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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

The "charging infra problem" is a hoax. The "fuel" comes out of ordinary electric sockets. People have them in their own garages, no less. Even the old EV1 from the 90's got a 75% charge in only 15 minutes.

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The original EV1 had a 16.5kWh battery, so to get a 75% charge in 15 minutes it would have to pull about 50kW. If by "ordinary electric socket" you mean a NEMA 5-15 or 5-20 i.e. standard American 120V socket, it would have to pull about 420 amps. Since the wiring and sockets are only rated for 15 or 20 amps respectively, this would pretty much instantaneously start a raging fire if you somehow managed to pull that much current without tripping the breaker. Even at 240V, you'd have to pull over 200 amps, which is beyond what most houses are provisioned for, beyond what any 240V plug is rated for, and far beyond what the actual charger could handle.

The actual "high speed" charger for the EV1 was 6.6kW, so a 75% charge would take a little under two hours. On a normal NEMA 5-15 socket, a 75% charge would take about ten hours.

To charge at 50kW you'd need DC fast charging technology, which wasn't available until a decade later.

Read it yourself: The EV-1 from way back in the 90's seems to have some engineering that surpasses even the latest Leaf. The last EV-1 got a full charge in only 3 hours.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/how-does-gms-fabled-ev1-st...

OK? How does any of that contradict what I said, or support what you said?

A full charge of a 16.5kWh battery in 3 hours requires 5.5kW charging power. That's nothing special, and it doesn't come anywhere close to what you'd need to charge 75% in 15 minutes.

From the link: "A Gen I EV1 took approximately 15 hours to recharge from a 110-volt household outlet."

No, I misspoke. I was certain I had read that statistic before, I was wrong. However, my original point remains: there isn't really an infrastructure problem for the vast majority of drivers. It's way overstated.

I agree, for local driving. There is an infrastructure problem for long-distance driving, which is slowly being solved now. Tesla has it solved for their cars in many areas.

I think that a lot of people don't really understand, on a deep level, how living with an EV actually works. Much of the discussion I see seems to be based on the idea that an EV works like a gas car, except you use a plug instead of a nozzle when you fill it up at the station.

The LEAF has a 26kW/h battery. Takes me over 20 hours to full charge from a regular outlet and get up to 100 miles range. It's straight physics: longer range requires more time, voltage or current. For anything over a 100 mile charge you'll need a 220v charger installed, and even then you're looking at 16 hour charging for a 400 mile preferred range.

Are those numbers bad? Do you need to drive two 400mile legs without a 16hr break in between? For "road trip", yes, but those are rare as a portion of trips, and most people don't need to purchase on the need. And there are supercharger stations.

They're not bad.

I was responding to the parent post absurdly contending a useful automotive charge could be achieved in 15 minutes from a standard wall outlet.

Not everyone owns a garage. For example, I have zero possibility to charge an electric car at home, so buying an electric car right now would be infeasible.

You just need a telescoping pole with a hook on the end, that will let you pull power from the overhead power lines when you park along the street.

Like the electric buses in Soviet countries!

Or SF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_San_Francisco

True. But places to plug in a car are far more plentiful than gas stations. Owners of the old EV-1 talk about how much they didn't miss having to stop at gas stations anymore. When GM took their cars back, they were amazed at how inconvenient it became to hunt for gas stations again.

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