What’s really going on is that we don’t believe you when you say you’ll forget to plug in your car. First, because the actual experience of EV drivers is that forgetting to plug in is at most an incredibly rare event. And second, because there are obviously other things in your life that you manage not to forget. Roughly every day, I hope, you take a shit–perhaps tens of thousands of times over the years–and every single time, you wipe your ass. Have you ever forgotten? No, because it’s important and besides, the toilet paper is right there.
Maybe you don’t magange to plug in your phone every night. If that’s the case, it’s because you don’t really value it much; the consequences to having a dead phone aren’t that dire for you. So you don’t bother arranging things mentally and physically to ensure you always have a charged phone.
With an EV, and especially if you expect to use the full range on occasion, it’s important to plug in. So you make sure the plug is easily accessible and within sight lines so as to jog your memory. Have to pee? It literally takes 5 seconds to plug in. It’s just not a hard thing to do.
I have many EV driving friends and family now, including my grandmother in her mid 80s, and exactly none of them have problems with remembering to plug in.
Of course it is. EVs are also 100+ years old, but they sucked so bad for most situations that nobody made them. Except for the niche applications where they made sense; e.g. there’s reasons NASA didn’t go with ICE on moon buggies. We built infrastructure for the superior technology. That is changing. And we’ve seen it change before. We eventually dieselified trucking and built out fueling infrastructure. I predict we will eventually electrify light duty passenger cars and build out charging infrastructure. But the reason we have one infrastructure and not another is absolutely due to the century of inherent superiority of ICE.
And in line with superior EVs, I read the other day about a company in CA that has Teslas with 300k miles. Some even near 500k. They’ve encountered some design issues that Tesla has since fixed. But generally the drivetrains are going strong and maintenance costs are lower:
I might not like the ludicrously slow charging times, but I also don’t like ludicrously frequent oil changes.
Yeah, I’m not getting his argument either. It’s well proven that people will plan trips with gas stations, bathrooms, and any number of other things in mind, so why not charging stations? And nobody forgets to gas their car up when needed, so why would they forget to charge their EV?
Cell phones aren’t a good proxy; most everyone who *forgets *to charge them tend to be addled old farts who still have land-line phones anyway. No one under 50 is likely to actually forget regularly without brain damage of some kind, or if they’re leading a lifestyle that is almost entirely off the grid. I suspect the people who would forget to charge their car is probably similar to that same crowd.
one big thing that slanted the market in favor of spark ignition ICEs is that they could run well on the mid-light distillate fraction of oil (gasoline) which was relatively useless at the time. too volatile for lamps or heating, too light for lubrication, and too “dirty” for use as a cleaning solvent.
I’m still a little leery about charging time. I’ve not been shy about mentioning the CX727 from Ford, now revealed to be the Mustang Mach-E. Disregard the name; I’m still excited to get my hands on one. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about non-local use, though.
I’ve taken a look at the current state (note: the Mach-E is about a year out) at Ford’s new charging network using our map your trip tool (which, frustratingly, isn’t directly linkable), and I’m still worried about range anxiety when I map common destinations (to me) from the Dearborn, MI area.
Sure, they’re in the network, but should I count on the one charger that’s available at the Volkswagen dealer on my route? And even if I get 32 miles of range in 10 minutes, how long do I have to wait in Kalamazoo to use one of the two chargers that are available? It might be nice to chat with other Mach-E owners who are also waiting for the charger, except I have to be in Chicago Heights for a meeting.
I’ve got an ICE vehicle, so this kind of stuff is still a minor inconvenience, because I have a choice. And, oh, I’m getting a Mach-E. That’s pretty much written in stone. But I’m a 95%-er, and I have options. I can’t help but have concerns for the populace in general.
I’m guessing the Mach-E will use the CCS standard for charging, so you’ll be able to use any charger of that kind - you’re not limited to ones within Ford’s network. I see the Sam’s Club in Kalamazoo has a station with 6 CCS chargers, and there are a few others on your route. By the time the Mach-E is available, there will presumably be others, including whatever Ford has installed for their network.
The reason everyone has a problem with what you’re posting here is that:
Your only expertise on the subject is whatever you’ve gathered on the Internet, as you’ve stated. If that’s the standard, I might be considered a physician because I’ve read quite a few articles.
You are saying that an EV isn’t right for you - which everyone agrees with — and then you go further and say only automatons can use an EV reliably. That isn’t fighting ignorance, that’s spreading misinformation.
You’re also arguing that EVs can’t handle 230-ish miles of driving over two days. As probably every EV driver in this thread will tell you, that is wrong.
You are continually arguing that using an EV requires a lot of mental effort. The drivers of EVs in this thread will tell you that’s wrong. Further, users of Tesla’s Autopilot almost certainly use less mental effort in driving than literally any ICE driver.
You can’t position yourself as an expert fighting against ignorance when the people you’re arguing with know more than you and have pointed out the disinformation that you are spreading — even if you really really feel like you know what you’re talking about.
EVs were solidly present at the beginning of the automotive industry. They were very popular in cities with a burgeoning electrical grid. This was no small task because the turn of the century saw a switch from DC to AC. EV’s were easy to build and had an additional market outlet of women who would otherwise have struggled with hand cranked ICE cars.
So EV’s are nothing new. Despite the higher complexity of ICE cars and lower performance it was the ease of fuel distribution that won out.
the technology is not new as I’ve already pointed out. And nobody has suggested the technology is inferior.
According to the people who own them they are not inconvenienced because the cars fit their niche requirements. But yes, you’re repeating what I’ve been saying. As battery technology improves and infrastructure grows you will see EV’s completely replace ICE cars.
I like the sheer irony of EV fanatics on one hand complaining that I’m discounting their experiences if I counter by pointing out that their experience is not universally applicable, and on the other hand telling me that they don’t believe me when I talk about myself. And the dogged obsessiveness with which they keep arguing that everyone must be exactly like them, and that no one could possibly not be exactly like them, and must be lying if the aren’t.
And the fact that the weird insistence that no one will ever neglect to charge a car lets them avoid actually discussing that EVs are not as convenient as they claim.
The second quote discusses “a handful of fanatical EV proponents on the SDMB” and not the “EV drivers” that the first quote claimed I made a statement about. Those are two distinct groups. The phrase ‘real people’ does not occur anywhere in the second quote, at all, even though the first quote claims I used it. I will happily stand behind my claim that SDMB users are not typical people, but it isn’t either of the statements that the first quote claims I made.
Yep, and your quoting a statement that makes no claim about ‘EV drivers’ supports my argument that I didn’t make a particular claim about ‘EV drivers’.
In other words, the objection I’m using actual independent sources of information instead of highly biased personal anecdotes, and don’t accept that highly unusual personal experiences are universal. If what you’re doing is the standard, then someone should be considered a physician because they once slapped a band-aid on a pimple, and we should ignore someone citing medical journals because that doesn’t involve personal experience.
I have literally never made this claim. Repeating strawmen doesn’t make them real.
I have literally never made this claim. Strawman again.
I have literally never made this claim. Do you ever get tired of strawmen?
No one has been able to point out any actual disinformation that I’m supposedly spreading, making up hilariously exaggerated arguments that are sort of like something I said and then ‘defeating’ them doesn’t count.
If you’re actually trying to ‘get my argument’, it would help to respond to something I’ve actually argued, and not weird distortions other people have made up. I have never claimed that people will not plan trips around charging stations. Also while it’s not something I’ve argued, people do sometimes forget to gas their car up when needed, that’s why roadside assistance plans typically include ‘bring a gallon of gas if you run out of gas’ as one of the services offered.
I have known numerous people in their teens, 20s and 30s who forget to charge phones and tend to follow a ‘run until empty, then frantically find a charger’ strategy. I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as ‘brain damage’ or why you think people with it don’t count as people worthy of consideration. In a broad definition anyone who has ever drunk alcohol has some degree of brain damage and that’s a rather large portion of the population, in a smaller definition anyone who uses psych medication would count as ‘brain damaged’ and that is about a sixth of the population of the US.
Are you asserting that no one with any kind of ‘brain damage’ should own EVs? That seems a really odd claim, since there are EVs specifically designed to help people with brain damage severe enough to cause major mobility issues.
The debate in this thread is really about this. EV proponents and owners think they’re pretty typical drivers and that EV usage now is common sense for a wide variety of non-niche drivers. The other side thinks EVs work for certain niche subset of car owners, and that they’re not broadly practical.
Everyone thinks they know what “typical” vehicle usages is. Personally, I was surprised how infrequently I drive over 200 miles. In the past, it was more a part of my lifestyle. I believe that there are many drivers like me, who would find a 200 mile range more than adequate for 99% of their needs and that–like me-- they wouldn’t mind a few stops on a longer trip that would probably happen less than once per year. That “inconvenience” is more than offset by the fact I start with a “full tank” every money and the performance and reliability of an EV. If someone else feels differently, it’s no skin off my butt.
The thing about this “strategy” is that it often works out just fine. In their world, things are OK. Perhaps a bit frantic at times, but OK.
With an EV, it’s not ever going to be OK. You can’t bum a charger off of your coworker and drive to Grandma’s house. This strategy is a complete failure with an EV. People who are competent won’t follow a strategy that is a complete failure every single time it’s used. Nobody with a functioning brain will say “this works for my cell phone, why not for my car?”
This is one of the many reasons why the cell phone analogy doesn’t work. A dead battery in a cell phone is a minor inconvenience. A dead battery in an EV (or any car, really) is a HUGE inconvenience.
I think that people are forgetful enough that in the near term it would cause issues for people with medium-length commutes that do not have a charger in between them and home. For those with short commutes they’d mentally know they’re “running on empty” once the battery is low but still have enough juice to get back to their home charger, but mentally if you see that you have 25% power left it might not click in your brain that you need to plug in even though you don’t have enough power or any way of getting power on next day’s commute.
In the medium to long term of course, there will probably be a lot of chargers springing up in urban and suburban environments for just these situations, and if they are superchargers, even if you are running late, it would be not much more inconvenient than having to stop for gas on the way to work.
A difference is that typical use for a car - any car – is less than 50-ish miles per day. EVs on the market today will handle several days worth of driving without needing to be recharged. Older EVs would need to be recharged every day, or at most every other day, to handle this typical use.
A smartphone will usually last about a day without recharging. Not plugging in at night is a bigger deal. But, if you go back to flip phones, many of them could last several days on one charge. Being able to borrow a charger just wasn’t a big deal with those older phones.
So for iPhones/Nissan LEAFs, not plugging in at night, every night, is a big deal. And if you don’t, recharging the LEAF is a bigger deal.
For flip phones/new EVs, not plugging in at night is totally fine. Just do it the next day – unless something unusual is happening.
As others have said, the car flashes your remaining range when you park it. The cord is usually the first thing you see when you exit your vehicle. I have forgotten many things in my life, but I have never forgotten to plug in my car. (my previous car, a Volt, I forgot to plug in one time in 7 years).
There are certainly reasons range can be an issue for EV’s. Forgetting to charge just isn’t one of them. It really isn’t.
Pantastic has a point that EV owners will forget to charge, and it’s a drawback for EV adoption as compared to gas cars. With a gas car, forgetting to get gas after driving home on Sunday night from a 300 mile weekend trip is likely only going to result in a delay of 5-10 minutes on Monday morning for the commute in to work. Forgetting to plug in an EV after a long trip will likely result in much more annoying consequences (1-2 hours of charging on a Level 2), unless Level 3 charging is super convenient. I’ve certainly forgotten to charge before, as I’ve mentioned upthread, but since the battery is roughly 5X my daily commute distance, it doesn’t matter.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend buying an EV with a battery capacity anything less than 3X your “daily typical” mileage, just to make sure that this sort of occasional “forgot to charge because I had too much stuff in my hand and thought I’d go back to it five minutes later, but then got distracted” event is well covered. Also, If you’re the type of person that drives a 250+ mile trip every weekend, i’d also think twice about ensuring you have some sort of contingency in place for the rare event you do forget to charge.
I think his argument goes off the rails with the insistence that driving a 250+ mile trip, then forgetting to charge is going to be a frequent event that’s going to happen multiple times a year for the majority of “real people” out there, and that remembering to charge qualifies as “planning my life around the car” beyond the loosest sense.
