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Comment by larrymyers | Hacker News Reader

I've owned a Model Y for about a year now, and range anxiety isn't a big deal on road trips as long as you're using the built in nav for your destination. The nav calculated estimations tend to be very accurate, within a few percent when it determines the battery remaining, and it'll add in supercharger stops as needed.

I definitely have to stop more in the winter time on road trips, but that's just the nature of how EVs work. On the upside Tesla puts superchargers in spots that make it easy to take a break for a rest stop anyway.

I do miss how quick gas station stops are with ICE cars when doing a road trip, especially if you're on a constrained schedule, but the benefits of having the EV have outweighed it so far, especially with most of my daily miles being in the city (where the EV really shines).

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This is key, because not every mile driven is the same. If you see "Model Y has a range of 300 miles" and set out to drive 300 miles you are going to have a problem. The temperature, wind speed/direction, humidity, pressure, cloud cover, altitude, uphill/downhill driving, vehicle weight, battery quality, tire tread, AC use, average speed... all make a huge difference. The nav system does take these into account and gives you a much more realistic number.

It's impressive how well these estimates work, given the outsized impact many of these factors can have. These things are more negligible in an ICE as the denominator of energy stored in a gasoline tank is 4-5 times more than an EV. I believe a typical EV has to make do with the equivalent of just 2-3 gallons of gasoline in energy on a full battery charge.

Do we know it doesn't cheat?

We know the range estimates used to (?) be gamed[1], I don't see why this part wouldn't be, too.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...

If I say I want to go to X destination the car says I will arrive with Y battery percent left.

This is accurate to me within about 5% of the battery, even driving at fast highways speeds and in cold weather.

If it was "cheating" I think I'd notice an issue when the car said I had 5% left but the real battery charge was empty.

Claim: "The nav calculated estimations tend to be very accurate"

> Do we know it doesn't cheat?

Then the nav won't be accurate then would it? Also: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-pannone-3a414610/

It would hurt the brand to cheat the sat-nav based range, it would mean the car wouldn’t make it to a charger when it said it would. You’d have a lot of unhappy customers.

Think of the sat-nav range as closed-loop and the other testing based ranges as open-loop.

The energy density of the fuel isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The chemical energy stored in gas is much harder to use. ICE cars typically get around 20-40% efficiency. Electric motors typically get 80-90%.

In some sense, they do that by moving the losses to before the battery/tank; so this isn't as big of a gain in terms of total energy usage. However, in terms of the effective capacity of the energy storage device, we don't really care about losses in refilling it.

> I believe a typical EV has to make do with the equivalent of just 2-3 gallons of gasoline in energy on a full battery charge.

The 57.5 kWh battery in the base Model 3 has the same energy content as just ~1.18 US gallons (4.46 liters) of pure gasoline. Electric motors are a lot more efficient than combustion engines, though.

It's much more like the range on a small private plane. It might be rated for 500 miles on a tank, but that involves so many factors that you have to take into account, because there aren't gas stations in the sky.

Once you learn how to take the factors into account, you get a "feel" for what you can and cannot do.

Do you live in a warm state or a cold state? I live in Michigan and during the winter range is reduced considerably. This is fine for my local commute, but is quite painful when you want to drive “up North” to go skiing. There isn’t a lot of charging infrastructure and coupled with the reduced range, longer trips can be inconvenient.

Driving around the midwest in the winter time I find I get about 200 miles to the full charge. The cold weather, increased wind speeds, and need to run the heater all eat into the range substantially.

I hear you about wanting to drive up north for outdoor winter sports. It requires a lot more planning once north of Grand Rapids to make sure you won't end up stranded.

Many times I'll stop at a supercharger early just to take advantage of the battery heating the charging provides. That alone makes the rest of the trip more efficient, and I can get back below 300 wh/mi. The heated seats and steering wheel also make a big difference and allow the heat pump to not have to do so much work.

You missing how quick it is to fill up on a road trip is one huge reason of few I'm not an EV buyer present day. Once the experience is road trip driving experience as an ICE of today then I'm an EV buyer.

Why not a PHEV?

Why does it have to be perfectly equivalent?

Do we only need to reduce emissions if doing so is not just feasible or workable but perfectly convenient for everyone in all situations?

For reference my road tripping charges on interstate highways tend to look like ~3-3.5 hours of driving on the first leg (starting with 90-100% charge at home) followed by 15 minutes of charging every ~2 hours of driving after that.

It's not perfect or quite as good as ICE, but I usually find that the car is almost ready to go after I use the restroom and get a bottle of water or something and get back to the car.

I make this great sacrifice of horrific inconvenience the two times per year or so that I take trips that actually require multiple charging stops, in exchange for zero gas station visits the rest of the year due to home charging.

I've done 4 3000 km trips (there and back twice) in an EV. Each trip was about 15 minutes longer because we had an EV rather than a gas vehicle. We charged while we were sleeping, eating, buying snacks and bathrooming. Granted we were a family so those took longer than a couple of 25 year old guys would spend doing them. The car spent far more time waiting for us than we spent waiting for it.

Other than those trips, almost all of the charging has been done at home which means in the last four years we've saved about 20 minutes a month in gas station visits.

How many times a year do you do road trips? I don’t do any (most places I want to go are a plane flight distance away), but I’m still buying an ICE car because I want to give the BEV market more time to evolve; the quality of interior I want is $20,000 higher for BEV compared to ICE at the moment but I think it’ll get more reasonable over the next 2 years.

A Few times a month

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