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by jeromeflipo 3722 days ago
A few thoughts/ideas:

Grid saturation: smart charging to flatten the demand curve (overnight), daylight charging with more chargers in parking spaces at the office, west-facing solar panels and grid storage to smooth the duck curve.

Lack of chargers on the highway: increase in charging speed (15 minutes breaks are recommended after 2h of driving), increased battery range, platooning with autopilot can save 15% of energy [0], very low cost of expanding supercharger networks, auto-pilot to tolerate longer drive, auto-park to accept longer pauses, battery swapping

Energy sources far from charging stations: don't underestimate the predominance of home charging; south-facing solar panels and wind turbines along highways; grid storage; battery swapping

Car sharing: battery swapping again; autonomous fleets to dispatch charged car and auto-park cars (with snake-like charger to auto-plug)

Infrastructure investment: large public program for distributed generation with solar panels and grid storage

Range anxiety: 250 miles might be the average range for EV in 2020, supercharging and battery swapping to the rescue

Trailers: battery swapping again, and battery integrated in the trailer (might turn into a backup battery once at home)

Lack of servcie: EVs require far less maintenance than ICE, Musk intend to make a 1-million miles powertrain and reuse battery for grid storage; also industry-wide standardization

Tax break: they will somehow be extended to balance the externalities of fossil fuels (health, environment); EV will reach cost-parity very soon too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_%28automobile%29