I really don't get why all the charging networks in Europe require you to sign up, get a card, download an app, etc. It's ridiculous. My sister drives an electric car, they have 5 cards from different charging networks, and she still struggles to find a charger that actually lets her charge.
Every gas station accepts normal debit and credit cards. There is no gas station that requires you to sign up before filling your tank. It is ridiculous.
Why can't the charging networks just install a normal credit/debit card reader and let people pay with their normal cards? It's mind-boggling.
I was shocked the other day to see a water dispensing ... thing, that required you to download an app. An app. For water that is free from another very similar water dispensing thing call a tap!
Well, in Verona, Italy, a few years ago the mayor installed benches with an armrest to make it harder for homeless people to sleep on them [1].
His party (Lega) is now (practically speaking) leading Italy. I wouldn't be surprised if many people would be in favor of forbidding black migrants from "stealing our water".
I imagine it would. If you read again I’m trying to distinguish people who are homeless and people who are mentally ill, filthy, and verbally threatening homeless. I don’t think we should restrict people’s access to water, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was a motivation. I would bet that the least desirable people in society don’t have smartphones generally.
I find this interesting. Don't you want to spread knowledge about and sympathy for your product as wide as possible to get a good base of advocates, eventually reaching decision makers? (See: Student licenses, open source and such)
I recently purchased software to the tune of ~AUD$25k, where downloading and installing a trial version makes almost no sense given the target audience: laser cutter, where each model of machine from any specific manufacturer can have a slightly different dialect of G-Code, and this type of software is often way too complicated for the average operator to nut.
So I sent a couple of emails and got swift responses and screen-sharing demos from both companies I contacted.
The sorts of programs I can download a trial version of and have running in half an our or so are nowhere near as mature as the products we short listed.
So I'm going to suggest it depends a lot on the target audience. When you're handing over multiple tens of thousands for a semi-bespoke software package management, in my experience, typically require interaction with a sales agent. This is in the context of physical industry, I can't speak for the software world, where perhaps spending multiple tends of thousands on online services is common? I have no idea.
It all depends on the product. Once you start getting into niche products which cost thousands or tens of thousands per year to use, the assumption is that the customer is a serious business with funding that has a known problem to solve. There will be a much smaller number of approaches than with a cheap consumer facing product and a conversion is worth a lot, so it makes sense to pair prospective customers with a domain specialist / sales person immediately to tailor the pitch to the specific candidate, modify the solution as necessary to fit the customer's needs, and make sure they are happy.
Selling electricity for money is not exciting. It's a simple and relatively low-margin commodity transaction. It's not going to create a unicorn. Making the transaction more complicated and collecting a bunch of user data increases the bullshit surface area for your pitch deck. If you're vague enough about what your business model really is, you might just fool someone into thinking that you can make them a whole bunch of money.
Stripe and Square both identify consumers by their unique CC numbers. If I swipe my card on a square reader, it recognizes me and asks if I want a receipt sent to my phone or email, even if I’ve never purchased from that vendor before.
Yes, most PSPs do this. E.g. Stripe calls it a fingerprint. It's only valid for your merchant ID (i.e. if we both signed up for Stripe and swiped the same card, we'd get different fingerprints).
To state the obvious: it's not determinstic outside of Stripe, and there's no way to revert it, or even iterate over all CC numbers and brute force the space. You'd need Stripe's secret, e.g. assuming they use HMAC.
Not really. I work with payment processing, I've got the partially obscured credit card number, usually the name and the location. Plus a bunch of other info.
Where there done by the payment processor like Artemis2 or in house?
I'm asking because I saw a lot of in-house tokenizer with hashes or deterministic encryption that could get reversed in a few seconds by brute force since the space to cover is so small.
No. With 10^12 possible account numbers and a hash rate of ~10^10 H/s using off the shelf hardware [1] it would only take 100*(10^12/10^10) = 10000 seconds to deanonymise the token.
I'm really surprised this was down voted so much. I really don't think it's all that controversial. Like so many websites require registration when you are almost guaranteed never to return.
If I may go a step further, usually gas stations also accept "normal" cash, which is even more normal (and BTW leaving less electronic traces) than "normal debit and credit cards".
Yeah, it would be awesome if you could just put a few Euro coins in a slot next to an outlet and it would let you take a couple of kWh. But dealing with physical cash is a hassle, so I understand why companies would prefer cards. We have a bunch of unattended gas stations around here, and you can't pay with cash there either.
Sure, everyone understands why companies would prefer cards, as a matter of fact companies would actually prefer to charge you € 1,000 (say) on 1st Jan of every year, and then reimburse whatever you haven't used/bought on the 31st of December, but here we are talking of what the customers would prefer.
At least here (Italy) it is unthinkable (yet) that a fuel station (attended or unattended) doesn't accept cash (besides Bancomat and debt/credit cards) (though all the petrol companies and the government is pushing for making everything digital, etc. like everywhere else).
For instance the cheapest chains (e.g. Total Access, Carrefour, Leclerc) often don't accept cash as there is most of the time no employee on premise, and they don't want to deal with vandalism.
In general France is progressively going away from cash. Using a credit card for super small transactions like buying bread at the bakery were deemed almost anti-social a few years ago, but more and more bakeries start to prefer it for speedier contact less payment for instance.
With cash, what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity? Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity?
With electronic payments, you can pre-authorize a reasonable amount, then charge the customer for the amount they've used - no excess charges or change required.
Most car chargers are standalone devices in a parking lot. There is no teller to pay. I have never seen one with an attendant.
They could take cash automatically like a vending machine but that's going to require new staff to go around and collect money and deposit it. Probably much more expensive than taking credit cards.
Have the dispenser display a code for a $2 future credit. Or to be redeemed for cash at a later time somewhere cash transactions with humans exist. Or just use a standard vending machine module and give change with a restocking employee.
The market will decide if it's more expensive. Customers exist who will commute to another charger so they can pay cash. If the money left on the table is more than the cost of the cash module and attendant, it will be adopted.
Automated fuel stations are always the cheapest. The only reason to go to a manned station is for the shop or cafeteria and you're paying 5-10 cents more per litre for the privilege.
Or you could even buy a pre-paid RFID card with cash that keeps your balance on it. Many cities have vending machines that dispense these for bus fairs. There are numerous ways to do this, it's a solved problem many times over.
To be fair, paying with cash at a gas station is annoying if your objective is to fill your tank completely rather than spend X amount as it forces you to guess your prospective spend.
That depend on where you are. This started about how it is in Europe, where it is common to first fill your tank, then go inside to pay if you want to pay with cash
what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity?
Automated change has been a thing for ages, see: vending machines, public phones.
Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity?
Mind your property.
> With cash, what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity? Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity?
What happens is the same as when filling a car with gas.
Like could you plug in, the car identifies itself as whatever VIN (add whatever anti-tampering challenge-response you want to armchair-design), and the electrons just start flowing?
This is how the Tesla superchargers work - authorization and billing is all in-car and takes place automatically, so all you do is plug in and it immediately begins charging.
For other charging networks, however, it seems to be needlessly more complicated.
It's quite sad that this comment (which is currently at the top) is full of misinformation.
Yes, you need an RFID card (or keychain hanger), because these are low-margin transactions; transaction fees would make charging more expensive, and the fees to maintain card readers would mean that there would be much fewer charging points as they would be more expensive to install.
No, you don't need an app. Some charge points allow you to use an app instead of a card, if you prefer that. But that's by no means required, you can always use a card instead.
No, you don't need 5 cards. One card (plus a backup one in case of an outage) should be plenty, the exception being if you're going abroad (this depends on the roaming agreements your card provider has). Now, some cards offer cheap rates at some charge points, so by having multiple cards it's possible to save some money. But that's by no means required.
Transaction fees for European PIN transactions aren't that crippling, and the convenience of being able to actually recharge is easily worth a couple of cents. These required signups are just needless fragmentation of an already small market.
What I don't get is why every gas station does not also have at least one charging point. They've got air for your tires, sometimes a car wash, and tons of other conveniences, but no electricity? Electricity should be the easiest thing in the world.
The whole point is of course that eventually you can recharge wherever you park, but that means there must be more places to recharge than there are gas stations, not less. This situation is ridiculous.
To be fair electric cars are still very much in their infancy. We are talking about 2-3% of all cars on the road.
I know Shell is actually starting to add electricity to their inventory in gas stations. But in urban Europe space is at a premium and the investments are huge.
Electric charging isn't a low margin operation. Sale prices for electricity via them routinely see a 200% margin compared to wholesale electricity prices.
European's charging network infrastructure is probably more fragmented whereas in the U.S. there is only a few dominant ones: ChargePoint, EVgo and Tesla. Both can have iOS Passbook / Wallet integration so that you don't need a physical RFID card but rather a digital pass, pair with a NFC-capable phone, physical ID cards are eliminated.
There are a lot of reason the charging infrastructure market is fragmented, mostly due to it's the early days of EV-lution where market consolidation hasn't fully played out yet. Also building charging stations is a capital-heavy business since it involves the land lease/purchase as well as construction/equipments (DC fast charging stations are very expensive, the higher the power the more expensive)/installation (permits etc)/maintenance. A friend of mine spent his own money to install a ChargePoint 50kw DCFC at his restaurant, it ended up costing an upward of $50k - at $2/kwh charging rate, he would barely break even in 3 years.
from the profit at the charger, agreed.
However, it's safe to presume this charger was installed in order to attract more wealthy customers -- ones who likely bring higher food & beverage profit margins than the average Corolla diver.
Yes and no. My friend told me that it didn't bring substantial business as he would have hoped for. But again, as a fellow EV enthusiast, installing a DCFC at his restaurant was his contribution to promote EV adoption rather than generating more revenue (nice to have). Obviously it would be a different story for different cases.
For most consumers, it isn't easy to find out the price of EV charging before arriving at the charger.
And by the time you've arrived, you probably are going to stay anyway, at least for a bit, because there probably aren't many other chargers available in your remaining range.
Yes - the EV incentive outlook have been changing quickly in Trump administration though. A lot of EV makers are undergoing phase out periods too, Tesla & GM and soon Nissan
I really don't get why it's so impossible to just add a (contactless or normal) card payment terminal to the stations. The standard gas stations will have those, always.
It's still hilarious to me that the great investors and moneymen of the world have all gotten together and decided that "step 1 collect users, step 3 profit" is the best business model.
This is probably so that credit card fees can be avoided. An app can offer alternative ways to pay that don't incur a fee for the merchant. Also it's a new industry, so they likely want to collect data on where people with electric cars live so they know where the best location to build a charging station is.
Every gas station accepts normal debit and credit cards.
On the other hand, skimmers and stolen cards are rampant at gas pumps. I'd be leery of deploying an unmanned roadside credit card reader. Maybe the extra vetting is an anti-fraud measure.
Card skimmers most definitely exist. Many ATMs have a warning sign to check if the card slot has been tampered with. And the use of chips instead of the magnetic strips they used in the past makes cards impossible to copy.
It's not a crippling problem, but that's largely because of such measures.
I would think that if you are setting up a charging station, buying half a dozen of commercial credit card readers would be cheaper than developing/testing/maintaining a specific payment app.
It's cheaper to develop the app that authorizes you to charge and deducts from a balance ($10, for example) than the credit card transaction fees that are unsustainable at charges between $0.50 and $10. This is no different than how tollways charge your credit card on file to replenish a balance, and then deduct from that balance (or even how Twilio does billing).
TLDR Credit card fees are expensive, especially when your margins are thin and you are not yet at scale where you have pricing power to pressure processors to lower your CC fees.
For road trippers, maybe an extra $1 convenience charge for using a CC, while signing up for the app waives that charge would work.
For those on a once in a while trip, they can eat the several dollars in convenience fees, while those that travel regularly can get their app of choice.
It's also not fun to leave some dollars hostage on some app as a credit when you may use them months or years later.
At least in the UK, until quite recently most networks were subscription clubs rather than pay as you go. There was no incremental charge for filing up, just a £10/year membership charge.
Now EVs have become more popular, the charging model is changing to a more sustainable system. The government is also working to enforce roaming between networks.
€10?! That is excessive. In the past, there have been shops that asked not to use a debit card for small transactions, but these days many shops welcome them, because handling cash is also expensive. (My favourite cheese shop is the lone exception: they only accept cash and nothing else. Luddites, but great and cheap cheese.)
Credit cards are extremely rare in Europe, and only few places accept them at all, unless they're compatible with standard bank card transactions. Bank card transactions aren't that expensive and used for absolutely everything, including very small transactions.
For recharging your car, there's really no problem at all to rely on standard bank cards.
You are still allowed to ask a reasonable minimum fee, depending on the payment method. Is 10 EUR reasonable for refuel? (instead of refilling 2€ only)
However price must be the same for all payment methods.
If there is an administrative fee it also must be the same across payment methods, excluding business cards and Amex/Diners.
Is this really true? Around here (Oakland, California) the parking meters take credit cards. Today for example, I paid $0.50 US for parking using a Visa card.
the first offer I found for the first offer i found for german CC terminals (sumup.de):
- 2.75% on credit card tx
- .95% on EC tc (popular form of debit cards)
- no base fee
I only found secondary sources for the direct way, but they state (zahlungsverkehrsfrafen.de)
- .3%, at least .08€ for EC tx
- 2-4% for CC tx, depending on provider
It's bugged me that this whole song and dance of wifi portals; unencrypted wifi, dns spoofing, and sign in pages have been around for over a decade and none of the wifi revisions formalized this. It's been a kludgey cat-and-mouse where the OS checks captive.apple.com and gives you a modal pop up, some wifi networks let you send iMessages and gmail, but wont let you browse without paying. In then end you're still using unencrypted wifi.
I've heard there is finally some future wifi spec formalizing open portals that negotiate to an encrypted connection.
The funny thing is, I made the trip from Lille, France (near where I live) to Poznan in Poland, a few stops required all along and no problem - more than 2000km on a few days.
In the summer, in France, Lille to Alps then Ardeche and no problem.
Same for my past vacations here in the South of France (Ardeche, France), around 1000 km long trip and same for getting back here.
I've been using my Tesla (TS85D) since Nov2015, and the only time I had a short stress was while I went seeing Elon Musk in Paris because there were hundred of Teslas in the same area.
So, frankly, I respect the author of this article, but I think if you're following what is displayed on board and adding a little logical thinking and planning a bit your trip in some remote areas (Britany for example) (with OpenChargeMap or ChargeMap applications among others), then it's all good.
That's the problem. The author admits to not using the onboard charging navigation but instead used Google Maps to plan the trip. She's intentionally being obtuse to make the article clickbait and make EVs look bad.
Do all cars come with a trip planning feature? IE, if she had rented a BMW or Volvo, would she be able to use the Tesla app or similar?
From my perspective, people are used to being able to pull off the highway just about anywhere and fill their tanks. Having to plan everything down to the mile, even for a mostly highway trip through populated areas, is a major change of thinking.
In my ICE car, I usually stop in Richmond or Williamsburg to get a snack and use the restroom. Based on Tesla's app, I now have to stop twice (once to pee, again to charge). And that second stop is longer than a 5 minute fuel fill. Not the end of the world, but different. Also, there is no charging station at the destination, so I now need to manage my mileage while at the beach to ensure I can get to the closest charge 10 miles to the south (which then adds time to the start of the return journey). Again, not an insurmountable obstacle, but it sure does add complication to a trip I make several times/year with a car full of family and pets.
Edit - I'm not trying to be snarky or difficult. I really have no idea how people plan their EV trips, as I don't own one (and probably can't any time soon, as I don't have a dedicated parking spot to install a charger at home).
Edit2 - if I change the charger routing to the smaller battery pack, it recommends two stops, adding even more time. This would likely be the case for any EV except Tesla, or possibly a Bolt?
It's built in to the Tesla's on-board navigation. It's not a separate app. The interface on a Tesla shows a big map and it displays Supercharger locations on the map when your range is inadequate or you can also manually show the locations via an icon. It also automatically routes directions to Superchargers if the route doesn't include enough charge to reach the destination.
I don't think you are being totally fair here (and most people aren't when making the long distance EV vs ICE comparison). If you have a car full of kids and pets, are you really only stopping for 5 minutes in your ICE during a 5+ hour trip?
And in your hypothetical EV scenario, when you make the first restroom stop, there is no reason you can't do that at a charging station and top up, cutting some time off of your second refuel stop.
Another thing to consider, most people who get an EV can charge at home or at work, so they likely eliminate all gas stops during their day-to-day commutes. And that can add up to a lot of time savings (the optimistic refueling time is 5 mins, but I have had plenty take closer to 20 due to lines, traffic, out of the way, etc...). So yeah, maybe long trips require a little more planning, and a marginal amount of extra time, but it feels like nitpicking.
When they were little? You’re right. Once they were in their pre-teens? We tried to stop as infrequently, and quickly, as possible. So, 2x 15-20 minute charges wouldn’t be much change, if any.
Still doesn’t help when I get there and the nearest charger is 10 miles from the house (though I suspect home-owners will start installing chargers before too long).
Anyway, I was mostly interested in how non-Tesla EV owners plan their trips, as most of the other respnses were along the lines of “use the Tesla’s belt-in planner”.
If I can figure out how to charge at home, I’ll likely own an EV for our next secondary car. Used Leafs are pretty tempting for cheap around-town cars.
I was assuming one could trickle charge at their destination. If there is a 220V outlet than that should be sufficient, but if you are doing it on 110v, then yeah, you would have to probably swing by a charging station.
I agree regarding the used Leaf, I have been keeping my eye on those. And I think for now, the optimal situation for most folks is to have one ICE and one low capacity EV assuming you can charge at home or at work. And for apartment dwellers, I think e-bikes and scooters are a fun alternative (I am an e-bike owner).
The destination above is a beach vacation destination. Hotels/motels/condos would all be hit or miss for any outlet. Rental homes might have a 110V outlet on the exterior (for lawn maintenance, etc). Chances of a 220V would be near zero, unless the homeowner added one for their own EV (or is trying to attract EV owners). That'll change over time, but slowly.
Thanks for sharing abetterrouteplanner.com. Planning a couple long distance trips that I commonly take seems much less odious than I would have expected. Although the last time I seriously considered buying a Tesla their network was much less well developed. I'm two years away from making that decision again and it seems much more likely that I'll consider a Model S or X then. Although there are still many aesthetic intangibles that make Teslas less appealing to me. But at least range anxiety seems more manageable.
That's totally fine and I agree with that but the car's in-built navigation tells you where the stops are when you get to a point that your car won't make it. She had to ignore those prompts in order to get into the situation she's in. Granted, she admits to driving an older model Tesla that she rented but it's really unlikely that the cars operating system hasn't been updated to include that feature.
The whole point of the article was that EVs (in this case, specifically Teslas) are not yet ready to be driven like normal cars, i.e., without regard to planning refueling stops.
It's not clickbait, it's literally the point of the test and the resultant article.
I'd like to see the opposite story: where a reporter drives an ICE car around town for a week and then it suddenly dies in the middle of the road because you have to go to a special station to refuel it instead of doing it in your garage every night.
It's true that road trips take a bit more care. (Although not much; all you have to do is put your destination into the car's navigation system, then make charging stops where it tells you to.) But "normal" cars aren't free of hassle either.
You just hit the nail on the head. Anything can be made to seem like a hassle if framed a certain way and that's my problem with this article. Everything is framed to make it seem worse than it is while simultaneously ignoring the benefits.
So it's ok for the article to be misleading and purposely misstate facts because the point of the article is sound? It's not sound. Plenty of people make those road trips with their Teslas and have tons of fun doing so.
EVs in general, and specifically NOT Tesla. If it was specifically about Tesla, she'd have used the superchargers exclusively and had a much better experience. OTOH, if she had used another EV with the same range, and not bothered to sign up for the various public charging networks' cards, she'd have had a much worse experience. This is.. a weird hodgepodge.
There are 8 superchargers between Paris and Mannheim, no more than 160km between the furthest apart, and in most places there are 2 near each other. (just from looking at Tesla's map).
I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt that she was trying to make a non-Tesla-specific example by also trying out other public charging stations, so that the article could analyze not JUST Tesla's network, but also the state of public charging in general.
If I wanted to be more critical, I'd have said it was stupid to bother trying to use other public charging facilities (other chargers or random wall outlets) when it would be far faster and more convenient (not to mention automatically planned for her) if she had just used the car's nav system to automagically plan the route and charging stops for her.
Your last sentence is not meaningful as there is no electric car that can only be driven "a few places where superchargers exist".
If I wanted to be really critical of your comments, I'd point out that she was quite frank about her article being about taking an EV on a European road trip, and just happened to choose a Tesla because it had the most range of the EVs available for rent. Because it was about EVs in general, she went out of her way to try and avoid using superchargers because those are Tesla-specific.
Her editor chose the headline, and presumably chose to specifically cite Tesla because it would draw in the eyeballs...which it did.
It is also quite apparent she drives with zero regards for energy management. The energy usage gauge is prominently displayed in the dash, for similar reasons that you use a fuel gauge. If you are at all concerned that your range may be questionable for a leg, then it is quite trivial to drive more efficiently. The author seems to not care about this at all and wants to drive wastefully. This is fine, but it takes away a lot of weight when whinging about range and poor planning.
This is pretty much backwards. Energy use per distance goes up as the square of the speed. Acceleration uses energy too, but deceleration recaptures most of it.
The tricks to really increase range are to keep speed moderate, follow a safe but close distance behind a large vehicle, and speed up and slow down gently.
Indeed, the resistance losses in an electric motor increase as the square of the current, torque increases linearly with current, so running higher current to produce more acceleration or deceleration is less efficient.
But, I^2 resistance is not a large effect compared to the losses from air resistance at high speeds. That is, slowing down from 75 to 65 will have more effect on range than how quickly you accelerate to 75.
> the only time I had a short stress was while I went seeing Elon Musk in Paris because there were hundred of Teslas in the same area
That's the scenario in which mobile charging stations make a lot of sense. They allow for a temporary increase in charger availability for the duration of some popular event like a sports final or a concert:
Instead of stopping at the Metz supercharger like the onboard navigation[1] would tell her to, this reporter with an axe to grind decides to do stupid things like charging to 100% to make a clickbaity article.
From Paris to Metz is roughly 205 miles. Her car had a range of 215 miles and she notes that the onboard estimates have been off "by at least 10 percent every time". But you're telling me that the navigation would still recommend her to attempt that kind of leg, in an area where chargers may be sparse? Seems like bad UI/UX.
The parent posted a trip plan for a longer-range configuration. Switch to a smaller battery and... it shows a stop more or less right where the author's first planned stop was.
The dialogue on all sides around Teslas is so exhausting. This article isn't even about Tesla, really.
I agree that maybe this article would have been better suited if its headline was about how renting a Tesla for a tryout on a road trip is not a good idea (having never rented a car, I have no idea the lifestyle of people who rent when going on long leisure trips). It seems like many of her problems would have long been figured out by Tesla owners. But her complaints seem like the kind I would have if I were to try out a Tesla for fun -- I could definitely see myself underestimating how much research I need to do to properly plan a trip, compared to how little I have to plan when driving a gas guzzler. Obviously things will get better when infrastructure continues to improve, but unless Tesla is marketing its rentals as beta products, I don't think it's unfair to point out the limitations in the experience is as a paying customer today.
And as far as this being an indictment of EV in general, and how the author shouldn't have singled out Tesla. I thought it was more or less accepted that Tesla is the top-of-the-line EV brand. I agree this article applies to the EV experience in general -- and as a layperson, I'd want to hear what it's like for the car brand that I am far and away the most familiar with. If she had chosen a non-Tesla brand and written the same complaints, I have a feeling Tesla fans would complain how the author tarnished EV -- and by association, Tesla -- and thus how irresponsible she is for talking shit about EVs without trying a Tesla.
Tesla's navigation system has (and has had for some time) something called "Range Assurance". As long as you use the vehicle's navigation system, it will ensure you never run out of energy. It will route you to appropriate Superchargers on your route, and tell you roughly how long you need to dwell at each charger prior to continuing your journey. If you cannot make the return journey successfully, the navigation system will inform you of this. It shows you ever Supercharger on the navigation display without having to make any additional changes.
If you're going to write an article about roadtripping in a Tesla, and you don't know this information, don't mention it in your article, and just default to "I'm using Google Maps, whatevs", I have no faith in your journalistic ability. I am unsure what else Tesla could do to inform you of this if you're borrowing or renting the vehicle, as this information is in the vehicle manual, which is also available through the MCU when sitting in the car.
> As long as you use the vehicle's navigation system
Again, I've never driven a Tesla. When you say "navigation system", is that something different than what the author refers to as the car's "dashboard"? From the article:
> About 50 miles from what I’d planned as my first pit stop, an inn near Chalons-en-Champagne, my dashboard tells me the Supercharger there is “temporarily unavailable.”
> I’m tired and hungry, and although my dashboard shows a Supercharger about five miles outside the city, I decide to go directly to my hotel, a half mile away.
She mentions using Google Maps, but it sounds like it's in conjunction with the info she's getting from the dashboard, e.g. to find other charging points that are near her current touristy destination that may not specifically be a SuperCharger:
> The area has several charging points, but after searching for one via Google Maps—like any other tourist—I’m directed to a shopping district with no place to plug in. I’m tired and hungry, and although my dashboard shows a Supercharger about five miles outside the city, I decide to go directly to my hotel, a half mile away.
The fact that Europe appears to have chargers compatible with Tesla and findable via Google Maps, yet can end up being dead-ends, seems like relevant information for people who are considering trying out EV road-tripping for the first time.
I fully support what Elon and Tesla are doing, but this Bloomberg article accurately points out the downsides of owning a Tesla, especially if it’s your primary car.
If you’re mostly using a Tesla to get around town and charging at home, it’s makes sense, but you’d be better off renting a car for road trips and not having to deal with this hassle.
A lot of people in America have not and still don’t buy diesels because those gas stations are not as ubiquitous as normal fuel. The problem exists to an even greater degree for electric cars, not to mention the amount of time you have to sit around waiting for charging.
> A lot of people in America have not and still don’t buy diesels because those gas stations are not as ubiquitous as normal fuel.
American diesel owner here and I initially had some concerns about this but it's the opposite problem of Tesla, thanks to trucks it's never hard to find diesel on road trips. It can be a little harder around town, but since the range is so far (500+ miles) I've never had a problem.
This is one reason I'm sad the Volt didn't take off more than it did. For me, 95+% of the time I only use electric (commute is 12 miles each way), but I never have to worry about "range anxiety" or doing detailed planning for charging stations on long trips. For me it really is the best of both worlds.
Fair enough, except it wouldn't have told her to waste time charging to 100%. Because charging gets slower the higher the state of charge, it's faster to charge twice like the car would tell her to.
That's pretty interesting. I struggle to believe Tesla's account, though, given their history of playing fast and loose with facts in the pursuit of good PR. It will take a while to earn back trust.
Musk's account was total bullshit. Here's a complete accounting of why.
You can read the response from the journalist[1] and the NYT public editor[2] which concludes the report was done with "integrity". Musk was initially sympathetic to the journalist, then decided to go after him after he calculated that the optics of this situation were not good for Tesla. He does that crap all the time including with accident victims. Blames the victim. We've seen this over and over again, with little or no consequences for Musk.
Here are the major issues:
1- LOWERING SPEED: Out of the gate range was dropping faster than expected. Probably due to cold weather range loss (it was 30F).[3] He was advised to slow down and did so, which already is not a very good road trip story for Tesla.
Musk attacks him over whether he really engaged the cruise control or just how fast he was going (claims "65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip"). But in his reply the journalist correctly notes that Musk mischaracterized what the data shows ("Tesla’s logs clearly show, much of my driving was at or well below the 65 m.p.h. speed limit, with only a single momentary spike above 80"). This is the first major mischaracterization of the data on the part of Musk.
2- LOWERING TEMP: The reporter was also advised to turn down the cabin temp to improve range. Musk accuses him of lying and notes the average temp was 72 degrees.
But notice, he only cites the average. The journalist response that he cycled between shutting off the heat until his extremities got so cold he couldn't take it anymore, then kicking it back on for a time. This also is not a great story for Tesla. He notes, "The data clearly indicates that I sharply lowered the temperature setting – twice – a little over 200 miles into the trip. After the battery was charged I tried to warm the cabin." Musk chose to omit this and only cite the average in an attempt to mislead you into thinking the journalist made up his experience of freezing to compensate for range anxiety.
3- "DRIVING IN CIRCLES" AT THE FIRST CHARGER: Musk goes absolutely bananas here. His "big reveal" is that the data shows the journalist driving in circles before plugging in and charging up. As the reporter notes, he just couldn't find the damn thing in the dark. Here's how Musk spins this:
"Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in. On the later legs, it is clear Broder was determined not to be foiled again."
What the heck? It is amazing to me that anybody bought this crackpot theory. Let's just think about it for one second, ok? If his grand scheme was to intentionally kill the battery and get stranded to make a good story.... Why on earth would he do it mere feet from a supercharger?
Boy oh boy. Occam's razor says the reporter just had a little bit of trouble finding the charger in the lot. If he wanted to invent a story about his Tesla battery dying, there's much better places to engineer a breakdown.. like on the road!
4- CHARGING UP TO 72%: The reporter spent an hour charging up to "well beyond" the range he needed for his itinerary. He trusted Tesla's range estimate. Musk also spins this as "deliberately stopped charging at 72%," implying that it was part of a scheme. This is just malevolent spin.
5- SUDDEN OVERNIGHT LOSS OF RANGE: The reporter parked the car overnight with 90 miles of range left, enough to make it back to the supercharger. When he woke up it had only 25 miles of range. This is the biggest problem in the trip!
Clearly the car suffered cold weather range loss. It was 10F outside. Whereas previously this forced some compromises, here it completed f'd him.
Musk did not dispute or even mention this part. It's the root problem: If you're going to do a cross country trip in the extreme cold you have a plan correctly for it and take some precautions like plugging in overnight and not trust the range estimate (in 2013). But this doesn't mean the journalist has an integrity problem; he just trusted his Tesla too much.
6- SHITTY ADVICE ON HOW TO DEAL WITH A F'D SITUATION: At this point he's just screwed. The nearest charger is too weak. He goes there. After an hour he's at just 32 miles of range. Then someone at Tesla gives him bad info: more range will come back as it heats up. This is believable to him because he got the same advice in the morning: warming the battery will give you back lost range.
Musk claims the reporter acted "against" the advice of Tesla personnel. But he offers no proof. The reporter replied by naming names: "Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored."
This is a plausible misunderstanding. But the bigger picture is: It's not a good story for Tesla even under the best conditions. If he had never spoken with Tesla, just trusted the car's estimate and stayed put it would have taken another 1-2 hours just to charge up enough to make it back to the supercharger, ruining an already ~2 hour delayed day.
So this results in a breakdown when the range doesn't come back after warming up, as he had been led to believe.
SUMMARY- The core problem here was cold weather range loss combined with a driver who expected the car to just work as advertised. At first he drove it normally and was surprised by the diminishing range. He still trusted the range estimate at the first charge on the road. He didn't plug it in overnight in 10F weather, not realizing that it could reduce range. Then he misunderstood instructions from Tesla on how to limp his way back, although the trip was already a failure at that point.
Musk did not like this story. He schemed to find an angle to attack the journalist's integrity. I didn't respect him then for it and I'm not surprised that more of this behavior has surfaced in the years since.
After the whole story with baseless pedophilia claims as a tantrum, I don't think anything Musk says personally can be trusted, and especially not when it's response to criticism.
Tesla's response turned off a lot of potential customers who realized that Tesla would go through their trip logs if they made even the slightest critical comment of the company.
Oh, you meant to the NYT? No, because they were just driving the car like a normal person would. They weren't trying to drive the car [like] a Tesla fanatic would, and it was bizarre for Tesla to go after them for trying to drive the car like a normal car...especially when Tesla spends so much marketing $$$ trying to convince people their cars can replace a normal car.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, but your comment reads as if you're very angry at Tesla yourself, which makes it harder to take your comment at face value. FWIW, if you're just legitimately trying to make an argument on HN it can be worth trying to be judicious about throwing around terms like "zealot" or "fanatic" or significant hyperbole in general. Furthermore you've started with something more then dubious:
>that Tesla would go through their trip logs
Above link was the first time I'd seen that, looks like it's from 2013. But even just reading Tesla's response alone I noted they said "media drive", as in this wasn't the reporter buying his own car and then writing about it, but getting a temporary loaner from Tesla. It's completely normal and within the rights of a manufacturer offering a loan of something valuable for review purposes to keep logs or check it for reported problems on return, it's their property after all and if there were real flaws they'd want to be able to work on fixing them. After I read further comments made at the time it was stated that private owners logs are theirs in turn, no Tesla cannot go through their trip logs if they write whatever they want. But if you want to just try something out for free, well it's not yours. This would be the same as if you used a company car or system or equipment or whatever, the company may monitor that. And loaners aren't the only way for journalists to do reviews either, Consumer Reports for example famously buys things themselves (with confidential shoppers to boot) precisely to avoid bias or cherry picking or whatever from either side.
Given the above, I have doubts about your assertion of "a lot of potential customers" too. If you have some newer information indicating that Tesla was lying about not logging data of private cars without consent (real consent, with a signature) maybe include that in your post?
I'm not angry at Tesla, though I did cancel my preorder after their response to the NYT. I also had the opportunity to ride in one, and it was a depressingly sub-par quality car for the price.
But in this case: at the time of the NYT article, Tesla's PR department was operating on hair-trigger reaction mode: even the slightest critical comment would send them into overdrive in response. They've since learned about the Streisand effect, and no longer respond to criticism in the way they did before. (This is likely because Musk no longer directly oversees the day-to-day of their marketing.)
As for the trip logs: it's not just the NYT trip. It was every time there was an accident involving a Tesla. Or a negative review. Even Tesla's response to the Consumer Reports review included information from the CR vehicle's trip logs, even though CR acquired those vehicles from third parties. The problem isn't that Tesla is logging the cars (most new cars do), the problem is how Tesla is using that data in ways that violate cultural (and in the case of Europe, legal) norms regarding privacy.
Finally, as to "a lot of potential customers," I count more than a few dozen in LA alone across a number of industries. Jaguar has seen the biggest windfall in terms of putative Tesla buyers switching to the iPace, followed by the BMW. A lot of the rest are simply waiting until the next generation of EVs and are sticking with their current luxury/mid-range vehicles. I am aware that on an absolute basis a few dozen customers isn't much, but it's a few dozen potential customers in the market segement most likely to buy and evangelize their cars.
Hey, sorry but I posted a reply right as you were writing yours, I even refreshed before to make sure you hadn't replied yet but looks like we began at around the same time. I just want to say that it does look like there are real issues now, and I think you did your own valid concerns a disservice in the original post by not having some more details and keeping things more measured. Remember a lot of us don't follow any of this that closely, and after a long time on the net have developed an innate distrustful response (reasonable or not!) for any usage of things like calling fans "fanatics." Even in this post:
>even the slightest critical comment
But I mean, I wouldn't categorize something like that NYT piece as "the slightest critical comment" it was pretty brutal. Maybe correctly, but not nothing. Same with the Top Gear, though since that's more a comedy show it shouldn't be an expectation (but I think a lot of Americans at least don't know that). Unless you can really link to something showing say a bunch of random owners doing little blogs or tweets along the lines of "the color wasn't quite what I expected" or "range is overall fine but a few miles lower then was represented" resulted an "overdrive response" your argument would be stronger if you just stuck to a basic "negative reviews". And as far as the "a lot of potential customers" you must realize that we've all seen the anecdote/data thing a ton of times right and a few dozen out of hundreds of thousands of sales and an enormous backlog of demand kind of seems not very compelling either? Particularly given all the confounding factors of their genuine other fuckups?
Anyway, that's all. I'm not saying you're wrong to be critical, but I don't think you did as good a job of it as you could have.
>If you have some newer information indicating that Tesla was lying about not logging data of private cars without consent (real consent, with a signature) maybe include that in your post?
So gamblor956 didn't reply (EDIT, did while I was writing this) but I was actually kind of curious about this (and I did bring up the question), so I took a stab at researching it a bit myself. Tesla has engaged in their own hyperbole after all, the cars do have online connections I think since there is some sort of remote maintenance that can be done, and they've talked about logs with autopilot before. And in fact it looks like (I am basing this purely on brief searching, I don't own one so corrections welcome) there is some real cause for concern though in a different way: sometime in the last 5 years it seems they've changed their privacy policy from opt-in to opt-out. It's still possible to uncheck general data sharing, but by default information is sent back to the mothership, and at least for trips with autopilot enabled it looks to be pretty damn granular (and AP apparently can't be opted out of now even?). A 2018 thread [1] I found in Tesla forums (which also links to some others) shows some pretty clear trip maps, and also claims the anonymization is pretty garbage (though with spatial information of that resolution I don't know if it's possibly anyway, it'd likely become instantly obvious where someone's house was and that's that):
>"What other things I have noticed: the "anonymization" is actually pretty superficial. Every trip (from the moment autopilot started to the moment autopilot is powered off) is given a unique uuid, and every snapshot taken during that uses the same uuid, even if some internal fields are cleared for "anonymized" uploads, internally the trip id is still stored, combined with camera calibrations uploaded every other minute under the same trip id without any anonymization - connecting the dots back together is actually pretty simple. And of course looking at enough trips it's also pretty easy to see that "this must be home, now who lives there from our customer database"? Obviously timestamps are also all there."
Finally Tesla is apparently not even at all transparent about sharing this with owners. So absolutely worthy of concern, and I wish all this had been in OP and they'd been more measured and precise because that 2013 post touches on none of that at all, nor naturally do comments from back then touch on anything that has changed sicne. Like at other companies, ML learning benefits from huge data intake and in turn is driving (harhar) a hunger for maximum data at maximum resolution. There is a real direct tension right now in a lot of areas of tech between that and privacy (witness Apple's issues trying to juggle that). A good step (if it hasn't happened already, seems like it must have but I can't find something on it) would be for an EU Tesla car owner to use the GDPR to force them to disclose everything they've got on them.
After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives.
You're logging more than just media drives, otherwise Tesla wouldn't magically have the data to put together a PR response denying culpability whenever something goes wrong with Autopilot.
Tesla does not hold itself to the same standard of truthfulness it insists on from others. The Top Gear segment was benign compared to Tesla's coast to coast FSD boast, designed to extract FCF from selling a product that may or may not eventually exist.
I am not Tesla, and I don't work for them either. That's a quote from their response. I was typing one-handed so I didn't get a chance to add the quotes.
> otherwise Tesla wouldn't magically have the data to put together a PR response denying culpability whenever something goes wrong with Autopilot.
NTSB -> crash scene -> find black box -> send to TSLA? Just one possible non-nefarious mechanism for this information to make its way to Tesla.
Right, that makes sense - I thought it was odd a Tesla employee would be commenting about it.
Is co-opting a crash investigation performed by the government and cherry picking data from it in order to cast the blame on their deceased former customer meant to be better or worse than collecting everyone's data indiscriminately?
It is different. Different threat models, concerning to different people for different reasons. To pick a random example, if I said "Donald Trump killed a homeless guy for looking at him the wrong way," that would be inaccurate. I don't like Donald Trump, think he's a bad guy, but I still wouldn't want to make a false or likely false accusation about him. In the same way, if I don't like that Tesla is making crash data public, I'll say that. I won't say that they're tracking everyone's movements.
OK, but OP was saying their actions were harming consumer confidence. You supplied an alternate explanation, but if it's just as Orwellian, how is it better?
> who realized that Tesla would go through their trip logs if they made even the slightest critical comment of the company
which is likely false. It's irrelevant in this branch of the conversation how Orwellian my more likely explanation is, because what's being contested is the truthfulness of this claim, not how bad of a company Tesla is.
Top Gear is a comedy show though? We're talking about the same show that featured taking a Reliant Robin needlessly fast around corners and getting pushed upright by celebrities, right?
"Our car" is the problem. It's not Tesla's car. Tesla took the customer's money and sold the car. It's theirs now. Tesla has no moral right to track a car that's not theirs and use the information for anything except to help the customer maintain their car.
Writing an in-depth feature story in the New York Times isn't really comparable to making "the slightest critical comment".
I think most potential customers would be smart enough to realize Tesla's actions don't generalize from reporters to all customers.
Especially since the reporter describes it as a "wondercar with California dealer plates", which means Tesla lent him the car. I don't see anything wrong with Tesla going through the logs on their own car after they got it back.
The crux of the story was a person testing east coast chargers had enough range when he parked for the night, had the cold sap their range, and then was unable to make it back to the charger to point he needed a tow. It was at the end because it was a recounted story with a climax.
Maybe you just need to defend mega corporations less and not assume other people are dumb.
Not me, it's not something I ever give a second thought to. When I pull out of my driveway I look to see if I need gas, and if I do I get it. Having to put thought toward watering the horse before a long journey seems like a pretty archaic concept.
It’s funny because Tesla’s responses just reinforces the absurdity of the whole thing. Reminds me of Steve Jobs “you’re holding it wrong.”
A normal petrol car gives you zero anxiety about finding a refuel station, and it happens in under five minutes. Even in the smallest cities and towns in American.
Maybe not in America but I've been caught out driving on the highway in Australia in a regular petrol car.
I had about a quarter of a tank left and saw a sign as I approached an off ramp which said "last service station for xx km". I did some mental arithmetic and decided not to pull over and refuel I'd be able to make it to the next service station.
Sure enough I got to the next service station - however when I pulled in the single pump was out of order. I ended up having to call roadside assistance.
That happened to me about 8 years ago and ever since I've been absolutely paranoid about range I'm very hesitant to let my tank drop below half nowadays.
I just re-read the NY article and the normal person did not at any point drive circles around in the parking lot when the range indicator was zero. They were told by the Tesla mechanic to "recondition" their car because the range indicator wasn't working, which in the NYT article was him sitting in the parking lot for half an hour.
As Tesla's own mechanics on the scene indicated that the car was malfunctioning, Tesla's subsequent PR statement has absolutely no value whatsoever and cannot be relied upon as an accurate statement of what the NYT driver did. Because Tesla's own people, on the scene, indicated that the Tesla software wasn't working, which means that the data Tesla used to "refute" the NYT article was simply untrustworthy, bad data.
> Tesla's response turned off a lot of potential customers who realized that Tesla would go through their trip logs if they made even the slightest critical comment of the company.
Oh shit. WTF? This is the first time I'm hearing this. What? Tesla has access to the car's trip logs?????
They also pull the same stunt of selectively releasing info from data logs and spinning them to make the customer look like they're in the wrong every time a Tesla crash makes the news. There's a cell modem in every car to send them up to the mothership.
Yeah... and whoever told her to make as many little charging stops as possible was clearly also out to misinform her. The Tesla manual specifically says to leave your car plugged in and charge it all the way. You're not supposed to worry about that kind of stuff. Just plug it in and leave it charging until it tells you to stop.
Really? Because the advice I keep hearing about Teslas is exactly the opposite: don't charge your car all the way; only let it charge somewhere between 66-80ish percent if you want to maximize battery life.
It was a rental though, why would she be worried about maximizing the battery. I'd say most people who rent will do whatever will give them the best results for there trip.
My response was to the generic advice about charging Teslas.
In this specific case, the author did attempt to charge to full when possible, but at the one stop where she ate during the day it would have taken too long so she kept going. Also, to note--she was specifically trying not to use Superchargers because the point was to see what the charging experience was like for EVs in general, not Tesla in specific. The author chose the Tesla because it had the longest range of EVs available to rent in her area.
The article was not specifically about driving a Tesla. The editor chooses the title. The author wrote an article about a generic EV roadtrip experience in Europe. The editor made it seem like it was specifically about Teslas.
The car manages that automatically. By default, the car is set to not charge past 80% (what Tesla calls the "daily capacity"). You can go into the battery settings and set it to 100% ("trip capacity") which gives you extended range but takes longer to charge (both at home and at Superchargers). The Tesla manual specifically says to leave the car plugged in any time you're not using it and let the on-board energy systems figure out when it should be charging and when it shouldn't be. Every Tesla has a bypass where it will use the energy from the charger to power the systems in the vehicle without needing to charge it. Some other EV's charge the battery and then run the systems off the battery which results in a continual power draw/charge cycle which can shorten the battery life. You don't need to worry about that in a Tesla.
Stories like this vaguely confuse me, typically the driver complains about not being able to find a charger repeatedly.
I bought a Tesla model 3 recently, hooray tax credits.
There is literally a button on the map screen that tells you how to get to the nearest chargers both Tesla and otherwise and if they, for the Tesla chargers, are available. This will then happily navigate you to the charger via GPS.
It seems like for a technology that is pretty frankly an early adopter thing, that using the tools provided rather than expecting it to work like a gas car is expected.
Precisely. If I had a natural gas or hydrogen car, I would expect to plan in advance for refueling. For an electric car, I would also plan in advance even though the car has the option to find the nearest station (better to avoid being out of range of a quick charger and having to spend more time than necessary at a slower station).
So yeah, I completely agree that it should be assumed to be more involved than the currently mass-market vehicles.
This article is so hard to read. 'Over 10 hours of charging', seven of those being while plugged-in and sleeping at a hotel, and 1.5h wasted on unnecessarily topping up to 100%. She also plays the 'cold battery' card but ends up making it to the destination with battery to spare.
Tesla has a trip planner that routes you to a 12-lane supercharger station [1]. This is not a complicated journey at all and only requires one ~30m charge each way. Somehow the author turned it into an anxiety-inducing odyssey.
She tried to drive the car like a normal car, i.e., by not specially planning for charging.
And in that sense, the trip failed for the Tesla, because trying to drive it like a normal car in Europe was anxiety-inducing. Which was the whole point of the article...
Replying to the dead comment: the point of not using the Tesla-specific tools was that she wasn't trying to do a Tesla-specific road trip. She was trying to do a roadtrip in an EV, and just happened to choose a Tesla because it had most range of the EVs available to rent (many of the EVs available to thoses of us in California aren't yet available elsewhere).
I think the author brings up some fair points. I respect that she tried to make it about electric cars in general and not Tesla specifically, which is probably why she tried to avoid relying 100% on the supercharger network. In that way, it could be more balanced than an article merely about the Tesla world.
OTOH, the very first thing I did was bring up the Tesla supercharger map and see 8 superchargers between Paris and Mannheim, with no more than 160km between any of them. It seems like she basically ended up testing the worst of both worlds.
Agreed, though I think there was a vague effort to make it more about EVs in general:
> With 215 miles on a full charge, the 2015 Tesla Model S had the biggest range I could find to rent. The distance was more than rivals like the BMW i3 or the Renault Zoe: cars that are both advertised as primarily for city driving. And although I rented a Tesla, it could’ve been any other make or model: I didn’t care so much about the model as I did about testing Europe’s charging infrastructure.
For anyone planning to take a road trip in an EV, there are really good tools that allow you to avoid almost all of the issues the author faced due to bad planning. The Tesla navigation system has one built in that takes into account supercharger closures, but there are also https://evtripplanner.com and https://abetterrouteplanner.com , which are highly customizable and quite nice.
The one issue that might have been unavoidable was having a supercharger be closed unexpectedly while you are driving towards it, but I suspect that Tesla indicates impending closures on the display, and you can also call their roadside support line to clarify details about impending maintainence if you are worried.
Car trips in Europe in general are less “fun” than the US due to the simple fact in Europe most businesses keep sensible hours. Unlike the the US you can’t just drive and expect to find gas, food, or lodging at midnight. This may have changed in the past 10-20 years though. At least today you don’t have to bother with showing your papers at every border crossing.
It seems that your view is outdated. Most gas stations are open 24/7 if you have a credit card and it has been that way for at least 25+ years. Showing your passport at borders has not been in effect for 3 decades--since the Schengen Agreement in 1985. You could not show up at a regular restaurant in the US at midnight either. For lodging, there are hotels that allow for late check-ins just like in the US.
This is not a comment about Europe, but rather America: It is quite normal for there to be several fast food restaurants open either all night or at least until 2 am.
I would very much expect to be able to leave the highway at midnight in most parts of the country and get something to eat.
I've taken exactly one road trip in Europe, and it was during the daytime, so I have no idea if this is common there or not. I do note that you specified "regular restaurant" but GP said "gas, food and lodging", all of which are readily available at midnight in the US.
It’s pretty doable to find over-night accommodation, you just kind of need an approximate idea in the morning about the town/city where you’re going to spend the night. I’ve managed to find same-day bed-and-breakfast stays in cities like Salzburg and Trieste at reasonable prices. And driving in Europe is pretty great. Seeing the Alps, the Lago Maggiore and the Adriatic Sea on the same day is quite the nice feeling.
It doesn't have to be 24/7, but, please, not everybody has a stay at home spouse to do shopping in the middle of the day.
When I lived in Europe there was a furniture store next to my house. An owner had a large poster glued to the window about how beneficial would it be for the economy of everyone used his store instead of Ikea. Being a huge fan of small local business I honestly tried to stop by. But theres no way I'll take a day off work to do it. Ikea won.
Well, you can leave the office at 4pm if you need to. It's also not uncommon to just take one of your 20+ week days off on short notice.
In many cities there are special days (thursday here) where many large and small shops are open until 9pm; one day doesn't break the bank. Big hardware stores, supermarkets and other larger chains are commonly open 9-9 every day. Smaller stores can not do this, and their owners also want normal work hours like you.
Yeah, it makes far more sense to be open 11-7 or something instead of 9-5 if your clientele will likely also be at work. A lot of smaller restaurants near me are only open for lunch and dinner (11-2, 4-9).
I prefer that people go home and spend more time on their hobbies or families. I spent a few months in Austria and in a couple of weeks I was used to everything bar restaurants closing at 5.
I don't really understand this, why not have everything people want to go to be open after typical office jobs close? If you are only open for 8 hours, why not open later (11am or so) or have a couple hours that the shop is closed for family time (e.g. 3-5pm or something)?
Closing at 5 isn't convenient for anyone but the business owner, and even then it's not necessarily better than opening later.
It isn't just the business owner who benefits, the cashiers too. In South Africa most of the cashiers are women with children. I like the convenience of getting my bread at 8pm but would rather these cashiers where home with their children. Certain parts of the country are not so safe when traveling at night. These tend to be the areas cashiers can afford to live in. So its a double whammy for them.
Look it is a balance that needs to be struck. I appreciate the challenges in South Africa and different to the rest of the world. There is a price for everything, I question the price we pay as a society to have all these shops open late?
In Austria and Switzerland bars and restaurants definitely don't close at 5PM unless they don't serve dinner. Even the staunchest German doesn't eat dinner at 4PM. In Swiss villages though, its not common for many smaller stores to be closed by 4-6PM. I don't understand it, however most do open quite early so you can get food before work, or a fresh croissant in the morning.
If I were opening a store today though I'd rather have the essentials in a vending machine out front for the morning rush and open the store later and keep it open until later. If you travel Switzerland you can see many Alpkäsereien (Fromageries) have vending machines for their cheese. Appropriately made out of wood and looking like a tiny little chalet.
I didn't say bars and restaurants close at 5pm. I said everything except restaurants (bars by extension).
I like the idea of vending machines for essentials. Look its a personal preference thing. In South Africa most of the cashiers are female and most have children. I just feel children should have mothers read bed time stories to them. I love the convenience of buying bread at 8pm but I wonder what the cost to society is for this convenience.
We have a problem in Africa where young kids have to assume the role of the adult all because mommy is away working late into the night. I guess the situation is different elsewhere.
I bought my groceries before 5pm. Sometimes during lunch. It really wasn't a big deal getting used to it. Humans adapt and in no time at all I was way more organised with my groceries because I knew shops closed at about 5.
Sure, I just assumed from context that's what OP meant (though I chuckled at the idea of getting on a train, but not in a train car, and what that would imply).
Bloomberg seems to have it in for Tesla so I take their reporting on this with a grain of salt.
They can easily choose to have a bad experience if they so desire by going to slow stations and avoiding superchargers. Or by using superchargers incorrectly such as by trying to fully top off at every charge, a typical newbie mistake, or choosing shared stations when non-shared ones are open (this guy was in a rental... possibly a newbie).
Also the supercharger network is continuing to be built out rapidly so anything they say here will be outdated in a matter of months if not weeks.
> supercharger network is continuing to be built out rapidly
I'm pretty sure this has been the case for a while now, years perhaps, and yet the author seemed to have problems none the less.
You say the reporting should be taken "with a grain of salt", but what did they do to make their lives harder than they could have been?
> Or by using superchargers incorrectly such as by trying to fully top off at every charge
I have a petrol car that I fill up completely whenever I am at a petrol station, why should someone not do this for an electric car?
> or choosing shared stations when non-shared ones are open
What does this mean? I read the article but couldn't see anything that to me sounded like it matched this statement, but that's likely just my lack of experience.
I get that you might have more experience than me, or the author, but you've not really explained how this was the authors fault, and how the experience could have been made better.
If I buy a Tesla then try to drive from the North of England to Seville, am I going to have the same issues the author had? What knowledge do you posses that would allow me to do the journey more easily than they did?
>what did they do to make their lives harder than they could have been?
The big issue for me is not following the directions for charging in the manual and battery screen for the car. The navigation has an option to find Superchargers and yet the author used Google Maps to find chargers instead. This means that they got "destination chargers" instead of Superchargers. Additionally, the car tells you not to make quick charging stops and not to wait until the battery is low to charge as it handles all that automatically. The author could have made this trip in 2 stops that would have taken a total of 40 minutes of charging if they had just used the navigation built into the car. They went out of their way to make sure the "range anxiety" lasted for as long as possible.
Why would a charger off the highway in the middle of nowhere be a destination charger? Also, isn't this a mode that could be configured, with the charger supplying more juice if requested? Even if its a destination charger I wouldn't be happy to hang out for 2 hours if I could be done in 30 minutes if its more than a few minutes walk to my apartment/hotel.
Destination chargers are typically non-Tesla chargers that are available for use with an adapter that's included with the Tesla charger. A Supercharger can charge a vehicle to 100% of daily capacity in 20-25 minutes while a destination charger will typically take overnight to fully charge.
> I have a petrol car that I fill up completely whenever I am at a petrol station, why should someone not do this for an electric car?
Because of the time requirements? Plenty of users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints.
Importantly, ICE cars also have eccentricities not all users know about, such as running low on gas often prevents the fuel pump from adequate cooling.
And the 80% rule is true of mobile phones as well.
> Plenty of users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints.
I don't think the "some people have time or budget constraints" is really a good reason for me to not fill up my car past 80%
The answer to "Why should I not charge my car past 80%?" doesn't seem to be "users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints"
> Importantly, ICE cars also have eccentricities not all users know about, such as running low on gas often prevents the fuel pump from adequate cooling.
It's not something that ever seems to have been a problem in any of the cars I've owned.
> And the 80% rule is true of mobile phones as well.
I feel like this might have been the case a long time ago, but surely modern phones with their integrated battery electronics will handle this. Sure, when I charge/discharge my gigantic LIPO batteries (robotics stuff) I have to take levels into account, but I'd expect my iPhone to just work.
> I feel like this might have been the case a long time ago, but surely modern phones with their integrated battery electronics will handle this.
Nope. This is still the case, chemistry hasn't changed; Quick Charge, Rapid charge both charge from 20-80% with much more power than 80%-100%. This is also why they don't advertise "fill up", but instead, go from 0-15% or get a half a days charge (from x%) in 15 minutes)
Accubattery analytics also show that modern cell phones w/ a charge limit maintain more battery capacity over time.
Better electronics and charge patterns DO make the top off (90-100%) better by fudging the numbers and trickle charging off an on.
In the Tesla, you have the time required till your next step on a long trip.
So, you don't charge until you're fully loaded at 100% but if you're following the instructions, you'll get at your next stop with around 20% left for best charging conditions. You even get the info on your mobile as a notification so you can know you can go back on the road.
Go to another, usually very close, petrol station. In the UK there are lots of them, they are not as someone else said of Tesla Superchargers spread "about half a charge apart".
> I have a petrol car that I fill up completely whenever I am at a petrol station, why should someone not do this for an electric car?
Because batteries asymptotically charge. The closer you are to 100% the slower they charge. The optimum way to drive is to stop frequently for short stops (5-10 minutes or so) and rapidly refill the battery while grabbing a snack or using your phone, and then continue.
My questioning was mostly to find out how the author could have made their life better. At the time of my response most comments were of the form "The author made her life harder" but didn't really include any details about how she could have made her life easier.
Ofcourse things are improving, but he just said the current situation with electric cars on roadtrips. And what he said is you currently have to plan more and yeah, you get more trouble as a newbie. Everyone is a newbie until they are not.
If she would have followed the beta-trip planning navigation on-board, then I'm sure she would have made it with ease. I already made that trip a few times and it's simple with a Tesla.
You appear to have missed my point: different people evaluate "the situation with cars on roadtrips" differently, and this Bloomberg reporter is one data point. The person I replied to appears to be over-interpreting one data point, and brand loyalty points to a different average opinion.
If you're attempting to make the point that this one data point isn't even that bad, that's a fine point to make, but it's confusing how that relates to this sub-thread.
> ... as by trying to fully top off at every charge, a typical newbie mistake, ...
Hmm, in what way? Throwing my usual home trip (~980km) from Switzerland into Tesla charger route calculator shows me that I'd have to stop twice and coast to each charger at less than 12% of battery left. Those are also only chargers on the route, what's the alternative here? Do a 1300km trip and stop three times?
There are usually more superchargers than the route planner shows you. That’s just one possible plan. Cancel the route temporarily (for others reading, it’s two taps to get it back) and just look at all the superchargers and you’ll see ones that were not shown in the route planner.
slow charging overnight at a hotel or 1 of your meal location; which would be part of your trip planning any way; because biology is going to make you stop more than twice.
You're assuming the place they stop has an outlet available and they give them permission to use it.
Besides, a regular outlet will charge it very slowly. A 30 min food stop charging on 220V/12A is only 2.6kWh. Since the author said it had a 215 mi range I'll assume it had the smallest 75kWh pack. That's only a 3.4% charge (7.3 miles)! In the US it would be about half that since we have 120V outlets.
No. But you might choose your stops to be at supercharging stations, where you can also eat, use the restroom, etc. and your trip might be an hour or two longer overall if your original stops were very short.
My numbers may not be perfectly accurate, but the sentiment is.
Tesla cars at supercharger stations charge to roughly 80% charge in 30 minutes, then take another 30 minutes to finish topping off to 100%. For that reason, they are typically placed at intervals of about half a battery range, so that you don't need a full charge to reach the next station with plenty of charge to spare. Typically, a well planned long road trip will involve rapidly charging the car from 20% to 70%, then driving 100-200 miles until another supercharger, where you repeat the process. In this way, you need to charge for much less time than if you tried to charge from 50% to 100%
The point is, that owners of traditional cars don't have to "plan" road trips unless they just like doing that sort of thing. I know when I have to make a 300+ mile drive I don't plan it at all, I just set off knowing that I can stop anywhere when I need gasoline. I normally don't stop for food and try to hold bathroom breaks to coincide with gas stops, which generally take no more than 10 minutes. The last thing I want to do when I'm trying to get somewhere is stop for an hour for a leisurely meal.
Having t break up trips into 100-200 mile segments based on limited recharging sites might be acceptable for some, but for many I think it will be viewed as a step backwards.
That's not really true but, admittedly, it depends on where you're going. There are plenty of places in the US where you can go 50+ miles on the freeway without hitting a gas station. There are even signs on the freeways that will tell you "Last fuel stop for x miles" in some parts of the country. Also, considering that Teslas have a starting range of 250 miles, you're stopping just as much as you would be in a gas car, just for a longer period of time (30 minutes max).
And Canada too, the moment I go driving in northern Ontario to somewhere I have not been before I need to note where gas stations are and often refill my tank when I am still have over half a tank of gas left just because I don't know when the next gas station will come along.
It's only thanks to GPS that we don't have to plan long trips anymore. Before GPS, it wasn't all that uncommon to plan your trip. (It's possible my dad went a bit overboard, though.)
I expect that in the future, every parking spot will have its own charger. At that point, EV drivers won't have to plan anymore either.
When driving through Germany on the highway, it's not unusual for gas stations to be 50km apart. Tesla has a supercharger roughly every ~100km in all of western Europe (much closer in dense areas), meaning you'll be on average 50km away from one at any point. Not much of a difference in how far ahead you need to plan.
Are there enough superchargers in Europe (inc. UK) fo this to be feasible?
What do you do if (as seemed to happen to the author) a supercharger station is out of action and you are on 20% battery with the next station half a charge away?
The UK is bad because Tesla didn't space out the chargers as evenly as they are in France and Germany. Instead there are more around London, Midlands, and Manchester but very few in the south west and north east, almost none in Wales, etc. Visiting friends in Bridlington about this time last year was only practical because I could charge at their house.
Generally I aim to get to the next charger with about 30% so that I have a good margin for unexpected detours (road works, an unexpected bit of sight seeing, etc.) Was very handy last summer when the road from Oslo to Trondheim (Rv 3) was closed and I hadn't noticed, had to drive an extra 50 km over the mountains to get to the other road (E6).
abetterrouteplanner.com finds a round-trip route for her journey that requires 2.5 total hours of charging, while never dipping below 10% charge or above 61% (subject to assumptions about what exact model vehicle she had). The screen in the Tesla will show you in real-time which stations are open, and even how many spots are free, although I don't know how well they indicate future closures.
Tesla's navigation interface will also do automatic routing through superchargers, but I personally like the web interface better.
Everyone seems to link these route planners while ignoring that the article author actually used the one in Tesla and had issues with nonfunctional or closed superchargers. Why didn't you read the text? :(
Either you plan your route, as you normally would (look at what roads you're taking and what's around, etc) or you would just follow your nav and do no planning at all.
The only difference with EV is that the nav will also tell you where to charge.
If you take this attitude for a road trip anywhere outside of major suburbia in the U.S.; Good luck. From the Florida turnpike, Alabama/Mississippi, Texas, Route 56, the Rockies, the Smokies, or almost any coastal highway, if you wait until empty you're going to have a bad day.
If you wait until empty, but I wait until I'm at 100 miles left and fill up - this has always been within 20 miles leaving me plenty of comfort space just in case.
True, but those are areas that few people go anyway. I would expect signs alerting me to the fact that gas is not available ahead - and I also expect I would never actually travel those roads.
To clarify: The planning, I mean. Takes about 5 seconds because you start typing in your destination, choose it from the displayed options, and the car makes the plan. In the meantime you are starting your drive already.
miles per minute (range per wait-time) goes drastically down after about 80% of charging because of the so-called 'Stadium effect'.
In simple terms 0-80 takes 30 minutes but the rest of the 20 percent will take 30 minutes too. So it is better to make two stops if you have to and get 80 + 80.
Paris to Mannheim is only 3 hours by fast train! Why take the car? Or if money is an issue, it is 7 hours and US$ 25 by bus.
This does not make the authors point invalid. I am just pointing out the good public infrastructure. Even so I have a Tesla, I still prefer public transport if possible. It is an sooo much more productive use of time.
If getting from point A to B is the only goal, then I agree with you.
Some road trips are more about the journey than the destination though. If a sign tells me the worlds longest paperclip chain is just off the next exit, I'm probably going to take it.
> While Tesla’s website shows roughly 600 Supercharger stations in the U.S., it has only around 400 in Europe, 65 of them in France (with a total of 220 charging docks). That doesn’t feel like much for a country roughly the size of Texas with more than double its population.
The supercharger network in Europe is strongly weighted towards the west, there's a map [1].
Texas seems to have 39 superchargers, and the journalist didn't have to wait while others were charging.
So my guess is a 715 mile road trip in the USA would be similar — particularly on a leisure road trip, which is less likely to follow the main motorways.
I know from my time back in the trench digging industry that a huge part of the charger lack issue is caused by the simple fact that ordinary superchargers gobble 150 kW electrical power a piece, which means that six of these things put a peak load of 1 MW to the net. The newer generations are said to be up 500 kW each... so you're looking at up to 3 MW or even 10x more, if you're an Autobahn rest place and aim for a load of electric trucks to be charged!
Your typical gas station, however, has a base load of tiny ~ 22 kW (per [1], divided by 8800h/year). The challenge is now that both the 10 kV electrical uplink to the gas station itself and, especially in rural parts of the country, also the 50/110 kV distribution backbone has to be upgraded, and this is not cheap.
This is the one big advantage of fossil (or synthetic) fuels: the energy density is incredibly high and the cost of shipping a fuel tanker truck is tiny compared to building out all that electricity network.
Makes sense. But this sounds like plumbing vs. carrying water in buckets from the river. The plumbing is more expensive up front, but cheaper long term.
We are talking about investments to the tune of dozens of billions of dollars. Who is supposed to pay for this? Or, who is supposed to build it? Europe has a decent shortage of construction workers on one side and in city/government planning and approval on the other side.
In my opinion this is a task for the government if it wants to make sure people move away from fossil fuels, but the US president is holding the country hostage over a wall while the infrastructure is falling apart and Europe is locked up by populists and Brexit so no movement from there (and we Germans can't get HV transmission lines built across Germany either without lots of NIMBY protests and tons of wasted money).
My generation however will have to live with the consequences, and that sucks.
I did a 4-day 16 hour round trip drive just this past weekend through the Midwest into the South. Can't imagine having to stop any more often than I already did; in fact at the pace Teslas charge, I'm not sure the trip would have even been possible.
Yeah, I just drove 14 hours or so one way to visit family and did it in one day. I can see 16 hours one way being correct for "Midwest to South" (both large regions) and can't really see 64 or 112 making sense. LA to NYC is 42 hours or so and Detroit to New Orleans is 16 hours or so, so 64 or 112 hours for a round trip between those regions would have to be quite circuitous.
So yeah, I'm a little confused at OP's math. I'm guessing there were a lot of stops involved in a very nonlinear trip.
Just curious, what is amazingly brief about driving two 8 hour (~500 mile) segments in four days? Even if I had the largest Tesla Battery, I would still have had to stop and do a full charge during each segment twice.
Sorry, now that you describe it, I realize the emphasis on the "round trip" part. Yes, doing a 4 day roundtrip with that many miles (and only 2 'travel' days) means a lot of driving for a brief stay. I was thinking more in terms of a relatively continuous trip where 4 hours a day for 4 days is not very much (for example).
My parents' house is about 500mi away from where I live, and I generally don't drive unless I'm staying for a week rather than just a few days, so this is a good point-- for a trip to visit someone, and return, a good % of your time is spent driving. As a typical "see the sights" type roadtrip, you might be doing 8 hours a day every day for an extended time, which is more what I was thinking.
(FWIW our 3 can easily get its rated 310 mi range so really you'd only need to stop once, assuming you can charge at your destination, but of course that assumes there's a supercharger relatively close to the 'middle' of your segment.. OTOH if you did stop twice they'd be quite brief stops, probably like 20 minutes).
I believe that it was the OP intention to do that trip mostly for the experience. It doesn't make sense to ask why not take a train or any other transport instead.
In any case, it just deepens my fear of electric cars. It surely looks expensive (almost as much as gas cars), there are very few superchargers in Europe (where I live there's only 3-4, and very badly placed) and the autonomy doesn't seem to be that great. Maybe I just have to wait for better autonomy and more recharge stations...
> I decide to do a full charge as my hotel is still 145 miles away. It takes a tedious 85 minutes, and I dine on a Whopper and fries.
It blows my mind that people think recharging their cars on the go can be the future of transportation. I understand that with good driver education and planning, the hassles of charging can be circumvented. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those that put in the effort: you are doing the pioneering work and boot starting a green revolution, I might join you soon.
That being said, for the average consumer electrics cannot represent a compelling alternative for an internal combustion car until battery swap technology is ubiquitous. The majority of people will simply not give up the convenience of fast refills, unless the cost of driving a petrol car rises significantly while the affordability and electrics increases dramatically. Even then, it will be seen by many as the low cost, inferior product.
A rechargeable car a significantly more inconvenient product for most consumers, so it has a lower value that has to be compensated somehow.
> A rechargeable car a significantly more inconvenient product for most consumers
Actually, a rechargeable car is significantly more convenient than a gasoline car because you can charge it at home and/or work. You only ever have to wait for charging on long road trips.
If you take road trips over 250 miles on a monthly basis, or you can't charge at home or work, then by all means get a gasoline car. But I think that given people's driving patterns, the majority of people would spend less time overall waiting for charging than they would driving to the gas station and filling up. I certainly do.
This is my exact situation. My electric car is far more convenient for me than my gas car is and, so far, I would extend that to long road trips. Literally the only benefit I find to driving my ICE vehicle is the short fuel-up time but, with every trip I've taken in the EV in the last year since I bought the car, you don't have to charge it all the way to get to the next charger/destination. I can charge to the daily drive capacity in about 20-25 minutes which has gotten me to the next charger with plenty of range to spare.
I live in Seattle and am currently considering what car to buy next. It will likely be an ICE car because during the summer we regularly will drive 70-100 miles in one direction to a hike. There are not and will not be charging stations at the trailhead. Typically we eat breakfast on the road or before heading out, eat lunch on the hike & get back home for dinner. Stopping for over an hour on the way back would be a big change of pace.
This is also true for some of the ski resorts. There are a couple charging stations, but parking is already enough of a disaster at the ski resorts that I'd rather not deal with it.
We'll likely follow the crowd and get a ICE Subaru.
EVs like any car have scenarios that work well and other things that don't. Driving your Tesla 250 miles, doing something for 10 minutes, and then driving home won't be a good experience. But driving 70-100 miles, even if going to Snoqualmie Pass or Mt Rainier, then driving home, that's fine in even a 4 year old model S 85D like mine.
First, did you know that going downhill your car can charge or at worst drive a long way without using any power. Second, the raw range of the car is such that I can go from Seattle to pretty much any place around here and back (Stevens, Olympic Peninsula). My car's modest 265 mile range is dwarfed by a model 3's > 300 miles.
If you don't live in a garage with any charging it can be a pain. I have just 120 volts in my garage, but I rarely need to go to a higher power charger, because I get 50 miles added overnight. If I am going to say ski two days in a row I can get enough charge at home to be ready to go the next day. If I was doing such a drive day after day I'd upgrade to higher power. If I was living in Seattle with a car on the street where I couldn't run power to it, or in a parking garage, I agree that it's too much trouble. But the key thing is the range and power used by your ev can be reliably modeled. Check out (among many such sites), https://www.evtripplanner.com/. Try planning a trip, picking a car, listing the temp, how many people.
It's true that you have to do a little planning if you are going to the limits of your car's range, but I almost never need to do this planning. When I used to go driving around the backcountry in Utah I also had to plan out where I'd get gas and decide if I was going to bring extra gas with me too. I never did that normally of course.
So 200 miles round trip for the hike, plus 20 or so for food/buffer? 220 miles isn't hard to get on a single charge, wouldn't you just charge it when you got back home?
200 miles round trip should be fine in a 300+ mile range car. Also you don't need to stop for an hour if you just need a few extra miles of range to get home. You can add 50 miles in 10 minutes at a Tesla supercharger.
The PHEV prius doesn't have AWD. It's a higher trim for a normal prius only. And the Crosstrek gets pretty poor mileage for a hybrid after the battery is empty, probably because it has "full" AWD. The Prius has a more limited form of AWD, though it is likely enough for most AWD vehicle buyers needs.
If you are interested in a PHEV AWD car (I am interested in PHEV, my wife is interested in AWD), other vehicles to check out are the Hyundai Outlander, the Mini E Countryman S, and a few more expensive BMWs and Volvos. Kia might have one? That's pretty much all of them. Crosstrek seems like the best to me, but has definite downsides and is a compliance car not widely available in the US.
The Crosstrek plug-in hybrid looks nice, but the battery takes up a lot of storage space (and only gets you 17 miles of EV range). We love the look of the Crosstrek in general, but found acceleration in the ICE to be sluggish, and the storage space is the same as the Impreza. In the plug-in Crosstrek, there's a big battery in the trunk, so storage is even more limited. We crossed it off our list and are looking primarily at the RAV4 hybrid.
Or just get an electric with greater range perhaps? Hyuandi Kona would do it. Plus it seems a bad time to buy right now. Lots of new models coming in 2019.
IF you do the math, even for the at home case you spend more time charging the electric car than filling the gas car. The difference is with the electric car part of your routine is pulling the cord off the wall at night and hanging it back up in the morning, and it only takes a minute extra. With a gas car every once in a while - never on schedule you have to make a separate stop that adds 10 minutes. Over the course of a month less time was spent getting gas, but with the electric it is part of the routine do you don't think about it.
It takes me no more time to plug the car in than it does to grab my bag out of the car. Probably less, since the cord is on the driver's side, and plug is up front, so I'm walking that way anyway.
Seriously. This is about 4 seconds of “work” on my way to get my bag from the trunk.
I don’t think people realize the plug has a button which pops open the charging door on it.
It literally takes less time than unscrewing and rescrewing on a gas cap.
Unplugging is even faster. Put hand on charging plug. Press button with thumb. Wait one second for clicking noise signaling that charging is stopped/unlocked. Pull out plug. If the car was fully charged (to the set charging point, e.g. 90%) then even the button click is not needed because it will already be unlocked. Just pull out the plug.
I do have an ideally located wall charger so there is not even a “coil cord” or “uncoil cord” step.
Waking up every morning with a charged (and warm!) car is a pleasure.
I know it’s possible to auto-schedule the climate control warm-up but haven’t bothered with that yet, I jump into the app and click it on after making my coffee.
I'm not disagreeing. However most people do not realize how much time it is costing them to do that act each day. (obviously how much time it costs depends on the specifics of your parking situation)
I just think you're stretching it. I walk past my charger in the garage to get to the door to the house so plugging it in and unplugging it is literal seconds of my time. The convenience far outweighs that.
I'm usually ready for a break every 200 miles or so anyway, so I don't think I'd really need much more than 300 mile range. At 60mph, 300 miles is 5 hours and at 80 (highest legal limit I know of) it's 3.75 hours, which is a long time to go without a break.
If an electric car can get me 200-300 miles on 30 minutes of charging, I'll take the minor inconvenience on road trips to get the major convenience of home charging the rest of the time.
Actually, a rechargeable car is significantly more convenient than a gasoline car because you can charge it at home and/or work
Given how many people I've heard "I forgot to plug in my phone last night" from, I wonder if "I forgot to plug in my car" will become a common late excuse in the future.
That's because people are still using their phone indoors. The instant you pull into the garage you plug in, as a matter of practice, before you enter the house. I have no idea why you'd forget that unless some kind of emergency was going on.
a rechargeable car is significantly more convenient than a gasoline car because you can charge it at home and/or work
There are services (in the U.S., at least) that will fill your car with gas while you're at work, or home, at a hotel, or anywhere they can get to your car.
Hmm, they charge a delivery fee, and they come on their schedule, not yours. Also you have to remember to leave your car accessible and pop your gas cap, otherwise you'll still have to go to your car when they arrive at whatever random time they choose.
Convenience has a cost. Just like people who pay Amazon for Prime membership.
they come on their schedule
Having a service fill my car while I'm asleep is a lot better than waiting in a filthy gas station for 90 minutes while my EV charges.
leave your car accessible
Like in a parking lot, or a driveway. Crazy!
pop your gas cap
I had no idea they still made cars with gas caps that have to be "popped." My car's gas cap opens with one finger. I haven't had a car with a lockable gas cap since the 1980's.
go to your car when they arrive at whatever random time they choose.
Hmm... hanging around wasting time waiting for a car to be refueled. Sounds an awful lot like EV charging.
> It blows my mind that people think recharging their cars on the go can be the future of transportation.
It's worth noting that article was written by someone who was driving a Tesla with 215 miles of range and who had clearly not done EV road tripping before. You cannot buy a Tesla model S with 215 miles of range anymore. The shortest model S is 259. The longest 335. And a thing you learn pretty quickly is that charging is super non-linear in its rate. 0->80 is much much much faster than 80->100.
I'm not disagreeing that EVs are worse for roadtripping. EVs are worse for road tripping -- but the car used and the choices of the author are exaggerating the issue.
www.abetterrouteplanner.com tends to be pretty spot on for "time spent charging" in the routes that it produces. If you want a better measure of the inconvenience, that's a good place to get such a measure.
I really think the path forward for a majority of people is plug-in hybrids. Most people have daily commutes under 50mi round trip. For those people, a car with 50-80mi electric range, then a reduced fuel range is perfect. My spouse drives a Chevy Volt (a sadly now discontinued model), which works well for her 40mi daily commute. Most weeks, the car never fires up the ICE, and we've put probably less than 4 gallons in the last two months. However, we're still able to make long-distance trips with the 7-8 gallon gas tank that gets us around 300 miles with the ~40MPG efficiency of the ICE.
That completely eliminates range anxiety, since once the EV range has run out, you still have a perfectly normal car, and can refuel at any station. And with the spare factory EVSE in the trunk, I can generally recharge at my destination when staying overnight.
For 2-car households, an EV car and an ICE (or plugin hybrid) will increasingly make a lot of sense, especially if the ICE is a bigger vehicle of the sort that people often want for roadtrips.
If there's just one car, my experiences may be flavored by the fact that I go to some relatively remote areas, but I just don't see an EV making sense for many people. I don't see renting a car even every few months because I need it for a wilderness trip. FWIW, Prius plug-in hybrid sales seem to be quite strong. It's not really an elegant solution compared to an EV but it's probably pragmatic.
I want to think that the future involves avoiding having to own bigger cars entirely and lease/rent an EV car plus credits for short-term rentals of different vehicles when needed.
Need a big SUV for skiing or camping? Swap your small EV for the weekend.
There's too many people I know that make vehicle purchasing decisions based on edge cases to avoid having to rent something different when they actually need it. We need to figure out how to give up large SUVs that only drive around a single passenger.
I get what you're saying but, for many of us, renting a car for the weekend is a significant hassle and time sink. And then the rental probably isn't set up with a roof rack for canoes, etc. If it were a once a year thing? Sure. But it's not. It's every few weeks at least. (There's also picking up home improvement stuff etc.)
It doesn't always need to be a big SUV either. There are somewhat smaller vehicles that are almost as good for a lot of activities. People are going to keep buying vehicles that they can use for most of their activities.
> renting a car for the weekend is a significant hassle and time sink
That's the real problem to be solved, and not by stationing one of those cars permanently in each person's house.
Evolving tech might enable at least three scenarios: self-driving cars can be summoned on demand; cars can be piloted remotely to the customer's location (a matter of legislation at this point); electric scooters can make it feasible for a driver to deliver and return to base at a reasonable cost. I'd pay a premium to have a standard-issue rental car at my door at the press of a button.
If you want to enable remote driving through populated areas it will take a lot more changes than just legislation. Our cellular data networks lack the reliability, latency, and bandwidth that would be needed for the level of streaming video to make this safe.
The problem is that everyone wants to go skiing on the same holiday weekends so the rental agencies have all their AWD SUVs booked weeks in advance at high prices. But they can't afford to add inventory because there's little demand for those vehicles at other times. The rental solution doesn't really scale.
That's only because you know wealth/high class people. I assure you there are plenty of people who will cram a family of five in a compact for a road trip, haul plywood on the roof of a sedan, throw a sofa in/on a station wagon, haul gravel with a compact pickup, etc, etc. They're just not people who are employed by tech companies shop at whole foods and browse HN. Shoehorning a vehicle into a use case for which it is a less than perfect fit is not how white collar professionals making tech money are expected to act.
Vehicle suitability for any given task is inversely proportional to the average net worth of the occupants. The only way you get a free pass is if the vehicle is environmentally friendly and plastered in the kind of bumper stickers you expect on the back of a university professor's EV conversion project car. Then you're just "eccentric" and not low class.
Maybe that's common in other countries, but in the US I see a lot of low wage workers driving large, practical vehicles like older model F150s and Chevy Tahoes. Sure they burn a lot of gas, but they can do everything and are relatively easy to repair.
It's just a lot of extra engineering and cost to have two discrete motors in a car. You're probably going to have a seriously underpowered ICE in it as well since available speeds are reduced which makes it less suitable to highway driving. Not to mention the additional costs on maintaining both of those engines.
> You're probably going to have a seriously underpowered ICE in it as well (snip) which makes it less suitable to highway driving
Why? You can put a powerful ICE in it just as easily.
My Chevy Volt can easily do 90+mph on the freeway, irregardless of whether it's on battery or gasoline. (Of course, I've never personally verified that...)
And yet Prius plugin hybrid sales are up almost 50% YoY. Pure EVs are probably the future at some point. But in the here and now, plugin hybrids are the pragmatic choice for a lot of people who mostly drive shorter distances and can charge at home but do longer trips also.
That's why the Volt didn't have an ICE, it had a gas-powered generator to run the electric motors. It's such a smart design that it's a crime they're killing the line.
It had an ICE-powered generator that could also be connected via clutches directly to the drivetrain for better efficiency at highway speeds.
ICE -> Generator -> Inverter -> Electric Motor is worse for efficiency at constant speed on the highway than just connecting the ICE directly to the wheels.
OTOH going the generator route allows you to avoid quite a bit of drivetrain - a transmission, differential(s), etc. Wouldn't surprise me if actual efficiency comes quite close considering you shed 200lbs or so of weight. More than that if AWD.
Nashville, TN has electric buses with a fancy inductive charge port on top, allowing them to be fully charged in 5-10 minutes (they do it on a regular extended stop). An arm descends above the bus until the charging port is in place.
I am certain that could be dangerous at car height, but I am also certain some form of this will eventually replace the 220 or 440 line currently in use in most charging stations. I think battery swapping is a good idea, too but it isn't the only solution.
Seattle has had electric buses for years with charging at the park and rides. I don't think it's inductive, it's kind of a giant slot they drive into, above the bus. It just works, but in the end it's no different than being on any other bus.
Does any electric car have an option where you can place a portable gasoline generator in the frunk and then trickle charge the battery while you drive on a road trip (with appropriate venting of exhaust).
If not, why not?
I've seen very small, quiet gasoline generators. I would think this could solve this problem easily at the expense of a small amount of storage space.
Yes, that's the effect. But I'd only have to carry the generator portion when needed for a road trip. You could perhaps even rent it only when you need.
Even if the generator was in a small trailer, that would provide the range freedom without loosing the storage space (and help with venting/cooling/noise).
True, except the road trip case is also the case where you want more cargo capacity than is standard. A rental trailer for one week that lets my wife pack the kitchen sink actually makes sense.
Weight probably isn't a problem - a Chevy Volt weighs a lot less than a Tesla S.
You don't even save much by keeping the gas tank mostly empty when you aren't expecting to need it -- the gas weighs ~6 lbs / gallon, so you might save 50 lbs by keeping the tank on 1/4 when you aren't planning to drive past the battery range.
Think about it this way: batteries are really heavy, and the Tesla has like 5x more battery capacity than a Volt. Meanwhile, if you're mostly making short trips, you're hauling around 3/4 of those heavy, heavy batteries as a contingency.
Not portable generators--which you'd really want built in for various safety and venting reasons. But you're basically describing a plug-in hybrid. The case against these is that you still carry over at least some of the complexity/maintenance of having an ICE.
You don't need much power to keep a car going on the freeway. If I can extend my drive from 200 miles to 700 miles before I have to stop and recharge - well that is as far as a human can drive in a day anyway (many humans have driven farther - it wasn't safe they were just lucky).
It doesn't take much energy to keep a modern car moving at highway speed. With regenerative braking and a limited top speed a small generator should be able to keep the car moving well enough.
Wasn't Tesla also working on an option where you would drive up to a special dock, and it would extract the battery pack entirely from the bottom of your vehicle and swap in a new, fully-charged one? That seems like a more proper method for long trips and very cool (probably faster than filling up gas!) but I'm not sure if it's a reality yet.
I think this style would be much better suited for short haul trucking. If you had trucks going from supplier to distribution center you could just swap out for the return trips. If they weren’t running near round the clock it might not be feasible.
I've heard talk about possible implementation of that in the future from both waymo and tesla, but I don't think there are any plans on the drawing board yet. I think fast-charging is what both of them are more focused on now.
They stopped development of it because to keep accounting simple you had to return to the swap point to get your original battery back. As a result, not very many people used their proof of concept swapping location.
A simpler way forward is to have faster chargers. The Porsche Taycan and (later on) the Audi e-Tron GT are based on an 800-volt architecture which can charge to 80% in 20 minutes from a 350 kW charger:
Diversity of charging options will also help. The Audi e-Tron GT and Volkswagen's I.D. cars and vans will support wireless inductive charging at 11 kW:
Or we just need to move to car subscriptions where you show up and swap the car out and someone else handles charging the car behind the scenes. Could even potentially do it in a similar model to how scooter companies crowd source the charging.
"The average travel time between Paris and Mannheim is 4h49 minutes. The quickest route is 3h05 minutes. The first train leaving Paris is at 06:01, the last at 19:06. There is an average of 27 trains a day between Paris and Mannheim, leaving approximately every 40 minutes."
I've driven Norway to the UK and back three times in the last year with a side trip to Bordeaux. I drove all the way from Bordeaux to Belgium avoiding toll roads and still had no problems charging my 2015 S 70D. It's really not a problem in a Tesla.
It's a bloody nuisance for other EV drivers though because of the lack of a common payment method, a friend of a friend in France has a Hyundai Ioniq and has a wallet full of cards for the various chargers. It's getting better though.
Upshot: what would normally (by Western standards) be an easy 17 hour drive takes the narrator something like 54 days on roads that ultimately destroy the vehicle just before completion.
Wow thanks for posting the link that was a great read!
Don't understand why the driver was so against paying bribes though. As one guy said:
> Before we were let go one office said "Ce n'est pas la Belgique ici, tu es en Congo!" - "This is not Belgium, you are in Congo". He hissed and gave us a terrifying look
Yeah, bribes are just the cost of being a foreigner in many parts of the world, and they're often not too bad (unless you did something terrible).
Before visiting a poor country, figure out how much a bribe should be and consider it similar to a tip here. Policemen aren't paid very well, so it's kind of like tipping an underpaid waitress here in the US. Account for it as part of your overall expenses and you'll be fine.
Almost all of the issues and frustrations that Marie ran into were new and/or unique to electric vehicle (at least initially), as she pointed out.
- EVs have shorter range: ICEs were similar in that fuel tank capacity hasn't changed much but engine design advancements improve fuel efficiency and in turn increase range.
- Charging stations are far and few between: same with gas stations in the early days - urbanization creates more of them.
- Different levels of charging station (1.8kwh home charging, 6.6kwh public charging and 24kw+ DC fast charging, colloquially Level 1, 2 and 3 charging). This is not the same as fuel grade. But it's obvious that just like a cellphone charger, higher output charger can fill the batteries faster.
- Range meter is a guess-o-meter. This is exactly the same as your ICE's range meter. Driving style affects fuel efficiency. Heavy footers tends to empty their fuel tank quicker same with EV, they tend to run the battery out faster or range reduced faster as the faster you drive an EV and higher current the electric motor requires and the more battery voltage drops. A range at 30mph is much longer than at 80mph. I would point out that EV range is also weather dependent (temperature affects battery chemistry, rain/snow road condition affects traction and in turn affects range as well). Newer battery management systems has mitigations for temperature control etc so it's less a concern.
- You have to be mindful about your road trip planning and charging station locations. This is the same for ICEs, but since gas stations are everywhere in urban areas so it is not a concern. It sure will improve for EVs as we build out charging infrastructure. U.S. regulators were able to negotiate a deal with VW for its diesel gate settlement so VW is contributing hughly in building out charging infrastructures.
- DC Faster charger's reliability. As an early adopter of EV, I felt this pain first hand. The early 400V DC faster charger prioritize safety and hence it gets tripped up and disconnect the charging circuit a lot. But I am seeing less and less this happens in recent years, so I'd say it's only getting improved.
- Charging etiquette. I suspect this is similar as ICE. When you refilling gas and getting some snacks and run for a bathroom break, do you park your car right in front of the gas pump even though it's fully refueled? You probably shouldn't right? Same with using DC faster chargers. Don't squat the charging spot if your car is fully charged and or above 80% of charge (above 80% charge it automatically switch to a slower charging rate), let the people inline to use the charger.
> - Range meter is a guess-o-meter. This is exactly the same as your ICE's range meter. Driving style affects fuel efficiency. Heavy footers tends to empty their fuel tank quicker same with EV, they tend to run the battery out faster or range reduced faster as the faster you drive an EV and higher current the electric motor requires and the more battery voltage drops. A range at 30mph is much longer than at 80mph. I would point out that EV range is also weather dependent (temperature affects battery chemistry, rain/snow road condition affects traction and in turn affects range as well). Newer battery management systems has mitigations for temperature control etc so it's less a concern.
The annoying thing here is that the range planners I've been using (Teslas and abtterrangeplanner) cut the charger distances really close on some common routes I've checked - like reaching the charger at < 15% charge. Which, at least for me, seems like a heck of a close call for a situation where road traffic conditions, temperature and possible detours can quickly burn away that remaining battery.
I though it was already clear that road tripping around anywhere is not the reason you buy an electric car. The infrastructure just isn't there yet (though that sounds like a good pork project).
On the other hand...he's literally the only person in the world who could post this and I'd take it seriously...
One thing about roadtrips - we like to take scenic routes. On scenic routes there are very few gas stations, let alone electric charging points. Even with a gas powered car we still have to plan our fuel-ups.
Another thing is that an hour and a half to charge the car is very long time to cut out of your day when on vacation. If you're with kids, you have to find stuff to do. Every day, since you do drive the scenic route which is much more heavy on battery than highways are.
Eating a meal while charging of course is a thing, yet we usually try to cut that time to minimum compensating with late dinner. Also, eating options near charging stations almost never hit home...
I suppose that if technology won't catch up, electric must change the way people travel. Or it will still be relevant for A-to-B trips or daily commuters only.
Last summer I took a road trip from Oregon to Texas and back in a Tesla Model 3. I covered about 600 miles a day over the course of 8 days, for a total of nearly 5,000 miles. I never had a problem finding a supercharger along my route, never had to wait to charge, and rarely had to spend more than 30 minutes charging before continuing.
I stuck to major highways and interstates for most of the route, though there were a few long legs in Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas that were on minor highways off the beaten trail.
It was a really fun trip and I'm dying to take more long road trips in the car. My experience definitely wasn't anything like the one the author of this article had.
Or don't use a Tesla for something it's not really designed for? Cars can be rented pretty cheaply. 99% of the driving I do is within a single charge of say 300 miles. I might have to rent once a year for longer trips.
My sister has an old generation Nissan Leaf with sub-100 mile range. It works fine for her use case and when she makes a long trip she uses her partners car or rents one.
No different to how I'd rent a van if I was trying to move a sofa.
>No different to how I'd rent a van if I was trying to move a sofa.
That's true. But, for a lot of people, long weekend roadtrips are a lot more common than moving sofas. There's quite a bit of friction associated with driving to a rental place on a Friday, parking your car someplace, driving the rental home, packing it up, and then doing the process in reverse during the rental place's business hours.
If you are doing a lot of long weekend roadtrips, you will likely want to own a ICE vehicle with the current state of battery tech. Not a big deal. To each their own. But for many people, especially households with two cars, one of those that fills up at home and has a range of 200mi, will be something that saves them time and money. People and society would probably be better off not attaching their identity and group affiliation to the type of car they use. Keep your identity small[1].
For a good many years when I was still commuting and otherwise driving locally more than I do now, I had a small 36mpg Honda 2-seater as well as an SUV for weekends and hauling stuff. I actually still have the Honda but it's very old and I'll probably get rid of it because I don't use it much. If a person or family has 2 cars, it makes a lot of sense for at least one of them to be something small and economical and (at least in the near future) EV--assuming home charging.
I'm rather surprised so many comments here fundamentally misunderstand EVs and think that this bloomberg story is representative of long distance trips with EVs. It's not and no one should consider it as such. She needlessly charged to 100% when she didn't have to and did zero research on the car she was using. The article is a farce.
If he wanted to go that far, he should've taken a train. I realize that the point of this was to test it out but he is flat-out ignoring that extremely few people here do trips over 200km over once a year, so there's no demand for infrastructure to support that.
Everyone is not exaclty like you. Where I live in europe, many people around me do more than 200km ocassionally or often. And when I go on a roadtrip, I notice plenty of cars with registration numbers not from particular country.
Studies suggest that "extremely few" and "many people around me" is about 10% of car trips. (At least in the U.S., typically more geographically sprawled than much of europe).
So, yes, maybe not everybody can have an electric car and may need to rent a better suited car some % of the time; Maybe that's a partner, a neighbor, a car club. On the bright side, renting a van, truck, land rover for longer trips also reduces the wear on your batteries.
I don't find that true at all, and I live in a small EU country. Multiple coworkers of mine commute more than that every weekends. Trains are great, but they don't reach everywhere roads do.
Well you could also say the target market for this car is city-commuters, and yeah a very high percentage of time, most car owners don't go hundreds of kms on their trips.
It'd be like evaluating a Smart car for road trips: also not fun.
To criticize this article as well: she says around Europe but she drove in France and a little bit in Germany. That's... not... around Europe.
Sounds fun to me if you don't mind planning a few off the beaten track style detours. Shouldn't be too hard, plenty of tools available for finding and navigating chargers.
A few points about range anxiety:
- To the best of my knowledge, EVs being towed away because they ran out of battery probably happens once in a while but seems to be easy enough to avoid for most drivers that it doesn't seem to be thing. Even the author of this article was fine in the end (and not for a lack of trying).
-You can charge some EVs simply by towing them (regenerative braking). So, not the end of the world if the "worst" actually happens. I imagine charging from a second EV might also be an option with the right equipment; I imagine that will become a common way to deal with idiot drivers getting stranded.
- If you drive 300 km and don't take a break, you are probably getting dangerously tired. Good excuse to plug in and take a break.
- Average yearly mileage in Germany is less than 14K km. That suggests a lot of short journeys and maybe a handful of big ones (if any) for most cars.
- If like many business drivers in Germany you regularly travel the Autobahn at 200 km/hour between big cities that can be as much as 400-500 km apart in Germany, you probably are burning a lot of fuel. You could save a small fortune by going electric! Chances are most such journeys have plenty of charging points along your way.
- For most people this is not a thing. Renting cars is a lot cheaper than owning vehicles that you don't need most of the time. You can have a simple EV for day to day commutes and just rent something with longer range when you need to make that yearly 1500 km journey to southern Europe for your vacation. The savings in vehicle and fuel cost should allow you to travel in style.
This is exactly how I would have imagined a trip would go. $85 billion market cap for a car that can't travel to most areas of the globe at all or with severe inconvenience? Give me a break.
Electric cars have been around for 100 years, and they've been consistently inferior. We've perfected the car with the internal combustion engine. Empower automobile engineers to make marginal improvements, but otherwise: can we please spend precious capital elsewhere? Think of all the cures or improvements to human life this money could have gone towards, rather than this stupid electric car will-o'-the-wisp. Build some nuclear power plants! Go to Mars! (In fairness, Elon's trying the latter, as long as Tesla doesn't become a financial albatross around his neck.)
Why must the history of humanity always be the story of one step forward and two steps backward?
> $85 billion market cap for a car that can't travel to most areas of the globe at all or with severe inconvenience?
Pure electric cars have only been widely available for a few years, so there isn't a lot of infrastructure yet. The market cap prices in risk-adjusted growth, so you have to consider what the world will look like 10-20 years from now. Do you think it'll still be the case that electric cars won't travel to most areas of the globe without severe inconvenience?
> Build some nuclear power plants! Go to Mars!
Firstly, we can do both. There is enormous amount of capital in the world, and not enough actionable good ideas. Secondly, dictating capital allocation top down is tyrannical. Thirdly and most importantly, there have been human societies that have tried to avoid various will-o'-the-wisp projects and allocate capital only to smart undertakings. Historically, they haven't fared very well.
The nuclear power plants you suggest building are of limited utility if the cars on the road still run on gasoline. If humanity is to survive, it needs to wean itself off hydrocarbon fuels completely.
Every gas station accepts normal debit and credit cards. There is no gas station that requires you to sign up before filling your tank. It is ridiculous.
Why can't the charging networks just install a normal credit/debit card reader and let people pay with their normal cards? It's mind-boggling.