Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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No offense intended but you come off sounding like a True Believer here. There have been and continue to be severe limitations on electric cars:

- high cost of batteries

- limited range largely limits them to urban settings

- materials currently required for manufacturer are limited

- cold weather reduces battery effectiveness and thus range

- time to charge is a huge issue compared to simply refilling a tank

- charging stations require a massive and expensive infrastructure upgrade for widespread use

- cost

- unproven reliability. This is partly an issue of the technology being so new but even Tesla says the batteries need to be replaced after ~8 years.

Battery technology has come a long way in the last 20 years. It's already enabled a bunch of applications that are hugely significant (eg smartphones, drones) to the point where I think that a massive breakthrough in battery technology may well be the most important discovery of the 21st century as the consequences will be so staggeringly massive.

So I'm not saying the electric vehicles are the future or that they aren't. The future is hard to predict. Regardless, putting liquid fuels into vehicles is here for some time to come yet.

There's no reason to pull out the True Believer ad hominem. You have valid points, but it also wouldn't be the first time that a long list of drawbacks with new technology are resolved one by one until it becomes obvious to everyone that the new way of doing things is better. I think that battery-electric vehicles are in this category, and that it will be tough for competitors to catch up once the "this is obviously the better way" point is reached. This is obviously a matter of opinion, but it certainly isn't clear-cut.

I'd also claim that the drawbacks you mention don't merit the word severe, given that Tesla is able to sell ~100,000 vehicles per year with these drawbacks. They are certainly disadvantageous, but not to such a degree that they are a limitation to more than a few precent of the use cases. Also, there are advantages to electric vehicles - e.g. less routine maintenance, fewer moving parts to service, lower operating costs, less noise and emissions. So to a degree it evens out even with the present limitations.

100k/year compared to 17m cars and light trucks sold in the US in 2015 is a drop in the ocean.

This seems to be another example, particularly on this forum, of "living in the bubble". The bubble in this case is urban living in California, a situation with relatively low ranges of driving with temperate weather.

Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm simply pointing out the obvious: it's got incredibly far to go and there are enormous challenges to overcome such that, at a minimum, it's going to take a long time.

Dominating their niche will be a useful outcome. If light vehicles in cities become predominantly electric, that is a useful outcome and I look forward to it for the reduction in air and noise pollution.

I think that "niche" covers about 70% of personal vehicles in the EU.

Time to charge is not a huge issue, you can simply replace the battery for a full one. Tesla has an automated battery swap station that can replace one in 90 seconds.

Those battery swap stations were mixed (... For now?)

http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a25...

I think you mean "nixed".

Whatever the case, I tend to agree that battery swaps is not a scalable solution.

Agree with whom? Elon said he's not pursuing them because they are not popular, as Superchargers are fast enough. That's in direct contradiction with your claim that time to charge is a huge issue.

> you can simply replace the battery for a full one.

I don't think so. The Tesla Model S batteries are everywhere through the chassis. There is no single "battery" to replace. It would be major surgery to swap batteries - you'd have to remove the passenger compartment from the lower frame. The car is not designed for that form of "refueling".

No you're definitely wrong about this. I don't think they're widely available but the S is designed for drop in battery replacement

They did a live demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Here's a closeup video where you can see the battery pack being lowered and another being pushed into place:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlaQuKk9bFg

That swap site was designed to arbitrage a loophole of California tax credits for EV's.

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-battery...

Basically, if a battery swap facility exists and has done it on at least one car, then all cars in the fleet capable of this battery swap can enjoy the extra tax credits, even though said facility is not open for actual use and has no plans to employ swapping on the other vehicles.

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