I disbelieve claims by EV proponents that directly contradict reference sites, published articles by EV users about actual experiences, and claims by EV companies themselves. Tesla’s website shows charger location. When an EV proponent tells me that there is definitely a supercharger on the way in my route and that L2 chargers are at every shopping center, but Tesla’s website says there is no supercharger on my route and that L2 chargers are few and far between, I’m going to believe that website over an obviously biased party.
This is especially when EV proponents also do things like assume that leaving the highway, getting to a charger, attaching, detaching, and getting back onto the highway takes literally zero time. The extremely hostile and outright nasty behavior that they either engage in or fail to criticize from their own side doesn’t help either.
Calling the Tesla website that maps charging stations or published data on charging times “my fiction” indicates an absurd level of bias on your part.
Again, the whole history of the conversation is still up in this thread. I mentioned a simple scenario that involved not plugging the car in on one night. EV proponents have made a substantial deal out of the idea that no one ever, never, not even once ever neglects to plug in a device, and I have responded by pointing out how absurd and unrealistic their idea of automatons who never, ever forget to charge a device are.
Just to point out how much of a strawman this is: The scenario that I posted did not involve someone who knew that they are going to be driving a long way the next day.
The scenario was reasonable. What’s unreasonable is EV proponent’s weird insistence that everyone everywhere will without fail follow a regimen of charing the vehcile like clockwork every day. Declaring that a perfectly ordinary commute or people acting like humans instead of automatons is ‘unreasonable’ does not make it so.
In other words, you and all of the other EV fanatics who berated me for questioning the assumption of having a car always at 100% charge were completely and wrong, even for a brand new vehicle (much less the older vehicle I assumed) but none of you will own it and apologize for it.
Just like I said in the original example, the EV involves the significant inconvenience of spending an hour or more charging by going to a charger (including one at home, which in the scenario would involve roughly an hour of driving an extra 50 miles). Contrary to the claims being bandied around, it is not just as easy as using a gas car. Just like I said and people jumped on me for.
I have no idea why EV fanatics keep repeating this patently untrue claim, but it’s very clearly not true, because I do not need to sit down and plan out gas stops, regardless of what clothes I’m wearing. Getting gas means I spend 10 minutes (high estimate, including time to leave and get back on the highway) to fill up on the way at one of the abundant gas stations on the trip, either when starting the trip or when gas gets low. I don’t need to use ANY mental energy whatsoever to plan for these stops in advance.
The example did not use an area with ‘zero public charging infrastructure’, it used my area with the actual public charging infrastructure that it has. If you mean that you consider the entire Midwest and Southeast to be an area with zero public charging infrastructure and that no one should own an EV there, that is a rather more extreme position than I have ever advocated.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but at some point in the future, you WILL have to start planning your gas stops pretty carefully. As gas cars are slowly replaced, gas stations will be closing all over the country.
At some point, you’ll be cursing, trying to figure out where an open gas station is and I hope you’ll remember this thread with fondness.
I like spending 10 minutes or less getting to and using one of the plentiful gas stations that are along every route that I drive to recharge an ICE vehicle to 100% more than I do driving 20 minutes out of my way then 20 minutes back to spend 40 minutes to charge an EV to 80% capacity.
To put it in perspective: In order to not pass multiple gas stations while taking a trip out of the area, I would have to deliberately get out of town using residential roads instead of 35-45mph roads. To not pass gas stations on the trip, I would likely need to avoid taking sensible routes entirely and avoid just getting onto 55 Mph small roads, and could not use any freeways or interstates at all. In order to get to a supercharger from my house, I’d need to spend 20+ minutes driving across town through traffic, or pick one of the few routes that intersects one. Taking the freeway to my parent’s house (as an example) would not get any closer to one for the entire route, and they don’t live in some tiny Nebraska farm town, they’re in a town of 50,000 with a medical school and regional hospital.
According to the article, the biggest batch of closures is gas stations inside of big cities like NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and so on - the article says “Ten years from now, gas stations may be pushed out of central cities and concentrated near highway off-ramps.” Gas stations out of central cities and concentrated near highway off-ramps are the ones I use for fueling on a trip so… I’m not really sure how the closing of gas stations that I would try to avoid when traveling should worry me. To put it in perspective, there were literally 2-6 gas stations at every exit that advertised gas on my last trip. If 75% of those gas stations went out of business, I would still not need to do any planning to find gas stations to ‘charge’ at, and would still not need to leave my route to refuel.
“You should buy an EV right now because one day gas engines will be phased out, but even the article I cited makes it pretty clear that this won’t happen within the next decade” is not an argument I find convincing.
We’re still in the leftmost couple of ticks (at most) on this graph representing the number of new adopters over time (Frank Bass’ diffusion model) when it comes to EVs.
Well, you really should include human-powered vehicles (guessing in the millions) and animal-drawn vehicles (guessing in the tens of thousands). Steam engines with external combustion are probably less than a hundred.
Here’s an interesting question (where’s Cecil when you need him): on a daily basis, do more people use a bicycle, or more people use an electric vehicle?
You’re reading a few things on the Internet and contradicting the experience of many EV owners. You know, when you’re talking to a bunch of EV owners, it’s pretty easy to dismiss a “But this is what EV owners are saying!” It’s kinda like mansplaining to a woman what it’s like to be a woman.
You’re talking about the charger just off of the Strawman Argument Parkway? Literally nobody is saying this.
You said that an EV can’t drive 230 miles over two days if it isn’t recharged. This is untrue, but you keep repeating it.
Plugging in an EV is just a routine thing. If you are the type of person who forgets to brush their teeth, has a phone constantly running out of charge, leaves the garage door open and the stove on, and so on, then you’re probably not fit to remember a lot of things. But I don’t think most people are that forgetful.
If we are talking about perfectly ordinary commutes, any new EV can handle at least several days worth of those without recharging. But you keep shifting goalposts, so your definition of a “normal commute” may involve driving from San Francisco to Hawaii – for which I admit there are no superchargers on that route.
Because we also do not need to sit down and plan out charging stops. This is what we keep telling you. Most EVs design the route for you if you need to charge. It takes no mental energy, but you keep insisting that it does. (See the mansplaining comment above.)
I’m using actual facts on the straight dope, which is what this board is supposed to be about. EV fanatics are extending their personal experience in one area to areas where all of empirical fact shows that it does not apply (like availability of charging stations) and attempting to claim that I’m being dishonest for using the factual information like Tesla’s charging website. If anything is like mansplaining, it’s people who live in weird areas like EP, where chargers are plentiful and gas stations hard to find attempting to tell me what using an EV would be like in an area where chargers are rare and gas stations are plentiful.
“I own an EV, therefore everything I say about EVs must be unquestionably 100% accepted as true” is not a legitimate argument.
Literally everybody criticizing my estimate of charging time on the Charleston trip used purely battery charge time with no additional time for from the highway to the charging station and back to the highway. Those posts are still up, it’s not a strawman.
At no point did I ever make this claim, or anything remotely like it. This is yet another strawman.
At no point did I shift what I was talking about with a normal commute. Nor did I use any commute that crosses multiple states or large bodies of water. Nor did I deny that any particular EV could handle several days of the commute without recharging. This is yet another blatant strawman.
This contradicts not only what other EV proponents have said in the thread, but literally what the EV proponent that my comment was a direct response to said.
Yes, you’ve made it clear that you’re the sort of person who uses insults (often explicitly bigoted insults) and bluster instead of making genuine arguments. I’m glad you’re showcasing your style for anyone new to the thread.
I’ve owned and used as my primary commuting vehicle a Chevy Bolt for over two years now. I typically charge it up to 80%, which gives about 190 miles of range. My typical daily commute is 30 miles each way, plus another 10 or so miles for ferrying kids around. I’ve forgotten to plug it in for its nightly recharge exactly twice. And that affected my commute: not at all; except that I was extra sure not to forget to plug it in the next night.
The longest trip we’ve used it for was one Saturday we had events in both Claremont and Thousand Oaks. Total distance for that day was about 180 miles. So I charged it up to 100% the previous night instead of the usual 80% and we were fine for range. Basically, as long as we stay in LA county, there’s absolutely no reason to worry about range. And staying in SoCal is fine if we fully charge up.
The marginal cost for us with the Bolt is about 0.02 per mile. Our second vehicle is a Lexus RX450h. Its marginal cost is about .15 per mile. That’s not counting maintenance costs for oil, oil filters, brake pads, transmission fluid, etc. The only advantages it has are farther range and larger cargo space. So we use the RX for camping trips and the Bolt for everything else.
I’m no early adopter. Commuting across a metropolis with an electric car is simply better than with a gassy car.
Both the Santee & the Florence, SC superchargers are located about 1/4-1/3 mile from the freeway exit, and are just a little bit farther than what the most convenient gas station is. Yes, the diversion time is non-zero, but it certainly doesn’t add up to your “3 hours of charging” calculation.
I think we can still agree though, that an electric vehicle is not suitable for your needs, and you should not buy one.
I’m a bit baffled then as to why you are so passionate about making sure that CURRENT electric vehicle owners are so very, very wrong about their personal experience.
Let’s give Pantastic a little credit. He hasn’t argued that EVs explode all the time because BATTERY ACID!!! and then linked to like the ten pictures online of a Tesla in flames.
If you were genuinely sorry, you’d apologize for the bigoted insults you slung around and would stop with the bluster, insults, and false statements. But you don’t.
I don’t agree with your explicit statement (which I’ve quoted above), notably the “not EVER [caps in original]”. You have made that particular statement multiple times, though in the latest post you’re backing down from it slightly, in a pattern of shiftiness that I’ve seen throughout the thread.
We also all know, however much you want to dodge around it, that you’ve made it clear that your reason for saying it is not that an electric vehicle would actually not be suitable for me, but because I pointed out that people, including me, sometimes don’t charge devices, and you believe that this indicates that I am not suited for modern society. The facade of politeness doesn’t change that your whole statement is really just a blustering insult. If you really were sorry, you’d cut it out.
I am baffled why you’d make a statement like this that doesn’t even make sense. How would I even go about making sure that people are wrong about their personal experience in the first place? Even if there’s a typo in there, at exactly what point have I said that people were wrong about their personal experiences (as opposed to disputing that their personal experience should be considered universal)?
Overall, are you really baffled that I’m fighting ignorance on this board? It’s right up there at the top of the page.
Yet another of so, so many strawmen in this thread - at no point have I stated that EV drivers are automatons or that they aren’t real people. Really stretching hard at this point.