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Originally Posted by ksa8907
Natural Gas generators? Just an idea, or large capacitor/battery banks that would transfer the power and charge over time.
Maybe the high cost would just incentivise people to "slow" charge when the vehicle is sitting idle at home and only pay the higher cost when they need to travel long distances.
You're right though, dedicated EV for normal long distance travel or OTR trucking is still quite a ways off without a breakthrough battery technology, which then these systems could be in place in anticipation.
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All of those solutions underscore the difficulty of this problem. EVs are wonderful for local trips; even long local trips now that the Bolt has 250 miles of range. Slow charging at home is cheap and convenient in this case.
The problem is people want the vehicle to be convenient on long distance trips, and charging while traveling sucks. A gas generator defeats the purpose of an EV as you might as well have just brought along a gas powered car. Converting fuel into electricity by burning it has conversion losses. The only solution I can envision is a massive battery that is used to then charge the EV batteries, but that's expensive and wasteful, and may not even alleviate the problem of supplying such a large amount of power in a short amount of time if many people use the chargers and over-run the capacity. It would need to be used frequently to offset the cost, too.
That's the other problem; that chargers need to be used frequently to cover the cost of building them, but people don't use them often because most trips are local. If demand for the chargers is too high, people are waiting around for a charger to become available. If demand isn't high enough, it isn't profitable to install in the first place.
We're back to where I started, that charging either takes too long, or costs too much, and usually both.