Will you buy an electric or hybrid car next?

Perfect description! :clap::clap:

Reportedly, raccoons agree.

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On long roadtrips, we really like Iexit app (gas, food, hotels). So far I don’t see indication of charging stations. Too bad - if we needed them someday it would be handy.

It is especially helpful when exits are few and far between. My husband does the driving and asks me to down the road, about XX miles, to see what I can find. Then I start nominating exits that will have a gas brand he likes and food option he likes near each other.

Last month we stopped at the Dayton Air and Space museum. We saw a guy sitting in his car charging, wondering if he’d come just for the charging station.

I think if you’re used to using an app for those sorts of things you’d have no problems finding chargers.

As mentioned, many EVs have this functionality built in to the nav software, although the quality of that does vary.

But even Siri and Apple Maps have EV chargers in their database, so it can be as easy as asking Siri to find the nearest EV charger, or the nearest Electrify America station, etc, and then getting directions.

In practice I personally don’t ever find the need to search spur of the moment as I’ve either let the vehicle figure it out for me, or I have a sense that I’ll want to stop at, say, the Electrify America or EVgo a few hours down the road and then check to see if it’s full when I get close.

For me it’s often a lot like planning when and where I’ll eat and/or take a brief break to stretch the legs. So if I’m taking a 6 hour drive I usually have a notion of when and where I’ll want to stop. It’s easy to include charging in that sort of plan, and the apps make it pretty hassle free.

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UPDATE: Just got another dealership email with a better offer to buy the new Tesla Cybertruck at $130,000! It said dropped from $142,000 so I guess I missed that email but just WOW, they really want to unload that truck!

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It’s an ugly cuss of a thing. And still very costly!

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We are 2 car, all EV family.

D1 recently drove her Y cross country, solo (except for the pets) when the family was relocating for a cross country move. She arrived in 4 days without any issues except for the first day. Tesla app will helpfully plan your route for you, noting where you should recharge. D1, being D1, thought she knew better and ignored the route planning on the first day of her drive. She charged at home overnight, then headed out on I-40 at Barstow. She did not charge in Barstow as advised. (Said she couldn’t find the supercharger,) Luckily she made across the Mojave to Needles without running out of charge. At Needles she used a public charger (used PlugShare to find a charger) to recharge while she walked the dog and ate lunch. That took about 30 minutes. The Tesla app said to recharge in Kingman, but she decided she could make it to Flagstaff. Bad decision. She was driving uphill, into a headwind, through a snow storm with the heat on and, because I know how she drives and because we app-stalked her, I know she was speeding in the 80-85 mph range. All of which lowers your battery performance. She didn’t have enough charge to get to Flagstaff. She stopped at a level 2 (slow) charger in Williams where it took an hour and a half to get enough of charge so she could eke her way to the Flagstaff supercharger. She fully charged there (20 minutes), then charged again in Grants, NM and made it ABQ still in time to get some green Chile cheese enchiladas at Cervantes before staying overnight with some friends.

For days 2, 3 and 4-- if the app told her to charge in certain locations, she did. At night, she always chose a hotel that had a EV charging station and did an overnight charge so in the morning she was fully charged and ready to drive.

Except for that unplanned and very cold stop in Williams, her trip went great.

I think, based on her experience, I wouldn’t hesitate to take a long distance trip in an EV.

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My EV is powering my fridge right now since Tropical Storm Debby Downer took out our power.

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Huh? I drive my EV everywhere. I’m really surprised by the concerns in this thread. I’ve driven about 20K miles in my Tesla, lots of road trips to cities and rural areas and everything in between. There is no issue.

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Yeah that’s kind of backwards. Just like gas vehicles there are far more charging stations in urban areas than in rural areas. Also like gas vehicles if you are driving through a more desolate rural area you’ll need to plan your stops more carefully — remember those “last gas in 100 miles” billboards — same deal.

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The only potential inconvenience I’ve had is a crowded supercharger stop (we got a spot but there were then people waiting) ans when you are sharing the charger with another car it doesn’t inquire as fast, and I’ve heard of people experiencing chargers blocked by ICE owner jerks either just wanting a parking space or purposely blocking the chargers (there is a term for those second type of jerks but not sure if the term is allowed here. It’s not a bad word but it’s a takeoff on one. And well deserved.

Our road trips cover a lot of territory where I worry about where we gas up. So I’m not keen on having EV only vehicle for that. (But probably won’t be doing cross country trips that many more years.) Around town it would not bother me.

This has not been my experience in practice, either with my owned or previously rented EVs. Pretty much every time we decided to take it on a trip to another city it’s been a big hassle to find a hotel near where we want to stay with reliable EV chargers, if any at all. Last summer I was staying in Foster City, right in the center of the Bay Area, and could not get a hotel with a working charger. Called 5 of them. 4 didn’t have them – and all directed us to the Walmart parking lot – and one had one that was broken, and had been for a while according to the person at the desk.

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That’s interesting, because there’s a massive amount of superchargers in a couple locations nearby to Foster City in San Mateo and San Carlos. And they’re always a ton of Teslas charging.

I’m not an EV owner, but I just always see major portions of parking lots that I frequent occupied by Teslas charging. :rage: :rofl:

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Can’t speak to Foster City hotels specifically as I don’t stay in that area, but there are a lot of level 2 chargers and a few level 3 there. SF to San Jose is a very charger-dense area. I’ve never had issues with charging through a combination of level 2 and level 3, without much change in my routine. YMMV.

One nice thing we saw on cross country trip was that eastern highways with rest areas (service areas) seemed to include a lot of charging stations.

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There were charging stations in the area, just not within walking distance of the hotels or at the hotels. We ended up using the Walmart parking lot that most of the hotels directed us to. But I was responding to a post about how its super easy to find a hotel with Lvl2 charging at the hotel. I’ve used either my owned or rented EV on 3 trips now where I wanted to have a charger at the hotel and it has worked out 0 of 3. In the case of Foster City all the hotels with rooms didn’t have them. In another case it claimed to but it didn’t work. And in another I would have had to make major compromises on the location of the hotel that would have completelyt chaged the trip plan to make it work.

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From Facebook:
The nation’s largest curbside electric vehicle charging network is coming to NYC!

We’re expanding curbside charging from 100 plugs to 700 thanks to a $15 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant. This will help phase out fossil fuel vehicles and support the electrification of NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission.

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My husband is at Audi dealer now, getting estimate on repair job for our 2013 A6. It had a check engine light on the last afternoon (104degrees) of our recent 5000 mile cross country trip. Codes say it relates to turbocharger. It’s possible we will be shopping for a car soon or next spring. So I’ll ask my question, with a plea that we NOT turn it into a political debate. Anybody worried that with all the electrification of cars (and in my area new homes and aparments)… there won’t be enough electric? In my area, there is an admirable push of sustainable energy source… closing some of the old power plants. In general I’m a real fan of “going green”, on the Earthcare committee at church. But still a bit leery about reliance on electric. Hybrid seems a good solution, though I am a bit jaded by son’s 100 mile tow when his Bolt (or Volt?) would not switch to gasoline mode… and there is a shortage of parts to fix it.

I’ve actually been involved in a lot of work on this issue. Electric car charging is not putting too much demand on the grid. The real problem will come from heating electrification (at least in cold weather parts of the country). The real issue with car electrification is that the distribution system has not been designed to supply heavy uses of power along interstates, to parking lots, etc. Transmission and distribution line upgrades will be needed to accommodate the changing patterns of usage.

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