Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrRadar | Hacker News Reader

My Chevrolet Bolt actually shows me the real-time kW draw from the high voltage battery and, while it's highly dependent on driving conditions, it seems to require around 12-15 kW to maintain 60 MPH on a flat dry road using cruise control and with the climate control turned off. It's not the most efficient model on the market, but it's also far from the least; as you noted your F-150 would need significantly more energy under the same conditions.

View on HN

The lightning is ridiculous, it weight 70% more than your bolt and is huge.

My partner and I honestly bought it to be a whole house backup battery. My regions get ice storms and we have hundreds of gallons of aquariums we'd need to keep powered through a long duration power outage. 135 kwh of battery storage cost more than the 135kwh battery truck, so we got a whole house battery backup system with wheels and cruise control. It can backstop 80 amps for 3 days.

If it were me I'd just get a whole house generator in that situation, seems like it would be a lot less than the truck with batteries or the batteries. The bonuses are I wouldn't need to replace an expensive truck with another expensive truck in the future if I didn't want to. 3 days is impressive, but I had an ice storm leave my family without power for 3 weeks once.

It's pretty strange that 135kwh of stationary batteries are more expensive than 135kwh with a truck attached, seems like some one must be running a screw job on the storage batteries.

Regulations!

We've had pretty poor experiences with generators in the past. A whole house generator is very expensive, especially with a transfer switch. Without a transfer switch you have to run the generator outside and route power inside through a window left ajar, which is not great when the ice storm has happened. The truck is parked in an insulated garage and is easy to route power from.

3 days is impressive if you're pulling maximum you can from the truck, if you pull anything less than that your time is greater. Our aquariums do not require all 80 amps. Max length power outage for us has been a week and the truck will easily last that long.

And totally agree about the cost of battery power banks. This was a few years ago, so things might be different now.

You can't drive the truck during that week? So you need to keep a spare car for the time your battery bank isn't mobile?

Rather, for all the other time when the power is working, you can use your generator for transportation!

I don't know about you, but I'm not driving very much during or after an ice storm.

Besides, the aquariums are fine without power for an hour or three, so technically I could if needed.

For what it's worth you get fairly similar results if you assume an efficiency for a ICE engine (25-40% depending on a lot of things) and work backwards from the energy density of the fuel and the milage you achieve over a trip.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com