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xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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I plug my car in in seconds
Driving to work 110 miles a day meant I had to get gas once per week, driving out of my way, stopping to get gas cost me 500 minutes per year as opposed to the two seconds to plug in at home. Totally a no brainer. I HATED stopping for gas on the way home from work at 11 in the evening, or whatever hour really. I think of people tied to ICE engines the way people were tied to outhouses a hundred years ago.
And then wait an hour to get acceptable charge levels for range. Filling up at a gas station is much faster.
This is not to say electric vehicles aren't a good idea, the charge rate and convenience while traveling are issues we need to improve on.
You can't fill your gas tank at home while you sleep...
I'm not at home sleeping when I'm out traveling. I'm referring to multi hour or multi day drives. This is an extremely common use case where I live.
Also not everyone has access to a charger where they sleep.
I don't need to
I hear this complaint a lot about charging times, but for 99.99% of people they are never in a single day going to drive beyond their cars range, meaning even a standard level 1 slow charger over night at home can manage their entire car usage.
It's only people doing long distance road trips that have to worry, and that's by far a minimum. Instead of boosting gas cars for that we could be looking at investing in rail so people don't have to make the longer trips in a car anyway.
Not only that, people going on those long trips are going to be looking for something to eat in a similar time frame that their EV takes to fully discharge. It takes EVs about 15-20 minutes to get from 0-80% charge. That's less time than it takes to sit down and eat at a restaurant
This is incredibly short sighted. I usually bring my own food on a long trip because I dislike stopping or buying crappy food. I eat while driving on long road trips because I have a schedule and want to get where I'm going. My gas car gets double the range of an electric car, so I'm stopping less often as well. I'm often in places where getting gas or food isn't within an hour's drive, and almost none of those places have the ability to charge a vehicle anyway.
Look, everyone has different use cases. I think electric cars for the in-city drive around town use case are great, and we should continue to encourage their use. I'm just saying that for wider adoption we're going to have to solve the charge rate, range, and charger accessibility issues.
I rarely go inside restaurants to eat on a long trip. I grab a burger and wolf it down and go again. I eat the fries while I'm driving and they're gone in an instant, and i'm still going.
Sounds like a you problem then
sounds like they have different priorities and values than you, is that intolerable?
You're saying 1 in 10,000 people will never drive more than ~200 miles in a single day? What country is that statistic for? Source?
I love the idea of rail, but it doesn't work in large spread out countries like where I live. Sure cities can be connected, and we should definitely do that, but the idea that I could get to all the natural and wild places I love in this beautiful country by taking mass transit is impossible.
And for about 50% of Americans, they don't have a place to plug in an electric car at night. It's only people above a certain level of wealth who have the luxury of their own parking space with a charger.
For the rest of us, we must take time out of our day to sit in a grocery store parking lot while the car charges.
EVs generally have adapters that allow you to plug into a standard home outlet, it's just significantly slower to charge to full due to the lower amperages. And even if you only have 1 plug in your garage, it's not hard or expensive to add more.
The only real hurdle for that is if you rent a house and aren't allowed to make those easy changes
Yeah this is losing the plot. I believe they're talking about the tens of millions of Americans who don't have private garages.
The point is that, for most journeys, you just charge at home overnight. It's rare to plug in and wait for it to charge. With petrol / gas, you always have to wait
*If you have a homecharger
It is faster to refuel your car with petrol.
A 120v standard Ac adapter is all you need for overnight charging, and I'm pretty sure those come with the cars.
Lv 1 charges are pretty shitty...takes my car about 12 minutes to get a mile-worth of charge on a 120v. I could still make it through a week of commuting doing that, but my range was a little lower each day until the weekend when I didn't have to commute. That being said, I ponied up for a 220v outlet in the garage, and the Lv 2 charging is much better. Takes about 15 minutes to recharge from a days-worth of driving (usually 30-40 miles between work and running the kids around to all their activities).
How much did the 220 outlet and the L2 charger cost to put in? Was it a turnkey thing from an electrician or something or were you able to do it yourself?
I had to get an electrician to come run the 220 line for me because I don't trust myself with high voltage electrical work. Bought the charger itself on Amazon for around $300. I installed that part myself. Wasn't too hard, basically jist mounted the converter to the wall and plugged it in.
"when you are empty, and you have to drive right away, its faster to refuel your car with petrol"
My relatives dont have a charger at home, they just plug their car into an outlet, and get ~40km range over night. That more than enough for the daily commute.
And my relatives don't have personal parking spots.
Poor people's time gets no respect, because the rules are made by rich people with tons of time conveniences and they just aren't conscious of how the other half lives.
They ban our shopping bags, failing to realize that for someone with a car and a garage, a disposable plastic shopping bag doesn't have much utility over re-usable bags, or dispsable paper bags. But for a person with no car and no garage, a disposable plastic shopping bag means they can carry like three in each hand and walk miles home in foul weather.
And if you want to just bring bags with you in advance, you gotta carry them with you all day.
It's doable, don't get me wrong. But it's more of a hassle. And the amount of hassle that it adds is far greater for poor people.
I rent a car for Uber. I'm working up to buying a car, but until I do I have to rent. Uber has decreed that all rentals must be electrics. To save the planet. The electrics cost about $100 more per week to rent than the gas cars did, and as a poor person I can't charge them at home because all I have is street parking.
This means that every day I work driving for Uber, I have to stop about once a day to charge the car. So that's about $25 a day I'm losing to charge instead of refuel my vehicle, so $125 a week I'm losing and then the other $100 per week it costs because it's a special car, I'm losing $225 per week due to this decision.
So I'm doing my part, but unwillingly. And I strongly, strongly suspect that the people who made this decision at Uber, that their contribution to climate action was going to come out of my cut, didn't think the cut would be so big because they live in houses or in fancy apartment buildings with chargers.
I just feel like nobody talks about how time poor poor people are. We lack time just as much as we lack money, and when we get new rules imposed on us that take up more of our time to comply with, the people creating the rules don't realize how must time it's costing us, because their own lives are relatively time rich. Many of the forms of their wealth come in the form of time conveniences, and those change the equation. They think the electric car's hassle consists of having to charge it occasionally on long trips, because they have a home charger.
Just across the board, we need to be aware of the time cost of these changes, and also to be aware that the time cost is often many times higher for poor people than it is for middle class people.
Overnight isn't "right away". "I have to get to y right away!" "Sure! I'll just charge the car and you can leave tomorrow!".
Listen, I'm not saying that EVs are shit but they are currently not my cup of tea. It's just all this BS. Of course it's faster to refuel a car with petrol than to charge a battery. Would you also deny that it's faster for me to fill up a glass of water than you charging your phone? I ENVY the great fuel economy that EV owners get. This sucks for petrol cars.
Not at home it's not. Where's your back garden petrol station lol.
I don't know what to do with you people.... We both have 5km range left. You plug in the cable juice and I plug in the gas to refuel. Who leaves the station first?
Charged at home and never needed to stop. Ten mins down the road already. Go shout at clouds old man.
So your electric car has more range than a similarly sized gas car? Unlikely.
Given both vehicles start at "full", drive until you have low range left. Now talk about convenience of filling up in the middle of nowhere, or when in a hurry.
Is this use case common for everyone? Definitely not, but I run into it a few times a month.
So you admit you are talking about edge cases. This is why no-one cares what you think. You are arguing for slower, less efficient, more polluting vehicles just cos it'll save a few minutes on a long run. Get outta here. Jokes.
I'm talking about millions of occurrences of this edge case a day.
I'm not sure what you're trying to fight. I said multiple times that we should continue to encourage and expand our use of electric vehicles. But to blindly fanboy electric cars without being able to honestly admit that we have some improvements to make just makes you stupid and smug.
https://youtu.be/vz4qnwNKxt4?si=
They don't mention it in the video because they could get in trouble but best estimates for how long they had been driving 360 miles for is 5 hours and on the Porsche it shows a drive time of ten hours. That's well into take a proper break from driving time. 45mins every 4.5hrs for a total of 9 is considered safe with some extra hour extensions.
Wow. Awesome. Only takes a few seconds to plug it in. Good on ya bud