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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

How does one "jump" a tesla - can a Tesla be used to jump-charge another tesla?

One thing that would be kind of cool would be a slide-in Jump battery - a small battery cell that can be physically swapped between two teslas to give them N-miles range - so if your tesla dies, another tesla can swap this battery with you. (the charging priority is to the swappable suitcase battery)

((What if your nav would alert you while driving you EV that another car needs your power and is in vicinity/on-route-you-are-driving... if you jump them you get credits for whatever such credits can be used for - and another EV driver can "venmo" you credits for the jump -- or create an "uber" market for driving around credits - make a mobile charging semi. Like the aircraft refueling fleet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tanker_aircraft ))

These can be carried by AAA tows and swapped to get you going.

It should be the floor of the FRUNK and lif out like a suitcase.

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If you mean the 12V battery, same as any other car.

If you mean using one Tesla to charge another when its main battery is empty, currently only the Cybertruck supports such power output.

https://www.tesla.com/powershare

Some services like AAA do provide roadside charging via generator or battery pack onboard their service vehicles.

Personally I haven't run out of charge in 4.5 years of driving an EV in all sorts of places. I never ran out of gas either.

> Some services like AAA do provide roadside charging via generator or battery pack onboard their service vehicles.

> Personally I haven't run out of charge in 4.5 years of driving an EV in all sorts of places. I never ran out of gas either.

I think that's true of a lot of drivers but I bet if EV makers threw in 5 years of AAA recharging for free it would alleviate a lot of range anxiety for first time EV buyers. It wouldn't even be that expensive for the EV makers since the actual incidences are probably pretty low.

>>>"Personally I haven't run out of charge in 4.5 years of driving an EV in all sorts of places"

Neither have i, but if the cybertruck is any dystopian-minded-MadMax types' "bug out vehicle" -- this is going to suck.

The cybertruck should come with a built in generator that can consume gas to charge your thing?

One can take a cybertruck-type vehicle out into the woods of Alaska, and carry a bunch of extra fuel, but you can't bring an additional 5,000 LBS of batteries...

I' dont have the energy (pun intended) to do it, but it would seem that one could make a simple spreadsheet to compare miles per gallon to miles per battery weight, such that you know that if you get 20 miles per gallon and a gallon weighs 8 pounds, vs you get how much distance out of the EV per weight?

Where will you find refined unexpired gasoline in your MadMax apocalypse?

A pack of solar panels you can set out in your bug-out camping zone seems more feasible to me. No dependency on ongoing supply chains. Just look at how quickly gas shortages start when a hurricane is aimed at Florida.

And Tesla does sell a bolt-in range extending battery pack for their truck for $16,000 https://insideevs.com/news/699262/tesla-cybertruck-range-ext...

> Where will you find refined unexpired gasoline in your MadMax apocalypse?

You get vehicles that can burn expired gasoline (or more likely, diesel and diesel-like derivates in a multi-fuel engine).

For true apocalypse you want to go back to steam engines, those can run on water and wood.

> A pack of solar panels you can set out in your bug-out camping zone seems more feasible to me.

I wonder how big those would have to be to be practical.

Depends on how long you can wait to charge.

10kW seems like a capacity that could be carried in the truck bed and then set up on flat ground while camping out.

A realistic daily average output would be 30-40kWh in a day, or about 1/4 of the truck's battery capacity. Sunny days in summer would do better, cloudy winter days would do worse.

Recharging fully in 5-7 days seems reasonable. Assuming you actually had drained the battery to near empty and were needing to charge it back to full.

By some comparisons that seems slow. But it might be faster than waiting for a gas truck that never comes.

> The cybertruck should come with a built in generator that can consume gas to charge your thing?

This is called a "plug-in hybrid". [Depending; some, like the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, have a dual drive train so the engine is an engine; others, like the Chevy Volt, have an all-electric drive train and the engine is just a generator.]

In you're post-apocalyptic setting, you're looking for a solar panel array you can tow behind your electric vehicle to charge it periodically; you wouldn't be able to haul a large enough array to charge at the rate you deplete your batteries, on the go, and depending on the size of your panels and your battery and the weather it make take several days or a week to reach a full charge, but where are you going in a hurry at the end of the world?

>>>"a solar panel array you can tow behind your electric vehicle to charge it periodically; you wouldn't be able to haul a large enough array to charge at the rate you deplete your batteries"

Power plant idea:

- Dig a giant Pit Mine

- Put a bunch of mechanically driven generators in the bottom.

- Build a F-TON of gearings to accept rotational inputs from Solar Paowered-ly Charged motors into a network of gears to drive the huge alternators... this will require Area-51 sizes of desert - Hey, Africa has a huge free space for this.

F150 Lightning also provides power output from its onboard big battery system

Wow. That's actually a great idea.

Perhaps Tesla maintains ownership of it so that you never have to worry about whether someone you're swapping with is unloading a bad battery on you. At a certain degradation, they just give you a new one.

It's not even dead weight! Just extra battery capacity that's removable.

Standardize the form factor and turn it into a uniform standard that every manufacturer can adopt.

If you extrapolate this to the whole pack you get Nio's swappable battery system.

I don't see this scaling out well especially with trying to get multiple manufacturers onboard with standard packs.

Every EV can accept 120V or 240V power, and that can be obtained in a lot of ways including generators, portable battery packs, or inverters on ICE or EV vehicles.

A 240V output from one vehicle and a standard charging cord seems like a more universal solution to me than moving 100lb battery packs around.

https://ir.lucidmotors.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

Fully swappable batteries seems untenable for a number of reasons.

a) It seems unlikely that you can standardize the battery form factor between different models. You'll still have a handful of different standards between small, full size, and truck/suvs, and semi truck forms. It's been hard enough getting manufacturers to standardize on a single charging port. Battery form standardization would be another order of magnitude hard.

b) Even if you somehow manage to do it, you're forever stuck on that form. Limits the experimentation and flexibility you have to develop for new use cases. Upgrading battery tech, like Tesla's switch to the bigger and more efficient 4680 in the cybertruck, would also get added friction since it wouldn't be compatible with older standards.

c) Tesla at least is starting to turn the battery pack into a structural element to reduce mass. Unlikely you can do this and be swappable at the same time.

You can add that an EV's battery is the most expensive part of the car and that a user can easily damage the battery if they drive/charge in a non optimal way.

I really do not want some other yahoo's battery after I take care of mine meticulously.

If you ever see Jason Statham replacing your battery - RUN.

If you are a diplomat in Iran, dont buy these cars.

>"Perhaps Tesla maintains ownership of it so that you never have to worry about whether someone you're swapping with is unloading a bad battery on you. At a certain degradation, they just give you a new one."

Someone Call Google and give them all the details! (reference required)

>Standardize the form factor and turn it into a uniform standard that every manufacturer can adopt

ANYtHING that requires power from the utility grid should have a standard plug.

Imaging buying a washing machine or refridgerator and having to update the wiring in your home because you want an LG washer and a GE fridge?

Oh wait, thats how cell phones seem to work and basically you cannot be a modern human without this tether.

Cell phones are pretty much all USB-C at this point.

EVs are either SAE J1772 or SAE J3400 which are adapter-compatible.

Yeah, dork... you know how many FN years it took and the impact of the mountains of e-waste before we could beat politicians with a stick from eating that corporate donut?

Agreed, but I don't get the point in complaining about the thing that's mostly fixed now.

JUST HOW LONG IT TOOK TO GET TO AN OBVIOUS result (ignore the caps... I wasnt yelling - just typing with eyes closed.)

ASIDE - WHY IS ther no KEYboard Key THAT sill shift BTWN caps and SMALL CAPS for a highlighted line??

“At this point” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a phone launched barely three months ago.

I've often thought that EVs with "adjustable range" would be nice, you can buy it with the stock battery that gets you X range, and maybe that's all you need, but you can buy add-on packs that give you more range, or rent them.

It's a neat idea but I think you're really underestimating how large the battery would need to be to provide any useful range. I have a Toyota RAV4 hybrid whose battery only provides < 1 mile range and its battery is basically suitcase sized. I'm not having any luck finding dimensions or weight but you can get some sense of the size from the pics in this eBay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266168009857

The Tesla S "small" size battery is 57KwH.

A MX FUEL™ REDLITHIUM™ FORGE™ HD12.0 is a bit below a KwH, and is 10x5x7 and weighs 13 pounds.

With the Cybertruck, you can charge another EV with it it. And plugin some other equipment. Earlier Teslas don't have this. Apparently that's something that they are going to do more of going forward. Also, using your vehicle to power your home is becoming a popular use case. It's a big reason Ford's F-150 is so popular as well. And there are a few other cars that can do this.

Anyway, the only way your battery would run out is if you willfully ignore all the helpful warnings and guidance to the nearest charger. Mostly people are smarter than that. There actually are a lot more cars getting stuck without petrol/diesel than EVs with dead batteries because EVs tend to give you more feedback on energy levels and usage. With a petrol car if you drive uphill or downhill, the indicated fuel levels actually change to be even less accurate than they normally are. When the needle hits zero, you might have 10 miles left or 20. Or just half a mile. Impossible to tell. That's how a lot of drivers get into trouble. The normal way to mitigate with both EVs and ICE cars is to just don't use the full range of the car and top up long before you get close to hitting zero.

But if it does happen, then yes the solution is usually somebody with a portable battery driving up to you and giving you a few kwh; or just towing you to the nearest charger or power outlet. If that happens to you, you should feel a bit stupid and embarrassed for letting that happen. Absolutely no need for mitigating that. It's a problem you shouldn't have and the fix if you do is low cost and easy.

>>Mostly people are smarter than that.

Now you listen hear - I am SO smart that I have designed these devices to do the thinking for me.

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