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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

It seems completely, extravagantly unnecessary, but that's much like many other qualities of Tesla cars I guess.

Is it really too much work to plug in a charging lead by hand?

Imagine you pull up to a Supercharger on Friday night of a holiday weekend. All the stalls are taken and there is a line of a handful of cars in front of you.

Today, you wait in your car until the people in front of you finish charging.

Tomorrow, you leave your car in line and go get dinner.

Imagine you pull up to a Supercharger on Friday night of a holiday weekend. All the stalls are taken and there is a line of a handful of cars in front of you.

I'm wishing I still had my gasoline-powered car at that point.

Well the gas car would just be in a line at a gas station instead. It doesn't solve the issue at hand.

The "energy current" when pumping gasoline into a tank is larger than what those achieved by Tesla's Superchargers (which take ~40 minutes to 80%). Thus gas stations can have much larger throughputs than comparably sized Supercharger stations.

Which is not a fair comparison because gas stations must meet 100% of the refueling demands of gasoline cars and charging stations only need to meet a tiny percentage because most charging takes place at home or at work.

Apart from the coolness of it, I think this is the main actual use-case.

As the cars get more autonomous, being able to initialize charging robotically (either in a supercharger-queue, or when the car parks itself at home) is useful.

Robot cars don't have hands.

There are several much simpler ways a robot car could connect itself for charging. This is just gee-whiz tech for its own sake, and it's fine for Tesla to do, don't get me wrong.

But as someone who can't afford to buy a Tesla, and who wouldn't spend that kind of money on a car even if I had it, I'd rather see the R&D going into more affordable, more practical EVs that I might actually consider purchasing.

Because the people who are skilled with robotics should instead be working on chemical engineering and process management?

I'm tired of seeing this fallacy of "one thing being developed means that another thing is being put on the sideline". It looks to me like Tesla have the best people on the jobs they need to be on, and just adding "more" isn't going to speed things up more than having more mothers will speed up pregnancy.

May I borrow that line? It's a great way to express a point that I frequently try to make.

> There are several much simpler ways a robot car could connect itself for charging.

I was wondering if Tesla would introduce conductive charging at some point; install a base in your garage, park on top of it, car's charged by morning. Perhaps not feasible with the amount of energy they need to transfer?

Even if technically feasible, it'd be a waste - the most efficient inductive charging systems still lose more than 10% of the energy.

But that is The Tesla Master Plan. Pay for the R&D with luxury vehicles before producing more adorable ones.

Build sports car

Use that money to build an affordable car

Use that money to build an even more affordable car

While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-p... (August 2006)

*before producing more adorable ones"

Oops, I meant "affordable" but "adorable" works too I guess. :-)

  There are several much simpler ways a robot car could 
  connect itself for charging

That's a bold assertion. What's your suggestion that would be simpler than a cable driven arm like in the OP? A couple linear actuators in the base, no precision bearings.

Same reason keyless entry exists.

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