Buttigieg Reverses on 'Mileage Tax': 'Not Part of the Conversation about this Infrastructure Bill'

trunks2k said:

Yeah, the last 10-20% of the battery charge takes significantly longer to charge that it's more time efficient to do a couple stops to charge a smaller percentage of the battery than to do one stop to charge the battery 100%.


A big problem is urban areas where there isn't off street parking. Consider my neighborhood - everyone has to park on the street. The only way you are charging your car overnight is if you manage to get the parking spot in front of your house, which is exceedingly unlikely to happen. We'd need a whole new infrastructure to make street side charging widely available. It's especially annoying because if charging was easily available, electric vehicles would be a fantastic option around here - you are rarely driving more than 20 miles in a shot, and that driving is very efficient for electric vehicles.

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There are going to be some real challenges for the US to move to electric vehicles. Your example of row houses (or other houses that have no dedicated parking) and apartments have the issue of how they can charge an electric car.

I suspect the best way, at least for on street parking, is going to be to build chargers on the street for the parking -- either cities selling the rights for a company to build these chargers or for cities to add them as part of their road infrastructure. These would likely be "level 2" chargers (not high speed, but 240V so they can charge the car overnight) and would have some type of payment system (an app, credit reader, etc.) that you'd set up when you park. At the same time, we can look at how other countries have handled it, such as Norway, which already have high adoption rates of electric vehicles (EVs) and often have homes without dedicated parking.

The other major issue that has to be fixed, and I have to hope that power companies are already planning for this, is the added electrical power that will need to be produced to allow millions of electric vehicles to charge. For example, we saw this winter the issues with the Texas power grid -- how they really don't have a lot of excess capacity when there is heavy electric use. Granted, some of that can be mitigated by "peak pricing" -- pushing people to wait to charge their cars until bedtime and only charge overnight -- but it seems clear we will need more added power generating capability as people switch to EVs.

NightHawkeye said:

...But, by all means use an electric vehicle for your road trips if that makes you happy.

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If this was strictly about personal choice, Id totally agree. But there's no way to keep ones vehicle emissions to oneself. So I'm all for flexing public policy muscle on this IF the facts justify it.

durangodawood said:

But there's no way to keep ones vehicle emissions to oneself.

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I mean, technically you could. Wouldn't last very long though.