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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

First world city streets already have electricity supply (for the street light and for the buildings). Setting up charging ports is already rather cheap and once cities realize that they can

- drastically reduce air pollution

- make more money selling electricity than just charging for parking

they will quickly start installing plugs everywhere.

Battery range is already at around 500 km for Tesla model S and X and the long range version of model 3, and close to 1,000 km for the new roadster. With the current incremental improvements, in 4-5 years battery range for ordinary medium priced EVs will go beyond 7-800 km on a single charge, super chargers and other chargers will be abundant, and charging will become a non-issue. Within 8-10 years, even the lowest priced EVs will have a range beyond that of combustion engine cars (6-800 km), unless innovation mysteriously were to end.

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Id speak to an electrical engineer before you make such wild assertions - upgrading supplies like this will be massively expensive.

Also battery tech doesn't follow mores law so we aint going to get an order of magnitude change in battery tech ever

We don't need improvements at a rate that is anywhere near Moore's law. Moore's law is about doubling transistor density every two years. But for EVs to reach that kind of ranges (7-800 km for mid range price) we just need to add 50-60 percent or so one time, and I'm talking about that happening in 4-5 years. For the cheap EVs that currently have a range of around 3-400 km we need to double one time. I suggest we will get there in less than 10 years and that is not even taking into consideration the fact that prices on batteries keep dropping.

A "modest" 5-10 percent improvement like we've seen historically, for another 7-10 years, and we have more or less doubled the energy density of batteries. Plenty for EVs to beat combustion engine cars.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-...

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...

your going to need Nobel prize level breakthroughs to make ev's ubiquitous and that will take say 20 years from discovery to industrial production

Battery technology is already improving by roughly 8% a year.

There is no need for a nobel prize level breakthrough.

These modern technologies like photovoltaic and eletric vechiles are already viable today. They are within the same order of magnitude as the technology they are replacing and the gap is decreasing with every year.

There is a lot of useless crap out there that doesn't at all work like gravity batteries. EVs and PV are not part of that category.

"First world city streets already have electricity supply" powering a light bulb in 100 street lights and having enough capacity to charge 100 electric cars are 2 totally different animals and will require significant infra. upgrades.

It’s the exact same cables that powers the thousands of light bulbs, hundreds of computers, AC, TV, fridges etc in the buildings next to the street

Yep and most of the cables are close to max capacity

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