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Comment by vegardx | Hacker News Reader

When I started driving I couldn't understand why you would want an automatic transmission. It's so simple, muscle memory. You feel the car. But then, after spending a couple of years with a car with a somewhat good automatic transmission that idea sort of faded away. It was both smoother and more reactive than I could ever dream of becoming.

Recently I switched to an EV, and now I don't understand why people would want a combustion car, let alone a manual transmission anymore. All that power, available instantaneously. You feel the car, sort of like your old manual transmission. I wonder if autonomous driving will have the same trajectory.

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Try driving 3 hours outside of cell reception or electricity and see how you feel.

With my truck, I can take an extra tank of gas in the bed and get back to civilization.

For most people that is a non-issue. Modern EVs (especially Tesla) are exceptionally good at estimating remaining range. I know EV adoption in Norway might be a bit of an exception as of now, but as things are right now, in Norway, it's not something you think or worry about.

Why would he drive into a situation without a plan for recharging?

Because it’s how people have driven cars for 70 years. Why would anyone drive a car _with_ a plan for refueling? Gas stations are generally everywhere, and you just to pay attention to how far the closest one is in the most remote and deserted of regions (of the US).

So is electricity.

My point is that some people need to do that regularly, such as myself, as an environmental/water quality engineer in a rural area.

OP indicated they couldn't see why anybody wouldn't want an EV.

In reality, there simply IS no feasible recharging plan in that scenario. The reason I made the point is this: I have regular need for my 4WD truck, and I carry a lot of self-rescue equipment: a 2-stroke gas chainsaw, winch, extra fuel, a satellite text communication device (this is less helpful than you'd think in a deep forest), food, water, clothes, shelter, hygiene products, a trauma kit and a firearm.

On this website loaded with urbanites, many people regularly attack those things as being "totally unnecessary" and would have no problem banning them without any consideration for edge cases.

Obviously I don't wholeheartedly mean that. Everyone, even owners of EVs and urbanites, understands that people have a different set of requirements and needs. If you see everything as an attack, then perhaps you're just the one looking at it the wrong way.

Because anyone who brings this topic up is regularly attacked. I've had it happen too when I mention driving to locations not on a supercharger route. "Why would you ever want to do that?" is the response de'jour.

It's easy to be defensive when the normal response is an attack.

As someone that has been trying to get a trackpad on a laptop work as well in Linux as those on MacBooks, I can resonate with that feeling.

Language is hard, and becomes very tame if you have to always add asterix everywhere. But fair point. It might not have been clear from my original post, but I was hinting that my current "cannot understand" would likely be challenged in the future, by autonomous vehicles. Rinse and repeat.

>Try driving 3 hours in a wooded forest without roads or lane markers and see how you feel.

>With my horse, I can trot around through trees and streams, and even let it graze on grass

That's sincerely how irrelevant your example is to people like myself who don't drive 3 hours outside of cell reception or electricity, or ride horses through forests

No it's not! ...because it's about not asserting your circumstances on others, and especially including regulation and policy in that which is where this attitude regularly ends up.

I've actually got no doubt there are important jobs for which there is still no replacement for a horse.

That's the whole point. OP couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't want an EV. I simply could not do the work that I do to help fix our streams and river to keep sediment & nutrients low and help rebuild the fish populations if I was forced to use an EV.

This is a huge, common issue especially amongst that silicon valley / bay area culture. They do not consider anyone's needs outside their immediate experience. This is a big part of the push back from rural communities against urban politics.

OP said

> I don't understand why people would want a combustion car, let alone a manual transmission anymore.

Then I said

> That's sincerely how irrelevant your example is to people like myself who don't drive 3 hours outside of cell reception or electricity, or ride horses through forests reply

Neither of us said anything about imposing anything on others, we strictly talked about our own circumstances, for which there is neither a need for horses nor a need for combustion vehicles. I am also against california "progressivism" but frankly you seem to have reacted reflexively to something neither of us was doing, just because we don't need combustion vehicles

After learning on a manual, and living with automatics for a good couple of decades, I intentionally got a manual again (a subaru).

It's not super smooth.

It's not the height of efficiency (yet still 5mpg better than the best of my automatics).

But that's on me, not the car. It's a skill I can develop, and it's a skill I'm proud of developing. If I want to drive smoothly, I can. If I want to drive like a bat out of hell, I can do that too.

And no, I can't really do the latter in my automatic CVT, at least not comfortably. Stepping on the gas to overtake causes it to downshift erratically (yes, a modern CVT emulates a manual transmission and downshifts), bringing me close to a redline before it shifts (again, WTF CVT?) back up to avoid the redline.

If you ever want to go on a road trip, EVs are not a viable option right now.

Depends on your location, I guess. I have not had any issues, and seeing as I don't use my car for commuting, but still have managed to do 25k kilometers this year I would say my data supports that idea.

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