizing this situation on a Plug-in Vehicle forum, why not try and address it and provide some solutions? We need policy ideas like incentives for apartment landlords to install charging stations. Maybe parking meters that double as charging stations. Maybe reduced rate charging stations at park and ride or other public transportation hubs.
Going back to gasoline (a finite resource) or using hydrogen is not a long term strategy that will work. Hydrogen is very expensive to isolate, hard to contain, and hard to use as a fuel, despite its combustion efficiency and cleanliness. I think if hydrogen was the way of the future, we'd see some of these vehicles available - but their costs make electric vehicles look cheap in comparison. (And we've not even begun to talk about the costs to develop a hydrogen fueling infrastructure - which would be MUCH more expensive than using the more ubiquitous electricity that fuels PHEV/BEVs.) Besides, why are you trolling the Plug-in Vehicles site with incoherent and ad hominem (lacking real substance) critiques of these vehicles? If you're really trying to enlighten people, you could do it in a more fact based or convincing way, I think.
· gorr · 2 years ago
-DAN, im shopping here in that site for an HYDROGEN electric vehicule and im not interrested in any way by that no nonsense marginal limp battery cars that are impossible to recharge in 5 minutes outsite of your home.
Slow recharge, high price, small range, difficulty in winter, battery overheating, short battery durability are not for me. Actually gasoline car are cheaper on a cost per miles especially if you go far on some occasion.
So in a logical way, im basching the bev offering and i ask for a hydrogen car while keeping my actual gasoline car for a while till the moment i will buy the car i need and want. So im doing buying bids as a consumer for a hydrogen car. The consumer is always right and even if bevs owner are consumers they RECEIVED big subsidies for buying their bev cars. After these horrendous subsidies and brainwash political statements, bevs sale will amount to zero per months.
· hxp417 (not verified) · 2 years ago
Gorr, you sound more and more like a person getting paid posting on various web forums. I am disgusted of any such behavior, but, I guess I have to live with it.
· Benjamin Nead · 2 years ago
I don't think gorr is a plant, hxp417. Most of the professional pro-oil shill bloggers (the majority of those knowing how to actually use their computer's built-in spell-checking features) don't go ga-ga over hydrogen, which gorr seems to think is a self-perpetuating entity that is dirt cheap. If he thinks reinventing the infrastructure for electric cars is unwieldy, he's in for a rude shock when he finally figures out how hideously expensive and complex it will be for us to move to the so-called hydrogen economy. It will be an even ruder shock when he realizes that the amount of government tax money required to do this hydrogen switch-over would completely dwarf what is projected to be spent on public EVSE deployment and battery research.
· Christof Demont-Heinrich · 2 years ago
I think "gorr" is just angry for a whole variety of reasons, and I don't ascribe to his views, or agree with him on much of anything (and where does that 80% of Americans with no garages figure come from? Source?) However, I do agree with "gorr" that it's pretty damn clear that current EV owners are not representative of the general population.
In fact, that's a big issue for the pro-EV movement, how to move beyond pulling in: a) the true believers (who didn't need a pull); b) or the low-hanging consumer fruit --greenies, techies, anti (foreign) oil/national security types, etc. -- to get more "real" people on board with EVs.
I'm not so sure the whole "yes, but" approach is going to work, e.g. "Yes, EVs won't get you to grandma's -- but you only drive 30 miles per day 99% of the time anyway," or "Yes, EVs have range issues, but 60% of Americans have a second car anyway," or "Yes, the true range-busting EV (Tesla Model S 85 kWh) is way out of the price range of 99% of Americans, but in a few years, it'll be half the price," etc.
Plug In America's clearly aware of this crucial issue of getting beyond the non-representative American consumer niche; It's now started a concerted effort to get current EV owners to actively tell their stories to neighbors, friends, coworkers, local media, etc. That's a crucial push, and we'll have to see how it goes..
· world2steven · 2 years ago
Way back when it was first rolled out by ‘weapons of mass delusion’ Bush, I ‘bought’ the hydrogen hoax. College physics was already a long time ago. I don’t recall what grade I got but I probably didn’t deserve it. Anyhow, I remember one of Mike Rupert’s writers on the old “From the Wilderness” web site was able to explain to even me WHY it was a hoax – and always would be; something about the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Gorr may not have had that advantage.
And furthermore, a lot of people who presumably did know more about basic physics – or at least employed those who do, like most if not all the major car companies, participated in this little hoax with lots of expensive dog and pony shows. (I believe many may still be doing so.) So the question is ‘why?’ Seems like I saw a Scientific American article a while back that said hydrogen would be a too-cheap-to-measure by-product of a nuclear fusion technology still 50 years away from implementation 50 years after it was first envisioned and predicted to be 20 years away. (I believe the hydrogen was supposed to be moved from the reactor to the end user on a super-cooled grid cooled by hydrogen.)
Anyhow, I think it would be a fascinating article (or two) to examine the basic physics underlying hydrogen with an eye towards explaining why, short of something like too-cheap-to-measure hydrogen, the hydrogen economy will always be nothing more than a ‘cruel hoax’. This has probably already been done a hundred or a thousand times so links to the best of the best would be appreciated. Part two or article two would explore why the car companies and the world’s governments played hydrogen-powered car games with the public.
· Benjamin Nead · 2 years ago
Good Idea, World2steven. I think that Scientific American article dated to around the summer of 2002. It became one of those things that I bought into for several years as well. I purchased the magazine then and, as I was sorting through vast quantities of old paper belongings the other week, I found it again. Needless to say, I was sure to set it aside and not let it go to the scrap heap. So, if one of the article writers here needs to examine it (I'm not sure if it's available online) I'd be happy to scan it and send it along.
Old magazines can be fascinating and often illuminate in ways that online reproductions might not be able to . . . such as seeing the double page inside cover advertisement for Shell Oil's hydrogen fuel program.
Hmmm . . .
· Teq · 2 years ago
I agree with gorr to that point, that most car drivers don't have a garage or can charge their car where they park.
I also agree with his "only long trips scenario" when let's say you live close enough to work to walk there and also live close enough to shop to buy groceries, nothing beats walking :) and you only use your car on those monthly huge shopping and for "grandma" travels, vacations, etc.
In this scenario, let's face it, typical EV is useless and impractical.
I have similar case, when I will be living very close to work (I start my job in a week) , but I will need to drive about 125 miles to school and back (pure freeway 140 km/h or 85 miles per hour) each week, again my old ICE car much more practical, and since it is LPG-powered also even greener and cheaper (fuel-vise) then the volt.
But, let's face it gorr, there are also very few people like us, and there are way many more people that simply need to travel 30-40 miles a day, spend sooo much money on gasoline/diesel and pollute the air for everybody else. Let's not be so short-sighted and don't condemn all electric cars just because it doesn't suite us.
Explore your options from every angle and find the best solution, I'm still waiting for a EV that has CNG or LPG range extender, that is with the current tech the best solution for us, long range freaks.
If all breaks down and no manufacturer makes such a car, I will just buy volt and have it converted ;)
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Whether the "primary car" results are meaningful depends a lot on how the survey was worded. I would say that my Leaf is my primary vehicle, as it's the one I drive almost every day, but as far as the household is concerned it's clearly a second car. I could not have bought it if my wife didn't have a hybrid that we can use for longer trips.