When I bought my Volt 10 years ago, I knew more about the car than any of the dealer sales people. I doubt the situation has changed much. That being said, I would hesitate to recommend an EV to a non technically inclined person, because the charging situation is still rough even in CA. Stations are often broken, or the billing doesn’t work, or they are in inconvenient areas. Gas is still the idiot proof option. We will know we’re really in the future when you can go to most grocery stores or strip mall and charge with tap to pay (no stupid app to pre-configure). There has to be 95% reliability. Right now I’d say about 1/5 of stations I visit have something wrong with them in terms of no internet connection for billing, slow charging, illegible UV-damaged screen, or just outright broken hardware. https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/nema-14-50-mobile-charger-lucid-air
Same situation, I have the bolt and volt cars and I drive about the same with the caveat that I coast more often to a stop and make full use of being plugged in at home for warming up or cooling down the car. Really, all you need to know about driving an ev or a hybrid. Everything else is just extra stuff to take care of and make better use of the dollar savings you get with an EV.
On the flipside, I know too many people who don’t care how hard they drive the accelerator and brakes that they would rather get a gas car because of how fast they consume and prioritize time spent fueling vs charging. Really, I save close to 2k/year more than those who drive semi efficiently, and about double that amount vs. the people who are economically irresponsible. Also, I meet a lot of tesla owners who do users using the tesla superchargers who are complaining about how garbage their battery life after 3 years of driving for Uber(20% of degradation). It makes sense why people don’t want to drive an EV. They just don’t want to slow their lives down. They want to constantly keep doing stuff and do it fast. It’s amazing how much instant gratification has made everyone’s lives worse. Even people like me who go slow have to deal with their BS.
I wouldn’t say gas stations have the same frequency of problems honestly. 19 times out of 20, my gas is dispensed without issue. And I’m able to buy it without joining a program or going out of my way. Electric charging is not yet that convenient, and it should be.
Regulating that all petrol gas stations also have charging stations for electricity would be a step in the right direction. That way somebody will be on duty to deal with situations that you’ve mentioned above.
I believe in large the reason for all the malfunctions at charging stations is because they’re unmanned.
You are very wrong. The product most definitely does not suck.
Petrol cars are unbelievably good right now even from bad manufacturers like Chrysler the reliability is through the roof.
Electric cars have come a long way they still have their hiccups but in general they function perfectly fine now. I most definitely will not recommend getting a Tesla from 2013 but something like a Chevy volt or a Volkswagen or a mustang EV are very very good cars.
Subscriptions to use any part of my car and even more tracking than my ICE car are part of the product, and that sucks. I beg to differ on me being wrong, on those two counts specifically.
No matter what the stability, reliability, and safety are, the two things I mentioned are each sufficient grounds to not buy pretty much any of the modern cars, EV or ICE.
What a weird outlook you have. I don’t even have a way to rebut it. You simultaneously agree and disagree with me. And at the same time still your only qualification that makes a car bad is the software which you personally do not like.
There are a myriad of cars out there that don’t have this kind of software built into it. There are even EVs that don’t have the software built into it.
I even agree with you I drive a Volkswagen id4 and the software in it is beyond horrific there have been times where I had to sit around poking around menus trying to figure out how to make my car actually run.
However, in my interpretation the benefits significantly outweigh the negatives of owning an electric vehicle not being tethered to gasoline is an extremely freeing experience. It is also significantly cheaper.
I feel like you just made something up so you don’t have to like EVs.
I feel like you just made something up so you don’t have to like EVs.
The fact that this is your takeaway from my messages (in addition to your general tone) just shows you are trying to push a self-righteous agenda without properly identifying who are your allies and opponents. I abhor ICEs and would have bought an EV by now if not for the scummy companies producing them, and the fact that I basically do not drive anymore so switching my relatively unused car out for any replacement vehicle does not make sense. I’d sooner just sell the car and wash my hands of them entirely.
What a weird outlook you have.
Not likely subscription services and the car manufacturers tracking me is not “weird” it’s well justified. I don’t like my insurance company tracking me either which is why I heavily restrict the permissions their app has (and use a second phone for it). ICE and EV manufacturers have immense overlap and I’ve yet to hear of one that actually respects their customers and doesn’t turn their products into drivable spyware.
I don’t even have a way to rebut it.
Perhaps you should quit the contrarian behavior since you’re not putting in the effort to be one. You’ve already demonstrated you aren’t putting in the effort to read my messages by openly misidentifying me as an EV hater.
You said that reliability and all that is irrelevant, only the tracking and the software on the vehicles is why you don’t like them.
Your original comment said that modern cars suck or a crappy my rebuttle was that they are not they’re significantly more reliable than older cars even from crappy manufacturers.
What in your comments above has anything to do with that?
The world changes things become better and things become worse the fact that you don’t like it is completely irrelevant back in the 80s you could use a flathead screwdriver to start up a car you can’t do that anymore because of modern software and technology.
So circling back around you are wrong, modern cars are better than older ones. Aside from your personal preference of not liking how they make cars today with the technology that’s in them do you have anything to substantiate your claim?
EVs require much less maintenance…dealers make much of their money from… maintenance! So they mark up the sale price to compensate for their lost revenue.
The solution is selling cars without dealerships, but our helpful state legislatures have made that illegal in many states.
And you need a safe place to charge it. Like a garage. I can’t afford a house so why would I buy a Nissan leaf (any cheap ev)? I can’t just run an extention cord out an open window. I also can’t just leave a wireless ground pad charger plugged in unattended outside. It’s all linked, nothing happens in a bubble.
Yeah, I do wonder about the wisdom of locking it to the vehicle. I wonder if it would really deter anyone or if it just means my car is also vandalized for the scrap metal in the cable
I’m not worried about that, but I’ve seen some more cautious people get the cable underneath one of their wheels so that you’d have to move the car to take it. I’m quite sure you could also find another way of attaching or securing it to your car to make it fairly difficult to walk away with. The chargers also aren’t really worth much, so it seems unlikely that even someone desperate for cash would put much effort into it.
It helps to have your own home, and my area doesn’t have much vandalism
My charger is not detachable and is not especially valuable in itself, so I think of it more as vandalism than theft. Someone might vandalize my charger for the metal in the cable, I guess, but I also have an air conditioner compressor outside that I’d expect to be more valuable, if harder to walk away with. As a property owner, there’s always something that could be vandalized or stolen, but you need to balance your costs and convenience with what you expect from your neighbors
The J1772 protocol is very basic and does not communicate any car identifier back to the charge unit, so it wouldn’t know what it’s plugged into (other than “something”)
I smell a solution here: Dealers can offer free charging on their lot (plus optionally a mobile charging service that comes to you) for a monthly fee.
That way, you have a spot to charge in your city that’s never taken, and dealers can make the money they used to make on maintenance, therefore giving them the incentive to actually sell EVs.
Dealers are waiting to see it the country becomes a full on fascist, road warrior, shit-hole country or continue on a path to a modern first world democracy.
PHEV is the worst of both worlds. You have to do maintenance that you would normally do on an ICE. The up front cost is often the same or more than EV or ICE.
It’s a great stop gap and it’s the bridge we need. It would reduce the great majority of emissions (those produced by commuters) while allowing people to drive longer distances without worry.
It buys us time to build out charging infrastructure and introduces people to the concept of a plug in vehicle.
Expecting everyone to switch to full electric overnight is unrealistic. There are still a lot of logistical issues we have to solve.
Nobody is expecting people to switch ‘overnight’. At best it’s only at 2035 and it will probably be later. With how fast charging infra is going it’s mostly just a behavioural issue.
It’s not though. There are lots of use cases that electric vehicles are not suitable for (many covered in this thread). Sure there’s people who could switch and don’t out of fear or unwarranted concern but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re simply not feasible for a lot of people currently and PHEV’s are a great middle ground that can still vastly reduce emissions and that’s the goal here isn’t it?
If there’s a usecase that electric is truly not suitable for at 2035 or even 2040. Then it will be hydrogen or a PHEV with shitty electric range.
You think all those new phevs will be charged literally every trip? Nah it won’t, people are too lazy for that. If the vastly improved electric in 2035 isn’t good enough then a small ass battery phev won’t do shit either.
Charged overnight most PHEV’s have plenty of range for the average person’s daily commute and there’s really no reason range can’t be improved. That’s a huge reduction in emissions.
I want an EV but the only affordable option is Chevy and somewhat the Nissan Leaf. Every other option is way to expensive. If my current car died, I guess I would buy one of them. But I’m going to drive it into ground or until sometime else affordable comes along.
It may also have something to do with all the announcements about changing the charging port. I wouldn’t buy a car when I know they’re changing g that next year. I mean, it’s about time, but that’s going to deter buyers
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When I bought my Volt 10 years ago, I knew more about the car than any of the dealer sales people. I doubt the situation has changed much. That being said, I would hesitate to recommend an EV to a non technically inclined person, because the charging situation is still rough even in CA. Stations are often broken, or the billing doesn’t work, or they are in inconvenient areas. Gas is still the idiot proof option. We will know we’re really in the future when you can go to most grocery stores or strip mall and charge with tap to pay (no stupid app to pre-configure). There has to be 95% reliability. Right now I’d say about 1/5 of stations I visit have something wrong with them in terms of no internet connection for billing, slow charging, illegible UV-damaged screen, or just outright broken hardware. https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/nema-14-50-mobile-charger-lucid-air
Same situation, I have the bolt and volt cars and I drive about the same with the caveat that I coast more often to a stop and make full use of being plugged in at home for warming up or cooling down the car. Really, all you need to know about driving an ev or a hybrid. Everything else is just extra stuff to take care of and make better use of the dollar savings you get with an EV.
On the flipside, I know too many people who don’t care how hard they drive the accelerator and brakes that they would rather get a gas car because of how fast they consume and prioritize time spent fueling vs charging. Really, I save close to 2k/year more than those who drive semi efficiently, and about double that amount vs. the people who are economically irresponsible. Also, I meet a lot of tesla owners who do users using the tesla superchargers who are complaining about how garbage their battery life after 3 years of driving for Uber(20% of degradation). It makes sense why people don’t want to drive an EV. They just don’t want to slow their lives down. They want to constantly keep doing stuff and do it fast. It’s amazing how much instant gratification has made everyone’s lives worse. Even people like me who go slow have to deal with their BS.
ICE vehicles suffer from the same problems, we’re just accustomed to them and understand how to work around the issues.
I wouldn’t say gas stations have the same frequency of problems honestly. 19 times out of 20, my gas is dispensed without issue. And I’m able to buy it without joining a program or going out of my way. Electric charging is not yet that convenient, and it should be.
Standardization is the key.
Regulating that all petrol gas stations also have charging stations for electricity would be a step in the right direction. That way somebody will be on duty to deal with situations that you’ve mentioned above.
I believe in large the reason for all the malfunctions at charging stations is because they’re unmanned.
I would have bought a plug in electric, but my apartment didn’t like the idea of me throwing extension cords out my second story window.
No one expects they should be able to install a gas station in their backyard to buy an ICE vehicle. The issue is infrastructure.
Sure they can. Just give the $7500 credit to an EV worth its price.
Fascinating, have they tried sucking less?
No.
I’m not buying an EV not because of lack of infrastructure or lack of interest, but because the product sucks.
I’m not buying a gas car either for the same product sucking reason, and an active desire to never purchase a gas car again.
You are very wrong. The product most definitely does not suck.
Petrol cars are unbelievably good right now even from bad manufacturers like Chrysler the reliability is through the roof.
Electric cars have come a long way they still have their hiccups but in general they function perfectly fine now. I most definitely will not recommend getting a Tesla from 2013 but something like a Chevy volt or a Volkswagen or a mustang EV are very very good cars.
Subscriptions to use any part of my car and even more tracking than my ICE car are part of the product, and that sucks. I beg to differ on me being wrong, on those two counts specifically.
No matter what the stability, reliability, and safety are, the two things I mentioned are each sufficient grounds to not buy pretty much any of the modern cars, EV or ICE.
What a weird outlook you have. I don’t even have a way to rebut it. You simultaneously agree and disagree with me. And at the same time still your only qualification that makes a car bad is the software which you personally do not like.
There are a myriad of cars out there that don’t have this kind of software built into it. There are even EVs that don’t have the software built into it.
I even agree with you I drive a Volkswagen id4 and the software in it is beyond horrific there have been times where I had to sit around poking around menus trying to figure out how to make my car actually run.
However, in my interpretation the benefits significantly outweigh the negatives of owning an electric vehicle not being tethered to gasoline is an extremely freeing experience. It is also significantly cheaper.
I feel like you just made something up so you don’t have to like EVs.
You said that reliability and all that is irrelevant, only the tracking and the software on the vehicles is why you don’t like them.
Your original comment said that modern cars suck or a crappy my rebuttle was that they are not they’re significantly more reliable than older cars even from crappy manufacturers.
What in your comments above has anything to do with that?
The world changes things become better and things become worse the fact that you don’t like it is completely irrelevant back in the 80s you could use a flathead screwdriver to start up a car you can’t do that anymore because of modern software and technology.
So circling back around you are wrong, modern cars are better than older ones. Aside from your personal preference of not liking how they make cars today with the technology that’s in them do you have anything to substantiate your claim?
When GM killed the Bolt, I tried to buy one at two different dealerships near me. One wanted a $10k premium over MSRP and the other wanted $8k.
They also both had a non-negotiable “security” etching added and wheel protection whatever that I had to pay for.
It isn’t that I didn’t want one, it’s that your dealerships fucked it up.
Honestly, may have settled for MSRP, but they wouldn’t budge. Fuck off.
EVs require much less maintenance…dealers make much of their money from… maintenance! So they mark up the sale price to compensate for their lost revenue.
The solution is selling cars without dealerships, but our helpful state legislatures have made that illegal in many states.
And you need a safe place to charge it. Like a garage. I can’t afford a house so why would I buy a Nissan leaf (any cheap ev)? I can’t just run an extention cord out an open window. I also can’t just leave a wireless ground pad charger plugged in unattended outside. It’s all linked, nothing happens in a bubble.
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I don’t know about other chargers but my Tesla charger is designed for outside use and can be configured to only allow my car to charge
And you just…trust other tenants to not just walk off with it?
That’s a problem that is pretty easily solved. It can all be solidly affixed to the wall, locked to the vehicle, etc.
Yeah, I do wonder about the wisdom of locking it to the vehicle. I wonder if it would really deter anyone or if it just means my car is also vandalized for the scrap metal in the cable
I’m not worried about that, but I’ve seen some more cautious people get the cable underneath one of their wheels so that you’d have to move the car to take it. I’m quite sure you could also find another way of attaching or securing it to your car to make it fairly difficult to walk away with. The chargers also aren’t really worth much, so it seems unlikely that even someone desperate for cash would put much effort into it.
It helps to have your own home, and my area doesn’t have much vandalism
My charger is not detachable and is not especially valuable in itself, so I think of it more as vandalism than theft. Someone might vandalize my charger for the metal in the cable, I guess, but I also have an air conditioner compressor outside that I’d expect to be more valuable, if harder to walk away with. As a property owner, there’s always something that could be vandalized or stolen, but you need to balance your costs and convenience with what you expect from your neighbors
The J1772 protocol is very basic and does not communicate any car identifier back to the charge unit, so it wouldn’t know what it’s plugged into (other than “something”)
I smell a solution here: Dealers can offer free charging on their lot (plus optionally a mobile charging service that comes to you) for a monthly fee.
That way, you have a spot to charge in your city that’s never taken, and dealers can make the money they used to make on maintenance, therefore giving them the incentive to actually sell EVs.
Other wires come in and out of your house. It’s not hard to drill a hole and insulate it.
This is exactly what my neighbor does in his apartment.
But he has a driveway, so it’s not like he’s running it over the sidewalk or anything.
oh… no… nobody want to buy a car with small range for 3 times higher price?
It’s that the lots literally don’t have space because people aren’t buying 50k cars they are selling.
Dealers are waiting to see it the country becomes a full on fascist, road warrior, shit-hole country or continue on a path to a modern first world democracy.
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PHEV is the worst of both worlds. You have to do maintenance that you would normally do on an ICE. The up front cost is often the same or more than EV or ICE.
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PHEV isn’t a solution. It’s a shitty stopgap
It’s a great stop gap and it’s the bridge we need. It would reduce the great majority of emissions (those produced by commuters) while allowing people to drive longer distances without worry.
It buys us time to build out charging infrastructure and introduces people to the concept of a plug in vehicle.
Expecting everyone to switch to full electric overnight is unrealistic. There are still a lot of logistical issues we have to solve.
A lot of people with PHEVs don’t plug in at all. So it’s actually worse for emissions.
Nobody is expecting people to switch ‘overnight’. At best it’s only at 2035 and it will probably be later. With how fast charging infra is going it’s mostly just a behavioural issue.
It’s not though. There are lots of use cases that electric vehicles are not suitable for (many covered in this thread). Sure there’s people who could switch and don’t out of fear or unwarranted concern but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re simply not feasible for a lot of people currently and PHEV’s are a great middle ground that can still vastly reduce emissions and that’s the goal here isn’t it?
If there’s a usecase that electric is truly not suitable for at 2035 or even 2040. Then it will be hydrogen or a PHEV with shitty electric range.
You think all those new phevs will be charged literally every trip? Nah it won’t, people are too lazy for that. If the vastly improved electric in 2035 isn’t good enough then a small ass battery phev won’t do shit either.
Charged overnight most PHEV’s have plenty of range for the average person’s daily commute and there’s really no reason range can’t be improved. That’s a huge reduction in emissions.
If they can be charged overnight, sounds great for an EV usecase then. Americans aren’t commuting 300 miles a day.
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I want an EV but the only affordable option is Chevy and somewhat the Nissan Leaf. Every other option is way to expensive. If my current car died, I guess I would buy one of them. But I’m going to drive it into ground or until sometime else affordable comes along.
I think driving your car to the ground is the most environment friendly approach anyway regardless of the type of car you’ll buy next.
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It may also have something to do with all the announcements about changing the charging port. I wouldn’t buy a car when I know they’re changing g that next year. I mean, it’s about time, but that’s going to deter buyers
That and the slow rollout the manufacturers have done in moving to EV.