I also think that there are a lot of people who are aware that their use pattern would not fit an EV car perfectly RIGHT NOW, but that you’ll dismiss as either making stuff up or as completely fringe cases. EV proponents have argued that my using ‘drive 10 miles to go out with friends’ is some kind of weird edge case that I threw in for no good reason, even though that is a low end estimate and it’s not uncommon for people near where I live to do (I usually make 2-3 50 mile trips on evenings, as do many other people t those events). EV proponents think that one should assume charging every night, even though there lots of situations where that doesn’t work. EV proponents think one should assume that charging stations are frequent and easy to get to, even though Tesla’s website says differently.
And there are a lot of people who’s use pattern RIGHT NOW might work, but not their pattern next week or next year. People in this thread want to talk about ‘irregular events’ like they’re so rare that they can be ignored, but plenty of people do drives other than their daily commute several times a week, have friends and relatives who aren’t close by and don’t have charging infrastructure that they visit fairly often but not as part of their commute, get new jobs or new housing situations that don’t fit the old pattern, need to travel for medical treatment, and so on.
If I’m going to buy a car, especially one as painfully as expensive as an EV, I don’t want to invest in something that handles only my daily commute and only right now, I want one that will handle my daily commute, my irregular but common travel, and situations that are not incredible unlikely to occur during the 5+ years I’ll be using that car. Planning for RIGHT NOW only is not a good idea.
Or they look at actual locations of chargers, their actual charging and driving patterns, and realize that an EV would cause them significant headaches and time.
No, and I’m really not sure why you all are so insistent on making blatantly incorrect statements. The scenario in question had the EV driver forgetting to plug in on one single night, then making a trip to stay with someone who’s home doesn’t have parking that can charge the car (just like the actual apartment of a friend of mine who lives the distance in question from me).
Do EV fanatics really have a hard time comprehending that chargers are not actually ubiquitous, especially for people renting a property where the parking is a dirt lot around the side of the building outside of extension cord range or street parking a block or two away?
No access to charging at the friend’s house in his scenario, I believe, so not charging Friday or Saturday isn’t forgetting. It’s all kind of silly, because the parameters of the scenario were set up to be just beyond typical range, so I’m really not sure why he started out with the forgetting the charging thing instead of just make the friend live further away. I mean, he’s got a point that sometimes we use cars in ways that require longer range than one charge. The dispute is whether those situations are common enough to worry about how to deal with them. The answer to that varies enough between regions and persons that it’s actually kind of silly how heated the argument has gotten at times.
I will continue to maintain that right now charging infrastructure is entirely adequate for at least 25% of vehicles (based on my half of all second/third cars in a household calculation) and that this is a large enough number to drive rapid growth of charging infrastructure which will in turn rapidly increase that 25%. Pushing from 25% to 75% or so should be pretty easy. The last 25% (roughly, half of all first cars in a household) will take longer. Obviously there will be significant variation by region on this as well.
Honestly, none of this should really be controversial.
In this scenario, is the EV driver completely unaware of the diminishing range of his car during this four-day period? So like, the car is just going to stop in the middle of the road and he will have had no idea what just happened?
So you stop in Huntsville for 10 minutes and supercharge while you have a bathroom break and stretch your legs. Even a gas stop with two people taking bathroom breaks is going to be 10 minutes. With young children, much longer. That will give you plenty of range to run around Houston after driving down. That is the today plan, which also includes “use a Tesla.” The in the future plan will have many more options.
I grew up in Texas, so I know that Austin/Dallas and even Houston/Dallas are often day trips. If you do plan to come back the same day, then you will have to find some level 3 charging at your destination. If the plan is to sit at your in-laws all day, then that would be annoying. If you plan to be out and about, then you need to arrange to be at one of the superchargers around Houston for an hour. That’s real bad if you have no reason to be near one, but not a big deal at all if your getting dinner a block away from one.
I think the biggest mental switch that has to happen is to start thinking “what can I do to make an EV work” instead of “why won’t one work?” It doesn’t take long to realize that most situations with an EV are manageable with very little inconvenience. I would also trade the inconvenience of having rare trips take 20-40 minutes longer for charging, but never having the inconvenience of having to get gas at other times. The response by some in this thread is that getting gas every week or so is not an inconvenience, which it is to me, and is what prompted my “lottery tickets and slim jims” comment from a few days ago.
See the link in post 807. As of today, only five vehicles can even do 250 miles, & three of them are in the luxury price range.
I guess until then I’ll just continue to use my flying car. :rolleyes:
So if I get home first & either forget to or don’t want to bundle up in the cold/rain to unplug & move my car you’re SoL because there’s no charger for you to use? Just like if you check at 10pm, I move my car at 10:05 & you fall asleep & don’t go out again. I doubt a lot of people would consider one without dedicated home charging.
…except for the windows. Hint: They ain’t shatterproof, Elon. :smack:
This is where Pantastic’s “plan my life around my car” comment comes from. By your own admission, I can do that today in only one brand of car. You also have me going out to dinner in a certain neighborhood; whether that neighborhood is convenient or not going out costs much more than eating at home.
I can fill my tank in < 4 mins; because gas stations are nearly everywhere, it’s not more than a minute or two out of my way. Even if there’s a line, I’m fully charged again in 7-8 minutes.
I think a lot of the complaints are that you have to make EVs work instead of them just working. I think this is why the iPhone took of it was easy for everyone and required much less effort then the palm pilots that had similar technology.
As for filling often vs filling longer. I think this comes down to if you are a person who does long drives. 60% of our population doesn’t drive more than 50 miles from home in a year while the other 40% average more than two 50+ mile trips per month. When you are already spending hours on the road extending it by an hour is brutal but if you are only spending 30 min on the road simply stopping is the pain.
That sounds suspiciously like zealotry… those are the questions that the vendors need to be asking, not the consumers. It’s not our problem to make ourselves fit EVs, but rather the other way around.
Given the choice between EVs and ICE vehicles, most people aren’t going to switch until EVs are clearly superior in ways that outweigh ICEs.
And this is where I push back. Very, very few things “just work.” Driving an ICE car means making trade-offs and concessions, but most people don’t think about it, because they’ve been doing it their entire life. Replacing an old ICE car with a new ICE car won’t change many of those. Replacing an ICE car with an EV will change some of them. For me, where as a household we drive 30-100 miles a day, the trade-offs leave us net better with an EV than an ICE car. I don’t consider changing my routine planning my life.
I totally agree, extending an already long drive to make it even longer is bad. The point I’ve made several times is that this happens to me already. I’ve got a car with children and old people. No stop is ever less than 30 minutes, and we’ve only done road trips in ICE cars. I’m sure I’m not the only one who goes on trips with kids or people who decide they want to buy a drink to go with that snack after everybody has gotten back into the car. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds.
Some of this is for practicality reasons, as fast charging is much quicker (in terms of kW from the charger to the car) when starting at ~10% battery charge than trying to top off at 90%. Thus the quickest way to reach your destination is usually to reach a charger with only a 5-10% buffer.
Some of this is due to the fact that EVs are much more efficient (around double the range) when driven slowly, so if there isn’t enough margin left to reach the destination , the car (Tesla) will notice it and just tell you to drive slower. This provides some additional confidence that you aren’t going to “run out” on the way to your destination, assuming you can follow the speed limits suggested by the car.
Some of this is just based on past experience. If the navigation tells you that you’re going to arrive with x% amount of charge, and you generally do, you learn to trust the nav.
I think you have to look at outlier use. Not outlier individuals, but the outlier use of any particular individual.
For instance, we are considering replacing our car. My husband would like to get a Camry to tide us over until there are more hybrid electric options on the market. He even tested the trunk and determined that the sound system I cart to an event every year will fit in it. But then I thought – what about the pole saw I lent a friend a couple of months ago? What about the apple picker I take to the orchard once a year? Or the rakes I brought to my company’s annual service day. What if a friend asks me to bring a couple of folding chairs with me? My current car is a hatchback and if I’m driving alone, it can carry any of those items. I don’t think a Camry can.
Is that my normal daily commute? No. But I’m not going to rent a car to lend a pole saw to a friend. But it’s nice to be able to lend a pole saw to a friend. Effectively, I become poorer if I can’t do that.
Same deal with an electric car. It’s not good enough to do the daily drive. It also needs to do the weird outlier thing you want to do once or twice a year. (Unless you have another car that can handle that.) Because otherwise, you will feel poor and crimped and resent the car. It’s not like it’s trivial to rent a car for a weekend, it’s a hassle, and takes a couple hours out of your precious weekend time.
I notice the “vault” on the Cybertruck is 6’5" long. That means it’s too small to compete with the full-size pickups, and instead will class against the Ford Ranger/Chevy Colorado class. However, with the coffin lid on, I guess it will make a fine SUV competitor.
Full-size pickups rarely have full length boxes these days. Most are sold with 6’6" boxes, or even 5’6" boxes, because a full 8’ box behind a 4-door crew cab is a monstrous beast of a truck. Back in the day when pickups had a single bench seat then yeah, sure, a 6 1/2 foot box wasn’t competitive. Now it is.
The bigger issue is the high box sides. Ask Honda how well people like those.
The R1T only has a 55" bed so 6.5’ will feel roomy. High sides are really tough and while a lot of my friends have bed covers to keep their tools from getting stolen they can still reach under the cover by the cab to grab small things they stash there. I hated bed covers since they made loading a wshing machine or what ever really difficult. I’m not quite sure how the bed cover rolls up and how much space it takes up when back but aside from the ramp this seems like a difficult bed to live with for a different reason than the R1T.
Chargers aren’t ubiquitous, but electrical outlets are. And it’s easy to tote around a charger – it’s comparable to toting around jumper cables. FWIW, I have friends who have charged their EVs in dirt lots by snaking an extension cord from the nearby farmhouse.
On the other hand, if you park on the street, and don’t have a place of your own to stash your car, you should not buy an EV in the current market. If your usual daily mileage is more than the range of the electric vehicles in your price range (which might not include any electric vehicles) then you shouldn’t buy an electric car right now. If you sometimes do long road trips, and you live in a one-car household, you may not want an EV. If the limited options in EVs don’t work for you for some other reason, then the market isn’t ready for you, yet.
It is ready for a growing number of people. And hey, I see a growing number of EVs on the road. What a coincidence! I expect that trend to continue. But the US auto fleet turns over very slowly, and I expect to see ICE cars for the foreseeable future, too.
Hmm, you think I should get a sedan with a roof rack? Maybe that would be good enough. Honestly, the sticking point is that I’m currently driving a plug-in hybrid, and even though the thing is sort of a lemon, I’ve gotten used to the advantages of electric, and it’s hard to go back. (And there aren’t a lot of hybrid-electric vehicles on the market.) Even with my paltry 15 miles of all-electric power, I almost never have to buy gas. The driving is super-responsive. (For some reason, some of the electric vehicles are tuned to drive like clunky gas cars. But mine isn’t, and driving it is fun.) There are also societal advantages, like parking places I can use by virtue of having an electric car. It just feels like a downgrade to get an ICE-only car right now.
5-10% is into the level of the “Hey, stoopid, you need gas” light is on, I believe it’s even higher than that in my car. I don’t typically let my car get that low on gas. If you’re saying it’s best to do that on a trip that goes against everything every Boy Scout was ever taught. 5-10% is between 10-25 miles in most of the EVs out there today; not a lot of wiggle room if something goes wrong. By definition if you’re filling up on the road you’re almost always not in your neighborhood.
[ul]
[li]Listening to the traffic reports last night, there was an overturned vehicle accident that shut down the expressway, meaning stopped traffic & eventually detours off that road while they investigated/cleaned up the accident. In the rural parts of this state, interstate exits are 20-30 miles apart. Having to drive local, indirect roads might use up your minimal reserve. [/li][li]In reading reviews of some of the recharge stations in some of the earlier linked websites some of them had problems, either only open certain hours or had inventory cars parked in those spaces (specifically at a car dealer).[/li][li]I made a 150+ mile drive last weekend, including one intermediate stop in a place I was unfamiliar with. I didn’t have enough gas for the whole trip. My choice was stop at the usual place, which I know has inexpensive gas or go the 45 additional miles to my stop & hope there was something, & not too expensive, on my way. I opted for gas sooner; as it turned out there was not only plenty of gas stations on my few miles off of the interstate but they were a couple of pennies cheaper too; didn’t matter though, as long as I filled up anywhere along my trip I was good to go. You’re saying it would take longer to fill up sooner rather than later.[/li][/ul]
Air resistance goes up exponentially with higher speed; IOW, ICE cars are more efficient at lower speeds, too. However, having to drive slower to make it to a recharge station is just one more way it’s slower to take a road trip in an EV.
Oh I totally know what you mean. The car itself is the selling point. Going back to an ICE is unconscionable for me now, because even my aggravating commute becomes enjoyable.
If an EV is actually something that could meet your needs, check out the Hyundai Kona, Kia Niro, or the Tesla Model Y available next year. And of course the Bolt could be something to consider.