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> People in these EV conversations tend to underappreciate the magic of simply being able to pull into a gas station in “AnywhereTown” with an ICE vehicle, top up the tank in less than 15 minutes, and then drive another 500 miles or whatever.

You are driving EV cars wrong.

> EVs don’t do that. In an EV, you drive for a few hundred miles at best, then you spend 30-60 minutes at a supercharger if you’re lucky

If you do this, you will have a terrible experience! EVs charge ultra fast when the battery is low. You are supposed to drive them down to say 10%, then charge up to around 50% repeatedly. This takes.. 10 minutes. You drive for 200 miles or so, stop for 10 minutes, repeat. It's pretty reasonable to take a 10 minute break every 2.5 hours. On an 8 hour (500 mile) drive, you will charge for 30 minutes or so. You should start using abetterrouteplanner.com

I bet, that when you go on a 500 mile drive, you are stopping that often to use the facilities and get some food already. Nothing changes.

> Because of the above dynamic, EV range figures can be a bit misleading

The corrected dynamic shows that EV range figures are spot on and you lose no time on long drives.

> Tesla’s supercharger stations are also a magnet for criminals — got the feeling I was being cased once at the Austin supercharger. (“The future is already here—It's just not very evenly distributed”)

I have exactly the opposite experience. In my city Tesla chargers are all in good malls, with plenty of people around, and lots of things to do. I've been to far shadier gas stations.

> For people who have access to a regular, dedicated charging outlet at home, or at work, an EV could make perfectly good sense

For sure. A charger at home is necessary. We had a few months between buying the car and getting the charger installed and the change was just astounding.

This seems overly optimistic. I don't even run my ICE tank to 10% because I am concerned that I will run out of gas before finding the next place to fill up. With my EV I am even more concerned, because of all the reasons stated in this thread.

When I drive long distance like that, I stop only for gas, which is almost always available immediately at the end of the highway exit ramp. I use the bathroom and if necessary get food at the same time. Pulling off the road every 2.5 hours and driving to the nearest mall or wherever the charging point is, and then back to the highway, is a complete deal breaker for those types of drives.

I think this is predicated on having a good enough charging network close to the motorway.

It's entirely personal, but I don't like to drive for more than 2.5 hours at a stretch, I find my eyes start to lose a bit of focus and it feels dangerous to me.

> nearest mall or wherever the charging point is

Like the gas station? Here in Norway most gas station chains are building out chargers, and a lot of them have charging stations right next to them already.

After all, gas stations still want to rake in on those snacks and drinks...

Well of course. You’re comparing 120 years of developing a network of ICE cars with what, 10? of EVS? If gas stations got on the “let’s also sell electrical” movement you’d also have much more availability of chargers at any ramp and you could do 10 min partial charges with less anxiety because you’d know that in any other exit you’ll be able to charge.

Pointing the obvious is just silly.

>Pointing the obvious is just silly.

Just as silly as pretending it's not an issue either :p

That's why range extenders are the perfect compromise and I'm excited to see the Mazda solution. A rotary is the perfect engine for a range extender - small, lightweight, few moving parts - and at a fixed speed many of the issues with seals won't be an issue at all. Should be an incredible solution and perfect transitional vehicle.

> If you do this, you will have a terrible experience! EVs charge ultra fast when the battery is low. You are supposed to drive them down to say 10%, then charge up to around 50% repeatedly. This takes.. 10 minutes. You drive for 200 miles or so, stop for 10 minutes, repeat.

I'm not sure why you're basing this off the assumption current EV's have 500 miles of range... (10->50% of 500 miles would be those 200 miles you're driving)

With actual EV's being more like 250-300, 10->50% is only 100-120 miles. Which leads me to...

> It's pretty reasonable to take a 10 minute break every 2.5 hours.

That's more like a 10 minute break every 90 minutes, and not very reasonable for trips taking 5-10 hours.

75-80mph with the current range availability on Tesla's, E-tron, mach-e, id.4 etc allows you 2-3 hours at speed before requiring a stop to recharge for 20-30 mins on a DC fast charger. It's not unreasonable and probably makes things safer than the guy who thinks you should 1000+ miles a day with only a single stop to refuel.

> I bet, that when you go on a 500 mile drive, you are stopping that often to use the facilities and get some food already. Nothing changes.

Certainly not. For example on a cross country trip the year before the pandemic I drove my regular car. 400 miles between fuel stops, 5-10 minute stop to fill up and hit the bathroom, ready for another 400 miles. Very easy to do over 1000 miles per day with no worries.

With my Fiat 500e, it's 80 to 90 miles then stop for 3-5 hours to charge. I plan very hard to never be stuck farther than 40 miles from home with that car.

For short errands in town though, it's absolutely perfect!

Luckily I can own multiple cars, right tool for each job. But if I could only have one, it would not be electric.

It's not a fair comparison to look at a vehicle that has less than 100 miles of range and call it bad for road trips. That car is only meant for commuting. Clearly you will spend a lot of time charging such a small battery with a slow charger. The way to do a longer drive with an electric car is to have several hundred miles of range and use DC fast chargers.

Depending on where you live, going on a long road trip can sometimes become a sudden necessity. If I still lived in a hurricane zone, for example, I wouldn’t go anywhere near an EV except as a second car.

Driving 1000 miles per day is anywhere between 12 and 14 hours solid driving. You are the outlier of outliers. On a trip that length, hitting any traffic is likely to slow you down more than having to recharge your vehicle.

Maybe an electric vehicle on it's current form isn't going to work for you with a regular 1000 mile per day trip, but you're at least 15 years off _new_ petrol vehicle sales being banned, so second hand ones are around for another 25 at least.

As an aside, this individualist respond of "well i can't do a 1000 mile road trip in one sitting" is why these vehicles are being phased out by legislation, because people won't even consider the _smallest_ changes to their driving habits without being forced to.

There's something romantic about a long road trip, unbroken and unplanned. Call it an outlier experience, but everyone should have one once. It's American to the core. You get in the seat and head out, first watching the familiar pass away. The first time your GPS says stay on this road for 400 miles, that's when the trip starts. That's when you accept it. You'll see whatever comes - open ranges, mountains, trains that span longer than you can see, bison that wander onto the empty road. You'll listen to whatever is on the radio. Nobody will tell you what to do next. A spirit of freedom comes flooding back, and you remember that you aren't just an ape in a box working for the next planned fun, but a human, a natural explorer, and you feel a bit more like yourself. Music is awesome. You spontaneously pull over to snap a picture and take a leak, just because you can, and nobody is around anyway. And then it hits you - bliss. Quietness. No more inner voice. Just sounds, sights, and sensations. The wind. The rest of the road trip after that is a bit different, and the passing of time doesn't matter as much. It's like when you go on vacation - it's not until the third day when you really settle in. For these trips, sure you're trying to get somewhere, but that's not what it's about. You could fly if you wanted to. If you legislate drudgery into this, or take away from the experience in any way, you're robbing others of something special, even if it's not your thing. EVs don't cut it yet - they require more frequent and longer stops and more overall planning. But I hope they improve because their silence is nice.

I did a 477 mile (each way) round trip last summer with no serious planning. Took 2 Supercharger stops each way in decent shopping areas, around 35 min each. I would have used at least one of those to eat lunch anyway, so the overall losses were minimal. Also, the whole point of a “road trip” is to stop occasionally and see things, so having these short breaks made the trip more pleasant.

Plus the sheer nerd excitement of watching my car drink 250KW on the app while I ate a meal. There’s nothing technically exciting about gas stations.

I can relate to this beautiful sentiment. I was reminded of CGP grey's video on the subject. I think you're right they will get there in a decade. In a rational world we could've had a carbon tax or actual legit biofuels, but no one wants to pay more for something they can't see.

These long road trips infact make me feel guily about driving an ICE car, that I had to make a tiny mess in the atmosphere for one tiny ape to get this amazing feeling.

1000 miles in a day is normal in the Midwest. Not common, but many people out here do such a thing on vacation. Flying a family that far is more expensive and uses most of a day so you may as well drive and have a way to get around once there.

> Certainly not. For example on a cross country trip the year before the pandemic I drove my regular car. 400 miles between fuel stops, 5-10 minute stop to fill up and hit the bathroom, ready for another 400 miles. Very easy to do over 1000 miles per day with no worries.

I highly doubt this is most people. I can do 200miles at best before I need a 10-15 minutes break. For woman/kids you are looking at 100 miles per break and more minutes per break.

Yes but even with kids you aren't stopping for 45 minutes just to go to the bathroom.

Charging batteries is a SIGNIFICANT time sync. You can justify it however you like, but it's still there.

why do you keep comparing a car with 400 mile range to your ev with 80 mile range, that doesn't even have dc fast charging? Its not even a comparison, obviously you wouldnt drive your car designed for daily commutes, you should be comparing to an Ev actually meant to drive 200+ miles, teslas, mache, taycan etc.

> why do you keep comparing a car with 400 mile range to your ev with 80 mile range, that doesn't even have dc fast charging?

I'm not doing a theoretical comparison, these are cars I can afford and actually own right now.

> you should be comparing to an Ev actually meant to drive 200+ miles, teslas, mache, taycan

I can't responsibly afford a tesla, mache or taycan, so not going to compare those.

I can easily afford a sub-20K regular car though and it lets me do 1000+ mile day road trips.

> You are driving EV cars wrong.

I assume that also includes tours through the Australian outback or the Siberian winter?

I can refuel an ICE car everywhere within minutes with just a canister. No need for a dedicated refueling spot aka gas station.

As someone else said. It's interesting that the negative responses to this are all incredibly extreme. Someone who likes to drive 1000 miles per day with a 10 minute stop in total. Someone who drives through the Siberian winter. The vast, vast, vast, majority of the population, even the rural population, isn't doing this.

> I assume that also includes tours through the Australian outback or the Siberian winter?

Yes, I frequently take my Toyota Carrolla across the Sahara in June. Until they make an EV that can do that in one trip, they're utterly useless to everyone everywhere under any circumstances.

The people who like doing that can buy ICE cars. This represents a teeny tiny minority of all car use. I'd wager that more than half of the driving population of the US has never in their lives driven in a place with hundreds of miles between fill stations.

>You are driving EV cars wrong.

And that's why EVs as currently pitched will NEVER take off. Heck you probably lost the majority of readers of this site, many of which probably have pretty pro-EV leanings when you start blaming the user.

If you are trying to win someone over to your side, telling them they are doing it wrong is NOT a great way to keep them engaged or convince them.

For example - you could point out that sure, EVs don't work exactly the same way as gasoline cars, but for these trade offs you get these other benefits.

Not by hitting them over the head with "your doing it wrong". Good grief.

>I bet, that when you go on a 500 mile drive, you are stopping that often to use the facilities and get some food already. Nothing changes.

Granted I'm probably not most people, but I'm far from in a minority that when I'm doing a long drive I just go. The only time I stop is to get more fuel which I may combine with a meal, maybe not. And I've never had that take more than 30 minutes. I've crossed the US in three days more times than I care to admit and have maybe one more of those trips left to face. And that's leaving me some nice time to have dinner/sleep and a decent breakfast before setting back out. Someone really motivated could probably do it in two but I think it's important to get good sleep when on those kinds of drives. Waiting around 45 minutes every 200-300 miles is ludicrous.

While I don't relish those trips, I relish being at my destination more than I do the drive to get there so an EV would be a huge downgrade and handicap. And at least one, if not two more nights of hotel bills. No thanks!

At least for Tesla, around the eastern seaboard, this is not the case. The rest of the EV world will eventually converge to this state as the infrastructure is built out.

The leading edge of EV’s (Model S Long Range) now have over 400 miles (300+ to 80%). I-95 for example in NJ and CT have 250kW peak Superchargers spaced every 20-30 miles or so. Its not quite the same as ICE still but it is getting very close. I can imagine the technology will be there in 2-3 years and it doesn’t require any sort of solid state battery technology.

I’m still hoping for inductive charging roads. The modern day electric race track toys, if you will.

Agree, it's all great if you are driving around a major built up metro area. It doesn't work if you're driving to North Dakota.

> People in these EV conversations tend to underappreciate the magic of simply being able to pull into a gas station in “AnywhereTown” with an ICE vehicle, top up the tank in less than 15 minutes, and then drive another 500 miles or whatever.

That’s because the energy is transferred into the ICE car’s tank without changing its form and there is therefore no real theoretical limit on the refueling speed.

For EVs, energy is changing its form from electric to chemical energy and due to the heat losses during that transformation process, you cannot arbitrarily increase the refueling speed.

This conversion of energy during refueling is why I personally think that battery-electric cars are not the best solution for clean cars.

>This conversion of energy during refueling is why I personally think that battery-electric cars are not the best solution for clean cars.

Yup - I used to think hydrogen fuel cells were ridiculously over complicated until you run into this aspect of battery driven electric vehicles. Now the allure of hydrogen makes sense - quick fill ups!

I am an Indian. I am curious, as to the amount of times one has the requirement to fill a tank of gas and drive 500 miles further.

EVs should target the regular commuter market. I was really surprised that Tesla invested in the supercharger network. I get the idea, but in the US, do people really go on such long drives regularly?

In the US? The number of times people drive 500 miles straight is basically never despite what people here will claim.

If by "straight" you mean only fuel stops I do ~750 miles or more at least twice a year.

> twice a year

Meaning basically never.

The importance of those twice a year trips is high though. Visiting family, resting up on vacation, exploring new places. Choosing a vehicle that doesn't support those twice a year trips is a hard sell for many people.

We are talking about buying cars with ~8 year lifetimes. So his "basically never" twice a year is 16 expected trips with the vehicle. That's significant enough to be a serious consideration when comparing ICE to EV purchases.

8 years at an average of 12500 miles a year is 100,000 miles or about 5000-10000 trips. 16 long distance trips is 0.3% of all trip.

So that's 0.3%.

Now ask what the marginal cost of a electric car that can drive 500 miles without stopping vs one that goes have the distance. What's that $20,000? For 16 trips? That's $1250 a trip.

From an accounting point of view that's insane. You should buy the lower range cheaper car and fly.

>So that's 0.3%.

Your heart is a relatively small part of your overall biomass.

So why don't you just do without it?

>From an accounting point of view that's insane. You should buy the lower range cheaper car and fly.

Even more presumptuous. What are you supposed to do on the other end of that plane flight to get around? Rent a car? Bum off of friends/family?

I once thought it would be cost effective to buy an EV and just rent when I needed to take longer trips - until I did the math. Rental cars get very expensive very quickly!

Must be this new math. When I was growing up never = 0, not never > 0

Also for all those saying just fly and rent or rent a car - most of these trips are around the holidays.

When everyone else is having the same thoughts. What happens if you don't get a rental car? No trip? Yeah, that's going to go over well...

> In the US? The number of times people drive 500 miles straight is basically never despite what people here will claim.

At least on the west coast (distances are longer) that's quite common. San Francisco to Los Angeles is ~400 miles. A day trip is ~800 miles, done it often.

San Francisco to Portland is ~600 miles, done that very often as well.

What do you consider very often? I’ve done it several times, but that comes to about once every few years for me. Certainly not a weekly trip.

For three years when I lived in San Diego I drove to Vegas at least once a month (it's where I have family).

Millions of cars on the road happen for a reason. Just because you rarely go on such trips doesn't mean for some they aren't more frequent for others. Heck just to go to my favorite German restaurant or go for my favorite crab cakes that could be a 300 mile round trip. I would do either without a second thought with my current cars and until EVs can get to the same level of comfort for people they will remain a niche vehicle.

That's the practical reality. You can hop up and down with your arguments around moral superiority and god help any idiot who tries to force change via legislation. Want to see a real revolution real fast? Just poke that bear.

Cars = freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom of expression, economic freedom (choice of jobs, supplies, living location, etc.). EV proponents can acknowledge this and work to rationally solve the issues (with transitional tech like range extenders), or continue to insist everyone else is doing it wrong and remain a niche.

Until most of the fervor around EVs graduates from cult status to being at least a touch pragmatic there won't be significant change. Screaming louder about how the environment is being ravaged (right or wrong) isn't going to move the needle either. You convince people by solving their problems, meeting their needs and doing so in a rational manner.

It really isn't that hard - until you roll up your sleeves and really start to work through things. Until we all are willing to do that it's just wish casting.

The 500 mile figure is roughly the range of a modern Toyota Camry. It’s just a useful baseline.

But as it happens, we’d drive 500 miles from Atlanta to St Louis every winter to visit our grandparents when we were growing up. I’m sure lots of people have relatives or friends they could visit who live about that far away.

Alternatively, Birmingham to Orange Beach is a bit shy of 300 miles one way. Atlanta to various popular beach vacation spots in Florida and South Carolina is roughly comparable. Beach vacation territory, IOW, is commonly several hundred miles one way.

Yes, people go on 300+ mile drives often enough that the ability to take long drives is important. While long trips are surely not very common as a percentage of trips, taking a "road trip" (a vacation by long car drive) might be done once or more per year in some families. For example, one might drive from San Francisco to LA, or Atlanta to Daytona Beach. It's not entirely uncommon to drive all the way cross-country either.

I believe, though, it's only a matter of time before charging stations reach parity with gas stations. It's already possible to take a road trip by major highways with a Tesla.

Lots of people drive from Canada to Florida in the spring. Go to Clearwater Beach in March and count the number of Ontario license plates you see.

> I believe, though, it's only a matter of time before charging stations reach parity with gas stations. It's already possible to take a road trip by major highways with a Tesla.

For a full transition to EVs, the charger network is going to need enough capacity to handle large emergencies like hurricane evacuations. A typical gas station with 4-8 pumps can keep a lot of cars moving in that sort of situation, and it doesn’t feel like electric charging stations will be able to handle that load anytime soon.

We have a bit of a cultural attachment to the road trip. In comparison to other countries, our roads are wonderful and some people can comfortably drive for a thousand miles a day. And our trains and busses are either non-existent or something only a student would do. For most people it's not a regular thing, but for the few times a year they do make the long drive, it's can be a badge of honor and show of independence. And there's usually some competition to see who can drive the most miles in the fewest hours with the least stops. Even when flying would be faster and cheaper, many people prefer to drive for the convenience of having their own car once they get to their destination. I definitely haven't seen this road trip phenomenon in Europe even though you could do similar drives. There just isn't the same need to have your car at your destination and people seem more comfortable taking planes, trains and buses generally.

Maybe once or twice a year, if that. Most people I know who are going more than a few hundred miles just fly and rent a car on the other end.

Not many families can afford that luxury - so they drive.

And that's the real resistance here - freedom. EV enthusiasts do themselves zero favors when they try to pretend that it's not a real issue.

Well, rent an ICE for your grand romantic road trip then.

I envy those people that go on 500 mile road trips all the time and therefore can't live without a car with ICE. Personally I think I could live with not having that kind of range at all times if there were reasonable car sharing or rental options around.

I’m personally a lot happier not living in HCOL, noisy, polluted and just downright unsafe major metropolitan areas these days. The tradeoff is this precludes practicable EV ownership IME, at least at the current time. Even still, I’ve loved driving every EV I’ve had the opportunity to, and would be quite ecstatic were modern ICE vehicles to be entirely replaced by full EVs. (Classic and 90s era Japanese sports cars are another story.)

Where exactly do you live that you need to go more than 100, 150 miles one way? Even in the moderate back ass of nowhere, you're probably not more than 20 or 30 miles to necessities (groceries, etc), right? Either way, this situation (20-30 miles from a grocery store) certainly wouldn't be a considered "HCOL, ..., major metro area," right? I just can't compute this.

Living in an area like that, and having to rent a car for longer trips in a PITA. Car rental is not exactly easy in areas like that. If there is a rental agency nearby, it probably is open 9-5. So you have to pick up the car a day in advance, and leave your EV there if they let you, or have another person along to drive it back. It's just not practical.

And if you are trying to rent a car around the holidays - when most people take these kinds of long trips you can forget it! If you are lucky you might get stuck with the minivan that smells of puke.

If you are lucky!

This is why I think the SUV PHEV is the perfect vehicle for the US market. And the market has shown this, demand for the RAV4 Prime is so great they can't make them fast enough and it's going for over MSRP. The car manufacturers are slowly noticing this (Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Ford, Audi, BMW have PHEV SUVs) but they need to push PHEV across all the models.

> then drive another 500 miles

When did cars start getting 500 miles to tank? I owned various incarnations of the Honda Accord for almost 30 years and the best I ever got was just over 300 miles.

I once drove from Berkely to San Diego (about 500 miles) on a single tank in a 2003 Saab 9-3. I have no idea how common ICE cars are that are capable of this.

To do that you would have had to either use the entire tank of gas at the highway MPG rating, or exceed it. That seems perfectly doable and that's not an everyday scenario.

You can do the same in an EV, there have been plenty of times where I left the house and returned with more charge due to using hills and regenerative braking.

That being said, it's unusual and you wouldn't expect go get highway MPG ratings under regular use unless your regular use is strictly highway driving under optimal conditions.

It wasn't a normal drive. Not only did I not fill up, but I didn't even leave the car. (Once I'd gone about 2/3s of the trip and realized it was maybe possible, it became sort of a challenge.) But yeah I've made that drive at least a half dozen times, but that was the only time I didn't fill up the tank.

In any case, my only point was that there are cars out there that can drive 500 miles on a single tank. The 9-3 I did it with is getting close to 20 years old. I'm sure there are older cars capable of the same.