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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

The trick is that you wouldn't take it onto roads where people go over 30mph.

That’s the problem with this car. Only 30 mph means city centers only. In those places there are already many other options for quick trips: public transit, Uber/Lyft, old-fashioned taxis, membership car rentals (Car2go, Zipcar), bicycle sharing, sidewalk scooters. With all that I don’t see them selling too many of these. You buy it, you have to park it, which would be expensive in many of the cities in which you could use it. All those other options don’t need to be parked (not at user’s expense at least.) Even for car rentals parking is a pain because you have to find it, even if you don’t have to pay.

I could see a market of selling them to fleet operators who team up with cities to get free parking for them, as Zipcar and Car2go do, but that’s about it.

Yeah, it's not alternative to a car, it's a bike that takes up more space that's easier to drive in winter.

> Only 30 mph means city centers only.

Or around towns. I could use this to go around my town, and to the surrounding towns.

And people could use it around suburbs too.

So useful to people in cities, towns, suburbs, which is most people.

I'd say a moped offers more utility and range, and can be had for like a grand used right now, but those haven't caught on in the burbs either. People have a highway mentality in the suburbs. They'd rather get on for one mile and take the next exit than take a parallel running surface road. Plus, suburban commutes are long, even errands are long. This EV claims a 40 mile range, so 30 miles in practice. That can make some trips pretty tight whether or not you get stranded, and there isn't going to be much infrastructure in the suburbs where you can pull off and charge. With more range it would be more viable.

I think a city setting might be better, for cities without too much congestion at least. Otherwise it's another vehicle on the road that could be a moped taking up way less space to move a single butt from their home to their desk in some office building. Cars pollute, but part of their harm in an urban environment is also the amount of physical space that they demand. You can fit way more people in an electric subway train than you can in a similar length line of traffic of these vehicles, for instance.

I live in a first-ring suburb of Philadelphia where we more or less have to drive or bike for everything (there are little downtown areas, but we live 1mi+ from any of them). The top speed limits are 35mph and speeding is rare because the roads are windy and narrow. This Ami would be nearly perfect--the top speed doesn't worry me at all.

The one thing I would say is I wish the range were a bit higher. We have a Ford C-Max plug-in hybrid that gets 18-25 miles before turning on the gasoline motor. Two trips in succession will sometimes run out the electricity. A 50 mile range would make me more comfortable, but still I'm excited to see a vehicle like this (even if I'm not super-hopeful they'll catch on in the US).

Yeah, I have a Prius Prime with similar range. It can do basically one outing and back in my city before it needs charge, and at 6 hours to charge on a 110 that means the gas kicks in many days.

Now, since this is a smaller vehicle with a smaller battery, it might able to charge faster on 110, but likely you'd want a 220 charger.

Really, it feels like all EVs will need a 220 line to be practical. Small-battery and PHEVs need frequent top-ups and you don't want those to take hours, and full EVs just take forever to charge on 110.

I think we need to forgo charging entirely on EVs, and start swapping batteries at gas stations like you would an empty propane tank for a full one.

I saw a demonstration of an electric moped that worked like this. You pull up to the station, put your empty batteries in the rack for charging, and take a set of full ones.

Fully charged EV faster than filling up a tank of gas.

That's fine for tiny things like mopeds and scooters, but for a full sized vehicle that means half a tonne of batteries.

Maybe we should rethink how we design our electric vehicles. Still, if the batteries are all mounted along the bottom plate, it wouldn't be too hard to engineer a solution that can drop out, roll away, and have a fresh battery array be reinserted into the vehicle.

We've been siloing our thinking that an EV should be some quasi hybrid between plugging in your phone to charge, and putting in a gas pump into a car. The best and most practical EV in the future will look nothing like a car today. Maybe in the future we will just bring back street car wiring to our cities and run an antennae above the vehicle like a bumper car.

I have a charger for the car on 240V, in our garage. It charges fully in about 2 hours. Mind you this is a plug-in hybrid, with only ~20 mi range before the gas comes on. But still that's lots better than swapping out lots of heavy batteries.

Swapping batteries makes sense for a car you don't own. For a car you own, I don't know. Of course car ownership is probably going away soon enough.

Two hours sucks compared to twenty seconds. It doesn't have to be you swapping the battery. Could be the pimple faced kid working at the gas station, or a robot.

Yes, it takes longer. But it happens while I'm sleeping, and requires no special trip. I do think swapping batteries will be the sensible way to handle this when we're also swapping cars, or when the cars drive us, unless charging times come way down.

So that would be no where at all where I live. Every single house in this city is on some street that is surrounded by a larger grid of arterial roads, all of them with 35mph speed limits which, when unimpeded by traffic, turn into 45mph minimums and drivers will go out of their way to be a dick to you if you don't adhere to this unspoken rule.

That solution makes sense in concept, but people do 45mph in our 30mph neighborhood all the time.

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