This is why there are no plans to try to sell something like this in the US. I drive three hours each way on day-trips fairly often, and a couple times a year I drive around 1000 miles per day for longer trips. Even people who live in cities with short commutes often want to travel to places several hours away pretty regularly. Here you can drive for hours and hours and hours and not even leave the state. It’s not like we can take a train either.
Comment on The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses
gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 month agoI don’t get thesr automakers, who is this made for, don’t they see that tesla is killing it with their largr batteries.
It is made for people living in places where you maybe don’t need to drive 50 miles to go to the nearest mall… a car with 600 miles autonomy would be an overkill if you just need to drive about 10/20 miles a day while commuting.
Why can’t they put a 600miles battery
because they are useless for the target market.
If you don’t need to drive that long distance for everything, you don’t need big batteries with all the associate problems (weight, dimension and so on) that in the end don’t give you any real bonus if not the fact that maybe you can recharge it less often.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 1 month ago
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
couple times a year I drive around 1000 miles per day
You can use the savings of having a $20k city car to rent a $70k monster car a couple of times per year, and come out way ahead. You probably need more luggage space on those trips anyway.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 1 month ago
The car I drive was only $22k new and it’s able to drive jeep trails and get me deep into the forest and up mountains on unmaintained roads/trails which when I’m not on a trip for work, that’s where I’m going. You can’t rent vehicles like that in my area. I have a Thule hard sided cargo carrier on the roof to hold the extra gear.
isableandaking@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The problem is that the battery degrades, so it’s a good idea to keep it charges to 60-80% so that it last way longer. If you have 600 miles of max range then that means you can easily have 360-480 miles for your driving. This is overkill as well right ? Wrong, if you live in a cold climate it practically gets halved so now you have 180-240 miles of driving.
Let’s say it’s summer though, now you want to drive 600 miles to your nearest ocean/sea and want to sightsee along the way. With a battery that big you might have to charge once and not even fully to have enough confidence driving to places where charging might be limited.
That’s why smaller batteries make sense only if you use the car for daily commuting, now you need to rent or buy a proper long range gas car or ev car - which now costs you quite a bit more or adds inconvenience. With tesla the problem is almost solved, but they have problematic political views and minimalistic interiors and a max battery of 402 miles. So yeah I think it’s worth it to make a car that costs 3x what VW are pushing, but is useful to everybody.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 month ago
Fine, but you still fail to look how the car is used. A battery that big also mean more weight (and thus more energy needed) and it can make sense if you use the car almost always for longer trips. For shorter drive it make more sense to have a smaller battery and recharge more often.,
Here you fail to consider the target market. EU and US are very different geographically. In US a car with bigger batteries can make sense, in EU probably not that much.
VW simply design a car for the market where they want to sell it, which make sense in my opinion.
That would be a problem anyway, with limited charging options you could arrive at the sea but then have problem returning home (but this is a problem that is slowly going away)
I don’t know how may miles you need to drive for your daily commute that need to have such big battery but in the supposed target market of the VW even a 180 miles battery can easily cover your weekly commuting.
So yes, you are right that a bigger battery is usefull but it really depend on where you plan to sell your car. Not everywhere you need that kind of mileage daily and you need also to consider other factors like the weight and size of the car.
isableandaking@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You are correct on many of those points. But lets look for edge cases - people living in apartments, they can’t charge their cars when there are no garages, so they need to do what normal people do with gas cars - go to the gas station to charge. So if you have a 600 miles car and drive 35 miles per day that’s enough to supercharge once per week for 30+ minutes and be good for the rest of the week - good for the battery, good for wait times, good for not pissing off the person buying the car as they don’t have to waste multiple hours per week.
If your point is that it’s inneficient to carry heavy batteries around I would agree, but isn’t it less efficient to use gas, to have 2 cars instead of 1, to have to rent a car, etc. I think it balances out and with new battery technology you’ll see that they’ll start competing more fiercely with range, but there is a sweet spot and I think it’s 600 miles, if the battery drain is not affected by cold/hot weather 360 miles would be a good sweetspot.
I hope the market appreciates this new model, but highly doubt it - most of the other things I suggested in the original post also affect if the buyer would decide to spend their money on the car. I don’t think it’s unrealistic for VW/Audi to make something like this at a competitive price of $120k - same as the starting price for a BMW M5.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 5 weeks ago
That’s a problem, I agree, but you don’t design a new car model around edge cases.
True.
Again, it depend on the target market. In EU it was relatively common to have 2 cars: a small one for the day by day commute (where other options are not available) and other tasks like taking the kids to/from school, small trip to the grocery store and so on, and a bigger one for the long travel.
It is still true outside the big cities, where services maybe are not that near and normally there are very few options for public transportation. And I don’t think that having a small car for the day by day and rent a bigger one for longer trip is really that bad.
Also, consider that often a really big car it not an option in places where street are really narrow to the point you are forced to buy small car (common outside most of the big cities)
I think you are out of price range. I don’t know is US (given the use of dollars), but in EU a 120K car is not a common car, I mean, the big cars like the Renault Espace are in the range of 50/70 k, a 120K car is an entry level luxury car here.