I would love to have gone electric (bought a car in September) but I rent and don't have any way to charge at my residence. How do we solve the renters-that-cant-charge-their-cars problem?
Public EV chargers are pretty widespread nowadays. Not as much as gas chargers obviously, but for most people in the country if you don't have a way to charge at home it's not fundamentally that different from not having a gas pump at your house.
Plus, most people can charge at home with an extension cord. It's not particularly fast, but you should be able to get 4-5 miles an hour. In the worst case scenario where you can only charge at home and can only charge for 10 hours overnight, that's still 40 miles of driving which is enough for a lot of commuters. Even if it falls short—again—you can use public chargers.
Lastly, eliminating the sale of ICE cars will be a pretty rapid forcing function on the deployment of EV chargers. Still, I'd be all for locations that ban combustion engines mandating that landlords provide EV charging facilities.
Also after you divide the amount of time required? So if an average charging session is 100 minutes and getting petrol is 5 minutes, you'd need 20 times more chargers to break even on availability. And I'm not sure that even works the same when considering that these events are probably bursty (most people will arrive at an energy station at a similar time of day)
In case it sounds like I'm gas station lobby: I'm not against EVs at all and don't own a car, I'm just wondering if this is a fair comparison
I don't think it even includes the ones at people's homes where probably "most" charging happens. No one has a gas station at home.
FWIW a fast charge is like 10-15 mins usually while you grab a coffee or something - in modern EV cars you have 100-200kw (or more!) charging where you can get like 400 or 500 miles in an hour, so 15mins gives you 100-125 miles extra range etc. If you time it, filling up a gas tank and going in to pay and all that is not like 40 seconds but more in the 5-10 mins mark, so 15 mins top up on a longer journey is not that much longer than filling up.
It's a bit of a different mentality really - with petrol/gas I'd fill up to the brim then drive until I was almost empty, but with an EV I wake up with a full tank and just do a quick top off here and there during the day (assuming I ever need it which 99% of the time I don't) until I can get home and charge overnight where is way way cheaper.
With petrol I'd never stop to just put in a few litres at a time, but doing it with an EV is so simple and easy, and you can go do something else while it's happening. Picking up some groceries, getting a coffee, bio break etc - perfect time for a top up
Only a tiny fraction of EV chargers are 100+ kW. Most are 10-20 kW. These are great for office parking garages or shopping malls, but stopping at one for 15 minutes gets you nowhere.
Walmart has some gigantic amount of sites under construction or in permitting at many of their stores, and many are being built by other operators too. Charging proliferation hasn't slowed down.
Well given Rivians rank among the worst EVs in the world efficiency-wise, maybe if you care about not spending your life at charging stations, don't buy a Rivian? Or a Tesla for that matter, since Tesla lies about their efficiency numbers and the real-world numbers are middling at best.
It is the low temperature performance that make most EV impractical. A Tesla power pack heater means the charge will be completely depleted if left outdoors for more than a week in winter.
EV are meant for people that live in 4'C to 42'C weather, and have excess capacity on their solar installations. Everyone else is getting subsidized by their neighbors paying for excess electrical capacity. =3
In the UK, in London at least, they're starting to put in more and more ~4-5KW chargers on the electric street lamps/lamp posts.
So far its like 1 or 2 a street (and not all streets either), but hopefully one day it will basically be all of them in every street so you don't need to worry.
So if you need to park overnight on the street anyway, park next to a lamp post that has the socket. Its "slow" charging at 4 to 5 KW, but if you're parked for 8-12 hours (while you are asleep), that is quite a considerable top-up in the 40-50KWh range.
One option may be to ask your work to electrify a parking spot for you? Depending on the type of company there can be big enough subsidies and tax-write-off capital investments in adding more electric parking spaces that they might do it just for that. (It can be fun to use accounting games in your personal favor.) For other types of companies they may see that as a possible "captive audience" revenue source, with nickel and dime-ing electric charge fees on top of existing parking fees to be a a fun game to play with their own employees whose cars are stuck in the same place for many hours at a time because they "must" be in the office.
Either of those two common types of companies you can possibly "win" an easy way to charge your daily commute.
And everyone you ask has a slightly different situation so no generic solution does it. We’ll have to spend some money and retrofit at least where possible. We’ll need free level 2 chargers wherever people congregate. And folks will probably have to adapt their expectation toward mobility in a way. Things change.
You could possibly have come to an arrangement about getting a 50 Amp (think dryer plug) hookup in the garage and provided your own charger. Also depending on your driving patterns a trickle charger in a 20 Amp socket may have worked for you as well. Mine takes about 48 hours for a full charge on the trickle charger.
There's no garage, and the only driveway-facing outlet is at the front door - opposite where my parking spot is allocated (an extension cord would have to go under/through the landlord's cars.) I have to drive 60km to work every day.
Only laws (accommodate EVs and/or WFH) or spending time sitting at a gas station will help me here. No landlord is interested in accommodating an EV unless it's a net benefit to them (and thus a net negative to me, who already spends 40% income just to have a place to work.)
Maybe it's possible to rent a cheap parking spot with charger elsewhere and take a tram/metro/bus/bicycle/scooter for the last ten minutes of distance as you get deeper into the city?
Having a car right out one's door is a real luxury though, no more than two steps through any weather. I can see the appeal, just not sure if the collective downsides are worth it compared to arranging good transport inside of, and between, cities. Outside of populated areas, yeah, whatcha gonna do, but at least inside of major settlements we ought to be able to get this done (in many cities it's already okay to not have a car, but imo the facilities to get to the countryside are relatively annoying and needlessly expensive)
All our local Tesla drivers park their cars partially blocking the alleyway each evening.
They can't make it into their garages on the narrow road, and there are no curb side plugs in the front (NEC safety rules.) Funny until the Garbage truck rage mashes the horn at 6am... lol =3
I’m in the same situation, but I did go electric. I’m in a bigger city in Europe and the public infrastructure here is adequate and reliable. I rarely have to wait for the car to finish charging, it mostly fits my usage.
what happens when there's more people that need 20 minutes? it takes me less than five to pull up, fill up, and go. when the gas station is packed, i might have to wait 4-5 minutes for my turn.
Now quadruple this.
"super extra 1gigawatt charging" isn't coming to my area, potentially ever. Afaik there's two "super chargers" in my metro area, both at dealerships. i've actually never seen a Tesla charger in person.
Why is your civic infrastructure so crippled? I'm not sure if I'd trust driving over bridges or drinking water in a municipality which is incapable of installing electric plugs.
With home charging, I'm almost never charging anywhere else. Maybe a few times a year when doing a longer trip. I just drive, and plug the charger in some times when I get home. I literally never think about range or having to drive a detour to fill it up.
But you have to do that probably weekly. And then also spend a lot of money while doing it. It seems you believe those driving EVs are "suckers", but do you realize you probably spend hours and hours more in a year going to the station and pump compared to most EV owners never having to do that in their daily life?
My cheap EV gets 200+ km of range (124 mi) from 20 minutes of charging. Again, why the hell are you talking about two hours. Why are you saying that 20 minutes gets you "home". Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV, ever. Sounds like you've never driven one.
Your display says that. And your display is bullshit.
I work with the people that make the displays man. There are entire groups dedicated to deciding what is indefensible lies, and what “could be true under the right circumstances so we’re allowed to say/show that”
> Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV,
lol, go to a charging station sometime and see the people sleeping or watching tv. If it’s your primary vehicle and you want to go somewhere, you are going from 0 to 100.
fwiw this just depends a lot on the OEM. All OEMs have a non-trivial mapping of assumed energy content to shown percentage, in part because that's just not trivial to do, in part psychology. (The same is true for fuel gauges). Some brands manipulate the consumption numbers a lot (iirc - Tesla fudges the numbers the most e.g. they don't count energy consumption when not moving).
For most the consumption of an EV is shown rather accurately and is really just (energy drawn from the HV battery as measured by the BMS, which is generally very accurate for safety reasons) divided by (kilometers driven in the current interval).
As far as I know nobody includes charging losses in the readout. Personally I think this is correct for range estimation purposes. If you're swinging at a cost perspective, this of course means you're going to always miss around 3-20% depending on charging method, temperatures, car model etc. (there are fairly significant differences in OBC efficiency across models and also across AC power, low power charging gets inefficient quickly, while 7-11 kW often gets you north of 90%. DCFC is usually more efficient accounting-wise, because fast chargers bill for DC energy, not AC energy, so DC conversion losses aren't on the bill in the first place, though I assume DC chargers are also more efficient at power conversion than OBCs in general).
> Your display says that. And your display is bullshit.
I don't know what to tell you. I drive a MG4 with a 64 kWh battery. My average consumption is usually between 14-15 kWh/100 km (I don't drive very fast on freeways), which means that a full battery gets me a bit over 400 km, which is the actual range I can get fro the car. It charges at 135 kW for a large part of the battery capacity and 20 minutes of charging gives me more than 50 % of the capacity, hence more than 200 km.
> lol, go to a charging station sometime and see the people sleeping or watching tv
I live in Prague, Czech Republic, in Europe. I don't see people sleeping or watching TV at charging stations, because there's a ton of them and they're in convenient places. I have never waited for an empty spot, not a single minute. I park my car on the street, I'm entirely reliant on public infrastructure and it works well.
> If it’s your primary vehicle and you want to go somewhere, you are going from 0 to 100.
My EV is my only vehicle and I only charge it to 100 % when I need the battery to balance (which my car only does at 100 %), i.e once every month or so. Again, with a working charging network and a reasonably modern EV, you can just start driving and charge when necessary (for 15 minutes or so).
The tracking, the module security lockdown, and that in a couple years particulate filter systems like DEF for diesel that everyone just loves… is coming to petrol
by regulation.
If you own a house, generally you can do things like install charging points (also backup batteries, solar panels, better insulation, all kinds of fun things) that renters can't.
I'm sure there are some homeowners who can't - maybe listed buildings, or these weird HOA rules I hear about from Americans.
> Android does provide a WiFi suggestion API [1], but it has several limitations and doesn’t behave quite as expected.
Can you expand on this? I read the linked doc, and it looked like a separate API should be used to used to "persist a network connection" (my words), but as someone with no Android dev experience there don't seem to be any obvious limitations.
You did mention in another reply that only certain root apps can do [what we expect]. Is there a link where I can learn more about that?
> I guess the question is "why generate a QR code rather than just connect?"
Exactly. Why not use the API directly?
Why encode a string into an image for the sole purpose of displaying that image to then basically do a screenshot to then read from the screen, to run an algorithm on that to detect & decode to get the string you already had after doing the OCR on the wifi credentials.
Btw: i didn't even open the link. My comment was based solely on this post. Now i see that it's an expo / react project... so the amount of wasteful energy spent is even higher.
I have looked at the code. This here stands out to me:
>>>
if (Platform.OS === "android") {
// On Android, we use system built-in WiFi connection dialog via qr code
return false;
} else if (Platform.OS === "ios") {
// On iOS, we need to use a different method
await WiFiManager.connectToProtectedSSIDPrefix(
ssid,
password,
!isWPA // iOS only
);
<<<
Aside from the fact that the comments indeed look very llm-esque to me, the way they're phrased also implies that the ios way of directly connecting is the "different" method. Like that one is the workaround of both approaches– and the wasteful way is the desired one– for no apparent reason.
Thanks for looking into the code! Initially, I wanted the app to work consistently on both platforms, but I found that the WiFi connection APIs behave very differently. In the end, I focused mainly on Android to ensure it matched my intended use case.
You’re right about the LLM smell. I’ve been using cursor composer and find it very handy at times!
I know. The simple answer is that Android doesn’t allow apps to directly manage WiFi connections. I’ve provided a more detailed explanation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384670
Just to add some (unprovoked) additional info here: I'm a 26 year old Canadian. We covered early Canadian history, abuse of the aboriginal peoples of Canada, war with America, and WW1/WW2/the Holocaust.
I don't think we were really taught at all about European/Asian history or the Soviet Union. I think I could have taken some classes related to those in highschool (secondary school), but for anyone working towards a non-history bachelor's degree those courses were generally not something that you could fit in your timetable.
Absolutely. They definitely can't expect to sell this to teams/orgs with non-devs without introducing separate pricing for folks who just want to read/write to projects but maybe read-only for some aspects of a repo.
We ran into this, informed our users to reinstall Docker (we use Homebrew), and seemingly have had no further issues. I guess we're the minority?
I would be more inclined to blame this on Apple than Docker, but I haven't looked too deeply since things are working for us. Curious about you folks' opinions.
Not sure what my point is here tbh. The internet sucks and I don't have a solution