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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

Another bonus of having an EV is charging in your own home. You end up with a full tank every night.

Yeah, it's silly to compare. BEV charging infrastructure is trivially expanded and piggybacked on an already ubiquitous power grid.

You still need big trucks constantly hauling liquid hydrogen around for the fuel cell option...

I've always considered electric charging to be similar to an interface. You can change out the back end without the consumer having to do anything. You consume electricity but it could be nuclear, wind, coal, or pig shit.

It is pretty close to ideal.

It doesn't even poison the groundwater when the pipes break.

Unless you don't have a home...if you live in any dense area in an apartment, forget about it.

I actually live in a condo complex with 300 units and I get by. I just charge at the local library for free like once a week or at work.

How many charging stations does your library have?

4. The McDonald's next door also has 4. And there are paid ones in the street. It's a solid setup.

I wish everywhere was like that, but anecdotally my midwest suburb experience or would-be experience is very different. The only places that have chargers are ~3 grocery stores all 15+ minutes away. Work is a surface lot nowhere near any electricity, let alone a charger. And the garage circuit in my rental house isn't even rated to support 120V charging. Being able to comfortably get an EV will either take years, or a complete change in scenery. :(

I charge through a ~40 foot long 120V "extension cord" made of 10 gauge wire and plugged into an appropriately rated outlet. Which is to say, you probably could charge in your garage if you really wanted to.

It's unfortunate people don't realize this doesn't scale. If everyone at your 300 unit condo had a BEV, this doesn't work.

If everyone at a 300 unit condo had a BEV, the cost of bringing in new high-voltage AC service to a dedicated 480V transformer and set of chargers could be divided 300 ways and shared by the condo association/strata plan, making it affordable for all. Economies of scale.

Good luck retrofitting the hundreds of thousands of apartments and condominiums out there.

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