Towing is currently tedious with EVs. Not much range, not many chargers with pull through parking:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/43320/how-an-electric-rivian-r...

Just more pull through parking at chargers would help a lot.

Right. The current 300 mile target is fine for cities or more dense regions. But I routinely drive around 250 miles with large uphills regions in weather that requires AC. The uphill parts are like a 2x range cost compared with the rest.

And you drive that much without taking a break?

In terms of parking at a charger, yes I drive that without taking a break. I mean I’m going shopping “in the city”. But that city only has one or two fast chargers for EVs and they’re very much out of the way and a little crime ridden for my comfort. We’ve also got a whole charging station going to waste apparently because it broke shortly after being built and not being brought back up.

This isn’t what the future looks like if we’re replacing ICE vehicles with electrics. A driver needs to be able to pull into just about any commercial parking lot and find a fast charger. The most obvious would be wiring up the big box and grocery stores with fast chargers. But I’ve seen maybe a handful of those across three states.

Oh btw I’m talking only about the US. It should be a known that the distances in the west US easily exceed those in the northeast and Europe on average.

> This isn’t what the future looks like if we’re replacing ICE vehicles with electrics. A driver needs to be able to pull into just about any commercial parking lot and find a fast charger. The most obvious would be wiring up the big box and grocery stores with fast chargers. But I’ve seen maybe a handful of those across three states.

Can you drive into just about any commerical parking lot and find a gas station to fill up with? We certainly need a much denser network of fast charging than exist today. But we don't even need to achieve the same density as our current gas refueling infrastructure because many people will be able to charge at home overnight. At some point apartment complexes will start to provide charging station for some or most of their residents.

Remember most people will only need to charge to full once or twice a week.

250 miles without breaks is not a big challenge.

I routinely drove 400-500 kms without stopping when I toured Europe.

Once on the highway you only have to go straight, anybody can do that.

The only secret is to not make it a strict rule, if you feel like stopping, just stop.

It's actually unsafe. You have never been exposed to the communication campaign about taking breaks for safety ? You for example can see signs about this on the French motorways.

it's unsafe if you don't stop when you feel the need to stop.

Also: never drive long distances alone.

I worked as a roadie in the music business, and I would never put in danger the 5-6 sometimes 9 people I had in the van with me, with all the equipment.

I just drive at a regular pace around 100 kms/h and use the cruise control whenever possible

I also set the limiter to something below the speed limit, to remind me to not go too fast (sometimes you find yourself speeding without even noticing because the road allows you to)

I never drove more than ~5 hours straight and of course it all depends on the road conditions, crossing the Italian Alps toward Austria with snow it's not the same as cruising on German highways (where there's always some kind of fixing going on, so you aren't really going that fast)

All in all the safest safety device right now is the human driving.

But modern safety technologies are more than welcome , you can set a safety distance from the car in front of you, they follow the lines on the road so they actually can correct you if you make a mistake or are distracted, it got a lot better than the 90s where I drove my dad's car for 9 hours from my house to go snowboarding on the Alps. We were a gang of four and took turns.

It's a 4-5 hour drive. Yes, you may take a break (I do), but it will be liek a half-hour break, at most, and most available chargers (if they are available, in Europe), will give you what? 10 miles extra in that time?

Add extra weight (luggage) or anything external (skis/snowboard on the roof rack), and boom, your effective range in an electric vehicle has gone down by a factor of 1.5 or more

Depends on the EV and the conditions of course but you can charge quite a lot during half an hour. Probably more than half a the range. It may actually be faster to do two shorter breaks with the current technology.

> you can charge quite a lot during half an hour.

Strictly depeds on the charger. Where I live, the vast majority of chargers are slow chargers, and all fast ones are usually occupied.

> you may take a break (I do), but it will be liek a half-hour break, at most, and most available chargers (if they are available, in Europe), will give you what? 10 miles extra in that time?

Depends on the charger and the car. Ionity's chargers are 350 kW:

https://ionity.eu/en/design-and-tech.html

And, for example, cars on Hyundai's E-GMP platform (currently Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Genesis GV60) can charge 10 to 80% in 18 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J46mG7I78Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCqcqy29ZCc

The Kia EV6's WLTP range is 528km so 80% of that is 422km. If we say the real world highway range is more like 400km then 80% would be 320 km.

> Ionity's chargers are

And their availability is?

Excellent. And they're not the only DC fast charging provider. There's FastNed, EnBW, Allego, etc. Even Tesla has started to open their chargers to all makes (only 10 sites in the Netherlands so far).

Define "excellent". As in "available to anyone at anytime at short notice"?

Nothing is available to anyone at anytime at short notice, except possibly disappointment.

Here are examples of some of the best charging stations in Europe and the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK2shbCwDYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yra3AsicSRY

> Nothing is available to anyone at anytime at short notice

Funny. When I drive a regular car, gas stations are available all the time, at short notice. With a throughput of possibly hundreds of cars an hour.

Nope.

Fuel shortage: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/fuel-shortage-uk...

Fuel shortage: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59059093

Fuel shortage: https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/canadian-province-exten...

Fuel shortage: https://www.ibtimes.com/diesel-shortage-amid-soaring-prices-...

Things are tough all over in the real world.

> Nope

Yup

> Fuel shortage

Ah yes. Extraordinary short-term events affecting only some regions vs. chronic shortage of available fast chargers pretty much everywhere.

Yup, same thing.

> Extraordinary short-term events

You picked the conditions of the contest, son. You claimed "available to anyone at any time at short notice".

You were straight up wrong. Deal with it.

It's not a contest, and I didn't pick conditions for it. This is called a reality.

This all started with a discussion of a long trip. The reality is that, at best, EVs require you to do very careful planning with potentially lengthy breaks regardless of "excellent coverage" and exuberant youtube ads of "best charging stations".

If your grand insight is that charging infrastructure is still being built out then that's no insight at all. New stations are going in daily.

Look, if you're too afraid to think about EVs now then the best advice is not to worry about it. Live in the happy tail as a late adopter. By then all the decisions will have been made for you and you won't have to think.

> Look, if you're too afraid to think about EVs

Ah yes. "Son", "deal with it", "afraid to think about EVs", a couple of Youtube vidoes. The grand arguments of a person who pretends they have any arguments.

No one is "afraid to think about EVs". Those who actually think about EVs see what they are, and all the problems they have right now. Good luck to early adopters, come back when you have more arguments than those listed above.

But you plainly are afraid, kid. You've done nothing but argue dishonestly. You set a ridiculous standard that not even gas stations meet and you think you've discovered something. You haven't.

EVs are here now, they work, and they're getting better year by year. No amount of whining from you will change that.

Who says that? Most people don’t pull trailers

People against EVs. Though they are less and less vocal. People do love trailers in Norway. It's actually a very important car feature, even though they need to pull a trailer once a year on average.

You don't need to be against EVs to be concerned about range. You can be pro EV and still be anxious that current ones won't fit your life situation. Let's not polarize unnecessarily.

The problem is that the range arguments are always brought as if they were a general use case. Most people will have maybe 1 or 2 trips a year that go over 500km in one trip. They still insist on buying a car for being able to do that trip, instead of buying a car for their general use case and renting a car for that one trip (if really necessary). Similar arguments for being able to transport 7 people, pulling a trailer, going off road etc.. People hardly ever need this they still buy cars because of this capability. Even disregarding electric cars, it doesn't make any economic sense.

Getting any type of car is a type of luxury and likely does not make any economic sense for most drivers today: taxi, rentals, airplanes, trains and other public transport can probably take average family through 10 years for the average price of the new car they are buying (I am ignoring the fact that most people are buying used, but that argument does not help the relatively new EV industry).

It only makes economic sense for those that need a car for their work (taxis, delivery, lots of client meetings...), and that's where electric cars already have an economic advantage. So the "economic sense" is not the reason people buy cars in the first place, but instead convenience it affords them.

I'd love to get an electric car for my city driving, but considering what car my family can fit into, it'd have to be something like an Ioniq 5 at 50K€. And if it was available at that price range 2 years ago when I was getting a new car (still significantly cheaper than Ioniq5), maybe I just would have bit the bullet. But I had to perhaps spend 100K€ on a Tesla or 80k€ on a Jaguar I-pace just to get a comparatively sized car back then.

Renting a car for those one or two trips can be pretty expensive, especially in the travel season, when cars are mostly gone quickly (on top of a cost of an electric car vs. a petrol car). You also have to plan ahead and those impromptu long-weekend trips are now suddenly much harder.

But anyway, we WILL get there. The fact that there are enough people willing to live through the inconveniences caused by EVs today means that infrastructure will get on par, and then none of us will have an excuse.

But pretending that these are not inconveniences in a tool most people get for their convenience does not help anyone.

True, but usually people asking for a lot of range are looking for arguments to dismiss EVs. It's very few people who actually need more range than what is offered today, assuming you have a charging network developed where you drive.

In my experience this dismissive attitude you're talking about used to be much more common 5 years ago than it is now. Many people today want to go electric but are concerned about their own use case, and their expressions of range anxiety are personal concerns, not points of virtue. The way to ease them into it is to be a good role model, not to debated them on absolute terms. The paradigm has changed for the better.

In my experience most people do pull trailers. It is a 1% use case, but they have a SUV instead of a sedan or two vehicles for a few 1% cases.

At least two Tesla models have towing options (Models X and Y). Hills are not a big problem because you get some of the energy back when you go downhill again. The real issue is the air resistance of whatever you're towing, which you cannot regenerate. To mitigate this you drive slower and accept some range decrease.

I think it‘s an understandable demand, no reason for snark. It‘s just that I want to replace my ICE and that‘s how I use it.

You know that drops your range in a gas car too, right?

Yes, but the full-range refill takes only a few minutes, and generally at a station that has room for you to refuel while a trailer is attached.

There's still a ways to go.