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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Most of the world only needs a car that will do 45mph with a range of about 50 miles.

What people need most of the time is basically irrelevent though. If you need a car to drive 20 miles a day for 364 days of the year, and 300 miles 1 day a year, then you need a range of 300 miles. It's the outliers that determine the requirements, not the typical use cases.

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Nope, no they don't. You can rent a vehicle or use public transport for the 1 day special trip.

I did this calculation when I switched from ICE to a cheap EV. With just the money I save a gas+maintenance yearly our family can _fly_ to our yearly vacation spot (~1200km away) and rent the biggest fanciest Mercedes for the week. And we'll still have money left over.

Or we could load our EV on a night train, wake up at the destination and drive around all week.

Or we could rent an ICE car for the week.

There was zero point in spending ~20k€ more for the car just to match that once a year event.

I like to think about needing to daily drive a box truck because, hey, sometimes I move and need to take all my belongings from one place to another!

No, I don't. I'll rent a u-haul every now and then, and own the 95th+ percentile transportation machine.

With just the money I save a gas+maintenance yearly our family can _fly_ to our yearly vacation spot (~1200km away) and rent the biggest fanciest Mercedes for the week. And we'll still have money left over.

And if you need to do a second trip that year? Or a third? Or 10 extra trips? The marginal utility of a cheaper EV starts looking really expensive. This is how people think. Owning a car that can cope with the outliers is a hedge against a period where you have to make lots of unexpected long trips.

People enjoy the freedom of ICE cars and their ability to go on essentially unplanned long journeys. Giving that up to use a cheaper EV will be a very hard sell.

Unless employers suddenly start handing out extra months worth vacations, an extra family trip sounds unlikely, let alone 10.

I'm in the UK. 28 days of paid vacation time is the legal minimum (22 vacation days, plus 6 bank holidays). I get quite a lot more. Some places around the world have higher legal minimums. People in Brazil all get at least 30 days.

And people's plans are already made for whatever days they get, so unless there's a sudden influx of vacations, more trips just won't happen. That is of course expecting people can also afford extra trips, the locations themselves often being quite expensive.

And people's plans are already made for whatever days they get...

Maybe I'm unusual but I rarely have any plans further than a couple of months ahead. Whether I'll be going on any long trips in the next 12 months isn't something I have any idea about yet. It depends on loads of factors (money, weather, work, whether I can pick up a bargain, etc.)

Going anywhere where EV couldn't reach would most often require some sort of reservations; hotels, skiing resorts, museums, sight seeing etc all require some sort of planning if you don't want to absolutely burn money buying things ad-hoc, which would go counter the point of saving money with an ICE anyway.

A month or two in advance is just fine, most people can do as much. They do know how many days of vacation they get though, and it's unlikely to change, so any plan you have you keep.

The VW ID.Buzz is the only vehicle at the moment that could handle all the outliers of my life. (And maybe a Model X Tesla, but I'm not made of money).

I could go camping with it, I could use it to haul stuff. It can fit seven adults and two dogs at the same time.

But for daily driving it'd be a huge pain. I don't need a car that big 90% of the time, a smaller, nimbler car is much more practical.

I think you're vastly overestimating the resources the average person (read: income under 40k) has to do things like drive 300 miles in one direction, multiple times a year

Only if you assume that there are no alternatives to your personal car that can take care of that usecase. For example, I don't own a car despite needing to move heavy objects once or twice a year. I simply rent something, or ask a friend. That's much cheaper than owning something that I only need rarely.

Is it? My car doesn't go fly or go 600 mph, so it's basically useless to me on that yearly outlier trip that takes me cross-country to visit relatives. Somehow I manage though.

That's assuming you have the money to overfit to your 1% use case. Otherwise you're paying $xx,000 to drag around batteries that you don't need most of the time.

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