Bob_Blaylock hates Electric Vehicles and was happy to highjack a thread about it

The BBQ Pit
1

  I’m a construction worker, and can expect to be sent to projects as far as eighty miles away from home.  I live in an apartment, with no EV charger available to me, and no realistic possibility of having one installed for my use.

  I usually work at places that are still being built.  There may be chargers there, when those places are finished, but by that time, I’ll be done with that project, and hopefully moved on to another.

  So, if I had an EV, I would have no choice but to stop somewhere on the way home from work, find an EV charging station, and spend hours waiting for it to charge.  That is, of course, on top of an eight-hour work day, and possibly three or four hours of commute time, depending on traffic.  Around that, am I supposed to somehow, also find time to sleep, eat, and carry out other parts of my life?

  With a real car, it only takes a few minutes to fully refuel it, so that’s not much of a time burden on me; even on distant projects where I may have to do so every work day.

  I do not see any possibility that an EV will be suitable for my needs, until the point is reaches that an EV has the range of a real car, and can be recharged at a rate comparable to pumping gasoline into a real car.

  As old as I am, and given what I know about the hard realities of electrical power, I see no realistic possibility that this point will occur within my lifetime.

  I’m going to have to stick with real cars.

2

:roll_eyes:

This is the only limiting factor in your case. If you had an apartment charger available, then your life gets easier than with an ICE, since every day your car starts fully charged, and you have more than enough range available. 160 miles is nothing in a modern EV, even under harsh conditions. Refueling an ICE may not take much time in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never very convenient since it doesn’t happen on any nice schedule–unlike the EV that you just plug in when you get home.

It’s unlikely that your lack of chargers will remain the situation indefinitely. In some places, apartment complexes are mandated to install chargers. In others, apartment owners are required to allow installation of a charger for a reasonable fee. And in any case, complexes will over time find that they are losing business by not supporting EV owners and install them just to be competitive.

That’s not the case everywhere, but unless you are on death’s door already, it’s likely to happen in your lifetime.

3

It would be about twenty minutes at the very most and probably less but ok

4

You know how much time I’ve spent “filling” our EV since we got it? A lot less than our ICE. I’ll stick with my fake car.

5

Yeah–I had to fill up the truck today (took 22 gallons). It was annoying and expensive.

6

Are there any good EVs that aren’t Teslas? I’m very interested in my next car being electric, but I despise Elon Musk.

7

While I appreciate the difficulty that you have, a lot of other people don’t have that difficulty, and by denigrating EV’s as “not real cars” you’re kind of being an ass. For example, I’m on record multiple times as both “my Mach E is the best car I’ve ever had” and “I also have a second vehicle for those 10% of things that a Mach E isn’t suitable for.”

For a typical, American, multi-car household, this is not a big deal. One might say, “My Fiesta can’t pull a trailer” and the answer isn’t “get a real car”; instead, the answer is, have a second car capable of pulling a trailer on those occasions that you need to do so.

My Mach E is a real car. It’s a great fucking car. Its 2024 replacement is scheduled to be built on April 29th. I’ve not had the same car two times in a row since my Taurus SHO’s. My EV does everything I need it to do 95% of the time (but only about 70% of the miles), and I’m probably stupid for just not being a renter that other 5% of times (well, not really, as we need a second car from time to time anyway, and having a second Mach E plus renting a truck when necessary would be stupider).

If you’d a dick and say that a Fiesta isn’t a real car, or a Corolla isn’t a real car, etc., then fine; you’re just a dick. But an EV is a real car that answers the use case of the vast majority of Americans the vast majority of times. 100%? No, but then an F-250 doesn’t address 100% of use cases, either.

8

Yes, read this thread or go to Car and Driver or any other car review website to read all about them. There are many excellent EVs that aren’t Teslas.

9

And be sure to look into how kind and charitable the CEOs of those other companies are.

10

I have a specific grudge against Elon Musk because of what he did to Twitter. But that’s going off topic.

11

That’s fair.

12

  You’re assuming that an average person can afford to have multiple cars, to make up for not having one car that actually meets his needs by itself; or that it is even rational to have multiple cars instead o0f having one car that is good enough to meet one’s needs.

  When you need to resort to making such an absurd argument, to defend your point, then you have to know that your point was nonsense to begin with.

  Why should I, or anyone else, resort to having multiple cars, when it is so easy to have one car that meets my needs, instead of having to split

  As it happens, all it takes is one common real car, not even a very impressive one, to meet all my needs.  At this time, there is no EV that can meet my needs, nor is there any realistic likelihood of there being one within what is left of my lifetime.  What would be the point in my wasting any of my scarce money or other resources on an EV, if I still need a real car to cover what the EV cannot handle?  There is no reverse version of this issue; there is nothing that my real car cannot handle, for which an EV would be a reasonable choice to cover that deficiency.

  You’re telling me that I am being a dick, for very rightfully pointing out that a real car meets my needs, in important ways that an EV cannot, and trying to tell me that the solution is for me to have multiple cars, instead of one real car that meets my needs.

13

  No, it most certainly is not, but it is a very big one.  Until I can find an EV charging station as easily as I can find a gas station, and until I can charge an EV as quickly as I can refuel a real car, I have no use at all for an EV.  Solve that problem, (which I am pretty sure is not going to happen in what remains of my lifetime), and then we can quibble over other ways in which EVs fall short; many of which might very well be solved in my lifetime.

  And if I had wings and was capable of flying fast enough, while carrying hundreds of pounds of tools with me, then maybe I wouldn’t need a car at all, and life might be even easier still.

  Or better yet, what if I had an innate ability to instantly teleport myself and my tools to wherever I needed to be, no matter how far?

  But what point is there to what-iffing about things that are not ever going to happen, and how they might make life easier than what is possible and available to me in reality?

14

You’re the one making strong claims about what’s going to happen in your lifetime. Claims that are largely nonsense.

Lots of people already have easy access to chargers in their homes and apartments. These people–like me–spend way less time on charging than we used to spend in gas stations. EVs are a complete win in this regard, not just in time savings but convenience.

The future, as they say, is not yet evenly distributed. But we can have reasonable confidence that it will be so eventually. I can’t predict how long it’ll take for every complex to install chargers, but it will happen sooner or later.

15

So in the mean time, go find a different thread to shit in.

16

So to summarize @Bob_Blaylock, to answer the OP, you’re not going to get one. Got it.

17

  And a lot more do not, and never will.

18

  Yes, that’s pretty much it. Barring some major unexpected technological breakthroughs, I just do not see any realistic likelihood that in my lifetime, we will reach the point where an EV is anywhere near as practical for my needs as a real car now is.

19

“never,” meaning 10 years or so.

20

Can we stop with that dumb description? My EV is very much a real car. It has four tires, and can transport me, my wife, our dog, and lots of our stuff on long trips using the same roads an ICE car can. I can “fuel” my car along the way, just like an ICE car. They are all real cars. EVs are not imaginary.

We are very fortunate that an EV works for us. We’ve only had ours about two months and it has saved us a lot of time from visiting gas pumps. Also, our “fueling” is a lot less expensive. We’ve gone 1900 miles and spent $88 filling it, and that includes a couple “expensive” Supercharger fill-ups.