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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I wish them much good luck, but it's a bit like the dinosaurs complaining about those uppity mammals getting underfoot: their days are numbered. BEVs are here to stay, hydrogen is - as far as I can see - a non-starter except when it comes to heavy traffic and possibly rail or air but even there I have my doubts.

Meanwhile BEVs are rapidly building momentum and coupled with solar and wind make very good sense. Even the last holdout for a passenger hydrogen vehicle (Toyota) has finally seen the light and is making BEVs now, I don't remember ever seeing a Mirai but given how many have been produced that's not so strange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

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I'm not so sure that BEVs will reach anything close to 100% of all cars on the road. My primary reason is this: as long as you "only" have 10%, 20%, even 30% BEVs the electric charging infrastructure is mostly free, we already have it. But after that, BEVs will require expensive infrastructure to be built in the electricity transmission grid. Think "we need to dig up all of the roads". Because it's not just cars going electric, it's everything else as well at the same time.

At that point hydrogen cars could very well see a resurgence. Especially in places with cold weather, where the fuel cell waste heat can be used for the climate control, while the BEV needs to spend energy running a heat pump, so the efficiency advantage of BEVs is mostly gone.

Yes, that's a good point. But: the grid can be expanded and probably will be expanded. I don't have a BEV but I've run the numbers and it would work very well for me today, it's just that I have an old, non-connected and fairly recently rebuilt car that I'll drive into the ground. But if I were younger and still in the market for a new vehicle I would definitely consider an electric one, though I'd make sure it had LiFePO4 or maybe even LTO in it (not yet available). Battery tech is getting better rapidly now that sufficient funds is pumped into it and I would expect the next two generations to be major improvements over what's on the market today.

This 100%, we're not done with batteries yet as a society and it's probably one of the most heavily funded industries because the opportunity to strike "gold" with good battery tech is too large to ignore.

Lithium wont be used forever and and downsides to batteries will slowly be eroded until we wonder why we ever used petrol in the first place.

As far as the grid goes, in my eyes rooftop solar is going to provide a huge amount of the power generation required for EVs. We're not there yet but the price of solar keeps dropping rapidly and you'll see a shift in messaging from "discounts and charge overnight when demand is low" to "discounts and charge during the day because generation is high".

I could already supply an EV with all the power required for my trips inside the country. 7700 KWh surplus from solar this year and we're not done yet. That's a multiple of what an EV would use for my current mileage (which is a fraction of what it was pre-COVID, and to be fair I also use my (e-)bikes a lot more than before).

The counter to your "think of the grid" argument is that the fossil fuel network may start to atrophy once there are significantly less people fuelling their gas vehicles.

If filling your gas car involves an unplesant trip to a peeling, cracking and unreliable gas station, then that's one more incentive to go BEV.

No, this has been debunked over and over.

People imagine BEVs need to be charged every evening at some super high power. The reality is they need to be charged about once a week (median US commute is 1/10th of typical BEVs range at city speeds), and can charge overnight, or when parked at work, while using less electricity than your air conditioning unit.

The grid is designed to handle peak demand (see the "duck curve"), and there is a lot of spare capacity outside of the peak hours, especially at noon when there's more solar production than consumption.

BEVs are very flexible with their charging time, and scheduling charging in off-peak hours is a standard feature.

> People imagine BEVs need to be charged every evening at some super high power. The reality is they need to be charged about once a week

Wouldn’t you say this is based on usage? Or do EVs run for a week regardless of distance traveled?

EV energy use is mostly proportional to distance traveled, except they're more efficient at lower speeds (typical values are 4-5miles per kWh in city traffic, and 2.4-3.5mi/kWh at highway speeds).

I've noted it's based on median commute, which is around 35-40 miles a day (median means that half people travel less than this, half of people travel more). WLTP range of Telsa Model 3 is 370 miles.

There will obviously be some users who need to charge often, but my point is that it's closer to once a week for at least half of the US population. And I'm using US stats, because the country is particularly car-centric, so if the US can do it, rest of the world can manage too.

Ah so it is variable. Ok glad that’s clear. I also only fill my gas vehicle once a week. Sitting at a pump (charging station) for 30 mins a week is still too long. Not every person will be able to have a charger at home (think apartments, condos, hotels, homeless, etc)

You don't need to be near the car while it's charging, so usually EVs are charged while they're parked.

There could be a charger at your work, or in a shopping mall, at a hotel. You keep the car plugged while it's parked, and it doesn't take more of your time than 30 seconds it takes to plug and unplug. You can be elsewhere working/shopping/sleeping.

In some countries there are already laws that require new parking lots to have chargers. I know the infrastructure isn't there yet, but if we imagine 100% people having EVs, there will be enormous demand for it, and having plugs in parking lots will be the standard.

Eh, you don’t want to monitor something taking a household worth of power? In the RC car world we monitor substantially smaller batteries and even charge them in a specific bag because of the risk. How long until you think it catches fire? A house down the road from me just burned down from an EV that ignited from a short, and risked all the houses around it. Meanwhile it takes 3 minutes to fuel a gasoline vehicle and you can still do it anywhere.

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