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Comment by numpad0 | Hacker News Reader

> bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute

If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.

If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).

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If you're in the city a car shouldn't even be a major consideration (ideally).

Yeah, so few households that still own a car but don't use for commute choose cheaper ICEs that require no attention during weekdays. Then company cars driven weekdays when necessary remain ICE for familiarity as well as various EV chicken and egg problems.

There is no electricity in Tokyo?

The canonical American setup of a house with a garage where you can charge your car is exceedingly rare in Tokyo. Most people live in apartments and don't have cars, and even suburbam houses rarely have garages. If they have cars, they're parked in the apartment garage or a monthly contract parking lot, neither of which has charging.

It's a solvable chicken and egg problem, and China cracked it, but for time being Japan is way behind the curve in EV adoption.

Robotic parking but not charging as part of it seems odd.

The trays that hold cars are either passed between different rails or rotated around like a paternoster lift(the Prague city hall weird elevator thing). It's just incompatible with the concept of a cable, and a third rail or giant bus bar docking plug upgrades for those systems would be too costly and risky.

Maybe that might have happened already if Japan was as insane as it was in 1995, but it just costs too much right now.

You’d think they could have a connector which lined up fairly easily when storing them and building a new one. Have a standard 30kW supply which automatically plugs in, then powers an on ramp charger. Not every ramp/spec would need the electic, only cars that need charging.

Indeed this seems to be an available product:

https://www.ip2.co.jp/parking/kikaishiki/products/ev-chargin...

https://www.tokyo-gas.co.jp/news/topics/20220930-04.html

With this being a retrofit

https://www.mhi.com/jp/news/1101285025.html

So it just seems to be a commercial question of demand rather than a technical question of feasibility.

Yeah, they do exist but IIUC, real world deployments are rare. I totally forgot about this when writing the original comment, but a lot of these systems can't take many SUVs and all Tesla vehicles(including Model 3) mainly due to width and also to height. Maybe that is a compounding factor for rarity of those upgrades.

That's true for majority of cases, but a small percentage of Tokyo that needs to visit places taxis and trains don't go is still a large number.

Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?

A car should always be a major consideration for someone's needs. Especially if you have a family with young children or are disabled. Discounting cars as useless because mass transit exists is a terrible idea.

Unless you live in a city that has mass transit that actually works.

Thanks, car company talking point.

Walkable towns and cities should always be a major consideration for human needs. Especially because most people go through stages in their lives of themselves being young children, sickness, injury, having young children, ageing and losing ability with age in a way that isn't traditionally considered 'disabled' but functionally is. Relying on being able to afford and drive a car as a neccessary part of life is a terrible idea.

In Tokyo however you have literally one of the best Public Transit systems in the world. So why buy car?

I don't know, but people do buy cars so long their financial and parking situations allow. Many seem to be used for non-daily/non-daytime purposes(Home Depot/IKEA/Costco, kids/pets/luggage too loud/bulky/stinky for trains, had a bad day and must hit touge at 2AM, whatever). ICEs probably fit those use cases better than commuter EVs as they are, which are built around constant trickle charges and regular driving.

   > robotic garages are everywhere

Robotic WHAT? That's crazy, if it's what I'm imagining. Is Tokyo that much crowded?

You park your car in a stall, get out of your car, and then the stall closes and it moves a platform under your car and stores it someplace. You punch in your claim number, pay your parking fee, and then it gets your car and puts it back in the stall.

They're in places other than Tokyo as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog

One was featured in the old Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift movie. That was probably the first time I had seen one, about 20 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8

Way back there was a news story about one of those, in which the owner didn't pay the licence fee for the software, so the software company bricked their parking garage with loads of people's cars inside.

City of Hoboken, NJ. Plenty of more recent stories about Hoboken using robots, so I guess it didn't put them off.

Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742

(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)

That's crazy awesome... I wish I'd had use for one where I live just to test it out LOL

It’s not some Japan-only technology. You see them in New York City too.

20 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8

https://roboticparking.com/how-it-works/

...as one example.

Unlike bumfuck nowhere, Tokyo offers decent public transportation. Right?

Tokyo has a similar car ownership as Amsterdam - 0.4 per household.

About 75% of houses in Amsterdam own zero cars, and thus most of the rest have two.

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