It's probably been a while since an electric car turned your head.
They aren't novel anymore, though they do remain rare, under 1% of new car sales here in the U.S., lagging where a lot of folks thought they'd be.
A lot of the normalcy comes from range issues being satisfied.
We no longer think about these as having range in the double digits Most of the cars that are coming to the market now are in the 200 to 250 mile range per charge.
That would be Chevy Bolt, the coming Tesla Model 3, newly announced Jaguar I���PACE and the new Hyundai Ioniq battery electric.
New research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance Suggests that by 2040, 35% of all new cars sold worldwide Will have a plug, and by 2025 those kinds of cars will have a lower total cost of ownership than those that are combustion only.
A new novel study from MIT did some interesting maxing of data.
They took a look at second by second GPS tracking of drivers in Texas.
California and Georgia, added that to a national driver habits database.
Also looked at real-world fuel economy of the vehicles and factored in local temperature which can affect the range and output of a car's battery.
Out of all that, they deduced that 87% of current trips in America Can be handled by the current state of the art plug-in cars.
And the remaining 13% or so would be handled by better, more prevalent carship.
Another new survey in the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute shows another piece of the discussion.
And that is the leadability of charging cars.
It's the number one thing that kinda works on someone's mind.
After range itself.
Researchers Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak found that drivers would want to decide each time their car is charged, not via some automatic authorization.
They would prefer pre-negotiated pricing, though, not the variable spot market we're used to at the gas pump.
And would prefer smart charging, but where the car and the infrastructure talk to each other to figure out when to do it based on using renewable energy.
It wasn't that long ago you had a big rift in the auto industry between companies who believed in plug-in battery cars and those that didn't.
The conversation now, though, is has that happened because of must-sell regulations or real consumer pull-through?
And a lot of this research is working on that answer.
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