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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

The article says at 11 kW it charges in 7.5 hours. That's $7.75 worth of electricity for me. Gasoline over the last year has averaged $2.56/gallon for me.

The article says it gets 250 miles on a charge. To get 250 miles from an ICE car on $7.75 worth of gasoline, that ICE car would need to get 82.6 miles/gallon.

The EV should also require much less routine maintenance than an ICE car.

For a heck of a lot of people, fuel cost per mile and the amount and cost of routine maintenance are among the most important metrics.

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Yes, cost of ownership (unpredicted or not) ought to be much lower with an EV. I’d love to finally move to electric but my personal main problem is that it only really looks like a viable option where I live for house owners due to lack of infrastructure for the many, many people living in apartments.

If you pay $17,000 more fore the electric car, it would take many years to pay for itself... maybe too many.

Maybe the battery would need to get replaced by then...

depends on how you use your car. Lots of the cost benefits will be swallowed up by the higher price tag. Also, for any long distance driving, you will need to hire an ICE. I think its an objective fact that electric cars still have a very long way to catch up.

> Also, for any long distance driving, you will need to hire an ICE

Why? There are many CCS DC chargers in the world and the number is growing month-by-month. It's true that some areas aren't built out yet, but many areas already are and new chargers are going in all the time.

Try out some road trips with a VW ID.4 on A Better Routeplanner. See how you go:

https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

If you assume using public chargers, then the cost-per-mile calculation needs to be updated, because electricity prices at the charging stations are much higher than the cost of electricity at home. Here where I live, in Poland, the difference can be up to 3 times. In this case HEV is actually much cheaper to run than an EV.

It's objective fact that it will take a lot of improvement before an electric car is equivalent or better in every way. But that's not a very fair standard for "catching up".

The only thing fossil cars have remaining is range and charging speed and I suspect is only a few years to go. Everything else is in another league.

Meeting range and price at the same time is going to be pretty difficult for a while.

And the ever lacking charging infrastructure in the cities.

Where I live in Europe all who own cars in the city have them street parked in front or around their apartment buildigs.

How will they all be charged if everyone would switch to electric?

Plaster all the streets or sidewalks with charging stations?

How will the existing power lines handle the extra strain? (Spoiler alert: they can't)

Who will pay for building and maintaining all this new charging infrastructure?

These are concerns that are somehow never considered yet they're the main bottlenecks for the future of mass EV adoption in the cities.

How well do the batteries hold up in cold weather? I live where it gets pretty cold and I worry about shrinking range, especially when using the heater.

>for any long distance driving, you will need to hire an ICE.

Either you are ignorant and unjustifiably overconfident in your opinions,

- or -

I am living in a simulation and the many long road trips I have done in an EV have all just been an illusion.

Most probably i am ignorant and unjustifiably overconfident. I shall have to humbly reconsider my position.

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