this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
335 points (95.1% liked)
Technology
88390 readers
3467 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The technology should still be improved as much as possible.
Everything is a tradeoff. At this point there are more valuable things to be spending money on than making chargers that are as fast as possible. Not all cars can charge at 500+kWhs many cannot even do 100kWhs. IMO better to spend money upgrading all the slow 7-50kWh chargers. As well as putting in more slow charging near residents. Kerb charging for people that dont have a driveway in cities or chargers for those living in flats. That would serve people better then spending more money on something very few can actually benefit from.
BYD did a 1.5MW and Geely did a 2.2MW charging now, but they faced the one big issue with such charging speed : building a facility for it. It requires a tremendous amount of power so it cannot pull only from the grid, so it can't be deployed in most place. That's the challenge they're facing, and even Geely said the speed has peaked. Practically there's no need to have those charging speed, more charger is much more beneficial than super fast charging.
They face a new issue: morons.
but the fast chargers do need more infrastructure that takes more space and cost, when having MORE slower, cheaper, easier to install AC chargers everywhere will help just as much
I think for my commute I would prefer a battery chemistry that needed slower charging, if it was cheaper or lasted longer or was safer, or lighter, or whatever. But I think there will always be use cases where it's worth maximizing uptime, like long-haul driving.
I wonder if trucking will evolve to do tractor swaps, where rigs coming into charge up will hand off trailers to fresh tractors. That way the cargo doesn't have to take up space in the charging lot or whatever. Or they might do battery swaps. I imagine for above some threshold of cost/minute downtime, the hardware for doing swaps will be worth the extra cost.
Nio has had battery hot swapping systems for years, but that's for progressive countries.
It infuriating how nice an actual non-fossil-fuel infrastructure could be, if only we had a government that would build it. The Nio battery swaps are cool, I want to convert one of my old tractors to a similar setup, except I'll probably just put a pallet of batteries on top of the engine compartment and forklift them on and off the tractor. But similar idea: let the batteries charge slowly on a rack while the tractor and implements only see a few minutes of downtime. But until we get our political shit together I'm stuck making my own with spit and baling wire.
In most jurisdictions, trucks are required by law to stop for the driver to rest every 5 hours or so. You can just charge the vehicle then.
But drivers swap on the road and don't stop.
oh yeah, duh. the vehicle's uptime is bound by its operator's.