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Comment by emilecantin | Hacker News Reader

I did a similar roadtrip back in 2015 (!) in my ex-boss's Tesla Model S: we traveled from Montréal to Atlanta for a weekend conference (JSConf, IIRC). We were driving continuously, switching drivers every time we hit a charger (we were 4 in the car). I think it took us about 24h to do the trip.

My main takeaway from the experience is that charging wasn't actually "painful" at all. On the contrary, it was a welcome break every time. Most times we even exceeded the charging time the car was asking for, because we found something interesting to do (like eating dinner in a nice restaurant).

When I was on the marked earlier this year, I really wanted to get an EV, but there aren't any that comfortably seat 6 (I have 4 kids). We ended up with a PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica), and I love it. Next car is going to be an EV, though.

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I find this kind of "it's great to have a break" justification tiring. Glad that you found something to do while your car is charging, but pretending it's not a limitation feels like just glossing over something that does make it less flexible, whether that was a problem for you or not.

It’s not, though. It is genuinely a nice break. The very first road trip I took on mine was with my three teenage children. It was a moderately lengthy trip, from Texas to Colorado. After we got back home I asked them which they preferred, and their answers were surprisingly unanimous: electric. And given that they had taken many road trips with their mother and her ICE vehicle, they had something to compare it against.

This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.

Are the breaks annoying enough you'd go back to a gas car if you had to pay the fully loaded carbon costs per gallon of fuel? At ~$100/metric ton of CO2, that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.

A few hundred dollars per year increase (at the pump or registration fees) still makes financial sense for an awful lot of people.

As long as you use taxes to internalize the cost of those emissions for people who don't want to wait an extra 15 minutes to refuel (and those funds go into air source carbon removal), that's a fine solution. At the rate at which EVs are selling [1], it seems the wait is not an impediment to ownership. It's important those who don't want to wait (and require liquid fuels because of that) don't put that burden (carbon emissions that aren't paid for) on everyone else collectively.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2020

... or you incentivize the wait by decreasing cost.

Sometimes I feel like these discussions about EVs are strangely divorced from most people's lives. We will likely make our next purchase an EV purchase, and I think the cost of waiting on long trips probably has to be considered against other annoyances of ICEs, but the economics of this are a major reason more people don't switch to EVs. Even the cheapest ones still cant compete against the ICE market as a whole, especially when you consider the used vehicles that will be in circulation for some time.

Adding costs will just make it more difficult for people to afford anything.

If people want EVs to take off, they need to incentivize purchasing them, not tax the ubiquitous alternative. If the carbon costs are real, manifest it in decreased costs for the alternative. Otherwise it's all theory.

Absolutely not, it’s minor. For me it’s not really a financial decision, it’s about driving a very nice and practical ev with much lower lifetime emissions than a gas car. Also most of my driving is local.

How do you get $100 per ton? The UN is selling carbon offsets for a couple dollars a ton.

https://offset.climateneutralnow.org/AllProjects

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401... (Control-F “ Table 2. Scenarios for the optimal carbon tax.”)

Optimal tax is closer to $126/ton, so my “shooting from the hip” was a bit low.

Carbon credits in Europe are trading for 50EUR/ton ($58 USD) currently.

(nobody is currently paying anywhere near the true cost per ton of emitted carbon)

Current U.K. price is $1.60 a litre or $5.60 per us gallon. That’s significantly more than current US gas prices and people still buy petrol cars. I don’t see a 90c/gallon charge impacting much.

> that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.

Right now european gas prices range from 1.2 to 1.6 euros per liter depending on the country (eastern europe tends to be cheaper and western more expensive). And that's for 95, 98 tends to be a few cents higher.

That's 5.3 to 7.1 USD/gal. 90c/gal would be a significant but at the end relatively minor increase: it's less than the increase in gas prices since the start of 2021.

Agreed. It reminds me of people who arrogantly proclaim "it's the journey not the destination" when excusing why they don't let people who want to drive faster pass on 2 lane roads.

It's also tiring on the other side hearing how bad a 30-40 minute charger stop is. C'est la vie.

However... Add up all the time a gas car spends at the pump, that an EV does not (charging at home), and I'd guess most people will spend less time waiting for the EV than for gas.

And the charging time is coming down. My older Tesla is limited to 100kwh charging, the modern ones can use chargers in the range of 250kwh.

> My older Tesla is limited to 100kwh charging

What does that mean? kWh is a measure of energy not power. Does the charge stop after delivering 100kWh? How long does it take to do that?

They probably just meant kW instead of kWh.

You're right, wasn't thinking about the numbers just what I remember on the displays. It's charging at ~100kW, (usually in the range of 90-120), and new ones can deliver power ~2.5x as fast.

Driving to a gas station and waiting to fill up is a time wasted, compared to charging at home or at work, which takes 30 seconds extra time. So if you want fair comparison, you should add up time you spend waiting at the gas pump and the detour time for a gas car. Seriously, one of the reason I like electric car is the convenience - less time wasted for gas station trips, and less time wasted with maintenance.

I refill once in 2 weeks. That would be about 28 plugs/unplugs of charging cable if I want to keep EV topped all the time. I bet 28 plugs/unplugs take about as long as a refill stop.

Each one takes about 10 seconds, so not even 5 minutes total... You're lucky if it takes less than that filling up, actually. Having just one person in front of you will easily double that time.

28 plugs/unplugs 10 seconds each (which I find highly dubious, most meaningful actions take about 30 seconds) is already almost exactly 5 minutes.

Ideally I think this could be resolved by having electrified freeways, so you can charge while driving and only have to stop because you need rest/food/etc...

We're a long ways from that, or even having the political will to start planning, let alone construction. It would do wonders for vehicle cost and weight, though, if people could get by with a 100-mile battery and still be able to make cross-country trips. And the environmental and cost benefits of electrified trucking would be huge.

I thought the reason the Tesla Model S sits 7 is because Elon had 5 kids at the time of the design.

Maybe your kids are all too big for those rear-facing seats?

Model X you mean.

There's no way 7 can fit in an S (and be safe!).

No, he means Model S. It was an option (that is currently discontinued) that put 'jump seats' where the trunk would be. Not useful for anything except younger kiddos, but could be fine for younger kids.

Sort of like the 7 seater option for the Model Y, yeah it technically exists but it sounds uncomfortable...

See: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-discontinues-two-colors-rais...

I did not know that.

I have a model Y 7 seater, it's actually not bad in the third row. Kids totally fine, small adults for short trips. Over six feet would hit the roof though.

The 2 youngest would probably fit in these seats, but not for long. I'm not buying a car that won't fit my family in 2-3 years.

Do you find yourself taking more breaks in your current vehicle?

Actually, I do. I pretty much always stop at least once every 3 hours; I need to pee, eat and the kids need to move around a little.

24h continuous? how's sleep on the Tesla?

About as good as you'd expect the rear seat of a sedan to be. We fell asleep like rocks at the hotel.

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