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Comment by tehwalrus | Hacker News Reader

I think the way we improve battery capacity in smartphones and cars will be to swap batteries for graphene capacitors. I've seen a couple of cool demos of these things, and they look awesome :)

In particular, think about the electric car - at the moment, they weigh much more than petrol counterparts because of all the batteries, and they have the rocket fuel problem of needing to accelerate all those batteries as well as the car and humans. If you can make the batteries out of carbon, even at the same volume they will be considerably lighter, and this alone will increase the range of EVs hugely! and, for free, you'll get the speedup in charge time. If manufacturing the things is as simple as using adapted DVD burners or paper presses, this lowers the barrier to adoption even faster. I'm really excited about this technology!

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Hopefully we will actually see it in production... I really hope so... too often you hear nothing anymore after this kind of exciting announcement.

I know, that is kind of annoying. It makes me want to work out how to hack it together in my shed and start a company.

(if I had a shed. and a lawyer to deal with all the patent suits from the scientists.)

Patent suits from the SCIENTISTS?

I honestly don't think the scientists are not the ones responsible for that.

As a scientist who's studied at two unis with massive entrepreneurship and research monetisation schemes (Cambridge and Imperial) I have to disagree - the only people with graphene patents today will be research scientists or universities. They may not do anything with them, of course, but they'll still sue you if you try and use the application they patented.

Not everyone wants a lighter car, since heavier survives a collision better. When I got my first car, my dad advised me to get a nice heavy one, in conjunction with a quick recap of momentum mathematics on why the heavier vehicle has more survivability in a collision. A while back, a young, female friend of mine who drove a surprisingly large SUV, said that her dad bought it for her so that she would be safe.

So, not everyone is going to see this as a positive selling point...

The worst kind of arms race. Let's all just take up more space and burn more fuel on the road to be bigger than the next guy.

Did her father consider that SUVs are easier to roll? Also, while his point about momentum may be correct, its one datapoint among many when it comes to crash safety.

More mass doesn't just help when you hit other cars. It also helps when you, say, run into a wall. Or a moose. The more mass you've got, the slower anything that hits you can reduce your speed, the less harm that the sudden deceleration does to you.

This is an arms race mindset that overall creates a disaster for those not outside your vehicle. Of course you'll be safe and sound (precluding rollovers), but you've introduced a greater probability of killing someone you hit.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/29/killer-cars-an-extra-...

Also, a heavier car isn't always safer than an equivalently sized lighter one.

How does momentum keep you safer?

On the other hand, with computer aided driving or simply better drivers, the lighter one will be much more maneuverable and it will avoid collisions much better, while also having more mileage.

In particular, if the car is FWD, you will understeer and lose control of the car by heavy braking much easier in a heavier car. A lighter one would simply steer away from the wall or the other car.

I know that I prefer the lighter one if the power and torque are the same.

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