> We need a dining room for when we have parties
(has a party once every 2 years; room sits empty 99% of the time)
(guests could stay at the hotel down the street)
(driver is an accountant who maybe picks up a couple bags of mulch from Lowes twice a year)
I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring.
That's what renting is for. You can rent a better party room than your dining room for very little.
> My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Fine, but I don't think it's this important to most people who have a spare bedroom, they just don't think about it.
> that landscaping work I do in my weekend is one of my favourite hobbies.
Mine too, doesn't mean I need a pickup. But anyways if it's one of your favorite hobbies and you do it every weekend, that's not what I was talking about.
And don't get hung up on this example. There are endless examples of the same sort and that pose the exact same conundrum.
Yes, there are countless cases of it actually making sense to have a spare bedroom. But that's beside the point. My point was that for a lot of people it is a decision that they take instinctually, but does not really make sense.
For example: my parents have a truck, a van, and an SUV. Do they need all of those vehicles? No. Do they get used all the time? Yes: my parents are both avid gardeners, they generously lend their vehicles to those who happen to need a truck or a van for the day, and I have several younger siblings who occupy them the rest of the time.
And even if they didn't, I could well see my dad still owning a truck purely for the convenience of being able to drive to the local garden center and pick up a load of mulch on a whim - even if in practice that happened twice a year.
Emotions are strange things.
And for a lot of people it does. so what's your point. People will figure out what makes them feel good. They do not need help in this department
Perhaps you really do make use of a guest bedroom often enough it’s worth spending 10’s of thousands on. But isn’t the case everywhere. Perhaps you’re wasting money on excessive car insurance etc across a lifetime of choice it adds up to a massive drag.
In terms of EV’s people are spending more time driving to stations because they picture the once a year vacation driving taking 1 hour longer rather than the wasted 5 minutes 48 weeks a year which costs them 4.
In the end I’m just describing a common mistake, not suggesting you specifically should buy an EV or whatever.
Nope. I prefer to do what I want. And want is the criteria and hence optimal by definition. What others might think about it does not matter at all.
If you could accurately predict what would make you happy, and decide based on that, it would be optimal.
You don't.
My point is that there is a cognitive bias towards overweighting the allocation of resources toward low-frequency events.
As I pointed out upthread, low frequency is not the same as low probability.
It might not make sense to upfront allocate resources for a low probability event, but it certainly could make sense for a high probability event even if it was low frequency ... like a spare bedroom, or a dining room, or a car with good range.
The probability of using those things are 1 i.e. guaranteed.
My spare bedroom has a futon couch but I actually use the space for various other things most of the time. Most people may have space that’s underutilized much of the time but that doesn’t mean it’s sealed off until they have an overnight guest or a large dinner part. Things aren’t that binary.
When provisioning servers, do you average your throughput and get enough capacity for that average?
Of course not, that would be assinine. You need to be able to serve 24 hours a day, even - especially - during your edge cases. Follow your advice and explain to the CEO that since Black Friday is a "low frequency event," it's fine that your site was down during that one day.
A better argument is that you should choose things, including houses and cars, based on edge cases since that is where meaningful differentiation occurs. If I take one road trip each quarter and my car is unable to handle it, then I bought the wrong car.
- Up front planning
- A pub to exist nearby. While I as a presumably fellow Brit would not buy a house without being able to walk to multiple pubs, that is not the common case in the US where I actually live.
- The pub to have a room that it rents out. Again, not the common case even in London, let alone in the US.
- Your potential guests to be OK with being at a pub.
- Potentially childcare. If you have to have your party away from your house, you can't put your kids to bed and return to your guests, you have to go home. That part, if you will pardon my French, really fucking sucks.
Hosting your own party has a lot more planning. And don't discount the planning that went into obtaining your own party room in the first place.
> A pub to exist nearby. While I as a presumably fellow Brit would not buy a house without being able to walk to multiple pubs, that is not the common case in the US where I actually live.
Don't get hung up on the 'pub' part. It can be a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you.
It can even be another room in your house. Move some furniture around, put in some speakers, BAM, party room.
It really doesn't. I have a backstock of beer and wine and cheese and a subscription to Apple Music, I can literally do it with 15 minutes notice, and have had plenty of practice at doing so. Most of my neighbours are the same.
> a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you.
- Restaurants do not like large groups showing up without reservations, and the cost is wildly different.
- Drinking in public parks is not typically permitted, nor is street drinking.
- Arcades and bowling alleys are out in the burbs and require driving to.
What is fun and convenient for me is to have parties at my house, in the entertaining space space that does not require manual labour to reconfigure.
I don't care whether you like that or not - I'm not the one who was getting "kind of annoyed" by the preferences of others.
We’re all well aware now that you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself and your fancy desires.
I bet you’re real fun at your awful house parties.
Twat.
Keep in mind this cost is compared to an extra or bigger room in your house. You can throw many restaurant parties for the money you'd spend on a larger house. (Invest the difference and the restaurant parties are effectively free)
I don't really understand what people are imagining here though - it's not like "entertaining space" is some gilded-age ballroom for most people making this choice, and the price difference matters if and only if there is an otherwise comparable house you can buy that meets your other constraints.
Also I don't think it always makes sense to get a smaller house. We got a smaller house and I kind of regret it now, since housing prices and mortgage rates have shot up so much it's now so much harder to upgrade (and the house we got was intended to be a starter home), and also we'd get so much more if we sold a larger house today than our house now.
For example, let's assume prices went up about 50% on average in the past five years for the sake of easy math (not too far from how much my home actually did go up after a reappraisal last year). Buy a house at $300k and it goes up 50% means you can sell it for $450k and make $150k out of it. But buy a $500k home and it goes up 50%, means you can sell it at $750k and made $250k out of it. Granted you're making higher payments that whole time as well but not as much as it went up.
That math doesn't make as much sense now, with prices starting to dip a bit and high mortgage rates muting demand somewhat, however.
You are also discounting the costs you have already sunk into throwing your own parties ("I have a backstock of beer and wine and cheese and a subscription to Apple Music, I can literally do it with 15 minutes notice, and have had plenty of practice at doing so.")
> What is fun and convenient for me is to have parties at my house, in the entertaining space space that does not require manual labour to reconfigure.
Good, I'm happy that you know what you want and are pleased. But I didn't say it was impossible to derive value from that.
> "kind of annoyed" by the preferences of others.
More frustrated with the way some people try to fulfill those preferences, and that every time I bring it up people get so defensive.
I also think you underestimate how often many people (especially in more social cultures) socialise. It could be literally 100's of times per year.
I'm not going to go to the room you rented at a local business, bring a six pack of interesting beers to try together, bring my baby that my friends have been so excited to meet and play with, etc. My friends who like weed aren't going to show up. Not to mention holidays, the hardest time to rent public spaces and the most likely time for friends to gather...
Sure. “Hi, I know it’s closing time, but can I rent your party space for my friends and I to drink our own alcohol in starting in 15 minutes time” is not exactly the kind of call a landlord would be particularly receptive to.
I think we’re done here.
The party you're describing doesn't sound like it needs a dining room.
My point is, climate change is an extremely big threat that we simply don't have much room for these affordances. 2024 is the year to make personal sacrifices to switch to EVs because that's how urgent the situation is.
There are far better targets to reducing the amount of oil and gas burned, ones that are more uniform and less varied them peoples lives not to mention moving people to transit and commuter rail is better then evs anyways
¹ https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result.
We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.
Trust me; I spent $2,000 on a bicycle recently. Not a sports bike or mountain bike or anything. Just a bike for getting around town. Am I under some illusion that I needed to spend 2k on a transportation bike? Of course not. But it's something that I use every single day and derive great joy from using, so I prioritize having a nice one. So I am no stranger to spending money on optional things.
I also enjoy mountain biking, but I only really do it when I'm with my dad which is like 2 times a year. So instead of buying a mountain bike, I rent them. And I rent nice ones (nicer than I would buy, man those things get expensive).
My point is that there is a bias toward ownership of certain conventional things that don't get used very often, and are easy to obtain temporarily. (And of course every example I used had people responding, "I have that and use it all the time!", which is also missing the point.)
I don't see a complete argument where doing so is strictly more rational than doing the polar opposite, i.e. hypothetically, renting the frequent item and vice versa.
I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
Owning something means taking on the liabilities of storage, maintenance, and depreciation. Renting allows you to only pay for the parts of those liabilities commensurate with your time of usage. Therefore if your time of usage of something is small, there are relatively more gains in reducing your share of these liabilities in this way.
Conversely, owning confers the benefit of reducing the friction involved in each individual use of something. So it stands to reason that the more useages, the more benefits owning confers.
> I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
I agree that they are different. But the attitude I am arguing against is that of 'if I don't own this thing, these experiences will never happen'. In other words, people seem to be completely discounting the substitute experiences. In reality, there are other places to go besides one's house, and even at one's house there are other things to do besides eating dinner, and even if one wants to eat dinner at one's house, it is not that different whether you eat it at the kitchen table, on a fold-out table in a game room, or in a bona fide dining room.
To the second point, what a dining room offers is social intimacy and formality at once. This is something a kitchen table does not do (formality, think a White House dinner), and a restaurant cannot do either (intimacy, think traditional cultural celebrations at home such as Chinese New Year entailing many social rituals and practices). A dining room has the fundamentally distinct property of being a setting for both. That's the actual source of disagreement which is why there were so many objections by other commenters given your continued insistence that "it's not that different".
I think this depends on what you value. I've never seen a party room available for rent that was better than a home, personally. The fanciest party room you can rent may look fancier, and if that's the important thing to you, then that's a great solution. Others, however, may place greater value on what you give up when you rent: convenience, intimacy, fewer restrictions on what you can do, etc.
That’s a fantastic drive by the way. Pack a camera!
They recharged out of their accomodation while they weren't out driving. We don't even have electricity 24 hours/day here due to our ongoing generation crisis, so I'm surprised you wouldn't be able to do something similar in the USA or are those two parks just really that remote? Or is it the 120V AC that's the issue?
[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/504858-i-drove-an-el...
This is not as impressive as you might think, to be honest. What they did is the ideal situation for using EVs: drive short distances and charge overnight.
>> over the course of our 4-night stay, despite driving over 100km per day in the park.
Their needed range was 100km/day, over four days, with overnight charging for each 100km drive.
To get there, they drove for 3 hours, then stopped for 1.5 hours to charge.
Honestly, the story makes it clear that range is an issue, not that range is doable in an EV.
It's not really an issue they were just extremely cautious, something you'd expect in South Africa if you know anything about their power grid. I believe the author was actually trying to show it is actually feasible and range is not a concern.
I'd also like to know how fast charging a lot but only from 20% to 80% works out cost wise over time. i.e. more stops to fast charge on a long journey but spending less time at each stop.
I have a feeling that if the car companies could get battery leasing and fast charging costs under control then a good charging network would cure a lot of range anxiety.
I've done long journeys in someone else's EV in the UK. Fast charging at motorway stops we'd make anyway really wasn't a problem but I don't know how that affects the cost depreciation.
(I still have the same old diesel car I've had from new for the last 10 years. I'd buy an electric car but I don't really drive much and I don't really like the current offerings).
I don't think that even the most anti-EV person is going to think that range is a concern for doing 100km off a full charge.
In a discussion where almost all of us are open to being convinced, it's even more pointless to link to a practical range of 100km/day.
(Also South African, so ... Hi? :-))
I am fascinated by this comment, because I don't consider a 3 hour trip to be particularly long. Certainly not long enough to require a half hour break in the middle of it.
That said, "range anxiety" isn't the reason that I won't buy an EV at all. Most of my driving would be well covered by EV ranges, and I'd be fine renting a car or using other transportation methods for the occasional long trip.
Not sure what argument you think I'm making, but OP already owns the car, I'm not making a claim about anything being impressive or trying to convince anybody to buy one.
I shared somebody's detailed log book for a potentially similar kind of trip in a similar vehicle in a more challenging charging environment. I've never been to the US parks in question, and I don't know how much driving one does on those trips, so I made some caveats.
> Honestly, the story makes it clear that range is an issue, not that range is doable in an EV.
How is it an issue? They had a great trip and found that the animal viewing was especially enjoyable in an EV, and the experience was significantly different from driving an ICE. If it doesn't work in OPs particular scenario, that's fine, but I don't know why you're making generalised statements about a specific trip.
And road trip? Between 500-1000 a day on travel days.
North America is big.
The world is big no matter where you are, but that just sounds like bragging how wasteful you can be.
Is that really relevant? If someone is prepared to drive 600+km one-way, it sounds like they are going whether or not anyone wants to go with them.
> The world is big no matter where you are, but that just sounds like bragging how wasteful you can be.
Someone prepared to drive long distances for a specific $SOMETHING isn't bragging.
You might argue that they must modify their entertainment preferences to suit your morals, but your morals are irrelevant.
> How is it an issue? They had a great trip and found that the animal viewing was especially enjoyable in an EV, and the experience was significantly different from driving an ICE.
That's not relevant to "range is an issue".
> If it doesn't work in OPs particular scenario, that's fine, but I don't know why you're making generalised statements about a specific trip.
Because it is being presented as newsworthy when it really isn't - 100km/day is not what people refer to when they say "range anxiety". A long trip in which 50% of the trip duration is spent waiting for charge is also not newsworthy.
Can you clarify what the point of your comment was? I'm just a little bit confused about the point of responding to a range-anxiety post with a link to a news article that demonstrates 100km/day range.
It's my understanding that no one is discussing and/or concerned about a range of 100km off a full charge, so my interpretation of your initial post was that it was an attempt to alleviate fears about range, so ... I (naturally) thought that you were presenting the 100km/day range as something new that I (and others) might not have know about.
[PS. Hi from another South African :-)]
Three phase 16-25A outlets are available (common in buildings/houses) in Europe (230V each phase to neutral, 400V phase to phase). Charging Li-Ion is not a linear process at all, but at so low power (0.02C, compared to the target's battery one) it'd be, as it'd be limited by the source instead.
Whole my kids were growing up we had a big people-mover vehicle. They grew up, we stopped using it, send I sold it. Recently I had a group visit and we wanted to see the sights. I simply rented (a much more modern and nicer) people mover for a week. Renting local, away from the airport, was really cheap.
My daily drive is negligible. For road trips I'll just rent a car. I can also rent a truck if I need to carry stuff, or something with a towbar to drag stuff.
Being "cheap " 350 days a year leaves a big budget for renting the edge case.
I don't pay fuel. I don't pay insurance. I don't have to finance a car.
When I need to move something big or heavy I rent a full size van or a box truck for about $100 for the day. Most people pay more than that just for car insurance in a month. And then I get a vehicle that is exactly what I need, including a lift gate when suitable. I rent a nice sedan when picking up my in-laws at the airport and a big station wagon when going on holidays with the family.
And I'm still ahead thousands of dollars every year compared to the average car payment which is more than $500 per month even for a used car.
Even when my son was swimming competitively and we had to Uber him around to 6 training sessions a week plus often competitions many miles away, I only briefly averaged 400GBP/month in total transport costs (though with the caveat that I work from home; had I commuted full time it'd have added ~200/month to get in to the centre of London, but then again I'd likely have spent that even if I had a car because commuting in to the centre with a car is a nightmare)
And I got to sit and relax and read or talk to my son or listen to music and not have to pay attention to the road.
I get that some enjoy the actual act of driving and/or driving a comfy, fancy car, but for many, it's a really expensive enjoyment and I suspect a lot of people have not considered just how much they could "paper over" edge cases and issues with public transport (yes, I know this is not a viable options for huge parts of the US) or choices like yours with Uber or rentals.
Uber in the UK must be awfully cheap?
Six trips a week (round trip makes 12) plus a few far-away competitions, so at least ~50 trips a month. For 400GBP?
I rarely use Lyft/Uber but even the shortest trips I've made (just a few miles) are at least $30.
Most of his trips would be to local leisure centres within about a two mile radius that would have been walkable in 20m-40m if not for the lack of time to finish up work, get him ready after school etc.. Normally I'd prefer to walk, and that's a large part of the reason my transport costs are very low.
EDIT: Just checked my most recent few trips, and I paid 16 pounds for a trip Google Maps tells me is 7.4 miles driving distance, and 20 pounds for the return the same distance. The last few trips to my local station have been between 6.50 and 8 pounds, so definitely gone up.
Chevy Blazer: $35,400. Chevy Blazer EV: $56,715. https://www.chevrolet.com/
Subaru Outback: $29K. Subaru Solterra: $45K.
No one makes a direct Sedan comparison that I am aware of, but:
Tesla Model 3: From $39K. Subaru Impreza $23K.
All the Subaru Solterras at the local Subaru dealer were going for north of $66,000.00 when I was down that way a few months ago.
Sincerely: Hell naw.
If you're going to spend $30k you can get an excellent ice or an entry level ev.
I do suspect we'll start to see lower priced EVs in the used market in coming years however.
Imho renting via a car share is great for the occasional city truck need but for recreation it’s much better to own.
There wouldn’t be much point to an Alaskan road trip with a rental. Again, just fly and rent a car I guess, but we could get up to Prince George maybe.
This is exactly how I feel
I got a compact crossover to carry my bike. It has the same size of an engine and emissions as my previous car (a sports mini), just the space inside is bigger, one can carry four people without getting crowded and it doesn't look funny with a tow hitch on. Most sensible people drive these kind of cars in the US as well, I saw a lot of Subaru crossovers.
Take the dining room example. A quick search says it costs ~$20,000 to build a dining room, so let's say a house with one costs $10,000 more than a house without. So by foregoing a dining room, one now has an extra 10k that they can spend however they want.
But that DOESN'T mean that they can't spend it on throwing parties! I'm pretty sure that even spread over many years, 10k dollars can produce a lot of fun times.
From this post, I'm not sure if you have underpriced dining rooms are exceedingly cheap, or if you are unaware how much a rental place actually costs. My parents have a rather nice dining room that they host every major holiday in and they still spent more than 10k in the last ~2 years alone for family gatherings they did away from home.
Edit: Reading through the thread I've come away with the feeling most people are just talking past each other with no frame of reference for how the other lives. There are people it seems coming from cultures centered on weekly/monthly gatherings that are bewildered that someone would consider a dining room superflous.
This is because people look at the utility of the room when it is used, but forget to multiply that by the frequency of its use.
And yes, sometimes a dining room can surprisingly come in handy for something that comes up. However, this is true of almost any use you can think of for the room. I would venture to say that most people who have dining rooms, who don't routinely host dinners, would be better served making it a video game room, or an aquarium, or a giant closet, or a room for whatever hobby they actually do. Yet across America, millions of dining rooms sit empty for months at a spread, screaming to be made into something that more accurately reflects the lifestyles of their owners.
Every day, my money sits in my bank account screaming to be spent on something intangible...
I know a group, where 8 people + a dungeon master meet weekly/bi-weekly to play DnD. It's a little on the larger side but this would be "dinner" party size. Of course they bring food and drinks as well. It would be a little ridiculous (and expensive) for them to rent a grand ballroom every weekend.
Similarly there are plenty of people I know who look forward to college football and hold similarly sized game days with themselves and significant others. Again nothing special, just 6-12 people ultimately watching tv. Food is brought, and drinks are had, but they aren't having a "rager". Renting a park every weekend to watch college football every weekend would be expensive.
The fact that you would think to rent a park for these kind of things just leads me to believe we are talking past each other. We are missing significant cultural context on the utilities of these rooms. If you don't watch sports or don't play DnD I can see how the idea of needing a dining room is superfluous.
And most people would't throw away their friend groups in order to invest $10k on the S&P. At that point, why even have the money?
I do have a couple rooms that can accommodate 8 or so people each and I use them when I have guests. Also outdoor space in the summer. But I use those spaces for other things as well.
I have s living room with kitchen which is 24 square meters, definitely not big, contains the kitchen, sofas, tables and I hosted 10 people in it.
The (bi)weekly social engagement that is an important part of their social life is not an edge case though.
Not really, because your principal loses value because of inflation.
If you buy that $10k CD, you get $500 out per year; you pay a couple hundred bucks of that in taxes, leaving $300. If inflation sticks around 3.2%, you'll be losing $20/year before you spend anything.
But it's beside the point. The point is that opportunity costs must be accounted for.
So yeah opportunity costs must be accounted for, but in your scenario the opportunity cost is negligible. We're talking 0.4% per year. Investing in a CD is like pissing in the ocean
You still generally owe taxes as the interest is accrued. So, the situation doesn't change-- that CD loses money unless your tax rate is low.
Even with compounded interest not subject to taxation until withdrawal, it's not much better. Even in a ridiculous case with 30 years, 10000 * (1.05^30) = $43220 ; minus .4 * 33220 = $29932; 29932 / (1.032^30) = $11401-- or about .4% real return per year.
Opportunity costs beyond inflation make the picture even more ridiculous.
Not surprising that a lower tax rate gets to the same number sooner through compounding.
BUt the bigger issue is that you have to pay tax on interest as it is accrued, not all at the end. So in your case there's a 3.35% return vs. 3.2% inflation or a .15% net return.
At least in areas where space matters...
Most people? I haven’t hosted any party in years.
Notably I am not imagining large parties (the 300 people you mention). I just haven't had more than 1 person over to my place at a time in over a year.
> Would you rent a space to host 8 people every week just to play DnD?
No but in such a situation only 1/8th of the people involved need to have a living room.
We host a few people, often using our dining room, at least once a week and often more. Sometimes two people sometimes twenty. Sometimes dinner, tea, craft night, board games, dungeons and dragons, birthday parties, whiskey tastings, family visits.
We aren't exceptional in this among our friend group - everyone shares the fun and stress of hosting.
I'm not in some exotic culture either, just a medium sized city in the southeast US.
You got me there, I'm not a sociologist and I can only draw from experience. I come from an immigrant family in New England and one my of my best friends is an immigrant from Europe which places high priority on the eating together thing. That said you could be right as more and more relationships move online.
>No but in such a situation only 1/8th of the people involved need to have a living room.
In a perfect economy with 100% efficient utilization there will never be any waste or duplication of resources. We don't have a perfect economy.
I guess I am just thinking about it from an urbanist point of view, and how our view of personal space and a relative lack of focus on publicly accessible community spaces affects our land use and exacerbates the housing crisis. I say this as someone in a family which has been in this country for generations, and probably focused too much on personal wealth and access to large homes. I am learning to appreciate the value of smaller private spaces and bigger public spaces as I have slowly moved from the country to a dense city throughout my life. I go to weekly gatherings with friends, but that's at the local hackerspace not at anyone's house.
I can see how from an immigrant background there is more focus on familial togetherness and I think that is a good cultural trait for us to encourage and support in city design. Though as a queer person my family is not who I want to spend time with on a weekly basis.
No offering your spare bedroom when someone drinks too much, no communal potlucks, no gatherings when businesses are closed...
Where you invest your resources speaks volumes about your priorities in life.
And I don’t have a spare bedroom. Also most of my friend group doesn’t drink.
Owning things means you get to be your own master. That is worth different things to different people.
I know couples without kids who only rent cars but that number goes way down for people who have kids.
Tell that to fixed income folks who are priced out of the houses they own due to property tax increases.
Can't really think of anything else I own that has anything equivalent to a property tax.
But anyways you're missing the point. For instance my house had a 'dining room' when I bought it, but I made it into something that I use every day (music studio/band practice room).
The conventional part of me would have just kept it a dining room, and used it maybe once or twice.
$10k would get you about $500 a year long term (5%).
$500 a year doesn't go far, and that assumes you don't use the dining room for any other purpose than a couple of parties a year.
Well said. And I think that you cut to the heart of what the electric vehicle advocates are doing wrong. They are telling us the only times we actually enjoy being in the car and travelling are the ones we should give up.
I don’t use a car in the city. An electric car can’t yet take me home in 2 days without perfect conditions and a tailored root.
With a rented car I need to take a full damage insurance just in case a tiny scratch is visible.
Would you pay an extra $500 a month to avoid having to spend $1000 renting a car twice a year? Probably not, so the question is how much more does it cost to not rent the long distance car.
And I've never rented a car where a 1mm scratch would require fixing, nor a 1cm scratch
Bumper Damage IS: Dent/scratch larger than 6” (size of the damage evaluator), or hole/tear of any size
Exterior Body Damage (Non-Bumper) IS: dent/scratch larger than 2” circle, or hole/tear of any size
Glass Damage IS: Any ‘Star’/crack
Ever since Covid happened we rent one for 1 month a year in summer and drive to my in-laws, and further down in central Italy. Overall clocking ~3.5-4k km.
We rented all types, ICE, hybrid and BEV with no noticeable difference: while with the Model Y we had to stop N times to fast-charges and a snack, with the ICE we’d stop anyway to rest, drink or use the toilet even on a half-tank.
Range anxiety is a thing, but it’s over after a couple days.
It’s just FUD, BEVs are ready
Frankly the amount of Nirvana fallacies in this thread is indicative of the coping stress the petrol-heads are suffering.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gasoline_consumpti...
Have you tried going to the mountains in France? Or anywhere not on the main roads, even? I mean actually traveling around, not just taking the highway across.
My ICE motorbike has a range of around 300 km on the highway, around 200 in the mountains if I'm enjoying myself. I've had range anxiety with it to the point I now cart around extra gas. None of the gas stations I visited had any kind of charging available (outside your regular outlet, but it's unlikely the attendant will let you hook up your car to the outlet inside the office – if it's even open).
Not everybody has the same usage patterns as you do.
Sure, but keep in mind that bikers riding on the rolling hills of the French countryside are a significantly smaller demography than the millions driving across the highway infrastructure.
The feeling I get whenever these discussions come up is that there's a distinct lack of nuance, and a tendency to shove a one-size-fits-all solution down peoples' throats, even though the solution might only fit-most. I get that it's easier to reason with absolutes, and that sometimes some people may need a nudge to take the jump. But I also understand being pushed like this with no apparent concern for peoples' situations can make them close down to the argument, even if it could actually make sense for them in the end.
People complaining about range anxiety are usually told "nah man, it's just FUD!" Maybe it is just FUD even for a sizable portion of those complaining, but just dismissing their concerns out of hand doesn't seem like a good approach.
And this isn't just a bunch of people on a random discussion board. It's actual policies being enacted affecting peoples' actual lives.
Talking about France, in a few years' time my motorbike won't be allowed inside Paris (where I live). I rarely use it. I'd really love to see the proof that building and buying a new one, to replace the one that is in perfect working condition, is actually better for the environment. Especially given that the newer model which complies with the current pollution standards consumes the same amount of gas as mine (judging by the manufacturer's specs). Of course, this law is stupid because it only considers the year the vehicle was sold, but it's just one example of many why people may have a knee-jerk reaction to being forcibly pushed to adopt new things.
The situation you described is purely recreative. Others might argue that the climate is much more important than the personal hobby of a few motorcyclists and would warrant banning ICE vehicles altogether.
One can change recreational activities easily.
> I'd really love to see the proof that building and buying a new one, to replace the one that is in perfect working condition, is actually better for the environment.
I am with you on that one and I believe that if all this wasn't an hypocritical way to save the automotive industry, the governments would push and force car brands to develop and sell homologated EV conversion kits for all cars builds in the last 30 years.
International shipping is single-handedly the greatest contributor by a small margin, tons of which just does not need to happen, full stop. We send products around the entire world because it costs pennies less to package pineapple in one country than another, and most of it goes in the fucking garbage anyway. And the products that do require shipping could be done in a much, much more efficient manner to save tons and tons of ship traffic per year. The other major contributor is industry, which could be trimmed significantly if we put serious work into ending the production of stupid, useless, shitty items that no one actually wants (knockoff electronics, basically anything drop-shipped, single use fucking lithium phone chargers).
And all that's not even going into shit like the FIELDS of e-bikes and e-scooters being stacked in China because there's just nowhere to go with that.
Military dick-wagging especially but not solely by the United States accounts for absolute shit-tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere, too, absolutely none of which needs to happen. Military vehicles, construction vehicles, LTL trucks, service vehicles like garbage trucks: this is where we can make big dents in climate change. Not by taking away Jerry's Corvette that does, at best, 10k miles if he has a good year where he gets in a lot of track time. As far as I'm concerned this is just the "check your carbon footprint" garbage with extra steps: blaming consumers for the state of the environment while completely letting off the dozens of multi-national corporations actually holding the power and making the decisions that are collapsing the biosphere.
If at some point in the far flung future, things like dirt bikes or even track monster race cars owned by folk turn out to be the biggest environmental problem, fine. Then we'll deal with it. But from my perspective we have an entire ocean of fish much bigger and far more worth frying first than them.
Now despite still enjoying riding a motorbike I am doing more recreationnal cycling and only transportation focused motorbike riding[1]. I just embraced moving a but slower. Turns out that with a simple bicycle you can get way enough thrill in the downhills, and with much less risks. As an ex elite road cycling racer, I am no stranger to catching and overtaking cars and motorbikes descending mountain passes.
[1] I basically only ride my motorbike if I have my partner with me and I am going to a specific place we wouldn't be able to make it and back home within a time constraint.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/2023-shatters-climate-reco...
This year we visited the Dolomites and the weather was insane. The place was full of old photo's of meters high snowfalls but all they got this year was a couple centimeters in early December. We need to change our habits, this pace is unsustainable
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/2023-shatters-climate-reco...
This is exactly the issue I'm talking about.
I'm all for preserving the environment, I really am. And I think that moving the immense majority of (sub-)urban commuters from ICE to EV is great and will make a difference. Or, even better: stop commuting if possible!
Isn't the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle", "in that order"? How are we reducing or even reusing here?
But this whole "replace all ICE vehicles now" just screams of disguised "won't somebody think of the economy?"
Also you make a common mistake of motorcycle owners in equating the amount of gas consumed with the amount of pollution. Smaller engines are by far vastly more polluting per kilometer than larger ones.
Which is saying something even worse than saying their per-litre pollution is bad since motorcycles get more kilometers per litre. In other words even with their better per-kilometer gas usage, they still pollute more per unit of distance travelled. That is truly bad, from a pollution perspective. It’s a mistake to think the small amount of gas used means there is less impact.
So your motorcycle should be trashed, yes.
I'm all for your considering that I shouldn't get to enjoy the mountains, but please, come out and say that, instead of dancing around the subject and saying that a newer ICE bike would be just fine. The argument just loses credibilty.
> Smaller engines are by far vastly more polluting per kilometer than larger ones.
How small are we talking, here? My motorbike's engine is bigger than many modern ICE cars' (I'm in Europe, so big-ass V8s aren't that common).
Be that as it may, you seem to ignore what I'd say is the most important part of my argument: I'm not complaining that I wouldn't be allowed to ride any bike. I'm complaining that the powers that be figured that a newer bike, with the same weight and similar sized engine (smaller, actually! – so more polluting?) and the same gas consumption is somehow better than my older model, and I should be allowed to ride that and not the one I already have.
Then one would hope we will have swappable battery pack options for motorcycles in the future as well, which could make refueling more widespread. Easier to do for motorcycles than cars. And with a smaller battery by necessity, swapping makes more sense. Anyway I'm just rambling on here, who knows what will happen.
As far as you getting to enjoy the mountains, I had (maybe mistakenly) been thinking you were talking about a dirt bike, versus a road bike. I don't think of the sound of road bikes as annoying to anyone, especially a quiet one. Not quite as Edward Abbey would say, "if there's a road there, the place is already ruined" but definitely you get more leeway to make noise on a road.
The much longer stops translate into needing to sleep at a hotel rather than being at your destination. You clearly haven't accounted for that either.
I’ve clearly accounted for everything dude, including my own endurance and that of my family: every couple hours we need to get out, stretch, have a coffee and use the toilet. Plugging a DC 150kW takes 2 minutes, and we were never stuck in a queue waiting for that.
In any case the worse time wasters are roadworks and traffic jams on the German highways and the abysmal wait at the Gotthard Tunnel. If not for them I could easily make it in one day with a Model Y
More like 2 seconds in a Model Y.
all other designs where you have to present a card are simply a failure
You realise that you weren't in a queue because there are very few EVs around I hope?
Most healthy people don't need toilet breaks every 2h, and you're not accounting for the line at charging spots. 10 minutes * 5 cars isn't a short stop really.
Please, enough goalpost pushing
Peace of mind.
When we're driving an ICE car, we simply don't care about the range. We don't think about it; it's not a concern. That peace of mind is fucking priceless, especially if one's life is already busy with far more pressing concerns.
In an EV we have to constantly keep an eye on that battery level, on that Miles Remaining counter. We have to micromanage the A/C and other things that consume power. That is mentally draining, and for what? It's something we don't have to care about in an ICE car.
I drove an EV, I constantly worried about the range. Range was constantly on my mind, even when I wasn't driving the fucking thing. It was mentally fucking exhausting. Sincerely: No thanks.
I'll happily pay the $50~70 bucks at the gas station to fill up my car in a few minutes and be at peace. It easily beats paying almost nothing charging overnight and then worrying if I can come back home when I start another day.
Personally I prefer paying almost nothing (in fuel) for a nicer drive with far less maintenance worries.
> I prefer paying almost nothing (in fuel)
Both of these look like very dependent on the personal situation. In my case I never really got over the winter induced anxiety (the range dropped severely for my expectations), combined with the lack of home charger, combined with high electricity costs, combined with the fact that I can walk, cycle, or take public transport for most of my needs. I eventually returned to a cheap, small, ICE car that I use occasionally but serves for peace of mind (it's there!) and makes me just as comfortable as an EV makes you. I wouldn't recommend to you a bicycle or even a small car because it's very important not to generalize to others based on my needs.
Of course all transport ownership is dependent on personal situation. That really goes without saying, just look out the window! I didn't recommend anything, to do so would be daft.
I simply do not believe range anxiety is still the problem it once was.
I gave it up and switched back in November 2022. While I always keep my options open and an eye out for what makes sense for me, I haven't seen any signs that the situation is radically different in general. It certainly hasn't changed for me personally.
> I simply do not believe range anxiety is still the problem it once was.
Maybe but that says very little. If your waiter told they don't believe the soup contains anywhere near the amount of spit it once did you wouldn't feel encouraged. I'm happy if the situation is improving and if I still care about owning a car in the future I'll surely reassess if that critical threshold was reached. Anything short of that will get a "very good, keep up the good work" but not my money.
My partner has had a series of EVs for 10 years now.
Just a few weeks ago dropped me off at the airport (~100 mile roundtrip) and started planning for it days it advance. How much needed to driver on day N-2, N-1, how much charge would be left. Then spent the morning of the trip sipping coffee at Whole Foods to bring the charge up to %100 (normally limited to %80). Then spent the whole trip hyperfocused on the mileage remaining, worried about getting home.
While the trip is quite a bit shorter than the advertised range, with hilly terrain it's always uncertain what the real world mileage ends up being.
It all seemed very exhausting. So I guess it takes more than a decade to get over range anxiety.
Which goes back to.. more range REALLY DOES help. 100 vs 200 miles range is game cahnging. 200 to 300 would be huge for road trips. 400, 500, starts to hit some diminishing but non-zero returns.
I pay about 15% of what I would have previously paid for diesel, and the only maintenance I've had to do was a new tyre after running over a nail.
Driving an EV in the SF Bay Area is super convenient -- I know all the chargers off the top of my head and maintaining enough range is second nature to me now. I regularly road trip my Model 3 as well without any issues. I don't even look at the miles, just battery %.
I recently got an ICE car for fun on the weekends and thinking about gas, oil changes, preventative maintenance, and repairs has been way more stressful than charging.
Give the infrastructure a few years to catch up. Now that NACS has taken over in the US, things will only get better.
Even our least populated states are littered with fast chargers alone highways and interstates.
When I bought my model 3 in 2018, infrastructure was good enough in Idaho the meet my needs, though there were a few tight gaps.
Now in 2024 the picture has dramatically changed with every route having excess charge capacity and options.
Those down on EVs are having to come up with ever more convoluted scenarios and routes to justify why they aren't feasible. I literally saw one where a person posited they needed to drive from Edmonton to Winnipeg Canada every day during the winter and because an EV is a bad fit for that situation it's a bad fit for everyone.
So what I want to say is, that poor people have better things to worry about than EVs and sustainability, like getting through the day with food on their plate and maybe a roof over their head. While they will be the most impacted, they can afford to care about it the least.
Also, EVs right now just shift the problem around until we manage to produce electricity from renewable sources, which is still some way off, especially in the poor places that will drive the least efficient ICEs while they last.
I don't think it's well thought through given how broken the rating of cars is, but that's a step in the right direction I guess.
> Also, EVs right now just shift the problem around until we manage to produce electricity from renewable sources
Until we manage to actually reduce the amount of cars. The solution for transportation is quite clearly less and smaller vehicles, all EVs.
[1] https://www.economie.gouv.fr/particuliers/prime-conversion
>Until we manage to actually reduce the amount of cars. The solution for transportation is quite clearly less and smaller vehicles, all EVs.
That's called a motorcycle, although they're not electric. There's a few hundred million of them already in the world, and greater adaption of motorcycles where possible would be incredible for reduced traffic and reduced pollution. On top of that they are cheap, fuel efficient and fun to ride. But nobody will listen to the solution, because there is too much money to be made from the problem.
Note that "the majority of people" don't have a car, they have 2-wheeled vehicle at best. [1] I'm not conflating "electric vehicles" with "electric cars".
> That's called a motorcycle, although they're not electric.
No shit.
> There's a few hundred million of them already in the world, and greater adaption of motorcycles where possible would be incredible for reduced traffic and reduced pollution. On top of that they are cheap, fuel efficient and fun to ride. But nobody will listen to the solution, because there is a too much money to be made from the problem.
Fully agree, even though the maximum amount of public transportation is in my opinion desirable in areas that permit it.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/04/16/car-bike-...
My mistake!
To add a bit more to the discussion. Larger adaption of motorcycles instead of cars in cities can also reduce the pollution from public transport. Nothing spews more exhaust than a bus stuck in traffic. Motorcycles are also a good complement to public transit, since you can get to a station or terminal that is far away on your motorcycle and easily park there. Car parking needs much more space. In many cases it is better to get to a terminal that has express public transport by your own means, so that you don't have to live by the local bus schedule and wait for the slow route to the terminal.
The main advantage I see to electric motorcycles is that you barely need to change anything in most car-dependant areas to start mass adoption. They are fast enough for you to not feel unsafe next to cars at a red light, and can go quite far on a single charge.
I've been raving about Taiwan's Gogoros for a while, but still, too many motorcycles is a big safety hazard. Electric bicycles are much better in that regard, muscle ones even more.
It would also save a lot of money on infrastructure, if traffic could be improved without having to build larger and larger highways.
As for electric and muscle bicycles, I think they have their time and place. There's nothing wrong with people combining all methods of transportation in their life, depending on circumstances and weather. Car + MC + Bicycle could be in everybody's garage.
I wouldn't consider many motorcycles a safety hazard. It's mostly people riding like lunatics. And safety gear has become better recently, with airbag clothes. At least bikers only hurt themselves in an accident. In my experience motorcycles are safer than electric bicycles, unless you're in a place with very good bicycle infrastructure. Motorcycles can accelerate out of dangerous situations and have better manoeuvrability than large-wheeled bicycles.
And I’m talking about gas cars.
And cars carry more people.
The fact that motorcycles use less gas has absolutely no connection to how much pollution they produce, which is a lot.
Cars carry more people, and more stuff. And it protects you from the weather. But if you're just transporting yourself or yourself and a passenger, the motorcycle can be a good option many times.
I don't know about that. It certainly affects mine. I may not be representative of the average person in my culture, but I was a product of my culture regardless.
All the while the same people drive ICE vehicles and contribute to the insane amount of environmental destruction caused by oil drilling and transportation. But they don't go commenting on every new ICE vehicle article saying "But what about the Exxon Valdez, what about the birds covered in oil?"
The really good ones can also check if there are free slots in the chargers and optimise accordingly.
Also, the fuel consumption of an ICE is going to be much more consistent and predictable especially later in it's service life.
*hyperbole
If planning a route using the built in satnav it will say "you won't make it, add a charging stop?"
But there's so many chargers I don't even bother planning.
This integration didn’t exist when the EV versions were just electrified versions of ICE cars.
This changed with the upcoming of car by traditional automakers that were designed to be an BEV first. I’ve used the route planning in a Kia EV as well as a VW EV without any issues. You can plan your route with charging points, select the desired remaining capacity, select the kind of charging you want, etc. AFAIK Porsche offers the same features too
Edit: Just looked up Porsche and they have it too. They call it "Intelligent range optimiser". Can't be asked to check more brands.
You are the exception. That's what all the replies are trying to tell you
And for hosting occasional guests an extra bedroom, plenty of solutions exist for creating temporary sleeping space in the living room, while leaving your own bedroom to the guests. A small inconvenience to pay to save out a whole bedroom to pay for and maintain. There’s also the option of going on vacation together, which can be a really fun way to spend the holidays.
Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead.
My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution. I see so many people maxing out their house and car within their budget, and then talking about but never doing things they really want to, like that far away vacation, or that expensive hobby. I never quite understand why.
If you want a small house and flying around to vacations, you can do it without looking down on who decides for another trade-off.
If you:
1. Like cooking.
2. Are good at cooking.
Imagine lecturing people about saving the planet while defending going out to eat in restaurants or ordering all your meals.
There are many ways to life your life and thankfully in the modern day, you can live your entire life without cooking anything involved yet getting all the necessary nutrients plus enjoying delicious food.
It's just more expensive, so you need to afford it.
I'm intentionally skipping all the other soapboxing in the rest of the comment.
If we look at the full chains of:
- Equipment distribution (production and delivery of large domestic kitchen appliances)
- Energy distribution (residential delivery of electricity/gas needed to power kitchen appliances, and water)
- Space required in each home for a reasonably kitted out kitchen (more space to heat in winter, more materials used in building)
- Ingredients and materials distribution (including the production and packaging of intermediate food products made from raw products, since everyone's cooking with canned things, packaged things, cured meats, pastes, pasteurized things, grains, ...)
The restaurants, fast-food chains and ready-meal prep companies are able to operate on economies of scale that are vastly more efficient than the individualistic, nuclear-family domestic "you must cook home-made meals for your family, friends and guests" culture.
We've made eating out seem either:
- Decadent (cost)
- Unhealthy (take-out and fast-food)
But neither of those things need to be true.
The problem with scale is the storage aspect - preservatives we use to reduce spoilage etc., which arguably affect the healthiness of the food. "Just-in-time" distribution works well until it doesn't (see: COVID).
But I'd argue that the individual household probably spoils more ingredients than industrial production does - that just isn't evident; everyone has their little compost heaps or things go to landfill. Old ingredients go mouldy at the backs of cupboards, just as things run out their shelf life in supermarkets.
Maybe the raw-food vegans and paleo bros are on to something...
It has nothing to do with the food, nothing at all, it has to do with intimacy and care. THIS is where I live and I invite you here, I take care of you because I care about you, THIS is food that I made for YOU, I'm sharing a part of my life, this is how I cook because I like it or because that's what my family usually eats or because I tried something new.
Maybe it's because I'm. Mediterranean and it's part of the culture but the idea that you invite someone to eat and it being about the food is oh god so depressing to me. It's like gifting someone a poem and caring about how good the poem is.
Yes, I think it's cultural. In at least parts of the Mediterranean (Italy), people say "they live to eat".
If I'm having people over, it's about sharing stuff, not necessarily food. Discussions, jokes, games, activities, etc.
Food is... secondary, frankly.
Right. So the act of cooking actually doesn't have much to do with it! Arguably, you are tying the act of making food to "intimacy and care" in a way that makes it feel to me like there's this big social pressure to feed people! There are a myriad of other ways to look after your humans.
Order some food, it doesn't even need to be from fancy restaurants. Low-end to cheap catering and delivery services (so not Uber Eats or such). You can prepare some appetizers at home if you really want some home made food.
Depending on where you order the food... people might not even realize you didn't cook it.
Honestly one of the most saddening comments I've read.
You can feed your people because you enjoy it, me and my tribe of outliers can chill in other ways :)
FWIW: It's not like I'd ever let anyone go hungry!! Just that in my mind there's a big discrepancy between "fully preparing a home-cooked meal for several hours". If you're privileged to have the time, space, energy and knowledge to lovingly prepare big feasts for people, more power to you. Me and my cold-hearted mates will be content with, oftentimes, shoving some chips in the oven or frying a bag of frozen nasi goreng, or getting cheap takeaway to go with our beers ;)
That’s however a joke that home food is better. There are great home meals, and there are bad restaurants, sure. But the top is obviously restaurants. And not even just because they really know what they do, but it’s even way more difficult to get those kind of ingredients what they use. One time, one of my friends from one of the best restaurants from my home country (Hungary) left some beef loin from his restaurant in my fridge as gratitude. I made the best steak from it, that I’ve ever made. It didn’t matter how expensive meat I bought, or in which expensive meat shop. I tried different techniques, but no. I couldn’t reproduce it. Simply that kind of loin is not accessible for common people there.
I think this whole thread is depressing because it suggests you need a bunch of shit to be happy and have good relationships. But if you have good friends and relationships often you don't need all that shit. If you need a pickup once a year you probably have a friend you can borrow it from. Even better you can invite that friend to help you with the thing you need it for and help them with something else when they need it.
And for the "dining room just for parties" argument from above: it is actually possible to invite your neighbours, your friends, your colleagues, ... to dinner more than once a year. I almost never had people turn down such an invitation.
No single restaurant. But in a city like mine, there are countless restaurants that offer meals I have neither the knowledge nor equipment to prepare.
It may not be 100,000 ingredients… but neither are the shops I'd buy the ingredients from.
We also like to sit an eat together "just because", so like you point out, a dining room can be used day-to-day, not just for parties (though it's also great for those).
Of course it's possible.
But that kind of thinking is often the problem. Plan based on what you'll actually do.
But you should try to increase your accuracy about what you will want when making big decisions. We all should.
Many on Hacker News have some sort of ambition. To create a startup, a side business, an open source project or have a hobby, be more knowledgeable or become better programmer. In theory that can happen having a home office and extra space in the garage. In reality it often doesn't because making any greater strides often requires coming together with others forming connections, exchanging information and sharing resource.
Yes, I can learn to cook for example Chinese food. But that isn't the same as having a good food industry with restaurants, entertainment, staff, importers and whatever else that actually enable a numbers of different experiences for many people.
Eventually many tend to realize that it isn't that great. But then they often end up blaming the government, the taxes, major cities, lack of investment or support, or anything other than the reality that they didn't invest in their local community neither through taxes for services or with their own income. But instead there are millions of dollars standing around in things like more expensive cars.
It isn't like I don't understand why someone would want those thing. I just don't think many who do want those things understand that to have a decent career many of their kids are going to have move somewhere where there are good education, successful companies, major airports or other resources. And then, while they get some use of their guest room, won't see them much overall.
I would like to have a personal garage workshop space. I can think about all the things I would build. I would like to be a person that builds things. But in reality, if I had it, I'd probably still be just sitting browsing Hacker News. It's just way easier than to actually get up and start doing something.
I've realized something similar with sports. I could go running any time, but I don't. I could buy some equipment that I rarely use. But if I sign up for some scheduled weekly team sport, and some friends are also going, it's much easier to keep the routine happening. Or if I do some sport together with my spouse.
The same happens with music. I could play and train on my own, and I do some. But it's really with a band and a commitment to an upcoming performance or upcoming recording session that I start more purposefully doing stuff, both on my own and in the rehearsals.
Computers, content and social networks and the pandemic have provided us opportunities to do cool stuff online and share with and learn from others, but I think we have atrophied some physical social aspects there. We need more electronics clubs or garage meetups or whatever method to do something as a group and share the motivation burden or get a bit of help etc.
It is when we do something with others that it gets better than average and the result in the form of being enjoyable or interesting is more than the effort of doing it. If we already don't have a lot of time, energy and motivation running isn't giving us enough to make it worth it. And often we don't because of other things or boredom.
I personally hate to see the millions of dollars wasted on restaurant-cooked food, most of which is not good for you and a lot of it not even good. We would all be better off environmentally, socially, and financially if we returned to the earlier status quo of people cooking most of their own food. "Local communities" still thrived when there were 10% the restaurants there are today. In fact, they were much stronger. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the rare night out as a luxury. But the idea that not eating at restaurants enough is the source of some kind of decline is exactly backwards. Your insight that about the criticality of local connections is critical is true, but it has nothing to do with the number of local restaurants, and they have if anything hindered it rather than helped it. Inviting people over for dinner is an activity that has declined precipitously and forms much deeper connections than going out to eat and patronizing someone's (often vanity) business.
You haven't eaten at a 2 or 3 star restaurant then. They use ingredients you don't have access too, using techniques you can't use at home and pair them with wines or juices you haven't heard about.
However good you think your home cooking is (I think I'm a fairly good cook), you don't come to the knees of a chef with such a restaurant.
Yes, they are not cheap. But neither is buying a bigger house.
And if it's about getting together, who cooked the food doesn't matter. Or even get together without food, that works too.
... and I still want to host people at my house and cook for them?
Fine dining for you may be a strictly superior replacement to home cooking (or alternatively: home cooking is what you do when you cannot have fine dining instead) - but many of us don't see it that way. They are complementary.
Yeah, my cooking isn't Thomas Keller... but that's not actually what it's about? In the same way I'm not Chris Nolan but yet I want to take video at family events?
And if I can say so: seeing fine dining as a strictly superior replacement of home cooking is a regretful way to view the world.
What these “unnecessary extras” or in the contrary “smaller footprint” give is the increased freedom of choice for that particular individual’s situation.
There is no free lunch - every benefit comes with its set of drawbacks. Extra rooms need furnishing and taking care of, cars need maintenance and parking etc.
Different people put different multipliers for each of them.
And this is fine, by the standards of a modern western society.
If I invite people, I do it for the people, if I go out to eat I do it for the food. I don't see why this regrettable just because you think it is.
The 3 star restaurants get old very fast. too expensive, way too long to eat. Very pretentious. As I got older I came to value home cooking many times higher than any restaurant that NYC can offer.
I highly suggest people try these places to understand what is possible with food, but don't value them any higher.
And that's fair enough, but I find the tyranny of "it works for me so you're doing it wrong" very real. In many areas, but in particular with electric car range discussions.
One could also talk about the tyranny of people living their freedom of personal choice to the maximum.
"My solution works for me but will never scale to work for the entire humanity as we're simply too many on this planet for that and also totally screws the environment for future generations, but hey, it works for me!"
Right now people have an issue with the edge cases of EV range. That doesn't mean they wouldn't ever replace their ICE car with an EV if the range story were better (meaning the range of the vehicle itself as well as the charging story).
I'm in a similar situation. My motorbike does, most of the year, ~50 km trips to go see my parents for the weekend (I take the metro or a bicycle for my commute needs). It could be electric, no problem.
But several weeks a year, sometimes on end, I'll go ride in the mountains where current electrical motorbikes would be useless. It's way cheaper for me to own my current motorbike (which I own outright) than to sell it and rent for my trips in addition to buying an electric one. If an electric motorbike could have the same range as mine and the charging infrastructure in the back roads were useful, I could see myself riding around on an electric bike.
It would be debatable whether buying a new motorbike when mine is still in perfect working condition would actually be better for the environment, but I'd say that's another question.
EV range concerns have an obvious solution: build more EV fast charging stations and guarantee cross-compatibility. Standardize the billing system (the EU strategy of "figure it out or we'll do it for you" would be a good one to pull on the automakers here).
The solution is not ever going to be another round of people posting caustic hot takes on social media trying to shame people.
As an aside, range is not a problem with new EV's with 500-600 km range as long as the charging network is good. There was a lot of talk about range anxiety in the early days when cars had 150-300 km range and charging stations were rare. These days with charging stations on every gas station, mall, ferry port, grocery store, random parking lots and what not long drives are no longer a problem as long as you plan a little bit and don't drive through hundreds of kilometers of no mans land without charging up first.
Then there is all the routes that just don't have chargers, so you are limited to only the common roads.
Until EV gets way better range, I think plug in hybrids make way more sense.
And only two of them are close enough I'd consider it a day trip.
That said:
> Until EV gets way better range, I think plug in hybrids make way more sense.
I absolutely agree. 90% of the environmental benefit with much faster roll-out.
500km is a short drive for some, when you can only fast charge to 80% and cars get far less range in the cold. 500km becomes 400km at 80%, you have to start hunting at 70km range, and at 140km/hr that's just over 2 hours of driving.
(Speed reduces range too)
But as I said in another comment, this will self fix. Charging time will come down, range will extend.
When you can fast charge a car to true 600km range, even at 140km/hr at -20C, with the heater running, and in under 10 minutes, I'd say we're there.
Maybe by 2028? I think?
But yes, this will solve itself. Each year charging becomes faster, each year travel distance longer, it will auto solve.
One thing people overlook, is many places have blackouts! If tomorrow, every person switched to electric cars, it would be disaster.
So as people switch, we'll have to build more capacity into the grid. Not just production, but substations, and transfer lines too.
And this will happen.
The reality of grid upgrades is unless we make the problem worse, it won't get better.
TBH, that is mostly a communication problem. Tesla already does much better than most non-EV types realize. A shocking number of people think road trips require literal multi-hour charging stops. "I heard from this Tesla owner that he only charges overnight... I'd have to stop at a hotel every 200 miles!" sigh
Consumer education is still important.
Outside of a Tesla... road tripping EVs in the US is often not fun.
They don't say it's superior. Multiple things can be true at once. People often like to cook at home. It's all cozy. It also is a way to save money. People with smaller house have more disposable income, to splurge more liberally on luxuries, feel less constrained in their choice to go out. All those things are true. I think the main message is that people needlessly make conventional choices (e.g. big house, big car), and these choices then drive their decision making after the fact. They're reminding us that stuff (the actual tangible inanimate things) have a tendency to start to own you, rather than the other way around.
I suspect most of the people replying to these EV threads are Americans living in extremely car-centric suburbia, where the nearest shop is 15km away. In this situation the only convenient way is to host dinner parties, have a small gym, have a guest room, and be able to do your hobbies in the garden.
Still, these replies show how spoiled, individualistic and entitled people are.
Are you living in a cave? Do you have children? Do you own a car? Do you fly anywhere? Are you sure your house has no glass walls before you throw rocks?
I didn't throw a rock, I pointed out a flaw. And it is safe for my wellbeing to do so without being perfect, because I'm aware of my own.
There is no flaw or entitlement doing whatever makes you happy. And there's nothing individualistic about not liking public transport (if you have access to it).
People living in rural America have to drive a lot farther than suburbanites.
Also, note that people who prefer to not own a car can choose to live in places with good public transit (mostly big cities like Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Boston, Philidelphia, etc.).
Fair enough, but that list doesn't include the third places the parent commenter was referring to: a choice of restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, etc.
All of that is included in the "etc." part.
A 15 minute city is therefore somewhere all of these facilities are a bit under a mile away.
Most places in the US are probably two- or three-hour-cities — which is still nothing to the average EV’s range.
> The 15-minute city (FMC or 15mC[2][3][4][5][6][7]) is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city.
Roughly 20mph on an electric bike, in 15mn I believe you do roughly 5 miles?
But yes, for all the suburbs I've lived in I've had the choice of dozens+ of restaurants, a few grocers, various stores, office parks, and more within 5mi. There's definitely places where this isn't true but it's not like all suburbs take two miles to leave the pure houses neighborhood.
No one claimed that the average suburban "Main St" is going to compare to high-density urban planning, but that suburban shopping options generally offer choices for most daily shopping needs within a reasonable (1-8km) distance independent from the city hub they're next to.
You did. Dense cities are struggling to implement the 15mn trip to any amenities. Yet you are claiming that everything is in a range of 8km from the average house in an American suburb, that roughly 15mn on an e-bike.
>> a choice of restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, etc.
> All of that is included in the "etc." part.
Now who's moving the goal post?
> Yet you are claiming that everything is in a range of 8km
No one said "everything", but "most shopping options". You don't seem actually interested on having an honest conversation rather than pushing a distorted view of American suburbs of which you don't seem to have any 1st hand experience.
Just because you don’t like how they do it doesn’t mean that they don’t do it.
Then why are people using cars so much if everything is at a walking distance?
I would love to be able to bike there safely. Wouldn't even take much longer than driving.
For example, one time I stayed at the The Cupertino Hotel in CA and tried walking to One Infinite Loop, a junction which every sufficiently old iOS user will be familiar with because it's what Apple used to use as the icon for their Maps app before they relocated their HQ to the flying saucer campus. The junction looks like this, and was an awful experience as a pedestrian:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3350322,-122.0325183,3a,75y,...
This is of course highly situational and varies by location. NYC, despite its reputation, was a lot less scary to walk around.
And once all (or let's say most) vehicles are self driving and powered by sustainable energy, things will be overwhelmingly better on all those dimensions.
Meantime, you could adopt some driving-analog version of the following approach, but don't expect most of us to do so:
"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts." --Spaf
This is only true for one of them and self-driving is still a long ways off. A self-driving EV still produces a lot of pollution (more than half of the CO2 is during manufacturing, and tire dust isn’t improved), costs a lot, and requires significant amounts of space to store and operate.
Nobody is saying there aren’t utility benefits but we shouldn’t continue massively subsidizing something while ignoring all of the problems. That’s why your analogy is nonsensical: spaf and the rest of the community didn’t say “perfect security is impossible, guess we shouldn’t do anything until AGI solves it for us!” and go to the bar.
Nope.
In term of general health, on average people will still lower their life expectancy every time they use a self driving vehicle instead of riding your bicycle or walking for the same short trip.
Plus the horror in term of land management and the general effect it has on psych.
And that car can haul groceries, etc. much better than a bike or hands can. I have a grocery store well within walking distance of me (on safe-ish sidewalks even), but I only walk when I only have a few things to pick up because otherwise I'm trying to haul 50lb of fragile and bulky stuff back half a mile to my house by hand (I also tend to go there mostly while I'm already out doing other things, so the marginal additional mileage is nearly zero). Yes, I could take the approach of going to the grocery store every day, but I flat out don't have the time for that (or the weather for that!). Or I could take the approach of buying a much nicer bike with more hauling capacity, but I already have a car (and do enough with it that there's no reasonable way to go without one) so I'm not going to spend $2k on a bike that would only reduce my mileage by 100 miles a year. Heck...just the savings from fixing things DIY covers the cost of my car in a typical year (I have an old house!), not to mention the car rental fees I'd incur for trips pretty much anywhere outside of a 5-10 mile radius.
But to your point, this is also highly situational. If I were in an apartment in NYC, that's a completely different situation than being in a house in a small-size city (honestly, my city in the US even has public transport that nearly rivals comparable cities in Europe...but they key there is comparing to comparable cities in Europe...where everyone still has cars because to go anywhere outside of a small radius, they need a car).
I just wanted to point out that this is missed on a lot of people. City planners in suburbs have come a long way, at least in DFW they have. I live in Oak Cliff which is about 3 miles S/SW of downtown Dallas. The northern suburbs of DFW such as Frisco are not the traditional boring/bland bedroom communities that get associated with suburbs. Well, there is that element but there are many good jobs, good restaurants/entertainment, and other amenities traditionally associated with city centers in the suburbs these days.
I suggest spending some times in a growing a suburb with an open mind. If you're a city person it's not likely to amaze you but it's not that bad either.
Trying to have a decent life, to live how you like is being spoiled, individualistic and entitled? Who are you to say such things to people?
If you're actively arguing against better alternatives for the collectivity, yes, it is.
You're also missing the point about how much it pollutes to make one car battery. There was a YT video a while back and you break even pollution wise at about 60-70k miles - basically your fancy electric car is pre-polluted. The only advantage over a gas car is the feel good sentiment.
The main point about climate change and everything is that you can't play ostrich and if you don't see happening it means you're gonna be ok. If the US pollutes too much (for example's sake) and the ice shelf at the North pole melts, you're gonna feel it all over the world because the water will rise equally.
"If the US pollutes too much", droughts and other rare-ish weather events in South America, Africa and South Asia will displace more people and lead to more instability. That's a much more tangible threat in our lifetimes...
The other advantage is environmental responsibility.
The pre-pollution you speak of is a myth, because after one year of use the total pollution crosses over in favor of the electric car. Even if the electricity is sourced from the worst source, coal burning, the net result is still a win for electric because electric drive trains use energy so much more efficiently than gas.
Though am not familiar with how much less pollution is generated by creating an ICE vehicle.
Democracy doesn’t come from surveys.
I agree with you on the supply chain of EVs... in particular if we're talking about electric cars which are extremely wasteful compared to smaller vehicles and public transit.
Housing might be a long term ponzi but we'll see I guess :-). As long as they keep devaluing currency it is not a bad bet. Especially in a metro area.
Property taxes are worse than capital gains in that the whole value of the property is taxed each year, compounding, rather than the increase in value when sold.
Not everyone has a five star restaurant down the street.
And I am a good cook, when the example above was given I was thinking it would have to be dinner somewhere like Chez Panisse for a party of 10. And even then it wouldn't be the same as a party at home--maybe SV tech people don't value this, but most cultures still value the social connection of cooking for ourselves.
ROFL no fancy restaurant will let me suspend a friend off the ceiling. Honestly most won’t be happy with board games.
Also, a home cooked meal is better - not because of the quality, but _because it’s home cooked_. And fyi cooking is a communal activity. The friends are in the kitchen then move with me to dining.
Not to mention I’m a solitary weirdo and I host people at least twice a month. Same with the last two generations of my family. The only time it was as bad as you describe (and “once per two years” is really bad) was when I was cripplingly depressed.
Edit: also, having a spare bedroom and a living room big enough to host even a dozen is hardly maxing out anything.
And you’re exaggerating the cost too. Two ovens? Seriously have you seen a Polish Christmas dinner? Dozen people, dozen meals, one stove/oven combo. It’s normal stuff done by normal people with small flats.
I like your idea of parties :3 Shibari?
Funnily enough I have had parties outside with such aspects, there are actually venues that specialise in such things. Friends regular rent them out. Usually combined with finger food only though.
That may be plausible for uncorrelated birthday events, but what about stuff like Thanksgiving?
Suddenly the usual third-party hosting capacity just isn't available anymore, and you can't simply merge the houses of all participants.
No thanks rent seeker.
I feel bad for you
That’s great until it’s like, Christmas or Thanksgiving or New Years, and everyone else in town also wants to host a party.
Ultimately people do things they enjoy. People enjoy different things.
I love hosting groups of people at home. Yes, it's hard work, but it's satisfying. The meal planning, excitement of preparing the house, cooking, having a big party at home - I enjoy almost all of it.
Having a party at a restaurant is a totally different set of activities - it needs longer term organisation to book a date, work out exact numbers, maybe pay a deposit. When the meal's over, everyone goes home. Doing it with kids is much harder. There's a different set of societal expectations over payment (people are much less comfortable being paid for in a restaurant than eating food you've provided).
These are different sets of activities. Some people enjoy doing one set more. That's OK. From my point of view - I'm finally in the position in the last few years where I can host large parties at home, and I'm really happy about it. To me it's worth the cost.
The same problem happens with car sharing: If you have the car in your driveway, using it is trivial. If you add booking a rental/shared car, going to the station, checking it for damage, ... a quick trip turns into a major chore.
And even if it may be overall cheaper to rent as needed than owning the "overkill" solution the whole time, it won't be much cheaper, because renting is ridiculously expensive. Short time rentals and car sharing around here are typically $50-100 per day and/or not that expensive per time but $0.50 per km which makes it prohibitive for longer trips. You can get an OK used car for a couple thousand and it will cost you way less than that in maintenance.
Self-delivering self-driving cars could alleviate at least the hassle (since you'd be able to reserve a fungible car from a citywide pool, for pickup and return at your door), although the cost aspect will likely remain.
Everyone who's ever worked on a website knows the value of being above the fold, the value of reducing a single click in a checkout, etc.
I lived car-free for many years, and while I had carshares easily available to me and went through the high-friction bits already (had the apps downloaded, accounts signed up, license verified, everything ready to actually rent) - I rarely did it (in fact I did it exactly twice in about 10 years!)
I sympathize with the argument here - having 4,000 lb steel boxes rolling around with a single person in them and no cargo is terribly wasteful, but a lot of the alternatives suggested assume a physics-experiment-like smooth frictionless surface that doesn't actually exist IRL.
Second, I think you're framing it as {truck + self pickup} vs {no vehicle + delivered}, but I think the more likely comparison is {truck + self pickup} vs {sedan + delivered}. Nobody's going to get a truck as their only vehicle that they'll literally only use a few times a year. They'll be choosing between truck and sedan as their daily driver (or truck as second vehicle). In the replacement case in particular (truck vs sedan) the friction delta is very small.
If you own the vehicle and it breaks you have to fix it - but most of the time it isn't broken. You need to pay insurance, but that comes in a regular bill, and so is easy to budget. In return for this you get a vehicle ready to use when you want to.
If you don't own the vehicle and need one there is a lot more friction: you need to figure out where to get a vehicle. More than once I've gone to get one and found they were sold out and so I couldn't rent when I needed one. More than once I've gone to get one and discovered the fine print didn't let me use it for what I wanted.
Open the app. Oh no, the car that's near my apartment isn't available when I need it. Ok what else is around? Ehhh the BMW is pretty expensive and unnecessary. Ah here's a Honda... but it's a 25 minute walk away.
Ok so I have to walk 25 minutes just to start the car. Then I can go where I want to - but if I bring anything back I'll have to find street parking in front of my apartment building to unload. Then I have to bring the car back to its spot, and then walk another 25 minutes back home.
Oh and don't forget to gas it up, because unlike owning a car, with a carshare more often than not you have to gas it up on the way back to avoid a penalty. You roll your eyes slightly at not just having to drop by the gas station but literally paying for the rental time to do it. But it's fine, whatever.
Like, I get that lots of people find this to be fine (I did, for over a decade!) - but it's anything but low-friction.
Traditional rentals are even worse - unlike carshares their pickup/dropoff locations are nowhere near you, so now you have to think about an Uber!
(US-centric view.)
If you live in a major urban center, sure. Paying hundreds of dollars a month for a parking spot would quickly convince me that car ownership was a bad idea. Otherwise, at least in the US, cities spread out to make room for the habits of their inhabitants. There's going to be easy parking where you live because that's what all of your neighbors want.
Of course, I agree that you should just have the deliveries... but I'm not seeing this as an argument why. The costs are not great enough.
Parking is similar. I can fit a small 2-door car into x% more parking spots in a city than a larger truck. So you can spend x% more of your time looking for parking spots. Maybe you're still looking for a spot when the car owner has already completed the errand.
As someone else mentioned, this friction is amortized over time so for some the psychological cost is lower, but for those who understand the principle of opportunity cost, it is a very real and tangible cost of ownership.
Now, if you’re in the 20% of truck buyers who really need them those are necessary costs but most people are buying them as a lifestyle accessory.
There’s also a fairly large group of people who live in urban settings who think they need all of that but are paying more than the cost of renting on the few times they actually do. Those people have been very good to the manufacturers’ profit margins but unfortunately all of the extra pollution and lowered safety affects their neighbors as well.
This is the real reason the SUV has eaten everything, because the so-called "crossover SUVs" and other small ones are just fancy hatchbacks, and a car with a square butt will always be more useful than a similar sized car with a trunk.
Physics, to a first order approx, doesn't care about the car mass, btw. It does care about A*Cd*v^3 though. Especially the v. A lot of problems depends on that v.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, this sounds several years out of date.
[1] https://boston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=2014%20prius
[2] https://boston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=2010%20prius
Did you buy your Prius at the beginning of the pandemic? There was a brief period when cars got super cheap (no one was buying anything, sellers were desperate) followed by one where they got very expensive (manufacturing was blocked on missing parts, more people were trying to buy used since they couldn't buy new).
I used to drive so rarely car sharing would have saved me several thousand per year and been less of a hassle because I could skip annual inspections, gas stabilization, etc. Driving weekly and owning a car is probably worth it but drive quarterly and it’s a hassle.
Also, in restaurants there is usually less to do - you either sit and eat/drink, or stand. Home parties have more activities - people can cook their own food, browse books, play with other things. They also last longer, and in the end it can be just a few last people chilling on a couch discussing life and stuff in general - can't have that in a restaurant.
(also, nice to find another party organiser!)
In the case of many of these things there's an early outlay of a lot of money to then pretend the incremental costs is negligible where something with less actual costs might be a lot more enjoyable but is harder to disguise.
It’s also cozier and you don’t feel pressure of having to get going after a couple of hours —any kids can find things to do around the house, be it gaming, TV, running, going off to a corner, whatever. Adults can group into convos of interest, etc.
If people are worried about food quality (rarely is food the focus, but if it were that can be catered).
When you buy a house there is an implied level of investment/saving as a by product of the fact that bricks and mortar in many countries are seen as a good store of value.
When you spend money in a restaurant it’s just gone, there is no chance of your annual meal/get together being counted towards your savings if/when you need to rustle up some extra cash.
There’s also the fact that it is almost always cheaper to host a meal at home opposed to paying for an entire group of friends/family to dine out.
it means that all old people end up living with too much space, and young families with too little space.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of places looked a lot like this for a long time. It is fairly recent that we see people swapping every 4-7 years, at surprisingly high cost.
This effect was so substantial that from 1950 to 1960 the population of most major cities actually declined [1], in spite of a rapidly booming population!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_i...
Today, the sprawl has reached a point where commuting into the city is no longer an option.
That's why the old method no longer works.
We need to add density in the population centres where there are opportunities and jobs.
Not force young families to choose between a good job and a house.
And IMO this is all a much more reasonable thing to aim for. Density can only take you so far. There are hard limitations and it comes with lots of nasty stuff. I think the only reason things are taking as long as they are to naturally go this direction is because of the hyper-centralization of businesses and seemingly endless low interest rates, making companies with billion dollar valuations quite trite. And at that scale, the long-term cost impact of real estate in an ultra-premium location versus in the middle of nowhere is a rounding error. But monopoly money economics will end, probably sooner rather than later - and it may well end up solving this problem, alongside a slew of others.
[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23113/reno/population
(It's actually still happening, but people dismiss where it is happening as "suburbs" but if you live in a "suburb" that is 60 miles from "the city" and basically never go to the city, it's really it's own thing.)
The earlier comment isn't a critique on what people enjoy. It's a critique on people's inability to estimate how changes affect their enjoyment, instead making things into an inflexible checklist.
People keep taking everything personally when it comes to personal anecdotes when this is about mere majorities. Gatekeeping is not the intent. It's to speak of a broader group that has an impulse to want a thing, but many in that group will be served fine with alternatives. And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
Especially for gardening supplies, delivery has no real downsides, it's a straight money calculation.
No, no. They are simply saying 'cater for the edge cases'. No more, no less. We know what you are saying.
They're just saying that you're ignoring nuance to their detriment (true), and therefore you are not trustworthy in decision making (true).
No, we are not prepared to let you make decisions for us ("But many in that group will be served fine with alternatives"). No, that's precisely the problem - Centralised planning thinks that the alternatives are fine, and they are often not. Similar to Google not having a phone number to unblock locked accounts.
>And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
Sure. We will assume that this is charitable / general statement (if it weren't: It is this attitude that makes one unqualified to make decisions. They think they know better, and assume that the other person does not.)
Besides for all the decisions society foists upon you, of course, including what kind of cars are legal to purchase.
I'm not an absolutist anarchist, and I don't think that undermines my points (given an adult conversation where nuance and context is discussed).
We don't need absolutism across the board here (the "if you legislate against personal atomic bombs, you must be in favour of legislating against people having a 2mm knife blade!" whataboutism fallacy)
You're making a jump here that is not at all warranted.
Many literally means many.
Not in the sense that they will get lucky, but in the sense that different people have different edge cases.
They're not trying to tell people what their needs are, it's that different people truly do have different needs.
A bunch of people are arguing that their purchases have to cater for needs that they don't actually have. Trying to argue them down is not trying to say nobody has those needs, it's that too many people are thinking about a problem for 5 seconds, not considering alternatives, and claiming to have needs, when the actual number is a lot smaller.
It's not about specific people being told they're wrong. It's statistical. We can count how many people are doing X or Y and it's not most people. People get aspirational about the future and make claims that are wrong. Or they consider a lack of an "expected" feature to be far more impactful than it actually is. It's not uncharitable to say this about statistical aggregates, it's a fact.
If I am a guest, I would rather use the guest room than a hotel room paid for by my host. The latter feels like I am free-riding, the first doesn't - even though the cost for a guest room is much bigger, it's already committed to.
Also, staying at somebody's place is a very different experience than staying in the hotel down the road.
With the hotel, you will leave at a reasonable time in the evening. With the guest room, you may end up staying up all night.
If I buy a trailer I never needed, it does increase the chances of me using a trailer on a given occasion.
It does not, however, mean that I used a trailer any less than I wanted to before, and if I hadn't sunk that cost I'd have more money for more useful things. In your case, inviting for parties or going to restaurants more often and having more luxurious ones.
If you want to see your friends, don't buy stuff and hope they'll come use it. Invite them.
> If I am a guest, I would rather use the guest room than a hotel room paid for by my host.
If it's just one guest, they can sleep on the couch. Don't need spare bedrooms for that.
> With the hotel, you will leave at a reasonable time in the evening. With the guest room, you may end up staying up all night.
Not really. Leave late, stay up all night, whatever. The only thing they might care for is the checkout time if the hotel is expensive.
This works until your friends start getting married, start having back problems, or just want a little privacy while they sleep.
And if they have back pain they can't sleep on just any mattress either, as it might be the wrong hardness for them. And you might have another friend staying over so now you need two guest bedrooms for them both to have privacy, and both of which need fancy specific mattresses, ah and what if it's one of those couples that don't sleep in the same bed so...
Having an entirely unused room to cater to a very specific situation in which someone has to sleep in your house but also wants a hotel experience with a particular choice of mattress is a waste of effort. Guest bedroom by themselves is quite an American luxury thing. They're not at all a thing in Scandinavia unless you live in a mansion, and even then it would be weird waste of rooms to make spare bedrooms. Friends sleep on couches or fold-out beds if they need to sleep over.
Then you should not have a guest room. or a good excuse!
I have the former, but the person clearly indicated that a couch would be insufficient to address back pains, in which case it sounds like they expect a copy of the master bedroom.
Yes, this is extremely common. All of my in-laws would go in this category, more or less. I might spend the night at their house, but it would be awkward to wake up with them in the room. Many friends who have moved far away and I don't see them regularly any more would also qualify.
> And if they have back pain they can't sleep on just any mattress either
There is an enormous population that exists between "can't sleep comfortably on a couch" and "needs some specific kind of mattress."
> an entirely unused room
Space isn't at a premium where I live, a whole unused room is no big deal. Plus if I have a another child there is a room ready for them.
That's the source of a lot of guest rooms, they are rooms for future/past children. My own guest room is also an office when there aren't guests.
But then we've also deviated from the discussion of acquiring things with the intend to perfectly cover an edge-cases. On-topic, that would be like getting a long-range car because you drive the 1000 km constantly rather than for trips, and later lose the need and only use the extra range for leisure.
> There is an enormous population that exists between "can't sleep comfortably on a couch" and "needs some specific kind of mattress."
I'm actually not sure there are many people in that group. I don't think there's far between a decent couch and an "eh" mattress, closing the gap of people that cannot sleep on one but can sleep on the other. A decent futon or fold-out bed also goes a long way, and to theorize a bit I expect those that would not be able to have acceptable sleep on such would not sleep well outside their own home and bed regardless.
Either way, futons or fold-out beds are quite reasonable propositions comfort-wise and I sure wouldn't consider providing more for friends and family that needs to sporadically stay over at my home.
I'm sure this is a cultural thing but I and seemingly everyone around me finds guest bedrooms to be an insanely wasteful concept.
But in specific, goddamn there's so many differences between hosting a dinner party at home vs at a restaurant, or getting someone to visit and putting them up in a room vs a hotel.
Totes agree about trucks tho.
Same with landscaping and other hobbies. The joy they bring you cannot be replaced by getting it done by someone else.
And I think the cost of having a truck versus a sedan is marginal, especially in the US where the roads are wider and parking spaces can accommodate trucks without any issues.
Just because an alternative exists now, does not mean it will in the future and also does not mean it is equivalent.
>Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead.
Congrats on choices that make you happy. Other people do have cars though, which enable your lifestyle and your landscapers probably do not have an electric or a car manufactured in the last 15years.
You just can't. You can deceive yourself all you want and skip all life events this way, but ultimately spending money cannot be substituted by not spending money and if attempted will cast long shadows onto your life if it going to exist at all. It's an ultimate bean counting, going over a same bag that never grows.
> A small inconvenience to pay to save
This thinking is literally penny wise and pound foolish. Taken me way too long to realize.
Maybe we can skip it all and send them a gift card from Uber Eats?
If you think eating at a fancy restaurant is a substitute for being surround by family while you cook a huge dinner in a large, cozy home then I feel bad for you.
>I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution.
I bet if we looked at your life, "car" and "house" are compromises you are willing to make, "edge cases", but there are other things in there that you are not.
Can I ask why you are so concerned about policing how other people want to spend their time and money?
I have a huge house but live in a low CoL area where it costs the same as a condo in a high CoL place.
I drive a big passenger van but live in a small town where I can walk to the grocery store, gym, and library.
So you can mitigate in more ways than your suggesting.
I find it staggering that you would feel those are the same experiences. I feel there's a difference in what you consider to be a party and what people consider to be a party.
Its spontaneity and freedom to do what you want when you want. Same goes for the OP story about EV's. The mental freedom of being able to drive across the country any time someone chooses is liberating vs. only being able to go 200 miles and having to plan out charging stations and wattages/volts/whatever.
Perpetual home price increases leads buyers into an "investing mindset". I don't particularly like it, but it is an easy one to fall into. This is doubly true since realtors make their money by encouraging it.
You obviously shouldn’t pay to cover every edge case, but if you can it’s worth paying for the ones you value.
I know there are significant cultural differences at stake here but if your party with family/friends at a restaurant only takes two hours, you're doing it wrong.
That just not true. Restaurant quality has plummeted and it's easy to out cook them. Go to your average fancy wedding and the food is mediocre (this summer I went to a wedding in Canada's fanciest hotel. Same "fancy" fare you get anywhere else).
By the time your guests arrive, if you're spending your time in the kitchen instead of entertaining, you've messed up.
Also, you're telling OP how to live his life. You'd hate it if someone told you how to live yours.
"And for hosting occasional guests an extra bedroom, plenty of solutions exist for creating temporary sleeping space in the living room, while leaving your own bedroom to the guests. A small inconvenience to pay to save out a whole bedroom to pay for and maintain. There’s also the option of going on vacation together, which can be a really fun way to spend the holidays."
The carbon cost of vacations is not zero. Close the ducts to the extra room and maintaining it is essentially free.
But again, you're telling OP how to live. You do your vacations with friends, I'll invite my in-laws to stay with me for a year.
"Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead."
And the detritus afterwards? Since I don't have a truck Ive been slowly cleaning my yard one green bin a week at a time since moving in two years ago. With a pickup I could have finished in two weekends.
Your travel is not environmentally sound at all. Sure, a plane gets 100 mpgp, if its full, but the distances are massive and its way worse overall.
But that's your life, you can choose to do that if you want. I care too much for the environment to air travel much (and, as a "third culture kid" -yuck- I actually do have friends and family scattered through out the world).
"My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution. I see so many people maxing out their house and car within their budget, and then talking about but never doing things they really want to, like that far away vacation, or that expensive hobby. I never quite understand why."
You don't have to understand. Ppl like to bitch. They would have even if their choices were different. That is a message of basically all religions throughout time - be content with your now.
E.g. maybe your parents staying specifically in your house is too important for you to give up, but for those whose actual need might well be to want to spent holiday time or the occasional long weekend etc. with family or friends, many places you can finance a lot of trips and big fancy AirBnbs for all of you together for the savings from a smaller mortgage.
For some it might similarly be even more of a highlight to throw the parties in a lavish rented location or fancy restaurant (but again: it might not be; if part of your enjoyment is to host at your home, that's your choice).
Depending on how frequently you need that truck, you might be better of renting/signing up to a car-sharing service.
Sometimes people genuinely want to be able to handle the very specific edge case and that's fine. But often people also just haven't considered the cost of buying for the edge cases vs. the cost of renting on occasion and what it might allow.
I wouldn't want to suggest you shouldn't make decisions that takes your edge cases into account, but I find to me at least that there are often alternative ways of addressing edge cases than people's "defaults".
It only makes sense to rent something if you don’t have any of your own options.
Getting bigger mortgage and having your family once a year instead of paying for a hotel gets you ahead really quick.
TCO of a bigger car is not that much bigger to match having a smaller car and then renting out a bigger once in a while. Unless it is like once in 10 years.
Similarly, with respect to a car, if the only alternative was a smaller car maybe I'd have chosen that, but my average total transport costs over the last 10 years is about 1/10th of the average UK car costs when factoring in occasional months with hundreds spent on Uber. That works for me, because I live somewhere with excellent public transport and don't need to use even that much. It won't work for someone who don't have my life or my transport options. That's fine.
That was my entire point: Do the numbers. And that also includes for people who think they're saving by holding back.
At least, as a rule of thumb, property value gains tend to exceed mortgage interest paid. It's not universally true, but generally you'll at least recoup a significant proportion of what you paid.
> Across the country's 35 largest metro areas, homes that boast of a formal dining room ask a median of $325 500, 23% more than the national median home price[0]
I didn't find specifically the median house price, but reversing the 23% increase puts the median at $265 000.
This suggests a median 'dollar value difference' from adding a dining room of around $60 000.
With a median down payment of 13%[1], and an average interest rate of around 7%[2], you'll pay back around $550 000 over a thirty year mortgage[3].
In order to pay back less than $610 000 (i.e. the $60 000 value difference), the mortgage shouldn't exceed $293 000, leaving you with only $28 000 to build your dining room and come off better off at the end of the mortgage term.
Obviously if you can do better than the median rates, down payments, and values, then the maths changes, but on average, it looks like I might be wrong about you recouping the full amount you spend on adding a dining room.
[0]: https://money.com/dining-area-home-sales/#:~:text=Across%20t.... [1]: https://time.com/personal-finance/article/average-down-payme... [2]: https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-rates/#mortgage-... [3]: https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chousepr...
You can't compare that to an AirBib bill dollar for dollar. The money you give to AirBnb is gone forever. The money you pay in mortgage partially goes to your equity and may partially be a tax deduction.
However there are other issues to take into account: 1) it's not a given the added value of a room will be as high as the cost of adding it, and it can severely prolong the time before you're in the black. E.g. my house is one of the largest on my street already, and that typically results in a lower return for adding additional space, 2) you need to also consider whether the cost to cover the needs you otherwise would meet by adding a room is met by more, the same or less than the amount adding the room adds to your mortgage payments. If it is less, then it takes fairly little less before you're able to increase your capital faster by putting the difference in an index fund at the point in time when most of your mortgage payments still go towards interest.
By all means, it can pay off to build, and odds are I in fact will add a room to my house over the coming year whether or not it will be profitable. I'm not saying you shouldn't. Just that it's worth doing the numbers and figuring out what actually works best for you (and, yes, that does include factoring in equity) and sometimes the right choice for you might not be what is financially most prudent anyway. But it's worth going into it having run the numbers.
And the authority for the people to decide their “actual” needs should be who exactly?
Surprised nobody mentioned externalities yet. Carbon tax, and then you can take a more wholistic view when planning your life.
By the way, landscaping as a hobby does not automatically imply trucks, not outside US at least. Unless you actually do it often and need to transport large loads—then yeah, go for it. You’re part of a small minority that might actually need a truck.
How about living it as if those things are more important to you that the way they are achieved?
You can see your friends and throw parties without a dining room - set a table in the living room or set up a meeting in some place. Or go see your parents more often at their place, and when they come, spend more time with them and do stuff wherever they stay at. Or do the landscaping work without a pickup truck, like millions of people managed.
An insistance on the rare edge cases is not about "refusing to average an entire life style down to the median day". It's acquiscing to the median day, and then using the edge cases as if they mean you haven't.
Thank you for this, this seems like the most rational take.
I went through the more extreme version of this debate myself, I don’t own a car anymore and despite what everybody told me, I haven’t lost any flexibility at all. Between financing the vehicle, gasoline, insurance, vehicle tax and maintenance I save about 4800€/yr. I can do about 360 days of the year without a car. I can rent a car best fitted for the occasion and still save tons of money. I used a van for when I got stuff from ikea, I had a sedan for a road trip and a compact EV for when we had a city trip. With this being a no brainer I’d argue I gained flexibility and improved my not so median days.
The same thing can be said about just switching to a BEV. The BEV will, for the vast majority of people, be an improvement for their median day. You can charge at home, you have less maintenance hassle and the range will be perfectly fine for your median day. At the same time it won’t hinder your above median days not significantly. You can plan out your trips with a little more breaks and you’ll be fine, at the same time, with the money you saved on ToC you can also just rent out a nice ICE for the extra ordinary occasions.
It's just that when you buy a car, you don't see the price tag on each trip.
Right now my car has broken down. I don't actually use it that much since I commute to work on my bicycle. But as it is broken down I realize that those "corner cases" actually occur much more frequently that I had thought. For instance, this week I've needed it twice. Next week I need to take a trip where I could either drive myself to the airport, allowing me to sleep in for another hour or so, or I can use public transport. If I use public transport I will be home much later so a social engagement I was planning to take part in has to go.
Sure, I don't use my car that often anymore since I try to ride my bike when possible. Even in winter. But that's not really how I use my car these days.
As for houses: they're a lot more complicated than I thought. You don't actually know how you are going to use a house and whether it will "work" before you move in. It took us years to figure out what a couple of the rooms would be used for. During covid the room at the top of the house, which was kind of a second living room up until then, became my wife's office. And it works great for that.
Instead of having a giant living room with chairs and table space for 30-50 people, you can temporarily set up something on a lawn, in a park, or rent a dedicated space.
Instead of having a pickup truck to carry a heavy thing once, rent a van that one time or have a trailer hitch on a smaller car (for the confused Americans, in EU even the smallest cars have or can be had with trailer hitches for small utility trailers from 750 to 3500kg).
Instead of having a car with a 1000 km range and 10 minute refuel when you only drive 30km a day, rent a nicer car for those trips or take a train/airplane.
Don't optimize for edge-cases - you get better and cheaper results by optimizing for the median and doing something else for edge-cases. Think of it like trying to do everything with a swiss knife vs. using a few good dedicated tools, renting those you rarely use.
There is a silver lining in smaller houses. They tend to be in denser neighborhoods and hence has some benefits in raising kids. There is no need to setup play dates, they can literally hear each other screaming and come out to play.
In my bigger house neighborhood, I see very few kids just playing casually outside and hence we have to setup play dates. Yes now I have place for table tennis table that I always wanted but I have to call my friends over because bigger house in my case also is bit more further in suburbs.
So big house might be great for parties and hosting guests but i probably traded away closeness to my existing friends for myself and kids both. I just made my median day more boring than before.
I like how you summarize it with this line, I think there's a lot of truth in that.
Sure, we could only own that which we need daily to get to work and be a good worker bee, but that's depressing.
Maybe that's the biggest problem and your current solutions are inadequate?
My edge cases come up fairly frequently and I don't really have a good fall back for them i could spend a huge amount of money or time to do the 50 mile trips via uber or transit. Or, I could own a hybrid. I could do something similar with less reliability for the 300 mile trip. Or I could own a hybrid. In both cases, i could keep an app that tells me where the charge stations are and account for any possible needed charging... or I could just own a hybrid and gas up at any random station I pass in 5 mins.
This is the problem of EVs. Yeah edge cases, but a lot of people can have their edge cases come up fairly frequently. And worse this changes over time. People like to plan for probably outcomes over the life of the vehicle. It's not strange to think you might a few hours a handful of times a year. The more people you need to transport with you the more alternative travel methods and the uncertainty of the charge network starts to matter.
For new cars, especially with the tax credit (which most americans qualify for), EVs are cheaper. That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years nor savings from charging at home (of course not everyone can charge at home).
I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K. I think that's a reasonable price for a small car that has maybe a 100 mile range.
But automakers are offering $50K cars and above that don't fully replace gas cars. No thanks.
The sticker price is just the "obvious" price you see when it comes to owning a vehicle. But everything else still matters, routine maintenance and gas alike. Ignoring it only sets yourself up for being surprised when those bills come due.
> I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K.
I'd consider an ICE vehicle if I could buy a new one for $10K. Have a suggestion?
People who like to stand out buy big cars. Big cars make people in small cars feel unsafe. So people replace their small cars with big cars. So, people in big cars buy bigger cars.....and so on.
So now every car has to have more 'safety'. Maybe if the car hitting me wasn't 5000lbs, at chest level and didn't accelerate like a bullet..... I wouldn't need more 'safety'. So now every one has bigger, "safer" and more expensive cars....... all while American road deaths keep growing with no limits in sight.
One day I will see a Ford-150 bed used for pickup truck tasks. Today is not that day.
I looked at EVERY used car in a 100 mile radius on every platform you can think of and the 2013 RAV4 with 105,000 miles at 15k hit the dealer lot the night before I purchased (they had multiple calls for that vehicle while I was filling out paperwork). Its because all the old people sold off there late 90's and 2000's cars that there STILL are no used cars anymore that aren't absolute junk (155k mileage plus junk selling for 15k - 20k). This lets dealerships sell new cars & trucks for way, way too much. If Cash for Clunkers never happened, used cars would be the competition for new cars like the Toyota Camry which are uncomfortable, basic vehicles but which set the pricing floor for the other manufacturers vehicle lines. No competition so set it at a high price point marketing it as new even though the rest of it is junk and then you can charge a premium on oyher vehicle options. (Hate the Canry but I love Toyota vehicles don't get me wrong).
All us poor people who just want a to work and back vehicle & who would buy off craigslist from private sellers don't have a market anymore and have to go dealerships. Pickups are overpriced I'll agree, and are faux status symbols, but the used market itself reaked havoc on trucks too.
Iirc the cheapest new car in the US market then was the Versa. And it was not $5k.
Maybe it was closer to 2010? Wouldn’t have been earlier.
Dealerships do sell under sticker with some regularity. Or they used to, LOL.
[edit] after some googling, I think they were two-door base-model (very base) Chevy Aveos. But I could have that wrong.
Even with this, a new Aveo for $12k in 2010 would now be ~$17k with inflation. New cars today seem to be around $17k and that includes the Versa and the Mirage. Of course wages haven't risen with inflation but that's another can of worms.
No, but any ICE vehicle will not have the limitations of an EV. I was saying I might accept those if it were cheap enough.
12,000 miles / 25mpg * $5/gallon = $2400
Maintenance is, at a very high estimate, $1000 per year, and that's paying a shop for everything - far less if I did it myself
Payments on a 5 year loan at 6% for a $40K EV (such as the Tesla 3) is $773/month or 9276/yr
On my local Craigslist I can find my vehicle, one year older but significantly lower mileage (85K) for $18000. I can find my vehicle but with more miles (222K) for $4000 (admittedly that sounds low and I have suspicions) or my vehicle with slightly higher mileage (115K) but in a higher trim for $11K.
You'll forgive me for continuing to drive my car or for buying an exact replacement rather than rushing to buy an EV.
It seems like it's you who's ignoring upcoming bills, by ignoring data:
My SO managed to run out of gas twice since she hated filling up on the way home, and forgot to check on the way out.
To her, the utility of being able to charge our BEV at home is immense.
I'm willing to bet she isn't that dumb.
I will admit that I ran a car out of gas once in the last 40 years: driving to Flagstaff AZ in a Prius there aren't many gas stations and I ignored the reserve light and the beep because I thought I could make it. Nope! 5 miles short. Maybe the 3000' grade I had to climb just before had some influence. However... never again. OTOH, that Prius that ran out of gas traveled several thousand miles over the years at over 90mph across the West, getting ~40mpg which works out to ~400 mile range. That right there is the entire argument, done.
That said, most of the utility comes from not having to spend time stopping by a gas station to fill up. Just park in the garage and spend about 10 seconds plugging in the car, and it's filled up in the morning ready to go.
Do people who think the only use of a vehicle is the home-work-supplies circuit? Don't you ever take a weekend off and go out of town? You really want to deal with the whole rental car scenario when you're supposed to be off? Or, oh well, I'm just gonna commit to spending a good chunk of my time on this vacation sitting around twiddling my thumbs at a charging station. I got an acquaintance who drove a decaying Tesla with <200 mile range from Atlanta to NYC and back and then bragged to me "it wasn't that bad". Yeah, I was polite.
Lotsa magical thinking going on here. And I haven't even pointed out that in vast swathes of the country the rental car option isn't even remotely convenient.
In an EV, that's ~11 hours on day 1, charge up at the hotel, and do one 15 minute stop on day 2. Before I had an EV, I'd do the same thing, just with ~10 hours on day 1 and my stop on day 2 might be at a different place.
But this is traveling for leisure with family. It might be different if I were really desperate to get there fast. I'd never rent a gas car to save the couple of hours, but also arrive much more tired.
I do agree, though, that there’s some novelty risk but (a) my numbers only include gas (and I’m not factoring my solar savings in at all because I ran the numbers before I installed solar) and (b) I’m spending quite a bit every year to maintain my Odyssey and basically $0 to maintain my Model 3 (only exception is I’ve changed the tires once, but I’ve gone through a couple sets of van tires in the same time period for a similar total expenditure). I think that I’d come out ahead even if I had to replace the battery (or sold the car when this is needed). Also, the depreciation on my Tesla over the last four years is much more in my favor than the van’s depreciation in the same time.
The 3 and Y seem to be doing better, as well as S/X after 2016, but those are still fairly new.
RepairPal says the average annual cost to maintain a Model 3 is twice that of a Honda Civic.
The only maintenance my Camry will need for the next decade or so that does not exist in Tesla is regular fluid changes which amortize to about $200 per year
Ps in SF Bay Area and don’t qualify for tax incentives
The math is skewed even further once you add the extra $500 you pay for CA annual registration for an EV vs. Hybrid (personal experience, Mach-E vs. Accord Hybrid).
Definitely it's massively less compelling in areas with extremely high electricity costs. That's pretty much as expensive as electricity gets in North America, isn't it? I think it's significantly more compelling basically anywhere else. E.g. in Ontario where I live, if you're set up appropriately and charge between 11pm and 7am it's $0.028/kWh (CAD), i.e. less than 3 cents per kWh, or roughly 1/35th the price you're paying.
If I've done my math right, that's works out to be less than 2$ USD per 1000km? A difference of 108$/1000km is 1728$/year for the statistically average-driving Ontarian. Adds up pretty fast!
I live in Ventura County and the cheapest my electricity gets is around 33 cents per kwh. During peak it's a whopping 60 cents per kwh.
I also assume that chart includes baseline credits and averages out the tiers - your first kwh is cheaper than your 600th kwh. Any brand new EV charging will be charged at your top rates and be more expensive than what those averages represents pretty much everywhere in the US.
If you have an EV (or some other devices), you can qualify for the TOU-D-PRIME plan which gets you $0.23/kWh[1]; at this rate, for my car usage patterns, the Tesla Model 3 is a clear win over any car more than $25k or so. If you have solar, you can drive the prices even further down (I offset basically all of my 2022 bill, but 2023 was cloudier and rainier than typical and so I'm doing worse this year).
[1]: https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residentia...
Here the EV time of use rate is 50-60 cents per kWh between 3pm and midnight and 34 cents the rest of the day.
Without spending another 10-20k on Solar, EV is a losing proposition at these rates.
In California of all places
I stop work at 5pm so I can power down my computer before electricity gets expensive.
And 8pm works great for us because in summer it can be 70 degrees overnight, and the kids start going to bed at 8pm so I can cool down the house a bit without paying crazy prices for that.
I do a lot of thermostat trickery in the summer. During the day we set it to 76, from 4-5pm set it down to 72 (to avoid running in the expensive hours), then we raise it to 78 from 5-8pm, then we set it down to 74 at 8pm.
Even though I can afford it I've never bought new car. Call me lucky but I did not feel like I was paying for somebody else's problems either. All my cars worked fine for me. Some maintenance and repairs but nothing major / expensive. For example used Grand Caravan I paid $5K for on the auction cost me another $1K to put in proper order and then served me faithfully 10 years. Only got rid of it because the rust had taken the best of it.
Yes, if other people have to contribute their money to the purchase of your new car, it's cheaper for you.
>That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years
Well, the data says that Teslas have some of the highest costs of ownership in the first five years.
Links please? I know a lot of Tesla owners and they have all said differently.
I think the issue is largely around having to adjust the mindset to plan in advance.
For the roadtrip scenario, it might be better to just rent a vehicle for a week. For transporting large or heavy items, renting a truck beats owning one.
I’d love a cheap EV as a second/commuter car but nobody will give me one, and my crappy old Passat still works.
There are services like Turo, where you know the exact car you're getting, but, sadly, they're far from universally available. And it's pricier, of course.
All rental agencies surely know what fleet they have - typically it's as uniform as possible, to make the maintenance easier. Yet, it's not exactly unusual to see that a particular location has a fleet of entirely different make than they had listed on the website. Or, e.g. I know a place that doesn't have "compact" cars (or have so few of them I've never seen one on the lot), and just automatically "upgrades" everyone to "mid-size" - no clue why, they're a good (aka not scammy or too blatantly overpriced) company otherwise.
My only guess is that no one complains or cares about it.
Obviously, if all you care about is getting from point A to point B somehow then you're probably don't care much.
However, different cars have different characteristics, such as safety ratings (how likely you're to stay alive if you crash is important factor for some people), instrument clusters (my personal pet peeve - most cars have very poor UI/UX), rear window and mirror usefulness (in some you can get a clear view, in some you can barely see if someone's directly behind you or not), and all sorts of "luxuries" such as additional convex mirrors, backup camera or smartphone integration (CarPlay/Android Auto).
All those things - save for safety ratings - are quite subjective, so while some folks may just shrug and wonder how those matter, they make a lot of difference for others. The difference between a car that can drive and a car than you can drive pleasantly (or confidently) is probably significant.
But maybe I've also been spoiled by German car rental places — literally every single car I got here in the past ~5 years has had CarPlay, backup cameras, etc.
And I'd care about all of the above if I were to _buy_ a car, but for a week (or two) long trip, I genuinely can't imagine caring.
(Though, I guess, I am quite opinionated when it comes to picking my computers and phones, etc; and if I had to use a loaner Windows PC for a week I'd probably be mad too. I guess people can have that kind of preferences in cars?)j
I charged the company back via my credit card provider, and have never even considered doing business with that company again.
If gas were much more expensive, it'd be much easier to sell people on EV's, but since there's not a huge difference in operating expenses between an EV and ICE car, why wouldn't people stick with the ICE car to meet 100% of their needs instead of an EV that meets 90% of their needs?
If the USA had a robust charging network for all cars (not just Teslas), then it'd be a different matter but I've regularly encountered broken chargers (shown as operational in the app) as well as long lines for chargers (at 20-30 minutes per car, even a few cars waiting in front of you makes for a long wait).
I thought I'd have traded in our second car (a Hybrid, not a plug-in) for a BEV by now, but have run into enough charging difficulties on long trips to make me hold on to it. Renting an ICE car for long trips isn't really a good option since it's 30 minutes to the nearest car rental place and they have no parking, so it means my wife and I have to drive an hour to pick up the car and bring it back home and may the same trip after we get back from our trip.
I walk the dog through a strip mall parking lot every day. There are some U-Haul rental vans that are always there. So pretty clearly, someone is doing daily rentals on a permanent basis. The prices are painted right on the vans: $19.95 / day plus mileage.
(Or maybe they just bought the vans from U-Haul and never repainted them? Interesting question. But U-Haul has a box in the strip mall for dropping off your keys, so I suspect they *are* rentals.)
- rentals for the roadtrips cost a lot (about 1.5-2k p/w for a SUV like an X5), and those cars are still poorly equipped. It ruins the fun of a roadtrip if the car audio sucks or the windshield is made of cheapest, thinnest glass. I never knew car companies sell premium vehicles with such low trims. Its a hassle too as the rental companies around where I live examine the car like they were buying it from me. One has to interact with various people and spend the time, and its not always an enjoyable experience, - rentals for hauling stuff are perfectly ok even for weekly use. I'd still love the luxury of owning a toyota proace full time, but there is less of a reason to own sth like this for me.
It would be some effort to figure out why they're doing it, so I haven't done so.
Wait! I've got it: U-Haul is just parking their rental vans there instead of their own lot. So the vans are actually NOT rented at the moment?
Stay tuned.
Today I saw a sign above the dropbox: "please park your returned trucks <in the lot>"
So I think what's happening is: U-Haul keeps the vans in the strip mall parking lot. (Do they have to pay the mall for that? Who knows?)
Possibly some of the mall tenants rent it occasionally, and this lets them get the van right at their place of business, instead of having to go somewhere and pick it up.
Maybe the keys are always left in the van! I could test that, but I don't want to get in trouble for car theft. Maybe U-Haul doesn't have to worry about someone stealing it, since they could have a locator device in it.
It's never going to be cheaper to rent daily than to buy. Renting daily has you paying the amortised purchase cost and a little extra for the costs of the rental provider (real-estate, offices, employees), and then a little more for the profit of the rental provider.
If the rental provider charges only what the amortised purchase cost is, they'll be out of business in a few days, if not hours.
The fact is, they are doing it. You're right, there might be some good explanation, but just dismissing the fact is never a good look.
I didn't make any statement about whether or not they are doing it, I pointed out that it costs more to do so. That's the fact in this case: the selling price of a non-loss-leader item can't be lower than the cost of providing it!
That there are people doing it is no indication that it is at all cost-effective to do. They may have some good reason for paying more (poor credit so cannot buy a vehicle, need the "daily" for only 3 months, it's a temporary solution while their own vehicle is being repaired, etc).
The fact is, it costs more to rent daily than to simply buy. The theory you have is that it must be more cost-effective to rent daily than to buy.
Are you seriously claiming that "U-Haul is running a profit" is just a theory?
> I'm the one with an unexplained fact.
The explanation is not going to be "It's cheaper to rent than to buy", if you're looking at periods that ownership generally runs for.
"It's unexplained" does not mean "It's cheaper".
I believe that when U-Haul (and other rental companies) sell their old vehicles, they remove or paint over the business-related markings first.
Sure it works if you're doing those trip once ever year or two. But if you do 1 or 2 road trips per year? Or more?
It's much more convenient just to have the vehicle in the first place. Plus you get the benfits of having it all the time.
It's a more difficult issue for very long range drives where an ICEs full range is required to get to the next gas station.
Why? Do the life choices of other individuals really cause you that much harm? I could see being annoyed that they're _marketed_ into over sized solutions that aren't actually correct for their use case, but to just be annoyed that other people appear to enjoy prosperity as an edge case is unusual to my way of thinking.
> People focus too much on edge cases when making life decisions, imo.
Similarly, and sorry to do this in reverse, but why do you think that is? Marketing, experience, habitual, unfairly priced?
> need
Anyways, personally, I'm more annoyed that corporations get to do this kind of edge case thinking. Shifting the growing of food, the use of labor, and the capital markets they sell to around in pernicious ways simply to add a few points to a publicly traded stock. Then using these profit streams to purchase selfish legislation and reduced taxes all to grease the wheels of this odd machine. Then we're all expected to accept a reduced quality experience just to paper over their decades of environmental abuse? That is madness.
I meant more emphasis on the 'kind of' in 'kind of annoying'.
Maybe 'frustrating' would have been a better word. It is frustrating when seemingly everyone around you is on a different page than you are.
And yet its their priorities that are wrong?
Honestly, some self-reflection may be in order here.
No I'm not, I'm using health as an example of a general principle.
Anyways, as I've said up-thread, the 'kind of annoying' thing is referring to the feeling of having any unconventional opinion that is better to keep to yourself (except on HN where such things are slightly more tolerated).
It's not that other people are annoying because they like other things than I do, or whatever the current straw man is.
Yes. Larger SUVs and trucks are making roads less safe for pedestrians, cyclists, and even other cars.
Yeah, it's really not the thing itself that's annoying. It's just knowing that it's an unconventional opinion and I'm not going to change anyone's minds on it and I better just keep it to myself to be polite. Not the end of the world of course, but slightly frustrating.
If I were writing the post again, I'd definitely take the 'annoying' sentence out of it.
I think it's right to be annoyed. It's an important issue, but I'm a fan of regular people, in general, and I always try to offer a defense of them at the expense of corporation whenever possible.
> It's just knowing that it's an unconventional opinion and I'm not going to change anyone's minds
You're a bit of a hipster. No shame in that. My argument comes from the same place, and wasn't phrased to target you, but to withstand HN.
If I have the right space, I'll become the kind of person who has parties.
If I buy a truck, I'll want to do big projects.
not consumerism, but advertising. Specifically, brand advertising (rather than informational advertising like walmart putting low prices in ads)
It's far far easier to throw a party when it just means inviting people over and making or ordering food than renting an entertaining space. It's easier to work on a project when you have the tools in your garage than if you had to go to the hardware store or go rent a u haul.
For all the talk of rampant consumerism the stuff on the bottom of my list of things to complain about are purchases intended to reduce your reliance on buying things. Owning nothing, making nothing, and renting other people's stuff and labor for every task is peak consumerist behavior disguised as "efficient" "minimal" living.
a LOT of people do not have the rosiest finances. Maybe it is student loans or credit card debt or whatever. But sure, maybe it makes sense for people with more wealth than they will ever spend to have extras around 'just in case'. But if you're not in that situation, I think it's something a lot of people should look at a lot harder than they do.
The fact that I have a (mostly unused) guestroom absolutely does increase the number of guests I get.
The fact that I have a mountain bike (mostly used for commuting) absolutely does increase the amount of mountain biking I do.
I want it on the comfort of my own home with my own amenities on all my own terms.
I know my friends would much prefer that as well.
I was more talking people like my family members who insisted that the must have a dining room in their next house, even though they don't use the one they have now.
Just the fact that you acknowledged that other options exist puts you ahead of many.
Yes, but in life, many of the most meaningful things are the edge cases. That's what makes them special. If people don't statistically have many dinner parties, then the dinner parties they do have might be even more special. This is life, not a statistical model.
In fact, I would argue that the edge cases feel even more special when you rent. For instance, my family rented a large passenger van for a road trip. The van itself became a sort of icon of that trip, and the source of distinct memories.
"Hey, you have a car, let's go do XYZ" doesn't happen to people who don't have a car. Replace 'car' with whatever else as appropriate. These social factors drive human decision making to a large degree. People might care about what others think, they might care about spontaneity, they might be influenced by their own desires and the desires of people around them.
Or consider the dinner party example. Sure, I've had dinner parties in rented spaces. It can be done, but they're not the same as being in someone's private space.
Yeah. Let's put the kids to bed while we continue our meal. Oops, forgot to rent a crèche. Want to stay over and continue chatting? Oops, forgot to rent a hotel and the space closes at 11:00.
I do believe it's over-weighted for a lot of people though.
those edge cases may be some of the most memorable and impactful days of the year
being able to have those times is always going to outweigh canceling them out. even if it makes more sense day to day
But I certainly wouldn’t pay a $10k premium over a similar vehicle with a 300 mile range and easy recharging (read: hybrid gas).
I'm not sure I can think of a strong argument for consciously living your life in a way which ignores potential failure modes, unless you're pretty sure you've projected the hidden costs and are prepared at any moment to pay them.
The cost of finding and paying someone else twice a year to haul wood or supplies can easily justify the extra cost of a larger vehicle, for example.
There are an infinite number of edge cases that can lead to total failure, so it is not rational to try to account for something solely on that basis.
> The cost of finding and paying someone else twice a year to haul wood or supplies can easily justify the extra cost of a larger vehicle, for example.
Wait, what? It costs like $50 to rent a pickup truck from Lowes. You don't have to hire somebody just because you're renting the truck. Driving a larger vehicle probably costs most people that much in gas costs alone in one month.
>> There are an infinite number of edge cases that can lead to total failure, so it is not rational to try to account for something solely on that basis.
I disagree here, because again you need to divide the probability by the severity of the consequences and only then rank the priorities. A $500k house on the side of a volcano that only erupts every thousand years is substantially different from the same house on a prairie, because the chance of total annihilation measurably increases the volatility of your bet. In gambling parlance, "risk of ruin". Once you see a possible risk of ruin you need to avoid it. I'll tell you why. Imagine that you had thought of it and discarded it as wildly unlikely. You did nothing to mitigate or plan for it. And a year later, it happened. You'd feel pretty stupid. You'd wish you had never even imagined it.
I didn't initially want to bring this up as an example, but it was actually the first on my mind: I live in a dangerous neighborhood. Some nights I fall halfway asleep without remembering to take my gun out of the safe and put it next to my bed. I look at the clock; it's 5am; it's probably fine; I don't want to get up. Then I think, imagine if ten minutes after I make this decision some guy breaks in and points a gun at me, how stupid I'd feel.
0.1 per cent vs. 2 per cent both look like a banal edge, but it is a 20:1 difference. If you do something 0.1 per cent of the time, you spend 1 day in 3 years doing so. If you do something 2 per cent of the time, you spend 1 week every year doing so.
Also, it matters what the consequences are. I spent nontrivial money securing my home from potential burglary, because I just don't want to experience it, ever. I don't have a guest bedroom, but your example with the hotel down the street actually assumes that there is a hotel down the street; what if the closest hotel is five miles away and taxi services are unreliable?
Etc.
I get that some people overspend, but the original topic was range, and in a country like the US, with its vast rural regions, a lack of chargers on some trips may be a serious concern.
Not in this situation. If you take a family trip[1] once or twice a year, that's not an edge case, that's an annual case.
The other thing you are missing is that those routes that are longer than the EV range are busy every day!
If you go out, today (non-peak season), and see 2000 cars drive that long route today, that's 2000 car owners today that need that range, or 2000 car owners who would tell you "range anxiety" if you asked them to move to EV.
On peak times, popular long routes get over 2000 cars per hour. We're talking 100s of thousands, if not millions, of this need coming up per year, so its hardly an edge case.
Obviously there’s people where this doesn’t apply, but there’s outliers everywhere and they’re free to continue buying gas cars today.
I humbly beg to disagree; it's most definitely not an edge-case as the phrase is defined.
You're using "edge-case" to mean low-frequency event. How I see the phrase used everywhere I've ever seen it, is "edge case" referring to a low-probability event, i.e. an event that is predicted to so rarely occur that it can be dismissed from consideration.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/edge-cas... says:
>> an extreme or not typical example of something, that should not be considered when forming an opinion about it:
An annual trip is an almost guaranteed event, so it's a very high probability event. I get that it is a low-frequency event, but "edge-case" is the incorrect term used to describe the event. Use "rarely" or similar instead.
System A delivering its event after system B may be an edge case.
Daylight saving time computations are not handling an edge case but a normal case that happens twice a year.
1. Is available.
2. If the car rental company doesn't pull shenanigans such as cancelling your rental at the last moment due to <reasons>.
3. Is the kind of model you want or need.
4. Has the extras you like/need (adaptive cruise control, etc).
Etc.
In my experience car rentals suck, I wouldn't want to use them except for when I'm flying somewhere.
A hotel is not a replacement for people staying with you. You do not get the same intimacy.
Put another way, if a service can only respond to 93% if requests, I wouldn't call it a very well architected service. EVs have a long way to go for many people.
That accountant driving to Lowes twice a year to pick up mulch, finds out he's missing a shovel or a reticulation fitting or something unexpected. The pickup truck is a solid work horse in new edge cases.
There's nothing worse than finding out that your hatchback can't fit a ladder you needed to buy because you broke off a section of the gutter when you tried to pull a broken branch off your roof.
A guest bedroom is often extra storage, kids sleep-over room and a communal signal that there's a spare bed for friends and family if they ever need it. The social signalling is worth the price of admission for the home owner.
Just saying the edge cases cover more outcomes than direct use.
I've had family over and ended up turning rooms into temporary bedrooms.
Basically, these things happen rarely enough that it is not such a crisis to put a little effort and adapt to them.
Whereas the drag of being prepared for every situation all the time is constant.
> a communal signal that there's a spare bed for friends and family if they ever need it.
This is true.
> The social signalling is worth the price of admission for the home owner.
I don't think you can just flat-out say this. The opportunity cost of an unused room is pretty terrific.
It might be bearable if you're wealthy, but most people are not. It also might be bearable if you LOVE hosting, can't get enough of it, it's what gets you up in the morning, but for most people it's not.
So you just stating that it's worth it without any further justification is actually an example of my point which is how the opportunity costs of these things are routinely ignored.
How is that annoying?
If we reason like that capitalism will push us further into buying and buying because what if.
Car rentals and Airbnbs literally are the answers for both.
Toxic how?
> If we reason like that capitalism will push us further into buying and buying because what if.
Capitalism pushes me to live comfortable life?
> Car rentals and Airbnbs literally are the answers for both.
“You will own nothing and be happy”?
Literally. Pollution.
> Capitalism pushes me to live comfortable life?
Capitalism pushes you to buy things that won't actually make you more comfortable. Or that are very ineffective.
> “You will own nothing and be happy”?
Yes, definitely. Suggesting you rent for rare occasions is the same as owning nothing.
Most of those far-fetched edge cases have simple solutions (such as renting).
I can't count the massive amount of stuff we have at home and don't use at all despite my active pushing against those, literally everybody I know is in the same situation.
Edge cases can mean life and death sometimes. Is my vehicle going to get stuck in an emergency if no one plows snow on a 1 mile stretch of unpaved road between my home and the major road?
If unrest/war/natural disaster happens and major infrastructure is non functional can I pack my family in to my car and just go 3k miles without worrying about charging infrastructure? You can just siphon fuel from other vehicles. Good luck doing that with an electric car (especially with some random half destroyed car dumped on the side of the road).
Edge cases may not matter much for daily life, but when they become important, they are really important.
Also, there is one thing regulators (and car makers) could do to make EVs a lot more interesting for everyone. A compatible modular batteries. Why were standardised batteries invented (AAA etc?)? So you can swap them yourself even if rechargeable. Imagine your Tesla, a Mercedes eqe or VW ev had their battery as a number of 10/5kWh user replaceable units? Perhaps you can't afford, or you don't need a 120kWh battery pack, so you buy a new car with 20kWh only. You could benefit from a car lighter by few hundred kg and you could buy the rest later (assuming total capacity was 100kWh let's say).
Then, on an old car, you could put new battery modules, or you could keep them when selling your car to stick in a new one.
It is an obvious thing to do, why are regulators not even talking about it? Would you rather have a single, horribly expensive part in which tiny element fails and the whole vehicle is essentially scrap value, or am ability to swap it part by part? If we're in any way serious about EVs being a true replacement for Ice cars, and not just a toy for wealthy people to feel better they need user replaceable batteries.
And the fact that you feel those edge cases life threatening tells a lot about the capitalist propaganda.
And somewhat the people that do these kind of reasoning yet don't even have seriously life threatening savers like idk a carbon monoxide sensor.
To take your examples, I want a large dining room and guest bed because they signal popularity and I can imagine all those people coming over. I also want a pickup because I can tell myself that I'll weather the next zombie apocalypse, or I'll imagine transporting building materials back home and build that outside sauna my now divorced wife always wanted. That will show her. Or something.
The 3rd one might be more silly :-)
I agree people should consider how much of an edge case it is though, and make a good decision. Even if "well it is an edge case but what the hell". Owning a Christmas tree ain't so bad.
> I agree people should consider how much of an edge case it is though, and make a good decision. Even if "well it is an edge case but what the hell".
Well put; wish I had said it so succinctly :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple....
:-)
For all the money spent on that pickup truck, just rent one from Lowe's when you need it.
Instead of buying a boat, save the money and rent an amazing one for those three times a year you have time to use it.
Renting a car is really easy these days, especially with Turo.
And with Turo, you can get the car dropped off at your house.
And splurge on the rental instead of driving a gas guzzling car all year for those road trips you take a few times a year.
Also, by renting you save wear and tear on your personal car.
It doesn't hurt anyone, and they do pay premium for that. It's just that they have different value system than you do.
If you're middle age and only see your family once or twice year when you visit them on holidays, it's sobering to make a guess as to how many more times you'll see them in your life.
I'm guessing my empty guest bedroom that might as well be replaced by a hotel visit has doubled the number of high quality visits I'll have with some family members.
Etc.
> But I like living in this kind of excess!
Sure, and I'm sure you deserve it. As do we all. But guess what? In the hard cold reality that we live in, it's not sustainable or feasible for everyone to own a huge hulking gas guzzling vehicle just to enable your yearly road trip. Wish it was, but it isn't. Not even close.
> How preposterous, I certainly don't live in excess!
Oh yes you do. On a global and historical scale, if you can afford a car, then you live in excess. I'd bet that all of us that read this website do. You need some perspective.
> But I pay for myself!
No you don't. If the planet is failing to even sustain civilization from this lifestyle, clearly somewhere there are costs that aren't covered. The market has no solution for the external costs that most things in our lifestyle incur.
> But the alternatives would mean a slight inconvenience to me! I would have to adjust and re-evaluate things I've grown used to. They're not the 100% optimal solution for me personally!
Well, I'm sorry that the freaking possible end of future civilization causes an inconvenience in your modern life of abundance. Actually no, I'm not. If stopping and waiting at a charging station those three times a year you make an 8 hour trip is what it takes to ensure a healthy life for future (and even current) generations, then I'm saving my concern for more pressing matters. Heck, I'd even argue that renting an ICE car on those occasions might be a reasonable price to pay, no matter the (in the grander scheme of things) slight inconvenience this means.
Grow up, people.
It actually is. The only impediment is neurotic busybodies who are obsessed with making everyone poor because they've fallen for the current strain of doomsday millenarianism.
"everyone" doesn't own a car in the first place, and owning one to go on family trips is not contingent on "everyone" owning a car.
Sustainability is a moot point. We're undergoing an aggressive shift to renewables in the West, including with vehicles, as a matter of policy. Issues pertaining to climate cannot be abated solely with a reduction in emissions.
Notwithstanding, "degrowth" is just demanding that people in developing countries not be permitted to improve their quality of life, that Westerners race to an arbitrary bottom to worsen theirs, and put lives at risk. The rise in emissions year over year stem from demand in East Asia.
I did not know that "degrowth" people are for banning quality of life improvements for all economic strata. Do you have any sources because this just sounds like a giant strawman.
Now you know.
> Do you have any sources because this just sounds like a giant strawman.
https://brankomilanovic.substack.com/p/degrowth-solving-the-...
"If one wants to keep world GDP more or less as now one must (A) “freeze” today’s global income distributions so that some 10-15% of the world population continue to live below the absolute poverty line, and one-half of the world population below $PPP 7 dollars per day (which is, by the way, significantly below Western poverty lines). This is however unacceptable to the poor people, to the poor countries, and even to degrowers themselves.
Thus they must try something else: introduce a different distribution (B) where everybody who is above the current mean world income ($PPP 16 per day) is driven down to this mean, and the poor countries and people are, at least for a while, allowed to continue growing until they too achieve the level of $PPP 16 per day. But the problem with that approach is that one would have to engage in a massive reduction of incomes for all those who make more than $PPP 16 which is practically all of the Western population. Only 14% of the population in Western countries live at the level of income less than the global mean. This is probably the most important statistic that one should keep in mind. Degrowers thus need to convince 86% of the population living in rich countries that their incomes are too high and need to be reduced."
Noah Smith also wrote about this several times.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/degrowth-we-cant-let-it-happen...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degr...
If you familiarize yourself with the degrowth perspective as is most popularly employed, you can't in good faith contrive that this is a strawman.
Also, you're equating "quality of life improvements" with economic income. Which is troublesome in many ways, especially if the economic income incurs major (huge) environmental problems that even jeopordizes the future of civilization as we know it. Or at the very least leads to _massive_ health and quality of life issues on a global scale. Then "income" is a worthless "quality of life" metric.
Anyway, your original reply comes off as very arrogant and/or hypocritical. You express concern for the developing countries, and at the same time acknowledge rich countries' rights to a lifestyle that you yourself acknowledge isn't sustainable if adopted by everyone. So as long as only the rich (us) have cars, it's ok?
Also, your claim that westeners are not the biggest emitters is factually incorrect. Check this out as a starting point: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
My claim is that either it does, or B is the alternative. Neither is realistic.
> Also, you're equating "quality of life improvements" with economic income. Which is troublesome in many ways, especially if the economic income incurs major (huge) environmental problems that even jeopordizes the future of civilization as we know it. Or at the very least leads to _massive_ health and quality of life issues on a global scale. Then "income" is a worthless "quality of life" metric.
In the first place, growth need not lead to such catastrophic problems (see the Noah Smith links), in the second, that has no bearing on whether lifting a country out of poverty improves their quality of life; it clearly does.
When immigrants move to the West for a better life, what makes it better is easily be qualified: houses, vehicles, electricity, gadgets, consumption in general, and better jobs. It's not for the healthcare. Those things are made possible, or imply, higher income.
> Anyway, your original reply comes off as very arrogant and/or hypocritical.
Stop projecting. That is arrogant.
> at the same time acknowledge rich countries' rights to a lifestyle that you yourself acknowledge isn't sustainable if adopted by everyone
I did no such thing. It isn't unsustainable. Unsustainability would have to imply global population growing in perpetuity. Not only are we nowhere near lacking resources, global population growth is projected to stagnate.
What's more, between innovation and aggressive transition to renewables, we more efficiently use resources and can expect diminishing global carbon emissions in the near future.
Western fertility is already stagnant. The only reason we grow is a matter of federal policy: the immigration rate. And immigrants come because of quality of life.
> your claim that westeners are not the biggest emitters is factually incorrect
Again, I made no such claim. I claimed that the *growth* in global emissions is primarily driven from East Asia.
2. Our current model of economic growth is clearly and demonstrably catastrophic. There's no sign of turning it around in any kind of relevant time frame.
3. A nation's economic growth is not equivalent to improved quality of life of individual people living in poverty. GDP as a measure of quality of life is deeply flawed. You need to look at income distribution, costs of living, availability of basic services such as healthcare, human rights etc etc. Sure, lifting an individual from poverty through a raised income raises quality of life but that is a very simplified picture of what is actually going on. And of course, most relevant for the discussion at hand, you also need to look at the long-term effects of the growth model that is driving the economic growth. If you look a few decades ahead, our current model doesn't work. It's starting to fall apart even now.
4. I apologize for commenting on your personality, of which I know nothing.
5. That is a very narrow point of view on sustainability. Why are you defining it as perpetual population growth, or lack thereof? Clearly, if we are consuming resources at a rate much higher than they are reproduced, it's not sustainable. Regardless of what your techno-optimistic hopes for future miraculous technological breakthroughs might tell you. They aren't coming. It's over.
6. You are clearly dismissing the content of even the article you're commenting. Which is of course well within your rights to do. There's no aggressive transmission to renewables happening in the transportation sector. It's not even close to happening in a time frame that's relevant. It would be interesting to see what data you're looking at that suggests otherwise.
7. I apologize for misinterpreting you. But either way, the West is still a far greater emitter per capita. So again, going back to your concern that we shouldn't limit developing nations from achieving the same wealth we have, we have no right to point any fingers.
I wrote : '"degrowth" is just demanding that people in developing countries not be permitted to improve their quality of life, that Westerners race to an arbitrary bottom to worsen theirs, and put lives at risk.'
This is meant to be an and/or for the first two. I hope that's clear.
> Our current model of economic growth is clearly and demonstrably catastrophic.
This is a mantra or truism, but there's no reason to believe this. It's also why "degrowthers" themselves are pivoting in their messaging. GDP growth does not scale 1:1 with resource extraction. Between technological innovation and the aggressive pivot to renewables, blaming "the model" stops making sense.
> A nation's economic growth is not equivalent to improved quality of life of individual people living in poverty.
Improved quality of life for impoverished countries depends on it, which isn't the same as saying they're equivalent.
The percentage of people on earth living in extreme poverty as defined by the UN has been diminishing for decades. This is because of growth.
> You need to look at income distribution, costs of living, availability of basic services such as healthcare, human rights etc etc.
If a country is poor as fuck, these are all a moot point. The bottom rung of countries will have worse quality of life regardless of distribution scheme.
> Why are you defining it as perpetual population growth, or lack thereof?
Tautology. Lack of sustainability by definition implies a scenario, not unlike the Malthusian argument, that there is a perfectly linear upward trajectory for land encroachment, resource extraction and emissions (which will lead to exhaustion of one resource or another, or ecological collapse).
The reality is it's a curve. The upward trajectory is temporary, there's zero reason to believe in some scenario where resources and land are completely exhausted; no prediction model suggests that.
We need short-run solutions, surely, because climate is an imperative problem in the near-term. That's what the shift to renewables and investment in innovation is for, and the Green New Deal spin from re-grouped degrowthers is starting to sound a lot like that anyway.
> Regardless of what your techno-optimistic hopes for future miraculous technological breakthroughs might tell you. They aren't coming. It's over.
lol emissions are a solved problem, there's no miracle necessary.
The lingering issue will be climate, not strictly speaking CO2 emissions.
> There's no aggressive transmission to renewables happening in the transportation sector.
Large transport is more difficult to abate, but that is still happening, yes. Hydrogen and nuclear.
> greater emitter per capita
Total emissions matter most. Canada has high emissions per capita but it has a population a fraction of the size of the US, and very spread out, so per capita tells you very little.
> we have no right to point any fingers.
I argue that developing countries are within their right to increase emissions to improve their quality of life.
> This is meant to be an and/or for the first two. I hope that's clear.
No, that was not clear to me. Especially not as you replied to someone else and confirmed that yes, degrowth means preventing improvement of quality of life across all economic strata. But let's not make this a "I-said-you-said" argument. Fair enough. We all seem to agree that degrowth doesn't necessarily imply degrowth across all economic strata.
Either way, note that nowhere did I even propose a "degrowth" strategy. I was merely saying that going on defense and conjuring all kinds of emotional arguments for why you personally can't dispense with your huge gasoline truck for reasons that are really quite trivial in the grander scheme of things, is very immature and selfish. Also very short-sighted, even from a selfish perspective. Nowhere did I suggest that you can't at least shift consumption from CO2E-heavy goods to less CO2E-heavy goods. That would in theory not require any degrowth whatsoever, merely a shift to more sustainable consumption even if the level of total economic consumption stays the same.
> This is a mantra or truism, but there's no reason to believe this. It's also why "degrowthers" themselves are pivoting in their messaging. GDP growth does not scale 1:1 with resource extraction. Between technological innovation and the aggressive pivot to renewables, blaming "the model" stops making sense.
Again, I don't share your narrow view of sustainability as equivalent to "resource extraction". Clearly, if the model induces external costs that threaten to end civilization as we know it and the economic models or at the very least radically decrease quality of life and incur huge economic and human costs in the foreseeable future, it is not sustainable. Sustainability, by the definition I know, means that you can keep the system or behavior unchanged. It doesn't matter if we have the potential to keep extracting fossil fuels in the current rate for millennia, if a side effect is a civilization-ending environmental catastrophe. The amount of resources is irrelevant. Unless you factor in "livable climate and environment" as valuable resource, it doesn't work.
> The percentage of people on earth living in extreme poverty as defined by the UN has been diminishing for decades. This is because of growth.
That model has obvious flaws and has been criticized by many. For one, the available data is lacking and hand-picked. Secondly, there have been many instances where GDP has risen alongside with poverty, if measured on a national level. See India for example.
> The reality is it's a curve. The upward trajectory is temporary, there's zero reason to believe in some scenario where resources and land are completely exhausted; no prediction model suggests that.
Really, there's no prediction that suggests that the current trajectory of emissions is catastrophic? Well, if you're gonna dismiss all climate models or predictions, then this whole discussion is irrelevant and I have nothing more to say.
> lol emissions are a solved problem, there's no miracle necessary.
> The lingering issue will be climate, not strictly speaking CO2 emissions.
> Large transport is more difficult to abate, but that is still happening, yes. Hydrogen and nuclear.
You are way too technology-centered. It doesn't matter if there are technological solutions on a lab table somewhere. You have to factor in rates of adoption, political incentive, scale, regulations, economics, etc etc. Given that, there's absolutely no indications that we are anywhere near on track for deploying technological solutions on a time-scale that is relevant. I'd love to see your data if you think otherwise.
> Total emissions matter most. Canada has high emissions per capita but it has a population a fraction of the size of the US, and very spread out, so per capita tells you very little.
Of course total emissions of a specific nation doesn't matter most. Total global emissions matter. It doesn't matter for the climate if people are spread out - it only matters for the local environment which is a different issue. And from a fairness perspective, of course you need to look at per capita. Why should you or I be entitled to a lifestyle that we acknowledge would not be anywhere near feasible if adopted by everyone?
The meaningful changes we would need to ensure a healthy future are way, way harder than getting used to electric vehicles. The fact we cannot even do such a straightforward transition is beyond ridiculous.
I have two ovens purely so I can host Christmas Day. 99% of the time that second oven is unused but it massively reduces the stress of that one day. It was worth every penny.
I own an MPV so I can take my bicycle to races/events. I can hire a car for the purpose but the flexibility and reduced stress of that 3/4 times a year (plus I can use it for other things) makes it worth it.
That's not to say all edge cases are justified. Some are silly, such as owning a pickup truck, which pollutes like crazy and is inconvenient as fuck for parking. Other things like buying an expensive machine for a job you'll do once (just hire it or pay someone to do it, you'll save money).
All I'm saying is you can't generalise from the specific cases.
Like petrol station: charge some reservoir batteries during off hours and then you're able to discharge this energy fast. The problem then is the energy density of batteries making it so you'd need a gigantic battery / capacitor to replace a lot smaller fuel tank.
Quartzite currently has 120 charging spaces. 100x increase boosts that to 12,000 spaces. That’s all the parking at the Mall of America. Mind boggling. 150KW for each spot, and that’s 1.8GW of power. To put it in perspective, one of the three Palo Verde reactors produces just 1.4GW. Mind blowing.
> I need a bathroom in my house
(Goes to the bathroom 4 times a day and room sits empty 99% of the time)
I agree with you on the trucks one though, but only because of the outsized negative side effects.
That's all well and good when you are on a long trip once a year. It's unfathomable to stop that often, for that long, when traveling regularly.
For some people, it would look like this:
> We need a car which can take us to our vacation home
(goes to vacation home once per year, it's unreachable by train or bus
and in a location where having a car is important; they could just rent
out a rental car for a month for a billion dollars instead of having a car
which can be used for the trip)
Granted, for a bunch of other people, taking one or two stops to recharge at well-maintained and nice charging stations along the way would suffice. But as I'm sure you're aware, that's not the universal experience with recharging EVs along the way yet.
Renting a car for a month is more like $1000.
> We need a dining room for when we have parties
(Our community group needs a friendly reliable place to meet weekly)
> We need a guest bedroom
(My in-laws hit hard times, they need a safe place, now)
> I need a pickup truck
(I get to help out my friends with their projects and when their pressed to move)
And
> I need long range to take the semiannual road trip
(There was an earthquake/hurricane/flood/tornado/(in many counties /civil disturbance) and I need to move my family/haul supplies now)
I have plenty more examples, and I doubt I'd ever have a dining room for example, but I have personally benefited from each of the above. Edge cases can make or break lives. Just look at software people rely on.
You don't, you live in one that took a huge loan against the future and counts on dying before it needs to be paid. The kind of environmental and socoetal damage caused by these kinds of inefficiencies is immeasurable.
The solutions to these edge-cases don't need to be solved by the same thing that solves your average case though. Give me a fleet of large cars that I can rent whenever I have a long-distance drive, and maybe I'll consider not even owning a car.
I lived in a city for a decade without a car - and did exactly that - but when I had children - I found I needed both more certainty and more flexibility for my travel - so I got a car.
Don't underestimate those aspects - range impacts that flexibility ( not just range on a single journey, but cumulative range over a number of journeys without charging ).
Availability of charging points impacts both flexibility & certainty.
These are real concerns.
Range and charging are of course linked - if charging was easily available and very quick then range on one charge ceases to be much of an issue. If the range from a single charge is massive, then frequency of charge points is less of an issue.
So the good news is any improvement on either has a synergistic effect.
2 to 4 times a year is a hell of a lot more often than "never". If I can only afford one car, why wouldn't I get one that fits _all_ my needs? If I can only buy one house, why wouldn't I get one that fits _all_ my needs?
During that time I was so happy to have access to my home gym, to have a spare bedroom we could turn into an office, etc.
You're welcome to make the personal bet that a pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime event, but it's amazingly self-righteous to criticize others who prepare for edge cases.
Probably we should let people decide for themselves what level of hedging is appropriate.
A pickup truck is a vehicle you can use every day that also has the capability of additional utility — you don’t lose everyday utility because it’s a pickup truck, but you have additional utility that’s there when you need it.
Why do most people own suitcases? Why not rent those when you need them? Why do people own skis? Or anything else that has occasional use?
In Spain, I drive a big diesel van. When I bought it, many commercial vehicle dealerships were pushing the electric version — for my daily driving which involves transporting motorcycles to the race tracks roughly 1.5 hours away, an electric would work, but the 10 times per year I have to drive across Spain for races, electric would be a nightmare — drive several hours, potentially towing a trailer then having to stop for hours to recharge? That turns a one-day 9 hour drive into a two day drive. Barcelona to Jerez for example. That also assumes that chargers are ideally spaced along the route and that time while I’m waiting for the van to charge? That’s wasted time. Then there is the matter of daily charging — parking in the Barcelona area, especially for a van isn’t easy. And finding a charging spot available that’s close to home would be an exercise in luck. Even if there were an order of magnitude more chargers, there’d presumably be an order of magnitude more EVs to compete with.
Then there is the question of weight — a large van requires large batteries which makes the weight of the vehicle substantially more than diesel — that means either a bigger vehicle is required or I get less payload. And driver licensing is based on weight.. so the EV version of my Crafter van would either mean I carry less (not an option,) or I have to move up to a higher weigh class which would require a commercial license.
While my personal situation is an “edge case,” the fact is that everyone’s life consists of their own version of edge cases. That’s the point of the free market — we can optimize around our own edge cases. The problem is when do-gooders are reductive, trying to fit everyone into a box based on what they think their needs should be rather than what they are.
(used only once, could have been rented much cheaper)I'll be damned if I have to spend 50K on a car that doesn't even get me to the south of France in a day. Yeah, I only take long road trips a few times a year but if I do, I want to be able to do it in my expensive car.
It's like buying a top spec macbook pro but if you want to edit video even once or twice a year, you got to rent another computer.
X meter tsunami waves -> nuclear reactor barrier walls
X days without replenishing vital supplies -> warehouses and buffers.
I loath to think how many bad decisions are made because someone decided "three stdev" is good enough because they don't even know what a long tail is.
Same with guests; people aren't going to visit you if they have to pay for a hotel, and have to travel from the hotel back to your house for breakfast in the dining room you don't have.
My town doesn't even have a hotel. You'd have to go to the neighboring city. The hotel is on the side of a mountain overlooking the river, which makes it hard to get to. About 20 minutes away is 20 minutes too far when everyone is exhausted and drunk at the end of the party. First to bed gets the spare bedroom, and the last one up crashes on the couch. In a pinch, a cot can be put in the dining room.
A spare bedroom is also an excellent location for a home office. Having extra rooms is capital. It greatly increases the quality of one's life, every day. You might as well say you don't need a kitchen. You don't really need to cook when you can get all your food prepared from outside, in our prosperous society. While technically true (there exist apartments without kitchens), it is an austere standard to live by.
No argument on the pickup truck, though.
Spending dozens of thousands on a personal people mover I would like it to enable and expand my freedoms. I.e. supporting painless weekend road trips. Fossil fuel cars answer this requirement, EVs don't.
For the extremely constrained happy path of commute in urban areas it is much more efficient to develop public transport. Living in a city with developed public transport I'd rather take the train than drive an EV to get to the same destination.
My minimum buying criteria for an EV is simple: high ground clearance, all-wheel drive, and 650+km range with a car full of people and luggage in freezing temperatures. Trivial to buy in a gas car for not much money and essential for many people in the US.
We will know EVs have arrived when Americans in the mountain west start trading their Subarus for Teslas.
No need to get the laggards onboard, you simply need to get to the inflection point where the petroleum supply chain is no longer sustainable (due to demand falling through minimum economic viable throughput). Still at least 10-15 years out, as the US accounts for ~35% global oil consumption. US EV uptake is still too early to see where the weakness is from well to pump, but those Achilles heels will appear eventually. Some consumers may not get the EV they want before they lose the gas stations nearby they have.
Japan shows us the future in usual fashion: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/13/japanese-refineries-clo... ("Japanese Refineries Close As The Country’s Petroleum Consumption Falls")
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-el... ("How electric vehicles are accelerating the end of the oil age")
I am sure that in 2050 the EVs will be far superior to what we have today. But then again, so will AI etc and most of these discussions may be moot.
I don’t understand what people expect to gain by antagonizing people that cannot drive an EV. It trains them to ignore or oppose the same people on useful climate mitigations that have nothing to do with EVs.
it's because the people who do this are actually expecting those who cannot drive EVs to sacrifice, in order to drive an agenda (which might be climate change for example).
Calling climate change an agenda is like calling gravity a political position. If you don’t believe in climate change, there is no value in a discussion. If you’re driving a studio apartment on wheels around town, some sacrifice might be required. The future is unlikely to look like the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/17/do-scientists-agree-on-clima...
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208016669/heres-how-american...
it's not the belief that's in question. It's the actions required.
I, and many others (whether they admit it or not), do not wish to make personal sacrifices to fix climate change, if others are not willing to make the same level of sacrifices (such that relative positioning within society does not change).
This is why i think we need global policy changes and regulation to achieve the commonly beneficial goals.
While I agree we aren't the nicest species of primate (that title goes to our cousins, the Bonobos), I also believe a lot of our nastiness can be attributed to nurture rather than nature.
My feeling is that any individual is OK with sacrifice as long as they are not unfairly disadvantaged relavitely to their society/neighbours.
For example: i would not be willing to pay more income tax unless this applied for everyone; even if i wanted higher income taxes.
The world is changing fast and the Earth does not wait for its population to be ready.
There's plenty of good reasons to drive an EV even if you don't care about climate change or the environment. Lower running costs, less maintenance, better reliability, better performance, quieter smoother driving experience, etc.
Besides that, there are significant wider economic benefits from domestically-sourced fuel: money spent on electricity returns to the local economy rather than enriching (often foreign) oil giants, and electricity is much more resilient against fuel price fluctuations caused by wars and oil shocks etc.
We're already well into the EV adoption S-curve, globally. I think it's worth considering.
Also, I assume by year-round navigability you're referring to snow. I'd point out that Norway has 80% EV adoption, and is covered in snow 6 months out of the year.
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F4dwzC2WEAAvpxd?format=jpg&name=...
The convenience of being able to heat up the car before stepping out has been priceless though. I know some ICE cars have it but it’s pretty rare.
Every major automaker except Stellantis has made an agreement to obtain access to the North American Supercharger network, and there are few coverage gaps evidenced by the map provided above. On highway routes, you’re never more than 30-50 miles to the next Supercharger. Tesla’s standard has been developed by SAE (SAE J3400). Gaps will be filled and density will increase as the EV transition accelerates. Electricity is mostly ubiquitous in the developed world, anywhere with electrical service is a potential charging point (albeit at slower charge rates than 150kw-350kw).
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/01/sae-develops-nacs-j3400...
Wyoming refused the terms for federal funds for fast DC charging stations. You cannot help those who won’t accept help, getting left behind is a choice.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/why-wyoming-wont-build-biden...
Sure, there are a lot of superchargers on many parts of the coast. They have always been available where I live and I have a Tesla charger in my home. But the US is a continent sized country. Pretending the inconvenient parts don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.
I am always astonished at how dismissive some people are at the practical concerns of Americans that don’t solely live in an insular coastal metro. It isn’t a good look and needlessly invites resentment.
As long as Tesla can sell every vehicle they build and continue to drag legacy automakers to an EV future, individual opinions of the network are of low value. It was of enough value for major automakers to know they couldn’t succeed without it.
Most people in Manhattan would not need a car at all.
Most people in LA would should be much better off driving an EV.
And those who live in places where an EV is not sensible or even feasible do their thing.
Why do you need to fight against adoption?
Europe is large. And.
If you don't want to drive an EV, fine. You want a drive an Audi 700 miles a day. You do you. 99% of America doesn't do that.
It’s a bit like antivaxxer parents: it’s their decision, but it puts all other kids at school at risk, especially those who can’t take vaccines for valid medical reasons.
It’s their decision, but the whole planet bears the consequences.
There was one occasion when the ring road was closed because of extreme wind in one spot.
The only way of getting to our destination 50km away would have been the full round of about 2000km.
In the population centers at the coast tho the temperature does not go much below freezing during the year but also rarely rises much above +15C.
An interesting place to visit.
Like I said, it is smaller than almost all US States. Iceland isn’t that large.
https://electrek.co/2023/10/20/cratering-motor-fuel-sales-in...
While a BEV may not be on the cards for them, a PHEV running on biodiesel can be a perfect way to both cut emissions and fulfil their daily requirements. Even just plain biodiesel can be enormously helpful in farming and remote locations.
It is because people say weird things like...
> As long as significant parts of the US are not readily navigable by EVs 12 months out of the year, and that looks to remain the case for quite some time
Words like "significant" and "quite some time" are undefined here, but there are really quite few places that aren't navigable now. And even in the remaining ones, there's no reason that it has to stay that way more than a few years.
Regular Amtrak trains don't count, they are too slow and too unreliable to count on - I'd take a train from LA to San Francisco if high speed rail existed and it it took less than 3 hours, comparable to flying. But not when it takes 11 hours on Amtrak (assuming it's on schedule, and you don't get delayed waiting on a freight train). Even a bus is faster than a train.
I've said in numerous other comments that we should provide generous subsidies to ease any transition burdens, but there might be gaps unfortunately.
"Freeloading on the rest of us", "some sacrifice might be required". What a depressing, dictatorial view.
Sacrificing people doesn't seem especially kind. Be kind, eh. When it suits you, I guess.
If you have no resources, as I've said elsewhere, we should absolutely provide you the means to make choices that both improve your quality of life and are good for the climate. Tax me more, provide the subsidies. More EVs, more heat pumps, more solar panels. If you are of means and make choices dumping externalities on others, clearly you can understand my position that those folks get wrecked. I have attempted to align my actions with my position on the topic out of integrity. I agree contributions towards a solution as well as sacrifice should be proportional.
Could you explain why asking people to pay their fully loaded costs is being a dictator? Don't their rights end where our shared rights being? Is enforcing rights and their boundaries tyranny? Or is it just fair and just? Not rhetorical questions. I am attempting to do my part, and besides that, voting, and perhaps running for office, that's all I can do.
My 2020 Camry hybrid LE has a real world range of 800km or 500mi as I call it ;)
The sort of people who used to buy brand-new Subarus are already buying Teslas.
The people who buy used Subarus will be buying Teslas (and other EVs) in 5-10 years time when they're going cheap enough on the resale market.
Reliability has only improved since then, especially with the recent shift (in some models) towards LFP chemistry, which is much less susceptible to degradation over time than nickel-based chemistry.
Besides, the Model 3 and Y are very popular vehicles today, selling in the millions globally. So not only will the resale market be strong in coming years, there will be a good supply of low-cost parts (including battery packs) from salvage vehicles. You won't have to go to Tesla for a replacement battery back even if you needed one.
Another alternative is to just rent a car for that long road trip which I’ve done in the past.
That being said, I think far more people worry about daily mileage than you think. People think in terms of time spent driving, not distance. They tend to assume every hour is 60 miles and reality is for most it’s nowhere near that. I’ve had my wife lose her mind that the car is warning about range with 25 miles remaining and she’s 6 miles from home. Humans tend to be REALLY bad about estimating the distance of something but really good about estimating time.
If someone were to ask you how far your office is from the airport, I bet you’d respond with how long it takes to get there, not how many miles it is away.
To be fair, in this case, time makes way more sense. I need to know when to leave to get there in time for my flight, and I don't care about the actual distance.
But EV's have upended that - distance matters with EV.
7 minutes, 3.4 miles. Hmm.. guess you're right.
If people would choose not to get an EV because of having to make one single stop then they’re idiots.
Discussing the state of charging infrastructure is one thing. But if you have a Tesla then there are superchargers everywhere. The whole argument is FUD, usually propagated by people who don't own EV's or have some agenda.
You can downvote me all you want, it doesn't win or lose the argument.
In the real world, I've never met an EV owner who didn't prefer it to a gas-guzzler, so I'm somewhat skeptical of the number of people on social media who claim to have returned theirs.
But once you start going to many of the smaller cities you have to start taking longer routes to get to chargers and make weird detours and backtrack from chargers to get to your route.
Same with many tourist destinations outside the major cities.
Friends that tried to go pure EV and didn’t live their lives entirely in one city have inevitably had to buy a second gas car or truck. Because those “occasional” issues show up a lot in Texas.
My personal main concern is the emergency situations where the grid is down or there are mass evacuations. After hurricanes entire highly populated of the state can be without power for weeks. The area I live in now to be near my ailing parents regularly has power issues. I can bring in gas from outside the area to last a while but I can’t bring in a high voltage source.
Superchargers are so dense on the major roads in Texas you don't even need to plan ahead: You just get in the car and drive, like in an ICE car. On smaller roads you have to plan a bit but Level 2 chargers are common. If I stay with friends, I charge in their driveway and leave the next day with a full "tank." Charging in Texas is a non-issue unless you're visiting very remote places like Big Bend NP.
The car was incredible to drive, and I was sold on the idea that my next vehicle would be an EV until I had 3 miles of charge left after leaving my fourth broken charging station.
Most people I know take annual or more frequent road trips for travel, sport, or to visit family in neighboring states. These aren’t edge cases, they’re normal and predictable parts of peoples lives.
How impractical is renting a car for a once a year trip? EVs have a lot of upsides in terms of never going to a gas station and having less maintenance.
We're a happy one ICE, one EV family, but there's no way in hell we could be all EV. Our Christmas road trip is 766 miles each way, and our gas car does it in about 11 hours of wall-clock time door-to-door, including the two fuel stops owing to that car having such a small gas tank.
I just saw the ABRP link below, so I played around with it abit. In our 2015 Nissan LEAF, that becomes a 29 hour trip with 22 charging stops. Obviously, that's a dumb car to take on a road trip.
In a Hyundai AWD Long Range, it's 14h02m with 5 charging stops. A Tesla M3LR shaves 28 minutes off that time, but still takes 23% longer than the sub-$5K 2005 Honda CR-V.
In my experience (M3LR) you spend about 15-20 minutes charging every 2-3 hours. ABRP tells you how much time you spend charging, and otherwise assumes map drive time, which may not correspond to your “11 hours” depending on how aggressively you drive.
How much longer it takes also depends on how long you’d stop anyway — rarely go more than 2-3 hours without stopping anyway, even when we road tripped in our ICE.
A similar length trip (Sacramento to Seattle) takes 1h15m of charging for a 11h45m trip — about 10%. (23% seems high, but you may be making different assumptions, perhaps leaving with a low charge and having to arrive with a high charge.)
Our ~11 hour actuals from this past trip were moving with a purpose, but not Cannonballing as a family of four in a 20 year old CR-V, averaging right around 70 mph door-to-door.
I found the range penalty for going above 75 mph to be a weird thing…I typically target supercharger arrivals at 15%. If there’s…extra drag, let’s say…I might arrive around 10% or lower. But the battery charges really fast at that SoC, at least on the 250kW superchargers. If the extra drag gets me there 10-15 minutes sooner for a 2-hour segment, I’ll only see a charge penalty of 2-3 minutes.
Of course, I’m only thinking about all this stuff because I love spreadsheets more than is reasonable; most people won’t, shouldn’t, and don’t have to bother!
Roughly, you get about 20% lower range by traveling at 80mph (80mi, 25 kWh, 3.2mi/kWh) vs 60mph (60 mi, 15 kWh, 4mi/kWh), and then lose another 20% going from 80mph to 90mph (90 mi, 35 kWh, 2.6mi/kWh). [0]
Peak charging speed is 250kW and is sustained from ~5%-~35%, and then tapers. Charging from 10%-60% is typical, and takes about 13 minutes for about 38 kWh, meaning that each kWh you use adds about 20 seconds of charging. [1]
We can integrate these into the speeds and consumptions above to construct effective speeds that account for the charging time required. E.g., at 60 mph you travel 60 miles in an hour, consume 15 kWh of energy, and thus spend 5 minutes charging -- 60 miles over 65 minutes is about 55 mph.
nominal -> effective speed (efficiency):
60 mph -> 55 mph (92%)
70 mph -> 62 mph (90%)
80 mph -> 70 mph (88%)
90 mph -> 75 mph (83%)
100 mph -> 80 mph (80%) - whee!
So even though you spend more of your travel time charging at higher speeds, your effective travel speed continues to go up well into speeds you're probably not cruising at.
In other words, that peak "optimized cruise speed" for a modern EV that can charge 38 kWh in 13 minutes (~175 kW) is well above what you're probably driving anyway.
For comparison, if you stop for 5 minutes every 3 hours in your ICE to refuel, at 80 mph you've got an effective speed of 77 mph, about 10% faster than your EV at 80 mph. (The above scenario has you stopping every 1.5h at 80mph in the 75 kWh-capacity EV; of course, you could stop less frequently but with a bit of a hit to your effective speed assuming 0 stop overhead.)
Not making any normative claims here about what's better, etc. -- just laying out the numbers as I see them!
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/15/tesla-range-plotted-rel... -- model 3 is slightly better than these numbers.
[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/24/tesla-model-3-on-superc...
I also think people forget what happened to rentals during COVID.
Finding one that can tow even 3000 lbs is uncommon and 6000 lbs or more puts you into the Rivian/Lightning/Hummer realm in EVs ($$$). Or any-old <$20K used half-ton or mid-size SUV can tow that all day long.
Let's wait until we actually get some real world towing figures, shall we?
Isn't Tesla currently involved in a scandal to cover up exaggerated range claims?
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...
You can be stranded in the middle of nowhere because a road is closed for many hours or days due to inclement weather or an accident and the detour is 100-200km beyond anticipated, with no charging possibility in between. Some parts of the mountain west have 200km between exits. Has happened to me multiple times. In some places and some times of the year, getting stranded legitimately risks exposure to the elements.
You can find a road impassable because EVs almost universally have poor ground clearance. If a road is closed due to conditions, per the above, the alternatives that are remotely reasonable in terms of distance may require high ground clearance to safely traverse. Again, I have been able to circumvent road closures for various reasons because I had a high-clearance vehicle. There are parts of the US where I will not drive without one.
Many years ago, I would routinely rescue people out of the Sierra Nevada in winter that had foolishly taken their (ICE) SUV on unplowed roads they were not equipped to traverse. You can die from exposure to the elements in that country, both winter and summer. An EV is much, much more poorly equipped for these types of environments. They were lucky I trawled for people on those roads (it was a hobby), they may not have been found for days.
tl;dr: high ground clearance and robust reliable range are serious safety features in the mountain west. Lack of it may find you stranded for days in difficult survival environments. Same reason I also carry ample water when driving through the same areas, just in case.
EVs have low ground clearance for efficiency, just like most sedans. That's been "almost universal" so far because extra range costs $$$ for an EV but almost nothing worth of space for an ICE, so every little bit of lowered resistance helps. But sedans "almost universally" have poor ground clearance too. In contrast, a Rivian's ground clearance is up to 14.9".
As you note an ill-equipped ICE SUV on unplowed roads is just as much as disaster.
"An EV" is not inherently more poorly equipped for unplowed roads and going off-road. Most EVs on the market today are, just as most sedans on the market today are too. You make serious compromises on efficiency to support going off-road, and for an EV that adds a lot of cost. (And frankly for an ICE that also adds a lot of cost, especially if most of the time that vehicle drives on a clear highway, in terms of operational expenses and externalities.)
As that cost continues to drop for EVs, though, we'll see more vehicles that are actually equipped for the mountain west at prices that are less stratospheric.
Define: "poor ground clearance"
Tesla Model 3: 5.2" Tesla Model S: 5-7" (in has a manually adjustable pneumatic suspension) Ford F150: 8-9.5"
You can get bigger wheels for bigger clearances and you can also obviously put snow chains on Teslas as well.
As of September 2023, 11.05% of new vehicle registrations in Colorado were electric. It has a lot of both mountains and snow. It depends on the specific model and how cold, but a Tesla generally speaking can keep the heat on for ~72 hours or so if it is not moving in the cold. I lived in Chicago and survived three polar vortexes (the worst was -22F in front of my house) and my Tesla did just fine.
My minimum requirement for ground clearance for many years, and based on real-world experience, is 8 inches. I’ve owned vehicles with less and more, and used all in less than ideal circumstances re: ground clearance. The last time I had a vehicle with ground clearance as low as a Tesla, it wasn’t great for the vehicle, and I have a lot of experience navigating those conditions to minimize damage.
Just because it never has applied to you, clearly, doesn’t mean it isn’t a real problem.
Get over yourself buddy. The level of arrogance is astounding.
Yes, and you were the one who mentioned chains in response to clearance issues. GP was asked to provide examples, and did. That's not arrogance.
It would be more practical if it worked like on the TV ads where you just walk up to your car, get in, and go.
I have the top tier of Avis loyalty program, almost exclusively on corporate rates, and even then arriving at SFO often results in a > 30 minute delay between arriving at the rental car centre and getting on the 101.
If you try to rent at an in-town location, forget about it, you're going to be dealing with someone who has spent a long time watching The Apprentice and thinks they know what business is about trying to sell you a 2008-era navigation system.
Maybe try someone other than Avis.
- Car class inflation (cheaper models, models being bumped up a category i.e. "Luxury" not actually being Luxury)
- Instead of raising prices sufficiently, they use 'damage' as a revenue stream more and more
- Reticence to give you a printed paper contracts, making it harder to inspect them.
- Far less thorough damage recording. It's like they just delete existing damage in the records at the beginning of the rental. I always get a blank damage sheet when I rent.
- Higher and higher mileage vehicles
- Bigger and bigger deposits and damage excess ("co-pay")
- Dynamic Currency Conversion scam
- Fuel recharge scam
This isn't just a post-pandemic cost-recovery thing. Renting was getting shittier in the years prior
Any of the big company "frequent renter" programs, like National Emerald Aisle/Executive, Hertz #1, etc., gives all the stuff you want. Usually I'm at airport locations (which do have extra taxes/fees), but it's "walk up to car, walk around one time just to make sure there's nothing obviously wrong, get in, adjust mirrors, configure usbc/carplay, stop at booth where they take my drivers license and credit card, drive off". With National I get my pick of any car on the lot (and with a corp discount code, usually around $30-40/day all-in).
The local branches suck a little more due to limited selection and lack of cannelized check out, but they're pretty close. Also way worse at most non-US locations (with the exception of big gateway airports).
I've returned cars and aside from one time where I drove over a concrete curb at CDG which I couldn't see (sigh, at the airport itself, returning the car), and had to pay for damages, it's always been painless. One time I returned a car where thieves at Stanford had broken the rear glass, and at SFO they just said "oh, another one", and checked a box on the return form; everything was handled via email after that.
There are also day-rate car rentals through Uber and some other programs like that where you use an app, find car, and drive off.
I would have no problem relying on rental for the last 5% of car needs (e.g. if I had a 2 seater or something, or didn't want to get snow tires to go into the mountains, etc. The "get to the rental location" is the biggest friction, and in true emergency cases where I absolutely need a car right then, which is why I usually rent for the whole trip.
We're talking about occasional rentals for long trips when the EV isn't a good option, not a "frequent renter" club membership.
I maintain that for this kind of occasional rental, not at an airport, it's a PITA.
When I fly and need a car I also use National to avoid the hassle of long lines and forms, just walk to the lot, pick a car get in and go, zero hassle. But this only works at airport locations so it is not a solution for the local use being discussed.
With local rentals I've never managed to get out in less than ~45 minutes of paperwork and waiting, it's a huge hassle.
Also as you'll know, with the Emerald Aisle the minimum class is midsize so there's a price premium for the convenience. Just got back from a trip yesterday using a National rental, $644 all-in for 6 days for the smallest car I can get on Emerald Aisle. Over $100/day. You must have a nice corp discount.
(My favorite rental car option of all time was Silvercar -- they had a fleet of identical Audi A4 sedans, no-hassle app based rental, good for the time prices ($50-60/day), and zero hassle overall. Something happened and they became audiondemand and became vastly more expensive, though.)
Throw in the risk of Hertz randomly charging your credit card $30,000 because they thought you stole the car.
Or they fancied some extra revenue and ding you for a bogus $500 scratch
Or they downgrade you but lie and say it’s actually an upgrade
Enterprise give me actual proper attitude when I decline their extra insurance. Their snotty 20 year old new recruits are all like “would you mind explaining why you’re declining?” in an aggressive tone
Enterprise also basically threaten you in to taking it. They mention they charge £1000 per piece of damage, reiterating this multiple times. They remind me of the mafia. I reminded the manager of my local branch that such intimidation is illegal
I took a week vacation with friends last year and it cost me more to rent a car to get to the location than the combined cost of every thing else. The car was only used to get there and get back, but it's not like I could only rent it for the start and end days.
Just having to rent a car a few times a year would kill most/any potential savings from an EV.
It's kind of similar to why we got rid of the second car. Sure, it's useful, but for all the extra costs, I can take multiple taxi trips a year. (I barely do 1 in practice)
But >90% of folks can probably just rent once or twice a year.
Yeah - you need robust charging network to incentivize more uptick in electric cars. Everyone knows that. This is classic. We can't handle 100% of use cases yet, so we're doomed.
That actually sounds pretty bad to me, especially if that is my primary charging mechanism.
Wait, so in conditions that wide swaths of North America reliably get every year, the car doesn't charge? How is that not a deal-breaking problem?
The car in question is a Dec 2016 Tesla Model S, location is Northern Colorado, USA. I don't have space in my garage, so the car is outside. My normal trips are 5 miles around town.
How is this not a deal breaker? It's happened for maybe 10-15 days of the 7 years I've had it. It's not going to be an issue if you park in a garage. Much further south and it's not going to be a problem. Much further north and you're going to want to have a garage, or...
Charge after you drive, so the battery isn't dead cold. Much of my lack of ability to charge has been due to scheduling the charging to start at midnight, so if I drive the car and plug it in, it will sit there for 4-8 hours before it starts trying to charge. When you drive it, the battery warms up enough that you can charge.
This means that if you plug it in and it won't charge, unless the battery is nearly dead, you can go drive it for 10-30 minutes and plug it in. Also, if you drive more than I do in a day (10-20 miles a day), if you plug it in after driving and start charging immediately, you'll probably be fine.
The more time of the year and the further down you tend to go, I'd expect more issues with charging if your car is outside.
But, this is from my perspective. If you live in a dramatically different climate, see if you can find someone in your area with your usage patterns to get their opinion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MazdaCX90/comments/18ib2cz/battery_...
A big component of it is heater use. In an ICE vehicle, you heat the car with waste heat that is going to be lost anyway. In an EV, you heat the car with energy from the battery. Heating takes up way more energy than most people realize.
On our last couple of trips in freezing temps, we had to hop on backroads so that we could safely reduce our speed enough to make it.
It is practically zero maintenance, so much more fun/pleasant to drive, and no more trips to the gas station every week or two.
I have considered replacing our other (ICE) vehicle with a second EV, but the article hits on the main reason stopping me: we still take enough road trips that the (current) lack of infrastructure would make those tough for an EV.
But I think I will always own at least one EV, and I’m hoping the infrastructure improves enough to allow me to get rid of our ICE vehicle.
Normal outlets take forever to charge. Days from, say, 20% charge to get to full. Better not be using it for any other driving while you visit.
May have to kick one of their cars out of a garage, in either case, to reach any outlet. Some people really hate having their car outside.
Everybody knows that hybrids are a stopgap and will go obsolete. Consequently, there is negative motivation to produce hybrids.
The problem is that nobody knows when hybrids will go obsolete. If you recommend manufacturing them and they go obsolete during your corporate political tenure, you're screwed.
Govenments need to start subsidizing charging stations just like they subsidized filling stations along interstates and turnpikes. That way we can just make the jump to pure electrics.
Govenments need to start subsidizing charging stations just like they subsidized filling stations along interstates and turnpikes.
So, if you want to encourage people to actually buy electric vehicles a better plan is to make it so inexpensive to charge them with actual carbon free energy that they cost less to own and operate.
AKA spend the money on making the power grid provide cheaper power, and the charger problem will solve itself as people compare the price of a new electric vehicle vs a gas one.
I still believe in the dream from the 1960's that started with the catch phrase "electric too cheap to meter". And given the state of the US economy (and may other energy driven markets) it would actually have even farther reaching positive economic impacts beyond convincing people to buy electric cars. Ex: many fundamental industries run away from expensive energy. Its also why the global economy tanks when oil prices spike, or a countries energy rates go above their neighbors.
I wanted to test drive one but when I was car shopping last year they were selling used for thousands over MSRP.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/cybertruck-range-extender-opt...
Average trips being serviceable doesnt help me. I dont buy a vehicle assuming it will work on average, I buy a vehicle knowing in will serve every one of my use cases.
From Brisbane, Queensland to Daintree Queensland and back. I do this trip once or twice a year.
22h of driving, of which 2h38m for rest&charging
Seems totally reasonable to me
Using ABRP and a random electric it adds a lot of time to the trip, diverting me via Warwick/Tenterfield avoiding the Toowoomba - Gwindi part of the trip. there's also 9 hours 21 minutes of charging.
Thats before determining whether the vehicle is suitably rugged, long stretches of road were uncovered. One of these trips we found ourselves on an unmaintained service road with deep potholes and several down trees.
My next trip is likely to be Brisbane to Mt Isa, and its got a large stretch of red on ABRP.
They didn’t have electricity?! What country are you in?! How did they power their pumps?!
Ok, I’m being too hyperbolic.
I assume you mean they didn’t have DC fast charging, perhaps making a trip less practical, but I’d find it hard to believe there was no electric service whatsoever. One of the great benefits for EVs is that you can plug in anywhere.
> I buy a vehicle knowing in will serve every one of my use cases.
Vehicles are for already specific use cases; I don’t try to drive my car into the lake. I think a vehicle that can do everything probably can’t do many things well.
For most of Argentina and Chile and Bolivia there was no electricity at all, except for the occasional domestic windmill. We’re taking about 5,100 km of wild land. They had to charge the Rivians by attaching tow-cables to semi-trucks and being pulled, back and forth, to use the regenerative system. So deisel power, indirectly.
I also drove right around Africa through 35 countries getting as remote as possible. Again, I had to work hard to need more than 600km of range.
I also drove 18 months around Australia, including the world's most remote road, also across the Simpson. Again, aside from a few really odd cases (where no normal ice vehicle can get anyway) I was never far from power.
All of those places are developing rapidly, and all have been driven by EVs more than once.
The vehicle is mine, I make sure its maintained properly, has correct tires, I make sure its got what I need. I have access to it even when the local rental company has only Nissan hatches. The diesel costs me maybe 15% more than the petrol for my old honda hatch. Its also more comfortable, safer (for me) and a more enjoyable ride.
Since then, I stopped doing as many roadtrips. Tesla also decided to open up its charger network and everyone is switching to NACS, so the infrastructure is way better. I'd say I'm ready for EVs now, except the car industry decided that electric vehicles inherently have to come with lots of anti-repair bullshit. The same kind that I already find disgusting in consumer electronics. So long as gas equals I own it and electric means I'm renting it, I'm not """buying""" an EV, even though they're otherwise great.
> The focus on increasing EVs' range is contributing to their relatively high prices. Unlike with gas cars, the more you pay for an EV, the more range you can expect to receive.
That's partially true. The most fuel efficient vehicles have traditionally been the cheapest cars, those given small engines and the least amount of heavy noise dampening and luxury items. But it's not always true that paying more for an EV will get you more range. $70-90k for a F150 Lightning will get you less range than a smaller, less expensive Hyundai Ioniq 6. Within classes / makes, though, it's generally true that you pay more for more range, which is a flip from ICE. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/longest-range-evs-2023/
> EVs can be an important part of the fight against the climate crisis, but America's EV plan needs to lean into what these cars do well: short daily trips that can be taken in small, affordable cars. People who frequently take long trips can take advantage of hybrid cars.
Hybrids by themselves already make a good deal of sense. While some may argue that the complexity could reduce reliability, the Prius has actually been one of the most reliable vehicles you can buy. Maybe your daily driver does not need to be your "everything for every situation" vehicle.
But this is an old argument we'll likely never win against the American car buying public. SUVs (and increasingly large ones) already do almost everything you could ever need, even if the vast majority of the time, all they do is move a single person around. And the same can be said for those huge 4 door trucks (with small beds).
It’s not a strawman if suddenly it costs hundreds more to rent a car to go visit the grandparents for the holidays. That doesn’t scale either because everyone will want a long range vehicle for holiday travel, making costs for them soar and availability drop.
My car is 40+ years old. If I rented a car every 300 mile trip I would need to be rich. Gas is relatively inelastic cost so a old reliable can be really cheap to keep around
It takes care of the short trips and the long trips too, also more affordable.
I live in a dense city and don’t own a car. For most of my regular trips, a bicycle is faster and more convenient than a car.
Any time we do rent a car, it’s for trips longer than 100mi. Weekend trips and such. An EV absolutely does not fit our usecase. We tried renting a Tesla once and it was … not great.
Yes we’re probably and edge case. But there’s lots of people living in dense cities. That’s why they’re dense.
I know that isn't true for everyone, but for me the edge cases are the only case for having a car at all.
Well, some populous cities sprawl, especially if they were built a little more recently.
EV and ICE have great synergy if you use them together. EV offers amazing acceleration from zero, and relatively less amazing acceleration at highway speed. ICE has better acceleration when you're already moving. ICE efficiency is poor at low speeds, and better at high speeds, and EV is opposite. ICE can warm up the interior of the vehicle at no extra charge. If the engine is idling to warm up (itself or the occupants), might as well charge the batteries. If the battery has enough charge, it can easily start the engine when needed, so you don't need to idle unless warming is needed... And EV is always ready so you don't have the delay to go that some auto start/stop systems have.
Anyway, at least in my PHEV, it had a 'EV only' mode you can use if you charge it, that operates close to what you suggest. It does run the engine a bit here and there for 'normal operations' and will try to cycle through the gas tank over several months to make sure the gas doesn't go stale. But if it's in EV only mode, acceleration from say 40 mph to 65 mph is poor, and the battery drains quick at 65 mph vs 30 mph ish or stop and go. Significant uphill eats the battery too.
The one I drive is also very much a compromise vehicle, the extra battery for PHEV doesn't have a good place to go, so the trunk space is poor. There's probably ways to design a car to be PHEV first and find better places for the battery, but most/all? PHEVs I've seen are designed hybrid or ICE only first and then stuff extra batteries in storage areas.
Many good options abound, but they’re all $10-15k more than the basic guzzler. And $15k is a lot of fuel.
This is the default setup for mine, it starts on battery unless it's too cold (e.g. today's morning was -22C). Li-Ion batteries don't like cold (or heat), esp. don't like charging at negative temperatures.
In short they are a thing, and a rather pleasant one; as a side bonus the combined power of the two engines is quite nice, e.g. taking large trucks at two lane roads (pedal to the metal does engage both engines)
YMMV if you have a super long commute.
It wasn't practical and didn't sell and was hence cancelled.
But they still take these occasional trips, and getting there in an expected way is important to people.
So I think the relevant statistic is not what % of trips are short, but what % of owners take a trip that may induce range anxiety once every few years or more? If I knew I had a big road trip planned for two years from now it'd still affect my choice for a new car today, if I felt that I might be limited by range.
Right now, that isn't reality for a lot of people. Chargers either aren't maintained properly, or wait times to get to a charger are horrendous.
> Especially given that most charging happens at home, saving time vs going to a gas station every week.
That's ignoring the parent post's point. The usual commute isn't what's causing range anxiety.
Some day, I'll own an EV myself, but it isn't likely to be soon.
Road trips was something that was I was worried about when making the purchase in 2018, and it turned out to be a complete non-issue. In all that time, I have waited for a charger exactly once, for under 5 minutes, because we decided to stop at a busy outlet mall. During road trips, I'm not going to argue that we don't spend more time charging than we would stopping for gas, but it's not enough to bother me or my family, and if we include getting snacks or a bathroom break, the car is ready to go before we are.
It is wildly offset by the convenience of never having to fill up the car outside of those occasional road trips. People in the comments are talking about gas cars as the ones where you just get in and go without having to think about it -- there's very much a mirror image of that situation with an EV. When I had a gas car, fueling it was a constant chore. I had to think about it orders of magnitude more often. It simply doesn't come up with our EV. Every time it leaves the house, it does so with hundreds of miles of range. The idea of getting another car where I have to watch the gas gauge is almost reason enough that I'm going to stick with electric forever.
It is absolutely true that my experience is highly dependent on where I live, the kind of use I have for a car, the places I go, resources available to me, and just dumb luck. Others' mileage, literally, may vary. I'm not trying to sell you on this. It's just really easy to overestimate the importance of EV range.
The concern is that as adoption of EVs increase, the availability of places where one can charge on a journey outside of one's home range will not keep up with demand. I hope it becomes a non-issue, but I am hesitant to commit until it is clear it will not be.
At some point, there will be a tipping point where finding gasoline becomes the harder problem, but hybrid technology seems to me the most pragmatic way to get over the hump, if there will be one.
This is the opposite of my experience. There are way more superchargers now than there were when I bought my car in 2019. Road trips are much easier. I worry about charging/waiting much less.
From the Bay Area, where Teslas are as common as Camrys, tons of people travel to the Tahoe basin for the holidays. I just did so last week. Charging was a complete non-issue even during this cold, extremely popular time.
And if you think about it, the same argument could be made about gas stations, that given how many ICE cars are on the road, places where you can fuel up on road trips will not keep up with demand — and is also not a reflection of reality.
Trips with fast charging/Tesla network has not been a problem for many years now; it's good to stretch your legs every 3 to 4 hours anyway.
Gas stations smell bad & exhaust is poison and smells awful.
So honestly, while I think pure EVs are already good enough now, I think the solution is to just tell people to buy plugin hybrids. If it's like the Volt, they'll almost never use the engine, and when they do they'll wish it was pure EV. So it's perfect training wheels for a full EV. No range anxiety whatsoever, other than the desire not to use gas.
I am actually getting 65 mpg on occasions when I'm not in an hour-long traffic jam in freezing weather (then it's 50-55), but I'd forgotten about the difference between Imperial and US gallons, so 65 would be 54 for Americans.
Who did this? Who promised every single American that they can replace their gas car with an EV and have the exact same utility in every single aspect of their life with it? The author is literally making up their own narrative as they go.
They're all Electrify America, which are pretty unreliable. I'd have to stop at each and every one of them to ensure I could actually make the four hour drive. Unbelievably annoying.
We considered a Tesla, but it became a pain to even acquire one. Purchase would involve driving to another state.
Battery running down? Go find a Supercharger station. If you're in a Tesla, it will even route to these automatically. It will tell you in advance how many chargers are operational, and how many are occupied, and it will reroute to a less busy station if available.
[1] Aging Wheels - EV Road Trips Suck Now (Except in a Tesla) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92w5doU68D8
We all want a cleaner planet and we need to be able to talk about how to solve the charge time problem without the hysterics and the bullshit.
Do you live in a world where you're the only person using charging infrastructure and never have to wait in line?
- by the 2.5-3.5 hour mark between charges, I'm ready for a 25-35 min break and its somewhere nice and not a gas station
- stop anywhere and sleep with air conditioning for free
- never have to use gas station bathroom
- never have to calculate any routes or fuel stops
- also no gas cars drive themselves as well as EVs can yet so driving fatigue is so much better
There were times it felt like I was on my own private train where I got to set the route through national parks, scenic routes, etc and not deal with strangers.
> - by the 2.5-3.5 hour mark between charges, I'm ready for a 25-35 min break and its somewhere nice and not a gas station
What does that have to do with the power source? You can take breaks anywhere in an ICE vehicle too.
> - never have to use gas station bathroom
Can't you use the same bathrooms in ICE vehicles? Are they EV only? Does your EV include a half-bath?
> - never have to calculate any routes or fuel stops
I don't do that in ICE vehicles; gas stations are so common that I just find one when I need it. Is your EV's range greater? Also, aren't EV chargers harder to find that gas stations?
> not deal with strangers
To each their own, but back to our primate ancestors we are social beings.
Yea, ADDITIONAL breaks, you also have to take short breaks at gas stations
>Can't you use the same bathrooms in ICE vehicles? Are they EV only? Does your EV include a half-bath?
I am not a lawyer but I do feel comfortable walking into a Marriott bathroom when I am a paying customer for their charging station, but would feel sketchy walking into hotels randomly.
> I just find one when I need it.
You're proving my point here by saying your just find one when you have to. My car just takes me to the ideal one automatically.
My mid-size sedan (Kia K5) gets about 400 miles on a full tank, which is larger than the range of most (all?) EVs, which means that I will be stopping less often for less time than an EV driver.
> You're proving my point here by saying your just find one when you have to. My car just takes me to the ideal one automatically.
Gas stations literally line highways. They're naturally on the way to wherever I am going, I don't need to route to them. Charging stations are not.
I agree, I have no issue taking long distance trips in my EV. My cars range is about 5 hours of driving, after which I am more than happy to get out at a charging station with a nice restaurant and eat some food, then drive to my stopping point for the day. I’m not really sure being able to drive 10 hours with a 5 minute stop for gas is a benefit over driving 10 hours with a 25 minute stop for a charge, especially if I do the 5 minute gas refuel then drive to the restaurant with the EV charger to eat for another 25 minutes. That’s 5 minutes of extra time to get gas rather than refueling at the same time.
No idea if it's right, but I think they are saying that places with EV chargers tend to be nicer than gas stations. And maybe ICE drivers can stop at those places, but are they really going to make an extra stop when they already have to get gas?
I'd point out that this is probably a temporary phenomenon, due to the relative rarity of EVs and their status as luxury items. Once everyone has them and they're cheap, I'll bet the EV charging stations' bathrooms will be just as bad.
- 90% of EV charging is done at home, meaning that even when all cars are EV, there will be an order of magnitude less usage of the public infrastructure.
- EV infrastructure does not require employees on site so it is not beholden to the same 'service center' economic model premised upon selling snacks and becoming defacto grocery stores for impoverished locals.
But also, EV charging stations are purposely located in existing commercial areas like malls, hotels, grocery stores, strip malls, etc. whose bathrooms are supported by businesses with a much bigger reputation to uphold than one whose customer loyalty is fundamentally linked to being 3 cents cheaper than the identical building across the street.
How much charge do you get on these breaks? I assume they aren't charging stations.
I've only had one stop ever where the bathroom was a hassle, it was a 'locked for paying customers', at a mall Starbucks in Arizona.
Strangely, the worst cases are often things like day trips. A 250-400 mile day can be harder to plan than a 600+ mile road trip.
Hybrids can be smaller, cheaper, lighter and gentler on the grid. Each of these matter.
Heavier cars cause significantly higher road wear [1], particulate pollution [2] and occupy more space. EVs by necessity, are heavier. This is especially evident in America's favorite product categories : SUVs and Trucks. The Ford- F150 lightning is 1.5x heavier than its gas powered brother.
Mazda is able to fit in a hybrid rotary [3] range-extender in the MX-30 REV, saving about 800 lbs from having a smaller battery. The rotary only serves as battery charger, so you get all the benefits of an EV and none of its negatives.
Full-EVs are solving a problem that doesn't need solving. I respect them as a premium market segment option. But, massively subsidizing them with a 8000$ tax credit & virtue signaling makes no sense. The infrastructure is decades out from being there. There will be an eventual transition to EVs over the next 30 years as energy density and grid issues are solved. But, we should wait for it to happen organically.
As of 2023, EVs are not the sustainable solution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
[2] https://dynomight.net/tires/
[3] Doritoes are back baybee.
Also, aren't heavy trucks much fewer than regular cars plus don't they have designated routes?
A * (W / A) ** 4
car = 30 units
truck = 6 million units
Dump trucks are even worse.
They are much fewer, and they do tend to have different travel patterns than other vehicles, and there is an equivalent average daily traffic for truck traffic where you convert each truck into a large number of other vehicles.
When you do that, the wear due to truck traffic still absolutely dominates almost always.
Let the rental companies keep and maintain the gas cars.
Plugin hybrids are a great answer for those people, but they're not buying those either. I mean, roughly 90% of car trips in the US are under 30 miles roundtrip. Therefore, nearly every PHEV is designed to handle 30 miles of fully electric driving. That means they are an EV 90% of the time for the average consumer.
The problem is, most consumers don't understand this so when they see that a PHEV only has 30 miles of range they think that's absurd when most of the time it's actually more than enough. Of course there are outliers and people who they wouldn't be right for, but we're just talking about most people.
Also, renting is a pain. I used to rent 6-10 times a year and about 50% of the time you'd get what you asked for, or had to run to an airport for better selection. I'd ask for a subcompact and they'd give me a van, vice versa...
Have you rented a car recently? It’s a nightmare half the time.
In engineering I’d call that a high risk single point of failure.
App-based free floating rental cars (think e-scooters, but with actual cars) are ubiquitous in large German cities and work extremely well. There are usually several free cars within a 5 minute walking distance, and booking one takes less than 30s. You can even pre-book a car the day before, and the company will bring it close to your home (if necessary), and reserve it for you.
The classical rental car experience (AVIS and co.) is comically bad in comparison.
I rented a Toyota Rav for a road trip from Seattle the SW for 12 days. $700 plus fuel and done. That hyperbolic math you haven't done doesn't check out.
So you are telling me, that for a car with a 30k MSRP, instead of renting it once a year for 700$ for a road trip, I should purchase it outright... Because of unpredictability and risk? Millions of people rent cars every day. Maybe your hassle tolerance is infinitesimally low?
In engineering, I'd call it innumeracy.
But yeah, I’m sure renting cars is always just perfect and never a nightmare.
When I called Hertz about it, they said they had no authority over the local agents. When I press them on it, they hung up on me.
What I'm pretty sure happened is that rental cars were in high demand for quite a while after Covid, and the local office didn't want to lose a car. (One way rental away from a small market, means there's not much of a chance of somebody delivering a car one-way back to that location anytime soon. So that means they have to pay to get a car shipped in from another market.) So they refused to give the car up.
If you want to hear the excuse the local agent originally gave it was that the rental was in my wife's name but the card it was paid for was my MIL's card. It was my wife who went in to get the car at first. But when both my wife and MIL went in to get the car, he still refused to give up the car, and stated that he wouldn't rent them a car.
So you can believe whatever you want about how I'm hiding things in the story. Believe me, if I spent the time to tell the whole story, it wouldn't reflect poorly on us, but only make Hertz look much, much worse.
Is it that hard to believe that a consumer had a bad experience with a rental company? I mean, seriously... have you ever watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles? It's only funny because so many people have experienced it. I'm not the only one in this thread citing a nightmare experience with a car rental.
As I understand, theirs is a fairly common post-pandemic car rental experience.
I've run into this and it sucks. "all our cars are rented"
there are times when there are no cars.
I have never had a nightmare experience renting vehicles, and I do it fairly often. Perhaps I'm lucky.
My own electric car is close to half the weight of a petrol F150. So the F150 uses more petrol and wears more tire as well.
Those kind of massive cars are only needed for farmers and construction workers in the first place.
Pigouvian taxes also work in the car industry and this industry isn't that special.
Looking at the Ford website, a F-150 starts at just over 4000lb. So your EV is a bit over 2000lb? Which one is it?
Maintenance seems to be a manufacturer problem more so than a hybrid vs others problem. Toyota Priuses have been the beater Taxi of America for a good decade now. These hybrids are troopers.
If Rivian and Tesla maintenance stories are any indication, Full-EVs seem to be an order of magnitude behind on dealing with problems during the ownership period.
> Hybrids can be smaller, cheaper, lighter and gentler on the grid. Each of these matter.
EVs do not affect the grid as much as you would think, and might even benefit the grid once vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home technology (+corresponding economic incentives) becomes more common. Think about it: right now we have enormous amounts of battery storage, sitting idle most of the time, that has already been paid for.
Most people do not charge their EV from empty to full every day, most people aren't using DC fast charging and not during peak hours. Most days the average EV owner probably drives 30 km and charges that amount at home, overnight.
There are probably millions of electric ovens/stovetops in any given country. If they were all turned on at the same time, it would definitely overload the electrical grid. But this doesn't happen, because of their sheer number. We can safely assume each oven will use a fraction of its rated power on average, possibly with a small peak when the average person gets off work.
Yes EVs are heavier but 1,000lbs more is not causing the type of wear to roads that you think it is. Model y is something like 4,300lbs. Max load capacity of a semi is 80,000lb distributed across multiple axles. Most trucks are probably not loaded to max but I could see the axle weight hitting 20k lbs.
Heavier vehicles are definitely going to need heavier compound tires or potentially cause more wear on the tires. I don't think tires is a worthy argument. Even a Hybrid is going to be consuming tires and then you are going to have to get into the argument of which is the lesser evil, potentially increased tire wear or increased point of use pollution.
The grid is just fine. Most charging happens at night and EVs have the potential to reall help out the grid. There is a large push for smarter home devices to min/max use depending on the grid condition. In times of overgeneration, EVs can soak up that energy.
Range extenders probably aren't what you expect - You still have to charge.
For example the bmw i3 range extender won't let you drive on gas. It will put charge in the battery while you are driving or stopped, but it won't generate nearly enough power to keep up with freeway driving.
Other hybrids are basically ICE cars that can capture a little power and feed it back.
and hybrids have twice the complexity - all of ICE + all of EV.
I do quite a lot of truck stuff: 2-3 major construction projects a year, gathering / transporting multiple cords of firewood at various stages annually, commercial landscaping, driving forestry roads for engineering work and hunting, etc. And I have a motorcycle that works a lot of the time for commuting needs. BUT, I also have kids and so I do end up needing a passenger vehicle, a need which is unfortunately filled by my truck since my wife has to also commute.
There is no way an electric vehicle would allow me to do the stuff I do. My truck offers 385 miles of range, and I usually carry enough extra fuel to get double that when I go into some extremely remote locations where there will simply NEVER be charge infrastructure. And I absolutely need it sometimes. I saw some poor guy driving that road get stuck in a Tesla out in the middle of nowhere. Not sure what that guy was thinking but he ended up getting towed out after failing to get a charge off of a gas generator after running it for 8 hours. It's bad fire country out there and he's very lucky that wasn't a concern at the time.
Next year, the 2025 RamCharger
https://www.ramtrucks.com/revolution/ram-1500-ramcharger.htm...
92-kilowatt-hour battery pack paired with a 130-kilowatt generator
I would like for the market to stabilize around PHEV for a decade while the rest of the infrastructure catches up.
Re: Range - ~250 miles is perfectly fine for me and mine 99% of the time. I haven't paid for charging since (checking...) July 2023. Roughly 6mo. Else, we take the Mrs 600mile range SUV the 1-2x/year it would be awkward to take my car.
If my wifes car died today? I have absolutely no idea what I'd replace it with. Dailying an EV for ~4 years now, I'm not sure I'd be ok going purely EV household yet.
40mi per day indicates that’s probably 2 trips per day, hence 4 over 30mi per month.
Worrying your car can’t go to the mountains and back to ski on the weekend (or whatever) seems valid — and why those 73% of people are concerned.
Telling me I shouldn’t worry about having a weekend getaway because it’ll do me fine going to and from work is a loser sales pitch. As many here have pointed out.
The author is free to disagree about whether a particular consumer’s concerns are reasonable.
If some particular consumer believes that an EV would have numerous significant benefits for their every day driving, but is concerned that a single weekend trip per year will take an hour longer with an EV due to charging, the author is free to have the opinion that this consumer is not weighing those benefits and costs in a reasonable way.
I live in a mildly dense city and a lot of my neighborhood uses street parking. I almost never drive for short trips and a major reason I got a car at all is for longer more infrequent trips. I'd be happy to take a train instead but it is twice the price of flying and takes twice as long as driving. Instead of trains we'll get EVs and their infrastructure subsidized, no matter how much it ends up costing.
It's not just direct subsidy. Some local ordinances now require buildings to provide chargers so people who don't drive will pay more in housing costs.
This is all in a certain sense irrational behaviour, but in another sense it is more about the feeling. People like to buy things that they can imagine them helping in all life situations.
A car is not a small investment for many and if you have the choice between one that perfectly serves 95% of your trips and might suck at the rest and another that serves 100%, but the 95% are slightly worse/inefficient/expensive, that is a choice one can make. In certain circumstances it could even be the rational choice. E.g. if the charging infrastructure where you live isn't there.
There's also conspicuous consumption/costly signalling to consider, when it comes to things that are on display like bikes, clothes, cars: in some respects, a car is a piece of jewellery.
The weekend trip is indeed the problem and I rent an ICE car for that. It’s a pain, car rental companies are crap. If I can order a taxi to my house in 10 mins with an app, why do I have to trek across town and queue for 20 mins with a bunch of seemingly random paperwork to do that. Adds an hour to my trip both ways just doing car hire admin. And then there’s the ‘damage’ they invent when you return it.
The sort of cars people are likely to have as a second car that they don't mind not having around for a couple days now and then.
I think the quote you highlighted explicitly mentions that they meet the daily range needs but "struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge".
> 93% of trips are less than 30 miles, but the vast majority of drivers take occasional trips that are beyond the range of an electric car. It's no wonder that 73% of drivers have range concerns-- no one is concerned with the EV getting through their commute, they're concerned with the EV getting them to their distant family / weekend trip / vacation home / etc.
Yah, policymakers should push PHEVs harder as an interim strategy. They can be effectively electric cars most of the time but have the versatility to make road trips easier.
If only 30 miles is required most of the times, why go with these big, heavy, expensive batteries when you need only a quarter of it. Something like the Chevrolet Volt would be perfect, fully covering the 93% case with its smaller battery, but for the remaining 7%, the gas engine gives it a better range than any fully electric car.
And for emissions, we are 93% there with a plug-in hybrid, so clearly that's the solution.
Except, maybe not... because there is another trick in that stat. Maybe 93% of the trips are less than 30 miles, but 93% of the miles driven are necessarily part of a trip that is more than 30 miles. Same thing for that "40 miles a day", it doesn't account for days where no driving happens. So it means that it you take a random car on the road, there is a good chance it is doing a longer trip than 30-40 miles.
I guess the only concern there is if one is already out and about in their EV and suddenly need to go further. But then that's what charging stations are for and, unless I'm wrong, one can charge up enough in 20 minutes.
The thing can pull a trailer, max distance is less but I only need to go the local hardware store.
I think those concerns overall are unfounded for most of us.
I'm actually curious about this. Say I where to drive with the AC on, 130kmph, outside temperature of -5C. What would you say the range is under these circumstances? Still 350km?
Summer usage is 17kWh per 100 km, winter usage 21-25 kWh per 100 km. Battery is 100 kWh.
That is 0.342 FoBpF ( firkins of butter per furlong ) in summer and 0.422-0.503 FpF in winter on a battery of 1kFoB, if you prefer imperial units
I never measured reach with a trailer. I only use it to haul lumber from the wood or buy heavy stuff close by.
I'm too much of a coward and I'll wait for the infrastructure to mature and for 120-150kWh batteries to become cheaper and more commonplace, though :-)
We've been happy with two cars. Our main around town car is the electric car, with limited but sufficient range. The second car is ICE and is used for road trips.
It's a good mix for us, but I do expect as the charging system is built out, the second car will eventually be replaced with an electric car. After all, the ICE has 100ish years of infrastructure build out that is going to need to be rebuilt for the transition.
For these trips, stopping halfway for charging makes no sense: I don't want to add another 30m to the trip. At the destination there is generally no charging infrastructure. If there was, that would be the only point I would consider for charging.
Charging infrastructure is still underdeveloped. I see many parking spaces converted to EV charging where the electricity cost is often double of your house utility cost, to the point that almost noone charges in such places if they can avoid. The utter nonsense of the app requirements for every single charging place.
Renting a car here is just a PITA. Go to the rental place, for which I need a car or public transport, waste 30 to 60m to get paperworks signed and car checked. I considered selling my car and just renting to get rid of the maintenance, but it turns out it's cheaper to get a used car like I do if you do at least one of such trips per month.
On top of this, EVs are still too expensive. I never bought new cars in the first place, so I'll be looking at EVs when the used marked starts to fill up with something at the same cost level of used ICE, factoring for the battery degradation.
People mention ICE maintenance, but honestly in my last 2 ICE cars, the engine was never a problem. It's usually everything else that starts breaking too often, requiring too much maintenance.
Also renting a car for a day/overnight trips sucks. I used to live like two blocks from an Enterprise during the 7 or so year range that I didn't own a car and experience was always awful the 1-2 times a year I'd have to do it. The availability of vehicles was always terrible, the people working there were scummy, pickup would take 30-60 minutes every time. My last time there really sucked and their "remedy" was a 10% coupon off my next rental, which never happened.
But of course people feel concerned, they always do when they go from the familiar to the unfamiliar, or when they organize trips that make it difficult to get timely help.
ICEs were unable to do long distance trip until gas stations were everywhere.
You'd have range anxiety about gas cars, too, if there wasn't a reliable network of filling stations on the routes that you are travelling!
In a prosperous society, the economic activity that you describe (daily commute, occasional trip) is important. Commuting keeps workers working, and trips are part of people's quality of life.
So let's agree with your point that consumers are choosing the type of vehicle that will meet all their needs.
At the same time, US car manufacturers know their business well and have not delivered small EVs or small hybrid vehicles because the manufacturers have chosen to aim at Tesla's demographic (i.e. rich and "spendy"). It's clear that physics absurdities like the F150 Lightning or the Dodge RAM "RAM charger" are also aiming at rich and spendy customers. US manufacturers are delivering "autobesity".
The daily commute is a dire source of pollution, though.[1a , 1b]
And the combustion engine is also having dire health effects on society, therefore economic effects. At scale, combustion engines are bad for the environment and bad for people. [2]
We can understand that a topologically large country or US state can't build extensive public transportation as easily as a small country. Trains and subways are expensive. Parking and roads are "easier" to build. But parking and roadways are more of the same problem at scale.
The estimated 100 million daily trips in combustion engines are responsible for a significant amount of pollution in the US were contributing to asthma, lung cancer, autism, and Alzheimer's disease. [3]
A right-sized selection of EVs and PHEVs would make a big difference to people's quality of life and economic prosperity. But maybe the message needs to be delivered better and more clearly.
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[1a] _ https://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-pollution-from-cars.htm
[1b] _ https://www.statista.com/chart/18208/means-of-transportation...
[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
[3] _ https://today.uconn.edu/2019/05/traffic-related-air-pollutio...
They're aiming at it because like almost everything (including ICE cars), you need to make it work before you make it cheap.
I don't disagree with that principle. But Toyota, for example, has been making hybrids for, hmmm, a quarter of a century.[1]
US manufacturers have been maliciously compliant. [2]
Sure, but that's not very long. 25 years after ICE cars were invented they weren't nearly as affordable as a Prius is today.
> US manufacturers have been maliciously compliant. [2]
I don't understand how they can be (who is the manufacturer blindly obeying the orders of?).
The majority of people don't know or care how their car works, they are busy with life.
Being dismissive of real and tangible concerns is a luxury of excess. Electric cars are fine in CA context, but there are plenty of learning curves with these cars. I've tried to rent an electric for rental car use when taking road trips to see how bad it is... Hertz has almost given up on Teslas and Lucid has started giving several to Enterprise and others to rent them out.
If you cant plug it in everywhere you park, for example in Colorado, there are some huge inefficiencies like battery heating/cooling losses which impact range up to 2x.
Hence, having a long-range car makes sense for them and me, especially because my city wants to expel gas cars anyway.
https://electrek.co/2023/12/05/us-ev-sales-pass-1-million-20...
Yeah, Elektrek, a site dedicated to EVs with affiliate links, has no agenda.
Sure, EVs work for 98% of trips. But they really suck for the 2% of trips where you’re driving 3 hours to+from an airport through a busy city where chargers are difficult to find.
And then there’s the experience of taking a 20 minute detour to go to a charger, only to find they’re all in use. This experience is even worse as a passenger in someone else’s EV because all you can think is “god I wish we could just pull over and fill up the tank”
I love EVs for short trips, but as a late adopter I’ll be waiting for range annd battery improvements before buying one.
A week back I needed to help a cousin move while my wife needed our car. The solution was simple - I rented a slightly bigger one that managed the move with ease. The total cost is still much lower than if we had two cars.
We thought we’d take the gas car on those longer trips, but the trip is comfortable enough that we take the EV despite the charging stops.
I have high hopes that the NACS standardization and Tesla’s growing supercharger network will put range anxiety to rest for good.
I also somewhat take issue with the article’s premise anyway - model y was the top selling car on earth this year. Clearly people are buying EVs.
The only way I see to change that pattern, outside of getting rid of cars completely, is a full switch from ownership (or "ownership" aka leasing) to fine-grained rental.
I'll postulate people don't buy single seater cars because they don't exist. (At least in the US?)
I've long wished for a very small single seater car, something under 1000lb, only needs a tiny engine so it could have very high MPG and yet still be very fun.
This just about sums it up. Even the best EVs today present a combination of strengths and limitations that mean they can't replace any given ICE car - only some of them.
I didn't buy my ancient gas-guzzling Lexus because it's good at doing things a public bus can do. I bought it because it's good at taking me into the sticks to see my loved ones.
The problem with EVs has little to do with the powertrain at this point. The biggest barrier is infrastructure. I need to be able to charge this thing anywhere along an interstate, without specifically planning every single stop ahead of time. We can figure out charging times later, just get the damn stations out there so we at least have something.
That's a big part of why the American consumer really wants a 3 digit number starting with 3. Anything else is a much harder sell.
As EVs become more common, that might shift to a 3 digit number starting with 2. Tesla is already having some success here with the base Model 3, which is by far their best value.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it road trips pretty decently too.
It's amazing how many people commenting here effectively refuse to acknowledge that there are ways (and more than one!) in which ICE cars are better than EVs and want to believe that no one could rationally decide on different trade-offs.
I own and EV, and I love it. But pretending the paradigm shift comes with no undesirable trade-offs is absurd. And wanting everyone to come to a uniform decision about what they value is a great example of technocratic tyranny.
Unless I'm hyper-focused on something, I'm lazy. On the off chance I get lucky and get a charging port, I'm not going to remember to go out in two hours or whatever to move it for someone else to use. I'd probably be getting angry emails for sitting in the charging port for days at a time.
Moreover, I frequently catch myself near empty on the tank. I like that I can find a gas station anywhere and fix the situation almost immediately. I had to sit and wait on a friend's charging once, and it's not something I look forward to.
The whole usage pattern around EVs frankly scares me.
Do you think I could go to Tulsa and back, 212 miles round trip, this Saturday in an all electric thing? Cherokee turnpike for a large portion of it, cruise control at 82 mph.
I think a lot of you city dwellers need to re-examine how you think "flyover states" work. But I know you won't, as you don't care about us, so you'll just keep these wrong thoughts in your head pushing policy on us from afar. It's working great for relations in our country so far, keep it up.
Luckily I drive a plug in hybrid but it still is an issue!
Do a 700 mile roadtrip through the center of the US in an EV in the middle of winter and you'll understand why I have range anxiety around EVs. I have range anxiety in my gas powered car in a few spots in the US and there are many more gas stations than there are charging stations! I'd absolutely buy an EV as a second car for my more local trips right now...but I don't need a second car and the production carbon costs of a car outweigh the gas carbon costs of not having a second car (not to mention the economic costs of having a second car!). Eventually once the second hand market improves, that around town+ EV might make sense for me to have. But not until then (but by that time, charging infrastructure should be highly improved and it might make sense to go full EV!).
Tesla will say that it has, idk, 310 mile range or something. It never has this range, period.
- You cannot run it down to 0%, much like you can't run a gas car to 0% and then be stuck on the side of the road.
- You cannot run it to really even 10%, because you're advised that this is stressful on the battery, and while there is high probability of a gas station within 30 miles of anywhere in the US, there is near-zero probability of there being accessible and reliable public EV charging. If it is cold out, the vehicle will advise you to never let it drop below 20%.
- You cannot really charge it to 100%, because you're advised that anything above 80% is stressful on the battery, supercharging above that level is quite slow (its oftentimes actually faster to just stop at 80% and also charge at the next supercharger, and the Tesla nav knows this, which is quite cool). Some superchargers will even charge you extra for going above 80%, if they're crowded.
- What this means is that, functionally, you're not dealing with 100% of the battery / 310 miles of range. You're working with 60% of the battery (80%-20%) / 186 miles of range. On the top of the line EV humanity makes. On long trips, you can eek that up a bit to maybe 70% of the range, but realistically given the distance between superchargers, its not going to make a difference.
> Niedermeyer said that while an electric car can meet most people's driving needs, it struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge. Since Americans have been promised a one-to-one substitute for their gas cars, this seems like a failure; an EV should be able to do everything a gas car can. This idea persists even though in 2023 the average US driver traveled only about 40 miles a day, and in 2022 about 93% of US trips were less than 30 miles. Still, in a survey conducted by Ipsos last fall, 73% of respondents indicated they had concerns about EV range.
93% of trips are less than 30 miles, but the vast majority of drivers take occasional trips that are beyond the range of an electric car. It's no wonder that 73% of drivers have range concerns-- no one is concerned with the EV getting through their commute, they're concerned with the EV getting them to their distant family / weekend trip / vacation home / etc. The argument is a clear strawman; it's playing down what people have genuine concerns with and focusing on the range aspect that's obviously unimportant.