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Comment by millzy | Hacker News Reader

It shouldn't be. There should be more education about why EVs are the clear choice.

The clear choice.

Please explain to me how being in the wilderness camping or fishing without a charge network close by is the clear choice?

Please explain how waiting an hour to charge your vehicle or doing “micro” 20 minute top ups followed by 35 minutes of driving followed by another 30 min top up is the clear choice versus a 5 minute fill up?

Please explain how to get charging when you don’t own your own house and street parking cannot accommodate charging your car overnight?

Please explain how EV is the clear choice when you do have your own house and still cannot get a charging solution installed?

Please explain how one can get a used gas car and repair it and do maintenance for years before hitting the cost of a new EV is the clear choice?

So are EVs the clear choice for affluent, urban people with discretionary income and time to waste when traveling? Are they for people who shouldn’t travel or dislike it? Where’s the clear choice here?

All these points must be answered! In my view, some of these come down to if the owner can afford the upgrades. (I know, they should do their homework before buying!) Also these questions are about the learning curve of owning an EV, some may not have the patience or, dare I say, the ability to grasp everything.

Also, the repair angle hasn't been properly addressed, is there a repairman near me? We all know the dealerships are wolves when taking your car to them.

The experience of charging a car without access to the Tesla charging network (using Electrify America-type chargers) is garbage and actively getting worse, because they aren't maintained properly. If a pump is broken at a gas station, it will be fixed within days, whereas it's not uncommon to see the same chargers out of service for months, even after reporting them.

EVs are often the clear choice for those that exclusively can charge at home or at a supercharger, but pretending there aren't all kinds of drawbacks for common use cases is unhelpful.

Chargers should need a lot less maintenance than pumps. They are over-sized, ugly electrical outlets with maybe extra capacitors and a bit of battery. Most of the "maintenance issues" that take the dumb things down are payments software goofiness or vandalism. The charging networks just need to calm their apps for the first bit, and regular, simple visual inspections for the second bit. The reasons pumps get fixed within days is because they make more money and also require regular inspections by law because they are a fire hazard or worse if left broken. The "Supercharger" network has regular inspections because it makes the most money right now. Right now we don't want to regulate the charging networks and a broken charger isn't a fire hazard or public safety danger to force regulation, so we have to count on "it makes more money if it is working" and it is Electrify America (et al) that are doing a terrible job at competing with "Supercharger" basics. (The "free market" is supposed to do that all on its own, right?~)

But also, the big reason that there isn't the same money in chargers as in gas pumps is how different the equation with home charging available to many, even if not available to "all". It's a different market/ball game from gas pumps no matter what, because electricity is not a centralized fuel source in anything like the gas model, no matter how much you dress up chargers in gas station drag.

It doesn't matter what economic theory you dress it up in: chargers are often broken for months, and clearly not only are people not acting on a visual inspection, but aren't even acting on specific reports.

As I understand it, the model for gas stations (in the US) is making small margins on gas, and huge margins on candy bars and bottles of water. There's no reason that can't be the same for chargers - indeed there's space for lounge style business models instead - no-one wants to sit in their car out by the dumpsters at Target for 30 minutes.

I agree though - Electrify America is failing. It doesn't matter why, it's still a huge negative for EV adoption in a large number of cases, and those who claim "EVs are perfect for everyone" need to start communicating that nuance, or it should be assumed they don't understand it and should have their opinion discounted.

Sure, I agree with you, and think that is a lot of what I'm hinting at. I think the business model is wrong for Electrify America. They are building "stations" often divorced from any other businesses. I still think Destination chargers are more important than "along the way chargers" and in general reframing even "along the way chargers" as Destination Chargers should have been the business model (could still be the business model for someone savvy enough to invest in it). It shouldn't have been "Electrify America" it should have been "Electrify McDonald's" (or Applebee's or Sonic Drive-In; that one even already has the form factor of a charging lot). Take a national chain that already wants to be at every interstate exit, encourage them to electrify every parking space in a way that their minimum wage staff can keep an eye on without too much effort, in exchange for extra foot traffic and encouraging people to spend on meals and such while they wait on a charge.

(My belief that Destination Charging matters a lot more than "along the way" is also where I see "EVs are already perfect for everyone, they just don't know it yet". I understand there is a ton of momentum in the existing mindset of a gas car and central gas stations and regular visits to those. I think Destination Charging and Home Charging and Everywhere Else Charging are an entirely different mindset, and it's an education problem that we're stuck trying to recreate the status quo rather than build the new awesome.)

It's nothing to do with "gas mindset" - if I'm driving 1000 miles (not uncommon, welcome to Texas!) I'm going to have to stop to charge even the longest-range EVs along the way twice.

One of those might be an overnight at a hotel (where the chargers are typically broken!), but the second is necessarily going to be somewhere en route. I agree it would be better to have them with amenities rather than in the back lot of a big box store, but that is not the current reality - even superchargers often lack amenities.

This makes EVs very much non-ideal compared to a gas car or hybrid for this use case. No amount of noisy people wanting destination charging and home charging to be The Thing is going to fix that - it's just gaslighting to suggest that it's a mindset problem rather than a real one that must be solved if EVs are to dominate.

I'd avoid using a charged term like "gaslighting" in this particular conversation.

From my perspective, Superchargers lacking amenities is still the "mindset bug" and Hotels allowing chargers to be broken is the "mindset bug". I'm not telling you at all to fix Texas and not drive 1000 miles regularly (though that's certainly not ideal), I'm just wishing there were more things to do with your charging time in the middle of that mess and a better usage of your car's time spent parked at both ends of your journey.

I think we fix the experience by encouraging parking lot owners of every kind, hotels especially, that charging is an amenity that makes a difference to the customer experience. We don't need every interstate exit to have a desolate "charging station" with no amenities, we need charging considered an amenity to parking.

It would be nice to be able to regularly and culturally think of a 1000 mile journey as "I need to park somewhere for ~30 minutes to eat/relax/play/stretch/whatever" and charging just happens while you do that. This could be the revenge era of the Roadside Attraction giving you reason to pick one place to stop and charge over another. 30 minutes of time to spend in a silly museum to the world's largest rubber band ball is a fun use of that time. Sure it would get old doing it regularly, but that's why you want more and more things to be Destinations. Restaurants, Roadside Attractions, Scenic Parks, etc, should all have charging as an amenity. Charging shouldn't be bland "stations" needing amenities, charging should be the reliable amenity to any other detour or pitstop you'd want to do on the road. It should be wall plugs that blend into the background anywhere you might want to park, not "Special Pumps" you have to seek out and wait for because electrons need to pretend to be siloed in tanks like a liquid fuel.

We are giving the same solutions.

The difference is, I'm saying that it is a problem _today_ that these solutions do not exist, and the lack of those solutions means that EVs are not a viable solution for a lot of people _today_. If these problems are solved, EVs will become more viable for more people, and all EV owners will benefit from the improved infrastructure. However, the infrastructure chicken must come before the EV egg.

Today, it is not a true statement that "EVs are the best choice for everyone", which is what I was responding to. Every one of your comments tries to dispute that, while also pointing to the same problems as I am and making them out to be imaginary - the very _definition_ of gaslighting!

> while also pointing to the same problems as I am and making them out to be imaginary - the very _definition_ of gaslighting!

A) That's very not the definition of gaslighting. Gaslighting is lying and faking events with the intent to abuse someone's state of mind (make them feel crazy, make them feel dependent/codependent, remove them from support networks). Like I said, it is a very charged term, and you should be a lot more careful with it.

B) I've never called these problems imaginary. I think our big difference is not that I don't agree those are problems, but that I think these problems get fixed by everyone buying an EV. I feel that this is an ugly dinosaur egg needs to come first before the chicken situation. The Supercharger network is an okay enough bootstrap tool today that people can switch to EV today (even if they don't think that they can). It won't be the greatest experience, and there will be many useful things to complain about, but it will start to give added perspective they may need to better ask for the right things to make the experience better.

Isn’t Electrify America part of the VW diesel settlement? That explains why it sucks, because the owner doesn’t care about it.

Sure. The non-supercharger alternatives aren’t much better though.

But there are many more chargers than tank stations. And there are a lot of electronic components which could fail due to age, weather or cheapness (economy of scale), the charging station is a complicated product.

One pump will serve many dozens of people per day, way more than a charger.

There is just not enough motivation for business to properly maintain them, I totally agree.

> the charging station is a complicated product

No, it's not. We've got the workings of electric plugs and electric circuits down to a science in the 19th century. Higher voltage complicates things a bit, but not nearly as much as most people think, and again we've had the technology for that for decades and decades at this point.

Most of the parts of an electrical circuit/outlet are solid state and don't hardly age/weather at all. You are more at risk of someone stripping it for parts (like copper wiring and capacitors) than it failing due to age.

We accidentally let "car safety standards" turn a boring electrical outlet into a gas pump-looking plug that looks way more complex than it actually is. A charger is a fancy electrical outlet with a weird costume, and then often over-complicated payment software installed on top. That's most of how "complicated" it is, just over-complicated payment software on USB Power Delivery High Voltage Edition ports.

With all do respect, my wife and I last year drove through the Texas panhandle, then into New Mexico. It was a fantastically beautiful drive. Many times we were in the "middle of no where", there weren't even any telephone or electric poles!This is why our next car will be a hybrid, two sources of energy for the long haul. Our Pacifica has a driving range of around 500 miles, we never were worried about fuel.

Can you send your route? It's extremely unlikely your route was out of supercharger range. There's good coverage on that route: https://www.tesla.com/supercharger

Superchargers don't have giant billboards advertising them, they are often very subtly tucked into a hotel or gas station. But they are there.

From Childress,Tx, we meandered SW towards Lubbuck, which we skirted to the north, then down a zigzag of roads to Denver City, Texas. Then from Denver City over to the border of New Mexico to Riverside, NM. There are signs saying to gas up because of a lack of stations further up the road all along that stretch. Guess what that means?

There are superchargers in Childress, Plainview right to the north of Lubbock, and Post right to the south. But also that whole route is only 300 miles, less than a charge.

Can you send a list of these chargers? Also, we chose to bypass Lubbuck, our gas or if we had a hybrid would have allowed us to determine our route, not our battery charge.

https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&bounds=38.67561317615354%2C...

EVs are not a clear choice for everybody, though. A whole lot of people aren't able to charge them at their home, so they'd be entirely reliant on commercial charging stations. That's a serious problem.

That's the thing, EVs are not the "clear choice" unless you choose to ignore the diverse practical realities. Better propaganda won't change that. Many households I know with an EV also have an ICE to explicitly hedge the cases where an EV is objectively a poor or suboptimal choice. For households that don't need or want to own two vehicles, hybrids serve much the same purpose. EVs are strictly worse in some regions and for some people.

As a simple example, there are no EVs that serve the regional markets where a Subaru is the inexpensive car of choice. Those long-range, high-clearance AWD vehicles are not some weird lifestyle flex in the markets where half the people drive one, they fill a concrete requirement that EVs currently can't fill.

> Many households I know with an EV also have an ICE

If that EV is a Tesla, every one of those families I know uses the Tesla for their road trips. Leaf drivers don't. Other brands are mixed.

They are almost all Teslas, and they usually use their SUV (the ICE always seems to be an SUV) for roadtrips. Seasonality matters as well, EVs are not a great choice for long trips over the mountains in winter.

It's not a clear choice. I drive 3,000mi round trip once a year. I like to do ~900 miles one day and ~700 miles the second. I stop once on the 900 mile leg for lunch and to stretch legs and use restroom which takes about 20 minutes. I'm not adding another 1-2 stops to that trip. As it'd push that driving day out to >12-13 hours.

For my daily driving I'd probably use little to no fuel at all with a plugin. I have not upgraded my car in 8 years as I'm waiting on a good plugin hybrid. I'd have a hybrid and an EV but not an EV as my primary. Gasoline still packs way more energy per unit volume and is easier to store than electrical charge.

If you out of gas, someone can get you going again with a jerry can. If an EV runs out, you might have to call a tow truck or cancel your trip. IMO range anxiety would be solved if EVs had a "jerry can".

This is why I always thought that swappable batteries was more important than plug-in charging, to be honest.

Properly designed, it would make "charging" as quick as filling a gas tank, would make having an EV a reasonable choice even for people who can't do home charging, and would make such "jerry can" scenarios entirely doable.

It would also disconnect (to a great degree) the value of the car from the state of the battery. I wouldn't buy a used EV because I'm worried about the batteries -- but if the battery were something apart from the car itself, that would eliminate that concern.

Those swappable batteries also need to work in a formfactor and swapping process that a regular, not fully able-bodied person could accomplish the task in a very small amount of time comparable to filling an ICE car with gasoline or diesel fuel to be a real replacement solution.

The 'complexity' and suitability of these vehicles aren't just about the vehicles themselves but the system that they are part of, which includes the related elements of charging/fueling, the process of charging/fueling, the process of operating the vehicles for driving-- which includes how the driver needs to be more conscious of and aware of their driving range, planning for charging/refueling, etc... The vehicles need to fit into people's lives which have their own constraints for evaluating suitability.

> a regular, not fully able-bodied person could accomplish the task

Why? Charging stations presumably would have staff and equipment to do the swaps. There's no need to make it so that literally everyone is physically able to do them.

> Charging stations presumably would have staff and equipment to do the swaps.

This is a very large assumption.

Also, where will the staff come from? Will there be enough charging stations with sufficient equipment and staff?

Gas stations manage to have staff.

All I know is that swappable batteries would eliminate a fair number of the problems that make me avoid EVs.

Perhaps it's not feasible, but the current charging situation isn't (for me) either. So, if I'm going to anything electric in the nearish future, hybrids are the only realistic option.

Plug-in hybrids are much more suitable for environments where you simply don't have the charging infrastructure at home. This is also unlikely to change in the near term (10-20+ years) if my home town is anything to go by (Tallinn, Estonia), older apartment buildings barely have enough funds to handle renovating the buildings for better energy efficiency.

Don't tell me EVs are the clear choice; show me available chargers practically everywhere I go.

EVs are the clear choice if you've got an ICE car as a backup.

I mostly do commuting, grocery runs, etc. EVs are great for that. But then I do road trips about once a year, and an EV just adds to the complexity of planning currently.

Yeah but I think range anxiety is a great name because a lot of anxiety can't just be "explained" away. I've tried for years with certain friends.

People don't like the _idea_ that they could one day be stranded without a nearby charger, or (even though this has literally never happened to me in 6 years), being _forced_ to wait 3 hours to charge your car.

I think NACS will help with this since the Tesla Supercharger network is quite amazing in its coverage and speed of charging. So as other cars get access to it, it'll make owning an EV more palatable.

It's fun to remind people that "range anxiety" was a term in literature a century ago referring to how hard it was to find gasoline (in certain city Pharmacies with certain old fashioned medicines they made in house, in certain city Blacksmiths that used gasoline as a forge starter, and that was about it). Every person that has ever driven a car has some version or another of the range anxiety of making it to the next gas station or not knowing how long of a stretch it will be between gas stations on some interstate. The earliest versions of that were a lot worse when gas stations were a (full service) novelty.

The fun part of the original uses of "range anxiety" was that it was also used in contrast to EVs at the time. You might not know where the next gas station might be, but electricity is easy to spot and you could charge an EV at any friendly house or business you stopped at with an exterior outlet to pick up a few miles to get back to where you needed to be. EVs were the cars where "fuel" was everywhere and plentiful and there were few worries about if you needed to make an extra stop somewhere that you could find a plug.

At some point we're going to see things flip back to that. When gas gets expensive enough, when gas pumps start to close fast enough, when more people have practical experience with EVs and home charging and even Level 1 charging as cheap and ubiquitous (if not the best charging experience; this is where Edison bites us by pushing the main US electrical outlets to be half the voltage of other continents out of losing the AC/DC war) things will flip back to that original "range anxiety" perspective. Gas is the weird, flammable thing that should be hard to find. Electricity is almost "everywhere the (LED) light touches".

But yes, "anxiety" isn't always rational and you can explain that to a lot of individuals, and they may get it rationally, but it will take a lot more momentum to sway the more emotional parts of their brain, especially those tuned to the zeitgeist and feeling a shared "cultural anxiety" here.

(I also think NACS is going to help. It was dumb for us to have two competing plug standards for quite as long as we did. The latest model of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the first non-Tesla NACS "native" car available to purchase and early reviews are quite favorable about that.)

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