Comment by to11mtm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by to11mtm | Hacker News Reader

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I'll give you a scenario.

It's not necessarily 'normal', but it did happen to me last year.

Vacation in St Ignace Michigan. Stayed at an AirBnB rental.

No proper EV charger on-site at the rental, admittedly maybe the owner had an extension cord or something. Still, Then we'd be charging at a fairly low rate of mileage gain.

One day trip was 100 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)

Another day trip was 76 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)

The shortest day trip was 50-ish miles each way, but a whole thing happened where my wife left her phone at the restaurant so it was a total of 200 miles driven that day. (There are charging stations at both points for this one, but none in between.)

BTW, when I say 'optimum route' for the first two, I mean that for at least one of those the trip wound up being longer because of road construction.

I know one could say 'Well plan out charging in the morning'. But at the end of the day that just messes with the rest of the itinerary for a vacation where one could instead be exploring what you actually went on a trip for.

So in your worst case you were 100 miles from a charger? Not counting the fact you could have charged at the Airbnb if you'd made some prior arrangements? That doesn't sound bad and you were always well within range.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my general understanding is that if they had a long enough 120V extension cord (and I will admit, they might have in this case) I would have only gotten 5 miles an hour or so of charging at best.

So, either:

A- I have to go find a charging station, and pray to god that during a peak tourist weekend there is an open spot, so plan the wait into every day and hope my plan in the day schedule and pray it doesn't get disrupted by the other tourist traffic.

or

B- I would get maybe 60-ish miles of range added each night leaving the thing plugged in when we are at the AirBnb.

I want to be clear about this, I'd be fine with an EV if the charging infrastructure made sense, as it stands today however the ideal state for me and my wife would require a plugin hybrid and an EV or a Plugin Hybrid and a Hybrid.

Besides the insanity of picking a place to stay where you are several hours of driving from your planned destinations every day they could have topped up over night then spent a few minutes each day at chargers to fill up completely if they were worried.

At no point was there any risk of them being without charge even on their longest driving day.

> the insanity of picking a place to stay where you are several hours of driving from your planned destinations every day

That is an entirely normal scenario for someone visiting many of the most popular outdoor destinations in the US, especially in the west.

That is not an entirely normal scenario. You would typically book accommodations near each location and move between them if you have a bunch of spots spread out over a huge distance.

Planning a vacation where even after travelling to your accommodation you require at least 10 hours of driving over a 3 day period just to get to the places you actually want to visit is absurd and uncommon.

> 10 hours of driving over a 3 day period

Since you're trying to be pedantic about trying to calculate the drive time for the distance, I'll note that (short of the unexpected WTF re-trip) it would have been less than 10 hours; I-75 speed limit is 75 in most of the UP, and the other main corridor roads have a speed limit of 65, because it is so sparsely populated.

For better or worse, the Upper Peninsula is this thing that your typical car-owning family who lives in the state can actually do an inexpensive but beautiful trip around.

It's a region that is only about 42,500 Square Kilometers but only has a population of about 300K. Thus the infrastructure gaps.

On the plus side, that means it's still a pretty drive at least. :)

I assumed you would have time between exits on slower roads unless you're driving an hour on the freeway to visit a roadside stand or something.

I grew up in Ontario and I'm familiar with the area. It still seems like an absurd trip plan but you do you.

Though we're back to the fact that even in your worst case the most that can be said is it would be slightly more inconvenient given current charger network. In reality you'd problem just do a better job picking a base location or not choosing one given the distances if you were really worried.

Maybe not during a summer vacation, but in the winter, the only bridge connecting St Ignace to lower Michigan can often close in inclement weather, along with parts of i75. Having plenty of charge can be literally a life-or-death situation in the winter there. It's not uncommon for people to spend the night in a snow drift. And if not that, you need to plan for overnight contingencies and detours.

I'd rather be in an EV in a snowbank where there is almost certainly more than enough power to run a heater for 24 hours. Bonus since I don't have to worry about snow accumulation blocking the exhaust and killing me.

Most of the people in these regions would rather have a vehicle they can keep full of fuel because stations are plentiful and carry a shovel.

I'm not saying this because I don't like EVs -- I do -- but I'm saying it because we have to address these problems to get higher adoption.

If you are stuck in a snowbank your fuel doesn't matter. Staying warm until help arrives is the issue. Like above you are shifting goalposts.

You are raising issues in this post that I would guess impact less than a hundredth of a percent of the driving population of North America. These are really not issues we need to be concerned about and they are very easily solved by installing more chargers. It's a solved problem without demand.

So bluntly I don't understand the points of your comments at all. Is there places where it will take longer to drive an EV currently yes. Is there are two points in the mainland us where you cannot reach because of a lack of chargers no. Do 99.99% of people find themselves in these areas in a given lifetime? Also no.

> If you are stuck in a snowbank your fuel doesn't matter. Staying warm until help arrives is the issue. Like above you are shifting goalposts.

They aren't shifting goalposts, they are being pragmatic and honest. The typical person who lives in the UP is going to be ready for the worst case scenarios (or, otherwise, just stay home.)

> It's a solved problem without demand.

There's not enough demand to make solving the problem economical for these niche cases. And enough people in the US still have to deal with these niche cases that we are where we are.

What exactly is your argument here? That there are a few cases where an EV currently isn't the best case? The original argument was that there were vast parts of the US where the distance between chargers was far enough to make trips impossible with an EV and now we're discussing an imagined situation where you get stuck in a snowbank overnight and somehow running a generator to power your heater is the preferred solution?

No it isn't being pragmatic and honest it's trying to find some weird edge cases to argue that his original claim(which was false) is actually technically true because under conditions X, Y, Z which impacts basically no one ever an ICE is required. It's silly. 350 million people in the country and you're coming up with situations that impact a few thousand of them a year as if thats a legitimate concern with EVs. Nothing honest about that.

Coming up with a situation where you make the worst possible travel plans, make the worst possible choices and still it's workable with an EV is not the argument you seem to think it is.

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