I think many of people here live in US and assume that it everywhere things look similar.
in my European country electric infrastructure is not ready for electric cars and with current energy prices this makes no financial sense.
I own plug in hybrid and I live in apartment meaning I have no possibility to charge at home.
near me (about 10 min of walking there is public single phase allow charger with 2 plugs machine maxing 3.5kW total (for both)) and if I'm lucky I manage to find free slot one a week, but usually that's one every two weeks. This is only "free" charger in reasonable distance from me, and free means that I can use it when I have ticket for public transportation with I need to have anyways.
there are some normal chargers, but they cost 2x for slow charging or 3x for fast charging than energy prices here + you have to pay per minute of taking parking spot.
in summary when I calculated how much does it cost $/km it is very similar to gasoline but it's much trickier to recharge.
I would love to own fully electric but without also owning house with solar this makes no sense right now.
> in my European country electric infrastructure is not ready for electric cars and with current energy prices this makes no financial sense.
I’m always amazed by statements like this. People who have lived through the rollout of the internet to the masses can’t see how we’d modify existing structure to accommodate needs. We had phone lines initially, 20 years later now we have 5G, fibre, satellites.
They just dug up every street in my European town to put fibre internet in. We already had broadband in the town. They dug up every street to give us fibre that most people won’t even need over their existing connection. People look at this and say “how will we charge electric cars” when we are already surrounded by electricity.
Not even that: We have managed to extract some dense and flammable black oil hundreds of meters deep under the ocean soil, transport it thousands of km again to remote countries where it is processed and again transported and distributed daily to many storage locations where any layman can again transfer it to their own vehicles. That is a feat.
Electricity infrastructure already exists everywhere where we have civilization. And production is usually just hundreds or less km away. For lots of people it even happens at their own home.
The average amount of km every European drives is around 40km. For a standard EV that is around 7,2 kWh of energy per day, which can be charged in 2-3 hours from a normal 240V Schuko plug at home.
If there’s no option to charge at home, a weekly load on newer EVs with around 500km range would be more than enough, taking around 3-4 hours on standard 22kW chargers or less than 2 hours in a DC 50kW chargers.
EVs are a real option for lots of people. Main blocker for most of people according to most statistics is lack of knowledge on how to operate, and as a consequence fear of the unknown.
That would be fine for second car. I need form time to time visit family that is about 270km one way mosty on a highway
The 500km mark is calculated in ideal conditions, flat street at 60km/h or something like that in more realistic highway conditions it's about 300km
That's why plugins have so much sense even when they cost about the same that EV would. I can drive fully electric on everyday short distances (my car is rated for 33km of electric range, but I'm able to squeeze about 40 by careful eco driving)
That usually covers my city driving and at the same time I have 700-1000km backup of ICE/hybrid range
In my observation hybrid approach have about 30% better fuel efficiency than pure petrol.
I agree that having 22kW charger nearby that is affordable could solve all of that. But for many people that is not the case and if so they are so expensive.
In my case petrol costs me about $0.12/km and electric from supercharger would be $0.14/km (assuming 19kW/100km). Why would I want to switch to more expensive car to pay more per driven distance?
Of course everything changes when you have solar installation and you have basically free electricity (of course I omit here installation cost that would make if free after about 10years or so) then driving basically everyday for free and paying for fast charging few times a year when doing very long distance trip makes is fine.
But again, not everyone can have solar installation.
I have high hopes for new sodium batteries, give them 2 more generations and we could afford ev cars with 1000km of range in cars less expensive than ice and that would be very compelling.
500km range cars are still stupidly expensive right now, and the fact that paid chargers are quite expensive compared to home charging remains. This may change in the future, but we live in the present.
People aren't that stupid as you think, you are just ignorant. EV preachers take the easy route and ignore issues which are inconvenient to them, or focus only on home charging.
The average price of a new car sold in Germany for private individuals is 42.000€. Around $47,000 in USA. Prices are even higher if you include company or fleet purchases.
A RWD Model 3 and Model Y with around 500km range is even less than that right now in their available stock.
How can that be stupidly expensive if it’s even below average price?
Street chargers are more expensive than home charging, that is right. However it is still cheaper than gas and diesel by 50-70% by average in mainland Europe.
You can look up facts instead of calling me ignorant.
We have two massive parallel energy transfer systems in the world. And they are massive. Consider the electrical grid for all it's behemoth costs and regulations, at least it exists and is a known monster. Doubling it is a technical challenge but not an unknown. Akin to laying fiber. On one side of the grid you could even just change how the energy is produced at a few thousand plants and have zero change on consumer side if you wanted (for a given territory the size of a USA avg state)
Now imagine we came along and said we were going to add to the electrical grid a parallel system of transporting explosive liquid to billions of distributed combustion engines. Not only that, the explosive liquid is only available in a few politically charged areas in the world. Add all the tankers refineries pipes truck lines holding tanks pumps etc so that most people live at most a few miles from a holding tank that will distribute hundreds of gallons to them for their own micro power plant that only exists for their commute.
It seems crazy. We built both systems incrementally over time so we're in a massive sunk cost analysis whenever we think about replacing gas cars.
In addition to electricity and gasoline, there's also natural gas, which is shipped around in giant tankers and via pipelines, and then piped into homes to be used for heating and cooling in many places. Also for systems we transfer energy around on Earth, consider the infrastructure used to ship coal all around the world, on trains and ships.
Naturally, the infrastructure arises when the demand is there. But nobody was ever hesitant to buy a 4G-only phone for fear of insufficient 4G service because every 4G phone also worked on 3G.
The same is not true of electric cars. People have real mileage anxiety because they can’t use petrol when a charger isn’t available
The big question is not whether the infrastructure will be built, but whether it will owned by rent-seekers who charge everyone without their own driveway a massive premium to charge their vehicles.
You need to acknowledge that in Europe, the high price of electricity mean consumers aren't getting any discounts in money/distance ($/mile being inappropriate in the EU), if not being charged more to charge an electric vehicle over an ICE vehicle.
Saving the environment is nobel, but affording it is another thing.
If price hikes in the US continue, there are places in the US where that may soon be the case, too. Then we're screwed. Thankfully hybrids aren't going anywhere. They may be more complicated, but they have the most critical feature, regenerative braking. instead of shedding the energy spent slowing down as pollution and heat, it gets saved and is used to move the vehicle later.
I can’t acknowledge anything without numbers to compare. In the UK some suppliers give cheaper rates at night (1/4 the rate). Is that not the case elsewhere? What is the cost per mile in Europe vs ICE?
Transferring so much electricity to everywhere in an efficient way is more expensive and harder though, not counting electricity generation, only partially clean, noy enough, very expensive.
There is a reason that I pay 7p/kWh (3p/mile) to charge at night compared to 30p/kWh during the day. There is already spare capacity at night. In my country it’s mostly wind.
No, but even if it was demand would still be lower than 2002:
> The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.
> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.
If I may disagree: I live in a flat with a fully electric vehicle. It's just a matter of planning around charging a bit. Once you think ahead (and it's not dramatic), you don't notice anymore.
I find plug in hybrids make no sense: electrification is the future.
I would really hate having to keep going out to move my car to a charger, then go out again to move it back to another parking spot when it's done (usually you pay a fine if you keep it at the charger). It's just so much work and it means I can't sit down and relax. And parking spaces in my area are extremely limited at night so every time I move I'd have to worry about finding one again (and a free charger too obviously which also seem to be extremely rare, I just know of one about 1km away)
For me a car is about convenience and having to worry about it and going out and doing things with it when I'm not even using it is the opposite of convenient. It should just be there and ready when I need it and forgotten when I don't. And it should be as cheap and low-maintenance as possible. If every parking space had a charger and I could just plug it in and forget about it when I park it, it'd be acceptable (in fact better than an ICE because at times I also had to remember to refuel it for an early trip). What adds to this also is that I don't really have a 'routine', my life is really ad-hoc.
So for me it would be a huge dealbreaker to have an EV until chargers are everywhere. But right now I have the perfect solution anyway which is not even having or needing a car at all :) My city has amazing public transport and 20 euros gets me an unlimited monthly travel pass. I don't even like spending money on cars, and when I did still own one it was usually a 1500-2000 euro old banger meaning that EVs are out of my price range anyway (even used ones will never be that cheap).
Really, just a bit of “planning around charging”? The less predictable your life is the less this is an option. The most extreme example of this is Hertz having to walk away from billions invested in 100,000 Teslas. Short term renters simply don’t tolerate the uncertainties that EVs bring.
So spend on that infrastructure instead, or mandate it. Honestly, spending resources on anything ICEs (outside of special industries) in this day and age is just wrong.
What are you looking for? Typically when people say sports car they mean high-torque (and thereby acceleration)... which ... you will not get an ICE motor that gives you similar performance to an electric drive
I am also an environmentalist and burn some fuel from time to time, I’m not a zealot.
For me to operate and support the environment the best I can I also need to be mentally fit and have life enjoinment. And riding my old classic carbureted Triumph helps me with that.
According to my dictionary an environmentalist is "a person who is interested in or studies the environment and who tries to protect it from being damaged by human activities".
I can't see how buying a Porsche (or any car really) is compatible with that.
That's a bit like saying, I'm pro athlete (or even just very health conscious), but going out for a night out with my friends to a fast food joint is not compatible with that.
Where do you draw the line then? If I spend the week jetting across the Atlantic but then take a reusable bag to the supermarket am I an environmentalist?
I'll note I've seen people struggling across the supermarket carpark to avoid buying a plastic bag only to get in a giant SUV. It's a form of moral licensing[1], there is a huge amount of dissonance around environmental issues.
I'll agree on that example. But that's different to what's been discussed in this thread.
A sports car, used fairly sparingly for fun, and not a daily driver - is different to the horrible trend of daily driving done via ugly, honkingly big SUV's.
There's a line somewhere out there that enables humanity to have fun and not destroy the planet ... probably related to the 80/20 rule.
Fortunately the definition of wrong is very personal. We still have at least 40-50 years of ICE vehicles running on the Earth. Making them even more efficient and cheap is a valuable feat for many millions.
I like to compare this to SSD vs HDD.
Why even invest in HDD development when SSDs are so much better?
Right now almost all consumers use SSDs because they are affordable for space most people need.
And I remember how we were transitioning where I bought 128gb drive for cost of 4TB HDD to have super snappy system and I had to manage system much more to not burn writes too quickly (ram drives for logs and temp etc)
That where I believe we are right now with EVs. But they are more affordable and have better range every year.
But to go further with this comparison we still develop new generations of HDDs even after all that time, even when everyone believe that at some point in the future we will abandon that technology completely
> I think many of people here live in US and assume that it everywhere things look similar.
Most of the US is in the same boat as you. Where I live, there is nowhere to charge and there are fairly great distances between things. You rarely ever see electric cars here, because they are only useful for people who have invested quite a bit in their house to build a charging station.
The people here on hn that have the attitude you mention, are people who live in large populated regions, especially congregated around the coasts.
I'm all for electrifying, and I think it is very necessary, but people do love to put the cart way in front of the horse.
My condo (sort of) put chargers for every parking spot and garage in the whole "complex". Wasn't that expensive and raises the value of the units more than the cost per charger.
I own plug in hybrid and I live in apartment meaning I have no possibility to charge at home. near me (about 10 min of walking there is public single phase allow charger with 2 plugs machine maxing 3.5kW total (for both)) and if I'm lucky I manage to find free slot one a week, but usually that's one every two weeks. This is only "free" charger in reasonable distance from me, and free means that I can use it when I have ticket for public transportation with I need to have anyways.
there are some normal chargers, but they cost 2x for slow charging or 3x for fast charging than energy prices here + you have to pay per minute of taking parking spot.
in summary when I calculated how much does it cost $/km it is very similar to gasoline but it's much trickier to recharge.
I would love to own fully electric but without also owning house with solar this makes no sense right now.