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Comment by downut | Hacker News Reader

So because she ignored both the beep and the reserve light turning on you spend quite a bit extra up front. More than once!

I'm willing to bet she isn't that dumb.

I will admit that I ran a car out of gas once in the last 40 years: driving to Flagstaff AZ in a Prius there aren't many gas stations and I ignored the reserve light and the beep because I thought I could make it. Nope! 5 miles short. Maybe the 3000' grade I had to climb just before had some influence. However... never again. OTOH, that Prius that ran out of gas traveled several thousand miles over the years at over 90mph across the West, getting ~40mpg which works out to ~400 mile range. That right there is the entire argument, done.

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To be fair, the car she had at the time did not beep on low gas.

That said, most of the utility comes from not having to spend time stopping by a gas station to fill up. Just park in the garage and spend about 10 seconds plugging in the car, and it's filled up in the morning ready to go.

This is really underrated by people who haven't experienced it.

The flip side of this point is for non-trivial distances the people in the ICE vehicles with 400+ mile ranges mostly invariant to speed only now begin to realize how amazingly convenient it is to only have to stop for < 10 minutes every 5-6 hours or so.

Do people who think the only use of a vehicle is the home-work-supplies circuit? Don't you ever take a weekend off and go out of town? You really want to deal with the whole rental car scenario when you're supposed to be off? Or, oh well, I'm just gonna commit to spending a good chunk of my time on this vacation sitting around twiddling my thumbs at a charging station. I got an acquaintance who drove a decaying Tesla with <200 mile range from Atlanta to NYC and back and then bragged to me "it wasn't that bad". Yeah, I was polite.

Lotsa magical thinking going on here. And I haven't even pointed out that in vast swathes of the country the rental car option isn't even remotely convenient.

Honestly, it just depends. Atlanta to NYC would be a 2 day for me. Even in the gas car, I'd only do ~650-700 before a stop.

In an EV, that's ~11 hours on day 1, charge up at the hotel, and do one 15 minute stop on day 2. Before I had an EV, I'd do the same thing, just with ~10 hours on day 1 and my stop on day 2 might be at a different place.

But this is traveling for leisure with family. It might be different if I were really desperate to get there fast. I'd never rent a gas car to save the couple of hours, but also arrive much more tired.

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