Range anxiety and the realities of electric vehicle dependability | Hacker News Reader

Range anxiety and the realities of electric vehicle dependability

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14 pointshammock13 comments

As soon as people own any modern EV most of these problems prove to be overblown and, in fact, are not even true.

Exactly. I sort-of wish that my Leaf had longer range, active cooling, and CCS-2 instead of ChaDeMo ... but in fact I have never needed any of those things. Not even close. For longer trips we take my wife's car anyway because it has more space. The idea of taking my own car on a ski trip or visit to our daughter's college - both possible but without a comfortable margin - is really only nice in an abstract sense. The "buyer's remorse" I feel is mostly that I could have gotten the electric Mini (I drove a Mini for 14 years and loved it) for slightly less, despite it having only half the range.

When we replace the aforementioned wife's car, such that going electric would mean no ICE as a backup, maybe these things will be real issues. Of course, by then battery technology and charging infrastructure will have improved to the point where I'm 100% confident we'll be able to find something suitable. Meanwhile, articles like this are just FUD from people rationalizing their innate (or motivated) resistance to change.

Yeah exactly. I now live in very rural Australia - I'm over 100 miles from the nearest traffic light - and got a Polestar in June. Theres a rapid charger 10 miles away and whenever I'm there range anxiety is always the thing people ask me about. Does it suck having to wait for a charger if someone is using it - sure, but the other day traffic was way backed up in Yass for gas. It's all relative. I've done 800km in a day on two stop for coffee charges, and tomorrow we'll do 500km up to New Castle with one stop. Its not perfect but its not at all the issue I thought it could be.

There's nothing to be anxious about. Most EVs will tell you how much range you have and where to go to charge. That might not be as much as you'd like and it might be annoying to you that you have to spend the time to charge up but it's not something that comes with a lot of uncertainty or anxiety. It tells you it is time to charge, you charge it. Problem solved. Plug it in at night and you can have it fully charged in the morning.

There are countless apps that help you find chargers. At this point there are more charging stations than petrol stations. Finding one is easy. And many petrol stations actually double as charging stations now. If you drive into the middle of nowhere, you might want to plan a little bit of course. But you'd do the same with an ICE car.

It's ICE car owners that should start worrying about range anxiety. As the number of ICE cars drops, so will the number of petrol stations. They'll be going out of business. The small remote ones first. They won't survive double digit percentage drops in customers for very long. So, you'll have to drive further to find a petrol station and get smarter about planning your fueling stops. And with fuel prices fluctuating wildly, you'll also have plenty of reason to be anxious about what that those detours do to your wallet. And unlike EVs, many ICE cars don't have a very accurate fuel gage. Never mind about range predictions. Come to think about it, ICE car owners have plenty of reasons to be anxious about range with their existing cars. Maybe they are just projecting their current anxiety and maybe the cure is getting an EV?

Nah, the core issue is the difference in total range vs distance to charge station, time it takes to charge and the fact that you probably cannot just leave an EV unplugged and expect it to hold full charge for a prolonged time.

While first two may get better, the last one is a technical limitation. It may be solved by keeping the car plugged in at all times, maybe.

> Plug it in at night and you can have it fully charged in the morning.

That’s going to be a huge problem for the massive number of people who have to street park or use open and even most covered parking structures. They’ll still have to gas up somewhere and it can’t take 20 minutes.

Drive to a super charger once a week, charge it up and use it for the rest of the week. Not that big of a deal. Maybe plug it in at the store, at work, etc. or whenever you have a chance. Mostly it will be much cheaper and not that much more hassle. Get something like an Aptera (which has solar panels) and you might only have to do this every few months. Plenty of solutions here.

The need to spend tens/hundreds of dollars per month on gas, is going to long term not be defensible for the vast majority of people.

Except that chargers can be, and often are:

a) broken

b) incompatible

c) taken by other cars

Or you "simply" need to wait a few hours at the station in the middle of nowhere to get 100-200 km or range. Every 100-200 km.

It’s anecdotal, but my sister-in-law is on her second Tesla and has been a Tesla owner for like 5 years, has never run out of charge, but still has “range anxiety”.

Since major hurricanes are often coupled with widespread power outages, the situation could leave electric vehicle drivers “stranded without transportation for days,” the report found.

How do these people think a gas pump works? The whole point of evacuation is to get out before the hurricane is on top of you and destroying your infrastructure.

This is a FUD piece.

I think this attitude, and even more relevant, those of the ones in the comments to that article, is something I have only seen in the US. It would appear that this stuff is politicised to a degree not seen anywhere else.

BEV vs ICE flamewar like this is also a popular topic here in Japan internet (but not politically, no party against EV but some like hydrogen). ICE fanboys continue believing their many misunderstanding/falsehoods, and EV fanboys continue trivialize EV's problems. Maybe the flamewar is big because Japanese automotives are winner for ICE and hybrid, local industrial situation is not good for BEV market, want to against growing China, and Tesla fanboys are jerk.

This is just fossil marketing FUD.

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