Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this week I was at a mall with a Tesla shop and about 5 supercharger in the parking lot. Something that I never really considered was that if electric car are set to replace ice car in the next decade(s), basically half the parking lot would need to have electric recharging capability i.e. several thousand slots. Street parking will need the same as will office and residential parking lots.

What happens currently is a multiplication of private charging network, which is good, except that you need to pay a monthly fee for access, then a fee per connection and finally a fee per minute or kWh. It costs 10 GBP extra fee if you haven't a monthly registration. So if you need to charge your Tesla (let's assume 60 kWh) on a network you are not registered that's going to cost you: 31.80 GBP ! OK it is still less expensive than petrol, but that's not longer an order of magnitude under.

I'm a bit afraid that in parallel to the legislation terminating the sales of ICE cars, there isn't any kind of legislation for the charging networks being put in place. Those private network will have to fight to install point on the public road, meaning the competition will be to win the local authorities, not on the consumer side. Failure to do something will lead to a situation quite similar to broadband in the US, with car driver required to pay several monthly fees to various network in order to make sure they can top up their car.

It is a bit offtopic, but until that day it never occurred to me that the golden age of electric car ownership is today! With lots of free goodies thrown your way, but all of that will dry up by the time the common folk get their EV and the future will look much like the present in term of cost of driving hidden in a few extra monthly fees tacked to your account. At least it's a win for the environment.

As a Tesla owner this logic seems very strange to me. I hardly ever use the superchargers at a location like a mall unless I'm stopping at the mall specifically for the charging station. So it's clear to me that the mall has the supercharger to drive traffic to the mall, not because people at the mall need to charge their cars. When I'm just doing day-to-day driving I always charge at home, and don't even do so every day.

In fact, the beauty of owning an electric car for me has been the fact that my home acts as the "gas station" and I almost never need to think about charging my car elsewhere.

I think the focus, instead of being the mall or on-street parking, would be apartment buildings/multi-family homes. Having a parking spot per unit with a charger, or at least some equitable way of sharing chargers within a building, will be a necessary step to electrification.

The economics in Europe are very different from the USA. In the US, the retailer would bite the electricity/infrastructure cost to drive traffic to their stores. In the UK, they wouldn't do that...heck, why would they even provide free parking? Instead, there would be a charge for everything, and it wouldn't be cheap (because nothing is). The same with scoring an off street parking spot, you are probably going to pay a lot for that already...

In the UK, they wouldn't do that...heck, why would they even provide free parking?

Nearly all out of town stores and supermarkets in the UK provide free parking.

Something that I never really considered was that if electric car are set to replace ice car in the next decade(s), basically half the parking lot would need to have electric recharging capability i.e. several thousand slots.

Not really. You plug your electric car in at home overnight, you start every day on 100%. You only need to re-charge at the mall or somewhere if you are driving beyond your car's range. That happens sometimes but not enough to need half a car park of chargers. Also, range will improve a lot in the next few years as battery prices/weights drop.

Cities where people don't have off-street parking at night (e.g. London) are a bit of an issue though. I suspect that can be solved though.

erm How? the density of car owners in London isn't that high as well

The car has no future in high density cities like London anyway. London needs its roads for buses and taxis, maybe bicycle infrastructure, not car commuters.

Are there cities where the majority of the people has off-street parking at night? I would be surprised if that were the case, at least here in Germany.

Planning regulations in the UK mandate minimum parking with a few exceptions so most new development has spaces. Visit anywhere built in the fifties though, when car use was lower and you find cars parked all over the place.

Smaller American cities, maybe?

And governments wont want to lose the tax revenue that's going to have to be replaced.

I am sure that government will want to be able to track these smart cars and trucks you know "think of the children" and possibly to disable them to reduce the risk of another Truck based suicide attack as happened in France

> Something that I never really considered was that if electric car are set to replace ice car in the next decade(s), basically half the parking lot would need to have electric recharging capability i.e. several thousand slots. Street parking will need the same as will office and residential parking lots.

I think self-driving taxis will have replaced car ownership for most people by then. Parking lots will probably shrink or disappear entirely.

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