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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Where's the sacrifice? Just charge it to 100% before you leave for a 200+ mile trip, there's even a setting in your app to make that happen automatically (it'll start charging at e.g. 2am or whatever is needed for your departure time).

Did you gas up your car every time you drove back from work? No, right? So why complain that the car doesn't sit at 100% all the time in your garage? Seems like a silly complaint to me.

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The sacrifice is that you can't use 40% of what's supposedly the range.

> Did you gas up your car every time you drove back from work? No, right?

Right, you gas up your car when it needs more gas. You can't do that with an electric car for two reasons: (1) you need to fuel the car well in advance of trying to use it, because fueling is extremely slow; (2) you can't go low on fuel without damaging the car.

The only logical response to this state of affairs is to try to fuel the car whenever it's not in use.

> So why complain that the car doesn't sit at 100% all the time in your garage?

Capacity that you're not supposed to use is not capacity that you can usefully be said to have.

You shouldn't normally run a fuel powered car all the way to empty either. Fuel pumps tend to be cooled by the fuel they're pumping, running low means you might be pumping air in addition to fuel and air cooling isn't as effective as liquid cooling, so you will overheat your fuel pump (may not be a big deal depending on how long you can go with the tank critically empty). Fuel tanks also accumulate crud which is more likely to make it out of the tank when you run it low. And your fuel tank may be more likely to corrode when it has more air in it, which naturally happens when it has less fuel, so you should keep it mostly full when possible.

That said, it's usually not a big deal until your vehicle and its fuel tank has sat on the side of the road unused for a few years, and your fuel has degraded in place.

Car tanks are plastic nowadays, there's a fuel fiter and they're pretty good at managing surge/sloshing. Many even reduce power when the fuel light is on for example. You probably shouldn't drive aggressively with the fuel light on but even the user manuals usually recommend refuelling at about the 1/4 mark mentioning the potential pump issue, the danger of running out of fuel entirely and that if the engine is sputtering systems like power anything, ESC, TC, etc might not work correctly. A full tank doesn't hurt but nowadays if you're not being a mong you can cruise with the fuel light on without damaging the car in any way.

Edit: Or at least way less than bad shifting, lugging, not waiting for it to warm up, not letting turbos cool down, etc. The fuel thing is one of those things I hear a lot but then it comes from people (not you, don't know you) who start their car after sitting in a parking lot for an hour and immediately do a pull or hoon around all the way to the parking spot and immediately kill the engine when they stop, etc. Triggers my mechanical sympathy 'tism.

> The sacrifice is that you can't use 40% of what's supposedly the range.

I do it all the time, just not every day. Going skiing? Set the car to charge in the morning. 40 minutes at 90%+ isn't going to hurt anything.

I think you've badly misunderstood that warning.

You can use the extra 40% when you need it (road trips), but you shouldn’t be using it when you don’t need it (daily commutes).

The difference is that I can fill my gas tank to 100% in a few minutes almost anywhere, no planning is necessary.

On the other hand, you don't have a gas pump in your garage, do you? Absolutely unbelievable we're still having these FUD arguments in 2025. EV's spend objectively far, far less of the driver's time fueling themselves for around-town driving, and it's not even close.

When my tank gets 10% on my ICE, I fill a full tank.

That's nice. It's just so weird to me that Musk's adventures in authoritarian nutjobbery are causing us to revisit long dead nonsense FUD arguments about EVs that have been clearly disproven in the market for like a decade now.

I mean, seriously? We're doing this?

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