Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Hybrids are the future for most of the market worldwide. It will take decades to build out the charging infrastructure necessary to support battery electric vehicles. Some industrialized countries will move faster.

View on HN

I wonder if you can expand on why you think it will take decades to build out the charging infrastructure. I've seen it suggested that technology adoption S curves have been getting faster and faster over the last hundred years. The power grid exists everywhere you'd want to charge a car already. It seems a petty simple job to go the last hundred feet to the parking space. My perception was that the liming factor is the price of batteries more than anything else. It's widely expected that once batteries reach $100/kWh, electric cars will cost less than an ICE car. At that point, I'd expect these cars to really take off quickly.

The moment you consider apartments, it does not. There are few if any apartments to get where you can charge your car. This is an area many overlook, but if you don't own a home, you might not have a good place to charge.

This does not fit when the big mantra around EVs has been "charge at home!" instead of "fueling up" at a station. Even now, the DC charge stations aside from Tesla are not fast enough.

We priced an electrical charging system for our apartment (2 spots), and the biggest cost was installation with energy coming in at a second (less than 5% of cost)

Appartments already provide parking spaces, so what's to stop them from adding some charging hookups? If that's what their customers are looking for, then they will wire it up. Also, I don't see why all the charging has to happen at home. If shopping centers and plazas add more charging, it'll be an extra incentive to go to a particular mall or movie theater. And why not offices too? Try not thinking of getting a charge as going to an isolated gas station and waiting for the tank to fill, and more like stopping off at a nice restaurant and having the car charge up while you eat. It's a paradigm shift, because once we've gone full electric, the filling stations will dissapear and a decent percentage of parking spaces will have a charging meter.

People used to working with software usually fail to appreciate how slow and expensive building real infrastructure is. It's just a lot of hard work of the "Dirty Jobs" variety. Obtain building permits. Upgrade local grids to handle the load. Dig trenches. Run cables. Install chargers. And then deal with ongoing maintenance from environmental exposure and vandalism. All of that will take years and years regardless of the potential benefits.

Not really, you just have to be creative and use the power lines that are already ubiquitous: https://www.zap-map.com/london-street-lights-converted-to-ev...

Cities LOVE electric cars, and they will do their best to encourage their use.

If they could get over their proprietary dreams and just ~swap, instead of charge, the batteries it would be a lot faster for the users, would shift the recycling to entities that can do the job AND almost instantly build the needed infrastructure...

~swap https://electrek.co/2019/06/10/yamaha-ec-05-electric-scooter...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com