[roschdal]

Petrol cars have significantly longer driving range, which is important for transport efficiency.

Petrol cars are significantly cheaper to buy.

Petrol cars refuel significantly faster than electronic cars recharge.

Petrol cars don't have a costly battery which degrades over time and pollutes.

[wilgertvelinga]

- Very few trips are long enough to deplete an EVs battery

- EVs have significantly lower Total Costs of Ownership

- To refuel your petrol car, you have to make an extra trip to the petrol station. While your EV is simply charged where it is parked overnight

- The extraction, refinement and transportation of petrol pollutes way more than that EV battery will

[fileeditview]

> - Very few trips are long enough to deplete an EVs battery

Ever drive to vacation by car? Or visit relatives a few hours away? Not all of our trips are inner-city or in a similarly small radius. So if you don't want 2 cars, electric is not an option.

> - EVs have significantly lower Total Costs of Ownership

Doesn't help with them being way more expensive in acquisition. There is also no used car market for them AFAIK. This will all change in the future but currently they are no option for many people just because of the price.

> - To refuel your petrol car, you have to make an extra trip to the petrol station. While your EV is simply charged where it is parked overnight

At least in theory.. in practice you maybe use a big garage shared with others and it does not have any sockets.

> - The extraction, refinement and transportation of petrol pollutes way more than that EV battery will

Nice claim but I doubt that. It's always hard to do these comparisons fairly but battery manufacturing and disposal is very dirty business.

[wilgertvelinga]

-- you could rent a petrol car for your vacation trip once a year, or make a charging and sleeping stop, or use fast chargers along the route (also not yet available everywhere)

-- you could private lease an electric car

-- I agree that it is not an option for everybody, everywhere. But with a little effort it will be for a lot of people in a lot of places

-- See this video for a comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oVrIHcdxjA&t=2s

p.s. nice nickname

[falcolas]

Renting is absurdly expensive for any vacation distances. Around a hundred dollars a day, plus mileage (enterprise is, for example, 100 miles per day, and 10¢ for each mile after).

Might as well buy a used car for those prices.

[nickik]

> Ever drive to vacation by car?

Go look up people who road trip with EV, the experience is rather good. Your blanket assertion that this is simply impossible is just not the case in many regions.

Certainty in most people where people actually want to go.

Sure if you drive into bumbfuck nowhere in West Texas you might have an issue, but that is the waste minority of people.

Europe is better then the US. In the US if you are doing serious trips Tesla is clearly the best but others are growing fast as well.

> Or visit relatives a few hours away?

Tons of people do that with EV. A modern EV has multiple 100 miles of range. And stopping once at fast charger is really not that big of a deal. How often do you seriously do 300+ mile trips in a day?

Maybe you have a steel bladder and never pie or stop to stretch your legs or eat something. Stopping for 10min is really a deal breaker.

If you ask me I much rather be in a car that is much more quite for hours that drives with much more pop.

> Doesn't help with them being way more expensive in acquisition.

Most people use a loan anyway

> There is also no used car market for them AFAIK. This will all change in the future but currently they are no option for many people just because of the price.

Depending on your use-case there are some absurdly cheap EV. Bolt for example Those don't have some of the fast charge features and range mentioned above, but for people that don't need that it absolutely make sense to get a EV.

> Nice claim but I doubt that. It's always hard to do these comparisons fairly but battery manufacturing and disposal is very dirty business.

No it isn't a dirty business. This is just flat out false.

Battery manufacturing is really not that dirty. Telsa is building batteries in the middle of a city in California. You have some waste water that needs to be treated (and newer process manage to cut that out already). Currently to much intermediate products are transported but this is true for oil as well.

Can you explain what you specifically are referring to that is so horrible?

Li-Ion batteries get used and re-used and even after 10 plus years they still fetch a good price as people use them for custom builds and other hobby projects. Even if they totally break people will rip them open and reuse some of the cells.

Even after that pretty much every economic forecast shows that recycling for batteries will make a huge amount sense as it basically represents really high quality ore. So if you buy a car now, when in 15-20 years your battery is totally broken it will absolutely be recycled.

Data actually shows that very, very few Li-Ion batteries are getting disposed at all.

[5555624]

> - To refuel your petrol car, you have to make an extra trip to the petrol station. While your EV is simply charged where it is parked overnight

I have yet to see an apartment building with more than a couple of charging stations, if they have any.

On the street where I currently live, half the houses don't have driveways. Assuming you can park in the same spot on the street every night, are you going to run an extension cord from the house to the street?

(It's not an "extra trip," it's a stop when I am going somewhere.)

[DoingIsLearning]

I really really wanted to disagree with you and bash on ICE's. But then I thought about it and this article's guilt trip is the type of hostility against 'carbon emitting' consumers that is also part of the problem in our fight for survival (and for the survival of whoever is left behind after we are gone).

It is the same lazy strategy as Coca-Cola making you feel guilty about not recycling the plastic they created or BP going on twitter asking people what is their 'climate pledge'.

If we are serious about this fight for survival then governments and Energy industry need to replace Coal and Natural Gas for something else non-hydrocarbon based ASAP and stop Oil & Gas Energy subsidies. Then there is moral ground to ask consumers to feel guilty about their ICE emissions.

[voisin]

I think this is the key. The solutions should not be pushed onto individuals when the problems were created by companies and governments that systematically eliminated public transit in favour of parking lots and highways and sprawl.

[busterarm]

Petrol cars actually work in extreme climates.

[theshrike79]

My diesel and petrol cars really didn't like longer -30C weathers. The oil turns into mush and the poor 12V battery can't hold a charge.

It was a roll of the dice every morning whether I could go to work each day.

With an electric car, I sit in the car, press a button and it works. The cabin is hot within 5-10 minutes.

Compared to my diesel, which started blowing hot air to the cabin around the time I was already at the office :D

[busterarm]

You had -30C winters and no engine block heater and battery tenders/jump kits?

Electric cars only really work at sedan weight/form-factor right now. Most people who need to drive in extreme climates aren't really city drivers and typically need more capable types of vehicles to go with the terrain...if not all out industrial vehicles entirely.

Heavy equipment like that isn't even viable with electric vehicles yet.

[nickik]

> Electric cars only really work at sedan weight/form-factor right now.

Complete nonsense. SUV/CUV are by far most new models.

All major manufactures have pick-up programs for next year.

> Most people who need to drive in extreme climates aren't really city drivers and typically need more capable types of vehicles to go with the terrain...if not all out industrial vehicles entirely.

They guy who has bought the most Teslas lives on the arctic circles. EV are incredibly popular in Norway and also the other nordic places. EV are very popular in Switzerland where we have high mountains, and go skiing there all the time.

Apparently it works for all of those people. But I guess people the state go on 500 mile expeditions to Alaska multiple times a month.

> Heavy equipment like that isn't even viable with electric vehicles yet.

Seems like your are moving the goal post pretty fast. By far most people that don't live in cities drive normal CUV/sedan/hatchbacks.

[busterarm]

> SUV/CUV are by far most new models.

And are not work trucks. They also don't weigh much different from your average luxury 4-door sedan these days.

Well-civilized places like you are talking about are not really extreme environments.

[theshrike79]

”Work Trucks” or pickups are a 100% American thing.

Aussies have their utes, which are like sedans with beds.

Europeans use either vans or trailers pulled by said vans (or sedans) for the same thing.

[theshrike79]

Of course I had a block heater. It did fuck-all for a 2-liter Turbodiesel engine when it was -30C outside for a few days.

Maybe if I kept it running all night, but most apartments only allow 2 hours of electricity on a mechanical clock.

Yes, electric vehicles aren’t valid for every single category yet, sedans and SUVs are the current leaders, maybe smaller hatchbacks too.

[6f8986c3]

Petrol cars can be easily fixed in a driveway.

[user-the-name]

Not a modern one. An outdated, inefficient one, sure. But not one that is actually built to be efficient.

[ppf]

The Fiat 500 from 1957 got 43mpg. Imagine what could be done, if car manufacturers were not focussed on the lease market, meeting the newest emissions regulations (more relevant in Europe), and filling cars with electronic toys.

[user-the-name]

Renault Twingo III gets 66 mpg, while having much more space and being generally more useful.

[ppf]

Yep, there are modern engines that will do that. I was using the example of an older engine, because they are generally much more fixable (which was OP's original point).

[busterarm]

But it's so much more complex than the 50+ year old Fiat 500 that the home mechanic can no longer work on it.

[Causality1]

This comment does not deserve downvotes. Tesla is every bit as anti-hobbyist as Apple or John Deere.

[nickik]

Did you know that Tesla is not the only EV company?

[Causality1]

Tesla is 80% of the US BEV market. Which manufacturers make their electric vehicles easy to work on?

[nickik]

No current company makes any of their modern cars deliberately easy to work on. No matter the %, the fact is you can get a car from VW, BMW, Daimler, Hyundai, Nissan and so on.

[nickik]

> Petrol cars have significantly longer driving range, which is important for transport efficiency.

95%+ you charge at home or at work and a single fully charged battery is by far enough for daily use.

> Petrol cars are significantly cheaper to buy.

Life-time analysis of anything but very cheap cars this doesn't really hold up.

> Petrol cars refuel significantly faster than electronic cars recharge.

Not relevant most of the time. If you actually road trip long distances most experience reports suggest that even just going to the bathroom and eating is enough to recharge enough to get to the next stop.

Very few people use their petrol cars to do road-trips in a way where the natural stops are not enough.

> Petrol cars don't have a costly battery which degrades over time

Petrol cars have much higher maintenance cost and an engine that degrades over time. If you take minimal care of your battery it will hold up for multiple 100k miles and even after that it will have significant resale value.

> and pollutes.

Far less then petrol.

[zhdc1]

> 95%+ you charge at home or at work and a single fully charged battery is by far enough for daily use.

Less than 35% of people in the EU live in detached houses. A sizable percentage of these either rent or don't have enclosed parking.

My guess is that only about half of the population, once you factor in people who live in apartments but have separate enclosed parking spots, have the opportunity to charge an electric vehicle at home. This is probably optimistic.

However, once you consider that the ratio of apartments and alternative housing <-> detached houses increases in highly populated areas, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of people who live in an urban area, are able to spend 20-30K+ on an electric car, and have access to convenient overnight charging is significantly less than 50%.

[nickik]

Not the whole population has cars either, specially in cities.

Adding Level 1 charger to outside parking spots is not very difficult and is already happening in many new developments.

Lots of people in cities park in parking garages where adding charging is easy to add any often still exists.

Charging at work places is also very possible and industrial area parking are adding these.

For people who drive long distance often in cities, going to a supercharger once in a while is also quite possible. Specially as Tesla and other increasingly add DC chargers in cities.

Its overall one of the bigger problems and that does limit EV however we are at 2%, nowhere even remotely close to be limited by that. However overall I agree, this is actually the area where states, cities and so on can actually make an impact.

This will solve itself when people start to want EV and try to figure out what the solution for their situation is.