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Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 44 points 2 years ago (26 children)

I would like to buy an electric car but I will not because;

  1. I don't have a garage.
  2. I live in a very wintery climate and don't trust the battery to take it/don't want to heat a battery
  3. The closest chargers are at least 50 km away in other towns
  4. My house has 60 amp service (upgrading that is on the todo list, but it's a long list)
  5. I don't trust the battery to last longer than the life of the lease
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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (40 children)

    Most of those fears aren't completely valid anymore.

    1. You can park it outside.
    2. winter gets you less mileage but not the end of the world, some of the fastest growing EV markets are cold countries.
    3. You might be surprised, a lot of grocery stores and even workplaces have some basic charging capabilities. Plus you can charge at home.
    4. If you have an electric dryer you can charge your car overnight, just don't do both together.
    5. Batteries will outlast any lease, if you're looking to get 10-15 years out of a car that would be understandable, but if you're leasing it won't be a problem.
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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think it's unreasonable to expect 10+ years or more out of a car without shelling out a large sum of money for a battery swap. This is probably my only concern. Repairability and the cost of those repairs.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I don't think I said that's an unreasonable concern anywhere. If the EV offering doesn't meet your requirements now, don't get one.

    Current EVs meet a lot of people's requirement, so they're getting more popular. They're also getting better, cheaper, charge faster, last longer, have longer range, and weigh less every year. They're literally getting better in every way faster than anyone thought possible thanks to how popular they are.

    Hopefully soon there will be an EV that does match your requirement. Maybe there never will be, but you'll probably be in the minority and that's for the best because we need to get ICE passenger vehicles off the road and into niche applications where nothing else works.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    If the EV offering doesn't meet your requirements now, don't get one.

    That's it exactly. 7 years ago EV's were way out of my price range and, to my mind, did not offer me value for money. This year when we went shopping, they were cheaper, there were way more options, but they were not available without a significant lead time and I wasn't fully sold on their reliability. I fully expect^hope that in 7 years from now we'll need to shop around to find a ICE car.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    If you have street parking in a urban area there's a good chance you can't get a outlet connected to your car without running a extension cord from your window, across a sidewalk, and then to the port.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

    I live in a small town in a rural area. There is one charger in my town, but it's at the county building and is for county employees. There are chargers at grocery stores, but those are 50kms away.

    My house still has a fuse box, I don't have any available holes. The whole system needs changed and I will, but that's $10k and that's not a very exciting purchase.

    I guess I didn't mean lease, I meant financing. I definitely hope to have a vehicle at least 7 years. I just upgraded my paid off corolla because we needed all wheel drive vehicle for our winters here. Otherwise I'd have kept it till it died in 20 years (corolla joke). The electric car would have to be comparable to that and I'm not sold that they will be. We bought one of the few cars available to us without a multi month wait.

    I'm sure many of my fears are unjustified, but I require further evidence. I'm not an early adopter type.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You really only have 1 problem (aside from perceptions), but it's a real one. You need to be able to charge at home, and it sounds like you probably can't do that. You'd be stuck on trickle charging (3 miles of range per hour on the charger), and even that's questionable.

    The car will keep the battery warm whenever it's plugged in. If you take care of the battery (rarely let it go all the to 0% or 100%), it will easily last over 100k miles, and probably to 200k. When it does start to wear out, it's not a hard cutoff- just like your phone, you'll notice the capacity (range) starts to drop.

    FWIW, there are very significant federal rebates/tax credits in the US for EVs. That specifically includes upgrading electrical service to support an EV charger. But given that you said kms, I have to assume you are in a different country. Many have their own incentives, but you'd have to check into those yourself.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    From what I understand our incentives ended a couple years ago and my Premier is a dick. I'm definitely not against electric cars, but I think the car we bought was a good choice for our current situation. I hope our car is the last ICE we buy. Much of my needs are met with my ebike and I try to structure my life to need a car as little as possible. Winter's a bitch though.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I get the old house rural life. I wouldn't worry about the lasting 7 years right now. That being said driving a relatively efficient car for a couple decades is definitely environmentally friendly by comparison to getting a new truck every 5 years. Probably not too far from buying a new EV every 7 years once you add the embodied energy.

    In a few years things will come around so make sure you've upgraded your electrical panel by then.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I charge my car off of a regular outlet outside in a very cold climate, and charging like that will actually likely make the battery last quite a while. The only way to find out for sure is to wait, but it has been 4 years and the battery hasn't lost any capacity. My car also has a 320 km range, so even in your scenario, if you charged 50km away and came home, you'd still have 270km of range.

    I think you may have given too much weight to FUD about EVs from companies that would like to see them fail. I've seen a lot of concerns posted online that just don't practically matter, once you actually try it. There's also some really nice minor things about owning an EV, like not having to breathe in toxic fumes when walking around the car. Especially nice if you have kids that are right at the level of the tailpipe.

    It is also fine to wait a bit, of course. In my area chargers are springing up in lots of places, and I think we're not far off from a tipping point away from ICE cars, which will spread even to rural areas pretty quickly when gas stations start becoming unprofitable.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Good to hear. I fully expect our next car to be electric. Funny enough, the only gas station in my town just announced it was closing this year (the tanks are outdated and the company isn't replacing them). Perhaps I made the wrong decision buying another ICE vehicle. Won't be the first time I was wrong.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Good news! I've got information relevant to you. I grew up in a locale that would drop below 0F for most of the winter. It was NORMAL to get an oil heater and plug it into your 110v 15amp outlet outside.

    Well with EV's you get that same cable, and plug it in and it accomplishes basically the same goal but for the battery instead of the oil. Even better it trickles "fuel" into your "tank" over night.

    Or if you splash out dolla bills, you can get a dryer plug installed (240v 50amp) which fully charges your EV in a couple hours and keeps it nice and warm all night.

    Everything else is the same, you put snow tires on it, drive to the slopes, skii all day, drive home....one difference though, its heat is available within seconds unlike my old car which took 10+ minutes in subzero temps to heat up and blow warm air. Heck, my EV has heated wiper fluid. That's pretty cool.

    oh... and here's some extra cool parts.... if you do the Airbnb thing somwhere, your "fuel" is included. Just plug it in to their 110v outside outlet. When driving back down the slopes, you know what it does? It CHARGES THE CAR! You get free "fuel", just for driving back down the hill.

    In all seriousness, a couple road trips with mine, in both 100+F and below 32F, I found out that all of those things don't matter. Yes winter tires wreck the efficiency, yes cold wrecks the efficiency, but it's still well over 200+ miles. All the extra convenience is so nice, that you really don't want to go back.

    One example, I drove the same route to the beach at different times, one in the winter, I got there with 31% battery remaining. The same trip in the summer I had 55% batter remaining. So, like 1/3rd a tank of gas left, or half a tank of gas. Both are FIIIIINE. Know what I didn't do? Go to the gas station. I just plugged it in to the slow ass 110 wall outlet since... I'm at the beach for the weekend, in an airbnb... I don't know how long it took, because it was charged when I was ready to leave. Honestly, how do people not see how convenient this is?

    Battery life is pretty widely available for Tesla's at least since they've been around for over a decade now. And like any car, it depends on how the owner drove it and maintained it. Some last forever, some are trash within years.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Most ev's dont charge with more than 7 kwh and habe active battery themp controll.

    Dont worry your phone is not blowing up in under 3 years and those batterys get mistreatet.

    I also highly recomend lobing your employer for a charger at the workplace.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Block heaters are a thing for decades and no one worries about needing to keep the oil warm. Don't see how warming a battery is any different.

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