I disagree that EV-s are held back by misconceptions. More their price and range.
That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge", and extremely common to do the "Put car on charger for 13 minutes while going into [insert any of the gazillion places with chargers in the parking lot] to use the bathroom, stretch legs, and get a snack, or see a landmark"
Also you usually structure it so you arrive at your destination with very low charge, because you fill up while there. I've yet to be at a hotel with a gas pump in the lot.
Again, EVs function differently than gas, and that change of paradigm really gets people ruffled up and confused.
The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!). If this doesn’t bother you, then it’s fine. It matters to me though.
Sometimes I also drive early in the morning 600km, and in the afternoon back, so I’m home until 22:00. With EV, that’s just impossible.
You also surely recognize that your driving patterns are very atypical and a car not working for them says very little about how suitable the car is for the market as a whole.
Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW.
One top of that you need to find a charger. They are all over, but many of them are slow speed chargers. There are also a lot of gaps, if you pass a charger with 50% battery remaining you can't be sure you will make the next one. (most cars can pass several gas station with 5% gas in the tank and still make it to one). You need to ensure you will get back to your car when it is charged so they don't charge extra (this is a problem if you are at a concert or something and are trying to charge while doing something else that can't be interupted)
Someday all the above will be fixed. Everyone agrees NACS is the future connector, but it isn't rolled out. Someday every "gas station" will have a charger with the gas pumps (or perhaps something else?) - at least along routes where people often make long trips. Someday you won't need a phone/account, just swipe a card - or so I hope. But someday isn't today.
This is why I am like a broken record repeating that EV misconceptions kill EVs. You are applying gas car logic to electric cars, which is what people do, and stops them from getting an EV.
But it's wrong.
Renault 5 EV charges with 11kW. This is the size of car I need.
The Renault 5 is a town car. Its specs are closer to a golf cart than a motorcar. It fills a niche, but if you are traveling often, a different EV would suite you better.
People assume everyone has the same resources as they do. Your point would be fine, if Renault 5 would be very cheap.
But it’s not. It’s the car what many people can afford.
Thinking that people have “misconceptions”, because they don’t buy expensive EV-s, which have good capabilities, is very strange.
You say EV-s are good and people just don’t get it. But people who buy EV-s for 25k, their experience is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than in EV-s for 50k.
These people are buying those cars, because that’s what they can afford, not because they are stupid to see that a more expensive car can do better.
Look at 25k ICE cars. They offer lot more comfort regarding “charging”, as same price EV-s. They work in a city and outside city as well. No trade-offs.
That’s my point, when I say “price and range”.
———- Renault 5 EV is a pretty normal car in Europe regarding its specs. Why would it be a golf cart?
AC only EVs dont exist in the US market any more AFAIK. Looking at the Renault 5 models currently available in the UK market, they dont have any AC only models either (maybe they do in other countries though).
Can Renault 5 EV be charged in 30 min?
If you got an EV with fast charging (and there were fast chargers on your route) it would actually be under 20 minutes more.
For example Ioniq 5 has a range of ~480 km. Let's say you started at 100% and drive down to 10%. That gets you 430 km, so 270 km left to go.
At a 350 kW charger the Ioniq 5 goes from 10-80% in 18 minutes. Assuming you do not want to take it below 10% that's 340 km before you next need to charge, more than the 270 km you need to reach your destination. You arrive with 70 km left before needing to charge again.
Let's do the round trip extra time. That's 1400 km for the trip. Again assuming we start at 100% and we don't let it go between 10%, then we get 430 km using before the first charging stop.
At that point we've got 970 km left that will have to be powered by our charging stops. Every 20 minute stop is giving us 340 km, so we'll need 3 stops, or one hour of stop time.
You might also need a stop, most likely shorter, at your destination if you are going to do a lot of driving there before returning home.
In a majority of cases with EVs charging speed is a bigger factor in how much time you spend stopped than range. Many people overlook this and might be a longer range EV when they would actually have faster trips if they got one with a much higher charge rate even if it had a substantially lower range.
The way to think of it is once you get past the range you got from charging before you left, every km travelled on the trip comes from stops during the trip. If EV X charges twice as fast as EV Y and they both need a stop at the same place, Y is going to spend twice as much time on chargers for the rest the trip as X no matter how many times they have to stop. If the fast charging X has half the range it will stop twice as often, but an X stop will be 1/4 the time of a Y stop actually charging.
Y making few stops does mean less time spent on stop overhead, by which I mean the time when you are off the highway but not actually charging. That should only be a couple minutes or so per stop though since you can overlap time consuming stop activies like visiting the bathroom with the actual charging.
On most trip that saving from less total stop overhead can't come anywhere near the savings from faster charging and so fast charging meh range will usually beat crap charging but great range unless the trip is short enough that only the short range car needs to stop. The great range car also does got farther before needing the first stop, so it doesn't need to add as much mileage during the trip put that too usually doesn't make much difference either other than fairly short road trips.
But “price and range/charging speed” still applies.
I can’t afford an expensive EV with fast charging, but I can afford a cheap ICE. I get it that in US people buy 100k cars as there is no tomorrow. But not everywhere it’s like that.
For 10k one can get a decent ICE. Can you get fast charging used EV for 10k?
This is fine if you're a homeowner. For a huge chunk of people living in denser housing, this is not feasible, and at best impractical.
I have a hybrid now, it's still a conventional powertrain, and it's not chargeable. That's not exactly what I want, but it's what I could get.
I want a fully electric drive train hybrid with around 100 miles capacity on the battery, then a generator that's big enough to keep it running if the battery is drained.
100 miles gets you through the average day without having to use gas.
An electric drive train turns your engine to a generator that runs at a fixed speed and is more efficient. It also massively reduces the complexity turning into a system more like an EV.
And, if I go on a long trip, the car still gets me to where I'm going without charges (unless I choose to so I can save gas).
Would you drive around with the trailer all the time? Probably not ...
- It didn't come with a home charger at all. They're not cheap.
- It came with a J1772 adapter, but no CCS adapter. The car itself has NACS. So I'm limited to Tesla superchargers, which are expensive, unless I buy a new adapter (not cheap, or cheap, but suspicious Temu brands).
- The experience of using all of these different branded charging points is _awful_. You need to create 10 different accounts with a bunch of terrible apps. The maps to find charging infrastructure seem universally awful.
- Pretty common to arrive at a charging location to find that some nutjob has hacked off all the charging cables. The only reliably maintained charge points are the larger, more expensive high speed charging locations.
I think a lot of the issues would be solved if I was more committed to the car and the house that I'm living in, and installed a home charger to charge at night. But the charging experience out in the world is absolutely _dismal_ when compared to gas vehicles, even if you change your behavior.
The real pain point, in my opinion, is whether you have any place to plug in nightly. If you don't, then as you pointed out, it becomes a nightmare to own. Range anxiety is completely justified when public charging infrastructure is still as unreliable as it is, years after the initial build outs. Your points about charging pain are all too common.
If you have a garage with an outlet, you are generally fine. I lived off a level 1 charger for over a year before I decided I wanted the convenience of a level 2 charger.
For most people a 240V outlet is worth it. Not to mention it's at least 10% more efficient, which is quite significant and weird that Technology Connections didn't mention that.
Also if you are always driving 40mi/day, you likely float with a battery percentage around 80%, leaving plenty of capacity for those consecutive 100 mile days with your standard overnight slow charge.
Again, this cannot be said enough, EVs are not gas vehicles, they do not refill like gas vehicles, if you apply gas vehicle logic to them, they look awful. But they are not gas vehicles, they don't follow the same logic and rules of gas vehicles. So you don't apply gas vehicle logic to them.
It's like handing chopsticks to an 18th century westerner, they'll stab their food with it and laugh about how stupid and useless they are. You need to learn and use chopsticks before criticizing chopsticks.
This whole thread (as always) is full of people stabbing their food with chopsticks.
What's bizarre is that this should be incredibly non-contentious when it comes to EV adoption. By code, everyone in the US already has two phases at their panel and running a wire and outlet in their garage (or a weatherized cable to the outside) costs $100-150 in materials and a similar amount in labor. This is literally negligible in the broader scheme of the automotive economy. My humble suggestion to you is: save your breath, we're on the same side, raise your voice instead when it comes to demanding a sane EV industrial policy, regulatory policy, urban planning policy, removing subsidies for oil and gas industries, and the like.
Level 1 EVSE's are super cheap, almost all of them are under $200. They aren't fast (most are 1.44kW), but that doesnt really matter if you are parked at home for 12+ hours a day.
(also small semantic nitpick, but your car did come with a charger, its built in to the vehicle. the EVSE that connects it to a wall outlet is basically just a fancy extension cord. this is why they are so cheap)
I've admittedly only used public fast charging twice in my year of EV ownership, and both times, I used a credit card at the machine. No app.
The two were EVGo and ElectrifyAmerica. I don't know if the other ten brands require an app ;)
Like:
- turn off the engine in your garage
- don't hold the ignition switch on and break the starter
- don't smoke cigarettes while filling up with gasoline
- the heater doesn't come on until the engine is warm
Just buy a house and install charger.
Nevermind the fact that there are very, very few EVs suitable for anyone with more than 2 kids.
Yes, if we're talking about normal family travel, an EV works fine for many trips (though there are still charging "dead spots" in parts of the country - looking at you WV).
But, "truck stuff" like towing, they aren't there yet. Maybe in a few years when we get the next generation of battery and charger tech.
So if you are towing a 2000lb empty box mobile home it's gonna be worse than towing an 8000lb flat bed of decorative boulders.
Obviously you could do that same thing in an ICE car, but I feel the pressure to keep moving so it hits different.
Those minutes add up!
I also try to drive in a manner that is friendliest to the battery (ie I'm not accelerating a bunch to pass people or driving 90 mph), and almost all the driving is on a highway. But, that's how I naturally drive in my gas car as well.
I do ~Denver to ~Salt Lake City and back 2x/year through the Wyoming route and I've done it 6 times so far in a Tesla and 4 times in a gas SUV. I do it in the early/late summer so temperatures are warm, which I'm sure helps the mileage.
The tesla mapper site claims you can do it with only 35 mins charging, but I prefer the northern route, and my actual departure/destinations are about ~1hr more driving, but I'm sure that wouldn't add more than 45 minutes to the charging time: https://www.tesla.com/trips#/?v=LR_RWD_NV36&o=Denver,%20CO,%...
How does cold weather affect this? What about when there is no supercharger (I live in Germany)?
Or driving faster, 160kmh/100mph in Germany is normal.
A common trip for me is DC -> Dolly Sods WV for camping. Less than 3 hours drive time each way, about 150 miles. I only need to stop for gas once during the trip and for only as long as the tank takes to fill (no meal needed).
In an EV, that ~6 hour round-trip takes about 9 hours due to 2 hours of charging and a 60 mile detour. That's using ABRP, with an Ioniq 5 from Reston VA to Dolly Sods Wilderness and back, no overnight charging because it's a wilderness location (gravel parking lot in the middle of nowhere).
That a fairly dead area of the country charger wise but I see several CCS chargers <5 miles out of the way and a lot more if your Ioniq has NACS.
My SO commented the same after our first long trip with an EV. She drove the whole way.
Yes it took an hour longer due to charging, but when we arrived she wasn't exhausted like she was used to, so she could go out and do stuff right away. So overall she preferred it a lot.
You can buy 1-2 year old used Teslas and BYD's in Australia for ~30% below retail.
Meanwhile Toyota hybrids not just retain their value but there have been moments where used RAV4's are listed above retail because the waitlist for new was so long.
The difference with Tesla is that their current "best price" is published out in the open.
Bought a $67K Polestar 2 with 20K miles on it for $29K.
So yeah, depreciation keeps me from buying $67K new cars (regardless of their powertrain.)
The extended range Lightning tended to be $60k and up. Sure, it had AWD, but lots of people didn't need that. The Cybertruck is even more expensive.
Both had huge preorders when they were announced at ~50k.
I admit I was also under the impression they were expensive, and I was shopping for a Powerboost F150 first, until someone told me that MSRP was a lie.
So you need to go 600 miles, and you need 1 full charge worth of energy during that.
If that one charge takes 1 hour, you can also break it up into four 15 minute sessions at any time of your chosing.
I'm sorry, but almost no regular person does 10 hours without at least four 15 minute stops.
Range is not at all the problem people make it out to be.
How much does that car cost?
Are you assuming, that every charger on the way is 200kW?
I did Shreveport, LA to Pesos, TX as an example.
If you're OK with 2 charging stops, an Ioniq 6 or a Tesla Model 3 will work just fine.
Also, charging speed is irrelevant to how many stops you need. Most chargers are >150kW these days, though.
If you truly want to minimize charging stops, you'd be better served charging 3+ times for shorter periods of time, though.
Nite that many cars can't charge that fast. And if they can, it's usually only for the very lowest SoC of the battery, say below 20% charge.
When buying, look at 20-80% charging times. Don't get dazzled by peak charge rate.
Like everyone else, you are thinking in "gas car" trying to resolve an electric car problem.
You start every trip in an EV with full range (unplug from home base charger). You drive 300 miles. You full recharge. You drive another 300 miles. You plug-in and go to sleep.
600 miles. One charge. $20k EV.
That's certainly a factor that eases adoption.
EVs aren't for everything, but mine fits my use case perfectly.
The 2025 gas version's MSRP was about 30k, and the electric one was about 35k with a $7500 tax credit.
Does this factor in cost of ownership? Gas, oil changes, less complexity?
> worse range (lower, particularly for towing)
Towing reduces a gas powered car’s range, too.
Not true for EV.
Towing is also a bit of an edge case.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
> According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
Most road trip stops, according to the AAA, are 15 minutes anyway. Only on the Internet does everyone take 5 minutes to refuel.
No, I'm just talking about sticker price.
Lifetime EV costs are relatively unknown at this point, so that would be a relatively speculative comparison. You have to have a pretty optimistic view on long-term EV maintenance costs and charging costs to have EVs pencil out better with long-term cost of ownership.
If you want to talk about ongoing costs like oil and gas in ICE vehicles, you probably also need to be thinking about cost of charging (whether you can charge at home, or only at expensive DCFS) and perhaps relative cost of consumables like tires (EVs might require costlier higher load rating tires and the torquey motors might make it easier to chew through tires faster). E.g., in my area, fast charging has a per-mile cost roughly on par with gas prices (~4x home electricity prices). So if I couldn't charge at home, ownership would be somewhat costlier.
> Towing reduces a gas powered car’s range, too.
Yes, yes, but that's more acceptable when you're starting from 500 miles of non-towing range than 230, and filling up gas is still faster than filling electrons.
So a car that's free to operate - zero maintenance, zero fuel cost - that cost $10k more than a regular car would not be a financial win?
Sticker price is a silly metric to solely focus on. Doubly so considering people rarely actually pay sticker.
You're just throwing around fictional numbers. EVs don't have zero maintenance costs or zero fuel costs. Real numbers for fuel can be lower than gas (in particular if you have home charging), and you could certainly color an argument that maintenance costs are lower. But it's not zero. Brand new gas or hybrid cars also have very low maintenance costs.
> Sticker price is a silly metric to solely focus on. Doubly so considering people rarely actually pay sticker.
Pretend I wrote "average out the door price" instead of "sticker." This number is higher than comparable ICE/hybrid vehicles, and for pretty obvious reason -- high capacity batteries are still enormously expensive. This is why range+price tends to be worse than similar gas/hybrid cars. I expect battery prices to continue to fall in the future, which will improve the economics for BEVs. But that's in the future! Not today.
Most other parts of the world EVs are starting to be cheaper than the equivalent ICE in the same category.
Range often doesn't need to get better, the impression of range needs to change. That's where a lot of misconceptions play into effect, over-focusing on things like gas-station-like charging stations over at-home charging. Over-focusing on "zero to full tank/battery statistics" when no one keeps a gas vehicle with a full tank overnight every night. Over-focusing on high speed charging and ignoring boring but useful "Level 1" charging, which is "just about everywhere" because our society has been building electrical outlets for a long time. Sure, the experience changes in things like long distance trips, but experience changes aren't "worse" by default of being a change.