Hacker News Reader

Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

Even if EVs are a smaller proportion of the vehciles on CA roads, this makes sense to me. A gas nozzle is used for a minute or two before a vehicle is refuled, while a charging station is likely at least 10 times longer per vehicle. If cars are spending longer to top up their batteries, you’ll need far more stations than gas pumps.

View on HN

The equivalent wattage of a gas pump is something like 1-2 megawatts, based on energy transfer per time. (Internalizing this fact is important for understanding why gasoline is hard to displace!)

It’s wild that Chinese automakers are getting to equivalent charging rates.

By this do you mean that Chinese automakers are getting close to a charging rate that would be equivalent to the time it takes to pump gasoline for the equivalent energy? If so, do you have any sources on that?

https://insideevs.com/news/755163/chinese-evs-1-megawatt-cha...

I just don’t buy this argument as a reason people don’t want EVs. The primary benefit of an EV is that you ~never need to stop and “refuel” it unless you’re making a long road trip. You can install a charger at home, even a very slow one that doesn’t need a special circuit, and always have a full battery in the morning. When you do need to stop on a road trip, you can use fast charging, which is ~250 kW, so somewhere around a quarter of the gas pump’s “wattage.” You’ll probably want to use the bathroom/buy a drink anyway, so charging taking four-ish times as long as pumping isn’t really a big deal.

> You can install a charger at home, even a very slow one that doesn’t need a special circuit

Lots of people rent, and might not have a parking space with charging available.

That said, battery and charging technology is evolving, so it might be a solved problem 10 years from now - especially as Toyota and Idemetsu Kosan are on track for mass producing Solid State EV batteries by 2028 [0]

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japans-idemitsu-buil...

Yeah, of course. I’m a renter, I understand. Some states [1] have laws allowing tenants to install chargers, although obviously not all renters have designated parking spaces. Where I live (NYC), most people rent and the idea of a “tenant parking space” is fairly foreign, but there are a decent number of EV chargers on the street in my neighborhood, so people make it work.

[1]: https://americanlandlord.com/california-landlord-tenant-laws...

> unless you’re making a long road trip

Yes, but that’s enough to really make road tripping on an EV a chore.

I don’t want an EV because it’s too freaking expensive. That’s basically the only reason at this point.

In the US if you buy before the tax credits go away you can get a Chevy Equinox EV for around $27500.

I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf for $15K. It had 18K miles on it, 150 miles of range on a full charge, and still 5 years on the battery warranty, and 2 years on the bumper to bumper warranty. I did admittedly find a good deal, but this is not unobtainium

A friend wanted one of those licensed electric golf carts to drive around town, it cost more than my car.

With off-peak charging, (and the cost of gasoline in San Diego) I expect the car to pay for itself in fuel savings in ~5 years.

How many years will it take an inexpensive gasoline car to pay for itself?

lol at that level of “good deal” one could find a recent low-mileage gas car for half what you paid. $7500k will pay for a lot of gas.

Yes, about 2 years worth at my 300 mile/week usage and San Diego $5/gal gas price.

After which, the gas car continues to use gas, and I continue to save $3000/year by not buying gas...

But your comparison is valid. You could also compare the saving of the small, gas efficient, car to the choice of buying giant, low milage truck or SUV.

BTW, this good deal was not a once in a lifetime thing. I see EVs in this price range on craigslist routinely...

> You’ll probably want to use the bathroom/buy a drink anyway, so charging taking four-ish times as long as pumping isn’t really a big deal.

That doesn't take nearly as long as charging, nor do I need to do it as frequently as I would need to charge. And even if it did, the places where you can do that, and the places with chargers, aren't the same.

Maybe the US will get there in a decade (or two at current rates), but for now a PHEV seems like the best of both worlds.

For the routes I take on road trips, this is already the way. Lots of nice rest stops with lots of EV charging. Some restaurants, clean bathrooms, convenience stores to buy whatever snacks, etc.

I stop, go to the bathroom, grab a beverage, and by the time I'm back to the car I've got more than enough charge to hit the next stop. Coupled with Blue Cruise and road trips have never been so smooth and easy.

And I'm in Texas, a place you wouldn't expect to be some EV mecca.

> The primary benefit of an EV is that you ~never need to stop and “refuel” it unless you’re making a long road trip.

Maybe for some people. I bought an electric car in 2018 because I think over the long haul that, first, they'll be better for the environment and second, disentangle my country from foreign energy producers. Note: I'm not saying EVs or current battery tech are perfect in these ways now, just that I think they have better long-term potential, which will only be realized if people buy imperfect EVs today to justify investment in making them better tomorrow.

All that said, while my family has never had a problem with charging on long-ish road trips (we like to take a break and get out and walk around,) I don't expect everyone to have the same attitude. Some people really don't like the idea of a 20-minute "fill up".

What I'd really like to see - what I hope gets developed long term - is a fast-battery-pack swapping system. Bonus points for a standardized form factor from SAE or some similar standards body. This could solve a few problems:

* Faster recharges on trips - potentially faster than filling up a gasoline or diesel vehicle.

* Optimized energy use, at least to a certain extent. Battery packs could be charged off-hours to reduce load on the grid.

* As part of the cost of swapping the pack, the charging station could take on responsibility for repairing the battery packs.

Battery packs are the most expensive single component in most EVs, and I think some people do have anxiety on getting stuck with a five-figure repair bill if their battery pack goes bad.

Obviously there's a lot to work out, both technologically, and vis-a-vis the business model of a battery swapping network.

The current bet is more towards even faster chargers, possibly with batteries supporting them in the back.

The problem with battery packs is that batteries age. It's not like returning a propane tank and getting a full one. If you just bought your car and you go to refuel and they swap your once used battery pack with one that's seen ten thousand charge cycles you aren't getting a fair deal.

I totally get where you're going with this, but propane tanks also age. One time I swapped the tank, and when I got around to replacing it less than a year later it was past it's certification time and they wouldn't take it unless I paid to get it recertified someplace else.

Much less of an issue than getting a bad battery though.

Why do you care if your interest in the battery pack is that it lasts 200 - 300 miles? The only way this model would work is if maintenance/replacement of the batteries is the charging network's problem.

Not sure it’s practical to hot swap EV batteries right now.

“An electric vehicle battery typically weighs between 300 kg (660 pounds) and 900 kg (2,000 pounds).”

https://poweringautos.com/how-much-does-an-electric-car-batt...

It's possible, NIO has battery swap stations, but I don't think it's really viable.

This is especially true, given that advances in battery tech, and fast charging are going to eliminate the need. Recharging as fast a petro fuel filling have already been demo'd.

Of course, here in the US we don't need any of that commonist technology. We're all so great, we're gonna say "Please, Please, don't make me any greater!". Can't wait 8-/

So, qualify what I wrote before with: _in_China_ they'll be able to charge as fast as a refuel.

https://www.nio.com/nio-power?&noredirect=

But it begs a question, who’s liable when the battery is swapped to some faulty unit that catches fire when it’s in your car?

Presumably the battery network would have insurance and would factor that into the cost.

(I’d expect that all-in, this gets a lot closer to the cost of a gasoline fill-up. My current charging costs are far lower than the equivalent cost to fill up with gasoline, but my primary interest in this is environmental. I’ll take the lower cost while I can get it, but I don’t expect it to last forever.)

The weight is the most trivial problem to solve in this whole problem chain. A hydraulic lifting apparatus capable of moving a ton that fits under a passenger car is something that exists today.

Getting automakers to agree to a standardized form factor (and to not put non-battery components in their battery packs ala Tesla,) automatically locating and removing whatever retentioning mechanism is used, having a large enough stock of batteries at each “filling station”, etc. are more difficult problems.

But, as I said, I hope this does happen in the future.

No, I’ve road tripped around the country with both types of vehicles. It’s delusional. And I’m not anti-EV by any means, I like them, but when you do need to use public charging, it sucks.

The charger may be right on the on your route, which is nice, but it often isn’t. If it’s five minutes out of the way, that’s an extra 10 minutes on my trip +20 minutes of charging. That’s a half hour where a gas station would’ve been three minutes. There are a good amount of times when it is more than five minutes away.

That’s extremely common and even supposes the chargers are available, I remembered to pre-condition the battery, etc. all of those are not given.

And for preservation of battery life you’re really operating with 60% of the stated capacity because you’re keeping it between 20 and 80 all the time. So a 250 mile range is really 150. I have had it happen where I drive two hours, spend a half hour charging, rinse, repeat on a road trip.

> You can install a charger at home, even a very slow one that doesn’t need a special circuit, and always have a full battery in the morning

I am fortunate enough to own 2 homes, and neither can do what you suggest since they don't have off street parking.

I won't bother arguing the rest.

I just got a RAV4 Prime (a “plugin hybrid” or PHEV).

In EV mode, it has 40 or so miles of range. That’s high enough that I never need to use gas during the week, unless I go to the next city over. It’s also low enough that it can always fully charge overnight without a special circuit.

If I need to go further, it just becomes a RAV4 Hybrid (with better performance - aka HV mode). No long waits or searching for chargers needed.

Generally I put in maybe a half tank of gas ($15) once a month. Especially in the US, I really think PHEVs make much more sense than EVs. BYD seems to make some really nice ones, but we’re sadly hostile to them.

'The primary benefit of an EV is that you ~never need to stop and “refuel”'

I beg to differ: The primary benefit of an EV is that I am not handing over my hard-earned post-tax income for oil to countries that loath my way of life and my values.

Some decisions in life should transcend economics.

If you’re in the US, most oil is domestic, but obviously that doesn’t make it much better. (If you’re not, sorry - “my way of life and my values” is very US-coded language.)

In not in the US. If you are, then the analysis just goes down one level: do the people in the USA that sell you domestic fuel share your values.

I submit you would be a lot better off with EVs for this reason alone.

> When you do need to stop on a road trip, you can use fast charging, which is ~250 kW, so somewhere around a quarter of the gas pump’s “wattage.” You’ll probably want to use the bathroom/buy a drink anyway, so charging taking four-ish times as long as pumping isn’t really a big deal.

Yeah, no.

My gasoline car gets ~400 miles to a tank. Well, more than that: 400 miles is effectively the "no matter the circumstances [that cause gas mileage to be sapped], I can always guarantee making it at least that," not like EVs where the range number tends to be more of an aspiration than a reality. Admittedly, I have a small sedan which gets ~40mpg on the highway, but it takes less than 2 minutes to fill it up at the gas pump (about 100s IIRC, I did actually time it). Even derating for less fuel-efficient cars, you're comfortably extending your range by > 100 miles/minute of charging.

The EV charging, by contrast, is going to run something like 200 miles/20 minutes. That's a multiplier closer to 10×, not 4×; it makes the time you need to stop to charge it much more considerable.

But the range issue means I now have to slot an extra major stop. Sure, I can fill up during lunch. But that isn't enough to get me to my destination--I still have 5-6 hours of driving after lunch (sometimes more, since I like to take early lunches to avoid crowds). That extra stop takes longer than all of my bathroom breaks on the trip, combined. That's a not-insignificant amount of extra time on my trip.

The other consideration is that, if you're trying to tell people to overlap charging with lunch, well have you seen how crowded the travel plazas get on a busy travel day? They can get so packed that every parking space is taken up. The fill-up-while-you-eat rule suggests that pretty much every single one of those parking spaces needs a charger, most of which don't have the room for a charger as it stands.

Took a trip to Canada with my brother in his new EV. Trying to get an EV spot at the hotel was a nightmare and when one finally opened up, the charger was incompatible. Most charging stations weren't in convenient locations and the ones that were, were slow and required you to pay through an app. I'm not anti EV at all, but the experience of dealing with charging issues outside of the day to day routine was pure shite.

> I just don’t buy this argument as a reason people don’t want EVs.

These descriptions are unrealistic to our experience. We're on our third EV, so plenty of experience with this. It's always a pain to go anywhere outside a small area. Just this week my partner needed to go to a nearby city 2hrs away. Round trip too long for the EV. Luckily my office is halway there and has chargers, so stopped by for 2.5hrs to top up the batteries. That's a longer refueling stop than the whole trip. Faster chargers exist but they are few and far between, usually broken or taken, so finding one is an exercise in frustration.

> You can install a charger at home, even a very slow one that doesn’t need a special circuit, and always have a full battery in the morning.

It takes us three days to fill up the car at home if it gets really low, not having a special circuit. So if the car was used yesterday it won't be full this morning.

The only way this works at all is because my partner normally only needs to commute about 30 minutes and only twice a week.

To further expand on this with some back-of-the-envelope calculation, I've heard EVs are on the order of 30-40 kWh. Say the power storage of the gas tank in an ICE car and the battery storage of an EV are commensurate. Conservatively, say refueling your ICE car takes about 1 min, so 30,000 Wh / ((1/60)h) ~ 1.8 MW.

40kWh is a pretty small EV battery. Many are more like 70-90kWh.

for home charging, figures are exact opposite - when i come home it "costs me" 3 seconds to plug it in, then i do literally literally nothing ( or something else rather), then it "costs me" another 3 seconds to unplug it in morning,

so for 100kwh it is essentially 6 seconds. so electric car wastes 1/10 of my time compared to gasoline one.

im good mathematician, but i like engineering more, because it has to take into account external factors, not "just" numbers.

(intentionally not calculating travel time to and from gas station, queue, noise, smell of a gas station etc )

The way you've described it, charging at your home takes 8+ hours. You can do other tasks in parallel, so the effective cost to you is 6 seconds but that doesn't change how long it takes to charge your vehicle.

There are many use cases where charging at home is not an option, in which case understanding charging time becomes an important factor.

I like mathematics and engineering, which is why I like to understand basic facts to better address an issue rather than contort facts to dismiss an issue.

you phone literally knows when you're going to sleep, when on toilet, what cake did you have on your birthday. so you can ask it to tell you exact trips you took, and you can calculate when and how you can charge and for how long, from that data.

"EVs convert over 77% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 12%–30% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels."

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml

EV charging doesn't need to deliver anywhere near the amount of energy contained in gas to displace gas.

The ~2MW value is after taking that into account.

Does this calculation account for the 10-20% electrical energy loss during transmission across the grid?

The fraction of energy lost in the grid in the US is around 6%.

Probably if you wanted to do that you would also need to calculate the energy loss of transporting the gas to the pump as well

And losses during burning of the gas.

Things look even more dire for gas when you consider the entire supply chain. Remember that you burn gas as terrible efficiency to transport it to gas station.

it is even more dire - transport of gas - imagine hurricane, tornado damages, pipelines, electric supply for gas pump pumps... good luck with pumping gas without electricity, or i remember 8 hour queue before hurricane in front of gas station for some reason...

with PV on roof you do not need to transport anything from anywhere, charge and be functional. not even talking about house comfort while literally everyone around you is panicking, because of lack of electricity. ( you can connect 200watt inverter to your outlet to help "pace" ongrid inverter to work in offrgid situation, so yes all PV can do offgrid for 30 bucks on top)

yes generators are a thing until russia knocks on US sovereignty and US does nothing about it - Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack ...

Did you really think 10-20% loss would erase 50-60% more efficiency when you asked that question? Did you also ask the same question about gasoline energy efficiency and whether it included the significantly higher amount of energy required to move that oil/gasoline all over, multiple times, before it ends up in a tank?

You’re missing a state of change. California uses coal, natural gas, and nuclear primarily. Nuclear efficiency is low at 33%. Best case you‘re charging your car from a new natural gas plant that is a combined cycle design which can potentially have up to 60% efficacy.

So 60% efficiency, minus 9.2% transmission loss, Minus charging losses and then electric motor efficiency loses… verses directly consuming fuel and putting the power to the wheels.

Electric cars are much less efficient if you consider the entire stream. If you want to use the argument that the gasoline needs to be refined and transported. Well so does natural gas. Or coal, or nuclear fuel rods, or bio mass, etc etc.

I’m not saying electric cars aren’t good. But we should really force people to charge them with solar if we want peak efficiency to save the planet.

Generating plant efficiency source - https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...

Electrical distribution loss in California 9.2% source - https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how...

you forgot to calculate how much of cost of nuclear energy(sic) is going towards removing all CO2, NOx it is generating....

so if you are calculating efficiency of one power plant calculate this into price of another power plant too.

we can build utility PV + 12 hour battery with LCOE lower than nuclear... PV + battery price is for already deployed system. nuclear price is prediction of price of new plant...

Nuclear is dead in the water. And it is not pacific ocean water.

I’m not missing anything. You’re being extremely selective in your argument by excluding all of the processes that extracted, transported, and converted, transported again, and again, and then again before ending up in a tank, and ignoring all those same processes required and used recursively for each of those processes, including the coal, natural gas, etc burned to power all those processes, etc etc to the same level of insane detail that you want to pick electric apart.

But then, starting from the position that 10% loss on a 60% directly efficient ‘fuel’ is worse than a minimum 83% loss of efficiency on another fuel isn’t much of a genuine position in the first place.

No, just like gas figures don't account for 100% overhead in rectification process.

This is the „well to wheel“ efficiency of a BEV. It accounts for transmission losses, charging and powertrain losses.

As a point of reference, the well to wheel efficiency for gasoline is somewhere between 12-20%.

On the other hand, a significant number of trips will begin their trip with a full "tank" (battery) and will therefore not even need to stop to refill.

The median distance travelled on long-distance trips is less than 200 miles in the US, which is clearly within the limit of a normal BEV battery.

https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...

The GP's point about the energy density of gasoline and how quickly it can be transferred is not refuted by this irrelevant statistic; indeed, reading the same statistic with a pessimistic interpretation makes my point: if the median trip distance is 200 miles, about half of trips are longer than an EV battery charge, requiring a long refuel stop.

Half is a lot of trips to give up by switching to an EV!

> how quickly it can be transferred is not refuted by this irrelevant statistic

Of course it is refuted. No need to transfer is without a doubt faster than a transfer taking a few minutes.

> if the median trip distance is 200 miles half of trips are longer than an EV battery charge

The median LONG distance trip. The trip which only happens a few times per yer. That trip. There are about 2.6 billion long distance trips, and 411 billion daily trips. So this means that just over 0.5% of all trips in a year is a long-distance trip, and therefore significantly less than half of those again can be completed without a refill.

0.25% of 365 = 0.9125

So one, probably two, long distance trips in USA per year on average need a refill on the way, when adjusted for all trips in the nation.

In what world is that a lot?

> if the median trip distance is 200 miles,

This is a figure not based on reality. The normal commuter car does not have a median trip distance of 200mi. More like 20mi, if even that.

How many people do you know have a 200 mile daily commute? Who normally drives 200mi to go get groceries? Absolute insanity.

For most people I know their median car trip is probably <15mi. Mine is probably like 10.

I was the person who brought up the number originally as a way to illustrate that the he median _LONG_ distance trip is that distance. Those trips accounts for less than 1% of all travel by personal vehicle. Maybe it was unclear.

You are entirely correct in noting that the mileage for the average daily/normal trip is about 15 miles: https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...

Ah, yep, that's on me for missing that context. Neat to know I was pretty close on my gut estimates there. Thanks for sharing that link.

Does that figure account for the wildly inefficient nature of internal combustion engines?

> BYD will soon start deploying its 1000 kW ultrafast charging stations in China. The first batch of 500 chargers will begin operating in early April

> ZEEKR unveiled a 1.2 Megawatt EV charger

So it's possible. Hard to do though, 1-10MW of available capacity is hard to come by, infrastructure is not ready. Well, gas station infrastructure was built over more than a century of gas domination

It seems to be 10x for 80% and 20x for 100% while 100% gives 50% of the range of a gas vehicle for a full-speed level 3 charger. Level 2 chargers are another order of magnitude slower (say 8 hours). I I would like to see the wattage over time for gas to compare with.

The article

>The commission estimates that more than 162,000 chargers are Level 2, which can provide roughly 14 to 35 miles of range per hour of charging, and nearly 17,000 are considered fast chargers

A 13 gallon tank at 30MPG is 390 miles. Most EV’s are well past half that, Lucid Air Grand Touring breaks 500 miles for example.

Hybrids seem to do even better

Light cars like Honda civic hybrid have much better MPG yet it’s EPA range is 519 miles vs 510 for that lucid air.

There’s a few outliers as a Toyota Prius at 644 miles, but gas is heavy so tank sizes adjust with fuel efficiency.

But I need to stop and use a gas nozzle every other week or so, meanwhile I use a public charger maybe once a quarter if even that.

I spend way more time waiting on a gas pump than I do waiting on a public EV charger, and I do way more miles on my EV.

Exactly!

I am always confused when i see electric car review and reviewer says "you have nice big front trunk to store your charging cables." My cables are hanging on wall of my garage darling! Why the heck do i need to transport them ? XD

So you don’t have to buy a new set of cables when you forget to bring them on a long trip?

I have the cables that came with the car and I have a different EVSE on my wall, but otherwise I've never had to buy cables.

Some places in the world expect you to bring your own cable to use the charger, but in the US public chargers have cables.

That said, I do keep the included charging cable in it's special spot under the trunk area. I've used it once out on the go, but wasn't really needed.

At home charging complicates the issue, and you don’t need a level 2 charger at home here. ~10 hours per day from a wall outlet and 3miles/kWh ~= 15k miles per year which is all most people drive.

I’d be pleased if I could refuel in a minute or two. It feels more like ten to fifteen by the time I queue for the pump and queue to pay.

yeah and most electric cars can pay for you automatically, without you doing anything, so no need to worry that someone sneezes on your back while in queue.

Probably depends a lot on the time of day and location. 19 out of 20 times when I refuel on my way to work, there is a free station and a empty queue to pay in cash, as I always do. Takes 3 minutes total.

No way it takes three minutes total. It takes about that much time just to pump 15gal of gas in an average flow pump. You also need to park, walk into the store, talk to the person, walk out of the store, etc.

Five minutes would be really fast.

You should actually time it. I pay at the pump with tap to pay which doesn't even require me to enter my zip or a pin, and I'm still almost 10 minutes overall for a stop to get gas. And I didn't even walk into the shop!

You'll need to add a bit of time to include pulling out of traffic as well, as chances are in the EV you wouldn't have even needed to make the stop in the first place.

Ok, fine, I exagerrated a bit, but actually I'm gonna time myself next time, I'm curious, thanks for the tip. And also yeah, with EVs there is no need to stop at all if you charge at home, that matters.

They're only counting "publicly accessible" EV charging stations. There are probably 10X as many EV charging stations that aren't publicly accessible, aka in somebody's garage. Or millions of times more EV charging stations if you consider that a standard 120V outlet is capable of charging a car.

Most EV charging happens at home, not at charging stations. Charging stations are the exceptions when recharging EVs.

I'd be curious to see numbers on this. Currently I believe you, although as EV adoption expands and EVs get cheaper I'd expect to see more people who can't charge at home buy them and charge at work/stores.

Also I don't have an EV, but if I did charge it equivalently to how I use my gas powered car, 1 trip to where I needed to recharge outside of the house would likely be equivalent to about 80 days of home charging.

Maybe I'm not understanding your point, but here is my math. 80 days * 24 hour/day * 1.4 kW (L1 charging / 12A @ 120V) = 2688 kwh of electrical energy. If your EV has an efficiency of 3.5 miles/kWh, that 2688 kWh would let you drive 9,400 miles. Of course, if you had a 240V @ 40A L2 charger at home, that would be 18,400 kWh, or 64,500 miles (@ 3.5 miles/kWh).

I think this is currently right but a view heavily based on freestanding houses with garage or carport that can charge there. The whole apartment or city charging is still developing. At least in Australia.

I agree, but these are broadly the categories of people most in need of cars. The density provided by apartments often affords less inefficient modes of transport, like transit.

In many places in the world, this ideal falls short however, and hence a push for installing EV chargers in apartment garages is also needed.

I feel like someone really smart who wasn't lazy could get up and figure out an expected load factor weather-adjusted range using an Erlang distribution and apply your charging time hypothesis to see if parity is over or under stasis for the current proportion of EVs.

Also, nobody is crazy enough to argue that office parking buildings should have gas stations in them, and a charger is not an environmental hazard needing to have the whole lot excavated later, with the dirt taken out somewhere out of sight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com