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On my morning commute, it's important that fueling be quick. I have to stop at a station and fill up, something I can't do at home. However, if I were in an EV, I could fill up at home, while I slept. It'd be fully charged when I got in to go to work. If I could charge 30 minutes to half at home, charging time is nearly insignificant.

I would still love to see hydrogen cars instead. I think Honda has it right.




It turns out that, among other advantages for electric cars, they can carry more energy than hydrogen cars when you take the efficiency of transferring kinetic energy to the car into account. There was an interview with Elon Musk where he scoffed at the use of hydrogen and the use of fuel cells.


The advantage of hydrogen lies in the speed of refueling, which is the main disadvantage of electric cars.


There's always battery swap-out. The problem with that is infrastructure cost, though.

Seems to me that the Supercharger stations are getting the time down to 30 minutes through parallelism. If one could bring component costs down even more, one could have more parallelism. What about 15 or 10 minute charging times? I'm going to guess that plans are in place to exploit some serious economics of scale when they start building $30,000 cars.

Once you have autonomous cars, this opens up the possibility of "battery trucks" once can rendezvous with on the highway to recharge without stopping.




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