Agree! I’ve lived in the tropics as well as the Eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains with their severe winters, I’ll take the mountains any time .
In the tropics I was looking at the same palm trees outside my window all year long. Same temperature and only wet and dry season to differentiate the climate.
Search EV forums… you would think this would work universally but it doesn’t. Some generators work for some EVs, some don’t. Fast Lane Car channel on YouTube tried this with their Tesla Model X and it would not charge.
@Barkydog A close friend’s husband was career Air Force. He had postings to both Grand Forks and Minot. Both his car and their family car were supplied year round with required survival gear.
North Dakota gets occasional freak summer blizzards. My friend got trapped in one with their young daughter along one summer day when she’d driven from the air base into town for some reason that took far longer than anticipated. Before heading back home to the base she called her husband from a pay phone. When she and other dependents who lived on base didn’t show up at home the base sent out search parties including on the road to town to dig out stranded motorists such as her.
A neighbor grew up in Minnesota. I asked her once if she would move back. She said no way. It’s too cold in the winter where she grew up. When she went back to visit family, winter visits were painful if she had to be outside.
My friend whose husband served tours at both Grand Forks and Minot air bases said she minded the harsh winters less than the summer hordes of mosquitoes!
Every place has its driving hazards. You couldn’t pay me to ever drive southern Oregon’s hwy 97 alongside Upper Klammath Lake after dark a second time. The evil swarms of green midges blanketed the windshield and headlights and ended packed inches deep in the front end of the engine, especially on the radiator. Dangerous, harrowing drive. And then it took a very long effort at the self-serve car wash in the middle of the night to wash the car and engine clean again. That experience explained why most visitors to Crater Lake stay in Medford, OR rather than the less expensive motels in Klammath Falls.
That sounds like heaven. No need to put snow tires on the car!
My mother said the summers were nice if you don’t mind mosquitoes the size of your fist.
I didn’t ask about those. Maybe I will the next time I see her. She and my wife walk together occasionally.
Careful there, fellow engineer…the EV has advantages, but let’s not overstate the case. The grid-averaged efficiency, including transmission losses, is close to 33%. One third of the input fuel energy is used as work. An EV is about 60% efficient (electricity to work), so multiplying 0.33x0.60 gives mid 20% range. For that you have to haul around heavy batteries, wasting energy. The big advantage is using green primary energy…as the grid gets greener, so does your EV. Meanwhile, we disappointingly run the EV partly on coal 
@g8treng Nice to talk to a fellow engineer. You make good points (although I think .33 * .60 is 20%, not mid-20s). For energy to work, I think the MPGe/MPG number is the best we got (120MPGe/30MPG for my car). So if the electric is 60% efficient (battery to miles), the gas is 15% (gas to miles). Overall, 20% vs 15% is not that impressive. Just glad I live in California, where half of the electricity is from renewable sources.
Interesting discussion.
Interesting comment. I thought a lot of it came from Canada, but like I said, efficiency really means nothing to me. Whether something meets my requirements is more important and I’ll be happy to just let the market do what markets do. I’m a consumer though not an engineer so my perspective is different, buy hey, it’s my money.
Of course, you do what seems best to you. Why do you spend time commenting on “Efficiency Advantage of Electric Cars” if efficiency means nothing to you?
Keep in mind that it’s becoming more popular for EV owners to also install solar panels and a battery storage system on their house. I imagine that number gets at least somewhat more rosy when the electricity is generated on site and transmitted about 30 feet to the storage array. 
Not to mention that sunlight is hitting your roof whether or not you have solar panels on it, so solar energy is “free” as far as ongoing energy production factors go. (Note that I don’t mean free of charge, I mean free as in beyond the initial manufacture of the panels and batteries, you aren’t putting any raw input into the energy generation unlike a coal plant).
I’m a warm weather kind of guy too. I grew up in Buffalo. I lived there through the Blizzards of '77 and '85. The walk to school was a little more than a mile, so close that it wasn’t worth standing around in the cold waiting for the bus, so most mornings, I walked to school, with cold wet hands and feet, a runny nose, and feeling miserable. When I moved to Florida in the early '90s, I fell in love with the place, and not just because of the weather.
Regarding the miserable summer weather, most of us go from our air conditioned homes to our air conditioned cars, to our air conditioned jobs, and then reverse the process. We go to air conditioned bars and restaurants. When I do something outdoors, like play disc golf or take my dog to the park, I dress appropriately, wearing light weight moisture wicking shorts and t-shirt, along with a wide brimmed hat. It’s quite pleasant in the shade when there’s a breeze, but best of all, we get gorgeous sunny 60-80 degree (F) weather from November through March, weather that lets me sleep with the windows open on chilly nights.
Worst of all, when I lived in Buffalo, our natural gas heating bills were outrageous. I know I probably have a larger carbon footprint living in Florida, but my utility budget is quite manageable compared to my brother’s, who lives in Buffalo.
This is a Forum and as long as the Forum rules are not broken then people can post on any thread .
Efficient or not an fully electric vehicle would not be practical for our use.
I live in Western NY, we go from our heated houses to heated work to heater restaurants, movies etc in the winter. I spend much less time snowblowing that I do lawnmowing and when I go outside in the winter I dress aproproatlyand am comfortable. I would not be comfortable in the summer in Florida in the summer no matter what I wore. Gas bills have come way down from their peak in recent years, my total gas bill for the year was $561 and that includes my heat, water tank and stove. My water bill is less per quarter than my son in Florida is per month. The walking path alongside the Niagara river is really beautiful in the winter, and there is a lot of bird activity as it never freezes over in the winter because of the swift current, the more time you spend outside in the winter, the better you feel and th warmer the house feels when you get back. The people who suffer the most in the winter are those who huddle in the house and get depressed especially thoswe who don’t have large South facing windows in the rooms they spend their days in.
My living room faces due North and my wife used to get depressed in the Winter, I addd a 14 x24 Family room on the South side of my house with a 10 foot South Facing Bay window and and an 8 foot East facing window. I have large maples shading it in the summer and bare trees letting the sun in in the winter. My wife can see the sunrise in the morning and we see wildlife all the time, deer 4 or 5 days a week and a red fox yesterday.
As for snow tires, I only used them one Winter in the last 50 years. Decided they were a waste of time and effort. Never had to have my car towed. Except when I purchased a non running car. Even then I towed it with the help of a friend or relative.
Unfortunately for the vast number of people who work…their vehicle won’t be parked in the garage charging when the sun is out. You could store the energy in batteries, but that energy is better served running household appliances.
Some of those battery storage systems are more than capable of running the house and charging the car. I talked to a guy a few years ago who had a Model S with the 85kwh battery. He installed solar and a large battery bank. He powered the whole house, charged the Tesla, and his wife’s Leaf, and still had enough left over that got dumped back to the grid for which he got a small payment from the energy company.
The initial costs, I imagine, were ruinous, but then if you can afford a 6-figure car the definition of “expensive” changes a bit.
He must live in Arizona or New Mexico and have a huge roof to put those 30-40 solar panels on. Here in the North East there isn’t enough sunlight to power a 2,000sq/ft home during the day. Let alone power home…store left over in a battery and run complete home at night and sell back to the grid.
I worked with a guy who bought half an island off the cost of Maine. He’s completely off the grid. But solar can’t do it completely. He bought a propane powered refrigerator and freezer. Stove and dryer on also propane. Plus he has a 2-3 wind-mills. Close enough to land for a cell connection. Satellite dish for TV and internet. Two huge propane tanks that are filled monthly.
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He lives in Minnesota. But he does have a big roof, as you’d expect from someone who can just plunk 6 figures down on a car. And he’s on enough land that his neighbors won’t see the giant solar panels and complain.
When I talked to him the system was only a few months old and he hadn’t yet gone through a winter, when days tend to be more grey than not here. So I imagine at the very least he was no longer dumping energy back onto the grid during the cold months.
But he also did a bunch of other stuff to make his house, which he had custom-built, more energy efficient. His outer walls are a lot thicker than a normal house, and they’re filled with a high grade insulation. He’s got a lot more insulation in his roof than most of us have. He runs an electric blower for HVAC, but he’s also got a geothermal system so he’s not having to use power to generate the actual heat. In short, he’s drastically reduced the amount of energy it takes to run his house compared to a normal house of the same size.
And yeah, I know, most of us couldn’t afford to set up a house like that. Yet. But all of those technologies continue to reduce in price, and as that happens the price of fossil-fuel energy is going to continue to go up. Not so much, as we used to think, because we’ve exhausted the supply, but because we’re turning to other sources of energy before the supply exhausts, and the old sources are therefore going to become less available, as we won’t be processing as many of them.
Kind of like in the old days everyone owned a horse until the car came along, and now mainly rich people own them because they’ve become harder to afford due to no longer being part of a large, common infrastructure.
So as those fuels become more expensive, and alternatives to them become less expensive, we’ll see more things like houses taking advantage of geothermal and solar energy, better insulation, etc, smarter designs with an eye toward energy efficiency, etc.