Hacker News Reader

Comment by cranberryturkey | Hacker News Reader

i just drove 13 hours from bay area to north eastern california (Alturas) and i didn't see one electric big rig.

1. How sure are you? The ones from established manufacturers don't really look substantially different from their diesel counterparts. Unless you're really looking closely you'd have a hard time telling them apart.

2. Electric semi trucks are not ideal for long distance trips, they're more for predictable day routes, so it wouldn't surprise me to not encounter many of them on what was presumably a highway drive.

I wouldn't recognize the Volvo EV semi pictured in the article while driving. It looks generic.

Similar to cars, it's easy to spot Teslas but other brands don't stand out this much and you really need to know the little details to spot. Same for trucks.

> Similar to cars, it's easy to spot Teslas but other brands don't stand out this much and you really need to know the little details to spot.

Disagree. All you have to do is look for lack of a front grill or flush door handles to tell if a car is an EV.

This caused a lot of confusion with VW; a lot of people thought the id.3/4 were their first electric cars, because the eGolf and eUp looked so... normal. I'm fairly sure they deliberately said "we need to make it look more electric-car-y" at some point.

Flush door handles are completely orthogonal to whether a car is an EV; that just happened to be Tesla's design language.

I’ve yet to see an EV that doesn’t have some sort of flush handle design. My understanding is that it improves aerodynamics and I’m sure a secondary reason is “Tesla did it first” and the high tech aesthetic that EVs are expected to have.

Hyundai Kona and Kia Niro have normal doorhandles.

These are mostly being sold in Europe, not the US. They're also not particularly distinctive looking, mostly; I'm sceptical that most people could identify one offhand as it passed by.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com