Comment by intensely_human@lemm.ee on xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas

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An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

Gasoline motors can be recharged in a couple of minutes.

If it’s not a concern for my phone, why should it be for my vehicle? It is so nice never having to go to a local gas station, when all I need to do is plug in at night

I plug my car in in seconds

And then wait an hour to get acceptable charge levels for range. Filling up at a gas station is much faster.

This is not to say electric vehicles aren’t a good idea, the charge rate and convenience while traveling are issues we need to improve on.

You can’t fill your gas tank at home while you sleep…

I’m not at home sleeping when I’m out traveling. I’m referring to multi hour or multi day drives. This is an extremely common use case where I live.

Also not everyone has access to a charger where they sleep.

I hear this complaint a lot about charging times, but for 99.99% of people they are never in a single day going to drive beyond their cars range, meaning even a standard level 1 slow charger over night at home can manage their entire car usage.

It’s only people doing long distance road trips that have to worry, and that’s by far a minimum. Instead of boosting gas cars for that we could be looking at investing in rail so people don’t have to make the longer trips in a car anyway.

Not only that, people going on those long trips are going to be looking for something to eat in a similar time frame that their EV takes to fully discharge. It takes EVs about 15-20 minutes to get from 0-80% charge. That’s less time than it takes to sit down and eat at a restaurant

I rarely go inside restaurants to eat on a long trip. I grab a burger and wolf it down and go again. I eat the fries while I’m driving and they’re gone in an instant, and i’m still going.

Sounds like a you problem then

And for about 50% of Americans, they don’t have a place to plug in an electric car at night. It’s only people above a certain level of wealth who have the luxury of their own parking space with a charger.

For the rest of us, we must take time out of our day to sit in a grocery store parking lot while the car charges.

EVs generally have adapters that allow you to plug into a standard home outlet, it’s just significantly slower to charge to full due to the lower amperages. And even if you only have 1 plug in your garage, it’s not hard or expensive to add more.

The only real hurdle for that is if you rent a house and aren’t allowed to make those easy changes

The point is that, for most journeys, you just charge at home overnight. It’s rare to plug in and wait for it to charge. With petrol / gas, you always have to wait

*If you have a homecharger

It is faster to refuel your car with petrol.

“when you are empty, and you have to drive right away, its faster to refuel your car with petrol”

My relatives dont have a charger at home, they just plug their car into an outlet, and get ~40km range over night. That more than enough for the daily commute.

A 120v standard Ac adapter is all you need for overnight charging, and I’m pretty sure those come with the cars.

Not at home it’s not. Where’s your back garden petrol station lol.

I don’t know what to do with you people… We both have 5km range left. You plug in the cable juice and I plug in the gas to refuel. Who leaves the station first?

My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.
My main problem is it’s never really empty enough.

If I’m on the road, a high voltage DC charger gets me from 10% to 50% in about 10 minutes. Barely enough time for a coffee and a leak, then it’s another 2 hours of driving. Rinse, repeat.

Sure, you can’t barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?

who wants that?

I do. We have family that we visit a few times each year. If I leave at 2am and drive straight through, we get there in 7-8 hours. If I make the drive during the day, it takes 10-13 hours.

Sounds like you need a train. Not a car.

Sure. But first you need to build one that takes me there.

For various reasons a car is often better for that kinda trip

Some real examples that are specific to the trip I take:

There is no rail service that goes there. It would be a combo of trains and busses that takes significantly longer and costs more than the gas.

Our dog comes with us, generally isn’t allowed on mass transit, and the much longer trip would stress her out if she was.

There is little to no mass transit in the town they live in to get around once we arrive so we’d end up borrowing or renting a car anyway.

With limited amounts of time off, making the trip overnight adds a full day of getting to see our family to the trip.

The only other realistic means of getting there is flying but, I enjoy driving and hate everything about air travel. It’s a pretty cheap flight for one person but becomes more expensive once you add in the rest of the family and the dog can’t come.

Edit: formatting

I make a 9-10 hour drive to see my family multiple times a year. I normally stop twice to get gas and use the bathroom, and that’s it. Sounds like you’d be adding most of an hour to my travel time each way. I’ve tried stopping longer and grabbing food, it’s not worth it for me.

With that said, I drive 25-40 miles a day the other 360+ days of the year, so it’d really make much more sense for me to have a short range EV and rent something for travel when I have too much luggage to fly.

Maybe don’t do that? Catch a train it’s significantly cheaper anyway.

No passenger rail. It’s car or a once a week bus that doesn’t even stop in the town my family lives in.

That’s an infrastructure problem you can help solve and regardless going on long trips for most people is 100% optional.

That would become a 15+ hour trip then…

Edit: On further investigation, it’s also not significantly cheaper than flying, and is much more expensive than fuel for driving.

But much better for the environment, sometimes others matter more and when more people use rail it’s more likely our country will catch up and build hyper train networks.

you really ought to be stopping a few more times, i don’t understand how so many people are just completely fine with driving for 3 hours nonstop

You should just live near the place you’re driving to.

Oh my God, why didn’t I think of that! Simply have more money, thank you internet stranger. My problems are solved!

Real shit though, I can solve your problems. Just tell me what they are, I’ll give you my best answer.

I’m glad you think I can afford to triple my rent, but that’s not happening.

Edit: If you mean the road trip scenario, my family works in various different industries, and the opportunities are better in different cities. That’s also not happening.

My EV sits in the driveway and soaks up excess production from my PV setup.

Yeah EVs are a great solution for homeowners.

Sure, you can’t barrel down the Autobahn for 10 hours straight without stopping but who wants that?

As an Uber driver, I want that. I want to be able to gas my car back up and go back on he road and keep earning money.

Congrats your are not the market target for EVs then, guess what that doesn’t mean that the majority of the population isn’t though.

So what? Doesn’t matter for most people

If you’re driving more than 300miles a day you’re just admitting your a much larger slice of the shitty pie.

This is a bit inaccurate. What about truck drivers? They are extra shitty then. But they wouldn’t be extra shitty if they didn’t deliver your Charmin to Costco for you to purchase.

Don’t blame the end-user, blame the system.

Fuck you, I drive so other people don’t have to.

By being eager to gauge people’s location in “the shitty pie”, you’re just admitting your (sic) a much large slice of the shitty pie

That just isn’t true, you just said you could ride a train. You choose not to, that’s a big difference.

But saying rail is significantly slower you narrow your nationality to maybe 5 major nations one happens to be significantly more represented on Lemmy. The “need” to drive safe over reaction to the guess means I’m almost certainly correct. Am I not?

Tbf to the guy you’re responding to, getting the extra 2-3 days of PTO necessary to take the train may also be a contributing factor. There’s a hidden work reform issue baked into this that also needs addressing.

They said they’re an Uber driver…

An optional “profession” that steals money from qualified taxis and is also super abusive towards its employees. That’s not an excuse, that’s an explanation an kinda of a bad one at that.

An optional “profession” that steals money from qualified taxis

It’s not stealing if it doesn’t take it out of their wallet. Maybe the issue is instead the expensive restrictions on becoming a taxi driver? Or the virtual monopoly many taxi companies have. Or just that almost always a taxi is a worse experience.

Why on earth do you get down votes? This is the truth. Downvoters just straw man argue pointing out that ‘just charge your car at home’, which isn’t the matter of discussion. There isn’t even a discussion to be had - it is faster to refuel a car than recharge. Might this matter to you? Maybe, maybe not.

If the car is recharged at home, you may never need to stop to add gas. Electric is the future bro, get over your hangups.

Charging the car at home is for middle class people and above, generally speaking. Not everyone gets to park their car next to an outlet.

You can plug into the standard 120V outlet at home. You don’t require the high amp charging and the installment costs associated

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