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twobitshifter

I can’t decide on my next car

- Live in cold village on US east coast

- ICE might be going obsolete

- BEVs are improving quickly so what I buy might be superseded soon - feels almost like the early days of smartphones.

- Gas prices are very high

- Used and new car prices are unreasonably high

- There’s not enough chargers to support the number of EVs being driven in my area leading to long waits.

- I could charge at home, but don’t have a garage

- My car now is 8 years old but has 150k miles.

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FWIW, my own investigations into this from a location that is currently 0:

I’m going with a plug-in hybrid.

There are precious few charging stations in the Midwest (especially those affiliated with the Subaru/Toyota brands), and a lot of miles between cities. A majority of my driving is inside the 45 mile range so the batteries, and the ability to fill up conventionally eases my worries about detours or delays.

Hopefully when this new vehicle dies, the charging (and cold weather) story will have improved.

I'm in the midwest, with a plug-in hybrid. I wish I had gotten a BEV instead of the hybrid I have. With the plug-in, I was filling up more than I had hoped (maybe once every 2-3 months), but more importantly, the maintenance is still all there. It's arguably even worse, since there are even more moving parts than a ICE vehicle (the 12V battery notably is difficult to replace).

I have a Chevy Pacifica Hybrid, so your experience may be different. Unfortunately, there aren't many great options for a BEV vans (yet), but here's to hoping.

> There are precious few charging stations in the Midwest (especially those affiliated with the Subaru/Toyota brands)

If you're looking for things to be explicitly related for Subaru/Toyota, you'll be missing a lot. It's not like you buy gas at Toyota gas stations. Outside of Tesla and Nissan Leafs the brand doesn't matter.

A quick look at plugshare.com filtered for CCS chargers show lots of areas with pretty good coverage of chargers. Some places do get a bit sparse, but kind of following along in Google Maps it looks like those are kind of sparse areas in general. Sticking to mostly major highways would get you practically anywhere around the Midwest in an average CCS EV from what I can tell. Obviously, if you're only ever in those sparse areas you're gonna have a hard time.

I definitely don't know your particular needs so I can't truly say that you wouldn't have had a problem charging. I'm just throwing it out to other people that there are over several hundred CCS charging locations in the Midwest today, with more locations being built out constantly. Use tools like plugshare.com to know the places you tend to drive and reach your own conclusions on if an EV would work for you. I agree EVs can't serve every use case and need, you gotta see what's best for you.

You'll be fine if you're able to keep the car connected to a charger overnight. Many EVs have an option to pre-heat the battery while on the mains power, so you don't lose the range on heating the battery up.

Get a BEV with a heat pump. This improves winter efficiency.

If you need a new vehicle, the you can certainly go with a quality EV. I live in NJ, it gets cold here in winter, with temps dipping in teens and single digits in Jan/Feb. Don't have a garage either. As long as you can plug your car in overnight, there are absolutely no issues. Range does drop a somewhat in winter, but as long as you're aware of it you can work around it. You don't need chargers in your area, your home will be the place where you charge the most, just make sure you have a high power outlet/wall charger installed at your home. Regular 120V outlets are not really feasible unless you're driving very little. 3d party chargers matter only when you go on road trips/vacations. That being said, maybe you can hold on to your car a couple more years, let the market cool down and EV offerings improve.

Indeed, if you can, I would avoid buying a new car with a combustion engine. As your car should have some more useful life time, of course it doesn't hurt to keep it running for a while longer. This allows you to watch as the market for electric cars expands. On the other side, when you absolutely need a new car and you find an electric car which fits to your requirements, it will continue to do so, even if the technology is further developed. This is, after all, the problem of buying any high-tech product, be it a new laptop or a new smartphone. Next years product always will be better, but when you need a new device and the offerings are suited to the purpose, then just buy one.

> I could charge at home, but don’t have a garage

No problem (why should it?)

> BEVs are improving quickly so what I buy might be superseded soon

That WAS my concern, but EV resale value is amazingly stable, better than most ICE in my area (EU). After all, EVs are still cars, so innovation cycles are long (many years).

Your current car is only a few years old and has relatively low mileage, so the best course of action is obviously to keep driving it. Unless there's something seriously wrong with it. Otherwise, buy a used car.

It’s a Volkswagen not a Toyota and many parts have design lifetimes of 150-200k. Since it’s the only car for my wife and I, I don’t want to end up in a situation where it’s in the shop all the time. I do plan on hanging on to it after getting another car.

My VW has well over half a million kilometres. Of course I did just have to change the cylinder head gasket, but that's because it's tuned and unknownbenownst to me had sticky turbo vanes for years, causing it to overboost significantly. Unmodified engines of this type (diesel TDI) often reach 700 thousand km with only normal maintenance.

But if it's your only car and you're not mechanically-inclined I get always wanting to have a brand new car for the reliability.

In no world is 150k miles "low mileage". That's comfortably in the "may break down at any time" age.

The ICE will not be "going obsolete." There's no real replacement and there won't be just because of the underlying physics.

There are too may drawbacks with EVs that they'll never be for everyone and everywhere.

If your 150k mile car is a reliable brand (i.e., Honda or Toyota), you probably have another 150k miles on it.

They are already obsolete for most usages in Norway.

What percentage of cars on the road are EV in Norway?

> according to Statistics Norway, in 2021 almost 6,000 million kilometres driven by passenger cars were powered by electricity. The total number of kilometres driven by passenger cars was 35,000 million, so EVs still account for less than 20%.

(I just stuck your comment into Google.)

They probably meant obsolete when buying new

Indeed. Though because of the resistances and fears to change, some people still buy hybrid PHEV cars. This year is also a bit special because of big supply chain issues and extremely high energy prices. Mostly because of the war.

Some categories for some usages will stay on diesel for some time. If you need a pickup truck for work in the artic, you don't have any good electric option. But if you need to drive to school, to work, to the supermarket, and to the cabin once in a while, you would look a bit like an outlier if you buy a new (expensive) fossil car.

This is a case of the government picking winners with tax incentives for adoption, and distorting the market. Tax credits don't change physics.

You could easily keep your car (it's not super old), and wait out the low-supply EV car market while you're at it.

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