Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

> (you'll spend less time overall than you spend at gas stations)

Curious how you are calculating this. I usually spend about 60-120 seconds refilling my tank once every 300 miles. (15 gallon tank, about 30 mpg).

Because gas stations are everywhere, I never have to plan a specific route based on availability of gas stations, or use an app to find where the stations are, or even think about how much gas I have, as I know there is a station on the way to wherever I am going, and all I need to do is pull over. I even have the luxury of refusing to stop at gas stations on the left side of the road because there will be another station a block down on the right side.

But with electric you have to go out of your way to find a charging station and it takes longer than 100 seconds to fully charge your car. So how can it be less time overall?

View on HN

With electric you plug the car in overnight while it is parked. It is full every morning, and you never need to go out of your way to charge it unless you are on an intercity trip.

It really is more convenient than gasoline!

I don't think most people would consider only charging at home an advantage or "convenience". If you even need to go to a charging station once and spend a half hour to an hour there, that becomes very inconvenient, even if you only need to do that once a month.

Most people would like to have a charging station always nearby so that it becomes stateless for them, so that they don't need to think about how much they drove that day, and they want the charging to happen within a minute or so to view it as equally convenient as gas.

PEV have many advantages, but let's be realistic -- the convenience of charging is a disadvantage.

Also this assumes you have a driveway that has a charge point hooked up.

This does nothing for, say, most apartment buildings which don’t have charge points, or people who park on the street.

That’s true; we’re going to want a substantial improvement in charging infrastructure over the next decade.

We need outlets in apartment parking lots (they already have light poles, and block heater outlets are common in northern areas) and off-street parking. It’s pretty cheap to just add outlets.

Assuming that the existing wiring can support the increased demand.

It used to be pretty common for electricity demand to double every decade. Residential electricity usage more than doubled from 1950 to 1960, and then again more than doubled from 1960 to 1970 (and then about doubling again by 1990). A lot of that was air conditioning becoming common and then ubiquitous. Electric cars will be able to be more responsive to grid constraints than air conditioners ever were.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38572

EVs are very energy intensive, and in a location of the building that never had such high energy requirements; parking garages are one of the pieces of the building that is extremely optimized and so may be complicated or expensive to retrofit.

Building codes have had to be adjusted to accommodate, but new housing is a fraction of the total building supply in any given area, and retrofitting can be nearly four times the cost of a new installation. And these building codes usually target a <10% amount of EV spaces. Anecdotally, I work in an office building that meets these codes and is all LEED-compliant and stuff, yet demand for the limited EV spaces outstrips supply and you basically get rationed access to it on a first-come first-serve basis.

If you have a garage and a power point at home, you just leave it plugged in while you're not using it. You don't really even have to think about it - definitely more convenient than having to find a gas station once a week

It's a huge convenience! I love not having to get to the gas station (it always at the least convenient time).

> So how can it be less time overall?

If you can charge at home overnight (or at work during the day) then you won't need to go anywhere else.

If a car never breaks down, then you don't need to waste time at a mechanic, either.

This metaphor doesn’t make sense to me. As a matter of course, a gasoline car needs gasoline; unless you live on a farm with delivered fuel, that means going to the gas station for it.

An electric car needs only electricity to operate, which is already distributed via wires to everyone’s home.

Both cars need tires; electric cars also need significantly less scheduled maintenance. No oil changes, no timing belt, etc.

The point being that estimating the expectation of something by excluding an important part of the event space yields a false estimate. No one believes that everyone always charges their cars at home and that charging stations are not needed, otherwise there would be no demand to build them. But when called out on the inconvenience of these stations there is a retreat to "oh, I only charge at home" and so that is the only case in which to take charge convenience into account.

It’s not a retreat. I drive a plug-in electric hybrid car, and I almost never visit a gas or charging station. Maybe every 6 months (I only use a little gas if I exceed the 35 mile electric range... I never drive 400 miles a day except on long road trips). I just charge at home. It’s way more convenient than gas stations.

People who have never owned electric cars just don’t grok this. Yes, some people live in apartments which often have no outlets for charging your car (altho they definitely do some places), but this is a minority of people in the US and so it’s fair to say that overall you likely will spend a lot less time charging than a typical gas car owner spends at gas stations. It’s a perfectly defensible statement.

I've had my model y for six months now, and I have not needed to charge it away from home once yet. Yes, it's the pandemic so I'm not making long trips, but it's met my regular trip needs without compromise.

I’d time your next fuel stop. Start a phone video recording and measure the time from making the right turn into the station and stop it once you’re back on the road. It’s never going to be 2 minutes and will often be more like 10 minutes.

In contrast, if you have a plug at your house, you spend well under a minute to plug and unplug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com