5 ms·

How much time spent charging? Charging time is what make petrol win. Drive 500 miles, take 5mn to charge up and you're good for 500 more miles. Until EV can d

by arkh 9y ago

How much time spent charging? Charging time is what make petrol win. Drive 500 miles, take 5mn to charge up and you're good for 500 more miles. Until EV can do this (surely through charging stations like petrol cars) they won't good at anything more than daily commute if you can plug your car at at home and at work. So battery technology is where the interest should be. We already know how to make efficient electric motors, we know how to make small vehicles. All wee need is fast charging energy stores. All some kind of electrical rails available on highways EV could use. Maybe setup specific separated lanes with no speed limit, EV rail but only if using some autonav which responds to the highway command to optimize the flow. Yes, you'd get something like trains for individuals.

_ph_ 9y ago
Yes, refuling will always be faster than recharging. That is physics. The question rather is: at which point (and for which driver profile) is it no longer a practical problem? Elektric cars already save you a lot of refuling stops in day-to-day driving, if you plug them in over night. And the Tesla supercharger network is basically almost fast enough, that it reasonably fits with the breaks one would take on long trips when not racing for time. And of course, electric cars give you all the benefits of electric cars, like no exhaust, no noise and better torque, no gear shifts.
- atourgates 9y ago
  Personally, I think it's when an EV can make a 9-hour drive without needing more than about 30 minutes of total charging. 9 hours is (in my opinion) the max amount of driving you can seriously do without at least a couple hours of resting. That'd be about 540 miles total, maybe a bit less if you could make those 30 minutes of rest stops at a fast charger. Right now, EV's are clearly the future. I'd say that when they have a 500 mile range with an MSRP that matches ICE vehicles, they'll go from being "exciting new technology" to "the obvious choice for most people."
  - elsonrodriguez 9y ago
    I don't think 500 miles of range is what will trigger it as the obvious choice. A proliferation of decent, non "ev looking" cars with 200 miles of range will be all it takes for people to realize that they only really drive 50 miles a day, and paying for gas is for suckers.
    - myself248 9y ago
      Yeah, 50 miles a day, most days. My daily commute is quite normal, easily within the range of a Leaf or whatever, but I also enjoy frequent roadtrips to Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, Toronto, occasionally Kansas City or Washington DC. Most of those are weekend jaunts, but there are longer trips too – I drove to Eagle Harbor last summer and Orlando over the holidays. I’ll probably drive to NYC this summer, as I have in 4 of the last 10 years. I love roadtrips and consider them a wonderful part of the American experience. (Following Route 66 with a few friends from school is an adventure everyone should have, and I simply don’t know if there’s a European equivalent. This is very hard to explain to folks who didn't grow up in the US.) The standard EV-evangelist response to this is “take the train” or “rent a car for the weekend”, but I’m sorry, those just aren’t comfortable for me – the train lacks the freedom and sense of adventure, and rentals usually smell funny, among other things. Altering my lifestyle to suit the car’s limitations means it was the wrong car in the first place: The car should serve me, not the other way around. The Tesla’s longer range and presence of Supercharger stations along the routes are totally irrelevant for my daily commute, but they completely change the game when you include the other driving I consider important. With any other EV, I would need a second car to address the other part of my usage, and that means twice the insurance, twice the registration cost, twice the driveway-space, and the chance of forgetting something important in the one car while I’m using the other. And feeling like a glutton for owning an “extra” vehicle. With a long-range and fast-charging EV, I can finally have a single car that handles my daily commute and my road-trip habit, and that's been the main thing keeping me out of EVs so far. I've saved my place in line and I'm looking forward to the day they call my name.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    A problem here is everyone's personal anecdotes are different. I have an uncle that has driven 10-12 hour hauls between Kentucky and Louisiana enough that he doesn't blink at doing it all in one day, with as minimal a break as possible. On the flipside, I know that my limit before wanting to murder people and/or feeling bone-weary exhaustion is somewhere between 4-5 hours cumulative in a day, regardless of the number and length of breaks, but overall better with at least one >30-minute break every two hours and/or 15-minute every hour. (For me, EV's are clearly the present. I'm pretty happy within their travel limits.) There's such a huge range of extremes with what people are comfortable with. I've also met a lot of people that need more breaks than they actually take, but don't realize that self-care advantage yet. It's possible that forced, longer recharge breaks with an EV could be a good thing for overall road health. More drivers overall with slightly more opportunities to stretch and rest could be an amazingly useful thing for US traffic and calming some long distance road rage, given the chance.
- hcurtiss 9y ago
  Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems to me that the solution is standardizing power cell size/shape, and simply swapping them out at stations loaded with pre-charged cells. It seems then you could use a lot more technology to recharge those cells in a single location with a huge power hookup (and cooling).
dmode 9y ago
IMO, charging time is a non issue for people with personal garages. I have owned a Model S for a year, and the only time charging time is a factor is when I am doing long road trips. For everyday use, my car gets charged overnight in my garage. I am actually very happy that I have to never make that weekly drive to the gas station.
perfectstorm 9y ago
good point. I would like to see battery swapping and I believe Tesla had plans for that but was temporarily suspended to focus on super chargers. Hopefully Tesla would start leasing car batteries so we could drive over a ramp and get our depleted battery replaced by a fully charged one in minutes and drive off for another 300+ miles.

by arkh 9y ago

_ph_ 9y ago

Yes, refuling will always be faster than recharging. That is physics. The question rather is: at which point (and for which driver profile) is it no longer a practical problem? Elektric cars already save you a lot of refuling stops in day-to-day driving, if you plug them in over night. And the Tesla supercharger network is basically almost fast enough, that it reasonably fits with the breaks one would take on long trips when not racing for time. And of course, electric cars give you all the benefits of electric cars, like no exhaust, no noise and better torque, no gear shifts.

atourgates 9y ago
Personally, I think it's when an EV can make a 9-hour drive without needing more than about 30 minutes of total charging. 9 hours is (in my opinion) the max amount of driving you can seriously do without at least a couple hours of resting. That'd be about 540 miles total, maybe a bit less if you could make those 30 minutes of rest stops at a fast charger. Right now, EV's are clearly the future. I'd say that when they have a 500 mile range with an MSRP that matches ICE vehicles, they'll go from being "exciting new technology" to "the obvious choice for most people."
- elsonrodriguez 9y ago
  I don't think 500 miles of range is what will trigger it as the obvious choice. A proliferation of decent, non "ev looking" cars with 200 miles of range will be all it takes for people to realize that they only really drive 50 miles a day, and paying for gas is for suckers.
  - myself248 9y ago
    Yeah, 50 miles a day, most days. My daily commute is quite normal, easily within the range of a Leaf or whatever, but I also enjoy frequent roadtrips to Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, Toronto, occasionally Kansas City or Washington DC. Most of those are weekend jaunts, but there are longer trips too – I drove to Eagle Harbor last summer and Orlando over the holidays. I’ll probably drive to NYC this summer, as I have in 4 of the last 10 years. I love roadtrips and consider them a wonderful part of the American experience. (Following Route 66 with a few friends from school is an adventure everyone should have, and I simply don’t know if there’s a European equivalent. This is very hard to explain to folks who didn't grow up in the US.) The standard EV-evangelist response to this is “take the train” or “rent a car for the weekend”, but I’m sorry, those just aren’t comfortable for me – the train lacks the freedom and sense of adventure, and rentals usually smell funny, among other things. Altering my lifestyle to suit the car’s limitations means it was the wrong car in the first place: The car should serve me, not the other way around. The Tesla’s longer range and presence of Supercharger stations along the routes are totally irrelevant for my daily commute, but they completely change the game when you include the other driving I consider important. With any other EV, I would need a second car to address the other part of my usage, and that means twice the insurance, twice the registration cost, twice the driveway-space, and the chance of forgetting something important in the one car while I’m using the other. And feeling like a glutton for owning an “extra” vehicle. With a long-range and fast-charging EV, I can finally have a single car that handles my daily commute and my road-trip habit, and that's been the main thing keeping me out of EVs so far. I've saved my place in line and I'm looking forward to the day they call my name.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  A problem here is everyone's personal anecdotes are different. I have an uncle that has driven 10-12 hour hauls between Kentucky and Louisiana enough that he doesn't blink at doing it all in one day, with as minimal a break as possible. On the flipside, I know that my limit before wanting to murder people and/or feeling bone-weary exhaustion is somewhere between 4-5 hours cumulative in a day, regardless of the number and length of breaks, but overall better with at least one >30-minute break every two hours and/or 15-minute every hour. (For me, EV's are clearly the present. I'm pretty happy within their travel limits.) There's such a huge range of extremes with what people are comfortable with. I've also met a lot of people that need more breaks than they actually take, but don't realize that self-care advantage yet. It's possible that forced, longer recharge breaks with an EV could be a good thing for overall road health. More drivers overall with slightly more opportunities to stretch and rest could be an amazingly useful thing for US traffic and calming some long distance road rage, given the chance.
hcurtiss 9y ago
Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems to me that the solution is standardizing power cell size/shape, and simply swapping them out at stations loaded with pre-charged cells. It seems then you could use a lot more technology to recharge those cells in a single location with a huge power hookup (and cooling).

dmode 9y ago

IMO, charging time is a non issue for people with personal garages. I have owned a Model S for a year, and the only time charging time is a factor is when I am doing long road trips. For everyday use, my car gets charged overnight in my garage. I am actually very happy that I have to never make that weekly drive to the gas station.

perfectstorm 9y ago

good point. I would like to see battery swapping and I believe Tesla had plans for that but was temporarily suspended to focus on super chargers. Hopefully Tesla would start leasing car batteries so we could drive over a ramp and get our depleted battery replaced by a fully charged one in minutes and drive off for another 300+ miles.