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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what drivel.

Almost zero planning/research and they are surprised they had a bad experience? I honestly don't know what to call this other than FUD.

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What? She planned her entire route around charging. Meticulously picked L3 for in-day top-up and L2 for overnight stay. Planned the entire route around the charging network using the PlugShare app.

What happened was that the charging stations were sometimes broken, sort of broken, or outright not as claimed such as L2 instead of L3.

And it should be stated that none of this planning would be required with a combustion engine.

This comment is FUD.

You could re-phrase that as "doing a long-distance trip in an EV requires meticulous planning with little margin for error and no concessions for novices, which may add hours to your total journey time". Or maybe "if you buy an EV, you will need to re-calibrate your definition of a distant destination".

Or just get a Tesla. I literally just said "navigate to <destination>" and did a 1100 mile road trip that crossed the two tallest mountain ranges in the USA. Charging added an hour or so to the trip, but it was 18 hours or so of driving and people needed to stretch, eat, hit the bathroom etc so much of that hour was used for other things anyways.

Counterpoint: consumers can embark on a long road trip with a gasoline powered car with zero planning or research with respect to refueling. If electrics want wider adoption in the free market, that is something that will need to be addressed.

It's too simplistic to say that the charging situation needs to be addressed before the cars become viable. It's a real chicken and egg problem. The charging infrastructure and the variety of use cases that EVs cover need to be addressed together. Right now, EVs are fantastic as second cars, or for people who never drive more than an hour or so at a time, or for specific longer trips where you know and are comfortable with the charging options. That's enough to get more EVs on the road, which will provide economic incentive for a higher density of chargers, which will be enough to enable even longer trips without burdensome planning, and so the cycle continues. That's how free markets actually work. Demanding a one-sided "big bang" approach is tantamount to demanding deliberate distortion of the market (whoever goes first needs to be supported by some external means), which itself a good way to ensure that EV adoption remains slow. It doesn't seem like a particularly good-faith argument.

I think you slightly misunderstood my point - I'm not arguing that we should or shouldn't built out a denser charging network. I'm just pointing out that from the standpoint of the consumer today, the fact that they can't hop in an electric and drive across country with the same lack of planning that they can with a gasoline vehicle is potentially significant.

Obviously many people are ok with that tradeoff, but it's likely that a much larger portion of the market will open up to electrics once consumers can essentially treat their electric as they would any other car.

I suspect that ultimately the solution will be a combination of many things working together: consumer education, longer range batteries, denser charging networks.

You don't need to do the planning ahead of time, your passenger does it on the road on the giant touchscreen. And it's really simple, you're just choosing restaurants and hotels based on availability of charging.

A fair point, and many early adopters are perfectly willing modify their behavior in these small ways to make an electric workable. There's another segment of the market that will likely only open up once fast electric charging networks are ubiquitous enough to exist off of (nearly) every major highway exit.

That’s exactly the point. We already have solved that problem with technology and there is a reason why battery-powered cars never took off and never will despite already being around for more than a hundred years.

Eh - the problem isn't intractable. Consumers do change their behavior when they are communicated with properly, and the technology has reached the correct inflection point. It's possible battery tech never gets to the point where it has mass-market appeal, but I don't see any reason to assume that will be the case in the long term.

The iPhone is a great example. We had PDA's for a long time, but the tech wasn't quite good enough for mass adoption until the iPhone.

On the consumer communication front, Apple pitched the iphone as three different devices that consumers could instantly understand: 1. A better music player 2. A better phone 3. An internet communications device.

Critically, once Apple educated people on how to think of the new product, they were able to drop that messaging and move on.

>Almost zero planning/research and they are surprised they had a bad experience?

B) The author did much planning, as described in TFA, other commenters have noted this. The author just didn't have the requisite experience to know their plan was unrealistic.

B) Having to to planning/research in that level of detail the kind of stuff you expect when you're like "Imma tow my big-ass boat over the mountains with my old minivan", not when you're renting a modern car for a trip with no special requirements.

Hard disagree. An EV at home/around town should be something you don't have to even think about (let it charge overnight at your house) but I would never consider going on a trip longer than 1 full charge worth of range without mapping out the route. There appear to be apps that specifically do this for you instead of just searching for stations along your route as you go and no excuse as to why they didn't do that (other than trying on purpose to make EVs sound bad or being woefully bad at planning).

What did I say that you are disagreeing with?

>but I would never consider going on a trip longer than 1 full charge worth of range without mapping out the route.

This represents a level of planning that is far greater than what has been the status quo since the advent of consumer GPS, arguably longer.

> without mapping out the route. There appear to be apps that specifically do this for you instead of just searching for stations along your route as you go and no excuse as to why they didn't do that (other than trying on purpose to make EVs sound bad or being woefully bad at planning).

Having to search for services in advance is a regression to the days of paper maps, road atlas's and printed tourist guides (though in those days people were searching for food/lodging, not fuel, but it's mostly the same IMO).

I think the author was naive to just wing it but anyone pretending the current state of EVs is not a regression is either being dishonest or naively projecting their specific use case (traveling with family, lots of stops, etc) onto everyone.

I never said that EVs don't have some regressions but anyone who gets behind the wheel of one and doesn't take that into account is not someone I would trust with almost anything requiring problem solving skills. I'm not aware of anyone saying "You can jump in an EV and go anywhere with reckless abandon", I know you can more or less do this with ICEs but no one is saying they are completely equivalent.

If you want to save money on the medium your car uses (gas vs electric) there are currently some downsides that you may or may not find acceptable. Jumping into an EV and expecting it to work just like an ICE or to be able to do a cross-country trip with little planning or knowledge of the car you are using is just silly. There are countless videos/articles about people successfully doing this, but that's not as interesting as this clickbait BS.

I watched the video and they did plan. The journalist showed notes she had prepared.

She wrote down a handful of stops in a paper notebook. I cannot take someone like that seriously. In life you have to roll with the punches and adapt, even more so when using new technology. To rely on a static list and then act surprised that you needed to use an app as weather conditions change is disingenuous.

Imagine blaming the driver for steps that are completely unnecessary in an ICE vehicle.

And? The point is: I don’t need any sophisticated planning with an ICE car.

New technologies are supposed to be better, not worse. BEVs are clearly a huge step backwards in usability.

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