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Comment by bilsbie | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why no one just has a pickup with a generator in the back and drives around to help EV’s that ran out of batteries.

Actually you could hang around overcrowded charging stations and make some good money. People in a hurry would pay a premium.

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That's what breakdown companies (like the AA and RAC in the UK) do. It's slow enough that you'd only want to use it to get just enough juice to get to a proper charger, though - they use 3.5kW or 5kW chargers: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/rac-news/rac-begins-rolling....

I'd imagine it's way less efficient and way more polluting than using the national grid, too.

I remember I saw something similar in Ukraine when the war stared, a Tesla drivers was photographed fleeing the country towing a generator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/zxk623/in_kyiv_the...

I doesn’t happen nearly enough to be worth the effort. Electricity is cheap, and these mobile services are only worth it if they can charge a premium. And they can only charge a premium when a car is literally stranded. And that happens infrequently enough that you may as well just use a tow, which is readily available.

That's the general idea behind series plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).

..Gasoline engine acts solely as a generator to recharge the battery, but can't mechanically power the wheels (known as "series hybrids"). Example: BMW i3..

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a45483659/plug-in-hybr...

The fossil i3 is notoriously much worse than the electric one. Heavier, less reliable, more expensive to run. It only makes sense if you don’t have a dense fast charger network where you live and you somehow decide to use this car to drive long distances.

You would need a pretty big generator though. But an interesting idea.

Well a generator would just make the power needlessly expensive. Presumably the whole point of such an operation would be to use cheap power and sell it at a premium.

I might use this in an emergency but otherwise this seems spectacularly inefficient and unappealing.

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