Is the EREV going to be a flop?

[SpaceEVDriver]

Funny you should reiterate your points here. You’ve mentioned them in the past and it just occurred to me this is the reason I use electric lawn tools. When I bought a dual line gas string trimmer years ago I thought it was the greatest thing. The continual struggle just to get it started made me say lots of bad things. Except for the lawn mower, all is electric. When the mower dies, electric will be its replacement.

Still on the fence about BEV/EREV Scout. We just don’t know all we need to know yet. There is time yet.

Our riding lawn tractor/mower is electric and it’s so much nicer than the Craftsman gas riding mower we inherited. I had to spend several hours fighting with it every season before I gave up and bought the EGO+ riding mower. I attached a 2” ball hitch so I can also pull our 5’x8’ utility trailer around the property instead of using the Lightning. This means a much lighter impact on the soil and far more maneuverability.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

I'm trying to reduce as many fuel-powered devices as possible. Most all of the yard tools are now electric, the chainsaw is electric. The Kubota is diesel and I don't see a way around that, but I'm starting to eyeball options to get rid of the gas generator as well. Some EcoFlow is tempting, but the cost doesn't justify it yet, so maybe a 3-point generator to go on the back of the Kubota? If I've got diesel around anyway, at least it's serving another purpose. They're building a new substation quite close to me, so power outages likely won't be as much of a concern soon.

I've been trying to consolidate vehicles for years, but there aren't many Swiss Army Knife vehicles out there for my use case. The EREV does that for me at least, otherwise I'd have an EV and an ICE.

I’m keeping an eye out for an electric hydraulic pump to replace my tractor’s diesel engine with. The extra weight of 100-200 kWh of battery will add much-needed ballast. When I bought the tractor, I didn’t realize how much I’d be 1) digging through very thick limestone; 2) using the forklift attachment on heavy materials. I may also look at linear actuators to replace the hydraulic rams, but I haven’t had time to compare the force differences between available linear actuators and the hydraulic rams on the tractor, nor the price differences. The rams are already leaking, so I have no doubt they’ll need replacing soon enough.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

I make a 500 mile one-way, 1200 mile round-trip (200 miles local driving) drive about once or twice a month, no fewer than six times a year. I’ve been doing this drive for >30 years. I started doing it with ICEVs, moved on to a mix of HEVs and ICEVs, and now exclusively do it with BEVs. It has taken me 7-8 hours depending on traffic and weather for all of those 30+ years. It takes me 7-8 hours depending on traffic and weather in our BEVs too. There is no extra time required to do the trip in our BEVs. For this trip, we stop once for lunch, sometimes stop for a restroom break, and then stop for dinner before arriving at our destination. The dinner stop is not strictly necessary for any vehicle type, but we’re often hungry by the time we are 2 hours from our destination. This has been our driving pattern for decades. Every stop we make includes a DCFC charge, even the quick restroom break, not because we need to charge at every stop, but because it makes sense to charge when we stop.

If I also discuss the trips made when I was much younger and not the driver, with the old beaters we had and the lack of 24-hour gas stations (no credit cards)…those trips took 10-20 hours to make the drive because: 1) 55 mph speed limits; 2) the need to stop a lot more often because of terrible efficiency; 3) the need to refuel from jerry cans at least once while crossing the desert at night; 4) the need to stop at least once at the emergency water stations to stop the car from overheating; 5) the stops to help other stranded (real stranded, not cell phone stranded) motorists.

We’ve driven 90,000 miles in our BEVs (combined), some 50,000 miles of that on road trips (far enough away from home that we needed to stay the night). We don’t spend extra driving time to take road trips in BEVs compared with ICEVs or hybrids. On multi-day road trips, we have fewer stops with our BEVs because we can usually end each day at 10% or less state of charge, plug in to an L2 charger at our overnight stay, and start the next day at 100%. This eliminates at least one, sometimes two stops per day.

When accounting for time wasted on refueling, I also consider that we live 30 minutes round trip from the nearest gas station. When we had an ICEV, it would take 40+ minutes to drive to the gas station, refuel, and drive home. Before moving to BEVs, we were going to the gas station once a week or so for each of our ICEVs. That’s about 80 minutes per week or so wasted on refueling. Over 52 weeks in a year (not counting topping up for road trips), that’s 60-70 hours wasted on refueling ICEVs.

We are saving at least 60-70 hours a year not going to a gas station. That’s nearly a two-week vacation.