I wasn’t trying to imply that the Teslas are the ugliest cars on the road. Far from it. The “Angry Origami” cars are much worse. We’d need a separate thread in which to argue about the best styling language of car design, past and present. But with respect to EV’s, for me, the Tesla is near the bottom of the pack with their bloated from every angle styling. And good aerodynamics is no excuse for bad styling.
If I’m not mistaken, either Edd China or Ant Anstead did an old VW Beetle as an EV conversion. I’ll have to google it later to confirm.
Interesting! I find the Tesla’s largely boring and nondescript. I mostly like my 2010 Prius and like the newer ones even better. That said my favorite broad design is the roadster. The Porsche Boxster is probably my favorite current production car judged strictly by looks (I like older models better than the newer ones).
I get it. Still driving a manual trans ‘hot rod’ myself.
What I don’t get is how someone could find charging an EV to be more difficult than gassing up. We have my car and a plug-in hybrid in our garage, and the comparative convenience isn’t even close. Her car is always at full charge every morning, and she only gets gas every 2-3 months.
I wasn’t clear before. I meant in the context of long distance travel/trips, not a short daily commute or general errands after which you return home.
I have family that travels south to Florida every winter (snow birds). They were excited to take their Tesla on the first trip and explained in painful detail how they planned to make stops to rest and recharge. It took them a day longer than expected. They only did that once. Perhaps it was due to poor planning. Anyway, having to drive long distances is irritating enough with finding good accommodations without also having to plan recharge stops. No doubt people will chime in with comments about how charging stations are widely available. But even if so, the time to charge was a factor in their longer than planned trip. So to me, that would be an irritation I don’t need in my life.
There’s no question that long road trips like driving to Florida are not ideal for EVs right now, particularly if you are in a hurry. I wouldn’t do it in my EV. But I think within the next 10 years it will be much closer to the current ICE experience, as range, battery capacity, the charging network, and charging speed all improve.
As the owner of a Focus ST that I’ve put a few mods into I totally understand this line of thinking. However, Tesla is hardly the only game in town if you want performance and looks:
Porsche Taycan, Audi ETron GT, Lucid Air, or even the Mercedes EQ if you want to stay with the three pointed star. None of them give up being a driver’s car IMO. None of them look like a Tesla either.
If you have enough clams the upcoming line of EVs from BMW will be pretty friggin’ awesome. If you were already in the market for a new Tesla Model S you’ve got enough clams.
That’s what I have. It’s really quite a remarkable car. Almost two years, and no regrets. I’ve never driven a car that people stop and want to talk to me about.
okay! Actually, I’m not the kind of guy that likes that attention. It was just unusual to have strangers remarking on my car. I have always had pretty normal cars, e.g., Prius, Explorer, and even (god forbid) a Taurus, so it’s never happened before.
A Tesla Model S was parked outside my condo the other day and that’s a better looking car than I remembered (I’m really only familiar with the Model 3). It still doesn’t make me go “wow” but I can understand better why it does so to others.
Inspection was today. Sadly it is only a 100 amp service and in fact nothing open. So we will have to upgrade the service to the house to add level 2. Still will do it but disappointed.
Can’t comment on the stale gas part of that posting, but your usage pattern sort of screams out for the approach we’ve used (for other reasons) for some time: drive the cars we own for around-town stuff, but rent something for the longer trips.
In our case, this has not been for EV range limit rules, but because both our cars were so ancient - plus, there were times when we simply needed a larger vehicle.
So in your scenario: an EV would be a perfect choice. Dunno what the cost differential is between a fully-EV car, and a comparable hybrid or PHEV, but it’s quite possible that renting a car for one week a year might wind up being cheaper than the price difference.
That’s too bad, as I’m sure it adds considerable expense. Hopefully the federal tax rebate can apply to the total cost. You might want to check when the current rebate expires (I have no idea) for setting a time line. I installed mine in the gap between the old rebate and the current one, so I missed out completely.
What I did, which may not be an option for you, is move the electrical outlet for my dryer to the garage to use for the car. This was possible because I have a gas dryer, so the plug was unused, and the laundry room shares a wall with the garage. That meant I didn’t have to worry about the house service or panel space.
Are you sure? The sum of all the individual breakers can (and often does) exceed the value of the main breaker. You should be fine as long as the expected load sums to less than the service rating. Which it probably would be if you do all your charging at night.
If your main panel is full, then I guess you still have to replace that, but it’ll be cheaper than upgrading your service.
Yeah I may not despair until I get an electrician in. It seems like there are a few of them that don’t need a full circuit. It might be able to be configured.
