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We’ve known for a while now that it was going to happen, right? And that all those countries that are committed to phasing out ICE cars by 2035 are being way to

We’ve known for a while now that it was going to happen, right? And that all those countries that are committed to phasing out ICE cars by 2035 are being way too conservative. Isn’t it estimated that within a year or two, you’re going to have to pay a premium just to purchase an ICE car? And that premium is just going to keep growing as battery costs continue to shrink.

SirMaster 3y ago
God I hope it's not that soon. There's like nowhere to charge an electric car near me. They really need to work on charging infrastructure before they convince me to buy an electric car. And the cost still needs to come way, way down. It seems like every electric car that has any decent range is a luxury car. I don't want a luxury car, I just want a super basic cheap car to get me from point a to point b.
- arc4n0n 3y ago
  you only charge on road trips. Charging at home has no analogue with gas cars... It's just something that's intrinsically better about EVs
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    I have no way to charge at home though, being in an apartment. I don't plan to change that any time soon. I am certainly not changing where I live just for my car when a gas car works fine.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    Yea, one of the current ironies is that the folks most able to use/charge an environmentally friendly car are the people living in environmentally unfriendly single-family homes. I've yet to see an apartment complex with more than 2-3 charging points for a building of hundreds of units, and plenty of older condo/apartment housing stock can't even easily retrofit chargers into the lot without spending tens of thousands of dollars on it, assuming your local power system supports it. Having to drive five to ten miles and wait for most of an hour to charge is just a bad experience.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I have friends who own EVs without access to home charging who charge at the grocery store once a week while shopping. The car is done charging before they’re done shopping for groceries. The trick is to distribute chargers everywhere, because your car is going to be parked somewhere long enough to charge unless you’re a taxi or some other high utilization use case. Most will charge at home and or work, but some cannot.
      - noirbot 3y ago
        Yea, it's what I'd have to do, I suppose, but it would mean driving to a grocery store 2-3 times further away, and my average trip to the store these days is only 10-20 minutes which I doubt is long enough for a full charge. My office and home don't have chargers and probably won't for a while, so I'd essentially have to make a special trip out on the weekends to charge my car while I get lunch nearby or something.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        For an L3 charger, 20 minutes is a lot. If you are 20%, it should get you to 70% or so, it takes longer to go from 70 to 100% given how battery charging works.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Indeed! I literally just charged a long range model y at a 250kw Supercharger from ~20% to ~80% in 17 minutes (per Teslascope) this morning after towing a ride on trencher back to the rental shop. Was done before I had finished using the rest room and getting a coffee at the grocery store.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Ya, I think people really underestimate how fast L3 charging is, especially for cars running on empty. But not all grocery stores have L3 chargers, and they can get really busy in holiday weekends. I plan my trips around these, but I wish they had more capacity.
  - spikels 3y ago
    Most people don’t understand this. They are so used to going to gas stations that they think they will have to regularly go to charging stations. All that time wasted refueling simply goes away as your car gets “fueled up” while you sleep.
  - nly 3y ago
    Hmm, tell that to the millions of people living in the UK in terraced/town houses where the only charging option is to drag a cable over the public footpath to the road side....if they manage to get a parking space directly outside their home.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Unfortunately there are a lot of people who can't feasibly charge at home, like people who have to park on the street, or who rent their home and don't have access to anything but a 120V 15A outlet, assuming they have access to an outlet at all where they park their car.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  Do you have charging where you live? (Private garage or parking spot?) All you really need is charging where you live, and charging along highways. I have literally never gone to any of the chargers within 30 miles of my house. Hardest part is for apartment buildings. No big incentive to install chargers for public use.
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    No, There is no charging anywhere "near" my home. I park in an uncovered open apartment parking lot. Same thing for at work. And checking the charging maps shows very few options anywhere near me and the few places that do only have a couple plugs. Would be annoying to find it's in use by the time I get there so I would have to wait for them and then me.
    - phinnaeus 3y ago
      Is it feasible to have charging installed at your home or office? To reiterate what GP said, I basically never charge anywhere except at home (currently in a private carport that I got a charger installed at, previously in an apartment building with a single shared charger for ~50 spots, 4-5 EVs).
      - SirMaster 3y ago
        I don’t really see how I could convince my apartment or the company I work for to install chargers any time soon. Sure maybe in years it will be common enough, but that’s my entire point. It doesn’t seem common at all around me yet, and I’m not going to buy an EV before charging is reasonably available.
        pjc50 3y ago
        Some jurisdictions are going to start mandating this for large car parks. The transition is definitely going to be very uneven; the closer you are to the centre of a big city with an air quality problem, the sooner it will arrive.
- noirbot 3y ago
  The cost is a big issue for me still. I get it, but I paid $15k for a car 10 years ago - small hatchback that's been more than enough for my needs. The only options I have for EVs are either 2-3x the size (Rivian, F150, Model X) or 4-5x the cost (Tesla, Lucid, Polestar), or both. I barely drive a hundred miles in a week, and often less, but having range to do a 2-3 hour road trip is a big bonus. You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. I'm not even sure I've spent that much on my car over the last decade, including gas, insurance, repairs, and initial cost. Makes it hard to justify the upgrade.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
    There were lease return iMiev, 500e, etc for about $4k-$10k in 2018, but the supply of those dried up.
    - noirbot 3y ago
      Yea, there was a brief experiment with smaller stuff 5ish years ago, but that seems to have dried up hard and left us with 2-ton trucks and SUVs or high end luxury sedans being the only options in the US for EVs. Seems like there may be 500evs coming back next year, so may look into that.
      - telotortium 3y ago
        It's good that the Tesla charging port (NACS) is well on its way to becoming a cross-manufacturer standard in the US, so it may make more sense soon to have smaller EVs that don't need to have as large of a capacity to find the few Electrify America stations.
  - foogazi 3y ago
    > You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. Bolt EUV is around 30k
    - defrost 3y ago
- pornel 3y ago
  The charging infrastructure can improve literally overnight. Around me there were very few places until McDonald's suddenly decided to have a charger at every drive-thru, and now I have as many chargers as McDonalds' around me.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    The charging infrastructure will take years to improve. "Literally overnight" is a laughable exaggeration. Pretty sure even McDonald's can't install EV chargers at each drive-thru "literally overnight".
    - pornel 3y ago
      But they do. Commercial locations like malls already have power available, so it's not a large-scale infrastructure project, but a matter of digging a cable and hooking up a box.
troupo 3y ago
In Sweden (at least) you're already paying multiple premiums to drive an EV: - the price is easily 1.5x compared to an equivalent ICE car - shorter driving ranges - nearly non-existent charging infrastructure

SirMaster 3y ago

God I hope it's not that soon. There's like nowhere to charge an electric car near me. They really need to work on charging infrastructure before they convince me to buy an electric car. And the cost still needs to come way, way down. It seems like every electric car that has any decent range is a luxury car. I don't want a luxury car, I just want a super basic cheap car to get me from point a to point b.

arc4n0n 3y ago
you only charge on road trips. Charging at home has no analogue with gas cars... It's just something that's intrinsically better about EVs
- SirMaster 3y ago
  I have no way to charge at home though, being in an apartment. I don't plan to change that any time soon. I am certainly not changing where I live just for my car when a gas car works fine.
- noirbot 3y ago
  Yea, one of the current ironies is that the folks most able to use/charge an environmentally friendly car are the people living in environmentally unfriendly single-family homes. I've yet to see an apartment complex with more than 2-3 charging points for a building of hundreds of units, and plenty of older condo/apartment housing stock can't even easily retrofit chargers into the lot without spending tens of thousands of dollars on it, assuming your local power system supports it. Having to drive five to ten miles and wait for most of an hour to charge is just a bad experience.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I have friends who own EVs without access to home charging who charge at the grocery store once a week while shopping. The car is done charging before they’re done shopping for groceries. The trick is to distribute chargers everywhere, because your car is going to be parked somewhere long enough to charge unless you’re a taxi or some other high utilization use case. Most will charge at home and or work, but some cannot.
    - noirbot 3y ago
      Yea, it's what I'd have to do, I suppose, but it would mean driving to a grocery store 2-3 times further away, and my average trip to the store these days is only 10-20 minutes which I doubt is long enough for a full charge. My office and home don't have chargers and probably won't for a while, so I'd essentially have to make a special trip out on the weekends to charge my car while I get lunch nearby or something.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        For an L3 charger, 20 minutes is a lot. If you are 20%, it should get you to 70% or so, it takes longer to go from 70 to 100% given how battery charging works.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Indeed! I literally just charged a long range model y at a 250kw Supercharger from ~20% to ~80% in 17 minutes (per Teslascope) this morning after towing a ride on trencher back to the rental shop. Was done before I had finished using the rest room and getting a coffee at the grocery store.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Ya, I think people really underestimate how fast L3 charging is, especially for cars running on empty. But not all grocery stores have L3 chargers, and they can get really busy in holiday weekends. I plan my trips around these, but I wish they had more capacity.
- spikels 3y ago
  Most people don’t understand this. They are so used to going to gas stations that they think they will have to regularly go to charging stations. All that time wasted refueling simply goes away as your car gets “fueled up” while you sleep.
- nly 3y ago
  Hmm, tell that to the millions of people living in the UK in terraced/town houses where the only charging option is to drag a cable over the public footpath to the road side....if they manage to get a parking space directly outside their home.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Unfortunately there are a lot of people who can't feasibly charge at home, like people who have to park on the street, or who rent their home and don't have access to anything but a 120V 15A outlet, assuming they have access to an outlet at all where they park their car.
brianwawok 3y ago
Do you have charging where you live? (Private garage or parking spot?) All you really need is charging where you live, and charging along highways. I have literally never gone to any of the chargers within 30 miles of my house. Hardest part is for apartment buildings. No big incentive to install chargers for public use.
- SirMaster 3y ago
  No, There is no charging anywhere "near" my home. I park in an uncovered open apartment parking lot. Same thing for at work. And checking the charging maps shows very few options anywhere near me and the few places that do only have a couple plugs. Would be annoying to find it's in use by the time I get there so I would have to wait for them and then me.
  - phinnaeus 3y ago
    Is it feasible to have charging installed at your home or office? To reiterate what GP said, I basically never charge anywhere except at home (currently in a private carport that I got a charger installed at, previously in an apartment building with a single shared charger for ~50 spots, 4-5 EVs).
    - SirMaster 3y ago
      I don’t really see how I could convince my apartment or the company I work for to install chargers any time soon. Sure maybe in years it will be common enough, but that’s my entire point. It doesn’t seem common at all around me yet, and I’m not going to buy an EV before charging is reasonably available.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        Some jurisdictions are going to start mandating this for large car parks. The transition is definitely going to be very uneven; the closer you are to the centre of a big city with an air quality problem, the sooner it will arrive.
noirbot 3y ago
The cost is a big issue for me still. I get it, but I paid $15k for a car 10 years ago - small hatchback that's been more than enough for my needs. The only options I have for EVs are either 2-3x the size (Rivian, F150, Model X) or 4-5x the cost (Tesla, Lucid, Polestar), or both. I barely drive a hundred miles in a week, and often less, but having range to do a 2-3 hour road trip is a big bonus. You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. I'm not even sure I've spent that much on my car over the last decade, including gas, insurance, repairs, and initial cost. Makes it hard to justify the upgrade.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
  There were lease return iMiev, 500e, etc for about $4k-$10k in 2018, but the supply of those dried up.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    Yea, there was a brief experiment with smaller stuff 5ish years ago, but that seems to have dried up hard and left us with 2-ton trucks and SUVs or high end luxury sedans being the only options in the US for EVs. Seems like there may be 500evs coming back next year, so may look into that.
    - telotortium 3y ago
      It's good that the Tesla charging port (NACS) is well on its way to becoming a cross-manufacturer standard in the US, so it may make more sense soon to have smaller EVs that don't need to have as large of a capacity to find the few Electrify America stations.
- foogazi 3y ago
  > You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. Bolt EUV is around 30k
  - defrost 3y ago
pornel 3y ago
The charging infrastructure can improve literally overnight. Around me there were very few places until McDonald's suddenly decided to have a charger at every drive-thru, and now I have as many chargers as McDonalds' around me.
- kelnos 3y ago
  The charging infrastructure will take years to improve. "Literally overnight" is a laughable exaggeration. Pretty sure even McDonald's can't install EV chargers at each drive-thru "literally overnight".
  - pornel 3y ago
    But they do. Commercial locations like malls already have power available, so it's not a large-scale infrastructure project, but a matter of digging a cable and hooking up a box.

troupo 3y ago

In Sweden (at least) you're already paying multiple premiums to drive an EV: - the price is easily 1.5x compared to an equivalent ICE car - shorter driving ranges - nearly non-existent charging infrastructure