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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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?

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