Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

As usual, wake me up when it's in the battery of a car that I can afford _and_ use to visit my mom 500km away. (Don't tell me your EV can do that : either it can't, for real - that's 500km of highway, of course - , or I can't afford it.)

Still, it will almost certainly not be a car built in my subcontinent, and that's infuriating.

It almost seems like the right way to address energy transition was to buy cheap fossils to increase living standards, then let governement heavily subsidy R&D while the rest of the world plunged into post-Reaganism.

R&D works ! Who would have guessed ? It only ensured the domination of so many empires and only got a man on the moon. Such puny matters.

Thanks God the US and EU are never going to subsidy R&D ever again. That would be communism ! Better to spend money on ensuring our 1945 baby boom retirees have enough money to buy cheap Chinese stuff. Shareholder over engineer, always, all the time !

But pay "young" people to do, what, fundamental Chemistry ? Experimental Electronics ? Naaah. We have a board meeting tomorrow, we need results by 10:00.

All your "research" stuff will never pay out the 12% yearly interest that our shareholders asked. And old people depend on that for pension funds.

The kids understood that, and they stopped looking for engineering or research jobs. They're all consultants now. The smart ones will realize they have a bullshit job and leave to work on an organic farm. The less smart ones will burn down.

Anyway, we replaced pour R&D department with a new wing of the legal team that's finding more loopholes in the tax code, to ensure we never ever ever give a cent to anyone else than the pension funds. They're on the verge of finding a solution to that pesky "salary" problem, it's not the moment to bother them with your "ion" sci-fi stuff.

It's not like developing countries will do that, right ? Right ?

You can't spend 20 minutes charging on the occasional 5 hour trip?

Agreed. And depending on other circumstances the EV might save time overall vs an ICE. I only use a public charger around 3 or 4 times a year, and I've had to "wait" exactly 0 minutes since I ate and used the bathroom during the charging time.

I save at least 5+ mins a week refuelling compared to my Diesel. That's half a day a year. The automated pre-heating saves me time defrosting in the winter. Probably another hour or more saved every year. All for around 1/4 of the running cost.

I'm (genuinely) interested in knowing which EV you own that:

* allows doing 500 km of highway with a single 20m charge stop

* I can afford

I perused simulators from the various manufacturers. In highway conditions, the only vehicles with autonomy approaching that are using 60kWh batteries, which immediately gets them out of the "I can afford" category.

Assuming I'm lucky enough to find a used one with a 40kWh battery that the owner gets me a huge rebate on for some reason, and, again, using the simulators from the constructor (which are probably too optimistic for real life), the autonomy is around 150km.

From the https://fr.chargemap.com/mobile/planner, I would need 3 stops, and 2h30 hours of _charge_ for the specific trip I have in mind - which brings it from 4h20m to 7h.

To be clear: if I was looking for a "second car" to run errands and drive around home, I would rush for a second-hand small car with a 25-40 kWh battery, and I know that it would be plenty enough for 99% of my usage.

The few outlier trips that I have to be ready to take on the spot are still not a thing with an EV, though. And I'm not going to stockpile cars and choose the one that matches my outfit every morning ;)

I suppose it will get better when the Chinese have done their thing - my point is, I stopped counting on western car manufacturers a long time ago.

They could have gotten their act together 25 to 30 years ago. They'll go the way of the dinosaurs.

Huh? 500km is easy. If you start out with 100% charge and 400km of range, you only need to add 100km more, which is about 10 minutes.

And sure the sticker price is higher, but sticker is only 1/3rd the cost of a vehicle. In TCO terms, an EV is cheaper.

Point is kinda moot when you don't have the cash to afford it _now_. Nor the debt capacity.

If you don't have the cash to afford a new EV, you don't have the cash to afford a new gasoline vehicle.

No, but I can sell it on leboncoin, and will have the cash to afford a gazillion used ones, which will all drive me around half the country on one (stupidly expensive and harmful to the environment) refill.

64KWh 2019 Hyundai Kona - £10,800 [1]

Not a single 20 minutes stop, but a 16-minute stop and a 32-minute stop [2]

1. https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202411015855192

2. https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=2707aa8e-702e-4d2...

About twice as much as I can afford :/

And looking at the ads, it seems like used ones would rather sell around 15k€ to 20k€ :/

To be fair, which none EV with autonomy could you buy at only 5k? And add to that the maintenance, taxes, fuel, etc. a decently modern used petrol or diesel car will entail, maybe 5k as a hard cut off makes owning any car financially unrealistic long term, especially when, like you mentioned, needing driver aids.

Well, a second hand one, of course ? My current car would sell for something between 5-9k€, and I guarentee you I only stop in the middle of the trip to pee, and not to refill (given the insane gas prices on highway stations.)

The expectation for the average driver is that you're going to buy maybe one semi-new car in your life, and then sell it to buy other used cars, with maybe a small down payment, as your needs grow (family changes, need for bigger load, etc..)

The first-hand market is a fraction of the total market for cars. (In France, 6 out of 7 cars sold are second hand according to this source [1], I suspect it's similar in other countries.)

So, of course there is a chicken and egg issue for EVs, where used EVs can't have a decent range since even brand new EVs are barely going by.

Again, with some R&D, it will get better. But we needed that R&D to happen 30 years ago, and instead people where working on putting Bluetooth in the media center.

[1] https://www.automobile-sportive.com/reportages/voitures-occa...

?

Cars with Sodium-ion will have less range. This is about situations where battery size is not that big of a deal.

Though this might allow you to build a car with relative small range, but that you can quick charge.

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