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Comment by wikwocket | Hacker News Reader

Spoken like an engineer: your points are technically quite correct, and yet, often irrelevant to the consumer!

For the average consumer of automobile technology, these are non-issues. Logistical and pricing issues are moderated and subsidized by governments and car manufacturers. From the consumer's point of view, you go to a gas station once a week, and the car "just works."

As superior as an electric system may be technically, economically, environmentally, etc, if you want it to take off, the UI and logistics need to be smoothed over until you get a similar level of "it just works" which matches the consumer's experience with gasoline.

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Irrelevant to the consumer? Hardly:

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy.

These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

> its price is too determined by foreign politics.

When gasoline prices doubled from $2/gallon to $4/gallon, people certainly thought that was relevant. The price spike is partly responsible for the rise in hybrid vehicles.

> it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.

Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

> it's not shelf stable.

I'll grant you this one is irrelevant to consumers.

> this one is irrelevant to consumers.

Not if I want to put my car in long-term storage. Then this, too, becomes quite relevant.

Can we stop acting like this is a problem when $5 chemicals off the shelf at your local auto parts store fixes this problem?

Yes we can.

Well, the Tesla cars' batteries are permanently wrecked and have to be replaced - at a cost of about half the price of a new car! - if you put them into long-term storage without leaving them connected to a charger, or if the charger becomes unplugged or loses mains power. That's even worse!

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy. These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

I live near a heavily trafficked road. To be honest these aren't problems; the noise issue is far outweighed by a) people playing uber-loud music on their car stereo (not any different with electric cars) and the noise of the electric train (BART) that runs above the road.

Well, yes, if there's a train right by the road, of course it will be louder. A train is one of the noisiest things you can have around. That's hardly a point in favor of gas cars. This seems a bit like trying to demonstrate that eating a bucket of deep-fried twinkies isn't so bad for you by comparing it to a bottle of bleach.

As an example of the externalities of gasoline, living near a highway has been shown to have high correlation with the incidence of childhood asthma hospitalizations.

Fair enough about stink and noise, but personal experience really isn't good for judging toxicity. Automobile-related pollution is a pretty big deal, but it manifests as large-scale health changes, not immediate personal changes.

(too late to edit the parent) I didn't so much want to defend gasoline cars, as to observe that the externalities are much less of a burden nowadays than people might expect. I was surprised by this myself, but then vehicles in California are orders of magnitude cleaner than the cars I grew up with.

I don't know why people are writing off stinks/toxic/noisy. As someone who has at various times lived near large roadways, this is a huge concern. Car pollution is a really big problem

Because its a problem which affects the environment, not the consumer. You could buy an electric car and it wouldn't help one bit. You'd have to get everyone to buy one.

It's a problem of external effects. Now if we would make an effort to attribute the costs of these external effects to their originator, internal combustion engines would be wholly unavailable to anyone under 1M$ net worth almost instantly. We don't do so because a) it takes effort (and thereby generates costs all in itself) and b) we usually don't care about the plight of future generations and those around us and c) we want the economy not to crash.

And we don't even know about all the external effects that gasoline cars have; there was this article in Mother Jones [1] recently that correlated leaded gas to the crime rate, owing to the detrimental effects lead has on the human brain.

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

Have you ever sat in traffic? I used to commute in Houston and even with a fairly decent filter on the A/C it stunk.

> Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

There are few items in this day and age that don't require owners to perform periodic maintenance. Tesla cars aren't immune from requiring annual inspections (http://www.teslamotors.com/service) either.

> These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

And the externalities of electric cars matter quite a bit to the people who live next to coal-fired power plants.

Good point, but it is a lot easier to get away from a power plant.

More concentrated, and more efficient, so it affects fewer people and creates less pollution overall. Additionally, we can power them with zero emissions power sources once we get there. People should really stop trotting out the coal power plant argument in trying to claim that this is somehow a relative weakness of EVs, because it's really not.

If you're changing your oil every 5,000 miles, you're wasting your money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/your-money/11shortcuts.htm...

Unless you drive an older car. My 14 year old Saturn's oil was rough when I changed it at 3200. I can probably take it to 5000 now that it has synthetic blend in it, but I'm not going to take a chance with a 154,000 mile old engine.

"Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book."

Newer cars require oil change/service every 30000 km / 2 years. That would be ~20k miles.

>These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

However, it occurs over such a timespan that the immediate effects are a non-issue, just long-term. The average person does not take into serious consideration the 30+ year effect of a decision, but a more near-term one.

Obviously it has to match or surpass the experience with gasoline. This is what Tesla has done, surpassing that experience for some(rich) people.

The rest is mainly a cost issue. Conventional cars have 100 years of mass production advantage.

It will take some time until price goes down, and catch gasoline. Electronics, batteries and electric engines are way easier to mass produce than thermal engines.

I fail to see how tesla has surpassed the experience of an equivalently prices car.

Perhaps you should ask owners, many of whom I have heard state exactly that. It's big, comfortable, fast, quiet, clean, futuristic, high status, low maitenece and beautiful machine. Not hard to see its appeal.

Fast - most cars that cost that much are fast.

quiet - one of the selling points of expensive cars are how great their engines sound.

beautiful - I don't think it's look compare to an Aston Martin or Maserati. Maybe that's just me.

high status - mostly because they are so new and rare at this point.

I can't commen on the others because I honestly don't know.

It's much faster than other cars in its class. It has supercar worthy acceleration and handling (thanks to that low battery pack it hugs the ground like you have wings).

It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear.

"It's much faster than other cars in its class."

Well, the best performing option does have excellent acceleration (4.4s to 60) - but they aren't actually that fast in terms of top speed - 130mph. Of course, that is pretty irrelevant to most of us who don't have unrestricted Autobahns to drive on.

"It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear."

Are you saying people buy a maserati for what they can't hear?

I'm not arguing that it is a bad car. I just don't think we can say it blows away all cars on its luxury and performance.

In other words its not the end all be all of cars.

The original Tesla is a lotus with shed loads of batteries stuffed inside which destroys the handling.

And having to take extreme care to look after the battery is not low maintainance.

If you want a beautiful machine with US style handling buy a Shelby Mustang (though they have now seen sense and make them with a non live back Axel)

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