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

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

#611

Post by AtlasBarfed » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

slovette wrote: post #331

mywittyname wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A staggering amount of buildings are built to code, and nothing more. If code says that there needs to be 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom for the complex, and the complex has 80 bedrooms, you can bet there will be 120 parking spots. Apartment managers will be dragged kicking and screaming into offering chargers for cars. The best way to get chargers into apartment buildings is going to be a local mandate that they hav…

I disagree with this. Retro installs maybe, yes. But new construction, which I consult heavily on, most of the developers I work with are motivated to install them. They’re revenue sources and attract the kind of tenants they want occupying their new building. The answer to retro installs (which is always about money anyway) is to not force the hand of property owners, but make the install cost a no brainer with tax…

Subsidies are the way to do this. The government should be highly motivated to spur transition to EVs for carbon emissions, and what is holding back almost everyone except Tesla is charging infrastructure.

Cities where concentrated apartments reside have the double whammy of pointless carbon emissions in traffic jams and smog.

Identifying lobbying groups with common interest in this would lead me to the mainline auto industry, especially GM and Ford. They need a charging infrastructure build pronto to compete with Tesla and its Supercharger network. This would probably be related, since city drivers are younger and more likely to buy an EV.

Such is American Politics that you have to lobby the lobbying groups to get anything done.

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

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Post by llampx » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #142

sandworm101 wrote: post #51

Maybe in the UK, but not where I am. It was -26 this morning. Batteries don't handle such temperatures well. And the nearest civilian airport is 400km away. I haven't seen a single all-electric car in my town since I moved here over a year ago.

What percentage of the world's car owning population lives in a place with a restriction like that? Few enough that it would be fine to let you keep your ICE/hybrid vehicles with almost no impact on climate is my guess. If I had to guess, you live in Canada which is a country of extremes like what you mention. The solution for Canada probably isn't to prohibit ICE vehicles, but to disincentivize them heavily where th…

Yep where its so cold, block heaters are popular. You see little plugs sticking out from under the bonnet. Diesels are also less popular in frigid climates because the fuel becomes a gel at those temperatures.

With most BEVs nowadays, you can set the battery to warm up and also warm up the interior on mains power before you set off. Far more convenient and comfortable than scraping the frost off, getting into a freezing cold car, and hoping the engine gets warm enough to put out some warm air before you succumb to frostbite.

I've noticed that HN and Reddit tends to gravitate to ridiculous examples to show how "Solution A" can't possibly work.

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

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Post by oblio » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

TedShiller wrote: post #460

worik wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining anything causes great big holes in the ground and piles of tailings. It does not destroy the Earth. It rearranges the furniture. Drastically

If you lived in the places where lithium is mined you’d be devastated

As opposed to all the other stuff we're mining?

Lithium mining outrage is a sham. What about the many, many more tons of iron ore, aluminum ore, copper ore, etc., that we're mining? Lithium mining is just a tiny fraction of those.

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

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Post by castratikron » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #327

It's one thing to install a charger in a two-car garage. Installing charging capacity for 20, or 50, or 100 cars is something else. I'm not sure how most existing apartment buildings could handle all of their tenants charging their cars at night at the same time. I'm not even clear on how much strain that would put on the electrical grid. How much more power would we need to produce to handle the demand if everyone h…

Seems like this could be solved if the chargers were networked and programmed with a set group charge limit. If you are a charger, and you're the only charger actively charging, you get 100% of the limit; two chargers get 50% of the limit; three chargers get 33% of the limit, etc.

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

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Post by iggldiggl » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #593

Daho0n wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a solved problem in most of the world. I have waited at a gas station at most 5 times in my life and never more than 2-4 minutes. Going to the bathroom or leaving the pump I have never seen anyone do. If I did I would turn off the pump at the big red STOP button as leaving the pump running unattended is illegal.

You can't leave the pump running outside of the US, the fuel nizzle won't lock. I mean the people who fill up their car, and just leave the car at the pump.

> You can't leave the pump running outside of the US, the fuel nizzle won't lock.

There might be places where locking nozzles are indeed uncommon, but I don't think you can generalise this to "outside of the US". I'm living outside of the US, but gas stations still commonly have locking nozzles.

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

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Post by jdeibele » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #455

ryandrake wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they require one to function. Gas stations, including ones where you pay at the pump, functioned fine without Internet before the Internet.

How exactly does a pay-at-the-pump gas station function without internet?

You go inside and pay cash to the clerk who authorizes $20 of gas on pump #5.

I'm in Oregon where we (mostly) legally can't pump our own gas. There may be pumps that are like vending machines: they take cards or cash.

There are exceptions, like if you're in the rural areas (counties under 40,000 residents). They also changed it for a while during the early part of COVID.

I notice that the pumps still run the commercials on the pumps here. Probably cheaper to just build one model of pump even though Oregon and New Jersey but it would drive me crazy if I was pumping gas for a living.

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

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Post by jdeibele » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #399

worik wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am never buying a Tesla. I want to own my car

You do own your car if you buy a Tesla?

Pretty sure this is a reference to the cases where Tesla has revoked different features (SuperCharger access, AutoPilot, extended mileage) from cars.

Sometimes that seems to be because they had the feature enabled by accident or the car was declared as totaled but I haven't been tracking the cases closely enough to be definitive. Not sure that anybody is.

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

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Post by kwhitefoot » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #454

blt wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could store the transactions in local memory until the connection is restored.

How do you know the account is valid, able to be charged, etc?

There are only half million Teslas so you can just distribute the VIN numbers of all of them with a single bit flag saying whether they are eligible for free charging and another bit saying that they have an account in good order. Twenty bytes per car should do it, say 10 MB of storage to hold enough information to say which cars are allowed to charge even if the network is down.

Mind you in three years of owning and driving (70k km) my Model S I have never encountered a Supercharger station that was entirely out of order, just a few heavily used ones that have one or two stalls often not working.

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

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Post by kwhitefoot » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #423

gnicholas wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I’m not going to want to spend the overhead time to figure out if my car is compatible with some random charger, figure out if the price is favorable (some are by the minute, others by the kilowatt hour), and then plug and unplug just to get the range equivalent of 2 gallons of gas while I’m at a store.

Tesla is the only one who doesn't support J1772. The compatibility problem has mostly solved itself with the industry adopting CCS, which is backwards compatible with J1772. Teslas sold in North America are the only new EVs without CCS. The reason charger pricing is inconsistent is because there isn't regulation requiring a standard the way fluid pricing is regulated. https://www.nist.gov/document/00-20-h130-iv-c-fin…

Just in case anyone failed to read between the lines: all new non-US Teslas have CCS.

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

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Post by fastball » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

jdeibele wrote: post #617

fastball wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do own your car if you buy a Tesla?

Pretty sure this is a reference to the cases where Tesla has revoked different features (SuperCharger access, AutoPilot, extended mileage) from cars. Sometimes that seems to be because they had the feature enabled by accident or the car was declared as totaled but I haven't been tracking the cases closely enough to be definitive. Not sure that anybody is.

SuperCharger access has nothing to do with "owning your car". Less so but still ditto for AutoPilot, as it is not a piece of hardware but rather software that is constantly being updated and honestly dangerous to deploy/use if Tesla cannot guarantee the integrity of sensors/drive-by-wire mechanisms/etc.

Extended mileage does seem weird though – they've revoked software updates that have extended mileage? That would be shitty if true (if not for a good reason), but I honestly haven't heard about that one. And I'd still argue in favor of this being ownership, as updates are not your right as an owner of the vehicle (and with every other car you've ever owned don't come with the vehicle at all). At the very least you always have whatever features you had when you bought the car from Tesla, which is exactly what you expect from any other car you purchase.