I recently changed job; I used to fill my car every week now every other week. (60 miles roundtrip to 30 miles roundtrip)
I also have some times where I have to drive 10.2 hours(730 miles one way) almost non-stop. When I have to do something like that, I want to drive. Not stop and wait.
The Tesla trip planner with the Model 3 Long Range edition for that drive show it will take 13h for the same drive so about 28% longer with 4 stops @ 30min each.
it would be cool if people felt like the environmental benefits were enough and didn't have to muddy the waters with made up other factoids.
if you want to buy an EV for the environment, great, more power to you, but stop trying to convince people that it's reasonable to sit and wait 45 minutes every few hours. You may find that acceptable but many of us don't.
I wouldn't find it acceptible but also I don't do that. Like people said more like 15 minutes. There's some art to it - don't charge to full during the trip, and to reduce your trip time, reduce your velocity to lower than max safe speed.
I do find it would be reasonable to pass laws to force you to switch to an EV even if it causes you some inconvenience, so that the likely future of my children and their peers is better.
I plotted from Atlanta, GA to Harrisburg, PA. You can do the same, it calls for 2 ~ 25 minute charges and 2 ~ 30 minute charges.
That's not "more like 15 minutes."
I would assume their trip planner is already calculating the optimal balance of speed and charge.
>I do find it would be reasonable to pass laws to force you to switch to an EV even if it causes you some inconvenience, so that the likely future of my children and their peers is better.
I am glad that you are willing to restrict the ability of people to live their lives because it won't have an inverse impact to you.
This thread started with the parent belittling someone else for not having the same use case. It is a shame that it has continued in that direction rather than explore ways to capture all use cases.
My data is mostly from having driven around longish trips on the West Coast where I expected it to be a much worse experience than it was, between the bath room breaks, food, faster charges when empty, etc.
If you haven’t tried it, I don’t think the idea that the route planning software gives does not reflect the actual experience, at least my experiences. Now I am not a hardcore stay in the car ten hours driver so YMMV.
The technology is getting rapidly better, all the use cases will be addressed before the fleet turns over. I had a leased Leaf in 2016 which was a lot worse than the used Model 3 I picked up in 2020, and the options I expect to have if I buy again seem to all be better each year. So far tho, the Leaf was destroyed in a pretty small fender bender, the Model 3 is holding up well.
That’s why the phase out is for a long time and involves public subsidies.
I have ridden in cabs that were owner operated that were electric already. TCO was better for the owner despite their great cost consciousness. And a lot of poorer people drive very efficient cars, it’s the rich that tend to be the “showy wasters of resources, screw every one else” folks.
It would be cool if we accepted that while the technology is getting better, it is not there for some use cases and people.
28% more is significant and just understand that we are not just talking about time spent. You factor that into my trip and suddenly I am awake for 2 more hours, more chance of a crash. Multiply that across the population and see what that does to death rates.
Most people live in a family situation where they have more than one car. They could replace one ICE car with an EV and not have any problems, the ICE becomes the family vacation car.
Starlink available? It's not cheap, but should offer at least faster download speeds most of the time and better than 1Mbps upload from what I've read.
Starlink is cheap - where I am at least - and it just got cheaper. I get 300/40 with it for €40/mo., which they just reduced from €65. I mean, dog slow fixed line fibre in the nearby village is €50 a month. If ISPs aren’t careful starlink is going to eat their breakfast. It’s also faster and cheaper than LTE.
Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice -- cell coverage tends to be incredibly spotty away from major roads. In populated areas, enough people are irrationally frightened of cell radiation to NIMBY additional cell towers required for coverage.
I have no idea where you got that information from. I've been using T-Mobile for about half a year now, and it's leaps and bounds better than the ATT DSL I was using beforehand. I went from 30 Mbps down to 200, and even during high usage periods it's well over 100. Their customer service is also far less of a pain in the ass than ATT or Charter.
why on earth would this comment be downvoted? This is absolutely true in some places, particularly in smaller states. To the downvoters, please go try using cell-based internet in nearly any big city in Wyoming and let us know how that goes. Idaho has a much higher population and even much of that is way too unreliable for home internet.
It’s irrelevant, and wrong. 20 minutes outside a major US city wouldn’t be in Wyoming or Idaho; it would be in an area serviced by one of the newer 5G Internet offerings that gets 100-300 down. Or at least about to be.
Complaining about rain and cloudy days doesn’t matter when leaving a connection capped at 20/1. In practice it does work well from the perspective of someone leaving a bad wired service.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Cellular home internet isn't the same thing as your cell phone; you can be 20 miles from the nearest tower without it being an issue. Def not 300 down at that distance but when all you need to beat is 20 it's no issue.
I didn't downvote the comment. Just wanting to address this idea:
> in nearly any big city in Wyoming
Every "big city" in Wyoming is smaller and way more remote than most "small cities" in the rest of the country. It is not really a good representation of the rest of the country. There are only four cities which break 30,000 people. There's 40 in Texas with over 100,000. Being 20 minutes out from a city of < 30,000 people is pretty radically different from being 20 minutes out from a city of > 1M people.
There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country. I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc. Its way more difficult to operate cell infrastructure in such a place, and then on top of that each valley only has a few customers to try and cover the cost.
All in all, the experience of cellular infrastructure in Montana and Idaho are massively different from the majority of the rest of US consumers.
I've got family in the suburbs 20 minutes out from the deep urban areas of a large city. Their main home internet is T-Mobile 5G. It has stable and low enough latency for them to work remote a remote job with videocalling, they play regular online games and they even do Playstation cloud gaming on it without issue. I've seen it being demoed at county fairgrounds far outside the big cities where they offered free wifi, I was able to get pretty stable low latencies (~25ms) at several hundred megabits of throughput with a dozen+ people using it at the same time.
It might not work in every market. There's a lot of variables in place, even within a specific geographic area. But it is something viable for a large chunk of US households.
> I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc.
I can't downvote you since you replied to my comment, but that's a pretty patronizing thing to say, (it's also classic big city elitism). You know absolutely nothing about me, so assuming that I'm some backward uber dumbass who hasn't even "looked out a window" let alone travelled anywhere else is not a safe assumption, and that's before we even get into my experience designing/deploying wireless comm systems.
Assumptions like that just make you sound like an asshole.
You replied to a comment stating "Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice", and your proof of why it often doesn't work was Wyoming and Idaho. Most of the country (population-weighted, at least) in practice does not look like Wyoming and Idaho. You might as well argue cattle ranching is entirely impractical, just look at downtown San Francisco and NYC. How are herds of cattle supposed to graze there?
Also my comment completely acknowledged I don't know you. It literally states "I don't know if you've looked out a window", so its entirely open to the idea that you have indeed. But then it really makes one wonder why you think Wyoming and Idaho are good examples as to why most US consumers wouldn't be able to get cellular home internet despite knowing the massive geographic and population differences and the challenges those would pose.
> There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country.
Duh. OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies, they were talking about cell service in "big cities." Geography is not a concern in the case of cities in these states. The Bay area's geography is much more extreme than 99% of cities in WY/MT/ID. I've spent time in those states in the last few years (vanlife) and the cell service in cities is atrociously oversubscribed on Verizon. I have all three carriers, and surprisingly T-Mobile has great service (in the cities out there at least.)
> OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies
Every location in Wyoming is what a lot of the country would consider "the boonies". That's kind of my point. Its a massive outlier compared to where the majority of the US population lives and not really a good place to point to when saying "see, cellular internet often doesn't work, it doesn't work in Wyoming!"
Cellular internet doesn't really work at my house 50 miles outside of Boston either. And, in fact, it goes out pretty predictably when I take the train in (presumably because the high-end closer-in suburbs where it goes out don't like cell towers).
50 miles outside of Boston is an hour away, not 20 minutes. 50 miles outside of Boston it can get really rural.
I'd also point out modern cellular home internet can give a pretty different experience than what you get on your cell phone. Antenna design and placement can be a lot better. You can place the antenna in a place where you're more likely to get good reception instead of deep inside your house. The frequencies and channels used can sometimes be pretty different. You're less power limited than your phone. In the apartment where my family lives their phone cell service isn't very great but as mentioned they get low latency several hundred megabit service through their router near a window.
Fair enough. I'm probably more exurban than rural although I'm in the middle of land with a lot more forest than houses. Cellular around Concord/Lincoln on the train is pretty awful though, but it's perhaps not universal.
Also fair that hot spots can be better than phones. My brother had one up in Maine but it went to Starlink and, more recently, to fiber.
As funny as your comment is, I believe you're both correct. If we actually had a functioning Congress, and not the clown circus we currently do, they could actually be getting things done. But the people that actually understand these problems aren't normally morally bankrupt enough to make it into Congress.
I took classes, not the fancy 6 months full time course, but a part time 6 or 8 (can't remember) weeks course that showed me the basics. I like to drive so this was not a hardship for me. Did not buy my own rig. I just got out of self employment and did not want to go back to that.
Finding a job as a newbie was not easy at the time (because of the insurance they were saying) so I went the agency route and they found me work right away. Worked there for 2 years then found a job closer to home. Been doing that for about 15 years already.
