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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

China has already solved the range problem by speeding up charging. When you can recharge 5 hours of highway driving in range during a 5-minute bathroom stop, an additional few hundred miles just isn't that useful anymore.

You could also go the other way and use the improved range to shrink the battery, but with the ongoing battery cost drop that's not exactly a gamechanger either - and fast-charging long-range Chinese EVs are available for their domestic market for a fraction of the cost of entry-level Western models as well...

Don't get me wrong, improving aerodynamics is a nice goal, but with the ongoing push towards gigantic SUVs there's zero chance anything even remotely resembling this concept car will ever see the light of day.

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Increased charging rate also means that fewer charging stations can serve more cars. One Megawatt charger can serve 4x as many cars as a 250 kW charger in the same span of time.

Sub-10-minute charging is going to be standard in new Chinese EVs very soon. There are already many new models on the market this year with charging times between 5 and 10 minutes. There will soon be cars with Megawatt charging speeds that sell for $15k.

As I understand it, Chinese manufacturers have optimized for a different set of parameters than European manufacturers. The Europeans emphasize range, but the Chinese are more willing to trade range for cost while optimizing charging rate.

I'd rather have longer range than faster charging because I pay so much less for electricity at home than at a public charging station.

Being able to bring more energy with me is a very useful.

Both are irrelevant for your sub-100-mile daily commute, and the additional initial charge for a twice-a-year road trip is a rounding error.

The additional range is nice for home charging when you regularly do 500-mile-plus daily round trips, but that's way beyond regular commute ranges, and someone like an on-location service technician will have the company pay for it anyways.

I won't say that nobody does it, but we're definitely talking about edge cases here.

For me it would not be about commuting so much as about leisure. I work from home and so have no commute at all.

I’m a mountain biker I want to put a tow bar rack on the back with the bikes.

That will reduce range on its own and added with the long journeys to bike parks I would prefer to be able to not have to charge if I can avoid it.

Or at least to have more options on when, where and for how long I stop.

Either way I think the benefit for me would be after the vehicle is well-worn and only has 10 or 20% of its original range remaining.

If it was so much more efficient than average to begin with that could make the difference whether it was still viable for daily use including short commutes for a number of additional years when almost all other vehicle choices would require a new battery at that point.

Batteries are a bit like capacitors, and I think people are aware how some of the shoddiest capacitors were placed on motherboards for a while there before people figured out how substandard their lifetime was after it caused so many premature failures.

However the engineers who used about twice as much capacitance as the minimum to start with, whether it was intentional or not, were not struck nearly as bad.

I strongly believe these announcements are simply performance art for the capital markets to keep the share price higher than fundamentals would dictate.

Great, you've designed and prototyped the vehicle. When will they be built at the rate BYD and other Chinese automakers are building EVs? Until then, it's vaporware. All that matters is deliveries (China is exporting ~4M more vehicles per year than VW delivers globally, as of this comment).

If this is messaging fluff, it's aimed at regulators and politicians in Europe. Not shareholders.

I don't know man, they're cutting 100k jobs to keep the dividends flowing (The Porsche-Piëch family controls a majority of VW's voting rights through Porsche SE) while closing factories. That strikes me as "preserve the share price and profits while the ship sinks" versus investment to scale EV sales to compete.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556939

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/26/vw-cut-jobs...

> versus investment to scale EV sales to compete

You can do both if you convince Berlin or Brussels to give you cash.

Are Berlin or Brussels giving VW cash?

This car is roughly 3-4x more efficient than the average Chinese SUV, which typically consume well above 20 kWh/100 km (which energetically, though not in terms of emissions, approaches what an efficient compact ICE car consumes). It does this range on a 50-something kWh battery pack, instead of a three-digit kWh battery pack. Since consumption is so low, range added per minute of charging is up there. Everything can be smaller, lighter, made with less resources, creating fewer emissions, byproducts and downstream effects etc.

Yes, driving truck-sized cars with two-ton batteries the size of a french-door fridge also works and also easily moves 1.5 people per trip.

> with the ongoing push towards gigantic SUVs

this is not a global thing.

Perhaps not "global", but it sure seems to be pretty much the entire Western world by now. The US was the first to lose its sedans, but over here in Europe the cars are rapidly expanding as well.

Personally would never buy an SUV. Don't think I'm the only one even if that market still has some room to grow.

I'm with you, but there's a bit of an arms race where the more people have SUVs, the more unsafe people in non-SUVs feel (due to collision characteristics, but also because they can't see past the damn things).

Are we sure that's still happening? It definitely did happen, but anecdotally the SUVs I see on the road seem to be shrinking slightly, from mid and full size SUVs to compact and subcompact SUVs. Not down to Sedans, but not as big as 10 years ago. Maybe my location is weird though.

cars WERE expanding. the reason for this were the road-tax cuts for EVs. Now that this is over, people start thinking again and we see a big shift towards sedans and cars like that.

Where is it not a thing? Japan?

I partially agree, but this doesn’t totally address the range issue. There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.

The western states are fairly well served by interstates, and all the interstates are now well served by chargers. Obviously there are routes that don't use interstates that aren't served, but in the continental US there is no spot that is more than 150 miles from a charger, and very few that are more than 50.

True, but as an EV driver I feel more comfortable when there are a couple of chargers available in an area — I run into too many chargers which aren’t working to enjoy relying on a single option.

This is literally the only reason I have a J3400 adapter, as much as I hate the idea of giving money to a Musk company we have to admit that Tesla are one of only two companies installing charging stations that has an incentive to maximize coverage instead of profitability (the other being Rivian who is largely targeting off-highway areas ignored by the other networks).

Heads up, Loves is deploying their own fast DC charging network.

https://www.loves.com/ev-charging

That's great, but honestly truck stops are the most obvious places and I'd be willing to bet that the majority of those locations already have at least one if not more than one fast charging provider either at the same exit or the next one. What I mean by coverage is more of the places where they don't put truck stops. At least where I'm at if I need to fast charge locally I generally have to travel further out of my way to charge with non-Tesla providers.

When I'm traveling long distances on the interstate it's always been easy to pick my favorite provider.

> There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker

Where? I live in Wyoming. The folks who have EVs around me are doing fine–there aren't many public chargers on a square-mile basis, but there aren't many places the public is randomly going. If you're travelling on a highway, you're passing chargers about half as regularly as you're passing gas stations.

My next vehicle will be an EV. (I'm waiting for non-Tesla self driving to get a bit better.)

I partially agree for a different reason.

Yes the Chinese have better infrastructure. Probably even better technology out in production available to them at this point. But so what? I mean it's great for the rest of the world. And that's awesome. But how are we plebes in the US ever gonna get access to those vehicles?

It's not as simple an issue as people make it out to be here in the US.

But yes. Good on Europe and China for pushing these technologies forward.

Population-wise that's a rounding error, and very few people routinely take 500+ mile road trips without ever encountering a rest stop or town large enough to warrant a charger.

Perhaps there are some farm workers left who would like some additional range, but they can always throw an extra battery pack or two in the cargo bed, Cybertruck-style.

There will always be people who aren't perfectly served by the currently-available options. We shouldn't let the outliers dominate the conversation when the existing options are sufficient for the vast majority.

> There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.

Not really anymore, at least not as far as places people regularly need to drive for personal reasons. I'm not saying you can't find people for whom an EV isn't a practical option, I don't even have to look outside of my inner suburban neighborhood to find those, but just like in my neighborhood the majority of people even living in the rural west would have no problem having an EV as a daily because they can charge at home.

Most people aren't driving 200+ miles every day or constantly towing things even if they live and work in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that they can install a fuel station that has little to no operating cost basically anywhere that has a good view of the sky offers advantages of its own.

Where?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=walmart+ev

https://supercharge.info/map

https://www.plugshare.com/

US Gains 11,300 Ultra-Fast Chargers in Bet to Lure More EV Drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815932 - January 2026 (11 comments)

Shrinking the battery is still a win as the vehicles can become smaller, or a same size one can have more storage. Also it reduces weight, which is significant.

Finally, higher density batteries make it easier to electrify other applications like trucks and trains.

> an additional few hundred miles just isn't that useful anymore.

Bad take.

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