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At the moment, ONLY Tesla has decent supercharging (i.e., fast-charging) infrastructure in the US: https://www.tesla.com/findus https://www.tesla.com/findus I

• borski 4y ago
  I’ve had zero issues charging either my Lucid Air or my Ioniq 5.
  • iknowstuff 4y ago
    Happy for you, but your experience is not the norm. https://twitter.com/RateYourCharge https://twitter.com/RateYourCharge
    • comte7092 4y ago
      The norm is honestly that over 90% of the time, there are no issues. The thing is, when there is an issue, it’s at minimum a huge pain in the ass, and a complete nightmare at worst.
      • jackmott42 4y ago
        I have been to electrify america stations twice. One had a broken charger at once of the two super fast stalls. The second time I had to wait in line because it was full, and then when I got in the card reader wasn't working. I had to install the app to be able to pay and get electricity. It was very stressful as we thought we might be totally effed. Compared to Tesla, where you just pull up and plug in. No app, no card reader. It just works. I've encountered 1 bad stall out of like 50 visits to superchargers, and since there are typically 10 to 20 stalls it wasn't a big deal.
        • steveBK123 4y ago
          Yep, I switched from Tesla to BMW EV and am happy, but I don't road-trip much & can charge at home. The problem with EA (and CCS networks in US in general) - 10x more likely to encounter a broken stall, and that stall will be at a station with 1/2 to 1/3 the stalls of a typical Tesla station, and if the whole station is out.. the next station is probably 2-3x as far as the next Tesla station would have been. I find EA roadtrip planning to be more nerve wracking than Tesla was 5 years ago, and Tesla continues to build more stations at a rapid pace... so the lead is not closing.
        • vel0city 4y ago
          > Compared to Tesla, where you just pull up and plug in. No app, no card reader. It just works. This has been 100% of my Electrify America experiences as well, along with a few other brands. Some have been able to take payment by tap to pay credit card as well without an app.
          • borski 4y ago
            Same. It just… works.
          • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
            Tesla lacks the need to tap card and you just plug in. Supposedly that tech is coming to CCS EVs someday.
            • vel0city 4y ago
              As I mentioned in my comment, this tech exists for CCS today already. That's my experience with many public CCS DCFC.
              • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
                What car? What provider? You mentioned taping a card, not just plugging in. Definitely not EA.
      • iknowstuff 4y ago
        If you have better data than them feel free to post it. Only 50% of attempts to charge at EA succeed without a problem according to their chart.
        • comte7092 4y ago
          I’m talking about personal experience. Is my experience universal? Of course not. However, the data on that page has massive sampling bias.
          • borski 4y ago
            Precisely this.
      • steveBK123 4y ago
        Right, and to those who might think "hey 90% isn't so bad". Imagine a light switch or sink faucet working "90% of the time". Or the gas pump working "90% of the time", knowing that there are no other pumps in a 30 mile radius.
        • borski 4y ago
          So charge before you are down to 30 miles?
          • prepend 4y ago
            The point is that 90% is not good when the alternative is 99.99%. For gas stations, 99.99% of the time the pump works. So much so that I don’t even consider that it doesn’t work. That’s the level of reliability that I expect.
            • vel0city 4y ago
              I see plastic bags over pump handles way more than 0.01% of the time. In fact over the last year I've had more experiences with gas pumps being broken than EV dispensers not working.
              • HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
                Put a different way, although I have seen plastic bags over pump handles, I have never pulled into a gas station and not been able to fill up.
                • vel0city 4y ago
                  I have on several occasions. Power outages, being out of gas, having to clean tanks because of a bad batch of gas, a gas station I used to go to on road trips going out of business, credit card processing issues, getting tired of lines so I go elsewhere, and just being closed for the night are all failure modes of gas pumps I've personally experienced. Some of these way more than once. I haven't personally experienced any failures to get a charge on CCS chargers though. I do agree if the power can't run the pumps it won't run the chargers either, but there hasn't been a similar major power outage since I got an EV and tried to charge on a public charger. That reminds me, I've experienced bad gas require me to make repairs on my cars. I've never personally had an EVSE break my car, but I do contend it could happen.
    • borski 4y ago
      That is not necessarily true. The outliers are widely reported, because successful experiences do not generally cause people to post online about how great their experience was. You’re going to hear about the negative experiences because that is what people commiserate about. It’s human nature.
      • lIl-IIIl 4y ago
        I wonder if they can combat that by only incorporating the user data once they posted 5 reviews or so.
        • borski 4y ago
          That’s a good idea.
      • iknowstuff 4y ago
        https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WoQdsHFJbUs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WoQdsHFJbUs
  • jackmott42 4y ago
    if you aren't doing road trips much you won't. When you don't do road trips you don't need any infrastructure at all except your own house
    • hn_user2 4y ago
      With most rental cars giving you unlimited miles, I'm very much of the opinion that when you factor in mileage and wear and tear on the car plus vehicle depreciation due to the long miles on the road trip--that renting a car for long trips is the way to go. Especially when compared to owning a second care with an ICE just for the occasional trip.
      • borski 4y ago
        The catch here is I really like my car, and I have no reason to own an ICE for road trips. I rent when I can’t bring my car (flying, overseas, etc.)
      • Gibbon1 4y ago
        I know a lot of women who own a beater and when they want to drive long distance rent a car. I think because they know it's cheaper and the idea of being stuck on the side of the highway makes them anxious. And then there is my friend on a fixed income that's realized it's cheaper to rent a compact car for long drives. Same as above because having the car break down in nowheres is expensive quick.
      • noogle 4y ago
        1. Flexibility. For a rental car you need to plan ahead, pick it up on time and return it on time. Traffic jam delaying you? too bad. You now pay a surcharge. 2. Cost: the rental cost is actually only a small portion of the cost. Extra insurance and other fees end up more than the rent itself. Your car will depreciate regardless of that road-trip, just by virtue of time passing. Rental companies won't subsidize the wear and tear for you, so you have to pay that anyway.
      • nradov 4y ago
        I actually like my car and have a bunch of my stuff in it. Renting another car just to save a few dollars on a road trip is ridiculous. Plus when I show up at the rental agency they often don't even have the car that I reserved. Now what?
• datadeft 4y ago
  I am not sure when the car industry reaches that iteration where you can swap out batteries. It already happened for the electric rollers and it is freakin amazing. I think many of the electric car skeptics would convert if there was a way to "re-charge" the car within 5-10 minutes. The batteries would be also happier.
  • Isolus 4y ago
    NIO ist doing this with it's Power Swap Stations. But there are too few to really use them.
  • jfengel 4y ago
    Battery swap seems unlikely. It's just an excuse for "skeptics". The use case for swaps is small. The vast majority of trips are short. Trips long enough to require a recharge often require a long stop for the driver. People have priced in the notion of spending some time each week pouring flammable liquids into their vehicle. If we had started with electric cars everyone would find it disgusting and far too frequent. The speed of it for rare use cases would not impress. Swappable batteries will not change that. They are too expensive and they limit design too much. Reducing the charge time to five minutes or even zero minutes would not change the minds of people who would simply swap to their next excuse.
  • Psychlist 4y ago
    https://www.vehiclesuggest.com/what-happened-tesla-battery-swap/ https://www.vehiclesuggest.com/what-happened-tesla-battery-s... Tesla tried it. There was no point Tesla building more swap stations because so few people paid the premium to get a swappable battery. It turns out that people who won't buy an electric car unless they can swap the battery will find some other reason not to buy an electric car if that reason is removed.
  • yarg 4y ago
    Never - Tesla's gone the opposite way and started structurally integrating its batteries.
  • kybernetikos 4y ago
    Since the battery is one of the biggest expenses to replace when it no longer holds charge, the economics of it would be tricky. Nobody would want to swap their good battery that they've carefully looked after for one that holds much less charge. Not to say that it's not possible to solve, but it's not so straight forward. Also, I've used lots of chargers greater than 100 kw, and they really don't take that long to charge a car. Combine it with a meal, even a fast food meal and they've generally charged more than I needed in that time anyway. Fast charging is an outlier anyway. >90% of the time you slow charge at home for a third of the price per mile, and it's lovely to only need to visit a filling station on rare long drives.
• synaesthesisx 4y ago
  Agreed. I never have issues predictably charging my Tesla on long trips. Range anxiety is non-existent. The supercharger network is glorious. When I tried to charge my previous EV (a non-Tesla) at public chargers, half they time they didn’t work, or charged at unpredictably slow rates.
  • cs702 4y ago
    > Range anxiety is non-existent. The supercharger network is glorious. Yes, that's my experience too. I never worry about range.
    • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      I was trying to make a trip work from Seattle to John day Oregon. It still isn’t very viable, well, it might work now but the range anxiety is there, even for a Tesla.
      • davidjones332 4y ago
        Yeah me too. I wish I never swapped my old car for a Tesla gimmick.
• mangosteenjuice 4y ago
  This was the only reason I got a Tesla instead of literally any other EV brand. I make frequent trips between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Electrify America is now an alternative, but it's not as reliable when it comes to availability and uptime.
  • cs702 4y ago
    > This was the only reason I got a Tesla instead of literally any other EV brand. It was a key reason for me too. I considered BMW, MB, and Audi EVs, but ruled them out due to horrendous state of non-Tesla charging in the US. Another reason was software. Tesla's UI has a lot of issues, but it's the only car UI that feels smooth and responsive to me. And now I'm looking forward to this: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1362/tesla-update-2023-12-1-an-in-depth-look-at-its-features-video https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1362/tesla-update-2023-12-...
  • Fatnino 4y ago
    How long does that trip take in a tesla? Charging included. When I need to make that trip (with more than one person. If just one traveler it's cheaper to fly) I just rent a gas car and can make the trip in just over 5 hours. I'd say that includes gas stops but often I don't even need to stop for gas. One tank will get me all the way across. It's still a good idea to stop for gas because you can find cheaper stations outside of the big metro areas. But a gas stop is 5 minutes offramp to onramp. I feel like all this comparing of charging times and ranges of various EVs misses the point that NONE of them offer a better experience that a gas vehicle yet. Sure, it's a trade off some people are willing to make already and that's great. But it needs to get even better.
• edbaskerville 4y ago
  Non-Tesla supercharger pilot: https://www.tesla.com/support/non-tesla-supercharging https://www.tesla.com/support/non-tesla-supercharging
  • cs702 4y ago
    As soon as the charging experience is as good as Tesla's for other EVs, including BMW, MB, and Audi, I will consider them :-)
• rzimmerman 4y ago
  It's hard to explain how much better the Tesla charging experience is to someone that hasn't tried both. As frustrating as the company (and the leadership) can be, the car is great and the charger network is outstanding. There are superchargers everywhere. You can get anywhere in the US without having to worry about it. You type your destination into the car and it plans a route for you. It picks stops strategically to minimize charge time (charging 20%-50% can take less time than charging 20%-80% once). Range on most Teslas is 300 miles + and you're never more than 150 miles from a supercharger, even deep in the desert. But beyond that, when you pull into a supercharger, you know it's working. If it wasn't working it would say so on the dash. You park, pick up the cable, point it at your port and the port opens. You plug it in. You walk away. Your phone gets a notification when it's time to go. And it charges your card automatically. No goofy app required, no NFC/authorization, no noodling with the charger to make it work, no effort. It's really really nice. Chargepoint stuff works fine. Stations are often broken (and like the author said, there's no way to know without going there). You have to use an app which thankfully supports an Apple wallet card. Before I figured that out it was super fiddly. I've had stations on other networks that are unusable because they have poor cell service. Then there's a whole "reload your card" thing where you get charged in $20 increments. And adapters, chunky connectors. To be fair I've never tried DC fast charging with anything but a supercharger.
  • m463 4y ago
    My experience was: - evgo was decent, but had limited capacity (usually 2 L3 per location) - chargepoint was usually pretty decent, but mostly was an L2 charger network - blink was L3, but their chargers were ALWAYS broken. that was 3 years ago, and switching to a tesla changed a few things: - the range of the car was higher - superchargers were in more locations - had more stalls per location - were faster at charging - were more reliable - one small detail worth mentioning - the other systems had payment networks that were frequently part of the problem - either preventing charging, or having you fiddle with things, or calling in to manually start things
  • davidjones332 4y ago
    [flagged]
• bsder 4y ago
  People have forgotten when gas stations didn't used to be every 100 feet. There was a reason why people stayed on the interstates and turnpikes and regularly spaced gas stations was one of them. Many of these were subsidized. That needs to occur again for EV chargers.
• retrocryptid 4y ago
  My brother's new Tesla cost $76,000 more than my used Fiat 500. The fiat gets something like 26mpg in the city and 34 on the highway. If gas is $5/gal, then it's going to be 400,000 miles or so before the cost of gas equals the $76,000 price differential. (It occurs to me I didn't even factor in the cost of the electricity to pay for miles his Tesla drives.) I'm also driving a car with about half to one fourth the environmental impact to construct (if you think the impact is proportional to the construction cost) I'm about 60,000 miles into owning the car and aside from typical maintenance and a fuel recirc solenoid that had to be replaced, it's not been that expensive to operate. It has the benefit that no one seems to want to steal it, so my anti-theft package is just to park it next to a Mercedes or BMW. My battery has never spontaneously ignited and it doesn't cost $24k to replace every xxx-thousand miles. But it's not all roses, I don't get to ride in the HOV lane, but that's fine. I'm a socialist and prefer the HOV lane be used for HOVs which are CONSIDERABLY more eco-friendly than ANY single-occupant electric or hybrid. My Fiat is pretty peppy for an ICE vehicle, but yes, not nearly as good at low end torque as EVs. But it's much better than the '71 VW bug I learned to drive on. But I think my point is... the upfront cost and TCO differentials between ICE and EVs make it difficult to support the argument "EVs are cheaper than ICEs" They will be, someday. But that day is not now and that vehicle is not a Tesla.
  • vel0city 4y ago
    Your brother didn't need to spend >$76,000 more than you did on a Tesla. I see used Tesla's in my area for sale <$30k.
    • retrocryptid 4y ago
      Except that the Tesla he wanted at the time he wanted to purchase it was $76,000 more than my Fiat. The existence of $30k Teslas at other points in spacetime do not change that fact. If we rework the example with a $30k Tesla, that's still $26k more than my used car, which brings the break-even point down to about 150,000 miles (if you assume electricity going into the EV is without cost) or somewhere around 225,000 miles if you go with the previous poster's assumption that price per mile is one third of an ICE engine. I (absolutely) got a cranking deal on my Fiat. But if you compare a new Tesla at $35,000 with a new Camry, it (the Tesla) is starting to look more compelling, but as long as ICE vehicles have functionality left in them, it's probably more environmentally conscious and economically sound to drive them. That being said... if you want a Tesla, get a Tesla. But if your objective is to drive around cheaply, I don't think it's the cheapest option.
• anonuser123456 4y ago
  > I charge at home for around 1/3 the cost per mile compared to filling a comparable ICE vehicle with a poisonous combustible liquid. Tesla batteries are filled with poisonous combustible electrolyte. The cost of batteries easily dwarfs the fuel cost savings with appropriate discount rate. And the electricity probably comes from coal or low efficiency nat gas turbine.
  • code51 4y ago
    I wonder whether autogas (LPG) systems are the cleanest alternative as of now. Until recently the main problem with sequential autogas was sudden explosions of cars with faulty units. Did it get safer as well?
• Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  Seriously. The Supercharging network is the most under-appreciated, under-advertised feature of a Tesla. 3rd party charging stations are usually only 2-4 stalls. Tesla stations are usually 8-16, with a couple monster stations on I-5 having 50+. > All the stalls always work. I wouldn't go quite that far. I have been to a station that had a dead charger. But that's been once. And Tesla from what I've heard, Tesla is usually pretty quick about getting repairs done.