Truly one of the more despicable examples of enshitification.
OkCupid was amazing for those who made full use of its “here’s who I am and here’s who I want” question matching system. Removing those features and turning it into another swiping app was a terrible anticompetitive move.
Electric cars do not make sense to own if you are not also owning a garage where you can charge them overnight. Also, if you are unwilling to add 1+ hour(s) to your travel time on longer distances.
Is this opinion based on experience or speculation? I had a house with garage and it was nice, but I moved to an apt with street parking. I had feared it would be a pain, and I'd be lying if I said it was as convenient, but it really hasn't been very difficult. Moving the car every two weeks for street cleaning has been worse.
As for long distances, I haven't found that to be a big issue. Of course, I have a Tesla which has a very good charging network - and that's the point. For any brand other than Tesla, you're probably right. It amazes me that the legacy car companies each of which are multiples of Tesla's size don't seem to be able to come up with a solution that doesn't involve getting taxpayers involved.
It's speculation on the part of the buyer. Why introduce more anxiety when you can just go with what you already know?
If every gas station supported CCS it would be less of an issue, but usually you need to find a station nearby and wait for 20-40 minutes if it's CCS or 6-8 hours if it's level 2.
20 minutes every 2 - 3 hours of rare long distance driving is acceptable, considering I save 4 hours of petrol station visits per yer vs my old diesel. Not to mention the fuel cost savings.
Oh I'm not referring to road trips here, they've been mostly fine in my EV. The issue is for people without a garage or a readily accessible charger then can use. My brother lives in Brighton, MA, and to charge his car he'd need to go out of his way to find a CCS charger and then sit there for 40 minutes about once a week. It just removes an EV as an option unless he moves elsewhere.
Depends how fast your car charges. 2017 Model S 75D charges for 30-40m every ~90 minutes of driving.
It's not as bad as it sounds, or I'm lying to myself, but having the 90 minute planned stops makes a cross country trip seem a lot closer ... even though it's doing the opposite.
Electric micromobility (e.g., e-bikes and scooters) probably makes more sense for more people right now. Keep an ICE vehicle for long-distance travel. But use your relatively cheap e-bike---that you can charge on a standard AC plug, even in an apartment---for short-distance chores and grocery runs.
Of course, people who live in car-only suburbs need not apply.
Rains a lot. Pretty cold. Snows. Lots of bikes. But really nice biking infrastructure — of the kind that’s hard to imagine in places like North America.
The population density is a bit of a factor. Like I live in a region in the US that is about the same size as Netherlands by area and has about 1/50th the population. And then if you go out west the difference gets starker than that.
Of course higher density parts of the US also don't really match up with the infrastructure that exists in Netherlands, but it's not unreasonable to expect the infrastructure in a given area to scale with the number of people in that area.
I did a 3000km trip 4 times (twice each way) during the pandemic. Charging added 15 minutes to the trip. Everybody has to eat/sleep/bathroom, and that can happen at the same time as charging.
You’re using a very unusual definition there. 3000 km is a long way and fueling up an ICE vehicle would take at least three full tanks, each one of which takes about ten minutes. Ignore sleeping, eating, and bathroom (I used to drive 1500 km in one day, three fuel stops, bathroom with that, no food - you won’t die if you don’t eat for a day). There’s no way you charged every 500 km and only paid a 15 minute penalty. Simply stopping and getting back on the highway costs about 5 minutes.
15 minutes more than it would have taken if we used a gas car. I was driving with the family. Regular stops would have been required no matter what car I had. Certainly 2 25 year olds driving in shifts with steel bladders could have made the trip quicker.
I did trip from London, UK to Southern Italy, Brindisi in Enyaq. By Google maps it should take 2 days (24 hours of driving, so 12 hours in 2 drivers/day). Charging dragged it on 4 days and we were charging on Ionity/Enel. So your 15 minutes is some kind of a sick joke.
A doubling of travel time is harsh. But I'm wondering how you managed to charge so inefficiently (time wise). Could it be, that you traveled with the smallest Škoda Enyaq which only supports up to 50kW of charging rate?
I checked your route with abetterrouteplanner.com using two different Enyaq models. One with 50kW charging and one with 100kW+. Here are the travel times:
- Enyaq iV 50 (50kW charging): 33 hours
- Enyaq iV 80 (100kW charging): 26 hours
- Google Maps (w/o charging time): 22,5 hours
I think you just had the wrong car model for this kind of trip.
I have Enyaq iv80. Charging rate means nothing when there are chargers in France which just won't give you juice because reasons. So then you need to slowly crawl to another charger like a clown to have even chance to get there.
Additionally it was during December, so cold weather reduced range even more, therefore your estimation would be correct but for summer time.
My experience riding over 37k km in less than a year all around Europe with my Tesla Model Y hasn't been any like it (many trips, including from The Hague to Malmö, The Hague to Berlin, The Hague to Budapest passing by Vienna, and more trips than I can count to Belgium, twice to Switzerland, and also all the way South to Barcelona).
I think your car model isn't very appropriate for long distance travels, as most EVs. But there are some EVs out there that definitely can do it, especially all Teslas.
That is part of the problem though. With petrol, you can hop into anyone old car, and go where you want, as much as you want. With 5 minute stops every few hundred miles
That's ridiculous. My trip was from Ottawa Canada to Saskatoon. It goes through some seriously unpopulated territory, unlike yours. It does follow major highways, so there are Tesla superchargers along the route every 100-150 km or so. We'd stay at a hotel with charging overnight so start at 100%, drive for 2.5 hours and then bathroom/charge for 15-20 mins, drive another 2.5 and eat/charge for 40 or so, repeat the morning pattern in the afternoon, and then drive for another couple after supper before stopping at a hotel to charge while sleeping.
So you're not charging back up to 100% until the overnight stop?
When I think about how I would do a long trip in an EV, I envision getting a full charge, because first, that's what I currently do with gasoline, and second, I want as much range as possible to account for unplanned detours and/or other unexpected issues.
Once or twice we did hit 100% because supper took longer than expected, but otherwise you never charge to 100%.
A critical component is the trip computer that knows about upcoming construction and charger status. On our first trip the Sault Ste Marie charger was down, and Sault Ste Marie <-> WaWa is the longest stretch between chargers because of a huge provincial park. But the car warned us about it and told us to make sure we were above 90% at Blind River.
AFAIK the charging rate slows down as the battery gets fuller. That's why all the fast charging metrics are like "30 minutes to charge to 60%" rather than "60 minutes to charge to 100%". So on a trip where you want to spend as little time charging, you want to stop charging before 100%.
Canada has some good charging infrastructure. If you are driving a Tesla, even better, super chargers are the gold standard for EV charging, everything else is kind of unreliable.
I just watched this Tom Scott video this morning about a Chinese company that created a "pod" where you can replace the battery instead of charging it.
There have been several attempts to make battery swapping for cars a thing. This includes Tesla's attempt and another company that went bankrupt. For some reason, it does not seem to work out and they all stop trying it.
I bet the reason it doesn't work out is greed and that everyone is doing their own incompatible system. Gas/petrol would also not work out if every car brand had their own unique & incompatible composition of fuel.
This is something that governments could solve. Commission a decent swappable battery form-factor and offer tax rebates & incentives to both buyers of compatible vehicles (thus incentivizes manufacturers to make those vehicles) as well as gas stations to adopt the system.
It doesn't have to be perfect performance-wise, if battery swaps take 5 minutes and every gas station supports it, it'll still be good even if the effective range of such battery is half of a custom proprietary one's.
Over 60% of homes in America are single family homes so it sounds like carmakers can sell plenty of EVs.
There are 1.88 vehicles per household in the US so it seems like many American households could have one of those vehicles be an EV while the other is gasoline for longer trips if they need that functionality so badly.
The range anxiety thing is so overblown, too. Driving 300 miles at 60mph average is 5 full hours of driving. That’s so much.
If you assume that EVs are barely doing 200 miles of real condition range that’s still over 3 hours of driving before you need to stop at all.
And then if you are going much longer than 500 miles it starts to make more sense to fly in the US. For a family of four you can’t make a trip from Ohio to Orlando make financial sense in a car, like, at all. The airfare is too low and the car travel time is too high.
Not if the municipality is installing enough low speed but cheap charging spots in the street parking. That’s working in some European countries at least
For me it was this, generalized to "Ultimately, no one, nobody else, will be able to or willing to care about your best interests except yourself."
People, families, groups, systems and institutions act primarily through their own structures and in their own best interests, are able to forget, misinterpret or simply not care about what you want/need/desire/expect/(feel you) deserve from them, and can never care about you as an individual as much as you can care about yourself.
This can apply to small or big things. This even applies to formal, specific, contractual obligations others have to you. That's just paper. It can be at best ineffective to expect others to act in your (best) interest while you are not there supervising and understanding everything they are doing. Trust, but verify, and be ready to protest for and enforce your rights.
The world is full of minor and major bullshit many have given up on to change, to care about, or feel powerless to change anything about. If anything moves in this world it is through the stubbornness of dedicated individuals. Since you yourself have only limited time and energy, be ready to endure this bullshit which makes life seem insufferable and unfair.
Also, today's society has no effective mechanisms to punish misbehavior at small scales, and repeat offenders who move between communities.
I may have been childish, naive, too hopeful or entitled to expect otherwise, but nowadays I know that at any time, people or the universe can metaphorically say "fuck you, i don't owe you anything" and fuck your life and feelings over, regardless of how conscientiously or nice or supposedly selfless you acted. But so must you, if people expect more from you than you can and are willing to give, even if it hurts them, else they will drain your joy and energy and potential out of your life.
Yeah, I know all about that. I've just seen my ex girlfriend go through the process of finding something nice that isn't excessively overpriced, which was exceedingly grueling, even more so considering that she makes 2.5x what I do. In the end the only decent opportunity was taking an appartement in her current building, skipping the entire selection phase as they already know her (which she knows is unfair).
I've already accepted I'll have to overpay short-term rentals for months and bot the shit of out Immoscout to have a chance.
Bürgerämter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities. I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go personally there in the early morning, yet here is what I encountered: arriving half an hour early to the Bürgeramt: THIRTY people waiting there, squatting in the hallways, all the way out to the door. On another day, arriving an HOUR before it opened: 12 people already waiting. It's all a joke. And this isn't a recent phenomenon - it's mismanagement for decades, the people responsible should all be fired (but of course that isn't possible).
There should be a "Minister for Time", who has the authority to crack down on such bullshit, not only in the German state bureaucracy, but also in the medical system (good luck getting any quick care here!). Both have taken to a level that is undignified, and wastes person-years of sitting in depressing places. Waiting should be an exception, not the norm, and there need to be metrics against that which have consequences.
I ran into something similar as a Dutch person trying to buy a car from Germany. The initial plan was to drive the car back from Germany, but to do this I had to get an export license plate. This can only be done in the municipality where the car was sold, and they told me I was lucky because I could get an appointment quite quick, which was a month and a half from now. I would also have to bring the car to the Straßenverkehrsamt. How I would have gotten the car there was also a mystery to me, as I did not have a license plate and to get a license plate I would have to bring the car there. If I did somehow manage to do that though, I would have to get a physical license plate made and then get temporary insurance. Not a single German insurance company said they could insure the temporary license plate, as I was not already an existing customers of theirs. I ended up just renting a car transporter and bringing it home that way.
The process of getting a license plate once home was actually a breeze. I used the website of the Dutch Vehicle Authority to make an appointment (for the following day at 2pm) and they gave me a temporary license plate. I simply had to write this on a piece of cardboard and put it where the license plate would go. Called the cheapest insurance company to get temporary insurance, which was no problem, and simply drove the car to get it inspected.
To be honest though as a foreigner living in The Netherlands who doesn't speak a word of Dutch past "lekker", your bureaucracy and general services are probably one of the best in the world. Even your weird medical system is amazing when you actually need help - which I did and got top tier care, extremely fast. The Netherlands should just export their whole system to all of Europe, including the way information is documented in English in every official website.
On top you got a culture of being on time, which is prevalent everywhere, and you wait for stuff very seldomly, and only for a few minutes. Waiting for anything was one of my biggest irks in my home country, the fact that I can make an appointment, be there 5mins early, and get the service, blows my mind.
I doubt many foreign governments would agree that all legal matters should be documented not only in the language of that country but English as well.
While some countries provide a non-binding translation for many things, someone could set the precedent in court that the English translation if relied on by enough people is somewhat binding or similar - Result would be two slightly different (mis-)understandings about the law, due process and bureaucracy from official sources. That could be have unforseen consequences.
Just because many people happen to speak English doesn't mean everyone has to.
There are red license plates for this exact case. Car dealerships generally have them to allow for test drives and bureaucracy drives.
If you buy a car (which is currently unregistered) from a private person that doesn't have those, you just did something that the bureaucracy didn't foresee and at that point, the best course of action is to avoid as much of it as possible.
At this point I have no hope that any of this will getter unless the german state collapses completely.
Here's what I do when I need to go to a Bürgeramt:
For every type of appointment you can make, there should be an official website containing links to each Bürgeramt's calendar page. Bookmark that website, not the individual pages.
Find one or a few locations you'd prefer, then open each calendar in a separate browser! Opening multiple in one browser doesn't work, as it remembers your last selection per browser session.
Next, keep refreshing and checking the calendars every 30 minutes. Slots free up pretty often, but they're also full again soon after. If you're lucky, you can figure out when canceled appointments are entered into the system for your location (for mine it was 10AM every day). Around that time, there's a good chance you might even get a few slots that are only a week or two into the future.
Once you figured out when slots open up, check around that time daily. Book the first slot you can get, then keep doing this for a few days and book any slot that is better than your previous one (but be nice and cancel the old slot).
It's a lot of work, and it shouldn't be necessary, but I'd never go into a Bürgeramt without an appointment and this method has worked for me every time so far.
It's officially sanctioned by the city, but it's capped to one request every 3 minutes to avoid replacing the official website. Every few months, I ask them for permission to add other services, and I get ghosted.
However, the tool is open source, so you can just `pip install` it and run it on any appointment type you want.
You make great use of modern technology and ingenuity. Congratulations, everyone should do the same. Sarcasm end.
As a German living abroad I look in horror at the stories I read.
Where I live changing the official registered address is a log into the gov services site, change it and two weeks late I get a letter with ned address stickers for my driver's licence. The driver licence on my phone does not need a sticker obviously.
I mean, from what I hear Berlin does take the cake on this one, but yes: its a country-wide phenomenon.
For what its worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the things you can do digitally in Kiel.
Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen, Hamburg and Bremen have "Dataport", a publicly owned company which does a lot of the tech for public institutions in the area. While they are not operating at the efficiency of a normal company, they seem to be fairly useful. I'm not sure if something similar exists for other regions in Germany.
For Berlin specifically it is important to note the city-state was super broke until around 10 years ago. Many causes for this including mismanagement by the government, but the main cause is the GDR, how Berlin was divided, and how very little industry settled in or around Berlin.
Now this has changed a lot in the last decade or two, but it has been accompanied by avg. yearly net migration of 80k people which is putting a major strain on all public services.
A big issue of Berlin's failure is within Berlin's constitution:
Berlin isn't centralized, but the districts (Bezirke) have quite some freedom to structure their work (similar to "kommunale Selbstverwaltung" in other states) and how they run the administration offices (Bürgerämter etc.) which then leads to city administration passing a law for something and each district implementing it differently and city administration having no authority to override district decisions, while taking the blame.
Fixing this requires a change to the constitution, but that requires a 2/3 majority in the city assembly (Abgeordnetenhaus) or a referendum. Getting the majority is hard as there are varying differences (from parties being happy about number of posts to full, like district mayors etc.) and "dislike" between districts (East/West, center/outer, ..)
That brings to mind the romance of waiting in the immigration queue in Dublin at 4 AM with my wife so we could get registered by the end of the day. https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/20853936/ . Simpler times.
Of course, the Irish government did eventually put in place an appointment booking system that was so comically bad bots would take all of the appointments immediately for resale on Facebook marketplace. It never crossed their mind to use a CAPTCHA. I only got my own appointment by writing a scraper for it.
I did that in Berlin about a decade ago and I think that only stopped happening here around 2018. I have fond memories of thermoses, multiple layers, a long grumpy queue trying to keep itself warm in pitch darkness. And then when the doors open, everyone rushes in to grab one of the few paper appointment tickets. Didn’t manage? Then try again the next day.
And that was actually a much-missed office hours system. If you had to see someone without waiting months, you waited from the middle of the night. Now you’re just screwed.
That appointment system is the worst online registration system ever. In fact I suggest people having trouble to move outside of the Dublin area to avoid it. Then you would only need to call the garda and an immigration officer handles everything. You just visit the station on the appointed date with your documents.
I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is far ahead of the appointment system one.
Of course, when I tried to register in Tullamore years later the immigration officer fobbed me off until she tried. Thankfully the one in Athlone eventually took pity on me and let me register there.
Incompetence and unprofessionalism were rampant. Also: typo - I meant until she retired, leaving Offaly with no immigration officer. I had to call a TD to get sorted. Peak Ireland.
The trick is not to go to the main registration side but to the small local offices in the outer areas. Like in Nuremberg not going into the city center but to Katzwang or Großgründlach.
Sometimes you can got there without appointment and you can go in, because they have nothing to do and they are waiting happily for you and they are very friendly.
Try registering or deregistering a vehicle in a major German city. That once took me three months, because I simply couldn't get an appointment via the web interface set up especially for that purpose. Since Covid, the process is kind of broken, at least in my city.
You might have chosen the worst example for your point, it is super duper easy to register a car online. I registered both of my cars online, the papers arrived in a week but I was able to drive and insure the vehicle without any interruptions. They give you a printout to carry around while the original registration papers arrive, but the police already knows whether the car is registered or not and will not bother you.
> it is super duper easy to register a car online.
If you are in possession of the title of the car, yes.
However if you lease a car, the leasing company will just post the lease to the Zulassungsstelle so that you will not be in possession of the title at any time. So it will require you to go there in person.
German here and a Berlin "native". In Germany, it is common knowledge that Berlin bureaucracy sucks even more so than on average. Part of it has to do with (Western) Berlin's history of being an island receiving a lot of subsidies. Nowadays, after re-unification, it still receives a lot of federal subsidies but for being the new country's capitol. As a consequence, Berlin's public sector is relatively large but not in the relevant branches and also lacking really competent personnel. So while Berlin spends Billions on paying public servants it cannot even maintain its basic public services, sadly.
I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).
In Berlin you can usually book a same day appointment for some city services including registration in the morning at 8:00-8:05, when they release few more slots. Sometimes you may need to go somewhere like Alt Tegel quickly, but that worked for me several times.
I am always in a similar situation in Valencia (Spain) when trying to book appointments. Fortunately, there is an integrated appointment system here and it's fairly trivial to automate checking for open appointments using their API. I can usually get one in a few hours by checking once per minute for free slots.
I also wrote something similar for getting a NIE appointment (foreigner's ID card) by using puppeteer (headless Chrome for node) to actually fill out the website for me, about once per 3 minutes (max without getting rate-limited).
I'm fortunate to have the skills to do so but I feel bad for the rest of the people who have to check websites for weeks at a time to get appointments.
The trick is to look for appointments early in the morning. People who think they won't be able to make it to the appointment that day cancel theirs and there's a bunch of openings every morning.
This, it requires getting up around 6 AM or so, however there are always several slots made available for the same day, think last tickets sale for a concert.
