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

The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 349 posts

Re: The Electric Car

#141

Post by greglindahl »

mahyarm wrote: post #134
greglindahl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New construction in Palo Alto, including single family homes, is required to have that sort of thing pre-installed. Conduit only for single-family homes, a lot of conduit and some actual chargers for multi-family and commercial buildings.

If you own a single family home, then electric cars are ok. If you live in a multiunit, rent, do not have a garage or similar, then charging at home is not practical.

Well, you just responded to a Tesla owner who rents in a multi-unit apartment. I charge, overnight once per week, in a city garage 1 block away. I didn't say it was easy or common, but that it's possible and getting more common.

(And if I ever get short, there's a new supercharger in Mountain View.)

Palo Alto's new law mandating chargers in new construction just recently passed; in a few years it will begin to take effect. And they'll probably extend it to renovations of older buildings, etc etc.

Re: The Electric Car

#142

Post by msandford »

greglindahl wrote: post #109
msandford wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means few millenials will ever be able to own them; real estate is just too damn expensive to buy, nevermind the car that you really only can get once you own a house with a garage.

Lots of places don't have super-expensive real estate, unlike the Bay Area and Manhattan. More and more places over time will require apartment garages to have chargers -- already a law for new construction here in Palo Alto. Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.

So let me get this straight. In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries, you're going to buy a $100k-$150k house because you don't make six figures. And then with all the leftover money that you don't have because you're not earning SF engineer salary, you're going to buy a car that costs anywhere from 25%-50% of your house?

Re: The Electric Car

#143

Post by philwelch »

dragonwriter wrote: post #41
philwelch wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the self-driving electric cab gets soiled with the last passenger's bodily fluids?

It will probably have facilities for identifying that condition and either self-cleaning or notifying the central dispatch system that it needs to be taken out of the rotation until cleaned. Pretty much the same thing as a human-driven cab. Worst case, all those things fail, and a dirty cab shows up, and you reject it on the hailing app with an explanation of why, leading to some delay till you get the next available…

People are still disincentivized from soiling taxis by the presence of the driver. Though at the very least, you'll have to have a membership/accountability system in place, and that becomes harder and harder as you scale.

Re: The Electric Car

#144

Post by UberMouse »

powera wrote: post #88
erikpukinskis wrote: post #24

I don't think people full comprehend the price drop that is imminent. The total cost of ownership per mile for a car in the U.S. right now is about $0.60. I was watching a panel the other day where someone calculated the cost per mile of a fleet of self-driving on-demand electric cars at $0.08. That an 86% reduction. People might have their misgivings about any of this stuff... electric, self-driving, carshare, and o…

If a Tesla Model S costs $70000, even if electricity and maintenance are free (and there's no premium for self-driving) you would have to drive it 875000 miles for it to cost $0.08/mile. This seems like the type of thing that is literally unbelievable without more evidence than "I heard somebody on a panel say this".

This would not be referring to the Model S, but something like the $20-30000 Model 3.

Re: The Electric Car

#145

Post by ajays »

mschuster91 wrote: post #118

While I agree with the author that electric vehicles will in not long time dominate the car market, I strongly disagree with point #3: > Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. Gas stations even today don't make money with gas, it's next to a loss leader to get customers into the store and spend money on snacks and car…

I live in SF. Within 2 blocks of me 3 gas stations have shut down over the past few years, to be replaced with apartments/condos. Probably it's not related to electric cars per se; but it is probably related to the decline in personal driving.

Re: The Electric Car

#146

Post by greglindahl »

msandford wrote: post #142
greglindahl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of places don't have super-expensive real estate, unlike the Bay Area and Manhattan. More and more places over time will require apartment garages to have chargers -- already a law for new construction here in Palo Alto. Personally, I charge at the city parking garage a block away.

So let me get this straight. In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries, you're going to buy a $100k-$150k house because you don't make six figures. And then with all the leftover money that you don't have because you're not earning SF engineer salary, you're going to buy a car that costs anywhere from 25%-50% of your house?

Last I lived in flyover country, I bought a $162,000 house on a $55,000 salary, and owned a car a bit more expensive than a Leaf.

So yes, it does work. And that's the owning a house case. There's also the "renting an apartment at a modern complex" case.

Re: The Electric Car

#147

Post by Tossrock »

CountSessine wrote: post #117
CountSessine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No carmaker has a city-driving autonomous vehicle that doesn't require super-precise, cm-scale, unrealistically always-up-to-date maps for the AI. The autonomous super-size dump trucks drive along carefully pre-programmed routes using GPS. We're still a long ways away from practical and safe self-driving cars. AI and computer vision just isn't there yet.

Think in terms of exponential progress, and we're about 5 years from the majority of trips being done by self-driving car, IMHO 5 years is a fantasy. Continued exponential increases in device computing power is by no means guaranteed now that chips are at the 14nm feature size. And the recent progress in AI can only be partially attributed to improved computing power - much of it was from improved approaches to train…

I don't think there will be any more AI winters. Previous AI winters were largely the result of a crash in federal grant writing (DARPA/the Strategic Computing Initiative) to labs at research universities, which depend on them for cash.

This time, the ongoing AI/ML renaissance is funded by private industry, and the value they are extracting from it far outstrips the costs of keeping their in-house R&D labs operating. Even if there's a contraction in the market, I can't envision any possible world where Google/Facebook/etc stop working on AI, and they have the money to keep it up as long as they want.

Re: The Electric Car

#148

Post by kailuowang »

hackuser wrote: post #20

The real story my be that car sales may decline, gas or electric: * People drive less; I saw a study showing that significantly fewer millenials are licensed to drive than their predecessors. * More people live in cities, where the cost of cars is higher (insurance and parking) and the demand for them is less due to the proximity of destinations and the availability of alternatives (public transport, taxis, ride-shar…

You missed the most disruptive potential change that will decrease the number of cars needed: driverless cars. These cars can make car sharing so much easier and more efficient that the numbers of cars needed for getting people around will shrink dramatically.

Imagine all the traffic during the work hours will be taken care of by the cars used to sitting in the parking for a whole 8 hours long. And all the house car sitting in the garage during the traffic hours taking care of the people going to and off work. I wouldn't be surprised if the total number of cars shrink to one third without anyone feel any inconvenient.

Re: The Electric Car

#149

Post by nosuchthing »

ajays wrote: post #145
mschuster91 wrote: post #118

While I agree with the author that electric vehicles will in not long time dominate the car market, I strongly disagree with point #3: > Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. Gas stations even today don't make money with gas, it's next to a loss leader to get customers into the store and spend money on snacks and car…

I live in SF. Within 2 blocks of me 3 gas stations have shut down over the past few years, to be replaced with apartments/condos. Probably it's not related to electric cars per se; but it is probably related to the decline in personal driving.

...or the supply limitations on SF's local real estate space

Re: The Electric Car

#150

Post by jellicle »

ajays wrote: post #145
mschuster91 wrote: post #118

While I agree with the author that electric vehicles will in not long time dominate the car market, I strongly disagree with point #3: > Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. Gas stations even today don't make money with gas, it's next to a loss leader to get customers into the store and spend money on snacks and car…

I live in SF. Within 2 blocks of me 3 gas stations have shut down over the past few years, to be replaced with apartments/condos. Probably it's not related to electric cars per se; but it is probably related to the decline in personal driving.

It's probably related to sitting on $2 million of land.
Post reply on HN