Anonymous wrote:I absolutely love my PHEV minivan. I stay 80% electric…100% for my daily commute c but with the flexibility to drive to Maine on a single tank of gas. Love it SO. (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid)
PHEVs are a great option. Hope their electric only ranges get a little longer. 50-60 would be ideal.
We really thought that was going to be our next car. Even at 30-40 miles they seemed a great fit for our use case. But (for now) the increased cost as against hybrids did not make economic sense. Had the cars we wanted been tax credit eligible we would have gone PHEV. Without credit eligibility the PHEV costs for the cars we wanted were @$6-10k more. Add onto that the Level 2 charge install cost and we decided to wait until the next generation/iteration.
PHEVs are eligible for the tax credit and it makes no sense to install an L2 charger for a PHEV
What's the point of a hybrid. Clearly all EVs stink due to a myriad of reasons from lack of charging infrastructure to quality.
Hybrids are an expensive and stupid stop gap measure. They have many more parts and complexity than an ICE, which means they are more difficult and expensive to fix.
That means our new car will still be an ICE. We probably won't buy an EV until the infrastructure, quality, and charging time issues are all solved. My guess is that all of those issues won't be solved until the 2040s.
Anonymous wrote:What's the point of a hybrid. Clearly all EVs stink due to a myriad of reasons from lack of charging infrastructure to quality.
Hybrids are an expensive and stupid stop gap measure. They have many more parts and complexity than an ICE, which means they are more difficult and expensive to fix.
That means our new car will still be an ICE. We probably won't buy an EV until the infrastructure, quality, and charging time issues are all solved. My guess is that all of those issues won't be solved until the 2040s.
Suit yourself but EVs will be cheaper, just as/more convenient and more fun to drive well before that— I don’t expect to buy another ICE
Anonymous wrote:I absolutely love my PHEV minivan. I stay 80% electric…100% for my daily commute c but with the flexibility to drive to Maine on a single tank of gas. Love it SO. (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid)
PHEVs are a great option. Hope their electric only ranges get a little longer. 50-60 would be ideal.
We really thought that was going to be our next car. Even at 30-40 miles they seemed a great fit for our use case. But (for now) the increased cost as against hybrids did not make economic sense. Had the cars we wanted been tax credit eligible we would have gone PHEV. Without credit eligibility the PHEV costs for the cars we wanted were @$6-10k more. Add onto that the Level 2 charge install cost and we decided to wait until the next generation/iteration.
PHEVs are eligible for the tax credit and it makes no sense to install an L2 charger for a PHEV
You think a great deal of yourself. They are eligible for the tax credit if they are assembled here. Many are not. But by all means, go about your life as a smug know it all.
Anonymous wrote:What's the point of a hybrid. Clearly all EVs stink due to a myriad of reasons from lack of charging infrastructure to quality.
Hybrids are an expensive and stupid stop gap measure. They have many more parts and complexity than an ICE, which means they are more difficult and expensive to fix.
That means our new car will still be an ICE. We probably won't buy an EV until the infrastructure, quality, and charging time issues are all solved. My guess is that all of those issues won't be solved until the 2040s.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Hybrid versions are more powerful than their ICE versions. They make FWD/RWD cars into AWD
versions and still get significantly better mileage. Many come with 10 yr/100,000 mile warranties on the hybrid drives.
You might want to do a little reading before so clearly displaying your ignorance.
Someone asks a serious question and is answered by gratuitous snark and insults. DCUM has turned into just another version of Nextdoor -- and that is saying something.
Anonymous wrote:What's the point of a hybrid. Clearly all EVs stink due to a myriad of reasons from lack of charging infrastructure to quality.
Hybrids are an expensive and stupid stop gap measure. They have many more parts and complexity than an ICE, which means they are more difficult and expensive to fix.
That means our new car will still be an ICE. We probably won't buy an EV until the infrastructure, quality, and charging time issues are all solved. My guess is that all of those issues won't be solved until the 2040s.
You do you. But you have no idea what you're talking about. Unless your commute is 200+ miles every day, EVs are fine. And many workplaces are installing chargers, so your commute could be 400 miles each way every day.
Anonymous wrote:Someone asks a serious question and is answered by gratuitous snark and insults. DCUM has turned into just another version of Nextdoor -- and that is saying something.
Out of interest, which one of them do you think was "just asking a question"? I'm guessing you think the person who said "all hybrids stink" was just asking a question?
Anonymous wrote:What's the point of a hybrid. Clearly all EVs stink due to a myriad of reasons from lack of charging infrastructure to quality.
Hybrids are an expensive and stupid stop gap measure. They have many more parts and complexity than an ICE, which means they are more difficult and expensive to fix.
That means our new car will still be an ICE. We probably won't buy an EV until the infrastructure, quality, and charging time issues are all solved. My guess is that all of those issues won't be solved until the 2040s.
And that year is based on your work in transportation public policy research? Why vomit out a date? Do you think it makes you sound more informed?
Anonymous wrote:I absolutely love my PHEV minivan. I stay 80% electric…100% for my daily commute c but with the flexibility to drive to Maine on a single tank of gas. Love it SO. (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid)
PHEVs are a great option. Hope their electric only ranges get a little longer. 50-60 would be ideal.
We really thought that was going to be our next car. Even at 30-40 miles they seemed a great fit for our use case. But (for now) the increased cost as against hybrids did not make economic sense. Had the cars we wanted been tax credit eligible we would have gone PHEV. Without credit eligibility the PHEV costs for the cars we wanted were @$6-10k more. Add onto that the Level 2 charge install cost and we decided to wait until the next generation/iteration.
PHEVs are eligible for the tax credit and it makes no sense to install an L2 charger for a PHEV
Le2 charger makes a lot of sense for a phev as you will be needing to charge it quickly between coming back and forth around town
Anonymous wrote:I absolutely love my PHEV minivan. I stay 80% electric…100% for my daily commute c but with the flexibility to drive to Maine on a single tank of gas. Love it SO. (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid)
PHEVs are a great option. Hope their electric only ranges get a little longer. 50-60 would be ideal.
We really thought that was going to be our next car. Even at 30-40 miles they seemed a great fit for our use case. But (for now) the increased cost as against hybrids did not make economic sense. Had the cars we wanted been tax credit eligible we would have gone PHEV. Without credit eligibility the PHEV costs for the cars we wanted were @$6-10k more. Add onto that the Level 2 charge install cost and we decided to wait until the next generation/iteration.
PHEVs are eligible for the tax credit and it makes no sense to install an L2 charger for a PHEV
Le2 charger makes a lot of sense for a phev as you will be needing to charge it quickly between coming back and forth around town
Gotta love PPP's confidence in their blind ignorance.
Anonymous wrote:I absolutely love my PHEV minivan. I stay 80% electric…100% for my daily commute c but with the flexibility to drive to Maine on a single tank of gas. Love it SO. (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid)
PHEVs are a great option. Hope their electric only ranges get a little longer. 50-60 would be ideal.
We really thought that was going to be our next car. Even at 30-40 miles they seemed a great fit for our use case. But (for now) the increased cost as against hybrids did not make economic sense. Had the cars we wanted been tax credit eligible we would have gone PHEV. Without credit eligibility the PHEV costs for the cars we wanted were @$6-10k more. Add onto that the Level 2 charge install cost and we decided to wait until the next generation/iteration.
PHEVs are eligible for the tax credit and it makes no sense to install an L2 charger for a PHEV
Le2 charger makes a lot of sense for a phev as you will be needing to charge it quickly between coming back and forth around town
Gotta love PPP's confidence in their blind ignorance.
It’s not actually ignorance. A L1 charger will give you about 4 miles of range/hr while a L2 charger will give give you about 30 miles/hr. But a PHEV only has about 30 miles of range. So yes, if there are situations where you regularly drive 30 miles then are home for an hour then drive 30 miles and it’s important to you to always be using electric range then a L2 charger would make sense for you. For most people that’s not the case and if you google you will find it’s pretty common advice that most people have no need for a L2 charger for a PHEV.
Anonymous wrote:I absolutely love my PHEV minivan. I stay 80% electric…100% for my daily commute c but with the flexibility to drive to Maine on a single tank of gas. Love it SO. (Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid)
PHEVs are a great option. Hope their electric only ranges get a little longer. 50-60 would be ideal.
We really thought that was going to be our next car. Even at 30-40 miles they seemed a great fit for our use case. But (for now) the increased cost as against hybrids did not make economic sense. Had the cars we wanted been tax credit eligible we would have gone PHEV. Without credit eligibility the PHEV costs for the cars we wanted were @$6-10k more. Add onto that the Level 2 charge install cost and we decided to wait until the next generation/iteration.
PHEVs are eligible for the tax credit and it makes no sense to install an L2 charger for a PHEV
Le2 charger makes a lot of sense for a phev as you will be needing to charge it quickly between coming back and forth around town
Gotta love PPP's confidence in their blind ignorance.
It’s not actually ignorance. A L1 charger will give you about 4 miles of range/hr while a L2 charger will give give you about 30 miles/hr. But a PHEV only has about 30 miles of range. So yes, if there are situations where you regularly drive 30 miles then are home for an hour then drive 30 miles and it’s important to you to always be using electric range then a L2 charger would make sense for you. For most people that’s not the case and if you google you will find it’s pretty common advice that most people have no need for a L2 charger for a PHEV.
Just get an L2 because your next car will probably be an EV.
Anonymous wrote:Tesla still has an advantage in long distance networks, esp for some trips but that’s a dumb reason to say they are the only choice for an EV.
First most people don’t use a long distance charging network that often. Some have a second car that’s ICE, some just don’t road trip a lot. I go up to New England once a year and the charging network is perfectly adequate for that trip. Why would I buy a car I’ll drive every day just to cover the few days a year I am driving long distance. Hell I’d rather rent an ICE than buy a car I don’t want for those couple days.
Second Tesla is losing ground every day on this “advantage”. EV America has billions to spend, the feds are spending billions— that’s why Tesla will make their network open to all, because there’s no way they will have a better network than every other entity combined. I’m not buying a car for the next 15 years based on a network that I use a couple times a year and will be obsolete in 5 years.
Maybe you use the long distance network every weekend— then maybe tesla is right for you, or maybe an ICE is. But declaring that as of today every other EV is garbage is just Musk fanboy nonsense
All good points. Since we are an ev only household, teslas are a must. And since the batteries are warrantied for 150k miles and we hope they will make it to 500k+ miles, these cars are going to be going on many more road trips! Ideally, eventually every household will be 100% ev, powered by solar and an extensive UNIVERSAL charging network. Would love to see solar powered city car shares like the citibike scheme.
DP. Do you drive 250–300+ miles EVERY DAY? No? Then you’re charging at home 99% of the time and not using that awesome Tesla charging network. That was pp’s point, which you missed or ignored.
I’ve had a non-Tesla EV for over a year and 99% of the time it charges at my house. The few times I’ve gone on the road with it I haven’t had a problem finding a non-Tesla charger. I haven’t tried it out in rural bumwhatever, but then again I haven’t had any reason to go there.
Making it all about Tesla’s charging network is a red herring.
It actually is important to people who do take road trips often and/or hate waiting to charge. I barely stop in our ICE car so stopping for 30+ minutes multiple times just wouldn't work for me.
We have a Tesla and a non-Tesla EV. The Tesla is barely tolerable on shorter road trips and only because of the super fast chargers (15 min to add 200 mile range) and longer range (~400 miles). The non-Tesla is strictly for in-town driving.
Well no wonder you’re obsessed with Tesla’s chargers. You reserve the Tesla for longer trips and your gas car for shorter (in-town) trips. Not the choice most would make, but you do you. The rest of us are using our EVs to drive to work and charging them at home at night.
Re-read. Our other car is a non-Tesla EV. We use it for daily driving and charge it at home every night. I would absolutely never take it on a road trip.
And I’m a DP.
You do you. Lots of us don't mind, in fact welcome, having to get a coffee at the station while the EV charges. We must not be in as much of a hurry.
Enjoy all of those coffees.
I hate Musk but, for road trips, Teslas are still the best option - by far. Charging speed and network are important. Hope we get better alternatives soon.
+1 Loathe the man and will not buy one of his cars. Partly because of him and partly because his cars have quality issues and the service model is scary to me (I don't trust Tesla). Having said that, the supercharger network is heads and tails ahead of everyone else. If you have a home charger and your use is mostly in/round town with maybe one distance trip per year it isn't an issue, but if you have a 2nd home hundreds of miles away and/or you travel distances and across the country the charging network is not there yet. This article was one of the things that convinced us that for our use EV was not for us (yet). https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/road-tripping-in-our-long-term-electric-test-cars/
We haven't really had any significant problems with a non-Tesla EV going on road trips from D.C. to New York or to the Delaware beaches (and charging on the Eastern Shore is generally pretty bad, but not so bad you can't make it work). I guess if you do much longer road trips very frequently, that might be an issue, but we go on a total of about six or seven D.C.-NY or D.C.-Del. trips a year, sometimes more, and it's been fine and is improving rapidly.
This. Unless your commute is 200+ miles daily, finding chargers away from home is a non-issue. Ditto if you only make a few DC-NY or similar trips per year. If you take longer trips on a regular basis, keep an old ICE around until the technology catches up, because most families have second cars anyway.
There *are* chargers, especially along 95, but you have to stop more often because your range isn’t that great and it takes longer to charge because your chargers are slower.
If you don’t mind multiple, long coffee breaks, you’re all set.
We stop either once on the way to/from New York (halfway, for 20-25 minutes) or twice for about 10 minutes each. It's possible to do it with less total charging time, but then we tend to arrive back in D.C. with under 20 percent battery, and I'd rather spend a total of an extra 8 minutes on a 4-hour drive to avoid needing to worry about range. The stops usually line up with when my kids want food or to use the bathroom, anyway.
When we did the same trip in a gas car, we stopped about as often for maybe a grand total of 10 fewer minutes, so for us, using the EV for this trip is essentially the same thing.
I guess if you don’t mind 30-40 minute stops then you’re all set. Plus the time to hurt down a non-Tesla charging station. That’s assuming the charger is at the place where you’re eating.
There's no time involved in "hunting down a non-Tesla charging station" because I just drive right to it. And it's one 20 or 25-minute stop on the way up (or two 10-15 minute stops) and one on the way back, so it's not 30-40 minutes of stopping. I mean, you're just not going to persuade me that this is not convenient; I do it every couple of months. I could stop at the non-Tesla stops at highway rest areas, too, but I go to the Electrify America ones instead because I don't have to pay for those.
You take time to go off route to go to an EA, which are harder to find than superchargers. Are you including time there & back in your time estimates? Plus, are the EA stations at places where you’d actually want to eat and use the bathroom? That could be extra time as well.
And you really stop twice between here and NYC?
Many people don’t want to add that much extra time to their drive every single time.
At the place we usually stop, there are Superchargers on the other side of the parking lot (it's a Wawa in Delaware), so I wouldn't say the EA one is any harder to find than the Tesla ones.
Maybe it sounds inconvenient to you, that's fine. But I don't see why you're going out of your way to try to persuade me that it's actually inconvenient for me.
Tesla has twice as many charging stations as EA and even has some at the NJ Turnpike rest areas. Generally, it will take longer to find an EA charger.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. You obviously have a higher tolerance for longer stops than most. But EV charging speed/network is certainly a differentiator/deal breaker for many people.
Tesla's are crap. Reliability stinks. At this point when they rank like 19 out of 24 . It went up a whole 3 places. Anyone who owns a tesla (sold ours) knows that they are garbage. Plenty of others to chose from.
There just aren’t that many parts to break. Reliability is fine.
Don’t get another Tesla. I’m not going to. But there aren’t better EV options for road trips at the moment.