5 ms·

One of the problems is that Joe thinks he needs a car with 600 miles of range to do his 30/mile per day commute.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
In EU long car trips are quite common especially in weekends or during winter and summer holiday season when everyone pack their family in their car and zerg-rushes south towards the Alps/Mediterranean, so everyone uses ICEs for such long journey. Range anxiety is too big of an issue for EVs to become popular for that purpose and families usually own one car to serve all occasions.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  Range anxiety is going the same way as peoples fear that electric cars were low powered and slow. The availability of chargers and cars that can give you 4-5 hours of drive time in 15 minutes is increasing every year. https://thedriven.io/2022/01/19/electric-car-range-anxiety-is-dying-a-public-death/ https://thedriven.io/2022/01/19/electric-car-range-anxiety-i...
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    That's not the reality in my EU world. Almost nobody either single or with family in my wider circle of acquaintances spread across 5 countries owns EVs. One guy's mom I know has one but also has an ICE for longer trips. Yes, statistically sales of EVS are increasing but growth is highly uneven, it's still mostly wealthy people and wealthy countries with chargers at home and businesses fleets with chargers at work. In my working class neighborhood of apartment buildings I see exactly zero EVs parked on the streets and zero chargers(could this be a connection? /s) And cheaper EVs don't usually support fast charging. Also EVs with half decent range and fast charging are still quite very expensive for the purchasing power of the average European. The best selling cars in the EU were almost all ICE and very affordable models to boot like the Dacia Sandero, well below the price of an EV with decent range. Biased feel good articles just saying "things are getting so much better" gloss over too many painful realities and don't really mean anything if that doesn't match the reality you're seeing with your own eyes.
    - toyg 3y ago
      I think the truth is somewhere in between: yes, things are getting better, but it's happening much more slowly than EV supporters claim. I'm in the UK, in a populous suburb of the second biggest city, and I have literally one fast-charging point in a 20km radius. That's not enough to serve even 5% of drivers here, if we all switched to EVs tomorrow people would start fighting in the streets to get access to it. I don't doubt we will get there eventually, but they will not be able to stop selling ICE cars by 2035; about 5 years from now there will be an uproar and the deadline will be pushed by at least another decade. The technology is getting better, the prices are getting lower, but infrastructure is nowhere near ready.
      - MEMORYC_RRUPTED 3y ago
        And to give an anecdotal counterpoint: I live in (relatively speaking because small country) the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands, I have 8+ charging stations (each with at least 2 chargers) in my small town and a fast charging point with 20+ chargers within a five minute highway drive. Not that there aren't any problems, and there are definitely "dead zones" so to speak, but the situation you're describing isn't valid everywhere.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Yeah I'm sure small wealthy green and well developed countries like Netherlands, Switzerland or Denmark have built good EV infrastructure, but in most Europe it's not like that at all. I live in Austria now and charging infrastructure is still very sparse in the city where people keep their cars parked and there's no signs of new chargers being built so I'm also skeptical on meeting the deadline. Also considerig that most people have old beaters, those people won't be able to magically afford more expensive EVs with worse range. So I think your parent is right and your situation in Benelux and the Nordics is the exception not the norm. If the infrastructure doesn't massively improve across the block and the price of EVs doesn't tank along with a range increase, there will be uproar in the less fortunate EU countries who depends on ICEs and the ICE deadline will have to be postponed again.
        3y ago
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > The availability of chargers and cars that can give you 4-5 hours of drive time in 15 minutes is increasing every year. The issues is drivers who use the charger for hours. Not a big problem in cities but definitely a problem during long trips.
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      The Tesla chargers will fine you for hogging. The ChargePlaceScotland ones will do the same but it’s different depending on the rating and location.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  I’m in the UK. My Portuguese workmates drive from Scotland to Portugal multiple times per year and say they have no issues.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Driving anywhere with an EV is no issue if you have unlimited time at your disposal to keep stopping to charge on route. But time is money. Your vacation time is limited. How much time does it take to reach Portugal from the UK with an EV that has a realistic 200km range and 30 minute fast charge(if your you're lucky to find them on route) versus a diesel with a 800km range wich takes 3 minutes to fill up.
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      I don’t doubt that. I don’t have unlimited time but a 20 minute top up after 2-3 hours of driving is worth the 80% reduction in fuel costs to me.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        20 minutes of top up to last you 2-3 hours of driving (assuming 100km/h highway speed) is very ambitious/optimistic for the range most average EVs and the charging speed of most chargers.
        thebruce87m 3y ago
        In the UK there are lots of 50kW chargers. A lot of major services have 130kW+ and there are a few 250kW.
        abrugsch 3y ago
        And how many are working combined with how many have a sufficient connection to the grid to power all the chargers in the local cluster if all are being used at once (for reference see the hassle a recent pair of youtubers went through when doing a ICE vs EV "race" from John-o-Groats to Land's end[0][1]. Spoiler alert, most chargers were broken or had queues to use (so an hour to wait even before you got your '20 mins') or were gimped into low power delivery because all of the points were in use and the connection to the grid was only enough to serve one car at full power. I'm not saying this all charging stations all over the country, all times of the year (this was on a weekend of a half term holiday) but even as a snapshot of where the UK is in getting the infrastructure up to speed, we are a long way behind the demand curve, and that's before you take into account all the people who haven't bought into EV's yet because of their reliance on public charging infrastructure (due to not living in a house with a driveway etc) which has been shown now to actually cost more per mile than an efficient ICE car in Diesel/Petrol when using public charging networks. (In the video referenced above, Lee had to resort to using more expensive charging locations (due to unavailability of the planned ones for reasons listed above) and the final charging bill for the distance of the journey was nearly £260. The ICE (diesel) was £122[2] The usual cry against the public charging situation is "should have bought a tesla" and "Home charging balances that out" 1. We don't have a monoculture of cars, not everyone wants or even LIKES Teslas 2. Home charging is fine if you happen to live in a house where that's viable, which is AFAIK less than 50% of householdes in the UK. 3. The home charging cost is typically (dependent on the tariff deal you have) anywhere from 8p to 30p per KWh. range varies on model, but the best EV's have an upper end in ideal conditions of around 4 miles/KWh so between 2-7.5p per mile in the Lands end run video, Geoff got around 13p per mile (mainly not using motorway filling stations so avoiding excessive costs.) Since an EV is still a premium/luxury/early adopter product, the cost premium is usually at least £10000 more than an equivalent ICE car. In order to recoup the cost premium you need to do 90000 and 150000 miles before it earns it's difference back. For most cars (in the UK due to attrition from road conditions or other drivers inability to not write your car off) that's in excess of the operational life of the car (that being said both the cars in my household are north of those numbers, but they are definitely in a minority) let alone that fact that people now are all too keen to keep a car that long. The numbers made sense a few years ago but until the prices start getting more realistic for ordinary people it's a gamble (Oh and now EVs are more expensive to insure too, further offsetting any running cost advantage) Right now the only argument (for me at least - and I do have a driveway) for an EV is the environmental one but the production of them is far from perfect too (but it's still early days so who knows) There are much bigger wins to be had in industry and travel than getting me into an EV (like improving public transport to the point that it actually becomes more viable for starters)this all sounds like I'm anti EV and anti public transport, but I actually WANT to like them both (I never needed a car when I lived in Hamburg with an excellent interconnected public transport system)
expertentipp 3y ago
Most Joe's cannot afford two separate fleets of cars in their household, for city commute and for long distance trips. Even for city commute, daily round trip of 30km doesn't mean that 200km range is acceptable unless the car costs maybe EUR 5k. No idea how much is it in miles or football fields.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  This is probably a product of location. I live in Houston, Texas, and have made multiple long-distance trips in my EV, including cross-country. As a side note, looking up km to mi or feet is super easy using Spotlight (or the equivalent in your OS of choice): Cmd+Space to bring it up, and typing "30km" shows me it's 18.64 miles. (it also tells me my EV has a range of 445km, which is much more than 200km)
TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
Well look on it as on product. Joe can get ICE car for X price with range Y but it does not even matter because he can "charge" his ICE car in minutes. Or Joe can get BEV car for 2X price with range Y/2 (or even smaller fraction) which actually matters because charging of his BEV car takes 30 minutes and more (assuming that there is no queue on chargers) + stress with stupid applications. Now add there fact, that cca 50% of Joes can't charge at home, because they are living in apartments and you can see why BEV is inferior product from Joe's perspective, because in Joe's mind he is paying more to get less. And btw I own Skoda Enyaq and that car is massive PITA when you have no place to charge.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  Sure, but the people who can charge at home are still convinced they need 600 miles of range. I charge at home so my charging time is 0 and it costs 1/5 of the price. There are 70 houses on my street with similar configurations to mine. I also did 3 months without a home charger with no issues.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Most people don't live in houses like in the UK so they can't charge at home overnight. If there's street parking then there needs to be street charging but nobody has really found a mass solution to that. The cities need to build that but they aren't. If you don't have a charger at home or at work you're screwed.
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      Sure, I live in the UK so I know the living arrangements. Not sure what’s warranting the downvotes but my point is that there are lots of people who do have the opportunity to charge at home and save big time with fuel costs but are still convinced they need something that behaves exactly like the thing they have, and for a lot of people it doesn’t have to.
      - 3y ago
Spivak 3y ago
You're intentionally arguing poorly for the average joe case in most of the US. You can pack up 6 people in an SUV and take an 800 mile trip one-way for <$200 of gas. The same flight costs $1600. You do that trip as little as once a year and you more than erase the lifetime savings of EV and the car that's better for your use-case costs significantly less. And this is the "disney vacation" case where you don't need anything. If you're going camping you're not gonna take your gear and bike on a plane. EVs are fantastic, I love commuting on my e-bike because it's the path to realizing the gains of an EV for short commutes with the benefits of an ICE for everything else. But I'm also young, healthy, fit and abled and there seems to be little market in the space of inexpensive EV transport for people who aren't that.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  I can’t intentionally argue poorly for people in the US since I don’t know any of the details. Edit: this is the closest you’d get in my country: https://abetterrouteplanner.com?plan_uuid=75ba2435-fd1b-4a49-a785-8f2c92254ac7 https://abetterrouteplanner.com?plan_uuid=75ba2435-fd1b-4a49... 6 charges, under 2 hours of charging on a 16 hour journey. Not ideal but considering ( IF you can charge at home ) you’re saving petrol station visits the rest of the year and your running costs are 3p/mile vs 10-15p/mile for ICE it CAN be worth it. Not for everyone. I think I’ve tempered my language well enough.
JoBrad 3y ago
My newest vehicle is 12 years old, is paid for, can pull a (rented) trailer if needed, can fit my entire family plus dog and groceries, and has low insurance rates. The downside is that it gets 18/20 mpg. I’ve never bought a new vehicle, and probably won’t for some time. Any time I look at an EV I’m pretty much priced out of what I’m willing to pay for a vehicle any time I try to get feature parity. Based on my calculations, it’s better for me to drive vehicles like the one I currently own into the ground vs buying a new EV, or even a hybrid. Hopefully a Maverick hybrid or something similar will break that cycle.

In EU long car trips are quite common especially in weekends or during winter and summer holiday season when everyone pack their family in their car and zerg-rushes south towards the Alps/Mediterranean, so everyone uses ICEs for such long journey. Range anxiety is too big of an issue for EVs to become popular for that purpose and families usually own one car to serve all occasions.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago
Range anxiety is going the same way as peoples fear that electric cars were low powered and slow. The availability of chargers and cars that can give you 4-5 hours of drive time in 15 minutes is increasing every year. https://thedriven.io/2022/01/19/electric-car-range-anxiety-is-dying-a-public-death/ https://thedriven.io/2022/01/19/electric-car-range-anxiety-i...
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  That's not the reality in my EU world. Almost nobody either single or with family in my wider circle of acquaintances spread across 5 countries owns EVs. One guy's mom I know has one but also has an ICE for longer trips. Yes, statistically sales of EVS are increasing but growth is highly uneven, it's still mostly wealthy people and wealthy countries with chargers at home and businesses fleets with chargers at work. In my working class neighborhood of apartment buildings I see exactly zero EVs parked on the streets and zero chargers(could this be a connection? /s) And cheaper EVs don't usually support fast charging. Also EVs with half decent range and fast charging are still quite very expensive for the purchasing power of the average European. The best selling cars in the EU were almost all ICE and very affordable models to boot like the Dacia Sandero, well below the price of an EV with decent range. Biased feel good articles just saying "things are getting so much better" gloss over too many painful realities and don't really mean anything if that doesn't match the reality you're seeing with your own eyes.
  - toyg 3y ago
    I think the truth is somewhere in between: yes, things are getting better, but it's happening much more slowly than EV supporters claim. I'm in the UK, in a populous suburb of the second biggest city, and I have literally one fast-charging point in a 20km radius. That's not enough to serve even 5% of drivers here, if we all switched to EVs tomorrow people would start fighting in the streets to get access to it. I don't doubt we will get there eventually, but they will not be able to stop selling ICE cars by 2035; about 5 years from now there will be an uproar and the deadline will be pushed by at least another decade. The technology is getting better, the prices are getting lower, but infrastructure is nowhere near ready.
    - MEMORYC_RRUPTED 3y ago
      And to give an anecdotal counterpoint: I live in (relatively speaking because small country) the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands, I have 8+ charging stations (each with at least 2 chargers) in my small town and a fast charging point with 20+ chargers within a five minute highway drive. Not that there aren't any problems, and there are definitely "dead zones" so to speak, but the situation you're describing isn't valid everywhere.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Yeah I'm sure small wealthy green and well developed countries like Netherlands, Switzerland or Denmark have built good EV infrastructure, but in most Europe it's not like that at all. I live in Austria now and charging infrastructure is still very sparse in the city where people keep their cars parked and there's no signs of new chargers being built so I'm also skeptical on meeting the deadline. Also considerig that most people have old beaters, those people won't be able to magically afford more expensive EVs with worse range. So I think your parent is right and your situation in Benelux and the Nordics is the exception not the norm. If the infrastructure doesn't massively improve across the block and the price of EVs doesn't tank along with a range increase, there will be uproar in the less fortunate EU countries who depends on ICEs and the ICE deadline will have to be postponed again.
      - 3y ago
- hulitu 3y ago
  > The availability of chargers and cars that can give you 4-5 hours of drive time in 15 minutes is increasing every year. The issues is drivers who use the charger for hours. Not a big problem in cities but definitely a problem during long trips.
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    The Tesla chargers will fine you for hogging. The ChargePlaceScotland ones will do the same but it’s different depending on the rating and location.
thebruce87m 3y ago
I’m in the UK. My Portuguese workmates drive from Scotland to Portugal multiple times per year and say they have no issues.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Driving anywhere with an EV is no issue if you have unlimited time at your disposal to keep stopping to charge on route. But time is money. Your vacation time is limited. How much time does it take to reach Portugal from the UK with an EV that has a realistic 200km range and 30 minute fast charge(if your you're lucky to find them on route) versus a diesel with a 800km range wich takes 3 minutes to fill up.
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    I don’t doubt that. I don’t have unlimited time but a 20 minute top up after 2-3 hours of driving is worth the 80% reduction in fuel costs to me.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      20 minutes of top up to last you 2-3 hours of driving (assuming 100km/h highway speed) is very ambitious/optimistic for the range most average EVs and the charging speed of most chargers.
      - thebruce87m 3y ago
        In the UK there are lots of 50kW chargers. A lot of major services have 130kW+ and there are a few 250kW.
        abrugsch 3y ago
        And how many are working combined with how many have a sufficient connection to the grid to power all the chargers in the local cluster if all are being used at once (for reference see the hassle a recent pair of youtubers went through when doing a ICE vs EV "race" from John-o-Groats to Land's end[0][1]. Spoiler alert, most chargers were broken or had queues to use (so an hour to wait even before you got your '20 mins') or were gimped into low power delivery because all of the points were in use and the connection to the grid was only enough to serve one car at full power. I'm not saying this all charging stations all over the country, all times of the year (this was on a weekend of a half term holiday) but even as a snapshot of where the UK is in getting the infrastructure up to speed, we are a long way behind the demand curve, and that's before you take into account all the people who haven't bought into EV's yet because of their reliance on public charging infrastructure (due to not living in a house with a driveway etc) which has been shown now to actually cost more per mile than an efficient ICE car in Diesel/Petrol when using public charging networks. (In the video referenced above, Lee had to resort to using more expensive charging locations (due to unavailability of the planned ones for reasons listed above) and the final charging bill for the distance of the journey was nearly £260. The ICE (diesel) was £122[2] The usual cry against the public charging situation is "should have bought a tesla" and "Home charging balances that out" 1. We don't have a monoculture of cars, not everyone wants or even LIKES Teslas 2. Home charging is fine if you happen to live in a house where that's viable, which is AFAIK less than 50% of householdes in the UK. 3. The home charging cost is typically (dependent on the tariff deal you have) anywhere from 8p to 30p per KWh. range varies on model, but the best EV's have an upper end in ideal conditions of around 4 miles/KWh so between 2-7.5p per mile in the Lands end run video, Geoff got around 13p per mile (mainly not using motorway filling stations so avoiding excessive costs.) Since an EV is still a premium/luxury/early adopter product, the cost premium is usually at least £10000 more than an equivalent ICE car. In order to recoup the cost premium you need to do 90000 and 150000 miles before it earns it's difference back. For most cars (in the UK due to attrition from road conditions or other drivers inability to not write your car off) that's in excess of the operational life of the car (that being said both the cars in my household are north of those numbers, but they are definitely in a minority) let alone that fact that people now are all too keen to keep a car that long. The numbers made sense a few years ago but until the prices start getting more realistic for ordinary people it's a gamble (Oh and now EVs are more expensive to insure too, further offsetting any running cost advantage) Right now the only argument (for me at least - and I do have a driveway) for an EV is the environmental one but the production of them is far from perfect too (but it's still early days so who knows) There are much bigger wins to be had in industry and travel than getting me into an EV (like improving public transport to the point that it actually becomes more viable for starters)this all sounds like I'm anti EV and anti public transport, but I actually WANT to like them both (I never needed a car when I lived in Hamburg with an excellent interconnected public transport system)

expertentipp 3y ago

Most Joe's cannot afford two separate fleets of cars in their household, for city commute and for long distance trips. Even for city commute, daily round trip of 30km doesn't mean that 200km range is acceptable unless the car costs maybe EUR 5k. No idea how much is it in miles or football fields.

bdcravens 3y ago
This is probably a product of location. I live in Houston, Texas, and have made multiple long-distance trips in my EV, including cross-country. As a side note, looking up km to mi or feet is super easy using Spotlight (or the equivalent in your OS of choice): Cmd+Space to bring it up, and typing "30km" shows me it's 18.64 miles. (it also tells me my EV has a range of 445km, which is much more than 200km)

TheLoafOfBread 3y ago

Well look on it as on product. Joe can get ICE car for X price with range Y but it does not even matter because he can "charge" his ICE car in minutes. Or Joe can get BEV car for 2X price with range Y/2 (or even smaller fraction) which actually matters because charging of his BEV car takes 30 minutes and more (assuming that there is no queue on chargers) + stress with stupid applications. Now add there fact, that cca 50% of Joes can't charge at home, because they are living in apartments and you can see why BEV is inferior product from Joe's perspective, because in Joe's mind he is paying more to get less. And btw I own Skoda Enyaq and that car is massive PITA when you have no place to charge.

thebruce87m 3y ago
Sure, but the people who can charge at home are still convinced they need 600 miles of range. I charge at home so my charging time is 0 and it costs 1/5 of the price. There are 70 houses on my street with similar configurations to mine. I also did 3 months without a home charger with no issues.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Most people don't live in houses like in the UK so they can't charge at home overnight. If there's street parking then there needs to be street charging but nobody has really found a mass solution to that. The cities need to build that but they aren't. If you don't have a charger at home or at work you're screwed.
  - thebruce87m 3y ago
    Sure, I live in the UK so I know the living arrangements. Not sure what’s warranting the downvotes but my point is that there are lots of people who do have the opportunity to charge at home and save big time with fuel costs but are still convinced they need something that behaves exactly like the thing they have, and for a lot of people it doesn’t have to.
    - 3y ago

Spivak 3y ago

You're intentionally arguing poorly for the average joe case in most of the US. You can pack up 6 people in an SUV and take an 800 mile trip one-way for <$200 of gas. The same flight costs $1600. You do that trip as little as once a year and you more than erase the lifetime savings of EV and the car that's better for your use-case costs significantly less. And this is the "disney vacation" case where you don't need anything. If you're going camping you're not gonna take your gear and bike on a plane. EVs are fantastic, I love commuting on my e-bike because it's the path to realizing the gains of an EV for short commutes with the benefits of an ICE for everything else. But I'm also young, healthy, fit and abled and there seems to be little market in the space of inexpensive EV transport for people who aren't that.

thebruce87m 3y ago
I can’t intentionally argue poorly for people in the US since I don’t know any of the details. Edit: this is the closest you’d get in my country: https://abetterrouteplanner.com?plan_uuid=75ba2435-fd1b-4a49-a785-8f2c92254ac7 https://abetterrouteplanner.com?plan_uuid=75ba2435-fd1b-4a49... 6 charges, under 2 hours of charging on a 16 hour journey. Not ideal but considering ( IF you can charge at home ) you’re saving petrol station visits the rest of the year and your running costs are 3p/mile vs 10-15p/mile for ICE it CAN be worth it. Not for everyone. I think I’ve tempered my language well enough.

JoBrad 3y ago

My newest vehicle is 12 years old, is paid for, can pull a (rented) trailer if needed, can fit my entire family plus dog and groceries, and has low insurance rates. The downside is that it gets 18/20 mpg. I’ve never bought a new vehicle, and probably won’t for some time. Any time I look at an EV I’m pretty much priced out of what I’m willing to pay for a vehicle any time I try to get feature parity. Based on my calculations, it’s better for me to drive vehicles like the one I currently own into the ground vs buying a new EV, or even a hybrid. Hopefully a Maverick hybrid or something similar will break that cycle.