Unrelated, but does anyone know how many electric cars have an autonomy of more than 700km, while also charging fully in less than one hour? Is that even possible with the current technology?
I think most normal drivers on a cross country trip need bathroom breaks, lunch/snacks/drinks, leg stretching etc. every 2-3 hours. Great opportunity to plug in and recharge enough for another 2-3 hours. Range anxiety is mostly irrational and mostly a non technical problem as your car probably has more endurance than you.
I always thought thatd be the endgame. Some standardized battery design where you roll up on top of a station and it swaps the battery underneath the car.
Or maybe this is something your car does for you before arriving. Which eliminates the amount of dead time tens of thousands cars will need to spend while using up expensive property in cities while charging.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/24/nio-builds-battery-swap...
Everytime I hear this I wonder if the people saying it have ever taken a road trip. Stopping every 2-3 hours for a half hour on a long road trip seems downright crazy to me.
This is beside the point that during the busy season of summer travel there are sometimes extensive lines at gas stations on popular routes. Imagine if every car took 15-45 minutes to fuel up?
Range anxiety is real. EVs are the ultimate commuting cars: known distance, charge at home over night. But for the immediate future, over long distance, gasoline cars are hard to beat.
It seems crazy to you because you haven't done it. It seems perfectly normal and acceptable to people who drive Teslas over long distances. I see people going for lunch, shopping, sightseeing at Superchargers. If you know you'll have to wait 20+ minutes, you just find something to do instead of biting your fingernails.
You'll find out eventually.
Sure, Tesla has pretty good acceleration (other than the roadster, nothing you couldn't get with an ICE). When I was 20 years younger, I might have even cared. Now I am somehow more interested in meaningful comforts and conveniences, and outside of the SV gaggle of kids who thing that being a computer on wheels, with a big screen means that Tesla is a "luxury" car, presenting even Model S as somehow competing with any of the big name luxury brands is just laughable. Hell, even my wife's Hyundai plug-in has things that you can't get in any Tesla. For half the price. Well, but Tesla has fart jokes. I'll take colled seats, thank you very much.
I wouldn't even start with the AP, it's not any better than anybody else's driver assist systems. Except when it drives you into a fire truck or median barrier, of course. Then it could be considered a natural selection tool, I guess /s
FWIW, in the same period I did 2 2000+ mile drives, and a few in 300-500 range, and in all of them I needed to actually get where I was going in some reasonable time. Maybe with stops at some vista points, but those generally do not have superchargers anywhere near. Could I make it in a Tesla? Sure. I could make it in a Leaf probably, too. It would just take significantly more time, and I would need to spend much more time at places that have chargers, and those (just like places with gas stations on the Interstate) usually aren't all that exiting.
For Tesla's target market, people with more money than actual need for a car as a tool, it actually all makes sense and works quite well. But I somehow doubt that this market is large enough to "drive German automakers out of business in 2 years" as some claim here, or even to make a significant dent in ICE car sales, absent some drastic legal or tax pressure.
Still works with everyone I tried. Do you know what really got old something like 7 years ago? The claim that you can't drive long distances in a Tesla. Hansjörg Gemmingen just reported hitting 900000 Km in his Model S (from 2015 I believe) after driving ~50000 Km in 2 months.
> Tesla has pretty good acceleration (other than the roadster, nothing you couldn't get with an ICE)
OK, how much is an ICE that gets the 2.6s 0-100 Km/h of the Model S Performance? And what comfort does it offer?
> FWIW, in the same period I did 2 2000+ mile drives
In 1 day? Impressive. Or we are talking about completely different things.
> But I somehow doubt that this market is large enough to "drive German automakers out of business in 2 years" as some claim here, or even to make a significant dent in ICE car sales, absent some drastic legal or tax pressure.
German newspapers already reported on recent losses by Daimer, BMW and explicitly mentioned EV (and their failing transition) as one reason.
I've never heard anyone say that you can't drive long distance in an electric car. The difference is how long will it take you.
Isn't 2.6 sec 0-60 something you only get with the "ludicrous" upgrade, where it counts how often you actually use it? There are faster ICE cars.
Good God, no, I don't think you can even do 2000 miles in a day (if you ever sleep) while staying even remotely legal. But I did quite a few San Jose to Las Vegas drives in 8 hours. 2000+ were when I first drove my wife's car from San Jose to Austin, which took me 2 days. Bloody thing goes 600+ miles on a tank, which is more than I can take. Could that be done in a Tesla? Sure, but it would take longer and involve planning the trip around chargers even if they were everywhere. Second time I was moving my car, which is technically faster, but has more reasonable mileage, and made two long stops, but only because instead of morning, as planned, left in the evening (apparently if an SV apartment complex says that the rental office is open on a Saturday, it does not mean that anyone will actually be there to give the keys to). It was still much faster than would be possible in anything you need to charge. And somehow all the interesting little spots where I felt like stopping and taking pictures didn't have any Superchargers anywhere near. Nor, often, any gas stations.
Automakers were regularly having losses long before there were any Tesla to blame.
It's pretty clear that ICE will be replaced by something, quite possibly electric, at some point in the future, and they need to prepare for it, but pretending that in 2 years electric cars will be anything but a statistical error in the number of cars sold, let alone that anyone is going out of business over it, is just a load of wishful thinking SV BS.
Then, of course, I just don't understand how anyone can, in a good consciousness, give Elon even a red cent.
Anyway, range anxiety would be justified if it was hard to find a charging point and or if you'd have barely enough range to get to the next charging point. Neither is the case. Your car will tell you how much juice you have left and where you can get some more. Unlike gas stations, charging points are all over the place and not bottle necked on fuel truck deliveries to handful of locations. So, there's no need to queue up to charge.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this is completely untrue. No one trying to do serious distance stops every 2-3 hours, and especially not for the 20 minutes for a Tesla 50% supercharge top up. Maybe 10 minutes every 3-4 hours is realistic.
I don't think this is true. I recently drove 12 hours to Austin, TX and I stopped only once to get gas after 6 hours. I don't really like to waste a bunch of time on stops when I have a destination in mind.
That said, I don't have a family or anything, so I could see how that changes when you have a couple children with you.
As for charging _fully_ - that's rarely done in practice, because over 80% li-ion batteries charge much slower. Bjørn Nyland recently beat the record[0] for longest distance travelled in an EV in 24h (2781km) by stopping to charge from 10% to 50%, because only then he could use the full power of superchargers.
I don't think this will match your expectations, but this is the best take on what you want I can think of
At some point, you can not improving the range any more by adding more batteries because any gain will be eaten by more rolling resistance.
At some point you will arrive to the point when your vehicle starts to resemble a battery stack with two wheels.