I have now owned a triumvirate of electric/hybrid vehicles since 2012. The quest began with a Chevy Volt in 2012 that we still own but that is used by our son in college. I recently worked with him to replace tires and windshield wipers on the vehicle, which is otherwise still rolling along despite a mild fender bender when he slid into another vehicle on a snowy night. The Bolt is the newest member of the grouping, serving as my wife’s daily driver but only accumulating 1500 miles since arriving via flatbed last October. And then there are the Teslas. The first, a Model S P85, was around number 4000 off the Fremont assembly line in early 2013, with the second taking its place in early 2016.
So has it been worth it? Yes, absolutely, but with caveats, operationally and ethically, as you will see.
First, the vehicles have been paired with photovoltaic systems, a 10kW system with microinverters in Cali and now an 8kW system at our remodeled southwestern abode. This helps to offset any concerns that grid electricity may be less clean than modern, high-efficiency gasoline engines.
Second, there is range anxiety. As the name implies, it’s the fear of running out of charge that is just like running out of gas but with far fewer places to recharge than are available in the modern ecosystem of gas stations throughout the nation. Mostly, when doing everyday errand-running and brief trips out of town, range anxiety is not an issue. Freeways are manageable in the Tesla now that superchargers are available for large swaths of the United States, including recent arrivals near the relatively desolate area where I now live. Still, supercharging is slower and required more often than fill-ups of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars. You get curious gawkers who want to ask about the car, which is usually fine. You get diesel pickup trucks who occasionally block the superchargers just because they are mean-spirited cusses (I’ve also been subject to “rolling coal” before), which I treat as the growing pains of a society in transition. And, once, I had fellow Teslarati who wanted to preach to me about how Jesus enabled his perfect marriage and presumably the purchase of their Tesla. Mostly, though, I just read the news on my phone for thirty minutes or so and move on. The Bolt, though it has high-voltage DC fast charging enabled, lacks infrastructure for long-distance travel, so remains a regional driver for the near future.
Third is the driving experience. Anodyne and sterile might best describe it. Press the accelerator and there is instantaneous torque, gobs of it in the case of the Tesla P90D, combined with all-wheel drive grip, that results in a lightly whiney squirt to whatever speed you want. The Bolt has similar characteristics, though with the slight torque-steer effect of front-wheel drive and a milder, but not lacking, pull to speed. The Volt, when charged, is not half-bad either, though in engine-mode the HP curve flattens out rapidly and the engine hums in and out of operation. Compared with any ordinary car, these are perfectly fine and spirited alternatives. But in comparison with a performance car there are obvious limitations with driver engagement. My ’02 Subaru WRX manual was a great, tossable little imp that lasted to more than 160K with only one issue with the A/C system. My recently departed BMW M6 was a roaring missile that was as stable and effortless at 150 MPH as it was toodling around town. Both were more enjoyable than any of the electric offerings, but only when pushed to their limits. But I was also younger and actually enjoyed driving.
And that last comment brings up a point about the 2016 Tesla P90D: if you find driving mostly tedious, the Tesla helps with the autopilot capabilities. The effect is not to be underestimated. I recently took the car for yearly service in Tempe, Arizona (due to legal limits in New Mexico that prevent Tesla from running service centers here). I stopped three times for supercharging along the way, but the car drove itself for ninety percent of the route. I stay attentive while it’s driving, but also have the luxury of looking out the windows for longer pauses than anyone who is focused on driving ever gets to do. I didn’t dread the long haul back like I often have on road trips in recent years.
Here’s a brief catalog of strengths, weaknesses, positives, and negatives for each vehicle:
2013 Tesla Model S P85
- Exceptional infotainment system that still sets the bar for modern cars
- Free 3G wireless and streaming audio
- Nice interior but unsupportive seats
- Great iOS app
- Some issues:
- Too much rear-wheel torque combined with lousy California roads broke three wheels (admittedly they were the 21″ low-profile) at $1K each and wasted five tires at $500 each
- Rear brake caliper froze up and had to be replaced
- Slow-to-arrive rear carbon-fiber spoiler
- A few recalls
- One close call with running out of charge returning from Monterey, rolling home with 8 miles indicated remaining charge
- Over-the-air updates to software and systems
- Overheating of high-power charging cable causes brittleness
- Everything (except wheels and tires issues and yearly maintenance) fixed for free with no-hassle loaner cars of the latest models
- Few superchargers because it was pretty early
2016 Tesla Model S P90D
- Autopilot allows hands-off and feet-off operation of vehicle on highways and freeways
- Improved interior and seats
- Free 4G wireless and streaming audio
- Still same over-the-air updates, cool Easter eggs, etc.
- No issues
- Great iOS app
- No range anxiety with newer trip planning software in nav system that uses highly accurate analytics to estimate charging times and locations
- Ludicrous mode is completely unnecessary unless one plans on taking the car to drag strips to show off
2017 Chevrolet Bolt LT Premiere
- Much better range estimates on battery life than Tesla, especially when driven on surface streets
- Much nicer form factor for parking and navigating city streets than Tesla
- Clunky charge adapter
- Angle of center infotainment screen captures sun (especially when backing up)
- Low-resolution backing camera
- Cross-traffic and lane-change assist are nice, but no dynamic cruise control
- Apple CarPlay for nav and streaming, but other than the Lightning cable plug-in requirement, I think it ties with Tesla in that the benefits of having one’s phone search history, text message read-out, etc. outweigh the hassles of having a hybrid system
- Manually-adjusted seats and clunky plastics in the interior
- No Homelink system requires separate garage door opener
- Front-wheel drive grabs and scrubs on turns through gravel and steering occasionally behaves unexpectedly
- Only recently, with dealer-installed update, did the system gain over-the-air software updates
- One recall to update system software concerning battery management problems
- Lousy Chevrolet OnStar system and crappy app (compared to Tesla) for monitoring vehicle remotely
2012 Chevrolet Volt
- Among earliest of the useable electric vehicles
- Great tradeoff between electric range (40 miles in this one, 50 miles in recent models) and infinite gasoline range
- Small size gas tank for long-range use (300 miles or so for this era car)
- Relatively poor gas mileage compared with other hybrids (35 mpg or so)
- Requires premium gas
- Strange infotainment system and button layout
- Extremely practical package for transportation and everyday use
- One issue in 35K miles: 12 volt battery failed while in an airport parking lot for two weeks, requiring jump start. Replaced under warranty.
But what about the ethics of being energy self-sufficient (minus the inputs for the devices themselves)? This requires a meta-ethical commitment. One might simply assert that reducing greenhouse gas production (and other pollutants) on an individual level is inherently desirable as part of an individual commitment to a lower-risk future. This hinges on what we might align with Peter Singer’s Universal Benevolence (UB) as a part of utilitarian ethical commitment. This is quasi-realist in that we are substituting some kind of “well-being” for statements about “good” but still are able to generate linguistic and cognitive claims about well-being. Well, perhaps these are just expressive attitudes and hence vaguely non-cognitive, but at least embedded linguistic statements (see Frege-Geach) carry some semantic value. But the ambiguity of identifying well-being as the good-target leads to a Moore-like “open question” when we move outside the realm of simple pain-pleasure responses. Is it better for people to commit to no cars at all or to balance the production of electric vehicles (and the positive economic impact of moving stuff around efficiently)? What about the broad impact of extraction industries on building and maintaining our highly well-being-enhancing modern lives? Opinions differ, and the mechanisms and arguments that one uses to arrive at moral positions are fairly diffuse and rarely rise above polemics. Economists might use economic discounting for sophisticated justifications of near-term benevolent moves on the part of individuals or groups, but these arguments have to be distilled down into policy changes that are mostly sterile and impersonal.
Indeed, on reflection, my interest in electification of my own transportation was like most people: it’s an enthusiast thing. In fact, I might have been more Rational Egoist than Rational Altruist in the Singer taxonomy. Saving the planet sounded like a possible side-effect, but the human ecosystem is as delicately interlaced and balanced as biological ones. Nothing is without unknowns and unknowables before we exhaustively study it or just adopt it and see the outcomes. The only thing I can really be rational about is my own agency, or at least I can try to be. But that might be too harsh. The egoism at least was driven towards an expressive hope for rational altruism about the future, and an appealing expressive good that might be bound up in the technological advances that arise from trying to solve a problem like the status quo of transportation emissions. So it was about both my well-being and that of others.
Now what about a manual Porsche GT3?