This community serves to share top posts on Hacker News with the wider fediverse.
Rules
0. Keep it legal
As great as EVs are, their range is heavily sensitive to both temperature and load
If you need to drive in cold weather, or need to tow with your EV, the range delivered by the car will be quite compromised
This isn't going to be a major issue for a lot of people, especially those that charge at home, and those that rarely drive over 100 miles in a single day, but for others, this may make current EVs insufficient for their needs
I fall into the "can charge at home/work" and thus can own my tiny ev. What id really like though is a way to tow my small camper/other trailers in the future without having to compromise so much and I think the way I'd like to see that is with a small diesel-electric plug in hybrid. If I can run on battery only during light duty work and have a diesel generator for towing/anything else. Diesels can run on several fuels and are inherently more thermally efficient and the tech to do this already exists. Some manufacturers are using wild engines like a turbine, rotary to accomplish essentially the same thing but both required years of R&D to produce a usable product. Ford could for example grab one of their tiny diesels and mate it to a pre-existing PHEV drivetrain and build a usable eF250...in theory.
I'm optimistic but I hope options like this exist in the future especially for larger applications. Maybe hydrogen will also be an option for situations like this but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
A diesel-electric pick-up truck would be a mini-locomotive. Efficient, relatively simple, and provide tons of torque
Honestly, I see that as a pretty obvious stepping stone between current heavy duty tractor trailer tech and fully electric versions. We’ll get there eventually, but transitionary technology has a very clear place in the near future.