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Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it again.

By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US. I am increasingly finding that I don't even bother to plan the drives anymore or micromanage the charging-- this is a significant difference from when I first started doing >1k mile trips in the car 4 years ago.

I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.

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> while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car

Is that you, Robert Dunn of Aging Wheels? (I don't think he owns either a Tesla or a Bolt, but he owns a lot of weird cars so I wouldn't be surprised, and you're aping his speaking style almost perfectly.)

Haha no idea who that is. I will look him up!

> By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US.

You gotta get off the interstate and away from major cities more! Plenty of places worth visiting that are far away from a supercharger.

The public charging tech is improving steadily. You might want to give the Bolt another try at fast-charging. Look for a high-power charger, like 200kW or higher.

The issue is that Bolts are limited to 50kw of charging, even if the charger can offer more power.

> I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.

If it doesn't plug into a supercharger it's pretty much defective on arrival.

https://youtu.be/hA_B7qPyUDA?t=1136

> If it doesn't plug into a supercharger it's pretty much defective on arrival.

Is it? Then why is it that these cars charge faster than a Tesla Model 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU

And why is it that Teslas charge faster on CCS chargers than on Tesla chargers:

https://insideevs.com/news/507489/tesla-model3-charging-fast...

And why is it that the fastest EV cannonball run was done with a CCS car:

https://insideevs.com/news/464763/porsche-taycan-beats-elect...

What would be best is if Tesla just went ahead and put a CCS inlet on their North American cars, like Tesla already does in Europe. The European Teslas are better cars purely because they support the open charging standard and can plug into more chargers with no need for an adapter.

Tesla's proprietary plug is a dead end. CCS Teslas in North America would gain access to an additional 4,566 charging locations with no need for an adapter:

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html

Is anyone working on an active adapter to make a Supercharger think the device on the other end is a Tesla vehicle, so it'll put out a charge?

I have no idea how Superchargers work, but I assume there's some sort of active electronic handshake going on over some control pins to authorize power delivery — perhaps even something cryptographic, e.g. the "pump" and the car both having Tesla-signed TLS certificates and peer-verifying one-another.

If so, spoofing a Tesla might involve cloning a cert from a real Tesla vehicles, possibly from the car's TPM. Full-on DRM-breaking stuff. Stuff I would expect from the kind of teams that present at DEF CON.

Tesla are supposedly opening up their network soon, but that's not really the issue. Cars have a limit on how fast they can charge, and for a lot of more economic cars that's often quite slow.

The 2022 Nissan LEAF 40kW (149 mile) model can only charge at 50kW, the 60kW (226 mile) model pushes that to 100kW. The marketing says that's 45 minutes to 80% capacity. The 2022 Chevy Bolt is similar. If you are just commuting to and from work, then these cars are fine, but for a long trip you definately want an EV that can charge faster.

Sure, but a car isn’t the only thing you could potentially plug into a Supercharger. (That’s why I said “the device on the other end” rather than “the vehicle on the other end.”)

Maybe you just want to charge the gigantic custom-built battery bank you use for accessories power in your RV! Or maybe one that’s just a hacked Tesla Powerwall or five. (That’d be the “white-hat” use-case.)

Or perhaps a portable (towable) hydrogen generator, to fill bottles for hydrogen-powered cars. Still an “adapter”, technically, though doing it at the substation-level rather than the near-power-generation HVDC level is probably horribly inefficient and wasteful.

Or perhaps a mobile Bitcoin mining rig consisting of server racks installed in a air-conditioned shipping container on the back of a semi-truck…

Or the lighting and sound for a pop-up roadside rave event!

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