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Comment by lakeeffect | Hacker News Reader

I think there is an advantage of only having to charge your car once every couple weeks if you are a short distance trip taker.

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If you can charge your car both at work and at home that advantage is reduced drastically.

On the other hand you still think about those 0.1% of trips when you buy your car, which is why people have big cars for their family to handle holiday trips even if they are half empty 99% of the time. And you don't want to have to stop every 400km to charge your car when you go in holidays, especially if it means staying in a saturated station for 30 minutes.

I know you have to get some rest but many people just switch driver and only have a real break every 5 -6 hours, which means around 700km, and current EV don't have that range. In addition, you can take some rest wherever you want, for instance by a lake or in the forest, whereas if you need to charge your car you will be forced to be in an ugly fast charging station :(.

I still believe in EV though and I am convinced it will take over the market progressively, those are just temporary problem that explain why their market share is still so low, but it's improving.

How often are these long road trips though? Would you really not get an EV because very rare road trips take slightly longer, but meanwhile you're saving lots of money the whole year long on gas costs and not destroying the environment?

I can't imagine letting a few longer stops during infrequent long distance road trips being the deciding factor in what kind of car I'd buy.

Like many a middle aged dad, I have become afflicted with boating disease. One of the many problems that comes with owning a boat is that you need some way to tow it. Another problem is that you want your boat to be as easy to use as possible. If I had an electric car I would have to go to home depot and rent a truck every time I wanted to tow the boat. This is too much yak shaving.

In conclusion, my advice as a boat owner is: Never buy a boat.

The vast majority of people don't own a boat though ... and it's not like ICE sedans are any good at towing either.

Also, how sure are you that EVs are bad at towing? Don't they have lots of low-end torque? The Model X apparently has the highest towing capacity of any passenger vehicle. Beyond that you'd need a bigger truck anyway.

Torque isn't the main consideration. Braking and handling capability is.

What's the advantage? Most people with EVs are charging overnight, not once a week.

Of course most people today with EVs do that, but for broader adoption it would be useful for that to not be a requirement.

Many urban dwellers don’t have a garage to charge overnight.

I think the future for urban dwellers is fast charging your EV while shopping. With large enough batteries it should only be necessary to charge the car once a week.

Also, most streets and parking lots in urban settings are already by law required to be electrified for minimum lighting requirements and/or parking meters. Extending the electrification requirements to include car charging seems only a matter of time. (Potentially especially in the cases where it makes sense to push for Smart Grids at the same regulative time.)

Some companies have already built interesting versions of street lamps and parking meters that double as car chargers (including at least one London company that was working to make sure that they could meet historic preservation standards of the street lamp design in London's core).

Road-embeddable induction chargers could even be an option soon in urban environments (particularly large parking lots for instance) where there isn't such existing "furniture" to take advantage of.

Gross, last thing we need is another influence pushing for parking minimums and more massive parking lot fast casual architecture.

I agree this may be the future but I really hope we can come up with something better.

Maybe eventually there won't be an advantage... We might need the battery capacity to stabilise the power grid if we add more renewable sources like solar.

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