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1. EVs are more expensive to buy compared to ICEs. But Chinese EVs... can I buy them in Europe for that price? No? Then they are irrelevant. 2. EVs are taking

1. EVs are more expensive to buy compared to ICEs. But Chinese EVs... can I buy them in Europe for that price? No? Then they are irrelevant. 2. EVs are taking more time to "fill up". Yeah, yeah, you can charge at home, but most people can't and will be charging on public chargers, where times are absurdly inferior compared to a gas pump. 3. Public charging infrastructure is overcomplicated. No I don't want your application. I don't want to create an account. Let me use my debit card and don't ask me on anything. 4. Public charging is often more expensive than gas - Ionity 0,69EUR/kWh Enel X 0,89-0,99EUR And I am saying that as owner of BEV. If you want to reach masses, you need to offer better deal than ICE, this is just a joke.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
> No I don't want your application. I don't want to create an account. Let me use my debit card and don't ask me on anything. I agree about this. But we now have a direct-to-car billing standard (as part of the CCS/NACS standards) that should solve this, it's just a question of manufacturers and network operators getting their crap together and deploying it.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Direct-to-car billing would be even less acceptable. Chargers should let you use a credit card without having to involve an account anywhere, be it on a phone app or on the car.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    That still involves the credit card account. It's not really "not involving an account" until you can pay cash.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      True, but that's an account you already have and is independent of the products and services, so using it for this doesn't make anything worse.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      How will direct to car billing work for rental cars? Am I going to get randomly billed weeks after I return the car? Just let me pay for my fuel at the point of purchase with whatever card I choose. I may have a corporate card that it is appropriate to pay with vs my personal card. Pay at the pump has been a solved problem for the entirety of the 21st century. There is no reason to "fix" it.
      - Libcat99 3y ago
        I was randomly billed for tolls up to 6 weeks after I had a rental car for a multi state trip, so yeah, that's probably what they would do.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Hell, there are more gas stations around me going card only these days. Unfortunately the cash only world of the past is slowly dying in many places.
      - Tostino 3y ago
        You mean there is no attendant you can go in and say "$20 on pump 8" and hand them cash??? Could you not buy a drink or snack at these stations either?
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    Direct-to-car billing in the age of subscriptions is indeed very unwise. We have activated heated seats of your car for 9.99EUR/month. Oh did you missed that notification and noticed it after a year from your bank history? Well sucks to be you.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    I don't disagree with the concept of letting people use a credit card. I'd just prefer people to enter it on their car's on-screen interface, rather than assuming physical card readers at every charging point. Leaving aside the annoyance factor (fumbling with cards and bending down to feed one into the curb each time I park), we're eventually going to have millions of charging points on random walls, curbs and lamposts. Based on my experience with today's chargers, the card readers are uniformly the first item to fail. And they never get fixed.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > I'd just prefer people to enter it on their car's on-screen interface I know I'm more -- ahem -- cautious than most, but I'd be very nervous about entering any sensitive data like that into a car's data system. I'm not even comfortable connecting my phone to a car via bluetooth. It wouldn't necessarily be a showstopper for me, but I would certainly want to see others use such a system for a few years before I started to, to be reasonably confident that the car wasn't helpfully storing my payment details for me or passing them along to an entity not involved with the transaction.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  Why is it so tough to just accept cash or card in exchange for goods, without any app or any other account? We do it all the time. It's not hard.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Re 2: I wonder if there's a market here. Some (larger) gas stations have a fast-food restaurant in them. Well, if the charge takes half an hour, say, I wonder if there's a market for charging stations with a medium-scale sit-down restaurant. (Or maybe for a sit-down restaurant with a charging station...)
- p1mrx 3y ago
  A sit-down restaurant only works if they have very predictable wait times. Nobody wants to go outside and move their car in the middle of a meal.
  - hightrix 3y ago
    Even with predictable wait times, this is a nonstarter for many people. Personally, if I’m embarking on a 6+ hour road trip, the last thing I want to do is plan multiple stops that are of any significant length. When on one of these trips, our goal is to be stopped as little as possible. We combine gas station with fast food and eat in the car. No way would I want to add 30-60 min of charge time.
pornel 3y ago
I'm really happy with my IONIQ 5. Where there's infrastructure, it works great. It can recharge in 20 minutes for 2-3 hours of road trip driving, which for me is quite acceptable. I'd probably take the same breaks anyway. But I agree about the stupid apps. They need to die. It's infuriating when my car could recharge quickly, but I'm forced to spend more time registering in some crappy app of a dodgy provider who's probably going to sell it all to spammers.
ActorNightly 3y ago
#1 pretty much includes 2-4. If you solve #1 the others get implicitly solved. Take a corolla, gut everything ICE out of it, give it a standalone EV drivetrain (none of that bullshit center console integration or OTA updates that can brick your car, keep the center entertainment console the same, keep the motor controller separate), run of the mill motor with 80hp or so and battery pack for ~100 miles or so, and sell it for $10-12k, and you would see MASSIVE adoption. Most people wouldn't even bother with public charging, since they can just top up at home overnight. The cars would also be better, even thought the horsepower figure would be low, the torque will be way higher which makes accelerating into merging traffic better and safer. Then, if people want a car for longer distances, they spend $5-8k on a good used gas car, get basic checkover/maintenance done on it, install a entertainment system that has android/carplay, and have 2 cars and more functionality for less than the cost of a modern EV. If the batteries are mainstream and not proprietary, the used market also becomes a shitload better, and people are more incentivized to buy these cars to resell at a higher price. It wouldn't be farfetched for people to even build their own packs, as many do for ebikes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pixl97 3y ago
  This is pretty much what Edison motors wants to do in the truck/semi side of the world.
- al_borland 3y ago
  If I need to drive longer distances I’m just going to get the ICE car, not an EV and an ICE car. There is no way I will save enough money driving an EV around town to make up the cost of having two vehicles. Not only is there the initial purchase price, but then also registration, insurance, and maintenance. There is also the more intangible cost of adding the complexity of 2 cars to one’s life. Every time there is somewhere to go it becomes a choice, car juggling in the driveway, managing maintenance schedules for both vehicles, etc. If an EV can’t do it all, it’s a non-starter for a signification portion of the population. They would be much better served, in terms of comfort, convenience, and financially, if they added those two car budgets together and got one ICE car for $15-20k (adding the two car budgets you listed together). Even charging at home is an issue for many people. A small battery may be easy to charge on 110v, but for those in apartments, condos, or any places that requires them to park in a parking lot or structure, it’s not as easy as using a plug in a garage one might find with a single family home. These living situations also make it harder for people to have multiple cars. The last place I lived required I park in a parking structure; I had to pay $1,200/year up front for a spot in that structure. Having 2 cars would double that cost. And while it did have some EV spots, it wasn’t a place an EV owner could simply park and leave their car for days, especially not with any reliability.
DanielHB 3y ago
The public charging infra is a mess, but at least you don't have to deal with watered down gas I am not joking, in Brazil it is a serious concern. People always try to fuel up only on the gas stations they trust.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

> No I don't want your application. I don't want to create an account. Let me use my debit card and don't ask me on anything. I agree about this. But we now have a direct-to-car billing standard (as part of the CCS/NACS standards) that should solve this, it's just a question of manufacturers and network operators getting their crap together and deploying it.

JohnFen 3y ago
Direct-to-car billing would be even less acceptable. Chargers should let you use a credit card without having to involve an account anywhere, be it on a phone app or on the car.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  That still involves the credit card account. It's not really "not involving an account" until you can pay cash.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    True, but that's an account you already have and is independent of the products and services, so using it for this doesn't make anything worse.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    How will direct to car billing work for rental cars? Am I going to get randomly billed weeks after I return the car? Just let me pay for my fuel at the point of purchase with whatever card I choose. I may have a corporate card that it is appropriate to pay with vs my personal card. Pay at the pump has been a solved problem for the entirety of the 21st century. There is no reason to "fix" it.
    - Libcat99 3y ago
      I was randomly billed for tolls up to 6 weeks after I had a rental car for a multi state trip, so yeah, that's probably what they would do.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Hell, there are more gas stations around me going card only these days. Unfortunately the cash only world of the past is slowly dying in many places.
    - Tostino 3y ago
      You mean there is no attendant you can go in and say "$20 on pump 8" and hand them cash??? Could you not buy a drink or snack at these stations either?
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  Direct-to-car billing in the age of subscriptions is indeed very unwise. We have activated heated seats of your car for 9.99EUR/month. Oh did you missed that notification and noticed it after a year from your bank history? Well sucks to be you.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  I don't disagree with the concept of letting people use a credit card. I'd just prefer people to enter it on their car's on-screen interface, rather than assuming physical card readers at every charging point. Leaving aside the annoyance factor (fumbling with cards and bending down to feed one into the curb each time I park), we're eventually going to have millions of charging points on random walls, curbs and lamposts. Based on my experience with today's chargers, the card readers are uniformly the first item to fail. And they never get fixed.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > I'd just prefer people to enter it on their car's on-screen interface I know I'm more -- ahem -- cautious than most, but I'd be very nervous about entering any sensitive data like that into a car's data system. I'm not even comfortable connecting my phone to a car via bluetooth. It wouldn't necessarily be a showstopper for me, but I would certainly want to see others use such a system for a few years before I started to, to be reasonably confident that the car wasn't helpfully storing my payment details for me or passing them along to an entity not involved with the transaction.
perryizgr8 3y ago
Why is it so tough to just accept cash or card in exchange for goods, without any app or any other account? We do it all the time. It's not hard.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

Re 2: I wonder if there's a market here. Some (larger) gas stations have a fast-food restaurant in them. Well, if the charge takes half an hour, say, I wonder if there's a market for charging stations with a medium-scale sit-down restaurant. (Or maybe for a sit-down restaurant with a charging station...)

p1mrx 3y ago
A sit-down restaurant only works if they have very predictable wait times. Nobody wants to go outside and move their car in the middle of a meal.
- hightrix 3y ago
  Even with predictable wait times, this is a nonstarter for many people. Personally, if I’m embarking on a 6+ hour road trip, the last thing I want to do is plan multiple stops that are of any significant length. When on one of these trips, our goal is to be stopped as little as possible. We combine gas station with fast food and eat in the car. No way would I want to add 30-60 min of charge time.

pornel 3y ago

I'm really happy with my IONIQ 5. Where there's infrastructure, it works great. It can recharge in 20 minutes for 2-3 hours of road trip driving, which for me is quite acceptable. I'd probably take the same breaks anyway. But I agree about the stupid apps. They need to die. It's infuriating when my car could recharge quickly, but I'm forced to spend more time registering in some crappy app of a dodgy provider who's probably going to sell it all to spammers.

ActorNightly 3y ago

#1 pretty much includes 2-4. If you solve #1 the others get implicitly solved. Take a corolla, gut everything ICE out of it, give it a standalone EV drivetrain (none of that bullshit center console integration or OTA updates that can brick your car, keep the center entertainment console the same, keep the motor controller separate), run of the mill motor with 80hp or so and battery pack for ~100 miles or so, and sell it for $10-12k, and you would see MASSIVE adoption. Most people wouldn't even bother with public charging, since they can just top up at home overnight. The cars would also be better, even thought the horsepower figure would be low, the torque will be way higher which makes accelerating into merging traffic better and safer. Then, if people want a car for longer distances, they spend $5-8k on a good used gas car, get basic checkover/maintenance done on it, install a entertainment system that has android/carplay, and have 2 cars and more functionality for less than the cost of a modern EV. If the batteries are mainstream and not proprietary, the used market also becomes a shitload better, and people are more incentivized to buy these cars to resell at a higher price. It wouldn't be farfetched for people to even build their own packs, as many do for ebikes.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pixl97 3y ago
This is pretty much what Edison motors wants to do in the truck/semi side of the world.
al_borland 3y ago
If I need to drive longer distances I’m just going to get the ICE car, not an EV and an ICE car. There is no way I will save enough money driving an EV around town to make up the cost of having two vehicles. Not only is there the initial purchase price, but then also registration, insurance, and maintenance. There is also the more intangible cost of adding the complexity of 2 cars to one’s life. Every time there is somewhere to go it becomes a choice, car juggling in the driveway, managing maintenance schedules for both vehicles, etc. If an EV can’t do it all, it’s a non-starter for a signification portion of the population. They would be much better served, in terms of comfort, convenience, and financially, if they added those two car budgets together and got one ICE car for $15-20k (adding the two car budgets you listed together). Even charging at home is an issue for many people. A small battery may be easy to charge on 110v, but for those in apartments, condos, or any places that requires them to park in a parking lot or structure, it’s not as easy as using a plug in a garage one might find with a single family home. These living situations also make it harder for people to have multiple cars. The last place I lived required I park in a parking structure; I had to pay $1,200/year up front for a spot in that structure. Having 2 cars would double that cost. And while it did have some EV spots, it wasn’t a place an EV owner could simply park and leave their car for days, especially not with any reliability.

DanielHB 3y ago

The public charging infra is a mess, but at least you don't have to deal with watered down gas I am not joking, in Brazil it is a serious concern. People always try to fuel up only on the gas stations they trust.