Most electric cars won't be charged at fast chargers most of the time. Because unlike fossil cars you can refuel them pretty much anywhere where there is electricity. At first this is only true for people with garages (or employers with a garage), but eventually most parking spots will have a slow charger installed. Since the typical car is parked for about 23h a day, charging time becomes a non issue as soon as charger availability is good enough. Fast charging is really only necessary for long roadtrips that exceed whatever range the car has.
As someone living in a very old and rustic street, I don't see my municipality placing an aesthetically unpleasing charging point every 6 meters. We need better solutions than what we have now. Induction charging, connection points underneath the car, pantograph.
Fire hydrants here in the UK are almost always under the road surface - that would actually probably be the logical place to install electrical charging outlets.
It turns out a good place for "on street" urban chargers is in lamp posts. They already have electrical connections and chargers can be retrofitted easily.
The last two streets I lived on in central Edinburgh only had lamp posts at one side but parking at both sides. Checking on Google Maps I reckon there is only enough lamp posts to charge 1 in 6 cars on the side of streets that do have them.
Good idea though - but I suspect other things will be required as well.
Above ground electricity poles and wires are still ugly. In my opinion areas where the infrastructure is all buried are much more aesthetically pleasing and calming. It’s also safer. No risk of electrocution by downed lines or starting fires in windstorms.
Underground junction boxes can get water in them. In a previous apartment I lived at in one exploded about half a block away, blew the manhole cover off clear down the block (a few hundred feet) and lit on fire. There's still some risk. Maybe not as much, but weatherproofing is still hard.
We don't have fire hydrants (water is pumped from nearby canals / ditches) or above ground electricity / fiber / cable (as this is a first world country). We like to keep things looking nice and authentic.
I think you're underestimating the inertia of deploying beefier electrical grids with even more charging points, and the nuances of billing and metering.
It isn't as easy as just making an outlet or inductive charger every 6m. That infrastructure has to be owned, installed, upkept, maintained, and subsidized by someone. Unless you think that all that power grid interfacing is just going to be paid for by someone else.
The flippant optimism that things will all just happen and ignoring of the potential for underlying complications beyond those immediately apparent is incredibly grating to those who have to actually trouble themselves with working through them. The idea of a single charging point per 6m doesn't even account for the sudden logistic complexity where the entire extended family all piles into the place and realizes that oops, we all have to charge here, but the local node is already saturated most of the time by locals because the engineers didn't foresee the need to provision for that type of surge in demand.
In comparison, gasoline dispensing is a relatively straight forward affair that doesn't put any excessive new loading on already heavily loaded infrastructure systems responsible for running everything else in our lives in the same way battery charging does.
Unlike software, settling for "good enough" isn't trivially solved by an OTA update. Hell, software isn't always that great about that either once the level of safety-criticality gets high-enough. The joke that is self-driving system development aside.
I understand that it's going to be very difficult, and it's going to take years, but that's no reason to not do it.
Gasoline dispensing is extremely complicated - what you really mean is that the complexity is just hidden from you and has been optimized on for decades.
Next time you fill your car with ~15 gallons (60L), have a think about how many gallons of diesel must have been burnt to get that gas you're pumping. Have a think about all the machinery involved in making it, transporting it and then you pumping it. Trucks, oil tankers, more trucks, pumps, etc.
Have a think about how differently we would think if we had to physically carry our own 15 gallons of carcinogenic explosive liquid every time we wanted to enable us to drive ~350 (550km) miles.
The system we have works very well, but it's terrible in every way.
I have put quite a lot of thought into that in fact
It's a bit of a labor of love to be quite honest. I call it Project Regression,and I've been spending many of my adult years filling out my understandings of the technologies and infrastructures that make modern life possible, why they were developed, why in the order they were, and what would need to be retained and elucidated to a human being to allow that development to be able to bootstrap from nothing within a lifetime.
And yes, I get annoyed every time someone ends up trying to pull a piece of that structure out without making clear they've thought through all the consequences. Something I'm not confident many do, but I've spent my life doing, because I've not run into anyone else who could be bothered to.
My very existence as a thinking, contributing member of society is predicated on the smooth operation of modern infrastructure, so I do get rather aggressive when people start advocating for sweeping change without showing that they've done all the work. Unrealistic expectations on the rate of infrastructure upgrades and propogation gets us nowhere.
I've not even got a financial stake in any company in particular's outcome; and I've been sitting through saga after saga of waste, moral grandstanding, outright lies, negligent corporate behavior, and a complete bloody breakdown in any semblance of sanity in the world as I recognize it.
I wish I had your optimism; or was still naive enough to be able to stoke the fires of my own. This bloody year has just bloody obliterated it though.
Ya know. I'm sorry. Forget I said anything. I'm in a bit of a bad headspace at the moment; and I just don't seem like I can keep things coherent enough to meaningfully contribute anymore right now. Ended up rewriting this about 5 times, and still not able to articulate anything I'm really satisfied with.
I know exactly how you feel, and I think I've just 'given up' and gone the other way. I try to accept that our lives will have to get less convenient, and the economy will have to take a bit of a hit as we move to things that are better for us, and better for the planet.
So we'll take a couple of steps backwards in order to take many forwards, and I'm OK with that.
I've also spent a lot of time in Latin America and Africa, and I hope that they can just go straight to the 'right' solutions because they are not so entrenched as we are with what we already have.
Who knows though, right. Certainly nothing is perfect.
I hope you have a good day, I'd buy you a coffee/beer if I could.
I live in an old and rustic street. The municipality is first and foremost focused on decreasing emissions, thus aesthetics have taken a backseat, and charging points are on every street.
Most cities have little stubby ugly things next to every parking spot already: parking meters. It wouldn’t be entirely crazy to convert most meters to combination meter-and-chargers.
That being said, it’s the overnight parking that needs charging, and maybe the employee parking. Charging while shopping isn’t that useful unless the charger is very fast, and those very fast chargers tend to be rather more expensive than home charging.
A gas station costs millions of dollars, an environmental impact assessment, regular safety checks, staff to run it, etc, etc. A fast charging station needs a machine. A gas station requires you to transport the gasoline to the gas station. A fast charging station can be put practically anywhere in a city now.
I don't even have a charger at home. I recharge at a fast charger every time. Usually I go shopping, or do some programming or play a game. Not for everybody perhaps, but seriously not as bad as portrayed by this article.
The companies that build gas stations have processes in place to do all of the above, so it is just a known cost of doing business. It is easy to schedule a truck to get gas to your new station - you don't even need to own it.
One correction though, staff is optional. I've used a few unattended stations. You need staff to sell the "junk" that most gas stations also sell, if it is just gas pay at the pump just needs someone to fill the tanks and inspect things once in a while.
A charger is actually harder. Processes are not in place (yet!) to roll them out in mass (Tesla might be an exception?). The biggest problem though is fast chargers need enough power that you need to ask the utility where you can put your chargers. Many otherwise ideal places for a fast charger don't have enough enough wires for the load a fast charger adds. If the wires don't already exist you can expect to pay millions to get them there (hundred thousand per mile is a quote someone I know got for a different load he wanted to run)
These are problems associated with personal car ownership, not EV's themselves. In a utopia with fully autonomous affordable electric taxi cabs this is not an issue, as they can charge by themselves in a cheap parking field outside cities, combined with a large solar array.
I personally think that EV charging infrastructure is not ready for mass adoption of electric cars. (This is, migration from internal combustion engines.)
But this article tries to seem "more than fair" without stopping to mention the one great advantage of charging - that some can do so at home, every night. So that should greatly reduce the infrastructure needs.
Peak charging in the public can and will be a problem, but I don't think the scale can be quantified without factoring in home charging.
>But this article tries to seem "more than fair" without stopping to mention the one great advantage of charging - that some can do so at home, every night. So that should greatly reduce the infrastructure needs.
I think some is the operative word here. Looking at the EU: 41.9% of people live in apartments.[0] In some of those countries it's over 60% even. I don't think even all houses are appropriate to charge your EV.
I didn't think this was as much of a problem until this article. I never considered the jerry can point. This does make me wonder if hybrids just make more sense after all.
Even the jerry-can point is bullshit. I already have a portable battery pack in my garage for jump starting a car with a dead battery (because it's not possible to get another car onto the drive to jump start one that way). The tech to do the equivalent for a battery powered car is achievable, and I doubt it'll be terribly long before the roadside assistance companies are fitting the equivalent to a number of their vehicles.
I suppose that is an option. Perhaps a 2nd electric car could charge the first one. That actually sounds like it should already be possible. Is it? I tried googling but couldn't find an answer.
Somehow this article misses the fact that electric cars are charged every day when parked at home. In the typical scenario of a car used to get into the city and back, it will not need to ever hook up anywhere in the city and will not run out of charge for the day.
When the article in the end complains that it will waste so much time I just wonder how the daily hookup at home compares to the weekly gas station visit. I'd say it pretty much evens out.
Everybody I know (3 - not a significant sample) with an electric car has at some point had to take "the other car" because their electric wasn't changed. Most often it is get home from work at night only to remember some dinner you are supposed to go to that you don't have enough charge remaining to get to. Sometimes it is your forget to plug it in (this probably only happens the first few weeks before you get the habit of plugging it in every night)
Sure that can happen. Much like it can happen that one has to detour to refuel the car. It's a failure at planning and the risk is bigger with electric cars due to the shorter range and longer refueling times. Weirdly the article treated it as the normal case. As if everybody will want to recharge at the most inopportune time.
Indeed. Most EV owners eventually realize that having to hunt for a gas station at the end of a tank an onerous requirement of ICE car ownership. They rarely charge outside their own garage.
Doesn't this assume that everyone owns a house? How do you propose to do this in an apartment building? Sometimes you don't even have enough parking for an apartment building and need to park elsewhere. That sounds to me like charging would be rather difficult at home. We're also not talking about an insignificant amount of people - 42% of Europeans live in an apartment. In some countries it's over 60%.[0]
How well do those hold up to the cold and poor handling? We don't want them just in the US, right? Ideally we'd want countries like Russia and Ukraine and even poorer countries to use electric cars too.
Apartments often come with parking spaces. They will need to be fitted with charging sockets but I don't see any difficulties beyond the small investment this takes.
Often, but not always. In my city most apartment buildings don't even have enough normal parking spaces for the cars. People park in places like the parking lots of supermarkets.
Article misses out that in all but the smallest/tightest parking lots (which I guess are more common in tighter downtown areas), gas stations typically have additional parking already that could also be converted to charging stations. Article also brings up the specter of extra carbon emissions for extra charging infrastructure, but doesn't provide even a basic analysis.
There are certainly some logistical issues that electrical has to work out. But this is straight up a fear piece. Yes, gas is transportable by hand if required, but I bet most North American drivers (or at least urban ones which this piece is targetting) just go with roadside assistance anyways, so the charger will come to them.
And finally, with the potential of charging at home/work (which I know can't include everyone... but I think can cover a reasonable percentage of people), you don't NEED to charge up even to 80% all the time. Needing a full charge all the time is a hold over of gas mentality and logistics.
The one bit that is reasonable here and noting that our current laws probably need a tune up in recognition of the changing nature of driving.
Treating charging like we treat fuelling is the problem. The reason we have gas stations is because we have to store and dispense the fuel safely. We don't have a safe, effective system to transport gasoline to all of our homes and offices. Natural gas cars would be one option, with "pumps" at our homes to fill up our cars, but gasoline is always going to be in underground tanks at a filling station.
Electricity is easily and safely delivered to our homes and offices and indeed, most EV owners probably do the majority of their charging at their own homes.
The issue of EV charging is actually tied to the range of the cars. If you get the range to where a car can be driven longer than the driver can safely drive (say 16-18 hours) then the time spent charging is basically moot...you can charge while the driver sleeps. Hotels become a logical spot for chargers.
I've lived in all types of rental housing across Michigan, and have never seen this. I don't think it covers even a small fraction of that 100 million.
I'm talking about places where -40 is common. And I'm not saying that many of the 100 million have block heater plugs, I'm saying that they could -- the cold places are a proof of viability.
Michigan doesn't get that cold that often (maybe the UP does). Think Minnesota or Finland.
And the point isn't that it already covers 100 million, just that if there's a need (like there is for warming cold engine blocks in winter), it's neither particularly complicated nor expensive to provide this kind of overnight trickle charging.
My understanding is that the typical block heater might draw about 750-800 watts (call it 7 amps @ 120 volts in the US), which would charge one of the most efficient EVs out there (the Tesla Model 3) at about 3 miles of range per hour. So, if you parked your car for the whole night, you'd add about 30-35 miles of range. Other EVs are even less efficient.
I think it's a different sort of effort to wire every parking spot with, say, a 40 amp, 240 volt circuit to enable moderately fast charging.
Thats probably fine for most people, for regular day-to-day commuting and things like that. A decent battery would give you a buffer in case you forget to plug your car in, or you need to do a lot more driving for a few days.
Mind you, some small part in me is sad at the idea of yet another device around my home that I have to remember to charge each night.
And I would expect that as EVs become more popular, chargers will start being something tenants will ask about. This will in turn put pressure on landlords who want wealthy tenants to wire up their garages for faster charging. We've done the same thing before with heating, washer/driers and internet over the last few decades.
Another possibility is that the changeover from incandescent to LED bulbs in streetlights has led to excess circuit capacity that is usable for curbside car chargers at the light pole.
Someone please explain to me why we have built electric cars so that the battery is fixed to the car and gets recharged rather than making the batteries swappable for an instant "recharge".
Sure, it moves the cost of wear and tear on batteries to the car owner rather than the fuel supplier, but since it seems it would makes such a big difference in the user experience of electric car ownership can this really be the whole explanation?
We own two Teslas. Charging overnight at home (daily) and within ~20 minutes at Superchargers (traveling) vs battery swaps would not make a big difference in our experience, and adds significant physical (swapping a 1200 lbs battery) and accounting (value of battery) challenges.
Battery swap doesn’t exist because it’s a solution looking for a problem.
In most cases, recharging is much cheaper and more convenient than battery swapping ever could be.
Batteries are big, heavy, and expensive. Significant infrastructure would be required to handle and recharge them at swapping stations. Standard sizes/formats for batteries would need to be established, restricting the design and innovation of vehicles that use them.
While I'm sure someone facing a 30+ minute wait in line for a charger would be happy to pay $50 for a 10-minute battery swap instead, this situation only happens once or twice a year at times of exceptional demand (like Thanksgiving). The rest of the time, those swap stations would just sit unused, losing money.
possible but expensive. you'd need something like robotic arms swapping the battery to do it quickly. would also require the vehicles to have their batteries at the exact same spot, in the same format and precludes using the frame of the car as a battery.
They tried that. I don't know the details, but Tesla did build a few battery swap centers. They ended up not going that route. I don't know the exact reasons why it didn't work out. My guess is the batteries are too heavy to move around with reliability, efficiency and speed.
Actually for a while there vehicles were designed to swap out the entire motive unit as well as the energy supply. You could even use different motive units for different purposes, such as long distance, larger loads, small journey etc.
This technology was called the 'horse and carriage'.
:-)
But joking aside I do wonder whether exactly this would be practical with non-living motive units. With modern tech it wouldn't be hard to control a separate traction unit, with its own wheels, at the front of your vehicle, and you could swap an electric one for a fossil fuel (or rented larger battery one) for long journeys in exactly the same way. I guess it would just be hard to design in such a way that it fulfilled all the things we expect from a modern vehicle, such as high stability, low drag, maneuverability, etc.
> "With modern tech it wouldn't be hard to control a separate traction unit, with its own wheels, at the front of your vehicle"
What you are describing is the tractor-trailer (aka semi-trailer) truck. It would indeed make practical sense to swap tractor units when moving important cargo over long distances where fast charging facilities are unavailable. It's already done today with fossil-fuelled trucks for various reasons.
But for private automobiles, the advantages are very niche/narrow and wouldn't be enough to outweigh the impracticalities and disadvantages that you mention.
I think the problem is the business models. EV manufacturers rely on the gas savings to make their product financially enticing.
The battery is the crappiest part of the vehicle. It will be the costliest and fastest major component to wear out. It will be the most toxic for the environment. If it can be recycled at all, it will not be economically effective to do so. If it cannot, safe disposal will be very expensive.
Any "swap the batteries" model would expose that EOL cost of EVs because the battery swap company would have to deal with those dead batteries. An EV also becomes a much less appealing financial proposition when the cost is upfront vehicle cost + lifetime monthly cost for battery swap service.
Battery packs are often now integrated into to structure of the car as well to save space, weight, and help with crash ratings.
EV batteries also require more than just an electrical connection. Most EVs (besides the Nissan leaf) have liquid cooling/heating so you'd have to manage those connections as well.
Many EVs have different size battery packs as well. It would be hard enough to manage all the inventory swapping one type of battery, let alone 50!
Initially, the Tesla Model 3 was capable of swapping its battery quickly. IIRC it had the assistance of some sort of hydraulic lift (there's a Musk demo on youtube, I'm sure). The car lost this capability when they added the armored skidpad needed to protect against road debris puncturing the battery.
I was not aware there were ever public swap stations, I'd be super interested in reading about that. (in particular how the economics of battery swapping were predicted to work)
Recharging electric cars requires plugging it in and walking away to do something else instead.
Electric car fuelling is a parallel operation, not a serial one.
Rapid charging happens on the longer journeys that require it while you're using the restroom, or grabbing a bite to eat or drink, or simply improving your safety by having a snooze
And if you get an efficient electric car with a high miles/kWh rating - rather than a status symbol electron guzzler - then there is less time required anyway.
There's a mental paradigm shift required when you have an electric car to one where you have a fully fuelled car every morning by default. Once you've made that switch you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
The topic here is long trips. For most trips you are right, it isn't a big deal. However if you are doing the yearly family vacation to the national parks your car will spend a significant amount of time in a charger that you would rather be driving.
Peak charging rate currently for a Tesla Model 3 at a v3 Supercharger is a bit over 1,000 miles per hour. It can't maintain that rate for very long to avoid battery degradation, but it could very well do 160 miles in 10 minutes or 200 in 15.
So... not quite yet, but not out of the range of the possible in the near future.
The recommended safety advice is to stop every two hours or so and rest for fifteen minutes each time. Otherwise you increase your chances of having an accident due to fatigue.
The EU rules for driving HGV allow you to drive 2 hours, have a 15 minute break, drive a further 2.5 hours and have a 30 minute break. Those are enforced by law and tachographs
It’s true, cars are big and require a ton of energy. That’s not a huge problem though, because with the correct land use policies you can pretty much replace them with bikes.
That doesn't do any good when I want to keep driving. Not a problem for 99% of trips, but the rare cross country trip liquid fuel is a lot quicker to get back going with.
More like a couple times a year for me. It sound viable, but it really isn't because the cost is so high - it is cheaper to have a (used) car that works for everything than to spending $800 to rent a car for a week. I visit family out of range of an electric car for many holidays - cheaper to buy a car just for those trips and park it than rent a car for those trips!
I'm not against renting a car, but it is far too expensive in practice to do for a regular vacation.
Recharging doesn't require any patience at all if done correctly (ie. overnight at home, or while you're stopping for a meal). Complaining that you can't run your EV to empty then drop in to a gas station for 10 minutes to refill it is like saying cars are useless because they can't eat the grass on the side of the road.
Isn’t this missing the point that you can put an EV charger ANYWHERE. There’s no need to regularly deliver gas to it. You can have it in you home and charge overnight. There’s no need to cluster them together.
1. When the powers out, gas pumps are out too unless there are generators. Even in Florida where this is expected after storms, we still have 95%+ of stations offline during power outages.
2. Typical fast charging times are < 20 minutes and you don't typically aim for full. The first half of the battery charges in less than 15 minutes, nearly matching a typical gas station stop on a road trip. You can get 75 miles of charge in just 5 minutes at peak with a Tesla.
3. Most users charge at home or work keeping them topped up ready for up to 180 miles typical miles of driving that day as long as they return to base and don't want to extend into the lower or higher reservations in the battery for long term health.
There's always someone posting a comment like this in every EV thread -- I'm hoping someday it will be a guy who pees in a bottle in order to minimize stops.
Bizarre comment. Have you ever taken a 6+ hour trip in a car?
If you don't control stops very carefully you can add hours to the already long journey.
And for the record I think a hybrid with a 50 mile battery is the sweet spot: Drive it electrically almost every day, but you can go farther if you need to.
I don't think EVs can be exact replacement of traditional vehicles in all instances yet, for this very reason. But in many cases they fit a use case perfectly. In my case I have 4 kids and a wife, and we have 2 cars. One is a mini-van and fits everyone with room to spare. The other one only seats 5 (uncomfortably) but I only use it to drive myself to work. So my next car may very well be an EV of some sort, but we cannot replace the mini-van with an EV due to the range and requirement that we need to drive farther than that (which means quick fueling at gas stations).
The Pacifica plug-in hybrid is a fantastic minivan that can go up to 30 miles all electric before needing to engage the ICE, and in hybrid mode it still gets significantly better milage than a conventional ICE minivan.
I think this article went a little too far and overstated the point.
I wouldn't be worried about charging my electric car in the city where I live. That's a nonissue, just charge at home.
I'd be worried about going longer distances. You roll up to the supercharger in the middle of nowhere, no ability to go anywhere else since you're out of battery, and every charging slot is full. There's a line of tesla's to get a spot. Sitting around in your car for a half hour as you wait for owners to leave to even start charging. This would be a legitimate fear of mine.
As somebody who has owned 3 different EVs (LEAF, Model X, and now I-PACE), I find this article a bit hyperbolic. Okay, it's a rather poorly-researched fluff piece that wouldn't pass muster in any of the subreddits I frequent. I'd expect something with more substance here at HN.
That said, I no longer drive an EV when I do road trips over 150 miles. I replaced one of my EVs with a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), so my household has one BEV and one PHEV.
The reason for having plug-in capability in both cars is because the "full tank every morning" part is amazing. The reason for having gas capability in one car is because the convenience of using gasoline on longer road trips is amazing. With a PHEV, you don't have to compromise in either case (around-town or road trip).
Individual situations can be highly varying, and so for some people all-BEV can work. In my family's case, we have one 150-mile trip that we do about 8 times a year where we can charge at the destination. The BEV can make that trip direct in pretty much any weather conditions without a problem. There's another trip we do to see family in another state that's 230 miles away, and we can't charge at their house. Can't do that one comfortably in the BEV, so we usually just take the PHEV for that one.
However with the BEV it's possible to do the 230-mile trip since there are Electrify America (EA) rapid charging stations both along the way and at the destination. Along the 150-mile trip there are in fact four EA locations, so if something weird or unexpected happens with the distance driven or the destination charging, there's no problem getting a quick charge at one of those stations. In any case it's been working out to just an extra 30 minutes of charging maybe 2 or 3 times a year, during which we can grab a bite to eat or get some shopping done. Really no big deal at all.
All that said, I would never attempt to drive a Tesla on a trip where I'd need to rapid charge frequently during times like spring break, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. You're beholden to a single proprietary rapid charging infrastructure, and that's very likely to suffer "hot spots" that are difficult to predict and that can ruin your day. The unpredictability, I would imagine, is due to Tesla being a victim of its own success. Having more cars on the road means that there ends up being more "tail-end" situations in the population.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadI'm sure people used to say the same thing about fire hydrants, above ground electricity poles and wires, and fibre hanging from utility poles.
I think you're underestimating what happens when there is a genuine need for a thing.
For example: https://www.ubitricity.co.uk
Good idea though - but I suspect other things will be required as well.
Once you have a significant portion/majority of cars on a street being electric, then yes, demand may exceed what can be supplied by the posts.
But, at least for the next few years, EVs are still a minority in most cities.
It isn't as easy as just making an outlet or inductive charger every 6m. That infrastructure has to be owned, installed, upkept, maintained, and subsidized by someone. Unless you think that all that power grid interfacing is just going to be paid for by someone else.
The flippant optimism that things will all just happen and ignoring of the potential for underlying complications beyond those immediately apparent is incredibly grating to those who have to actually trouble themselves with working through them. The idea of a single charging point per 6m doesn't even account for the sudden logistic complexity where the entire extended family all piles into the place and realizes that oops, we all have to charge here, but the local node is already saturated most of the time by locals because the engineers didn't foresee the need to provision for that type of surge in demand.
In comparison, gasoline dispensing is a relatively straight forward affair that doesn't put any excessive new loading on already heavily loaded infrastructure systems responsible for running everything else in our lives in the same way battery charging does.
Unlike software, settling for "good enough" isn't trivially solved by an OTA update. Hell, software isn't always that great about that either once the level of safety-criticality gets high-enough. The joke that is self-driving system development aside.
Gasoline dispensing is extremely complicated - what you really mean is that the complexity is just hidden from you and has been optimized on for decades.
Next time you fill your car with ~15 gallons (60L), have a think about how many gallons of diesel must have been burnt to get that gas you're pumping. Have a think about all the machinery involved in making it, transporting it and then you pumping it. Trucks, oil tankers, more trucks, pumps, etc.
Have a think about how differently we would think if we had to physically carry our own 15 gallons of carcinogenic explosive liquid every time we wanted to enable us to drive ~350 (550km) miles.
The system we have works very well, but it's terrible in every way.
And yes, I get annoyed every time someone ends up trying to pull a piece of that structure out without making clear they've thought through all the consequences. Something I'm not confident many do, but I've spent my life doing, because I've not run into anyone else who could be bothered to.
My very existence as a thinking, contributing member of society is predicated on the smooth operation of modern infrastructure, so I do get rather aggressive when people start advocating for sweeping change without showing that they've done all the work. Unrealistic expectations on the rate of infrastructure upgrades and propogation gets us nowhere.
I've not even got a financial stake in any company in particular's outcome; and I've been sitting through saga after saga of waste, moral grandstanding, outright lies, negligent corporate behavior, and a complete bloody breakdown in any semblance of sanity in the world as I recognize it.
I wish I had your optimism; or was still naive enough to be able to stoke the fires of my own. This bloody year has just bloody obliterated it though.
Ya know. I'm sorry. Forget I said anything. I'm in a bit of a bad headspace at the moment; and I just don't seem like I can keep things coherent enough to meaningfully contribute anymore right now. Ended up rewriting this about 5 times, and still not able to articulate anything I'm really satisfied with.
I know exactly how you feel, and I think I've just 'given up' and gone the other way. I try to accept that our lives will have to get less convenient, and the economy will have to take a bit of a hit as we move to things that are better for us, and better for the planet.
So we'll take a couple of steps backwards in order to take many forwards, and I'm OK with that.
I've also spent a lot of time in Latin America and Africa, and I hope that they can just go straight to the 'right' solutions because they are not so entrenched as we are with what we already have.
Who knows though, right. Certainly nothing is perfect.
I hope you have a good day, I'd buy you a coffee/beer if I could.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/haaRo1Zq2juyP1ZRA
(Behind the SUV if the link doesn't work)
Free electricity how? It needs some sort of a payment system too. Probably contactless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaEhBjt1ls
That being said, it’s the overnight parking that needs charging, and maybe the employee parking. Charging while shopping isn’t that useful unless the charger is very fast, and those very fast chargers tend to be rather more expensive than home charging.
I don't even have a charger at home. I recharge at a fast charger every time. Usually I go shopping, or do some programming or play a game. Not for everybody perhaps, but seriously not as bad as portrayed by this article.
One correction though, staff is optional. I've used a few unattended stations. You need staff to sell the "junk" that most gas stations also sell, if it is just gas pay at the pump just needs someone to fill the tanks and inspect things once in a while.
A charger is actually harder. Processes are not in place (yet!) to roll them out in mass (Tesla might be an exception?). The biggest problem though is fast chargers need enough power that you need to ask the utility where you can put your chargers. Many otherwise ideal places for a fast charger don't have enough enough wires for the load a fast charger adds. If the wires don't already exist you can expect to pay millions to get them there (hundred thousand per mile is a quote someone I know got for a different load he wanted to run)
But this article tries to seem "more than fair" without stopping to mention the one great advantage of charging - that some can do so at home, every night. So that should greatly reduce the infrastructure needs.
Peak charging in the public can and will be a problem, but I don't think the scale can be quantified without factoring in home charging.
I think some is the operative word here. Looking at the EU: 41.9% of people live in apartments.[0] In some of those countries it's over 60% even. I don't think even all houses are appropriate to charge your EV.
I didn't think this was as much of a problem until this article. I never considered the jerry can point. This does make me wonder if hybrids just make more sense after all.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
When the article in the end complains that it will waste so much time I just wonder how the daily hookup at home compares to the weekly gas station visit. I'd say it pretty much evens out.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
There are certainly some logistical issues that electrical has to work out. But this is straight up a fear piece. Yes, gas is transportable by hand if required, but I bet most North American drivers (or at least urban ones which this piece is targetting) just go with roadside assistance anyways, so the charger will come to them.
And finally, with the potential of charging at home/work (which I know can't include everyone... but I think can cover a reasonable percentage of people), you don't NEED to charge up even to 80% all the time. Needing a full charge all the time is a hold over of gas mentality and logistics.
The one bit that is reasonable here and noting that our current laws probably need a tune up in recognition of the changing nature of driving.
Electricity is easily and safely delivered to our homes and offices and indeed, most EV owners probably do the majority of their charging at their own homes.
The issue of EV charging is actually tied to the range of the cars. If you get the range to where a car can be driven longer than the driver can safely drive (say 16-18 hours) then the time spent charging is basically moot...you can charge while the driver sleeps. Hotels become a logical spot for chargers.
Owning a house is pretty much a prerequisite of electric cars for personal use in the US. 100 million Americans live in rental housing. https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/08/who-rents-their-home-he...
And the point isn't that it already covers 100 million, just that if there's a need (like there is for warming cold engine blocks in winter), it's neither particularly complicated nor expensive to provide this kind of overnight trickle charging.
I think it's a different sort of effort to wire every parking spot with, say, a 40 amp, 240 volt circuit to enable moderately fast charging.
Mind you, some small part in me is sad at the idea of yet another device around my home that I have to remember to charge each night.
And I would expect that as EVs become more popular, chargers will start being something tenants will ask about. This will in turn put pressure on landlords who want wealthy tenants to wire up their garages for faster charging. We've done the same thing before with heating, washer/driers and internet over the last few decades.
that said, there have beens steps to help renters:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Sure, it moves the cost of wear and tear on batteries to the car owner rather than the fuel supplier, but since it seems it would makes such a big difference in the user experience of electric car ownership can this really be the whole explanation?
Battery swap doesn’t exist because it’s a solution looking for a problem.
Batteries are big, heavy, and expensive. Significant infrastructure would be required to handle and recharge them at swapping stations. Standard sizes/formats for batteries would need to be established, restricting the design and innovation of vehicles that use them.
While I'm sure someone facing a 30+ minute wait in line for a charger would be happy to pay $50 for a 10-minute battery swap instead, this situation only happens once or twice a year at times of exceptional demand (like Thanksgiving). The rest of the time, those swap stations would just sit unused, losing money.
This technology was called the 'horse and carriage'.
:-)
But joking aside I do wonder whether exactly this would be practical with non-living motive units. With modern tech it wouldn't be hard to control a separate traction unit, with its own wheels, at the front of your vehicle, and you could swap an electric one for a fossil fuel (or rented larger battery one) for long journeys in exactly the same way. I guess it would just be hard to design in such a way that it fulfilled all the things we expect from a modern vehicle, such as high stability, low drag, maneuverability, etc.
What you are describing is the tractor-trailer (aka semi-trailer) truck. It would indeed make practical sense to swap tractor units when moving important cargo over long distances where fast charging facilities are unavailable. It's already done today with fossil-fuelled trucks for various reasons.
But for private automobiles, the advantages are very niche/narrow and wouldn't be enough to outweigh the impracticalities and disadvantages that you mention.
The battery is the crappiest part of the vehicle. It will be the costliest and fastest major component to wear out. It will be the most toxic for the environment. If it can be recycled at all, it will not be economically effective to do so. If it cannot, safe disposal will be very expensive.
Any "swap the batteries" model would expose that EOL cost of EVs because the battery swap company would have to deal with those dead batteries. An EV also becomes a much less appealing financial proposition when the cost is upfront vehicle cost + lifetime monthly cost for battery swap service.
That's quite ridiculous.
Battery packs are often now integrated into to structure of the car as well to save space, weight, and help with crash ratings.
EV batteries also require more than just an electrical connection. Most EVs (besides the Nissan leaf) have liquid cooling/heating so you'd have to manage those connections as well.
Many EVs have different size battery packs as well. It would be hard enough to manage all the inventory swapping one type of battery, let alone 50!
The Model 3 has a different battery design that was never designed for swapping.
I was not aware there were ever public swap stations, I'd be super interested in reading about that. (in particular how the economics of battery swapping were predicted to work)
Electric car fuelling is a parallel operation, not a serial one.
Rapid charging happens on the longer journeys that require it while you're using the restroom, or grabbing a bite to eat or drink, or simply improving your safety by having a snooze
And if you get an efficient electric car with a high miles/kWh rating - rather than a status symbol electron guzzler - then there is less time required anyway.
There's a mental paradigm shift required when you have an electric car to one where you have a fully fuelled car every morning by default. Once you've made that switch you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
And stop no more often than every 3 hours.
So I'd need about 200 miles of range in 10 minutes of charging. Can they do that?
So... not quite yet, but not out of the range of the possible in the near future.
The EU rules for driving HGV allow you to drive 2 hours, have a 15 minute break, drive a further 2.5 hours and have a 30 minute break. Those are enforced by law and tachographs
I'm not against renting a car, but it is far too expensive in practice to do for a regular vacation.
For that much money you could just buy another car.
This isn't an article, it's a hit piece.
2. Typical fast charging times are < 20 minutes and you don't typically aim for full. The first half of the battery charges in less than 15 minutes, nearly matching a typical gas station stop on a road trip. You can get 75 miles of charge in just 5 minutes at peak with a Tesla.
3. Most users charge at home or work keeping them topped up ready for up to 180 miles typical miles of driving that day as long as they return to base and don't want to extend into the lower or higher reservations in the battery for long term health.
Renting a car just for those trips simply costs too much, so your daily driver also needs to be able to perform that task.
For me, I'd need at least 200 miles of range in 10 minutes. Long trips already take too long, waiting longer than 10 minutes is a non-starter.
(And before you ask, I eat in the car. It's 10 minutes for bathroom, refuel, and back on the road.)
The only way I could buy an electric car is if I had two cars.
If you don't control stops very carefully you can add hours to the already long journey.
And for the record I think a hybrid with a 50 mile battery is the sweet spot: Drive it electrically almost every day, but you can go farther if you need to.
I wouldn't be worried about charging my electric car in the city where I live. That's a nonissue, just charge at home.
I'd be worried about going longer distances. You roll up to the supercharger in the middle of nowhere, no ability to go anywhere else since you're out of battery, and every charging slot is full. There's a line of tesla's to get a spot. Sitting around in your car for a half hour as you wait for owners to leave to even start charging. This would be a legitimate fear of mine.
That said, I no longer drive an EV when I do road trips over 150 miles. I replaced one of my EVs with a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), so my household has one BEV and one PHEV.
The reason for having plug-in capability in both cars is because the "full tank every morning" part is amazing. The reason for having gas capability in one car is because the convenience of using gasoline on longer road trips is amazing. With a PHEV, you don't have to compromise in either case (around-town or road trip).
Individual situations can be highly varying, and so for some people all-BEV can work. In my family's case, we have one 150-mile trip that we do about 8 times a year where we can charge at the destination. The BEV can make that trip direct in pretty much any weather conditions without a problem. There's another trip we do to see family in another state that's 230 miles away, and we can't charge at their house. Can't do that one comfortably in the BEV, so we usually just take the PHEV for that one.
However with the BEV it's possible to do the 230-mile trip since there are Electrify America (EA) rapid charging stations both along the way and at the destination. Along the 150-mile trip there are in fact four EA locations, so if something weird or unexpected happens with the distance driven or the destination charging, there's no problem getting a quick charge at one of those stations. In any case it's been working out to just an extra 30 minutes of charging maybe 2 or 3 times a year, during which we can grab a bite to eat or get some shopping done. Really no big deal at all.
All that said, I would never attempt to drive a Tesla on a trip where I'd need to rapid charge frequently during times like spring break, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. You're beholden to a single proprietary rapid charging infrastructure, and that's very likely to suffer "hot spots" that are difficult to predict and that can ruin your day. The unpredictability, I would imagine, is due to Tesla being a victim of its own success. Having more cars on the road means that there ends up being more "tail-end" situations in the population.