Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com