Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

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Like most people, my car is used for not just my regular trips around town, which I can certainly charge overnight no problem and be fine. My car is also used for the longer road trips.

It is 300 miles to my mom's house. Some electric cars could just make that in perfect conditions but give me a headwind or a cold day both of which happen once in a while and I can't make 300 miles on a charge and I will have to stop in the middle. At that point a fast charge is required. It is not acceptable to say I have to stop somewhere that I don't want to be for many hours to charge my car to get it the rest of the way. That is a trip where, if you have to make it, there isn't a better option. Flying would be even longer than driving by the time I get to the airport and rent a car on the far end, not to mention a lot more expensive.

At least in the U.S. it is very common for people to make a one or two thousand mile trip once a year for vacation. Particularly if you have a family, flying is not a reasonable cost and so you'll take those several days of driving to save money. Those road trips also let you stop someplace and see some weird small-town exhibit which is fun in its own way

> It is not acceptable to say I have to stop somewhere that I don't want to be for many hours to charge my car to get it the rest of the way.

I think the issue you're stuck on is driving an EV like an ICEV. When you're low on gas you stop, fill up, and continue. It's slightly different with an EV because you shouldn't fill up all the way on a stop. That takes so much more time because the batteries charge slower as they fill up. So if you want to get somewhere quicker you should actually be charging less at stops and stopping more often. I don't know about other cars but Tesla has a good route planner built in that does this for you and preconditions the battery while you travel to a fast charger, which is also important to reduce charge times.

No, I'm not stuck on that. A gas car refuels in five minutes max. Now certainly an EV from say 20 to 80% which is what most people talk about is done in 15 minutes in the best case but that's still three times longer and it's someplace I don't want to be. That's assuming that there is a fast urge during the location. There are a huge number of level 2 chargers scattered around the U.S. and level 3, although they're becoming more common, are somewhat rare.

In that 300 mile trip, there is a gas station every 10 miles. There is a level 3 charger every 100 miles. Which is to say, I certainly can make the trip in my electric car, but I'm I have to make sure I stop where there's a charger because unlike a gas car I can't say the gauge is getting low. I'll stop at the next exit. I have to say the gauge is at half per charge - I better stop at the next charger because I don't know if I can make the one after that.

> A gas car refuels in five minutes max

Except most people stop for 15 minutes to refuel when they're on a road trip.

I have never spent this much time refueling my car. I don't think it's ever taken me more than 3 minutes to actually put gas in the tank. While it may be true that sometimes you have to wait 30-45 seconds for a pump, the wait times on chargers can be much longer because people spend 20 to 30 minutes at each charger.

Yes, I understand that some people will present contrary anecdotes, but AAA says the average is 15 minutes. And I trust them more than I trust anecdotes from random strangers who show every indication of motivated reasoning.

And to share my own anecdote, I've never once waited for a charger.

Have you ever spent 15 minutes at a gas pump? I can't imagine spending more than 4, and I have an SUV.

Total stop time is not just time spent standing at the gas pump but includes things like going to the bathroom and getting snacks or drinks from the convenience store.

The great thing with an EV is you don’t have to stay there while it charges, so you can do those things in parallel.

You may be thinking of a different context. This is about road trips, not around town fill-ups. On a road trip, people stop to fill the car, get snacks, take a leak, stretch, etc, which is why the average tends to be 15 minutes or so.

You can do faster stops for the weekly fill-up, certainly. But in that case the comparable situation in the EV is zero minutes. The vast majority of owners will spend far fewer minutes on refueling for their EV in a given year even if the road trip stops really did take two or three times as long.

15 minutes seems long. That implies a lot of people are doing something other than getting gas. I guess on a roadtrip I will sometimes eat in a gas station which takes longer - but I don't eat in my car - an unusual rule.

There will definitely be a lot of variance to it. Tank sizes. Pump speed. Some people exclusively fill up at Costco where lines at the pump can be longer. Some shop around a few stations to find a slightly better price. Some make a separate trip to a station at night because they lower prices a bit then.

> Some shop around a few stations to find a slightly better price.

And those people are often bad at math or grossly undervalue their time.

Some people drive 10 minutes out of their way (20 min round trip) to save 5 cents/gallon. Even if you have a 20 gallon tank, that's only saving $1.00. I wouldn't take 20 minutes out of my day just to save $1, even 15 years ago when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck on $10/hr.

I've done a 400 mile trip in a Model 3 Long Range and only needed three stops at L3 chargers. In winter, in Canada. With over eight hours of driving it's not unreasonable to stop for a few breaks, and you should be able to plan your breaks near chargers.

But you can't really compare a petrol car and an EV. Petrol cars are going away, that's not optional.

An EV that takes an extra 10-15 minutes over 300 miles seems like a reasonable alternative: there may be others.

> Petrol cars are going away, that's not optional.

They're definitely not. At least, certainly not any time within the next 10 years.

It's interesting to think about because we should start seeing a decline in gas stations as EV adoption picks up, which flips the problem around. We're definitely nowhere near that now though.

My ancient 2015 Model S 70D would do that 300 mile journey with less than an hour of charging in the middle. A new car with much less time for charging.

I've just done a thousand mile journey from UK to Norway in that car. It was not a big deal to charge on the way and would be less so in a newer car.

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