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Comment by whiteboardr | Hacker News Reader

So upselling a supposedly “green” product by throwing away a sizable portion of energy while charging it.

What a world we live in.

It's apparently 90% efficient (which I believe - it can't be too inefficient otherwise it would generate too much heat to be usable).

A 10% efficiency drop takes electric cars from "much greener than ICE cars" to "still much greener than ICE cars".

In fact if this tech encourages 11% more people to buy electric cars then it might be more green overall. So take your poorly thought through naysaying elsewhere.

A device that only makes sense in extraordinarily high-end cars with an expensive adjustable suspension probably isn’t going to move the needle that much. If you’re doing object detection and moving the car, why not go a little farther and move a plug into a physical port on the base of the car, so you don’t need the car to move to the charger.

> with an expensive adjustable suspension

It seems weird they took that approach vs having the box extend upwards when it detects that it should. Seems a lot simpler and cheaper.

It likely already had the active suspension anyway.

> why not go a little farther and move a plug into a physical port on the base of the car

Because that is not "a little farther", it's vastly more complicated. And also because the charging mat is flat, not some box in the middle of your garage.

This is clearly a better solution overall (for people who are too lazy to plug in a plug themselves).

well, in this case it means you got extra 1.2 kW heater in your garage. and this is considering standard "slow charging" in ev world.

this amount of extra heat would probably need in car AC to kick in draining probably another 500W

Does anyone still believe EVs are here to save the world from climate change?

Their sole purpose is to save the auto industry.

There are pretty clean combustible sources out there or even alternative electrical sources out there, but somehow humanity has gone with big, heavy, rare mineral hungry batteries.

What's the deal against hydrogen? Toyota made a car that made it to market, it can't be that dangerous if it was sold in certain regions with extensive safety testing procedures. I know the problem is getting hydrogen at the pump station but other fully battery dependent cars have had that same issue before.

I'm sure hydrogen has other problems (conversion efficiency?) but what about ethanol? Better than gasoline, no? At least 40% less greenhouse gases out of the tail pipe, and its production is pretty mild for the environment compared to batteries. It wouldn't make cars that much more complicated either, and you could "easily" convert your ICE car. Of course, at the scale we are talking about the gains would be way lower given a 5 year timespan vs batteries

Hell, there are others.

Such a weird set of events dictating the future of cars ngl, some of the alternatives may have had come sooner if someone focused there (I know Brazil has some minimum ethanol requirement that seems like a good idea while transitioning).

Clean hydrogen begins with electricity and then loses a vast amount of energy in the conversion process. Also it’s extremely pressurized and/or cryogenic, and one of the most difficult molecules to store. If there was a process for converting electricity to ethanol and burning it that was more efficient than batteries, we’d be using it instead of batteries. Other sources like corn-based ethanol have their own problems that have been pretty extensively covered elsewhere. In fact, all of this stuff has been covered elsewhere and great answers are available with a search.

Man you see this crap pop up on here so many times I'm almost starting to wonder whether car industry shills are just trying so sow seeds of doubt with misinformation.. haven't we agreed by now that the only future we should strive for is one that can plausibly be made completely emmissionless...? All options you list either still have emmissions associated with them or are so hilariously inefficient that we would need to blanket half the globe with PV panels to power everything. All alternatives have been extensively explored and the only and most efficient way to power cars in an emmissionless way turned out to be a battery electric drivetrain. There is a reason all the options you list didn't take off.

Batteries don't dump half their capacity overnight because they're filled with the gas that doesn't want to be contained.

But a 1 Ton full battery is the same with a 1 aton empty battery.

Surprised to see this dumb of a take on HN. How exactly are they saving the auto industry? And yes they are obviously better for the environment. Are you just being conspiratorial for the sake of it or do you actually think this?

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