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How much of this is due to a high level of pre-purchase excitement followed by buyer's remorse? Anecdotally, I know several people who were gung ho about gettin
by MontyCarloHall 1y ago
How much of this is due to a high level of pre-purchase excitement followed by buyer's remorse? Anecdotally, I know several people who were gung ho about getting an EV, fully willing to pay its cost premium, who initially loved their EVs but sold them within a year or two after encountering issues that only become apparent with semi-long-term ownership:
— In the US, charging infrastructure is still quite poor, with a high amount of disabled or damaged chargers that aren't apparent on maps. Nothing worse than planning a route around the only charger within a few dozen miles and arriving to find it broken. The overall overhead of having to plan driving/parking around chargers is also too onerous for some people.
— Similarly, people underestimate how much harder long road trips are on EVs, especially when fast chargers are damaged and don't actually supply anywhere close to the advertised amount of current.
— People underestimate how much range degrades in cold weather. One person I know bought their EV in the spring, loved it until winter came around, and then promptly sold it the next spring. In a similar vein, people don't realize how poor and battery-hungry climate control can be in an EV, especially in models without a heat pump.
It would be interesting to rigorously study this, examining whether people buying EVs are more likely to sell them within the first couple years of ownership versus people buying comparably priced ICE cars.
- xethos 1y ago> especially in models without a heat pump. Oh for- who the fuck is putting resistive heating in an EV?! What brain-dead PM greenlit that pants-on-head jackassery? Was it GM? I can see an American OEM getting that close to the goal line only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Really though, that's just disappointing; I had earnestly assumed every EV that made it to market (in North America at least) would be using a heat pump.
- MontyCarloHall 1y agoI believe most new EVs have heat pumps [0], but this wasn't common until a couple years ago. [0] https://www.recurrentauto.com/questions/which-electric-vehicles-have-heat-pumps https://www.recurrentauto.com/questions/which-electric-vehic...
- stetrain 1y ago> who the fuck is putting resistive heating in an EV Tesla before 2021.
- bluesquared 1y agoYes it was GM. My 2017 Bolt has resistive heating.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoTesla, Honda, Nissan, Chevy, Fiat and Volkswagen have all produced cars with resistive heat in the past decade (not an exhaustive list, just a list that I could find on the first page of search results). So no, not an exclusively American thing. Heat pumps are expensive, complex, prone to warranty claims, and subject to additional regulatory control (refrigerants). Resistive heating is cheap and simple. I'm guessing that the development costs for a heat pump that is good enough for automotive use is well into 8 figures, and would probably take at least a year to fully test. Given all those constraints, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that many cars were built with resistive heating.
- eldaisfish 1y agoheat pumps are not magical technology. Pretty much every car sold in the West in the last three decades has one. There is only one reversing valve worth of difference between a standard auto AC and a heat pump.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoA belt driven AC powered by a combustion engine is not at all the same thing as a DC electric heat pump system. Yes they both use compressors and refrigerant, but essentially none of the expensive and hard to engineer parts are interchangeable. If that was true you could just replace your broken fridge with a car AC system, or for that matter just use a fridge to heat your house. After all they all use the same “not magical” technology. As it turns out the underlying concept/technology is pretty simple, but adapting it to be fit for purpose is where the complexity lies. If it was that easy the car companies would have done it instead of designing a novel resistive heating system that can only be used in their lowest volume cars.
- kalleboo 1y agoDon't nearly all of these EVs already have DC-powered air conditioning though? Adding heat to an air conditioner is trivial. Where I live, they literally do not sell air conditioners without heat anymore.
- jansper39 1y agoHeat pumps aren't free to run, they still require a decent amount of energy and and on shorter trips resistive heating (which is required for other reasons anyway) is quicker.
- stetrain 1y agoFrom personal experience over ~6 years of EV roadtrips, the first two really aren't much of a problem with a Tesla or a vehicle that can access Tesla's network. Other chargers can definitely be a bit more hit-and-miss although they are improving. These days if you stick to the big networks (Tesla, Electrify America, Rivian, IONNA, etc.) you're going to have a pretty good time. The one-off chargers in municipal parking garages are a different story, I don't really on those unless there is a recent PlugShare review showing that it actually works.
- MontyCarloHall 1y agoI agree that Tesla's network is universally pretty reliable. For the other networks, I've found it can be quite location-dependent, likely proportional to the density of EV drivers. Bay Area or LA? Pretty solid. Orlando? Not so much.
- everfrustrated 1y agoTeslas supercharger network is so good that even if I had a non-tesla EV I'd want to be charging only at superchargers.
- thatfrenchguy 1y ago> charging infrastructure is still quite poor Now that basically every car can access Tesla Superchargers and vice versa for Teslas, this is really not a problem anymore. We’re at the « sometimes I’m grumpy the best stop for my car does not have the exact amenities I want » stage now. I guess is worse than the « the stop with the exact amnenities I want is not the provider with the cheapest electricity that I wanted » stage that we are in say, France.