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

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

#511

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:00 AM UTC

cabaalis wrote: post #203

Can someone who knows more about the subject that I do comment on the statement "electric powered vehicles are coal powered vehicles?" I'm seeing that in conservative circles.

Only if the country itself is producing electricity with coal.

But the catch here is that when the politicians get their shit together and more to more renewable and less polluting methods of electricity production, suddenly ALL EVs in use will instantly become less polluting.

ICE cars don't mysteriously grow new particle filters or catalytic converters with a free OTA update. They pollute the same amount (or more) for their whole existence.

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

#512

Post by athms » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:01 AM UTC

qndreoi wrote: post #381

athms wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Simple: most people charge at night. Except the people that don't have a charging station in their garage or folks that have a power outage. Just this week, we had a heat wave (70-80F) and winds up to 90MPH across California that resulted in power outages throughout the state as well as several fires.

It seems that gas stations would not work during a power outage. Santa Ana winds cause lots of edge case problems.

You are right, but I have cans of gasoline as part of my emergency kit in case of an earthquake or fire.

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

#513

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

hntrader wrote: post #167

If a country relies only on oil and gas for electricity, are EVs any better than petrol-powered cars as far as emissions go?

The main point is that emissions are produced in the power plant, not outside your house.

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

#514

Post by athms » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #476

athms wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for people that live in the suburbs and have disposable income to put in a charging station.

You don't need a "charging station", you need a wall plug that can handle 8A current without melting. In Finland we have one of those for most private parking spaces for car block heaters. If you want something fancier, it's 300-1000€ for a "proper" charging station with a Type2 cable. If you've already bought an electric car, it'll pay itself back in a few months just with fuel costs. (EU prices, American fuel price…

Great, now all I need to do is run an extension cord out the window, down the stairs, across the parking lot to my space in the carport.

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

#515

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

julienb_sea wrote: post #359

cure wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands. Relatively centralized electricity generation can be converted to lower carbon generation. This is happening pretty rapidly in many places for economic reasons; renewable power generation is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel power generation. Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distrib…

I'm merely making an in my view commonsense point. ICE engines are carefully regulated worldwide, certainly in any nation which would consider mandating a transition to electric vehicles. Subsidies and gasoline taxes encourage societal transition to make transportation as efficient as possible, without mandating a full phase out of gasoline as a power source. Renewables have scalability issues. Grid scale renewable e…

"ICE engines are carefully regulated worldwide"

...Volkswagen would like to have a word :D

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

#516

Post by erik_seaberg » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:06 AM UTC

jjav wrote: post #508

cbozeman wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really need 4,000 chargers though? I don't think so. Between charging at home and charging at work, it shouldn't be necessary to occupy the charger every single time you pull in. Maybe once or twice a week, depending on your commute. A long range Model 3 has as much range as your average gasoline vehicle... how often do most people fill that up? Seems to me if 4000 employees go electric and you can slow charge…

Pre-pandemic I was commuting to a large bay area employer. About a ~hundred or so chargers in the parking lots. The choices were to either arrive very, very early ( I mostly left after 7pm so it was ok but on days when I had to go at 5pm it was a big problem, didn't have time to get enough charge to get back home. Also, there's not enough power available to feed all the chargers simultaneously. So when all chargers a…

I don’t know how anyone is so casual about this. If a charger is only available half the time, I have to plan as if it weren’t there, and then what good is it?

I can run my gas tank down below 1/4 because the Bay Area is littered with 24 hour gas stations; I never have to wait a day to get gas. I’m considering a PHEV, but I can’t buy a BEV until a large majority of apartments (or maybe employers, after WFH ends) have that kind of reliable charging whenever I might need it.

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

#517

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #144

cure wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands. Relatively centralized electricity generation can be converted to lower carbon generation. This is happening pretty rapidly in many places for economic reasons; renewable power generation is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel power generation. Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distrib…

> Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distributed all over the world is effectively impossible. Delivering said energy to over a billion cars all over the world is pretty impossible. As things stand right now that's an entire continent (Africa) which in many places doesn't have reliable power even for basic things like keeping the hospitals running (they have to use diesel generators and the like). But…

You can generate electricity on-site with quite limited resources.

What you can't do is drill, refine and distribute liquid fuel. First you drill crude oil in one location, ship it to a second location to be refined, ship it to your country and then someone has to drive tanker to every single gas station to fill them up.

With electricity you put up solar panels or wind turbines and add a battery. Now you've got electricity for years to come.

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

#518

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #119

julienb_sea wrote: post #115

Electric cars are perfectly pleasant to own as a second car or if you very rarely take long road trips. If it's very cold or very hot, if you drive to the mountains or rural areas for pleasure, range anxiety is a serious problem. Waiting for a re-charge is ok if you have access to Tesla supercharger speeds. Forcing this lifestyle change on everyone is absolutely insane. The climate imperative is poor reasoning becaus…

It's wild to me that no other car manufacturers have taken Tesla up on their offer for supercharger access. EVs without supercharger access are strict city cars. The electrify america network sucks, non tesla range is mostly bad (with a small number of exceptions). Even with decent range, lack of supercharger access makes the car a non-starter. I think Tesla's advantage here remains huge, I think legacy car companies…

> It's wild to me that no other car manufacturers have taken Tesla up on their offer for supercharger access.

It's a prestige thing. Legacy manufacturers would lose face if they'd have their cars charging at the young upstart's superchargers.

This is why most european manufacturers have partnered with 3rd party companies and provide some amount of free charging at certain branded locations for new vehicles.

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

#519

Post by twblalock » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:11 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #472

twblalock wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in Thanksgiving 2019 that Tesla owners were sometimes waiting in line for hours at Supercharger stations in California -- and California has a lot of those! Even Tesla doesn't have it figured out during peak travel times.

You can't build for peak traffic, not in software nor in hardware.

Gas stations seem to be able to handle it. Why can't we expect the same for charging stations? Build for peak capacity. The chargers don't draw much when they aren't plugged in to cars. If we expect to succeed with charging infrastructure we need to make it convenient, even during holidays.

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

#520

Post by OJFord » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

bartvk wrote: post #434

TheSmiddy wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in China where everybody rides ebikes and my building has a free for all parking space where 2/3rds of the parks have no chargers and the spots with charge ports all have qr codes you scan and pay with wechat to turn the port on. This is an easy problem to solve.

Just curious, what's the kWh price for this? Here in The Netherlands, we get charged about 0.33 euro per kWh (= 0.40 US$), and that's for overnight charging of cars, where you typically draw no more than 11 kW.

How does that compare to your household €/kWh? I appreciate there's a value-add, just seems a lot compared to mine (£0.12something).

I suppose if expect to pay roughly a day's standing charge, plus the kWh used. I'd rather pay for it like that than roll it together and have my overnight charge subsidise someone else's 30min top-up.