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Comment by julienb_sea | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars are perfectly pleasant to own as a second car or if you very rarely take long road trips.

If it's very cold or very hot, if you drive to the mountains or rural areas for pleasure, range anxiety is a serious problem. Waiting for a re-charge is ok if you have access to Tesla supercharger speeds. Forcing this lifestyle change on everyone is absolutely insane.

The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands. Renewables alone will not be able to keep up, so we will need to increase fuel based generation of electricity, which is less efficient as an overall usage of fuel for transportation versus an efficient hybrid vehicle.

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I've taken several long (2000mi) road trips in my Tesla. The only range anxiety I've had has been self induced. Eg, skipping the Tesla map planned supercharger and using the next one down the road for a variety of reasons [1] . The most anxious I've been is when I pulled into a supercharger with 2% remaining.

[1] I often do this to arrive at a supercharger with a lower state of charge. This allows for charging lower on the curve, which allows for faster charging. I sometimes do this to avoid unpleasant chargers. My least favorite is the Savannah super charger, which is located several stoplights from the highway in an airport parking garage.

I understand and overarchingly agree - my drive to my preferred ski resort nearby is approx. 180mi roundtrip and this can be easily covered in a Tesla. I used to take weekend trips to Whistler and the increased travel time from charging would be much more noticeable, as the entire trip timeline is pretty tight as it is.

I think charging infrastructure like superchargers will have difficulty scaling up to large potions of the population owning electric vehicles. This is of course my opinion, but if there are a factor of a hundred more Teslas or equivalent on the road than there currently are, and supercharging stops regularly are 30-60 minutes, I suspect the convenience factor of supercharging may decrease substantially.

It's wild to me that no other car manufacturers have taken Tesla up on their offer for supercharger access.

EVs without supercharger access are strict city cars.

The electrify america network sucks, non tesla range is mostly bad (with a small number of exceptions). Even with decent range, lack of supercharger access makes the car a non-starter.

I think Tesla's advantage here remains huge, I think legacy car companies are in trouble (and this is even ignoring their inability to write or ship software). The dealership model of legacy car companies will also be a big problem for them and will continue to hold them back.

That said, I think ultimately forcing the EV switch makes sense and with something like supercharging in place is viable. Battery capacity will continue to improve, charging rates will continue to improve. Pushing this shift makes sense.

It just might be that legacy car companies are too dumb to do it properly and will cede a lot of the market to Tesla (and maybe Apple).

> It's wild to me that no other car manufacturers have taken Tesla up on their offer for supercharger access.

It's a prestige thing. Legacy manufacturers would lose face if they'd have their cars charging at the young upstart's superchargers.

This is why most european manufacturers have partnered with 3rd party companies and provide some amount of free charging at certain branded locations for new vehicles.

Well whatever it is, I think it’s a stupid decision that harms their potential customers.

They did nothing for ten years while tesla built out an entire network (except publicly complain about EVs).

It’s like Steve Ballmer’s video trashing the iPhone and then losing the entire phone market. I have little respect for that.

You lost me at

>this is even ignoring their inability to write or ship software

If anyone cannot write or ship software it is Tesla. My Toyota is light-years ahead in the software and updating department and I'll never again touch a Tesla with a stick in my life. Talk about crappy software. No what Tesla's got going for them is first mover and that is over soon. Even cheap Chinese EVs like the MG is closing with Tesla fast. Apple is working with Hyundai, which is another company biting at Tesla's heals. Hyundai cars with Apple software/design for Apple fans and Tesla is left in the dust. They need to invest a lot more in quality than they do now -without raising the price- if they aren't going to be left behind when the big guys get moving.

I think most people would disagree with you on the point that Toyota software is “light years ahead in software and updating”, but there is some subjectivity here.

> The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands.

Relatively centralized electricity generation can be converted to lower carbon generation. This is happening pretty rapidly in many places for economic reasons; renewable power generation is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel power generation.

Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distributed all over the world is effectively impossible.

> Renewables alone will not be able to keep up

Source please?

> Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distributed all over the world is effectively impossible.

Delivering said energy to over a billion cars all over the world is pretty impossible. As things stand right now that's an entire continent (Africa) which in many places doesn't have reliable power even for basic things like keeping the hospitals running (they have to use diesel generators and the like).

But, then again, this EV-vehicle "revolution" is targeted at the Western middle-classes + China, they can afford to not care about the rest of the world as they've done until now.

You can generate electricity on-site with quite limited resources.

What you can't do is drill, refine and distribute liquid fuel. First you drill crude oil in one location, ship it to a second location to be refined, ship it to your country and then someone has to drive tanker to every single gas station to fill them up.

With electricity you put up solar panels or wind turbines and add a battery. Now you've got electricity for years to come.

I'm merely making an in my view commonsense point. ICE engines are carefully regulated worldwide, certainly in any nation which would consider mandating a transition to electric vehicles. Subsidies and gasoline taxes encourage societal transition to make transportation as efficient as possible, without mandating a full phase out of gasoline as a power source.

Renewables have scalability issues. Grid scale renewable energy is possible but needs to be supplemented by either significant on-demand generation when the renewables are offline (at night, when wind is weak), or very large scale battery storage. Localized in-home energy storage is plausible but expensive to roll out. We are also talking about absolutely gigantic demand for raw materials to produce sufficient battery capacity to smooth out the renewable power generation curve.

My point is that in order to feasibly power a society which is heavily reliant on electric cars, power generation via renewables alone is not a viable answer.

"ICE engines are carefully regulated worldwide"

...Volkswagen would like to have a word :D

Indeed. Also Fiat Chrysler, Nissan, Renault, and Mercedez-Benz. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

I recently drove over 800 km in my Hyundai Ioniq 28 kWh EV, it only took 1 hour more than when I drive my Tesla. Most of that time was spent eating or stretching legs anyway so it is fully possible to take longer trips :)

People always bring up long road trips as an excuse against EVs but honestly I don't get it. On road trips the stop for gas was always an excuse to stretch your legs, use the restroom, grab snacks at the convenience store, and just GTFO of the car. A gas stop is never just 5 minutes to fill up.

I moved from GA to CA last summer. I drove a moving truck towing our Leaf and my partner in our Model 3, we made it a point to take the same route but not stick together. When ended up staying together for most of the trip and would arrive at our hotels within half an hour of one another, usually the Model 3 arrived first. Often we would pass them charging at a Supercharger only to be overtaken when we stopped or just due to speed.

For me, the only thing keeping me from going to 100% electric for my household is that nobody seems to offer an EV with 200 miles of range with AWD and clearance for a rough forest road with potholes. Until then, we're sticking to a short range EV for the city and a crossover for the mountains.

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