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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Limiting QC events is easy enough. A daily commuter vehicle can easily trickle charge over night, and even the measly 40 kWh old used Leaf can get you 200km a charge - assuming an average commute of 20 km for Germany, that's a whole work week worth of battery life. The only time you as an average person actually "need" QC is for the yearly vacation road trip, but as the author writes, renting an ICE or chungus electric vehicle for that occasion is way more cost effective. Admitted: if you don't have access to trickle charge at either the workplace or your home, the situation looks different.

As for the battery health rating, it's easy enough to measure. Go on the highway, keep it at 80 km/h straight and note how much range you get out of it. In practical commute settings, range will be longer than that anyway due to regenerative braking in all that start-stop-start-stop dance.

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This is the thing that ICE people need to internalise.

You THINK you're driving long distances every day and you THINK charging is a massive hassle where you have to drive to a Charging Site and wait for the car to charge for HOURS.

When in reality you plug in at home and have a full battery every morning.

And when the infrastructure is properly built (yay Finland), you can get a week's charge when you're getting groceries as the shop has multiple 100kW chargers along with a fleet of Level 2 (22kW) chargers.

The only times I need to actively think about charging are over 200-250km day trips (my old Ioniq EV has a WLTP of 300km on a warm summer day). And even then the kids an dogs need a bathroom break anyway and I need to walk around a bit to freshen up. 20-30 minutes gets us 100-150km of charge (old car, slow charging) and we're off again.

>> When in reality you plug in at home and have a full battery every morning

Right, but I should buy a house with a garage first.

>> charge when you're getting groceries as the shop has multiple 100kW

Unless you do groceries in unusual time, those chargers are occupied. Will you wait in line then?

You just need an outlet that is close to the car, but it’s mostly an American issue.

We get 230V/16A from a bog standard outlet, three phase is triple that.

I had a leaf on demonstration for 24 hours. I was impressed with it. I drove the 50 miles to work and back, and put it on slow charge knowing I had 16 hours until I needed it. No problem. When I came to drive it in the morning it hadn't charged. It was actually a problem with the plug in the garage, it must have gone off a few minutes after I plugged it in. Now what? Wait 16 more hours?

A couple of weeks later I went on holiday. I wouldn't be able to charge where I was stopping, and there were no chargers within 15 miles. I kept my diesel.

> It was actually a problem with the plug in the garage, it must have gone off a few minutes after I plugged it in. Now what? Wait 16 more hours?

So what, that's something you find out once that your electric installation is shoddy enough to most likely be a fire risk (because the charger plug has a thermal protection built in!), fix it and then you won't have that problem again. And as the Leaf should have 150 miles worth of range, you still should have way more than enough range on the battery to do two days worth of commute even if you suddenly find out the trickle charge didn't work.

50 miles each way...150 miles range turned into 10 miles left. So no.

Renting a car for vacations / road trips is expensive. sure you can but expect to pay $100 per day. Also expect to arrive and be told they can't fill your reservation as they are out of cars.

> Renting a car for vacations / road trips is expensive. sure you can but expect to pay $100 per day.

Indeed... but now, think of the price difference between a small-ish commute EV and a chungus EV or ICE. Easily tens of thousands of dollars, that's a lot of days worth of rent.

> Also expect to arrive and be told they can't fill your reservation as they are out of cars.

That's extremely fucking rare to happen. In the eventuality your reservation can't be filled, you'll usually get upgraded for free. Personally, got upgraded from a small VW Golf class to a VW Phaeton once, plus a day for free. And automatic, no stick shift like the Golf.

Over the life of a car tens of thousands of dollars isn't that hard to build up though if the car cannot do anything. And there is value in having the vehicle that does what you need when the inspiration strikes.

Not having any rental cars is very common in my experience. I'm often renting in smaller cities though (like the rental car place just a couple miles from my house), I've never heard of problems in big tourist destinations or large cities.

There's also the convenience of having the car more appropriate for day-to-day use.

E.g. a family with two cars, where the smaller car is preferred because it's easier to park in the limited space available in a European city.

Seems expensive but in the grand scheme of a road trip that is only like a 33% increase in price when you factor in a motel room for $100 a night, maybe $100 spend on gas a day filling up twice, $100 on three meals coffee and snacks for one. Give or take of course.

That is probably why the american road trip is a dying animal. Past a days drive you are coming way behind just flying straight there.

I thought about this too - own a small electric vehicle for 90% of the family needs and rent a bigger SUV when the need arises.

Until you do the math and realize that the 3-4 annual trips of multiple days would end up costing thousands of dollars in rental fees per year. Plus the usual inconveniences around renting.

Suddenly the math does not look so appealing.

> Until you do the math and realize that the 3-4 annual trips of multiple days would end up costing thousands of dollars in rental fees per year.

First, 3-4 annual multi-day trips that go for longer than 300 km? If one has that amount of disposable income to afford that, go for whatever the biggest Tesla is and use Superchargers along the route, even drives so long they're a safety issue on its own due to fatigue don't get that much longer due to charging because kids will need to go to the toilet every so often even with an ICE.

As for the rental fees: here in Germany, I just checked - a Mercedes Benz Vito, so up to 8 people (or 6 people plus a ton of luggage), that's 50€ a day here. Crossing four digits takes 20 days of rental, that's a lot of vacation time even by European standards.

I'm surprised you consider a 300km trip long, or 3-4 trips in a year excessive. That's only Berlin to Bielefeld. What do you do with your holiday?

The EU minimum is 20 days annual leave per year.

For that kind of distance I take a train, Munich-Dortmund doesn't take that long. As for holidays, Croatia by bus or by night train to get around horrid traffic, extortion level road tolls and dumbass border controls.

No idea what numbers you are crunching. I am doing this for 10 years now and able to afford luxurious cars for holidays because of it.

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