Did you tell him to buy used, after major depreciation is borne by the first owner?
Again: multiple car family is better, so the real car can be used when the toy breaks.
Frequent long trips, 250+ or so, means more planning.
If he doesn’t plan to charge at home, there is no benefit.
Like ND, says, cheaper for short commutes is the way to go. Your Tesla is too nice/expensive for most people’s needs. But, I’m not in charge of other people’s money. Used Bolt should do the job.
But Prius Prime (plug-in) is still top of the list.
Dude was driving a Ram 2500 and said they had a Yukon Denali for road trips. I left it to him and his wife to sort out buying one. And he said he has just started building a new garage and adding a 220v charger is easy.
I will say EVs have been hit pretty hard on depreciation, maybe more so than ICE. Obviously the supply/demand equation has changed for all cars in the past ~2 years. But Tesla cut prices a LOT and I think that was a pretty big shockwave.
The Model Y Performance peaked at $70k, now you can pick one up for $51.5k, for example.
I’d suggest for many, it’s really 30 minutes vs 30 minutes. Charge/fill, bathroom breaks, getting snacks, moving around a bit, etc. Less true, if it’s someone on a mission and possibly travelling on their own (e.g. my dad).
In my lengthy experience of road trips with an EV (n = 1), we paired 1 stop with lunch. The second charging stop was at an out of the way spot. I think that one was supposed to be 15 minutes. It was nice to have a break, but the location was lousy for traveling adults, but would have been good if we were traveling with kids.
I did notice that more gas/convenience stores seem to be adding charging facilities. The thing that surprised me a bit is that areas with clusters of fast food restaurants or stores weren’t adding more chargers (Trans-Canada between Calgary and Kamloops). Seems like a no brainer to me as a means of boosting business.
As a former apartment dwellers who was thinking about an EV, I would have thought you were right. I’m less sure now. Where you’re apparently supposed to keep your battery charge between 20 and 80% most of the time, with the right local infrastructure, I think I could have made it work. On average, I drive about 10-15 km a day. With a lot of the newer cars, it seems like that’s about a half hour to 45 minute charge at a fast charger. I’d only have to charge once every 2-3 weeks. If my grocery store had a fast charger, that would be super convenient to handle. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. If we were a bit more like Paris with chargers in neighborhoods all over the place (or at least near the city center), it would be easy to go and charge while grabbing lunch or hanging out at a pub or cafe.
I’m convinced Murdock media has created a large luddite class in Australia. The opposition to high speed internet when I was there in the 2010s was crazy. Why would anyone ever need more the 1 Mbps download speeds? 20 Mbps was madness. Absolutely no need ever for it. Meanwhile rest of the world is moving to 1.5 Gbps.
The latest move by the right wing party in Australia is to stop using solar (cause it makes no sense in a huge sparsely populated sun-drenched country, right?) and put everything into nuclear power.
There are some really contrary ideas in Australia. High solar adoption but high distrust of EVs? Not sure what is the reason (Murdock media is a strong possibility).
Range anxiety? Between the outback and all of the poisonous / venomous critters native to Australia, getting stranded there seems like it would be a bigger problem than getting stranded here.
Nah, apart from the crocodiles, sharks and dropbears most critters are more scared of you than you are of them. I’m more worried about mountain lions and grizzlies here.
The solution is to garage the EV on cross-Australia trips or even halfway-to-the-outback trips. You want to go on long trips in AUS? Well an EV is not for you. Heck, even from MEL to SYD is a 1h20m flight ($70 (aus?)) versus a near-9-hour road trip (per Google Maps).
Oh, you only have one car? Well, pick that one car based on one’s expected usage. I cannot do everything here.
And yet they aren’t. Why, then, are they not? I am guessing there is a reason. No electricity of that voltage, possibly.
The government could simply require petrol/gas stations to add chargers within, say, five years (gives them enough time to sell or just close their stations). I mean, petrol stations are already there for people who’d rather not take a 4-hour flight ($318).
