Battery electric vehicles are like Concorde | Hacker News Reader

Battery electric vehicles are like Concorde

telegraph.co.uk

5 pointskpw944 comments

What's with the constant bad mouthing of EVs that I've been seeing on social media for the last 3 months? They have been on the market for the last decade and there are no unknowns about them.

Is the competition with chinese EVs so hard that only way out is to buy out the public opinion?

I've been riding an electric motorbike for a year. I will never go back to ICE based transportation. I get 100km a charge on my motorbike, which can go 100kms/hour - and this is simply enough for me. The user experience is superlative in every other way. I don't mind having batteries to swap out - its perfectly fine. I have a set at work and a set at home, and I never, ever find myself waiting for a charge - I just swap batteries when I need to.

And next year I can look forward to some nice battery upgrades that will push things even further. Thats really, really exciting - new range and power capabilities, just by swapping the battery box.

And as well, there are new hub motors on the horizon which I will probably upgrade.

All of this adds up to a far, far better user experience than my prior ICE motorbike. You can therefore take my electric motorbike into the Concorde grave in the sky when you pry it from my cold dead fingers ..

A electric motorcycle is surely an efficient form-factor, and 100 km/h is fast enough not to be crushed out of hand, but it has all the safety issues of ICE motorcycles and is basically a nonstarter in a lot of places due to weather. Too hot, too cold, too rainy, whatever.

I want an electric microcar that will do 100 km/h. With climate control and enclosure. Or I want a totally walkable city. Since I live in the US outside of a tiny handful of places, public transit isn't going to cut it.

The whole premise of the article is that BEV are dead in the water as they are too expensive, the range is too low, there is not enough electricity to charge them and it would take at least 50 years to solve these problems.

Clearly the author has completely missed the developments in battery technology of the past 10 years and the lowering prices of EVs in that same timeframe. Just an example, a 2012 Nissan Leaf started $36k (MRSP) and could barely get you through 100 miles. The 2024 model starts at $28k and gets you 200 miles. Take inflation into account and you pay 40% less for twice the range. I don’t see any reason why these developments would not continue into the future.

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