Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.

  • TheFogan@programming.dev
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    17 days ago

    Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work

    why the hell is that ridiculous? People do go places other than home and work. People take road trips and vacations. Electric cars are a good thing, just because one particular brand is owned by a narcisist ruining the country.

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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      16 days ago

      Also, not everyone has a parking spot with electricity. How are you supposed to charge if you’re parking on a random place on the street, like most people do? I’d joke about “lower a chain of extension cords from your 20th floor”, but that would be assuming you can park next to your home at all. My building’s parking, for example, had all its spots sold out by now, while the very few ones for sale in the neighborhood cost a fortune. Apparently, they were affordable if you bought the apartment new, but on a secondary market - no.

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      17 days ago

      I don’t care about any particular EV brand. Trying to use battery powered EVs for such purposes means that they need to built with heavy, oversized, extra hazardous batteries. The responsible, proper use case for BEVs is short trips with plenty of time for charging at home or work.

      • TheFogan@programming.dev
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        17 days ago

        So your suggestion is basically families should own an EV just for getting around home… and a gas guzzler for long distance travel? IMO the ideal should be a slow phase out of the gas cars.

        Or you know… instead of needing super heavy batteries… they could have smaller batteries… if charging stations become common enough that people can relatively easily find places to stop and charge on long trips.

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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          9 days ago

          Maybe there’s a battery range/charge time sweet spot, but I think it’s easy to underestimate what common enough would look like. These chargers are going to have to be everywhere and they’re probably not going to be taken care of properly. It’s just more e-waste.

          To answer your question: no, that is not my suggestion.

          • TheFogan@programming.dev
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            9 days ago

            To answer your question: no, that is not my suggestion.

            I mean so what is the suggestion? The post I was responding to made it sound like you were saying you shouldn’t use EV’s outside of short trips near home. Which begs the question what should someone who 99% of the time drives near home, but once a year needs to visit their family for christmas 2 states away.

            To me I’m wondering how complex are the chargers… we already have gas stations all over the place. To me it wouldn’t seem super inplausible for say fast chargers that are, reasonably easy to add to say the typical truck stop level gas station. Of which, they’d start with just adding one or 2… as EV’s become more common add more. Would be slowly working towards future proofing the consumer gas side (To my knowledge EV Trucks aren’t in the near future, but every truck stop I’ve been to has also had a huge regular car side)

            • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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              9 days ago

              BEVs aren’t compatible with the gas station model because they take too long to charge. ICE vehicles and even FCEVs are in and out of a gas station in five minutes, so you don’t need a big footprint to fuel up a lot of vehicles. BEVs need to park for a while to get a substantial charge, not even full one. The fast chargers get Teslas to 80% in something like thirty minutes. So, if these fast charger were installed adjacent to gas pumps, the price to charge your BEV would have to be something like 6x the cost to refuel in order to cover the missed fuel sales.

              As for what type of vehicle a someone should own for the scenario you describe, a long range BEV is overkill. Either keep a ICE car for all your driving or keep a small BEV for local trips and rent a more appropriate vehicle for infrequent long trips. Better yet, take a train or bus for those long trips and rent a short range BEV closer to your final destination.

              • TheFogan@programming.dev
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                9 days ago

                BEVs need to park for a while to get a substantial charge, not even full one. The fast chargers get Teslas to 80% in something like thirty minutes

                That’s why my point was “truck stop level gas station”. IE those huge gas stations off the highway, several in most cities… huge lots, and most importantly have at least one, sometimes a few restaurants inside. IE they are already designed as a good place for truckers to take a half hour to an hour to, re-organize themselves for a long trip. Not a totally unreasonable process for a road tripping family etc… to hit every 3-4 hours that an EV can drive.

                I can’t fully disagree on the potential of renting a car if it’s extremely infrequent to make long trips. Public transit would be nice, though gotta say there’s a lot of places where that’s pretty non-viable. Least from where I live the nearest bus station from me is about 30-45 minutes away by car.

                • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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                  9 days ago

                  What you’re describing only works if an increasing number of parking spots have chargers installed at them. I just don’t think it’s sustainable or feasible.

                  My main contention is that long range BEVs are a bad idea. They might mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but that comes with the above infrastructure problems, increasing demand on the problematic battery industry, and in turn creating more battery disposal problems. Furthermore, they perpetuate the living room on wheels paradigm that holds us back from the real solution to transporting people over land: rail. Meanwhile, short range BEVs are great because they make the most of their batteries, barely require any new infrastructure, and save their owners the hassle of needing to visit a gas station or find a “fast” charger at all.

      • tabular@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Batteries and liquid fuel are both hazardous in terms of catching fire, do you mean something else?

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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          9 days ago

          When these batteries burn, they can’t be put out except by cooling them down somehow because they contain their own oxidizer. So fire departments tend to just let them burn and send whatever metals and other chemicals into the atmosphere. A gasoline fire can be put out with fire suppressants that deprive it of air. Apart from that, the batteries are also hazardous in terms of their manufacturing and disposal lifecycle and also just by making vehicles heavier. Heavier vehicles mean more energetic collisions and they also require bigger brakes, which means more brake dust pollution.

          • tabular@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            I think that refers to lithium ion batteries. Some EVs use lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) which can still can catch fire but can be starved of oxygen. Sadly it is heavier but it is made without the immorally sourced cobalt.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          One can use natural gas (usually combined with some amount of gasoline). In terms of safety - if you’ve ever seen gas stations with concrete walls between fueling spots, that’s where this is popular, so not very safe.

          • tabular@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            I’ve not seen those (may not be in my country). What do the concrete walls stop, explosions?

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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              16 days ago

              It’s cheaper and more dangerous, and usually done where natural gas is much cheaper than gasoline. Yes, explosions.

  • Singletona082@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I’m going to disagree with you on the sentement. We need a better infrastructure for EVs, and non-tesla vehicles can use those charging stations (either via adaptor, or a few use that same plug type.)

    • bach37strad @lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Wait, do they not all use the same plug? Forgive my ignorance on EVs, my car is 60 years old.

      With ya on infascructure. Would like to see better build quality than tesla stuff though, and hardware you own not locked behind pay walls. Add standardization to the list I guess.

  • Skunk@jlai.lu
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    17 days ago

    Just get rid of the fuel stations. It’s ridiculous that vehicles owners should expect to refuel their cars anywhere but at home or at work

    • b161@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      16 days ago

      Just get rid of the cars. Build cities built for human communities, not for cars and mega corporations. Electric vehicles are a band-aid solution that’s not going to save us, and doesn’t solve the fundamental problem.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      If people want to go somewhere, they can just walk. They have two perfectly good legs and nobody is stopping them.

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      17 days ago

      I’m inclined to agree that all motorized personal vehicles and their attendant infrastructure should be eliminated. However, you’re making a false equivalency. I live in New Jersey, so it takes maybe five minutes for me to completely refuel my car with gasoline. My understanding is that it takes six times as long to charge a big EV to ~80%. Therefore, a single fueling station can serve many more people with a much smaller footprint. Furthermore, fuel gets consumed, whereas batteries are mostly dead weight that occasionally do the thermal runaway thing.

      • Skunk@jlai.lu
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        17 days ago

        I really like the “thermal runaway thing” expression, and yeah it is a false equivalency but it’s a funny one.

        EV charging and the tech around it can be slow today, but it doesn’t mean we should abandon and go back to what we know is working (as some people want to). This is a recipe for zero innovation and not the way to become a Star Trek like civilization.

        In my city there are electric buses that charge in a few seconds at some stops along the route. No overhead wires, no big diesel engines and no noise.

        We just need to work and improve those new vehicles, find better than the actual EV and combustion engines as well.

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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          17 days ago

          Which buses are those?

          My position is that the development of long range BEVs (and all the externalities associated with manufacturing and disposing of these batteries) has been an incredible detour. We already had the technology for fuel cell EVs with as much range as ICE vehicles. Meanwhile, short range BEVs are great because they solve the problem of refueling and avoid the problem of recharging, since you can do it while you sleep work. Long range BEVs just trade refueling for “fast” recharging, which is actually slower and more inconvenient than refueling. Where we really need innovation and development is in mass, public transit.

      • shaggyb@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        all motorized personal vehicles and their attendant infrastructure should be eliminated

        I live in New Jersey, so

        Nuff said.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    17 days ago

    Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.

    Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.

    EDIT:

    Long distance power transmission is normally done with aluminum lines, rather than copper.

    https://www.anixter.com/en_au/resources/literature/wire-wisdom/copper-vs-aluminum-conductors.html

    Aluminum has 61 percent of the conductivity of copper, but has only 30 percent of the weight of copper. That means that a bare wire of aluminum weighs half as much as a bare wire of copper that has the same electrical resistance. Aluminum is generally more inexpensive when compared to copper conductors.

    Resistance is a function of the material’s conductivity and the cross-sectional area of a cable. If aluminum has 61% the conductivity of copper, then one needs 1÷0.61=1.63 times the cross-sectional area for an aluminum cable to have the same resistance. That’s a radius 1.63^0.5 = 1.28 times the radius of an equivalent copper cable.

    So you only need an aluminum cable with a radius 28% larger to achieve the same overall resistance.

    In the case of the EV charging cables, flexibility is at a premium, and increasing the radius decreases that. But my guess is that it’s probably within the range of acceptability to use a bulkier aluminum cable, if need be.

    EDIT2: I was also going to suggest liquid-cooled cables, which electric arc furnaces use for their power busses. Apparently Tesla already tried using experimental liquid-cooled cables, a decade back:

    https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/

    Tesla’s Mountain View Supercharger has always been a little different from the rest.  Not only is it located at the world-famous Computer History Museum – where Tesla sometimes holds events, but until recently, it was also running an experiment utilizing propylene-glycol-cooled supercharging cables…

    These cables are thinner and more flexible than the standard Supercharger cables which are about as thick as gas station hoses and sometimes more unwieldy, especially in cold weather when they become less flexible.

    We’ve gotten word today that Tesla has switched out the experimental cables in Mountain View for the standard thicker cables, thus ending the public experiment.  Officially Tesla told us “We changed the cables to unify service procedures and parts across all current Supercharger sites.”

    That would have been liquid-cooled copper, but one could presumably also do liquid-cooled aluminum. That’s another option, if one wants to keep heat under control with higher resistance from a cable. Probably some extra cost for the cooling system, and there’s some extra waste of energy as conversion to heat that way, but I doubt that it’d make EV charging impractical, were that what was required to deal with people stealing copper.

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      17 days ago

      l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.

      Battery powered EVs should not be used for long-distance trips.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        17 days ago

        I mean…I agree with you that EVs are relatively-poorly-suited compared to ICEs for long distance trips, and if I had both a gasoline-powered and electricity-powered vehicle, I’d use the gasoline-powered one for a long-distance trip… but not everyone is going to own both. It’s hardly reasonable to say “well, people who own EVs just can’t travel long distances”.

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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          17 days ago

          Take a bus or a train. Public transit is of course the real solution. Transitioning from ICE personal vehicles to personal BEVs doesn’t really solve much and arguably creates more problems.

  • Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 days ago

    The idea that EV owners should only be able to charge at home is a joke I hope? Should they not be allowed to travel?

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      17 days ago

      Not joking. Why do you think EV owners need charging stations everywhere in order to travel? They’re not restricted to using only their EVs, right?

      • Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        17 days ago

        Ah I see, EV owners should also own a gaz guzzling car only for going on vacation I see. Very good point you are very smart.

        • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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          17 days ago

          If you take a lot of long distance trips that it probably makes most sense to just keep a single ICE car. If you only take long trips occasionally then just rent one. Hopefully, buses and trains are also on option for you.

          If you’ve got one of those BEVs capable of hundreds of miles of range, but you’re only driving tens of miles everyday, you’re not any better than an F150 owner with a clean bed.

  • Victor@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.

    Freaking BASED.

    But for long-distance trips, that doesn’t really hold up until we get battery capacities vastly superior to those of today. For countries with workers that have vacations, we like to go places other than home or work, sometimes. 😅

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      9 days ago

      Aren’t EV batteries already big enough? As in, you probably shouldn’t drive more than 8 hours or so in a day without taking a long break and getting a good night’s sleep. There many models on the market with that capability, right? Also, if that’s the type of driving you’re doing frequently, an ICE vehicle or ideally an FCEV would be a better choice, just in terms of avoiding battery wear and tear and reducing the amount dead weight you’re schlepping around. If you’re only going on long drives occasionally, just rent a suitable vehicle or consider another from of transit like a train or a bus and then rent a little EV near your destination.

      • Victor@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        If you’re going to visit family up in the backwoods, the options you listed aren’t really viable. At least not for us.

        And I don’t think you can drive 8 hours before recharging. Say you have a battery of 120 kWh, which is absolutely massive. And let’s say you’re driving at higher speeds like 100+ km/h, maybe you’ll be doing around 20 kWh/100 km consumption rate (that might even be generous depending on the car, especially in the winter). Finishing the battery from 100% to 0% would be (units in italics) 120 kWh ÷ 20 kWh/100 km × 100 km ÷ 100 km/h average speed = 6 hours of driving. And then your car needs to be towed at 0 percent charge left. 🙃

  • kat@orbi.camp
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    17 days ago

    What if you work remote and live in an apartment building without plugs???

    • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOP
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      17 days ago

      Instead of socializing the cost of putting charging stations everywhere, landlords and employers should be forced to provide outlets.

  • Amoxtli@thelemmy.club
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    17 days ago

    They must have a lot of copper. Thieves are going target them. What can you do in a land of criminals?

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
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      17 days ago

      Fix the system so people don’t have to make money by stealing copper.

      And yet, here we are with billionaires in charge—robber barons v2.0.

    • Singletona082@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Considering the voltages and amps going through it is safe to assume those are fairly thick solid copper wires yes.