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Comment by arwhatever | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if electric cars were to approach the maximum range that most people would ever want to drive in a day, about double the stated range of the current longer-ranged cars, if that might trigger a rather profound and sudden tipping point.

Who cares how quickly they charge if you’re stopping to sleep for the night anyway?

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You are looking at it from an American viewpoint.

If you are in US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, you might reasonably need to cover huge distances in a day.

However there are a _lot_ of people in countries across Europe, Indian sub-continent, SE Asia for whom the current EV range is actually enough.

The US’s cars also emit a huge percentage of the world’s greenhouse gases so solving that problem is kinda important.

My point is for a lot of people around the world the technology has reached their non-anxiety range. Which doesn't mean we should stop battery and motor innovation.

US is 14% of global co2 emissions, vehicles are 29% of US emmissions, so US vehicles are 4% of global. I don’t know if I would call 4% a huge percentage but it is certainly significant.

It would be nice if EV batteries were standardised and modularised enough that one could just swap out the battery for a charged one at a gas/charging station in a couple minutes.

I saw that in Taipei for electric mopeds. Spread through the city, there’s racks of batteries ready to go: just grab one, put your empty one in the slot where it’ll charge for the next person and be on your way.

Probably more complex for cars (the weight alone might make usability a challenge), but a cool concept

Tesla explored this and found it to be unpractical. A battery swapping station can cost millions to build, compare that to something on the order of $50K per high power rapid charger.

https://www.powersystemsdesign.com/articles/why-did-tesla-gi...

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