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Comment by bradlys | Hacker News Reader

> The Tesla is a far superior experience for road trips than a gasoline car is.

This is hyperbole. If all your stops have very fast electric then you’re going to have a comparable experience (assuming you like long stops). But to say that a Tesla is better than all gasoline cars for road tripping? Hyperbole...

We’re nowhere near the level of infrastructure for any electric car to be comparable to gasoline. I can and have filled up in less than five minutes many times. And only made 3 stops over 16+ hour drives (each being under 10 minutes). I would not and could not have made the same amount of time with an electric car. Therefore, not a superior experience as far as I’m concerned...

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Also, in a petrol car you are literally never worried about running out of fuel. I can confidently take detours, drive a bit faster if I want to, run the AC/heater on max, and I am 100% sure I will always find a filling station when I need to. I don't have to "plan" my refuelling stops at all. I stop whenever I feel hungry or need a bathroom break. There will always be a petrol station at every stop.

Another benefit comes into play when I am going to a less populated/remote place. For example the Ladakh region in India where petrol stations are far and few between. Just fill up a few 5 liter cans with petrol and you have a spare 500-600km range in your trunk. Cheap, easy and efficient.

> Also, in a petrol car you are literally never worried about running out of fuel.

Slightly hyperbolic. I was on a long trip through Arkansas one night, and was very worried about finding a gas station.

These days, with smartphones and more 24 hour stations it's less of a concern, but if you're not careful it's certainly still possible to end up somewhere without a gas station in easy range. The world is a big place.

It's going to be interesting to watch this perspective drastically shift soon, likely in the next few years. The electric grid is wired just about everywhere and even worst case you can always find a boring "Level 1" plug somewhere to at least get you trickled a couple miles to try to make it a bit further. "Anywhere the light touches" has electricity (because most lamps this century are electric).

On the other hand gas is a highly volatile liquid shipped at great expense across the country to pump stations that typically sell it for low or no margin loss leaders for convenience stores and grocery stores. It's a great miracle of logistics that it seems like gas stations are everywhere, and have more than enough supply to meet demand. The 1970s isn't that far back in human memory to suggest exactly how fragile that supply chain really is and why disruptions in that supply chain are likely to snowball really quick and how quickly petrol cars may have to soon worry again about running out of fuel.

> how quickly petrol cars may have to soon worry again about running out of fuel

The nice (?horrrible?) thing about petrol is that those stations are environmental disasters, and in many parts of the US the laws governing the dismantling/re-purposing of the stations/land make it an extremely expensive development.

This means that you're not likely to find significantly less stations in most areas anytime soon

You'll certainly find far fewer operating stations in most areas "soon", but you are right that the stations themselves will likely stand as historic monuments of an earlier time far into the future under current US regulations, because dismantling/cleaning/repurposing them is extremely expensive.

(I've got a couple old unused stations in my neighborhood already and watching the various ways they are reused, left to rot/wild, signed and resigned and signed again for sale/lease is an odd past time. I can't imagine what things are going to be feeling like when this is an even far more common phenomenon out in the suburbs and exurbs.)

I've done those types of trips before. They're awful.

Our last trip was 3000km, most of it across Northern Ontario. Beautiful country, our only regret is that we didn't stop enough.

On that trip we only spent 15 minutes waiting for the car to charge. The car was plugged in for much longer than that, but while it was we were using the bathroom, eating, sleeping or walking on the beach.

I didn't say the Tesla was better than all gasoline cars. Maybe if you gave me a brand new S class it might have been a superior drive to the Tesla. Whatever car you give me would have to have a feature comparable to AutoPilot, that's a lifesaving feature for long trips in the back country. With AutoPilot on you can spend most of your attention scanning the ditches for moose and other wildlife.

Yeah I think that works now. But it isn't scalable with current battery technology if most of the cars on the road are EVs. If it was the case, perhaps you had to wait in long queues every time you want to charge.

EVs need much longer range, or much faster charging time. Otherwise it will not be scalable.

It's a heck of a lot easier to build an electric charging station than a gas station. Yet somehow there are gas stations everywhere. Chargers will scale up with EV adoption.

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