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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

I think they're saying that the very short charge time seems potentially dangerous given the amount of current involved.

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right every charger would be like a high voltage substation, of course people have complained about the safety potential of every new innovation and for the most part they're tamed. Seems likely that people dying from stupid drivers will far exceed deaths from the charging infrastructure even of hydrogen or this very high current.

Have there been any electrical accidents from current superchargers, etc.?

I have been following Tesla for many years and have heard of lots of story about people getting hurt with Tesla. I have never heard of such a case during everyday operations of a supercharger.

Likely somewhere somebody has died during installation of these stations but I have never heard of it.

My guess would be the death rate are about as high as installing any electrical system with high current.

Yeah, I did a quick Google for supercharger electrical accidents, and I can’t really find any: I suspect you’re more likely to see a gas station fire than an accident at a fast charger.

there are around 200 times more gas stations currently than fast chargers so absolutely. The question that matters is if you replaced all of those with fast chargers would the accidents at fast chargers be worse than gas station accidents. I am not saying that is not the case and also like gas stations they will get safer over time.

Probably the larger concern (or at least as large) would be that the current electrical grid couldn't handle that kind of load if a significant number of people started driving these quick charge electric cars which require these large currents. Likely we'd need to slow down the charging anyway to accommodate the limitations of the power grid.

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