Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vel0city 1053 days ago
> I just drive and when my tank gets low I pull into a gas station and fill up in a few minutes and move on with my day.

In my ICE, I have to think "dang, getting low on gas, I better leave a bit earlier to make sure I can get gas next time" and then take time out of my day every other week to get gas.

In my EV, I practically never stop at all because I leave the house every day with a full tank.
1 comments
lolsal 1053 days ago
That’s awesome! I guess you live in a house? Or at least a place that you can park your car and charge every night? And drive 30-40 miles a day?

Lots of folks don’t have those privileges.

link
vel0city 1053 days ago
The majority of US households do. It's not like it's some massive outlier. Especially with people who commute to work by car instead of living in denser areas where car ownership rates are lower.

Lots of people always point to this idea that charging a car is a huge pain point compared to just pumping gas, but the majority of commuter cars would have the exact same experience as me.

For most commuters they spend more time pumping gas than they would waiting for their cars to charge, their travel costs fluctuate more, and they have to think more about buying gas than if they just had an EV for their commuter car.

link
lolsal 1053 days ago
No point in discussing it really I guess. My anecdotal evidence says otherwise. I’m happy you have these conveniences though; I’m looking forward to when EVs catch up to the conveniences of ICE vehicles and infrastructure.
link
vel0city 1053 days ago
Cool, I base my data off actual statistics instead of just anecdotes.

https://www.statista.com/topics/5144/single-family-homes-in-...

82 out of 129 million units are single family detached homes. 62%. That's the majority. And I imagine most car-free households probably don't live in single-family detached by a large margin, so whatever percentage of that moves more car owners towards being the single family homes. Then another percentage of non-single-family-home dwellers probably aren't in the market for $40k cars, which for sure EVs have an upfront cost penalty.

Plus some of the other sizes like 2-4 units still often have garage or at least private parking spaces (carports and driveways) which would probably be easy to add individual chargers as well so another 16M units or 92/129 or 71% of housing units.

Average miles driven is like 16k these days.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

16,000 / 300 or so days driven is like 53 miles a day on average. Easily doable by any EV, even doubling or tripling that average use.

Maybe you should look outside your bubble. The majority of US households who could afford a $40k car probably live in a place that can add charging without too much difficulty. And they also don't drive much more than 50mi a day on average, by a large measure.

> I’m looking forward to when EVs catch up to the conveniences of ICE vehicles

For most US households in the market for a car priced like an EV, an EV can be more convenient than an ICE, today.

link
lolsal 1052 days ago
I appreciate the source, but averages don’t really mean much in the real world.

I’ll tell my neighbors they should get an EV even though they can’t charge it at home and have commutes in areas where there aren’t super chargers yet, but on average they should be just fine, and let you know what they say, if you’d like.

So far we’re talking about refueling logistics, but a huge chunk of all the other uses of a vehicle preclude EVs as well.

link