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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> They are in severe danger of being disrupted by the very automakers they took on.

The worst part is they’re nowhere near: the effective strength of Tesla is that they built a large and reliable network of fast chargers. I don’t know how non-Tesla charging is in the US, but in Europe it’s still a complete mess of half-assed crap, meaning if you don’t have a Tesla you either simply can’t make trips beyond a single-charge round-trips, or you have to plan the trip for days in advance poring over maps and fallback chargers like it’s the 60s and you have to account for 50% odds of needing to rebuild the engine on the roadside.

Not “green book” bad, but absolutely “get close to hurling from the stress and triple travel time because you had to hypermile to reach the charger then it was worse than a home socket”.

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I've been following the situation via a few Youtube folks with non-Tesla charging, and I think your description is a bit exaggerated for the US, but not entirely.

It seems like many routes (not all though) along interstates have enough Electrify America fast chargers that the mere existence is adequate. However, the charging experience is very buggy and unreliable. Cars randomly refuse to charge, charge much slower than they should, etc. And it's not rare, it's likely that this will happen multiple times on a trip, from what I've seen. The videos posted were with the Mach-E and ID.4, so very recent cars.

However, I think as long as these cars sell (and the F-150 lightning does too), this will all get better very quickly. Most of it looks like it should be fixable with software updates, and these companies are all doing OTA updates now.

> Cars randomly refuse to charge, charge much slower than they should, etc. And it's not rare, it's likely that this will happen multiple times on a trip, from what I've seen.

Indeed that seems to be very common around here hence my mentioning fallback chargers: you can’t currently rely on a specific charger working, so you must plan for an alternative or two at every charging stop.

I've had a Tesla, and I still have a Bolt, so I have experienced both. The supercharging experience is smoother. But the standardized infrastructure generally works fine, even if it is more expensive.

What I think a lot of people are starting to realize is that the road trip angle is small. It needs to work, but it doesn't make or break the experience. In both cases I found that I did 99% of my charging at home, and so the experience has been the same.

The third-party networks are also collectively growing at a rate much faster than Tesla is growing the supercharger network. At some point in the foreseeable future it will be a disadvantage that you can only DC fast charge a Tesla at a proprietary supercharger.

Between where I live now and where my parents live, there is a distinct lack of dc fast chargers (most are in dealers where you need to be there during business hours to use as they regularly park cars in those spots), while there are plenty of superchargers. I really want to buy a used i3 for my daily driver, but there is no way I'd be able drive it to my parents without borrowing my wife's car.

I think you can charge Tesla at any charger (at least in Europe)

Yes, European regulators demanded that Tesla support CCS2. I think Tesla still prevents non-Tesla cars from charging at their superchargers, but they can at least use standardized chargers.

Tesla is still 100% proprietary in the US.

> meaning if you don’t have a Tesla you either simply can’t make trips beyond a single-charge round-trips

You’re overestimating how many people make road trips > 200 miles.

Most Americans never leave their hometown, with an even higher percentage who never left their state.

For the middle class family who drives to visit grandma once a year in a different state, they’ll just use their ICE car.

> Most Americans never leave their hometown

This can't possibly be right. Maybe they never move away, but never leave a radius of 200 miles from their home town? Do you have a cite for that?

Yeah, 200 miles is under a 4hr drive. That's just not considered very far in the US. Most people don't make a trip like that every day, but not even once?

Forbes [0] claims 11% have never left their state, but it doesn't cite a number for people who have never left their town. It has to be smaller, of course.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lealane/2019/05/02/percentage-o...

Meaning 89% have left their state, to say nothing of their hometown. So GP is totally wrong.

Not to mention there are many states you might not get out of in 200 miles. 200 miles from the Californian coast is still Cali unless you’re at the northern or southern edges.

Or rent an ICE car, that's always going to be an option.

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