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Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm. That is not how EVs work or how they should

Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm. That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge", and extremely common to do the "Put car on charger for 13 minutes while going into [insert any of the gazillion places with chargers in the parking lot] to use the bathroom, stretch legs, and get a snack, or see a landmark" Also you usually structure it so you arrive at your destination with very low charge, because you fill up while there. I've yet to be at a hotel with a gas pump in the lot. Again, EVs function differently than gas, and that change of paradigm really gets people ruffled up and confused.

mdavid626 9mo ago
That’s exactly the problem. I’d be happy to use an EV daily, as I drive short distances. But when I drive longer, then I don’t want to waste hours on charging. The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!). If this doesn’t bother you, then it’s fine. It matters to me though. Sometimes I also drive early in the morning 600km, and in the afternoon back, so I’m home until 22:00. With EV, that’s just impossible.
- plorkyeran 9mo ago
  As long as there's a fast charging station somewhere along the route you'd need more like 30 minutes to charge midway through, not multiple hours. You also surely recognize that your driving patterns are very atypical and a car not working for them says very little about how suitable the car is for the market as a whole.
  - mdavid626 9mo ago
    Assuming car can charge that fast. This is why I said “price and range”. Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    A fast charging station that is working, that has the correct connector for your car (including adapters you carry), that your car will work with (Tesla hasn't opened their superchargers to call cars with the NACS connector), that you have an account with... There are too many things that just are not there. One top of that you need to find a charger. They are all over, but many of them are slow speed chargers. There are also a lot of gaps, if you pass a charger with 50% battery remaining you can't be sure you will make the next one. (most cars can pass several gas station with 5% gas in the tank and still make it to one). You need to ensure you will get back to your car when it is charged so they don't charge extra (this is a problem if you are at a concert or something and are trying to charge while doing something else that can't be interupted) Someday all the above will be fixed. Everyone agrees NACS is the future connector, but it isn't rolled out. Someday every "gas station" will have a charger with the gas pumps (or perhaps something else?) - at least along routes where people often make long trips. Someday you won't need a phone/account, just swipe a card - or so I hope. But someday isn't today.
    - dalyons 9mo ago
      someday is today in california at least. there are so many superchargers everywhere that i have never worried about the problems you mention.
- Workaccount2 9mo ago
  In your typical 475km EV sedan, you would only need about 20 minutes of charging to do that 700km. This is why I am like a broken record repeating that EV misconceptions kill EVs. You are applying gas car logic to electric cars, which is what people do, and stops them from getting an EV. But it's wrong.
  - mdavid626 9mo ago
    Are you assuming 250kW chargers? …and cars which can charge that fast? Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW. This is the size of car I need.
    - Workaccount2 9mo ago
      If you often mowed a town park, you wouldn't buy a hand-push lawnmower and then be upset about lawn mower technology. The Renault 5 is a town car. Its specs are closer to a golf cart than a motorcar. It fills a niche, but if you are traveling often, a different EV would suite you better.
      - mdavid626 9mo ago
        I see the confusion now. People assume everyone has the same resources as they do. Your point would be fine, if Renault 5 would be very cheap. But it’s not. It’s the car what many people can afford. Thinking that people have “misconceptions”, because they don’t buy expensive EV-s, which have good capabilities, is very strange. You say EV-s are good and people just don’t get it. But people who buy EV-s for 25k, their experience is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than in EV-s for 50k. These people are buying those cars, because that’s what they can afford, not because they are stupid to see that a more expensive car can do better. Look at 25k ICE cars. They offer lot more comfort regarding “charging”, as same price EV-s. They work in a city and outside city as well. No trade-offs. That’s my point, when I say “price and range”. ———- Renault 5 EV is a pretty normal car in Europe regarding its specs. Why would it be a golf cart?
    - ac29 9mo ago
      > Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW. This is the size of car I need. AC only EVs dont exist in the US market any more AFAIK. Looking at the Renault 5 models currently available in the UK market, they dont have any AC only models either (maybe they do in other countries though).
- rootusrootus 9mo ago
  You are perhaps an edge case. For many people (the vast majority), you end up spending way, way less time refueling, even if the occasional road trip takes a little longer. It depends on how important time is to you.
- tzs 9mo ago
  > The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!) If you got an EV with fast charging (and there were fast chargers on your route) it would actually be under 20 minutes more. For example Ioniq 5 has a range of ~480 km. Let's say you started at 100% and drive down to 10%. That gets you 430 km, so 270 km left to go. At a 350 kW charger the Ioniq 5 goes from 10-80% in 18 minutes. Assuming you do not want to take it below 10% that's 340 km before you next need to charge, more than the 270 km you need to reach your destination. You arrive with 70 km left before needing to charge again. Let's do the round trip extra time. That's 1400 km for the trip. Again assuming we start at 100% and we don't let it go between 10%, then we get 430 km using before the first charging stop. At that point we've got 970 km left that will have to be powered by our charging stops. Every 20 minute stop is giving us 340 km, so we'll need 3 stops, or one hour of stop time. You might also need a stop, most likely shorter, at your destination if you are going to do a lot of driving there before returning home. In a majority of cases with EVs charging speed is a bigger factor in how much time you spend stopped than range. Many people overlook this and might be a longer range EV when they would actually have faster trips if they got one with a much higher charge rate even if it had a substantially lower range. The way to think of it is once you get past the range you got from charging before you left, every km travelled on the trip comes from stops during the trip. If EV X charges twice as fast as EV Y and they both need a stop at the same place, Y is going to spend twice as much time on chargers for the rest the trip as X no matter how many times they have to stop. If the fast charging X has half the range it will stop twice as often, but an X stop will be 1/4 the time of a Y stop actually charging. Y making few stops does mean less time spent on stop overhead, by which I mean the time when you are off the highway but not actually charging. That should only be a couple minutes or so per stop though since you can overlap time consuming stop activies like visiting the bathroom with the actual charging. On most trip that saving from less total stop overhead can't come anywhere near the savings from faster charging and so fast charging meh range will usually beat crap charging but great range unless the trip is short enough that only the short range car needs to stop. The great range car also does got farther before needing the first stop, so it doesn't need to add as much mileage during the trip put that too usually doesn't make much difference either other than fairly short road trips.
  - 9mo ago
JohnMakin 9mo ago
> They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else This is fine if you're a homeowner. For a huge chunk of people living in denser housing, this is not feasible, and at best impractical.
pixl97 9mo ago
The big problem here is we need a hybrid stage in between. I have a hybrid now, it's still a conventional powertrain, and it's not chargeable. That's not exactly what I want, but it's what I could get. I want a fully electric drive train hybrid with around 100 miles capacity on the battery, then a generator that's big enough to keep it running if the battery is drained. 100 miles gets you through the average day without having to use gas. An electric drive train turns your engine to a generator that runs at a fixed speed and is more efficient. It also massively reduces the complexity turning into a system more like an EV. And, if I go on a long trip, the car still gets me to where I'm going without charges (unless I choose to so I can save gas).
- alex43578 9mo ago
  On the flip side, it massively increases your BOM and maintenance considerations, as now you have to have all the bits of an electric powertrain and most of the bits of a gas powertrain. All for the few times that you’re driving more than 300ish miles in a stretch?
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    Na, far less bits of a gas powertrain. Generators are are a pretty simple setup.
    - bombcar 9mo ago
      I guess one way to think about it is imagine a Ford Lightning that has a trailer that can keep it running "indefinitely". Would you drive around with the trailer all the time? Probably not ...
ashtonbaker 9mo ago
I actually leased a Kia EV6 recently without too much research into the charging situation, assuming that in 2025 it was probably pretty well figured out, and I could just do as you propose and just charge in small bursts at the grocery store etc. But: - It didn't come with a home charger at all. They're not cheap. - It came with a J1772 adapter, but no CCS adapter. The car itself has NACS. So I'm limited to Tesla superchargers, which are expensive, unless I buy a new adapter (not cheap, or cheap, but suspicious Temu brands). - The experience of using all of these different branded charging points is _awful_. You need to create 10 different accounts with a bunch of terrible apps. The maps to find charging infrastructure seem universally awful. - Pretty common to arrive at a charging location to find that some nutjob has hacked off all the charging cables. The only reliably maintained charge points are the larger, more expensive high speed charging locations. I think a lot of the issues would be solved if I was more committed to the car and the house that I'm living in, and installed a home charger to charge at night. But the charging experience out in the world is absolutely _dismal_ when compared to gas vehicles, even if you change your behavior.
- Dibes 9mo ago
  The thing is, for most people a standard wall outlet is plenty. The math works out that a simple 15/20 amp circuit can charge over 40 miles overnight, and the vast majority of people aren't driving more than that for their daily commute plus errands. Level 1 charging is genuinely sufficient most of the time. I was particularly swayed by the technology connections video on this topic I watched before buying my first EV https://youtu.be/Iyp_X3mwE1w https://youtu.be/Iyp_X3mwE1w The real pain point, in my opinion, is whether you have any place to plug in nightly. If you don't, then as you pointed out, it becomes a nightmare to own. Range anxiety is completely justified when public charging infrastructure is still as unreliable as it is, years after the initial build outs. Your points about charging pain are all too common. If you have a garage with an outlet, you are generally fine. I lived off a level 1 charger for over a year before I decided I wanted the convenience of a level 2 charger.
  - ak217 9mo ago
    Sorry, I love Technology Connections as much as anyone, but that's a ridiculous argument. Even people who drive less than 40 miles a day will occasionally need to drive 100 miles a day for two days back to back. That's not even a long distance trip, it's just driving around. With level 1 charging they are stuck and frustrated. With level 2 they're fine. Not to mention the hassle and mental energy required to plug in and out for every little trip. For most people a 240V outlet is worth it. Not to mention it's at least 10% more efficient, which is quite significant and weird that Technology Connections didn't mention that.
m463 9mo ago
people forget all the stuff they had to figure out about ICE cars when they first started. Like: - turn off the engine in your garage - don't hold the ignition switch on and break the starter - don't smoke cigarettes while filling up with gasoline - the heater doesn't come on until the engine is warm
- morshu9001 9mo ago
  also everything transmission-related
somerandomqaguy 9mo ago
So.... what happens when you don't have at home charging, or it's too limited to give you any meaningful range?
- alex43578 9mo ago
  Get better at home charging, or have your apartment/condo install it? If none of the above, then an EV isn’t the right choice for you.
- mdavid626 9mo ago
  Of course the answer is “don’t be poor”. Just buy a house and install charger.
Auracle 9mo ago
It’s easy to say that EV charging on long trips should align with other stops until you factor in kids. Doing a normal 2-3 hour one way trip with kids is already not fun, I don’t want to pull over for them to pee 20 minutes before I need to sit and let the thing charge for 30 minutes. Nevermind the fact that there are very, very few EVs suitable for anyone with more than 2 kids.

mdavid626 9mo ago

That’s exactly the problem. I’d be happy to use an EV daily, as I drive short distances. But when I drive longer, then I don’t want to waste hours on charging. The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!). If this doesn’t bother you, then it’s fine. It matters to me though. Sometimes I also drive early in the morning 600km, and in the afternoon back, so I’m home until 22:00. With EV, that’s just impossible.

plorkyeran 9mo ago
As long as there's a fast charging station somewhere along the route you'd need more like 30 minutes to charge midway through, not multiple hours. You also surely recognize that your driving patterns are very atypical and a car not working for them says very little about how suitable the car is for the market as a whole.
- mdavid626 9mo ago
  Assuming car can charge that fast. This is why I said “price and range”. Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  A fast charging station that is working, that has the correct connector for your car (including adapters you carry), that your car will work with (Tesla hasn't opened their superchargers to call cars with the NACS connector), that you have an account with... There are too many things that just are not there. One top of that you need to find a charger. They are all over, but many of them are slow speed chargers. There are also a lot of gaps, if you pass a charger with 50% battery remaining you can't be sure you will make the next one. (most cars can pass several gas station with 5% gas in the tank and still make it to one). You need to ensure you will get back to your car when it is charged so they don't charge extra (this is a problem if you are at a concert or something and are trying to charge while doing something else that can't be interupted) Someday all the above will be fixed. Everyone agrees NACS is the future connector, but it isn't rolled out. Someday every "gas station" will have a charger with the gas pumps (or perhaps something else?) - at least along routes where people often make long trips. Someday you won't need a phone/account, just swipe a card - or so I hope. But someday isn't today.
  - dalyons 9mo ago
    someday is today in california at least. there are so many superchargers everywhere that i have never worried about the problems you mention.
Workaccount2 9mo ago
In your typical 475km EV sedan, you would only need about 20 minutes of charging to do that 700km. This is why I am like a broken record repeating that EV misconceptions kill EVs. You are applying gas car logic to electric cars, which is what people do, and stops them from getting an EV. But it's wrong.
- mdavid626 9mo ago
  Are you assuming 250kW chargers? …and cars which can charge that fast? Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW. This is the size of car I need.
  - Workaccount2 9mo ago
    If you often mowed a town park, you wouldn't buy a hand-push lawnmower and then be upset about lawn mower technology. The Renault 5 is a town car. Its specs are closer to a golf cart than a motorcar. It fills a niche, but if you are traveling often, a different EV would suite you better.
    - mdavid626 9mo ago
      I see the confusion now. People assume everyone has the same resources as they do. Your point would be fine, if Renault 5 would be very cheap. But it’s not. It’s the car what many people can afford. Thinking that people have “misconceptions”, because they don’t buy expensive EV-s, which have good capabilities, is very strange. You say EV-s are good and people just don’t get it. But people who buy EV-s for 25k, their experience is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than in EV-s for 50k. These people are buying those cars, because that’s what they can afford, not because they are stupid to see that a more expensive car can do better. Look at 25k ICE cars. They offer lot more comfort regarding “charging”, as same price EV-s. They work in a city and outside city as well. No trade-offs. That’s my point, when I say “price and range”. ———- Renault 5 EV is a pretty normal car in Europe regarding its specs. Why would it be a golf cart?
  - ac29 9mo ago
    > Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW. This is the size of car I need. AC only EVs dont exist in the US market any more AFAIK. Looking at the Renault 5 models currently available in the UK market, they dont have any AC only models either (maybe they do in other countries though).
rootusrootus 9mo ago
You are perhaps an edge case. For many people (the vast majority), you end up spending way, way less time refueling, even if the occasional road trip takes a little longer. It depends on how important time is to you.
tzs 9mo ago
> The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!) If you got an EV with fast charging (and there were fast chargers on your route) it would actually be under 20 minutes more. For example Ioniq 5 has a range of ~480 km. Let's say you started at 100% and drive down to 10%. That gets you 430 km, so 270 km left to go. At a 350 kW charger the Ioniq 5 goes from 10-80% in 18 minutes. Assuming you do not want to take it below 10% that's 340 km before you next need to charge, more than the 270 km you need to reach your destination. You arrive with 70 km left before needing to charge again. Let's do the round trip extra time. That's 1400 km for the trip. Again assuming we start at 100% and we don't let it go between 10%, then we get 430 km using before the first charging stop. At that point we've got 970 km left that will have to be powered by our charging stops. Every 20 minute stop is giving us 340 km, so we'll need 3 stops, or one hour of stop time. You might also need a stop, most likely shorter, at your destination if you are going to do a lot of driving there before returning home. In a majority of cases with EVs charging speed is a bigger factor in how much time you spend stopped than range. Many people overlook this and might be a longer range EV when they would actually have faster trips if they got one with a much higher charge rate even if it had a substantially lower range. The way to think of it is once you get past the range you got from charging before you left, every km travelled on the trip comes from stops during the trip. If EV X charges twice as fast as EV Y and they both need a stop at the same place, Y is going to spend twice as much time on chargers for the rest the trip as X no matter how many times they have to stop. If the fast charging X has half the range it will stop twice as often, but an X stop will be 1/4 the time of a Y stop actually charging. Y making few stops does mean less time spent on stop overhead, by which I mean the time when you are off the highway but not actually charging. That should only be a couple minutes or so per stop though since you can overlap time consuming stop activies like visiting the bathroom with the actual charging. On most trip that saving from less total stop overhead can't come anywhere near the savings from faster charging and so fast charging meh range will usually beat crap charging but great range unless the trip is short enough that only the short range car needs to stop. The great range car also does got farther before needing the first stop, so it doesn't need to add as much mileage during the trip put that too usually doesn't make much difference either other than fairly short road trips.
- 9mo ago

JohnMakin 9mo ago

> They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else This is fine if you're a homeowner. For a huge chunk of people living in denser housing, this is not feasible, and at best impractical.

pixl97 9mo ago

The big problem here is we need a hybrid stage in between. I have a hybrid now, it's still a conventional powertrain, and it's not chargeable. That's not exactly what I want, but it's what I could get. I want a fully electric drive train hybrid with around 100 miles capacity on the battery, then a generator that's big enough to keep it running if the battery is drained. 100 miles gets you through the average day without having to use gas. An electric drive train turns your engine to a generator that runs at a fixed speed and is more efficient. It also massively reduces the complexity turning into a system more like an EV. And, if I go on a long trip, the car still gets me to where I'm going without charges (unless I choose to so I can save gas).

alex43578 9mo ago
On the flip side, it massively increases your BOM and maintenance considerations, as now you have to have all the bits of an electric powertrain and most of the bits of a gas powertrain. All for the few times that you’re driving more than 300ish miles in a stretch?
- pixl97 9mo ago
  Na, far less bits of a gas powertrain. Generators are are a pretty simple setup.
  - bombcar 9mo ago
    I guess one way to think about it is imagine a Ford Lightning that has a trailer that can keep it running "indefinitely". Would you drive around with the trailer all the time? Probably not ...

ashtonbaker 9mo ago

I actually leased a Kia EV6 recently without too much research into the charging situation, assuming that in 2025 it was probably pretty well figured out, and I could just do as you propose and just charge in small bursts at the grocery store etc. But: - It didn't come with a home charger at all. They're not cheap. - It came with a J1772 adapter, but no CCS adapter. The car itself has NACS. So I'm limited to Tesla superchargers, which are expensive, unless I buy a new adapter (not cheap, or cheap, but suspicious Temu brands). - The experience of using all of these different branded charging points is _awful_. You need to create 10 different accounts with a bunch of terrible apps. The maps to find charging infrastructure seem universally awful. - Pretty common to arrive at a charging location to find that some nutjob has hacked off all the charging cables. The only reliably maintained charge points are the larger, more expensive high speed charging locations. I think a lot of the issues would be solved if I was more committed to the car and the house that I'm living in, and installed a home charger to charge at night. But the charging experience out in the world is absolutely _dismal_ when compared to gas vehicles, even if you change your behavior.

Dibes 9mo ago
The thing is, for most people a standard wall outlet is plenty. The math works out that a simple 15/20 amp circuit can charge over 40 miles overnight, and the vast majority of people aren't driving more than that for their daily commute plus errands. Level 1 charging is genuinely sufficient most of the time. I was particularly swayed by the technology connections video on this topic I watched before buying my first EV https://youtu.be/Iyp_X3mwE1w https://youtu.be/Iyp_X3mwE1w The real pain point, in my opinion, is whether you have any place to plug in nightly. If you don't, then as you pointed out, it becomes a nightmare to own. Range anxiety is completely justified when public charging infrastructure is still as unreliable as it is, years after the initial build outs. Your points about charging pain are all too common. If you have a garage with an outlet, you are generally fine. I lived off a level 1 charger for over a year before I decided I wanted the convenience of a level 2 charger.
- ak217 9mo ago
  Sorry, I love Technology Connections as much as anyone, but that's a ridiculous argument. Even people who drive less than 40 miles a day will occasionally need to drive 100 miles a day for two days back to back. That's not even a long distance trip, it's just driving around. With level 1 charging they are stuck and frustrated. With level 2 they're fine. Not to mention the hassle and mental energy required to plug in and out for every little trip. For most people a 240V outlet is worth it. Not to mention it's at least 10% more efficient, which is quite significant and weird that Technology Connections didn't mention that.

m463 9mo ago

people forget all the stuff they had to figure out about ICE cars when they first started. Like: - turn off the engine in your garage - don't hold the ignition switch on and break the starter - don't smoke cigarettes while filling up with gasoline - the heater doesn't come on until the engine is warm

morshu9001 9mo ago
also everything transmission-related

somerandomqaguy 9mo ago

So.... what happens when you don't have at home charging, or it's too limited to give you any meaningful range?

alex43578 9mo ago
Get better at home charging, or have your apartment/condo install it? If none of the above, then an EV isn’t the right choice for you.
mdavid626 9mo ago
Of course the answer is “don’t be poor”. Just buy a house and install charger.

Auracle 9mo ago

It’s easy to say that EV charging on long trips should align with other stops until you factor in kids. Doing a normal 2-3 hour one way trip with kids is already not fun, I don’t want to pull over for them to pee 20 minutes before I need to sit and let the thing charge for 30 minutes. Nevermind the fact that there are very, very few EVs suitable for anyone with more than 2 kids.