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Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

For sure. The lack of charging stations will eventually be solved, but longer charging times and unreliable readings might be with us forever. Hopefully the cost offset for fuel will make it worth it.

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Regarding unreliable readings of remaining charge, I'm of two minds. Consider digital cameras, which use a similar battery chemistry. For more than a decade, Sony has for some reason been basically the only manufacturer whose cameras produce a fairly specific and reliable indication of time remaining. Maybe it's a patent thing, but my Sony prosumer camera from 2002 had a better indicator than pretty much anything not from Sony I've seen since.

I'm not saying the tesla couldn't be better or that they couldn't learn something from Sony. But part of the author's complain was that he had one reading in the evening and when the temperature dropped overnight his reading the next morning was drastically lower.

Also a while a digital camera does get to spend some time outdoors it spends most of it's life in fairly people comfortable environment.

There is no reason for unreliable reading to be with us forever, accounting for temperature and driving-style in an estimation system is non-trivial but far from impossible. It is the sort of problem that will be incrementally solved as the technology matures, Telsa themselves will learn from their more northerly deployments.

Gas stations are incredibly common. Public EV charging stations will never be as common unless a different business model is adopted.

If EVs become common, people will have home charging stations. Demand for non-at-home charging stations will come from (1) folks who drive a lot and need to charge intraday (and who cannot charge at work) and (2) road trippers. The sum of both of these categories is fairly small and less demand means less supply. So if you do fit into one of those two categories, you will need to plan your driving carefully instead of figuring that you'll be able to pick up some gas when you need it. This can be overcome by arranging for the proliferation of public EV charging stations even absent the demand. Perhaps the manufacturer or municipalities will subsidize it.

Making people sit and wait for an hour whenever they need to recharge is just plain nuts. It makes the "road tripper" use case untenable. The right way to handle this for road trippers is to swap the battery packs or swap their contents. Don't make the driver wait while his battery is recharged - swap in a full pack and send him on his way. Charge the battery that was left behind slowly and at leisure, then give it to the next driver who pulls in needing a charge.

I don't care how many charging stations there are - adding multiple hours of charging time to a short trip like that is just not going to work.

Although there's one other conceivable option for a technical solution - if you could add charging circuitry to the freeway and recharge while driving, that would be a game-changer.

There's a company that's been working on swappable car batteries for some time now:

http://www.betterplace.com/

I agree with you that this is the only realistic mainstream future of electric vehicles as long as batteries remain in their current low-density state.

If swapping is the answer then in that case you need a non-ownership model for batteries. I am not going to swap out a brand-new battery for a 2 year old one and then be stuck with that one for the foreseeable future on my regular local car use.

I think what will happen is that people will all own EVs and then rent gas cars for long distance trips until there is some huge breakthrough in battery capacity or charging times.

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