Electric car that charges itself • Hacker News Board

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#381

Post by fomine3 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

Qwertious wrote: post #260

majewsky wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misrepresenting the current argument. This is not about "electric cars will never be viable", the current argument is "this particular electric car has significant downsides and nearly no advantages compared to existing electric cars".

>You're misrepresenting the current argument. It's not talking about the current argument. It's saying the current argument shares the property of arguing against the use-cases of people outside the target demographic. People who argue "electric cars will never be viable" (and not anyone in this thread) commonly complain about lack of supercharging speed, despite that being a feature that most people (and all initial…

Agreed but it's partially due to EV manufacturer/fan's advertisement. They should say that what you need is just plug in at home for most days, rather than supercharging.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#382

Post by ganafagol » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 7:36 AM UTC

hnuser123456 wrote: post #295

iso1631 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is building cars for a mainly american style market - long drives and private parking. topping up 5 miles a day means that a full battery will last me and the 1.8 million UK cars that do under 2000 miles a year, months between having to plug in and recharge.

I'm in the US but have a 2 mile commute each way, and I don't drive to work every day (pre-covid). Uncommon but I'm not alone. - For me, 5 miles a day would keep the battery topped off and I wouldn't have to visit a charger except on longer trips. - Would also be much more palatable to limit the full-charge voltage to something a little lower, prolonging the battery's useful life, knowing it'll passively recharge dai…

Using a car for a 2 mile "commute" sounds very US. That's a 10 minute bike ride tops.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#383

Post by iso1631 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 7:37 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #350

outworlder wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It adds cost and complexity to the cars, so that's one reason not to do it. Still - I have an EV that's sitting idle most of the time because of the pandemic. I had to plug it in a handful of times this year, that would mean plugging it in zero times. Also, if it is very sunny, it means the car is hot. One common thing to do is to start climate control before getting into the car so it will be at a comfortable temper…

One bad thing about leaving your car outside all the time vs a garage although is increased wear on the body and the overall life of the car.

Again American market. parking your car indoors is weird in the UK. Parking on the street with no ability to plug in overnight is far more common.

"In England in 2018 – the last date for which figures are available – 9 per cent of household vehicles were parked in a garage overnight; 63 per cent were parked on private property (but not garaged); 25 per cent were parked on the street; and 2 per cent were parked in other places."

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#384

Post by vidarh » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

dheera wrote: post #342

JKCalhoun wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think it is the degree of the regulations. Examples: no cars parked on your front yard. Check. No solar panels on your roof. That would be too far.

> Examples: no cars parked on your front yard. This would be too far. If the front yard and car are both my property it is not for anyone else to tell me what to do with them.

If driving the cars on and off your property does not in any way affect your neighbours, I'd be with you. But restrictions on numbers of cars are often used as a proxy for restricting traffic and noise.

E.g. near me planning regulations generally prevent new construction from creating more than an average of 1.5 parking space per housing unit, to prevent further strain on the transport network. One might argue it's a poor proxy, as some people will have cars just sitting around, but it tends to work reasonably well.

There certainly is over-reach, and one of my pet peeve is that restrictions like this (and ideally all regulations and laws) ought to have stated justifications as part of the text, and "test conditions" to validate if they achieve the goal, as it's often hard to unpackage why the rules are the way they are, but a lot of these restrictions do have a reasoning behind them as well. Whether or not one agree about that reasoning is a separate issue, but I think a lot of conflict over these kinds of regulations boils down to not knowing the reasoning behind them.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#385

Post by EmoSupportEmu » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 7:52 AM UTC

Kind of neat, but I suspect the coating over those flexible cells will degrade like any other clearcoat and eventually cause significant efficiency loss. Especially when drivers are encouraged to just park it out in the sun.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#386

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

hnuser123456 wrote: post #295

iso1631 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is building cars for a mainly american style market - long drives and private parking. topping up 5 miles a day means that a full battery will last me and the 1.8 million UK cars that do under 2000 miles a year, months between having to plug in and recharge.

I'm in the US but have a 2 mile commute each way, and I don't drive to work every day (pre-covid). Uncommon but I'm not alone. - For me, 5 miles a day would keep the battery topped off and I wouldn't have to visit a charger except on longer trips. - Would also be much more palatable to limit the full-charge voltage to something a little lower, prolonging the battery's useful life, knowing it'll passively recharge dai…

Those are all very real and legit advantages, but they are also very tiny, and for a very small subset of usecases of the car - where it is parked for most of a month, and only used for a couple of days here and there, and only for short trips, in a very sunny country, that also has bad infrastructure in terms of garages and charging (otherwise you just plug it in and forget about it), and yet where you actually have a space in the sun to park it.

Yes, those are all useful things but you have to (as a manufacturer, at least) weigh them against all the costs of building this feature, making production more complex, deal with the returns/breakages, etc. etc. So like the parent comment said, the consensus seems to be "just not worth it".

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#387

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 8:06 AM UTC

hnuser123456 wrote: post #307

40four wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. There are cars for the European market, and I don't think we'll be seeing many in the states. My main point though, is that the amount of electricity you can collect from the surface area of a car is very negligible. It's a very ambitious goal indeed. It's not worthless, it's basically free energy so anything gained is good I guess. It just seems there are a lot of people here that seem to think…

I really can't understand your POV. Of course it doesn't mean never having to visit a charger for cross-country trips, which is obviously a dream. It does mean the car adds charge passively rather than losing it, the panels are silly cheap compared to the cost of batteries, and the hardest part would just be integrating them into the body panels, which is certainly achievable. See my other comment in this thread wher…

> There's really no reason not to do it

Cost is the reason. You have to consider cost.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#388

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

hourislate wrote: post #304

mbreese wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi trucks and trailers are two different components. Most trailers have a large flat area, but these can get swapped often. And even within the same company you won’t always have the solar trailer hooked up to the electric semi. The swappable nature of the load is part of the appeal of semis. I guess what I’m saying is, even if you had a solar trailer, you would lose a lot of the load flexibility of using a semi tr…

Trailer manufacturers could make all trailers solar (panels on the roof of the trailer) and have a battery pack somewhere in the area a refer unit would sit. This way you could power the refer if there was one or the the Truck if there was no refer unit and the Truck was electric. They become a energy storage unit while not in use (sitting in lots). I think this is what we'll see when there will be more Electric Semi…

In a fantasy world unrestricted by physics and market and costs and raw materials, - yes, they could.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#389

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #159

leoedin wrote: post #106

It's easy to dismiss this as green washing, but there is some value to it for city cars. The amount of electricity generated is never going to be enough to fully power the car, but that's not really the point. If having solar panels on your car roof means you can avoid charging much in summer, that will make owning an electric car for people who live in cities much simpler - and so support adoption. As a back of the…

Indeed, I were once skeptical (remembering EEVBlog's Solar Roadways series) but it really seems a good deal. Short commutes in cities can probably be covered. And a killer feature to me: if you ever get stranded somewhere without power, you at least have the option to wait a day or two to charge and get to somewhere nearby with power (around 3 miles/day for ioniq, 10 miles/day average for sion according to the articl…

> you at least have the option to wait a day or two to charge

This argument gets thrown around sometimes, but if you really consider it:

Who has time to wait a day or two at a random place, with no infrastructure? People who have no valueable job (where time is very valueable), and at the same time are outdoors enthusiasts who can sleep in a random spot? But who at the same time are in the market for a futuristic EV? Even for those, how many times out of each trip would that be a viable solution? If you consider this in practices, it just makes much more sense to call the tow truck.

And if you know that you are going on a really long trip where there is really no possibility to even call a tow truck (but like, where is that? Where is the place where you have a close proximity to an EV charger, otherwise you wouldn't be going there, and no possibility for a tow truck to access?), even in that unlikely circumstance - you can just already buy a 1000$ 10kg diesel generator and bring with you for emergencies.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#390

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 8:23 AM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #215

dreamcompiler wrote: post #7

This idea will never be practical but it also seems it won't die. 69 miles per week of charging. Assuming the car is sitting outdoors all week and the weather is not cloudy. A Tesla can charge more than this in an hour.

For a site devoted to people who love technology this is short sighted thinking. People thought the iPhone was a gimmick too that would never sell. You are looking at a development model of an idea: what happen 10 years down the road when solar technology improves like everything else and becomes light and more efficient. People thought Tesla would never work as well when it started. People thought Ford would never s…

I was there, and I am still wondering - who thought iPhone was a gimimck? Certainly not people in tech? The tablet phones and phones with keyboards already exist, the palm, the windows phones. iPhone was just a better more slick implementation. Maybe some people had doubts that iPhones would to better than Windows phones, but since those already existed, and there was a market for them, why would anyone consider iPhone a gimmick?