… and not entirely unreasonably so, given that Elon Musk teased that number as late as last week: “We have a shot at achieving our first 100,000 vehicle delivery quarter,”
Probably correct, however from a user perspective it’s much more convenient to charge when parked overnight or at work. Installing an ordinary AC charger is quite cheap, and the goal should be to have lots of these, to make EVs more practical then fossil fuel cars.
EV charging hardware is very expensive at the moment.
A 100 Amp relay good for 10kW is < $2, yet the cheapest similar EV charging system is easily $1000.
I imagine a future where the people who make streetlights just integrate a couple of sockets in the bottom of every streetlamp. Total human time to fit one to an existing streetlamp should be only 15 minutes or so, so they can be rolled out en-mass.
> A 100 Amp relay good for 10kW is < $2, yet the cheapest similar EV charging system is easily $1000.
The grid operates at 10kV. Most electric cars accept voltages less than one tenth of that. The cost is creating a large transformers.
That said, large transformers like these are pretty standard in sub-stations, it's still not clear to me why our existing infrastructure can't support super charging everywhere.
It sounds like there should be a startup out there that sells small weatherproof boxes with an outlet and a relay and a microcontroller inside, that makes it trivial to sell electricity to everyone who uses an app. There's really no reason such a box needs to cost $1000.
From what I've seen on current hydrogen fuelling stations having the capacity to actually refuel a significant amount of cars are limited (because tanks have to be repressurised), if you add electrolysis to this I imagine the fuelling rate is even more limited.
Hard to say. Their hydrogen efforts seem half-assed at best; so maybe it is just management not yet convinced BEV will work, and assume hydrogen at some point will be good enough so they want to have some experience with it.
Most likely there is internal company politics in many of these car companies which makes it hard to convert to BEV development, it will mean many people losing their jobs, factories closing, etc.
Or synthetically generated fuels (eg audi e-diesel, which is a diesel, but I think a petrol equivalent can be generated), which can be done today, but are very costly for general use. I don't think the cost of fuel for a classic car will be a huge issue even if it is very high (10x of todays cost).
> I don't think the cost of fuel for a classic car will be a huge issue even if it is very high (10x of todays cost).
Not sure about that.
Let's consider a generic classic car that delivers 25 miles per (UK Imperial) gallon, which is 5.5 miles per liter of petrol. At the moment, petrol is ~1.3-1.5 EUR/liter in central Europe.
Taking a mean of 1.4 EUR/L, that's ~25 cents/mile, or 4 miles/EUR. A 200 mile trip (say, a weekend away) would cost ~51 EUR - not too bad. 3000 miles in a year would cost ~764 EUR.
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Now, consider 10x the cost. 510 EUR in fuel, just for a weekend away? 7640 EUR for a year's occasional cruising around? Accepted that's no problem for the super-rich, but it starts to be punitive for a hobbyist owner. What about if you're into American classics that deliver 10 MPG?
Further, with that cost for fuel, the economics of a conversion make a lot more sense, before you even consider other possible incentives.
With regards to weight - hydrogen tanks are heavy, even if the fuel is light. The tanks on a Toyota Mirai weight 87.5kg (193 lbs). In addition you need the fuel cell, piping, more wiring.. The actual weight advantage is not as great as it might seem.
I see people talking about refuellig time of hydrogen beein an advantage. Although most videoes I see on youtube seem to use ~10ish minutes - and it depends if the pumps has the correct pressure). Recharging an electric car is usually done in a few seconds of active time (plugging in the cable when you park), only if you exhaust the range during one trip you have to wait for recharging.
> Recharging an electric car is usually done in a few seconds of active time
You forgot the 5 minutes spent trying to download and install their own proprietary app, creating an account, just for the app to fail to start the charging...
FYI there are only some countries where evidence is inadmissible solely because it is aquired illegaly (eg in the United States, but not most of Europe AFAIK). Not that I in any way condone what this company have done.
Even in the US, the exclusionary rule only protects you against illegal evidence acquisition by the government. If a private party illegally gathers evidence against you (without any government prompting), that is admissible. See for instance Burdeau v. McDowell [1]. Another interesting case on this topic is Sackler v. Sackler [2], where the New York State Court of Appeals held that evidence illegally gathered by private investigators (working for one of the divorcing spouses) was admissible in divorce proceedings.
That's true. However, using credentials harvested in this way is almost certainly going to constitute unauthorised access of a computer system and a breach of the Computer Misuse Act.
True. However, it's hard to argue diagnostics data for Ubuntu would be performance of contract (art 6.1: b). It could be argued legitimate interest (arg 6.1: f), but then the right to object comes into play.
Yes, it definitely wouldn’t be performance of a contract!
I have no insight into their reasoning here, I just wanted to bring this fact up given I see people talking about consent all the time when that is not the only basis allowed under the law.
