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Comment by rospaya | Hacker News Reader

> Toyota is regretting wasting the past 30 years foregoing battery research

That's true.

But EVs have a massive infrastructure problem in developing countries which won't be fixed anytime soon or even ever, and somebody has to make cars for them as well.

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If you saw any of the video's where many of the EV Chargers across the US broke (including a few of the famously reliable Tesla's) due to winter cold I think it is more than just a problem for developing nations.

Charging networks in the US need ALOT of work, and it appears the stations can not even properly report there outages as there are countless stories of charging spots being reported by the apps as operational only for the EV driver to find them unusable on arrival.

BEV's have a long way to go to build trust with cold weather drivers, and for me this winter has removed any desire I had to buy a BEV in the coming year.

> ”EVs have a massive infrastructure problem in developing countries which won't be fixed anytime soon or even ever”

Thailand has just gone from near-zero charging infrastructure to nationwide fast charging networks and being the leading country in South-east Asia for EV sales, in about 2 years.

It doesn’t take long to turn things around once the right policies and incentives are in place.

Still easier to fix using charging stations than hydrogen though :s

When you’re behind, it’s easier to sling mud then catch up, especially when you’re a conservative multinational without recent experience swinging for the fences (to give credit due, Toyota’s hybrid synergy drive was the result of their fear of US emissions standards decades ago).

Tesla spent $1B on their global Supercharger network. Does Toyota not have $1B to invest? Their market cap is $226B, so clearly this isn’t the case. Get building y’all. You just need a charger team to identify locations, coordinate plans and permits with the local AHJ (authority having jurisdiction), and to engage local electrical contractors to receive the equipment and install. Every Toyota dealer is a possible location to operate a charger installer team out of if so desired (for residential and level 2 requirements).

(Tangentially, make sure your fast DC chargers actually work in the cold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq0RAjJ1PKQ ["Kyle finds out that the new Electrify America chargers that they co-developed with BTC don't work in cold temperatures. He also heads to ChargePoint, EVgo, and other EA chargers to see if they have similar issues in this cold snap."])

Norway’s ban on new combustion vehicle sales goes into effect in 2025; registration data shows they’re almost at 100% EV and hybrid sales (with hybrids making up less than 10% of new car sales), and their mobility story hasn’t come to a grinding halt. The evidence is overwhelming that challenges raised (cold weather, charging infra) can be solved for with time and resources.

https://supercharge.info/map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34069028

That would require someone admitting a bad decision from a position where that is not only not going to go well, but from which they may defacto not be able to do so.

Which is the big problem with top down, ‘lifetime job’ type environments - or authoritarian ones. Thought sometimes they can be flexible, ironically, by blaming ‘the other’ or similar tricks.

I've never understood the infrastructure argument for Hydrogen vs Battery. Electricity is ubiquitous in many places in the world and can be made in situ. One can argue that there will need to be a lot of infrastructure upgrades for the power demand, but that is needed for the slightly less efficient hydrogen electrolysis as well. I see developing countries continue to do what they have already been doing; using smaller, more efficient vehicles including bikes (both motorized and non), and shared transport methods.

BEVs have a pretty massive infrastructure problem even in developed countries. Many people live in apartment buildings where you can't just use your own dedicated level-2 charger every night, or in places where the electrical grid just isn't up to providing enough shared ones. I think a (second) paradigm shift is still necessary, but hydrogen is the least likely alternative. Ammonia-based hybrids and especially swappable battery systems both loom larger in my mind, at least.

I live in such an apartment and this is such FUD. Everyone is getting by just fine with level 1 chargers. Almost no one drives so much they actually need level 2, and in a pinch there are public charging stations.

> Everyone ... Almost no one ...

sigh People presenting their personal, and often anomalous, experience as some sort of universal rule is the absolute worst HN habit. You took a statement about two categories of people for whom L1 is not enough, stripped one off, and only addressed the other with an untrue statement (clearly messing up on the difference between L2 and L3 in the process BTW). Are you that sure there isn't one person who's not getting by fine with level 1? That's all it takes for your statement to be false, and in fact statistics show there are many, making your excluded-middle pseudo-argument a bit pathetic.

Let me introduce you to the concept of thresholds. It's not necessary for everyone to need more than L1 regularly for lack of same to be a problem, nor did I claim that. There is simply some percentage of people being "left out in the cold" because of a bad ratio between vehicles and chargers, and we're already hovering right around that level. Availability of charging is already a major limiting factor in adoption, which wouldn't be the case if anything you said were generally true.

The reason I know this is that I own an EV myself. The ad hominems elsewhere in this thread about discouraging EV usage made me laugh. I'm personally doing fine because I own my own home and had my own dedicated 240V circuit put in for charging, but I know many people for whom that's not the case. I'm well aware of things like how cold or speed affects range, or the actual availability of L3 chargers. I want EVs to succeed, and (unlike some here) I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is.

When you see someone claim that working unoccupied public chargers are plentiful, there's always a good chance you're dealing with someone who doesn't even own an EV (the most common case), hardly drives it at all, or works at a FAANG where free charging is a perk. None of those are the real world of most EV drivers.

Hi, seems you miss interpreted "everyone" in my post to mean "everyone in the world" when in my context I used to to mean "everyone with electrics cars in my apartment building". You seem to me engaging in the absolute worst HN habit of not assuming good faith and jumping to conclusions. ;)

So it was meant as anecdata, but that's sufficient to accuse me of FUD for sharing a different (statistically more common) experience? Not buying it. I think there was sufficient reason to interpret your comment the way I did. Why didn't you assume good faith on my part? Don't use that as a shield after you've denied it to others.

That’s literally a last several meters problem. It can trivially be fixed with a tax incentive for landlords to install chargers. Even installing simple wall plugs would be helpful since most EVs come with those chargers or they can be easily purchased. We have an EV that we trickle charge in our garage and that’s usually enough.

For hydrogen you have to do much more significant build out. Apartments already have grid connections.

> That’s literally a last several meters problem. It can trivially be fixed with a tax incentive for landlords to install chargers.

It's not just that. The grid is nowhere up to what is needed to support the majority of vehicles being EVs; take a look at this study[0] done by National Grid in New England, which shows the problem clearly. "Already have grid connections" is not enough for electrified long-distance travel or cargo-hauling, simply due to the amount of power required that far exceeds current capabilities.

[0]: https://www.nationalgrid.com/us/EVhighway

That’s still an easier problem than gigantic amounts of heavy piping or compressed gas transport everywhere.

Wires are just cheaper and lower maintenance. They are also more general purpose. Improving the grid will improve its robustness generally.

> gigantic amounts of heavy piping

You are aware that liquids can be transported over land, not just in pipes, right? Like we already do for gasoline, in case you need a very concrete and relevant example. At least GP provided data, which is too rare around here.

Transporting hydrogen by truck is going to be very energy intensive especially given the heavy refrigeration required to liquify hydrogen, meaning you're going to lose a lot more in the transfer than you do with the power grid. That's gonna really wreck the economics.

You lose a lot in oil and gas trucking too, which is part of how you end up with stuff like "driving an EV powered 100% by coal emits less carbon per mile than an average gasoline car." It's not just the vehicle efficiency but the whole end-to-end system efficiency. Trucking fuel around is very expensive.

> Transporting hydrogen by truck

If you look back a bit, you might see that this whole thread started with me saying that I wasn't that keen on hydrogen. This is one of the reasons that I was suggesting ammonia or swappable batteries instead.

> Trucking fuel around is very expensive.

So is transmission over power lines. Transformers and wires are not free, nor are the rights of way they sit on, nor maintenance of same in remote locations. 5-7% is lost in transmission. Sometimes there are fires. Let's not be too selective about which advantages and disadvantages we focus on for which alternative. That's called cherry picking.

I do think we need to get away from fossil fuels, and that transmission over copper lines should be our first choice in most cases, but I don't make up reasons why "just build out the grid" should be the only option we consider.

What is so complicated about installing plugs in parking garages? It doesn’t need to be level 2, even 110v would probably be fine for a lot of people. And since we’re probably talking about cities, power draw probably isn’t a concern. My apartment in Brooklyn had plugs 3 years ago

> What is so complicated about installing plugs in parking garages?

Nothing is technically complicated about it, but a great many landlords are unwilling to incur even the tiniest expense. Have you never seen an apartment with inadequate insulation? With leaky plumbing? I've seen plenty, even when it was the landlords themselves who ended up bearing a cost greater than simple improvement would have incurred. Sometimes it's a liquidity issue, sometimes it's "boiling frog" syndrome or pure laziness, but no matter the reasons it's reality.

> My apartment in Brooklyn had plugs 3 years ago

How nice for you. Are all of your experiences universal?

Mmmm.

Think for a sec. Large concrete structure right?

So you can't lay your wire in the concrete parts, which means you're putting it in conduits...that are exposed, and open to be harvested by people looking to repurpose the copper wiring for other things.

Or you're doing inductive charging via copper loops in parking spaces, but then maintenance is potentially impacted.

Point being "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Level 1 chargers do not work well in the winter, in cold climates

As someone with an EV that is charged primarily with a level 1 charger and is currently experiencing temps below -20C, that is simply not true.

Please don't parrot lies pushed by the fossil fuel industry. I've seen far too many people on this site that have clearly never been within 100 feet of an EV repeating obviously wrong "information".

Let me guess, garage kept?

There are plenty of first person accounts on YT, Twitter, and other social media where people report being unable to charge their EV because the energy needed to keep the battery warmed exceeds the available power for charging

Please stop blaming everything on some kind of conspiracy by the evil oil industry, you sound like qAnon when you do that.

No, it's an outside regular 110V outlet.

This bad behavior is well-documented. Start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...

Please stop trying to dispute facts. If you're going to argue, you should at least attempt to not be ignorant of the basic relevant facts.

You’re getting like 1.3-1.5 kWh with that charger. Assuming an 90% efficiency on charging (~1.2kwh). You wouldn’t be able to really do half of the average American daily commute (20 miles) and use your heating system to bring the car up from -5 C to 20 C.

Your car is likely going to be using 400-450 wh per mile until it’s warmed up and maybe down to 320 wh per mile for the rest of the trip. That’s ~10 kWh for your one day commute.

Now this is assuming basically a lot of perfect conditions for winter time driving. Also it’s assuming no traffic, because once you add waiting in traffic while heating up the interior of the car the power use skyrockets.

Also this is assuming you’re even able to hit 90% charging efficiency on 110V which honestly I’ve never seen personally.

I'm not really sure what to tell you. Empirically, I plug the car in when I get home, and that charges it well enough that I never worry about range except long distance trips. The car says I averaged around 30 kWh/100km on the trip that I took today on the highway, though it's also warmed up today all the way to -11C. Units are metric even though I'm in the U.S. because imperial units are silly.

It helps that I've got a 62 kWh Leaf, so I've got lots of range to start with.

How long is your commute though and are these low temps normal? I get about 3-4 “miles” of charge per hour with 110v and honestly that’s barely enough.

I WFH, so no commute. These temps are pretty normal for winter where I am.

I don't know what your situation is, but you'll honestly probably have good luck with just finding a regular outlet somewhere at work and trickle charging. I've done several vacations where I just asked where an outlet was, and left the car to charge up to 100% for the return trip. It's a lovely trick that gas cars can't duplicate.

I’m fortunately WFH as well but installing a 240V outlet wasn’t too bad.

This is one of the things non North Americans don’t have to worry about.

That only happens around -20C, which is when most IC cars start to struggle too. It’s like every EV caveat is some gotcha that means we shouldn’t adopt, when IC cars have many of the same issues that we accept without really thinking about it.

Faster charging times (fast enough that your vehicle is charged in the time it takes to enjoy a coffee and a bagel at the coffee shop adjacent to the charging point) would also be an acceptable solution in many cases.

You still need the same amount of energy, but now in a shorter timeframe, so that probably won't help.

Historically (before China's manufacturing boom) it was used cars that made their way to developing countries, and the infrastructure was built for those cars.

Which is to say, nobody made cars for them, but cars made their way there, and they still developed the infrastructure to support them. A solution to the problem will likely be found once there is a problem to be solved.

Still true for much of the developing world: large quantities of vehicles from the UK and Europe end up being exported to African countries, for example.

Once there are sufficient volumes of cheap used EVs being exported to Africa, the infrastructure will naturally emerge to support them.

Hydrogen has an even larger infrastructure problem and grid wiring is easier to deploy than pipelines or compressed gas supply chains.

I only see a big future for hydrogen in grid scale energy storage if it can be made competitive with batteries. It has the advantage of requiring less manufactured mass and costly materials to store more energy and perhaps would be better able to warehouse energy long term. You could reuse at least some of the natural gas storage and power generation infrastructure, probably with some upgrades to deal with hydrogen or a hydrogen / methane mix.

Green hydrogen is very important if we want to decarbonise many industrial processes that currently depend heavily on fossil fuels, like steel making.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense as a general-purpose transport fuel, however, in a world where cheaper and more efficient battery EVs already exist.

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