Comment by pilom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilom | Hacker News Reader

US drivers drive 3.1 Trillions miles per year [0]. Every month, the 12 Month moving average has been going up at 5 billion miles [0]. So every month we need to install enough charging stations to charge 5 billion miles/year. Lets use a Level 2 charger that adds ~25 miles of charge per hour. So 5B miles / 25 miles of charge per hour / 24 hours per day / 365 days per year = about 23,000 Level 2 chargers need to be added every month.

There are currently about 44,000 Charging outlets in the US [1]. So just to keep up with the increase miles we drive each month, and not increase the percentage of electric vehicle miles, we need to install more than 50% as many charging outlets as have ever been installed EVERY MONTH forever. Time for that exponential curve to help us out some more.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA [1]: https://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html

You forget charging at home. There are currently around 100M home charging stations in the US, most of them completely underused :-)

So every home is a charging station and if the range for EVs keep increasing 10 percent per year we will reach 400 miles in 2 years, 500 miles in less than 5 years. By then, road side charging stations will be for people driving more than 7 hours in a day and for the very forgetful.

I drove more than 300 miles in one day once this year, and I still haven't driven more than 400 miles in a single day this year.

Even if you commute 30 miles to work and 30 miles back, you would only have to charge your Tesla model 3 in the weekends. In 5 years you could drive 100 miles a day and still only charge your EV every weekend.

I wonder if someone could come along and make an app to connect people possessing home chargers with people traveling long distances in EVs, like a mixture between GasBuddy and AirBnB.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-car-char...

For comparison, there were approx. 168,000 gas stations in the US in 2004 [1] and that number had been steadily decreasing during the decade before (202,000 in 1994).

[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/quizzes/answerQuiz16.shtml

98% of all charging on my car is done at home, at night.

Charging stations are for long trips or connivence at points of interest.

How do you account for charging at home?

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