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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

You cannot charge fast past a high state of charge, mostly because you don’t want to overload the battery cells by having a too high voltage.

Cars that charge that fast to 100% either do not care about not destroying the battery, which makes sense in a racing context without sustainability concerns, or the 100% reported by the battery management system is a lot lower than the maximum state of charge possible.

That’s why you cannot find common electric cars that charge to 100% in 15 minutes. But you will find some that can charge fast for 15 minutes and that’s what matters.

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This and the sibling comments seem to prove the (grand)parent's point though; you can "charge fast" (apparently to 60-80%) in 15-30 min, which leaves you with a less-than-full-distance capacity in a longer time compared with an ICE which is "5 min and full capacity." That doesn't mean that electric cars aren't good, but it means they are slower (less distance, more down time) - this is good enough for most local traffic situations, though.

With "local traffic distances", my ICE has been slower overall. I spent ~3 hours on "charging" time driving around town last year, while I've waited 0 minutes waiting on my EV.

That's 3 hours of downtime with my ICE, 0 minutes of downtime with my EV. Which one resulted in more downtime again?

You have commented this on a handful of subthreads, but I feel like you're missing the goal of the argument. If you want "instant recharge," gas wins. I understand that charging overnight will work in most cases, I understand you have a window of perhaps as much as two weeks to find a single night to do it, etc. Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.

In most cases having a battery will get you from A to B without issue - same on a tank of gas. When it won't, you will spend more time waiting on the battery to charge, which is a tradeoff that is probably still worthwhile for the vast majority of people.

I was specifically talking to their statement of "local traffic distances". Is >200mi "local traffic distances" to you? That's a long drive to me. "Local traffic distances" to me means maybe 60 miles round-trip, max. Most EV's can handle "local traffic distances" without having to stop and recharge.

> Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.

You literally couldn't unless you were massively wealthy or lived on a farm or something along those lines. You probably wouldn't be able to secure the permitting to have that much gas on site at small residential lot. It would also be a pretty big headache managing the gas delivery contracts for such a small amount. It would be a huge hassle getting it delivered to your home. Realistically, you couldn't get as much convenience at your home assuming you lived in a statistically average suburban/urban single family home.

Meanwhile all it took for my EV was to install an outlet, <$200. No crazy permitting, no massive storage tanks storing hazardous liquids, no managing additional delivery contracts needing to get big fuel trucks to pull up near the house to deliver gas, no EPA inspections for that storage tank, etc.

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