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Comment by sippingabonedry | Hacker News Reader

Not in rural Europe it isn't.

There is still no widespread charging infra. Oh sure, there are chargers. If you're lucky and your town is on a state highway there might be one or two chargers in the entire town — their purpose being so visitors don't become stranded.

Outside of cities, they are not there in sufficient quantity for widespread adoption.

The apartment problem has not been solved either, and people do not have the time in their lives to dedicate to charging at a shared public charger.

Europe still loves its compact manual transmission cars; but what we may see is a transition away from diesel to petrol vehicles strictly for cost reasons.

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I’m not claiming this to be an entirely solved issue, but the situations in which EVs make sense are already very broad and keep expanding. The city I live in has lantern chargers (admittedly not everywhere), some others are building them into curbs. Apartment parking spaces and garages are getting chargers installed. If you live rurally, chances are high you can install your own.

> Not in rural Europe it isn't. > There is still no widespread charging infra.

You can charge your car at home on a simple reinforced 230V socket. Even city car which should be bad for this purpose have at least 200km of range.

I charge mine on a 120 V 20 amp outlet in the US that was already in my garage… And it works fine for me

Now imagine you have double the charging power yet have to drive less due to Europe's more compact nature

Don’t forget about the public transit system continent-wide is vastly better than the US as well.

Except in certain European countries you actually have 400V tri-phase to the door.

This then gets split into constituent phases of 240V each at the panel.

Or if you call your electrician, then in modern garages, you can take it straight.

I’m in the US but I’m basically charging the same way. 16A 240v. I’ve accidentally stepped it down to 13A and didn’t really notice. If you sleep, and can plug your car in while you do so, you can charge.

Strangely I’d expect urban centers with apartments and street parking to be the problem.

In the US Electric vehicles are easier for those who can park a car next to an outlet they own. We have a lot more suburbia with people owning their own charging.

>The apartment problem has not been solved either, and people do not have the time in their lives to dedicate to charging at a shared public charger.

this looms much larger in the imagination than in reality given that the average urban European drives about 9-15km per day. If you're living in a space where charging space is in short supply you in all likelihood drive so little you maybe need to charge 3 times per month.

And this doesn’t even have to mean having to idly wait 20-30 minutes at a fast charger: Lots of shopping and work places have chargers now.

This was probably what people used to say about petrol stations.

And it would have been a legitimate issue at that time too.

that's fine; the issues that electric cars are trying to solve in congested urban areas aren't as prevalent in rural areas, where diesel engines are still going to be doing most of the work anyway

That's fair; but articles like this tend to view reality as black or white, rather than the grey area it is.

You are complaining about an article just talking about how sales are increasing as being too black and white while posting repeatedly trying to think of edge cases where EVs aren't a great option. It's like it's awesome your thinking experiment managed to come up with a situation where 0.001% of people can't use an EV but why do you think that is relevant or important to the actual article?

I would expect that in rural areas, it's much easier to simply charge at home. It's harder when you live in an apartment and park on the street.

ideally an apartment would have underground parking with chargers where needed. but i don't get to design cities irl :)

the distances traveled in rural areas, along with the power you need to get through that terrain, makes combustion a decision made from a different dimension. excited for solar tractors however!

My apartment was built before EVs were common and doesn't have charging in our underground parking. And it's apparently difficult to add (some neighbours looked into it).

And do people in rural areas frequently need to drive 1000 km per day? EVs have had a pretty decent range these days. Not enough for long haul trucking, but good enough for most things short of that.

But urban traffic is absolutely a perfect fit for electric micromobility vehicles. Less so for cars in general.

> manual transmission

I thought this was a German (D/A/CH) fetish, is it all of Europe?

Sadly, it is—I recently moved to Ireland from the US, and it's annoyingly difficult to find an automatic transmission here. (Fortunately, I'm not currently in the market for a car; I live and work in Dublin, where the public transport is fantastic by American standards, and passable by European.)

It's difficult to find used cars with automatic transmission, I assume? Because most new cars being hybrids or EVs already come with one.

No.

It's a complete non-issue.

"compact manual transmission cars" means cheapest cars you can get. Nobody loves them, but they were cheap. They aren't cheap anymore and if TCO points to a small EV, people will buy that one.

If my memory servers right, in 2008 you could buy a new Dacia Sandero for under 6000 euro in our country (EU). It's over 13600 right now for the current generation.

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