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I wonder how you might feel about your car if you are caught in the middle of an emergency (earthquake, fire, take your pick) and your car has 60 miles if range

I wonder how you might feel about your car if you are caught in the middle of an emergency (earthquake, fire, take your pick) and your car has 60 miles if range left, you are at work and have to drive home and evacuate your family. We were planning and ready to buy two Tesla’s this year. The first one in April, when my wife’s car lease expires and the second around September. We even installed a 13 kW solar array and n preparation. Now we have exactly zero interest in the segment. What changed our minds? The last fire season here in CA. It became obvious to us that owning any electric vehicle, given the state of the technology and infrastructure, could be dangerous. The technology is not well aligned with real-life events that require a significant degree of reliance on self transport. We absolutely want to own electrics but feel we could not rely on these vehicles when it really matters. That’s a moment when driving the future could cost you and your loved ones the future.

mullen 7y ago
FUD > I wonder how you might feel about your car if you are caught in the middle of an emergency (earthquake, fire, take your pick) and your car has 60 miles of gas left, you are at work and have to drive home and evacuate your family. 60 miles of gas or 60 miles of electrical range in an emergency is all the same, you are SOL. At least with an electrical car I can plug in every night and be assured that I will have a fully or mostly fully charged car in the morning. With a gas car, I will fill up my car once a week and run down the miles until I need to fill up again. Gas stations need electricity to work and if I can't fully charge my car with electricity, then I sure as hell can't fill it with gas.
- robomartin 7y ago
  Nope. Very wrong my friend. First of all, unless you are in the middle of nowhere --which is even worse for electric vehicles-- the gasoline distribution infrastructure in every city in the world is such that you are likely to have up to dozens of gasoline stations available to you within a 60 mile radius. Second. Obtaining 300 miles of range takes 5 minutes at the pump. Third. If you are paranoid, you can store 100 to 150 miles of range in a sealed container in the trunk of your car and even thousands of miles in sealed drums at home (a friend of mine did that). Fourth. Obtaining 300 miles or range, even without gasoline station takes a few minutes and short water hose to siphon fuel from other vehicles. One could even pool resources with other drivers to extend the range of one vehicle and help each other out. Fifth. We own three vehicles. We make it a point to keep them fueled at or above half a tank precisely because we live in earthquake and fire country. We can use a water hose to collect fuel from two of our vehicles, pump it into the third and have more enough range to get out. We are not preppers or survivalists at all. No, we don't have a couple of 50 gallon drums of fuel buried in the backyard like our friend. However, our perspective is based on having experienced and lived through at least one major earthquake (Northridge, 1994, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake, lived 1 mile from the epicenter) and several bad fires, two of which encircled our neighborhood. This isn't theory, this is reality. I would have a lot more respect for down-votes if they were accompanied by cogent arguments. As much as we really, truly want to get away from our IC engine cars today, the last fires here in CA drove the point home like nothing else. My wife was stuck away from home for eight hours. I was lucky enough to have been able to get to my kids at school after a 200 mile round-about detour that took six hours. Nothing sharpens an argument more than when you are facing real conditions with real consequences. The flaws of the charging infrastructure are such that you'll find yourself competing with hundreds of other Tesla (or EV) owners. This isn't theoretical, this is real and it has already happened: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7755753/Chaos-California-Tesla-drivers-stranded-hours-half-mile-long-line-charge.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7755753/Chaos-Calif... https://keyt.com/traffic-2/2019/12/27/tesla-drivers-stuck-waiting-4-hrs-at-central-coast-charging-stations-during-holiday-travel/ https://keyt.com/traffic-2/2019/12/27/tesla-drivers-stuck-wa... https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/07/black-friday-tesla-fail-half-a-mile-queue-to-recharge/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/07/black-friday-tesla-fa... Our local Tesla supercharger station is always packed and people are waiting for a turn. And these were not even emergencies!!! When emergencies strike things are worse, because now we are dealing with potential life-threatening circumstances: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29428694/electric-car-owners-power-shutdown-california/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29428694/electric-car-own... https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/californias-power-outage-demonstrates-biggest-flaw-with-teslas-plan-to-sell-everyone-an-electric-car.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/californias-power-outage-demo... It's one thing to be an electric car enthusiast/fanatic and want to defend them at all cost. I it a VERY different thing to be driving home while you see everything on fire at a distance around your neighborhood and you know that your kids, your loved ones and your pets need you to be there for them. Calling this FUD is absolute bullshit. Unless you've had that experience, with all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about. We wanted to buy electrics this year and the experience surrounding the last fires drove the point home like nothing else. I love electric cars, but the technology and the infrastructure simply isn't ready to deliver the same level of reliance that IC vehicles offer with ease. Which stands to reason, the technology and the infrastructure has been built over more than a century. I applaud early adopters. We were going to be among them. Great plans, to paraphrase, don't always survive contact with reality. If someone actually thinks they can defend the case of electrics being equivalent --I won't even go for better-- to IC vehicles and the infrastructure in place to support them, please speak up, I am more than willing to listen. But please, pretty please, with sugar on top: Don't insult anyone's intelligence or call things FUD when the reality of the differential in technology and infrastructure requires almost walking on water to even remotely approach equivalence.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    To get a sense of the scale and throughput difference in the infrastructure and technology all we have to do is compare gas station statistics vs. charger stations. There are about 10,000 gas stations in CA and approximately 1,200 Tesla Supercharger stations in the State. How long does it take to load-up with a 300 mile range with each technology? Gasoline, about 5 minutes plus another 5 for the transaction (in and out of the car, paying, etc.) Tesla (can't do 300 miles but let's just call it topping off), about 80 minutes. Round numbers: One gas pump can service approximately 144 vehicles per day. A Supercharger station charger can do about 18 vehicles per day. That's basically a factor of 10 difference in throughput. Which, during an emergency or holiday/high-travel-volume event is an absolutely MASSIVE difference. If we assume 10 gas pumps per station and 10 chargers per Tesla location, the total number of vehicles that can be serviced per day in CA is: Gas stations: 14 million cars per day Tesla Superchargers: 216,000 vehicles per day That, right there, is the difference. The infrastructure isn't anywhere near the ubiquity, availability and performance of the IC engine fuel delivery infrastructure. We can deny this all we want, but reality hits you hard when things deviate from the ideal. I mean, the army could go down neighborhoods distributing gasoline to people in worse case scenarios. What are they going to do, park massive diesel generators to charge electric cars? Not going to happen. My educated guess is that we need a better energy delivery mechanism for electric cars. It has to be something you can pump into a tank in 5 or 10 minutes. Pushing electrons into a battery, without fundamental advances in technology, seems like a bad long term plan. I mean, Tesla doesn't have that many cars in the Southern California region in comparison to conventional vehicles and their Supercharger network flops with holiday travel and becomes a liability during emergencies. That's not a good long-term plan. The cost of adding a million EV's will require an absolutely massive investment in the charging network. Ten million and the numbers become almost unthinkable. A hundred million feels like a joke to even consider.
xvector 7y ago
Keep in mind that in a Tesla because you charge at home and leave every day with a full tank. You could easily escape natural disasters on that range. But yes, Teslas are not optimal from a prepping point of view.
- robomartin 7y ago
  Of course, yet life doesn't really work out to be a nicely aligned set of ideal conditions. The gasoline equivalent to that would be to top-off your gas tank in 5 minutes every day (which is silly). I do want to clarify that my comment has nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural phenomenon of prepping. We are not preppers at all. We have some supplies at home for earthquake preparedness because, after having lived thorough a couple of large quakes, it would be silly not to have learned from the experience and be a reasonably ready. The perspective we gained by observing what happened during this last fire and power-outage season drove home a point we really had considered much prior to that event. Perhaps this was because we were within a couple of months of ordering our first of two Teslas that we became a bit more critical and analytic about the decision. I don't know. A friend of ours reached exactly the same decision without any input from us. In their case they had placed a deposit on a Rivian SUV. They live in Northern California. When I told him of our decision to not order our Tesla's he revealed they had made the same decision with respect to their Rivian order. They turned around and bought a Suburban instead, replacing their old one. I think this is a real issue. It's disconcerting that this can't be discussed with honesty in a place like HN. I want electric cars, with Tesla and Rivian being the top contenders for our eventual purchase. But, I have to tell you, it's really disconcerting to see, feel and be at the receiving end of something that has become a religion. Try to have any reasonable conversation about Tesla on HN where you might disagree with the cult and you'll be treated to a bunch of down-votes (read: silly, childish passive-aggressive behavior) and even personal attacks. The good news is that facts don't require belief, which means that the truth is what it is, downvotes or otherwise.

mullen 7y ago

FUD > I wonder how you might feel about your car if you are caught in the middle of an emergency (earthquake, fire, take your pick) and your car has 60 miles of gas left, you are at work and have to drive home and evacuate your family. 60 miles of gas or 60 miles of electrical range in an emergency is all the same, you are SOL. At least with an electrical car I can plug in every night and be assured that I will have a fully or mostly fully charged car in the morning. With a gas car, I will fill up my car once a week and run down the miles until I need to fill up again. Gas stations need electricity to work and if I can't fully charge my car with electricity, then I sure as hell can't fill it with gas.

robomartin 7y ago
Nope. Very wrong my friend. First of all, unless you are in the middle of nowhere --which is even worse for electric vehicles-- the gasoline distribution infrastructure in every city in the world is such that you are likely to have up to dozens of gasoline stations available to you within a 60 mile radius. Second. Obtaining 300 miles of range takes 5 minutes at the pump. Third. If you are paranoid, you can store 100 to 150 miles of range in a sealed container in the trunk of your car and even thousands of miles in sealed drums at home (a friend of mine did that). Fourth. Obtaining 300 miles or range, even without gasoline station takes a few minutes and short water hose to siphon fuel from other vehicles. One could even pool resources with other drivers to extend the range of one vehicle and help each other out. Fifth. We own three vehicles. We make it a point to keep them fueled at or above half a tank precisely because we live in earthquake and fire country. We can use a water hose to collect fuel from two of our vehicles, pump it into the third and have more enough range to get out. We are not preppers or survivalists at all. No, we don't have a couple of 50 gallon drums of fuel buried in the backyard like our friend. However, our perspective is based on having experienced and lived through at least one major earthquake (Northridge, 1994, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake, lived 1 mile from the epicenter) and several bad fires, two of which encircled our neighborhood. This isn't theory, this is reality. I would have a lot more respect for down-votes if they were accompanied by cogent arguments. As much as we really, truly want to get away from our IC engine cars today, the last fires here in CA drove the point home like nothing else. My wife was stuck away from home for eight hours. I was lucky enough to have been able to get to my kids at school after a 200 mile round-about detour that took six hours. Nothing sharpens an argument more than when you are facing real conditions with real consequences. The flaws of the charging infrastructure are such that you'll find yourself competing with hundreds of other Tesla (or EV) owners. This isn't theoretical, this is real and it has already happened: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7755753/Chaos-California-Tesla-drivers-stranded-hours-half-mile-long-line-charge.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7755753/Chaos-Calif... https://keyt.com/traffic-2/2019/12/27/tesla-drivers-stuck-waiting-4-hrs-at-central-coast-charging-stations-during-holiday-travel/ https://keyt.com/traffic-2/2019/12/27/tesla-drivers-stuck-wa... https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/07/black-friday-tesla-fail-half-a-mile-queue-to-recharge/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/07/black-friday-tesla-fa... Our local Tesla supercharger station is always packed and people are waiting for a turn. And these were not even emergencies!!! When emergencies strike things are worse, because now we are dealing with potential life-threatening circumstances: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29428694/electric-car-owners-power-shutdown-california/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29428694/electric-car-own... https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/californias-power-outage-demonstrates-biggest-flaw-with-teslas-plan-to-sell-everyone-an-electric-car.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/californias-power-outage-demo... It's one thing to be an electric car enthusiast/fanatic and want to defend them at all cost. I it a VERY different thing to be driving home while you see everything on fire at a distance around your neighborhood and you know that your kids, your loved ones and your pets need you to be there for them. Calling this FUD is absolute bullshit. Unless you've had that experience, with all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about. We wanted to buy electrics this year and the experience surrounding the last fires drove the point home like nothing else. I love electric cars, but the technology and the infrastructure simply isn't ready to deliver the same level of reliance that IC vehicles offer with ease. Which stands to reason, the technology and the infrastructure has been built over more than a century. I applaud early adopters. We were going to be among them. Great plans, to paraphrase, don't always survive contact with reality. If someone actually thinks they can defend the case of electrics being equivalent --I won't even go for better-- to IC vehicles and the infrastructure in place to support them, please speak up, I am more than willing to listen. But please, pretty please, with sugar on top: Don't insult anyone's intelligence or call things FUD when the reality of the differential in technology and infrastructure requires almost walking on water to even remotely approach equivalence.
- robomartin 7y ago
  To get a sense of the scale and throughput difference in the infrastructure and technology all we have to do is compare gas station statistics vs. charger stations. There are about 10,000 gas stations in CA and approximately 1,200 Tesla Supercharger stations in the State. How long does it take to load-up with a 300 mile range with each technology? Gasoline, about 5 minutes plus another 5 for the transaction (in and out of the car, paying, etc.) Tesla (can't do 300 miles but let's just call it topping off), about 80 minutes. Round numbers: One gas pump can service approximately 144 vehicles per day. A Supercharger station charger can do about 18 vehicles per day. That's basically a factor of 10 difference in throughput. Which, during an emergency or holiday/high-travel-volume event is an absolutely MASSIVE difference. If we assume 10 gas pumps per station and 10 chargers per Tesla location, the total number of vehicles that can be serviced per day in CA is: Gas stations: 14 million cars per day Tesla Superchargers: 216,000 vehicles per day That, right there, is the difference. The infrastructure isn't anywhere near the ubiquity, availability and performance of the IC engine fuel delivery infrastructure. We can deny this all we want, but reality hits you hard when things deviate from the ideal. I mean, the army could go down neighborhoods distributing gasoline to people in worse case scenarios. What are they going to do, park massive diesel generators to charge electric cars? Not going to happen. My educated guess is that we need a better energy delivery mechanism for electric cars. It has to be something you can pump into a tank in 5 or 10 minutes. Pushing electrons into a battery, without fundamental advances in technology, seems like a bad long term plan. I mean, Tesla doesn't have that many cars in the Southern California region in comparison to conventional vehicles and their Supercharger network flops with holiday travel and becomes a liability during emergencies. That's not a good long-term plan. The cost of adding a million EV's will require an absolutely massive investment in the charging network. Ten million and the numbers become almost unthinkable. A hundred million feels like a joke to even consider.

xvector 7y ago

Keep in mind that in a Tesla because you charge at home and leave every day with a full tank. You could easily escape natural disasters on that range. But yes, Teslas are not optimal from a prepping point of view.

robomartin 7y ago
Of course, yet life doesn't really work out to be a nicely aligned set of ideal conditions. The gasoline equivalent to that would be to top-off your gas tank in 5 minutes every day (which is silly). I do want to clarify that my comment has nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural phenomenon of prepping. We are not preppers at all. We have some supplies at home for earthquake preparedness because, after having lived thorough a couple of large quakes, it would be silly not to have learned from the experience and be a reasonably ready. The perspective we gained by observing what happened during this last fire and power-outage season drove home a point we really had considered much prior to that event. Perhaps this was because we were within a couple of months of ordering our first of two Teslas that we became a bit more critical and analytic about the decision. I don't know. A friend of ours reached exactly the same decision without any input from us. In their case they had placed a deposit on a Rivian SUV. They live in Northern California. When I told him of our decision to not order our Tesla's he revealed they had made the same decision with respect to their Rivian order. They turned around and bought a Suburban instead, replacing their old one. I think this is a real issue. It's disconcerting that this can't be discussed with honesty in a place like HN. I want electric cars, with Tesla and Rivian being the top contenders for our eventual purchase. But, I have to tell you, it's really disconcerting to see, feel and be at the receiving end of something that has become a religion. Try to have any reasonable conversation about Tesla on HN where you might disagree with the cult and you'll be treated to a bunch of down-votes (read: silly, childish passive-aggressive behavior) and even personal attacks. The good news is that facts don't require belief, which means that the truth is what it is, downvotes or otherwise.