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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

> 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)

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> 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.

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