7 ms·

Maybe when the charging speeds are in the megawatt range (equivalent of pumping gas).

by hoseja 6y ago

LarvaFX 6y ago
Car charges overnight. Not wasting any more time on trips to the gas station. On longer trips, charge while eating.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  Most people don’t live in houses with garages where they can charge their car.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Chargers will get cheap and public when electric cars become common. In the same way street lights are pretty much everywhere today. You could imagine a special type of paving stone that has a magsafe socket in, and you just pull a wire from your parked car to the kerb.
    - lstodd 6y ago
      No way. People can't get lousy fiber pulled to their houses and you're talking about multimegawatt electricity supply.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        I'm talking about slow chargers - the kind that are 60 amps or so AC. The kind that require no expensive electronics in the charger. The kind that'll take 12 hours for a full charge. Fast DC chargers will always cost more due to the need for expensive power electronics.
        lstodd 6y ago
        Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid. 1 MW would be enough for just ~150 chargers. And where would you get that megawatt at night? More base load, which means nuclear or fossil which means less niche for solar because no one would shut down such amount of base load generation each day. Besides 60 amps isn't exactly cheap in electronics. It might not require active cooling for the cable and the battery, that's true.
        Reason077 6y ago
        > "Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid." Only if every car in your neighbourhood is plugged in and pulling 7 kW at the same time. Smart charging solves this, by reducing charging during demand peaks (ie: 6pm when everyone is arriving home from work and plugging in at the same time), and increasing it later in the night when more capacity is available.
        lstodd 6y ago
        However you slice it, you have to deliver say 40KWh to that many cars overnight, or they fail to charge and thus are useless. So the grid has to handle that and even if you can get rid of extreme peaks with "smartness", you can't lower the cables and switches ratings much.
        Reason077 6y ago
        First of all, the average car does not need 40 kWh every day. The average driver in the USA drives 13,500 miles per year (far more than the average driver in the UK/Europe!) That's about 37 miles per day, so about 12.5 kWh per night on average at ~3 miles per kWh. And remember, those who are driving long distance are probably going to be using fast chargers on-route, so their domestic charging demand will be lower. Secondly, even if they did need 40 kWh every night, that only equates to 4 kW over a 10 hour charging cycle. Easily manageable by avoiding the typical late afternoon / early evening peaks. Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      Ubitricity already have a pretty nice kerb-side charging solution, including sockets which integrate into existing street light poles: https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ These are quite widely deployed in a few London boroughs.
      - dfgdghdf 6y ago
        Great, so we can turn London into a parking lot for electric cars. The solution for urban centres is to have fewer (but electric) cars.
        Reason077 6y ago
        No, these aren't adding any additional parking spaces. Just allowing cars to be charged at existing ones. (I totally agree about fewer cars, but remaining ones must be electric. And electric cars need charging infrastructure.)
  - trengorilla 6y ago
    Yet.
- randunel 6y ago
  Not good enough for many of my friends, I'm afraid. It would definitely not be an option for me, I drive 1200km in roughly 12h - 14h each night, for 2w long tours: - Heviz to Saint Tropez 1200km - Empuriabrava to Malaga 1100km - Porto to Andorra 1100km - Krakow to Bucharest 1200km - other shorter trips (700km-800km) ----- - business trip Bucharest to Leipzig 1600km (I go much farther without passengers) - Leizig to London 1200km (slow ferry) - etc I drive a diesel and it's just excellent for my family's holidaying, we would be wasting considerable time charging, reducing the overall time to enjoy the tour's destinations.
  - wastedhours 6y ago
    I mean, impressive mileage - but you must definitely be an outlier with those numbers in single trips I'd imagine. Also, if you're only do those kinds of numbers a few weeks a year, you could have an electric car for 50 weeks of the year and then hire a diesel one for the longer stints? That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time. (I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
    - bluGill 6y ago
      The fixed costs of owning two cars means that it rarely works out. Rental cars can work, but again the math rarely works out because it is so expensive to rent a large car.
      - jfk13 6y ago
        I also worry that in the hypothetical world where most people just own a small electric for local daily use, and rent a large diesel (or whatever) for the family holiday, demand for those larger, longer-range vehicles will be extremely seasonal. It may not be viable to maintain a large fleet of family-vacation-type vehicles just to satisfy the demand for summer holidays in August and ski trips in February.
adammunich 6y ago
The latest DC fast charging standard goes up to 400kW, it's only a matter of time.
yholio 6y ago
I think battery swap can be made to work and solve all these problems with the right economic structure that does not yet exist. You have a battery pack that you own and maintain carefully, and you absolutely do not want to rent it out to anyone. So you use it day to day transport and charge slowly overnight, perfect to prolong life. When time comes to make a long, cross country trip, you visit a swap center and deposit your battery, and switch to rented batteries for the duration of the trip, while paying a charge+rent fee. When you come back from the trip, your own battery is waiting for you at the same station, charged and stored in good conditions. Or, you can make the first leg of the journey on your own battery, then have it shipped back to a station near your home before you return; by necessity the network will have to perform rebalancing anyway for the rental stock. I know Tesla demoed battery swap, but they were only interested in the associated subsidy and not keen on it because it requires a large stock of batteries that they had no capacity to produce in large quantities at the time. When safe and cheap batteries are available in quantity, they will pretty much be forced to revisit this model or face tough competition from charge networks that can handle swap.
- klondike_ 6y ago
  Battery swapping isn't practical with modern electric car design. In most EVs today, the battery is part of the structural frame of the car and can't be removed easily. DC fast charging seems like a much more practical solution for the occasional cross country trip
  - yholio 6y ago
    That seems more like a practical engineering decision since battery swap is not yet widespread. There doesn't seem to be anything fundamental that prevents it and in fact Tesla retrofitted the idea for vehicles that were not initially designed with swap in mind. It's either that fast charging attains exceptional safe speeds (i.e less than 5 minutes), or that competitive pressures will force electrics to embrace swap. The current status quo of waiting an hour for a full charge cannot stand on the long term; the lost productivity is so large that it completely dwarfs the costs of implementing the swap networks, so somebody is bound to package it in a consumer friendly product and pocket the profits.
adrianN 6y ago
The average car spends 23h a day parked somewhere. You just need to equip a largeish fraction of the parking spots with a charger. You don't need high currents, because most people drive less than 30kWh (~150km) a day, so a normal 220V 16A plug is more than sufficient. The only issue are long roadtrips, where high current chargers are needed, but they already exist. In 20 minutes you can recharge more than you can drive in two hours. You're supposed to take breaks anyway.
- bluGill 6y ago
  That makes things worse. Right now there are many fast fill gas pumps in my little city. If everyone is charging at home there is less demand and so those pumps go away - even for the rare long distance trip where the slow recharge isn't an option. 95% of the time you are correct, it would be just fine to charge in my garage and who cares if it takes 12 hours as the car isn't moving anyway. However a couple times a year I - like most people - take a longer trip and depends on the infrastructure that allows me to refill my car in a few minutes and get on my way.
  - hedora 6y ago
    I recently drove a long way (24 driving hours) through multiple states in the southwestern US (deserts, scrubland, etc). There was a Tesla charging station within walking distance of most of the places we stopped for gas, food or lodging. I don’t think the trip would have taken any additional planning with an EV.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map With that said, electrical infrastructure is ubiquitous. You can install EV chargers anywhere there is power.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      When I'm in some unknown location I'm not going to hire an electrician to put in a charging station where I happen to need one. I depend on one being there. However as I already said charge at home means refueling places become uneconomical and they out out of business meaning that even though it isn't hard to put a charging station anywhere that doesn't mean they will exist. Of course what I'm lacking is knowing how much this will affect things long term. Right no charging stations are being installed on hope they are worth it, if this turns out to be false owners will start to tear them out.

Maybe when the charging speeds are in the megawatt range (equivalent of pumping gas).

by hoseja 6y ago

Maybe when the charging speeds are in the megawatt range (equivalent of pumping gas).

LarvaFX 6y ago

Car charges overnight. Not wasting any more time on trips to the gas station. On longer trips, charge while eating.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
Most people don’t live in houses with garages where they can charge their car.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Chargers will get cheap and public when electric cars become common. In the same way street lights are pretty much everywhere today. You could imagine a special type of paving stone that has a magsafe socket in, and you just pull a wire from your parked car to the kerb.
  - lstodd 6y ago
    No way. People can't get lousy fiber pulled to their houses and you're talking about multimegawatt electricity supply.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      I'm talking about slow chargers - the kind that are 60 amps or so AC. The kind that require no expensive electronics in the charger. The kind that'll take 12 hours for a full charge. Fast DC chargers will always cost more due to the need for expensive power electronics.
      - lstodd 6y ago
        Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid. 1 MW would be enough for just ~150 chargers. And where would you get that megawatt at night? More base load, which means nuclear or fossil which means less niche for solar because no one would shut down such amount of base load generation each day. Besides 60 amps isn't exactly cheap in electronics. It might not require active cooling for the cable and the battery, that's true.
        Reason077 6y ago
        > "Even just +7 kVA per house means a complete rebuild of the grid." Only if every car in your neighbourhood is plugged in and pulling 7 kW at the same time. Smart charging solves this, by reducing charging during demand peaks (ie: 6pm when everyone is arriving home from work and plugging in at the same time), and increasing it later in the night when more capacity is available.
        lstodd 6y ago
        However you slice it, you have to deliver say 40KWh to that many cars overnight, or they fail to charge and thus are useless. So the grid has to handle that and even if you can get rid of extreme peaks with "smartness", you can't lower the cables and switches ratings much.
        Reason077 6y ago
        First of all, the average car does not need 40 kWh every day. The average driver in the USA drives 13,500 miles per year (far more than the average driver in the UK/Europe!) That's about 37 miles per day, so about 12.5 kWh per night on average at ~3 miles per kWh. And remember, those who are driving long distance are probably going to be using fast chargers on-route, so their domestic charging demand will be lower. Secondly, even if they did need 40 kWh every night, that only equates to 4 kW over a 10 hour charging cycle. Easily manageable by avoiding the typical late afternoon / early evening peaks. Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    Ubitricity already have a pretty nice kerb-side charging solution, including sockets which integrate into existing street light poles: https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/ These are quite widely deployed in a few London boroughs.
    - dfgdghdf 6y ago
      Great, so we can turn London into a parking lot for electric cars. The solution for urban centres is to have fewer (but electric) cars.
      - Reason077 6y ago
        No, these aren't adding any additional parking spaces. Just allowing cars to be charged at existing ones. (I totally agree about fewer cars, but remaining ones must be electric. And electric cars need charging infrastructure.)
- trengorilla 6y ago
  Yet.
randunel 6y ago
Not good enough for many of my friends, I'm afraid. It would definitely not be an option for me, I drive 1200km in roughly 12h - 14h each night, for 2w long tours: - Heviz to Saint Tropez 1200km - Empuriabrava to Malaga 1100km - Porto to Andorra 1100km - Krakow to Bucharest 1200km - other shorter trips (700km-800km) ----- - business trip Bucharest to Leipzig 1600km (I go much farther without passengers) - Leizig to London 1200km (slow ferry) - etc I drive a diesel and it's just excellent for my family's holidaying, we would be wasting considerable time charging, reducing the overall time to enjoy the tour's destinations.
- wastedhours 6y ago
  I mean, impressive mileage - but you must definitely be an outlier with those numbers in single trips I'd imagine. Also, if you're only do those kinds of numbers a few weeks a year, you could have an electric car for 50 weeks of the year and then hire a diesel one for the longer stints? That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time. (I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
  - bluGill 6y ago
    The fixed costs of owning two cars means that it rarely works out. Rental cars can work, but again the math rarely works out because it is so expensive to rent a large car.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      I also worry that in the hypothetical world where most people just own a small electric for local daily use, and rent a large diesel (or whatever) for the family holiday, demand for those larger, longer-range vehicles will be extremely seasonal. It may not be viable to maintain a large fleet of family-vacation-type vehicles just to satisfy the demand for summer holidays in August and ski trips in February.

adammunich 6y ago

The latest DC fast charging standard goes up to 400kW, it's only a matter of time.

yholio 6y ago

I think battery swap can be made to work and solve all these problems with the right economic structure that does not yet exist. You have a battery pack that you own and maintain carefully, and you absolutely do not want to rent it out to anyone. So you use it day to day transport and charge slowly overnight, perfect to prolong life. When time comes to make a long, cross country trip, you visit a swap center and deposit your battery, and switch to rented batteries for the duration of the trip, while paying a charge+rent fee. When you come back from the trip, your own battery is waiting for you at the same station, charged and stored in good conditions. Or, you can make the first leg of the journey on your own battery, then have it shipped back to a station near your home before you return; by necessity the network will have to perform rebalancing anyway for the rental stock. I know Tesla demoed battery swap, but they were only interested in the associated subsidy and not keen on it because it requires a large stock of batteries that they had no capacity to produce in large quantities at the time. When safe and cheap batteries are available in quantity, they will pretty much be forced to revisit this model or face tough competition from charge networks that can handle swap.

klondike_ 6y ago
Battery swapping isn't practical with modern electric car design. In most EVs today, the battery is part of the structural frame of the car and can't be removed easily. DC fast charging seems like a much more practical solution for the occasional cross country trip
- yholio 6y ago
  That seems more like a practical engineering decision since battery swap is not yet widespread. There doesn't seem to be anything fundamental that prevents it and in fact Tesla retrofitted the idea for vehicles that were not initially designed with swap in mind. It's either that fast charging attains exceptional safe speeds (i.e less than 5 minutes), or that competitive pressures will force electrics to embrace swap. The current status quo of waiting an hour for a full charge cannot stand on the long term; the lost productivity is so large that it completely dwarfs the costs of implementing the swap networks, so somebody is bound to package it in a consumer friendly product and pocket the profits.

adrianN 6y ago

The average car spends 23h a day parked somewhere. You just need to equip a largeish fraction of the parking spots with a charger. You don't need high currents, because most people drive less than 30kWh (~150km) a day, so a normal 220V 16A plug is more than sufficient. The only issue are long roadtrips, where high current chargers are needed, but they already exist. In 20 minutes you can recharge more than you can drive in two hours. You're supposed to take breaks anyway.

bluGill 6y ago
That makes things worse. Right now there are many fast fill gas pumps in my little city. If everyone is charging at home there is less demand and so those pumps go away - even for the rare long distance trip where the slow recharge isn't an option. 95% of the time you are correct, it would be just fine to charge in my garage and who cares if it takes 12 hours as the car isn't moving anyway. However a couple times a year I - like most people - take a longer trip and depends on the infrastructure that allows me to refill my car in a few minutes and get on my way.
- hedora 6y ago
  I recently drove a long way (24 driving hours) through multiple states in the southwestern US (deserts, scrubland, etc). There was a Tesla charging station within walking distance of most of the places we stopped for gas, food or lodging. I don’t think the trip would have taken any additional planning with an EV.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map With that said, electrical infrastructure is ubiquitous. You can install EV chargers anywhere there is power.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    When I'm in some unknown location I'm not going to hire an electrician to put in a charging station where I happen to need one. I depend on one being there. However as I already said charge at home means refueling places become uneconomical and they out out of business meaning that even though it isn't hard to put a charging station anywhere that doesn't mean they will exist. Of course what I'm lacking is knowing how much this will affect things long term. Right no charging stations are being installed on hope they are worth it, if this turns out to be false owners will start to tear them out.