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Fear Mongering About Range Anxiety Has To Stop — CT Governor Calls Out EV Opponents
(cleantechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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There's no fear mongering about it! I'm anxious about the range of an electric car and not having a quick and convenient way to refuel if I near empty.
Honestly, track how far you normally drive and you’ll see you don’t go that far. My PHEV has a paltry 26 mile range and we use electric only 90% of the time. An EV with 200+ miles wouldn’t be an issue unless you travel for work.
People really like to overestimate how much range they actually need on a daily basis.
I drive maybe 200 miles a week. Almost all EVs could easily get that range in spring/fall. And even in the worst of winter as long as I have 120 volts to keep the battery warm I'll make it through the week no problem.
Honestly big fast charger networks aren't the biggest hurdle. We need basic 120v or 240v outlets ran to every apartment/town homes parking spot. With essentially a trickle from 120v you'll be fine for 90% of your driving needs.
I don't think the issue is the daily basis. It's the few long trips people take yearly that would blast that 200 mile range out. People don't want to buy a very expensive new car that they know won't work for them several times a year. It's the same reason people who tow something several times a year make sure their vehicle can tow that.
Because renting a vehicle for a trip or to tow is actually a PITA and expensive.
It's a hell of a lot cheaper to buy an EV with a range/capacity lower than what you need 5% of the time, and spending $40 to rent a truck/$100 to rent a car for a trip than it is to buy some ridiculously oversized battery. Sure 5% of the time it's useful, but getting a rental isn't that bad.
Plus with a rental you can pick the exact type of car suits the trip well. I took a V6 camaro on a road trip for thanksgiving and that thing gets almost 30 mpg doing 80+ on the highway. Vs if I had my one size fits all Outback for that trip I'd be getting 25 doing only 70, and in the low 20s at 80 if I'm lucky.
I don't know where you live so I can't talk to your experience, but where I live, if I want to rent a car for a week trip I'm driving at least 30 minutes one way, spending an hour getting the car, and paying about $1,000. If I want to rent a truck for towing (we tried this for like a year, for ~3 uses that year) we have to drive 45 minutes, it seems to take them about 2 hours to do the paperwork if we're lucky - we've waited 4 hours or more before, and we paid $350 for a weekend because they couldn't rent it for one day for Saturday because they were closed on Sunday, but charged for that day anyway. Then we got to spend another 1.5 hours driving there and back again to drop it off, 40 minutes doing paperwork.
This is a plausible PITA, stress and annoyance once every 5 years or so, but for multiple times a year, plus all the "we just WILL NOT use a truck and make due with a less suited tow vehicle and light trailer" which is more like 12 times a year, we broke down and bought a used truck.
You see - people don't buy cars just for dollars and cents, they also buy it for value, and in a lot of cases, that's paying slightly more for the ease and convenience of jumping into said car and doing what they need to do right now, rather than with days of planning.
I know some folks that just made a cross country trip in a Tesla model Y. They don't do huge distances every day so it took a couple of weeks but they made it just fine. They did note that the South was really bad for chargers. Something about some state legislatures or municipalities actually passing laws against public charging or something like that. It sounded pretty southern and believable though.
If I had Tesla Y money, I'd get an RV for a slow cross country road trip. Save on hotels. I'm talking about trips where you want to get to your destination, yet don't really want the added expense, hassle, and limits of flying (and probably renting a car at the other end). This mostly has to do if you have 3 or more people on the trip, if you're just one person who can avoid renting the car on the other end somehow, it doesn't apply.
They did have one but got rid of it because they didn't want the hassle. They are olds and are more about convenience at this point.
Boy have I got a video for you! https://youtube.com/watch?v=1Vm_ASm2zfs
I will wait in line for cheap gas at Costco a hundred times before I have to stop and charge for 30 minutes on my annual road trip.
/s
I have no idea what this has to do with towing or long road trips, but my personal experience is it's usually pull up to gas station, pull up to pump, start pumping. I very rarely have waited in line anywhere. Even when I have, it's like 5 minutes maybe. Do you claim there aren't ever lines at charging stations, and there won't be lines in the future as more people want to use them?
I charge at home. I never need to go out of my way or really even think about fuel/charge level. Every day I wake up with a full tank. It’s always the same price (cheap), so there’s no need to shop around.
I know not everyone can charge at home, but at least half of America can, and it’s a convenience that is seldom mentioned in discussions of “range anxiety.”
If you have 120V to keep the battery warm, you have 120V to charge from.
I love it when ev drivers act like the rest of us are just fucking stupid.
People really like to reframe the discussion to be about daily use when it's almost completely meaningless in the context of maximum range.
I've been on several road trips where there weren't any chargers along my route, or that I had to make a long, several hour detour. So I ended up having to get another vehicle. Which was fine. But it's not a non-issue either.
And that's with a Tesla. Any other vehicle there will be even fewer, and a good chance they won't even be working when you get to them.
This is only accurate if you are being as stubborn as possible. There are many third party, and even some first party solutions to this problem. With the right adapter, literally any EV can charge at a Tesla station.
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Currently there are only a handful of stations that support this and most of them are located on the opposite side of the country from me.
The only way it makes sense is if you’re intentionally constraining things to the most unfavorable. You’re ignoring charge stations, ignoring that EV adapters exist, ignoring portable chargers.
The adapters I’m talking about are something you just throw in your trunk and pull out when you need them. They are “universal” and don’t require support on the charger side. You just buy one for your specific car.
There's no such thing.
I must be hallucinating these.
What you're hallucinating is that those do anything today:
They're not compatible with anything today. They will be, in the future.
Even when you plan ahead on a road trip there's a pretty high chance half the chargers are down and there's a queue of cars waiting. Made it to the next stop on my last trip with 4 miles to spare. That was a nerve-wracking drive.
Now I gotta check plug share to see recent reviews on stations and decide whether or not to take my ev.
I've owned an electric since 2013, never run into a down charging station. Early on, I'd run into single chargers that were occupied, but that's it.
Not saying it's not possible to have a broken station, just never hit it. But I, like most people, charge at home, 95% of the time.
Where are you located where there is perfect charging station maintenance for the previous 10 years?
I'm not saying it isn't possible that you've never encountered a broken station, but I've had an EV for only a few months now and encounter malfunctioning stations on nearly every trip to a DC fast charger. It usually isn't that every single station is broken, but if there are 4 stations, 1-2 of them will be out of service.
I’m still new to EVs but with the convenience of charging from home, my battery is just never low. Think of it like charging your phone: start every morning with a full charge and you just don’t have to worry about it
(Actually have mine set to stop charging at 80% and I don’t drive much at the moment so don’t plug-in every night)
It’s really the time to refuel. I can plan out spots to charge on a long drive, but if I have to wait that long, I can’t just refuel quickly if I forgot to plug it in last night.
Sounds like you are fear mongering.
From TFA:
So 41% of EV drivers worry about it? That's an issue! I'm guessing only 5-10% of ice drivers every worry about running out of gas.
What you're not addressing is that current EV drivers change how they drive, i.e. don't go on the same sort of trips the same way (if the various articles on that site are to be believed). This isn't addressing range anxiety, it's saying plan your trips around charging your car so we work around the problem. And the problem isn't "range" now - it's where are the fast chargers? It's getting better, but it's still hard enough to pull off that there are regular youtube and news articles about the hassles and issues doing a road trip in an EV. No one does the same sort of reporting on ICE because you can find gas stations just about everywhere every 5-10 miles just about anywhere you go, and where it isn't there is some reporting of the signs saying "last gas for 100 miles" or whatever. People know they can find a gas station, even if they're going into a rural area.
So you're saying 41% of EV owners have range anxiety? That's a pretty significant portion...