DCFC Hacking

[Newton]

I had a small taste of a region-wide disaster rather than a little hurricane or tornado - fortunately the worst case scenarios they talked about did not materilze. With a hurricane you just need to get out of the area to get back to normal and power comes back fairly quickly somewhere. What screws you in a regional outage is that credit cards and ATMs no longer work, so whether you can get tanker trucks across the destroyed freeways is moot since nobody is pumping gas for free. You have about four days before the cell towers go out.

The plus of an EV is that you can always charge it somehow. It might take a week to get decent range with a solar panel, but your ICE vehicle ain’t going nowhere until you get gas somewhere. I find these hypotheticals interesting, where are you going in a region wide power outage? There is no reason to go to the office if it doesn’t have power or communications - and if it does, you can charge there. You aren’t going to be driving 90 on the freeway after the earthquake, every overpass will have chunks of concrete under it (as I discovered when I hit one.)

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[MM in SouthTX]

I had a small taste of a region-wide disaster rather than a little hurricane or tornado - fortunately the worst case scenarios they talked about did not materilze. With a hurricane you just need to get out of the area to get back to normal and power comes back fairly quickly somewhere. What screws you in a regional outage is that credit cards and ATMs no longer work, so whether you can get tanker trucks across the destroyed freeways is moot since nobody is pumping gas for free. You have about four days before the cell towers go out.

The plus of an EV is that you can always charge it somehow. It might take a week to get decent range with a solar panel, but your ICE vehicle ain’t going nowhere until you get gas somewhere. I find these hypotheticals interesting, where are you going in a region wide power outage? There is no reason to go to the office if it doesn’t have power or communications - and if it does, you can charge there. You aren’t going to be driving 90 on the freeway after the earthquake, every overpass will have chunks of concrete under it (as I discovered when I hit one.)

I wasn’t talking about a hypothetical.

if you have generator power you can use a credit card. And there is a lot to do that involves driving after a hurricane.

Best vehicle to have after a hurricane is a gas or diesel truck with onboard generator. You can almost always get fuel to run it without waiting a week for solar to charge it, and you can provide power anywhere in town where it’s needed.

 

[Sobmartin]

A number of years ago we were coming back from a horse event with a diesel F250 pulling a 4 horse trailer. Pulled into a station in Idaho and there was no power in the whole town. They tried to get the pumps going with a small generator but that failed. Even if it worked they couldn’t use the charge machine. We barely made it to the next town on fumes.

 

[srspring551]

That's the reason I have a home battery backup system that can charge from my 17 kW solar panels. If the sun shines, I'm good for home and vehicle.

 

[larrylsb]

If you find a way to do that let me know. I’ll pay you instead of EA.

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