Electrical Vehicles & Energy Issues

EV Numbers We Should Know!

This is a new column with very important numbers and facts. It will be often updated with more and more accurate information. So enjoy the reading and feel free to send us more information that you feel would be good to have included.

EVs have become more frequent subjects of conversations and mostly positive. They don’t smell as gasoline vehicles, using electricity seems safer and more efficient. And so we have looked at real numbers to have better answers to EV questions.

Does it make sense to use electrical vehicles? Are they truly more efficient than gasoline powered ones? Can we even handle saving oil (maybe) but burning more electricity?

Example with Tesla Model 3

Tesla Model 3 needs

6.8 kWh per 20 miles or
34 kWh per 100 miles or
34,000 kWh per 100,000 miles

Average daily car driving distance is approximately 27 miles in the USA. Example vehicle would need 9.2 kWh per 27 miles on average per day.

To Better Imagine Watts

Imagine power that standard 75 Watt lightbulb needs to be on and shine.

75 Watt lightbulb would run for 10 hours using 750 Wh or 0.75 kWh.
Tesla Model 3 runs 20 miles using 6,800 Wh or 6.8 kWh – 75 Watt lightbulb would be on for 91 hours for the same energy.
Tesla Model 3 runs 27 miles using 9,200 Wh or 9.2 kWh – 75 Watt lightbulb would be on for 123 hours for the same energy (5 days).
Tesla Model 3 runs 100 miles using 34,000 Wh or 34 kWh – 75 Watt lightbulb would be on for 453 hours for the same amount of energy (19 days).

Average House

In 2020, the average consumption of electricity in kilowatts for a house in the USA was 893 kilowatt-hours per month or around 30 kilowatt-hours per day.

One Vehicle Per Driver

Our country has about 330 million people and about 230 million licensed drivers. If we have an electrical vehicle for every driver in the USA (estimate 100 million vehicles), and they all stick to average daily driving of 27 miles, we will consume about 920,000,000,000 Wh (nine hundred twenty billion) or 920,000,000 kWh.

We would save oil, perhaps, but we will have to build more power plants to make that extra electricity available. And the new plants will need to burn oil, natural gas, coal, or nuclear, hydro or air energy.

What To Do?

Current vehicle improvements so they burn less gasoline.
Hybrid vehicle improvements. More miles per gallon and less electricity.
New inventions of better sources of electricity.
More efficient and less expensive solar panels.
More use of panels on vehicles, buildings, …
Less cars, less driving.
Less oil energy consumption – cars, motorcycles, RVs, trucks, airplanes, ships, trains, buses.
More saving of oil and more oil replacement with other energy sources.
More functional financial incentives – fair tax policies.

How We Pay For It

EV’s first impression is that it’s good, it works, saves nature & energy … but for it doesn’t & to survive it will need to be subsidized by government. So if you don’t like it, sorry, you will still pay for it via taxes. That’s where subsidies are from.

Story of Electrical Vehicles

Newspaper column from about June 12, 2023 – 17 fatalities, 736 crashes. The shocking toll of Tesla’s Autopilot. It simply is not a good vehicle and we are not drivers, we are test monkeys. We claim it saves energy but we cannot even make cars safer.

This trouble chases me for a long time, it may be unnecessary or it attacks all of us. It’s about electrical vehicles, how they are great, economical, they save our nature and we may just be stupid when burning the gasoline just to go somewhere by car. TV is full of it, so are newspapers and magazines not to mention the internet and various media outlets. Unfortunately I have not seen any specific accurate numbers and so a few days ago I decided to start look it all up.

Of course it is a problem. I don’t have exact information, there is nowhere to go to get it, and so I did the research on my own as best as I could. What I found is truly bad, negative, so I wrote it all down in this article and posted it online for all to read.The page is here, it’s only in English, but at least the numbers are for everybody to understand.

In short I would describe this story like this. Right now we have a company, which manufactures and sells electrical vehicles and is run by person who is difficult to be trusted. He is very rich person, but also possibly very much lying. His name is Elon Musk.They manufacture electrical vehicles under the name Tesla, these are EVs powered at 100% by electricity, they are not hybrid or other types of cars. And so the driver or owner has to have their batteries charged up in order to drive the vehicle and the consumption of the electrical power is not something they like to brag about. It is typically shown in various units and numbers most people do not understand or accept as too complicated.

That’s why I jumped in and here is what I was able to find out. I tried my best not to make any mistakes, this info is not good only for owners of EVs, but for all of us and this beautiful planet.

Average driver in the USA drives on average about 27 miles per day, about 43 kilometers.
Tesla Model 3 consumes about 9.2 kWh of electrical energy in 27 miles. That number does not include efficiency of electrical vehicle but it appears that EVs use about 60% of power to operating and 40% for waste such as heat etc. So counting that then it may be about 15 kWh rather than 9.2 kWh.
If we imagine basic 75W lightbulb, it could be on for the same 27 mile energy for 123 hours or about 5 days.
Average house in the USA consumes approximately 893 kWh in one month or about 30 kWh per day.
When we add one average 27 mile electrical vehicle to our average electrical bill, then our 30 kWh per day immediately rises to 39.2 kWh.
If the new vehicles will be replacing gasoline cars, we need to consider approximately 100 million vehicles in this country
So many new cars will obviously increase demand for electricity and the consumption would go up by approximately 30%..
Gas or oil could be save, but 30% more needed electricity will require new power plants and these are no cheap factories plus they need oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear fuels … wind or water work too, but we don’t have enough of those.

Another detail I have avoided so far is the fact that the new electrical vehicles are very expensive, more expensive than gas vehicles. And so as an example the Tesla company pushes the government to financially support electrical vehicles. And they advise that they can be supported by suggesting they are saving energy, saving money, nature and that’s why government should be supporting it. Also help folks to perhaps lower the taxes when they buy an electrical vehicle.

It all sounds great for most people except the numbers simply do not work. Plus they are not accurate and I could not collect all I needed, for example exact efficiency of electrical system in electrical vehicle. I found a document which explains that Teslas for example consumer 40% of power energy for warming up or heating the electrical system, which is not a purpose, it’s simply how the system works and wastes much energy while using only 60% for operating of the vehicle. So if you need 9.2 kWh of electricity for 27 miles, you really need about 15.3 kWh in batteries to consume. We should count that 27 miles doesn’t cost only 9.2 kWh, but in fact it costs 15.3 kWh where 6.1 kWh is waste of the vehicle’s system. House consumes about 30 kWh per day, car will add about 15 kWh. We save nothing, we use up more.

I apologize if this has been boring or more importantly if I made any massive mistakes. In any case even with small errors this appears to be catastrophical problem which for all of us as the population of this planet doesn’t help but hurts us instead. To live next to the new power plant is not great … and if I made any major errors here then why we did not start investing into electrical vehicles 50 or more years ago?

It also bothers me that the propagation of electrical vehicles goes after the character of mostly nice people we have in this country. It tries to suggest that electrical vehicles are smart choices, it is what nice people really go for to be even nicer and it simply is the only option for vehicles we have. They never explain some solid and accurate numbers and instead they discuss the decision as the only step to take. You don’t have to know how many kWh you will need, nobody really knows what kWh means, our only option is electrical vehicles only and that’s the end of their story.

Tesla Model 3 Warnings

Taken from this page.

autopilot system in doubt
cold climates affect the performance
shareholders wanted to remove elon musk
the cars cost an arm and a leg
hidden costs and add-ons
some report their Teslas creak and rattle
maintenance is a pain
cheaper alternative modes of transportation
no way to test drive
there have been reported problems
electric car technology isn’t perfected yet
the basic models are a joke
early models haven’t worked out all the kinks yet
Tesla is fashionable today, out of style tomorrow?

More Tesla Warnings