Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

The arguments in this thread are amusing to say at the least. 30 minute charging times, high prices of Tesla cars. Yes all that is true. But this was never about 'Electric cars are awesome now'.

I'm pretty sure cars during and before pre Henry Ford times were not very great in terms of their overall affordability, total cost of ownership and availability of fuel all around the country. You could trust your horse to drive you back home on any day more than a car. Similar to that, the IBM computers during their early days. You mobile phone is likely to have more computing power than all the computers IBM sold a few decades back, they were highly painful to use, maintain and use. Needless to say all these things had huge maintenance issues.

But these things have caught on. So have automation, productivity and so many other new things that eventually people show friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli and learn to move forward.

Electric cars, self driving cars, wearable computing(like Google glasses) well these really might look to be unfeasible at this time. But please, these are just ideas which are waiting for their time to come, with a little push they will eventually catch on.

This is obviously a very "disruptive" technology and/or business model, from every point of view, both positive and negative. Just think about how all disruptive innovations come to be. They are awesome and game-changing from a certain point of view (free charging/"gas"!) but can also have some big downsides (30 minute charging, only half a charge - at first).

But the part you should be focusing on is the first one, the positive one. Because that will change everything and to some people, the second part, the negative one, will be irrelevant just long enough for Tesla to work on improving it and years later making it "good enough" for most people.

Remember how the iPhone was awesome at user interface and interaction? But sucked at battery life (compared to other smartphones), had only a 2 MP camera, no video recording, only 2G connection and no MMS? That may not have been good enough for 90% of Nokia or Blackberry users back then, but the iPhone is good enough for almost everyone today, and the iPhone changed the entire industry. That's how disruptive innovations work, and I believe that's exactly how Tesla's new model will work.

Also, do you know how everyone says I wish I would've bought Apple stock when the iPhone first appeared? Well, if I was into stock, I'd probably start buying Tesla stock just about now.

The positives are enough of an incentive to have people change their behaviours in order to compensate for the 'negatives' of using such technology. If you know you'll have 30 minutes minimum to kill then you'll plan for it. Lunch time, work time, walk around a park time, meetup and chat with other people who are waiting time, walk your dog time, mini-yoga class time, etc.. Throw in self-driving cars into the mix and the break activities will likely be more social and physical things, and less high mental activity time - unless you're a workaholic.

From what I understand 30 minute charging is amazing.

To paraphrase Richard Hammond: "Forgetting something at home when I go to work would be a 2 day round-trip because it's so far no electric car has the range. I would have to spend one night recharging the car somewhere in the middle"

His problem has just been solved. Sure, it might take him 3.5 hours (random number) instead of just 3. But that's insanely better than having to stay the night to recharge your car.

Honestly, electric cars are never going to be completely practical for people with a daily commute beyond 150 miles or so.

But if you're commuting 3 hours a day total, you have bigger issues with your life, to be honest. Move closer to where you commute!

I'd say a 150+ mile daily commute isn't practical :)

Maybe with the hyperloop even 150 miles will be "nearby" someday. See http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-hyper-loop-2012-9

Frankly, if I can't get there in less than 1/2 an hour on my bicycle, I don't think I'm interested.

Try doing that in the midwest. Finding jobs gets hard and apartments are rare and low quality, so it's not uncommon to have to settle on a 20 minute (or much more) commute by car on the freeway. There are also no bike lanes. Commuting long distances isn't great, but moving more people into the city isn't always the best option either. We learned that in the 1900's

Moving more people into an _early 1900s_ city wasn't the best option, unless you wanted a non-farm job. And then the GI bill (given predominately to white veterans over black veterans) jumpstarted white flight and the beginnings of suburbia.

I guess one should move out of the midwest then, where moving people into cities works better?

Depends on the speed with which you can travel. During rush hour, even 1.5 miles is unbearable.

Just walk. Or take a bike.

I'm doing 86 miles (43 one way) a day if I don't go into town (then its and extra 13 one way). Housing shortages will do that to you.

My commute here takes less time than my 30 mile (15 one way) commute in the Twin Cities.

Miles aren't really the deal breaker - it's the time.

I had a 130 mile commute in the 90s in Arkansas that took me.. 130ish minutes. Now I have a 32 mile commute that takes around 2 hours and is 15 miles driving, BART for 35ish minutes, and walking for 20 minutes.

Never? You're telling me that in a thousand years, we won't have electric cars able to sustain a 300 mile daily commute?

This isn't a discussion of if. It's a discussion of when.

I think he is saying even a thousand years from now 300 mile daily commute even though possible is not practical on the part of the person traveling.

With 1,000 years, feel free to think bigger: teleportation!

Beware the telefrag.

No no, I'm saying a three hour commute. Regardless of the distance there's still going to be 24 hours in a day. Spending 12% of your day commuting is bonkers.

I hope that in a thousand years we don't commute at all.

I think people don't understand how disruptive electric cars will be, when combined with autonomous cars.

When all you do is pull out your cellphone, select a route and a car picks you up in 5 minutes, takes you to your destination, and leaves... you don't worry about range and electricity and recharge.

You just use it, and the system can intelligently maintain battery levels and recharging across the fleet, ensuring efficiency.

Heck, such a system could provide gasoline or hybrid cars for trips that required them.

The Tesla has ~180 mile range on a 30 minute charge. 150 miles one way with a charger at the office sounds quite practical based on that. It'd actually be less disruptive than a gasoline vehicle.

Right, and iron horses will never replace real ones in farming because they are too heavy and use up too much coal.

Take a look into graphene-based supercapacitors. It _is_ possible to charge an electric car in a few minutes. It's just a matter of time. [and no, we're not talking EEStor. We're talking multiple research universities actively looking into the technology. Angstron Materials is one.]

I read about this charging issue being addressed in Israel with a company called Better Place that does battery swapping. The reasoning was Israel is small enough to roll out something like this on a large scale. Battery swapping sounds great because they were saying it'd only take a few minutes, which is comparable to fueling up with gas.

30 minutes is already a vast improvement over the old technology which took hours, maybe 6 hours if you weren't on the fast connection, or I heard days if you were stuck using a normal outlet.

Electric cars are 100 years old and have not improved much, bizarrely http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/05/the-status-quo-of-ele...

Well mechanical engines were there from a couple of centuries in fact. The steam engine was invented a ton lot of years before fuel driven cars caught on.

Electric cars have improved immensely.

- Better battery performance and lifespan. - Improved charging time and technology. - Distance cars can travel in a single charge. - Increased torque and horsepower. - Affordability and increases is mass production.

And most importantly, increases in the necessary infrastructure to support long-distance travel (exactly the topic at hand)

Your comment is very uninformed.

Did you read his link? The point the guy makes is completely correct.

Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density. If you had 'free energy' you'd extract C02 from the atmosphere and turn it into a hydrocarbon.

For more info look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

and this interview with Nobel Prize winning Physicist Robert Laughlin

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.htm...

the key quote is:

"The ones that are technically trained get it right away: hydrocarbons, which we burned today have the greatest energy density possible of all fuels. Things that have carbon in them. Will people fly airplanes? Usually people say yes for the same reasons. Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. Oh--you can't have airplanes unless you have hydrocarbon fuels. You could in theory do it with hydrogen, but it's highly dangerous, noxious fuel. Quantum-mechanically, we know the energy content of those fuels is optimal. There will never be anything that beats them."

A massive breakthrough in energy density for batteries might be possible but it's unlikely. Huge resources have been put into improving batteries and while they have improved it's not been enough to get near the energy density of hydrocarbons.

>>Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy.

"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible"

-Lord Kevin.

Yet we have them today, thanks to a phenomenon in physics called Bernoulli's principle- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them" - Albert Einstein.

Why, O why do we think that problems have to, must be and will be solved at the same level and direction of thought the problems were framed in? Besides the whole point of a disruptive technology is that the solutions generally come as a bolt from the blue, completely surprising even the biggest experts in those areas. Directions from which those solutions come from are so radically different paths than originally they would come from. And this has not happened once, twice but many times.

Over confidence in science especially with regards to the negative aspects is not a good direction to begin with.

That's actually not how airplanes fly at all...

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=22977

Bernoulli's principle is indeed how airplanes fly. Your link shoots down the silly equal-time theory, not Bernoulli's principle.

Basically, airplanes fly for three reasons:

1. The wing deflects air downwards. 2. Air moves faster over the top of the wing than over the bottom. Much faster than the equal-transit theory indicates. 3. Air pressure is higher on the bottom of the wing than on the top.

The important thing that few people seem to grasp is that all three are equivalent statements. They aren't additive. There aren't three different reasons airplanes fly, there's one reason airplanes fly, with three different ways to look at it.

This interesting. You say there is one reason airplanes fly. But "deflecting air downwards" is causing an lifting force by action=reaction (the way a rocket works) and "air pressure is higher on bottom of the wing than on the top" is causing a lifting force by pressure differences.

Those are different reasons, or am I mistaken here?

Nope, they're completely inseparable. If you deflect air downwards, no matter how you do it, you must end up creating a pressure differential where air pressure is higher on the bottom than on the top. If you create such a pressure differential, then no matter how you do it, you'll end up deflecting air downwards.

Pressure is just a fancy way of saying force per area. The air pressure on the bottom of the wing is just the downward force exerted by the wing on the air, divided by the wing's area. The only way to deflect air is by applying a force to it, and the only thing applying a force to it is the wing.

> Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy.

You could get a huge win by offloading the power to ground stations and beaming it aboard. You'd still need some onboard power reserve for reliability and backup reasons, but you could offload most of it. This would let you lighten your airframe, which has a snowball effect, allowing even more lightening and more efficiency. Get the craft light enough, and VTOL becomes a possibility, meaning you could land these things on heliports downtown and not have a 1 hour trip to the airport.

Just think of it as "high speed rail" with lower infrastructure costs and fewer right-of-way problems.

They have twice the range, are more than twice as fast, charge in 1/10th the time, AC, power steering, etc.

But, yea then again by your estimation internal combustion cars have not improved either as they still use fire.

Hmm The lowest end Model S vs. Fritchle Victoria Phaeton

* Similar cost, adjusted for inflation (49k vs 48k)

* 1.6x range compared to Fritchle (160mi vs 100)

* At more than 2x the speed (25max vs 55(speed for quoted range))

* With climate control

> friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli

Two malapropisms in a row, or an iOS autocorrect?

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