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Fear Mongering About Range Anxiety Has To Stop — CT Governor Calls Out EV Opponents
(cleantechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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People really like to overestimate how much range they actually need on a daily basis.
I drive maybe 200 miles a week. Almost all EVs could easily get that range in spring/fall. And even in the worst of winter as long as I have 120 volts to keep the battery warm I'll make it through the week no problem.
Honestly big fast charger networks aren't the biggest hurdle. We need basic 120v or 240v outlets ran to every apartment/town homes parking spot. With essentially a trickle from 120v you'll be fine for 90% of your driving needs.
I don't think the issue is the daily basis. It's the few long trips people take yearly that would blast that 200 mile range out. People don't want to buy a very expensive new car that they know won't work for them several times a year. It's the same reason people who tow something several times a year make sure their vehicle can tow that.
Because renting a vehicle for a trip or to tow is actually a PITA and expensive.
It's a hell of a lot cheaper to buy an EV with a range/capacity lower than what you need 5% of the time, and spending $40 to rent a truck/$100 to rent a car for a trip than it is to buy some ridiculously oversized battery. Sure 5% of the time it's useful, but getting a rental isn't that bad.
Plus with a rental you can pick the exact type of car suits the trip well. I took a V6 camaro on a road trip for thanksgiving and that thing gets almost 30 mpg doing 80+ on the highway. Vs if I had my one size fits all Outback for that trip I'd be getting 25 doing only 70, and in the low 20s at 80 if I'm lucky.
I don't know where you live so I can't talk to your experience, but where I live, if I want to rent a car for a week trip I'm driving at least 30 minutes one way, spending an hour getting the car, and paying about $1,000. If I want to rent a truck for towing (we tried this for like a year, for ~3 uses that year) we have to drive 45 minutes, it seems to take them about 2 hours to do the paperwork if we're lucky - we've waited 4 hours or more before, and we paid $350 for a weekend because they couldn't rent it for one day for Saturday because they were closed on Sunday, but charged for that day anyway. Then we got to spend another 1.5 hours driving there and back again to drop it off, 40 minutes doing paperwork.
This is a plausible PITA, stress and annoyance once every 5 years or so, but for multiple times a year, plus all the "we just WILL NOT use a truck and make due with a less suited tow vehicle and light trailer" which is more like 12 times a year, we broke down and bought a used truck.
You see - people don't buy cars just for dollars and cents, they also buy it for value, and in a lot of cases, that's paying slightly more for the ease and convenience of jumping into said car and doing what they need to do right now, rather than with days of planning.
Boy have I got a video for you! https://youtube.com/watch?v=1Vm_ASm2zfs
I know some folks that just made a cross country trip in a Tesla model Y. They don't do huge distances every day so it took a couple of weeks but they made it just fine. They did note that the South was really bad for chargers. Something about some state legislatures or municipalities actually passing laws against public charging or something like that. It sounded pretty southern and believable though.
If I had Tesla Y money, I'd get an RV for a slow cross country road trip. Save on hotels. I'm talking about trips where you want to get to your destination, yet don't really want the added expense, hassle, and limits of flying (and probably renting a car at the other end). This mostly has to do if you have 3 or more people on the trip, if you're just one person who can avoid renting the car on the other end somehow, it doesn't apply.
They did have one but got rid of it because they didn't want the hassle. They are olds and are more about convenience at this point.
Yeah, I've been looking into possibly getting an EV and apart from renting in a place without anywhere to charge making it a nonstarter, another problem is that a routine trip like to my parents' and back is like 250 miles with nowhere to charge. Giving a bit of wiggle room for degrading batteries, doing anything other than making a straight line for their house that day, and random other inefficiencies, only the 300+ mile models are doable, maybe. I don't know how much to tack on for winter range loss. And we have very modest needs for our region, most of my family makes trips that long or more at least once or twice a week.
I understand that it's probably frustrating for people who get by well enough with an EV to see people who live similar lifestyles to them overestimate what they need, but in much of America at least there's a lot of people who have to drive hours and hours to get anywhere. Our needs are very real, not the result of fear mongering.
For my part, I'm currently thinking we'll just get ourselves some used shit from the late 90s to avoid the privacy hellscape of new cars and do our part environmentally by just using it as little as possible.
I will wait in line for cheap gas at Costco a hundred times before I have to stop and charge for 30 minutes on my annual road trip.
/s
I have no idea what this has to do with towing or long road trips, but my personal experience is it's usually pull up to gas station, pull up to pump, start pumping. I very rarely have waited in line anywhere. Even when I have, it's like 5 minutes maybe. Do you claim there aren't ever lines at charging stations, and there won't be lines in the future as more people want to use them?
I charge at home. I never need to go out of my way or really even think about fuel/charge level. Every day I wake up with a full tank. It’s always the same price (cheap), so there’s no need to shop around.
I know not everyone can charge at home, but at least half of America can, and it’s a convenience that is seldom mentioned in discussions of “range anxiety.”
I'll just repost the parent post to show how irrelevant this is to this specific thread:
I don’t think the issue is the daily basis. It’s the few long trips people take yearly that would blast that 200 mile range out. People don’t want to buy a very expensive new car that they know won’t work for them several times a year. It’s the same reason people who tow something several times a year make sure their vehicle can tow that.
Because renting a vehicle for a trip or to tow is actually a PITA and expensive.
If you go the Tesla route, they have fast charging stations roughly every 100 miles everywhere in the US. Other brands are working on it.
So you’re talking a 30 mins break every 2.5 hours of driving. And if you can charge at your destination, it’s even better. Trade that for never need to stop for gas outside of road trips and it really, really isn’t that bad.
If you have 20 minutes, watch this: https://youtu.be/vXzuFprlyrw?si=deU4W2fAQ5KsBmsM
The end result is that over 18 hours of driving, the Tesla only added 1.5 hours compared to a gas vehicle.
I mean, it's not how I travel, we usually take about 10 minutes every 2.5 hours if I'm with others, by myself I usually do 4 hours without stopping. The main thing is not that EVs will never be there, it's that right now the infrastructure still isn't there. I'm literally just starting to see chargers at WaWas and that's not guaranteed, and I have no idea what they work with TBH. The great thing about gas is I know every gas station works with every gas car. We finally just agreed on a charger, but I still will wait a few years to see if it actually pans out to be the USB-C of cars.
And we just haven't yet gotten the chargers where anyone wants to stop. They're in strip malls as far away from the stores as possible. They're in downtown parking garages. This in some ways is great, but also TBH backwards - they're where locals, you know, the people who really ought to be charging at home - would make the most use of them. (at least around me in rural southern NY and northern PA) It's the places you avoid like the plague on a road trip because you want on and off the highway fast, not to investigate the local downtown. They're also not by the convenience stores or food places where you might realistically spend 15-40 minutes.
The other thing that I hadn't thought of till seeing some other road trips (though they were in the UK) was - plan your trip is great, but what if something goes wrong? An unexpected detour? A traffic jam? Until the chargers are in way more places, you could really feel unsafe if you go below 50% charge. I don't like going below 1/2 a tank of gas to have a buffer. And that's going to change things also. Because worst case with a gas car on a trip, I can call AAA and get 2 gallons delivered to me on any county road forget about state roads etc. I have no idea - am I getting a tow or something with an EV?
I'll also say, if I'm driving 18 hours, the last thing I want to hear is I'm going to intentionally make it 19.5 hours.
Diesel, premium, E85, etc.
There are already adapters. They aren't that expensive. My Tesla works with every charger in the US at the moment. Tesla's adapter for other vehicles should be out in the next year. In fact, when I purchased it, my vehicle didn't have the functionality to communicate using the CCS adapter, but a $140 part and an afternoon gave it that capability. I assume the same will be true for any future changes.
Tesla's superchargers are specifically built right off major highway exits by design. Take a look Most larger multi-car stations are also built off highway exists. Urban charging stations are mostly intended for apartment dwellers as a stopgap before curbside charging is more prevalent.
Yes they are. The car even tells you what amenities are available in each location. If you're still not convinced, just take a look at https://www.plugshare.com/ and play with the filters. I do agree that they tend to be at the end of the parking lot, but any closer and ICE drivers would hog them for convenience. So that's a 3-5 minute walk both ways I guess.
Cars get better mileage when they're driven slower. Same for EVs.
One thing people tend to ignore is that you start every day and every trip with a full tank. My vehicle starts every day with 250 miles of range and rarely dips below 200. When I drove an ICE, I'd sometimes leave for work with less than 30 miles in the tank. Statistically speaking, you're more likely to have more range at any given moment in an EV than an ICE provided you can charge at home.
Yes, and what kind of vehicle does the AAA person drive? They tow you to somewhere you can charge. I mean it feels a bit silly to purchase a vehicle to make it slightly more convenient only after you already fucked up and have to wait two hours for AAA to show up. Your day is ruined either way. If you're that concerned, you can replace your jumper cables and jerry can with a few adapters and plug into at a lot of remote locations. A 1 hour stop at an RV site will get you 40 miles of range. I personally like the idea that the worst case scenario for me (no cell service) is finding an exposed 120V outlet, running an extension cord, and camping out for the night. 10 hours gets you about 30-40 miles of range.
The infrastructure is good enough as is, and it's only getting better. If you really drive long distance more than you drive locally and/or you can't charge at home, I can see the trepidation, but the benefits of charging at home are tremendous and for some reason, vehicle manufacturers and consumers are ignoring it. The current ads are trying to convince you that EVs are just as convenient as gasoline vehicles which presupposes that gasoline was convenient for everyone in the first place.
I have to admit, it's been decades since I've driven a car that takes anything but 87 octane. I forgot there are other needs, and if that's the case you do need to plan I guess. But I have yet to get to a gas station that's working that doesn't have 87 octane.
Yea, I'd ignored Tesla's network because I was never going to buy a Tesla, and till like a month ago, no one else could use those so they were out of mind for me. Honestly, the main thing I want to see is all charge points taking a credit card standard like gas pumps do. I don't want apps or sign ups or saving anything. I'm driving by one time in my life, or maybe twice - I don't want an account. I fear it's likely I'll lose this unless the government mandates taking normal payment options like cash (which honestly they should).
Honestly, I looked at plugshare, and there's more than I expected, though I'd go by at least 2-3 gas stations in each direction before I'd get to one. The issue seems to be they're for some reason not on the road noticeable like gas stations, so you wouldn't know about them without driving into random apartment parking lots or car dealerships. TBH, I had no idea car dealerships would have charging stations. I'd still feel a little uncomfortable going into a hospital parking lot or apartment lot I don't live in or college campus I don't go to or town hall of a town I don't live in to use the charger, but maybe that's just a cultural shift we have to endure. I will say that's still not necessarily where I want to spend 45 minutes or more but fair enough. I also live in a rural area and often am going to rural areas, so the middle part is on a highway, but not necessarily significant start or end parts.
Yes, I've regularly said for a daily commute of any normal length even around here (100 miles or so being the longest I'm aware of), if you have faster than 110 charging you're golden for that use. I've never suggested in this thread that EVs haven't met that need for like 8 years or so now. It's just that few people have a "daily commute" car and "all other needs car", they buy one car or truck. On trips I wouldn't assume there's a charger available for me at the hotel or resort for instance.
If you didn't plan enough to have reasonable amounts of gas in your tank, I really fail to see how you're planning enough to take road trips in an EV. What if you forget to plug in your EV? These are kind of stupid arguments - People can run out of gas, just like they can run out of charge. No one is (actually if they think about it) concerned about that, which is why I have said in this thread it's a concern about finding refill locations, not a concern about range. And I think the problem is actually that no one (outside Tesla) is building "EV Charge stations" but that's what the masses are looking for. I'm finally starting to see some WaWa's put in charging stations, but we need to start seeing either better education of the masses (marketing changes) or people getting the local small gas stations to put in some charging stations too.
If I still drove somewhere not for a long trip regularly, I would be interested. I had been interested for a while. Now that I go to doctors appointments maybe 2 times a month and long trips otherwise, the gas isn't that inconvenient. I just make it part of my trip to town once a month or so. This change in my life made me realize that the real win was pandemic style WFH for anyone who can. EVs can work for some people, I'm just saying they're far from ready for everyone. I'm sure they'll be ready eventually, but I've pushed out my expectation of when it'd make sense for me to get one.
Fair response and thank you for having an open mind.
Funny story about fuel types. On a vacation, the car rental company upgraded me to a Camaro after not driving an ICE for like 5 years. First stop to fuel it up and I saw "no E85" under the gas cap. Had to sit for 5 minutes to Google what that meant.
I think the point maybe you missed about running out of gas is that deciding to purchase gas is an active decision that has to be planned out. Some people shop gas by price and put off fueling until they find it cheaper or schedule time to wait in line at Costco. If you're in a hurry, you might put off buying gas until the next day, or maybe your kid is lazy and tries to get away with not filling up when he brings dad's car home from his date.
Sure you can forget to charge your car just like you can forget your wallet at home, but it's much easier to build a routine out of a task that involves things being at the same place at the same time every day. In fact, some home chargers have wifi connectivity and a setting to ping your phone if you forget to plug in by a certain time of night. In the best scenario, fueling up might be a 5 minute detour, but plugging in takes more like 5 seconds.
If you have 120V to keep the battery warm, you have 120V to charge from.
I love it when ev drivers act like the rest of us are just fucking stupid.
This is only accurate if you are being as stubborn as possible. There are many third party, and even some first party solutions to this problem. With the right adapter, literally any EV can charge at a Tesla station.
The only way it makes sense is if you’re intentionally constraining things to the most unfavorable. You’re ignoring charge stations, ignoring that EV adapters exist, ignoring portable chargers.
The adapters I’m talking about are something you just throw in your trunk and pull out when you need them. They are “universal” and don’t require support on the charger side. You just buy one for your specific car.
I must be hallucinating these.