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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

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.

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