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Comment by mnw21cam | Hacker News Reader

My diesel car from 2020 has a 40-ish litre tank and a range of around 500 miles. I just drove back from my holidays yesterday, which took nearly six hours, including three stops for loo breaks, lunch, and looking around a very small museum. It still had half the tank remaining when I got home. I have never had range anxiety with this car.

A range of 745 miles means ten hours of driving in the best of circumstances without a stop. I cannot imagine wanting to drive for ten hours without stopping. I cannot understand why EV manufacturers are putting such large batteries into cars, especially when I hear how much heavier they are making them.

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The problem isn’t needing to stop, it’s charge time and availability.

When I stop with an ICE car during a road trip it’s for 15 minutes max and I know I can do it basically whenever I want. With an EV, you have to carefully plan your road trip around fueling.

Roadtripping is much nicer in an EV, IMO. You just set your destination, it tells you where and when to stop, you almost always go to the bathroom and eat at those stops anyway. You never deal with gas station bathrooms, you just pop into a Starbucks or whatever. The car is almost always ready to go by the time you are, or maybe you wait 5-10 minutes.

There's an intuition that the minor additional flexibility gas cars give you on a road trip makes the experience better, but in practice I think it's worse.

Is this with a Tesla on their fast charging network? Most companies are standardizing on their plug type and so on, but I don’t want to buy a Tesla for a variety of reasons.

Yes, but the point is it’s not inherent to EVs, regardless of your preferences.

It's only relevant insofar as fast charging stations have a huge impact on how long you have to wait. The fact that basically only the Tesla network offers this is a pretty big limiting factor.

Yes, but it's not really a limiting factor or fair complaint about EVs in general. It is perhaps a limiting factor for people who only consider non-Tesla EVs and don't want to wait for the Tesla Supercharger network to become available to other brands.

I think there are more buyers than you think that don't want a Tesla.

I shouldn't have to say it again but this is not the point.

Outside of few crazy people no normal people drive 5-6h at a time. If you can get out on the highway, plug in and spend 20min doing basic necessities you are find.

The United States is a huge country and lots of people take road trips with 5-6hr drives. If you live in California you can easily do 5+ hours and not even leave the state.

On most people almost never make such drives. This has been pretty well researched. And those that do most of the time stop and make 15min breaks at least.

So the whole issue is that on very, very long drive you might lost 15min. That not the end of the world.

When travelling long distances it's also important to derate the range for safety and comfort.

For example, it's well known that EV range decreases by 20-30% in cold weather and a recent study is claiming about the same loss in hot weather. And on long drives you tend to be more heavily loaded than normal, also cutting a few percent off actual range. Further, you need a reserve in case you get stuck on the road for some reason. Also you need a further reserve to ensure you can make it to the next next charger should the next charger be unavailable for some reason. And the advertised ranges are in better-than-average driving conditions at slower-than-average speeds, so you lose another few percent there as well.

All these derates stack which means if you want to ensure low stress in an EV you might have to derate the advertised range 50% or more depending on charger density for long drives when you decide to purchase. ICEs also need derating, but 25% is usually lots and ICEs tend to have much longer ranges to begin with.

Gas cars also have a 15%-24% range decrease in cold weather, and I'd expect similar results for hot weather. I think it's just more notable in EVs because of the higher average range of a gas car.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-powered-cars-lose-driving-r...

There are a lot of places in America where you can leave a city and go to a rural place where at best you might have a 120V charge, possibly nothing. An 800-1000 mile range battery takes a lot of the charging anxiety away until the infrastructure for electric catches up to convenience and availability of gas.

The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on the whole.

>The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on the whole.

But they aren't. The "minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette" exist today in the ICE world and are very few and far between because of price. You can buy a Lamborghini Urus that does 190mph, or a Range Rover Sport Turbo, or BMW X5. But those cars are all 6 figures++ so very few people can afford them.

Sure, a Rivian R1S can do 0-60 like a Corvette, but Bob down the corner isn't spending $100k on a car, so the ones that accelerate like a Corvette will be exactly as ubiquitous as a Corvette.

Meanwhile the fastest/heaviest Kia EV9 does 0-60 in 6.0 seconds, and weighs 5,700 lbs. Both a far cry from the numbers you're concerned with. Meanwhile a Chrysler Pacifica weighs 4,300 lbs, so the differences most people imagine are GREATLY exaggerated.

The vast majority of the "the vehicles are too fast and too heavy" are scare tactics by oil companies. The F-150 tips the scales at 5,500 lbs and nobody is worried about them "ruining our roads". Please don't buy into the nonsense.

It's not about ruining roads, it's about how deadly heavy vehicles are for the pedestrians they hit.

IIRC average car weight has been stable for ~20 years, not increasing, and also pedestrian deaths have been decreasing over the same period, even as people are buying big weirdo trucks and whatnot. Also, I'd expect increased prevalence of active safety features is more important than the weight of the vehicle for pedestrian safety.

I think neither of these statements are true. Car weight has increased (https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...) as well as pedestrian deaths which have increased 77% in the last 10 odd years (https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/map-pedestrian-fatalit...)

I suppose you are somewhat right, it's a bit muddier than I remembered and I guess I completely mixed up the pedestrian statistics.

In this source, the increase in car weight seems quite minor over the last 10 years:

https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-... (fig ES-3)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/660493/us-light-duty-veh...

Your link does not support your claim of a 77% increase, but this better source pegs it at 80%, so I suppose that's about right: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

That said, the rate hasn't gone up if you look at a 30-year timeframe, but it's a worrying trend nonetheless. It's a bit confusing though because I think you'd want to look at this per-capita. The absolute numbers show a 10-year upward trend, and the per-capita numbers are only split out by age group and show that same 10-year upward trend except it hasn't gone up at all for people under 20, which seems surprising.

But I remain confused because the 10-year weight increase is very small, less than 10% or so, so it is not clear to me that increasing vehicle weight is the most important factor. IIHS mentions road design and front-end design, but not weight as key factors.

The shape of the vehicle has far, far more to do with pedestrians dying than the weight of the vehicle. I would MUCH rather go over the hood of a 4800lbs Tesla model S going 30mph than under the front bumper of a 3900lbs Tacoma.

In the case of EV pickups, it’s about towing. Towing a 3 ton trailer at highway speeds roughly triples the energy consumption of a pickup truck, so for 200 mile towing range you need 600 miles of unladen highway range.

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