• 0 posts
  • 11 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 4th, 2023
  • You call them excuses when you are simply unwilling to accept the reason.

    Since apparently we’re hung up on the probably 1% of driving you do (where you go more than 250 miles in a single day)

    No you don’t need it 99% of the time, but in that 1% when you need it, you really need it. 99% simply isn’t enough because that 1% is really important.

    Time on a road trip is way more important than time in regular drives. I don’t mind being 30min late getting back home from work, that happens all the time from traffic, but 30min late on a roadtrip means you’re missing daylight, or an appointment, or that restaurant you really wanted to try is closed. These are not imaginary hypotheticals, all of these situations have regularly happened to me even with gas cars.

    plan out your route and stops. Requires maybe 15 minutes of planning before your trip. You pick a place with food nearby, get out for 30 minutes, stretch, eat your meal, and you are good until the next meal.

    You say this like this is trivial burden. It is not. The mental load of constantly needing to plan stops around fueling is a significant difference from gas cars in experience and is a significant barrier to adoption. This is a real problem and must be overcome in the future if we are to reach higher EV adoption.

    if you are one of the 80% of households with 2 cars, take the other car for that roadtrip.

    We are not talking about today, we are talking about increasing EV adoption, to say 90-100%. If 80% of households have a gas car, you’re not getting there.

    get a rental car for your trip. (Remembering that a couple hundred for a rental car is vastly cheaper than paying for gas for 10+ years)

    Again, we are not talking about today, we are talking about a future where EV adoption is 90-100%. How many gas stations will remain in that future?

    Since apparently we’re hung up on the probably 1% of driving you do (where you go more than 250 miles in a single day), let’s refer to what I already said above you:

  • Nobody starts an EV road trip with much less than 100%.

    That’s exactly the problem. Yes you start a trip with 100%, but that only happens at most once per day. What about in the middle? You willing to sit a fucking Walmart for 1hr to get to 100%? We’re not talking about a trip where you drive 3hr from home to the destination. I’m talking about road trips where you go half way across the country and do 5+hr of driving in a day, across multiple days.

  • Lets say you have a 300mi range EV. that sounds great, until you realize you can’t actually use it all.

    We like to save the bottom 20% for emergencies and battery longevity, and fast charging is too slow above 80% to be worth it, so effectively, on a road trip. only the 20%-80% range is usable. Your 300mi+ range just turned into 180mi of usable range. And then factor in ~10% battery degradation over time, or range reduction in winter conditions, and you could easily have as little as 150mi of actual usable range between charging stops. And that’s assuming the charging stations are perfectly spaced apart.

    That’s only a little more than 2 hours at highway speeds. And that’s not along time to be driving, even for a single person. In gas cars, we will regularly do 3-4 hours without stopping at all. And if we do stop for a break, it’s rarely at gas stations or places with charging stations. Those are typically awful places to spend the limited amount of time you have on a trip.

    In practice, the charging interval is far, far less than the ideal 300mi and far more frequent.

  • Requires maybe 15 minutes of planning before your trip. You pick a place with food nearby, get out for 30 minutes, stretch, eat your meal, and you are good until the next meal.

    It assumes when you want to eat coincides with when you need to charge. It assumes there’s something you want to eat within walking distance of the charging station. Also assumes you eat as often as you charge. I almost never find any of those to be true.

  • Does it take more time on long distance trips? Yes. Does it actually matter when those long trips are usually going to be entire day or even multi-day trips anyway? Not really.

    Yes, but when in the rare cases when you need to make 900km+ in a day, you really need that ability. 99% simply isn’t enough because that 1% is really important.

    Time on a road trip is way more important than time in regular drives. I don’t mind being 30min late getting back home from work, that happens all the time from traffic, but 30min late on a roadtrip means you’re missing daylight, or an appointment, or that restaurant you really wanted to try is closed.