Notes for Week 48, 2024
Song of the week:
Notes
Whoa! Two weeks without an update.
Not quite. I did the unthinkable and went on a family vacation. We packed the doggy into my parents house, handed the keys of my house to my brother to babysit the building and took our four selves on a plane down to the tropical island of Fuertaventura.
If you're not from Europe reading this, there are a set of islands just off the coast of Morocco that, for colonial reasons, are part of Spain. As such, are part of the EU. So people speak mostly Spanish with some English. They trade in the Euro currency. And most of the brands for food, drinks and stuff are familiar. But the weather, given the proximity to the equator, is almost guaranteed to be sunny, mid-20s (centigrade) and pleasant overall.
And so, for 10 nights, I took a vacation with my family. Largely to celebrate my wife's doom-laden 40th birthday (doom-laden because... 40!). But we were joined by her mother, brother and about 25 others from her extended family, who were celebrating and uncle's 60th and a cousin-in-law (as a result of an on-vacation wedding proposal) who turned 30.
We learned a lot on this vacation. Notably that our kids are not quite ready for 10 days away from home, particularly our youngest, who turns 3 in February. But probably more notably, is on my end of the ASD/ADHD spectrum, so alone time and chill-down time is important. Something that can be hard to do on a huge family vacation. We also learned that going on a holiday with a swimming pool probably saves you hundreds of euro in swimming lessons. We started the week with two very nervous kids, and ended the week with fish.
On a totally separate note, I was a bit of a mule (story of my life) because I was the only one to rent a car. There was a big shop nearby, but nothing as useful as the Lidl and Mercadona 10mins drive away.
The car was a fairly bog-standard, off-white VW T-Roc. "Compact SUV" class car that could carry the family plus a bunch of luggage. Other than almost leaving the clutch at the airport upon departure, it was fine. But it really brought to the fore the absolute idiocy of ICE vehicles in 2024. I've not driven one since ~2018, when I made the switch to EVs. There was one occasion in 2020 when I had a rental on vacation but at that point the muscle memory was still there.
There are several reasons why ICE cars are utter idiocy from the perspective of me, a person who only drives EVs:
- Gearboxes are shit and stupid. I realise an enormous amount of people don't feel this because they drive automatic, but I drove a manual (which is cheaper) and my left foot has never done more work in its life. Moreover, even if it had an automatic, the level of performance is atrocious.
- I've driven high performance sports cars who have phenomenal gearboxes, where you can extract maximum value. But since I've been driving EVs, which extract far more performance than an ICE could (including the fact that 80% of ICE energy is lost to heat, whereas BEVs consume 80% of their energy, losing only 20% to heat), even a top-end 911 GT3 can feel tame at the low or mid end of the performance spectrum. My large family SUV is fast.
- Petrol stations are stupid. EVs are seen as time-consuming because of the time it takes to 'fill' the battery. But this mostly comes from non-EV drivers who've only seen YouTube videos of people pulling into full, or closed stations. This happens, and it's true. But it's rapidly advancing and improving from a public charging POV, while the vast, vast, vast majority of actual EV owners charge their cars at home once a week, if not less.
- But a petrol station takes a lot longer than you'd imagine. First, it's not convenient. You've to park up, get out, faff around with the hose thing, wait for it to reset, then it goes. I had to fill about 50% of my tank, and it took about 5mins. Then I went back to the shop to queue and pay, which took another 5mins. In my Tesla, if I went to a supercharger and went from 20% to 70% to top-up en route to Cork (roughly 260km), it would take the same amount of time, if not a little less. And I wouldn't need to queue anywhere; the app would just charge my card. In fact, if I was to go into the shop, instead of queueing to pay for dead dinosaur juice, I could be getting a coffee or something exclusively.
- Rolling around is insane. I never noticed it before, but last week I noticed a lot of cars going too fast, taking risks around the corners, etc. etc. And I realise given the nature of the location, that's down to drivers not using their normal cars at home, etc. But it was evident that people free-wheel around the place. They don't use the gearbox to engine brake, or even change gears appropriately. They slow down to a crawl, shaking the car while it sits in third gear. Which is really inefficient but also shows how poor the driving standard is. BEVs are easier to drive. It's easier to slow down and take off again, which in-turn should lead to better driving practices when dealing with intersections or, more importantly, pedestrian crossing zones.
- Petrol is not efficient: Range anxiety is hopefully a thing of the past as batteries get bigger. Granted, charging anxiety is a thing (i.e. will a charger be online, will there be a car parked there, etc. etc.). But the VW interestingly showed how much petrol was there by measure of quarters-of-the-tank. But they also showed the range. The top range at full was about 620km, if memory serves. My car's stated range at full (assuming good conditions etc.) is 600km. Good conditions, etc., also applies to an ICE vehicle. Even more, the gradient decline of range as battery is consumed in my EV is really easy to track, obvious and even has reports/charts to demonstrate. Heavy right foot? You'll lose range. Cold? You'll lose range. Motorway driving? You'll consume more battery more frequently. Etc. etc. That's not data an ICE driver gets, and so they just point and shout at EVs. Yet, here I am in a 1.5 petrol engined vehicle that was used for airport runs, Lidl and a few short excursions (everything is 20mins away) and in 5 days I somehow dropped from 620km to 250km.
- In theory, petrol is explosively efficient compared to a battery. Like, literally. But in real world comparison, me being the useful idiot behind the wheel of an ICE as if I've never seen one before, I would never say ICE is more efficient than BEV. And imagine if I had a BEV to compare with in temperate conditions like that! I would never have consumed that much energy that quickly had I got what I would have loved; a VW id buzz. But alas none were available!
TLDR; the BEV vs ICE thing needs to go to bed. I just did a week-long real world test and would never advise someone to choose ICE for the sake of range, price or performance. It's a fools errand.
(via my flickr)