Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Electric car mileage calculations

Gas pump = megawatts

I remember doing a back of the envelope calcuation once, and a typical gas station pump is putting energy into your tank at a rate of several MW while pumping.

Obviously there are entirely different paradigms you'd use for electric cars, like slow charges overnight, but no matter what there will be situations where you want to go from empty to full quickly and that's a huge problem for all-electrics (though not hybrids). If I'm driving from Seattle to San Francisco I don't want to have to stop and charge for two hours every 150 or even every 300 miles. Sure, you could have an all-electric for city commuting and another car you use for long-distance, but why bother when I could just own one car that does both?

People talk about swappable batteries but I have yet to see any short of practical scheme there on either the car or the infrastructure side.

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