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Comment by freetanga | Hacker News Reader

Or anyone that needs to do a 500-600 km every 2-3 months and is not eager to add 90 mins and uncertainty to those trips.

I think is a fairly common situation in Europe, you might live in a city but relatives are away. You visit but don’t see the point of making a complex planning factoring cold weather, vehicle load, potentially broken chargers no your planned stop,….

And train is not an option if you are carrying a family of 5 or plan on moving around once you arrive.

Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?

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At that point it's worth considering renting a car every 2-3 months for those trips, and get a car sized to your day-to-day needs instead.

Of course that's also worse than the status quo (well, probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient), so I don't expect people to flock to that solution

> probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient

If it lets you get rid of your cars, maybe.

If you also need a daily car (or even two), rental is not necessarily cheap, and beyond convenience it has flexibility issues.

For instance the rental closest to me is a half hour bus ride away, and not open on the weekends, and the prices can vary a lot depending on time to trip or period, and obviously the type of car can triple the rental price.

It’s worth it to me, because I can otherwise get by fine without owning a car. But if I need a daily anyway, it makes more sense to upscale it a bit and get the extra freedom. Especially if relatives start getting up in age and you never know when you need to pack up quick.

It’s the same issue with timeshare vehicles, if people have kids they’ll all need it at the same time (because school schedules), and you’ll always remember when it was not available for an emergency.

Rental is so expensive it compares poorly to owning a small 10-15 year old ICE car.

Similar sentiment to, “just rent a UHaul pickup instead of owning one just in case you need to move furniture/appliances”.

It's not a 90min stop to go 500-600km in a lot of modern EVs. More like 10-20min.

I just looked up a trip in A Better Route Planner in a Hyundai Ioniq 6 going on a trip around Texas, 495km trip. 4h44min total trip time, 8 minutes of charging.

Do you really not take a 10 minute break in nearly 5 hours of driving?

As someone who has been tooting the ev horn for a while, generally most arguments against EVs are couched in "I do x now and don't want to change" or they are I heard about x and am afraid of it.

People who are willing to look into the situation on the ground tend to react positively

I used to be one of those people who really tried to just power through and rush through the drive every time, massively minimizing my stops. It felt pretty easy as a single guy doing this.

Now I'm married with kids. Even road trips in my ICE, I tend to stop more often and for a little longer than I would have otherwise. And you know what? Overall, my road trips are more enjoyable. I'm far less drained when I arrive. I'm less stressed on my drive. I'm more alert in the car for more of the trip. Its a much better experience in the end taking a few more breaks on a long road trip, and I look back at my previous min-maxing attempts in regret of stressing myself out so much unnecessarily.

The road trips I've done in my EV have been absolutely pleasant, and my EV isn't even that great for road trips.

As someone who has driven the complete breadth of Pennsylvania (300 miles) dozens of times in my life in ICE cars, the rule is that you add 30 minutes of stoppage per 3 hours of driving, in order to stretch, use the bathroom, refill your water bottle, get snacks, etc. As long as an EV can fill 3 hours of charge (180 miles) in under 30 minutes, charging time adds nothing to the trip. The only thing that matters is that rest stops have adequate charger capacity.

> Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?

Depends. If you believe climate change is a hoax pushed by evil liberals or whatever, the status quo is fine.

If you understand that it is real, then you know that keeping the status quo of burning oil means working towards destroying human civilization. Then it's easy to decide that mild inconvenience of charging an EV is worth keeping humanity around.

Let’s not forget that simply driving an EV is enough to reduce your carbon emissions.

How many miles do you need to drive an EV until you break even on the emissions required to balance out manufacturing of the car, recycling of the battery and car once it has reached its max lifetime use, and how the electricity to charge your EV was generated?

If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use probably isn’t the biggest bang for the buck.

I’m not 100% convinced an EV is better for the environment when you consider all of the indirect emission sources.

(I’m bracing for the downvotes, but would much prefer to be proved wrong with citations and research studies)

> If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use probably isn’t the biggest bang for the buck.

Absolutely is not. Passenger road transport accounts for only about 10% of CO2 emissions[1], and reducing that is one of the more difficult approaches because you're asking millions of people to each change their personal habits which individually have essentially no impact.

State regulatory changes applying to large industrial emitters will have the biggest impact and while the costs will ultimately be borne by customers, it is more likely to actually happen. This includes both encouraging "green" energy production such as nuclear and renewables, as well as demanding capture and/or reduction of emissions.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

Sounds like most studies point to a little over 20,000mi break even for cars based on the average US grid energy source mix. In my area it's an even higher mix of renewables than average, so probably 20,000 or less.

My EV is already a bit over 26,000mi, so it's most likely past it's break even and I plan on probably putting another 100,000+ miles on it before I sell it.

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