It should also be said that even if there are some days where you go a bit over–maybe a combination of some extra distance and cold weather–that doesn’t mean you’re suddenly subject to hours of charging. EVs charge fastest when they’re almost drained, and you only need to charge enough to get home. A Tesla can add about 80 miles in 5 minutes, and other modern EVs on fast chargers are similar. Not so different from a gas station.
Well, they are unfailingly polite. That’s a plus.
Steve the Otter rules.
Elephant seals, on the other hand, are complete assholes.
No. The complaint about that issue is that you mistakenly believe that people are disagreeing with you about biology when they’re actually disagreeing with you about language use. You don’t even understand the nature of the disagreement you’re having.
Same thing here:
Again, your problem is that you don’t even understand the nature of the disagreement you’re having. Nobody’s claiming that it’s dickish of you to say that an ICE car is a better choice for your particular circumstances than an EV. There’s nothing dickish about that, and nobody has said otherwise.
What’s dickish of you is to keep childishly insisting that an ICE car is a “real car” and an EV is not, just because you like expressing contempt for EVs. Geez, dude, would you say that an oil-fired hot-water heater is a “real hot-water heater” and a solar-powered hot-water heater isn’t? No, because obviously they both are hot-water heaters, because they heat water! Duh.
I mean, I’m willing to allow for the possibility that instead of deliberately being a dick, you are simply too flat-out stupid to perceive your illogic here. Maybe you are just genuinely so ignorant about cars, and/or so incapable of understanding how they work, that you honestly believe that merely having a powertrain that includes an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine somehow prevents a vehicle from being a “real car”.
(What would it be instead, if it’s not a real car? An optical illusion? A toy? A truck? A bicycle? No. Obviously, since a car is a passenger-transporting motor vehicle that meets official automobile safety and performance criteria, an EV counts as a car. You don’t even have a definition of “real car” that means anything more than “the kind of car Bob_Blaylock personally prefers”.)
But whether you’re a dick or just a dumbass, you are still entitled, by default, to be considered the best judge of what kind of car is the best choice for you. And nobody in this thread has said otherwise.
Is it uphill both ways? Then, if so, an EV might not be right for your particularities.
Coincidence? You decide.
I’ve heard people who have never actually driven one refer to EV’s as “golf carts.”
Overall, it’s Seanette I feel sorry for. She seems nice.
Gas pumps, at least in my state, do not have battery backup. I don’t know why, but I assume cost. If my company felt it would make them money to have back up you can bet they’d have it. Hell, we stay open when the power is out. We can’t sell, gas, fountain (our biggest profit that also doesn’t have battery back up), cold/frozen, or prepared food. All we can sell is shelf stable items, and we have to write everything down. TL;DR: Battery back up isn’t profitable and if the grid is down so is gasoline.
This comes up from time to time.
I’m not embracing a falsehood, but give me a moment to explain. It is NOT because I’m right and your wrong about gender identity.
It’s because I’m not embracing a theory of gender identity at all.
I’m embracing a little kid who needs support from the people around them. I’m not interested in debating biology or nature vs nurture, because theory is just theory and I’m looking at a real human kid who needs a hand finding their place in the world.
I recently reached out to a kid’s mom about a new girls scouting program I was involved with. I thought the kid would be thrilled at the opportunity, but instead I was told the child was trans, had joined a nearby boys scouting program, felt shunned by his peers, unsupported by the adults, and quit scouting altogether. This nice kid who I remembered as a smiling, energized participant in Cub Scouts is out altogether because the people around him didn’t support him.
This isn’t a formal debate where one side gets to win because they had better support for their theory. It’s kids asking for recognition, for support so trivial it’s buggers the imagination to call it “support” at all. It’s not cool to think that definitions and word usage is more important than actual living kids.
This: We are encouraged to look at the P&L statements for our store. We make almost no profit on gasoline. Seriously it is shit all, this is true of smokes too. The profit is in fountain; we make and enormous profit on fountain and prepared food and we sell a lot of those items despite the sky high prices. The discontinuation of gasoline would probably increase the profits for at least the individual store. Of course that sort of depends on how expensive it is to maintain charging stations. I’ll be interested to see.
I just want to make this line stand out.
Just FTR, I’m not an EV hater. I just am not entirely convinced that they’re appropriate for every situation yet- the public safety concerns I brought up were just examples of situations where they might not be appropriate.
And I also think convenience plays a role too; I don’t agree with the idea that people should be expected to put up with some of the currently onerous issues that come with EVs in some situations- driving well out of your way and having to devote large amounts of time to charging, when there’s a much more convenient alternative (ICE) speaks more to a limitation with EVs than it does about the people not willing to do that.
Remedy that stuff, and people will vote with their wallets. For my part, if they could get me a 400 mile range, a full charging time no more than 10 minues, and a 15 year full capability lifetime, I’d happily buy an EV. Without that, the alternatives look better at the moment. But I do believe they’ll get there one way or another in the next decade or so.
As many of us have said, EVs do not currently work for every person or every conceivable situation. (same for ICE, of course). I think owning an EV would be a pain if one didn’t have home charging ability. (not impossible, but certainly something you’d have to deal with). People who often take long trips and don’t like 30 minute stops would also do better with an ICE vehicle (i.e., a “real car.”).
My wife and I have relied on EVs only for the past four years. We have charged outside our home out of necessity probably 5 times. That extra hour or two of our lives pales in comparison to the ease of home charging, never going to a gas station, and the driving experience of an EV over an ICE. I won’t mention saving money, because we spent quite a bit more for EVs than we ever spent for an ICE vehicle.
I will mention the reduction of exhaust. YMMV.
I’m not going to address your comment that they’re not appropriate for every situation, because EVERYONE HERE HAS ALREADY SAID EXACTLY THAT.
But you really should examine this bit about going out of your way and devoting time to filling up. How many times do you fill up your gas tank in a year? Do you have a storage tank at home, or do you have to divert to a gas station? How many times do you get your oil changed, and how long does it take?
I’ve gone out of my way and waited to fill up my EV exactly zero times in the last year, and that’s with a few road trips 150 miles each way. If I made a few 400 mile road trips and had to spend 30 minutes charging in the middle, the time spent would still be way less than the time I’d otherwise spend on gas station stops and oil changes.
I said in another thread, if EVs were the standard for a typical driver, and you told them they could get a car that would only need a 10-minute stop instead of a 30 minute stop on their few long road trips, but the tradeoff would be they’d have to stop at gas stations a couple times every week and spend 30-60 minutes getting oil changes a couple times a year, they’d laugh. All the time you spend on fill-ups and oil changes is normalized for you, so you discount it and focus on that 400 mile road trip.
And because somehow this still must be repeated in every post, that doesn’t mean EVs work for everyone. But at least evaluate it honestly. It doesn’t need to be as good as an ICE car on road trips if it is so much better everywhere else.
That sums it up. But I take very few road trips, so the calculus is easy. Plus, I’m no longer in a hurry on road trips, and enjoy taking my time, and stopping for 30 minutes to catch up on my emails or stretch my legs. I don’t even exceed the speed limit most of the time. In my younger days, I’d drive 8 hours straight as fast as I could, with only a break for gas.
I am… I don’t drive that many miles for the most part, but when I do, it’s typically on long road trips. So those are pretty prominent in my personal calculations. And they’re typically with a group of people (Scout troop and Cub Scout pack) who drive ICE cars, so having to go miles out of the group’s way and spend extra time charging is a non-starter right now for me. Plus, we do enough gardening/home improvement and I haul enough stuff for the Scouts that I pretty much need a small/mid-sized pickup.
If all I did was drive to and from work a couple of days a week, and schlep my kids to various things in the general area, then an EV would be fantastic for me. But EV pickups are either astronomically expensive, ugly as sin, or non-existent, and I go far enough off the beaten path often enough that an EV isn’t for me.
It’s not necessarily the happy path that people are concentrating on- it’s the edge cases where EVs aren’t right for many right now, whether it’s functionality, cost, or availability.
Totally fair. I had my own list of “if they haves” but never really paid a whole lot of attention to how EVs and self driving was these days. One conversation over dinner with a friend three weeks ago fought my ignorance and one test drive the next day convinced me that a Tesla with the full self driving was ideal for me. I owned one six days later.
Now that I have done a lot of research including on this board I have been surprised about the level of ignorance (to be clear not from @bump) and hostility over Teslas. I get the Elon hate but damn. I was ignorant about them too but I didn’t speak with such authority about them because I knew I didn’t know about them.
I’ve said this a few times in the other EV thread, but just for anyone reading here, this is not true if, like me, you can charge at your work. When we were looking to get a new car several years ago, I absolutely did not consider an EV because I can’t charge at home. Then I happened to see the EV chargers in my work garage and saw that my employer subsidized the cost of charging there. And I thought: wait a second! Let me rearrange my brain to consider work charging. I was already driving in at least once a week, so doing the charging then instead of at home made sense. And because my employer wants to “be green,” the charging rates are ludicrously low.
And it’s not just my employer. I was at an event at a middle school last weekend and they had six chargers in their lot that were completely free of charge. If you worked there, you could probably go an entire year (outside of a long road trip) without paying anything for charging.
So if you want an EV but can’t charge at home, check to see if you can charge at work!