I Rented an Electric Car for 4 Days and Spent More Time Charging Than Sleeping
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'm tired of hearing everybody acting like they drive 500 miles daily and there's just no way an electric car would ever work for them. I'm sure that's true for some folks, but not the majority. Just like there are some folks who need to routinely tow heavy loads. An electric truck may not be good for you either. There are most definitely pathological use cases where with today's technology and charging infrastructure an electric vehicle is not a good idea.
What's frustrating is it seems those pathological use cases are the only ones anybody talks about. What about commuters? Soccer moms? Urban people running their daily errands? Those are the primary use cases and people need to know how they hold up in these cases. How often do you have to charge? What if you don't have a garage to charge overnight? How does the car handle in snow and ice? These are the things we need to be discussing. I don't really care about the pathological cases.
Had a dog, kid, and partner with me. Car charged at 550 miles of range per hour, when empty. Generally after everyone got out of the car, got food/snacks, stretched the legs, walked the dog for a tiny walk, etc. Usually we'd wait an extra 10-15 minutes or so for charging. The car was fast, confident at highway speeds, and has a quite nice stereo. I've never nav'd to a supercharger and not been able to charge, which seems to be a quite common experience for others. I think nearly every other review (Ford Mach-E, HD Livewire, and Zero e-motorcycle spring to mind) have charging issues during the review test.
Sure it probably added an hour or so to a 17 hour trip, but that's not my normal use case. Waking up each morning with a full (actually I charge to 85% unless I'm planning a big trip) EV is nice. Not having oil changes 3-4 times a year is a bonus as well.
In my experience a Tesla is a fine road trip car.
Okay. Let's look at Tesla's used inventory.
At least several cars are available, the cheapest being a 2020 Model 3 for $56,900. The last car I bought was in 2018 and it was a 2015 Honda Civic I picked up for $11,500. Now figure that I drive, at the most, 20,000 miles per year and I have a fuel efficiency of 35 MPG. That means my max fuel consumption rate is roughly 575 gallons per year. Even if gas hit ten dollars per gallon I'd still only be paying $5,750 per year in fuel. At that rate the payback for buying the cheapest Tesla available to me would be 8 years! And that's assuming gas were to jump to $10 per gallon! And that's why I haven't pulled the trigger on getting a Tesla. The value proposition simply isn't there for me.
Now, if you were someone who routinely bought cars in the $30K-$50K price range then this would be a different analysis and a different discussion.
I would however suggest looking at total cost to own: including not just gas, but oil changes, maintenance, and even the gas and time spent getting to/from oil/gas/maintenance. I had a 2004 Subaru Forester and was surprised how much I was spending on gas, oil changes, and maintenance. Had a head gasket go and that was pretty expensive. So far the Tesla's been just purchase price, my home electricity rate (except for $50 ish of supercharging), and costs for a second set of tires at 30k miles.
Used cars do decreases costs, but if buying new the model 3 often wins comparisons on cost to own against Toyota Camry and Honda Accords.
I've know quite a few Tesla owners (3 on my street), joined a Tesla slack channel for my org with dozens of users, visit various Telsa forums, and I can't say I've heard the 3+ month story from any of them. I did see it pop up on the news, but not at all sure that it's more common than other vendors. It does seem like Tesla is doing generally better than the competition in not halting production because of parts shortages.
If it doesn't plug into a supercharger it's pretty much defective on arrival.
Of the two that are open 24/7 - one is located somewhat conveniently close to me but is located inside a parking garage. I don't know if you'd have to pay the parking fees to use the chargers and I don't know if you'd have problems with someone parking in a spot you'd need for charging.
So there's one supercharger that's open 24/7 that isn't located inside a parking garage and it has 10 chargers - to serve a population of 2 million people. Realistically what that means is anyone living in my metro area driving any EV is charging at home. They have to have their own garage. Seeing as how my city has a lot of townhomes and homes without garages that's going to hamper adoption!
I had explored a bit, then did Mt Evans in my model 3, and was worried that I was still climbing and at 45% charge. I was amused to arrive back at my house ... with a 45% charge.
May as well fly. Modern jets get better mpg per seat than most cars on the roads in the US (caveat: assuming the plane is mostly full, and the car is single-occupancy).
I take it you have a similarly dim view of electric planes.
As far as electric planes are concerned, I don't know much about them. My first thought is airlines would be looking to use them for regional air traffic - where you need to fly from a city that's not one of their hubs to one that is. I'm imagining at this time they're not being considered for trans-national or trans-continental travel - for the same reasons you shouldn't be considering electric vehicles for long road trips.
Or take a train. A quick check tells me Amtrak has a direct train, and would be infinitely more comfortable.
Ask CAHSR how that’s working out for them…
Those idiots goes on a thousand miles journey and don't bother doing the slightest research. 2 minutes with ABRP (abetterrouteplanner.com) would have showed them where the fast charging station were, allowing to take advantage of the great charging speed of their KIA.
Had they done so, they would have been able to do the 1000 miles with less than 2 hours charge total (ABRP claim 1 h 34 min), very little in comparison of the 17h drive...
I wonder who pays for having such crap published...
This is how the "idiots" "didn't do any research". It's not going to help your cause if you get angry at people who do significantly more research than normal to do a road trip, but who are not experienced enough with the intricacies of owning an EV to know just how detailed those plans need to be.
I don't ever do any planning when leaving for a road trip in my Tesla: I just let the car tell me where I have to stop... Nothing complicated there.
You're seriously calling these people idiots for not knowing about some specific four-word domain site that I've never heard of in my life.
This is why I don't touch Twitter with a ten-foot pole. People like this, calling other people idiots, because they wrote an article with a contrary opinion to their own. Perhaps the only idiotic thing here is the suggestion that someone is required to visit "abetterrouteplanner.com" to properly use a product that costs tens of thousands of dollars.
Not doing the most basic effort of finding out about ABRP when writing about long trip in an EV while claiming they did extensive planning and research is bullshit.
I'm very inclined to think that they knew very well about ABRP but needed a good story so decided not to use it and look for troubles instead.
It’s frankly a little disturbing.
Did you try what you just suggested? I did. It didn't pull up ABRP.
Why don't you try all the different permutations you can think of until you get the right one.
I cannot take this "reporter" serious when her "planning" was to write down a handful of stops in a paper notebook.
But again, that would not have make an interesting read...
My gas car would require one or stops to refuel in order to travel 1,000 miles. That would be a maximum of half an hour total, which is one-third the time it would take to charge. That extra hour to charge is one-eighth of the travel day (I do not drive more than eight hours per day on a road trip if I can avoid it).
Right now, today, an electric vehicle is not suitable for road trips IMHO. That's fine! They are great for daily commuting. But given that I do take road trips, and don't commute daily, my gas-powered car is good enough for me today.
There are so many things to plan when doing a roadtrip that I sure as shit won’t be adding charging the fucking car to the equation until I’m forced to.
Also, I strongly suggest you stop for a bit longer than 3 minutes when driving 1000km in the same day...
I canceled my WSJ subscription 6 months ago.
It’s a climate change denying, EV hating, and proponent of other popular right agenda ideas
You just drive away and that’s it.
Electrify America has the most coverage (at least in the Seattle area), but their stations are unreliable. IME, >50% of the time, I'll have to replug multiple times or try another station. (or have to find another location)
Be prepared to have a backup location or two in case you need to charge during your trip. Also, allocate extra time for charging as your EV may not charge at the full power it's rated for. (In winter my Bolt takes 2x the time to fast charge it does in the summer).
Electric cars are designed and are suitable for everyday trips.
If you are buying an EV mainly to do road trips, you are probably stupid. You are using the wrong tool for the job.
If you really want to do road trips, well... you'd still better buy an EV... and use the money you spared by not buying oil all year long to rent a nice road car.
Almost zero planning/research and they are surprised they had a bad experience? I honestly don't know what to call this other than FUD.
What happened was that the charging stations were sometimes broken, sort of broken, or outright not as claimed such as L2 instead of L3.
And it should be stated that none of this planning would be required with a combustion engine.
This comment is FUD.
Obviously many people are ok with that tradeoff, but it's likely that a much larger portion of the market will open up to electrics once consumers can essentially treat their electric as they would any other car.
I suspect that ultimately the solution will be a combination of many things working together: consumer education, longer range batteries, denser charging networks.
The iPhone is a great example. We had PDA's for a long time, but the tech wasn't quite good enough for mass adoption until the iPhone.
On the consumer communication front, Apple pitched the iphone as three different devices that consumers could instantly understand: 1. A better music player 2. A better phone 3. An internet communications device.
Critically, once Apple educated people on how to think of the new product, they were able to drop that messaging and move on.
B) The author did much planning, as described in TFA, other commenters have noted this. The author just didn't have the requisite experience to know their plan was unrealistic.
B) Having to to planning/research in that level of detail the kind of stuff you expect when you're like "Imma tow my big-ass boat over the mountains with my old minivan", not when you're renting a modern car for a trip with no special requirements.
>but I would never consider going on a trip longer than 1 full charge worth of range without mapping out the route.
This represents a level of planning that is far greater than what has been the status quo since the advent of consumer GPS, arguably longer.
> without mapping out the route. There appear to be apps that specifically do this for you instead of just searching for stations along your route as you go and no excuse as to why they didn't do that (other than trying on purpose to make EVs sound bad or being woefully bad at planning).
Having to search for services in advance is a regression to the days of paper maps, road atlas's and printed tourist guides (though in those days people were searching for food/lodging, not fuel, but it's mostly the same IMO).
I think the author was naive to just wing it but anyone pretending the current state of EVs is not a regression is either being dishonest or naively projecting their specific use case (traveling with family, lots of stops, etc) onto everyone.
If you want to save money on the medium your car uses (gas vs electric) there are currently some downsides that you may or may not find acceptable. Jumping into an EV and expecting it to work just like an ICE or to be able to do a cross-country trip with little planning or knowledge of the car you are using is just silly. There are countless videos/articles about people successfully doing this, but that's not as interesting as this clickbait BS.
New technologies are supposed to be better, not worse. BEVs are clearly a huge step backwards in usability.
Spoiler: this person had a very different experience. They spent 2h20m charging going from Illinois to Florida (at least I'm pretty sure it was Florida)
The drive started without the vehicle being fully charged.
They drove two different paths even though it was round trip.
They did not book stays in hotels that offer onsite charging.
The clickbait title is only possible because they averaged only 4 hours of sleep a night and averaged 4.5 hours charging.
Interestingly they managed to make time to interview people along the way, which gives me the impression they scheduled the charging around interview opportunities rather than efficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31630737
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627168
This strikes me as more corporate propaganda spamming campaign, like the 4 reposts of the "tires cause more pollution than car exhaust" The Guardian article over the last few days.
Every other time the car was charging we were either bathrooming, eating or sleeping.
If you can't do that, just fly.
Flying is worse for the environment, anyway, since there will be no electric jets in the foreseeable future.
That said I’ve spent 10+ hours going from sf to la in a car.