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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Charging still takes a long time and has relatively low mileage. Hydrogen doesn't have that problem and in the end accounting for lithium mining destroying the environment I still don't think it's that clear cut. EV just has more adoption because it's easier at this point and perks don't want to fall behind against Tesla.

I also don't see how Toyota "deserves" to lose. When you take into consideration their longevity and fairly good track record on gas mileage...they are better than a lot of manufacturers that are now pushing hard for electric. People tend to forget that manufacturing a car and replacing a car wears on the environment just as much as driving it.

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> "lithium mining destroying the environment"

1. Any environmental impact from lithium mining needs to be weighed against the impact of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels

2. Lithium is recyclable (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1682-5) and there is room for a lot of process improvement in lithium extraction (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/general-motors-looks-to...)

3. Studies of the lifecycle emissions (emissions including manufacturing) of electric cars consistently find that EVs beat ICE vehicles, and future lifecycle emissions must be considered as a curve, as the percentage of renewables on the electric grid increases and industrial process eventually move away from fossil fuels (https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...)

>1. Any environmental impact from lithium mining needs to be weighed against the impact of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels

Why? If we're comparing EVs and hydrogen powered cars then we shouldn't. We should compare lithium usage to what hydrogen powered cars need.

>2. Lithium is recyclable

But do we actually recycle lithium in enough quantities?

>Currently, globally, it's very hard to get detailed figures for what percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, but the value everyone quotes is about 5%," says Dr Anderson. "In some parts of the world it's considerably less."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779

Lithium-ion batteries can be the most recyclable thing in the world, but if we don't actually recycle them then it makes no difference.

There are quite a few stories about companies and research groups gunning for increasingly high lithium extraction from spent batteries. We're not there yet, but leave it to an open market to extract something of value as efficiently as possible from an effectively free resource.

> We're not there yet, but leave it to an open market to extract something of value as efficiently as possible from an effectively free resource.

Recycling can never be free or even close. There's a lot of processing that goes from dismantling a battery, to segregating the lithium, to putting it back in a new battery. Recycle is last of the 3 Rs for a reason.

We're not even recycling "recyclables" at very impressive rates. Our local waste management program here in Maryland has a Facebook page that talks about how there are a very very limited number and types of plastics that are even accepted at recycling facilities - and the market for recyclables is starting to dry up. Largely because a lot of the foreign countries that were taking it in by the container ship load have stopped doing so.

The market for industrial metal and chemical recycling is completely different than consumer plastics. Metals are often recycled because there is significant money in it. Recycling plastic is not profitable and frequently not even possible.

If you want to consider lithium against hydrogen, that's fine: What's the environmental impact of hydrogen electrolysis, transportation, and construction of infrastructure to support it at a scale large enough to replace the ICE vehicle fleet? What kinds of materials need to be extracted to produce hydrogen fuel cells, and at what scale? How do those compare to the inputs for lithium ion batteries?

The sobering answer is that fuel cells also need a lot of problematic minerals too for catalysts. The most widely used H2 fuel cell catalyst is PtCo - so you still have the same cobalt problem there too.

Except hydrogen fuel cell vehicles lost already. There's no point comparing to them because we don't live in a reality where they're going to become a thing. If you want to play the "what if" game, that has its merits, but it has nothing to do with the world we presently live in or the proximate future.

In fact, an ICCT study shows that hydrogen tank manufacture is as CO2 intensive as batteries… if that is true, my mind is blown

https://theicct.org/publications/global-LCA-passenger-cars-j...

https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/14193077299995115...

> Any environmental impact from lithium mining needs to be weighed against the impact of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels

There's also the costs and externalities of shipping fuel to fueling stations all over the country in perpetuity, there's no additional cost to "ship" electricity to homes or charging stations.

Some (5%) electricity is lost during the transfer.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

Hydrogen absolutely does have this problem. A fast hydrogen fill requires the hydrogen to be at super high pressure, a typical hydrogen station can only do three fast fills per hour. Not to mention the time you take driving way out of your road to get to the very limited number of stations, if there are any.

You can swap out hydrogen tanks a lot more easily than you can swap out batteries. Something to consider.

Lol. All the downvotes. It's like I said something bad about Apple 10 years ago. All hail Elon, dear leader.

Theoretically you can swap anything easily.

I wouldn't want my container on high pressure explosive gas be swapped from some DIY dudes car.

Like a gas grill I would suspect. The issue with swapping out batteries is they are friggin' heavy when they are that big.

No, you really can't. In order to make high-pressure hydrogen tanks in passenger vehicles safe in crashes they are embedded deeply inside the chassis and are much bigger and more difficult to access than you seem to be thinking. There is absolutely no way to swap the tank on a Toyota Mirai, for example, without taking the car mostly apart. Take a look at [1] to see where the tanks are actually placed.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/37872/now-with-three-hydrogen-...

Why couldn't you put an access panel right next to them, or even a slide out tray? They both seem to be near the outside of the car in that diagram.

Hydrogen is already terrible enough as it is to contain. So now you want to add a bunch of connect/disconnect cycles to a high pressure tank?!

I mean we've known how to store flammable gas for quite a while now. Welding tanks, oxygen tanks, propane tanks. Why would it be different from swapping out a propane tank in my gas grill?

I mean don't EV's have issues? Lithium is expensive to mine, electricity is usually produced by burning coal, and can our current grid even handle 100% electric vehicles? I mean it's better than gas, but it's not the end of the road of vehicle power is it?

Pressurized explosive gases are dangerous. Your propane task isn't part of a multi-ton vehicle traveling at high speeds that may be subject to a high speed crash at any random point in time.

A hydrogen tank that is part of your car, however, may be subject to a high speed crash coming in at a random angle.

BBQ grill propane tanks can explode, but they are typically stored on porches, an environment where they are not often hit by SUVs.

>Pressurized explosive gases are dangerous.

So are lithium ion batteries. Here's an article on a recent Tesla burn:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/01/tesla-model-s-plaid-caught-f...

I wasn't arguing that hydrogen wasn't dangerous, I was arguing that a hydrogen tank was easier to swap than a 1200 lb. battery.

> Why would it be different from swapping out a propane tank in my gas grill?

Because we are not talking about propane. We are talking about a tank storing highly pressurized hydrogen, which is way more difficult to handle than propane. In a moving vehicle, not a grill.

> Lithium is expensive to mine

Yes. It can be mined once and then reuse countless times, however. Hydrogen is expensive to manufacture too, and it's "burned" so you always need more.

Expect prices to go down as more infrastructure to mine and refine is put into place. This is even ignoring technological advancements in extraction - which tend to happen once there's demand.

> electricity is usually produced by burning coal

This is highly location-dependent. True for some places, not true at all for others. That's also becoming less true by the day.

_Even_ in the case where 100% of the grid power worldwide came from coal, EVs would still be a win. The generator on a huge power plant is far more efficient than any car engine. And the pollution is concentrated on a few places - places we can improve. Additionally, there are no emissions on population centers, meaning an enormous improvement on quality of life and a decrease on deaths due to respiratory illnesses.

Then, once you upgrade the power plants, the entire vehicle fleet gets an instant upgrade.

If it's in your means (essentially, if you own your property) you can generate power from renewables on site and power your vehicle that way. Try doing that with hydrogen.

> and can our current grid even handle 100% electric vehicles

Yes according to the US Department of Energy.

> I mean it's better than gas, but it's not the end of the road of vehicle power is it

Just until we find something better, then we'll _easily_ change our vehicles to store electric energy using the new storage device. That's the good thing about electric motors, they don't care where the power comes from.

>> electricity is usually produced by burning coal

> This is highly location-dependent.

It really isn’t. Electricity moves through a network: for example using more electricity in France might cause a coal power station to be started in Poland. The same occurs for any network.

Additionally, when you add an EXTRA kWh of load, what really matters is where that extra kWh is generated. Think of it that all the electricity on the network is already being used (all the green electricity is virtually guaranteed to be used).

When you add one marginal kWh of usage, that kWh is often genersted 100% from gas or coal.

Obviously there are a lot of different situations where the above points are not relevant, and where an efficient coal station might be better than an ICE. I am just saying that many people are ignorant of how the electricity networks work.

> Electricity moves through a network

I know. We haven't interconnected the entire planet. So it still depends on what region we are talking about. Even inside a country some regions might be barely connected (see the Texas power grid).

> might cause a coal power station to be started in Poland

It also might cause a natural gas station to be started up. Again, that depends on the location. Usually it would cause a natural gas power plant to start up. It could also be pumped storage hydro, or even batteries.

Since you are talking about lack of knowledge, it's useful to point out that coal is very unlikely to be used as a peaker plant, just like we don't start nuclear power stations for the same purpose. Generally they are used for baseline power.

We aren't going to be starting coal plants because France is using more power. Some countries might decide to build more though, to account for the predicted energy usage growth.

Here's a video of someone breaching a full hydrogen fuel cell with a bullet. No explosion because it comes out too fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVeagFmmwA0

Fuel cell is very different from a gas tank at high pressure.

Propane is a vastly different substance with different properties. I'm not sure why you are so insistent that they should be similar.

Sure, EVs and hydrogen each have their pros and cons. But that is meaningless without numbers. So far, it seems like the numbers work out a lot better for EVs.

Maybe someone comes up with a great idea and hydrogen becomes the future of cars. But there is zero evidence of that today.

>I'm not sure why you are so insistent that they should be similar.

I'm not insistent, I'm just asking why it's not possible or practical to swap out a hydrogen tank in a vehicle. I guess that's heretical.

Here's a company that sells tanks. You can use it for welding among other things. There's one in just about every city.

https://www.airgas.com/resources/gases101/hydrogen

Fork lifts currently use them too.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/musk-calls-hydrogen-fuel-cel...

Storing pressurized hydrogen safely & efficiently is much harder to do than storing propane.

Pressure for propane tanks, 100-200 psi.

Pressure for hydrogen tanks, 5000-10000 psi.

It's not the same.

Also, hydrogen has the funny habit of being much smaller molecule and diffusing through solids.

The answer is also because hydrogen is insanely light. A propane molecule is much bigger in size than a H2 molecule - which makes hydrogen storage and handling uniquely difficult

Not what you were going for, but the people talking negatively about Apple's strategy ten years ago were similarly extremely wrong.

Or extremely right, considering we now live in a world of walled gardens and user choice and repair-ability has diminished in large part because of Apple.

I think he/she means that Tesla, like Apple, has a cult following in which people can't see the company doing any wrong or facing any criticism when it comes to its products or repercussions for what it will do to the industry down the line.

Apple's value went up over 10x from ten years ago. You may not like the result, but many others did and do. The people ten years ago talking about why Apple would fail or why what they made wasn't what people wanted were wrong.

Similarly pushing hydrogen as a better option is wrong today.

I mean if stock price is all you judge a company by, Amazon and Activision are angels that can do no wrong.

I was referring more to the rabid fanboy-ism. People committing suicide in their plants? Well people commit suicide everywhere. Nets? Great idea!

One of the reasons companies do horrid shit is that we let them.

I'm an Apple fanboy, but they certainly aren't beyond reproach.

Video from this week on battery swapping tech / companies

https://youtu.be/2-xWYScsvts

It helps to fully understand the drawbacks of what you're advocating in order to have a coherent argument.

That's why people have issue with your statement on "easily" swapping hydrogen tanks, as it's anything but "easy".

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-chall...

> Charging still takes a long time and has relatively low mileage. Hydrogen doesn't have that problem

Hydrogen has SO MANY other problems though it's not even funny.

It's incredibly hard to store. We literally have devised no containers that can hold it long term, as the molecules are so small they seep through. As they do so, they embrittle said containers, which need to be then replaced.

It's not energy dense. So we either have to compress it (wasting energy) or liquefy it(not viable for cars, without even accounting for boil off).

Then you need the whole 'manufacturing' (as there's no free hydrogen on Earth) - probably from fossil fuels. You need to transport it to where it's going to be used. And you need to create and entire new fuel infrastructure. The current fossil fuel industry likes this for obvious reasons.

For all the talk on the lack of EV charging infrastructure, up to level 2 all we need are glorified relays. Electricity is available even in places we have no gas infrastructure.

And then, what are we doing with hydrogen? Using it on fuel cells... to produce electricity.

Just skip the middle man and charge batteries directly.

Even liquid hydrogen with all its added problems due to the ultra low temperatures needed has very low density - that's why all hydrogen powered rockets are so massive. Even in liquid form the hydrogen tank is massive with a tiny liquid oxygen tank next to it (Delta IV, Ariane V, H II, Shuttle external tank). The extra tankage weight and added aerodynamic drag remove quite some of the adventages of the otherwise good specific impulse hydrolox has.

>Hydrogen doesn't have that problem and in the end accounting for lithium mining destroying the environment I still don't think it's that clear cut.

99% of the hydrogen currently produced come from natural gas. Of course, it could be made from water but lithium can also be extracted cleanly from clay with with table salt.

Besides, making hydrogen from water uses over 3 times the energy required to make and charging a battery (the well-to-wheel efficiency of hydrogen vehicles is that low).

So for now and the foreseeable future, hydrogen is far worst for the environment than Li-Ion batteries.

Moreover, room-temperature fuel cells require platinum-group metal catalysts and this is the main reason that has prevented the introduction of vehicles with fuel cells.

High-temperature fuel cells do not need expensive catalysts, but it seems that nobody succeeded to reach acceptable lifetimes for them.

On the other hand, if the fuel cells contain expensive materials then we're more likely to actually recycle them.

> relatively low mileage

You can get a base model 3 today with 263 to 353 miles of range. That's upwards of 3-4 hours of driving with no breaks. Stop to take a break at a super charger for 30 minutes and you can do another 3-4 hours.

How is this still no practical especially combined with all the time and money they save not having to do most routine maintenance.

That also depends on passenger weight, or if you're hauling something. The new electric trucks plummet on mileage if they are carrying weight. I understand that gasoline vehicles do the same thing, but not at such a steep rate.

I don't think a lot of commenters here have much experience living in rural environments.

This doesn't even begin to touch on the ability to repair the vehicles.

All vehicles plummet in range pulling heavy loads at high speed. You notice it more in a vehicle with careful range estimation, and slower refuling. If you need to drive 600 miles a day pulling a heavy trailer, EVs don't work for you right now. Similarly my wife's Toyota Camry does not work for that either.

I'm not trying to take sides, but electric cars seem vastly simpler from a mechanical perspective.

I'm sure they have complicated electronics, but most modern cars do as well and those aren't components people typically work on.

Just consider the electric vehicle has no transmission, no drive train, no oil. It doesn't have most of what cars have under the hood.

EVs have less than 20 moving parts in their drivetrain. Scheduled maintenance is brake fluid every few years (as it absorbs moisture over time), cabin air filter every 2-3 years, and tire rotations (~7k miles) and replacements (as needed). Brake pads and rotors under normal duty cycles should last the life of the vehicle due to aggressive regenerative braking (at least that's what Tesla is seeing).

Mechanically simpler, but (at least in Tesla's case) can be harder to get replacement parts for. Obviously their repair network isn't going to be as complete as a more established brand, but it doesn't really sound like they're prioritizing repairability at all.

That's true, but it seems to be an issue with Tesla as a company rather than electric vehicles as a product.

Fair point. Unfortunately it's a trend I've already seen over the last decade with battery-operated power tools, and they-re a simplified and scaled-down version of electric car drivetrains.

Pretty much all modern brushless power tools, while mechanically simpler than their brushed cousins, require a full motor and control module replacement when something as simple as the switch fails.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that electric propulsion is the future for efficient transport and that gas isn't a long-term solution going forward. It just seems to me the marketing and hype have gotten ahead of the current offerings, and I worry the 'scrap it and get a new one' approach employed often by tech companies will end up being applied to cars as well.

It's hard to get replacement parts for Teslas because every single part they make is put into a new car and sold.

There is no extra capacity producing spare parts to sit on shelves.

It's possible that they do last longer, but the track record is not there yet. There are a lot of Toyota vehicles with over 1M miles, you can look up high mileage Toyotas for sale. That does not yet exist with Teslas. I have heard (not first hand) of Tesla having some quality problems, so immediately jumping to the conclusion that they are future proof seems like a mistake.

> but electric cars seem vastly simpler from a mechanical perspective.

The electric motor is simpler than an ICE, yes.

OTOH, a modern (and by modern I mean anything in the last ~30 years) ICE engine is supremely reliable, so it's a wash.

Most repair time isn't from having to fix the engine or motor anyway, it's the whole rest of the car.

We have a a Fiat 500e (EV) now sitting it's fourth week (not continuous) at the dealer to get window regulator problems fixed. Those types of problems have nothing to do with whether the car was an EV model or the ICE model.

> The new electric trucks plummet on mileage if they are carrying weight.

Source? Supposedly the F-150 Lightning numbers are including 1000 lbs of cargo. So a full cabin of people still supposedly getting the stated 300 miles on a full charge (For the extended range.)

Ohhh there was this YouTube video (from Motortend?) showing a model X in tow that had a drastic reduction in range when towing a trailer.

Now compare that to the LandCruiser that we haul race cars with… the LC always gets 14 mpg, we have filled it with 6 adults going to Tahoe, same MPG. Haul a 2700lbs sports car. Doesn’t change at all.

Honestly an EV would be nice for hauling stuff to the track, hopefully with the race car, and equipment it can make it to Willows on a single charge, at least the track has RV hookup points, can charge while you race.

> Now compare that to the LandCruiser that we haul race cars with… the LC always gets 14 mpg, we have filled it with 6 adults going to Tahoe, same MPG. Haul a 2700lbs sports car. Doesn’t change at all.

This is physically impossible unless the LandCruiser is just throwing energy away when empty.

What's more likely is that this estimate is not very precise.

Considering the LandCruiser is pretty much a box with maximal air resistance, it might actually get more aerodynamic by adding the trailer to it :p. So the difference while trailing would be much smaller than adding a trailer to an aerodynamic car. Energy consumption when trailing with constant speed is mostly about aerodynamics.

It is believable. Towing is more about wind resistance than about mass. A car on a trailer is probably sitting mostly in the slipstream of the LC (they are not very aerodynamically shaped) and so not contributing much to the total wind load. Also engines to a point become more efficient under load. All told, there probably isn't a noticeable difference.

Of course we are talking about towing a light sports car here. Tow a different type off trailer, or a very heavy load and the losses will start to catch up.

In addition to wind drag, the additional weight contributes to the acceleration work required by the engine. This acceleration is occurring during cruise speeds as well as starting from rest (you can tell because your car engine is louder during cruise speeds than it is while the car is idling from rest.) Anything towed or carried contributes to the weight of the car which means the car is accelerating more weight. The curve isn’t perfectly linear with additional weight, as you noted, but the reduced MPG is measurable with a number of passengers in the car, let alone a towed car. A reduction of only 10-25% mileage might not be noticeable to a less observant driver but that isn’t to say it’s effectively the same.

Just look it up? I think it was part of many press questions regarding the truck, including Car & Driver. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36481590/ford-f150-lightn...

"Applying these results to the F-150 means that towing a modest trailer would put the highway range at roughly 100 to 125 miles, depending on the pack. Towing anywhere near the 10,000-pound maximum rating on XLT and Lariat models (with the maximum trailer tow package and extended-range battery) at highway speeds, we believe you'd be hard pressed to exceed double-digit miles."

I live and have lived in a "rural" environment for most of my life.

Because there's not a supercharger across from every McDonalds and at every exit.

I don't want to stop for food, order, wait, eat, get in the car, drive to who knows where for a charger, and then start charging for 30 minutes.

Well, give it time. As combustion vehicles are outlawed [1] and billions of dollars are poured into charging stations [2], early adopters will pave the path to get to the future you want. I've driven over 50k miles cross country in the US on Superchargers [3], and it's a pleasant experience using them and works for us (most of the time the car is done charging before we're done with our pit stop or grocery shopping). Happy to help drive forward innovation as a consumer (being the squeaky wheel demanding charging infra from any business I interact with that'll listen). See you in the future!

(i am also advocating with policy makers to outlaw new petroleum filling station permits/infrastructure, but that is a topic for another thread. i am applying YC startup school lessons to public policy efforts. please excuse the dust while the electrification of transportation ramps)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

[3] https://supercharge.info/map

Basically all superchargers are placed next to food and the major highways.

It's not "who knows where". Your car knows where and its right off the interstate in a parking lot next to a lot of places to eat. Better than most gas stations actually.

You want to eat while you charge? Get food next to your charger. They have already thought of all this when they were spending billions of dollars on building out charging infrastructure

Where do you live that this is the case?

At least in California, on our road trips, ever supercharger has been near a place where we could get food.

All the ones we stopped at in Canada were near food as well

IME, superchargers have not been located very conveniently, unfortunately. Mostly doing trips around Oregon.

Umm, a quite few McDonalds in Finland have 350kW chargers. [0]

Your car is done charging before you get your Big Mac and eat it.

[0] https://kempower.com/information-center/news/kempowers-leadi...

> I don't want to stop for food, order, wait, eat, get in the car, drive to who knows where for a charger, and then start charging for 30 minutes.

That's not what you do... You stop at the charger and then go get food or take a break at the store that's right next to it.

Don't you also have to stop, eat, and then drive somewhere to get gas?.

Which is no problem, if it only takes 5 minutes to fill up. But when I use a route calculator from Tesla, it schedules two charges (one 45 minutes the other 20 minutes), to get to my in-laws. At places where I don't want to stop. There are, apparently no super-chargers between Cincinnati and Indianapolis. Do you know how many gas stations there are on that route?

Right now I can choose what I want to eat, find one of those restaurants and fill up there. You can't pretend as if the opposite (planning around where my car wants to go, and eating what happens to be there) is the same thing.

Nor can you pretend that it is just as convenient to spend an hour and 5 minutes waiting for my car to charge when I normally spend 10 minutes max filling it up.

I just compared, and that's a route where having the long range Tesla makes a big difference. With the long range, the charging is reduced by around 30 minutes, so it only adds 30 compared to the ICE car, and only requires one charging stop.

Do you normally go through Bloomington? Both Google Maps and the A Better Route Planner say it's faster to go through Indianapolis.

Do I know you? Did I say where I was going from and to? Lol. Just a bit confused/creeped out.

But from Cincinnati to WI (the route I’m talking about) I always go through Indianapolis. I used the default car. Didn’t think much about the range differences, but you’re right. That makes a big difference.

LOL sorry, I was just going off your comment:

> There are, apparently no super-chargers between Cincinnati and Indianapolis

I think the charging situation is incredibly overrated. This really only matters for long trips. If you are someone driving 200-300 miles daily, it might be an issue, but at at the same time I can't imagine driving that long to stop for 30 minutes.

If you commute like most Americans (26 minutes), then you just charge at home and never think about it. I don't think people realize that most Telsa owners don't use public chargers.

Model 3 owner here. In practice, I stop every 1.5 to 2 hours on road trips for a 10-20 minute charge. You're never going to realistically charge to 100% and drive to 0%. Staying in the 20% to 80% range is ideal for fast charging purposes and some breathing room in case of emergency.

Standard or long range? To me, this seems pretty close to being practical. Driving for 2 hours and then stopping for 10-20 minutes is about where I'd prefer to be on long trips.

Mine's long range and I find it to be pretty practical. I definitely stop more often than I did in my ICE cars but it doesn't bother me to be forced to stretch my legs, use the restroom, and watch a bit of Netflix in the car or play on my phone.

Edit: On the plus side, charging at home at night every evening is really nice compared to a weekly gas station visit.

My TM3 SR+ (USA made in 2019) latest supercharge was 10 minutes to add 17 kWh going from just under 20% to 54%.

Charge started a 143 kW (on a 150 kW unshared charger) and I ended it 10 minutes later while it was at 80 kW. This was enough to drive 130km to home (non highway) with about 20% battery left so 130 Wh/km.

When I travel on highway I stop at all superchargers, they're usually 1h to 2h of highway driving apart in my country (France), so similar experience.

2 hours is only like 100 miles of driving. Wouldn't it make more sense to run the battery down further, since charging is faster at a lower state of charge?

As long as we are talking hypothetically and pilot projects, unlike hydrogen you can charge EV’s at highway speeds for unlimited range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road

As to the current infrastructure, plugging in nightly works for most people most of the time. Spending an extra 15 minutes charging for long trips is hardly a big deal. People tend to go inside for drinks walk around etc which eats into the time lost.

Adding to that, it's also worth noting that the battery segment of all-electric EVs has improved considerably over the past 20 years. The charging times per mile of distance will drop further and the range of the vehicles will continue to improve. The Toyota hydrogen arguments often intentionally ignore that the current approach to EV batteries is an improving target, despite that it's already good enough to take over the market as is.

This is becoming less true every year. Tesla now has 250kW superchargers, and there are even 350kW CCS chargers starting to be installed. In practice, for a Model 3, this means that you can charge the battery up to about half in 15 minutes.

For a long day of driving, say, 700 miles, assuming charging available at both ends, this means two charging stops of 15 minutes each instead of one gas stop of 5 minutes.

IMO while this can always be improved, this is now at the "good enough" point for long distance driving. Obviously to make this a true reality, there needs to be widespread charging available in parking lots, and more 250kW Superchargers, but progress towards this is rapid.

That is IF the charger is available when you want it and you don't need to wait 15-30 minutes for the car that's ahead of you to charge. Maybe rare now, but unless chargers keep building out at or greater than the pace of EV sales, it will become a bottleneck. It happens now with gas stations at busy interchanges, but generally a car can fill up and move in < 5 minutes.

How are urban car owners with street parking going to charge EV's is also a great question. There's zero infrastructure in place for that and it will be expensive when it does come.

Yes, in the UK it will be a massive problem. But practical issues seem to be irrelevant to those making policies.

1300 street lights already converted as chargers: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/...

Seems like there's a lot less street lights than cars.

Really, people should just have fewer cars.

Overly simplistic nonsense like this does not add to a discussion

Well the infrastructure certainly needs to be built, but the solution is straight forward. You just place slow charging stations where the cars are parked overnight.

1. Many owners run a cord from their house — this can be solved with a modest update to city codes and maybe a trenching service to help run lines under sidewalks. 2. Street lights have power lines and it seems like that infrastructure can be reused: https://metroenergy.org/programs/current-projects/streetligh... 3. We should be doing everything possible to discourage urban car ownership — EVs still make the city more expensive for everyone else, hurt people, pollute (tire, brake, sound), and require far more space than any other form of transportation.

You have an odd way of using the word zero. I see plenty of infrastructure including both charging stations, as well as the undeniably real electric grid infrastructure which is a huge start on solving the problem.

I think you're missing your parent's point here. Folks who have street parking don't have a way to charge their cars at home. Folks are currently doing ad-hoc solutions draping wires overhead or underfoot, which is seen as a nuisance. If every residential block had a single charger, it would be both hugely expensive for a municipality and inadequate to the point of conflict among neighbors sharing that block.

No I got the point but the point is misinformed.

We have many blocks (roughly 10x10 blocks, so 100 square blocks) sharing a single charger site now and for the last 3 years with only two plugs in a high EV density area and we don’t have any conflicts that I know of.

Most of these objections are just imagined problems coming from the minds of people without actual experience of owning an EV.

That being said, some EVs, once bought, are an easier ownership experience than others, but that’s getting off track.

> Most of these objections are just imagined problems coming from the minds of people without actual experience of owning an EV.

Hi, previous EV owner here, had to get rid of it because there was too much range anxiety thanks to the lack of chargers near my house and inability to use my house's power thanks to street parking. Saw multiple conflicts at congested chargers, mostly passive, some aggressive, because the infrastructure was insufficient to meet the demand.

Most EVs do it poorly though. This may be the fallacy of judging an entire product category based on a poor implementation. Very common amongst people who bought cheaper EVs. In any case both EVs, and charging options, are only getting better.

Most EVs do what poorly? Get charged from a 120V cable stretched across a sidewalk? Last I looked, it would take a several days to fill a Tesla's battery like that. That's not because somebody cheaped out on the Tesla.

Lots of things poorly. A lot of EVs don’t have internet so you can’t monitor the status, don’t have sentry mode so people can screw with the cable without being noticed, don’t have a mobile app that lets you (again) check on things or remotely control things like when your wife goes to collect the car but forgets the key and you can unlock it remotely, don’t give you a fast charging backup option that makes life easier, don’t have the range, don’t have Netflix and YouTube to pass the time for the odd times when you need to sit in the car for a while… the list goes on.

Okay, but we were talking about a lack of charging infrastructure, and your evidence that I'm misinformed and making up imaginary problems is... watching youtube and a forgetful wife trope? And BTW my combustion car lets me do almost all that crap, including turning on the AC over the internet. Whoop dee.

Fast charging sounds so great! It sounds like you've got two Teslas in a place where fast chargers are plentiful. That doesn't describe where I live. So, good for you, but please remember that people aren't necessarily idiots just because their life experience differs from yours.

But, hey. Credit where credit's due... at least you didn't say FSD.

My list of stuff is specifically things that help make life better for charging.

... if you can find a charger. All those bells and whistles are beyond useless if you can't. It's rather amazing that you continue to talk past this point.

When I had an EV, it frequently took several hours of combined searching and waiting to find a charge per week. That's not counting time to charge. Frequently, broken chargers would remain listed on apps for weeks, which made it a terrifying gambling game when range was low.

A combination of superchargers and plugshare helps a lot!

What you say is indeed right for some EVs and some locales, but give it time, it’s getting better.

Are you sure you are in a high EV density area? Because I can't imagine how that can work out if more than a few % of cars in the area are EV.

As an urban car owner with a car that has a 300 mile range, when I am running low on “energy”, I will drive the car to a dedicate place where more “energy” is put into the car. ICE or EV, it makes no difference to me, energy goes in at an external place.

What EV has over ICE is that these energy-giving places can be located anywhere - my work, the supermarket, a town car park, a mate’s house, an extension cable pit my window in absolute emergencies, etc. I really don’t see why this is a good argument against EV. Yes I can’t fill up outside my house, but I can’t do that with a petrol car either.

Last year I saw a charge point added to a public curb parking area near me.

It's about half the height of a parking meter. The power is right there under the pavement. Probably cost £800 to install, which could generate £200 in revenue each year.

Not every charger needs to be a super charger.

Getting lots of 11kw chargers in every parking bay would be a higher priority than everywhere having super chargers. Most people could keep topped up and those doing long trips use the faster charging points.

The grid capacity is not infinite. Of course, we are going to improve the grid but it is not a trivial problem.

I was wondering this same thing, then I found out that in many cities home owners can have a high speed charging port installed at the front of their property line and run a cord across the side walk to their car.

Of course this doesn't work well if your neighbors park right in front of your house, oops. (In most American cities, AFAIK, home owners have no claim over the parking space directly in front of their home)

Not sure what to do in "real" dense cities, Chicago row houses and such.

Honestly making them public infrastructure where people pay a monthly fee subscription fee to the city might just work. (And generate revenue for the city!)

If you live somewhere so dense that there is no off-road parking then why do you have a car in the first place?

It's not density that makes this happen in the U.S., but age. Old streetcar era suburbs didn't have driveways or garages. I've lived in neighborhoods entirely made of single family homes with hardly any off street parking. It was terrible coming home after 6pm. Ironically, if you live in a dense area of the U.S., your building probably has a parking spot for you in the garage as most apartment builds since the 60s included parking.

Because having a car is nice and convenient? Its great and all to be able to take the subway to a bar but the subway doesn’t get me to my golf club, the beach, the mountains etc.

> Because having a car is nice and convenient?

But it's not convenient if you have to park on the street... because there's nowhere to charge. That's the point.

Which is why I have an ICE and will continue to have an ICE... which is exactly the point: EV's are not convenient and they will not work for a large number of us.

Within a few years you will have dedicated parking spots with chargers on every other street corner, so it won’t really be an issue.

In Warsaw city center there is a such a public parking spot every 300-500 meters or so, where you can park for free as well if you have an electric. Those will get even more common as electrics get more popular.

The only issue is if you tend to leave your car unused for extended periods of time.

As demand for gasoline drops, more gas stations (which are already declining) will close. As time goes on, it will be more and more convenient to charge an EV than to drive half way across town to a gas station.

They're doing pilots in my city where there are just chargers next to some of the street parking spaces. They use one of the major EV networks, so you can use the app to get an alert when it's free, and people cycle through.

I used a rented BMW i3 with range of 150km in Warsaw city center for a month or two. Charging was not an issue - there were multiple. harging public spaces within 5 min walking dostance from my apt, and also a communal charging spot in my apartament building. I just left the car there for one in a few nights.

The real issue - and the one that prevented me from buing an electric car so far - was that without my own charging spot I would have an issue leaving the city for a month or two, or just swotching to transit for a while. With ICE I can leave the car for 6 months unused and it’s not a big problem.

Range and recharging speed of electric cars are pretty close to what hydrogen cars offer. But there is a catch: you don't have to go to fuel stations to charge your electric car. Anywhere where there is electricity, e.g. at home or at any business, it is trivially easy to add chargers, starting at a few hundred dollars. Which means, most electric cars will have to go to charging stations only on road trips. With hydrogen, you have to stop at a fuel station for every single refill.

(Not to mention that "green" hydrogen requires at least 3x as much energy as plain electric cars)

It is not trivially easy to add chargers. The energy needs to come from somewhere and be transported to the charger via some infrastructure. Sure, currently when there is an odd charger here and there it is not an issue, but if we want to scale it it will require huge investment into the grid.

Not saying it is impossible, but it is not trivially easy.

> Charging still takes a long time

Barring roadtrips, charging at home costs about 30s. Even factoring the longer time supercharging on roadtrips (relative to gas), I'm confident I spend far less total time charging my EV than filling my gas tank.

30 seconds per day times 30 days is 900 seconds or about 15 minutes per month spent charging. How much time do you spend filling gas per month?

You don't need to charge an EV every day...

On a model 3 range, you maybe change 3x as often as fill up.

Gas is a 10 minute overhead generally. So 90s vs 10 minutes per 400 miles or so.

Not only that but counting fill up time against gas, while not counting all charging time against EV is hardly apples to apples.

If the justification is doing something productive with that time, then washing your windshield or going into the C-store to get a snack and a drink shouldn't count as gas up time.

I get that progress is being made, but the contortions required to prove that the status quo is "good enough" are frustrating, at best.

The best way to get a person to commit to an ice vehicle for life is to mislead them into committing to an EV before it or the infrastructure suits their needs.

When I get home, I plug in my car and then go do something else "productive". When I need my car, I unplug it and go. Both of these operations take about 10s each (because I like coiling the cable nicely).

Contrast that with the experience at a gas station, where I have to stand awkwardly next to my car while I keep my hand on the pump handle (there are no "locks" on the handles anymore), then wait in line inside the store to pay while the old lady in front of me buys a gazillion lottery tickets in pennies (tongue-in-cheek, but hey, it happens).

Not having to do that every week is very nice, IMO.

Then you have the roadtrip experience, where yes, you have to wait a bit while you charge, but it's a lot less of a problem than people think. I did a roadtrip in a Tesla back in 2015 with 3 other guys. We did Montreal - Atlanta for a conference, and we were driving non-stop, changing drivers every time we charged. There were maybe 2 stops total where it was inconvenient because we had to wait in the car, but the dozen others were often longer than the car wanted because we found a nice restaurant / café. Again, this was in 2015. 6 years later, I imagine it's improved a lot.

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