5 Comments

My prediction is that outside of emergency situations, "power sipping" from another EV on the road will be useful the same way as siphoning gas from another vehicle's fuel tank. In other words, not widespread in daylight and not widely accepted socially. Exchanging gunfire at charging lines is more likely.

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What about emerging markets when chargers aren’t prevalent? Hell they are hard to find in Dubai. Is there a peer to peer use case there?

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100% no. Unless capacity increases orders of magnitude to the point, where you won't notice drain from another car charging 100-200 km.

Cute feature if it is next to free of charge for the car owner.

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You forget one big issue why siphoning gas did not take off. Safety. It is a lot more unsafe to handle gas than to plug one vehicle to another. Also, finding and fueling at a gas station is relatively quick. So, when a driver is running low on fuel..they could risk finding a gas station, fueling in 5 minutes and then, getting on with their journey. Whereas with EVs at least for some time, finding a charging station may not be that easy and the time required could be minimum of 30 minutes. It improves the case for getting some range from another vehicle that has energy to spare.

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Considering the amps and voltages in current EVs, siphoning gas with a hose and a jerrycan is not that much more dangerous.

Obviously if car manufacturers can make it a cross-brand compatible plug and play-operation that will make it easier, but considering the potential risks to electronics and batteries I doubt most EV owners will jump at the chance to help a stranded EV traveler to juice up. User manuals advise against jump-starting even modern ICE cars because of potential electronics damage.

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