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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I would love to have an electric car, and my next one will most likely be electric.

But I notice that the article claims his article was "roundly debunked", but fails to actually link to any of that debunking.

Here's an article that does that. It's on the same site as Atkinson's article, even.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/08/fact-che...

I feel that Rowan may be in the wrong about the facts in the end, but I'm not surprised that he feels "duped" since so much of marketing is about hiding the things they don't want you to know, and he found all that stuff out. And it was a lot.

In the end, though, I do think they're already a net positive and that's just getting better with time and effort.

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I too would love an EV, but the problems are many:

- My current car cost €13k, and is a station wagon that comfortably fits 5 and their luggage for any occasion. It's luxurious and quite fast for what it is. The cheapest EV that matches this in my market is around €60k.

- Modern cars, and EVs especially, are usability nightmares. No more buttons, everything hidden in apps and behind touchscreens.

- Modern cars, and EVs especially, are privacy nightmares. They are always on computers, constantly reporting back to the mothership. Mozilla did a deep dive on their terms and conditions, and all of them are horrible. Multiple brands admit to collecting and sharing details about sexual activity, genetic and health information in these legal documents.

- Long term ownership and servicing is a hard proposition currently. Batteries need replacing after a number of years (let's say 10 years, some will last a little longer, but many will lose significant range before that point), and the cost of replacement currently exceeds the value of the vehicle (sometimes even exceeding the price of a new vehicle). This is not an accident. Tesla introduced the "structural battery pack" with the Model Y, and others are sure to follow their model. Ostensibly to increase efficiency and lower the astronomical weight of EVs, in reality this is a thinly veiled attempt at introducing more planned obsolescence.

- Charging infrastructure is woefully underdimensioned in many locations, even for the current adoption rate.

I'm honestly waiting for the market and charging networks to mature, so I can just pay a company to convert an older vehicle to EV and sidestep all the garbage the car industry is trying to push on us with the current crop of EVs.

Beyond the unnecessary spending right now (since our car is basically new), the charging infrastructure is our biggest worry. Even when places supposedly have charging spots, I keep hearing about how many are broken and how few are actually working. I don't want to sit still for even 1-2 hours, and I certainly don't want to sit and wait for one of the few working spots and then sit there charging, too.

I suspect some of that is overblown, but I'm not about to find out with a $50k investment.

And how once you go for fast and non-subsidised charging how expensive does it get... Losing most of the savings on the way...

I'm not sure if non-home charging will ever be too cheap. At least on the scale needed, as the cost of charged will need to cover the hardware, the maintenance and the grid connection, plus of course the momentary price of electricity.

My wife has had an EV company car since 2019. From her experience, I can say it pays to think ahead about what range you need and charge the car accordingly.

Fast chargers are convenient when available, but most of the time she uses slow chargers and charges the car overnight and/or seeks out a parking lot with chargers close to her destination.

She's upgrading to her second EV next week, which has bigger range (still not massive). For most trips with the kids however, we resort to my old fossil fuel wagon.

> Modern cars, and EVs especially, are usability nightmares. No more buttons [...]

Depends on car. My Renault Megane e-Tech has buttons for most of the stuff I want[1], like AC controls, windscreen heater, media controls, seat adjustment and such.

> Batteries need replacing after a number of years (let's say 10 years [...]

My car has a guarantee of minimum 70% battery (SOH) after 8 years or 160000km. That's roughly 280 km range, so should be useful for many years after that.

That said, it's certainly a transition period, and it'll take a decade or two before things settle I think. It's like buying computers back in the 90's and 00's, the next processor was just that much better so it never felt like a good time to buy.

[1]: http://ranknews24.com/renault-megane-e-tech-ev-for-australia... (good interior shot at end of article)

> That's roughly 280 km range, so should be useful for many years after that.

In ideal conditions though. Have you driven it in winter in a colder climate? My wife has an older EV with 270km range in summer, but it falls to close to 170km in winter, sometimes less, when fully charged.

I live in Oslo, Norway, we've got -12C and snow now. If I preheat the car using charger I get at least 250km range mixed driving, with AC at a quite comfortable 22C. If my SO isn't in the car I reduce the AC a bit and it gets closer to 280-290km.

We had -25C earlier this winter, it dropped a bit closer to 200km, again with a comfortable AC level.

So yeah, it drops a lot. We found we need at least 150km range for our car to be useful (we have an old Leaf with less for some time), and if things scale linearly we should still have about 175km effective winter range with 70% SOH.

Sure it's not winning any range contests, we knew that when we bought it.

Interesting, does Oslo have a lot of chargers? For my area, this is an option only for those who have the ability to charge at home to pre-heat the car / battery pack. I live in a dense city and street parking is the norm, so for us this is not an option.

When I'm driving on my own with my wife's car, I turn heating or AC off, and it makes a little difference, but not all that much.

> Sure it's not winning any range contests, we knew that when we bought it.

I mean, it is also far more affordable that a lot of the alternatives. I find that range is only useful up to a point. If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?

We're fortunate to be able to charge at home thanks to our condo parking getting chargers. There's been tax incentives for this.

And the municipality is installing street chargers. While not enough currently due to the high % of EVs, they're going to install a lot more they say.

> If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?

This was exactly our approach. We wanted 400km which we felt was sufficient for us. So we just eliminated cars with less and looked at other aspects to decide which one to pick.

I too have settled on 400km, which I think is a reasonable range for most European countries. After 400km, it's quite reasonable to take a 40min break or something anyway :)

Does it have a heat pump heater? I have an Ioniq5 with a heat pump, cold weather performance is basically the same as my mid-summer performance in the temp range the heat pumps covers (-15 C+). The batteries do benefit from pre-warming, but they're actively cooled in most evs anyway so once you start moving the ambient temperature is not much of a difference to the battery pack.

Yeah it has a heat pump[1], but physics is physics. SO wants a balmy 22C inside, regardless of outside temperature.

It uses the resistive heater when preheating from charger though, I can hear the heat pump kick in when I disconnect the charger while it's preheating.

[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/538616/renault-megane-electric-ba...

LOL, I just realized that I totally forgot we keep the car capped at 80% to protect the batteries. So yeah, ranges at 100% is better than what I wrote.

I second this. I was planning to buy a Tesla when this hit me: you need to change tires every 7-10k miles. My current Toyota I changed at 70k miles. This is creating a graveyard of old tires at 10x the rate.

My friend's EV just broke down in the moderate CA storm and had to be towed.

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