C’mon you can’t be building ev’s in 2025 with less than 300 miles of range
But I'd want that car to be under $15k. That car doesn't exist, at least not in the US, so I'm still on an old ICE.
My current car is worth at most $5k, and I spend maybe $500/yr on gas.
My wife uses it for commuting and it's our standard "run to town" car. We have an ICE vehicle for trips.
Absolutely would buy again.
Consider for example a very long road trip, such as a drive from Los Angeles to New York which is around 2800 miles. Suppose Alice has a 200 mile range EV and Bob has a 300 mile range EV. Assume their cars both charge at 300 miles/hour.
What effects will the range difference have on their trips?
• If DC EV charging stations are too far apart the trip might not be feasible for Alice.
• Assuming DC EV stations are not too far apart for Alice, then she will have to stop to charge more often.
• Assuming both start fully charged, and during the trip they drive until 10% and then charge to 80% then Alice will drive 180 miles until her first recharge, and then recharge every 140 miles. Bob will drive 270 miles until his first recharge, and then recharge every 210 miles.
• Alice will have to recharge 20 times. Bob will have to recharge 13 times. That works out to be a stop about every 2 hours of driving for Alice and a stop every 3 hours of driving for Bob.
OK, that is a lot more stops for Alice. But lets look at the time spent stopped rather than the number of stops.
• Alice first stops with 2620 miles left to go. Her car recharges at 300 miles/hour, which means she needs 8h 44m of total charge time.
• Bob first stops with 2530 miles left to go. His car recharging at 300 miles/hour needs a total charge time of 8h 26m.
Let's assume the each charge stop adds 5 minutes of delay beyond the actual charging time. Alice stops 7 times more than Bob so has 35 more minutes of delay. Add that to the 18 minutes more Alice spends actually charging and we have Bob gets to New York 53 minutes ahead of Alice.
Suppose Alice's car could charge faster than Bob's? Say 500 miles/hour? Then she would only spend 5h 15m charging. That's 3h 11m less charging time than Bob. She'd still have 35 minutes of delay from more frequent charging but even with that she'd beat Bob to New York by 2h 36m.
This suggests that for long road trips charging rate may be more more important than range, as long as range is sufficient to let you reach DC charging stations.
The SUV is in all likelihood quite uncomfortable, as it has to fit into the surrounding pickup.
A small affordable truck works great as a commuter and picking up supplies from a hardware store for home improvement.
Not if it has two seats and you want to carry more than two people.
>picking up supplies from a hardware store for home improvement.
I don't remember where I heard it. But it was something like "most people buy cars for reasons least likely to happen". If you aren't using your bed daily you bought the wrong car. Buy a trailer if you need to go to a hardware store once a month.
Then you don't want a small truck.
> If you aren't using your bed daily you bought the wrong car.
Plenty of cars have a second row of seats that are not used daily too. I guess they bought the wrong car as well.
Plus not a lot of cars have trailer hitches...
Yes, that was my point.
>Plenty of cars have a second row of seats that are not used daily too. I guess they bought the wrong car as well.
Cars with only two seats are in almost all cases more expensive. To buy a pickup you pay extra, to get 4 seats you don't.
What you personally need I have no idea nor was my reply pertaining to that.
Gain, people do not buy cars they need. They specifically buy cars for situations they will never find themselves in.
Your scenario here makes even less sense because most cars do not come with a trailer hitch (trucks on other hand...), you're buying another thing (which lowers that this is supposed to be an "affordable" EV), you have to renew registration for the trailer, and have a place on top of your vehicle to store it.
A truck bed is nice to have sometimes. You can quickly throw things in it (like plywood, a new large flat screen, bicycles, fishing gear, a dead deer, etc). You don't have to hookup a trailer or fiddle with wiggling things between doors and so forth.
Such as commuting to & from work. But I imagine you believe that is the least likely thing to ever happen to a person. Driving to and from work.
I say this as an EV owner btw
GP is pointing out that anything less than 300 is not practical, and they're not wrong. 150 miles, in particular, is just too low to be used for anything other than a basic commuter vehicle. It's useless on highways (try driving I-70 through KS in this thing) and if you change job sites more than once, you're likely to run out of range in one work day. Traveling between cities is going to be unreliable if you're not able to stop and charge at your destination. Live in Colorado Springs and want to go to Denver? You probably have to stop and charge before coming home.
we're also talking in raw miles, straight line, no hills, decent weather. I'm in a hilly city that gets to -30C on the regular, and these factors could turn 150 miles in to 75 pretty fast.
That's 2x the average daily distance driven, 4x if you do it back and forth. This is more like a cheap utility truck for day to day things, not a thing you want to travel in for hours at 65mph
If you have other reqs by all means, pay up. But don’t force the cost on everyone else.
Additionally range dictates how often you have to charge. This does not matter if you can easily charge at home, but when you have to do it at public infrastructure it is obviously a hassle, which is increased with lack of range.