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Comment by helloguillecl | Hacker News Reader

I think you are ignoring the fact that we can produce extraordinary amounts of electricity from sources that were not available at economic scale 10 years ago.

A solar farm is capable of producing 350 Mwh per year/per acre and it takes 18 kwh to power a Tesla for a 100km ride [1], so a single acre of solar power can produce enough energy for 19,000 of those rides, or power 190 cars (10.000 km per year) just by putting a bit more than the roof of their parking lots in solar cells.

Furthermore, people do want to have their own car, and they are going to become the more affordable than their ICE counterparts and the polluting and flammable oil they need.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/support/european-union-energy-la...

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I can't begin to tell you how excited the thought that I can have my car mostly powered from solar panels on the garage roof makes me.

The recent outbreak of ‘range anxiety’ among combustion-engine owners in the Southeast US when the colonial pipeline went offline illustrates very clearly how thin a myth of ‘independence’ has been built around gasoline cars.

You can hit the open road and just keep driving - as long as a complex global energy distribution network keeps up just-in-time fulfillment of fuel to gas stations along the way.

Whereas an electric car, powered with charge gathered from the sunlight that struck the roof of your own home? That’s truly independent.

This is _exactly_ the niche the Ford F-150 Lightning is marketed towards. The "you can power your house from your car battery" was like custom made for Texans who still remember the power outages last winter.

You can get a car, that you can charge at home, for free, AND you can also use it to run your house if the grid goes tits up again? Sold!

Yeah, like, it sounds too good to be true. People like to think you are incredulous for believing that it might be possible. Yet, it will be a reality that will change the world.

I don't think it's that far-fetched, people are already installing solar panels (and have been for a while), it's just that now you'll have a much closer need. Hell, you'll probably even be able to use your car's battery as storage for your energy needs overnight, so you charge the car during the day and power your fridge/TV from it during the night (assuming you don't need to go somewhere in the morning).

Pretty damn exciting.

> Yet, it will be a reality that will change the world.

Yeaaaah, I kinda think smartphones were bigger change than this. It's nice, but not a flying or self driving. Just different, cheaper source of energy. It does not enable anything new, other than charge.

For you, who probably are energy rich already, and can afford as much fuel as he needs, like most of us in the developed-ish world.

Think of someone in a village in Africa.

It was fun for the first few days and then you get kind of used to it.

But what never gets dull is laughing at people paying to fill their cars with liquid explosives.

Sounds like you've never seen a battery explode! Anything energy-dense is an explosive.

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