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Comment by violet13 | Hacker News Reader

> Anecdotally, in conversations with other drivers, it seems that far too many people overestimate their driving habits.

Or conversely, folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car.

If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor. Not glamorous, but enough to get you through your average day.

The car culture has very little to do with averages. And for what it's worth, it's the same for most other goods, from computers to kitchen appliances. I mean, how many techies need a kitchen in their home to begin with?

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> folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car

It’s anxiety. I took a parent’s EV to Sonoma and back (100 mi each way + detours + driving around Sonoma) and stopped once for a 5-minute fast charge on the way back. The battery got to a low of 5%, but that was expected.

Unbeknownst to me, my father was checking the battery level remotely and freaking out that it would get that low. Let me remind you, this is in the Bay Area. There is no deficit of public chargers here.

Another: I had a mid-forties friend visit me in Wyoming. I have a gas Subaru. Its fuel level getting to quarter full—good for at least 100 miles—freaked them out. To go to the grocery store. Two miles away.

I think this is partly because there is not really an alternative once you run out. Getting a jerrycan of gas from a gasstation is possible, a reasonable expectation can be made that if that happens a good samaritan will help you. Or a friend can drop by with one.

The same thing cannot be said about electric cars, unless you have a good friend with a fuel generator. Even then you still have to wait for it to charge. More likely you will be towed, at least in The Netherlands they will tow you to the next parking place. If you are lucky it will be one with a charger, if you are unlucky you are once again on your own.

> same thing cannot be said about electric cars

Gas cars need a jump all the time.

If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger. That should work in 90%+ of situations.

> Gas cars need a jump all the time.

All the time? That's some strong exaggeration there. Last time I needed a jump start was in 2016 and before that.. can't put an exact year to it but it was back in the 80s.

> If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger.

Please describe in some detail how you expect this to work? Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?

> Last time I needed a jump start was in 2016 and before that.. can't put an exact year to it but it was back in the 80s

As in it's frequent. I'd estimate about as frequent as someone running out of charge in an EV nowadays.

(If you're in a hot climate, e.g. Arizona, and park your car outdoors, it literally can be every year or two.)

> Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?

Apparently they're still marketed to commercial users, pricing in the $5k+ range. EV to EV charging, emerging on newer vehicles, would be the analog.

Do these exist?

A quick Google turns up this kind of thing [0] which, based on the price point and form factor, is aimed at tow truck operators rather than individual drivers. Costs $10k+ and will take up most of the back of your car.

[0] https://jtmpower.ie/collections/electric-vehicle-charging

Yes, they do, and it's available as a service in Australia:

https://mobileevcharging.com.au/

That's a commercial unit again, not something you throw in your trunk.

That's probably the right solution to this - and something every tow truck will carry in 10 years - but it's not the "capacitor in the back" analogue to an empty jerrycan.

>Gas cars need a jump all the time.

In my family's 20+ years of owning multiple vehicles I can count on one hand how many jumps we've needed, and they fall under the category of 1. old battery or 2. left some lights on.

The latter wouldn't even kill the battery any more.

Errr that's a few minutes at most to fix, and once the car is started, the battery is no longer necessary. That's a fundamentally different thing to a dead battery in an EV, where the battery is essential to the propulsion system.

They also sell portable jumper battery packs for like 60 bucks. We got one because our car battery got terrible during COVID, when we barely drove it for a year or more. I've never had to use it, but it's nice to have in case the need ever arises (and it can be used to charge electronic devices). It stays basically 100% charged for surprisingly long periods of time.

Aren't their car models who can charge other vehicles ?

In some capacity yes, a lot of them. Plenty of EVs can do "vehicle to load" or V2L. i.e. they have plug points for running appliances off the vehicle battery. This can be used to slow-charge another EV.

"The scenarios where this is useful are plentiful, from helping a stranded EV driver with no power to whipping up a brew with a portable kettle."

https://www.ag-elec.com/vehicle-to-load-v2l-what-is-it-and-h...

I see it like "give the vehicle a few miles, to get to a better charge point" and nothing more.

We'll have to see. I know AAA has some mobile charging trucks that can boost an EV with a few extra miles (diesel generator AFAIK), but I don't know how widespread it's been deployed or response time, and it does mean that the service truck is on site for 30+ minutes vs the 1 minute to give you some gas.

I think the shitty part at least in Canada is the sheer network fragmentation for fast charging. Understandable why it's fragmented but it's still frustrating nonetheless.

It's not just that, it's also time... in 99.9% of cases, the gas station is there, and you'll get gas in ~5 minutes, full tank, enough to drive another 1000km. Even if it's busy, you wait a few more minutes and get it.

If you come to a busy charging station... are you really going to wait for an hour? are you going to risk it with the next one? What if that one is even busier?

I live in a country which is full of people transiting every summer from norther europe to croatian beaches, like literally 10km traffic jams to go through a tunnel, police stopping transiting vehicles from leaving the highway (so the locals can use the side roads, but the gas stations can manage it, because refilling takes just a few minutes.

Now replace just 10% of those german cars with electric ones, calculate how many refills you need to drive between eg. frankfurt to split, multiply by thousands going through every weekend, and there's no way to get efficiently charge all those cars, and noone is designig charging stations for peak traffic. 30km left? 8 charging stations, 15 cars waiting, will you really risk it? Or will you wait two hours at least to get a chance to charge your car?

Charging stations are extremely scalable, though. Tesla has one supercharger in California with 98 charging bays, and plans for another with 200 bays. You’ve never seen a gas station with that many fuel pumps because it would be extremely difficult to install the tanks and fuel plumbing and fire suppression systems to make it work. With electric charging you just need a parking lot.

But you don't need that many pumps, because it takes 5 minutes to fill up the gas and pay... and then drive a 1000 more kilometers. You don't have to stay there for 1hour+ and then repeat the same after a few hundred kilometers.

Pretty much no EVs on the market in North America take an hour or more to charge enough for a few hundred km.

On the road trips I've gone on with my EV the average charge time I had was like 15 minutes. The longest was 22 minutes. I sometimes charged a little longer than as it took some time getting the kids through the bathroom and get a snack.

And my EV kind of sucks for road trips. Smaller battery, only 400V instead of 800V, and a less efficient motor setup compared to other EVs on the market.

Yeah I’m baffled by the GP poster. 15 min is standard. 25 or 30 in rare circumstances or when you want to sit down for food. And this is using today’s battery chemistries, while even faster charging is already coming from solid state and sodium batteries. Naively if we assume that a gas car can move in and out in 5 minutes, you need 3-5x as many charging bays to maintain similar throughput, and those numbers are already deployed in some stations. I also think the poster seriously underestimates the cost of building, maintaining and decommissioning fueling infrastructure. Gas stations are not cheap or scalable in the same way that charging stations are.

I just did the math, and it's even worse...

VW id.3 are one of the most popular electic vehicles here.. They don't need an hour on fast charger, but still...

I took the data from here: https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro

> Charge Time (35->280 km) 31 min

So, for ~250km of driving, you chrage it four half an hour (let's say everything is ideal, no AC needed, no stopping in traffic with ac running)... for a drive from eg Frankfurt to split (~1200km) and then back, this means 9 charges (assuming you did the first charge at home, which is far from a common thing in frankfurt with a lot of apartment buildings and not a lot of chargers there). For a normal diesel car, that would be 2 refills (assuming you started with a full tank... and you'll still haeve half a tank left over).

So, 9 charges means using the charging stations for 279 minutes, a bit over 4 and a half hours if done ideally. Refilling a diesel would take 10 minutes. So to serve an equivalent number of tourists here in transit (since our gas is cheaper outside of highways, and locals fill their cars there), we'd need 28x more charging stations compared to gas/diesel pumps. Also, even with gas pummps, during peak times (weekends all summer), you sometimes have to wait for 3-4 cars infront of you to refill, so even that is not enough for peak usage.

So, for an average german tourist going to croatia for a vacation (and there's a lot of them.. a lot!), the electric car is useless until we build A LOT more charging stations, 30x more than our curret gas ones, and add 4.5 hours of drive time.

Sure, living in a house (charge at home) and commute to work and back within the range of the vehicle... that's great. But for road trips, we're not really there yet.

I deleted my earlier comment, I didn't realize you were saying 1,200km there and back. So nine charges to go 2,400km does sound a bit realistic.

But you're saying 4 and a half hours to charge to go 2,400km is worse than the above poster who said 1+ hour to go like 200-300km. 4.5 hours of charging to go 2,400km is ~533km/h effectively, assuming starting with a good state of charge.

But you're also ignoring the fact nobody doing that route would be driving 1,200km and then immediately turning around and driving back home. They're probably going to stop at some point along that 24+ hour journey, right? Probably going to spend the night somewhere, probably going to get food to eat somewhere, right? I imagine most people need to use the bathroom at least once every 24+ hours? And they're probably driving that distance to actually visit someplace, so they're likely going to stay there at least a few hours if they're willing to drive over a dozen hours each way right? So some of those charging stops are realistically only a few minute wait, as you're just talking about the time to plug in to the charger near a restaurant, or plug in to the charger near your destination, etc.

Do drivers in Frankfurt really get in their car and drive 24+ hours round-trip only stopping to get gas a couple of times? Do people in Frankfurt not need to sleep, eat, or pee? Is driving 24 hours non-stop round trip an ideal German vacation?

And then to top it all off, the ID.3 isn't the best road trip EV. There are many other models that will charge faster. If you're the kind of person making non-stop 2,400mi road trips every few months you could pick a different EV that has better charging speeds.

Pick a Kia EV6 Long Range and you'll get an average of nearly 200kW charging speeds doing a 10-80% charge. The ID.3 Pro in your link only gets about 82kW average charging speed for a 10-80% charge. (1070 km/h vs 470 km/h). You'll end up doing the trip in significantly less charging time.

https://ev-database.org/car/1481/Kia-EV6-Long-Range-2WD

No, those drivers drive 10, 12 hours from frankfurt to croatia, then park in a place like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hRNCgPUhGEHayXex6 or this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/mTg4SpaNrcsi1hiv5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/dWEqaBQNVbMtC26f8 or https://maps.app.goo.gl/w4Ywf5cMzU1e4dSf8 etc. No charging station anywhere. I live much closer to that (only ~500km), and park between cars with german and czech licence plates in parking "lots" just like these every year.

I also live in a transit country for them, so I have to actively try to avoid them every summer: https://www.rtvslo.si/slovenija/zastoj-pred-predorom-karavan... most of them have german plates (this is on the way back in a 15km long traffic jam before a tunnel, and our police closed the exits so they can't leave and use the local roads.

This is the charging station before that 15km traffic jam: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xBrxbccqVg7mSw3D8 ...so, either wait here in line, or risk it for a few hours... will you use the AC, or not? :) It's not much better in austria, and even worse in croatia.

The throughput of a charger is a lot lot lower. A single pump can maybe serve 20 cars an hour if it’s got a credit card reader. Most petrol stations in the UK have this and maybe 4-12 pumps depending on size. So just ball parking, if the average needed duration to charge is 10 mins on a supercharger, you need 4x more chargers than you would pumps for an equivalent.

The obvious difference is that you can’t pump your car at home, and by installing chargers in ordinary car parks you can mitigate the need the specific infrastructure of petrol stations, but the number of total chargers needed is still high, they are just not in the same places.

  If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor.

I don't know if this is true. For example, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest cities in the US. Public transport for my typical journeys (kid's school, Costco, doctor, dentist, visiting in-laws) takes twice to four times as long as the same journey by car. I wish it were not so.

That argument can be made everywhere even with perfect public transport. It is usually about choices you have made. Of course in the US it is far too easy to become car dependent. If you wish it, it is most certainly possible but you have probably made some personal choices that makes it harder.

Car dependency is a choice. Even in Europe the norm of cars is strong.

  That argument can be made everywhere even with perfect public transport.

Where I grew up (London) public transport was usually faster than driving.

Even that is only really true when traveling within zone 1 and 2. If you're further out and not going into zone 1, then driving is generally faster, especially if you have to change trains/busses.

2x is pretty common in some parts of the Netherlands. If you’re deep within the city center, sure, public transit is faster because streets are designed intentionally to be hostile to drivers.

In the suburbs or even smaller cities, driving is still faster. Hell, the trains here hardly have time to accelerate past 120kmph so driving can actually be faster than the train too unless you are going directly from city center to city center (most people need a 10 min bike ride on one or both sides).

Even If North America starts taking transit seriously, the routes needed to connect the suburbs to most metro downtowns will be enormous. There will either needs to be hundreds of bus routes feeding into light rail, or perhaps better bike infrastructure can get people close enough to one of dozens of light rail stops.

In any case, sprawl is currently setup to make urbanizing a slow and painful future for transit enthusiasts.

When I lived in Amsterdam, so a solid public transport connection on at least one end, the best I clocked is 2x. Often it was more like 3x.

I was just rarely traveling to other city centers, and some town or forest isn't going to have a time competitive public transport options.

Hell, the Flixbus Amsterdam-Maastricht (station to station) is faster than the train. It has a lower top speed, no direct line, but it just doesn't stop 7 times or so in between.

Hah I didn't know about the Flix bus! Living near Eindhoven, it's crazy to me that I need it's almost faster to drive to Amsterdam, especially when I need to cycle to the station first. Not to mention the ticket is 22 euros one way. I drive a very fuel efficient car, so paying 40 euros for a day trip is crazy. If you add one more family member or friend, then taking the car is a no brainer. You can park at one of the P+R facilities and take the metro to the center and still come out ahead financially.

If the Netherlands wants to continue to be competitive and ease the housing crisis, the trains need to be faster and cheaper so everyone can spread out and not be forced to spend 3 or 4 hours a day commuting to work if they live in a different city.

Even as of 1 person, the car was also cheaper, all in, for me back then (a 20 year old car).

NL public transport is super expensive. Doesn't mean it's never interesting, but when I lived in France near a TGV station, I took the train much more often. It did often have both speed and price advantages.

Yeah, that's pretty accurate, I'd say that population-weighted for the Netherlands the average is around 2x. If you're in rural areas it can easily be 8x or worse (2 hours for a 15-minute drive.)

Where things really shine is high-frequency, high-speed rail plus bikes. The IC Direct Rotterdam-Amsterdam is fast enough that I used to go from my place to my sister's, door-to-door, in about fifty minutes by bike+train, versus typically around a little over an hour for a car.

If you want a really impressive ratio you have to look to the TGV; in college I did Marseille-Paris, Paris-Lille, Lille-Brussels often and each of those segments are three times faster than the car!

> Or conversely, folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car. ... The car culture has very little to do with averages.

On the other hand, capacity planning e.g. for charging or gas stations, has everything to do with averages and the aggregate effects of people each exercising that flexibility occasionally.

Needed capacity for EV charging will be lower, and more centred around longer trips, since a large percent of charging is at home, from wall sockets or L2 chargers.

Parents make up a significant enough part of thr population that I can't believe this is true for most people. When you have a kid you have a significant chance of impromptu emergency trip to pick up your kid. It's bad enough that I have seen this restrain people's careers because committing an hour was not viable when you might have to drop everything and get your kid, so they took lesser jobs in order to maintain that flexibility. Speaking as someone who actually lived on public transportation for years in the US, you definitely need a car in the US the moment you have a child. It was what prompted me to get a car. Working with the US's public transportation system is awful when you have to make these kinds of time sensitive trips. Taking ubers to where you need to go is prohibitively expensive (I've done this). Relying on neighbors just puts your kid's wellbeing on the grace of others which is untenable for parents.

Maybe if you live somewhere like New York it's possible, but I can't see it in other US cities. You definitely need a car in the US. If you don't have one as a parent in the US, you wish you had one.

> If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor. Not glamorous, but enough to get you through your average day.

It’s not a matter of being glamorous or not. Public transit is with relatively few exceptions much slower than point to point driving. This is true even in places with excellent public transit, like Tokyo.

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