Hacker News Reader

Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

    > At 1.5 hrs/day, we will only ever need to
    > charge when stopping anyway to eat or sightsee,
    > never just for charging itself.

I'm all for the development of electric cars but downplaying having to stop at what's effectively a gas station in the middle of nowhere for 1.5 hours per day is pretty disingenuous.

You wouldn't get a lot of people buying a normal gasoline powered car if it took 1.5 hrs to fill it up each time, so electric cars have a lot to make up for in other features if you're using them for road trips like this, rather than just commuting where you're charging overnight.

View on HN

It's free. If you could get gasoline for 200 miles for free, would you mind waiting for 30 minutes? I guess it's $25-30 worth of gasoline, corresponding to $50-60 per hour of waiting. I could wait.

With the battery swap that Tesla is now introducing, you could also chose to swap the battery in a couple of minutes.

charging electric cars ain't free.

No, but using the Tesla Supercharger stations is free for Model S owners.

It costs $80,000 but it comes with a free car.

So it's built into the price of the Model S and TANSTAAFL and all that. The point being that you don't do a transaction at the supercharger station in the same way you do at a gas station. Theoretically, you could use a supercharger station multiple times a day and pay nothing additional.

It's like the "free maintenance" on BMWs. Or "free loaner cars" when your car is in for service.

Seems pretty nitpicky to point out that it's not in fact free. Whatever it is, it's quite a bit different than chucking some dollars at Chevron or whomever.

Charging electric cars is free at the stations where Elon Musk is using solar canopies:

http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

Charging comes at no additional cost.

It's NOT free, you paid for a very expensive battery upfront.

I would mind waiting 30 minutes on my own and with children in the car doubly so. Yes.

That 1.5 hours represents three(3) thirty(30) minute charges. A supercharge gets 200 miles per 30 minute charge.

http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger.

This is the beginning of a new way to fuel cars and the charge time technical hurdle (30 minutes) although already small, will be reduced in future battery technologies.

Sure. It's going to get better. But it's still 1.5h per day spent on the equivalent of a gas station. If you wanted to stop for sightseeing while on the road in a gasoline powered car you'd likely take 10 minutes or so to fill up for the whole day, and then stop somewhere more interesting.

I'm just saying that it's disingenuous marketing speak by Elon Musk to try to pass of a 1.5 hr mandatory stop at a place you wouldn't have stopped at unless you needed to as "stopping anyway".

True if you're only interested in getting there as fast as possible. For most people who choose to drive from coast to coast, stopping often to see random things is part of the fun and reason they chose to drive in the first place.

Indeed, I love stopping at random places when I'm on the road.

Having to spend 1.5hr per day at a gas station is not a random stop however, and having to spend 1.5hr per day at one in lieu of stopping somewhere more interesting takes some of the fun out of driving and stopping at interesting places on the road.

Won't the interesting places want to attract people who can afford expensive cars? Won't they start to add charging points?

Now someone's starting to get it ...

The inferesting places are not always private properties that are trying to attract people. On my road trips, I often end up stopping and stretching my legs at scenic overlooks, hiking trails, lakes etc, none of which are likely to sprout charging stations any time soon.

Agreed. I could point you at any of a number of highly memorable breaks I've taken pretty much out in the middle of nowhere.

But you've got to eat. And if the place is interesting to the level of offering food, the bonus of adding a charging station should be a reasonably good investment.

I think the point is that Tesla are likely to have their choice of charging locations as they build out their network, and even non-SuperCharger stations will offer some range extension for the cost of a 220AC outlet.

I often forget how big the US is.

But the government builds roads, and taxes[1] some road users. It's in the government's interest to provide some kind of infrastructure for lower carbon transport.

Providing a few thousand charging points for electric vehicles seems a reasonable thing for government to do, so long as those are vendor-neutral and can be used by any electric vehicle.

The SuperChargers are not at gas stations. They are on purpose locating them near malls, restaurants etc.. I certainly would not like to spend all day cooped up in a car without a couple of stops to eat or stretch my legs, and I think you'd find very few people drive all day without taking breaks to eat etc. of that kind of length.

That's the thing, isn't it? I've just charged up my battery, so I know I have 200 miles in my "tank." And it's 170 miles to the next Supercharger. So when we spot a billboard in the distance advertising some awesome spectacle and the kids say, "Can we go there, Dad?" I have to determine whether it's more than 15 miles off course. 'Cause if it is, then no, we can't go there. Unless someone wants to push the car.

To be fair, it probably took a while before gas stations sprouted up like mushrooms all over the vast, heaving bosom of America too, and I do wish nothing but success for Musk and Tesla. Want to see that infrastructure get built quickly, because in the next 5 years or so, I'm going to be in the market for a new car, and I'd love for it to be one of those affordable electrics with a 200+ mile range.

It's 30 minutes per supercharger stop. I have a challenge getting my friends back into the car that quickly on road trips. (I have chaotic friends. Musicians.)

Obligatory Louis CK link: http://touch.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amaz...

Elon Musk is on the cutting edge of changing our society and tries to make the best of the hiccups along the way and you're complaining about the slightly degraded experience of charging your car with... renewable energy??

Give Elon some slack, I'm sure he'll find a way for you to reduce the charging time to an acceptable time in the near future, but in the mean time try to be a little amazed by what's he accomplishing here: making electrical cars a part of our society.

This is disingenuous. The critique is not so much over the inconvenience of having to recharge, but how his statement glosses over that inconvenience.

The critique isn't even accurate in the context of the trip. 1.5 hours isn't the duration of each stop. It's the total time per day.

This is PR, so spinning the charge time as nothing more than a good opportunity to grab a bite to eat is smart. One assumes that the charging stations are located in places with a variety of nearby amenities for this purpose?

To me the fact that any journey would have to be planned with charging stations as waypoints is more obnoxious than the actual stopping itself.

It's obnoxious to use gasoline...it's just the norm so it doesn't seem so.

No, it's not. Every 300 or so miles you stop and pump gas for a few minutes at any number of available locations, and then you move on. You don't have to plan your trip around gas station locations. If charge stations become ubiquitous so that isn't a requirement then this is ameliorated somewhat.

I've always had this silly idea for an electric car company that sells cars but 'loans' out the batteries. When you want to recharge, you pull up to a station and a trained technician swaps out your entire battery setup for a freshly charged one in a few minutes, basically meaning you are paying to rent a set of batteries. Not sure how economically and technically viable this plan is, but it does seem convenient from a consumer perspective.

Once upon a time, I'm sure you couldn't get very far in a gasoline-powered car because there weren't many gas stations. Also, Elon is already trying the battery swap idea:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/22/tesla-motor...

Indeed. Many early cross country motorists had to buy small bottles of gasoline at pharmacies (where it was sold as some sort of topical treatment, I think.)

Tesla is already testing battery swapping: http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap

This is exactly what Shai Agassi tried doing with Better Place [1]. Sadly they're bankrupt now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

All the supercharger points are on their website, with a list of amenities, and yes they are pretty much all next to malls, restaurants etc.

Imagine how long of a wait you'll have if there's a line.

If you're the only electric car in town it's not a big deal, but if you have to wait for 3 other cars to fill up...

Hopefully more efficiency in battery capacity as well as in solar cells down the road will alleviate some of that with built in solar panel in hood and part of the roof as an option. I'd have to run numbers, but of top of my head says with ideal weather conditions and 1m2 clean hood panel you'd gain about extra mile or km a day which isn't all that great now.

The cost of solar cells, the limited size, the exposure they'd have on a car (impacts, rocks, hail), the percent of time spent out of sunlight (under trees, carports, indoor garages), and the very limited power supplied even when decking over the entire vehicle, vs. the cost of plugging into an outlet (which itself can be powered by a larger, permanently active, and optimally oriented PV array) makes solar-on-car pretty much a non-starter.

Perhaps a small array for auxiliary electronics, but even that's really not particularly cost-effective.

I didn't mean as a sole energy source, auxiliary. Somewhat like brakes converting kinetic energy to electric current.

But even a breakthrough gave us 100% efficient solar cells it would only marginally add to the range. We're never going to see a 50x improvement in solar cells, that would violate thermodynamics.

If you want a futuristic range-enhancing technology to dream about, look at in-road inductive charging (in-road discussion starts around 5:00): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b71wC4z8its Infrastructure costs would probably be massive though.

Car2Go has solar panels on the roofs of a good number of the gasoline powered Smartcars in their fleet. This helps to keep the cars' battery from wearing down while powering the onboard cellular data and GPS. The panel however is promoted as only 100W which is enough for this purpose but wouldn't go far in terms of locomotive power, and it seems that newer models have forgone PV in favor of moonroofs and regular (presumably more durable) rooftops.

Sightseeing at the supercharger station? Count me in.

I'm sure they've got them on the North Rim, and one near Devil's Tower, and Moab, and Yosemite, Yellowstone near Old Faithful, and on the Going to the Sun Highway. Conveniently right by the trail heads. Or not.

I've seen the idea of simply replacing the batteries with charged ones in stations thrown around quite a bit in previous discussions and it always seemed the perfect solution to me. It's even faster than pumping gas (if done correctly) and you don't have to worry about your battery capacity degrading (when the station detects a battery won't hold less than a certain amount of charge it'd but the battery offline for recycling).

What's the flaw in this reasoning? Or the hidden cost, more likely.

A) Consider the technological acumen of the average filling station worker. Is that the guy you want to be in charge of determining whether any given battery is fit for reuse?

B) Consider the weight of an average automobile's starter battery. Not the sort of thing that a petite woman like my wife would be able to sling around on her own. If you hire battery jockeys to swap them in and out, that increases the cost.

C) Now consider the fact that an electric car requires a LOT larger battery than a starter battery. After all, the starter battery only has to turn the starter motor for a few seconds; the EV battery has to turn the entire drivetrain for the entire time you're traveling between charging stations. If you broke the battery modules up into easily manageable pieces, it would take just as long to pull them all out and replace them with fresh ones as it would to just charge them up in place.

D) Consider that because an EV battery is so large, they tend to be located in fairly inaccessible places--under the passenger compartment, molded into the frame... Thus, it is not a simple job to remove and replace.

There are probably other obstacles to implementing a battery swap scheme that I'm not seeing off the top of my head. And none of these are truly insurmountable, but the solutions tend to involve the movement of pieces of green paper, or the big hand on the watch dial.

For all those points I imagined the process would've been automated, like those automatic car wash stations. Obviously manhandling the batteries seems difficult to achieve.

You're slightly off on a few points.

A is handled in an automated fashion, in a similar way to many other modern service intervals. You don't have your average BMW or Mercedes mechanic hooking up Siemens bits to jigs to verify traces in the same way that you wouldn't have your "average filling station worker" checking all the LiPo cells. Battery health checks are already built into the vehicle.

B is handled by relatively simple tools for the purpose of moving around hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of battery components.

C and D are trivial to solve.

All of this has already been solved in the Model S. Deployment will take some time due to cost.

[1] - http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap

My point is simply that swapping batteries is not a simple, do-it-yourself process. The batteries are heavy, bulky (at least for now), and inconveniently shaped and mounted, necessitating additional labor, tools, and time to swap. And a battery of unknown provenance may harbor damage that is invisible to the human eye--there needs to be a health checker at the point of swapping, because if you don't get that checkup until after it's mounted in your car, you risk having to waste your time doing a second swap. And that equipment is also going to drive up the cost.

I suspect that convenience and cost will tip the scales away from swapping and toward recharging, especially if the recharge cycle can be sped up and the infrastructure build-out continues.

This is exactly what Shai Agassi tried doing with Better Place [1]. Sadly they're bankrupt now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

This isn't about how annoying it is to stop for 1.5/hrs a day, it's about quelling the notion that some people don't even think it's possible.

> if it took 1.5 hrs to fill it up each time

Disingenuous? That's 1.5 hours scheduled per day, not each stop.

1.5 hours is NOT a lot for an entire day's trip. Two weeks ago I took a much shorter 240 mile trip and we stopped for about an hour to fill up gas, rest and eat. The bottom line is this is a very typical usage pattern, many people like to break long car trips into 3 - 4 hour segments so Tesla fits right in WITHOUT any inconvenience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com