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Comment by fictivmade | Hacker News Reader

It's going to be interesting to see how car companies adapt to the stricter standards and whether people are willing to give up the speed and power to go electric.

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I own a company making truck accessories. I recently purchased a 2009 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid because I think I can tweak the electric drive to produce a lot more power - My own version of Tesla's "Ludicrous Mode" for the Tahoe, electric backed up with the 6.0L V8. My target is 1000 hp, 500 from gas, 500 from electric (for a 1/4 mile at least). Just driving the truck unmodified, I am thinking that the marketing people for that vehicle did a bad job. It was panned in the press, but is very fun to drive.

Stock the truck can do 28 mph on electric only. Not bad for a 8 seat vehicle. Once I get done tweaking it, I should be able to drive full electric when I want ( I have a 5 mile commute!).

Personally, i am excited about all the good electric motors out there. It makes going faster really easy! and better on fuel!

I think going electric will not be "giving up speed and power". As a hardcore auto enthusiast, I think that people like me will be embracing electric to GET speed and power.

See also Rhys Millens 1300 hp all electric Pikes Peak racer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMjsAMlXGBI

"The 93rd Running and 99th Anniversary of The Broadmoor Pikes Peak International Hill Climb Brought to you by Gran Turismo was won on Sunday, June 28th, 2015 by Rhys Millen in the electric powered and Latvian built Drive eO PP03. This historic win marked not only the first electric powered overall victory at the PPIHC but the first time an EV had defeated all internal combustion challenges in a head to head race."

Tahoe and its cousin Escalade hybrid are interesting, but it seems both are discontinued. Hopefully, Chevy and Caddy are taking the lessons from Voltec and are applying in these categories.

Don't forget the independent hacker hotrodders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMQjcukphpA

There is a lot of interesting electric motor stuff in the junkyards now.....

Gasoline's advantage is not in speed and power; electric engines can produce quite enough torque, and get maximum speeds well above the legal and practical limits for highway driving.

It's in range and fast refueling on existing infrastructure - for example, the Tesla Model S gets only about 200-250 miles on a charge, after which it needs somewhere more than half an hour to recharge on a Supercharger. Compared to much cheaper gas-powered vehicles that can run 400 miles on a tank, and refuel in minutes, this is pretty bad, hence the BMW statement hedging the all-electric promise with things like range extenders and hybrid technology, rather than power-boosters of assorted types.

The solution to the refueling speed issue is so obvious to me that I think I'm probably missing something about the economics of it.

All they have to do is swap out the whole battery pack, you wouldn't really own your car's pack. It'd be like propane tanks where you exchange your empty tank for a new one. The whole car would have to be manufactured around this idea to make it easy to lift out the battery pack, probably with some kind of forklift.

Tesla have started doing this, but I do not recall the details.

They've implemented it, but Musk says it'll probably be discontinued: http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a25...

It turns out that for real world long distance driving, stopping to charge for 20-30 minutes every couple of hours isn't a big deal for most people. There are some who are really in a hurry, of course, but the reaction from most Tesla owners hasn't been very enthusiastic. The superchargers do the job well already.

Most of the manufacturers have demoed variations on that theme. The big problem is that you have to get all the manufacturers to agree to use same battery pack on all their models. If every gas station has to keep a stock of dozen different batteries with a dozen different swapping procedures it will get too expensive to implement.

Another aspect is a question of manpower. I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world, but here in Sweden more and more gas stations are completely unmanned. And at the ones that do have staff they're are basically just there to run the large convenience store. No gas station today employs people who actually knows anything about cars. Unless this procedure is completely automated, it will require the gas station to take on extra, trained, staff.

Well, why must there be "a" station? You can just have manufacturer-specific battery swapping stations. Since these will mostly be located outside cities, the extra area is probably not that big a problem.

That sounds horribly inefficient and expensive, and doesn't really solve the problem. Standardised battery packs would be a much better solution than making each manufacturer operate a national/global network of recharging stations.

Better Place tried to make this happen in a few small test markets, and failed spectacularly. Turns out building out that kind of infrastructure is quite expensive, and only works if a large number of cars on the road are compatible with your batteries. It might take off when electric car deployment is much higher than it is now, but it doesn't help with bootstrapping.

The only real speed is refilling time, other than that electric is speedier and more powerful.

Well, the speed and power of the car will depend on the gearing. The Model S only has one gear so while it has tons of power and torque from 0, it tapers off quite a bit when the car starts going fast.

I expect Tesla to work on improving this in future models. Elon has stated that he wants to prove that electric cars can be better in every possible way than gas cars. And largely, the Model S accomplishes that goal. What performance the Model S doesn't deliver compared to other cars will probably be fixed asap.

... but not in a way that limits its usefulness as a street car. As mentioned, refilling time is the bigger drawback as a street car. On the road, acceleration over 100mph is not really all that important. On the track, it's crucial.

Tesla dumped the multi-speed gearbox because it was a hard problem to solve, for one, but I think that was inside of the parameters of it not being that important. If it needed a multi-speed gearbox to make it go over 60mph, they would have made it work.

Torque does taper off, but power does not. It rises smoothly to peak power at ~80-90% of max RPM, then declines modestly.

Electric is not slower or less powerful, electric's issue is the low energy density wrt petroleum fuels, so you need much more volume dedicated to batteries and you still get a much lower range. See the recent news about a hypermiler getting 452 miles out of a Model S (on 0-grade roads at 25mph), the hypermiling record on a production petroleum car is more than 1600 miles.

This is exacerbated by the much longer refueling times, a supercharger needs ~20mn for a 50% charge, an at-home 240V/40A does ~10%/hour.

Hypermiling isn't necessarily a valid comparison method. How do they compare in stop and go traffic where the gas powered car is wasting power that the electric car can retain via regenerative braking?

Range is of very little concern in urban stop and go traffic. But even there and though it's the worst environment for a straight ICE car, it'll still have a better autonomy than the EV.

Furthermore while regenerative braking offers some advantages to EV, chances are that's lost by the loss of energy to cooling (in summer) and especially heating (in winter) the car interior.

2016 Toyota Camry: 25mpg city * 17gallon fuel tank = 425 mile range just city driving.

If you still want regenerative braking, the hybrid version is rated at 43mpg city and has the same size fuel tank.

Refueling times don't tell the whole story, because you aren't necessarily waiting for it.

This is especially true with home charging. 10%/hour means you plug in when you get home in the evening and your battery is full in the morning. While technically it might take some hours to charge, in terms of your wait time it's zero.

On a long-distance trip, the possibility of actually having to wait for the car is higher. But if you time charging to coincide with meal and bathroom breaks, you can often put that time to productive use as well, in which case the wait time is once again zero.

It only takes a few minutes to fill up a gas car. But that time can't be used for anything else. You're waiting a few minutes no matter what.

For an average driver with home charging, the average time spent waiting to charge an EV will be much lower than the average time spent refueling a gas car.

Don't get me wrong, it can be a problem if you go on a longer trip and things don't line up right. And it's something I'd love to see solved. But all too often I see people equating charging times to time spent at a gas station, when it's quite different.

> give up the speed and power

Electircs are faster and way more powerful (torque) than almost all ICEs until you get over the speed limit(s) or an S curve.

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