3 ms·

Filling up a gas car is faster, but it's really not that much difference in real life usage. I have a VW ID.3 (an electric hatchback). It can easily do a 100 m

Filling up a gas car is faster, but it's really not that much difference in real life usage. I have a VW ID.3 (an electric hatchback). It can easily do a 100 mile round trip without worrying about running out. And if you go further, the car will just navigate you to the nearest rapid charger if it thinks you need charging to comfortably finish the trip. The car software makes it pretty hard to run out. You get back up to 80% charge in like 20 minutes on a 150kw rapid charger. Caveat: This is in the UK where things are pretty dense and it take some real effort to run out of charge and ignore all the car's warnings without being near some kind of charging point.

noirbot 4y ago
Sure, but that caveat is pretty dang important. I'm in a part of the US where it's not hard to be on a highway where there's 10 miles between exits, and some of those exits won't even have a petrol station. I'm planning a road trip this summer that will easily be over 3000 miles, with many stretches through national parks or just barren desert where even my petrol car is going to require me to remember to refuel before I proceed. Or if I want to go camping, I need to make sure there's either a charger in whatever small town is near the campsite, or make sure I have the charge for a full round trip. I know a friend of mine with a full long-range Tesla literally carries all the cables to work out how to charge from a basic outlet because his family lives out in the country far from any charger, so often the only way he can get back to town reliably is to unplug an appliance at his family's house and run the cabling out the window to where he's parked his Tesla in the yard to make sure he can get home.
- maccard 4y ago
  > I'm planning a road trip this summer that will easily be over 3000 miles For a comparison, my annual mileage, including 1-2 driving holidays a year is about 4000 miles. > many stretches through national parks or just barren desert where even my petrol car is going to require me to remember to refuel before I proceed. Are any of those stretches longer than 300 miles without any refuels? Why is it ok to refuel and potentially run the entire range of your gas car, but not your EV? > I know a friend of mine with a full long-range Tesla literally carries all the cables to work And? Are you judging him for being prepared? I can make slights about people who drive with litres of water and foil blankets in case they get stuck in the wilderness, but that doesn't mean that they're not completely correct in being prepared for the situations they're facing. Maybe an EV isn't for you. But for people who don't drive the width of the continental US on a vacation or do spontaneous driving trips that are greater than the range of a petrol car, (which I'd wager are far more common) they are.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    You're imputing a lot of malice into what I've written that I didn't intend - I'm a big fan of EVs and would love to get one in the near future. I'm just outlining the sort of issues and complexities that come up if you live outside of the US east coast in terms of normal distances that you need to travel. On average, I drive about the same amount as you. I have a 8 year old car with around 50,000 miles on it. The issue is that there's a range of common-enough activities outside of my day to day driving that make a 300 mile range more difficult. I bring up my friend's Tesla situation only to point out the complexities. For a lot of the more rural midwest, there's not charging options that aren't bringing your own cables and hoping there's a plug you can use near where you can park your car. The reason he does it is that the closest charging station that's meant for EVs is nearly 50 miles in the wrong direction, so unless he wants to spend most of 3 hours recharging his car for the drive home, he has to get creative. I certainly didn't mean it as a slight to anything but the US EV infrastructure. The reason I bring up the distances involved is not to brag about my driving or anything, but to illuminate the differences between EV viability in the US vs. Japan or the UK in the earlier replies. If I had an EV, this trip (to see my family for the first time in 3 years, and an old friend for the first time in 10) would be thousands of dollars in plane flights that are quite a bit worse for the environment. For right now, as you point out, relying on an EV puts constraints on your life. The long drive to see my family again would go from 14 hours to 16+ if I had to work in stops to fully re-charge my EV. Or I could take a flight, but wouldn't that nearly undo all of the environmental benefit of having driven my EV for the rest of the year?
    - maccard 4y ago
      > For a lot of the more rural midwest, there's not charging options that aren't bringing your own cables and hoping there's a plug you can use near where you can park your car. Sure, so EVs aren't for the rural midwest then. Living in actual rural areas means travelling with jerry cans in case you get stuck, and keeping emergency packs in case you're caught without transit. > Or I could take a flight, but wouldn't that nearly undo all of the environmental benefit of having driven my EV for the rest of the year? Unless you're driving a hyper efficient vehicle already, for a drive that long, depending on how many people you're driving, you would be better off flying. It's ~1.3 tonnes of CO2 for a 2500 mile drive and about 0.6kg CO2 per person to fly the same distance. Cars are a remarkably bad way to travel. > The long drive to see my family again would go from 14 hours to 16+ if I had to work in stops to fully re-charge my EV That doesn't sound unreasonable to me, to be honest? Driving 14 hours has got to be in the top percentile of non-commercial trips, and it only being ~15% longer on probably the worst case imaginable is pretty good.

noirbot 4y ago

Sure, but that caveat is pretty dang important. I'm in a part of the US where it's not hard to be on a highway where there's 10 miles between exits, and some of those exits won't even have a petrol station. I'm planning a road trip this summer that will easily be over 3000 miles, with many stretches through national parks or just barren desert where even my petrol car is going to require me to remember to refuel before I proceed. Or if I want to go camping, I need to make sure there's either a charger in whatever small town is near the campsite, or make sure I have the charge for a full round trip. I know a friend of mine with a full long-range Tesla literally carries all the cables to work out how to charge from a basic outlet because his family lives out in the country far from any charger, so often the only way he can get back to town reliably is to unplug an appliance at his family's house and run the cabling out the window to where he's parked his Tesla in the yard to make sure he can get home.

maccard 4y ago
> I'm planning a road trip this summer that will easily be over 3000 miles For a comparison, my annual mileage, including 1-2 driving holidays a year is about 4000 miles. > many stretches through national parks or just barren desert where even my petrol car is going to require me to remember to refuel before I proceed. Are any of those stretches longer than 300 miles without any refuels? Why is it ok to refuel and potentially run the entire range of your gas car, but not your EV? > I know a friend of mine with a full long-range Tesla literally carries all the cables to work And? Are you judging him for being prepared? I can make slights about people who drive with litres of water and foil blankets in case they get stuck in the wilderness, but that doesn't mean that they're not completely correct in being prepared for the situations they're facing. Maybe an EV isn't for you. But for people who don't drive the width of the continental US on a vacation or do spontaneous driving trips that are greater than the range of a petrol car, (which I'd wager are far more common) they are.
- noirbot 4y ago
  You're imputing a lot of malice into what I've written that I didn't intend - I'm a big fan of EVs and would love to get one in the near future. I'm just outlining the sort of issues and complexities that come up if you live outside of the US east coast in terms of normal distances that you need to travel. On average, I drive about the same amount as you. I have a 8 year old car with around 50,000 miles on it. The issue is that there's a range of common-enough activities outside of my day to day driving that make a 300 mile range more difficult. I bring up my friend's Tesla situation only to point out the complexities. For a lot of the more rural midwest, there's not charging options that aren't bringing your own cables and hoping there's a plug you can use near where you can park your car. The reason he does it is that the closest charging station that's meant for EVs is nearly 50 miles in the wrong direction, so unless he wants to spend most of 3 hours recharging his car for the drive home, he has to get creative. I certainly didn't mean it as a slight to anything but the US EV infrastructure. The reason I bring up the distances involved is not to brag about my driving or anything, but to illuminate the differences between EV viability in the US vs. Japan or the UK in the earlier replies. If I had an EV, this trip (to see my family for the first time in 3 years, and an old friend for the first time in 10) would be thousands of dollars in plane flights that are quite a bit worse for the environment. For right now, as you point out, relying on an EV puts constraints on your life. The long drive to see my family again would go from 14 hours to 16+ if I had to work in stops to fully re-charge my EV. Or I could take a flight, but wouldn't that nearly undo all of the environmental benefit of having driven my EV for the rest of the year?
  - maccard 4y ago
    > For a lot of the more rural midwest, there's not charging options that aren't bringing your own cables and hoping there's a plug you can use near where you can park your car. Sure, so EVs aren't for the rural midwest then. Living in actual rural areas means travelling with jerry cans in case you get stuck, and keeping emergency packs in case you're caught without transit. > Or I could take a flight, but wouldn't that nearly undo all of the environmental benefit of having driven my EV for the rest of the year? Unless you're driving a hyper efficient vehicle already, for a drive that long, depending on how many people you're driving, you would be better off flying. It's ~1.3 tonnes of CO2 for a 2500 mile drive and about 0.6kg CO2 per person to fly the same distance. Cars are a remarkably bad way to travel. > The long drive to see my family again would go from 14 hours to 16+ if I had to work in stops to fully re-charge my EV That doesn't sound unreasonable to me, to be honest? Driving 14 hours has got to be in the top percentile of non-commercial trips, and it only being ~15% longer on probably the worst case imaginable is pretty good.