Are they, though? If they swap every couple of hours, that's safe, surely? 2 hours on, 2 hours off is... fine.

And remember, this isn't about getting around locally, this is about giant road trips with 14 hours of driving. If you're telling me the DC charging network is capable of supporting htat across Canada in the winter, then I'm happy to hear it, but it feels like it may be some time away.

So there's a guy on here who has a usage pattern that works for ICE but not EV. It also happens to be my idea of hell on earth. He and his wife pack sandwiches and then drive almost continuously for hundreds and hundreds of miles and for 16 or 18 hours. They stop only to pee and switch from one driver to the other, five mins max, and every so often, they'll also refuel in that stop. An EV can't deal with that situation yet, especially in a Canadian winter with chargers being few and far between. But as I said, I cannot possibly imagine wanting to do this ever for any purpose, much less at the start and end of a holiday.

I dunno. I think what really matters is ubiquity and frictionless experiences. Thegarbz posted about what it’s like in the Netherlands. That’s what I’d like.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fcomm...

That is nutso. Only in America. The only European vehicles without DCFC are tiny quadricycles like the Ami.

We used to go to this little village in the Cotswolds that had a few streets with this kind of access. It was horrible, I always felt sorry for the residents

I’m sorry for your loss. May his memory be a blessing.

I’ve had three Renault Zoes and now a Mercedes EQA, and have had unequivocally great experiences with all of them, despite London traffic. I chose the EQA specifically because it’s only 4.4m long and 1.8m wide, so it’s pretty compact on the outside for an SUV, yet is much roomier and much nicer inside than my Zoe. So I can cope driving around north London even during busy times of day. I’ve no idea how people cope in their massive Cayennes etc.

If you have questions about EVs, feel free to ping me with them. It’s honestly been dead straightforward, and the charging network is just better and better all the time. Easiest way to test that is to go to Zapmap and play around in the areas where you might want to charge (eg when visiting an elderly aunt or near your house etc). It’s now pretty hard to find anywhere that’s more than 5 miles from a charger across the whole of the UK. Scottish Highlands in some spots, and that’s about it.

Come on in, the water’s lovely!

True, but bear in mind that Fluffernutter lives in a Canadian town and does these giant road trips, so that’s always in the back of his mind

It’s emergency stop of a charge, and it’s not solely for emergencies. It’s just a big red button labelled stop, like the ones you get on treadmills in a gym. No need to get your knickers in a twist about it

Nio is giving this a good try, but you won’t see it in the US any time soon. Other OEMs prefer the flexibility of built-in non-swappable batteries, rather like smartphone OEMs

I don’t know how it works in the US, but in the UK, motorway service stations are primarily focused on facilitating travellers to pee, crap, eat, drink, and buy stuff they forgot for their journey. Only a small percentage of people refuel or recharge. And anyway in the UK, many people in EVs will be setting off with a full charge and won’t need to charge en route, because trips of more than 250 miles are pretty uncommon, and destination charging is common.

What EVs are on the market that don’t do DCFC?!

This is me!
2015, first EV on finance - 90 mile range
2018, second - 186 mile rang
2020, third - 245 mile range
2024, fourth - 330 mile range (and finally a move from a Renault Zoe to a Mercedes)

I’m skeptical for another reason: for Tesla to thrive off the back of robotaxis, they don’t merely need to succeed with FSD after a decade of failure. They also need to completely revolutionise transportation. You only have to look at EV threads on Slashdot to see that people are pretty slow to adopt new mindsets in relation to cars. If people can’t get their heads round the subtle but fundamental differences in how you treat charging an EV vs putting gas in an ICE car, what hope is there for people to be giving up their cars by the million and turning to robotaxis instead? That’s a giant modal shift, in a country that’s more emotionally wedded to private car use than all others.

And he ought to have insisted on a longer term contract than five years. But the Authority was wise not to agree this, given that Tesla signally failed to invest in these stations

While it's true you'd need six times as many recharging stations to handle the same throughput of cars as a fuel station, it's also true that you won't need to handle the same throughput of cars. At least 60% of US cars and 70% of UK cars are parked off-street overnight. The UK currently has 80,000 public chargers... and 1,000,000 home chargers (for 1.4m EVs). So in practice today, 400k British EVs are using 80k public chargers.