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Comment by tovkal | Hacker News Reader

That's why they are doing the Model 3.

The Model 3 is nowhere close to an affordable car for your average car buyer e.g. Corolla owners.

It's likely to be about 62,000$ here in Australia before any options or upgrades, so that's with no autopilot and the smallest battery. Still a luxury car, in fact, with some options expensive enough to trigger the Luxury Car Tax, which kicks in at $75,525.

When you can get a brand new Suzuki Swift for 15,000 you really have to ask yourself how much you care about electric.

It's the charging that worries me. I live in a 45 year-old house with old wiring of 120V/60Hz only the stove is 240Hz. If I got an electric vehicle I'd like to put in a 240V outside plug but cost would be nuts. But even just charging such an EV over old wires is worrying. It may cost thirty thousand to get the house rewired.

Plus the liability of having a 240V outside plug may be against the building code. The weather here can really destroy anything outside.

As much as I like them the "care and feeding" and overall maintenance of an EV is way beyond my means or anyone else in my minimum wage blue collar town.

> But even just charging such an EV over old wires is worrying. It may cost thirty thousand to get the house rewired.

Why would you rewire the house to run a 240V plug for your car? That's nuts. You'd add a dedicated 240 circuit. You're probably still looking at a a minimum of $1k and likely in the $3-5K range, especially if your panel needs to be updated/expanded, but there's no reason you'd need to rewire your whole house for this. As for the outdoor outlet, there are exterior rated outlets (and presumably exterior rated chargers). Code isn't the concern.

Yep, you just run a fresh 240 line direct from your panel to your parking space, bypassing the aging interior wiring all-together. The plug is also not really an issue, as if you're fresh-running a line for this, you'd just hardwire a weather-resistant EVSE (like the ClipperCreek HCS-40) into that circuit, and you're golden.

Assuming you have a free breaker spot. ~50 year old circuit breaker is probably already tied up 100%.

It is full and old 100A I think. Like I say it's an old house early 1970s.

My reasoning is I may as well change the panel and house wiring while the electrician is there. It's a small house so really it would be more efficient to get it all done at once.

My other concern is the growing number of things using power. When the house was built TV, fridge, stove, washer, dryer, lights, furnace and water heater. Now there's Xbox consoles, big TVs, computers, cellphones charging, A/C units.

This is small town Canada too probably more expensive than the US unless I can get a good buddy electrician after hours deal.

I hear you on changing it out. My house was built in 85, with 100A service, only about 20 circuits total. Going to put in a 200A box before I finish the basement and slowly re-allocate to separate circuits over time.

I haven't gotten bids yet to know for myself, but assuming you feel confident enough to do the wiring after the new box install, it shouldn't be outlandish price-wise, even in CA.

I'm only doing that because I don't want to mess with the live feed from the street, though I did watch some electricians replace my mains breaker. Their solution was being very careful with rubber gloves and rubber-handled-pliers, but I just don't think that's for me :).

Probably $500 or so if you need a breakout panel installed. Unless you need a full panel replacement or a service upgrade, getting a spot for the breaker probably isn't prohibitively expensive.

Yeah. In our area, 50-year old panels are often discovered to be Zinsco-brand, and should be replaced for safety reasons.

In which case you should budget for that regardless of the new 240 line, of course. :)

The average price of a new car is $33,560. That's much more than a Corolla and not much less than a base Model 3.

plus the model 3, like all current EVs, is still highly limited it. It makes a great commuter car but any trip requiring a recharge will quickly show you the limitations of such. Have more than one recharge and you best have the time. Figure four hours at best on road and one off; superchargers require close to an hour to full charge and add in time to and from it based on where you are going.

When I mentioned "At best" EVs suffer disproportionately from the effects of cold weather, the colder the worse it gets and elevation changes aren't your friend either.

I am really curious what the average pricing will be on IIIs. I do remember Tesla talking about how you could get into a S for a little over 60 yet it always seemed people just talk about the 90k and up versions.

Occasional long distance travel in a Tesla, using the superchargers, is a fine thing. A supercharger stop is generally 15-25 minutes, not an hour -- charging is fastest if you charge only enough to get to the next one. And they're conveniently placed on major travel routes.

So, basically, your complaints are all things that most Tesla owners don't complain about. Almost every discussion about electric cars features a subthread with the same back and forth about these same topics. No sign of any learning.

Ah well.

This argument is a no-go here in Canada, where distance between reasonably large cities can easily range in the few hundreds kilometers.

Assuming that by "few hundred" you mean more than 400 km, sure, many countries have long trips in sparsely populated areas that aren't going to work for electric cars. That comes up in most electric car threads, too.

Tesla and other EV car companies successfully sell cars in Canada, so apparently it's not all Canadians: http://www.fleetcarma.com/ev-sales-canada-2016-final/ In fact the market share of EVs in Canada is similar to the US.

Of course, most of Canadian population lives in cities. Also, people who have the means to buy a Tesla have also the mean to have a second ICE car, thus making this a non-problem. However, commuters who have to live outside of the cities won't have that option. Heck, their apartment complex aren't even wired.

Yes, that's also a traditional comment in every EV-related Hacker News discussion.

I'd be surprised if Canada was that different than the US: some apartment complexes will install chargers because it will eventually be an important amenity (that's why I have chargers at my apartment complex), some communities will start requiring them for new construction (Palo Alto does this already), you'll find chargers installed for on-street parking (already happening various places), and eventually the government will probably mandate installing chargers in all larger parking lots (probably when EVs are a lot more popular than today.)

Another place you might charge is at work. Facebook has ~ 170 chargers at their headquarters, last I looked. They're ahead of the curve, but you'll find that more and more over time.

probably gonna be another recurrent comment, but Facebook and Palo Alto are hardly a generalization of a trend, more of an exception actually.

By all means, if you want to be skeptical about these examples, go right ahead! You might be able to find similar Canadian examples if you looked, who knows.

The Supercharge network also won't be free to use with the Model 3.

It has 215 miles(346 km) range. For a long distance trip I would plan a 30 min break after every ~ 300 km of driving.

Why? That's just a hour and a half to two hours of highway driving.

Bladder. Sore/stiff muscles. Eye fatigue. People certainly love their 6+ hour non-stop drives enough to keep doing them, but my human body likes to stand up, stretch, maybe relieve itself every couple of hours.

Yeah, I didn't mean to drive for 6 hours straight, but at least 3 is the norm.

My experience is that the normal reality is that your first stop is after about 2.5 hours, because you leave with a 100% charge from home, then you stop about every 1.5-2 hours, depending on supercharger placement and destination. That worked out pretty well for the 6.5 hour drive that I did most recently, with two stops one way (up into the mountains), and one returning (downhill helped with range). I think it would be more impactful on 10+ hour drives, but still within the realm of reasonable. If you are someone who does 10 hour drives regularly, then EVs aren't for you.

We should be talking about range, not hours of driving. I'm regularly driving 600km/day, but on a highway, in 160-250 km/h range (my car says that average speed of my last trip to Berlin was 218 km/h). I can't go 3 hours at this speed because I would run the battery dry, and stopping for charging prolongs the trip by at least 2 to 3 hours. Time is money, and I'd rather spend this time with my family or working, not waiting to charge.

I know that EVs aren't for me, that's actually what I'm trying to show. Some people have the feeling that charging is just a little inconvenience and everyone should buy one. For someone like me, charging doubles the trip.

You are certainly an outlier in the discussion.

There are range extended EV options (the Volt/Ampera, for instance) to at least use battery for part of the trip.

It certainly doesn't have to be all or nothing right now. You are enough of an outlier you might never be satisfied, but that shouldn't stop you from trying for a middle ground.

There are people that wish to tax conventional vehicles relentlessly. I feel the need to mention my case in the discussion because while I'm most certainly an outlier there (and in the general population), I know there's still a lot of us, and that the tax has the potential to ruin life of these people.

Me personally, I have an EV Smart that I use in my home city. I love electric vehicles, but there are use cases when they just can't be used.

Model 3 is $35,000 before incentives.

https://www.tesla.com/model3

Right. Now add the 180% taxation: $98,000. Not THAT far off the 110k you're replying to.

Oh wow. So, to get the figure after tax, you're multiplying by 2.8, not by 1.8? That's even worse than I imagined. I suppose that when we talk about a 6% registration tax in my state, that's unambiguously multiplying the end cost by 1.06, or 106% - but I'd assumed that they were inflating the figure by using the multiplier directly. That's astonishing!

Still, doesn't this also apply to the cheaper cars? You're getting a Pugeot 208 for not $20k but $56k. While the difference between sticker price and post-tax price is smaller in proportion with the cost of the cars - $63k vs $36k - that's still $56k... for a Pugeot.

Where is that 180% taxation on EVs? In Denmark?

On all cars, not just electric cars. That's sort of the point of the whole thing. Electric cars were taxed less than diesel or petrol powered cars, the law changed and electric vehicles started to be taxed as any other car and sales dropped like rock.

Yes, as per the article

That's not Telsa's fault at all though.

Does it matter whose fault it is (for purposes of this discussion)? It's the reality.

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