Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 460 posts

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#251

Post by JoeAltmaier »

bradleyjg wrote: post #248
deevolution wrote: post #235

I can't wait for the day where public transportation is replaced by more efficient, cheaper and more personalized ride sharing services. Public transit is horribly broken, at least in NYC... personaly I dont see my self ever sinking 35k into a new car unless it would be making me money.

I don't see how ride sharing services are ever going to be more efficient than public transit. Or how it will even be barely possible to replace the one with the other in a place like NYC. Riding sharing is about utilizing a vehicle in a temporally more efficient way, but it does little to improve spacial efficiency during peak times. The commuter rails, subway, and buses are far more dense than a fleet of self drivi…

Ride sharing does help with parking though. Which is almost as bad a problem.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#253

Post by ghaff »

opportune wrote: post #232
fjsolwmv wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suv/minivan/wagon aren't wealthy cars, they are suburban/rural family cars.

I guess I don't understand the original post then. Of course if you live in a rural area you'll need a car with longer range than an EV. Most people don't live in rural areas, so most people won't need to own a gas powered car to go alongside their electric car. It just seems like an unfair complaint about electric vehicles - the problem isn't the EV's, but people buying them without having a good use for them. I don…

There are certainly good use cases for them but one of the best ones is as a second vehicle. That's more or less the situation I have in an exurban locale. An SUV for weekend trips, snow, hauling stuff and (in my case) a small good gas mileage car for most local trips.

What I wouldn't do is give up the ICE SUV. There's no way I'm going to deal with the hassle of a rental or the uncertainty of a charger system whenever I have a longer drive unless the economics became really compelling.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#254

Post by Cthulhu_ »

kuceram wrote: post #34

I think that the market will decide. It will be a balance between few major things like: price, range, efficiency, safety and fancyness (cars are more emotional than rational :-). The same happened in the beggining of car industry. https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/hybrid-techno...

> cars are more emotional than rational :-)

Depends; in my country there were / are significant cost / tax benefits for getting hybrid and fully electric cars (for lease cars, and there's quite a lot of those here). If driving an electric car is cheaper then people will go for that too. Does Tesla still do free usage of the supercharger network for the Model S? That's another incentive, given the cost of electricity over time.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#255

Post by hermenaut »

mschuster91 wrote: post #213

Biggest problem I guess will be expanding the charger network, simply due to physics. On the country side, laying cables for 1MW peak load (4 superchargers @ 250 kW) will be expensive - the grid in rural areas is enough for some farms and small villages, that's it. In cities, electric-car chargers will have to deal with political obstacles (no one wants to sacrifice free-for-all parking spots!), in addition to the el…

Over the next 50 years if solar roofs take off ( https://www.tesla.com/solarroof ) I don't see it being that much of a problem on the country side. We probably won't need to rebuild the entire grid, may be able to leave some part of the grid behind. May even be cheaper to do so with savings compared to the alternative options

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#256

Post by kozak »

mschuster91 wrote: post #213

Biggest problem I guess will be expanding the charger network, simply due to physics. On the country side, laying cables for 1MW peak load (4 superchargers @ 250 kW) will be expensive - the grid in rural areas is enough for some farms and small villages, that's it. In cities, electric-car chargers will have to deal with political obstacles (no one wants to sacrifice free-for-all parking spots!), in addition to the el…

If charging happens at the place where the car spends most of its time, then even domestic 16A/230V sockets would be enough for typical usage (for atypical usage, there are superchargers).

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#257

Post by digi_owl »

mschuster91 wrote: post #234
davidgh wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of rural areas, this will be an interesting challenge. When you drive cross country in the USA, you can expect to find gasoline reasonably close to even the most remote areas. The distance to the next gas station from anywhere in the USA is well below the range of the typical car. However, in regards to cities, you are presenting a situation where the charging station comes to the parked car, rather than the…

> if the charging times are rapidly decreased Charging times have an upper bound: physics. 250 kW is an insane amount of power and still you'd need around half an hour to fill a 100 kWh battery, to get even close to the 5-10 minutes of charging like at a gas station you'd need megawatts of peak power... and as there are two steps of conversions involved (grid => HVDC => battery voltage), even with 99% efficiency you…

If the range is enough, stopping to charge up for 30 mins means one can also grab a bite to eat.

My parents took us kids on car trips during summer holidays, and usually by the time we needed to stop to refuel the car we also took the time to eat and such.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#258

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Dowwie wrote: post #170

Are electric buses even necessary when electric autonomous sedans are available?

Depends on how big and busy your roads are. Gridlock might be alleviated a bit due to autonomous driving and planning, but by the time that rolls around the world's population will probably have gone up by a couple billion again (wikipedia says it's projected to be 10 billion by 2050) so there'd be more cars on the road.

There'd be less gridlock if people did more carpooling, buses, or drove more on motorcycles.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#259

Post by dagw »

michaelt wrote: post #180
dagw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been talking about this for as long as they've been talking about electric cars, and several companies have demoed prototypes. The two main problems are that the machines needed to do this change are very expensive and tricky to maintain compared to a simple gas pump, and more importantly, unless you can get all car manufacturers to agree to a universal standard for batteries and battery access you're goi…

unless you can get all car manufacturers to agree to a universal standard for batteries And unless batteries get so good that the battery in that £19,000 Renault Zoe has identical performance to the battery in that £90,000 Tesla Model X, they never will :)

Or for that matter people accepting having their brand new Tesla X battery replaced with a 5 year old Tesla X battery.

I suppose one solution would be that cars have two batteries. One battery that is specific to the make/model of the car and one battery that is easily replaceable. So perhaps the cheap Renault basically only has the replaceable battery while the Tesla X has 70% of its battery capacity in it's super awesome main battery and only 30% in the 'crappy' replaceable battery which you only replace when you quickly need an extra 100 miles of range.

Re: What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World

#260

Post by kozak »

mschuster91 wrote: post #234
davidgh wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of rural areas, this will be an interesting challenge. When you drive cross country in the USA, you can expect to find gasoline reasonably close to even the most remote areas. The distance to the next gas station from anywhere in the USA is well below the range of the typical car. However, in regards to cities, you are presenting a situation where the charging station comes to the parked car, rather than the…

> if the charging times are rapidly decreased Charging times have an upper bound: physics. 250 kW is an insane amount of power and still you'd need around half an hour to fill a 100 kWh battery, to get even close to the 5-10 minutes of charging like at a gas station you'd need megawatts of peak power... and as there are two steps of conversions involved (grid => HVDC => battery voltage), even with 99% efficiency you…

Is there really a HVDC to battery voltage conversion step? I thought the whole point of quick charging is that you get exactly the DC that the battery needs right from the charger.
Post reply on HN