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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I did not expect anyone to be offering a SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND mile warranty on their batteries. That's some serious confidence. I didn't see anything about it transferring, though. That would be smart on their end - the resale value for electric sports cars at least, is about 50% in the first year, then it levels off hard after that. This would encourage buying new, but not aftermarket. I'll have to look into this.

Still, while this removes a primary concern of mine, there's still one major hurdle that cannot be bypassed as far as I can tell (yet): If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. Maybe if it's an outdoor parking lot you can rely on solar power somewhat, assuming you're in a good situation for that?

Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage. Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.

Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there. Let me turn a thing to unlock it, pull out that one cell, and replace it. But maybe I'm a little more wrench-y than their customers want to be?

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At my last apartment before I moved into a home where I did have the ability to install a charger, they had 4 EV chargering spots in the parking garage. I believe residents just had to pay the normal residential electricity rate to use them, they were standard commercial level 2 chargers like the kind you see in public parking lots.

All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.

We get away with level 1 chargers, and live far from the city. Residential lots could easily get away with one level one charger per spot. (The wattage is < 25% that of one level 2 charger, so you can put in 4x as many with the same backend connection to the grid.)

For city commuters, this would probably be more than good enough.

Yeah, Level 1 charging is way too easily overlooked in the US. A lot of US parking lots could add simple Level 1 outlets to most lamp posts and do a lot, easily, for EV charging. (Most traditional halogen lamps were nearly Level 2 circuits, prior to recent switches to LEDs. If the LED transition had been timed a little different there might be way more L2 chargers "easily" installed in parking lots.)

A bit of an aside: I think part of the public perception problem is calling Level 1 "chargers" and not just "outlets". At so many points in our discourse, especially in the US, we've let car manufacturers sell us this idea of "gas-pump-like capital-C Charger" as something bulky and "hard/expensive to install", but really most EVs just need more wall outlets, classic, boring electrical outlets. Sure, the US can blame Edison that we don't have Level 2 as a default outlet and our cheapest/easiest outlets are Level 1, yet still we need to stop underestimating L1.

The other thing beyond "don't discount L1 as a reliable way to charge" (slow and steady charges the race car, eh) is "don't discount the power of destination chargers". Everywhere you park is a possible place for a charger. If you can't get one easily at home, maybe your employer can build one. Your grocery store and your church or bar or pickle ball court or other third place can build one. (Especially Level 1. Outdoor outlets have always been a thing, moving them a little closer to parking spaces shouldn't always be a big deal. Boring old electrical outlets are "everywhere" already, we just aren't always yet in the mode of thinking about them, their ubiquity, and how they can charge our cars, while we eat or shop or work or hang out or play or sleep.)

I try to make this point all the time.

We have already built all of the charging infrastructure except the chargers.

You are probably no more than a block from a 440v line (that's what typically goes into the transformer, of which there is one on almost every block, at least). You are in a building that almost certainly has 220v power in it. You are probably less than 10 feet from a 15-20 amp 110v plug for almost your entire day. There are far more places to charge a car than there are people in most of North America.

If the incentives are correctly aligned, we have the infrastructure to make this happen VERY quickly.

Electricity generation is an issue, but not as much of one when you realize that not every car will be charging at the same time. Not every car will be fast charging. Hell, not every car will even need a full charge every week. I fill up my ICE car every 400km or so, which is about 2-4 weeks depending on weather. Right now AI growth is projected to increase the rate of power consumption far more than electric cars even under the most optimistic adoption curves. If generation is the problem, we need to kneecap chatGPT immediately.

Its amazing how many people think that our gasoline infrastructure is a given, and that electric car infrastructure is impossible.

A related tale: One of Rivian’s goals was to electrify National Parks and campgrounds as part of their branding as a “rugged” or “off-roading” brand and one of the maybe funniest things about that was how unsuccessful they were in parts of that branding effort, not because it was hugely expensive to get electricity out to such places but as much that it was hugely silly to take credit for all the electricity already there.

Any US park or campground with regular RV visits has tons of 240v “dryer plug” outlets, many of which with decades of battle testing of simultaneous high draw use. EVs look almost considerate next to most RVs, and those don’t even use any of that electricity to drive.

SAE J1772 (the ugly “gas pump” looking thing that CCS in Europe still resembles, but the US is fortunately moving to the relatively saner NACS instead) should have just been a “dryer plug” and we might have avoided some silliness in how few people realize how much existing EV infrastructure exists and/or what can be repurposed easily as EV infrastructure.

I think the biggest hurdle to just doing that is who pays for the electricity. Sure right now it's a nice perk you can provide your EV owning visitors that probably won't cost too much, but in a world where 10%+ of cars are EVs the costs will add up even at level 1, so you'll need to go for capital-C Chargers that come with payment infrastructure.

one answer would be to make the parking spaces expensive enough to account for electricity. parking meters are pretty widely adopted.

Arguably a lot of parking fees are already expensive enough to account for electricity. In a city charging, say, $15/hour for parking, it seem like we should be able to expect say $0.15/hour to be a drop within the existing profit margin. There's a very simple order of magnitude relationship between the two numbers already.

WiFi-controlled 120V outlet plugs cost $20 or less retail (including tariff costs.) Those aren’t rated for the sorts of continuous draw an L1 charger needs, but upgrading the hardware to handle this isn’t going to make the hardware crushingly expensive. So the actual question mostly comes down to software and integration. Seems like a good ycombinator business. Think of the TAM!

I do keep joking that I've got hundreds of dollars to invest in the first restaurant that wants to be the McDonald's of EV Charging. (The early business model of McDonald's was notoriously putting one near almost every interstate exit so it became a ubiquitous staple of the driving landscape.) Could be McDonald's itself. The Sonic-style of sit-in-your car "drive in" restaurant seems almost like a preternatural echo of an EV restaurant business. It would be a beautiful irony if Cracker Barrel decided EV charging was the next great idea; sit in a rocking chair and peruse the gift shop of very analog goods while you wait for your car to charge sounds like a smart business model to me.

Some company that wants a restaurant near every interstate exit to build their brand is going to figure out that the economics of electric charging are simpler than they expect and with it they build a potentially very loyal audience of travelers with easily 30+ minutes a stop on their hands to eat, shop, what-have-you. Maybe it will be one of the old guard of such restaurants, maybe it will be a new disruptor. If someone on HN wants to start it, I have a very tiny seed fund round in the hundreds of dollars to invest.

Yep absolutely, I used a level 1 charger at home for a couple years and it could easily recharge my daily work commute in about 5-8 hours (depending on season). Even now the only upgrade I did was move to a 240V16A charger because I wanted it to be a little quicker after long trips, but most of the time I limit the charge rate to 8A to preserve battery health.

There are some cars with panels, but they can only get about 10ish miles a day with good sunshine. Stationary panels work much, much better.

> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.

What does that have to do with EVs? The inflection point for adoption is solid state batteries, and there are some experimental factories under construction. (Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked and can charge about as fast as filling a tank of gas.)

> Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there.

Battery exchanges are impractical because the battery is part of the frame.

I don't think the bottleneck for charging is in the batteries, it's in electricity as an energy vector. By its very nature, someone is either instantaneously dispatching it from somewhere, or it's already being generated and curtailed. I just don't see that being cheaper than even biofuels in the long run, because time arbitrage matters. Making fuel with overcapacity that is worth zero (or less!) probably scales better than trying to store it all in batteries, because holes and containers will always be cheaper and easier to expand.

> Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked

citation needed. /s

Never heard of batteries without self-discharge.

> If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car.

The neighbourhood I used to live in London (where almost nobody has off-street parking) installed chargers into lamp posts. This BBC article has more details and photos https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869

Home charging in shared parking scenarios is difficult. Municipalities can add curbside chargers and in some places this is fairly common. In a private condo or apartment scenario you'd need the owner or association to agree to install them.

A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.

A third option is using a fast charger somewhere you go once or twice a week. Like grocery stores, gyms, etc. Costco for example is adding fast chargers to their stores, which should be fast enough for a full charge by the time you actually get in and out of Costco.

Replacing cells in a pack can be difficult. You want all the cells in the pack to have roughly the same capacity and voltage curve, so that you can connect them all together and charge them at the same time.

GM says that their Ultium batteries are segmented into modules, which each module having its own Battery Management System, and that it supports mixing and matching modules of different degradation and even cell chemistry.

But anything that adds complexity to the pack beyond being cells packed in as densely as feasible is going to add costs and reduce maximum energy storage.

I think the long term answer here is that there will eventually be a used and remanufactured battery pack market for popular models, just like you can get a used or remanufactured engine today.

> A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.

I don't think this will ever happen. It's the worst case in most every sense. You're talking thousands of chargers, for most parking structures, to solve a problem that's mostly about current battery tech/infrastructure. When battery tech is ready for general use, this won't be needed.

Battery tech is for general use. The median and mean usage of a car in the US is 40 miles per day. A 300 mile battery gets you a week's worth of driving between charges (~7.5 days). That's comparable to a median ICE car that gets 300 miles on a tank, with the subtle distinction of needing a 30-45 minute fast charge versus a 5-10 minute refill. But that's still a once a week "problem" with useful mitigations such as it is dangerous and illegal in most states (just poorly enforced in many as well) to leave a car unattended while refueling with gas, but electricity is far safer and multitasking is easier and more convenient while fast charging. (That fact that most fast chargers aren't interesting destinations with enough things walkably nearby is a different problem to solve, that the market should be rather good at solving eventually.)

But that's all still treating EV charging in the old world ICE model which everyone is familiar. When people are talking about wanting more chargers everywhere a car may be parked, like offices or transit stations and other parking structures, that isn't a need, that's a market opportunity unavailable to ICE. You can't put a gas pump in every parking space, but you sure can put an ordinary electric outlet. We can distribute the charging "problem" of a car far more easily than the current centralizing forces of gas logistics. It's an amenity that anyone who owns a parking lot or garage can offer to encourage walkability to nearby businesses and/or homes. It's a possible revenue source for other parking lots or garages that love low margin business models like electricity metering and/or think they have a captive enough audience to charge whatever margins they like, to make the bottom line grow.

We don't need those things to happen. We've driven gas engines for enough decades without that. We want those things to happen. We expect market forces to eventually deliver those things, as soon as the market better figures out what EV charging disrupts in parking lot planning and operations/maintenance. You can't expect your gas car to have more gas when you come back to it in a parking lot, but an EV can have a slightly higher charge almost anywhere it is parked for a while and that's a game changer that will slowly spread as the market finds the fun (and profit or marketing opportunity) in it.

Battery tech is ready for general use. Over 20% of cars being sold in California are EVs now, and over 90% in Norway.

Slow chargers are pretty low-tech devices, just a 208V-277V circuit with a device that handles switching, ground fault check, and potentially payment. These are going to be cheaper and easier to install and maintain than fast chargers, and I think adding them to workplaces is going to be easier than covering individual apartments.

That certainly won't cover all needs, which is why I listed other alternatives as well. The answer will be a blend of these solutions where each makes sense.

> Battery tech is ready for general use.

> Over 20% of cars being sold in California are EVs now

These are not compatible, if you're talking BEV. Regardless, you've provided data showing that it's not acceptable for the overwhelming majority of buyers, which matches market research [1]. And, out of that group, 30% want to switch back to gas [2]. Cost, and the massive depreciation is a factor related to current batter tech.

And, what % of commercial vehicles sales are BEV (which is included in general use)?

> and over 90% in Norway.

In California, 2023: 25% sales. 2024: 25.3% sales. There trend has slowed, maybe related to our ridiculous electric prices (fuel is cheaper, in many cases). It's very difficult to compare small European countries to a something in the US.

For some anecdotal evidence (which seems somewhat sufficient for the definition of "general"), I own an EV, and I know it's not ready for general use, because I will not be selling my gas car. In fact, I'm replacing it next month with another gas car. Most people I know have an EV (like 70%), and the majority have a second gas car that they say they will not sell. The majority of those that only have an EV say their next purchase will be a hybrid, all matching the trends shown in market research.

I'm crossing my fingers for another salt battery breakthrough, which are making their way into BEV [3].

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/25/ev-owners-want-to-buy-gas-ca...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-battery-maker-cat...

I don’t think it’s the battery specs holding back most buyers. For one thing transitions take time even when new tech could cover most of the market’s needs. But the main thing currently is purchase cost and charging infrastructure availability, both of which are improving at a fairly steady rate.

Most of the work going into scaling up EV production currently is about producing higher volumes of the batteries we have to bring costs down. A second prong is working on higher energy density and faster charging, but these solid-state batteries are going to be expensive and start in high-end vehicles, not economy cars for the masses.

> I don’t think it’s the battery specs holding back most buyers.

First link shows it's, at least, the primary (majority) concern for purchase. Price is part of the battery tech/chemistry package (~40% BEV price is battery), which seems to be the real killer:

> Only 33 percent of global survey respondents say they are likely or very likely to buy an EV at current price levels

Yes. But scaling up current battery tech is what the industry is doing, and that will bring down prices.

Improved charging infrastructure also offsets range concerns.

> talking thousands of chargers, for most parking structures

My home has an average of 10 chargers per room; I don't think it's really been a big driver of its cost.

I imagine the chargers you have are not drawing 3kW each though.

That's the main problem - your legacy infrastructure is most likely wired for 220V@32amps for the whole garage/street just to run the lamps from it, so 7.2kW. That's one EV charger, or two if you want to split them into 3.6kW feeds. If you want to run a proper 7.2kW charger from every lamp post or next to every parking space, that's a lot of brand new cabling that you need to add.

Yes, but potentially easier than adding 250kW per charger for a bank of DC fast chargers.

The grid connection for one fast charger could serve 50+ L2 chargers, potentially even 100 with load-sharing chargers.

There are good use cases for both kinds.

1.6kW is the limit; but no, they aren't. But you don't need 7.2kW all the time! There's no way that every single car would need to charge at every moment, and I know this from walking through parking garages and seeing some cars not move for days at a time.

A EVSE could easily serve multiple spots, and fairly (or unfairly, for profit!) distribute power between cars from a limited supply

Please note, the context here is level 1 charging. 7.2KW is level 2.

With level 1 charging is only 3 to 7 miles per hour, so average of 35 miles in a 7 hour day (assuming you drive for your lunch break). Where I am, the average distance to work is around 27 miles (one way), so a net loss of charge.

But the reason you drive such a long distance to work is to be able to live in a suburb, right?

Looking at the actual stats, you're a bit of an outlier: https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/202309_... (p. 12). The average commute trip is 22 miles, and keep in mind you also could use a level 1 charger at home.

No, it's 22 miles to/from work, one way [1]! My commute distance is only a few miles more, and my commute time is almost exactly the average time listed there.

For most, the purpose of living further from work is reduced total cost of living, especially if you're near a big city [2], where it's not usually an option. I save thousands a month by commuting a little, for the same number of bedrooms (which has a legal minimum where I am). If I wanted the same square footage, I'm saving > $10k/month, compared to being 1/3 the distance from work.

[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/...

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2022.2...

This is already being done in Finland.

Shopping malls have parking with literal hundreds of chargers.

Even my local grocery store has 6 Level 2 chargers and 4 level 1 chargers.

Hell, the McDonald's has four 350kW chargers. Modern cars charge faster than you can order a Big Mac and shove it down your throat =)

The solution is to have Level 2 and Level 3 charging _everywhere_. Then you don't need to have massive 100kW+ batteries in cars, because you can get a bit of a charge every time you park.

The first big leap people moving from ICE to EV have to get over is that unlike ICE cars, EVs don't "need" to be charged to full every time. You plug in, do your stuff, unplug and move on. Very rarely does one need to "go charge" during normal daily life, that's only for road trips.

> The solution is to have Level 2 and Level 3 charging _everywhere_.

I somewhat agree with this. My response was specifically, which I quoted, about "slow chargers" at office or transit, which I assumed was level 1. Level 2 is 8x faster, and can accommodate a 25 mile commute in two hours, rather than a net loss of change over 8 hours.

Level 1, at these locations, doesn't make sense.

Depending on the level 1 though.

My "level 1" at home charges at 230V/10A from a normal outdoor outlet, which is around 2.3kW/hour. During an assumed 8 hour work day that's about 18kWh, which is enough to move my EV for over 100km.

My commute is WAAAY less than 100km, meaning that the battery is, in practice, full every time I leave. Even dropping it to 8A would still be perfectly enough.

The biggest problem is that L1 chargers are just glorified wall warts, nobody is doing L1 speeds with proper integrated Type2 connectors.

Do you believe mass deployment of level 1 is going to happen?

It already has, Finland has "level 1" at pretty much every parking location for block heaters.

All we'd need to do is remove the 2 hour hardware timer from it and make them 24/7.

> Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage.

Presumably over time shared parking areas will get upgraded with charging infrastructure to keep attracting tenants.

The housing and rental markets currently favour owners/landlords significantly and it's not looking like slowing down. I have zero hope that "charging infrastructure" will be installed to "attract tenants".

Here in Australia landlords seem to struggle with basic things like insulation or a split system aircon.

> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.

I don't think superconductors solve anything in the EV charging space, and certainly wouldn't make L2/L1 charging easier to install for shared parking / street-side parking. An L2 charger uses something like a electric clothes dryer circuit, with 240V at 40A. Or somewhere in the 6-10 kW range, to recharge you overnight.

Room temperature super conductors would be huge for the EV charging space. One big thing holding back EV transport trucks is charging capacity. The infrastructure to support charging a fleet of EV trucks at 1MW+ each is insane with current tech.

Even supporting a bank of 350KW chargers is pretty nuts like you see in some highway rest stops (or Tesla Supercharger stations). Locations are limited by the proximity to high voltage transmission lines right now (ie: it's really expensive to push that much current for any significant distance).

If we had cheap and ubiquitous super conductors that could be run like regular ole medium voltage electrical cables....game changer.

One also needs good connectors.

There is also just the situations where cars are parked on the street and the cabling has to get across the public pavement to charge the car. Even though those people can deploy a charger they can't be blocking the pavement. There is a real concern here where the incentives for the individual to pay to deploy charging capabilities in their car parking bay or front garden can't actually do so because of ownership. It needs solving via legislation, a basic default that people can pay to deploy these systems themselves.

Charging on public infrastructure ought to get there in time but the really big benefit of electric cars comes when it charges at home on cheap electricity and the only time you worry about charging it at all is when you do a long trip and you have to charge it at the half way point for 30 minutes.

I live in Portland OR where electric cars are fairly popular. People just run an extension cable out to the street and put a cable cover over it on the sidewalk.

Where I live in Canada, that's illegal. Tripping hazard on the ground, I don't know the exact reason why overhead is also illegal (though I can make a few guesses).

I don’t know about the law, but the cable covers are the big industrial ones they use at concert venues etc. So no significant tripping hazard.

I know. Those cable covers are also illegal, something city law enforcement and spokespersons confirmed. Don't ask me why a cover is illegal, it seems strange to me. Maybe it's because of the danger of snow clearing equipment chewing it and the cable to pieces, but I'm just spit balling here.

And it's not like it's a new issue, I've heard public complaints about lack of solutions to this brought city council for years now. Haven't heard anything about the law being changed at this point.

It might be illegal here, too, for all I know. So is parking on the wrong side of the street, or blocking your own driveway. Some laws get ignored and no one cares.

Installation of AC Level 2 charging in garages is a technical problem but not exactly a problem on the level of “superconductors”. You need to install wiring and upgrade your service connection, and also install chargers that can share a circuit (which is commercially available.) It’s just a problem of figuring out who pays for it.

Certain ev sports cars are bought so that you get the privilege of buying nicer cars e.g. the taycan

That's true of any car, not just EVs. The word in certain circles is that people are only buying the Ferrari Purosangue in hopes of getting on the waiting list for their more desirable cers.

And the Taycan is a great car in its own right, just the price is stupid. The Audi E-Tron is the same car just packaged differently and can be had for sometimes half the price.

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