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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed we are basically past the early adopter phase. Most of us are even on our 2nd EV.

Now the hurdle is higher as you need to get people used to a different way of fueling.

Kind of like when we switched from flip phones you charged every 3 days to iPhones that sometimes didn't make it a full day.

There is a higher cognitive load than just driving around in an ICE and pulling into any of the 15 nearby gas station "within range" for 5 minutes when your gas light goes on.

Charging needs to be as easy as possible, and it probably still won't be until 2025ish when the CCS->NACS transition in US finishes.

Currently I wouldn't suggest anything but a Tesla to 99% of general public, and I say this as a former Tesla owner who probably won't buy another myself.

Unless you can charge at home/work full because its either just a commuter car or you never really drive past a 100mi radius of home, non-Tesla charging is still too hit or miss.

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I'm not really in the market to buy a car, but I was thinking the prius prime was a good compromise. Basically it's a plug in hybrid with a large enough battery for a lot of day to day city driving (44 miles), but hybrid after that. Seems fairly low risk in terms Toyota having pretty extensive experience with hybrids.

In terms of improving the environment it would seem like not driving/using public transportation trumps any ev or hybrid anyway.

https://www.toyota.com/priusprime/

IMHO the plug in hybrids are a great compromise. I'm happy with mine. If one can charge at home and one's daily mileage is within the plug in range, one can easily cut most of their emissions.

It has the added benefit of not having to worry about range/changing on road trips. My biggest concern with it is stale gas in the tank from not using the gas engine that much, I don't think I've filled the tank more than three or four times in the last year.

As you point out, not driving is better, but for many people it's not possible due to the public transportation systems/bike paths not being particularly great in most of the US.

On modern cars the gas tank is usually sealed and pressurized when working properly. It takes a while for gas to go stale in that kind of environment.

This and fuel injection means that you can’t nearly as easily gum up small passages since they run at 30-1000 psi depending on the design.

Yep, that'll also reduce the negatives of bad gas. Then on top of that you've got lots of detergents blended in these days to try and help prevent/cleanup that stuff, and modern ECUs can detect and dynamically remap when the gas is starting to go bad, etc.

Unless you're leaving the gas in your modern car for >~1yr I probably wouldn't worry about it too much.

That's good to know, thanks!

The biggest issue is they aren't making anywhere near enough of them.

Toyota argues that batteries are constrained and that for one EV they can make five PHEVs which will reduce emissions more than that one EV. It makes sense on paper and they have a wildly popular PHEV in the RAV4 Prime but they haven't even remotely scaled to meet demand, so it feels more like we are replacing one EV with one PHEV while the other four buyers go ICE or plain hybrid.

Pricing is the other problem. The Prius Prime is more expensive than a Model 3, even before you factor in the $7500 tax credit and the inevitable Toyota dealer markup. The Prius Prime made a lot of sense when it was $10,000 cheaper than a model 3, but does it make as much sense when it's $10,000 more expensive than a base Model 3?

I agree that the pricing is too high, although I think the base model ends up only being ~$1000 higher than the base model 3 with a $7500 tax credit. Dealer markups are a huge problem but mostly stem from Toyota not producing enough to meet demand.

I think there are a lot of people for whom the math works out on Toyota PHEVs at MSRP, they might be worried about range anxiety, they might travel a lot (56mpg at US prices generally costs less than super charging), they might not need a home charger because they can charge up at work, they want a super-reliable car they can drive into the ground, etc.

but a lot of that is thrown out the window if you have to get on 10 waitlists, wait 6+ months, and pay $10k over sticker.

Model 3 base price is $39K without the tax credit, $31.5K with the tax credit. Prius Prime base price is $40K.

I'm not really sure where you're getting that number. 2024 Prius Prime SE shows up as $32,675 for me on Toyota.com before $1,095 delivery fee for a total of $33,770 as seen here: https://www.caranddriver.com/toyota/prius-prime

M3 is $38,990 + $1,390 delivery fee, minus the tax credit comes to $32,880, or about $890 cheaper than the Prime. Come January 1st the M3 will be almost $3k more unless changes are made to the tax credit.

That's a really good question. I'm not sure where I got the price, and can't find it again. $40K is a bad price for a Prius Prime, so if it isn't I'm happy to be corrected.

If you want a PHEV it does, I don’t see myself in a full electric soon: single car family that goes on long adventures.

I've done several 3000km trips in my Tesla. It works great with a family -- bathroom stops are longer than charging stops.

The problem is that with tax incentives, you can get a Tesla Model 3 for same/less depending on how you spec out your Prius. The Tesla is also going to be more fun to drive / attractive to most people.

Other problem with hybrid is you have all the maintenance & failure modes of ICE plus the maintenance & failure modes of EV in one vehicle. Statistically they have the highest rate of vehicle fires (this makes sense, you have the risks of both ICE & EV under 1 hood).

> Other problem with hybrid is you have all the maintenance & failure modes of ICE plus the maintenance & failure modes of EV in one vehicle.

You'd think so but in practice most hybrid designs allow for some fairly radical simplification compared to your average ICE vehicle. eCVT transmissions are stupid simple and reliable compared to traditional automatics and also have the benefit of replacing the starter and alternator. The high voltage system also let's you easily replace failure prone belt driven components like power steering pumps and A/C compressors with electric versions. Hybrids can also hit efficiency and power targets while naturally aspirated, avoiding the need for turbos and all of the associated complexity which is very common in ICE cars.

Hybrids generally also have longer maintenance intervals because the engine only runs ~2/3rds of the time relative to ICE for a given distance driven. Rotors and pads will also last much much longer.

OTOH the hybrid is a Toyota and the EV is a Tesla. I've seen Prius taxis with >500K on the meter.

I find the opposite. 99% of my drives are a few miles each way. I no longer think about fuel or any maintenance. It's so damn convenient.

Sure, the few times a year we plan a longer trip it gets trickier. Although, the number of chargers coming over the next two years will change that landscape. I'll also say, I often just rent something, I do not want to drive a van all the time but they're great for road trips with two kids. Likewise, I do a lot of woodworking. If I need to haul more than the roof rails will hold I drop by home depot and grab a truck then go to the lumber yard.

I do think that "There is a higher cognitive load than just driving around in an ICE and pulling into any of the 15 nearby gas station "within range" for 5 minutes when your gas light goes on." is more about familiarity than anything else. People who drive regularly have routines built around fueling: I know how often I need gas and tend to get it at one of two places. There's an inconvenience and attention factor there, but we're so used to that it doesn't feel like a burden. On the other hand refueling on road trips is very natural in an ICE car. You need to stop and get out for a minute anyway, and there's stations everywhere, so you just decide when to stop and get gas while you're at it.

EVs flip that. The day to day cognitive load for "refueling" is basically nothing once you're setup. Just plug it in at night like everything else in our lives today (obviously this assumes that you have a place to plug in, I'm not sure how/why one would live with an EV without that). Road trips are tricker since the stops are longer than you might otherwise want and the options are fewer. Some of that will be solved with time but I think it will always be the case that day to day is easier with an EV but road trips require a bit more planning

I've driven an EV exclusively for 5 years and it's just not something I would want to suggest to my parents or in-laws and then deal with them calling me when they are stranded.

Even in densely populated areas of the US, if you are on CCS, you could find yourself at a dead station with 5-10% battery remaining and the next station not in reach. Tesla this is less of an issue, outside of rural areas.

Road tripping in EV I frequently find myself having to plan my stops around which rest stop shave chargers rather than what my stomach/bladder tell me. This is not the same in an ICE vehicle where you can just drive and fuel up whenever you need food/bathroom (and the highway range is higher).

Also dont' forget the answer to "what's the range" is "well it depends" with an EV even more so than an ICE. Well the Tesla says it goes 350mi, but that's best case lab scenario you can't replicate so take off 5%. Oh and only charge to 80% on the go, and leave a 10% buffer at the bottom.. and your highway range going 75% is 10% worse.. so you are looking at 192mi between charges on a road trip. Discount more for cold & wet weather especially if wind is against you. That's about half the highway range of a typical ICE.

It's not the end of the world, but it's a non-zero incremental cognitive load.

And it's not just US. I nearly got stranded driving an EV in Europe on holiday and spent an hour on the phone with Ionity stuck at a non-operational station while they rebooted stalls and manually activated a session for me.

I agree, I'm just pointing out that you're talking about road trips. For my driving, though I don't have an EV, almost every day would be cognitively simpler than my current situation. I just don't drive more than 200 miles a day more than 2-3x a year.

Road trips absolutely require more thought, but that's just not routine for most people in my experience

5 year EV owner, would never buy ICE again, but things in theory & in practice do not always match.

Road trip can have a broad definition. My parents live 75 miles away. When you do visit your parents? Holidays.. aka winter. So the nominal 310mi Tesla should make a 150mi round trip no problem right? Well.. ermm.

I've had trips where my battery was at 80%, cold soaked, snowing, a bit of wind.. but highway flow of traffic was 75mph. What should have been a routine half-battery using trip required me to top off on the way home as not to land too close to zero in freezing weather.

The trip computer on an EV really reduces the cognitive load. If you punch in a 3000km trip it adds charging stations as waypoints. The map also makes it easy to see where the next closest charger is, and what amenities are around it. So when the kids say "I need to go to the bathroom" you can easily say "20 minutes to the next charger". Plug in while the bathroom is being used. Unplug when the bathroom break is done and the charging stops recalculates.

If you have young kids, the bathroom and sanity breaks take more time than charging.

My challenge is that even in the dense Northeast I95 corridor, chargers are in the minority rather than majority of rest stops.

So you may end up taking all these bathroom breaks and then still need to take discrete charging breaks at different stations. NJTP for example has been in the evGo build out/expansion project for the last year. If you have a Tesla it's not too bad but on CCS you are screwed.

Not all EVs trip computers are built the same either. I love my BMW but the thing lists gas stations as prominently as EV stations on the map in my EV, lol. The list of nearest stations lists each pedestal/stall individually so you have to scroll and scroll to see the distance between the next 1,2,5 stations is.

For example yes you can rely on the computer to tell you when to stop & charge, but if you feel like you could go a bit longer before bathroom/food, you may want to know what is the next station beyond the one it is routing you to. In a Tesla you can wing it and there's probably 1..2..3 more stations before you run down to 0%. On CCS.. it could be 0.

Wow, that does sound a lot worse than the experience in our Tesla. Tesla has had this experience for at least 4 years. Can't the other car markers just point their devs at the Tesla software and say "copy this"?

> you may want to know what is the next station beyond the one it is routing you to.

Yes, this is easy to know on a Tesla.

Yup, the Tesla UX for charging was incredible.

My 2023 era CCS experience is still worse than even the 2018 Tesla charging experience I started with.

Car charging map/UX, charger locations & distances between, charger uptimes, charger UX once trying to init charge, etc.

For me I don't actually care because now I can charge at home, and my BMW EV truly gets 320mi+ on highway and still a solid 290mi+ in cold on highway.

If I am going further than that I am probably flying. I've had to charge on the go twice in 18 months.

Yup, the 3000km road trips are probably over for me too; we were avoiding airports during the pandemic.

I think it's more than just "getting used to."

You aren't just buying an EV. You're buying an EV and a way to charge it. If you have a garage, that's not a problem. If you have to run electrical to have a way to plug it in, it's an annoyance but solvable. If you live in an apartment complex or rent a parking spot or rent a house... you likely have no options.

There is going to be significant structural cost to the transition and only part of that is new cars.

This. It's not just the vehicle. I look at the houses on my block and there are only two that have a garage. More than half don't even have a driveway.[0] Even if you have a driveway, most are only big enough for one car; so, if you have two EVs, your moving cars around to charge them.

[0] My neighborhood was laid out more than 125 years ago. The two houses on my east side were built in 1898, years before the Model T. Mine was built in 1900 and the only reason I have a driveway is because a past owner bought half of an adjacent lot.

I agree and I feel like your response is a surprisingly realistic one for an EV driver. So many EV folks see that it works well for them and extrapolate that it should work for everybody.

OTOH most EV opponents have never even tried an EV. At least the EV fans generally have years of experience driving a gasoline vehicle.

I've had several people tell me that an EV would never work for them because they have to drive between X & Y regularly. But when you punch in those two points into abetterrouteplanner.com you find that an EV could make that trip quite readily.

I think that there's still a perception of electric vehicle owners as being fanatical and unrealistic (e.g., "Tesla fanboys") that really isn't true. Yeah, they want EVs to work for everybody, but if someone without a feasible charging environment shows up to a place like r/electricvehicles they aren't going to try and sell them on it.

EVs are still too expensive, at least here in Australia.

More-or-less double the cost of an equivalent ICE vehicle i.e. Toyota Corolla. $29,270 vs $61,900.

$39K for an MG4. Under $35K for a Citroen e-C3.

In addition to the factors you list to encourage mass adoption, the batteries should get about double the current range and charge in 10 minutes. Which according to Toyota is coming with solid state.

It would also be helpful if the warrantees on these electrics where much longer, and/or if most EVs moved toward a leasing model. Consumers are rightly concerned about the long term maintenance and resale value uncertainty around electrics.

You think 99% of the public can afford a Tesla?

But yeah, the problem for me has always been no ability to charge at home or at work.

Not 99% by any means but Teslas are beating the average car cost in the US by a decent margin.

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-model-3-and-model-y-cost-less-tha....

They're comparing base trim for the Model 3 with the average price paid across all ICE vehicles. It's a useful thing to note, but it's not a realistic comparison for what people will actually want to buy (especially when one of the big trim options is how far you're allowed to drive it per charge).

This seems very much US specific. In many other places, EVs are still 2x-3x the cost of ICE cars.

They are pretty cheap now just that all cars have become more expensive. Also almost everyone is switching to the new charging standard

I think people who post comments like this aren't aware what the new car market in the US is like right now. The most common new cars on the road today are gigantic crossovers and blinged-out F-150s that cost more than Teslas do.

Via Consumer Reports in Sep. 2023:

> The average cost of new cars is now well over $48,000—up almost $6,000 from two years ago and about $10,000 from September 2020, according to Kelley Blue Book. That figure largely tracks with inflation, but there are many other factors at play.

When the average price of a new car is pushing $50K I don't think it makes sense any longer to say "nobody would ever buy a Tesla, they're too expensive."

That average price is being dragged up a lot by truck sales, including fleet purchases.

While the average MSRP of cars in general has definitely risen over the last few years, I don't think it's all that likely that most people are buying much larger, more expensive cars, particularly given the overall decrease in their purchasing power.

Frankly, I suspect that many buyers have been priced out of the new-car market entirely—which would provide another upward pressure on their average selling price, as more of those who would have been buying at the bottom simply vanish from those statistics. And someone who's now looking at used cars because they're not even able to afford a $23k new Corolla or Civic is absolutely not going to be in the market for a Tesla of any kind.

Is that average of all models weighted by actual sales?

No, they think that of the general public who are looking for an EV, 99% of those people would be best served by going with a Tesla.

Most of us aren't even on our first EV.

Or did you mean "most of us EV owners"? If that's true, that's a problem - EVs are not attracting new users at a rate to make the new users the majority.

Or did you mean "most of us early adopters"?

"Most of us are even on our 2nd EV." Most of us (early adopters) are on our second EV

> Now the hurdle is higher as you need to get people used to a different way of fueling.

There’s an opportunity to make it even better than ICE. EV batteries should follow the “propane tank exchange” model: pull into a station, drop off dead batteries, pick up charged ones. Pay a nominal fee for battery inspections, recharging, etc.

People keep saying this, and it never happens.

Probably because the battery is the most valuable part of the car.

Nio has done >20 million of them.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/12/nio-10-billion-kilomete...

That's been talked about for thirty years now. So far it doesn't seem all that feasible until we see a significant reduction in both the size and weight of these battery packs.

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