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Comment by TrisMcC | Hacker News Reader

The charging story is still far from ideal. Even if a large-scale supercharger network is developed and deployed it still takes far too long and needs to happen far too frequently to be convenient is many places in the USA.

I was idly watching a Hasan Piker Twitch stream this weekend when he was in Austin, TX and most of the time in a rented Tesla they were very concerned with finding charging stations and the range predictions were dropping far quicker than expected in the hot Texas sun. Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Gas stations even 100 years ago operated faster than superchargers promise to in the foreseeable future.

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But isn’t that a niche case? I’d have thought the vast majority of car usage is short local trips and regular commutes, not road trips. If you’re able to charge the car at home that should cover most usage.

Well, the use-case I mentioned above was not a road-trip but just driving around Austin doing errands. Many places in Texas are routinely 30+ miles away from each other.

All recent electric cars can manage multiple 30+ mile trips on a single charge. Bad privacy around supercharger stations due to streaming is definitely an edge case.

People expect vehicle to work even in the one-off cases like long trips. You can't just design for the median trip.

It’s not the median, it’s the 90th percentile of car miles. And people do have alternatives for longer trips - either using charging stations, renting a different vehicle with better range characteristics, or mode switching to another form of transport, like a train.

This is where someone always chimes in with ‘but what about people who live in rural Idaho and need to drive eighteen hours to a hospital once a quarter and they need to tow their boat when they do it’

There are outliers who have specialist niche needs. But the vast majority of trips taken by the vast majority of drivers are short range and start/terminate at home.

Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.

>>Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.

Will this be the case going forward? I wouldn't consider apartment dwellers a niche case. It is a lot to ask for apartment building to install chargers at every parking place.

Apartment owners will do what it takes to get renters. Most apartments have Cable TV wired in even those built before cable TV. If landlords discover that potential renters are refusing their apartments because they can't charge their cars they will install charges to attract those people. Of course this is an economic decision - they will consider if the additional rent they can charge is worth it (or in some cases if the high class people they can attract for the same rent are worth it)

It won't be when states implement new ICE vehicle bans. If you can't register a new ICE vehicle in CA or MA, then you won't look at places where you can't charge your EV at home. Because you're going to be buying a EV if you're getting new after the ban takes effect, and you're probably going to be looking at that before then too.

People buy for optionality. Otherwise pickup trucks and second homes wouldn’t be so popular.

And with charging stops once you embrace it the dynamics are different:

With fossil fuels you first drive to the pump, fill up, then take a break for restroom, food, ...

With an EV you drive up to the charger, connect and do the other things. A while later you come back and drive on.

Also instead of a long charging stop when the battery reaches 0% you can plan for multiple short stops, which is positive for concentration. (Given enough chargers)

> Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.

Right. For commute usage you charge over night at home and/or at the office while working and can completely avoid the weekly (or whatever) detour to the gas station completely.

I wonder if most families with an electric car have a second car with an ICE.

I can see having one car that’s really only good for local driving, but if I were considering whether to go all electric “this car can handle 90% of what your old car could do” doesn’t sound like a great pitch.

People are weird, somehow renting or borrowing a car for that 1% of use cases never comes up.

If you do a 1000 mile road-trip once a year while towing a sailboat, does your daily driver really need to be able to do it? Or could you drive something cheaper/smaller and use the money saved to rent a huge truck for that once a year thing?

But yea, I know many families who bought an EV for their second car. Then it became their primary car. And soon they had two EVs and no ICEs.

There are outliers where EVs aren't usable yet, but the new F-150 Lightning will fill a lot of those use-cases.

If you have a sailboat you are using it more than once a year.

The 1000 mile trip is something you do often anyway for shorter trips. You take the sailboat to the cabin most weekends and the special 1000 mile trip once a year. Or you take the family to grandma's monthly, and the family on a 1000 mile yearly vacation.

I think there’s this disconnect where proponents of EVs are too focused on what people should want rather than what they do want. It’s pretty clear from people’s purchasing habits that many if not most are not trying to maximize efficiency when they buy a car. I think the person below who said people are paying for “optionality” when they buy a car is absolutely right. I don’t want to have to rent a car to go on trips, or rent a truck to go to Lowe’s, and I don’t care what someone else thinks I need. That said, I think electrics are very obviously the future and have big advantages. I’m excited about the lightning, and expect that range, etc are just going to keep getting better.

Very true the average day is drive to work> drive from work to home maybe stopping at a supermarket on the way.

This reads like the comment of someone who has never lived outside of the coasts. It's very common to do 300+ mile road trips every other month in the Midwest on a whim. Yeah, the most number of miles might be those commuting from bedroom communities/suburbs, but the important metric in this case is what percentage of people also take long distance trips and how often. I don't even live in a rural area, but I don't think I could reasonably own an EV as an only vehicle and don't really expect to for a decade.

People without a ton of disposable income who can’t afford to rent a car for fun don’t want a car that only fits _most_ of their use cases.

People without a ton of disposable income probably aren’t buying electric vehicles today (or brand new cars in general). The industry will cater to those folks in the medium term, I think; but for now I think it’s just one of the trade offs of being an “early adopter”.

If I could (hypothetically) buy an electric car that’s affordable, cheaper to run, more reliable than an internal combustion car, less environmentally damaging, and covers most of my normal usage, I’d be on it like a shot, even if it means I have to figure out another solution for occasional stuff like house moves and driving holidays, and I think a lot of other people would too.

I think the biggest blocker right now is just price. It seems like electric cars are either very expensive or not very good.

Charging networks are definitely an important part of the overall solution but I don’t think they’re the whole story. I think if enough people have EVs, charging networks will inevitably follow, rather than the reverse.

Edit to add: I’m assuming I can charge at home in this scenario, which I realise may not be easy for many people (eg in apartment blocks). I would have thought that’s a somewhat different problem from charging networks, though.

Price will block you again. You pay as much insurance and tax on cars that sit around doing nothing as cars you use every day. You have to drive the extra car a lot more than the average person to make it worth having a second car sitting around for rare trips. Renting is expensive enough that the rare trip has to be very rare before it is worth it.

For most people the oversized SUV that can do anything they need is a more economical choice than a similar SUV and even a "cheap beater" car for most of their driving - and of course most people would demand both cars be expensive nice cars.

For particularly short trips I would hope that even smaller forms of transportation like bikes and e-scooters would gain some ground.

Looks like a huge percentage of car traffic in the most congested cities is under 3 miles: https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-co...

That is my usage pattern yes but then I’m used to having one car satisfy both the use cases. In many developed countries one could rent a car for road trips, but not in India unfortunately. There are some rental companies but it’s mostly a hit and miss and when it misses the experience is a shitshow.

While I can afford to buy two cars it’s a big capital expenditure that’s extremely under utilized.

And so my wait continues, looks like I’ll be stuck with ICEs for at least a half a decade.

Agreed.

Half a decade seems too optimistic to me though - lack of charging facilities at residences, current power grid cannot support any significant usage of electric cars, little space for charging stations in cities etc.

Though if fuel taxes & prices continue to rise in current fashion, ICE might become too costly to use.

I use public transport or bikes for local trips, the car is for all the exceptions.

At least in the US, this is very regional. As an example, I don’t use a car at all for commuting or short local trips because I live in a dense urban area. When I do need a car it is almost invariably for those cases where range and recharging are a material limitation, so I have an ICE.

In the agricultural regions of the US where I’ve lived in the past, distances are intrinsically long even in the small cities and infrastructure sparse. Real shopping may be 70+ miles away (but road speed is 80-85 mph so not that long). In other non-coastal city I’ve lived it was normal for people to do a 300 mile (each way) drive twice a month between cities. While more niche, a lot of working trucks in the agricultural and mining regions of the West are modified to increase their range — almost twice the range of the F-150 Lightning on a single charge. There is little charging infrastructure at all, and what exists is clearly positioned to target tourists from the coast, not the driving patterns of people that live there. There may be charging stations in these towns one day but I suspect it won’t be for a long time and range will still be a very real issue for a significant percentage of people.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem with the lack of range and lack of charging stations that make them unusable in many parts of the US. If no one buys EVs then no one will build charging stations, and the lack of range in regions that really need range means they aren’t a practical vehicle absent ubiquitous charging stations in places that probably won’t pay for the investment.

> due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems.

Doesn't seem to be something most car owners would have to contend with.

Destination chargers seem a key point. If I could reliably add significant charge while spending time in a store/restaurant I’d probably never worry about range.

True, but it doesn't look like we're trending towards an entire parking lot/garage of chargers at the mall/grocery/theater/rec site/etc.

Supply is well matched with current demand.

The Tesla "charging station" I've personally been to was a few chargers on the edge of a supermarket parking lot (I live in rural-ish Michigan).

It'll probably trend like WiFi did. Initially it was seen as a luxury to draw people in. Nowadays people get pissed if you don't have it.

I doubt we will have dedicated "gas" stations for electricity in the future. Most car parking spaces will come equipped instead.

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It’s not like they all need to be fully functional at the same time. I could see it being only a few are active at a time and it rotates the load as vehicles fill or leave.

Destination chargers will be a huge thing for people on road trips.

If your Mom & Pop coffee shop/restaurant adds a few 22kW AC chargers on their parking lot, those will show up in the "find me a charger" navigators in thousands and thousands of EVs. This _will_ drive new business.

If I have the choice of stopping at Generic Station Chain Alpha to charge vs. a smaller shop on a road trip or vacation, I'll always pick the latter one.

Doubtful most places will have 22kW AC chargers. Most cars won't be able to accept that much AC. That's a 120A circuit by itself on the grid side, and most cars max out at 40A or less right now, because it's more power than that is usually supplied by DCFCs instead (makes the onboard power electronics much cheaper, and you can go to higher power for DCFC easily).

For 120 volt 1 phase land, yes. Over here it's a semi-basic 3x32A 230VAC connection.

Some cars only use one phase (1x32A = about 7kW) Others use all three phases in different formations, usual charging speed is 7-11kW. I think only a few specific Tesla S models and the Renault Zoe can utilise the full 3x32A.

But yea, its mostly a cost-cutting maneuver on the car manufacturer's side to limit the onboard AC charger.

240 volt split phase land, thank you.

We can have 240V 3 phase, but that's not common in homes, and the standard J1772 plug doesn't support more than a single phase.

I mean, yeah, cost cutting manuever, but it's a sensible one. The rectifier for high power is expensive and hot. Better to move it to somewhere fixed that is potentially higher use, and easier to cool. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find 80A EVSEs becoming more common for home use, but those will likely be either weird dual cord things, or large vehicles, or have something else special going on (like the F-150 Lightning's V2H charger), or more than one of the above. But I suspect there's a reason why Tesla stopped selling the 80A wallboxes.

> Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems.

Ahh yes, a problem that will certainly affect the majority of Tesla owners.

Fast swap batteries is the solution.

I remember a company years back was taking this approach.

If we standardize on battery size/format. Then it becomes possible to drive up. Have a machine swap out the battery, and have you off again in less time than fuelling at a gas pump.

It also removes my biggest concern about owning an electric car—the replacement cost of its batteries.

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