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Comment by garyfirestorm | Hacker News Reader

Inversely I leased a Fiat 500e for a year in Detroit Michigan and had no issues with range ~130 miles. I would plug it in nightly as I had a level 2 charger installed at my house. The experiment was quite successful. I just didn’t like front wheel drive on somedays with heavy snow. I used it for commuting to work, buying groceries and visiting friends nearby. It met my needs and I feel a slightly bigger car with 4 doors and 200-250 mile range should be sufficient for most of the people (assuming it is affordable)

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Sadly, I don't own a wall box. So I'm dependent on public infrastructure. If I could charge at home I'd be even happier with my car.

Sadly I think it's kind of accepted by this point that overnight charging is a prerequisite to a good experience with an EV.

It's not a prerequisite: I see lots of people plugging their cars at public chargers in my residential area; I assume they charge once a week while doing groceries or dining out.

Public charging can easily be 2x or 3x as expensive.

And being in your car doing nothing waiting for the charge for 25mn is frustrating. Even more so when it’s the height of summer (and that was in a car where the AC didn’t block charging).

If you can time it with some errands it’s less of a hassle, but that was one of the main non-car annoyances with my EV rental (the other was the flakiness / unreliability of getting a charging session to start).

I only use public fast charging when on a long road trip. So the 30 min charge always coïncides with me emptying my bladder, so it's never been a hassle.

As I wrote, this was a rental, there was no charger where I was and no mains adapter provided with the car, so my options were fast charger or pushing the thing.

And even during long legs I don’t need to piss for 30mn every two hours.

I charge my car with the granny charger dangling out the window next to where I park. Been doing so for 2 years now. I have some high density foam packed in the window crack to keep the cold out. Im in Ireland.

I like the form factor of the 500e, but boy do I not trust Fiat.

My friend has had one for about 6 years and put about 40,000 miles on his. Then one day some battery control module died. Now the car is a brick, and isn't worth fixing. The whole battery has to come out to get to the module, and it's possible that the battery itself is still bad. But we won't know until the module is replaced... which means putting the battery back into the car before knowing it's condition.

How is all this Battery waste good for the environment?

#ElectrifiedEnvironmentalDestruction

Mostly by replacing the use of a gasoline-burning internal combination engine car.

And instead moving to a component made of critical raw materials with recycling rates of <5%.

I'm curious where you got those numbers from. I did a quick search and find wildly different numbers (depending on method and source, from ~60% to >98%).

However I don't find anywhere claiming anywhere near <5%. Can you back that up?

Example source of manufacturers claiming >95% [0].

0: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicl...

"Despite their wide use, it is estimated that only 5% of lithium batteries are currently recycled."

https://www.ameslab.gov/news/new-lithium-ion-battery-recycli...

This is probably because it's not economical to recycle lithium ion batteries, certainly not for the lithium itself. Lithium is an extremely abundant element. If this ever stopped being the case, or if there are other battery components that were scarce enough to make batteries economical to recycle, we'd start doing that.

There's no virtue in recycling equipment for recycling's sake alone, we do it in exactly the situations where some raw material in the equipment is expensive enough to justify the cost of the recycling process.

Your argument can't be both that "the batteries are recyclable" and "well duh no one does it because it doesn't make any money."

Anything at all is recyclable if you're willing to spend enough money on the recycling process. If the raw materials of that thing are cheaper to get from nature than they are to get by recycling old versions of the item, then this is a good sign that it's not worth recycling the item and therefore we shouldn't do it.

Ice car engines also sometimes grenade themselves for no reason sometimes. Same story: too expensive to fix and on cheaper cars that means a write off.

Lithium batteries are highly recyclable, so is all the copper in the motor. I can promise you that fiat will never en on a landfill battery and all.

>Lithium batteries are highly recyclable

And fake meat is highly edible. But do many people eat fake meat? No. Do many people recycle lithium ion batteries? Also, no. Less than 5% is the current estimate for what percent of lithium ion batteries is recycled.

Do you have a source for that 5% claim? I was under the impression that batteries are mostly recycled these days, especially EV batteries.

Shouldn't that still be covered under the battery warranty?

Related: The problem I have with Fiat is that there's an obvious step to combat the impression of poor reliability/durability: Increase the standard warranty. If Fiat declines to increase the standard warranty, the impression is even worse — it's that they're not increasing the warranty because it isn't financially viable for them to do so, because the reliability is bad and that Fiat can't afford to warranty the cars past 3 years. Compare to e.g. Hyundai with a 10-year/100k-mile powertrain and 5-year/60k-mile general in the USA.

Also related: I'm in Canada but looked up Hyundai's USA warranty there just to give more-broadly-applicable numbers. It seems that Fiat's warranty in the US is actually better than in Canada, where it just seems comically low — other than for the high-voltage battery the Fiat 500e new vehicle warranty is lesser of 3-years/37k miles.

>Compare to e.g. Hyundai with a 10-year/100k-mile powertrain and 5-year/60k-mile general in the USA.

Most cars are sold by the first owner between 30,000 and 60,000 miles. Hyundai's warranty is cut in half for the second owner, 5/50k powertrain and 2.5/30k general. There's nothing to cover, so it's basically free to put 10/100k in all of the commercials.

If it's basically free, then Fiat should offer it for the 500e, and I might consider buying one.

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