Hacker News Reader

Comment by idontwantthis | Hacker News Reader

Never, but I’m trying to understand what the experience would be like. If you charge at home then you are looking at like 2 days to fully charge at 240v. What I’m wondering is if these ranges are necessary or realistic for electric cars even if the storage tech is there. Maybe 4-500 miles is the max anyone would want regardless of how long charging could theoretically take if you were connected directly to a nuclear generator or something.

View on HN

Only couple of times per year I drive those kind of distances myself, but I’d say the main benefit comes for “derating”. In other words, you can buy a 900 mile range car, and can travel 400 miles in Lapland winter (batteries don’t like cold, and self heating uses battery capacity). So you can drive to a place ~150miles away and back without thinking about destination charging, plus some reserve. This system would also last longer since you’re not forced a full charge cycle every day -> less aging.

Surely not an issue if you can have multiple cars. One can just have a diesel car for longer trips and have a small electric city car for everyday trips.

But why would you need to fully charge? What matters is charging enough in a day to cover your daily needs.

OK but then why have the battery capacity? It isn’t free in dollars or grams. Probably more likely we get smaller and smaller batteries and the range stays roughly constant.

Will be amazing for trucks and aircraft though. Truck stations on highways could potentially each have massive hookups or even their own solar and battery plants.

Because it covers trips long enough to reasonably do in a day. And if on average you are charging more than using, the battery will be at near full capacity most of the time. It eliminates range anxiety.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com