On May 13, 2015, at 8:37 AM, Lawrence Rhodes via EV <[email protected]> wrote:
> So I think the engineers need to put their thinking caps on, reduce the > weight of every vehicle, make the CD of all new vehicles .16 or so and stop > making these energy hogs. That's definitely where a good deal of engineering effort needs to go, no matter what...but we've also got a bit of a conundrum on our hands. Most EV charging can and should reasonably be expected to be done while the vehicle is parked, especially overnight at home. L1 chargers are today and always will be good enough for that for nearly everybody, and L2 is pretty much guaranteed overkill for nearly all the rest. ...but...unless the per-charge mileage is in the four-digit range, there will be situations where people will want to charge, wherever they happen to be, and they're not going to be happy if it takes more than ten or fifteen minutes. And 15 kWh / 15 minutes is 60 kilowatts...not quite the level of insanity of a megawatt, but still in a range far beyond what you'd ever see in a residential setting. The *real* problem is that I don't think that there's an overlap between what rapid charging is likely to cost and what people are likely to be willing to pay, especially when they're used to paying on the order of $0.10 / kWh at home. And with low demand, the prices would have to be even higher since they won't be spread out over as many customers, driving down demand even further. But without the option for rapid charging, a small but significant minority of the miles people unthinkingly drive today simply can't be done in an electric vehicle, creating a chicken-and-egg problem. That's part of Tesla's marketing brilliance with their own rapid charger network, but I don't know that it's something that can realistically be made universal. Perhaps our best real-world hope is for Tesla to offer universal adapters to their superchargers for about the same price as they charge to upgrade their vehicles to supercharger capability. (Same price because Tesla's price includes their capital and operating expenses for the network, not just whatever is done to the car itself.) Done right, that would allow the minority who need to make road trips in non-Tesla vehicles to do so...and it even opens up the possibility for renting the adapters for rare road trips. b& _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
