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I think the power-delivery aspect is solvable. From the perspective of a power company, EV chargers seem like ideal customers: you can run high-capacity power
by elihu 5y ago
I think the power-delivery aspect is solvable. From the perspective of a power company, EV chargers seem like ideal customers: you can run high-capacity power lines to one big customer instead of running little power lines to every residential customer. Though on the other hand, if you have a fast charger that's seldom used, that's a lot of infrastructure in place that's sitting idle most of the time.
Coming up with batteries that charge quickly is a different matter. Batteries are getting better, but it seems that part of the solution so far is to just have batteries that are so big that they don't need to be charged very often. Charging a 30kwh battery in an hour only gets you half the range in the same time as charging a 60kwh battery in an hour.
Maybe if we keep increasing the power of the chargers, we'll eventually ditch the cables and move to something like parking a car over a pair of big copper plates that extend to make contact with a matching pair of copper plates on the bottom of the car. I could also see some kind of system where the car has a fixture for attaching a coolant hose, and the charger pumps cold water through the battery while it's charging.
At some level, though, I think this is a trying to engineer around a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. If we had electrified roads that are capable of charging vehicles while they're moving, then battery sizes and charge times would be less of an issue, and we wouldn't need to have cars that devote a quarter of their mass or so to batteries. It would only really need to be on major roads, and probably only in short sections at regular intervals.