Road Tripping Around Europe in a Tesla Is Less Fun Than You’d Think

Never forget the corollary!

“...But don’t dismiss malice.” Dismissing reasonable concerns about a nearly universal practice is best done through reasoned argument, not aphorism.

To be pedantic, that's till harvesting your data, it's just not selling it.

Does that make it malicious and stupid?

You should be aware that many malicious people feign incompetence when caught.

I'm really surprised this was down voted so much. I really don't think it's all that controversial. Like so many websites require registration when you are almost guaranteed never to return.

never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profit motive.

I dont think so, this would probably go against PCI DSS.

Tokenized? One-way digest: SHA-512 the card number, iterate SHA-512 on the results 100 times, store that as your tracking code.

That's how the Tesla chargers work.

It also looks like CHAdeMO has a 'Plug and Charge' protocol defined:

https://www.chademo.com/chademo-releases-the-latest-version-...

But that's pretty new, and not the SAE standard used in the US. So, it'll be a while...

This is how the Tesla superchargers work - authorization and billing is all in-car and takes place automatically, so all you do is plug in and it immediately begins charging.

For other charging networks, however, it seems to be needlessly more complicated.

With cash, what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity? Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity?

With electronic payments, you can pre-authorize a reasonable amount, then charge the customer for the amount they've used - no excess charges or change required.

It's cheaper to develop the app that authorizes you to charge and deducts from a balance ($10, for example) than the credit card transaction fees that are unsustainable at charges between $0.50 and $10. This is no different than how tollways charge your credit card on file to replenish a balance, and then deduct from that balance (or even how Twilio does billing).

TLDR Credit card fees are expensive, especially when your margins are thin and you are not yet at scale where you have pricing power to pressure processors to lower your CC fees.

I wouldn't be sure about that. Depending on incentives, a Nissan Leaf can be even cheaper than a Toyota Corolla.

Yes and no. My friend told me that it didn't bring substantial business as he would have hoped for. But again, as a fellow EV enthusiast, installing a DCFC at his restaurant was his contribution to promote EV adoption rather than generating more revenue (nice to have). Obviously it would be a different story for different cases.

It's cost concerns, I suspect. Gas pump credit frauds are also a concern.

It absolutely does, but the businesses that work that way are dinosaurs run by people with a 1970s mindset.

Is it possible this exists to prevent homeless people from using it?

Those products typically go right to the end of my list.

Or download Docker... :P

How about turn up, NFC/swipe and plug in. Not customer experience should be "improved" by an app.

Sure, everyone understands why companies would prefer cards, as a matter of fact companies would actually prefer to charge you € 1,000 (say) on 1st Jan of every year, and then reimburse whatever you haven't used/bought on the 31st of December, but here we are talking of what the customers would prefer.

At least here (Italy) it is unthinkable (yet) that a fuel station (attended or unattended) doesn't accept cash (besides Bancomat and debt/credit cards) (though all the petrol companies and the government is pushing for making everything digital, etc. like everywhere else).

Most self service petrol stations in Switzerland take card, as well as cash.

there are neither references nor a timestamp on that article.

at least in germany, where OP was trying to charge along the route, there is a minimum transaction fee charged by most payment providers.

the first offer I found for the first offer i found for german CC terminals (sumup.de): - 2.75% on credit card tx - .95% on EC tc (popular form of debit cards) - no base fee

I only found secondary sources for the direct way, but they state (zahlungsverkehrsfrafen.de) - .3%, at least .08€ for EC tx - 2-4% for CC tx, depending on provider

Didn’t ChargePoint already win, at least in the US?

All vending machines taking cards in Europe are NFC rather than magstripe, so aren't vulnerable to cloned cards.

Card skimmers most definitely exist. Many ATMs have a warning sign to check if the card slot has been tampered with. And the use of chips instead of the magnetic strips they used in the past makes cards impossible to copy.

It's not a crippling problem, but that's largely because of such measures.

I'm not sure where you live, but it absolutely is a thing in my part of Europe (the UK).

To be fair electric cars are still very much in their infancy. We are talking about 2-3% of all cars on the road.

I know Shell is actually starting to add electricity to their inventory in gas stations. But in urban Europe space is at a premium and the investments are huge.

It's bugged me that this whole song and dance of wifi portals; unencrypted wifi, dns spoofing, and sign in pages have been around for over a decade and none of the wifi revisions formalized this. It's been a kludgey cat-and-mouse where the OS checks captive.apple.com and gives you a modal pop up, some wifi networks let you send iMessages and gmail, but wont let you browse without paying. In then end you're still using unencrypted wifi.

I've heard there is finally some future wifi spec formalizing open portals that negotiate to an encrypted connection.

https://xkcd.com/1865/

That's totally fine and I agree with that but the car's in-built navigation tells you where the stops are when you get to a point that your car won't make it. She had to ignore those prompts in order to get into the situation she's in. Granted, she admits to driving an older model Tesla that she rented but it's really unlikely that the cars operating system hasn't been updated to include that feature.

Agreed. You reaaaaaly don’t want to be driving around France without Waze telling you where the photo radar is.

Probably true of Germany as well.

It's built in to the Tesla's on-board navigation. It's not a separate app. The interface on a Tesla shows a big map and it displays Supercharger locations on the map when your range is inadequate or you can also manually show the locations via an icon. It also automatically routes directions to Superchargers if the route doesn't include enough charge to reach the destination.

I don't think you are being totally fair here (and most people aren't when making the long distance EV vs ICE comparison). If you have a car full of kids and pets, are you really only stopping for 5 minutes in your ICE during a 5+ hour trip?

And in your hypothetical EV scenario, when you make the first restroom stop, there is no reason you can't do that at a charging station and top up, cutting some time off of your second refuel stop.

Another thing to consider, most people who get an EV can charge at home or at work, so they likely eliminate all gas stops during their day-to-day commutes. And that can add up to a lot of time savings (the optimistic refueling time is 5 mins, but I have had plenty take closer to 20 due to lines, traffic, out of the way, etc...). So yeah, maybe long trips require a little more planning, and a marginal amount of extra time, but it feels like nitpicking.

So it's ok for the article to be misleading and purposely misstate facts because the point of the article is sound? It's not sound. Plenty of people make those road trips with their Teslas and have tons of fun doing so.

EVs in general, and specifically NOT Tesla. If it was specifically about Tesla, she'd have used the superchargers exclusively and had a much better experience. OTOH, if she had used another EV with the same range, and not bothered to sign up for the various public charging networks' cards, she'd have had a much worse experience. This is.. a weird hodgepodge.

I'd like to see the opposite story: where a reporter drives an ICE car around town for a week and then it suddenly dies in the middle of the road because you have to go to a special station to refuel it instead of doing it in your garage every night.

It's true that road trips take a bit more care. (Although not much; all you have to do is put your destination into the car's navigation system, then make charging stops where it tells you to.) But "normal" cars aren't free of hassle either.

If you want range but don't care about speed, just use a bike.

It was a rental though, why would she be worried about maximizing the battery. I'd say most people who rent will do whatever will give them the best results for there trip.

Wasn't Tesla supposed to be doing it itself, with the upper limit on battery charge specifically picked to maximize its life?

The car manages that automatically. By default, the car is set to not charge past 80% (what Tesla calls the "daily capacity"). You can go into the battery settings and set it to 100% ("trip capacity") which gives you extended range but takes longer to charge (both at home and at Superchargers). The Tesla manual specifically says to leave the car plugged in any time you're not using it and let the on-board energy systems figure out when it should be charging and when it shouldn't be. Every Tesla has a bypass where it will use the energy from the charger to power the systems in the vehicle without needing to charge it. Some other EV's charge the battery and then run the systems off the battery which results in a continual power draw/charge cycle which can shorten the battery life. You don't need to worry about that in a Tesla.

Tesla's response turned off a lot of potential customers who realized that Tesla would go through their trip logs if they made even the slightest critical comment of the company.

Oh, you meant to the NYT? No, because they were just driving the car like a normal person would. They weren't trying to drive the car [like] a Tesla fanatic would, and it was bizarre for Tesla to go after them for trying to drive the car like a normal car...especially when Tesla spends so much marketing $$$ trying to convince people their cars can replace a normal car.

Musk's account was total bullshit. Here's a complete accounting of why.

You can read the response from the journalist[1] and the NYT public editor[2] which concludes the report was done with "integrity". Musk was initially sympathetic to the journalist, then decided to go after him after he calculated that the optics of this situation were not good for Tesla. He does that crap all the time including with accident victims. Blames the victim. We've seen this over and over again, with little or no consequences for Musk.

Here are the major issues:

1- LOWERING SPEED: Out of the gate range was dropping faster than expected. Probably due to cold weather range loss (it was 30F).[3] He was advised to slow down and did so, which already is not a very good road trip story for Tesla.

Musk attacks him over whether he really engaged the cruise control or just how fast he was going (claims "65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip"). But in his reply the journalist correctly notes that Musk mischaracterized what the data shows ("Tesla’s logs clearly show, much of my driving was at or well below the 65 m.p.h. speed limit, with only a single momentary spike above 80"). This is the first major mischaracterization of the data on the part of Musk.

2- LOWERING TEMP: The reporter was also advised to turn down the cabin temp to improve range. Musk accuses him of lying and notes the average temp was 72 degrees.

But notice, he only cites the average. The journalist response that he cycled between shutting off the heat until his extremities got so cold he couldn't take it anymore, then kicking it back on for a time. This also is not a great story for Tesla. He notes, "The data clearly indicates that I sharply lowered the temperature setting – twice – a little over 200 miles into the trip. After the battery was charged I tried to warm the cabin." Musk chose to omit this and only cite the average in an attempt to mislead you into thinking the journalist made up his experience of freezing to compensate for range anxiety.

3- "DRIVING IN CIRCLES" AT THE FIRST CHARGER: Musk goes absolutely bananas here. His "big reveal" is that the data shows the journalist driving in circles before plugging in and charging up. As the reporter notes, he just couldn't find the damn thing in the dark. Here's how Musk spins this:

"Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in. On the later legs, it is clear Broder was determined not to be foiled again."

What the heck? It is amazing to me that anybody bought this crackpot theory. Let's just think about it for one second, ok? If his grand scheme was to intentionally kill the battery and get stranded to make a good story.... Why on earth would he do it mere feet from a supercharger?

Boy oh boy. Occam's razor says the reporter just had a little bit of trouble finding the charger in the lot. If he wanted to invent a story about his Tesla battery dying, there's much better places to engineer a breakdown.. like on the road!

4- CHARGING UP TO 72%: The reporter spent an hour charging up to "well beyond" the range he needed for his itinerary. He trusted Tesla's range estimate. Musk also spins this as "deliberately stopped charging at 72%," implying that it was part of a scheme. This is just malevolent spin.

5- SUDDEN OVERNIGHT LOSS OF RANGE: The reporter parked the car overnight with 90 miles of range left, enough to make it back to the supercharger. When he woke up it had only 25 miles of range. This is the biggest problem in the trip!

Clearly the car suffered cold weather range loss. It was 10F outside. Whereas previously this forced some compromises, here it completed f'd him.

Musk did not dispute or even mention this part. It's the root problem: If you're going to do a cross country trip in the extreme cold you have a plan correctly for it and take some precautions like plugging in overnight and not trust the range estimate (in 2013). But this doesn't mean the journalist has an integrity problem; he just trusted his Tesla too much.

6- SHITTY ADVICE ON HOW TO DEAL WITH A F'D SITUATION: At this point he's just screwed. The nearest charger is too weak. He goes there. After an hour he's at just 32 miles of range. Then someone at Tesla gives him bad info: more range will come back as it heats up. This is believable to him because he got the same advice in the morning: warming the battery will give you back lost range.

Musk claims the reporter acted "against" the advice of Tesla personnel. But he offers no proof. The reporter replied by naming names: "Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored."

This is a plausible misunderstanding. But the bigger picture is: It's not a good story for Tesla even under the best conditions. If he had never spoken with Tesla, just trusted the car's estimate and stayed put it would have taken another 1-2 hours just to charge up enough to make it back to the supercharger, ruining an already ~2 hour delayed day.

So this results in a breakdown when the range doesn't come back after warming up, as he had been led to believe.

SUMMARY- The core problem here was cold weather range loss combined with a driver who expected the car to just work as advertised. At first he drove it normally and was surprised by the diminishing range. He still trusted the range estimate at the first charge on the road. He didn't plug it in overnight in 10F weather, not realizing that it could reduce range. Then he misunderstood instructions from Tesla on how to limp his way back, although the trip was already a failure at that point.

Musk did not like this story. He schemed to find an angle to attack the journalist's integrity. I didn't respect him then for it and I'm not surprised that more of this behavior has surfaced in the years since.

[1] https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-...

[2] https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-w...

[3] https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/cold-weather-range-los...

I agree that maybe this article would have been better suited if its headline was about how renting a Tesla for a tryout on a road trip is not a good idea (having never rented a car, I have no idea the lifestyle of people who rent when going on long leisure trips). It seems like many of her problems would have long been figured out by Tesla owners. But her complaints seem like the kind I would have if I were to try out a Tesla for fun -- I could definitely see myself underestimating how much research I need to do to properly plan a trip, compared to how little I have to plan when driving a gas guzzler. Obviously things will get better when infrastructure continues to improve, but unless Tesla is marketing its rentals as beta products, I don't think it's unfair to point out the limitations in the experience is as a paying customer today.

And as far as this being an indictment of EV in general, and how the author shouldn't have singled out Tesla. I thought it was more or less accepted that Tesla is the top-of-the-line EV brand. I agree this article applies to the EV experience in general -- and as a layperson, I'd want to hear what it's like for the car brand that I am far and away the most familiar with. If she had chosen a non-Tesla brand and written the same complaints, I have a feeling Tesla fans would complain how the author tarnished EV -- and by association, Tesla -- and thus how irresponsible she is for talking shit about EVs without trying a Tesla.

The OP just seems like another Tesla/Elon fanboy.

I fully support what Elon and Tesla are doing, but this Bloomberg article accurately points out the downsides of owning a Tesla, especially if it’s your primary car.

If you’re mostly using a Tesla to get around town and charging at home, it’s makes sense, but you’d be better off renting a car for road trips and not having to deal with this hassle.

A lot of people in America have not and still don’t buy diesels because those gas stations are not as ubiquitous as normal fuel. The problem exists to an even greater degree for electric cars, not to mention the amount of time you have to sit around waiting for charging.

Fair enough, except it wouldn't have told her to waste time charging to 100%. Because charging gets slower the higher the state of charge, it's faster to charge twice like the car would tell her to.

That makes no sense. She clearly planned ahead in a way you wouldn’t for a petrol car.

The “tool” everyone is mentioning is literally in the car dashboard. You have to go out of your way to _not_ use it by default.

Agreed, though I think there was a vague effort to make it more about EVs in general:

> With 215 miles on a full charge, the 2015 Tesla Model S had the biggest range I could find to rent. The distance was more than rivals like the BMW i3 or the Renault Zoe: cars that are both advertised as primarily for city driving. And although I rented a Tesla, it could’ve been any other make or model: I didn’t care so much about the model as I did about testing Europe’s charging infrastructure.

With european wages it's not always economically feasible to have people on the clock 24/7, plus you won't find many people doing 12h shifts.

I prefer that people go home and spend more time on their hobbies or families. I spent a few months in Austria and in a couple of weeks I was used to everything bar restaurants closing at 5.

If they were as insane as you make out, surely they would have gone bust.

This is not a comment about Europe, but rather America: It is quite normal for there to be several fast food restaurants open either all night or at least until 2 am.

I would very much expect to be able to leave the highway at midnight in most parts of the country and get something to eat.

I've taken exactly one road trip in Europe, and it was during the daytime, so I have no idea if this is common there or not. I do note that you specified "regular restaurant" but GP said "gas, food and lodging", all of which are readily available at midnight in the US.

A private room in the train where you might have a bed, etc. Kind of "business/first-class" of trains.

You're the only one who mentioned "hate the brand", and the experience wasn't that bad. (Although she did skip one of her destinations.)

Are there enough superchargers in Europe (inc. UK) fo this to be feasible?

What do you do if (as seemed to happen to the author) a supercharger station is out of action and you are on 20% battery with the next station half a charge away?

That seems awfully annoying (having to plan a road trip rathe than just driving). Cars should be meant for driving, not planning.

The point is, that owners of traditional cars don't have to "plan" road trips unless they just like doing that sort of thing. I know when I have to make a 300+ mile drive I don't plan it at all, I just set off knowing that I can stop anywhere when I need gasoline. I normally don't stop for food and try to hold bathroom breaks to coincide with gas stops, which generally take no more than 10 minutes. The last thing I want to do when I'm trying to get somewhere is stop for an hour for a leisurely meal.

Having t break up trips into 100-200 mile segments based on limited recharging sites might be acceptable for some, but for many I think it will be viewed as a step backwards.

What do you do when you get to the supercharger/other brand station and it's not working and you're at 20%?

> Plenty of users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints.

I don't think the "some people have time or budget constraints" is really a good reason for me to not fill up my car past 80%

The answer to "Why should I not charge my car past 80%?" doesn't seem to be "users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints"

> Importantly, ICE cars also have eccentricities not all users know about, such as running low on gas often prevents the fuel pump from adequate cooling.

It's not something that ever seems to have been a problem in any of the cars I've owned.

> And the 80% rule is true of mobile phones as well.

I feel like this might have been the case a long time ago, but surely modern phones with their integrated battery electronics will handle this. Sure, when I charge/discharge my gigantic LIPO batteries (robotics stuff) I have to take levels into account, but I'd expect my iPhone to just work.

My questioning was mostly to find out how the author could have made their life better. At the time of my response most comments were of the form "The author made her life harder" but didn't really include any details about how she could have made her life easier.

Why would a charger off the highway in the middle of nowhere be a destination charger? Also, isn't this a mode that could be configured, with the charger supplying more juice if requested? Even if its a destination charger I wouldn't be happy to hang out for 2 hours if I could be done in 30 minutes if its more than a few minutes walk to my apartment/hotel.

You're assuming the place they stop has an outlet available and they give them permission to use it.

Besides, a regular outlet will charge it very slowly. A 30 min food stop charging on 220V/12A is only 2.6kWh. Since the author said it had a 215 mi range I'll assume it had the smallest 75kWh pack. That's only a 3.4% charge (7.3 miles)! In the US it would be about half that since we have 120V outlets.

So I need to prolong my usually 10 hour trip (with stops) to an overnight one? :/

Agreed that it’s a government job (though the utilities are quasi-governmental agencies if I’m not mistaken).

How many billions are we talking? If it’s not too many, I’m sure the US government wastes that amount on much less important things.

Sorry, now that you describe it, I realize the emphasis on the "round trip" part. Yes, doing a 4 day roundtrip with that many miles (and only 2 'travel' days) means a lot of driving for a brief stay. I was thinking more in terms of a relatively continuous trip where 4 hours a day for 4 days is not very much (for example).

My parents' house is about 500mi away from where I live, and I generally don't drive unless I'm staying for a week rather than just a few days, so this is a good point-- for a trip to visit someone, and return, a good % of your time is spent driving. As a typical "see the sights" type roadtrip, you might be doing 8 hours a day every day for an extended time, which is more what I was thinking.

(FWIW our 3 can easily get its rated 310 mi range so really you'd only need to stop once, assuming you can charge at your destination, but of course that assumes there's a supercharger relatively close to the 'middle' of your segment.. OTOH if you did stop twice they'd be quite brief stops, probably like 20 minutes).

Except the engine isn't always there as taking up extra space and weight.

Yes, that's the effect. But I'd only have to carry the generator portion when needed for a road trip. You could perhaps even rent it only when you need.

Even if the generator was in a small trailer, that would provide the range freedom without loosing the storage space (and help with venting/cooling/noise).

building a tiny engine that runs efficiently and produces enough meaningful electricity to make up for its weight is difficult.

From a regulatory standpoint, yes, fuel systems would be regulated in this design.

You don't need much power to keep a car going on the freeway. If I can extend my drive from 200 miles to 700 miles before I have to stop and recharge - well that is as far as a human can drive in a day anyway (many humans have driven farther - it wasn't safe they were just lucky).

It doesn't take much energy to keep a modern car moving at highway speed. With regenerative braking and a limited top speed a small generator should be able to keep the car moving well enough.

And yet Prius plugin hybrid sales are up almost 50% YoY. Pure EVs are probably the future at some point. But in the here and now, plugin hybrids are the pragmatic choice for a lot of people who mostly drive shorter distances and can charge at home but do longer trips also.

> You're probably going to have a seriously underpowered ICE in it as well (snip) which makes it less suitable to highway driving

Why? You can put a powerful ICE in it just as easily.

My Chevy Volt can easily do 90+mph on the freeway, irregardless of whether it's on battery or gasoline. (Of course, I've never personally verified that...)

That's why the Volt didn't have an ICE, it had a gas-powered generator to run the electric motors. It's such a smart design that it's a crime they're killing the line.

I want to think that the future involves avoiding having to own bigger cars entirely and lease/rent an EV car plus credits for short-term rentals of different vehicles when needed.

Need a big SUV for skiing or camping? Swap your small EV for the weekend.

There's too many people I know that make vehicle purchasing decisions based on edge cases to avoid having to rent something different when they actually need it. We need to figure out how to give up large SUVs that only drive around a single passenger.

Get a PHEV. The Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid looks amazing, and the 2019 Prius has AWD. Save yourself some money until electric is ready.

200 miles round trip should be fine in a 300+ mile range car. Also you don't need to stop for an hour if you just need a few extra miles of range to get home. You can add 50 miles in 10 minutes at a Tesla supercharger.

So 200 miles round trip for the hike, plus 20 or so for food/buffer? 220 miles isn't hard to get on a single charge, wouldn't you just charge it when you got back home?

Or just get an electric with greater range perhaps? Hyuandi Kona would do it. Plus it seems a bad time to buy right now. Lots of new models coming in 2019.

EVs like any car have scenarios that work well and other things that don't. Driving your Tesla 250 miles, doing something for 10 minutes, and then driving home won't be a good experience. But driving 70-100 miles, even if going to Snoqualmie Pass or Mt Rainier, then driving home, that's fine in even a 4 year old model S 85D like mine.

First, did you know that going downhill your car can charge or at worst drive a long way without using any power. Second, the raw range of the car is such that I can go from Seattle to pretty much any place around here and back (Stevens, Olympic Peninsula). My car's modest 265 mile range is dwarfed by a model 3's > 300 miles.

If you don't live in a garage with any charging it can be a pain. I have just 120 volts in my garage, but I rarely need to go to a higher power charger, because I get 50 miles added overnight. If I am going to say ski two days in a row I can get enough charge at home to be ready to go the next day. If I was doing such a drive day after day I'd upgrade to higher power. If I was living in Seattle with a car on the street where I couldn't run power to it, or in a parking garage, I agree that it's too much trouble. But the key thing is the range and power used by your ev can be reliably modeled. Check out (among many such sites), https://www.evtripplanner.com/. Try planning a trip, picking a car, listing the temp, how many people.

It's true that you have to do a little planning if you are going to the limits of your car's range, but I almost never need to do this planning. When I used to go driving around the backcountry in Utah I also had to plan out where I'd get gas and decide if I was going to bring extra gas with me too. I never did that normally of course.

Would renting a car once a year not wind up cheaper?

The convenience outweighs the time.

It doesn't take a whole minute to plug/unplug, and you don't have to do it every day if you're in a hurry.

It takes me no more time to plug the car in than it does to grab my bag out of the car. Probably less, since the cord is on the driver's side, and plug is up front, so I'm walking that way anyway.

Hmm, they charge a delivery fee, and they come on their schedule, not yours. Also you have to remember to leave your car accessible and pop your gas cap, otherwise you'll still have to go to your car when they arrive at whatever random time they choose.

That's because people are still using their phone indoors. The instant you pull into the garage you plug in, as a matter of practice, before you enter the house. I have no idea why you'd forget that unless some kind of emergency was going on.

That's a fair point. If we could come up with battery tech with slightly higher power density and less exotic chemistries all the better.

If you are doing a lot of long weekend roadtrips, you will likely want to own a ICE vehicle with the current state of battery tech. Not a big deal. To each their own. But for many people, especially households with two cars, one of those that fills up at home and has a range of 200mi, will be something that saves them time and money. People and society would probably be better off not attaching their identity and group affiliation to the type of car they use. Keep your identity small[1].

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html