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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

35kWh on a boxy vehicle? As mentioned in the article, more like 150mi range on the standard the US uses to calculate range, and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles.

Not tiny, but it's not exactly a slippery vehicle; low mass could help it do better than a tesla-type car at lower speeds, but worse at higher speeds, I imagine.

Charge to 90% and you're at 135mi range, leave a safety margin and now you're looking at 100mi real world. Not bad for most day-to-day, but when you look at real world usage and the safety margins most drivers like to use, it starts getting dicey.

Been in a Great Wall or two. Fine cars. I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point.

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This is supposed to be an urban car. Almost all trips in cities are less than 20km (Berlin is about 30km across, Beijing maybe twice that). Even a 160km range is plenty if there are chargers where you park your car. I suppose China is building charging stations to match their accelerated introduction of EVs in their cities.

I'm sorry but I can't afford to own two+ vehicles, one for urban, one for long range.

For the purposes of the article, 'long range' equals one tank of gas (~250 miles in my 90s SUV) for an ICE. I am behind the concept of EVs in general, but IMHO they aren't quite practical for suburban (which is in EV terms in long range territory) usage. (yet!)

How often do you actually drive these long distances? At some point it's much less expensive to just rent a car when you need to travel that far.

One problem with that approach is that those long distance trips tend to coincide with everybody else in America taking those long distance trips (Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, end of school year) with surge prices for rentals as a result.

Well personally, the overwhelming majority of my driving km are longer distances. I work from home, and mostly use my car to carpool to ski hills in the winter, and crags and trailheads in the summer.

You don't need a vehicle for long range travel: when you want to do that, you either fly or take a train. What, your country doesn't have good trains for intercity transport? Maybe you should work on that.

What, your country doesn't have 20% of its population living in idyllic rural areas that cover 97% of your nearly 4 million square miles of land?

Let's not pretend that what works for some people will work for everyone. It would be beyond unfeasible to take a plane or train everywhere I typically go in a given month, and 100mi range would be pretty dicey, especially when it gets brutally cold in winter and I need extra power to get heat and get through snow on the roads.

> What, your country doesn't have 20% of its population living in idyllic rural areas that cover 97% of your nearly 4 million square miles of land?

Still, getting around on the east coast is absurd, though somehow the Europeans and Japanese manage it under similar conditions. In an environment where high speed rail would be superior to air travel there are 0 lines[+].

In the west I agree the "travel density" is minor except in the SF-LA region which is both being developed and tying the Central Valley into the wealthier areas.

The real reason is that the US has the most highly developed rail freight transport system in the world. Passenger trains lease access to those lines and must work around freight (including having passengers stop and wait).

[+] yes I have used the amusingly-named "Acela".

...have you seen our country? It's nice that Europe is dense enough to use trains, but let's not pretend that your solutions scale.

That is a bad excuse, USA is denser than Sweden yet Sweden still has enough trains that you don't have to take cars between basically all cities with more than 10k inhabitants, even those in the mostly depopulated Swedish north.

USA also holds a dubious record of building the most expensive rail in the world https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

The northeast US is more dense than Europe.

Wouldn't work in america. It's no dense enough. Which is why people poor money into automated cars. It makes way more sense for america.

If you drive more than 100 miles per day more often than once a month, then an EV is probably not for you. Otherwise you can just rent a car for the days where you need the range. Just like you rent a transporter when you buy new furniture instead of driving one every day to the office.

it depends what you count as Beijing, i used to ride bicycle sometimes from eastern Beijing to western part and it's easily 40-50 minutes in heavy traffic with numerous traffic lights, i don't think it would be even 30km across

actually using car in Beijing it's pretty stupid, why would you do it? it's flat as pancake, ideal for biking same as Bangkok, you don't even need car for grocery since you can have it delivered for free right to your door, even if you don't have elevator, more convenient and cheaper than shopping with car, subway station it's always pretty much less than 1km walk unless you live in Beijing suburbs

shame there is not done elevated LRT, since buses are useless and there are no trams/trains either so only solution to avoid traffic jams it's subway, elevated LRT could have more frequent stops in places subway can't reach or where it's not possible to upgrade capacity anymore

My daily driver is a Honda Jazz, cos it's tiny and fairly reliable. Weekender is the VW T5 Transporter.

This Great Wall Motors ORA R1 would be ideal for me as a daily river. I'd only need to charge it once a week!

> I wouldn't want to crash in one, but they're engineered to a price point.

Great Wall Motors sell vehicles in Australia, so presumably they've passed all the relevant crash tests? Not sure about the ORA R1 though, obviously.

Edit to add: ObsoleteNerd's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775462 supports your claim that you probably don't want to be in a Great Wall accident.

> I wouldn't want to crash in one

This is what is keeping my wife and I from getting her a Nissan Leaf. She drove a Nissan Versa (basically the same platform but traditional gas engine) until she was hit by another car. The accident was caused by a person in the oncoming lane not seeing her and turning left, striking her driver's side door. The other person was in a mid sized SUV (first gen Jeep Liberty) and was only going about 15MPH when she struck my wife's car, but the force pushed my wife's driver side door all the way into her seat and against her hip. The Versa was severely frame damaged and not driveable; the only damage the Jeep sustained was losing the bumper cover.

Thankfully my wife was not hurt apart from some bruising and soreness on her hip, but if the other car had been going faster (say, at an intersection) she could have been seriously hurt or killed. She is now driving our Crown Victoria, a full frame vehicle with five star crash ratings all around and reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car. Her fuel economy sucks, and she was just moved to a more remote office at her job which makes the Vic a very expensive commuter car now, but we're leery of getting her a subcompact (gas, hybrid, or electric). It's probably an irrational fear; such an accident is probably a once in a lifetime thing, but traffic is insane where we live and work so we both feel much safer with her in "The Tank".

What are the crash ratings all around on the Versa? I feel you are not being very scientific on this. She wasn’t injured in her wreck, you are extrapolating that she would have been, but you don’t know that. Bigger is not always better with crash safety, I see this idea espoused a lot. The old huge rigid cars from back in the day are actually death traps because they don’t have crumple zones and the frames are too rigid, transferring all the force to the occupant in a crash. That’s why demolition derby contestants always get those old full frame cars from the past, they don’t crumple and they transfer force to the other vehicles, but also to the driver.

If the modern crown vic is 5 star rated this may not be a problem, but the rating probably came before they added the door supports for the police, so the car may actually be more unsafe now.

> What are the crash ratings all around on the Versa? I feel you are not being very scientific on this.

Front on the Versa is 3 stars, side impact is 2 stars, rollover is 4 stars. The Crown Vic is 5, 5, 5. The door additions were designed to improve officer survival in a crash, not reduce it (I used to work in law enforcement and that is direct knowledge). I'm not sure why you think I'd look at the Vic's safety ratings and just make an assumption about the Versa, that's extremely presumptive of you.

> She wasn’t injured in her wreck

She was injured, she had bruising and a sore hip for a few weeks, as I stated. This was from a 15MPH crash, one which rendered her car totaled with severe frame damage. If it had been at highway speeds I doubt she would have survived.

Also, the Crown Vic is a 2009, not a 80s or 90s car. It has crumple zones, breakaways, and other modern safety features that all contribute to its exceptional crash rating.

Sources for crash ratings:

Versa: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2011/NISSAN/VERSA/5%252520HB/F...

Crown Victoria: https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2009/FORD/CROWN%252520VICTORIA...

The crown vic police interceptor (which is likely what the op is talking about) is a fairly "modern" vehicle; it was the go-to vehicle for police departments across the country. Detective versions typically were white or black only (not "cruiser" decorated), and usually lacked the interior cage and hose-out rear seat. Other than that, they usually had the full interceptor package (unless the dept cheaped out for the detectives, I suppose, and just bought standard crown vics).

I'm not sure when they stopped making them, but it had to be sometime in the early-2000s, maybe a bit later. I know that a lot of PDs went to an SUV platform, or other vehicles.

The one potential issue with a crown vic that would make it more dangerous that other cars is that it had a saddle fuel tank. Ford did not learn the lesson of their Pinto. Rear-end accidents with a crown vic had the potential to turn in to fiery death-traps. It wasn't until a police detective here in Phoenix got horribly injured (but survived) did they make modifications to police fleet vehicles (I think they put in a racing fuel bladder or something like that in the tanks). I don't believe such modifications were implemented for standard civilian crown vics...

Regardless, the crown vic isn't the same as much older vehicles. While it likely isn't up to modern crash standards, it is still a fairly new vehicle that does have crumple zones and such, and won't spear someone thru the heart with the steering column in a front-end collision.

> The crown vic police interceptor (which is likely what the op is talking about) is a fairly "modern" vehicle

Yes, it is.

> I'm not sure when they stopped making them, but it had to be sometime in the early-2000s, maybe a bit later.

The CVPI (Crown Victoria Police Interceptor) and the Crown Victoria itself were retired in 2011. Their immediate replacement from Ford was a Taurus based Interceptor sedan and SUV. Most officers I know derided the new Interceptor platform for having less acceleration and smaller interior space than the old CV platform. Where I live, the Dodge Charger police vehicle became much more popular after the CVPI was retired.

> The one potential issue with a crown vic that would make it more dangerous that other cars is that it had a saddle fuel tank. Ford did not learn the lesson of their Pinto. Rear-end accidents with a crown vic had the potential to turn in to fiery death-traps. It wasn't until a police detective here in Phoenix got horribly injured (but survived) did they make modifications to police fleet vehicles (I think they put in a racing fuel bladder or something like that in the tanks). I don't believe such modifications were implemented for standard civilian crown vics...

This is correct. The last revision of the CVPI (2004 to 2011) had a ton of safety improvements, including to the gas tank.

> Regardless, the crown vic isn't the same as much older vehicles. While it likely isn't up to modern crash standards, it is still a fairly new vehicle that does have crumple zones and such, and won't spear someone thru the heart with the steering column in a front-end collision.

It's still one of the safer (for the driver) cars on the road today, though its weight and bulk make it more likely to cause the most damage to other vehicles in any accident it's involved in. And you're exactly right about the steering column, it's a breakaway design. I know this because I've had to replace a dash component that required unbolting the steering wheel and column.

Yes! I had the exact same reaction to this story. The way I interpreted the story is that the design of the Versa may actually have contributed to his wife's safety. It's possible the car was designed to crumple in such a way to distribute the weight of the collision. Ironically getting a Crown Victoria may decrease the overall safety.

There's not much zone to crumple in a side impact. On the sides, all effort is invested in keeping the rigid zone rigid and cushioning the resulting acceleration with airbags, as good as space inside the rigid zone is permitting.

I also think the problem space is being solved incorrectly. Sure, 9k might not make a comparably safe 2-4 seater (which is debatable). But I bet they’d make a much safer 1 seater. That’s precisely what most day commuters need.

God. That story rankles me, the new Jeep, a lifestyle product and environmentally terrible choice, being driven very poorly and causing massive damage and potential serious injury at only 15 mph. These large cars need to be taxed, they are not good for our planet or other drivers

I agree. Driving is essentially an arms race with how people drive large vehicles.

They are effectively taxed through taxes on gas though, aren't they?

Apparently not enough. They're the most popular type of car right now.

We should tax things more because they are popular?

We should tax things to appropriately account for the external costs. Big cars not only consume more fuel, the external costs of which are not reflected by current fuel taxes, they also consume a lot more space on the road. They're also more dangerous to other people, especially pedestrians and cyclists.

I agree, and I would love to trade her Vic for a comparably safe hybrid or full electric. The former simply doesn't exist, and the latter is only available right now as a Tesla S, which is far outside our price range. Maybe when the Tesla or Rivian pickups debut they will be somewhat affordable, but until then we unfortunately are stuck with gas guzzlers in our household.

In general, a side impact is a very bad scenario for the party being hit. There's not much room for crumple zones at all, and cars are often not rigid enough, leading to an intrusion by the other vehicle. But this is true for larger vehicles as well, e.g. older Ford F150s were famous for basically folding in half from the slightest side hit (say, a telephone pole at low speeds after losing control). In this situation, a rigid battery pack might actually make the car a lot safer. But yes, I wouldn't want to be in a tiny car getting hit from the side by a larger one.

Your feeling of safety is not justified. The Ford Crown Victoria had a "Marginal" rating for side impact crashes. And the type of modifications made to police vehicles don't actually do anything to improve crash safety.

https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/ford/crown-victo...

Check out the side impact crash test pictures. The body actually buckled and rode up over the frame! This is not a safe design.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2009/FORD/CROWN%252520VICTORIA...

As I said above, the modifications made to the police version were done to increase officer safety in a crash, not decrease it.

The NHTSA side impact ratings are considered outdated and inadequate, which is why I linked to the newer IIHS ratings above. The Crown Victoria is not a safe vehicle in a side crash compared to more modern designs.

Ford installed ballistic panels in some of those vehicles, but those won't give you any significant extra protection in a crash.

One little-known fact is that (at least for Euro NCAP crash test scores), the scores are only comparable within "vehicle class", and even then by vehicle mass.

> Euro NCAP’s frontal impact test simulates a car crashing into another of similar mass and structure [...] cars which are within 150kg of one another are considered comparable.

This means that at least for Euro NCAP scores, you can only meaningfully compare crash test results within a type class of vehicle, for vehicles of similar weights. Heavier, higher vehicles will usually be better-off, so a compact roadster with a 5* score is not going to come off well from a collision with a 5* SUV.

Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20090222214930/http://www.euronc...

What you're saying is true, but there is also this

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emtLLvXrrFs

modern safety features make a big difference, even against heavier cars.

I would argue that a Nissan Leaf would be overall safer than a Crown Victoria.

First of all, the 2nd generation (2018/2019) Nissan Leaf seems to have a comparable weight as the Crown Victoria. From the data I've been looking at online, it's around 25% less weight than the CV, but definitely more than a Versa. Also, this weight is likely better distributed throughout the car instead of being concentrated in one place.

Another factor to consider is that the CV is an older vehicle (did they stop making them in 2012?), and in general newer cars are safer due to strong materials and safety features/design.

Also, the likelihood of a fire during an accident is greatly reduced (although still non-zero, as demonstrated by Tesla).

Yet he said the crown vic has "reinforced doors due to being a former detective's car." Also, are fires really that much of a worry when you get in an accident? I have seen very little of that happening... More likely probably that your alternator causes a fire.

According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24073770 (fire-related auto deaths in Sweden), this is a problem. Around 5% of auto-related deaths in Sweden involved burning cars, and around 1/3 of these deaths fire was the cause of death. Definitely not the main cause of death, it is a factor that has to be considered when looking at overall safety.

Honda is making hybrid versions of their full and mid-sized SUVs.

I don't imagine too many people doing a round trip commute that would make a 100mi real world range dicey even after a safety margin.

Well, actually my round-trip commute is about 300 kilometers/200 miles (Antwerp, Belgium to Lille, France - it's fine because it's only once a week, I would never do that more frequently) and when I was looking for a new car just a few weeks ago, I realised that it made using an electric car just not practical at all, especially if I'm not guaranteed to be able to park in front of my house to charge it, or to have free EV parking spots at work.

Obviously most people have shorter commutes, but here in Belgium it's actually not that uncommon to have long commutes. I see more Teslas in the city of Antwerp than on the highway.

"Not that uncommon" still means that >>50% of all commuters could switch to an EV if cities built charging infrastructure. That would be awesome for the air quality in cities.

But you have excellent trains in that area! Ok Antwerp-Lille has a change in Bruxelles, but you still can do the trip in under 90 minutes.

They're actually really not that good. Antwerp-Lille by train is more like 2 hours and 30€, one-way.

So even if we don't take into account the extra time it's still about twice as expensive as by car (about 12€ one-way on diesel) and then the train does not depart from my home, and I still have a metro to take in Lille to get to the office.

If the various transport networks were better integrated though, it could be at least as fast and as convenient as by car. A first step would be not needing between six and four different tickets for a round-trip: De Lijn for the tram in Antwerp (and/or Velo passes for the shared bikes) SNCB for the train departing from Antwerp, Transpole for the metro in Lille (and/or V'Lille for the shared bikes) and SNCF for the train departing from France.

Comparisons like these are moot because if you regularly plan to use the train you can commonly (not sure about Belgium specifically) get a subscription allowing you to save costs. Especially if you don't work from 9 to 5 but odd times.

Actually, it's not possible to get a plan for a once-a-week commute, at least with SNCB/NMBS, even putting aside the fact that my commute crosses a border (which makes most of the available plans unavailable to me anyway).

I've tried very hard to look for something that would make taking the train even remotely competitive with using my car, but unfortunately there is absolutely no convenient option in my particular case (and even in the more common cases, train is just as cheap or as fast as car in the best case, rarely better).

But had is not your only cost. Insurance, repairs, ...

And It's not all about cost. Just to add two factors that you might want to consider as relevant::

How can you use the time. Eg in a train you can read a book, do an online course, ... even work if you feel the need. I'd choose a 2h train ride any time over a 90 minute drive. Twice a week 60 minutes spent on a good course book or online course will in the long term give you much more value than the price of the train ticket compared to the price of gas.

And of course environment-wise the choice is obvious.

Nowadays you can listen to audio books in your car. I haven't done this, I'm curious how safe that is.

You can try to resonate real cost per km eg thru this tool by the German car driver association.

https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/autodatenbank/autokosten/aut...

Let’s not forget the fact that the trains run unpredictability late very often!

Let's not forget that road contents and flow are at the best times unpredictable.

That's Germany not Belgium ;)

> I wouldn't want to crash in one

I feel like this is a regulatory issue; my wild-ass guess would be that in the EU, at least, they'll have to be engineered to be a minimum level of crash-safe.

If so, it'll weigh a lot more. It's easy to make a light vehicle that isn't reinforced.

About 50 HP. That's pretty OK for a small city car like that, especially with electric engine which has nice torque from the start. Boxyness doesn't matter much at 30-50 km/h.

It has similar shape and size to Fiat 126p - the car that motorized several communist countries in 70s-80s (and is still used in Cuba). They made millions of them. It had about 600 kg empty mass, and 24 HP. I assume this weighs more because of batteries, but surely not twice as much?

It wasn't comfortable (back seats were designed for people about 160 cm tall :) ), and certainly wasn't safe (famously - the structural integrity during a crash depended on a spare tire being in it's intended place in the front trunk, and even then any serious crash was deadly).

But there were almost no heavy cars on the roads then, and you weren't supposed to drive it over 80km/h anyway - it felt like you're in a formula one when you exceeded 90 km/h, and it took over 40 seconds to achieve 100km/h speed :)

I would be OK with driving this in city traffic, especially if it was allowed on bus lanes and if access to the city center was paid for ICE cars.

50Hp is a bit low for a car - a Vespa Scooter has 22Hp Btw

Which Vespa scooter? A 150cc scooter is pretty big and you need a proper motorcycle license for it, and that has 12-13 bhp. Smaller scooters have even less.

Vespa 150cc scooters were commonly sold in India and were a very popular commuter vehicle for many years, earlier. Later Bajaj Auto manufactured the Chetak model which was similar, probably under license or know-how transfer.

I rode a Vespa for some time. Never thought of it as big. But you could be right. Depends what you compare it with, I guess.

You did need a license for it. IIRC, only mopeds like 50cc or below did not need a license.

GTS 300, and probably the GTS Super

https://www.vespa.com/us_EN/news-promo/vespa-GTS-300-new-HPE...

300 GTS ie the one you need a full licence for

My Fiat Punto has 54 HP at 860 kg and it's perfectly fine for urban driving.

That's the biggest engine ever put in a Vespa. For a long time (until the 1990s) they were legally limited to 1.5 Hp in Italy.

That Vespa also costs nearly as much as this car.

this is the 300 they have done 500cc

I would not be surprised that they were measuring the range on a perfectly flat road in vacuum.

My knowledge of engineering suggests me that Great Wall guys are lying.

200 miles / 33kWh is about 6 miles per kWh. A Tesla Model S does about 3 miles per kWh. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a much smaller car with a 35kW engine instead of a 580kW engine could be twice as efficient, but maybe my knowledge of engineering is not as good as yours. Care to elaborate why they're lying?

To double the specific impulse of a vehicle, their losses at cruising speed have to be 3-4 times smaller in real life.

They claim the weight at around 1t. Half that of Model S, but still I don't see them realising such efficiencies.

As another comparison point, my volt does about 3.5 miles per kWh at 60-65mph on a highway and close to double that at 20-30mph in cities. And it’s not that light.

The article says 35kW motor, not 35kWh battery.

my apologies, lack of sleep and too much exposure to american units. I even read what it said, and thought it was erroneously written as 'motor size' rather than 'battery size'.

35kWh on a boxy vehicle?

24kWh has been pushing Nissan Leafs around for eight years.

and a smaller battery than some Zero motorcycles.

Well, you made me look, at least. Because if they can fit a 35kWh battery on a bike, I’m buying one tomorrow. They don’t, of course. The biggest thing Zero makes is a tenth that size.

They don't, but their bikes top out at 18 kWh, not 3.5 kWh as you're implying. The power tank add-on is 3.6 kWh which could be the source of the confusion.

Thanks for the correction. 18 kWh ought to do the job, then. Not quite in “buy it tomorrow” territory, but close enough I should give them another look.

I can see many people buying one of these in european cities once they start heavily benefiting electric cars vs ICE ones.

The main problem is charging, but that could also be fixed by installing chargers in the financial districts where only electric cars can park...

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