I’m always amazed by statements like this. People who have lived through the rollout of the internet to the masses can’t see how we’d modify existing structure to accommodate needs. We had phone lines initially, 20 years later now we have 5G, fibre, satellites.

They just dug up every street in my European town to put fibre internet in. We already had broadband in the town. They dug up every street to give us fibre that most people won’t even need over their existing connection. People look at this and say “how will we charge electric cars” when we are already surrounded by electricity.

Electricity infrastructure already exists everywhere where we have civilization. And production is usually just hundreds or less km away. For lots of people it even happens at their own home.

The average amount of km every European drives is around 40km. For a standard EV that is around 7,2 kWh of energy per day, which can be charged in 2-3 hours from a normal 240V Schuko plug at home.

If there’s no option to charge at home, a weekly load on newer EVs with around 500km range would be more than enough, taking around 3-4 hours on standard 22kW chargers or less than 2 hours in a DC 50kW chargers.

EVs are a real option for lots of people. Main blocker for most of people according to most statistics is lack of knowledge on how to operate, and as a consequence fear of the unknown.

People aren't that stupid as you think, you are just ignorant. EV preachers take the easy route and ignore issues which are inconvenient to them, or focus only on home charging.

A RWD Model 3 and Model Y with around 500km range is even less than that right now in their available stock.

How can that be stupidly expensive if it’s even below average price?

Street chargers are more expensive than home charging, that is right. However it is still cheaper than gas and diesel by 50-70% by average in mainland Europe.

You can look up facts instead of calling me ignorant.

The 500km mark is calculated in ideal conditions, flat street at 60km/h or something like that in more realistic highway conditions it's about 300km

That's why plugins have so much sense even when they cost about the same that EV would. I can drive fully electric on everyday short distances (my car is rated for 33km of electric range, but I'm able to squeeze about 40 by careful eco driving) That usually covers my city driving and at the same time I have 700-1000km backup of ICE/hybrid range

In my observation hybrid approach have about 30% better fuel efficiency than pure petrol.

I agree that having 22kW charger nearby that is affordable could solve all of that. But for many people that is not the case and if so they are so expensive.

In my case petrol costs me about $0.12/km and electric from supercharger would be $0.14/km (assuming 19kW/100km). Why would I want to switch to more expensive car to pay more per driven distance?

Of course everything changes when you have solar installation and you have basically free electricity (of course I omit here installation cost that would make if free after about 10years or so) then driving basically everyday for free and paying for fast charging few times a year when doing very long distance trip makes is fine.

But again, not everyone can have solar installation.

I have high hopes for new sodium batteries, give them 2 more generations and we could afford ev cars with 1000km of range in cars less expensive than ice and that would be very compelling.

Now imagine we came along and said we were going to add to the electrical grid a parallel system of transporting explosive liquid to billions of distributed combustion engines. Not only that, the explosive liquid is only available in a few politically charged areas in the world. Add all the tankers refineries pipes truck lines holding tanks pumps etc so that most people live at most a few miles from a holding tank that will distribute hundreds of gallons to them for their own micro power plant that only exists for their commute.

It seems crazy. We built both systems incrementally over time so we're in a massive sunk cost analysis whenever we think about replacing gas cars.

The same is not true of electric cars. People have real mileage anxiety because they can’t use petrol when a charger isn’t available

> The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.

> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...

Saving the environment is nobel, but affording it is another thing.

If price hikes in the US continue, there are places in the US where that may soon be the case, too. Then we're screwed. Thankfully hybrids aren't going anywhere. They may be more complicated, but they have the most critical feature, regenerative braking. instead of shedding the energy spent slowing down as pollution and heat, it gets saved and is used to move the vehicle later.

I find plug in hybrids make no sense: electrification is the future.

For me a car is about convenience and having to worry about it and going out and doing things with it when I'm not even using it is the opposite of convenient. It should just be there and ready when I need it and forgotten when I don't. And it should be as cheap and low-maintenance as possible. If every parking space had a charger and I could just plug it in and forget about it when I park it, it'd be acceptable (in fact better than an ICE because at times I also had to remember to refuel it for an early trip). What adds to this also is that I don't really have a 'routine', my life is really ad-hoc.

So for me it would be a huge dealbreaker to have an EV until chargers are everywhere. But right now I have the perfect solution anyway which is not even having or needing a car at all :) My city has amazing public transport and 20 euros gets me an unlimited monthly travel pass. I don't even like spending money on cars, and when I did still own one it was usually a 1500-2000 euro old banger meaning that EVs are out of my price range anyway (even used ones will never be that cheap).

Those of us living in the present prefer to be more flexible and have the best of both worlds (electric commute, ICE for long trips)

They make sense depending on how far away that future is, and I think that 'future' is way different for different parts of the world.

Because in almost every other country there is a real lack of decent charging infrastructure.

Especially outside of densely populated areas.

Not just availability of chargers but also the average kW rate.

https://apricum-group.com/ev-charging-infrastructure-race-in...

Rapid charging is now widely available (certainly could be more)

I'm an enviromentalist and I'd still buy an ICE Porsche.

No EV has come close ... only the Hyundai ioniq 5 N seems to be looking interesting.

Environmentalists walk or ride bikes.

I am also an environmentalist and burn some fuel from time to time, I’m not a zealot.

For me to operate and support the environment the best I can I also need to be mentally fit and have life enjoinment. And riding my old classic carbureted Triumph helps me with that.

I can't see how buying a Porsche (or any car really) is compatible with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

I'll note I've seen people struggling across the supermarket carpark to avoid buying a plastic bag only to get in a giant SUV. It's a form of moral licensing[1], there is a huge amount of dissonance around environmental issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

A sports car, used fairly sparingly for fun, and not a daily driver - is different to the horrible trend of daily driving done via ugly, honkingly big SUV's.

There's a line somewhere out there that enables humanity to have fun and not destroy the planet.

Right now almost all consumers use SSDs because they are affordable for space most people need.

And I remember how we were transitioning where I bought 128gb drive for cost of 4TB HDD to have super snappy system and I had to manage system much more to not burn writes too quickly (ram drives for logs and temp etc)

That where I believe we are right now with EVs. But they are more affordable and have better range every year.

But to go further with this comparison we still develop new generations of HDDs even after all that time, even when everyone believe that at some point in the future we will abandon that technology completely

Most of the US is in the same boat as you. Where I live, there is nowhere to charge and there are fairly great distances between things. You rarely ever see electric cars here, because they are only useful for people who have invested quite a bit in their house to build a charging station.

The people here on hn that have the attitude you mention, are people who live in large populated regions, especially congregated around the coasts.

I'm all for electrifying, and I think it is very necessary, but people do love to put the cart way in front of the horse.