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Comment by noogle | Hacker News Reader

So the article seems to be right - wait with EVs until they improve. Why suffer the pains of an early adopter?

I think it is absolutely true that people who don't want to be early adopters shouldn't be. At the same time: I had no regrets about being a DVD early adopter, because (hot take incoming) DVDs were in fact better than VHS tapes, and not dealing with VHS's badness was really nice, even if it was also annoying in some ways. Similarly, there are going to be people who are happy being EV early adopters because the (very real) wins of EVs outweigh the early adopter annoyances.

"This technology is still relatively new, and if you buy into it, you're going to have some early adopter pains" is a fine message that will help people sort out what they personally want to do, but isn't the same as a blanket "wait until they improve."

It's a different risk: if your novel DVD player did not work, you could just watch something else. If your novel EV doesn't charge, you may be left stranded, miss a flight or fail to reach medical care. Moreover, no government planned to ban VCRs using those early problematic DVD players as a justification.

> It's a different risk: if your novel DVD player did not work, you could just watch something else.

Also, you could (and nearly everyone did) add a DVD player to your stack but keep the VCR so you had both.

Sure, the same is possible with cars, but gets several orders of magnitude more expensive to have multiple cars so it's not practical for many people.

As an early adopter, the benefit of less maintenance, home "refueling", and the fact that an EV is more fun to drive offsets the hassle. We've done a few road trips in it, and while road trip charging is annoying (we have a VW ID4, so the CCS network) its still worth dealing with because we enjoy the EV.

Personally I think right now EVs are a great second car for almost everyone because you get the benefits of an EV but can fall back to your gasoline car for trips. We're still in the early adopter phase of "primary" car right now, where you need to be aware of the drawbacks.

> benefits of an EV but can fall back to your gasoline car for trips.

Why not just get a pehv

Having both, ICE and EV tech under the hood means more technology that can fail. Heavier than either, less EV range, possibly no subsidy in some jurisdictions, things like that.

That's cool in Gartner research theory land, but Prius and hybrid Camrys confirm its nonsense.

> That's cool in Gartner research theory land, but Prius and hybrid Camrys confirm its nonsense.

The Prius Prime has a range of 72km according to [0] so it's clearly not "nonsense".

[0] https://www.toyota.ca/toyota/en/vehicles/prius-prime/feature...

I was referring to the reliability and weight claims.

And 72km is still higher than the average US trip distance, and it will kick over to petrol to augment any occasions when you go over that.

Its literally the best of both worlds - plug in charging convenience for the bulk of your driving and fast refuelling for the times when you need to do road trips.

That's the thing about cars: their real test (or importance) is not the 90% of the time spent in the "happy path" (short, planned drives after a full night charge). It's to address those edge but critical cases - long trips, unexpected drives, off-the-beaten-path routes.

Another thing rarely raised is the correlated nature of traffic issues. Charging is fine now, mostly because it seems there is a huge over-provisioning of chargers compared to EVs on the road. What happens with busy days? An evacuation order sending 1M people on the same route at the same time? For ICEV there is an easy solution. Not for EVs.

What is the easy solution for ICEVs?

Gas jerrycans. Either one kept at your garage for emergencies (cost: $5), or the gas station scaling horizontally by using/selling jerrycans.

Haven't seen any solution for instantly increasing charging throughput, and an on-line power is needed, while it is more likely to fail exactly in the kind of events that require mass evacuation.

I'd say that it's more like 99%. The vast majority of my time with the car I'm driving around the Boston metro area, where it's an objectively superior experience. The three days a year I'm making a long road trip (0.8% of days), it's mildly more inconvenient.

In June we're driving to northern Maine. This involves a stop halfway through at a CCS charger for 30-40 minutes while we change the baby and eat. Sure it takes longer, but it isn't inconvenient enough.

An evacuation order is an interesting worse case scenario, but not one I'll likely ever encounter living in New England. Our storms tend to be "stay home" affairs instead of "get out".

> the benefit of less maintenance

Toyota/Honda ICE cars my extended family owns usually go many years without more than an oil change every 8-10k miles. Maintenance costs are absolutely trivial if you go Japanese. Heck even the Chevys made it to 200k when we sold them with no major mechanical issues. The costs of ICE maintenance seem to be the most overblown electric selling point. FWIW I dream about ways to rationalize buying a Tesla.

It's not so much cost as in I only bring the car in annually for a cabin air filter, tire rotation, wipers, inspection sticker, etc. Since most of the braking is regenerative the brake pads are essentially unused.

Reducing brake pad wear seems like premature optimization to me. Good pads can last well north of 50k miles, with some claiming 100k. They're also dirt cheap. I haven't changed pads in almost 5 years and my brakes don't squeak yet.

Because EVs are fun to drive.

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