Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption • Hacker News Board

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#461

Post by Zanni » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:15 AM UTC

kylecordes wrote: post #255

turtlebits wrote: post #178

Mass adoption won't happen until charging infrastructure improves dramatically. As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them…

This is a great mystery of electric vehicle charging: why is it so hard for anyone but Tesla to keep most of the chargers working most of the time?

It's not really a mystery if you understand who the customers are. Tesla's Supercharger customers are Tesla owners (for the most part), and Tesla has a vested interest in keeping them happy.

Other charging stations are mostly installed in mall parking lots and so on by government mandate. The owners of the parking lots pay to get them installed and maintained--they are the customers. And since they're (mostly) satisfying a government tick box, there's not nearly as much incentive to keep functioning.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#462

Post by dagurp » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #408

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick charging is a just in case solution and probably shouldn’t be relied on. It’s more efficient and likely much easier on the battery to slow charge it overnight.

The problem with that is that in many places (i.e. most European cities) you don't have a dedicated parking spot, so to park overnight you would need to put charging spots on every street every five meters. The task is possible, but gargantuan.

For those people it's a matter of buying a number of chargers that they can choose between.

They can limit access to those chargers to the people living in the building or allow anyone to use them and make some money by selling the electricity. You can even have access control depending on the time of day.

Another benefit is that you get load balancing when many people are charging at the same time.

Private chargers are only a good idea if you there's only a few living spaces.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#463

Post by whatever1 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

erikrothoff wrote: post #456

whatever1 wrote: post #427

EVs currently have high enough utility in the wealthy suburbia where you own your garage and have the capability to charge overnight. If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reas…

I’m literally a euro-peasant in my third floor apartment with street parking outside my third floor apartment window. The city has but up a bunch of charging parking stations on said street parking and it’s great. There are no gas stations on the ”island” (Södermalm, Stockholm) I live on, but a ton of electric street parking charging stations. I think the decentralisation of these types of charging stations will win…

Let's take Madrid as an example of a typical densely populated euro-city. ~ 3M population, half a million registered cars. I really don't see it economically, environmentally, or even technically viable to install a quarter million chargers to fix the battery charging problem.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#464

Post by missedthecue » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:22 AM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #427

EVs currently have high enough utility in the wealthy suburbia where you own your garage and have the capability to charge overnight. If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reas…

swappable batteries seems like a two birds, one stone solution, though i'm aware they have drawbacks of their own

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#465

Post by whatever1 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:28 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #464

whatever1 wrote: post #427

EVs currently have high enough utility in the wealthy suburbia where you own your garage and have the capability to charge overnight. If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reas…

swappable batteries seems like a two birds, one stone solution, though i'm aware they have drawbacks of their own

Even if we assume battery size/shape standardization, this would move the baterry liability from the car owner to the battery pack vendor, since they would have to maintain the batteries in circulation (introduce new ones, retire old ones) etc. This would require crazy high locked capital and it would cause the cost to be prohibitively high for a casual weekly swap.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#466

Post by scruple » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

elihu wrote: post #457

One side of this that doesn't seem to get looked at much is how many ICE cars are on the roads that could be converted. Doing conversions at high volume would be very labor intensive, but it would give dealerships and mechanics something to do, and it would generate less waste than replacing whole cars. Right now it's kind of on the edge of being practical, mostly because of the batteries. They're expensive and bulky…

Who is in this space for consumer vehicles? I'm only aware of Hyliion for semi trucks.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#467

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #427

EVs currently have high enough utility in the wealthy suburbia where you own your garage and have the capability to charge overnight. If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reas…

People fixate on charging speed and forget that the best use case for EVs is to literally charge them when you sleep at a low current.

If the the street has lights on it, they can be used to deliver power to EV cars easily. Adding Type2 plugs and kWh meters to street lights is not a technical issue, it's a political thing of who gets the money and who pays for the up-front costs.

230V/8A per car with smart load balancing will charge 100km of charge overnight. Up that to 12 amps and you've covered the majority of Europeans' daily commute.

Won't work for the US though, your two hour commutes are Mad Max -levels of madness =)

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#468

Post by 205guy » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:37 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #246

My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon. This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week! Do people... not plan ahead…

As others have mentioned, Teslas charge at their fast chargers (and getting faster all the time) spread around the area. Other cars can do the same, or at workplaces. Some new building codes now mandate that the parking be charging ready, so they have to put the conduit under the pavement, but they don’t need to wire it right away. So that’s a first step to simplifying a retro-install.

I do think apartment parking will eventually be retrofitted. The charging networks could easily have a apartment product—or license their network access to a manufacturer. So you would just use your charging network app or card as when charging around town. There are also products like Evercharge that split the power from a single circuit across several plugged in cars (optimizing power usage and reducing the need for conduits and wiring).

The various EV promoters have been tackling this issue for a while, something like the Electric Auto Association may have people or resources to help convince an apartment owner.

I wonder: shouldn’t a grid with lots of solar incentivize workplace charging (day-time use of peak generation), and a grid with wind majority incentivize home charging (night-time use of peak generation)? Maybe

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#469

Post by erikrothoff » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:40 AM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #463

erikrothoff wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m literally a euro-peasant in my third floor apartment with street parking outside my third floor apartment window. The city has but up a bunch of charging parking stations on said street parking and it’s great. There are no gas stations on the ”island” (Södermalm, Stockholm) I live on, but a ton of electric street parking charging stations. I think the decentralisation of these types of charging stations will win…

Let's take Madrid as an example of a typical densely populated euro-city. ~ 3M population, half a million registered cars. I really don't see it economically, environmentally, or even technically viable to install a quarter million chargers to fix the battery charging problem.

Why would a quarter of a million chargers be needed? Seems really excessive.

Re: Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption

#470

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 8:40 AM UTC

kylecordes wrote: post #255

turtlebits wrote: post #178

Mass adoption won't happen until charging infrastructure improves dramatically. As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them…

This is a great mystery of electric vehicle charging: why is it so hard for anyone but Tesla to keep most of the chargers working most of the time?

Multiple vendors in one system.

You've got the provider for the actual charger (a handful of different providers), which needs to negotiate with the car via CCS. This can fail in umpteen different ways, as car manufacturers differ on how they implement CCS (Dunno how, but it happens).

Then you've got the software in the charging point, which needs to be customised for the brand you're selling under (another moving part).

And lastly, you have the back end system for the brand, which handles authentication, authorization (RFID or App) and billing - this is the bit that ultimately gives the charger the go-ahead to start feeding power to the connected car.

Any of these fails, no electricity for you.

For 22kW "slow" chargers this is a bit simpler as the actual charger is a lot less complex, it doesn't need to negotiate, it just needs to switch one relay.

Tesla is like Apple in this case, they take care of the whole stack. So as long as the charger has power, it'll work. Authentication and authorization are done by having the car negotiate with the charger directly via the charging cable, no dongles or apps needed.