EUC efficiency vs. electric cars vs. IC cars

[PLEASE_DELETE]

Deleted.

Edited March 18 by PLEASE_DELETE

[meepmeepmayer]

1 hour ago, LanghamP said:

Pretty please with ice cream on top?

It's a somewhat complex question that moves around depending on how it is phrased.

Suppose you want to travel 5,000 miles. Should you drive faster but then stop 40% more often, considering each fill up cost you 20 minutes to get off the freeway, find a gas station and fill your car? And if you spend $50 instead of $30 to go 400 miles, then isn't that an extra hour lost via working? That is, each fill up might cost you 140 minutes (20 minutes to fill up + 2 hours of work to fill that gas tank).

Well it's an optimization problem.

Your total costs (depending on the average speed) are gas costs + how long you take * how much $/h you would earn working in that time.

How that cost curve looks depends on the exact numbers. Gas costs are simple, just your average speed and how much gas you use then for the entire distance. The second part is more complicated and discontinuous. Which hours can you work if you save a certain amount of time? Time needed suddenly jumps with an extra gas stop. Etc. It gets complex soon (as complex as you want it). But you could write a computer program to give your costs for a given average speed.

How the resulting curve (of costs over average speed) looks depends highly on the exact numbers, specifically how much $/h you make when working. And you want to minimize your costs (I guess?).

Basically, if you have a high paying job, drive as fast as possible because the extra time saved is worth more to you as you can work in that time and earn a lot of extra $$$. The less you earn, the more important a cheap trip becomes, and you go slower. If you're a poor earner, go as slow as possible.

So the cost curve falls with average speed if you're rich (so go as fast as possible), grows with average speed if you're poor (go as slow as possible because your time isn't worth much but gas savings are), and has some optimum average speed somewhere in the middle if you're a middle earner. (How the curve looks exactly may be a bit messy because of the discontinuities, but this should be the big picture).

I hope that's right. It's an optimization problem. Not sure if you can simplify it into easy algebra without leaving too many details out for a longer distance ride (e.g. When could you actually work in the saved time? How many sleep and rests stops? How much do they cost and how do they change the time needed?)

TLDR: Compare $/h of what you earn and $/h of what the trip costs (gas costs divided by time needed) at a certain speed. Drive as fast as possible without exceeding your $/h earned. Whether $/h net earnings and $/h for the trip costs is easy to compute depends on how detailed you make your calculation. But for short/simple trips it might be easy enough to do on paper.

Edited November 6, 2019 by meepmeepmayer
tldr added

[Mono]

On 11/5/2019 at 9:25 PM, meepmeepmayer said:

That shows why wind resistance is the main power draw for EUCs. A good argument for seated riding.

True, but seating can mitigate the problem only so much: consumption has only a linear dependency with the front area and seating will realistically reduce the area by a factor of less than two only. Assuming to be in the regime with cubic dependency of consumption on speed, reducing the speed by 20% reduces the consumption by a factor of almost two as well.