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Comment by throwaway3699 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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