A cheap and easy way to increase the size of the car you already have is to buy a roof box. Our previous car was a small hatchback and interstate trips with our three kids in the back would have been impossible without the roof box. I only bought a bigger car when my oldest kid was pushing 6 feet and running out of legroom in the back seat of the hatchback.

And increase drag, resulting in lower fuel economy/range.

Meh, I'm currently on a cross-island road trip with. Family of four in a >10 year old, manual, brown diesel grandtourer/station wagon. Trunk and roof box fully loaded.

Long range fuel consumption at 5.3L/100kms, as usual at summer conditions.

Of course, ymmv : - )

Sure, but I only used the roof box on occasional long trips when we had lots of luggage (e.g., visiting the grandparents interstate for Christmas). So I might have paid a few tens of dollars extra in fuel, but it was far certainly cheaper than buying a bigger car when we otherwise didn't need the extra space.

The roof rack and Thule box cost maybe $1200 AUD. But the rack was also useful for attaching bicycle carriers.

Needs to be done in comparison with a larger car that would fit the same cargo as the smaller car with a roof box.

A larger car is likely going to have worse fuel economy and/or range than a smaller car. If you get the larger car, you take that hit every single time you drive it. If you get the smaller car and a roof box, you take that hit only when you mount the roof box. If that's most of the time, then sure, it probably makes sense to get the larger car. But I don't think that's the GP's use case.

The larger car is likely more expensive to purchase in the first place than the smaller car plus the roof box.

People are not gonna buy 5 cars or hire cars just for every use case. They want one car that can handle most of their needs. If the range on these vehicles doenst increase we will never see true mass adoption.

Which is exactly what the poster above said. Buy car for 99% of use cases and hire out for the outlier.

EVs are perfect if you road trip once or twice a year. If you’re road tripping every weekend then they may not be a good solution for you.

This strategy is not working if many people go long trip at the same time. This is happened for a long time in Japan, highway (and train) get jammed about 10 days every year. This is also pain for EV fast charger usage, so govt should encourage people to distribute holidays.

But i dont see how a road trip is an outlier. I get that needing a 4x4 is one, but most people go on some form of long trips a few times every year i would think.

A road trip of >200mi at highway speeds where you also cannot stop for 20mins to recharge?

Assuming there's not a line of cars waiting.

You're replying in a thread where the issue at hand was more than two hours of recharge, and a bunch of stress around the car's trip planner being way too optimistic about the range of the vehicle in the first place. Maybe your statement is true in some cases, but clearly not all.

It all depends on what kind of EV you have. Top of the line Model S has 400 miles of range and add to that supercharging. You will be able to drive almost as quickly as with an ICE car - you loose like 20 minutes on 620 miles. The limiting factor then becomes the driver of the car - rest stops, food and so on.

Check out Teslabjorns data ; https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6ucyFGKWuSQzvI8lMzv...

He does 1000 km range tests on youtube amongst other things.

Even before owning an EV, whenever I would do a road trip, I would rent a car/SUV. it gave me a piece of mind. I wasn't putting 100s of miles on my car. It was much easier.

A road trip is an outlier for me. I go on maybe 1-3/yr. The other 360 days, my driving is local, and with home charging I never worry about filling up.

Yeah, I buy my vehicle(s) for 100% of my use cases, thanks. And not everyone has rental companies within convenient distances / routes.

Turo may work for some/many: https://turo.com/

That's fine, this solution may not suit you. But it will suit many people.

You must have very limited use cases, I tried to do that but ended up with a vehicle that was heavily compromised because half my use cases are at odds with the other half.

I was driving to my office job in an F150, burning enough gas to finance and fuel a new Civic, all while being terrible to drive.

So I did the logical thing, and added a vehicle that was efficient and enjoyable to drive, a motorcycle.

But it's agility made me only further resent the truck during the winter months, so I also added a compact luxury sports sedan.

Worst part was the F150 was both "too much" truck to daily drive, but never enough when I needed to do truck stuff.

Tried to landscape my home with some crushed rock, had to do 9 trips bottomed out because of it's paltry payload. Couldn't tow enough to borrow a friend's skid-steer. Had to buy my bricks a half-pallet at a time, a full pallet bottomed it out before the forklift had even finished putting the full weight on.

Downsized the F150 to a Tacoma, anything over 1200lbs and it's more practical to pay for delivery using a proper commercial truck anyways.

In the end I ended up with 3 vehicles, and if I had the means I'd have 4, I'd split the compact luxury sports sedan into a small sports car and a full sized luxury sedan for long highway travels. And this is all before even adding an EV.

tldr: In the motorcycle community they say the correct number of bikes is always 1 more than what you have. I strongly feel that applies to cars/trucks too.

I recently drove my electric vehicle through my town and saw 5 electric vehicles in a row. This is not terribly unusual now. A friend is buying a hybrid rather than a pure ICE not because of environmental concerns but because it drives better in traffic. A number of countries will make sales of new ICE cars illegal in a few years time.

True mass adoption is already here. Not to say that I don't agree that range needs to increase (although it's incredibly rare I'd want to drive more than 250 miles without a 15 minute break). But I don't think the transition to electric will stop or slow or is really in any danger.

I think at this point most EVs are bought for performance or economic reasons rather than environmental reasons. I still haven’t gotten over the acceleration on my i4.

And that's my point really. EVs have some disadvantages (although for most people these are not as serious as claimed if you can get the longer range versions), but overall they have a lot to recommend them simply as cars, even beyond their benefits to the environment. Even in a hypothetical world where nobody cared about the environment, mass adoption of electric cars would still be inevitable.

EVs arguably already have true mass adoption in some countries. They're 30% of new car sales in Denmark so far this year.

I don't think range is really the issue. If charging stations were as prevalent as gas stations, and charging time was much lower, that'd probably be sufficient for most people.

Haha, literally YMMV (your mileage may vary)!

You've inadvertently made me feel better about purchasing an ICE car last year. I'd been having some regrets that I hadn't worked harder to find an EV (or at least a plug-in hybrid) that met my other requirements.

Since I don't commute to work, and usually take transit or walk for local trips, the bulk of my driving is longer trips. Range anxiety would kill me in an EV.

I do think there are some cases where it makes sense to at least choose the features of a car with some minority-trips in mind. For example, I drive to a snowy, mountainous region 2-3 times a year. I decided to buy an AWD car (sedan, as I dislike driving larger vehicles like SUVs). With the trips I've made since then, the added cost between the AWD and non-AWD versions of my car has already been covered by the savings in not having to rent a vehicle with AWD.

Tangential, but I was also offered an EV when I rented a car last week (after flying across the country), but I had no idea what the charging situation would be at my destination, so I turned it down and got an ICE car. Turned out to be the right call, as there were no charging facilities where I was going.

A plug-in hybrid could be a good choice for probably most people. There are quite a few with an EV range of 30-45 miles (e.g., Prius Prime is 44 miles). In the US the average driver drives 37 miles per day which would be mostly or completely covered by EV mode.

I rented an Ionic PHEV a while back when I was in LA and was surprised how efficient it was! I drove the entire day, from West Hollywood to Santa Monica and then down to LAX and only used about 1 gallon of gas. It blew my mind at how efficient it was.