I used to like hybrids, and obviously series hybrids are the coolest kind of hybrids, but now that I’m driving a budget EV, I honestly don’t see the point anymore. Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs.
Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
That's the irony of EVs. They're most useful in cities--short driving distances and less emissions in dense areas, but easiest for the consumer to use in the burbs where driving distances are longer and emissions are less of an issue.
I'd say they're most useful in suburbs. You can charge them overnight in your driveway or garage so there's almost no reason not to have one unless you're really focused on the road trip scenario but that's an issue for city cars too.
Even still, people driving from the suburbs to the city are a large part of emissions. People living in the city are already likely to use transit for some trips and so are going to make less emissions. Also for emissions we really shouldn't separate the suburb from the city - they are too close to each other and so one affects the other.
People who live in cities often don't drive that much, so they don't need to charge that often - I drive like 400 km per month, meaning I'd have to charge once a month on most modern EVs.
Also even in the sprawl, people usually don't drive hundreds of kilometers s day.
I'd correct this to be "a smaller sized EV" versus "the smaller size of an EV" as many of the EVs on the market are surprisingly big. Without pointing to the obvious behemoth truck/SUV EVs, my Tesla MY is considerably larger than a lot of CUVs on the market and has a much worse turning radius. What it does do well is stop and start fast meaning I can be more decisive and navigate through messy NYC/BOS traffic with more confidence than in my CRV, and regen braking + having lower "idling" costs does improve its city-profile.
Is the hybrid car then just a social cover for “I want gas savings, but where I live doesn’t have EVSEs?”
It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).
I can't vouchers for the specifics, but it could make sense because gas and electricity prices as well as incentives vary a lot between US states.
There's a really easy calculator available at <a href="https://chooseev.com/savings-calculator/" rel="nofollow">https://chooseev.com/savings-calculator/ You can play with different values for vehicles and local prices.[0][1]
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
> For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.
It makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.
Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560 for energy costs in the EV, let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.
Sorry, but how are these two related? What point are you trying to make? I live in the capital of a smaller European country and there's enough of both for it to be viable for me to own an EV. I believe it's the same in other larger cities and towns in the country (and smaller ones with malls or close to highways), then there's the weird gap of smaller towns that don't have enough chargers, but where many people live in apartment blocks with street parking, and then there's the countryside with small villages where people usually park in front of their house (and can charge at home easily).
I live in West Seattle and own an EV. There still is not enough easily accessible charging infrastructure, requiring users to constantly monitor and go out of their way to use the only level2 pole station available in the neighborhood.
The nearest level3 is off the peninsula and both are under repair.
The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out. EV is not for everyone (yet)
> The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out.
I know that EV infra generally sucks in the US, but don't people understand that more than 96% people on the planet live elsewhere? Often in places where EVs work just fine?
Most people are not fluent in English and not technically inclined. While I haven't seen real numbers I would expect a bit over half of the people here do live in the US.
Are they though? I mean you also don't have a gas station at the curb but you get by. Maybe you just need to charge at a public charging point. Just because you have an EV doesn't mean you absolute NEED to charge at home for it to make sense.
I can fill my 35L tank, pay, and be on my way in about 2 minutes. That gives me about 750km of autonomy. That's why I don't mind not having a gas station at the curb.
I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.
It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.
Thankfully we're getting close to ~10 mins to go from 10% to 80% charge with newer models. Battery tech is actually advancing very steadily, so it won't be long for this to trickle down to cheaper models either.
Rules are also going in the right direction where I live. The onus is now on the homeowner association to justify denying you the permission to install a charging spot by your private parking space.
I luckily live in a building with reasonable people, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
AIUI, fast charging still degrades the battery faster than slower/overnight charging so should only be done when absolutely necessary. Is that still true?
It's really not like that. It may seem like that from things you heard a few years ago, but even then, in the last four years, I haven't experienced any of this. Your car tells you when you'll need to charge on a road trip, and those chargers are at places that have food, or a bathroom, so you stretch your legs for a few minutes or eat something. Outside of road trips, it's not even a consideration.
Around me gas is $4.00/gallon right now, and the public fast charging station closest to me is $0.39/KWh. It’s actually cheaper to burn gas unless you get less than ~30mpg (at least compare to my EV which gets about 3.2M/KWh). But I charge at home at about $0.14/KWh so it’s much cheaper than gas.
Long story short, I’d never have bought an EV if I couldn’t charge at home or work.
Far more in the U.K, well maybe with the recent petrol increases.
In April it cost about 14p mile off the motorway for petrol, 17 on the motorway (higher prices). Today it’s another 3p due to Iran, so 17/20p a mile.
Home electric costs 2.5p a mile at night, 8p during the day. public charging is around 15p on a slow overnight charger and 24p on a fast charger.
Given the proliferation of public charger competition, I haven't run into this in the last two years. In 2023, I think I waited 10 minutes once in a rural area.
It was always an issue, but he ended up moving to a more surban place. If you drove to work daily and they had charging it wouldn’t be an issue. Rapid charging isn’t that quick.
Though at my old office they started limiting time at the chargers. The city has recently started having public chargers.
One of the selling point of electric is you always start out with a full ish charge.
I’m on my bike on most days I commute. I like it better. Except in the winter where the lack of plowing of these separated bike lanes forced me onto public transit, which I don’t love. My car (2010 element) is gas but I only fill every 3 or so weeks.
I thought this but after 3 years I can say it is unfounded. the only reason I ever think about my state of charge on the city is when I need it to be low so I can use street parking that requires me to charge.
We really need more slow charging stations for folks to just park at. I’d have assumed that the economics would have been favorable to charge by the day/night rather than by the minute.
Probably not. Often that 15a is shared with several others nearby. In many cases there is a light sensor on one light that controls them all. Sometimes the transformers that supplies them isn't big enough for more load.
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
There’s a genuine technical issue: the AC EVSE protocols (J1772, NACS, etc) have several safety features that are far in excess of anything you’ll find in a regular 15A NEMA receptacle. I don’t think it would be wise to gave high traffic NEMA receptacles on fully weather-exposed streetlights.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
No, the cable you carry for AC charging has a Type 2 connector on both sides, it's purely an EV charging cable. It's not the same 3-phase plug you'd plug a table saw into.
AIUI, Tesla really screwed the pooch here. For the original Model S, Tesla really really wanted the US model to tuck the charge socket under the little hinged reflector, and they couldn’t figure out how to fit the Type 2 “Mennekes” connector their. So they invented their own socket (which evolved into NACS), and the Tesla one is rather inferior to Type 2, at least when used for AC charging.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
European Model S has Type 2 in that location, only ones that don't fit is the Type 2 CCS with giant DCFC pins below the regular Type 2. NACS is just Tesla doing Apple.
NACS is far less clunky than CCS. And don’t get me started on ChaDeMo - my best guess is that whoever designed it thought that big heavy awkward gasoline nozzles where cool and wanted their EV chargers to be at least as massive.
ChaDeMonis basically dead now other than for existing cars. A typical U.K. service station will have 20 ccs chargers for every chademo, and nobody is deploying the latter for new places.
Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.
I think massive CHAdeMO plugs might have been for ultra rapid charging that never rolled out. There are brochures of 350kW+ watercooled CHAdeMO charging test equipment floating online, noted as plug limited to 200kW, dated at least as far back as 2015. That was when Tesla was still rolling out V2 150kW. So the plug overall dimensions and pin sizes are probably way overspecced for what it is in practice.
3 phase has a property that the total power is (with fully balanced loads and no harmonics) constant. But n phases, equally spaced in phase angle, each an RMS voltage V from ground, with RMS current I per phase in phase with the voltage to ground, gives power n•V•I. (I’m assuming that n>=2 so that there is no neutral current.) There’s no savings for n=3 vs n=2.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
> Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs
Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.
It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.
It could even be cheap in a low-current version — it would basically be an extension cord, with two 12AWG hots and a ground plus a couple of little wires and the whatever inexpensive electrical parts are needed to declare its capabilities. If you can buy an e-marked USB-C cable for a few dollars, the latter won’t cost much.
It wasn't a matter of aiming low. NACS is arguably the perfect connector for the North American marketplace, or as perfect as anyone could reasonably expect for a standard of this class. The only other option on the table was a migration to CCS1, which would have been an objectively worse choice in literally all respects. CCS1 is more cumbersome, more fragile, and never enjoyed any numerical/incumbent advantage, peaking at 31% of deployed vehicles and plugs.
Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.
There is not enough street lamps to charge a meaningful fraction of cars. I mean, look at the streets, there is so, so many cars, parked everywhere they can fit.
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
And how many amps does the street light draw? And how many are on the same circuit? How much extra capacity is there on that circuit to charge a car? I'd bet it's close to zero.
It's not that simple. A pure EV needs ~10x as much battery as a PHEV. So for the same amount of batteries produced, you could make 10x as many vehicles PHEVs as EVs. Not all vehicles can be EVs due to practical issues.
Which results in more total electric miles driven replacing gas? I don't know, but "gas is destroying the world" is a brain short circuit.
Yes, EV's solve one of the many negative impacts of cars. It's not some magic bullet.
They still depend on minerals that require destructive mining from equipment that runs on fossil fuels, still use rubber tires, still has tons of plastics that are made with petroleum, still dependent on a power grid mainly sustained by fossil fuels...
We should be thinking bigger than this, even. Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit whenever possible. If it's not possible, try to move somewhere where it is.
We must be willing to be slightly inconvenienced for the greater good instead of arguing about which type of car to drive. People don't want to have that conversation, though.
Of course they don't. That's a great argument for changing structural incentives, but not for convincing people who are talking about what car to buy.
Hybrids have much more efficient ICE motors, which generate less CO2 than the motors of traditional cars. The amount of CO2 is further reduced by energy recovery.
TFA links another page where it is explained how the ICE motors used in Nissan hybrids have surpassed 50% efficiency, which is an efficiency that in the past was reached only in huge 2-stroke Diesel engines for ships.
50% is already not much lower than the efficiency of the gas turbines used in electricity generation plants, but the power plants with combined cycle (gas turbines + steam turbines) may reach over 65% efficiency and the power plants with Combined Heat and Power may reach over 80% total efficiency.
Battery EVs may take advantage of continuous improvements in the energy generation infrastructure, but for now they are still not usable everywhere, so hybrids are still preferable to cars with pure ICEs.
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
acomjean · · focus · HN ↗
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
pavlov · · focus · HN ↗
The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
AdamN · · focus · HN ↗
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
pepperoni_pizza · · focus · HN ↗
Also even in the sprawl, people usually don't drive hundreds of kilometers s day.
vrc · · focus · HN ↗
xattt · · focus · HN ↗
It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).
(1) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWqweWjsbU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWqweWjsbU
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
twilo · · focus · HN ↗
For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.
syedkarim · · focus · HN ↗
georgeecollins · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gas-taxes-state/" rel="nofollow">https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gas-taxes-state/
<a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/08/07/governor-newsom-announces-3500-instant-rebates-now-available-for-californians-buying-their-first-zero-emission-vehicle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/08/07/governor-newsom-announces-...
stvltvs · · focus · HN ↗
dublinben · · focus · HN ↗
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
[0] <a href="https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/" rel="nofollow">https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/
[1] <a href="https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
The above is for most people. There are exceptions in both states where gas makes more sense.
vel0city · · focus · HN ↗
It makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.
Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560 for energy costs in the EV, let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
That sounds very high. The most common lease cap is 10k miles per year.
vel0city · · focus · HN ↗
Also, 10K seems like a common base lease arrangement, but up to 15K is common. On top of that its not like most cars are leased.
rswail · · focus · HN ↗
They worked on the same principle as the old mechanical signs at airports and train stations.
So it was mechanical first with the motors, then the LED display and then LCD and then the current TFT etc.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
I dunno. Ask the OP.
StarlessHours · · focus · HN ↗
The nearest level3 is off the peninsula and both are under repair.
The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out. EV is not for everyone (yet)
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
I know that EV infra generally sucks in the US, but don't people understand that more than 96% people on the planet live elsewhere? Often in places where EVs work just fine?
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
GuestFAUniverse · · focus · HN ↗
Parking during charging is often the only option. E.g. Gent even had parking only for rented BEVs and car sharing BEVs.
So, I don't know what you are talking about at all. There a restricted zones were you aren't even allowed to enter with an ICE.
BadBadJellyBean · · focus · HN ↗
lbreakjai · · focus · HN ↗
I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.
It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.
jonkoops · · focus · HN ↗
lbreakjai · · focus · HN ↗
I luckily live in a building with reasonable people, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
SirMaster · · focus · HN ↗
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗
texruska · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
sgerenser · · focus · HN ↗
Long story short, I’d never have bought an EV if I couldn’t charge at home or work.
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
In April it cost about 14p mile off the motorway for petrol, 17 on the motorway (higher prices). Today it’s another 3p due to Iran, so 17/20p a mile.
Home electric costs 2.5p a mile at night, 8p during the day. public charging is around 15p on a slow overnight charger and 24p on a fast charger.
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗
toddmorey · · focus · HN ↗
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗
acomjean · · focus · HN ↗
It was always an issue, but he ended up moving to a more surban place. If you drove to work daily and they had charging it wouldn’t be an issue. Rapid charging isn’t that quick.
Though at my old office they started limiting time at the chargers. The city has recently started having public chargers.
One of the selling point of electric is you always start out with a full ish charge.
I’m on my bike on most days I commute. I like it better. Except in the winter where the lack of plowing of these separated bike lanes forced me onto public transit, which I don’t love. My car (2010 element) is gas but I only fill every 3 or so weeks.
nasmorn · · focus · HN ↗
lumost · · focus · HN ↗
tencentshill · · focus · HN ↗
SirFredman · · focus · HN ↗
nutjob2 · · focus · HN ↗
This should really be handled in the car and through the charging cable.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
amluto · · focus · HN ↗
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
amluto · · focus · HN ↗
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
amluto · · focus · HN ↗
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.
numpad0 · · focus · HN ↗
sugarkjube · · focus · HN ↗
Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.
May save you 5-10% on the bill.
amluto · · focus · HN ↗
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
simondotau · · focus · HN ↗
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
amluto · · focus · HN ↗
Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.
It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.
It could even be cheap in a low-current version — it would basically be an extension cord, with two 12AWG hots and a ground plus a couple of little wires and the whatever inexpensive electrical parts are needed to declare its capabilities. If you can buy an e-marked USB-C cable for a few dollars, the latter won’t cost much.
simondotau · · focus · HN ↗
Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.
(For reference, I'm in a CCS2 marketplace.)
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
US power supplies tend to be 1kW though for constant load (1.5kW rather than 2kW) so even worse.
j1elo · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
sugarkjube · · focus · HN ↗
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
pepperoni_pizza · · focus · HN ↗
creato · · focus · HN ↗
Which results in more total electric miles driven replacing gas? I don't know, but "gas is destroying the world" is a brain short circuit.
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗
fckgw · · focus · HN ↗
webdood90 · · focus · HN ↗
They still depend on minerals that require destructive mining from equipment that runs on fossil fuels, still use rubber tires, still has tons of plastics that are made with petroleum, still dependent on a power grid mainly sustained by fossil fuels...
We should be thinking bigger than this, even. Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit whenever possible. If it's not possible, try to move somewhere where it is.
We must be willing to be slightly inconvenienced for the greater good instead of arguing about which type of car to drive. People don't want to have that conversation, though.
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗
adrian_b · · focus · HN ↗
TFA links another page where it is explained how the ICE motors used in Nissan hybrids have surpassed 50% efficiency, which is an efficiency that in the past was reached only in huge 2-stroke Diesel engines for ships.
50% is already not much lower than the efficiency of the gas turbines used in electricity generation plants, but the power plants with combined cycle (gas turbines + steam turbines) may reach over 65% efficiency and the power plants with Combined Heat and Power may reach over 80% total efficiency.
Battery EVs may take advantage of continuous improvements in the energy generation infrastructure, but for now they are still not usable everywhere, so hybrids are still preferable to cars with pure ICEs.
Schiendelman · · focus · HN ↗