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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

Most of the places they drive their car to, will have chargers. Supermarkets, workplaces, parks, etc.

You don't need to charge at home. It's just the most convenient.

Many of those parking spaces in major cities cannot handle even a slight increase in congestion due to charging, and the time to plug-in and un plug is too much for them. Think about your local downtown Whole Foods parking lot.

My local Whole Foods parking lot has had EV charging spaces for 8 years. I used to charge my Nissan LEAF there while grocery shopping back in the day.

And how many others can charge when you charge? 5? Or fewer?

4, and I never saw all 4 in use at once. You don't need infrastructure for 200 million EVs today if there's only 2 million on the road. They'll grow together.

Is that a bad thing if it’s still early days for EVs? Do you not think that more stations can and will be installed?

Why are you driving downtown to supermarket? Perhaps your city needs to be planned in a more efficient and livable manner.

You stay at the supermarket the whole day ?

No, but it’s usually 30 minutes. Enough to take a normal EV from 20-80 percent.

No it's not, not unless you have Tesla style massive DC chargers. And they are not putting those in every supermarket. Regular chargers will barely give you enough charge to get home in that 30 minutes.

> No it's not, not unless you have Tesla style massive DC chargers. And they are not putting those in every supermarket. Regular chargers will barely give you enough charge to get home in that 30 minutes.

Not it's not, not unless you have IBM style massive cabinet hard drives. And they are not putting those in every home computer. Regular hard drives will barely give you enough disk space to store plaintext documents.

Sorry, you just sound like people that used to say things like "you'll never need more than 1 GiB of hard drive space." Things will evolve. It'll happen faster than you anticipate.

Wake up, we don't talk about computers. We talk about cars. Big heavy maschines that can't be shrinked and where the technic is not evolving as fast as the first years in computers. You will need the same amount of energy to bring a car today or in 20 years from a to b. And this amount of energy needs to be transfered to the place where you want to charge your battery. And there is the problem that will not change in 20 years. You can supercharge 5 cars an a parking lot now, but for 50 cars you need a complete other infrastructur thats bind on the same physics that cars have today.

And no, you never ned 1GB of hard drive for anything that was done with computers at this time. Now we use computers for completly other things. I suppose on cars the usage will not change as far as with computers.

> We talk about cars.

No, we're talking about batteries and charging. If you think battery tech is done evolving, wont shrink, and that "energy" and "power" are interchangeable concepts, then I don't think we can have a fruitful discussion.

> And no, you never ned 1GB of hard drive for anything that was done with computers at this time.

That was my point. Saying something wont happen based on what's happened so far is foolish.

I think the point is that if battery technology is good enough, it's not the limiting factor. Being able to deliver that much power becomes a bottleneck. At some point the owner of the parking lot will have to upgrade their electrical service, which could be expensive.

I'm not sure how much of an issue that really is, though. Even if all cars are EVs, it's not like every single grocery store customer is going to fully charge their car every time they buy groceries.

You find DC fast chargers in many supermarkets in Norway. Not every but it’s really not a problem to find one with chargers.

The supermarket is 5 miles away. You can charge that in a few minutes even on a 7kw charger.

> Supermarkets, workplaces

Problem there is that the trend is towards home delivery and working from home.

They're not using the car, so the battery isn't depleting.

Tell that to all the Tesla owners that leave their cars at the airport and return to a dead battery.

That's a (mostly early model year) Tesla problem, not an electric car problem. My Nissan LEAF sat unused in my driveway for several months in 2020 and its charge level didn't drop at all.

I would think the ambient outdoor temperature would have a rather large impact here. If it's cold outside the car has to use battery power to keep the batteries themselves within operating range.

The Nissan LEAF's battery warmer only activates at -17C and turns off at -10C.

It does not reach -17C any day of the year in much of the world.

First I'd have to find them, but I've never heard of that happening. On the other hand, I've had plenty of battery problems in ICE cars.

I bought a bunch of LFP cells a couple years ago to do an EV conversion of a Mazda RX-8. After a couple years of literally just sitting there, they went from about 3.2 volts to about 3.1 volts.

Tesla cell chemistry is different (unless you get one of the new ones that use LFPs from CATL), but it's not an inherent problem with electric cars generally.

Late to reading this comment. That's a beautiful option for an EV conversion, how's it going / how'd it turn out? Is there a progressive diary blog or somesuch?

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