[stavros]

I really don't understand how people offer "but that ten-hour trip I take once a year will be 40 minutes longer!" as criticism and completely ignore "my EV TCO will be half of an ICE".

Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.

[eldaisfish]

I will offer you a realistic answer - the uncertainty and need for planning are the killers.

An EV dropped my transportation fuel bills by 90% but even i will admit that an EV is a hassle. On any trip that exceeds the range of the car, we must identify EV chargers, then determine whether they are working and only then can we start counting the additional minutes.

In the winter, seeing the range of you car drop by 26% and not knowing where the next working charger is, is the #1 reason why we still have two cars. If i could eliminate one with access to better transit, it would be the EV, not the combustion car.

[BLKNSLVR]

Legit question (and one that I need to answer for myself as well):

Would it be cheaper to keep the EV and rent a car for when you need to do longer trips? (also taking into account the additional hassle of renting a petrol/diesel car)

Only speaking for myself, I'd seriously consider renting a (combustion) car for an interstate driving holiday if it's a rare occurrence, like once a year or once every two years. It will become an exercise in accounting[0].

My silly-ish analogy is: I don't own a plane because I fly rarely enough that it's not worth buying a plane to allow me to fly wherever, whenever I want.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQPIdZvoV4g&t=137

[ZebrasEat]

Chevy Volt. Perfect car. I can consistently squeeze about 60 miles electric city driving, and 400+ on a trip. Soooo disappointed GM canceled the program. No one ever understood how great this car was…

[fragmede]

The problem with the Volt is that it's a nerd's car, and they don't have enough political clout inside GM to have kept it going.

[eldaisfish]

the short answer is that it depends.

I did the maths on my situation and it did not work out. It is currently cheaper to pay the $120 / month or so on insurance and maintenance for the second car as opposed to renting a car for the once a month that we actually use the second car.

The trouble is that renting a car is expensive and public transit is an even bigger hassle.

[stavros]

Sure, but this is just a temporary infrastructure issue that will be solved thoroughly as EVs become more popular. If you take long trips often, maybe it's not for you, but I personally only take trips longer than 200km or so once a year, if that, so I absolutely adore my EV and would never go back to ICE.

[eldaisfish]

that is beside the point.

The reality is that operating an EV is a hassle unless you can deal with the hassle or have sufficient privilege (e.g. live in a detached home) to be able to offset some of the hassle.

[stavros]

And an ICE isn't a hassle just because you've gotten used to it? They're loud, they smell bad, their torque is terrible and uneven, they're inefficient, they have tons of moving parts that are liable to break and are hard to service, and they're expensive and susceptible to fuel price hikes, like now.

How that gets turned into "yeah but EVs can't drive for 500km on one charge, so they're a hassle", I don't know.

[BLKNSLVR]

> Humans really do not like change

This is definitely part of it. My personal opinion is that 'mechanical intelligence' is so intertwined with, cough, masculinity that EVs are a threat to these kinds of men at the very core of their being. There's so much 'identity' that people associate with the car they drive, the noise it makes, that they can take it apart and put it back together again despite its complexity.

The simplicity of the electric motor and the minimal servicing required of an electric car is potentially anathema to (toxic) masculinity. As is enforcing 'stopping driving for a rest and (literal) recharge'.

It's a super old school way of thinking, but aren't we in the midst of seeing exactly that bubbling up to the surface as far more entrenched in society than we thought it could be?

(May be overthinking this a bit, but the illogic from otherwise logical family members around EVs really twisted my mind into knots that I had to spend the time undoing)

> tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones

This is just cope. Clutching at the thinnest branches because that's the only thing on offer. It's the rationalisation of all of what I've mentioned above.

[ethbr1]

> that they can take it apart and put it back together again despite its complexity.

It's definitely not this, since that hasn't been true since ~2010 CAFE standards required ECUs + their array of feeder sensors, all usually factory-locked.

[BLKNSLVR]

Also, counter to my own argument is that EVs can still be hacked with (although less 'mechanically') as per recent article and HN discussion:

http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/ev/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342185