this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Gasoline motors can be recharged in a couple of minutes.
I plug my car in in seconds
And then wait an hour to get acceptable charge levels for range. Filling up at a gas station is much faster.
This is not to say electric vehicles aren't a good idea, the charge rate and convenience while traveling are issues we need to improve on.
The point is that, for most journeys, you just charge at home overnight. It's rare to plug in and wait for it to charge. With petrol / gas, you always have to wait
You can't fill your gas tank at home while you sleep...
I'm not at home sleeping when I'm out traveling. I'm referring to multi hour or multi day drives. This is an extremely common use case where I live.
Also not everyone has access to a charger where they sleep.
I hear this complaint a lot about charging times, but for 99.99% of people they are never in a single day going to drive beyond their cars range, meaning even a standard level 1 slow charger over night at home can manage their entire car usage.
It's only people doing long distance road trips that have to worry, and that's by far a minimum. Instead of boosting gas cars for that we could be looking at investing in rail so people don't have to make the longer trips in a car anyway.
And for about 50% of Americans, they don't have a place to plug in an electric car at night. It's only people above a certain level of wealth who have the luxury of their own parking space with a charger.
For the rest of us, we must take time out of our day to sit in a grocery store parking lot while the car charges.
EVs generally have adapters that allow you to plug into a standard home outlet, it's just significantly slower to charge to full due to the lower amperages. And even if you only have 1 plug in your garage, it's not hard or expensive to add more.
The only real hurdle for that is if you rent a house and aren't allowed to make those easy changes
Not only that, people going on those long trips are going to be looking for something to eat in a similar time frame that their EV takes to fully discharge. It takes EVs about 15-20 minutes to get from 0-80% charge. That's less time than it takes to sit down and eat at a restaurant
I rarely go inside restaurants to eat on a long trip. I grab a burger and wolf it down and go again. I eat the fries while I'm driving and they're gone in an instant, and i'm still going.
So what? Doesn't matter for most people
If it’s not a concern for my phone, why should it be for my vehicle? It is so nice never having to go to a local gas station, when all I need to do is plug in at night
My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
My main problem is it's never really empty enough.
If I'm on the road, a high voltage DC charger gets me from 10% to 50% in about 10 minutes. Barely enough time for a coffee and a leak, then it's another 2 hours of driving. Rinse, repeat.
Sure, you can't barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?
I do. We have family that we visit a few times each year. If I leave at 2am and drive straight through, we get there in 7-8 hours. If I make the drive during the day, it takes 10-13 hours.
Sounds like you need a train. Not a car.
For various reasons a car is often better for that kinda trip
Some real examples that are specific to the trip I take:
There is no rail service that goes there. It would be a combo of trains and busses that takes significantly longer and costs more than the gas.
Our dog comes with us, generally isn't allowed on mass transit, and the much longer trip would stress her out if she was.
There is little to no mass transit in the town they live in to get around once we arrive so we'd end up borrowing or renting a car anyway.
With limited amounts of time off, making the trip overnight adds a full day of getting to see our family to the trip.
The only other realistic means of getting there is flying but, I enjoy driving and hate everything about air travel. It's a pretty cheap flight for one person but becomes more expensive once you add in the rest of the family and the dog can't come.
Edit: formatting
Sure. But first you need to build one that takes me there.
Yeah EVs are a great solution for homeowners.
As an Uber driver, I want that. I want to be able to gas my car back up and go back on he road and keep earning money.
Congrats your are not the market target for EVs then, guess what that doesn't mean that the majority of the population isn't though.
I make a 9-10 hour drive to see my family multiple times a year. I normally stop twice to get gas and use the bathroom, and that's it. Sounds like you'd be adding most of an hour to my travel time each way. I've tried stopping longer and grabbing food, it's not worth it for me.
With that said, I drive 25-40 miles a day the other 360+ days of the year, so it'd really make much more sense for me to have a short range EV and rent something for travel when I have too much luggage to fly.
you really ought to be stopping a few more times, i don't understand how so many people are just completely fine with driving for 3 hours nonstop
Maybe don't do that? Catch a train it's significantly cheaper anyway.
No passenger rail. It's car or a once a week bus that doesn't even stop in the town my family lives in.
If you're driving more than 300miles a day you're just admitting your a much larger slice of the shitty pie.
This is a bit inaccurate. What about truck drivers? They are extra shitty then. But they wouldn't be extra shitty if they didn't deliver your Charmin to Costco for you to purchase.
Don't blame the end-user, blame the system.
Why on earth do you get down votes? This is the truth. Downvoters just straw man argue pointing out that 'just charge your car at home', which isn't the matter of discussion. There isn't even a discussion to be had - it is faster to refuel a car than recharge. Might this matter to you? Maybe, maybe not.
If the car is recharged at home, you may never need to stop to add gas. Electric is the future bro, get over your hangups.
Charging the car at home is for middle class people and above, generally speaking. Not everyone gets to park their car next to an outlet.