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Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

EV's are great for big cities, but about half of US pop lives in rural areas. Outside major highways EV chargers don't exist in the sticks.

In rural places 50 mile trips are normal. It's not unusual to drive 90 miles each way in a day. And chances are you won't find an EV charger on either end.

And in rural areas you have single phase electric, slowing down charges. And in the same places, power goes out for days at a time most years.

If you think the US is ready to go EV-only you live in an urban bubble. In much of the US, EV's are still wildly impractical.

In the country you may need to go 500 miles with no electricity when power is out for a week. Only a fool would buy an EV in sparse areas where long outages happen (most of rural US)

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"about half of US pop lives in rural areas." that doesn't seem plausible at all; US has 15-20% rural population depending on how exactly you define "rural" (e.g. https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/definition/index....)

I guess it depends on if you consider suburbs rural too. There's plenty of ~40,000 pop cities in the middle of nowhere

That isn’t true. Rural areas served by the grid don’t have down times weeks for weeks. Maybe you are referring to a few area in California last summer during fire season?

Rural areas off the grid usually have some way of getting their own electricity, like solar or small hydro. These places typically also lack roads so Tesla charging isn’t much of an issue.

America is greater than 80% urban, not as urban as Canada and Australia, but urban enough that even if rural dwellers had vastly different electric resources, there would still be a huge market for EVs. If anything, urban users have a disadvantage because many of them don’t have their own parking in residence to charge overnight, which is not really a problem in rural America.

I believe the claim was days and week(singular). It is true. Tornados, hurricanes, heavy winds, ice storms, snow storms, etc. I have had my power go out for days at least once in the last 10 years. I don't think there is a year which goes by where there is not multiple instances of areas around here loosing power for days. Most of the areas are not what I would call rural either.

Ya, I experienced that also. But the gas pumps run on electricity also.

> But the gas pumps run on electricity also.

I can't say I have ever experienced a situation where I could not drive a short distance and pick up gas. Even when I was without power for days, there was no issue getting gas.

Because those gas stations still had electricity. Guess how you charge an electric car?

I grew up in the country. Outside urban areas it's normal to have multi day power outages in the US. The less people your circuit serves the lower it's prioritized for repair.

Our longest outage was a bit over a week. Several days was normal.

And backup power is never enough to charge EV. You would need to run typical 120v 1500w generator for days.

We used our gas car for backup power. Many others did too. Idle and hook an inverter to battery and it will do 1000w output for a couple days.

Rural is a bad sell for EV's because they don't have 80kw supply needed for charging stations or reliable enough electric.

I went without power for two weeks in Vicksburg Mississippi when I was a kid and we got hit by an ice storm, that isn’t even rural. But that was like a once in a twenty year event. And since the gas pumps at many stations didn’t have power either, well, I don’t think EV would have made a difference.

I grew up in rural Canada, and perhaps the U.S. is a much more undeveloped country than I thought, but almost nothing you say applies to where I grew up.

Perhaps. Canadian population is concentrated in southern areas. Majority of continental US is habitable and has population density less than 10 people per square mile.

I did not live at all near the U.S. border. I've no doubt that you can find places such as you have described in the U.S. (and in Canada), but I think you are vastly over-estimating the percentage of the population who lives there. Even in rural areas, reliable electricity is the norm, and people's typical daily commute is well within the range of an EV. The availability of public chargers is growing, too.

Yeah, I haven't lived in the sticks for some years and EV chargers might be more widespread than I thought. Rural folks still love their ICE cars though for sure

What fraction of the cars are driven in such areas? We could probably go a long way to reducing carbon emissions by replacing ICEs with EVs for the people who have reliable electricity. Cars are parked almost all day. If we can ensure that there is a kW or two available at most parking spots, I'm pretty sure that 90% of the charging needs are met.

Probably about half are deiven rurally, and they are more likely to be trucks with worse fuel economy. The cybertruck has a 300 mile range for the mid tier anf costs about as much as a new fullsize. The power outage thing is real though. A week a year sometimes un the cold, and there is no gas out there, but you have fire. Worse is when its 100 outside and you cross your fingers and eat dry food cooked on a fire so you don't have to open a fridge. Getting a generator big enough to run the fridge for a week was a nice upgrade for us.

I'm trying to convince people of this :) . In rural areas a car is frequently your only lifeline when power fails. It's a source of heat, power, and transport. Making that all dependant on electricity which you won't have when you need it most is a non starter

EVs are good for suburbanites, maybe.

A fair amount of city drivers do not have a dedicated off street parking space where they can install a charger. There are basically zero street parking spots in any American city with charging. It is not going to be possible to retrofit most multistory garages to have even a significant minority of spots with chargers.

I live and work in fairly new multistory buildings, and there aren’t many EV spots. My coworkers with EVs move their cars around constantly in hope of getting their one hour ration of charging in the office garage.

What proportion of carbon emissions are made by rural drivers?

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