The other night a local journalist was interviewing a taxi driver on what is more cost effective, an electric or internal combustion engine car? I thought it was a joke at first, as there is a program where a guy goes around towns and cities asking persons what they know about a certain subject and getting all kinds of crazy answers. However, in his program he at least has an expert explaining what the right answer is. In this case, the journalist was relying entirely on the taxi driver as an expert.
Electric cars have grown in popularity in Vilnius. I remember when our Russian neighbor owned the sole Tesla in town - a white Model S. He loved it. He had tried out a variety of electric cars and said this one had the greatest range, about 400 kilometers. Others were in the 150 to 200 kilometer range. He charged it at home on a special outlet he installed in the garage.
Teslas are very popular now. My son tells me that many of them are shipped over as insurance losses from the US, having been declared totaled. Local entrepreneurs patch and repaint them and sell them for around 25 thousand euros on average. A new Model S is in the 100 thousand euro range. A Model 3 a little more affordable.
My wife and I have toyed with the idea of leasing one. We've been driving around in a battered Toyota Verso for years. We both feel it is time for an upgrade, but most of these cars are out of our price range. The government offers some compensation but not much. Jonas says we should try out the city rental cars first. Spark has quite a range of electric cars. He loves the acceleration, but doesn't think they are much good outside the city. Not very many charging stations beyond the metropolitan centers, so you have to carefully gauge your consumption on longer trips.
Spark has done so well that other electric car rental companies have sprung up. Even City Bee offers electric cars and vans as an option. The only condition is that you have to leave the car at a charging station, which are now all over the city and most business parks and shopping centers. Vilnius ranks as one of the leading European cities in electric car rentals per capita. The electric scooter is still the most popular means to get around town.
Ownership has also greatly increased with additional EA license plates, as the licensing registration department quickly ran out of EV plates. Lanes have been specially designated for electric cars and you can park free downtown. A clear advantage. A lot of these cars are hybrids, with relatively limited electric driving range. In order to qualify you have to be able to manually shift between electric and internal combustion engine. The old hybrids would do so only automatically and don't qualify.
Jonas was also telling me of the Lithuanian-German joint venture to produce electric city buses. Klaipėda has invested in a small fleet of these buses and is very happy with them. Vėjo Projektai had first approached the Vilnius mayor but he deemed them too expensive and bought cheaper Chinese electric buses instead. Not very patriotic.
I don't know why Tesla doesn't enter into this market as more and more cities want to switch to electric buses that don't require overhead cables. The tram-like buses are often losing their connections on turns with the drivers having to get out and use a long pole to hook the extending arms on the cables again, resulting in traffic jams. This seems to me a huge potential market but to this point the great Elon Musk has expressed his reservations.
It seems to me he's not much interested in public transportation at all. The tunnels he's been boring in different American cities are designed for underground vehicular traffic. Basically, underground roads you would most likely pay a toll to enter and could cut out the traffic above. He advertises the Vegas Loop as getting you from the Las Vegas Convention Center to Mandalay Bay in three minutes. A drive that typically takes 30 minutes during rush hour. I suppose he wouldn't be adverse to electric buses using his tunnels as well, but this strikes me as a rich man's folly.
On the whole, electricity is much cheaper than petroleum. The cost per kilowatt hour has jumped dramatically in Lithuania in recent months, but it still costs far less to recharge an electric car than it does to refuel an internal combustion engine car. Jonas was saying about 15 euros as opposed to 100 euros for the same driving range. I would trust him over some taxi driver on LRT news, largely because he finished a three-year school in automobile electronics and has made it his specialty.
It's funny because a few years back he couldn't see any value in electric cars. For him the internal combustion engine was king. He still loves the power he gets from a V8 but now sees the advantages and disadvantages of both. Acceleration being foremost in an electric car. However, distance breaks down quickly at high speeds, which he likes to drive. For him, the electric car is not for the open road. But, he loves the electric car in the city. He can move in and out of traffic with ease, get the jump on most cars at the traffic light, and drops the car off at the nearest charging station and doesn't have to worry about it afterward.
In time, the electric car will completely replace the internal combustion engine, which is a bit of an irony as the very first cars were electric. Even Henry Ford would have preferred an electric over internal combustion engine, but the petroleum companies convinced him otherwise and the rest as they say is history. It makes you wonder what the world would have been like had Ford and Edison stuck together.
The sad part is that public perception still lags far behind the reality of the situation. It doesn't help when you choose to interview taxi drivers to reinforce cognitive biases, but this is the case everywhere. Many Americans are loathe to consider an electric vehicle unless you package it as a Ford F150. In Europe, there is less resistance but it still exists.
Comments
Post a Comment