Next regulations for WRC cars

[Mirek]

When you drive 800 km do you only use a 2 min stop? Well maybe you do but 95% of people will have 1-2 stops with toilet/food etc breaks. As I said right now with realistic breaks it is slightly slower in an electric car, but certainly not "unsolvable".

Of course I do stop. But I don't need to wait half a day before 10 cars ahead of me recharge. You still don't understand what it takes to change all the traffic on motorways to electric. It's simply impossible to multiply all fuel station capacity by 30 in foreseeable future, mainly from financial reasons but only them. This is simple mathematical fact.

Also even if you only stick to the current petrol station network. How much of the area where you can park is actually used for refuelling? 10%? With charging it is much easier to use the whole area. It's also much easier to build a dedicated charging station than a petrol station. In Germany petrol stations on motorways often have 50km or more between, at the same time there are parking areas much more often. Adding charging stands on all of them is not that much of a problem.

Again 30x times bigger capacity is needed. You can't create that by a magic wand. We're speaking about huge change which needs money and time.

With electric car you have a fuel station in every garage and in some countries in pretty much every parking lot already now. This takes care of all the charging bare the (for most people) few long range trips. Yes if everyone has an electric car you need a lot of them, but as the numbers of cars is rising slowly the number of connection points has no problems keeping up.

The discussion is about long range traffic. I said already that I do support electrification of city traffic.

It's somehow hard to take your "unfeasible" arguments seriously when every 5th car I meet every day is electric and when about 1/4 of the people I know drive them. When I look out of the window right now I see a parking lot with about 90 cars, out of these 20 are fully electric and they are all plugged in and there are some empty charging slots.

Today roughly 1% of cars in Germany are electric (2015 it was 0,75%) and they are very seldom used on motorways. When I travel through Germany I often drive 160-180 km/h for long distances and I'm nowhere close to being the fastest. For example most my business trips take places in a German office some 400 km from my place. If You drive that sometimes twice per week You really do value the time You can safe on the trip. And that's pretty common for many people.

Sure a change like that doesn't happen over a few months, but here it's already well on the way.

It will take long, to create all infrastructure and also to change the people's mindset. It's not going to be prepared any time soon.

EDIT: My Tesla driving colleague tells me he typically stopped after 250 km on autobahn. With 75 km/h average on normal roads around 400 km is normal. (Note that your graph is for 85 kwh). Anyway all this is just arguing about details, my point is.. it is certainly not unsolvable problem, neither range nor charging.

It's no unsolvable but not in a near future. That was my point and I'm pretty sure that the carmakers see the very same issues which I named. In the end I work in automotive in an major R&D center which is dedicated mainly to the future driving systems.

Fact is that currently EVs are not suitable for long distance driving no matter how many charging stations you put on the route. Let's say you drive from Calais to Prague, pretty much 1100km on motorways. Google estimates it roughly as a 10 hour drive, so the average speed would be around 110km/h.

10 hours is feasible with several stops. I drive nearly every year Prague - Ypres which is nearly the same case (at least one way through Lilles). And I usually do it between 9 and 11 hours depending on the number of traffic jams on the road (common case sadly). That is without driving over 160 km/h in Germany and with driving within limits in Belgium and France (120/130).

For example when I drive to Ypres shakedown I can start in early morning and I still comfortably arrive one hour before start. If I shall use electric car I would need to set off one day before and take a sleep somewhere on the road. I also need to spend more time planning to be aware where I can recharge in the areas where I go to. It's not like it would be possible in every village.