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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Yes, like that famously warm country, Norway, where 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are electric.

Norway is generally warmer than a lot of Canada. Most of the population of Canada don't get the warming of the Gulf Stream.

EV suffering range loss in cold conditions is well documented. Norway has tons of EVs purely because of massive government incentives.

The question becomes “is that loss important?”

I suspect people overestimate the frequency in which they drive 250 miles a day.

Yes.

No.

The nice thing about fuel cars is you almost never need to think about range beyond the refueling visit to a gas station once every week or two. If you're going on an extended road trip, you know you could skip a dozen gas stations and still be fine.

I drove an EV before alongside a fuel car, and I constantly considered whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day or journey. The constant mental load, light as it was, is something I don't have to deal with driving fuel cars. Having ease of mind is priceless.

Strange, I’ve been driving EVs for seven years and I have just as much ease of mind as you claim to about gas cars.

Maybe it has more to do with how much you need to drive each day?

If you’re putting in triple digits of miles every day, then you have a very different set of constraints compared to someone commuting up to 40 miles a day, which is the United States average.

I have the opposite. Some of my kids activities are almost 50 miles away. I have to think about whether there's enough gas in the gasoline car to get there and back. If not, we have to leave 10 minutes early, and that means you have to yell at the kids to hurry up, et cetera. Or when driving home you always have to ask yourself "do I need to fill up or not"?

OTOH, if the EV is at home, it's plugged in and is always sitting at 80% full. No load.

> The nice thing about fuel cars is you almost never need to think about range beyond the refueling visit to a gas station once every week or two.

If that's your frequency of gas fillups, and you have a garage charger, the same is true for an EV. (If you lived in an apartment where you couldn't plug in regularly, perhaps not.)

Here's the thing: I rarely ended the day on an empty tank. I always ended the day on an empty battery.

So there I was, constantly considering whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day. It's a worry I can do without, and so batteries will need to see exponential improvements before I'll consider one over a good old fuel tank and an engine.

This doesn't make sense to me. Average gasoline-powered car has 300-400 miles range, and you're filling up once every week or two? That implies an EV range of something like 80 miles?

Norway is rich. If electric cars weren't suited for Norwegian conditions, many Norwegians can and would buy gasoline cars instead. EV's sell well in Norway because they're both good enough and cheaper. If only one of those two conditions held they wouldn't sell well.

The bar for "good enough" is artificially lower in Norway when it comes to EVs. I'm not sure if you're aware just how huge the subsides are for EVs in Norway. They are trying to reduce these a bit and I'll be interested to see how that affects purchasing patterns. You're exempted from a punishing 25% VAT that gas cars are subject to first and foremost. Also, electricity is very cheap in Norway due to their abundance of hydropower.

https://elbil.no/english/norwegian-ev-policy/

I've got relatives in Norway and Denmark. All the ones in my generation can afford gasoline cars even though they cost ~twice as much. They would drive gasoline cars if electric cars sucked. They don't.

Electric cars would have to suck pretty bad for someone to spend twice as much, I'm not sure that anecdote is saying what you seem to think it is.

They might be saying "In an ideal world I'd drive a gas car, but the electric car is good enough where I'd rather not pay double." I don't think the person I was responding to was saying they "sucked", just that they had drawbacks.

A $25,000 base Civic is a fabulous car yet $50,000 cars are far more popular in the US.

Their tax and energy policy dictates what cars their population can drive. That 87 percent of Norwegians drive EVs really says nothing about the quality of ownership experience. Many could be annoyed by forced EV adoption in cold weather.

Norway is forcing EVs everywhere, generates tons of waste due to overconsumption of cars and uses oil money to do it. It's an abhorrent policy.

Norway: 323802 km²

California: 423970 km²

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