Comment by cpprototypes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpprototypes | Hacker News Reader

Most discussions of FC and BEV miss the most important factor that will determine which one succeeds in the marketplace. Comparing engine efficiency, pollution, none of that matters compared to this single factor. And that factor is infrastructure.

BEV supporters often assume that everyone lives in a nice suburban home with a garage. But the reality is far from this. Millions live in apartments/condos with parking structures that contain hundreds or even thousands of cars. And there may be a trend of the younger generations favoring denser urban living instead of the suburban living of past generations. Installing a few charging ports in a parking structure that has hundreds of parking spots is not a realistic solution. Will the owners of apartments and condos be willing to install hundreds of electric plugs into parking structures? I think the answer is either no, or they would do it too slowly to determine the FC vs BEV fight.

So for the millions in this situation, there are only these options for the future. BEV battery swapping stations vs Hydrogen stations. Supercharger is too slow compared to hydrogen filling. Only battery swapping is comparable. Which infrastructure is built more quickly will determine if FC or BEV wins. Energy efficiency, pollution, none of that matters compared to this.

Fuel cells require massive infrastructure before a single FC car can be sold openly. BEV can saturate the market of people with access to parking and power right now - and that's not a small market.

The FC vs BEV fight doesn't start when FC enters the market, it's already on and FC is losing.

Why would presume that owners would not want to install electric car chargers in their garages if there was demand for it? Presumably in such a situation you would be expected to pay for the electricity in the same way you pay for your gas, so installing chargers would actually make money. The building owners would have to hate money to not want to install electric car chargers in their buildings.

Also, for many urban dwellers the choice is academic because they choose to not own a car at all. Instead using car sharing services these services would have no problem ensuring that their cars get charging ports.

These things aren't free. An apartment with a parking garage space with an electric car charger will certainly cost more than one without a charger, and WAY more than one without the parking space at all. If this doesn't translate directly into higher rents then the building owners won't want to do it.

Making sure a shared car is charged sounds like a nightmare. The whole point of car sharing is the cars get more use and spend less time parked. Considering how long it takes to charge some of these rigs, I'm surprised that the sharing companies have adopted them. My car share offers three models of battery-electric vehicle, one of them is the ridiculous Scion that only goes 35 miles between charges. Personally I don't understand how the economics works on that.

These things nearly are free if they'll last (and are used) for 20 years.

These things are pretty inexpensive if you already have conduit and room on a power panel.

That's why my local city requires new construction, from single-family up to big apartment buildings, to pre-install conduit etc. such that it's not bad to subsequently add chargers to garages and parking areas. It's pretty cheap to do that at construction time; for retrofitting, the argument revolves around how to amortize the (admittedly larger) cost over the lifetime of the asset.

My city even has street parking and public garages with chargers.

These are not hard problems to solve. The main unknown is whether chargers are going to be actively used for a long time or not.

Paris already has a very successful shared electric car device called Autolib. I use it at least once a week, and it's brilliant. The scheme works because the battery has a range of about 150km, but the typical trip is only 5-10km. The systemight not work as well in less dense cities.

Wow, this is interesting: they use a car that I haven't seen mentioned before. It has a range a bit longer than the Leaf. In low-speed urban driving it's good for 250km range, or 150km on the highway. Given that it's mostly used for short trips in cities, that's enough that it will probably last an entire day, and then charge fully overnight.

> assume that everyone lives in a nice suburban home with a garage

Well, at the moment they can sell to the people who do live like that. If adoption takes off they could then build more infrastructure.

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