Comment by dm319 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dm319 | Hacker News Reader

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I think now might be a good time to stop obsessing over acceleration of EV cars. What Tesla did with their high-performance EV cars was to prove that electric did not equate to a milk float, and they shut up the performance-car obsessed pistonheads and the car press with their 0-60 times.

But this is turning into a penis-waving / megapixel arms race, where EV journalism is obsessed with only two metrics - range and performance. We're at the point now where EVs are generally faster than their ICE counterpart (due to smooth power application, consistent torque and no requirement for gear changes), with a range that will meet the needs of 95%+ of daily commutes.

There are a whole range of different types of EV vehicles, in terms of size, luxury, and purpose to meet different needs, but the reviews seem to obsess over a drag race.

What we need now is a good EV charging infrastructure. Widely available rapid charging that will give your EV 2 hours of driving for 20 minutes will mitigate the need for bigger batteries. And not just for Tesla.

>> What we need now is a good EV charging infrastructure.

Haha. I've just started working on the charging end of this, after years of drivetrain stuff. The J1772 standards for chargers has some good features and some... politics. Biggest complaint: why mandate a PHY for broadband over power lines when the signals dont go over the high current conductors? Next up, everyone wants to play middleman with billing systems and cloud connections.

Tesla, can we all just use your connectors before more of this nonsense gets built?

The various billings groups, cards, keys, accounts, phone apps is frustrating, but I don't see any drive to unify this. Electric vehicles are becoming mainstream, and I think regular customers will find the various providers confusing. For example, I planned to do some shopping at a place where I knew they had free charging. I figured I would be in the store for about 2 hours, which for a 22kW charger should have fully charged the car. Despite being relatively tech-savvy, I wasn't aware that my 120kW limit applied only to DC charging, and not AC charging, so it was reduced to 11kW. Which it only did for 5 minutes because apparently I needed to navigate to a website and 'ok' it online for it to continue.

Until a non-tech savvy person can simply drive up and pay for the electricity like at any other petrol station, EVs are going to run into some serious issues and disappointed customers. At the moment it works for those who are willing to put the effort in.

I have a horrifying vision of huge "dongles" everywhere ... like USB/headphone/etc but for cars. $100 each, aftermarket is $50 but they slowly ruin your batteries, etc.

Thankfully the cars are at least converging on the Type 2 connector. It's a shame though that with the ubiquity of contactless payments, I can't use many stations without registering and applying for a fob or card to arrive in the mail.

Like I said, everyone wants to be a middleman and get a piece of the action, and your usage data.

The end game should look just like pumping gas. Maybe even take cash at the dispenser. I bring this up at work. Build what vehicle owners want, not what industry investors want.

I think the big problem is people still care about this stuff. Car heads have always bragged about the speed of their vehicles, that’s not going to change just because electric cars are faster off the line.

You're right that it's purely a bragging point. A status symbol, or if it's really just for personal enjoyment, then a gimmick that will amuse you the first 10 times you launch from the lights.

Sure, having a reasonably quick car is useful for overtaking and pulling out, but then we'd regard performance as being 'good enough', rather than marking down a car for doing 0-60 0.2s slower than another.

I wonder if EVs will change things. It seems the likes of Kia and Nissan are able to put pretty powerful and efficient electric engines into their motors (150kW is not bad). I think what limited the availability of high performance ICE cars was the fuel efficiency and tax. If that's not such an issue with EVs, then performance will become less of a bragging point I guess.

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