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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

I’m out for 2-3 days. Better take an external battery for the phone. Done.

Doesn’t work with a car.

Really easy to work around Apple’s utterly crap battery life. If it were better that would be nice to have.

Going a certain distance so can’t take an ev at all. It’d be nice if you could, if your usage is mostly very urban, sure that’s just nice. Gotta visit Dad on the farm a dozen times a year or whatever? That’s not your life so you don’t see it as essential even if the rest of the driving is much shorter range.

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To fix iPhone battery life, create an automation that turns on battery save mode when battery dips below 80%. Works really well. I figure they don’t build this functionality into the settings because people would use it instead of buying a new phone when the battery degrades.

Similarly, I use an automation that turns on low power mode any time the phone’s not charging. Not found any real downsides to this.

It really should work with a car (there's no reason why they couldn't support additional external battery packs in the trunk or as a trailer, etc).

for $10, right?

Renting a U-Haul starts at $19.95 per day...

Uh. How much do car batteries cost again?

A hell of a lot less than entire trucks.

I think maybe there’s some cross thread confusion.

The comparison I’m making is an external phone battery is $10. Replacing an ev battery is, hell i dunno, $10.000?

Not needing an external phone battery would be nice.

Needing external ev batteries is far more likely to be cost prohibitive. Adjacent to this thread people have raised size and weight issues as well. I didn’t even bother going that far because the straight up price puts it in a different ball park to an external phone battery.

Hope we’re all on the same page again!

Right, that's the discussion up to a certain spot.

Then the GP had a counterargument to EV batteries being expensive, by suggesting you could rent one for your three day trip for a pretty small amount of money.

And not only would that charge be quite small compared to everything else going on with your car, the further you drive with the extended battery the more you save by electricity being cheaper than gasoline. And that includes having to pay for depreciation.

Well something is up because i simply do not see that counter argument anywhere in this thread. Crazy huh?

"Renting a U-Haul starts at $19.95 per day..."

So in the scale between $10 and $10000, it would be like renting a big piece of road equipment, not buying one.

To be clear the middle paragraph of my post was explaining why I think they said that, and the last paragraph was me adding my own commentary. I wasn't suggesting they were implying the part about gas savings, that was all me.

(Thank you Dylan16807, your interpretation is correct, and I apologize to harry8 because I didn't realize that my comment would read so cryptically when I wrote it).

Fair enough.

Go on then, show us your estimate for the cost of renting a fully charged towable battery for 2-3 days.

I'm struggling to see it being much cheaper than renting an ev for 2-3 days if such a thing were wished into existence.

> I'm struggling to see it being much cheaper than renting an ev for 2-3 days if such a thing were wished into existence.

Even if it was the same price, lots of people don't want to rent a car, and many of the reasons they have for that don't apply to renting a battery pack.

But I'd be surprised if it wasn't a lot cheaper. If I think about a non-towed battery, it costs 1/5 as much as a car, needs 1/10 as much storage space on shelves, and can be kept in service for hundreds of thousands of miles. Towed units would be harder to store and have a bit more wear but should still be a lot smaller and cheaper than cars. A small trailer that could carry a battery is only a thousand bucks retail. You'd probably want some cooling, in the end maybe it's 1/4 the cost of a car and takes up 1/6 of a parking space? Still sounds like a cheap rental.

And as for the price of "fully charged", they can have the same price per kWh as a supercharger and have massive profit margins. So that's an amount you'd have to pay anyway and not a downside to renting.

The reason is that batteries are heavy.

Want an extra 100 miles of range? That's 600lbs of cargo. A person can't place that in a trunk, and a trailer would probably barely extend range due to the extra drag and efficiency loss.

It's obviously more valuable to double the range of a car compared to a phone.

But is it multiple thousands of times more valuable? I don't think so.

I don't understand your point. EV batteries won't cost multiple thousands of times more for the exact same battery that would go in a phone. If you pay 1000 times more for 1000 times more battery, I don't see the problem. If anything, they probably want 1000 times more demand so they can gain economies of scale.

> If you pay 1000 times more for 1000 times more battery, I don't see the problem.

We know that "if" isn't true. That's the problem with the argument for only making EV batteries. A car battery is five thousand times as big as a phone battery and it's only hundreds of times as expensive.

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