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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Get back to me when a practical, affordable, and go over 300 mile on a charge, battery powered car is here. Currently batteries are not a practical replacement. Currently if you want to hit near 300, you don't quite get there, your in the eighty thousand plus range if that low after common options for your only real choice. Home charging is still a four hour plus affair with the best chargers.

Odd he claims that a hundred mile range isn't available using "safe tanks" when the Honda Clarity has been around six years and does twice that.

Manufacturers seem to be betting on fuel cells because they have many other uses other than cars. They also will have a weight advantage over battery powered cars

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Lots of people who have yet to own an electric car think like you do. People who've tried it and have home chargers discover:

1) It's really nice that your car is fully charged every morning... sure beats having to visit gas stations on a regular basis. 4 hours is not a big deal if you're asleep.

2) If you want to go long distance, a network like Tesla's supercharger does the trick. (Tesla owners drive SF-LA by stopping twice for 20 minutes, or pay for a 5-minute battery swap once.)

3) While the only long-range electric car today costs 80k+, Chevy and Tesla are both planning on releasing a cheaper long-range car in 2017.

Is it the case that anyone other than cars is betting on hydrogen fuel cells? The only big fuel cells that I've ever heard of are used in the datacenter industry, where Bloom Energy is the main fuel cell company, and they power theirs on hydrocarbons, not hydrogen.

and have home chargers

This is an incredibly significant point that continuously gets glossed over in these pro v con lists. I park my car on the street, and that's not particularly uncommon. Should I run an extension cable over the footpath? What if I have to park further away than my cable reaches?

It's not glossed over: That's why I mentioned it. You are not in the sweet spot for this generation of electric cars. If you look around Hacker News, you will find a bunch of people like you complaining that it doesn't work for people like you. Sorry. Electric cars can grow a lot without buyers like you. If they grow to the point that you're a big problem, they'll be pretty common.

I would run some underground conduit to a box in the ground by the road with ~10m of extra extension cable in the box.

Currently technology is OK.

Your reference to 300 miles is probably based on your most extreme situation when you go on a long trip. If the charging network (DC fast charging, in under 30 mins) is there, 300 miles isn't a problem.

I have a Nissan Leaf with 160 km range and it has never been a problem yet. Home charging is perfectly fine, every morning my car is full. I will never need a faster charger at home. Fast chargers are useful on the roads near highway exits for when you do long trips, much like with gas stations.

95% of the time, my travel distance is under 120 km per day so for only 5% of the time I need to plan a recharge or swap car with my parents, sisters or friends or rent a car for very long trips.

For people with a Chevrolet Volt, they don't even have this issue, when they go on long trips, they simply charge when they can and run on gas for most of the trip.

Personally, I am fine with current technology.

In my case, I live in a city of 200,000 in the lower 48, and according to Tesla's website, the nearest open access charger is 347 miles away. Now I expect those numbers to go down, but currently, a Tesla would be a toy and not a viable means of transportation given my driving habits. I have no issue with alternative fuels such as electric or HFC, but it it is going to be a very long time before it is viable in low density parts of the country, at least for me.

Tesla chargers are only for Tesla, sadly. As much as I love them, I cannot use them either with my Nissan Leaf.

And yes, central and the lower states of US are behind in term of sales AND charging options available.

Hopefully this will change!

Nearly all car trips are way under 300 miles. I believe the P95 trip distance (in the USA) is 30 miles each way. Most people can use an affordable pure-electric car such as the Leaf, e-Golf, or Fiat 500e for most trips. From a system optimization perspective, it's OK if some people (like you) always need the range of an internal combustion engine and everyone else switches to electric.

yeah 90% of my trips might be short, but i'm not going to go and rent a separate car when I do need a long trip

That's a valid point. But perhaps you'd be willing to paus for ~20 minutes every 3 hours or so? (especially if you make long trips infrequently)

Yeah, adequate infrastructure at all the 'break' points would essentially solve the problem as people should be taking those 3 hour breaks anyway

Sure, and for some people the solution to that is car sharing, or car pooling, or just owning two cars.

I don't understand your comment about how home charging still takes four hours. Who cares how long it takes as long as it can be completed overnight?

I've driven plenty of gas cars, including a bunch of recent vintage, that couldn't go 300 miles on a full tank.

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