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Comment by wesleyd | Hacker News Reader

Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.”

Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!

(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)

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99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop, don't need separate infrastructure, logistics and supply chains for delivery of electricity. There is a very small fraction of EV trips that need charging on the go. The vast majority of trips are under 3 (or 5 miles).

> 99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop

This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage.

Even in the US, only 63% of households have a garage or carport.

"home" can be substituted for "place where car resides when owner is at home" without meaningfully changing the point

In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.

The ‘burbs truly are the worst of all worlds.

Some of the homes in my neighbourhood have 2 cars in the driveway and another two on the street.

They all move regularly. Walkability is terrible. Public transit is iffy. People have to get places on time.

Zoning changes: can't park inside, in front of the house, and on the street. This will address the problems you raised. Unlikely it will be passed.

Change these rules in hopes there are less cars? Or what?

Where will people put all the cars? The driveways holds 2, and really that’s only if you choose them wisely.

It is already illegal to park your car on the street for an extended period of time. Nobody cares.

Limit the number of vehicles owned by each address?

Fix public transit? Pipe dream. We’ve invested millions and it’s even worse.

The stores and plazas are already built, so walkability is unlikely to improve.

WFH? Actively being abolished.

We really suck at this civil planning thing, don’t we?

> In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. Most streets have street lighting and electricity, easy to add chargers to lamp posts. NYC probably hasn't heard of street lighting yet?

> The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging. I think it would be an impressive feat of engineering to charge cars while they are on the move. I like how you think, cars are mostly idling in traffic, we can consider them as stationary, and charge cars while they idle!

Parking is not assigned, sometimes you got to drive around for 20 minutes to find a spot to park over-night and its not guaranteed to be next to a street light. By idling in traffic, I meant that we would love ev's since most of the time we are just wasting gas and fuming up our own neighborhoods.

In London, I saw lampposts with EV chargers built in, as well as tastefully concealed sidewalk ports. This is not an intractable problem.

Well no it does change the point, because the place where the car resides when the owner is at home is less likely to be near a power socket unless its in a garage or the homes driveway. I can't realistically charge my EV from a socket if its on the street.

> This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage. It is a US-centric view to think that the rest of the world is hunter gatherer tribes. Most people live in some kind of constructed building which has electricity, indoor plumbing, a place to park a car. Before that building is built, the first infrastructure that is ready is electrical, without which most of the tools required for building a home do not work.

A garage is not a sine qua non for EV charging. A place to park is. If a person is buying a car, they would've already figured out a place to park. That place is right next to a building with electricity unless you are sleeping in the woods.

I don't understand why people think that running a cable (a few feet) from the nearest building to a car is impossible.

In Europe, I live in an apartment with an garage in the basement with EV chargers. Not sure why you you think it's an US-centric view.

because most buildings are too old to have an underground garage, at least in Western Europe.

> The energy density of oil is amazing

Have you heard about nuclear? Over 3 million times more energy dense than coal or gasoline.

Why not anti-matter matter reactions???

Pfff. Infinity stones put these to shame.

At least power orbs are real

https://xkcd.com/2115/

Fair but any EV owner knows after a bathroom break, quick stretch and maybe a bite to eat every 1-2hr while charging and you never even notice the stopping to charge time.

As an EV owner, I'm not sure I agree with this. I'd make less stops if not for the car's need. That said, it's a compromise I'm willing to accept since 99% of the time I'm not road tripping but commuting, and the EV is oh so nice for the commute.

I am not EV owner but that’s not how like my car trips. I can drive 4 hrs nonstop and then expect to “charge” my car in 5 minutes at the pump with a bathroom break, and be on the road.

Sometimes we like a more leisurely drive, but it should be up me to decide when that happens not the car.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with liking how EV behave, it’s just it’s not for everyone. And I think a lot of recent pullback from EVs (Ford, Honda) kinda points that way. With as fast a charger as a gas pump situation may change though, so let’s what happens!

I felt the same way as you until I took a few road trips in sn EV.

I drove about 20 hours in two days. The thing that struck me is how refreshed I felt when I arrived. Normally I'd be dead on my feet and the travel day would be lost completely but I was ready for activity on arrival. I was very surprised.

What kind of EV was it?

I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…

I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!

Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.

By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.

The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.

e-GMP platform (IONIQ 5, etc.) is really good for road trips.

At least in summer temperatures it reliably charges to 80% under 20 minutes. Its range estimate is quite good, and I can depend on it to know when I can skip a charging stop (when I first drove an EV I was freaking out about the 20% state of charge like it was a cellphone. Now I roll to the chargers with 2% left when it saves time).

It depends where you live, but infrastructure in the UK and EU has got good enough to the point I don't need backup plans. Chargers are as common as McDonald's (often quite literally). If a station is slow or busy, I can just go to the next one (and they are in clumps often enough that even with a low battery it's not a big deal).

It was a Kona 2019. Not self driving, requires hands on the wheel but it does lane keeping and adaptive cruise control.

If you find a semi going a good speed and set the follow distance to maximum, it's a very easy drive.

I think you are 3 orders of magnitude off in your airplane energy calculation.

3,168,750kWh = 3 GWh

Darn it! You are correct!

Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.

It’s the same order of magnitude, allowing people to mentally budget zero time for a charge.

You're right that it seems close enough, but only as long as we're talking about the time it takes a single vehicle to "fill up". Taking 2 minutes vs 8 minutes to fill up your car doesn't matter to you personally, but it is a significant difference to those installing and operating the fill up infrastructure since it takes 4 times as many charging points as it does gas pumps to serve the same volume of customers in a given period of time.

In a lot of cases that probably won't matter since chargers can be installed in more places than gas pumps and for gas stations that serve mainly local customers I'd expect demand for an equivalent charging station to be lower since some people will charge at home at least some of the time. But things like highway rest stops could be more of a challenge since you'd expect customer volume for EV charging to be similar to the demand for fuel so you'll need more charging stations at each stop to handle the increased time it takes each customer.

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