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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought an EV and it's obvious that they still have some significant downsides: expensive up front and poor public charging situation, mostly.

The ID4 we got is very comfortable to drive around in, but doing a road trip in Winter feels out of the question. Not that it'd be completely impossible, mind, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a pain in the ass. We'd need to stop more frequently than in our CRV, for a longer period of time each time, and the whole situation with electric car chargers are that sometimes they're broken or working worse than expected, or they're all taken (and it takes way long for a spot to be freed up than at a gas station), or there's problems with the software running the charger, etc.

It'd also be nice if it charged faster and had more range too; it's not terrible on those metrics, but I wouldn't say it's great. Certainly not comparable at all to gas cars.

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Should have bought a Tesla - they had the foresight to actually build their supercharger network which makes longer trips feasible, if not necessarily as convenient. But I go on long roadtrips (by which I mean longer than 200-250 miles) maybe once a year, if that. What you’ve described is not an issue to the vast majority of Tesla owners.

My wife really disliked the Model Y we took for a test drive, especially the road visualization that you can't turn off for some reason. Can't fully blame her, the thing looked unstable/distracting, and making it impossible to turn off is a bizarre UX decision.

But yes, I'm aware that Tesla has the charger situation handled much better.

Does anyone know what that visualisation is about? It doesn’t bother me, but it also doesn’t help me or give me any useful information.

If it showed me the road behind me, for example, that would be super useful for lane changing. But it doesn’t.

I have never once been able to work out what it does, and would love to see the map take up the whole screen, or maybe a list of route instructions could go there.

I also noticed that the “full self driving preview” option seems to have disappeared (it never worked anyway, guessing it’s because we drive on the left)

My assumption was that it was to help build confidence in their self-driving by always showing you what it sees no matter if it is control or not. It does have some effect in that you start to get a feeling of what situations the car has a good idea about the surroundings and when it struggles.

There is probably a "it looks cool" factor that doesn't hurt.

As far as UX options. Providing customization is old-school thinking these days :/

In my car it doesn't even look particularly cool. The visualisation from FSD that I've seen people post on the internet does look nice, but that's not what I see - I get a very low detail representation of the lines on the road, and occasionally the vehicles ahead of me. I think that's what it used to look like before FSD, but it seems like the FSD preview hasn't arrived in Australia yet.

It does show some indicators form proximity sensors.

Pretty much though what the other commentor said - to give a visualization into the self driving for the user.

When traffic cones and street signs were added to Autopilot - you can bet that visualization was updated to show it off.

Same when they added stop light detection.

It makes sense to me. For some, that visualization literally _is_ the AI, for all they know.

I (almost) never use that. I expected it to be more distracting than it is though.

I have the screen dimmed right down. You can also choose dark mode.

I think Tesla needs better salespeople, there's a lot of things that I found out after purchase that makes me like it more.

Dark mode was on. She hated that more than light mode actually, said it looked like a horror thing (she's not wrong).

It might sound minor, but that visualization is on the part of the screen close to the steering wheel 100% of the time you're driving. If it's distracting to you, it'll be distracting any time you're driving, and you can't turn it off.

It's like a running shoe that comes with a pebble permanently stuck inside.

Agree. I did an 6-hour/500km drive last week in my model 3, we had to charge once. Found a supercharger in the car park of the local golf course.

The anxious feeling about “will the charger work/will there be a space” is real, but the more EVs are out there, the less this is going to be a problem.

My petrol car could have done the trip without refuelling, but it would also have cost, literally, 5x the cost of charging in fuel.

Isn’t the supercharger network now open to everyone? Or is that an EU only thing?

I checked and no. It seems to only be some a relative few stations.

Most OEMs have signed deals with Tesla to use their network in the US, but I don’t believe these have yet to go into effect.

Tesla built the US superchargers first, so they used a proprietary plug that only just got standardized as NACS / SAE J3400, whereas non-Tesla US EVs were selling with standard CCS (or J1772) ports.

Different from the EU Superchargers, which I believe do offer standard CCS?

There are two parts to this:

1) Tesla needs to open up superchargers to other cars. They're doing this at scale now, but generally only the less popular ones, or if they're required to do so by government grants. So many key sites are still off limits to others.

2) In the US only, other car manufacturers need to adopt Tesla's NACS charging standard, so they can physically connect to superchargers. (In the rest of world, everybody including Tesla is already standardized on CCS2.)

Road trips in the winter suck in a Tesla, despite the Supercharger network. Batteries perform worse, you have to charge frequently, and you have to drive slower than during normal weather. That pretty much writes off the entire Midwest where people travel a lot during the holidays. My FIL used to live one state away, roughly a 4.5 hour drive in an ICE. The same drive in a Model 3 would require 3 stops, and then we'd arrive at his house with less than 20% charge. And since he doesn't have a charger, we'd be stuck using 110v, which would add basically nothing. So the return trip would require a long long stop just to get on the Interstate.

Most people don't do roadtrip. They just charge at home.

If you drive a tesla, a supercharger stall is usually available. No other kind of chargers I found either work, or are compatible with my tesla.

Yes, this is exactly what we do.

But it would be nice to be able to road trip more easily, and 100% this is an important factor in a lot of people's decisions, even if road tripping is something they do only infrequently.

> Most people don't do roadtrip. They just charge at home.

It’s very common for Americans to drive long distances to visit family for holidays.

The median American lives within 18 miles of their mom and 80% within "a couple hours."[0] 55% are within an hour's drive of their extended family.[1] The majority of Americans do not drive long distances for holidays. It's common, but like, most people aren't doing it, which is congruent with GP's statement that "most people don't roadtrip."

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than...

So a couple of hours. Say 140 miles. In winter, that's about your max range in a Model 3/Y. So you arrive with so little juice, and at a house that has no charger. So you have to charge forever on 110v. Then limp your car to a Supercharger and wait forever to get to 80%. Then make a stop halfway home to charge again.

Winter does NOT like EVs...

this is the type of thing i would say before i actually got an EV.

now that i have an EV and no place at home to charge it (like tens of millions of other Americans) and have to use public infrastructure...

its crap. its just utter crap. yes 90% of trips are not road trips but people do not want to buy a car that can do 90% of what they want any more than they would buy shoes or clothes that only work 90 percent of the time. (and imagine if you could only buy one pair of shoes or one shirt).

Yeah, I agree that buying an EV without charging at home doesn't make much sense. And if you do need to drive many hours, even occasionally, that would be a great reason not to get an EV. To be clear: I don't own an EV, nor am I planning to buy an EV next time I need a car.

Midwest especially; growing up a one day drive across the entire width of Illinois and Indiana to see relatives was a common occurrence for the holidays and our summer family trip.

The truth is that EVs work very well in China and parts of Europe because they have good public transportation, so the EV is used only for minor or infrequent trips. For anything longer they will use trains. In the US the situation is different, you need to use cars for major trips, which is not the best option if you have an EV.

> longer they will use trains

There isn't really any data backing up this claim.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/e...

Planes are much popular and this data seems to include commuters so the proportion of people travelling medium to long distances by train is much lower (and most medium/intercity travel is obviously usually done by car and not trains..)

Amongst other significant issues (e.g. cross border travel) high-speed trains tend to be quite expensive, so unless you're travelling alone a car is usually cheaper.

This is what I still can't comprehend about Amtrak. I priced out a bus trip to a few states away and it was <$40. Amtrak cost more than a plane ticket. Is it astonishingly overpriced because nobody uses it and then nobody uses it because it's astonishingly overpriced?

Train systems require heavy government investment until they can (maybe) produce any profit. But the same is true for other transportation systems: the auto industry is also heavily subsidized at all levels in the US, you just don't hear the numbers.

Amtrak is heavily subsidized: the federal government pays for its capital expenses (tracks, tunnels, etc); Amtrak is expected to cover its operating expenses (employees, etc). Very common arrangement all over the world.

you can fly several states over for $40? damn, if i were to fly from, say melbourne to sydney, capital cities of neighboring states, it'd be at minimum $150 AUD (~$100 USD) round trip. interstate travel is way more accessible there huh?

I think you misread him. He was said that the bus (ground transport) was $40, and that the train (Amtrak) was more than a plane. He didn't say how much the plane cost. Your $100 USD for a short flight is probably the low end of a reasonable estimate here in the US too.

ah, yes i see that now, my bad :)

It's not really that different though. Google is showing me a round trip flight between New York and Miami for $55. Amtrak wants more than four times that, and it's 27 hours each way instead of 3.

I feel like the premise of a train is that it costs less than a plane and uses less fuel per passenger, so it should be slower but have the countervailing advantage of being less expensive. That is not what I'm observing.

In Europe, yes.

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/promotion/getaways

That page shows me flights to Bulgaria, France and Italy for around €25.

It is more like €50 if you aren't flexible, and more again if you need business-friendly times.

fascinating! i would assume then that has an impact on the culture in europe as to how far is considered a "long" drive then, it never occurred to me that it could be that flights are so cheap, i always assumed the main reason for the difference in attitude was just because the countries were so much smaller and therefore local cultural differences became apparent much sooner!

Note that most airports that Ryanair flies to are in the middle of nowhere, so nobody I'm aware of uses them for business travel (except maybe in Ireland). Also Ryanair is famous for all sorts of add-on costs, i.e. they will weigh your carry-on, 30s too late at checkin, pay with credit card ... all cost significant extra.

I think that's only the case for a few major, western European cities.

Ryanair fly to the primary airport in eastern and southern Europe. I'll take a direct Copenhagen to Sofia flight rather than enjoy changing with Lufthansa.

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