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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

> but keep in mind that if you can pump ten gallons of gas in a minute you're effectively drawing the equivalent of something like 20MW, so in the context of vehicle refueling it's not so crazy

If 15 Teslas pass through a stretch of road per minute with full 100kWh battery packs, you could also describe that as 90MW of current, but it's also not really.

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I always forget just how energy dense petroleum and its derivatives are..

When charging, the Tesla shows you a little miles per hour figure (how many miles of range you gain per hour of charging) and it can often reach 1000 or so on the super chargers I use frequently. It’s fun to calculate the miles per hour of gas (around 12,000).

This is true. Though the electric batteries do have the advantage of having already paid the "thermodynamics tax". Some of the energy in gas will go towards heat losses; energy that cannot be converted to movement.

And they are very efficient over a much larger rpm band. But the real win is the energy recovery from regenerative breaking.

But that thermodynamic tax is a negative in very cold climates where the electric vehicle will see a major change in total travel distance compared to ICE.

Heat pumps make it more efficient to convert the fuel to electricity at a big, efficient power plant, and then to heat, than to burn the fuel itself for heat in an internal combustion engine (or at home for that matter)

It’s overall a net positive.

Yes, but note that this type of 'overall thinking' sometimes has interesting consequences. Eg overall globalization raises wages, but it decimated rural economies in the west and caused a lot of social harm leading to the rise of populism.

The odometer shock that will start hitting low wage earners forced to migrate to EV may have less important but similarly surprising unintended consequences.

Yes. One of the usual YT channels had this interesting picture. Gas mileage is miles per gallon. Or in this case, do it the European way: l/100km. The unit of that is an area. Typically a rather small one, ca 0.1mm^2.

That's the area of a trench you have to dig along your path if you want to supply your car from the trench instead of your gas tank.

That doesn’t make any sense to me. The amount of fuel a trench can hold is its volume, not its area.

Probably means cross-sectional area.

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