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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

I recommend watching "Who Killed the Electric Car?" - it explains most of the history of EV cars in California. I disagree with its conclusion that battery technology was not to blame - I feel that range-anxiety is a real concern and the GM EV1's range of under 100 miles using bulk lead-acid or 140 miles using NiMH batteries was, and remains, inadequate. Compare to today's Telsa's S and X 250-300+ mile range.

That - and the program was open to easy sabotage.

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100-140 miles is inadequate for a lot of people however it is more than enough for others. Even if a multi-car family adopts 1 EV it makes a difference.

100-140 miles is more than adequate for nearly all of the United States. While there are people who drive farther, the vast majority of the citizens of this country travel less than 40 miles for work, and I don't know anyone who would drive that far for groceries. People tend to want to buy a car for the largest trip they can imagine they'd take, even if that event may only happen a few times in the vehicle's lifetime.

Well I drive beyond the range of any electric car several times a month. Granted that's probably somewhere beyond "normal" use but it means an electric car remains infeasible for me. I'm not going to deal with the hassle of renting a car that often.

I have a hybrid (well, I did before the flood) and it got 17 miles on a charge. It handled most of my trips to the store, errands, etc.

You're assuming that you always start from a full charge (an assumption I used to make before I got an EV). That's not always the case. I live in a townhouse, so I'm in the process of getting a charging station installed (it's been six months so far and we're still in the paperwork stage ...) In the meantime, I charge where I can. That means I almost never start my day with a full charge. Worse, there are only a few places I can charge, and my best options add 20 miles of range in an hour. Say I start my day with 70 miles of range, which should be more than adequate for my ~45 miles of round trip commute. But an emergency comes up and I have to run an errand. It's just a short 10-mile trip, but now I'm coasting in to home with just 5 miles of range left ... if my meter is accurate (it's not), if traffic's not bad (it might be), etc. Charging stations are few and far between, which means the nearest one might be outside of my remaining range. Or, if I can get to one, it might be occupied. At a gas station I can just wait five minutes. At a charging station, I might have to wait hours for someone who's trying to get a full charge.

> 100-140 miles is more than adequate for nearly all of the United States.

Keep in mind that an EV rated at 100 miles probably won't go for 100 miles for a number of factors just like most ICE vehicles won't go their maximum range. The difference is that most ICE vehicles have far greater ranges so it's never an issue.

My old Honda was rated at 26 MPG city and had a 17 gallon tank so in theory I could go 442 miles. In practice I never felt comfortable going above 330 miles on a tank. The low fuel light came on around 280 miles and at 300 miles the fuel gauge was on empty. That's only 67% of the range it could go. Of course when I filled up it was only 12-14 gallons so there was probably another 100 miles in the tank. The car still cautioned you not to go the full range of the tank.

EVs caution you in the same way as ICE vehicles. When the battery gets too low in an EV it can be damaging, just like running an ICE dry can damage the fuel pump. Most EVs will warning you at around 20% capacity and at a certain point will kick into Turtle mode to prevent you from drawing too much current and damaging the battery. If manufacturers hid that 20% capacity the way an ICE vehicle fuel gauge hide their true capacity then suddenly that 100 miles EV is an 80 mile EV. Maybe that's what they should do but they don't.

My EV is rated at 84 miles and my commute is 25.4 miles. So when I get to work in the mornings I should be at ~58 miles of range. Yesterday I arrived with 60, one time I arrived with 44. That's a big range and a number of factors come into play. High winds or rain introduce drag which sucks range. If you're heavy on the pedal then you're going to get a reduced range. Oddly I get better mileage in heavy stop and go traffic and reduced range on wide open freeways.

Now you might say everything looks good and 100 miles should be plenty but what if I have to take my kid to an appointment after work that's 12-20 miles from home? I have two such appointments each week, one is 24 miles round trip and then other is 40 miles. Suddenly a 100 mile EV becomes a nail biting situation. The reality is that people do more than just commute to and from work, they have lives that demand traveling on occasion.

But I can charge up! Maybe... but not always.

LV1 charging takes 18-20 hours to charge my car from 20% to 100%, it would take longer with a 100 mile EV.

But what about LV2 or DC Fast Charging? It's not always an option for people. I have to pay $4000 to have my breaker panel upgraded and a 240v line run to my garage for LV2. Some people live in apartments and condos and might not even have the option to install LV2. I can pay for LV2 charging and there's a DC Fast charger along the way to one of my appointments so I can make my EV work with my schedule but that can't be said for everyone.

If people were to drive calm, cool and collected all the time, and they had access to LV2 or DC Fast Chargers in most places then a 100-140 mile EV would be just fine. But that's not realistic right now. Perhaps in 20 years when robots drive us around and the infrastructure is there, but not today.

I haven't seen it, so I can't comment on the movie, but it's worth noting that in the early 90s there was no such thing as high-capacity lithium ion batteries. The capacity of 100 miles with bulk lead-acid was pretty incredible for the time.

> I feel that range-anxiety is a real concern

The term "range anxiety" seems crafted to make people not take it seriously. The implication is pretty clearly that range is actually fine and it's your feelings about it that are the problem.

It's both. My commute is 30 miles a day (15 miles each way) and about once or twice a week I'll drive further - perhaps 60 miles in a day - by that logic I would be happy with the Ford Focus Electric as in practice that car gets 70 miles per charge.

But this assessment completely disregards the times, often at unpredictable occurrences, when I need to drive 100-200 miles (or more) at short notice and when there is not a time allotment to spend 4-8 hours to have the car recharge sufficiently. I would need to rent a car at very short notice in that case - which can be impossible. Things like a family emergency, a server crash at a data-center, a friend urgently needs a ride from Seattle to Portland and back, etc...

Remember, even if an ICE car and an EV have the same range, if both have zero fuel/energy left, the ICE car can be refilled from a hand-portable gas-tank or AAA truck enough to get to the next fuelling station - and you're free to carry additional fuel in your storage space, an EV car does not have that option: there's the prospective of expensive towing and hours waiting for it to recharge. I'd be less concerned if Tesla made some kind of "towable" extended battery or drop-in for the frunk or trunk, or even a portable Honda generator - but it doesn't.

I think it's naive to expect that while the majority of American car owners have no need to travel more than 100 miles per day - that they also have no expectation of travelling that distance - and you only need to travel that distance a few days in a whole year to make the purchase of an ICE vehicle worthwhile so long as EVs take longer to recharge without any kind of fast battery-swap feature.

I'm in the market for an EV myself - I wish I had gotten on to the Model 3 waiting list sooner - but it would have to be a Model 3 because the range of the Chevy Bolt, Volt, Leaf and the Focus Electric is not sufficient for those occasional long-distance journeys, and I imagine that a plurality (if not the majority) of the car-owning public feel the same way I do.

Lead acid batteries have short lives, too, when deep-cycled.

Unless they're built to be deep cycled.

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