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Comment by Mashimo | Hacker News Reader

1 MW charging. Impressive if the battery can handle that on the long run. Though I guess for a lot of users it will not be used often, only on long vacation trips or similar.

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In SI unit m means mili and M means mega.

I thought maybe “m” means “metric mega” as usual in US, so.

This is the first time I hear about "metric mega", and I hang out a lot here, where Americans use their units without explanation.

Thanks, fixed it.

Not to mention KB means kelvinbytes.

KB is a JEDEC thing where they invented a new shorthand prefix but re-used the Si prefix names of (kilo, mega, giga) while changing their meanings. They used capital K for kilo meaning 1024.

It's certainly one of the dumbest standards in existence and the fact Microsoft went with it and extended it is frustrating too.

In SI prefixes M=mega/m=milli, sure. In SI units m|M=metre.

I wonder myself, if countries are already having infrastructure problems, especially in summer, where also Air conditioning systems are active at full blast (I speak now from an EU perspective), how can these MW Chargers be able to handle the load?

During winter, without using carbon fossil generated energy, it's pretty unrealistic, isn't?

Does not really matter, if you charge 10 cars at 100kw or 1 car at 1MW. The amount of miles you add to your transportation system is the same.

I don't believe it's the same. What about charging multiple cars at 1MW though?

Under the assumption that electric cars will drive the same amount and the efficiency is the same and any car charges at a random time and there is a big enough numbers of car, then charging faster will not increase the load on the net. In reality this will drastically decrease the number of charging station needed, as they will be freed faster.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted - this is actually a valid point. If your average charging station handles 24 cars an hour, it does not matter from a power consumption perspective if it does so by having 12 chargers and everyone waiting half an hour or 2 charges with everyone waiting 5 minutes (but the UX will be drastically improved).

The only effect will probably be increased EV adoption, but that's something we generally want and need to prepare for anyway.

If you think from the angle that BYD’s first target customers are Chinese people, and how China has been adding an incredibly amount of infrastructure YoY, it makes a bit more sense. Completely different playing field.

Summer is more or less a solved problem - we cover southern Europe with solar panels, then add transmission lines to shunt the excess north.

Every car park, every commercial building... they've even started installing them to shade the highway medians. Plenty of barren desert to build out solar too. And if that's not enough, we can juice North African economies by building connectors down to the Sahara

I believe in China EV batteries are commonly on some kind of subscription system, replaced at service intervals or when their total capacity runs low, so from a consumer point of view it doesn't matter so much if it shortens the battery life. If you’re buying the pack outright it matters more.

China does have some car brands that support battery swapping, with NIO being a notable example that markets this feature. However, their market share isn’t particularly high. It can be said that battery swapping is a common practice in China, but it isn’t the primary method for electric vehicle energy replenishment. Incidentally, NIO vehicles don’t support particularly high charging speeds. High-speed charging can impact battery lifespan, so manufacturers like NIO also prefer to avoid promoting fast charging from their perspective.

I wasn't referring to battery swapping, but I can see how my post could be interpreted that way so I've edited it.

Yeah, I think the goal of these systems is not that everyone has a MW charger in their home. You still (relatively) slow-charge the car at night, and only use the MW chargers for infrequent highway top-ups

Most likely gas stations will have to buy these systems to keep their business running.

It's mandatory for gas stations to install at least one EV charger in a lot of EU countries. Spain recently started requiring one EV charger per 20 spaces in every parking structure. The electric transition may not be fast, but it's happening.

I wonder is switching to cell in parallel/series would speed up charging

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