this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Gasoline motors can be recharged in a couple of minutes.
My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
My main problem is it's never really empty enough.
If I'm on the road, a high voltage DC charger gets me from 10% to 50% in about 10 minutes. Barely enough time for a coffee and a leak, then it's another 2 hours of driving. Rinse, repeat.
Sure, you can't barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?
I make a 9-10 hour drive to see my family multiple times a year. I normally stop twice to get gas and use the bathroom, and that's it. Sounds like you'd be adding most of an hour to my travel time each way. I've tried stopping longer and grabbing food, it's not worth it for me.
With that said, I drive 25-40 miles a day the other 360+ days of the year, so it'd really make much more sense for me to have a short range EV and rent something for travel when I have too much luggage to fly.
Maybe don't do that? Catch a train it's significantly cheaper anyway.
No passenger rail. It's car or a once a week bus that doesn't even stop in the town my family lives in.
That would become a 15+ hour trip then...
Edit: On further investigation, it's also not significantly cheaper than flying, and is much more expensive than fuel for driving.
But much better for the environment, sometimes others matter more and when more people use rail it's more likely our country will catch up and build hyper train networks.
Sadly, yes. I live in Germany, and here you need a BahnCard50 (or better) for the train to be cheaper than the gas for driving.
you really ought to be stopping a few more times, i don't understand how so many people are just completely fine with driving for 3 hours nonstop
I do. We have family that we visit a few times each year. If I leave at 2am and drive straight through, we get there in 7-8 hours. If I make the drive during the day, it takes 10-13 hours.
I’m not wealthy enough for a PV setup.
And I love road trips. Some of the most beautiful areas of my country are 3000+ km from me.
Yeah EVs are a great solution for homeowners.
As an Uber driver, I want that. I want to be able to gas my car back up and go back on he road and keep earning money.
Congrats your are not the market target for EVs then, guess what that doesn't mean that the majority of the population isn't though.
I plug my car in in seconds
Driving to work 110 miles a day meant I had to get gas once per week, driving out of my way, stopping to get gas cost me 500 minutes per year as opposed to the two seconds to plug in at home. Totally a no brainer. I HATED stopping for gas on the way home from work at 11 in the evening, or whatever hour really. I think of people tied to ICE engines the way people were tied to outhouses a hundred years ago.
And then wait an hour to get acceptable charge levels for range. Filling up at a gas station is much faster.
This is not to say electric vehicles aren't a good idea, the charge rate and convenience while traveling are issues we need to improve on.
I hear this complaint a lot about charging times, but for 99.99% of people they are never in a single day going to drive beyond their cars range, meaning even a standard level 1 slow charger over night at home can manage their entire car usage.
It's only people doing long distance road trips that have to worry, and that's by far a minimum. Instead of boosting gas cars for that we could be looking at investing in rail so people don't have to make the longer trips in a car anyway.
Not only that, people going on those long trips are going to be looking for something to eat in a similar time frame that their EV takes to fully discharge. It takes EVs about 15-20 minutes to get from 0-80% charge. That's less time than it takes to sit down and eat at a restaurant
This is incredibly short sighted. I usually bring my own food on a long trip because I dislike stopping or buying crappy food. I eat while driving on long road trips because I have a schedule and want to get where I'm going. My gas car gets double the range of an electric car, so I'm stopping less often as well. I'm often in places where getting gas or food isn't within an hour's drive, and almost none of those places have the ability to charge a vehicle anyway.
Look, everyone has different use cases. I think electric cars for the in-city drive around town use case are great, and we should continue to encourage their use. I'm just saying that for wider adoption we're going to have to solve the charge rate, range, and charger accessibility issues.
You're saying 1 in 10,000 people will never drive more than ~200 miles in a single day? What country is that statistic for? Source?
I love the idea of rail, but it doesn't work in large spread out countries like where I live. Sure cities can be connected, and we should definitely do that, but the idea that I could get to all the natural and wild places I love in this beautiful country by taking mass transit is impossible.
And for about 50% of Americans, they don't have a place to plug in an electric car at night. It's only people above a certain level of wealth who have the luxury of their own parking space with a charger.
For the rest of us, we must take time out of our day to sit in a grocery store parking lot while the car charges.
You can't fill your gas tank at home while you sleep...
I'm not at home sleeping when I'm out traveling. I'm referring to multi hour or multi day drives. This is an extremely common use case where I live.
Also not everyone has access to a charger where they sleep.
If you're driving more than 300miles a day you're just admitting your a much larger slice of the shitty pie.
If it’s not a concern for my phone, why should it be for my vehicle? It is so nice never having to go to a local gas station, when all I need to do is plug in at night
Why on earth do you get down votes? This is the truth. Downvoters just straw man argue pointing out that 'just charge your car at home', which isn't the matter of discussion. There isn't even a discussion to be had - it is faster to refuel a car than recharge. Might this matter to you? Maybe, maybe not.
If the car is recharged at home, you may never need to stop to add gas. Electric is the future bro, get over your hangups.
Charging the car at home is for middle class people and above, generally speaking. Not everyone gets to park their car next to an outlet.