5 ms·

> Other people don't buy a car with limited range because they might need to drive more than 4 hours without a long break once a year. This is an easy argument

by mschaef 10y ago

> Other people don't buy a car with limited range because they might need to drive more than 4 hours without a long break once a year. This is an easy argument to make, and I've made it myself in other cases, but there are two parts to the equation. The first is how often you might need to travel a long distance, but the second is what the consequence might be if you can't. Personally speaking (this thankfully hasn't happened often) I've had to make literally last minute 12 hour drives to attend to gravely ill relatives. If our only car had been a 300 mile range electric, those drives wouldn't have been possible in anything close to the same duration. (Looking for an alternative/rent car at 11PM isn't really an option. Looking for a Supercharger station in rural Virgina at 3AM even less so.)

ambicapter 10y ago
12 hour drive? Wasn't quicker to grab a plane?
- mschaef 10y ago
  At least one or two of the calls were quite urgent - We got the call late in the evening and were in the car within an hour or two. Flying would've meant booking a last minute flight, waiting for whatever flight time, getting to the airport an hour or two in advance, landing at our destination, arranging transport, and then taking a two hour trip by ground transport. There was so much in the way of overhead and transition costs it didn't make sense. (Amtrak had the same problem.... we've tried that before too, but only once.)
- TomMarius 10y ago
  Not possible for me since my car is full of computers usually.
mikeash 10y ago
There's a third part to the equation: how often your trip is one which can't use Superchargers. Most trips can. Coverage is pretty good nowadays. You don't "look for" them, the car tells you where to go. 3AM is irrelevant, they're open 24/7. If your trip is well covered by the network, you're looking at a 10-20% time penalty. If it's not, you're screwed, of course, but people seem to overstate how likely that is.
- mschaef 10y ago
  > you're looking at a 10-20% time penalty Running the route I'm describing through a trip trip planning website, the travel time goes from 11:12 (h:m) to 15:52 (3:53 charging)... so more like a 40% penalty. In my particular scenario, it would have translated into 4-5 hours of (minor) detours and waiting at Supercharger stations in the middle of the night with sick family waiting. For me, personally, the flexibility to avoid that kind of delay is something I've found valuable at particularly important moments of my life. Aside from the fact there are fewer Supercharger stations, some of this is just an inherent limitation of the technology. Even a Supercharger station (145KW) is slightly more than two orders of magnitude less capable of transferring energy than a gas station pump (16MW). Even if the battery technology got to the point it could handle that level of power transfer, I'd hate to be anywhere near a 16MW electrical charging station. (>2K amps at 7,200 V, not to mention the required >100MW feed INTO something like an 8 car station with that capacity per car.) This makes me wonder about the idea of swapping out battery packs. It seems like that could possibly be made just as fast as filling up on gas.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Can you give the approximate route? Just curious what this particular scenario looks like. Of course the limited charging speed has an effect, but it's not gigantic, especially if you're going to be taking breaks anyway. If you're not taking breaks, the effect is larger. I'm not trying to tell you not to care about this, mind! I see a lot of people thinking it's worse than it is, saying long trips require extreme patience, etc. Having done many thousand of miles of long trips in my car, it's not bad at all. But certainly there are cases where it really is just too much, and as long as the facts are out there, I don't mean to try to convince you to alter your priorities. As far as battery swapping goes, Tesla did develop this, and built a station in between LA and SF. They originally showcased it as being twice as fast as filling up a tank of gas, but that was before they added the titanium shield under the battery, so the version they put into operation was more similar to gas filling time. It never got very popular, partly because it was expensive, partly because they never pushed it, and partly because most people didn't mind the Supercharger stops. I'm not sure if the station is still in operation or not, but it'll probably remain the only one.

by mschaef 10y ago

ambicapter 10y ago

12 hour drive? Wasn't quicker to grab a plane?

mschaef 10y ago
At least one or two of the calls were quite urgent - We got the call late in the evening and were in the car within an hour or two. Flying would've meant booking a last minute flight, waiting for whatever flight time, getting to the airport an hour or two in advance, landing at our destination, arranging transport, and then taking a two hour trip by ground transport. There was so much in the way of overhead and transition costs it didn't make sense. (Amtrak had the same problem.... we've tried that before too, but only once.)
TomMarius 10y ago
Not possible for me since my car is full of computers usually.

mikeash 10y ago

There's a third part to the equation: how often your trip is one which can't use Superchargers. Most trips can. Coverage is pretty good nowadays. You don't "look for" them, the car tells you where to go. 3AM is irrelevant, they're open 24/7. If your trip is well covered by the network, you're looking at a 10-20% time penalty. If it's not, you're screwed, of course, but people seem to overstate how likely that is.

mschaef 10y ago
> you're looking at a 10-20% time penalty Running the route I'm describing through a trip trip planning website, the travel time goes from 11:12 (h:m) to 15:52 (3:53 charging)... so more like a 40% penalty. In my particular scenario, it would have translated into 4-5 hours of (minor) detours and waiting at Supercharger stations in the middle of the night with sick family waiting. For me, personally, the flexibility to avoid that kind of delay is something I've found valuable at particularly important moments of my life. Aside from the fact there are fewer Supercharger stations, some of this is just an inherent limitation of the technology. Even a Supercharger station (145KW) is slightly more than two orders of magnitude less capable of transferring energy than a gas station pump (16MW). Even if the battery technology got to the point it could handle that level of power transfer, I'd hate to be anywhere near a 16MW electrical charging station. (>2K amps at 7,200 V, not to mention the required >100MW feed INTO something like an 8 car station with that capacity per car.) This makes me wonder about the idea of swapping out battery packs. It seems like that could possibly be made just as fast as filling up on gas.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Can you give the approximate route? Just curious what this particular scenario looks like. Of course the limited charging speed has an effect, but it's not gigantic, especially if you're going to be taking breaks anyway. If you're not taking breaks, the effect is larger. I'm not trying to tell you not to care about this, mind! I see a lot of people thinking it's worse than it is, saying long trips require extreme patience, etc. Having done many thousand of miles of long trips in my car, it's not bad at all. But certainly there are cases where it really is just too much, and as long as the facts are out there, I don't mean to try to convince you to alter your priorities. As far as battery swapping goes, Tesla did develop this, and built a station in between LA and SF. They originally showcased it as being twice as fast as filling up a tank of gas, but that was before they added the titanium shield under the battery, so the version they put into operation was more similar to gas filling time. It never got very popular, partly because it was expensive, partly because they never pushed it, and partly because most people didn't mind the Supercharger stops. I'm not sure if the station is still in operation or not, but it'll probably remain the only one.