Charge it up before you leave. Do snowmobile riders bring gas with them on trails? I suspect the charge will be good for hours and hours of fun.
Polaris going to introduce an EV Indian also?
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No, but they probably leave a can of gas in the truck. Or I used to when riding a dirt bike, at least. Electric snowmobiles or atv’s - would be nice if they came with a “reserve tank” - where once you run out of charge you can flip it to “reserve” and maybe at least get it back to the truck. And they may indeed have something similar.
I’m kinda balking at the $25-$30k price tag, though!
EV ATVs could have a reserve power supply, but it would cost several thousand dollars. I suppose it could be like those cell phone power packs, only a thousand times larger. Or you could mix power sources and use a gas portable generator to provide electricity for a refill. That’s probably a lot cheaper but would take a while for a fill up.
Do you use that gas station every day? Do you drive to a store and then find the nearest gas station and fill up? Do all the offices in your town have gas pumps?
Why are we assuming that electric cars need to be treated differently?
I get around 300 miles on a tank of gas. I drive it till the gas gauge gets to around 1/4 tank. Then I start looking for a gas station.
EVs are getting 250+ miles on a charge. There’s no reason such a car would need to charge every day. It wouldn’t need to charge at work - certainly not on a daily basis. It’s certainly most convenient to charge it at home, since you always have a “full tank” in the morning, but it’s not necessary. Sure, right now it takes around 15 minutes to get to 80% charge as opposed to 5 minutes at the gas pump to fill the tank. But many chargers are located somewhere you want to be anyway. You can get your grocery shopping done while the car charges. Or have lunch at a restaurant. In short, if you live in an apartment that lacks chargers but really want an EV, you can easily make it work.
And those charge times are going to come down, while range is going to keep going up. At some point we’ll think it funnily old-fashioned that anyone had to charge their EV more than once a week or so, or that you couldn’t drive all day on a single charge.
And on apartments, yeah, I think they’ll start offering EV charging as amenities. No, not all of them. But not all of them offer garages. Or even off-street parking. That somehow didn’t lead to the abandonment of cars entirely. It’ll start with the luxury apartments and move downward from there as EVs become more commonplace. In fact, it’s already happening. Here’s a listing of apartments in Minneapolis that have EV charging:
https://www.stevenhong.com/green/green-apartments/
Honestly, if I were still in an apartment, I’d much rather have that amenity than a stupid pool that’s constantly closed because idiots break glass bottles in it and it can’t reopen until it’s drained and cleaned.
The world is moving on. We’re moving toward EVs and away from gas vehicles. Complaining that we are not currently set up for what the future is bringing is like a guy in 1900 complaining that there aren’t enough gas stations right now and therefore we’ll always ride horses.
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+1
That same guy probably would have invested in a Buggy Whip company because cars “are just a passing whim”.
Similarly, in the distant past, the CEO of Western Union passed-up the opportunity to buy Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patents for $100k. Clearly, he was a person who lacked the ability to envision the future of modern technology.
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Many people in this forum have posted pointless arguments about EV’s and autonomous vehicles. Both these technologies are still very very early. Things are changing very fast. People are complaining about fully autonomous vehicles and saying how dangerous they are and yet they aren’t even on the road yet. At least wait till they have them on the road before complaining about them.
I don’t think people should buy and EV because there isn’t a charging station near where I live? Great argument to not buying an EV where that person lives…but totally worthless for everyone else.
As with all technologies you need to see if it’s right for YOU. If not then don’t buy it. Simple.
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Agree with this. It would be foolish in my opinion for me to just buy one, not do any investigation on where I’d charge it, how often I’d have to charge it, etc., and then say “well the technology is advancing and I’m sure they’ll put in more charging stations as demand increases”. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume an EV might not work for everyone, everywhere, right now. Will they work for everyone in the future? I don’t think we really know that yet. We will see how it goes in the larger metro areas first, I imagine.
Same can be said for petrol cars in the past. I doubt the first folks to adopt them were folks in rural areas. In the early days of automobiles, I imagine a horse was more useful in the back woods of TN than being the one guy in the area that owned one of them thar new horseless carriages.
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I tried that with some of my co-workers, but they never noticed the difference.
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EVs pre-date gasoline cars by over 50 years. 1831. Rechargable batteries were invented in 1859. There were more EVs in the US than ICEs in 1900. Electric cabs ran in New York in the early 1900s. EVs are not new.
EVs lost out to ICEs by 1920 because ICEs were cheaper and better met the buyer’s needs.
The technology IN modern EVs is new, but then so is the technology in ICEs. It looks like batteries have more to gain than ICEs at this point. They will be a big part of our future but I don’t think ICE’s will totally go away for a long time.
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Polaris ev has 15Kwh battery with 45 mile range. Can tow 2500lbs. For 45 miles? Does use 120v charger though. Step up model has 30kvh battery but it’s $5k more
Hmm, Tesla models have 50-100kvh batteries. Heard they cost $30k to replace
It is Niagara University., The engineer that guided us on the tour ofr the power plant bemoaned the fact that he lived 2 miles from the plant and was paying such high electric rates.
The problem is that they are on the road. Las Vegas and Jacksonville already have autonomous shuttles operating. They’re restricted to their own special lane, but we’re relying on the software to not mess up and exit that lane.
The other problem is that Tesla is making BS claims about their “autopilot” “full self driving” cars that are anything but. And people are buying into the hype, letting the car drive itself, and then causing wrecks.
Autonomous tech is interesting, and I have no doubt that it will be implemented well at some point, but it really isn’t ready for prime time yet. We aren’t going to change that by deploying the alpha releases and hoping nothing bad happens, but that’s exactly what some companies are trying to do.
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Autonomous shuttles are not the same as true autonomous vehicles. Their route is mapped out. There are probably sensors in the road. This isn’t the same. What people have been complaining about are for things that haven’t even happened yet.
That I agree 100% with. There are 5 levels of autonomous vehicles. No manufacturer is at level 5. Maybe level 3. Within those levels the IEEE has established standards. These standards are still changing as the technology changes. We are still a ways off from level autonomous vehicles. But as I’ve said many times in this forum the technology is changing daily.
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Yeah, but they aren’t walled off from external incursions. We’re still hoping those things will stop when a kid runs in front of them, etc.
On the true autonomous front, Connecticut Transit will be testing the level 4 Xcelsior AV bus next year, for scheduled operational deployment in '23. It’s closer than we think… Or at least, deployment is closer than we think. I remain unconvinced that they will work out enough kinks by '23 to deploy it safely, but that doesn’t mean they won’t deploy it. 
And while CTransit does say that there will be a driver behind the wheel of the bus at all times while it’s driving itself (which presumably means they are thinking of it as a level 3 bus rather than a level 4), we know from that disastrous Uber test that said drivers will probably get bored and distracted, because staring at the road while something else drives just isn’t very engaging, at which point we have to hope that level 4 designation is genuinely warranted.
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Just read about Tesla delivering their EV Tractor Trailer to a beverage distributor who wants to go ) emissions, Delivery was 4 years late. It os claimed to have 3 times the power of a 350 HP Cummins Diesel and a 500 mile range. Others say the real world range ids much less. Beverage co took delivery of just 4 and plans to use them om delivery runs of 80 miles each way because they will have the only charger for them. For long runs they bought a fleet of natural gas powered tractors.
It will be interesting to see how this real world test turns out.
This is an ideal situation for electric vehicles, with runs of a known length every day and presumably the opportunity to fully charge every night, in which case the only issue I’d expect to see here is reliability.
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Wait until it is close to the end of the day and it gets caught up in a bad traffic jam in very slow traffic and it runs out of battery power…
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How is that different from a driver who allows his gas gauge to get very low?
Every driver–whether he is piloting an IC-powered vehicle or a battery-powered vehicle–needs to be responsible enough to monitor the state of his vehicle’s motive power source, and to replenish it long before it runs out.
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