Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "The tech which can charge an electric car in 10 minutes" video.

@PiOfficial A surprisingly large number of people do not understand the difference between 'kilo' and 'mega'... for that matter, a shockingly large number of Americans (purely due to lack of data regarding anyone else on this matter on my part) don't understand that '1 million dollars' and '1,000,000 dollars' are the same thing, and will proceed to treat 'million' as part of the Unit rather than the Number, resulting in truly nonsensical assumptions and opinions regarding taxation and the cost of doing a given thing at a given scale...
22
of course, the reason oil based fuels have been the standard for so many things for so long is energy density. Even allowing for the lack of efficiency, it still fit more power into a given amount of storage space than anything else, and also more power into less Mass than anything else. The main thing that stopped EVs being competitive until recently (and still makes battery powered trucks nonsense) is that no batteries were able to beat that energy density... and the ones we have now are rather horrifically prone to exploding and/or catching fire if anything goes wrong (of course, this lead to the implementation of a lot more features to prevent this from happening, meaning in many cases they're safer than the older, less energy dense batteries... assuming they were made properly.) Of course, if you power your vehicle using overhead wires, you get to skip that issue entirely... which is why electric locomotives and EMUs (and trams, and trolley buses) have been pretty much universally superior to the alternatives basically since they existed (at the expense of the infrastructure to set them up costing more) anywhere the infrastructure for them has been implemented.
9
@nnnnnn3647 No, shit urban planning, poor infrastructure, and a lack of public transit makes you a slave to the car. ICE vs EV makes not a scrap of difference to that issue. Except in so far as changing demand and usage patterns as people switch to EVs Might encourage increased spending on public transit infrastructure... (you know, the one thing that ACTUALLY allows you to NOT be a 'slave to the car'.)
8
@nnnnnn3647 you might want to look into these rather clever devices invented... oh, over a hundred years ago now... we call them... Railways. Or, alternatively, Also over a hundred years old now, Aeroplanes! shocking! Then there are buses, rental cars, taxies (ok, that last one's a bad option). Heck, Bicycles!
8
@nnnnnn3647 It's... not meaningfully different from the current situation with ICE cars. Well, you trade the ability to store extra fuel in gas cans or the like on long trips for the ability to refuel while the car's sitting around in your garage overnight, and I'm sure it's not too hard to find use cases where that's a bad thing rather than a good one (though the sorts of vehicles and uses for which the ability to just load up extra fuel is relevant generally also have other requirements that make current EV tech less than ideal anyway), but other than that? The problem is the car and infrastructure designed around it, not EV vs ICE. EVs are fundamentally an attempt to make money off patching some of the flaws in the car based system. They're a step up in most regards, but they're still Cars, with most of the problems that brings with it. To avoid being a slave to the car requires properly implemented public transit (which, shockingly enough, should Also be electric in most cases... though overhead wires are vastly superior to batteries in almost all use cases. Capacitor banks are the answer to most of the 'but sometimes!' issues.)
3
@jwb52z9 yes? There are situations where cars are necessary. There are situations where ICEs are still the best option. Both are a tiny percentage of the situations in which ICEs and cars are currently used, and aren't all a good reason to not replace both systems in the situations where superior alternatives are available. And fundamentally, public transit infrastructure IS the superior alternative in most cases. Extra bonus: in an awful lot of cases, railways can use existing highway right of ways for most of their trip. Heck, Good railways would allow for the highways they then share right of ways with to get Smaller due to reducing the amount of traffic on them. Even a four track rail right of way is less than half the size of highway with 4+ lanes in either direction, after all.
1
@Novashadow115 to be fair, he'd actually be right about...well, most people. It just has nothing to do with EV vs ICE or much of anything else that might be thus implied. Most people simply do not actually travel to other cities much. Usually due to lack of time, lack of money, or just lack of reason to do so. Perhaps they don't see other cities as other countries, really, but that's largely due to not really thinking about either very much... There's places within reasonable travel distance by whatever methods are available for just doing day to day things, places that are within day-trip distances for doing something a bit special on a weekend or other day off, and then there's everywhere else that requires a lot of planning ahead, packing, organization, etc. (degree of paperwork and language learning involved varies, but beyond that not much changes) That's really how most people think about that sort of thing. EV cars, ICE cars, various public transit options (of whatever type and quality happen to be available), they all nudge around which thing is in what category a bit (and just being flat out rich makes a big difference Not to mention the fact that the USA is large enough that more distant states (and the cities there-in) pretty much Are different countries in most meaningful respects.
1
@BlackHawkBallistic Ideally if you're going outside of EV range you'd be able to make use of various mass transit options... ... of course, some parts of the world are much better in that regard than others. Also, last I heard smaller delivery trucks and vans could be battery powered quite happily. Of course, you do hit range and mass limits after a while. EVs have their own version of the rocket equation to contend with. The ideal solution to this is, well, electrified rail in most cases, but there is a range and throughput band between 'last mile consumer and small retail delivery in cities' and 'roll several entire train cars right into the warehouse', and that does assume the rail infrastructure's still in place/gets built. (too bad so much got ripped up in the later half of the 20th century). For that, ICE vehicles are still the way to go... Though there has been an interesting experiment/first stage infrastructure project in... Germany, I think it was? Basically takes its cues from trolley buses. Basically your standard big-rig trucks, except there's a pantograph on the cab roof and overhead cables along the outermost lane of the highway (some of these are hybrids that use ICE once they leave the highway, others have batteries for their last mile in cities, and I think some just run between depots that are just off the highways and served by the cables as well. Can't quite recall for that last one)
1