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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to.

I have my doubts that everyone can switch over to a (prices starting at) $70,000 electric car like the author can.

In the UK at least, I think the thing with electric cars isn't so much the price (leafs are pretty cheap-ish, seems like a perfectly good A->B car) but that you basically need land or a safe area to be able to charge them. That's what makes them a toy for the rich at the moment.

Yeah. If I had a car here in London, I'd keep it on the street (prefer to use the garage as a workshop). There's a public charging point within a minute's walk. However, the parking space it's next to isn't reserved for EVs and so there's always some non-electric car parked there, rendering the charger useless.

I suppose I could run a charging cable from the house onto the street (across the pavement), but that doesn't seem like an ideal long-term solution.

There's a process for an EV owner to ask the council to install a public charging point close to their house, but I've no idea how well that process works. And again, if they don't reserve the adjacent parking space for EVs, it'll likely also be quite useless.

People who are financing brand new cars are either wealthy enough or uneducated enough to not worry about a $40k+ MSRP.

I've frequently championed my Chevy Bolt. Caveat being the recent recall on the battery fires, but ignoring that...My 2017 Bolt, bought used with ~35k miles was ~$16k USD. 238 mile advertised range, 50kW "DC Fast Charging". My Bolt (and I believe all of the new ones) still have the pathetic 50kW "fast charging" which is pretty shortsighted, but I still think a used Bolt is the best entry into the EV world.

Another point I'd like to make is that even with the slow "fast charging" on some of these EVs, the use case of long road trips is very infrequent, and often biased online by users presenting their edge case commutes or 'frequent' roadtrips. According to https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips 95% of trips are < 30 miles.

I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it again.

By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US. I am increasingly finding that I don't even bother to plan the drives anymore or micromanage the charging-- this is a significant difference from when I first started doing >1k mile trips in the car 4 years ago.

I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.

The public charging tech is improving steadily. You might want to give the Bolt another try at fast-charging. Look for a high-power charger, like 200kW or higher.

The issue is that Bolts are limited to 50kw of charging, even if the charger can offer more power.

> I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.

If it doesn't plug into a supercharger it's pretty much defective on arrival.

https://youtu.be/hA_B7qPyUDA?t=1136

Is anyone working on an active adapter to make a Supercharger think the device on the other end is a Tesla vehicle, so it'll put out a charge?

I have no idea how Superchargers work, but I assume there's some sort of active electronic handshake going on over some control pins to authorize power delivery — perhaps even something cryptographic, e.g. the "pump" and the car both having Tesla-signed TLS certificates and peer-verifying one-another.

If so, spoofing a Tesla might involve cloning a cert from a real Tesla vehicles, possibly from the car's TPM. Full-on DRM-breaking stuff. Stuff I would expect from the kind of teams that present at DEF CON.

Tesla are supposedly opening up their network soon, but that's not really the issue. Cars have a limit on how fast they can charge, and for a lot of more economic cars that's often quite slow.

The 2022 Nissan LEAF 40kW (149 mile) model can only charge at 50kW, the 60kW (226 mile) model pushes that to 100kW. The marketing says that's 45 minutes to 80% capacity. The 2022 Chevy Bolt is similar. If you are just commuting to and from work, then these cars are fine, but for a long trip you definately want an EV that can charge faster.

Sure, but a car isn’t the only thing you could potentially plug into a Supercharger. (That’s why I said “the device on the other end” rather than “the vehicle on the other end.”)

Maybe you just want to charge the gigantic custom-built battery bank you use for accessories power in your RV! Or maybe one that’s just a hacked Tesla Powerwall or five. (That’d be the “white-hat” use-case.)

Or perhaps a portable (towable) hydrogen generator, to fill bottles for hydrogen-powered cars. Still an “adapter”, technically, though doing it at the substation-level rather than the near-power-generation HVDC level is probably horribly inefficient and wasteful.

Or perhaps a mobile Bitcoin mining rig consisting of server racks installed in a air-conditioned shipping container on the back of a semi-truck…

Or the lighting and sound for a pop-up roadside rave event!

> If it doesn't plug into a supercharger it's pretty much defective on arrival.

Is it? Then why is it that these cars charge faster than a Tesla Model 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU

And why is it that Teslas charge faster on CCS chargers than on Tesla chargers:

https://insideevs.com/news/507489/tesla-model3-charging-fast...

And why is it that the fastest EV cannonball run was done with a CCS car:

https://insideevs.com/news/464763/porsche-taycan-beats-elect...

What would be best is if Tesla just went ahead and put a CCS inlet on their North American cars, like Tesla already does in Europe. The European Teslas are better cars purely because they support the open charging standard and can plug into more chargers with no need for an adapter.

Tesla's proprietary plug is a dead end. CCS Teslas in North America would gain access to an additional 4,566 charging locations with no need for an adapter:

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html

> while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car

Is that you, Robert Dunn of Aging Wheels? (I don't think he owns either a Tesla or a Bolt, but he owns a lot of weird cars so I wouldn't be surprised, and you're aping his speaking style almost perfectly.)

Haha no idea who that is. I will look him up!

> By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US.

You gotta get off the interstate and away from major cities more! Plenty of places worth visiting that are far away from a supercharger.

I just splurged and bought a very used Prius for $3,400, when my $400 car was stolen. I can't afford an EV. Many oriole can't. That dictate just ensures fewer people will be able to afford a car. Which might work with decent public transport.

Median new car in the US is over 38k, give it time and plenty of cheap EV’s will be around. Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 base model Nissan Leaf: $32.6k.

Considering even with a Prius most people would still be paying ~1,000$/year on gas, old EV’s will likely be more affordable.

Sure, and I look forward to it. The quote was "everyone... now" but I agree with your modified sentiment.

Mh, but you're on used cars, so you are a cycle or two behind. So yeah, you can't afford a new EV. But let's wait for until there are used EVs.

It'll be interesting to see what the used car market for EVs looks like once they age out where the battery packs start degrading. Not sure they'll have the same long-term value that quality ICEs do today.

IIRC, the average price of a car last year in the US was around $41k. There are many options whose MSRP is under that price, e.g. https://www.myev.com/research/buyers-sellers-advice/comparin...

Once again, the "average" fallacy. In normal circumstances, the average is rarely the statistic you want to quote (and definitely not unless it is accompanied by standard deviation values). Median is the correct way to identify "the typical" [0].

You're in luck though. The median appears to be about $38k, so the difference in this case is not that great.

[0] there's the old joke about (Gates|Bezos|Musk|...) walks into a bar, and the bartender says "hey! thanks, on average we're all millionaires in here now!"

That’s the average new car, the median purchase price of all cars will be much lower

The median price I cited was for new cars.

To illustrate the point even more, if it's an average sized bar they'd still be billionaires on average.

How about having the luxury to even park or charge your electric car near your house or place of work? So often a very important factor forgotten by more well off EV drivers who are wondering why people still buy ICE cars

At least in the US, a significant majority of people live in single family homes. So home infrastructure is an issue, but at the current rates of adoption we have a ways to go before it becomes a hard limit.

And who knows, at the rates range and charging speeds have increased over the past few years, we might be pretty close to apartment dwellers being able to buy one and use it exactly like their ICEV -- charge it up once a week.

It is definitely true that not all people's driving needs can be met by electric cars quite yet, but prices start quite a bit lower than $70k

Standard Range+ Model 3: $39k. 2021 Nissan Leaf: $32.6k. These are reasonable numbers.

If you're buying a new sedan, electric is the way to go.

Reasonable numbers...if you can afford it. Saying $40k is "reasonable" depends on how much you earn. That is 20-25% more than US median annual gross income...it is a lot of money.

Also, most people who are unable to buy this kind of car aren't polluting a great deal anyway. A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes.

I have an ICE car, it cost something like $4k, it does 50+ mpg, I haven't taken a plane or boat in something like two decades, I do at most 5k miles in my car per year...sorry, I don't really think I should be forced to buy a car that costs 10x, probably pollutes about the same amount, and is only being suggested because some rich person had a "come to Jesus" moment (after polluting as much in a year as much as I do in a decade). It is the worst kind of puritanical grandstanding.

It's also very close to the average price paid for a new car in the US: $39k.

> A huge share of pollution is caused by wealthy people jetting around every few days on planes.

This is true, I'm not really into Tesla for the environmental aspect, I like them because they're fun appliances that break less.

Average for a new car. A lot of people can't drive at all. A lot of people buy used cars. It is funny because I find it hard to imagine a wealthy person in my own country not being aware of this...in the US, the wealthy seem to live on another planet.

Okay, maybe. But lots of ICE manufacturers have 10-year warranties...they don't break down a lot. I also think that whilst a car is a "fun appliance" for some people, for most people it is how they earn money. They can't live closer to their work because property is too expensive. It is practical, it is how they feed their kids, not fun. Making everyone pay the luxury price because people without your "fun appliance" are morally inferior is...questionable.

I'm not in support of a mandate on EVs. I'm strictly talking about pricing and accessibility. Should have clarified that in my original response.

Edit: I also said "If you're buying a new sedan". That is a qualifier on my recommendation, which is Tesla.

It doesn't pollute the same amount: https://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2018-63%20Lifecyc...

And if you're only doing 5k miles a year, you're not part of the problem.

> 40k is "reasonable" depends on how much you earn. That is 20-25% more than US median annual gross income.

The median household income is somewhere north of $60k.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_Unit...

> The median household income is somewhere north of $60k.

The median personal income is about $36K [0], so $40K is about 10% more. The median full-time worker is about $50K. [1] Households frequently have more than one earner.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/industr... [XLSX]

Apparently buying a Standard Range+ Model 3 for $39k is next to impossible.

Not sure where you get that. Just buy an SR+ without any options and it's 39.9k on the nose. Tax and fees not withstanding, so it'll be closer to 45k all said and done... but that's the same with any car price, it's pre-TTL pricing that people compare.

New Nissan Leafs are extremely affordable. Range is more limited, but they still have DC fast charging options.

Are Nissan doing proper thermal management of the batteries yet? I don’t like “fast” charging that isn’t fast because the battery is too hot.

VW was running a promo for a 3-year ID.4 lease for like $175/month. That's cheaper than a Civic.

You can get the 2022 Nissan Leaf for an 24 month lease at $89/month with $1,449 due at signing [0]. That's effectively like $149/month.

[0] https://carsdirect.com/deals-articles/2022-nissan-leaf-gets-...

I leased a Bolt for about the same for 3 years, paid it up front for $6K (for the high mileage options; was closer to $5K for 12K mi/year). Bolts have routinely been available for this price, or outright sale for $23-25K after discounts & such. They're momentarily more expensive now because the refresh was just released, and the car market is currently insane.

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