I just did a 2 day 2000 mile trip in my long range model 3. Total charging costs were around $100, which didn’t include two stops where the superchargers were free (network connectivity problems?). Required a total of 13 supercharging stops. Each stop was between 20min to 45min. I started off completely full, and charged overnight at a Tesla destination charger, (so, 14 stops?). Roughly half the cost of the article’s reported charging costs.
At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked.
What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that.
At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert.
Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.
I've done multiple ~1000mi road trips in my Model X, and I've peed in a lot of bushes too. A lot of the newer chargers (at least on the east coast) are located at WaWa's, and have 24hr restrooms. But the chargers at malls are a pain. Either the mall is closed, and you need to pee in the bushes, or the mall is open and the traffic is terrible and the chargers are ICE'ed in.
There is one charger in Hardee SC thats in the parking lot of a police station. I was a bit nervous to use the bushes there..
In the UK an ancient law says it is legal to pee against the rear wheel of your carriage.
Don’t try “googling” the validity of this law. The mainstream (ahem) media anti-public-disorder industrial complex seems to have polluted cyberspace with articles falsely claiming this law is a myth. Stand up for your rights and pee on your wheels.
/s
See also: British women having the right to urinate in a policeman’s helmet if they are caught short in public (and are pregnant.)
I did a 1,857mile (2,989km) road trip including some of the more remote parts of Scotland in an electric car last year. Interestingly most of the ChargePlace Scotland chargers were in public car parks, which have public toilets. The Highland Council even has a map of public toilets. All very civilised.
When it comes to Tesla superchargers in the UK, most are in service stations, which tend to be open all the time, and indeed were some of the few facilities to remain open in the strictest periods of lockdown given that good transportation was classed as essential service. There are a few superchargers by hotels and restaurants, but in my experience they're always fine with you using their facilities (the main issue seems to be a few who charge excessive parking fines if you don't register with them while charging).
It's interesting that these charging stations are even permitted to be built without restrooms.
No gas station built today would be exempt from that requirement. Although I can think of at least a few unattended gas pumps that also are without restrooms.
It's obviously an emerging market, but it seems like charging stations would be suited for bucee's or even truck stop style facilities, with areas to rest, eat, shower, etc. At least compared to consumer based gas stations. I'm not sure what the economics of building those would look like without selling hundreds of gallons of diesel at a time.
The non-Tesla public chargers I used are pretty well all at gas stations or big-box stores. So there's always a bathroom, a fast-food joint, and sometimes even a real-food diner.
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [...] There’s no excuse not to.
Isn't there?
Right now for me to own a Ford Mach E, a Tesla Model 3 or a RAV4 Prime is $3400 to $3700 per year for comprehensive insurance, $1400 a year for liability only. My SUV right now costs $1100 a year to insure comprehensive, but even a 2021 Acura NSX or Jaguar F-Pace is only $1400 for the same level of insurance that I have right now.
I only spend about $1200 a year on gasoline for the SUV and another $200 for regular maintenance. So right out the gate, assuming electricity is free and tire rotations are free, I'm already looking at least $900/yr increase in operating expense.
And then there's the upfront; the above is on top of the $10,000 to $20,000 more I'd have to spend to buy an EV vs a comparably sized and equipped ICE. And an additional $1500 to $2000 to have my garage accommodate charging a car, assuming main panel doesn't need upgrading and only installing a 240V circuit.
Right now it's a detached garage with a single 120v to it, so it's retrenching and installation of new conduit and wire, installing a new sub panel in the garage, and rewiring everything. Not going to count the cost of a level 2 DC charger (Chevrolet and Kia are offering one as an incentive for purchase). Main uncertainty is whether or not the main panel would need to be upgraded.
If I didn't have a garage, I'd also have to be super concerned about charging stations though. You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit. A nearby truck depot gets the copper wire cut from the trucks battery systems sitting there overnight every few months.
120v over night will add about 45 miles of range to your typical tesla. Most people drive less than 20 miles a day, so you always start out with a full tank. When I go skiing, I drive 120 miles, so I come back with a lot of range depleted, but it charges up the next few days. On the rare occasions over the past 8 years when I needed to go a long distance, I just use the super charger in my town, although once I went to a pay place that has 220v and 40 amps (so instead of ~3.5 miles of range per house, I added 20 miles of range per hour). What doesn't work with 120v regular power outlet charging? If you drive 250 miles and spend 5 minutes and then need to drive 200 more miles. That is pretty rare.
"In this context, there’s another number there that I think is really interesting: The “km/c-h”, how far you can get on an hour’s charge. For this particular car on this selection of chargers, it was over 200km (124 miles) per charge-hour. I think that’s enough? Maybe in the lower regions of enough, but there."
So at 110km/h, less than 2 hours of driving for every hour spent charging? In what world is that close to "enough"?
My next car will likely be an EV, but the evangelists hand-waving away limitations like this do nobody any favors.
Yes it is ridiculous to claim that this is somehow minor.
That said, there are electric cars far better for road trips than the Jaguar mentioned in this story.
A long range Tesla Model 3 will easily do about 350km within its 10-80% state of charge bounds and the charging stops can be limited to 20-30 minutes each.
Experienced EV drivers with good EVs can achieve 100km/h average speed INCLUDING stoppages for charging.
Exactly right. EVs are perfect for day-to-day commutes and what not where it's drive a distance, let it sit for several hours (while at work or at home at night), lather-rinse-repeat. Long distance continuous driving would be brutal with an hour pitstop every couple of hours.
I'm from Helsinki but live in Berlin, and drive between the two somewhat regularly. For this trip you essentially have two options - either via Denmark and Sweden, or Poland and the Baltics. You need to take a ferry to reach Finland regardless of which route you pick.
The experience and emissions differ pretty dramatically. Intuitively you might think the total emissions would be lower for the Baltic route because of the significantly shorter ferry trip, but this is more than negated by how dirty the grid is in Poland and Estonia. Polish electricity production is about 100x as polluting as Swedish electricity.
The Nordic route also wins in terms of infrastructure. There are plenty of Superchargers as well as non-Tesla charging stations, located at highway rest stops with good services. Making the 1000km+ drive in one day isn't a big deal at all, and I find that plugging the car in for the time it takes to go to the restroom and grab some food is enough to continue the trip.
> You need to take a ferry to reach Finland regardless of which route you pick.
Well technically not on the Sweden route but it would be crazy to drive the extra to go all the way north to Tornio and then drive back south to Helsinki instead of just taking the ferry from Stockholm (this adds around 1300km to the trip)
I did a similar roadtrip back in 2015 (!) in my ex-boss's Tesla Model S: we traveled from Montréal to Atlanta for a weekend conference (JSConf, IIRC). We were driving continuously, switching drivers every time we hit a charger (we were 4 in the car). I think it took us about 24h to do the trip.
My main takeaway from the experience is that charging wasn't actually "painful" at all. On the contrary, it was a welcome break every time. Most times we even exceeded the charging time the car was asking for, because we found something interesting to do (like eating dinner in a nice restaurant).
When I was on the marked earlier this year, I really wanted to get an EV, but there aren't any that comfortably seat 6 (I have 4 kids). We ended up with a PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica), and I love it. Next car is going to be an EV, though.
I find this kind of "it's great to have a break" justification tiring. Glad that you found something to do while your car is charging, but pretending it's not a limitation feels like just glossing over something that does make it less flexible, whether that was a problem for you or not.
Also, charging by the minute seems wrong .... a Porsche Taycan is going to get a whole lot more range out of each minute than a five-year-old Nissan Leaf, so why should they pay less for the same amount of range? Hmmmm.
Bear in mind that at home with the Level 2 charger in the carport, charging feels close to free.
You are primarily paying rent to take up a charging spot vs. buying electricity. If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.
Yeah, I own an EV with piss poor fast charge rates so it pains me to say this, but charging per minute is probably the right move. It certainly feels like the bottleneck right now is charger availability, not amount of electricity available. We should be incentivizing higher charge rates to make the chargers more accessible especially as EV penetration increases.
Nothing more annoying than arriving at a charger on a roadtrip and having to wait 45 minutes just to start your charge because all the spots are full. And don't even get me started on the people who just leave their EV on the charger for hours at a time even after fully charged.
IIRC the primary reason there are any chargers with bill by the minute is that in some jurisdictions it is illegal for any entity other than the electric utility to sell power by the kWh.
> If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.
I wouldn't be so sure, not in the US anyways. It sounds like a captive audience, and convenience store+gas station combos are already known to generate more profit from the overpriced crap inside than the gas since gas prices are so cut-throat competitive. There's already a few gas stations around me that I explicitly avoid because their pumps are notoriously slow to pump. If gambling were legal here, they'd have video slots in the convenience store.
About a week or so ago the Greek PM (I think it was the PM) strongly advised his fellow Greek compatriots to use less air conditioning because the electrical grid was very close to collapsing. No way one can add a few million EVs to that grid.
And Greece is a EU member with a resonably well functioning economy (ignoring the financial crisis from a decade ago), I fail to see how poorer countries will be able to make all this work.
It varies from country to country. If your grid is at the brink of collapse, it might be a challenge.
Here in Germany, even changing all cars to electric would increase the total electricity consumption by less than 20%, not counting in the elektricity savings by no longer providing gasoline. This would probably doable by todays grid and the transition to electric cars will take 15 years even in the best circumstances, just by comparing the 45 million cars owned with the 3 million cars sold every year. Enough time to do adjustments to the grid where needed.
One also needs to consider how much electric cars can be beneficial for the grid. With charging of parked cars remotely controlled, they can help with stabilizing the grid.
An electric car in Germany uses about 8kWh/day - that is probably less that the AC unit now use in Greece. And if Greece doesn't have ample solar yet, it would be about time to change that urgently.
An interesting anecdote, but I've never understood why anyone would willingly drive a car (electric or otherwise) such a long distance. The longest I've ever driven in a single trip was a bit over 750 km, and I think I slept for 16 hours straight after I arrived. The next time I took that same trip, I rode the train instead.
Sometimes the train trip is absolute hell e.g. you need to switch a lot with significant delay inbetween, and the trip ends up significantly longer by car.
You can use the train trip to read (or sleep if you can do that, I can't) but you also can't really put your music or podcasts and you have to deal with other people. The train changes can also be very stressful.
Then there's traveling at your destination, if you need a car at your arrival the advantage of the train plummet, whether you need to rent one (which is expensive) or borrow one (which imposes on your hosts).
FWIW that's exactly why despite being in europe after years of taking the train when I go back to see my family I ended up now renting a car instead (I usually live car-free):
* both my own home and my family are a bit out-of-the-way, there's public transport (though not ideal) around my own home but none at the destination so I'd need to impose e.g. be fetched at the train station, with regular issues of delays and friends
* by train the entire trip takes about 8 hours, with 6 transport changes (some rather annoying / stressful), by car I can take a more direct route so it only takes 0530, and I can stop when I want (I usually end up stopping twice and taking between 0600 and 06:30)
* by train there is no real independence unless I rent a car anyway, I just end up bothering to go see the rest of the family, meanwhile renting a car lets me more actively help
* even if I don't rent a car at the destination, the financial gain of the train is basically nil, the train is rather expensive unless I take a slow train and basically need two days to make the trip
* and finally carrying shit in the train is a pain in the ass, both ways, I can easily load presents or stuff in a rental car, and bring comfort food or whatever back, there is no space premium of any sort
Different people react differently to long car trips. I can drive the 1,800 miles to my wife's family in one shot, especially given time to nap while charging and the driver automation taking up the slack for being tired. I can then have a normal nights sleep and be fine.
My wife, on the other hand, being a passenger for such a trip, she arrives and then is wasted for 2 days.
But if you really want to be miserable on a trip... Take a train. My wife and son did that same trip by train a few years ago and: was delayed a solid day by flooding, lost power, had to suffer with malfunctioning toilets for part of the trip, and it cost more than flying or driving (counting hotels).
As someone who has driven across Canada on numerous occasions, it's a special kind of zen. I did BC to Newfoundland by myself, and 16-hour driving days were normal. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
It also depends on the car, for example, driving 750km with my GTI in a day would really tire me, as it is very uncomfortable. On the other hand, my father’s A8 is very, very comfortable, and I could drive it for 12 hours a day and not feel that tired.
If my math is correct, driving 1,725km in a Prius (assume 6L/100KM - which is fairly conservative) would cost about $135 CDN in fuel - (approx. $1.30 per litre).
Not much more than $120 spent on charging. For a car that is much less expensive than the Jaguar.
Environmental considerations aside, this is a tough sell for most consumers.
For most long trips are rare so if 90% of your miles are charged from home (for much less than the cost of gas) you’d prefer charging outside of home to be more easily available even if it comes out more expensive than gas for that particular trip.
Even if you set aside environmental considerations (which is mental) the gas is only a tiny portion of the value proposition of EVs. In 5 years of used leaf driving i've visited 0 gas stations, 0 repair shops, 0 emissions inspectors. It's the burden of all that mess that you get to avoid, not a just $0.15 on the dollar savings.
There’s this documentary I really enjoyed watching called “Long Way Up” where Ewan McGregor (plus another actor I was not familiar with) rode from Tierra del Fuego to Los Angeles on electric motorcycles.
They talk a lot about the pros/cons of going electric, and there are issues with like cold temperatures affecting battery performance at the start.
But I also found that I just really enjoyed the show even excluding that.
I’ve done 1300km in two days in an EV comfortably along the east coast of Australia. ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving, charge overnight at the hotel, ~4h driving, 1hr charge and lunch, ~4h driving and arrive at destination. Same in reverse. Cost was only charging at home to 100% before departing (under $10) at both ends. The supercharging was free. The autopilot makes a huge difference to driver fatigue, and keeps paying attention when you’re distracted by kids in the back (saving me from at least one accident). It really has made it more of a difficult choice between flying and driving across the major cities on the east coast of Australia. Going further west is possible, but will just take a bit more planning.
One could generalize Tim Bray's "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now." into "everyone should stop burning stuff ASAP". Burning stuff is the largest source of CO2 emissions.
The two largest sources of direct personal CO2 emissions are transportation and heating and/or cooling our homes.
For personal transportation, EVs are a great replacement for ICE. They allow you to stop burning fuel directly and instead buy electricity. They're improving really fast, to a degree they're getting usable even for 1000 mile trips. And they use less energy, about a third of an ICE.
For heating and cooling homes there's heat pump, which uses electricity to pump the heat either into the house when in heating mode or pumping heat out of home when in cooling mode. No more dealing with soot, ash, and chimneys, and they're so efficient that you get more heat if professionals burn gas in power plants to power your heat pump than you would get if you burned the gas directly.
Both these allow you to drastically reduce your direct CO2 footprint, also known as scope 1 emissions.
A lot of electricity is produced by burning stuff, that's where it makes sense to get solar panels to try to produce most of your consumption or at least offset your use. Those are a modern miracle - getting 20% of sun's energy into usable form is far better than photosynthesis, which gets few percent at most.
While Tim says "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles now", I acknowledge that it's logistically impossible to replace all the vehicles overnight. But the car market in the USA sells about 4 million of new cars every year, and those really should be electric if at all possible. Buying an ICE is essentially buying a 10-year subscription to fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.
I drove 2000 km in a single day, on a number of occasions, when I was younger. I don't see how anyone could do it in less than 3 days with this many charge stops.
I had no idea the range of electric cars was so short. I expected that they'd do better at cruising speed on the highways, because the mpg in my car goes up as I get up to 70 MPH. Apparently a Tesla Model 3 is only good for 289 miles at that speed before giving up the ghost.
13*40 --> 520 miles is what I'd expect to get out of our car.
Electric cars tend to be the opposite as far as highway vs city MPGs. Range at 80MPH is far worse than at lower speeds because of air resistance. On the other end of the spectrum, around town they do better because of regeneration capturing a lot of the stop and go that kills gas car range.
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [ ... ] There’s no excuse not to.
Admirable sentiments, but can anyone point definitively to the net gain/loss in CO2 terms of actually ditching a fossil fuel based car and replacing it with a new EV? And how does that look if the FF car is something like a Honda Fit (good mileage, lower than typical emissions)?
I'd be willing to dump our Fit for some sort of EV, but I'm really not convinced that it's helping climate change to do so.
Wait until the author finds out how the batteries are made.
EDIT: just to be clear, I am not a "climate change denier"...although always interested to have lots of random people attempt to diagnose me. I worked in equity research, I have seen mountains of reports on this topic: lithium and cobalt production are terrible for the environment (ignoring issues with forced labour and human cost at mines, most people who mine this stuff won't make it 50), this is why Tesla is acting (onshoring production, attempting to alter their supply chain, focusing on increasing battery life)...but if you buy one today, the effect on the environment is going to be pretty negligible...relative to people taking their PJ every two days, relative to coal-powered electricity, and even relative to ICE cars with good MPG. This has nothing to do with my views on climate change, and everything to do with how electric batteries are produced. And personally (I will take my turn diagnosis), my view is that people buy the car, and then go about judging other people...because people, particularly wealthy people in my experience, like judging other people...climate change is a way for wealthy people to feel less guilty about being wealthy when they drive past a homeless person in a tent. If you are concerned about climate change: there are still coal mines in the US, still coal mines in China, coal consumption isn't going to peak until 2030...it is just madness to suggest what we really need is for poor people to go out and buy a $40k car because wealthy people said so.
There are many people driving from London to Warsaw on a semi-regular basis. That a 1000+ mile drive. It can be done in 19 hours with a ferry crossing. I’ve done it myself a number of times. Relaxing drive takes 22 hours.
There is no reason this should take twice as long.
Is there an website where I can see what a long distance trip plan for a electric vehicle would be, how long it would take including the charging times?
[+] [-] jmpman|4 years ago|reply
At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked.
What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that.
At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert.
Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.
[+] [-] drewg123|4 years ago|reply
There is one charger in Hardee SC thats in the parking lot of a police station. I was a bit nervous to use the bushes there..
[+] [-] gorgoiler|4 years ago|reply
Don’t try “googling” the validity of this law. The mainstream (ahem) media anti-public-disorder industrial complex seems to have polluted cyberspace with articles falsely claiming this law is a myth. Stand up for your rights and pee on your wheels.
/s
See also: British women having the right to urinate in a policeman’s helmet if they are caught short in public (and are pregnant.)
[+] [-] m-i-l|4 years ago|reply
When it comes to Tesla superchargers in the UK, most are in service stations, which tend to be open all the time, and indeed were some of the few facilities to remain open in the strictest periods of lockdown given that good transportation was classed as essential service. There are a few superchargers by hotels and restaurants, but in my experience they're always fine with you using their facilities (the main issue seems to be a few who charge excessive parking fines if you don't register with them while charging).
[+] [-] beerandt|4 years ago|reply
No gas station built today would be exempt from that requirement. Although I can think of at least a few unattended gas pumps that also are without restrooms.
It's obviously an emerging market, but it seems like charging stations would be suited for bucee's or even truck stop style facilities, with areas to rest, eat, shower, etc. At least compared to consumer based gas stations. I'm not sure what the economics of building those would look like without selling hundreds of gallons of diesel at a time.
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbray|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|4 years ago|reply
"The PAINS of Living with an EV! My WORST Experience Yet"
https://youtu.be/XwevvreoNjE
[+] [-] carcostthrow|4 years ago|reply
Isn't there?
Right now for me to own a Ford Mach E, a Tesla Model 3 or a RAV4 Prime is $3400 to $3700 per year for comprehensive insurance, $1400 a year for liability only. My SUV right now costs $1100 a year to insure comprehensive, but even a 2021 Acura NSX or Jaguar F-Pace is only $1400 for the same level of insurance that I have right now.
I only spend about $1200 a year on gasoline for the SUV and another $200 for regular maintenance. So right out the gate, assuming electricity is free and tire rotations are free, I'm already looking at least $900/yr increase in operating expense.
And then there's the upfront; the above is on top of the $10,000 to $20,000 more I'd have to spend to buy an EV vs a comparably sized and equipped ICE. And an additional $1500 to $2000 to have my garage accommodate charging a car, assuming main panel doesn't need upgrading and only installing a 240V circuit.
Right now it's a detached garage with a single 120v to it, so it's retrenching and installation of new conduit and wire, installing a new sub panel in the garage, and rewiring everything. Not going to count the cost of a level 2 DC charger (Chevrolet and Kia are offering one as an incentive for purchase). Main uncertainty is whether or not the main panel would need to be upgraded.
If I didn't have a garage, I'd also have to be super concerned about charging stations though. You leave an extension cord more then once out overnight, it will get stolen; the copper in it is worth a dollar or two. I can't imagine how fast a $200 charging cable with $10 of scrap copper in it wouldn't get swiped. It's unfortunately common here, there's quite a few sections of street where the street lights have been knock out for months now due to copper thieves ripping it out of the conduit. A nearby truck depot gets the copper wire cut from the trucks battery systems sitting there overnight every few months.
So... yeah. There's my excuse. Money.
[+] [-] NotSammyHagar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alvah|4 years ago|reply
So at 110km/h, less than 2 hours of driving for every hour spent charging? In what world is that close to "enough"? My next car will likely be an EV, but the evangelists hand-waving away limitations like this do nobody any favors.
[+] [-] abraxas|4 years ago|reply
That said, there are electric cars far better for road trips than the Jaguar mentioned in this story.
A long range Tesla Model 3 will easily do about 350km within its 10-80% state of charge bounds and the charging stops can be limited to 20-30 minutes each.
Experienced EV drivers with good EVs can achieve 100km/h average speed INCLUDING stoppages for charging.
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aakour|4 years ago|reply
The experience and emissions differ pretty dramatically. Intuitively you might think the total emissions would be lower for the Baltic route because of the significantly shorter ferry trip, but this is more than negated by how dirty the grid is in Poland and Estonia. Polish electricity production is about 100x as polluting as Swedish electricity.
The Nordic route also wins in terms of infrastructure. There are plenty of Superchargers as well as non-Tesla charging stations, located at highway rest stops with good services. Making the 1000km+ drive in one day isn't a big deal at all, and I find that plugging the car in for the time it takes to go to the restroom and grab some food is enough to continue the trip.
[+] [-] doikor|4 years ago|reply
Well technically not on the Sweden route but it would be crazy to drive the extra to go all the way north to Tornio and then drive back south to Helsinki instead of just taking the ferry from Stockholm (this adds around 1300km to the trip)
[+] [-] ant6n|4 years ago|reply
... What would be really nice on that route would be a sleeper service, once that tunnel between Finland and Estonia and rail Baltica is built.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
I'm getting old. The thought of driving 600+ miles in a single day sounds like hell.
[+] [-] emilecantin|4 years ago|reply
My main takeaway from the experience is that charging wasn't actually "painful" at all. On the contrary, it was a welcome break every time. Most times we even exceeded the charging time the car was asking for, because we found something interesting to do (like eating dinner in a nice restaurant).
When I was on the marked earlier this year, I really wanted to get an EV, but there aren't any that comfortably seat 6 (I have 4 kids). We ended up with a PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica), and I love it. Next car is going to be an EV, though.
[+] [-] version_five|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cd00d|4 years ago|reply
Maybe your kids are all too big for those rear-facing seats?
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aperocky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ortusdux|4 years ago|reply
Bear in mind that at home with the Level 2 charger in the carport, charging feels close to free.
You are primarily paying rent to take up a charging spot vs. buying electricity. If it took some vehicles 45 minutes to pump 20 gallons of diesel, I guarantee stations would start charging per minute.
[+] [-] nharada|4 years ago|reply
Nothing more annoying than arriving at a charger on a roadtrip and having to wait 45 minutes just to start your charge because all the spots are full. And don't even get me started on the people who just leave their EV on the charger for hours at a time even after fully charged.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pengaru|4 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be so sure, not in the US anyways. It sounds like a captive audience, and convenience store+gas station combos are already known to generate more profit from the overpriced crap inside than the gas since gas prices are so cut-throat competitive. There's already a few gas stations around me that I explicitly avoid because their pumps are notoriously slow to pump. If gambling were legal here, they'd have video slots in the convenience store.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
Except of course there aren't nearly enough electric vehicles to make this a possibility, and if they did the grid capacity wouldn't be there.
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
And Greece is a EU member with a resonably well functioning economy (ignoring the financial crisis from a decade ago), I fail to see how poorer countries will be able to make all this work.
[+] [-] _ph_|4 years ago|reply
Here in Germany, even changing all cars to electric would increase the total electricity consumption by less than 20%, not counting in the elektricity savings by no longer providing gasoline. This would probably doable by todays grid and the transition to electric cars will take 15 years even in the best circumstances, just by comparing the 45 million cars owned with the 3 million cars sold every year. Enough time to do adjustments to the grid where needed.
One also needs to consider how much electric cars can be beneficial for the grid. With charging of parked cars remotely controlled, they can help with stabilizing the grid.
An electric car in Germany uses about 8kWh/day - that is probably less that the AC unit now use in Greece. And if Greece doesn't have ample solar yet, it would be about time to change that urgently.
[+] [-] thescriptkiddie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|4 years ago|reply
You can use the train trip to read (or sleep if you can do that, I can't) but you also can't really put your music or podcasts and you have to deal with other people. The train changes can also be very stressful.
Then there's traveling at your destination, if you need a car at your arrival the advantage of the train plummet, whether you need to rent one (which is expensive) or borrow one (which imposes on your hosts).
FWIW that's exactly why despite being in europe after years of taking the train when I go back to see my family I ended up now renting a car instead (I usually live car-free):
* both my own home and my family are a bit out-of-the-way, there's public transport (though not ideal) around my own home but none at the destination so I'd need to impose e.g. be fetched at the train station, with regular issues of delays and friends
* by train the entire trip takes about 8 hours, with 6 transport changes (some rather annoying / stressful), by car I can take a more direct route so it only takes 0530, and I can stop when I want (I usually end up stopping twice and taking between 0600 and 06:30)
* by train there is no real independence unless I rent a car anyway, I just end up bothering to go see the rest of the family, meanwhile renting a car lets me more actively help
* even if I don't rent a car at the destination, the financial gain of the train is basically nil, the train is rather expensive unless I take a slow train and basically need two days to make the trip
* and finally carrying shit in the train is a pain in the ass, both ways, I can easily load presents or stuff in a rental car, and bring comfort food or whatever back, there is no space premium of any sort
[+] [-] linsomniac|4 years ago|reply
My wife, on the other hand, being a passenger for such a trip, she arrives and then is wasted for 2 days.
But if you really want to be miserable on a trip... Take a train. My wife and son did that same trip by train a few years ago and: was delayed a solid day by flooding, lost power, had to suffer with malfunctioning toilets for part of the trip, and it cost more than flying or driving (counting hotels).
[+] [-] mig39|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csunbird|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wstrange|4 years ago|reply
Not much more than $120 spent on charging. For a car that is much less expensive than the Jaguar.
Environmental considerations aside, this is a tough sell for most consumers.
[+] [-] laurencerowe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elif|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senkora|4 years ago|reply
They talk a lot about the pros/cons of going electric, and there are issues with like cold temperatures affecting battery performance at the start.
But I also found that I just really enjoyed the show even excluding that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up
[+] [-] Hamuko|4 years ago|reply
I have my doubts that everyone can switch over to a (prices starting at) $70,000 electric car like the author can.
[+] [-] nreilly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zejn|4 years ago|reply
The two largest sources of direct personal CO2 emissions are transportation and heating and/or cooling our homes.
For personal transportation, EVs are a great replacement for ICE. They allow you to stop burning fuel directly and instead buy electricity. They're improving really fast, to a degree they're getting usable even for 1000 mile trips. And they use less energy, about a third of an ICE.
For heating and cooling homes there's heat pump, which uses electricity to pump the heat either into the house when in heating mode or pumping heat out of home when in cooling mode. No more dealing with soot, ash, and chimneys, and they're so efficient that you get more heat if professionals burn gas in power plants to power your heat pump than you would get if you burned the gas directly.
Both these allow you to drastically reduce your direct CO2 footprint, also known as scope 1 emissions.
A lot of electricity is produced by burning stuff, that's where it makes sense to get solar panels to try to produce most of your consumption or at least offset your use. Those are a modern miracle - getting 20% of sun's energy into usable form is far better than photosynthesis, which gets few percent at most.
While Tim says "everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles now", I acknowledge that it's logistically impossible to replace all the vehicles overnight. But the car market in the USA sells about 4 million of new cars every year, and those really should be electric if at all possible. Buying an ICE is essentially buying a 10-year subscription to fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
I had no idea the range of electric cars was so short. I expected that they'd do better at cruising speed on the highways, because the mpg in my car goes up as I get up to 70 MPH. Apparently a Tesla Model 3 is only good for 289 miles at that speed before giving up the ghost.
13*40 --> 520 miles is what I'd expect to get out of our car.
[+] [-] linsomniac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
>And everyone should stop driving fossil vehicles starting now. [ ... ] There’s no excuse not to.
Admirable sentiments, but can anyone point definitively to the net gain/loss in CO2 terms of actually ditching a fossil fuel based car and replacing it with a new EV? And how does that look if the FF car is something like a Honda Fit (good mileage, lower than typical emissions)?
I'd be willing to dump our Fit for some sort of EV, but I'm really not convinced that it's helping climate change to do so.
Change my mind?
[+] [-] hogFeast|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: just to be clear, I am not a "climate change denier"...although always interested to have lots of random people attempt to diagnose me. I worked in equity research, I have seen mountains of reports on this topic: lithium and cobalt production are terrible for the environment (ignoring issues with forced labour and human cost at mines, most people who mine this stuff won't make it 50), this is why Tesla is acting (onshoring production, attempting to alter their supply chain, focusing on increasing battery life)...but if you buy one today, the effect on the environment is going to be pretty negligible...relative to people taking their PJ every two days, relative to coal-powered electricity, and even relative to ICE cars with good MPG. This has nothing to do with my views on climate change, and everything to do with how electric batteries are produced. And personally (I will take my turn diagnosis), my view is that people buy the car, and then go about judging other people...because people, particularly wealthy people in my experience, like judging other people...climate change is a way for wealthy people to feel less guilty about being wealthy when they drive past a homeless person in a tent. If you are concerned about climate change: there are still coal mines in the US, still coal mines in China, coal consumption isn't going to peak until 2030...it is just madness to suggest what we really need is for poor people to go out and buy a $40k car because wealthy people said so.
[+] [-] rad_gruchalski|4 years ago|reply
There is no reason this should take twice as long.
[+] [-] 238475235243|4 years ago|reply
It's cheaper, autopilot is pretty great, has a vastly better charging network, charges vastly quicker...
I guess it means you can write blog posts about bad experiences with an electric car...
[+] [-] omega3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isodude|4 years ago|reply