this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Economy
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Tangential but why are all of the fast charging stations broken? Traveling fucking sucks with an electric car. It wasn’t this way a year ago
Because the American public can't be trusted to treat anything well..The shit I saw working retail just working the checkout stand was fucking astonishing. Nobody reads prompts or listens to anything and end up breaking things due to ignorance.
Because America can't run anything as a service, fast charging infrastructure is expensive to maintain and make a profit off of but there was lots of grant money available to build them (and VW had to build a ton of them as part of a legal settlement) but there's no public funds to maintain them, so they aren't.
I have learned that in order to be able to transfer that much power without overheating, the charging cable would have to be impractically thick. The way to get around this is to have a cooling system integrated into a thinner cable. This makes it prone to breakages. If the cooling system doesn't work the station defaults to slow charge.
So it’s just a matter of how recently the station was installed? That is immensely lame. But I appreciate the answer!
Ohm's Law?
Ohm fuck. I never considered that and it makes a lot of sense.
One of like, two things will happen. Either, consumers will adopt electric cars en masse in short order, and gas stations will start installing charging stations and maintaining them, or, a completely different solution is going to be required as these stations become less and less reliable over time and people flock back to gasoline.
One of the most expensive wear items in a lot of factories are the connections between welders and weld tips. We use these massive 1 to 1 1/2 inch cables or inch thick copper bars and they need to be replaced kinda often. Not as often as the weld tips themselves, but often enough that we've spent many thousands of dollars trying to find a way to stretch them out a little bit.
Admittedly, the daily use of industrial weld cables and the daily use of a charging cable aren't quite the same, but the ones we're using are the right size and still burning up regularly.
I’ve never seen a fast charging station broken in my area. All the slow chargers are constantly out of service though.