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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

It happens to trains, too.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/12/national/heavy-...

> Around 430 passengers in Niigata Prefecture were forced to spend the night on a packed four-car train after it got stranded Thursday evening by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan coast.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1904881/jap...

> About 110 passengers on a Sanyo Shinkansen bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka Station stayed overnight on the train at Okayama Station, western Japan, after the train arrived around 2am on Monday.

> The train had been stranded en route for about two hours due to a breakdown of railway equipment, apparently caused by snow.

(I'd rather be stuck in a train, that said.)

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Agreed, being stuck on a train in a winter storm is far far less terrifying to me than being stuck in a small car, running out of gas (or battery charge), without water or food or access to bathrooms.

And that's why you always have a blanket, a few cans of water, a few cans of food and a book in the trunk in wintertime. There's no excuse not to.

Still significantly less comfortable than being able to walk around and use a proper bathroom.

And if you have young kids.... yikes I can't even imagine the hell of that sort of situation.

It would be really nice to have an alternative to being forced to drive for every day tasks. Instead, we have forced car dependent through law and through federal spending.

If you're in the middle of Virginia on I95 in an electric car, you'd be fine.

To get from Fredericksburg to Richmond or vice versa, you have at least 60 miles of charge in your tank or you were never going to make it. At highway speeds, that's at least 20 kWh of battery power. It won't take more than 300-500 watts to heat the cabin continuously even in the middle of a blizzard. That means your battery will last 44 to 66 hours at minimum. So you've got multiple days of heat, water is falling from the sky, and the bathroom is immediately outside your doors.

This is one of the nice things about electric cars: the motor uses no energy while idling, and moving the car requires so much energy that you'll never run out if you're stationary. Most new EVs today have 60-80 kWh batteries. It would take several weeks to drain a full battery just running A/C or heat along with the radio and screens.

Also of note- in a snowstorm situation there are no exhaust pipes that can be clogged with snow on an EV. It’s self-contained!

I’ve never heard of exhaust pipes getting clogged with snow, the gas coming out is hot. I’d be surprised if this has ever happened unintentionally.

If what you mean is that the exhaust can linger too long or be redirected in ways that aren’t ideal then yea.

If you're trapped for a day in a inches-per-hour snowstorm, you're not going to be able to run the engine the whole time. You may also be in a snowbank, with wind causing drifts to build up.

It definitely happens.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/carbon-monoxide-poi...

> In New Jersey, 23-year-old Sashalynn Rosa, of Passaic, and her 1-year-old son, Messiah Bonilla, died of carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in a running car that had its tailpipe covered in snow. Rosa's 3-year-old daughter, Saniyah Bonilla, was hospitalized in critical condition and died on Jan. 27. The father of the children was just steps away shoveling snow from around the car.

> Angel Ginel of New York died in a similar way Monday afternoon. Police say Ginel was found inside his running, plowed-in car in Brooklyn. His relatives believe he got inside the car to warm up Sunday, and the car got buried.

Pedantic, but you said clogged. And you’re right, which is why I acknowledged the possibility of exactly the situation in those stories.

These deaths were avoidable, and of course some thing that EV’s don’t have to deal with.

I ran a similar calculation for my Spark EV with 14 kWh capacity remaining. I can run my router and two wifi APs for around 15 days (at least) if needed. So I picked up a small inverter and will manually fail over from my UPS if a power outage goes beyond an hour or so. (Of course, if there's no power for 15 days there are likely bigger problems than internet access.)

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