Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty weak accusation.

It was quite obvious watching the program that they were aware the battery was running low (they commented on the "miles left" meter several times). They more-or-less willfully ran out of juice in a small town. So what.

The point wasn't that the car can only go 60km versus 100km on a charge, or whatever the numbers. The point was that the car has a range limit, that the limit is not terribly far, that the car takes a while to charge when it dies, and there aren't many charging stations.

Perhaps Top Gear was a bit hyperbolic to make that point (Consumer Reports they are not), but these are all fair points.

I'm sorry. I'm all about calling out bias where I see it, but this just smacks of a car maker trying to spin some largely legitimate complaints with their product.

Not many people could get away with owning a plug-in electric as their only car. Even if it were half as much as a comparable gas car (rather than twice as much). As Clarkson said in the episode, the leaf is actually a really nice ca and electric is obviously the future, but today it is just not practical.

>Not many people could get away with owning a plug-in electric as their only car.

This is actually the myth that Top Gear seems interested in forever perpetuating.

Most people don't drive that far (http://news.discovery.com/autos/range-anxiety-nissan-leaf-11...) I think Chevy determined the average daily driver drives around 40 miles. The range of these new electric vehicles are actually fine for the majority of people's daily drivers and are only going to get better.

For long drives they're not a good choice yet (since the infrastructure doesn't yet exist and without something like battery swap charging takes too long).

>The point wasn't that the car can only go 60km versus 100km on a charge, or whatever the numbers. The point was that the range has a limit, that the limit is not that far...

Was that really the point? You don't see them driving a gasoline powered car near empty and then acting confused when it can't reach it's destination while suggesting that gasoline powered cars are not the future. I think they went past hyperbolic into misleading.

Off the top of my head, 80% of drivers drive less than 40 miles/day in the US, and that number is probably much lower in Europe and Asia. Since cars spend most of the day parked somehwere, you have lots of opportunities to plug an EV in, and so most times when you drive off you have a full battery.

That's not the only meaningful statistic in deciding whether or not to buy an electric car.

What's the farthest the average person needs to drive in a given month? I bet it's more than the range of an electric car. That presents a problem.

I would bet it's less, especially for people who live in small countries or in cities.

Indeed, but for a technology to sell well, it doesn't need to work for everybody at once. There's a large number of people for whom EVs can work, but by the time that market is saturated, chances are that prices will have come down, battery capacity will have gone up, and fast charging stations will be more common.

Early cell phones didn't work for everybody either.

Totally agree.

Although it surely would have been a cool and useful toy, there are lots of good reasons I didn't buy a cell phone in the 80s.

I have to buy a new piece of furniture this month. There's no way it will fit in a sedan. Does that mean I need to buy a light truck, or is there another solution?

Thanks for the great and funny answer.

If you knew you were buying one every other week for the life of the sedan, then would you decide to buy a truck?

Except that most drivers can't afford two cars so they can get around on their non-average days. What is the percentage of people that never drive more than 40 miles/day in the US?

> Since cars spend most of the day parked somehwere, you have lots of opportunities to plug an EV in

Maybe in theory, but how many outside wall outlets do you see, and who's paying for the electricity?

A huge percentage of normal-distance commuters are in homes with driveways. As for the rest, how hard is it to provide charging just like parking meters?

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/californi...

Except most people in America don't park at meters. Not at work, anyway. Most people park in parking lots, where there's no infrastructure for charging stations. How many businesses would want to distract themselves with maintaining and running a network of metered charging stations?

I sometimes park in the Yerba Buena garage, which has eight floors and 2,585 spaces. At 5.2 kW each, it should be quite an engineering challenge to add thirteen megawatts of daytime capacity in the fully-built heart of San Francisco (for scale, that's over 1% of the entire city's peak demand concentrated into one block). If power were cheaper, maybe they could smelt aluminum at night to offset the construction costs.

Very few commuters into San Francisco would require charging while in the city, as the majority are commuting in from near distances. For those who do require power to continue their journey, it could be provided at a cost far higher than home charging.

It's rather silly to take the total number of parking spaces and multiply it by total possible charge to get your estimate of demand.

Average daily distance driven != the most you need to be able to drive. What happens when you need to drive further than that? Are you expecting people will rent a gas car once or twice a month? Like I said, it's not practical as your only car.

> You don't see them driving a gasoline powered car near empty

It's easy and quick to refill a gasoline car. At least around me, only the very smallest towns don't have a gas station. I can't remember the last time I was more than 20 miles from a gas station. That's the point.

Some day, I suspect (and hope) they will all have recharging stations all over. But right now they don't.

You're right that for the times you need long distance you'd have to have some other vehicle. I don't know if a cheap second car is practical for this or renting something for a long trip. I also don't suspect that it would be needed once or twice a month. I would think it would be much less than that, but I don't have any real data to back up that suspicion.

However rather than saying something like this, they exaggerate the situation and act as if you are unable to drive the EV anywhere without unwittingly running out of fuel. That in conjunction with the similar unwarranted bashing they did on Tesla makes people think they have something against EVs.

There are legitimate criticisms they could make, it isn't necessary to fabricate stories or lie about what the cars can do.

> ...act as if you are unable to drive the EV anywhere without unwittingly running out of fuel

Not to be a jerk, but have you actually watched the episode or did you just read the article?

This linked article makes it sounds like they were just driving along and poof the car died. But that's not at all how it looked on TV.

Well, they were in a big town and were told by the county council that there were no charge points remotely nearby. Whatever you think of Top Gear, that fact does not reflect well on electric cars.

Figuring out who would be able to deal with 150 kilometers (or so) of range would actually be a very interesting social science study.

I really do suspect that the numbers would be quite high, at least in many European cities. High density and reliable rail networks reduce the need for long ranged cars and when it’s down to one or two trips per year, renting becomes very viable.

Not many people could get away with owning a plug-in electric as their only car. Even if it were half as much as a comparable gas car (rather than twice as much).

Why not? If an electric car was half the price of a petrol car, then there's no way I would not buy one, and then just rent a car those times i need to drive far.

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