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Comment by rickdale | Hacker News Reader

My big qualm with the electric cars that I don't read about is the 40minute-1hour charging. People complain that charging stations aren't near them, but the convenience of pulling into a gas station filling up and being ready for another 400 miles in less than 5 minutes is hard to beat. Even if the charging stations were all around, 5 versus 40-60 min is a big difference.

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If you can get a car to go 200 miles and charge in 1 hour, at a price that is comparable to gasoline, that is probably good enough. Maybe some traveling salesmen wouldn't want it, but even people who take a lot of vacations would be okay. And it'll probably end the cross country road trips, but these actions are total outliers.

I've driven on semi long road trip vacations my whole life. Chicago to Hayward, Wi. A 400 mile trip almost exactly from my parents old house in the burbs.

You'd just take a break halfway and get dinner while the car charges. It's about 7 hours to go 400 miles including a gas stop, piss break and quick dinner. Just make it 7.5 hours and take a long dinner.

The extra 45 minutes charging time is really no big deal if you only have to do it every couple months.

People mention this frequently, but they never mention how often they procrastinate on stopping by the gas station when it's time to fill up. And the additional anxiety associated with not knowing if you pushed it too far and aren't going to make it to the gas station. Or the times you're later than you wanted because you forgot you needed to get gas. I've never had this problem since getting my Tesla since it's always charged. I've spent maybe 2 hours charging at a supercharger in the ~9000 miles so far. I would have easily spent a similar amount of total time driving to gas stations and filling up in my previous car, since ~5 minutes times ~9000 / ~350 is about 2 hours. And when you're sitting at a supercharger you can do things like eat or read your kindle. And if you needed to stop to eat anyways, it doesn't really take any additional time.

How often do you drive that distance? Sure, there are people that take road trips of 200+ miles often, and then it may be more convenient for them to refuel quickly. But the majority doesn't do that very often.

People who don't drive that distance don't need cars, frankly--and not owning a car at all is a trend that's growing faster than Tesla sales.

Most people I know that live in peninsula and south bay of silicon valley have a 10-25 mile commute (1-way) and it would be a huge inconvenience to not have a car. You can't get around with just Uber down here.

Yes, it's unfortunate that people still live in suburban areas that don't have transit.

Humans have not historically all lived in hyper-dense cities that make public transportation more practical than private automobiles. Like many others, I have no intention of doing so personally. And, outside of such locations (and I'd like to see the plan to, for example, move everyone in the South Bay to a few very dense urban centers) it's generally inconvenient to depend on public transit.

People have not historically relied upon private car ownership to get around, either, but the trend of history for the past several centuries is towards urbanization.

Why wouldn't you have your car charging overnight? It'd be great to not have to bother stopping at a grotty petrol station - can't wait for that to be over.

I have read countless bits about charging times, Supercharger network, hot-swappable battery plans, etc. Surprised you've missed it in electric vehicle discussions and articles.

Petrol cars are limited to petrol stations. Electricity is easily and safely available everywhere. I'm sure soon enough many parking locations will come standard with charging. This is already in place in some areas. And if your doing long haul driving timing lunch or a break with their charging doesn't seem unreasonable. So I don't see this being an unsolvable problem at all. Quite the opposite. In 50 years people will probably be reminiscing about 'the hassle' of altering their destination to find a place to fuel their car. That's if we are still driving them at this point!

Yes the only way to get 5 min is with battery swaps.

Electric cars assume that you won't use charging stations at all during day-to-day driving.

There's no way you fill your car in 5 minutes, and Superchargers are noted to take 30 minutes, not 40-60.

It takes no more than 5 minutes from the moment I drive into a gas station to the moment I drive out to refill my Honda civic (10 gal). EPA dictates a maximum pump rate of 10 gal per minute [1].... so the actual pumping phase of fill-ups is just 1 minute for my car.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/OMS/regs/ld-hwy/evap/spitback.txt

How is there no way to fill a car in 5 minutes? I suppose I don't time myself, but it always seem to take between 3 and 8 minutes.

Sorry, what? I fill my car in closer to 2 minutes, not counting time that would be included in either type of refill (pulling in, paying, etc).

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