this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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I hear this complaint a lot about charging times, but for 99.99% of people they are never in a single day going to drive beyond their cars range, meaning even a standard level 1 slow charger over night at home can manage their entire car usage.
It's only people doing long distance road trips that have to worry, and that's by far a minimum. Instead of boosting gas cars for that we could be looking at investing in rail so people don't have to make the longer trips in a car anyway.
Not only that, people going on those long trips are going to be looking for something to eat in a similar time frame that their EV takes to fully discharge. It takes EVs about 15-20 minutes to get from 0-80% charge. That's less time than it takes to sit down and eat at a restaurant
This is incredibly short sighted. I usually bring my own food on a long trip because I dislike stopping or buying crappy food. I eat while driving on long road trips because I have a schedule and want to get where I'm going. My gas car gets double the range of an electric car, so I'm stopping less often as well. I'm often in places where getting gas or food isn't within an hour's drive, and almost none of those places have the ability to charge a vehicle anyway.
Look, everyone has different use cases. I think electric cars for the in-city drive around town use case are great, and we should continue to encourage their use. I'm just saying that for wider adoption we're going to have to solve the charge rate, range, and charger accessibility issues.
I rarely go inside restaurants to eat on a long trip. I grab a burger and wolf it down and go again. I eat the fries while I'm driving and they're gone in an instant, and i'm still going.
Sounds like a you problem then
sounds like they have different priorities and values than you, is that intolerable?
And for about 50% of Americans, they don't have a place to plug in an electric car at night. It's only people above a certain level of wealth who have the luxury of their own parking space with a charger.
For the rest of us, we must take time out of our day to sit in a grocery store parking lot while the car charges.
EVs generally have adapters that allow you to plug into a standard home outlet, it's just significantly slower to charge to full due to the lower amperages. And even if you only have 1 plug in your garage, it's not hard or expensive to add more.
The only real hurdle for that is if you rent a house and aren't allowed to make those easy changes
Yeah this is losing the plot. I believe they're talking about the tens of millions of Americans who don't have private garages.
You're saying 1 in 10,000 people will never drive more than ~200 miles in a single day? What country is that statistic for? Source?
I love the idea of rail, but it doesn't work in large spread out countries like where I live. Sure cities can be connected, and we should definitely do that, but the idea that I could get to all the natural and wild places I love in this beautiful country by taking mass transit is impossible.