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Comment by vsskanth | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this entire article has a single mention of "charging infrastructure", and even that's a passing reference. This doesn't address all the arguments against an EV. The fact of the matter is, if I don't have a Tesla and rent my apartment, I won't be able to reliably charge this vehicle. Even for someone with a house, long trips face unreliable charging infrastructure.

It's gonna take a few more years

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The article is just a big fantasy. It makes the fundamental mistake of assume current trends will just continue into the future without regard to technical limitations. People have at various times made similar predictions about how diesel cars are the future, or ethanol and biodiesel powered cars, or even compressed air cars, just by looking at short-term trends. Battery cars are just the next stage of this charade.

I'm a permanent apartment-dweller (houses are far too expensive in my area and I will never need/justify the space and expense), this is exactly it. I might get an EV when I have a personal (guaranteed) at-home charging spot.

Not likely to happen, so I'll probably drive hybrid cars for the rest of my life. That's OK with me, though.

Conversely, if I own my home, with an attached garage, and especially if my spouse has a gasoline vehicle we would use for long trips, then charging infrastructure and range over ~80 miles are largely irrelevant to me.

Being a perfect vehicle for 2/3rds of the population is good enough for now.

Agreed. EVs are a great second commuter vehicle for someone with a garage.

50% of people in EU are living in apartments. So it is not 66%

Much of Europe doesn’t have free street parking like the states does, a lot of those people don’t have cars or are paying extra to have their cars garaged.

Teslas are pretty expensive and charging infrastructure is very cheap. If you can afford a Tesla you can afford to rent a parking space and get it outfitted with a charger. If this sounds impractical to you it's not because the charging infrastructure is too expensive, it's because the parking space is too expensive.

It does not matter if building cost is cheap, when charging prices are more expensive than taking petrol into ICE. Of course if you can get the charge at the first place, because having car with CCS connector and having charger with CCS connector does not mean they are compatible with each other.

You can pay to install a charger to your own electrical meter, at which point the cost is just the cost of electricity. And with the cost of public chargers, yes, this pays off very quickly.

But people does not want to charge their car for 24+ hours from my outlet. They want to charge their car in less than an hour, which is expensive.

In the states, renting a parking spot outside of where you live just isn’t common. Maybe in LA or NYC, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else.

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