Anybody else notice that this is about what some rando posted on Reddit?
Name a more reliable source! You can’t!
Reddit content fed through Google “AI”. What’s not to trust about that?
My neighbor’s dog. Sam’s a cool dude and his dog tells me some pretty neat things.
Sam sounds like a good dude and his dog the goodest boy!
EVs work when you are home where you are guaranteed to have a parking spot with a charger so it charges overnight without any hassle.
People rent cars when they are away from home. Nobody wants to have to worry about finding a working charging station in an unfamiliar city and have to spend hours there waiting for it to trickle charge because the fast charging is unavailable or broken.
I got crucified in the electric vehicles instance for pointing this out, but 100% this.
See your first mistake was going to an enthusiast community and criticizing the thing in any way.
There’s a specific enchantment you have to do before you can criticize the thing in any community. It varies from one place to another, and if you don’t utter it before you criticize the thing, you obviously are a troll and must be expunged.
For example, if I go to a Table Top gaming community to bitch about 40k players, the legion will show up in force to show me exactly why I’m the worst example of a gamer. But if I first show admiration to the dedication these players show to painting these figures, I can then bitch about how the dumb space jocks take over the shop I like for weeks at a time.
If I go to a Linux community, so like, most of Lemmy, I cannot criticize Linux before first casting a curse on Windows. Even though Linux has a shitty user interface and everyone knows it.
Yeah, I didn’t even realize it was the electric vehicles instance, just was offering an opinion on the article which was about hertz selling off Tesla’s. Guy was not having it, and like you said accusing me of being a troll and all kinds of shit. I’m like dude I get that this is an enthusiast instance but FFS, there are legitimate concerns folks have, especially pertaining to renting an electric car and clearly it’s not working out business wise for them. Dude never backed down. It was exhausting.
It is a fanatic’s job not to let reality get in the way of doctrine. Everyone else pays cash.
Tangential but why are all of the fast charging stations broken? Traveling fucking sucks with an electric car. It wasn’t this way a year ago
Because the American public can’t be trusted to treat anything well…The shit I saw working retail just working the checkout stand was fucking astonishing. Nobody reads prompts or listens to anything and end up breaking things due to ignorance.
Because America can’t run anything as a service, fast charging infrastructure is expensive to maintain and make a profit off of but there was lots of grant money available to build them (and VW had to build a ton of them as part of a legal settlement) but there’s no public funds to maintain them, so they aren’t.
I have learned that in order to be able to transfer that much power without overheating, the charging cable would have to be impractically thick. The way to get around this is to have a cooling system integrated into a thinner cable. This makes it prone to breakages. If the cooling system doesn’t work the station defaults do slow charge.
So it’s just a matter of how recently the station was installed? That is immensely lame. But I appreciate the answer!
Ohm’s Law?
Ohm fuck. I never considered that and it makes a lot of sense.
One of like, two things will happen. Either, consumers will adopt electric cars en masse in short order, and gas stations will start installing charging stations and maintaining them, or, a completely different solution is going to be required as these stations become less and less reliable over time and people flock back to gasoline.
One of the most expensive wear items in a lot of factories are the connections between welders and weld tips. We use these massive 1 to 1 1/2 inch cables or inch thick copper bars and they need to be replaced kinda often. Not as often as the weld tips themselves, but often enough that we’ve spent many thousands of dollars trying to find a way to stretch them out a little bit.
Admittedly, the daily use of industrial weld cables and the daily use of a charging cable aren’t quite the same, but the ones we’re using are the right size and still burning up regularly.
I’ve never seen a fast charging station broken in my area. All the slow chargers are constantly out of service though.
Yeah — exactly. I travelled to Hawaii last year and the cheapest rentals were all Teslas. My initial instinct was — no I don’t want to worry about charging it, or spending my limited vacation time driving around looking for a charger that would charge it in a reasonable amount of time. I went with a gas car. However, these rental companies never have the vehicle I actually want — a hybrid.
What benefit does a hybrid bring to the dealer? They didn’t care about how many mpg you get and it is just added cost.
I know, but as the renter, I save money on gas. And, it actually is better for the environment.
Not to mention the majority of people, at least in the US, have never charged an electric.
It would take a 4th grader 30 seconds to figure it out. Let’s not pretend this is rocket science.
well it’s not that they can’t figure it out. If it’s renting they want the most comfort possible. A good portion of comfort is familiarity.
It’s not especially hard on its own, but it does go against existing mindsets, and at a time they are already stressed. Most people that buy an EV, myself included, did all sorts of research before buying. We were pretty sure of what we were getting into long before it was necessary.
Now, imagine you’re traveling. You’re in an unfamiliar city, probably with a packed agenda. You already have to deal with all the things that Tesla (specifically Tesla, not just EVs) does that’s very different and confusing. You’re used to seeing gas stations every few minutes, always on a corner. They’re easy to spot, too, with the giant price signs. You don’t worry too much about planning, because they will have plenty of time to find one when the light comes on, at which point you can just pull in and pay with their Visa/MasterCard.
Except none of that works in an EV, particularly Tesla. The fast chargers are often in large parking lots, and relatively inconspicuous. They may not be anywhere near where you’re going. You have to use the infotainment system to navigate to them, which itself foreign to many drivers. For non-Tesla, you have to search and navigate with your phone. Once you get there, you have to register your payment in that same system. You can’t just slide your card at the pump, and God help you if it’s somewhere with poor signal.
Then on top of all that, you’re stuck waiting in the middle of nowhere for ~30 minutes while it charges. There usually isn’t a Wendy’s or even a bathroom next to these things.
And that’s when it actually works like it should. There are countless stories of broken or blocked chargers for various reasons, so you’ll have to find another charger.
Then to top it all off, you don’t even get to experience the benefits that make EVs worth owning. You probably didn’t get cheap fuel, or the super convenience of it being fully charged when you left in the morning, or the minimum of repairs.
I fully believe EVs are the future, but rental cars are going to be among the last passenger groups to switch.
At this point the Tesla brand itself is toxic to me, it’s not the sticker price stopping me. Putting that aside, what was Hertz smoking when they purchased a bunch of EVs for rentals? Either you’re driving a lot or you’re in unfamiliar territory, either way that sounds like a horrible fit for the use case.
EVs are a hot request for rentals. Source: I worked for a national car rental company.
I can see that. I actually would love to have an EV rental, payed for by someone else which is often the case with rentals, so I can try one out. I’d love a small electric truck… well if they made one.
Yep, I have a Bolt that I love and would trade in my other car for a small EV pickup, but there aren’t any. It sounds like 2027/28 there might be several. Of course, still waiting to see what the prices look like, but it looks like Chevy plans to do something in the new Ultium lineup (no go if they persist with not offering Android Auto) and Ford has plans for the Maverick (sounds promising).
Yeah I’d love an EV maverick.
And then turns around and calls the cops on them for grand theft auto.
