For occasional commutes, 115km one way is ok (not for me, but it's not unthinkable).
But 115km each way (230km round trip) 5 days per week is a problem. We should not be doing this, at least not in individual cars. That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road, not to mention its contribution to general traffic.
The focus should be on how to reduce the commute distance (or eliminate it as often as possible), and to build/use efficient mass transit systems.
So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy - with diminishing returns. At some point it's time to step back and rethink the greater system. (I believe that point was 20+ years ago, when it became clear that cities would continue to become the population growth centers.)
> So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy
I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car. I think you're suggesting "we should all be doing public transport, it's more efficient."
You aren't wrong, but there's a human/emotional element/aspect here.
Personally, my time in my car is some of the only pure "me" time I have, and I would hazard a guess that it is the same for many others.
A car to me is a personal, climate controlled cocoon, where I can turn on whatever music I want, have a coffee or a snack, and escape for the 30 minutes or however long it takes to reach my destination...without the chance of being bothered by anyone else, much less any of the other belligerents that you are sure to find on public transit from time to time.
I will continue to own and drive my own car for this simple fact...
I love driving as much as the next person but being on the roads at commuting time is hell on earth. Battling all of the other sleep deprived idiots to travel 3 miles in an hour. It's awful.
The article was about that person's reality of 230km round trip commute each day, and the discussion was related.
A 15min commute as you have is a different situation (much better!). Nobody is trying to take away your car. I realize that it is often framed that way in US media, as if the options are public transport OR private cars. I have a car in the Netherlands which I use for some trips where public transport is not the better choice. But when possible, especially when going from one major city to another, public transport is such a nice luxury. (It also means I can go have fun at that late night party and never face the decision of whether to drive somewhat inebriated or not.)
Well I met guy on HN, who was adamant that bike is always the right choice, as long as you dress properly. Given recent 30cm of snow, then melted by rain I kinda disagree :-)
But yes, if we try to complement them, not just ban, this is very reasonable. I also travel by train quite often because it's simply very convenient compared to car.
Okay, but what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?
I get it might not be exactly the same, but walking/biking/Public Transiting with headphones in for a period of time is all that and more. And with the exception of a bike, you can do all of those things without having to sit in traffic...
> Okay, but what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?
This would probably make some people uncomfortable, but one fantasy I can imagine which might be nice is to have private transport capsules. We could own our own capsule and decorate/style it to our liking. It has common exterior form factor, with power, plumbing, etc. connectors.
We go from home to the nearest capsule station (where ours is in automated storage). We schedule picking of the capsule so it is ready for us upon our arrival. We set the destination, hop in, and the delivery system takes us for a ride. Hell, with a nice private capsule you could sleep, watch movies, work, even have "fun" with a partner. The system (ideally) ensures you arrive at your desired capsule station end point, whereby you exit and set your storage option.
This would take more space than current public transport (a lot more!), but it would take less space than a typical individual car, not to mention less roads as the exchange systems would be optimized and operating in three dimensions.
This would still be mostly a common ride, although the space requirements would be increased significantly. But with the automation and routing systems (and coordination) it would be far superior to cars on roads.
It still sounds like we each have our own individual pod that's less efficient than if we had one common pod that can handle a bunch of people going in a common direction.
Distributed systems that have to coordinate multiple moving parts are more prone to breakage, and single points of failure.
Not to mention the infrastructure that's required to build millions of what it sounds like are indivdiual train cars (albeit, much smaller), and the tracks required to get people to where they're going.
Better would be to make train cars with seats that have better isolation for people traveling in small groups. But honestly, I think we're overestimating the number of people that need this. And there's a small possibly they could still be serviced by a small car in a world where 80% of people are able to use other services.
> what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?
I think GP's point is that it's more about space than about travel. Walking, or being on a public transport with headphones on, doesn't replace that - it's at most a very poor substitute.
The point is to be able to hide from other people - to have some minimum personal time, in a personal space, free from nagging and expectations of your spouse, children, friends, co-workers and bosses. Driving in a car to work enables this, because for the duration of your commute, you can ignore everyone's calls and requests guilt-free. It's the law that says you can't pick up a phone on the road. It's dangerous. You're also not driving for fun, you're driving to/from work. Nobody can have any expectations of you during that time. Yes, commute in traffic is torture. That's a feature. It gives you plausible deniability.
I may be breaking some unwritten fight club rule by spelling it out loud. Sorry. Also, I don't drive - to work or otherwise. But to the extent what I described above is a major part of car ownership, more and better public transport won't help, because it doesn't address this major part.
This still smells like some greater problem. If retreating into our own private cars, solo, is the only way we can get some solitude and space from others, then we have painted ourselves into a corner.
Long ago I briefly shared an office with an "old guy" - an expert in a particular topic which gave him more freedom to behave strangely and not get fired. His strange behavior was to spend half of his lunch hour at his desk, leaned back, mouth wide open, napping. That was traditionally not acceptable behavior in a professional environment, but he apparently decided it was for him. So he did it. While it was a bit of a shock at first to the other employees, eventually we all became accustomed to it and even kept our voices down in the hallway outside when we new it was his nap time.
The point is that we have the freedom, even if it seems scary, to make some decisions about how we want our lives and how to get the balance we need. I am only just starting to learn how to do this.
The commute drive solo time is clearly not the same quality of solo time as many other options (choose your favorite).
When I had young children and a busy house, and my normal full time job, the bathroom was my solo space. Unsurprisingly, people didn't seem too interested to come bother me when I was in there. So I would read entire books while seeking solitude. Instead, it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet. Granted, a toddler will not respect those agreements, but the spouse can help ensure it works most of the time.
I agree with your points - though I think you're underselling the "even if it seems scary" bit.
I love your bathroom example, because it speaks to the same need as the "car commute solo space". You say:
> it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet
And the same is be true of me (having small children too), and of the aforementioned commuters. We could. But, for some reason, we don't. Can't explain it, but the very idea feels truly scary. That's why the comment upthread resonated so well with me - I don't drive, but I understand striving to get "solo time" in a way that doesn't have to be justified directly, but instead is a plausibly deniable side effect of some external necessity (like having to commute to work).
> Personally, my time in my car is some of the only pure "me" time I have, and I would hazard a guess that it is the same for many others.
I totally get this, and I was in the same situation for many years (the young children period of my life).
However, imagine that instead of a 1hr commute, the commute was 30 minutes. Now your day has 1 hour "free" that you could choose to spend doing something for yourself. Maybe it's gym time, or maybe a music practice room in a building near your office, or yoga in the garden of the office rooftop.
As I say, I did share that same feeling when I was doing the normal commute/family thing. But it still points to a problem. We should be able to find or make the time and space to have a cocoon of calm or whatever we need and still have a life+family+work. I don't think that a small side-effect of solo driving in traffic which provides something like that cocoon is at all the right way to get the life balance we need.
It's not about taking away people's cars, it's about making public transit so good (and building cities/neighborhoods that you don't need a car in), that you don't want to take a car, because it's less convenient.
I think this quote really nails it: "A developed country is not where the poor have cars, it's where the rich use public transit"
It's also worth noting that car driving is the worst kind of positive feedback loop (not a positive thing). Cars need Parking, which makes it harder to put things close together, which makes you need to drive places to get there, which makes you need parking. And cars are much bigger than humans, so the amount of space needed for cars, also increases much bigger than it would for humans.
Not to mention that public transport doesn't go everywhere. Even places with healthy and robust public transit networks only reach a subset of a metro area, and only a subset of that has routes that stop with acceptable frequency.
I think the answer lies in things like e-bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. Rail as a high-speed backbone and an e-bike for last-mile sounds close to ideal - especially if I can charge the bike while on the train. Bike lanes ought to be the rule rather than the exception. Bike racks and moped/motorcycle parking spaces (ideally - again - with outlets for charging batteries) could and should be ubiquitous.
Fortunately more cities are starting to experiment with car-free zones, and they are making shared or subscription bikes (e-bikes often, at least in hilly places) more common. People in those areas report being much happier, and actual communities seem to begin to form as there are more people crossing each others' paths on a regular basis.
For me the weakness with public transport isn't so much getting around in the city (I basically never drive in the city), as it is getting out of the city. Getting to my favourite down town restaurant is 15 minutes by car or 20 minutes by public transport door to door, so I take public transport and don't have to worry about parking. Getting to my favourite hiking spot by the coast is 30 minutes by car or 2+ hours by public transport, so I take the car.
I’m hoping there’ll be a more mature rental / car share market, too. It’d make a lot of sense to have no/low-car city centers (e.g. accessibility and delivery only zones, low speed limits & non-prioritized roads, etc.) and more high speed road infrastructure on the edge of cities but the people I know who’ve had significant issues with things like Zipcar reservations seems like the greatest barrier for that. If people are use to going when they want, you need to deliver reliable availability to get them to reconsider.
Even putting vehicle storage on city edges (and/or concentrating it close to highways) would mitigate a lot of the problems we currently see with car-centric infrastructure. Even if I own my own car, I don't necessarily need it to be close by if I can rent a garage somewhere - so long as I can get anywhere in town (including said garage) easily and quickly via public transit and/or bike and/or foot.
This is also where I wish we’d market price it more: having to pay for street parking would make it obvious how much taxpayers have been subsidizing it, often at everyone’s expense (pedestrians stuck with narrow sidewalks, drivers using ostensibly two-way streets which are now only one-way between increasingly large vehicles).
> I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car
Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.
Increasing car costs and reducing lanes/streets/parkings, while making the public transport more frequent/extensive/comfortable, will make citizens choose public transport (or more sustainable means) themselves.
On the other hand, when cities are developed (in certain cultures or at least areas) with private transport in mind, and it can be hard or impossible to redesign for public transport.
> Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.
I'm reading that as, "we don't need to ask, we can just make them do it." Which to me is pretty arrogant.
Society has made the choice so far to make owning a car as convenient and inexpensive as possible, while allocating almost no resources to other options. And no, usage fees including gas taxes don't cover the cost of roads -- let alone the land usage, externalities, and supporting infrastructure like drainage.
HN has a pretty strong majority of US readers, I think. And as I'm American, I recall that many other Americans have little idea what life is really like outside the country. (What goes on day to day, or how life works, in other countries is just not well understood.)
From the US-centric view, society (or rather, energy and automotive companies and their lobbying) has made the decision to put all the focus on cars, and to even put intentional negative spin against public transport.
It seems to be slowly changing in some states or a few cities within some states. And yes, it does seem to be very different depending on which way an area leans politically. The "red" (Republican) areas are vehemently against public transport and frame it as the government trying to take away people's rights to go where they want (in their own cars).
Unfortunately for the areas trying to put energy into public transport and non-car alternatives, there is a vast amount of corporate finance and influence that works against it at all levels of govenerment.
It's also not forcing anybody; it's a shift of conveniences. In a hypothetical situation with fantasy metrics, making a city 2x as comfortable for sustainable means (bikes, motorbikes, public transport) and 0.5x as comfortable for cars will not force anybody to use the former - people who love their time in the cars will still be able to.
(I stress that this applies to cities where logistics make a restructuring possible, which is not the case everywhere)
The US already "makes" commercial and residential building developers dedicate large proportions of their lots to meet minimum parking requirements in order to make it easier for people who want to drive do so. Is this "pretty arrogant" as well?
Tough to say “most”. You’re probably right but a non-zero amount of people who pay luxury cars like Mercedes/BMW want a) status symbols but b) the time they spend in their vehicles as enjoyable.
And not to mention the epidemiological aspect, hello covid. A compromise situation could be individual transport but much smaller than current cars. Because EV's scale much more easily than ICE technology it's practical to have EV's with, say, a three person occupancy that take up half of a current car lane. This is the best of both worlds. Single occupancy vehicles and a city's transportation infrastructure doubles at zero cost.
Speaking of range, ebikes today vary a lot, some do 100 miles but some can only do 20 (which wouldn’t even get me to the office on the shortest route).
It's definitely preferable to grinding brakes to slow the vehicle both because of the reduced wear/pollution and extended range gained from the small bit of charging that occurs.
You don't need to have the one pedal driving enabled to reap the benefits. In all EVs and PHEVs you brake with the electric motors first even when using the actual pedal - normal brakes are engaged only past a certain threshold.
Also to give a personal anecdote, in my Volvo XC60 PHEV, I've just had the inspection done and after 24k miles the brake pads are 5% worn. That's insane for a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. If it wasn't a PHEV I can guarantee that the pads would be nearly worn by now.
Sure. My last car was a Mercedes AMG that needed new pads every 8-10k miles, so I might be a bit biased. But TBF my car before that was a Land Rover Discovery 3 and that was eating pads like crazy despite not driving it aggressively at all - I attributed it to the weight of the vehicle.
You are very out of date, on a modern car the rear brakes will go first. With traction control they move all the braking to the back, if possible, so steering works better. Of course if you brake hard there is no choice but let the front brakes take over, see my comment about bad driving.
This is not true. At least for Teslas, the brake pedal only controls the friction brakes (they are hydraulically coupled). Same with a Chevy bolt. Unsure on other EVs
Yes, Tesla is an outlier in the EV business. They only have one-pedal driving with regen or fully friction braking with the brake pedal. That is not true of the Chevy Bolt.
Almost every other EV (and hybrid) on the market does blended regen with the brake pedal. Regen is applied when you first press on the brake pedal. As long as the pressure is mild to moderate, regen is used. If you press hard (as in emergency braking) the friction brakes are engaged. When you get below about 10mph the friction brakes are also applied as regen is minimal at that speed. The result is that these cars will do regen whether you are using one pedal driving or not and their brakes will wear much less often.
I’m not sure why Tesla doesn’t do blended regen. Early one the manufacturers didn’t have the algorithms tuned and you could feel the transitions but that has not been the case for several year. It seems that Tesla just never bothered. They seem to expect you to only use one-pedal driving and some people do.
One think to watch for if you only use one-pedal driving, your friction brake pads can get rusty from disuse. Then when you do press on the brake pedal, the brakes may grab or may not decelerate as quickly as expected. Some people find that their brake pads are actually frozen from rust and don’t work at all. It is a good idea to once in a while use those friction brakes to scrub off the surface rust.
Well regenerative braking is limited and even more limited when cool. So Tesla's trying to train you to use the brake pedal when you want stronger braking. Makes sense to me, last thing I want is to get half as much braking as I expected.
So with regen I get variable braking, but I get a reward (more range and less brake wear) if I plan ahead enough to make it work. However if there is surprise or immediate need for more braking then the brake pedal is there. So it's pretty much the best of both worlds, once you get used to it.
In a well designed system you have absolutely no idea whether the car is using the regenerative brake or proper brakes when you use the pedal - my Volvo XC60 uses regerative brakes first and you honestly can't tell when the transition happens. There is no "oh shit I need more braking" moment because the pedal operates in a very predictable linear fashion, like in any normal car. Same in my VW e-UP. The algorithms for this have been sorted out for a while now.
So sure, it feels great and provide predictable braking. But is harder to maximize range and minimize brake wear and brake dust.
I generally drive only using regen, because I can tell. If you remove the feedback it's going to be harder, especially since the level of regen available can radically differ based on temperature and level of charge.
So do you want regen to be invisible? Or do you want better range, efficiency, and brake wear?
In my XC60 the dial just goes below zero when you're breaking into regen zone, and then there is a little red area at the end of it - if you get into the red zone, normal brakes are used. So there is feedback, you just don't feel it through the pedal.
Non-Tesla’s also give you “the best of both worlds” by having regen on both the accelerator lift-off and on the bake pedal. Tesla only gives you regen on lift-off.
In Teslas, any time your foot is completely off the accelerator, you're getting maximum regenerative braking. If you then press the brake pedal too, you're getting maximum regenerative braking plus friction braking.
My point was that unless you do something bizarre or go out of your way to make regeneration not happen (e.g., hit both pedals at once, or shift into neutral while braking), the friction brakes will never get used except for when full regen is already getting used.
Right, but they use regen just by releasing the accelerator. So unless you're hitting both pedals at once, you will be regenerating every time you're braking.
And their increased weight makes them much harsher on roads than normal cars. They wear down roads faster, and I suppose they also produces more particle pollution than normal car for this reason.
Threads like this read like EVs are double or more the weight of an ICE car.
EVs are a couple hundred pounds heavier in average than an equivalent ICE car. In terms of road wear, it's still a rounding error compared to industrial trucks.
Yeah, that's my point. A single garbage truck is going to do more wear on the roads than thousands of passenger vehicles. Anything besides industrial vehicles is negligible.
The rear tandems of a semi or heavier straight truck (garbage truck, dump truck, etc) occupy roughly the same road area as your car and may be carrying the weight of ~10x your car. The contact pressure is also much higher (100+psi tires vs your 20-40 or so).
A typical garbage truck has 2 or 3 axles. Let's assume 3 to be conservative. A fully loaded garbage truck weighs around 50,000 pounds. That's 16.6k pounds per axle, vs a Tesla Y's 2.2k pounds per axle.
Doing the math, a single garbage truck does as much road wear as ~3,300 teslas.
Yeah turns out an electric drive train is much lighter than a gasoline one which offsets the battery weight somewhat. Gasoline engines aren't light, nor are the transmissions. Currently I think the weigh penalty is about 15-20%.
My guesstimate is if they can increase the energy density of batteries by 30-50% the weight penalty will disappear. Some of the reduction is the weight reduction of the battery and some is due to cascading effects on the rest of the car.
Typo, fixed. I could have sworn I typed "couple hundred pounds".
But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord. Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear. But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.
> But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord.
At the heaviest weights, yes, but the heaviest Accord weight and the lightest 430i weight are only 148 lbs apart... and the Model Y can weigh in almost 400 lbs heavier than the heaviest of 430i's.
> Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear.
You mean, so long as it's not an EV? ;-)
Seriously, nobody freaks out about a BMW 430i's tire wear, because that of the branding of the car. It's like freaking out over coffee increasing your heart rate.
> But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.
Be fair, those aren't comparable cars. BMW Model 3 and the Tesla model 3 are pretty similar in size, weight, and cost. The fastest of both is AWD and the Tesla is 4072 pounds and the M3 Competition and M3 Touring (the 2 variants with AWD) are 3924 pounds to 4116.
The non performance models are similar as well, the current BMW 3141-4023 pounds (the AWD are of course on the heavier side, and the Tesla model 3 is
3814 pounds.
Because of the weight scaling characteristics (damage done corresponds to fourth power of axle weight), it’s irrelevant if trucks are allowed on the same roads. The damage increase done by EVs is probably not even worth considering.
Any light vehicle traffic is basically inconsequential for any road build to handle any amount of medium trucks or heavy trucks.
Complaining about the 9000lb EV hummer makes for some great circle jerks among the demographics that hate people who drive normal hummers but the road basically doesn't care about them.
Almost all EVs that are not Teslas, use blended regen with the brake pedal. When you press on the brakes, regen is used for light to moderate braking and the friction brakes only come into play on hard braking. Most EVs product little brake dust and their brakes last a long time due to this regen. Teslas are the anomaly here.
My curiosity here, but is it true as well for bikes (e-bikes or not) using disc brakes? As fair as I understand they are really similar with car's one...
I think auto infrastructure should be designed around lower steady speeds with roundabouts and stop signs and lights, at least in the US. Right now we have high speed limits, wide roads which encourage speeding, but a lot of stop signs, long stop lights and driveway filled stroads that are terrible for everyone.
I'd like narrower lanes, bump outs raised intersections and crosswalks to slow traffic. Reduce curb cuts and driveways to cut down on conflicts - thinking Dutch style access streets and alleys that connect to the less interrupted travel lane.
The added benefit of lower speeds would make it safer for bikes and pedestrians and reduce auto crash fatalities.
Slower steady speeds would reduce stooa go, dropping noise and particulate emission from acceleration.
Cars should be smart enough to automatically adapt the allowed driving style to their surroundings. There is no reason why cars should be able to accelerate at maximum torque on normal city roads. Or go their max speed.
According to the linked article excluding some compounds would be lower hanging fruit. Though I agree tires could use a higher tax given how much of a problem they produce.
I worked in a temporary office for a summer next to a large overpass. It had no AC so we had the windows open most afternoons. The amount of particulate that would coat everything in just a single afternoon shocked me.
I had a link once to a government paid for study that claimed tire and brake dust were about 5-10% of the dust produced by light cars. The rest being tailpipe emissions. Of course brake dust, tire dust, and exhaust PM2.5 aren't the same types of dust. So feels to me like grasping for straws especially considering no one makes the same arguments against large SUV's and trucks.
Wait, we…do…have public transport. Effective and useful public transport. In NYC 60% of people commute with it. Boston, DC, SF, Chicago, Philadelphia… You might have a specific gripe because it doesn’t take you exactly where you want to go with exactly the comfort you think you need, but these places have public transit that is good enough for hundreds of thousands or even millions to use every day
Having lived in a few of those cities, I’d say NYC is very much the exception. It’d be great if every major city’s public transit was as good, but it’s inadequate or barely adequate for a large percentage of the area of those other cities.
If you look outside of the USA lots of cities have good public transport systems that aren't plagued by poverty, crime, homelessness and mental illness. Just because Americans have decided to optimize their society to maximize misery of a minority for the benefit of an even smaller minority doesn't make it necessary.
It's the other way round: cities that aren't plagued by homelessness, rampant drug use, and criminality can have good public transit. Middle class people simply won't pay (in taxes or directly) for public transit that acts as a homeless shelter and routinely features crimes against them.
Western European countries are also much stricter on law and order via transit. Brussels, for example, deploys heavily armed police to check fares on the metro often. And Switzerland…you really don’t want to break the laws there even if you have nothing to lose.
You're getting downvoted to hell, but there's some truth to this. No one wants to ride Hotel 22 as a passenger, and homeless people on Bart is at least a small negative for ridership. Caltrain doesn't have this problem because they do fare enforcement, a ticket only gets you one ride, and its mostly a commuter train. Caltrain even lets people drink on the train and its not a problem, but it's because of the crowd they serve.
> Caltrain even lets people drink on the train and its not a problem, but it's because of the crowd they serve.
Even Caltrain gets rowdy on the game days, particularly with people on the bike cars refusing to give way to bikers boarding/deboarding in the intermediate stops. While this only happens occasionally, it made me miss my stop enough times (in addition to lack of safety with last mile biking) to completely give up on Caltrain.
EVERYDAY CITY DRIVING - I drive whenever I need or want, without ever worrying about range. If I notice the expected range has dipped below ~60 miles, give or take, I plug it in at home at the end of my day. I'm delighted that I never have to go to a gas station, which reeks of all that smelly/poisonous/explosive stuff.
LONG TRIPS - I charge to 100% the night before, get on the road, and stop to charge only if/when the software tells me I should. The longest trip I've taken is ~325 miles, and it requires only one 15-20 minute stop to get 150+ miles of range at a supercharger (I grab a snack and go to the bathroom). Whenever possible, I try to stay in/go to places with destination charging, so I can plug the EV and find it fully charged by next morning.
I'm not sure I agree that 325mi is a long trip. I used to live in FL and you can drive more than 600mi and stay in the state. I now live in Texas where that number jumps to about 900mi. I'm sure in California it's at least 500mi.
EVs can be great if your commute is less than 30mi one way, but that doesn't make them good for road trips. At least in the US.
I’ve done >800 miles in a day a few times (San Jose <-> Seattle) with my EV (Ioniq 5). It was fine, stopped every 2-3 hours for 15-20 mins. Granted, it’s one of the better supplied charging corridors in the US, so your hassle/overhead may vary depending on where you are going.
325 miles is a long trip to drive IMO. My threshold for when a road trip is "long" is 250 miles.
As for commuting, your 30 miles number is way low. Even if you accepted this article's ridiculously low 50% as true, most modern EVs (think 300 mile range) would still be fine for a commute that's 75 miles each way even with no charging at work. And that's way further than most people commute (to put it in perspective, living in Philadelphia and commuting to Manhattan would be 75 miles each way).
Author first assumes that only 60% of the available battery capacity is used (80% > 20%) and then arrives at the conclusion that the range is lower than expected. Well, no shit.
I personally do charge my Ioniq BEV to 100%, and I often drive it to, say, 6%.
In summer, I get a range of 220km, and in winter 160-180km, depending on temperature and number of cold starts (cold starts seem to trigger a battery warm-up). SOH is still at 100% after almost 3 years.
Select charge-locations with 4+ chargers available, and in the larger charge-locations along motorway/freeway intersections, there's usually chargers from multiple networks/suppliers, so even failures on a backend of one provider can be worked around by using another network.
Doing 2000km this week, I only encountered 1 case where I had to use the 50kw charger, as it was the only one available (there were 2 300kw chargers, 1 in use and 1 in maintenance-mode). Most charge-locations had 4+ available and unused stalls, with various locations having 10+ 150kw+ stations.
Availability can be seen in many charge-apps miles before you get to the location, so if you see it at 75%+ capacity, select a different location.
This is a very nice theory. Does not work in practice.
Got into France, north of Troyes in Enyaq, last 20km in battery. Only chargers there in 30km perimeter are Freshmile 22kW chargers, which won't charge my car (can't start session, car refuses charger, tested 3 of them). Was able to save myself in local PSA dealership, which got their own charger and gave me 20km more so I can get to Troyes to Ionity charger.
What is extremely annoying is
* This is a large network, yet not compatible and there is no way to figure that out.
* The car was actually trying to lead me on those charger via its own internal navigation, so even somebody who was creating this map believed that those chargers are compatible, yet they aren't.
* I could never get into such situation with gas. In the most extreme case, I could have just use funnel to get the gas into the tank if hose would not be compatible with my car.
So the fact that there are chargers around you means nothing at all if you don't know if they are working and are compatible without your car.
Not OP and drive a Tesla. Charging stations are pretty large at least where I live. 10–15 chargers minimum and the Tesla nav system tells you in advance how many are available to use.
I mean, you can't walk to the nearest working charger with a gas can, but if you have your level 1 charger with you, you can probably find an outlet nearby. Utility electricity is nearly ubiquitous along highways. Any sort of building near a highway is bound to have electric service; the question is if you can convince the occupants to let you charge for a couple hours.
If there's a big queue, you just wait. Same as if there's a big queue at the fueling station.
The guy replying to you said it's a pretty unlikely situation, so you treat it the same as other unlikely, but always present, issues that your car might have. You accept his answer.
Or you don't, and argue with him and say that you think he's wrong and it's going to happen too often, that's a fine reply too.
6% is likely enough to get you to another charging site, or a regular outlet for a slower charge. I’d expect AAA-style roadside assistance to deal with these scenarios in the near future, as well.
Personally I've never run into this but -- a long queue would be fine, the car doesn't eat up much electricity idling. As for charger status, I mostly use the Electrify America app for finding a charging station (i get 2 years free with my car) and it's good for showing charger count and availability. So, if a charger was out of commission, it would just show 3/4 available.
Google maps will actually show similar availability of various other company stations.
I just don’t. With 6% (sometimes less) I arrive only at home or at sites with multiple chargers. Apps in the EU can show operating status for individual points, but I‘ve stopped looking that up at some point.
I see colleagues that have to choose a new EV and use the EPA rating as an actual distance ("Oh I can drive to Paris in 1 go"). They don't know that you normally don't start from 100%, and you don't go down to 0%. Your 94% range usage is impressive, but not the norm for daily usage. Most people follow their vendor's recommendations for battery longevity.
Most people also don't drive 400km+ in "daily usage." When they do they charge to 100%. Just like in a gas car you don't fill the tank 100% every day. But you do before a long trip. Can you imagine the article "well acshually, your gas car daily range is much lower because you don't usually start with a full tank!"
We went on several long trips with this car (600-800km), with all the bathroom breaks we didn’t really notice the charging much. Took maybe half an hour longer than with an ICE. And that’s with the first gen Ioniq, with quite low range. I bet with an Ioniq 5 we wouldn’t notice any difference at all.
My article talks about daily usage. For long distance travel, obviously I charge to higher % and I use Superchargers. Although even in those circumstances, I never reach 400km between charges, more like 300-350km. Never the ilusive 533 km.
Range depends on so many things - speed, acceleration, elevation, temperature (not only from heating/AC but there’s also increased drag in winter from air resistance), wind, precipitation, tire pressure, tire profile.
You can try following trucks closely on highways, the reduced drag does wonders.
If you have a Tesla, really watch that gas pedal. Strong acceleration is fun but super bad for range.
So you deliberately don't charge the battery to 100% then conclude the realistic range is shorter than advertised? I get you don't charge to 100% every day, but if you know you're going to drive further then....you do. Or just do what I do and charge to max each time, the battery is warrantied for 8 years, it's going to be fine.
>>Imagine your daily commute is 115 km (e.g. Roeselare-Brussel
That would be an extremely unusual commute to be doing by car in Europe, people do it but it's very rare. If you're going to be covering over 1000km a week(!!!!) Then get a good diesel, not a brand new EX90.
Even if you do 100%, with just 1 year of used, my Tesla battery on 100% charge shows 320 miles, which is a far cry from 358 advertised.
Plus the other estimates are correct. The range drops if it’s too cold, or if it is too hot, or if you use any of the features that the car advertises, or if you’re driving on a freeway, or if it is a stop and go traffic, or if you gain elevation, or basically if you use your car as a car.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love my car and I would never drive an non EV again, and a non Tesla EV at the moment. But calling out the marketing bs is totally fair.
My Y is showing about 93% of rated range after 19k miles, FWIW.
> The range drops if [...] you gain elevation
That's true, but unless you're driving inexorably up into the Himalayas, you're going to come down that hill. EVs have a magic trick they can play in that situation. :)
In point of fact regenerative braking makes EV's equivalent range penalty in hilly terrain much (MUCH) better than any fuel-burning vehicle.
I doubt it would outperform EPA estimates (you can only recapture energy not create it afresh with regenerative braking), but compared to ICE cars the percentage of stated range would be very high.
It’s because air resistance is a much bigger drag on efficiency for an EV, so stop and go traffic is a bit more closer to its ideal efficiency (which is going slow without stopping).
The Chevy Volt PHEV had an estimated 53-mile all electric range. During the summer, I routinely got 56-60, and once got 67.5 miles before the engine had to kick in.
I used a Nissan Leaf as my thrice weekly commuter vehicle for several months. It couldn't quite make the full round trip on a 100% charge and there was nowhere to plugin at work. For a while, I'd go to Ikea at lunch and charge there during my lunch break. That was enough extra charge to make it all the way home but going to Ikea each day for lunch got old fast. Instead, I started stopping at charge point near a Fry's on the way home but even Fry's got boring after a few days. Then I discovered if I got off the freeway about fifteen miles earlier than my usual exit and used surface streets, I could make it home even though it was a bit longer distance and plenty of stop lights, stop signs, and traffic slower than the highway. I suspect the lower wind resistance at the slower speed is what provided the extra bit so I could get home with about nine miles of range showing on the dash. Probably wasn't good for the battery but it was the last few months of a lease and never ended up losing any bars of range. The anxiety sure was real.
My experience has been that the car does best when you’re driving at a steady speed of 25mph without having to stop. This is based on the internal chart that Tesla provides.
When you’re in stop and go, you actually use a lot more energy to go from 0->X but do not regenerate back enough when you come down to 0. On the other hand, maintaining a steady 25mph uses a lot less energy as compared to 0->X. Again, this is based on the Tesla energy usage data that they themselves show in car.
USA traffic engineers love stop lights which force idling. Fortunately some European tech to stop/start the engine is arriving in USA. In isolated cases, some USA intersections are being converted to traffic circles.
Installation of new stop lights should require a giant pollution fine paid by government.
It can be turned off, and there's very little visual indication that this has happened. The feature bugs some drivers, so if you have a second driver, they could have easily done it.
I've had this this issue on my Mercedes before, the cause turned out to be the 12V battery that never charged properly, so the system didn't want to activate.
> What percentage should I charge the battery to?
>
> For regular use, we recommend keeping your car set within the 'Daily' range bracket, up to approximately 90%. Charging up to 100% is best saved for when you are preparing for a longer trip. You can adjust how full the battery charges from the charge settings menu.
> [tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation/faq](https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation/faq)
> There are two reasons: charging performance and battery longevity. Most of the time you should only charge an EV to 80% because charging rates slow down dramatically past the 80% mark. And two, the long-term health of your vehicle’s battery pack is improved when kept below 100%.
> [witricity.com](https://witricity.com/newsroom/blog/the-80-rule/)
The “charging slows down” is only true for DC fast charging. If you’re charging at home it doesn’t have an effect because the ratio of input energy to battery size is already so small.
That's only true of NMC batteries, not of LFP ones, which their Model 3 SR now ships with. With LFP batteries, it's better for them to charge them to 100%.
> That would be an extremely unusual commute to be doing by car in Europe, people do it but it's very rare. If you're going to be covering over 1000km a week(!!!!) Then get a good diesel, not a brand new EX90.
There's no talk of outlawing any vehicles people already own. You won't be able to buy a brand new one in a decade, but there's no indication you won't be able to use one you already own.
Yes, from this year and applies to new vehicles allocated to employees. Companies generally lease or long term rent in Belgium. What I hear, people are now replacing their car parks.
How so, exactly? There's no way for anyone to check how much a battery was charged regularly, just like there's no way to check if a car was only used to drive to church once a week or driven like a hooligan hitting redline all the time - I'm not suggesting fraud of course, far from it - just that buyers have to assume the worst possible use case, and if so I don't see how actually regularly charging the battery to max affects the resale value at all. Besides, I don't expect the resale value to be very high after 8 years(realistically more) anyway.
I believe the SoC (state of charge) history is recorded for Teslas and other EVs. There is a company called Recurrent [1] which uses this data to estimate battery degradation. I think the idea is to generate something like a Carfax report for used EV battery packs.
I agree this is a cultural problem. Houses are seen as retirement vehicle, etc. I think it's partially a sales tactic, to switch your brain into "investing" mode and willing to fork up a lot of cash and leverage (I'm "investing" in a Tesla, see how much gas i'll save?).
It's double edged, the first edge is selfish, maximum extraction of value. The second is definitely not exclusive to Americans - taking care of your belongings and reducing the rate of sending things to landfill.
Because the better the resale, the nicer the car you can afford to replace it. Most new cars are kept for 3 years and traded in, (or leased) so the better the resale the more money to put into your next car. Or if you lease the less your lease will be.
Those who buy used cars keep their cars longer, and are willing to pay more for a car they think will last longer.
Sure, there will be groups of people who are doing that. But to commute 200km a day? That will be something like 0.0001% of all workers, I cannot imagine it's any more than that.
You'd be surprised. Belgium is weird. Lots of companies in Brussels, which is central in Belgium. And lots of people commute in. Every day, going and coming back.
The freeways are clogged every morning going towards Brussels and every evening leaving Brussels.
I can believe the motorways are clogged, it's a capital city after all - but who lives 100km away from their workplace, and why? I knew someone who did this in Germany, but his argument has always been that actually, this is "only" 30-60 minutes away on the autobahn depending on conditions(which I still think was nuts), but from what you're saying people accept 2-3 hours per day(!!!!) In a car just to get to work? That's nuts, and again, I really doubt it's common in any way shape or form.
While the sticker estimates of range are probably advertising, and the % battery to range meter you get in the app / dashboard is junk, the drive estimates are spot on.
When you enter a destination, it will tell you very precisely how much energy it will take, accounting for every current condition, including temp. This must surely be data driven because it is alarmingly good. So your day to day use will not involve these guessing games, imho
This is the point my EV-skeptical relatives don't get.
"What are you going to do if the battery runs out in the middle of nowhere?" they ask.
"The same thing you will do if you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere: Call a tow truck." I reply.
I cannot get them to understand that they're asking the wrong question. The right question is "How do you ensure that you won't unexpectedly run out of energy?"
They don't run out of gas in the middle of nowhere because gas stations are everywhere. I don't run out of energy because the car does an exquisite job of tracking and predicting energy usage, as well as helping me find charging locations. It's an alternative (and IMO better) solution to the problem of running out of energy, but too many ICE drivers cannot conceive that there even could be another solution than "gas stations everywhere."
For example, when driving a long distance (150m+), it told me that I could have saved X miles if my tires were inflated another 5psi, and saved Y miles if I had used less cabin heating.
That's impressive. I can see accounting for the state of the world, weather, and the elevation change and cornering between A and B, but being able to generate counterfactuals "if X were true or Y were true" is strong stuff.
Just did a 1000km (and back) drive this week, using a Kia Niro, which does about 400km on 64kWh. Was amazed I actually managed to drive this distance with 4 charges one way, and just 3 on the way back, reaching almost 400km actually on the first leg of the return trip (though this was downhill from the Alps). With longer roadtrips you want to go way below 20% remaining charge. With the quality of the charging-network in western-europe, and using ABetterRoadPlanner I managed to get a charge at 2% and a second one at 8% remaining, thus giving you 25% more capacity than re-charging at ~20% (~4-80 compared to 20-80). And this was with winter-tires and a full car. Sure, the actual range is still lower than the EPA / WLTP / NEDC range, but very usable and predictable.
That's not really amazing. That's a massive waste of time. I got 260km per charge in Enyaq iv80 going 130km/h on highway so cca same as you. That's 2 hours of driving and 1 hour of charging on 150kW+ charger.
My understanding is that the preservation of the battery is built into the charge controller and you shouldn’t have to worry about it. In other words when your car says it’s fully charged it’s only “really” charged to 80% or some other cutoff as determined by the charge controller. I don’t drive a Tesla so my only point of reference is my Fiat 500e which doesn’t have as far as I know a setting to limit battery charging to a certain percentage and I would think most consumers just plug in overnight without thought to this.
The author assumes that all EVs behave like Teslas. Other car manufacturers are aiming for simpler UI, and the charging system itself is meant to deal with the oddities of deciding exactly how much to charge the car to. For instance the often don't show a charge percentage but an estimated range with bounds.
I apologize for not bringing a link but there is a beautiful story of real world range that shows that Teslas are systematically over reporting their range. It was posted recently. The author should probably read it before generalizing...
> The author assumes that all EVs behave like Teslas.
It's not a Tesla thing, it's just battery chemistry. Virtually all EVs are being sold with NMC batteries which don't like sitting at 100%. We're starting to see a few LiFePO4 cars arrive on the market, which is a heavier but much more durable chemistry. Most of those are BYD cars, with a few other Chinese brands.
Ironically the most common iron phosphate car to be seen on western roads is... a batch of chinese-made Tesla Model 3 RWD's that reached the US market last year.
It doesn't matter if the 80/90% charging is hidden in the UI or not. The EPA uses a 100% -> 0% range, and all vendors use this range in their marketing material.Of course they do, because people compare product sheets when choosing.
The actual range you will use day-to-day is way less. That's what I wanted to point out.
Many Teslas being produced today use lithium-iron phosphate batteries, which can be charged to 100% without degradation. If you have an LFP-based Tesla, you won't get the notification.
The Tesla app asks you how high the battery should charge (where I choose 80% for daily use), and it will warn you no to take higher than 90% except for sporadic long-distance travelling.
Charging above 80% is also a complete waste of time, unless you're charging overnight.
The fuller the battery is, the slower it charges. 10%-80% charge often takes same or less time than the final 80%-100%, so when road tripping it makes much more sense to make a few short top-ups than wait forever for last percent to trickle-charge.
"Cold weather has an influence on the battery capacity too."
I take this to mean that the author acknowledges GAS cars are also affected by cold weather. There's just no escaping thermodynamics. It's also like pointing out GAS cars' MPG is reduced by 20%+ in cold weather. While it's true, it's like pointing out a gotcha edge case for all cars. So the conclusion can also apply the same way to GAS cars. 'Next time you estimate the mileage, take a 20% discount!'
According to energy.gov[1]:
Cold weather and winter driving conditions can significantly reduce fuel economy. Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
That article seems a bit misleading. I have to think the impact of cold weather on an ICE vehicle is highly variable on other factors. It certainly wasn't quite so bad when I was growing up in Canada, and most of the variance was attributable to differences in winter vs. summer fuel mixes.
Most of the effects it describes are only in effect while the car is warming up, and given that say, engine oil typically warms up to around 70C when operating, it's hard to believe that the difference between starting at say -10C vs 20C is really going to add up for anything more than a VERY short drive (one that, if you cared about fuel economy or environmental impact, you'd probably just make on foot).
Sure, if you have electric seat warmers and the like, that could add up, but one of the "advantages" of an ICE car is their inefficiency leads to lots of waste heat, so they can keep the car cabin warm just from that, without needing to use electric heaters at all (keeping the interior cabin warm is one of the primary factors that sucks up EV range in cold weather).
No where did the energy.gov article nor parent article mention interior heating. The discussion was always about battery performance vs ICE performance degradation under cold weather.
Actually I wasn't referring to ICE, just that the climate influenced the realistic daily range too. But your remark is very interesting, I would have thought that combustion did not suffer much from the cold.
I believe those were factors once upon a time, but modern cars tend to heavier and more aerodynamic than they once were, so drag is less of a factor... and the air gets warmed up prior to combustion, which minimizes the impact of its initial temperature.
'Lane ends by saying EVs can "work as well as ICE counterparts in many, or even most, ordinary situations." But in the extraordinary ones, like 16-hour blizzard traffic jams? "We're not there yet.'
I charge my Bolt EV to 100% every day. Most manufacturers provide some headroom so rated capacity is less than actual and you aren't hitting 100% SOC, just what the car reports.
What the OP also omits is that you gain range during fair weather. My Bolt EPA rating is 255 miles, but I've gotten 303 miles in the summer and as low as 191 in the winter.
I have the same experience with my Kona EV. Official range 415 km, but in the summer it's actually ~450 km. (Not that I ever run 100%-0% of course, but I get 90 km going from 80% down to 60%.)
Same with a Kia Niro EV I had, which is on a shared platform with the Kona. I think it was 239 miles EPA rated, in the summer it was quite easy to exceed. I don't have a lead foot and drive pretty efficiently though.
Great car, good space, level 2 driver assists and very efficient which offset the slow DC charge speed. Relatively lightweight for an EV at 3800lbs as well.
For a data point outside the Kia/Hyundai family, I get a similar experience with my Nissan Leaf. Nominal range is 215 miles, but I usually get 220-240 as long as it's all at lower speeds. If I get on the highway for any length of time, it's more like 150-200 depending on exactly how fast I go and whether it's winter.
> the slow DC charge speed
AFAICT this is one of the major differences between the semi-affordable EVs like ours and the Tesla/Jaguar/Audi kind. The Leaf might well be the worst in this regard TBH, but I certainly wasn't going to pay 50% more (at least) just for faster DC charging which I rarely use anyway. It's just one part of the overall experience, not worth that much to most of us.
The author says his average mileage is 184Wh/km. I've seen similar numbers in other sources: about 200Wh/km.
I am an avid cyclist. When I output 200W for an hour I can go 20-30km depending on the terrain. Maybe 15 if it's steep uphill all the way. Cyclists are not very aerodynamic. They sit high and have boxy shape. A small vehicle can be much more efficient (the reason recumbents beat standard bikes on a track).
It all seems so wasteful to me. It's true sometimes you need to carry load or more people, or go to very steep uphill, or maybe sometimes you really need to go fast. In vast majority of cases though, especially inside populated areas it's one person and a short trip. You carry your 2 ton metal box with you, use 20-30x more energy than a cyclist would and take so much space traffic jams are inevitable.
True innovation those electric cars. The very definition of missing the forest for a tree.
Wouldn’t you rather want to compare manually operating a bicycle to an electric bicycle? They’ve basically taken over China for more than a decade now, so it’s not like they are uncommon.
E-bikes are fine. My point was that bikes are not very efficient because of shitty aerodynamics. A light, low and narrow electric vehicle would be more efficient and more palatable to a lot of people than bikes.
It's not true at all!
Most of the forces you have to overcome when cycling are from air resistance. At around 10mph it's already majority of resistance and at about 18mph it's more than 80%.
This is the reason the best upgrade speed wise for a casual road cyclists are tight clothes. This is also the reason you could be way more efficient if you construct a tear drop shaped vehicle. Illustration from Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient
The author is claiming way more (and worse) than they can actually back up. Different EVs actually get different percentages of their nominal mileage, and then respond differently to cold weather. I like this one for range under semi-optimal conditions.
I'd take that second one with a little grain of salt, though. I know that my 2022 Nissan Leaf SV+ gets more than the 175 miles they claim for summer (as long as I keep my speed down which is another factor OP seems to ignore). Haven't really given it a real winter workout, but I'd expect that number to be a bit higher than that table's 125 too. That's a very far cry from OP's claim of only ~110 miles.
Some might try to dismiss that as anecdata, but so is OP. Claims based on their one empirical observation, failing to account for known confounders and clearly wrong for a second sample, are kind of worthless. I'm not trying to propose any grand theory like they are. Find out the right numbers for your vehicle, routes, temperatures, and driving style.
If you preheat the battery I've noticed far better winter driving range. In fact, I only recently noticed because I always preheat the cabin which preheats the battery. Recently I didn't do that and was pretty surprised at how much energy it used while it warmed up.
If you typically plug in at home you should always be preheating the car before going out.
>Imagine your daily commute is 115 km (e.g. Roeselare-Brussel) and you can’t charge at the office. Then you need 230km realistic daily range, and probably more like 300km. The only cars that come near that, are the Volvo EX90 or the BMW i7. Those are not cheap cars.
Realistic daily range is a bullshit phrase that assumes you will never have access to a fast charger. I understand realistic range, e.g. you can not go as far in cold, and daily range, e.g. you need to go 230km every day. I'm calling out how a combination of the two terms somehow excludes the ability to refuel when needed on that 230km commute. If you're going to be realistic, be realistic.
Despite the provocative headline, it's not a bad rule of thumb.
But at least in the US, pretty much any new EV you can buy has a rated range of 200 miles or more. More than 100 miles of commuting per day is a lot! Also, workplace charging is becoming more of a thing, and would effectively double your range without any additional inconvenience.
Ironically, the inefficiency of ICEV engines is what makes them less variable in their range. First, you get heating for free because the engine produces an abundance of excess heat. Second, since the engines are at best 30% efficient, the effect of things like drag and grade are far less noticeable in terms of fuel consumption.
Calling out an enormous assumed fact in this article that I very much doubt is the case. Author claims people don't charge to 100%: they absolutely do.
Tesla advises 90% max, other sources advise charging to 80% to save battery performance. I use 80% for day-to-day, 90% for longer day trips, 100% for international travel.
[tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation/faq](https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation/faq)
I am aware of that. I charge my Tesla to about 50-70% as most of my infrequent trips are short. But I also don’t write articles complaining about low mileage.
This article was inspired by colleagues who are choosing their first EV and use the EPA range as an actual distance. I have colleagues that live > 100km from work. I wanted to point out that an EPA rating of 350km doesn't mean the car is a good match.
Good point. For daily long range commute EVs are not the best option right now. Even if you add some charge midway, it still takes 20–30 minutes, so not ideal.
(Saying that, if gas prices are a major concern then EVs could still be the preferred choice.)
Impossible due to laws of physics surrounding diffusion based batteries. The vehicle would be so big to accommodate the heavier and heavier battery it would not be street legal.
Green hydrogen will be an eventual solution for those use cases.
Totally agree, EPA ranges are bullshit. The real world has these things called hills that they've probably never heard of in Washington DC. It also doesn't snow much in in DC so they probably don't know about that either.
They really should be reporting 50% of their ranges as standard. When people get slightly better than that, they'll be pleasantly surprised and it will result in much more customer satisfaction across the board.
ALWAYS underpromise and overdeliver if you want happy customers.
The EPA doesn't have competitors, they can totally do this just to increase electric car satisfaction which will help drive adoption.
Everyone will be all over social media with videos saying how their car was rated for 300km but they got 400km out of it and EVs will start getting very, very positive reviews.
This just shows another reason EVs are unrealistic at least in rural USA. 200 km or 125 miles in cold weather. And that's for a Tesla a top of the line EV. Even if you live in the city most people want ability to travel long distances. I just reviewed consumer reports reviews of EVs. Not at all impressed. Overall ratings were very low for most cars. Charging is proprietary for the most part or slow or just in general a hassle. To get decent reviews you need to spend $50k at minimum. The tax rebate may help to extend the fantasy for a while but even Tesla owners are getting disillusioned. For the most part Tesla has saturated the market for high end EVs and the rest are low quality or suffer technical problems. I mean the vision is enticing but most Americans won't put up with the expense and hassle. And attempts to legislate the hassle won't bode well for politicians or will result in the predictable deadline extensions. And this is not even taking into consideration the extreme burden it will put on the grid which is not at all prepared for hundreds of millions of electric vehicles.
If you are driving an hour both ways every day in a cold climate, yeah, EV probably isn't the right fit for another couple of years. It's also an extreme end of usage. I imagine that a large portion of those people in a rural community don't drive more than 60 miles a day. It is also why the average commute per a person is not 125 miles but substantially less in the US.
For reference, 125 miles is about Louisville, KY to Indianapolis, IN.
125 miles is nothing in the US. It's not about commuting, it's about road trips to the next city, the next state. Sure most people are not doing that every day but they are doing that a few times a year to visit friends, family, and for business. And then what? Meticulouly planning your charges and timing your breaks? or taking a bus or a plane? If you've just spent $50,000 on an EV I would imagine you want to drive not worry about whether you are going to be stuck without a charge. EV success is about selling to the average driver, not EV and green enthusiasts.
It's the range between charging stops, not the range until you abandon the car and walk.
With the current 800V battery tech you need to spend 20-30 minutes charging per 2-3 hours of driving. It's not as fast as a pee-in-the-bottle cannonball run, but only about 10% slower than a normal ICE car trip time.
Check out actual times with https://abetterrouteplanner.com with a fast-charging car like a recent Tesla model or Kia EV6/Ioniq 5/GV60.
If by meticulously planning you mean using a navigation system that most EVs come with, I don’t see why this is hard? Sure, Tesla provides better routing software than EV manufacturers, but this isn’t a hard problem (this is HN, so we should have some affinity for software).
But 115km each way (230km round trip) 5 days per week is a problem. We should not be doing this, at least not in individual cars. That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road, not to mention its contribution to general traffic.
The focus should be on how to reduce the commute distance (or eliminate it as often as possible), and to build/use efficient mass transit systems.
So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy - with diminishing returns. At some point it's time to step back and rethink the greater system. (I believe that point was 20+ years ago, when it became clear that cities would continue to become the population growth centers.)