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Comment by coderenegade | Hacker News Reader

>Because ICEs and EVs are equivalent in capabilities

They aren't, though. Supercharging is an order of magnitude slower than filling up a tank, and most of the time you're charging overnight. These are non-trivial differences to people who, say, rely on on-street parking for their vehicle. Ditto if you run out of juice (no jerrycan equivalent), or need to get something serviced (mechanics for BEVs are still rarer).

The two are effectively equivalent most of the time, but there are some non-trivial differences that conveniently get glossed over. 20% of first time BEV purchasers sell their car and go back to an ICEV, so it's probably important to be honest about the distinction.

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It takes 5 minutes to refill my ICE car and 20 minutes to refill my Tesla at a supercharger. That's a factor of 4, not an order of magnitude.

In addition, I don't have to babysit the pump when refilling my Tesla. I can sit in the car in air conditioned comfort and check my email or watch Netflix on the console while the car is filling. I can walk away from the car and use the restroom and buy a snack and stretch my legs while the car is filling. All that is impossible or illegal if I'm alone while refilling my ICE car.

My point is that refills of the two cars are completely different experiences that cannot be compared with a simple time scalar. Refilling the Tesla is vastly more pleasant even if it takes a bit longer.

>It takes 5 minutes to refill my ICE car and 20 minutes to refill my Tesla at a supercharger. That's a factor of 4, not an order of magnitude.

One of these is going from empty to full, the other isn't. You can split hairs all you like on whether or not it's good enough to charge from 20%-80%, the reality is, a petrol bowser is filling a standard vehicle at a rate of 3.5MW, with zero attenuation of the charging rate as you approach a full tank. They just aren't equivalent.

>In addition, I don't have to babysit the pump when refilling my Tesla. I can sit in the car in air conditioned comfort and check my email or watch Netflix on the console while the car is filling. I can walk away from the car and use the restroom and buy a snack and stretch my legs while the car is filling. All that is impossible or illegal if I'm alone while refilling my ICE car.

Okay, if that works for you, more power to you. It doesn't work for me. I don't have any love affair with petrol stations, but if it's a choice of refilling the tank in 5 minutes every other week versus plugging my car in every night, or planning my trip around charging stops, I'll pick the former every time.

I get that. I like trip planning. I like plugging my car in every night and starting every day with an 80% full tank and never stopping at a gas station except to squeegee my windshield.

I even like doing backroads trips where there are no superchargers and I have to think creatively about where to get electricity. That's fun for me, but I understand how it might not be for everybody.

In Oslo where there is a significant number of EVs (30.64% of all cars) there is also a lot of charging stations on the sidewalks, you simply park your car, plug it in, and activate the charging with an app on your phone.

See https://chargemap.com/cities/oslo-NO

It's not that hard to build infrastructure to support EVs, since electricity already is everywhere in a city.

That's kind of the point, though. It's enough of an issue that the only way to really rectify it is to put charging stations on every sidewalk. If that's the way we go, fair enough, but it's still inaccurate to call a BEV and ICEV equivalent when solutions like this are required for a BEV to mimic certain functionality of an ICEV. BEVs certainly have their advantages, but they're not equivalent to ICEVs -- they're a different product that can meet the needs of certain (large) segments of the market, but they can't replicate the full functionality of a regular vehicle just yet.

They can though. I guarantee you that in most large cities, almost everywhere within them, you're closer to an open and available charge point than you are to a public gas station. Putting fewer car-miles in a city is a very good thing. Especially when your car spews exhaust everywhere it goes.

>They can though. I guarantee you that in most large cities, almost everywhere within them, you're closer to an open and available charge point than you are to a public gas station.

Just saying "they can" doesn't make it so. I've relied on on-street parking before, as have most of the people I know. None of them would consider running a cable from their apartment to the curb to charge their car to be a practical solution, which is why the solution is for cities to make public chargers ubiquitous (see the previous comment).

Because they can't do everything that a standard car can do.

>Putting fewer car-miles in a city is a very good thing. Especially when your car spews exhaust everywhere it goes.

I don't believe anyone is arguing otherwise. But if you're arguing that having a less capable vehicle that encourages less driving is a good thing, I'd point out that a) the market is unlikely to accept that, and b) this is mostly a city design problem that is orthogonal to the type of car you drive.

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