Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

JonChesterfield

If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars. And for the other electric vehicles that haven't worked it out yet. Only reason I'm on petrol is unwillingness to wait an hour to recharge the car.

The rest of the infra is fine if that can be done. Array of batteries and/or capacitors at the supply point and draw continuously from the grid.

Most entertainingly run a diesel generator on site if that doesn't work out. Lines up well with basing them at the existing fuel stations, got the diesel supply already sorted out.

Put a bunch of solar near it when you can. Maybe sell back to grid, nice to have the extra capacity available.

All comes down to capital deployment at that point. Do the calculations on how much to charge for slow car charge vs fast charge, fallback to slow with an apology/discount when the infra is struggling etc.

Huge news. Iff the cars don't catch fire when plugged in.

It definitely does not take an hour if you have an 800v car and an 800v EA station.

Can’t speak highly enough about lucid, but their current offerings are definitely not for the budget conscious, but that should change soon.

I have as far as I'm aware the cheapest 800v car on sale in the US (Hyundai Ioniq 5) and in the right weather conditions a 20-80% charge is legitimately 10 minutes.

The weather conditions do unfortunately matter. Travelling during the post-Christmas blizzard last year was very much less than ideal. The battery heaters in my car could not keep up with how bitterly cold and windy it was and I had multiple 30-45 minute charging sessions because it wasn't ever warm enough to accept more than ~120kW.

I'm looking forward to traveling with it in the warm season and seeing how things compare.

Same with the EV6. Charged at a Rivian station from 20-80% in 15 minutes.

Now (in China) there are also cars with sodium-ion batteries, instead of lithium-ion batteries.

Sodium-ion batteries have the disadvantage of a worse energy per weight ratio, but they also have an advantage (besides the fact that they will become cheaper when their production will be more mature): they work much better at low temperatures, not losing capacity or charging speed until minus 40 Celsius degrees.

Therefore, they may become preferable in colder climates, where they will not have the problems described by you.

> If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars

Chinese people are complaining about this. In highway service stops, the megawatt charger is too fast, the 20%-95% charging is done before people returns from the toilet. Realistically, the charging speed should take around 10 minutes in average for everyone.

Or there could be some price surges. You are in a really hurry pay some 1.2x price for 3 min megawatt charge, or flat price for a regular 10 min charge.

For me EVs already won when charging got down to 20 minutes.

EVs charge unattended. It takes less of my own time to leave EV plugged in parked next to a place I want to be at, than to go drive to a gas station and stand there holding a smelly nozzle.

Agreed. Right now EVs are almost strictly superior for day to day usage (only real downside is that the higher weight goes through tires faster). But for road trips, combustion vehicles blow them out of the water. If I'm taking a 12 hour road trip, no way am I going to take an EV if that means I will have to spend an extra hour or two charging it.

My wife has an EV and it's genuinely really nice. But until they get the charging experience on par with the speed of filling up a gas tank, we will always have one of our two cars be a combustion car, to give us that extra flexibility for long trips.

For once or twice a year road trip I’d just rent a combustion car, otherwise it’ll just be sitting in the garage not good as a daily driver.

Or just eat an extra few minutes of charging time once or twice a year; it's simply not a big deal. Charging at home saves me so much time relative to getting gas that the occasional road trip wait is already overcompensated for. ICE/hybrid only saves you time if you can't charge at home or do lots of road trip type driving.

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