Of course, that would work better in colder climes! :0)
Posted on 08/21/2023 7:33:04 AM PDT by Red Badger
After test-driving one for an entire week, we learned we will never buy a Tesla or any electric vehicle as long as we have the option of gas-powered cars or even hybrids.
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While planning a week-long trip to the Seattle area recently, I wondered aloud to my husband if we should rent a Tesla. Neither of us had ever driven an electric vehicle before. The price difference between the long-range Tesla Model 3 and a standard mid-size gas-fueled vehicle was pretty negligible.
We agreed it would be an interesting learning experience despite our objections to the eco-agenda to phase out gas-powered vehicles. We also don’t believe EVs are particularly environmentally friendly since they need batteries that require the strip-mining of rare earth minerals such as lithium and cobalt. The World Economic Forum knows this very well and is likely looking for heavy limits on EV mobility after eliminating gas-powered vehicles.
But more people like us are also finding some very practical reasons to object to Teslas. There’s a glut of them on the market now despite subsidies and price reductions. After test-driving one for an entire week (instead of just 30 minutes,) we learned we will never buy a Tesla or any EV as long as we have the option of gas-powered vehicles or even hybrids. Read on for seven big reasons why. (Yes, “mileage may vary.”)
1. Battery Drainage Is Stress-Inducing
In the Tesla, stress is a given. The battery drains faster than you might think. Our Model 3 had an advertised range of about 300 miles, but that’s if you charge it to 100 percent (which no one does) and run it to 0 percent (which no one does). So the practical range is about 150-200 miles. We felt compelled to recharge after going just 150 miles versus refueling after about 450 miles in our Honda Accord. The battery even drained 10 percent just sitting in the driveway for about a day. Granted, we covered some distances in Washington state during our travels. But that confirms EVs are a poor choice for road trips unless you enjoy the risk of being stranded.
2. Few Charging Station Locations and Length of Time There
Yes, there are now more than 1,500 “supercharger” stations across the U.S. Regular chargers can be found at hotels, where guests at least have a room to stay in while charging for three to six hours. We plugged into a Tesla charger at a hotel for nearly three hours to get the battery up to 85 percent from about 30. Compare that with about 150,000 gas stations where we could fill up in less than five minutes and be on our way, ready for the next 500 miles. Even at a supercharger, we had to wait about 30 minutes to up the battery charge by 50 percent. And it’s all a matter of luck if there are amenities close by, especially if you need a charge when it’s late at night.
3. Personal Safety at Charging Locations Can Feel Dicey
It’s a good idea to plan the times at which you charge your vehicle. We had to stop on a Sunday evening at a supercharger located in an Ikea parking lot. Ikea was closed, and there were no walkable amenities around it. Ditto for our visit to another Tesla supercharger located across from a pawn shop. I got the uneasy feeling that many of these unsupervised locations — and the length of time required to be there — were crime scenes waiting to happen. Sure you can stop charging and be on your way. But on your way to where? To another supercharger.
4. Texting While Driving Is Required
Texting while driving is considered dangerous and mostly illegal. How ironic that in a Tesla, you are dependent upon the touch screen that sits between the driver and passenger seat like a big laptop. The interface is not intuitive, and autopilot is too new and unpredictable to use safely.
Luckily for us, there was always a passenger available to cope with the screen. We had to be in motion in order to check for a charging station nearby. There’s nothing intuitive about the air conditioning. Ditto for the radio, which we could only “turn off” by reducing the volume. The windshield wipers are supposed to be automatic, but when it started raining, we realized they were “turned off.” After fishing around the screen, we finally pulled over to consult YouTube to get them working again.
5. No Convenient Manual to Consult While Renting
Our Tesla rental was proudly “paperless.” It would have been worthwhile to have a hard copy manual on hand that didn’t put us at the mercy of a satellite signal. Hertz at the Seattle airport could provide no support in answering our questions about the vehicle. When I was able to flag employees down (twice), they were unable to help. We hoped to get a clue from a manual in the glove compartment, but what glove compartment? The employee at the checkout kiosk explained that the glove compartment was permanently locked shut. There’s no spare tire either, by the way.
6. How to Lock the Car?
This was not clear, not even with the Hertz tutorials on renting a Tesla. The key card operates like a hotel-room “smart” key, but (per YouTube) we discovered we needed to find the “sweet spot” by the window on the driver’s side, apparently the only place to lock the car. There are ways to lock from the inside as well, but it all depends on your tech-savviness, and willingness to risk locking yourself in, I suppose.
7. Don’t Expect the Cost of a Battery Charge to Always Be Lower than Gasoline
There are so many variables in fuel/charging costs, it’s hard to know if you’re getting a deal. When we tapped the “lightning bolt” image on the Tesla’s touch screen, we got a list of superchargers in the region as well as the cost per kilowatt hour, which varied from about 18 cents to about 50 cents. Our cheapest total charge was around $7 and ranged up to $25. We generally didn’t put more than a 50 percent charge into the car at any one time, and given the miles driven, the $25 charge was about the same as we would have paid for gas. Since there are government subsidies both for purchasing an EV and for charging, I would expect those prices to rise if everyone gets with the program and demand is up.
But pigs will fly before I buy an EV based on my Tesla experience/experiment. This conclusion is not based on a one-hour test drive but on an entire week of driving in an EV-friendly part of the country.
Granted, there are some moments of fun when driving a Tesla. “Regenerative braking” is a system that recharges the battery. So once your foot is off the accelerator, the car slows down quickly. We rarely needed to use the brake at all, even at red lights. And once you accelerate, expect a fast pick-up! The tinted glass roof was kind of cool. The seats were comfortable enough. But all in all, it was too much hassle and too much anxiety. I’m now totally sold on gas-powered vehicles.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of "The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer." Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda.
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Large-screen TVs and car phones utilized the same technology as other TVs and phones; there was no mandate to buy them. You could still make calls from other phones and just as easily watch TV on a 36" screen, if needed.
An EV car is an entirely new technology that's being pushed on people in an effort to control them. Personal mobility is a way to exercise freedom and we are heading to a future where there will be haves and have-nots of EVs because of their cost.
If you can't afford an EV, you'll be subject to whatever mass-transit is available. Like living in suburbia? Too bad, move to where mass transit is found.
I take my Honda Accord down to about 25 miles between fill-ups, which is about a gallon.
Combined hwy. and city driving, the Accord gets a little over 500 miles per tank. Subtract 25 miles from that and I get 475miles between fill-ups.
Codswallop. What a blooming mess.
I had a electric vehicle from 2001 through 2011.
It was excellent! It was much quieter than similar gas powered vehicles and no obnoxious exhaust. I drive 6 miles 5 times every week and then plugged in charger for next days use. I purchased new acid lead batteries for this used vehicle and never had to replace batteries.
Yes, it was my riding golf cart.
Great article and thanks to the author for summarizing the truly awful downsides of an electric car.
There are now so many Teslas in Metro Atlanta I counted 3 drive by the other day during a stoplight interval. They’re everywhere.
then don’t buy one.
Thats not good enough. The EV bull$hit is hurting everyone. Including the environment.
A couple weeks ago hwy 50 leaving Lake Tahoe was closed for 2 hours because an EV caught fire and the fire dept was just gonna let it burn. The freeway was closed for 2 hours because of one car. What a bunch of horse $hit. Battery cars are a damn racket.
The 5.0, 3.5 DT or the 2.7?
You’re correct of course, EVs are not practical for road trips, and are really only useful for shorter regular commutes. I believe that was the point of the article.
Almost everyone needs/wants to take a long distance trip at some point. So this means they would need two cars, or have to rent a car for a road trip. Neither is ideal.
But when they can have a vehicle at half the price that is capable of both commuting and road trips, it makes an EV pretty impractical for 90% of the country.
This is a great idea for anyone who gets a fever to buy an EV. Rent one for two weeks before spending your cold hard cash.
There are lots of anti EV folks in kneejerk mode about blah blah government intrusion this or that.
There are a lot of folks on “the fence” about “it’s not there yet, but it will be. Just wait.”
So here are some items not mentioned in the thread above.
Oil consumption is rising. The insertion of EVs into society is not having much effect on it. The reason is
The people who buy these were never driving long distances to begin with. They would not have bought the EV if they were. Therefore, them not driving a gasoline car does not save much gasoline, because they weren’t consuming much pre EV.
The limits on charging are not engineering. They are physics. You can only force so many amperes into a battery so fast. The limit is generally always the conductors along the path of flow. They heat up. To avoid melting and fire, you slow the flow. This could be engineering only if you had superconductors in the entire infrastructure that do not heat up. People quote the battery capacities in miles, or kilowatt-hours — but what they mean is ampere hours. Because:
A watt is a volt-ampere. If you quote a battery as 100 kilowatt-hours, which Tesla does, then you get to ampere hours by knowing the voltage of the battery. It is about 400V. So a 100 KwHr battery at 400V has a capacity of 250 Ampere Hours.
Forget how long it takes to drain it. To replace that you have to flow 250 Amperes (at 450ish Volts, needs to be above the battery voltage to flow) in 1 hour. 250 Amps is a lot to ask of the cables and charger so drop that down to, say, 125 Amperes **and now 2 hours**. Even 125 is a lot so another divide by 2 to 75 amperes — and so on. This is why it is hours and hours to recharge. The cables will melt otherwise.
The battery terminals ditto.
My point is, this is not engineering. This is physics. You have to have entirely new superconducting materials for this to not eat the time of people who have lives to live. And if they are non paperwork sort of workers, that time is not just out of their lives, it is time out of their $$/hour work of plumbing or construction or . . . even truck driving. The driver isn’t making money if he’s sitting and waiting.
There’s also how long one’s personal holding tank will last.
But that's because I had to spend time for gas fill-ups even for local driving. The EV charges at home for local driving (and the first leg of a trip) without me having to stand around waiting for it.
I still have an ICE pickup I occasionally drive for pickup chores or times my wife and I need 2 cars to run separate errands for the day. And I'll use the ICE pickup if I go on a long trip without my wife. She wants to stop every 200 miles and walk around for 10-15 minutes anyway, which is conducive to charging the EV on trips. I'd rather go 350-400 miles before stopping for a pee break and gas fill up (ICE is better for trips I'd take without my wife, which hasn't happened since we got the EV but I'm sure it will).
Last but not least are hotel reservations or cabin reservations on a trip. If we stop at a hotel that has a complementary charger, it saves me from having to "fill up" the next morning like I would if I had an ICE car. The same with if we rent a cabin to stay at a state park while on a road trip and they let us use a nearby RV spot for free to charge the EV. So trips with those options make us lean more to taking the EV. Basically, on those trips we don't just "get by" with an EV -- having an EV is more convenient than an ICE car. But trips with few charging options mean we take the ICE pickup. By having one of each car type we get to choose what's best for the occasion. After we decide on a trip to take and make our hotel/cabin reservations and look at the various fast charging options, we know which car is best for the task.
I expect a fight when I refuse to buy an RV.
The government is planning to force the issue.
I’m standing by, waiting.........bring it on.
Where TF have you been the last years?
EVs are not being hyped as putz-around-town cars as you pretend. China, fed.gov, Joe Biden and many manufacturers push them as replacements for all ICE vechicles.
They have no useful future.
Of course, that would work better in colder climes! :0)
EVs are just not ready for prime time. They are upper class golf carts.
I see them all over here in the Ft. Walton/Destin area every day. There’s one down the street from me, and I see them on the USED CAR lots now...............
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