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Comment by thebruce87m | Hacker News Reader

> in my European country electric infrastructure is not ready for electric cars and with current energy prices this makes no financial sense.

I’m always amazed by statements like this. People who have lived through the rollout of the internet to the masses can’t see how we’d modify existing structure to accommodate needs. We had phone lines initially, 20 years later now we have 5G, fibre, satellites.

They just dug up every street in my European town to put fibre internet in. We already had broadband in the town. They dug up every street to give us fibre that most people won’t even need over their existing connection. People look at this and say “how will we charge electric cars” when we are already surrounded by electricity.

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Not even that: We have managed to extract some dense and flammable black oil hundreds of meters deep under the ocean soil, transport it thousands of km again to remote countries where it is processed and again transported and distributed daily to many storage locations where any layman can again transfer it to their own vehicles. That is a feat.

Electricity infrastructure already exists everywhere where we have civilization. And production is usually just hundreds or less km away. For lots of people it even happens at their own home.

The average amount of km every European drives is around 40km. For a standard EV that is around 7,2 kWh of energy per day, which can be charged in 2-3 hours from a normal 240V Schuko plug at home.

If there’s no option to charge at home, a weekly load on newer EVs with around 500km range would be more than enough, taking around 3-4 hours on standard 22kW chargers or less than 2 hours in a DC 50kW chargers.

EVs are a real option for lots of people. Main blocker for most of people according to most statistics is lack of knowledge on how to operate, and as a consequence fear of the unknown.

500km range cars are still stupidly expensive right now, and the fact that paid chargers are quite expensive compared to home charging remains. This may change in the future, but we live in the present.

People aren't that stupid as you think, you are just ignorant. EV preachers take the easy route and ignore issues which are inconvenient to them, or focus only on home charging.

The average price of a new car sold in Germany for private individuals is 42.000€. Around $47,000 in USA. Prices are even higher if you include company or fleet purchases.

A RWD Model 3 and Model Y with around 500km range is even less than that right now in their available stock.

How can that be stupidly expensive if it’s even below average price?

Street chargers are more expensive than home charging, that is right. However it is still cheaper than gas and diesel by 50-70% by average in mainland Europe.

You can look up facts instead of calling me ignorant.

That would be fine for second car. I need form time to time visit family that is about 270km one way mosty on a highway

The 500km mark is calculated in ideal conditions, flat street at 60km/h or something like that in more realistic highway conditions it's about 300km

That's why plugins have so much sense even when they cost about the same that EV would. I can drive fully electric on everyday short distances (my car is rated for 33km of electric range, but I'm able to squeeze about 40 by careful eco driving) That usually covers my city driving and at the same time I have 700-1000km backup of ICE/hybrid range

In my observation hybrid approach have about 30% better fuel efficiency than pure petrol.

I agree that having 22kW charger nearby that is affordable could solve all of that. But for many people that is not the case and if so they are so expensive.

In my case petrol costs me about $0.12/km and electric from supercharger would be $0.14/km (assuming 19kW/100km). Why would I want to switch to more expensive car to pay more per driven distance?

Of course everything changes when you have solar installation and you have basically free electricity (of course I omit here installation cost that would make if free after about 10years or so) then driving basically everyday for free and paying for fast charging few times a year when doing very long distance trip makes is fine.

But again, not everyone can have solar installation.

I have high hopes for new sodium batteries, give them 2 more generations and we could afford ev cars with 1000km of range in cars less expensive than ice and that would be very compelling.

We have two massive parallel energy transfer systems in the world. And they are massive. Consider the electrical grid for all it's behemoth costs and regulations, at least it exists and is a known monster. Doubling it is a technical challenge but not an unknown. Akin to laying fiber. On one side of the grid you could even just change how the energy is produced at a few thousand plants and have zero change on consumer side if you wanted (for a given territory the size of a USA avg state)

Now imagine we came along and said we were going to add to the electrical grid a parallel system of transporting explosive liquid to billions of distributed combustion engines. Not only that, the explosive liquid is only available in a few politically charged areas in the world. Add all the tankers refineries pipes truck lines holding tanks pumps etc so that most people live at most a few miles from a holding tank that will distribute hundreds of gallons to them for their own micro power plant that only exists for their commute.

It seems crazy. We built both systems incrementally over time so we're in a massive sunk cost analysis whenever we think about replacing gas cars.

In addition to electricity and gasoline, there's also natural gas, which is shipped around in giant tankers and via pipelines, and then piped into homes to be used for heating and cooling in many places. Also for systems we transfer energy around on Earth, consider the infrastructure used to ship coal all around the world, on trains and ships.

Naturally, the infrastructure arises when the demand is there. But nobody was ever hesitant to buy a 4G-only phone for fear of insufficient 4G service because every 4G phone also worked on 3G.

The same is not true of electric cars. People have real mileage anxiety because they can’t use petrol when a charger isn’t available

The big question is not whether the infrastructure will be built, but whether it will owned by rent-seekers who charge everyone without their own driveway a massive premium to charge their vehicles.

You need to acknowledge that in Europe, the high price of electricity mean consumers aren't getting any discounts in money/distance ($/mile being inappropriate in the EU), if not being charged more to charge an electric vehicle over an ICE vehicle.

Saving the environment is nobel, but affording it is another thing.

If price hikes in the US continue, there are places in the US where that may soon be the case, too. Then we're screwed. Thankfully hybrids aren't going anywhere. They may be more complicated, but they have the most critical feature, regenerative braking. instead of shedding the energy spent slowing down as pollution and heat, it gets saved and is used to move the vehicle later.

I can’t acknowledge anything without numbers to compare. In the UK some suppliers give cheaper rates at night (1/4 the rate). Is that not the case elsewhere? What is the cost per mile in Europe vs ICE?

Transferring so much electricity to everywhere in an efficient way is more expensive and harder though, not counting electricity generation, only partially clean, noy enough, very expensive.

Yes we already have power cables but they do not generate power. The issue is clean power generation capacity.

There is a reason that I pay 7p/kWh (3p/mile) to charge at night compared to 30p/kWh during the day. There is already spare capacity at night. In my country it’s mostly wind.

Is your country 100% EV now?

No, but even if it was demand would still be lower than 2002:

> The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.

> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...

That’s better than I thought. But you still need to ensure that power source is clean, otherwise it defeats the purpose.

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