Technology

Or to splash on your male model friends

Energy is amp x volt. Same energy faster is more energy in same time, be it amps or volt. Dunno if your grid can bear it multiple times in each city but still better buffer it. And more volts needs more gum or you get the volts.

Well, you'd need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can't force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they'll lose out on precious markups.

That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.

The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you'd let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you've already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I'm sure it's a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.

I'm all for the idea, mind you. This isn't me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what's stopping us (and the answer is probably "rich people that don't like sharing" as usual).

Hydrogen power is the past not the future it's just a past that never came to be so we sort of feel like it's something futuristic.

It's a great idea in theory but there's so many problems with the idea not least of which is where do you get the hydrogen from? The amount of power that you would need to compress hydrogen into liquid on an industrial scale would practically necessitate dysonsphere.

Hydrogen has extreme structural problems. Hydrogen tanks need constant maintenance, due to how small the molecule is - it's very difficult to contain and prevent corrosion. You then have significant conversion loss between the powerplant-native format of electricity, and the hydrogen. So nothing can be as cheap as pure electricity. Fuelling the car with ammonia that then gets converted to Hydrogen inside the car is the solution to the first problem, but further increases the loss on the second.

What you're describing sounds like a small, high-capacity battery to me! Like a super AA battery. Maybe in 50 years :)

Hydrogen has the same problems tho. Well, except metal/bor hydride, but they have low enery density.

The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be

Exactly. More energy means either more copper or more rubber in the cable.

Definitely availability and range. I thought of getting EV here in Thailand but limited range + limited charing coverage + 30min charing time is a real deal breaker.

All of which are very solvable issues and I'm sure my next car will be an EV tho

But is it really?

A 2000 mile road trip with 20 minute charging breaks is gonna add what? 3 and a half hours on top of 30 hours of driving?

Unless you plan on doing a bunch of meth and speeding across the desert, I don't see a scenario where a regular person does 8+ hours of driving and doesn't take a 20 minute break.

I'd like to add that for the once in 20 years that car sees a 2000 mile road trip, I don't think waiting a little bit is actually an issue.

Take an honest reflection, and think, how often are people driving driving more than 300 miles in a single session.

Then think about yourself in the position of the road trip, are you going to sacrifice the lifespan of your battery to go from 20 minutes to 5 minutes charging time?, (especially since it's likely you will spend more than 5 minutes anyway just going to the bathroom, eating some food, etc.)

If the insulation doesn't insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don't know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I'm way off.

Fairly unlikely, we engineer things to fail safe.

Even if so we have ways to calculate the power going in and coming out, and if there's an imbalance kill everything, that's how gfci and arc fault breakers work.

Gas powered cars catch fire all the time

If there's literally one place in America we need to throw money at, it's the electrical grid.

We have a decades out of date power infrastructure, Europe especially has us beat.

Just like electrification originally, and later the internet, increasing power delivery will have benefits for everyone that pay off for centuries .

Mostly we need to make the grid far smarter.

Evs should be allowed to load coordinate with the grid, so they switch on at the optimum times for grid stability in exchange for major discounts on power.

A superload like this one should have to request clearance, then the grid compensates by reducing 'cheap ev power' in the area, while also requesting evs configured for v2g to be ready to possibly supply.

The supercharger has a slightly higher cost per kwh to make up for this, but that is the cost of convenience.

i seem to recall it wasn’t an outright ban, but unreasonable tariffs on chinese evs specifically.

Yeah, tariffs.

Otherwise, you'd see the subcompact EVs with a 150mile range for about $9,000 US that BYD sells.

No US manufacturer can remotely compete with the cost of EVs from China. Rather than letting people buy cheap EVs, the government decided to tariff them so that they cost as much as a luxury car.