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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

Have you driven a Model 3? It's like night and day. Everything that burns gasoline feels like a dinosaur to me now after driving a Model 3. I can't stand renting cars, they are all complete junk compared to my Model 3 at home. I said this to a Hertz in Denver, they gave me their best Jaguar. It stinks, it is slow, it is pathetic. It's basically game over for ICE, and they know it. They have 10-15 years maybe but at that point, nobody will be buying a gas car, because they're disgusting, expensive, unsafe, and slow compared to an EV, and everyone will know it by that time.

ICE is rapidly going obsolete, and Tesla is making money digging the grave.

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Replying here because your other comment hit the depth limit.

For decades ICE cars have been designed to drop off the mounts and go under the cabin while absorbing energy in a frontal crass. There's not some dramatically higher risk of the engine crushing your legs vs a BEV.

There are many reasons to prefer the BEV, but please don't spread FUD.

I don't see why it's FUD. Having the engine go under the mount pushes the car... up in the air, where it can roll over. The fact is that mass distributed at the nose and tail (gas tank) is worse for dynamics than having the mass evenly distributed along the bottom of the vehicle.

I took my BMW i3 in for service recently and got a high end 2019 BMW SUV loaner..worth 50% more. I was expecting to be impressed. Instead I was amazed how much I disliked it - clumsy tech, loud, needs fill ups...it seems ICE tech is at a dead end. I truly wouldn't want that vehicle if it was free.

Almost everything unsafe about gas cars applies regardless of the power train. The only exception is leaving it running in a closed room (and even there it isn't nearly as bad for a modern car)

Every car I've ever owned had no problem reaching freeway speeds. Even my geo metro which is rightly considered underpowered at best (and mine had a misfire problem). I'm not going to a track so I don't need more speed than is legal.

EVs are much safer than gasoline cars because of how the mass in the car is distributed. Gasoline cars have a giant brick in the front (engine and transmission) which moves back into the passenger compartment in a frontal collision. Automotive engineers have to work all kinds of magic to stop the engine from smashing passengers. In an EV, the big sled of batteries in the bottom causes the car to rotate away from the crash energy, and makes it almost impossible to flip. Plus EVs can use that frontal space for energy absorption.

It's actually a big deal.

I couldn’t find any after a quick search, but are you aware of any studies that compare EV to ICE safety normalized for model year? It would be an interesting comparison given the assumption that there are a lot more older (and this less safe) ICE vehicles on the road

It would be. I also can't find any. One of the challenges here is that in many cases Teslas (the pre-eminent EV of course) aren't even considered "cars" that qualify to be in a safety survey, because (just as an anecdotal example) "they don't crash enough": https://insideevs.com/news/370539/tesla-safest-list-didnt-cr... or in other cases, they simply aren't a qualifying car (not enough market share.) So while actual studies seem to be impossible to come by, commercial studies that sell magazines are completely unreliable due to mostly just not including EVs.

So eventually we will get the data; after all, in some places Teslas were the #1 selling car in the second quarter of 2020. It's hard to ignore the #1 selling car. For now, engineering principles and crash test results are all we have to go on.

Model 3s drive great for a practical sedan, but for getting to point A to point B, I'd slightly prefer a regular economy car. Tesla's UI doesn't quite make up for physical knobs and buttons yet, and gasoline makes road trips a lot easier. I'm really looking forward to the Rav4 Prime and plan on getting that after I move to a place with charging.

> I can't stand renting cars, they are all complete junk compared to my Model 3 at home. I said this to a Hertz in Denver, they gave me their best Jaguar.

I can't stand meat. I've asked McDonalds to give me their best BigMac and it was horrible.

Rental companies can and will (eventually) rent out EVs. And when they do, I'll likely never have to drive another gas car again.

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