Item — HN Reader

> The issue is it had the range of a golf cart. So it basically ruled out 98% of the population that needs a car that can go on road trips.

You're trying to use weasel words to try to hide the fact that the Nissan Leaf, which was released in 2010 and elected world car of the year, was the world's most successful electric car and top-selling electric car until 2020.

That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.

Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.

Why do you think it's design range was slightly over 300km? That roughly represents a ceiling of a round trip that takes 2 hours each direction.

For over a decade, the whole world has been buying Nissan Leafs more than any other electric car. How do you explain it?

1 comments

> That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.

Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.

> Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.

No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.

A “city car” isn’t a concept in the US. Only when you get into upper middle class where people can afford multiple cars per household is when you could sacrifice one car like this.

I dunno, as someone who was raised in a pretty rural area and has since lived in both cities and suburbs, I think the need for long distance driving is dramatically overstated.

From my rural hometown, the drive to varying degrees of civilization (just big enough to have a small shopping center up to the state capital) is about 25 and 75 miles, respectively. Cities sized in between are around 40-50mi out. The drive to the nearest tiny town for groceries and such is about 2 miles.

I currently live in a suburb and everything one might need, including an international airport, is within a 30mi radius, with the majority of that being within a 5mi radius.

With that in mind and remembering that the bulk of the population lives in cities or their surrounding metro areas, "city cars" are viable for more people than they aren't. Sometimes they'd be better suited as secondary vehicles dedicated to errands, which at first glance might seem more expensive, but the dramatically better fuel economy of e.g. a tiny hybrid or even plain gas car quickly adds up, and in states with cheap electricity combined with scheduled charging at off-peak times, the scales are tilted even further if you have a plug-in hybrid or full EV. The up-front cost is higher, but you quickly make that back from not having to haul the big gas hungry SUV or truck around all over the place.

More than half of US households have multiple cars. The market that can handle a limited-range car is enormous; most of those households and many single car households too. And the existence of range anxiety doesn't change that.

> Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.

What are you talking about? The Nissan Leaf was the world's best-selling electric car until 2020, outselling all Tesla's until Tesla Model 3 surpassed it. Are you trying to claim with a straight face that electric cars weren't being used en masse until 2020?

> No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.

I don't think you are being serious. "Rage anxiety" was literally GM propaganda to throw FUD at electric cars.

https://www.jalopnik.com/how-gm-will-use-fear-to-sell-you-a-...