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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

We’ve known for a while now that it was going to happen, right? And that all those countries that are committed to phasing out ICE cars by 2035 are being way too conservative. Isn’t it estimated that within a year or two, you’re going to have to pay a premium just to purchase an ICE car? And that premium is just going to keep growing as battery costs continue to shrink.

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God I hope it's not that soon. There's like nowhere to charge an electric car near me.

They really need to work on charging infrastructure before they convince me to buy an electric car.

And the cost still needs to come way, way down. It seems like every electric car that has any decent range is a luxury car. I don't want a luxury car, I just want a super basic cheap car to get me from point a to point b.

you only charge on road trips. Charging at home has no analogue with gas cars... It's just something that's intrinsically better about EVs

I have no way to charge at home though, being in an apartment. I don't plan to change that any time soon. I am certainly not changing where I live just for my car when a gas car works fine.

Yea, one of the current ironies is that the folks most able to use/charge an environmentally friendly car are the people living in environmentally unfriendly single-family homes. I've yet to see an apartment complex with more than 2-3 charging points for a building of hundreds of units, and plenty of older condo/apartment housing stock can't even easily retrofit chargers into the lot without spending tens of thousands of dollars on it, assuming your local power system supports it.

Having to drive five to ten miles and wait for most of an hour to charge is just a bad experience.

I have friends who own EVs without access to home charging who charge at the grocery store once a week while shopping. The car is done charging before they’re done shopping for groceries.

The trick is to distribute chargers everywhere, because your car is going to be parked somewhere long enough to charge unless you’re a taxi or some other high utilization use case. Most will charge at home and or work, but some cannot.

Yea, it's what I'd have to do, I suppose, but it would mean driving to a grocery store 2-3 times further away, and my average trip to the store these days is only 10-20 minutes which I doubt is long enough for a full charge.

My office and home don't have chargers and probably won't for a while, so I'd essentially have to make a special trip out on the weekends to charge my car while I get lunch nearby or something.

For an L3 charger, 20 minutes is a lot. If you are 20%, it should get you to 70% or so, it takes longer to go from 70 to 100% given how battery charging works.

Indeed! I literally just charged a long range model y at a 250kw Supercharger from ~20% to ~80% in 17 minutes (per Teslascope) this morning after towing a ride on trencher back to the rental shop. Was done before I had finished using the rest room and getting a coffee at the grocery store.

Ya, I think people really underestimate how fast L3 charging is, especially for cars running on empty. But not all grocery stores have L3 chargers, and they can get really busy in holiday weekends. I plan my trips around these, but I wish they had more capacity.

Tried this while in Hawaii with a rental EV (with no charging at my hotel) and it did not work at all. Hawaii is one of the states with the most EV's per person and there's frequently chargers in places like malls and grocery stores (whole foods and target in particular). However, because there's so many EV's, all of these chargers are always in use, and there are usually lines or people waiting around to snag a spot as soon as it becomes available. It was a massive inconvenience and put me off of EVs for the near future: I'd either need an sfh or to be somewhere that figures out public charging when more than a tiny fraction of the total vehicles on the road are electric.

Yea, I feel like this is also likely an issue. You can't let yourself run too low because you can't for-sure get a charger quickly if you don't have one at home. I regularly run down to a sub 10-mile range and less than a half-gallon of gas in my ICE car now because I live by a couple gas stations, so I'm never more than a couple minutes away from being able to fill my car.

If I had to drive around for a while to find an open charging spot, I'd have to be more opportunistic about where/when I charge to stay ahead on it.

As number of electric cars increase converting parking lots to charging stations will increase as well. Though I think currently just like we have incentives for cars we need incentives for businesses to install chargers specially for chargers with solar backend to speed up the change as more chargers are built more people will move to electric as it gets more convenient.

China this year reached $10k car with BYD introducing its $10k cars with sodium ion batteries, these are not like previous cheap cars which were practically golf carts. With the prices of batteries and solar electricity falling 10%-12% a year on avg I think electric cars are going to take over a lot faster than people are expecting. Main reason being cost ice cars are almost 3 times as expensive to run today as an electric car already. It will be 5-8 times in 5-8 years.

This. It's weird that EV owners do virtue signaling from their house and commute by car everyday, while condo people can't afford EV and don't commute by car. Slow EV charger at condo parking is what every govt should invest, instead of huge subsidy for vehicle.

I'm an EV person. Some of us commute by bike.

Most people don’t understand this. They are so used to going to gas stations that they think they will have to regularly go to charging stations. All that time wasted refueling simply goes away as your car gets “fueled up” while you sleep.

Hmm, tell that to the millions of people living in the UK in terraced/town houses where the only charging option is to drag a cable over the public footpath to the road side....if they manage to get a parking space directly outside their home.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who can't feasibly charge at home, like people who have to park on the street, or who rent their home and don't have access to anything but a 120V 15A outlet, assuming they have access to an outlet at all where they park their car.

Do you have charging where you live? (Private garage or parking spot?) All you really need is charging where you live, and charging along highways. I have literally never gone to any of the chargers within 30 miles of my house.

Hardest part is for apartment buildings. No big incentive to install chargers for public use.

No, There is no charging anywhere "near" my home. I park in an uncovered open apartment parking lot.

Same thing for at work.

And checking the charging maps shows very few options anywhere near me and the few places that do only have a couple plugs. Would be annoying to find it's in use by the time I get there so I would have to wait for them and then me.

Is it feasible to have charging installed at your home or office? To reiterate what GP said, I basically never charge anywhere except at home (currently in a private carport that I got a charger installed at, previously in an apartment building with a single shared charger for ~50 spots, 4-5 EVs).

I don’t really see how I could convince my apartment or the company I work for to install chargers any time soon.

Sure maybe in years it will be common enough, but that’s my entire point. It doesn’t seem common at all around me yet, and I’m not going to buy an EV before charging is reasonably available.

Some jurisdictions are going to start mandating this for large car parks. The transition is definitely going to be very uneven; the closer you are to the centre of a big city with an air quality problem, the sooner it will arrive.

Sure, but you're missing the point that you yourself just made: "are going to start", as in, they haven't yet. Most people are not going to buy an EV today without a reasonable charging solution, banking on the idea that situation will fix itself at some point in the hopefully-not-to-distant future.

Yeah, it's always been a chicken-and-egg transition problem. There's always a least convenient link in the chain. Hence all sorts of schemes to nudge people / subsidize early adopters so the cycle of "we don't need to solve charging because nobody has EVs"/"we can't have an EV because there's no charging" is broken.

Hence why I think it will expand outward from urban centres, motivated by e.g. ULEZ requirements.

Hawaii already has this rule for what it's worth. The issue there is that they have so many EV's on the road that these chargers are always in use and have lines (and aren't really that fast to begin with). Having experienced that, I still wouldn't get an EV without a guaranteed place to charge at home.

Sounds like you live in the middle of nowhere. I live in what people consider the middle of no where and there are a number of Tesla charging stations near me.

I don’t live in the middle of nowhere.

I live in Wisconsin between Madison and Milwaukee.

That is basically the middle of nowhere in the United states.

I live 10 kilometers from the center of Stockholm in a dense suburb with a population of 55 000 (Stockholm is a small center core with lots and lots of suburbs).

There are perhaps 20 chargers in total in the entire suburb. Maybe 8 of them are fast chargers. There are another 20 in neighbouring suburbs.

And no, it's not an American suburb with single family homes. It's an European suburb with apartment complexes.

The cost is a big issue for me still. I get it, but I paid $15k for a car 10 years ago - small hatchback that's been more than enough for my needs. The only options I have for EVs are either 2-3x the size (Rivian, F150, Model X) or 4-5x the cost (Tesla, Lucid, Polestar), or both. I barely drive a hundred miles in a week, and often less, but having range to do a 2-3 hour road trip is a big bonus.

You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. I'm not even sure I've spent that much on my car over the last decade, including gas, insurance, repairs, and initial cost. Makes it hard to justify the upgrade.

There were lease return iMiev, 500e, etc for about $4k-$10k in 2018, but the supply of those dried up.

Yea, there was a brief experiment with smaller stuff 5ish years ago, but that seems to have dried up hard and left us with 2-ton trucks and SUVs or high end luxury sedans being the only options in the US for EVs.

Seems like there may be 500evs coming back next year, so may look into that.

It's good that the Tesla charging port (NACS) is well on its way to becoming a cross-manufacturer standard in the US, so it may make more sense soon to have smaller EVs that don't need to have as large of a capacity to find the few Electrify America stations.

> You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k.

Bolt EUV is around 30k

Sadly it's not anticipated to return to Australia;

    One reason it's shame we'll never see the Bolt on Australian roads is because it actually stemmed from an electric vehicle concept designed here by GM’s Australian design centre and went into production in 2017.

    Now, of course, with GM all-but out of Australia – apart from its ties to the shrunken GMSV outfit here – it's less likely than ever we'll ever see the Bolt models here.

https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-news/chevrolet-bolt-euv

GM is ending production of the Bolt later this year. They lost money on every one they sold. GM CEO recently said they won’t be able to make sub-40k EVs until the end of this decade “maybe longer”. GM is really struggling with the transition to EVs. Ford is struggling too but at least has a plan…

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1139848_sub-40-000-evs-...

But you can still get it today

I suppose my curiosity there would be if it's a smart idea to buy a car model that's getting discontinued - would it be more difficult to get it repaired in the future? Will it be hard to get replacement parts later?

The charging infrastructure can improve literally overnight.

Around me there were very few places until McDonald's suddenly decided to have a charger at every drive-thru, and now I have as many chargers as McDonalds' around me.

The charging infrastructure will take years to improve. "Literally overnight" is a laughable exaggeration. Pretty sure even McDonald's can't install EV chargers at each drive-thru "literally overnight".

But they do. Commercial locations like malls already have power available, so it's not a large-scale infrastructure project, but a matter of digging a cable and hooking up a box.

In Sweden (at least) you're already paying multiple premiums to drive an EV:

- the price is easily 1.5x compared to an equivalent ICE car

- shorter driving ranges

- nearly non-existent charging infrastructure

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