Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

The issue of energy portability is not an insignificant one IMO. I can carry 5 gallons (or 100-150 miles worth of range) of fuel fairly easily. Not so much with an electric vehicle.

What happens when I run out of juice on the side of the road? I don't care how many times the car warns me; that it shouldn't happen, etc. People still manage to run out of gas today. With an electric vehicle already hampered by half the range of an I.C.E. vehicle, it will happen even more often. If I drain my battery, I can no longer walk down to a gas station, fill up a 5 gallon container and be on my way.

"But that should never happen!" sure and people don't get stranded for hours in traffic in the middle of a winter storm. An I.C.E. vehicle can easily idle for a day non-stop on half a tank. Can an electric vehicle provide me with heat for 24 hours when it's -3F outside on half a charge?

Even when we reach range parity, the convenience and portability of gasoline will keep me buying I.C.E. vehicles until it is overwhelmingly superior.

A car should be able to charge another car. There needs to be some kind of standard here.

Or else small portable batteries need to become more common.

Or I could envision a service where, if you run out of electrons, you tap a button and a drone is dispatched with a portable battery to your location. Or maybe the car itself could place the call automatically.

How big would a battery have to be to get a dead EV off the side of the road and 25 miles to a charging station? Can a drone fly a 25 or 50 pound battery? What would the range on the drone be?

I'm guessing a tow truck with the ability to charge a car is more likely.

What if the battery shipped by drone is what powers the drone itself?

(I'm just trying to imagine some extreme scenarios, I'm not saying this is The Solution.)

I was going to say, flying, huge capacity battery == drone. It doesn't need to replace the car's battery, just charge it.

In addition to fuel being portable, storage is important too. I can store extra fuel. When the power is out and the gas station can't pump - I don't care, I have a backup. I can put it in my truck, generator, etc.

You can't do that with a spare battery?

And solar panels can both power your home and recharge your car. Indefinitely. What happens when you run out of extra fuel?

The same thing that happens when there isn't sun - yes I have enough winter, clouds and snow that solar isn't "worth it". I have a panel to see what I can get out of it, but I'd hate to rely on it. A Tesla battery is more likely to find its way into my home than my vehicles.

My real energy storage is wood because I can't run out of it. Batteries don't grow on trees, but trees do?

Trees may warm your home, but provide neither electrical power for the rest of your home nor provide any fuel for your vehicle. Solar may not be 'worth it' in terms of an investment, but there are few places on the planet where they would not be able to provide some power or slowly recharge a vehicle.

This may sound like a joke but I think it might work - would carrying a pedal/hand generator resolve emergency like this, at least for a little while?

For all that is holy, carry a small gas generator instead. The same way people today carry a small extra battery for their ICE cars.

Ehhhh. I doubt it. I looked up and a typical hand crank is 10 watt. That won't be any good. That wouldn't power a laptop. I found a decent pedal generator that says it can output 400 watt. My car uses around 330 wH to go a mile, so if you charged at 400 watt for an hour, you would get slightly more than a mile of range (assuming no efficiency loses). Pedaling for an hour to go one mile doesn't sound like fun to me.

Just add removable floorboards so you can Flintstone it.

>hampered by half the range of an I.C.E.

Not always the case. There's plenty of petrol powered cars that have horrible range. Thing with electric cars is they'd be plugged in when parked (ie overnight). ~300 miles on electric might not sound like much, but do normal people drive 300 miles every day? nope. If their car is fully charged every morning they should never run out of battery power. Long trips, yeah it's a problem that'll need to be fixed but really not all that different from being stranded in the middle of no where miles from the nearest station. Likely roadside assistance will have portable chargers or just simply tow you to the nearest charger.

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