I get it, it's new, and we got--we have some things to figure out, but oh my God, I am tired of seeing people with electric cars acting very strangely in ways I do not understand so let's just jump in and do a quick list of kinda deeply unhinged things that I'm tired of seeing you do.

Okay, let's start with when you're about to buy an electric car.  The number one most insane thing you can do is buy a new electric car.  I know, people like to buy new cars.  I don't understand why you're doing it.  So you have two superior choices to buying a new electric car: you can lease an electric car, which is a good idea because electric cars do lose their value quickly, because the technology is moving very fast so the next year's model is often significantly better than last year's model and so it's hard to sell your old one 'cause it's not as good as the new one, but you can lease and that is a solution to that problem.  You lease your car, and then at the end of your three years, you get a new one and it has all the new features, but even superior to that, you could buy a used electric car.  You can still get the tax breaks on used electric cars and whenever anybody says to me, oh my God, the biggest problem with EVs is that they lose their value so fast, that's the biggest advantage of used EVs and I honestly think in addition to like, the technology getting better fairly quickly, a big reason why people don't want to buy used EVs is because they think that the batteries in a car are like the batteries in a cell phone and two years from now, your car won't go anywhere, and that's not how it works.

These batteries that are coming out now, if you get like a three year old EV, that battery's gonna last well beyond 100,000 miles.  You're gonna lose a little bit of range, okay, but you need to stop worrying so much about range, which leads me to thing number two.  When you buy the car with the most range, for the one road trip you go on every three years, the rest of the time, you're lugging around a battery that can go 400 miles.  You don't need that.  You don't need a battery that's that big.  You don't.  You've gotta look at the way that you drive and then get a car that's good for that situation.  

This is why they come with sometimes a variety of different battery size packs.  You don't want the biggest one, not just because it costs more now, but because you have to carry it around all the time and also because leave some of those minerals for the rest of us, right?  My car has a range of about 250 miles.  This is more than I usually need.  I drove it to Seattle, which is about 500 miles.  I had to stop to charge it twice.  It was a total of about 30 minutes of charging.  This is okay.  I had to pee anyway.

Now, if you live in a place that doesn't have a lot of EV infrastructure and you're gonna be going on road trips across like, Mississippi or something, maybe this is a concern.  I've never had a problem.  Gas cars have longer range but my bladder doesn't and that's gonna be the limiting factor anyway.

I'm interrupting this video with a temporary advertisement.  It will be deleted out of the video in six days.  My wife and my son and I have come to Oregon to celebrate her birthday.  This is also during the Crash Course Coin campaign, which is a very busy time for me, so what I decided to do is every time somebody came up to me to thank me for Crash Course, I would record them saying thank you to the people who buy the Crash Course Coin.  So without further ado, here are some people I have met in the last 24 hours.

I'm waiting at a food truck and this is Catie, she came up to me to say thank you for Crash Course.

Catie: Hi.

Hank: I'm at Shirts and Pants in Portland, Oregon.  Gracie said thank you to me for Crash Course.

I'm at Isaac's in Salem, Oregon, and Jay just said thank you for Crash Course to me.

Hello, I'm here with Kylie who just thanked me for Crash Course.

Kylie: Thank you, Crash Course.

Hank: I'm still waiting for my food at this food truck.  Skylar has come up to me to say thank you for Crash Course videos.

Skylar: Hi, guys.

Gracie:  Thank you so much for buying the Crash Course Coin.  

Jay: I just wanna say thank you to educate us youth.

Catie: It got me through college.  It was like, so easy to follow.  I just can't believe I'm meeting you right now.

Skylar: Super good explanations and uh, the visuals were awesome.

Hank: You are studying to be a paramedic right now?

Skylar: Yes, almost done.

Hank: What do you do now?

Catie: Well, I became a (?~3:44) scientist and then I became a data scientist and now I do data for healthcare networks.  Thank you, thank you, Crash Course donors.

Skylar: Thank you, donors, for making Crash Course possible.  

Hank: And then say 'get a Crash Course Coin'.

Skylar: Get a Crash Course Coin.

Hank: Okay, thank you.

?: Is that like crypto?

Hank: No, it's not crypto!  Yeah, no, no, I'm leaving that in.

You can see why I think supporting Crash Course is a no-brainer because I am constantly reached by people.  In fact, one of those people went and bought a Crash Course Coin while I was watching her.

We are providing a lot of value, we know that, and we know that we can do Crash Course with not very much money.  We need everybody to consider it so that the people who can end up doing it, and then after that, that's basically Crash Course funded for a whole year, so if you think that might be you and this part of the video is still in the video, that means the campaign is still live, then check it out.  There's a link in the description.

But I should have started with like, the number one most crazy thing that I've seen people do, which is charging at a fast charger when they could be charging at home because they don't have a fast charger at home.  This is very dumb.

My car gets about 30 miles of range if I plug it in for 12 hours, which is about how long it's going to be plugged in, so I like, get home maybe at 5, I'm leaving maybe at 8, that's longer than 12 hours, but in that period of time, I can get like an extra, like, 35 miles of range, and that's more than I'm going to use that day in a typical day, and for clarity, it is plugged in to a normal 110 outlet.  It is just plugged in to the plug that I use to plug my lawn mower into when I--cause I also have an electric lawn mower, not to brag.

If you don't have the ability to charge your car at home, then an electric car is not worth having, but many people hear that as 'if you don't have the ability to charge on like a level 2 charger, which is like the one that your oven plugs into, then you shouldn't get an electric car'.  You can just plug it into a normal plug.  I don't know where this came from.

I am a technologically sophisticated guy with plenty of money.  It is not worth it for me to hire somebody to come and install a 220 charger for my electric vehicle.  I just plug it into the 110 and it's great.  I've never had to worry about it.  It's charged in three or four days.  Now, if you're driving maybe a hundred miles a day, this can be a problem, but not charging at home because you don't understand that the 110 also works infuriates me.  Stop that.  Just plug it into the 110, and remember, charging at home is like 1/3 of the price of charging at a fast charger, and this is like, it is real money.

This is your fuel, you know, charging at a fast charger isn't that much cheaper than gas.  Charging at home is way cheaper than gas.

Alright, another thing is always charging up to 100%.  Now, this doesn't bother me that much, but you probably shouldn't keep your car at 100%, especially if you don't drive that much.  If you do, if you have like, a lot of range you need, you can keep it at 100% and it's just gonna decrease the life of your battery a little bit.  I keep mine charged to 80%, and then I like, let it float down to below 50% and then I charge it up overnight, 'cause that's about how much range I can charge in one day, but the battery is like, technically happiest at around 50% charge, but the--it sort of gets exponentially less happy up at 100% or down at 0%.  It's crazy to treat this like a gas car, where you only like, plug it in when you get to 0.  No.  Plug it in.   Get it up to 70%.  Drain it down to 30%.  Plug it in.  Get it up to 70%, and then when you're going on a road trip, you can just tell it--and this is all inside the little panel, you just tell it to go up to 100% and then you can have that and go on your trip, and it's fine to do it like, once and then immediately drive away.  

Now here's one that I'm--I have a problem with, because I am not taking it in for oil changes, I'm also not doing all the other stuff, so you also have to do the other stuff.  You have to take it in.  You gotta get the tires rotated.  You gotta check your brakes.  Brakes are weird because I mean, this is true with a lot of cars, but with any kind of regenerative braking, you might not use your brakes very much.  I don't think that I've used the brakes in this car, but you still have to get your brakes checked.

Okay, another one, and this is also one that I was--I problematically had this issue, which was to only use the internal navigation on the car when going on a road trip.  So I'd look and it'd like, tell me where to stop and what to do, and it was just, it was not the best way to do it.  There are several apps.  The one I use is called A Better Routeplanner, ABRP.  It's great and it saves me time and it gets me to the chargers I'd like to go to rather than just the chargers that my car wants me to go to, which might--I don't know if it's like preferencing chargers that are better for the car company or if it's just like, doesn't believe in my ability to not freak out when I get below 10% or something, I don't know, but when I was driving to Seattle, like my car told me I was going to have to stop for three charges on the way, but with A Better Routeplanner, it was just two.

There's physics reasons for this.  It's always going to be that way.  That last bit will always take more time.  A Better Routeplanner will tell you what level to charge to, so it'll say you should charge up to 65% and that'll get you to the next charger or that'll get you home.  You can plug in at home.  You don't want to charge more than that at a charger on the road, 'cause you're wasting money and you're wasting time.  

You want to get home and plug in at home where it's cheap.  If you can plug it at home.  If you can't plug in at home, I wouldn't even suggest getting an EV.  If you do that, more power to you, amazing, I appreciate you doing that, but like, it's too much of a pain in the ass, I would never do it.

The whole thing that makes it so great is plugging in at home so that you don't have to worry about ever going to a gas station again.  I only go to gas stations on road trips now.  It's amazing.

So your route planner will tell you what to charge to.  Charge to that.  Get an extra 5% if you wanna feel safe, but then do not take up space at that charging space, especially if there are other cars around.  That's a real faux pas and even if you are currently charging, if you're charging up to 100% when you don't technically have to in order to get where you're going, that is wasting everybody's time, wasting your time, and wasting your money, and now, back to buying EVs for a second.

Number one: remember that efficiency still matters.  Efficiency in EVs is usually miles per kilowatt hour, so you might get like, my car gets about 4 miles per kilowatt hour.  A cybertruck will get like, 1.5.  That's a big difference and it's a big difference for two reasons.  One, because like, it's gonna cost you more per mile to drive, and two, because your "tank" is bigger and so it will take more time to charge that tank, to fill that tank up, whereas my car can charge quite fast because, you know, to get me 100 miles of range might take 10 minutes, if I'm at like, a superfast DC fast charger, but if my car was half the efficiency, if it got 2 miles per kilowatt hour, it would take me more time than that, it would take me 20 minutes to get 100 miles of range.  That is not about the speed of the charging.

It's not about the size of the battery.  It's about the amount of energy the car consumes per mile traveled, and so you want a car that consumes less per mile traveled.  This still matters.  It doesn't just matter for the environment, it matters for the amount of money that you spend on the car charging it, and it matters for the amount of time that you spend charging the car.  More efficient cars are better.  Now, they won't always charge faster, like, a Chevy Bolt, like a 2023 Chevy Bolt, doesn't have fast charging, versus like an Ionic 5, which does.  A Chevy Bolt's gonna take forever and it is not a road trip car.  

Basically, remember, you don't have to buy a road trip car.  You may be in a two car household, in which case, get a Bolt.  Get a Bolt and then have another car to be your road trip car, whether that's EV or plug in or just a regular gas car.  Have your Bolt for getting around town and never having to burn gas ever.  Having an extremely cheap way to get around.  Also, they're not expensive to buy used.  I mean, it depends on where you are.  They're very hard to find used here, but I got lucky.

So getting a giant truck is still going to be inefficient, it's still going to be worse for the environment, it's more minerals going into the car, it's more electricity going into the car, which might be coming from dirty or clean or a mix of sources and it's more time spent at chargers if you're going on a road trip and it's fewer batteries available for other people, like, if, you know, the cybertruck's battery is twice as big as the battery that's in my car. 

These things matter.  Efficiency still matters.  It isn't like we escaped from the paradigm of efficiency mattering.  And that's my list.  That's my list of the things that I have seen EV owners do or believe that I think are dumb and if you stop believing those things, your EV ownership will be less expensive and more smooth and happier, and yes, I do need to get my car's tires rotated and I'm probably not gonna do it for another 12 months.