Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nickik 1821 days ago
> Petrol cars have significantly longer driving range, which is important for transport efficiency.

95%+ you charge at home or at work and a single fully charged battery is by far enough for daily use.

> Petrol cars are significantly cheaper to buy.

Life-time analysis of anything but very cheap cars this doesn't really hold up.

> Petrol cars refuel significantly faster than electronic cars recharge.

Not relevant most of the time. If you actually road trip long distances most experience reports suggest that even just going to the bathroom and eating is enough to recharge enough to get to the next stop.

Very few people use their petrol cars to do road-trips in a way where the natural stops are not enough.

> Petrol cars don't have a costly battery which degrades over time

Petrol cars have much higher maintenance cost and an engine that degrades over time. If you take minimal care of your battery it will hold up for multiple 100k miles and even after that it will have significant resale value.

> and pollutes.

Far less then petrol.

1 comments

> 95%+ you charge at home or at work and a single fully charged battery is by far enough for daily use.

Less than 35% of people in the EU live in detached houses. A sizable percentage of these either rent or don't have enclosed parking.

My guess is that only about half of the population, once you factor in people who live in apartments but have separate enclosed parking spots, have the opportunity to charge an electric vehicle at home. This is probably optimistic.

However, once you consider that the ratio of apartments and alternative housing <-> detached houses increases in highly populated areas, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of people who live in an urban area, are able to spend 20-30K+ on an electric car, and have access to convenient overnight charging is significantly less than 50%.

Not the whole population has cars either, specially in cities.

Adding Level 1 charger to outside parking spots is not very difficult and is already happening in many new developments.

Lots of people in cities park in parking garages where adding charging is easy to add any often still exists.

Charging at work places is also very possible and industrial area parking are adding these.

For people who drive long distance often in cities, going to a supercharger once in a while is also quite possible. Specially as Tesla and other increasingly add DC chargers in cities.

Its overall one of the bigger problems and that does limit EV however we are at 2%, nowhere even remotely close to be limited by that. However overall I agree, this is actually the area where states, cities and so on can actually make an impact.

This will solve itself when people start to want EV and try to figure out what the solution for their situation is.