Comment on xkcd #3214: Electric Vehicles
ebc@lemmy.ca 23 hours agoNot to full, you never charge to full on a fast charger… You charge enough to continue with your trip, which, yes, takes about 10-15 minutes in my real-world experience. I’ve also timed my fueling stops in my gas car, and they also take at least 10 minutes if I have to pee, grab some coffee, etc.
Reygle@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
So I’m not at all opposed to electric cars, but I’m on the old side and what I’m not “for” is spending time charging enough, planning my next charging stop, rather than “filling up” and “there’s one on any exit, whenever I see fuel is low again”.
Maybe it will reach that point some day, but if I want to go sightseeing or go to somewhere interesting, I don’t want the whole trip being highly stressfull stops of “OK where do we plan to stop next and for how long”.
At that point I’d much rather take a train, and yes I know how insulting that is considering it would be AmTrak here in the united states of late stage capitalism.
ebc@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
You misunderstand. The roadtrip planning, at least in my EV, is all handled by the car itself. I just punch in my destination and go. It figures out where I need to stop to charge, for how long, etc. When I’m stopped charging, the “time remaining until full enough” is prominently displayed in the car itself as well as in the app, and I get notified (in the car and in the app) that my car is ready to continue. All that time I also have a (very accurate) estimate of how much charge I’ll have remaining once I reach the next stop.
There’s no guesswork, the car figures it out on its own, and I can tweak it however I want.
Also, the actual experience refueling is horrible compared to charging: When fueling I have to stand outside in the cold, breathing noxious fumes while being blasted with loud adverts from the machine… Then I get inside to pay, and if I want to grab a snack, coffee or go to the bathroom, I know that I’m not making progress towards my destination during that time so I’m kind of in a hurry.
Charging, you just park, plug, and let the car do its thing. You know you have 10 minutes to kill anyway, so you do the same things knowing that your car is doing something productive in the meantime. The vast majority of the time, the car is done before me anyway. It’s just a lot more relaxing honestly.
But all this is something I do what, at most once a month with my car? Day-to-day is done with home charging, where I get home, plug in, and the car is full the next time I need it. No more stressing about running late but finding out you need to stop to refuel, etc.
All in all, I find my EV experience to be WAY less stressful / annoying than my gas car. Just yesterday, we did a small family trip about 2 hours away with the gas car (the EV doesn’t fit the whole family sadly), and on the way back we found out gas prices had jumped 15¢ / liter during the day, thanks to Trump’s war… With an EV the price stays a lot more stable over time.
Reygle@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
So- genuine question here, not baiting. So assuming your 4G/etc (telemetry soaked) connection is working, how often would you wind up stopping to charge “up another X percent” along the way? It sounds like it would be having you stop more often than every few hundred miles?
The home charging scenario is great, near perfect experience FOR SURE, but there are cases where it’s not possible, like renters.
ebc@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
I kinda doubt the genuineness of the question given the comment about telemetry… I’ll be the first to admit that these things are a privacy nightmare, but that’s a problem with ALL modern cars, not just EVs. It just so happens that most EVs are modern cars, but they’re not necessarily worse than your random off-the-shelf 2026 Nissan Rogue.
Still, genuine answer: Haven’t done that many roadtrips where I’ve needed to charge more than once, actually. But my car can easily leave now and go 2-3 hours at highway speed without stopping. Make that 3-4 hours if I set it to charge at 100% the night before (in case of a planned roadtrip), as I usually only charge it to 80% to preserve battery life. Not sure how many miles that is as I’m to lazy to do the conversion, but this is why I use “hours at highway speed” as a metric.
A good resource to look at the various scenarios specific to your situation / area would be ABRP.