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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

Charging speed is too overrated as a metric, in my opinion. For the overwhelming majority of people, you're almost never driving more per day than the capacity of your battery. And even on an 11 kW home charger, you're easily back up to 100% during the night, especially since you're never starting from 0% or even close to it.

Even my Nissan Leaf which has notoriously slow AC charging (being single phase), the max 6,7 kW charging is very rarely a concern for me.

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Charging speed is a big issue when you’re renting or road tripping. When people use shared infrastructure, charging time corresponds to how many customers you can serve per parking spot/charging station. With gas, hoards of cars can be serviced quickly. Thus it’s really important that the car can be meaningfully charged during an extended rest stop or lunch break. Consumers disproportionately buy for these “happy” occasions, even if it would make much more economical sense to just rent once or twice a year.

Me + partner rented a small e-fiat in Mallorca and it was really fun to drive, but there was a lot of anxiety around finding charging stations and wandering around for hours while charging. Note we didn’t have overnight charging at the hotel though.

> how many customers you can serve per parking spot/charging station. With gas, hoards of cars can be serviced quickly

For gas stations the throughput matters, because cars are blocking the queue. BEV charging is more comparable to parking. This is simply solved by having more charging stations (dispensers) at parking spots.

BTW: even in shittiest EVs, DC charging doesn't take hours. You probably have been misdirected to an AC charger designed to be used overnight. Unfortunately, many satnavs still treat charging stations as all equal like gas stations, and send you to the nearest one, instead of the fastest one.

I guess it makes a huge difference for the station if they have to build 10 or 100 charging spots no? Space, cost, etc.

Kind of the reason why there is 10 gas pumps and not 100.

The big difference is that EVs are designed to be charged unattended (you plug in, and go do something else). Nobody needs to be monitoring the "pumps".

Charging locations are often combined with other businesses, which means it's usually not taking new space, only converts the parking space that would have been used to park a car anyway.

Large DC fast charging installations usually have a central hub that does the expensive things (AC-DC, batteries), and then the power is distributed to simpler dispensers that do communication with the car and cooling on the car's end. The whole setup is expensive, but the number of dispensers isn't the main limiting factor. The costly limiting factor usually is the maximum power the system can deliver at once. That directly dictates the maximum throughput (number of cars they can serve over time), regardless whether that power is delivered via few fast chargers or many slower chargers. The number of dispensers cancels out in the equation.

^^^ Hasn't been to Buccees

> You probably have been misdirected to an AC charger designed to be used overnight.

It’s possible, I don’t recall. But those were the only available spots, in a European country with large ambitions to transition. Half were out of service, and many were occupied, which we often found out after driving to them for 15 min. With scarce spots, charging has to be fast to clear out space.

Getting to the point of convenience is a very solvable problem, but it’s still not there in many places and situations. I think fast charging will remain as an important part of that solution.

If you are road tripping somewhere remote, having too many fast chargers available can overload very small local power grids.

A ton of people live in flats, apartments, condos and other shared housing that do not provide home charging capabilities. Just because it’s not a big deal for you and your situation doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone else.

And people who rent a house and can’t install the necessary equipment.

I agree,and this is why I really wish the EV charger rollout focused on L2 chargers rather than L3.

Incentivizing workplaces, grocery stores, malls, and apartment complexes to install slow chargers would make a huge impact on feasibility.

All for a lot less money than it takes to install L3 chargers.

Wouldn't grocery stores want bigger chargers, so someone with an apartment can combine a grocery run that takes maybe 30 minutes inside the store with fully charging their car for the next few days?

With an L2 charger it doesn't take days to fully charge. It is more like 8 hours when going from 0 to 100.

But that's not necessary. You just need to recover enough charge to cover daily driving. In 30 minutes that can equate to adding 20 miles of range.

With EVs you are rarely trying to charge from 0 to 100. A slow charge is sufficient and preferable for battery health.

Superchargers.

But a LOT of US apartments have mass parking or even a parking garage. These should be PERFECT for cheap efficient rollout of a charging infrastructure.

I've been pretty disappointed that cities or the federal government have not been proactive in providing incentives to apartment buildings to put in charging, even just normal 110v or 220v plugs.

Urban centers have not completely won the car pollution war, incentivising EV ownership in cities should be a paramount concern in infrastructure planning.

Street parking should be able to provide 110v charging as well. I mean, there are street lamps, right?

> Charging speed is too overrated as a metric, in my opinion

Then you will _never_ electrify the entire fleet of vehicles and you will always have ICE vehicles to fill the space that you feel is "overrated."

> charging is very rarely a concern for me.

Ostensibly because you live somewhere where large ICE vehicles bring the goods within range of your EV for you. This is great it's adequate for you. This is not sustainable.

I always get mistaken on these issues, as I think EVs are important, but the way we've deployed and built them is precisely backwards. We hoisted EVs on you because you would pay for them but it's made a complete mess of the transition.

This is the most important metric.

1000km in the slow-charging Leaf takes 14 hours. 1000km in quick-charging cars takes 9h-9.5h, compared to 8.5h in a gas car[1].

For the trivial case of a city-only car with a home charger all battery metrics are irrelevant, so even the terribly outdated Leaf is adequate.

But when leaving the perimeter of the home charger, the car will need to be recharged. Charging speed is primary factor that makes long road trips in BEVs take longer than in gas cars. Battery sized large enough for a longest road trip adds a lot of weight and cost, which is a waste in daily city driving. Quick to recharging makes long trips possible, without need for a huge battery.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6ucyFGKWuSQzvI8lMzv...

People are OK with added weight and cost. You can't sell a truck without the added 500lbs and $12k of 4x4 shit under the front end. It lives there dragging down tow capacity, fuel, and driveability the entire life of the the vehicle, rarely used if ever.

While that's true in the ideal case, there are still many areas in America where you need significant range to make it from one charger to the next. I have a Leaf which can fast-charge via Chademo, but the low range means that if I go anywhere rural I often have to spend several hours at a level 2 charger because it doesn't have the range to drive directly to the next fast charger.

> 1000km in the slow-charging Leaf takes 14 hours. > 1000km in quick-charging cars takes 9h-9.5h, compared to 8.5h in a gas car[1].

There are so many variables here. 1,000 cumulative km for my normal usage requires no waiting since I charge at home, so the it’s the ICE car that eats up time since I have to visit a fuel station.

On a 1,000km road trip I would be stopping anyway, so as long as it charges within the 30 min window it would not be additional time here either.

It is a big deal in the US considering that almost 20% of Americans say they’ll plan to make a road trip of between 250 and 500 miles, and almost 10% of Americans plan to take a trip between 500 and 1000 miles by car.

Overall, 75% of Americans surveyed said they intend to take some kind of road trip.

https://thevacationer.com/summer-travel-survey-2024/

This is on top of what other people have brought up about people who live in apartments, rent, or have no garage space.

Everyone replying to me as if I said charging speed is totally irrelevant and are bringing up contrived edge cases. If all you're doing is commuting to work, which is what most of us are doing, unless you have an absurdly long commute you will never need fast charging. Can I do a trans-european road trip in my Leaf. No. But I'm not buying a car for what I might do some day, and neither should you unless you like wasting money. If I was going on a trip like that I'd rent a car or swap cars with a friend. My point is, people place far too much importance on it, when it for most people, most of the time is not that big of a deal.

It’s not an edge case. 75% of Americans plan to take a road trip during the year per the link I sent.

Remember that in the US the 300-500 mile problem is huge. There’s no viable train alternative for medium to short distances for almost every city pair. If you have family in Tennessee and you live in Illinois you need to drive 6 hours unless you want to blow money on plane tickets and still end up eating up 4-6 hours at the airport and on the plane anyway.

The same can honestly be said for shorter trips like 100-200 miles. There’s no usable public transit between cities like Dallas and Houston.

“Most of the time” doesn’t really work when you need your car to do the thing you’re doing 5% of the time. I don’t buy a two door car because most of the time I don’t have four passengers inside, I buy a four door car because it’s extremely useful to have that capability without needing to reserve a rental car or borrow cars from friends.

This is especially important considering that gasoline vehicles are already for sale and compete with electric vehicles. Why am I renting a car or swapping cars when the whole point of owning a car was to have a car?

In Norway in mountains charging stations are often literally in the middle of nowhere with their placement dictated by availability of high-voltage power lines. They are fully automated with just few charging boxes and nothing else. Although the view is often nice with mountains and valleys, when it is snowing or raining spending an extra hour on top of 7 hours of driving is not nice especially as for toilet and food one needs to stop at other places. So I would appreciate if I do not need to spend that extra hour sitting in a car and watching rain.

Now, Norway may be an extreme case, but driving for 1000 km daily in Europe while rare is still a normal event. For example, from Paris to Mediterranean coast it is like 800 km. And if one drives 130km/h that 1000 km of battery will be reduced to 500km so one will need to charge once and it will be nice if that can be done within 15 minutes not to add too much time to the trip.

This is a nonproblem inflated by petrolheads routinely doing 1000 kilometers in one go, which are overrepresented among journalists. Most people don't do that and are doing longer stops at least twice, vacations make that even more likely.

And cherry picking distinct worst aspect of long distance driving in Norway and France and mashing them together them as one argument is disingenuous. There's plenty of stuff to stop and enjoy between Paris and Med.

Electrical with range of 1000km and fast charging gives an option that is not presently covered. There are people in Norway who still do not consider electrical cars because they want to have an option to drive 500 km over mountains in one go without extra delays. The same in France. Or even consider Spain. The argument is that one cannot go from Madrid to Alicante (like 400-450 km) without extra stops to charge still prevents people to get electrical cars. In a lot of cases option to drive a long distance will never be used, but people want to have that option as a form of insurance.

But "just to have an option" isn't how it's usually presented.

Besides, no one appears to realize gas supply will vanish first in case of crisis, it did once happen already in Europe. Electricity usually gets cut later, if at all.

No, it is a a real problem for most people who buy their cars for the 2 holiday trips they do a year. Yes it does not make sense economically but this is how customers buy they cars.

And hence, this battery range and ability to quickly charge will be very important to people.

You may disagree with their position (I do) but that won’t affect their buying decision - range and charging speed will.

Eventually this might make electric vehicles practical for people who can’t charge at home, much like going to a gas station.

It won’t happen in the first round, which is for luxury vehicles, though.

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