Want an Electric Car with a 300Mile Range? When Was the Last Time You Drove 300?

We live in a city. We had a BMW i3 with about 250km effective range in the summer, and a tad under 200km during winter. It got totalled (rammed in an intersection) and we had to get a new car quick, so ended up with a 2017 Leaf. It has all the battery bars remaining, yet only gets 150km during summer tops, and less than 100km during winter.<p>For us, we noticed that the 250km was a minimum. The drop to 200km was manageable during winter, but we noticed it. The Leaf&#x27;s 100km during winter is barely enough for daily use, and the 150km really isn&#x27;t fun when we want to go to our cabin.<p>We knew the Leaf would have less range, but it really drove home that the next car must have at least 250km, but we don&#x27;t really need significantly more than that. When going to the cabin or visiting family it was usually enough to just charge midways, which fit well with a short break for visiting the bathroom and grabbing some food or refreshments.<p>That said, after about a couple of days with the i3 it was clear our next car would <i>not</i> have an ICE. Just the lack of engine sounds when driving slowly (like in traffic or residential areas) and lack of exhaust fumes was enough for that.

This is such a short-sighed headline, because it&#x27;s baiting people into snarkily answering &quot;last week&quot;.<p>The reality is that the vast majority of people don&#x27;t drive more than 150 miles a day except on rare occasions. And, for families with more than one car (which is a lot of people), it&#x27;s not unreasonable that their second car be of a more limited range. Further complicating things is the recharging story - something that will only get better over time.<p>I&#x27;m not saying electric cars &quot;have arrived&quot;, but they&#x27;re going to; however, acting like they have for everyone just makes you look foolish. Writing this title as a question was a mistake, imo, and frames the argument poorly.<p>e: By the way: 300 miles is <i>at least</i> 4 hours in a car, not including breaks. It&#x27;s not unreasonable to take a 20 minute break to recharge during a 4+ hour car ride - and while you&#x27;re at, plug your car in as well. A better headline might have been: &quot;When was the last time you drove 8 hours?&quot;

Do a 300 km trip most weekends and run 450 km to the big city once a month. Maybe one or two local shopping trips a week. Even though downtown is walkable from my neighborhood, I&#x27;m in a food desert.

Four days ago.

When was the last time you bought a new generation of a product which is way more expensive AND inferior compared to the legacy one? No matter how you put it 300 miles range and 1h to get back to full range is inferior compared to 400 miles range and 45 seconds gas splash and go to get back to full range.<p>Considering that EVs are way more expensive than ICEVs and the design team has even more constraints compared to gasoline cars (because they need to have an even lower aerodynamic Cx)...buying an EV as it stands is essentially an altruistic choice.<p>As a young person I feel like I maxed by dose of altruism when I was asked to essentially stop living 2020-2022 for what essentially amounts to a virus comparable with the 1969 Influenza when people where having the time of their lives consming all sorts of drugs at Woodstock and engaging in decadent expenses such as the one incurred in sending people to the Moon.<p>Also it&#x27;s not even clear who&#x27;s gonna be the beneficiary of this altruism, it&#x27;s a story as old as time that if you leave a vacuum someone else is gonna fill that vacuum. For every ugly Tesla 3 that people in the West inflict upon themselves (and those who have to look at it) there are Indians and Malay farmers who see it as an opportunity to light up even more palm oil for their convenience. Not to mention Chinese industries which post bogus GDP numbers and will soon post bogus CO2 emission numbers.<p>The West is cucking itself on basically every possible front so we have to thank Nature for installing backup systems in other cultures which will come in handy as they refuse to follow us in this nonsense.<p>tl;dr Austerity and limiting one&#x27;s quality of life has never been the answer, all the way back to very beginning of life itself. It won&#x27;t start being the answer now.