Shortage of charging stations to become a bottleneck to mass adoption of EVs? | Hacker News Reader

Shortage of charging stations to become a bottleneck to mass adoption of EVs?

fresnobee.com

83 pointslxm210 comments

It's a fair point, if overdone.

My current employer has 16 EV chargers and they're all full by 8:45am. Even in just a few months here, I've noticed them becoming occupied more rapidly. People need to start rotating their cars off the charge mid-day to accommodate more cars. The 4 handicapped spots with chargers are often also poached with some regularity. (private garage, but still risky).

At former employers, I saw chargers go from nonexistent, to installed, to saturated, in a matter of 6 or so months. In a given site, so far, construction isn't keeping pace.

I own an EV and charge at home so it's not really an issue for me, but those with shorter range vehicles are more likely to have issues, and it is something that will have to be dealt with.

It's not insurmountable, but it's an issue. The massive increase in electrical demand from EV charging when rates go off-peak but solar generation is nonexistent is definitely something that'll have to be dealt with. My house used to consume maybe 1500w at 9pm. Now, when the charger flips on, bam, 13kW. It's impressive how much more load a neighborhood with even just a few EVs can put on the grid.

Same here, except it's the bike racks that fill up pretty early. Companies really should be doing more to encourage sustainable transportation.

Except bike racks are pennies on the dollar compared to EV stations.

Also: It's pretty remarkable how many bikes can fit in the size of say, 2 car park spaces.

However, some of your employees can't use bikes, so this isn't an entirely fair comparison. All the employees could arrive by car (not all of them might drive, but the nice thing about cars is that they take passengers). Thus it may make sense to have 10 parking spaces worth of bike racks, and 5 parking spaces, but it doesn't make sense to switch to 15 parking spaces worth of bike racks... and no parking.

Depends entirely where you live. If there are people commuting to work by car every day in Central London, they're too senior for me to have encountered them.

That's fair, I have worked in a Central London building where the car park is so ludicrously expensive most people who have a space there don't actually have any time to drive places in their own car, so their cars just sit there getting dusty over years. There's some really nice motors down there (it's a basement obviously) from what you can see - but they have an actual layer of dust on them. Anybody with a normal job in that building can't afford to park there.

Still, to make _that_ work London has a mandate for all its cabs and buses to carry wheelchairs, all new public transport infrastructure is step-free, at which point cycling is largely symbolic, I know people who do it but I also know people who live in the centre (yes in Central London, no they aren't wealthy enough to park in that car park) and walk to work and again, it's largely symbolic, like, I'm sure it makes some difference, but compared to the costs imposed by people driving to work in cities that don't have working public transit it's nothing.

If there's someone coming as a passenger why not have them arrive by public transportation or even pedi-cab?

Our bike lockers are relatively underutilized, due to the unfortunate suburban location of our office. I used to bike commute and had to park next to my desk; we moved to a big fancy office with all of the perks, but it's a horrible miserable bike slog.

Tesla charges you for time your car is at the charging station but full. They do it to encourage people to park their car elsewhere and make the charging station available to others.

I think that's pretty standard. My office is $0.85/hr for the first 4 hours then $20/hr after that to encourage you to move.

The security will ticket your car if you park in an EV spot without plugging in. We have 4 but only 2 chargers and had to explain that EVs will park in the extra spots to hold their place in line.

Employers don't have free gas stations. Having limited charging stations at work is a bonus, not a restriction, compared to the past. That being said, I'd love for all employers to subsidize clean energy as much as possible.

Surely it would be enough in most cases to put an ordinary domestic single phase supply to each parking bay. No need to have big fast chargers. My Tesla S 70D gets about 1 km per hour per amp at 230 V. So if it sits there for an eight hour work day and can get 10 A (common for a domestic circuit in most of Europe) it would get 80 km or about 50 miles. Surely most people commute less than 50 miles each way?

It's easy to commute more if you're on a highway, your range in Europe can be around 150 km given 1 hour commute. My father used to commute 120 km (less than 1 hour ride on a highway).

But nonetheless most people don't commute so far. The average commute time in the US is 26 minutes (https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10801), so probably less than 30 miles (each way I presume). And that amount of charge is easily done in an eight hour working day on a normal domestic circuit, no special charging infrastructure is required just a pole with a normal socket on it at every parking bay.

Yeah, but the average is most probably skewed by people who live next to their workplace. And still, even if it was just a fifth of people who commute from a larger distance, it's still a lot.

Also, in the USA it probably works different than in the EU - the cities and rural areas look very different. Here it's extremely common to live in a village that's around 50km from the city where you're working.

Sure, but in the US on 110v we'd get maybe 4 miles of range per hour of charge.

But I agree, it seems to make a bit more sense to simply have an outlet, but then there's the billing issue...

Article like this always seem to ignore/forget that you can charge your EV at home, and that this is usually where you charge it the majority of the time.

It's an understandable thing to forget, since you can't fill up your gas car at home.

I own an EV and I only use public chargers extremely rarely.

Not everyone can charge at home. Everyone can gas up at filling stations almost everywhere they go. For mass adoption, chargers need to be as available for everyone.

that is an absurd standard to hold.

In most cities, the cost of time to park long enough to charge would exceed the cost of electricity.

Alternatively i would suggest: when the paradigm has shifted, the ancillary processes shift accordingly rather than cling onto some cloned reliquary husk of gasoline culture.

Gas pumps have much better throughput though. I can fill up the 45 litres tank (good for ~750km) in less than a minute. How long would charging for the equivalent range take?

Assuming you own your own home.

If you live in an apartment complex or otherwise only have street parking, you likely don't have access to electricity. Or at the very least, would need to negotiate with the landlord to have a new outlet installed -- which is going to depend on how much you get along with said landlord.

There are solutions for street parking (both standalone and equipment that can piggyback off street lamp installs). In this case, you do need municipal buy in for the installation and maintenance of this infrastructure.

Yes the problem with that is you kind of need it everywhere all at once, whereas if you have a home with a drive you only need to install it when you buy an electric car and only in one place.

You really don't. You just need to pace the installs to EV vehicle uptake (which you can monitor with vehicle registrations and the addresses vehicles are registered at). Install where cars are being bought and garaged (or in this case, street parked).

What happens when someone else nabs that space?

Laws are already on the books that penalize non-EVs for parking in EV charging spaces. My statement assumes you'd overbuild in order to ensure spots (one EV in neighborhood? build capacity for 3 to charge).

Street parking spaces aren’t reserved for individuals. Anyone else with an EV (visitor? neighbor who just bought one?) is equally entitled to those spots. You would own a car rather than rent or take public transit (esp. in an urban area) because you need it to be available and working every time, not just under ideal circumstances. Gambling your work attendance on getting a particular street parking spot the night before isn’t smart.

The better EVs available now will support a typical commute without charging for a week or more.

There's a couple of spots by a charger in a plaza where I often go, posted as "reserved for hybrid/electric". Well, they didn't make it explicit enough, because someone with a non-plugin hybrid was using one of them, the last time I was there. It would suck if I had an electric car and someone like that was blocking me.

Minor logistics issue to be fixed.

Not a problem in California at least:

"Assembly Bill 2565 would give tenants the right to install an electric-car charging station at their residence, provided the tenant submits a written request to the landlord and pays for the installation costs."

(Passed already)

At a cost of at least $1000 for a charging station and installation, I can’t see many people wanting to pay for this if they are renting.

I'd be curious if there are loan options that would cover the cost. Then it's not such a crazy thing for renters to consider installing a charger. (I mean, they're already paying ~$30k for a car on loan; another $1k isn't much).

I move every 3 or 4 years, so I'd basically be paying each landlord to make improvements to their place and then leaving those improvements behind.

If the landlord bought the charger station, they'd up your rent by what the market would bear for parking spots with EV-charging capacity.

So you install it at your expense, sell it at the depreciated price when you move out, and the landlord recovers the cost by upping the rent for the next EV driver looking for a new apartment. Or they don't, and you remove it and take it with you when you leave, paying the electrician labor again on both ends.

The demographic that would currently buy an electric car in California can easily pay for $1K for a changing station. If you're going to spend $30K on a Leaf or plug-in Prius or $50K on a Model 3 (vs. $18K for a Corolla or Fit), $1K is a drop in the bucket. It's also a tiny fraction of rent in Northern California, roughly 12 days worth.

The new Hyundai Ioniq PHEV can be bought for $25k.

In any case, most people don’t just shell out a random $30,000 they have burning a whole in their pocket, they finance the purchase over 5-6 years. Sudden out-of-pocket $1,000 is kinda a big deal, especially if one plans on moving out in a year or two.

I must be living in Silicon Valley too long, because a large number of people I know - amongst the tech crowd at least - do in fact shell out a random $30K they have burning a hole in their pocket.

(Lest I get accused of being way too out of touch, I do know people for whom affording even a $200 car repair is out of reach, and something they'll put up a GoFundMe over. These people do not drive electric cars. If you can afford the ~$5K in interest that financing a car over 6 years will cost you, you can afford the $1K charger. If you can't afford this, you buy a used Ford or Chevy rather than any of the cars we're talking about here.)

The way I see it that with 0% financing deals aplenty there’s virtually no incentive to pay cash upfront. Might just as well stick that $30k into some high-yield savings account and set up automatic payments from there. Builds credit history, too.

The last couple times I've been car shopping the 0% financing deals come with a jacked-up list price. You may get the loan at 0%, but the way that works is that they quote a higher price to begin with and then the 0% financing (assuming good credit) was their "concession" in the negotiation. We bought our cars for under dealer price, paying by cashier's check, so I assume that the actual dealer price was even lower (otherwise they wouldn't be willing to sell us the car), particularly since the lowest price they would go with financing was a couple thousand higher (credit scores in the 800s).

When I bought my LEAF in Dec 2014, I negotiated a price including a $2000 incentive from Nissan. Turns out that incentive was from NMAC (Nissan’s financing arm) and was only avail if I took a loan with them. Ok, what’s the interest rate? 0%. Wait, you give me $2K at signing and finance the car at 0% for 60 months? Ok, sign me up!

In terms of selling below their invoice price, they also get an advertising holdback that scales with cars sold, so they’re still making a small amount on the sales floor. The real money at a dealership is made in the service bays, not on the sales floor. This is what really sucks for dealers about electric cars. In 42 months, my LEAF has never seen the dealer again and I’ve only added washer fluid and changed the wiper blades once.

Watch the range over time, though. The cells in even the latest Nissan Leafs do not have any charge or temperature conditioning for the batteries, so they are likely to age poorly basically anywhere with more than 1 season.

If you care for the batteries nicely (drive slow, don't slam accelerator, avoid winter), I'm sure they'll last a good long time, but the battery is a consumable that will need to be replaced sooner than most other major components, I think the Leaf has them under the rear seats, and may be a pain to deal with. If your Leaf has fast charging, it's advised to avoid using it too often because it will heat the batteries and may reduce charge over time.

I guess the skimping of quality here seems short-sighted, but every EV has some weird, questionable choices to cut down on weight.

Concur all around. I think I’m down about 10% range in 3.5 years. Other family members own 3 different Smart electric drives and they’re down only 2-4% in the same timeframe. (Those cars have liquid cooled batteries, which appears to dramatically reduce long-term range loss.)

This is exactly right. And i reiterate this often, TANSTAAFL. (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch).

No one is loaning you money interest free. You are just paying for it in the purchase price or through other fees.

I will admit there are rare cases where strange incentives may make it cheaper or the same price to buy with credit, but these are very rare, and are only applicable if you artificially limit your available selection of vehicles to brand new. Even though you could get virtually the same car with 10k miles on it for much less.

For used cars there's always room for negotiating, but for new cars I felt the pricing was standardized through TrueCar (and their derivatives, like Costco Auto, Amex Cars, Overstock Cars). Is that not true?

There's the floor on prices that they will advertise to the public and then there's the actual floor on prices, and the latter can be significantly lower than the former.

Car dealerships have a number of incentives that can change their reserve price in strange ways. There's the advertising holdback and potential servicing cross-subsidies that sokoloff mentions, and then there are also monthly quotas and per-salesperson quotas. If the dealer is very close to their monthly quota and it's almost the end of the month, you can get a car below invoice price, because the manufacturer will give them a bonus for hitting the quota and so the marginal profit on the one car they sell you can be positive (including the bonus) even though the car itself sold at a loss. Similarly, if an individual salesperson is close to hitting their personal quota, they will let you have the car for the lowest price that won't get them in trouble with the dealer, because it helps them hit their numbers and gives them a bonus.

It's entirely possible that similar incentives exist for financing, and that's why people get zero-percent auto loans with cash back, and they're cross-subsidized by people who end up paying thousands in interest because their credit scores weren't as good or they didn't get as good a deal. But on average, the financing cost needs to be eaten by somebody, so on average you're likely to get better deals paying cash than financing. The dealer can also book all the cash immediately when you pay cash, which makes them somewhat more amenable to offer deals and opens up some other incentives for them to sell cheap (like getting rid of old model years near the end of the fiscal year and converting it to cash so their numbers look good and they can order more new model years).

(There can also be strange situations that make buying new more economical than buying used - I bought my Fit in 2009 for less than used 2007 Fits were going for, because the bottom had fallen out of the economy and oil had gone from $100/barrel to $50/barrel. The used car owners had paid ~$2000 over sticker price for a fuel-efficient car in a booming economy, while I paid ~$500 under invoice price because dealers were desperate to hit their quotas, and the dealer's beliefs about where the market is at adjusts faster than private owners' beliefs about where the market is at. Such situations are the exception rather than the rule, though.)

I used the TrueCar price as a starting point for negotiation. I emailed a bunch of dealers asking them to beat the out-the-door price until I found the dealer offering my the best price. I walked in with a certified cheque and bought it after a short test drive. I got my car below TrueCar. The dealer claimed that I was getting it below invoice and he was only making money because of incentives. I brushed it off as a negotiation tactic.

I think it's easier to do this for a popular car so your mileage may vary.

In theory, you can get a 1 year old car for much less than new, but people who buy cars with the options I want* tend not to sell them after 1 year of use. Or like truck prices in the bay area, when I bought my ranger, it was about $2000 more to buy new than to buy a 10 year old truck. Or, occasionally I'm dumb and buying a new model, even though that's a bad idea because when things break nobody knows how to fix it yet.

* Or really, without the options I don't want.

If you expect to move apartments 3 times over the ownership period of the car, $3K is 10% of the purchase price for the Leaf.

If you buy a leaf off lease, 3k is 30% of the purchase price.

Eh, not so sure about that. I live in Portland and 2011-2013 used Nissan Leafs go for ~$7k. They're not rich people cars anymore, at least not here. I assume the same is true in California.

if $1000 is rough, you can buy a $50 extension cable.

Source: I drag an orange 75 foot extension cable once per week and have used a public charger exactly once for novelty-sake.

There are some losses with running that much power through a long extension cable - maybe 1-4% depending on the setup.

Do you think that will be a significant factor in this discussion and dissuade people from EV ownership?

My wife wants a new car (I don't drive) and I'm looking into an EV. We live in an apartment building. The biggest problem I see is that there is no power I can connect a cable to that can be billed to me. The only external power in the building is used by the building for various things (mostly cleaning).

So there is going to be some cost to setting this up even if the landlord allows it (which he may not).

I'll suspect that these people (and most people in fact) won't own their own cars. Those that do, in regional areas most likely, will have their own garaging and access to power.

You probably don’t need a charging station. Teslas can charge from a wall outlet, for example.

The Tesla gives around 5 hours of range per hour of charging in a standard 120VAC outlet, so if your car is parked 12 hours overnight, your one-way commute has to be less than 30 miles.

5 miles of range per hour of charging, presumably?

You have weekends to catch up as well, where depending on life style, might keep the car parked in garage for longer period.

Who said 120v? Plug it into a dryer outlet. My point was that you don't need all this big excessive expensive charging circuitry.

Here in the UK, EV chargers are heavily subsidised, on the basis that they're tantamount to a common resource. Installing a 7kW home charger costs as little as £150 ($200) after subsidy, with charger grants also available for businesses and local governments. It's a bit regressive considering the high cost of EVs right now, but it seems like a sensible step if you're aiming for ubiquitous charging infrastructure.

Great. What if someone parks in your spot?

What do you do if you park on the street. I've seen some people here just throw the cable across the sidewalk but I'm not sure thats really the best solution...

Medium-term solution:

EV chargers can be integrated into lamp posts or other items of street furniture. A city-wide network of charging points can be managed using contactless payment, with IoT sensors to indicate vacant charging points. Building out widespread on-street charging infrastructure won't be quick or cheap, but it's entirely feasible with existing technology.

There's also a reasonable expectation that some combination of car-sharing, ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles will significantly reduce the rate of private car ownership. Electric bicycles and scooters show tremendous potential for reducing the demand for car ownership in urban areas. Good public transit of course has a major role to play.

http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Str...

Autonomous vehicles makes owning a car even more convenient. I don't have to worry about parking, it can drop me off at the door, and then go park a mile away (or just circle around). I can get one for my child, so I don't have to drive him to school or let him walk/bike to school (it's dangerous, what with all the cars around).

My parking garage in California charges $5,000 for charger installation. Plus you have to pay for the energy, at retail charging rates. Definitely not worth it.

Assuming you own your own home

Pretty much every significant apartment building built in Chicago in the last decade has had EV chargers in the garage.

The problem is that there aren't enough EV spaces to go around for all the residents who have electric cars.

If you're renting a stand-alone home, isn't there an EV station you can plug into a regular outlet? Naturally, the charging time would be slower than a 220V connection or whatever is needed, but if it's charing overnight, is that not an option?

(Don't own an electric car yet, so I'm not up on chargers)

Pretty much every EV out there comes with a "granny cable" that you can use to very slowly charge. It won't fully charge overnight (works out to about 4 miles an hour), but if you are topping off it can be adequate. I have used it many times, including one time where I actually ran out and had the car towed. Towed the dead car home, plugged in. Went to work fine the next morning and plugged there.

That's if you are in the US, actually, where most outlets are 110V. If you have access to 220V or you can rewire an outlet, then charging time should be similar to public level 2 charging stations. Beware that not all charges will support 220v and will blow up (but some can be modified).

110v is the biggest barrier for adoption everywhere, that and old electrical installations.

As an EV owner, I'd say that you need either a place to charge at work, or at home (great if you have both). If you do, then it is more convenient than pulling up at gas stations (more so if you are trying to get the cheaper ones in the likes of CostCo). If you do not, then relying on the public infrastructure is stressful and time consuming.

Thanks for the detailed response.

One of the cars in my family only drives eight miles a day, and never on weekends. So I'm thinking about replacing it with an EV. Sounds like a granny cable might be all I need.

My commute today is exactly 8 miles (4 each way). With a 2015 Leaf, I could go for two weeks without even bothering to charge if I'm only commuting. Since I can charge at work for free, I do it every Friday. And it's fantastic.

My previous commute was 50 miles a day. Using only a standard 110v, I would top off every day, and that worked just fine. I could even forget once (but not twice in a row!). It took about 12 hours to charge what I used up during the day.

So yeah. Just grab an extension cord (make sure it is rated for the current), and plug into whatever outlet you can find.

Not to be a smart ass but a bike/e-bike also works pretty well for a 4 mile commute assuming you can ride a bike.

US residential electricity is (typically) 240 V center-tapped to ground, so you can have 120V or 240V.

110V hasn’t been the standard since before World War II.

Slow charge for my LEAF is about 5 miles per hour from a standard outlet.

That's not going to be a serious obstacle to that 5 million figure, though. It obviously hurts individuals plenty, but in aggregate, enough people own their own homes that adoption can be orders of magnitude greater than it is now before the renter issue is figured out.

Even if you down own your home, it's no guarantee.

I live in a condo with a detached garage, which is on the far side of another row of condos.

So getting power from my meter to the garage means trenching through a sidewalk, under a block of condos, then through about 20 feet of pavement. Alternatively, I could trench through 100 feet of pavement from the power vault where our complex's transformer is and have the power company install a new meter for me.

The garage has a light bulb + garage door opener circuit, but the panel that feeds it wouldn't support a single charge station, let alone enough for the 8 garages that the panel serves.

The HOA isn't interested in running enough power to let residents install an EV charge station in the garage, and I'm not interested in paying for it either. So unless I can get my neighbors to help share the cost, I'm not going to be able to install a charge station.

Just a thought: a sufficiently smart EV and a sufficiently smart garage door could talk to each other to share a circuit. The car just stops charging when the door needs to move, which shouldn't add up to too much time.

Not practical for an individual to develop to solve their individual problem, but maybe it could become a selling point for any particular EV.

The problem isn't "sharing" the circuit, the problem is that the EV charger wants power, as much power as possible, and the circuit to that garage has been sized to allow for just enough to run a bulb and some trivial electrics like a door opener. Say 150W.

If you divert that 150W to an EV charger, so little power will make no perceptible difference to the charge overnight. Maybe 3-4 miles per night. And in fact a smart charger might conclude the circuit is faulty and cease charging altogether at this very low input.

For instance, in California, it is now law that apartment renters can install EV charging stations (at their own cost). So even those who do not own a house can charge at home.

That seems like it would result in a random hodge-podge of chargers getting installed? At least, until a landlord had enough of it and redid it.

Why does it matter? The actual charger is in the vehicle, the stations are basically only talking to the vehicle and regulating power flow.

Smart landlords would hopefully require a standard 50A NEMA 14-50R outlet. Those are compatible with almost all EVSEs.

What would it even mean to install EV charging in a stacker?

This rule is a lifesaver.

I’m renting a single family home in San Francisco. I drive a Chevrolet Bolt EV.

Using a little known SF electrical code that allows DIY electrical work in a fully detached house, I installed a 50-Amp 250v NEMA 14-50 outlet in my garage. I did 50A service for room to upgrade the stock EVSE in the future. My landlord is fine as I’m insured, followed all National Electric Code guidelines and laws. It cost me $100 in parts/wire.

I then created a NEMA 14-50P to a NEMA 5-15R adapter to plug the GM stock EVSE in at 250v.

It’s a little known fact about the Chevy Bolt that the included EVSE charger supports 250v - by wiring each blade on the NEMA 5-15 plug to a 125v hot lead; then wiring the ground pin to neutral. I then locked the NEMA 5-15 plug/receptacle extension cord in a lockbox clearly labeled.

While a normal 40A EVSE Gives 7.2kW, this setup- still limited to 12A due to GM/Clipper Creeks firmware - gives me around 3kWh. That’s perfect for my use. I am not tempted to really upgrade this set up a time soon, but can if I want to. It’s also easy enough to take with me.

Total installation of level 2 charging in my San Francisco rental? $150ish.

(Please don’t try this at home if you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to working with electric. this is only informational, not an endorsement!)

Using a little known SF electrical code that allows DIY electrical work in a fully detached house

If you did this in my property, when I found out what you did, you'd be in violation of the lease and paying me to have a licensed electrician out to inspect the work and do anything needed to bring it up to code.

I can't imagine why your landlord is ok with a tenant's DIY electrical work, since the landlord is the one on the hook if it goes bad now or in the future.

They said they were insured, so presumably, the landlord is covered.

That's not a safe presumption -- insurance companies can deny a claim based on unlicensed work.

So unless the tenant was a professional electrician with his own liability insurance that would cover the work, it's quite possible that the landlord is not covered.

It's funny how some people seem to be afraid of DIY electrical work. In European countries it's really different. For example, in Switzerland, you can do it yourself, but it must pass the routine inspection. France is even laxer.

If you follow most of the most important rules (Fuse, RCCB, cood conduit, proper cable), hardly anything can go wrong.

Hell, you can easily destroy a house with a single cigarette, but nobody talks about it.

In the USA, the landlord holds the bulk of the responsibility if shoddy electrical work injures or kills someone.

While it is certainly possible for an amateur to follow the right procedures and do safe work, it's also possible (and even quite likely) that they don't know everything they need to do, and end up doing something unsafe.

While you can easily destroy a house with a cigarette (though many landlords have non-smoking clauses here), a cigarette won't generally burn down the house a year from now after the tenant who did the work is long gone.

Two points, one more "editorial" than the other:

First, the person you replied to didn't say that they didn't have it inspected and didn't have to meet code. I just perused San Francisco's municipal ordinances. They follow the same ones I've seen elsewhere. The homeowner or lessee of a single-family detached house is allowed to pull permits on his or her own authority and do the work. The work must still follow the same inspection process from the city and must meet all relevant codes. It is not just that the tenant could slap wire wherever he or she chose; the relevant rules would still be followed.

Second, and this is the editorial part, why do landlords--at least the ones I read on the Internet--have such an adversarial relationship with tenants? "My property," "what you did," "violation of the lease," and so on. The tenant is the one making the money for you; why immediately assume bad faith? If you're going to be all legalistic about it, when you signed the lease, you signed over most of the rights for "your property" to the tenant. Perhaps that should be a more harmonious relationship?

I assumed he didn't pull permits because he said It cost me $100 in parts/wire -- nothing about permit fees.

Because tenants, in general, don't have a long-term interest in the property and are willing to cut corners. Some things I've seen:

Switching 15A breaker for a 20A breaker "because it trips too much".

Wiring an extension cord into the panel and running it through a hole in the wall to the garage "because I needed another circuit (my grow lights kept tripping the other one)"

Swapping hot/neutral when replacing outlets

Using a wire nut that's too small and taping it to hold it in place.

Not using a wire nut at all, just twisting wires together and taping them.

So, most people are going to have to completely rework their electrical system in order to put in an EV charger, going by the Tesla specs[1], up to including a larger service. Not too many people have an extra 40 amps of capacity kicking around, much less 60 or 90. And let me tell you, it's not exactly cheap to redo an electrical panel, particularly once you get in there and then have to bring up any other things that were grandfathered in up to newer code.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation

Your point is valid, but I'd mention that I doubt most people need >40 amp installation. If we talk about your average Joe who gets a Model 3 or equivalent than they're already getting 30mi/h charge at 40 amps. Average Joe only drives 16 miles to work.

We have the 40 amp installation and have never wanted for more.

Somewhat related, but a neat hack might be to get solar installed at the same time. Re-doing the panel would be included as part of the project, which means you can A) get a loan to cover everything, and B) get a 30% credit from the government (in the U.S.). [I say might; our solar installer explained to us offhand that many people do things like that and get other upgrades as well like new water heaters, etc. You'd have to check with your CPA to confirm.] Considering that solar is cheaper over the long-term it's a pretty good deal depending on what loan terms you can get.

I recently moved and have been lazy about getting a charger installed at the new place. I’ve been plugging into a standard outlet in the meantime. Turns out that’s plenty. I still want to get something faster because it’s more efficient and it would be nice before and after long trips, but there’s no rush.

Yea, it is a good starting point as many EVs use 30-32A charging (including the short range version of the Model 3 in fact), and fits into the 200A service that most homes since the 1980s have pretty easily.

Most Tesla owners install standard J1772, not the faster Tesla thing.

> Not too many people have an extra 40 amps of capacity kicking around

Not even EV owners. That's overkill.

Probably.

I had the advantage of moving into a place where the previous tenant had the service and panel upgraded / house rewired for their cannabis business.

Really glad too. There’s lots of Hazardous Federal Pacific Electric panels in operation around here.

Unfortunately, almost everyone I know that would be a candidate for buying an electric vehicle doesn't own a house. Definitely a big issue in places with sky-high housing prices like San Francisco.

Almost everyone that I know in my age-group is nowhere close to being able to afford buying a house.

Time to build a smart charger that can plug into several outlets at once and regulate power draw heh

That doesn't help if the underlying cable leading to that circuit isn't thick enough to handle the current draw.

Or if all of the outlets are on the same circuit.

Yeah it's a stupid idea. But outlets can't all be on the same breaker, otherwise you would not be able to run an average home.

Having something like a Powerwall that's always plugged in, and fast charging your car off of it overnight (or faster) could work. Very expensive, though.

> Unfortunately, almost everyone I know that would be a candidate for buying an electric vehicle doesn't own a house.

See, that’s the problem with anecdotal evidence based on your own bubble. I’m in the exact opposite position - literally everyone I know that would buy (or already owns) an electric car also owns a house.

I don't know if people are forgetting that.

My apartment complex with hundreds of units has a built in parking garage, and there is one (1) electric charging station. Two pools though.

Not all houses have connected garages either.

You need a home with a driveway. Out of all my friends in the UK, I can count two who have such a thing - if you live in a terraced house, apartment, or even a regular house but without a driveway, how are you going to charge your EV? Where you park at night is completely arbitrary - one night you get a spot close to your door, the other you have to park on the street nearby because there is no room. Public fast charging stations are the only solution to this.

The problem is the delivery mechanism. Charging is always going to be a bottleneck, unless we invent mass production supercapacitors on the order of what graphene promised (which is seems to be highly unlikely). Edit: even with supercapacitors, the amperage required seems unlikely.

Assuming self-parking as a baseline (although it's not strictly required), cars would be able to position themselves over an automated battery pack replacement station. Replacing the discharged pack could take less time than a petroleum refuel, so EVs could be more convenient than petroleum vehicles (any replacement technology should offer more benefits than what it replaces).

The station could then move the pack underground for recharging. This underground area would have much higher density compared to cars (where batteries are, what, 10% of the volume?). In addition, dead packs could be identified and scheduled for pickup and recycling.

The first problem that most people would bring up is: replacing a worn pack with a new one. This problem actually turns out to be an advantage: disclose the mileage of the pack and allow the customer to pay less for it. I don't need a 300mi pack if I'm just going 5mi to work. This way, more useful lifetime can still be extracted from old packs while turning the recycling problem into a logistically simpler problem (no more complicated than delivering petroleum to fuel stations).

The only real problem with this is the clamping mechanism between the car and the pack. It would need to be standardized. Reliability: mechanical systems fail - it's the undercarriage of the car, there's dust and other particulate getting in the way.

Tesla originally had a demo of this 'replace the pack under the car' method (called "Fast Pack Swap"; see: https://vimeo.com/68832891). But they seem to have backed off that idea, probably for a variety of logistical reasons.

I remember reading about an underground battery swap system in a 1980's electronics encyclopedia too, but it seems the barriers are too great for the size batteries needed for a good long-range EV.

Wow. I was convinced it was a foolproof solution. I wish I could learn more about the problems that they were worried about.

Thanks for the citation, it's nice to see the idea in action :)

Here's an article on Tesla abandoning battery swap [0]. There was also an Israeli company trying to do the same thing that failed to pull it off. [1]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/teslas-battery-swapping-plan....

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

People still don‘t get just how radically synergistic electric driving, self-charging and self-driving technology will be. All the drawbacks of electric driving such as low range and slow and cumbersome charging will just instantly disappear as soon as cars will just drive away and charge themselves. It will mostly solve parking problems, availability of chargers and even help absorb the (basicall free) excess energy produced by photovoltaics in the middle of the day. Just one or two of these technologies won‘t do much, but I suspect we‘ll see a massive tipping point once all three hit. If you ask me, we‘ll see this completely altering cityscapes and car ownership between 2020 and 2030.

but that's not happening for a while. 10+ years maybe more. what are we doing for the next 10 years?

> what are we doing for the next 10 years?

pour gasoline into fuel tank (:

Self-driving is expected to bring down ridesharing costs. As costs go down, ridership goes up. As ridership goes up, traffic goes up. Currently I can get around by bicycle, rideshare, bus, subway, trolley, and rail. With the exception of the subway, all of those are slowed down by increased vehicle traffic. The tipping point you're talking about may be city streets becoming gridlocked.

Then there's the bit rot problem. Most of this self driving tech is software. Over time, software becomes old, eventually is abandoned, and has to be rewritten. Assuming the cityscape was changed by 2030 (this is impossible, but just for argument's sake) we could have broken legacy tech by 2050. But we will either be stuck with it, or middle-aged people will have to start driving 30+ year old cars as taxis, as no young people will have gotten a drivers license, and all the self driving cars won't have steering wheels.

A vehicle miles added tax would, in smart policy districts, allow the curbing of excessive car use, especially for a company like Uber or Lyft. There's also congestion tax, which many cities are already implementing. Some cities just straight up banned non-electric past a certain year, so we're already moving slowly to deal with traffic. I think we'll have the tools we need by the time it's a huge problem. In Boston, the traffic is pretty awful, there are just many cars shoved into a small area with infrastructure based on cow paths from original settlements.

You don't think they'd just pass the taxes on to the customer in fees and then blame the local govt?

Personally I'm for banning cars altogether from city centers. Many cities are implementing that too, and not nearly soon enough.

There's some balance in that we might be able to ditch some parking spots, opening up lanes for other usage.

Chargers have been getting noticeably more busy over the last year (bay area). It's pretty absurd at this point that we are relying on private companies like Whole Foods to build public transportation infrastructure. The state really needs to get on top of this and start building out more level 3.

>It's pretty absurd at this point that we are relying on private companies like Whole Foods to build public transportation infrastructure.

Most (maybe all?) gas stations are privately owned, how is this different?

Probably because gas stations and EV chargers have very different logistics and modalities. For example, you could realistically put an electrical outlet by every parking space, but doing that with gas pumps would be completely untenable.

I know this was just an example of how they're different, but this particular feature should make EV chargers easier for the market to supply relative to gas stations.

Each car in a city requires alot of parking spaces I've read 4-10 empty parking spaces per car. This would mean that every car owner would need to pay for that many charging stations.

A gas pump by every parking spot is probably easier at scale. Manufacturing costs would scale down significantly, and a plastic gas pipe is cheaper than a copper wire.

We don't do it because a gas car refuels fast enough that you don't need it.

How about the cost for the nozzle, the pump, and all the safety equipment you need to stop an oopsie from turning into a kaboom?

Let's not forget vapor recovery systems for all these gas spickets in California

Yeah, we can have a pump. And a gas pipe.

But they do not make fuel. Did you forget the massive underground fuel tank though? Or even worse, gasoline pipes?

We just need a 220v outlet. That's it. The charging station is welcome but EV owners already carry their own (not all support 220v but that's an easy fix)

"just a 220 outlet" is not easy. It is a 220 outlet, but we also need large wires to each outlet.

So far they've preferred providing incentives through tax policy - worked for residential solar installations.

The land in popular destinations (shopping plazas, malls, large corporate offices) is privately or municipally owned, the state cannot just barge in.

This is a good list of current California incentives https://www.chargepoint.com/products/station-incentives/

Government hasn't historically been the one building parking spots. See the history around mandatory parking minimums, like from this video from Vox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akm7ik-H_7U

So... force non-EV owners to subsidize your driving choice?

I'm pretty shocked at the low adoption of hybrid cars. Why don't people want them?

Good question. What is your expectation? I found a link that seems to suggest that people do want them (at about 2% of cars sold), maybe just not at the level you expect? They are typically more expensive to buy. People aren't good with long term cost benefit analysis. https://www.hybridcars.com/june-2018-hybrid-cars-sales-dashb...

It seems absurd in retrospect, but I was envisioning something like 20-30% of cars. Possibly this is due to commuting with rich people in SF where priuses are every other car. 2% makes it seem like we have no hope for addressing global warming--nobody seems to care.

When the market is ready for hybrids and electrics, hybrids and electrics will become more plentiful. People seem to forget that individuals have to look out for themselves first. Not everyone is willing to make the financial sacrifice to solve a nebulous problem.

As long as China and India have little incentive to fix their pollution issues, the impact of even the entire state of California is literally a drop in the bucket.

The thinking is “why should I suffer” when the developing world pretty much does whatever they want. A bunch of Bay Area techies driving electric has about as much impact on climate as a whale farting in the ocean. The sky might be falling, but it isn’t going to be stopped by Americans driving electric.

> People seem to forget that individuals have to look out for themselves first.

Why do you say that? I can understand people need to look after themselves, but I can have my own hopes at the same time. Why would you want me to not hope to address this problem? The market certainly isn't going to provide any hope; that's why emissions are considered an externality, because people don't approach the problem rationally (as a society). Tragedy of the commons should be a descriptive trait, not a justification.

Shenzhen just went to 100% electric buses. 16,000 of them. China is going electric faster than the US is.

good point....yeah you're right.

Sounds like you're talking about electric cars, not hybrids.

Possibly parent post is confused, but apperently to jump start a modern prius, you need to open the fuse box, which is unusual. So maybe he didn't do enough research?

As to the mountains statement, here's a piece of anecdata. My boss, who was a big fellow, said he had a really hard time driving through mountain passes with his first gen prius. It just didn't have enough power to drive up steep grades at freeway speeds carrying 300 lbs. He said he was constantly being passed by semi trucks hauling loads...

That's a problem of the first generation Prius then. Even a Nissan Leaf has absolutely no problem climbing mountains (they will murder the battery charge though – ask me how do I know – although you'll get some of it back as you go back down). A Chevy Volt would do it even better, and that's an actual hybrid. Electric engines have outstanding power relative to their size. The Leaf actual engine is the size of a football.

The Prius has been redesigned three times since then, so I'm not sure what that tells you.

Gasoline engines lose power at altitude, as it happens.

My mom just bought a Prius Prime, a plug-in hybrid, a few months ago, and it seems to solve all the problems of dealing with poor charging infrastructure in Texas. It can go around 25 miles on pure electric power, so that takes care of 90% of her driving (charging at home at night). For longer drives, it's a hybrid, so it still has a gas tank and can go just as far as a regular hybrid or gas car.

BEVs are mechanically simpler, requiring less maintenance and expense (and they eliminate all use of fossil fuels). Hybrids and PHEVs are mechanically more complex than ICEVs, often requiring more things that need maintenance and repair.

PHEVs are the worst of all, in my opinion, because on top of everything else, they tend to clog up public charging stations.

BEVs with decent range (the Chevy Bolt, Tesla, and some upcoming models) are the real solution. Charge at work and home - and only use DCFC (high current) public charging for trips.

Background: I've had a LEAF for 4.5 years as my daily commuter car; it's got (32K miles). For trips last year we got a Tesla Model S (24K miles).

> Charge at work and home - and only use DCFC (high current) public charging for trips.

As I essentially only use my car for weekend road trips, how is the long-distance experience hopping from charger to charger? How about country driving--is the density high enough you can check out some nature?

Previous generation Leaf? Debatable. I have one. I plotted a trip from the East Bay to Yosemite and the range seemed enough on paper, even accounting for elevation. But in at least one stretch there was a single quick charge station (ChaDeMo) that I could rely on. If that was out of service I would have issues, as even L2 were not plentiful. On Yosemite itself I could find only one L2. So I did not attempt the trip.

Current generation Leaf, Bolt, Tesla? The range would be pretty adequate and comfortable.

Not sure about long desert stretches, you could have an idea here: https://www.evtripplanner.com/planner/2-8/

Also of note is that a major drawback in the US is the high highway speeds. Drag increases to the speed squared, so going 60mph vs 80mph makes a huge difference. We don't notice as much in internal combustion engines, because a gas tank has so much energy – we may notice in our pockets though.

You might want to spell out your acronyms on first use. I'm having to guess at what you're talking about.

and PHEVs are mechanically more complex than ICEVs, often requiring more things that need maintenance and repair.

Not necessarily. At least in a Toyota hybrid you won't find a regular transmission but a much simpler planetary gear set.

Also everything that can be powered by the battery - like power steering, AC, water pump etc. - is, so less fluids, pumps, belts etc.

Lastly there's no starter motor and I think there's no need for a stepper motor since load and thus RPM can be regulated by the motor-generator pair.

what makes you think adoption is low? Probably you do not realize how many models you see are hybrid, most don't look different.

A couple months back in Ireland Toyota was doing a free upgrade to PHEV on all models sold.

They’re more expensive and the cost differential isn’t offset by the gas savings. Hybrids don’t solve any real problem in the market: gas is plentiful thus relatively cheap. You don’t generally save the cost difference in gas savings unless you keep the car longer than is typical. Even in Europe where gas is far more expensive and taxed, hybrids don’t make financial sense in most cases: hybrids are more expensive and a higher price car means higher sales taxes, offsetting gains from saving gas. A diesel Peugeot 5007 gets over 40 miles to the gallon, which is approaching hybrid levels for that size vehicle but a hybrid can cost €8000 or so more. No way during the normal lifespan would you save that much in gas. Also, if you are financing, you are paying interest on that higher price, thus making the lack of cost savings even more pronounced.

Hybrid big rigs on the other hand, could be game changing. A Prius is a statement car more than an actual exercise in frugality. A Honda Civic is a nicer car, doesn’t look like a squashed bean and costs less with more features and plenty of fuel-efficiency. But then a Civic doesn’t give people the same sense of superiority as does a Prius.

In the Bay Area replace Prius with Tesla and Civic with Audi and you can make similar arguments.

> Hybrid big rigs on the other hand, could be game changing.

How? I believe most of the efficiency of the Prius and other hybrids is realized with city (stop and go) driving. In highway driving it is not any more efficient than any other car with a similar 1.3L engine and aerodynamics.

The Prius is still more efficient on the highway than other cars because nobody (at least in the US) would buy a similar-sized car with a 1.3L engine and no hybrid system to boost power.

In Europe they are the best, especially PHEVs as they lower the cost of driving substantially in addition to getting less taxed. There is no competition cost wise.

I think its safe to say we're experiencing a true Renaissance of petrol powered cars right now, which makes the EV options fairly unappealing to "car" people such as myself (generally speaking). As for the commodity type of car buyer, the price seems to be the issue I hear most often. Why spend 40k on an EV with limited range and utility, when you could drop 30k on a mid-sized sedan that gets excellent gas mileage, has comical amounts of power, and has a level of luxury that would have required a 6 figure investment 10 years ago? Not to mention you can take it on a long drive without having to pre-plan the entire thing.

In a few years, when gas prices are high again I'm sure we'll see the EVs start picking up, and at that point I suspect the charging station issue will solve itself.

> Why spend 40k on an EV with limited range and utility,

Parent said hybrid.

Pure electric is sexy. Also, hybrids are mechanically more complicated (that's my excuse).

Priuses are with the dual drive train. Chevy Volts are not, the generator is much simpler than a normal car engine. You are trading a normal ICE for an electric + generator combination, which is mechanically simpler (transmission is basically non-existent, for example). Not as simple as an EV, but can be simpler than a normal ICE.

Chevy Volts are not serial hybrids as you describe. They have a complex transmission that merges the gasoline engine and electric motor power in several modes for optimal efficiency. Nice car but not simple.

Perhaps you meant the Chevy Bolt which is fully electric with no transmission or gasoline engine?

Honda has multiple hybrids now that have essentially no transmission - either the engine charges the battery, or it is connected to the wheels as if in top gear. I haven't spent a lot of time driving one, but it seems elegant on paper. Perhaps not quite as smooth as the Toyota hybrid transmissions because it has the clutch engaging or disengaging the direct drive.

It would seem to me that doing it this way is ideal, because you can run the ICE at one specific optimised RPM. Would the losses from from charging the battery would be less than those from running an ICE in inefficient ranges?

Is the only downside that you can't get a combined peak power from ICE+electric that's higher than the electric on its own?

Am electrical engineer, not mechanical, so I'd be interested in someone who knows about these things chiming in.

You've still got two complete power systems, electric and gasoline. The BMW i3 is available with a range extender option (a motorcycle engine with a generator), but it adds about $4,000 to the base price and significantly increases the servicing costs. That's not a dealbreaker on a $40,000 car, but it does become a significant issue if we're aiming to get EVs down to the price point of a Honda Civic.

Toyota's style of hybrid is far less mechanically complicated than an automatic transmission.

I think that gas going back down to two-something a gallon again after that period a few years ago where we started getting used to it pushing four bucks, combined with increased fuel efficiency of newer ICE vehicles, and the price premium of hybrids explains a lot of it away.

Howcome gasoline is so cheap in the US? Here in Belgium prices are between 1.5 and 1.6 euro/liter, which corresponds to 6.5 to 7 dollar/gallon.

Taxes (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Gas_and_...)

Taxes are low and there would be a mass revolt if they were jacked up to European levels.

Fracking, and development of all that domestic shale oil that became economical to exploit when oil prices were through the roof previously, as I understand it.

Oil is sold on a global market. In fact the state of Texas is due to become a large producer/exporter than the nation of Iraq in the next year or two. Differences in price are due to regional taxes.

"Hybrids" of all kinds are usually a dead-end transitional technology. See the fate of "touch-optimized" Symbian and Blackberry OSs.

The old timers dislike them for being "different" and the ones who want the new tech want 100% of it, not just 20% - they want the ideal solution in this new paradigm. As such, hybrid tech is doomed from the start.

It seems to me that houses will always run on electricity, but that doesn't mean backup generators will ever become obsolete, because electricity isn't 100% reliable.

For the same reason I think the end state of cars in the forseeable future will/should be PHEVs, not BEVs. People who disdain the former in favor of the later are responding to vague, illogical ideas of purity and simplicity, in my opinion.

Purity and simplicity applies to the vehicle's operating costs which are an entirely pragmatic matter.

If you have a BEV the drive train is almost childishly simple, and that means fewer things that can go wrong and the things that do go wrong are mostly simple to replace, which in turn means your maintenance costs are low.

All the time you're driving a PHEV you're hauling the ICE power system around, even if you don't use it for days, weeks, months, or indeed ever. That's an ongoing cost drag compared to the equivalent BEV.

Anti air-pollution and anti climate-change rules will punish PHEVs. Not at first, because a PHEV is better than ICE, but gradually a PHEV is going to be paying surcharges and subject to access rules that don't apply to BEVs, rather than try to distinguish whether your specific PHEV would be a problem on this specific occasion it's simpler to just say "No, buy a BEV".

I think you're exactly wrong about this, lots of people are going to dip their toes in the water with a PHEV, expecting to use ICE mode a lot, then when it comes time to replace it they'll think back to the few times the PHEV "paid for itself" by running in ICE mode, and all the times they were fine on battery, and they'll eye the latest BEV with more range, and they'll say to themselves hell with it, let's buy a BEV, we hate spending 8+ hours at a time in a car anyway so let's just make it impossible rather than unpleasant.

The arguments for a BEV over a PHEV strike me as just like the insistence of some that it's a good tradeoff to get rid of your spare tire to save a fraction of a percent in gas.

You seem to agree that a PHEV doesn't need to and won't use much gas on average, which means its environmental impact is not a lot greater than a BEV. And something you are ignoring is that a PHEV needs a significantly smaller battery than a BEV, which counterbalances the cost of the engine as well as its environmental impact.

Speaking only for myself, I get irritated every time a new model comes out without a spare tire. I know it's possible to fit a spare into a hybrid, because some models of Prius have one. But many don't.

From the prevalence of SUVs where compacts would do, it’s clear that people are not particularly motivated by gas mileage.

Even if you are, 50mpg vs 35mpg is just not that compelling when it costs so much in terms of money, mechanical complexity, and driving dynamics.

(Unfortunately, automakers seem to be making hybrids less fun, rather than more, until you get to the very high end).

Because you can't get a decent one for less than 25 grand.

Here in Tokyo I ended up with a Nissan Leaf v.2 (2018 model) with the 40kw/h model with real world range of 150 km (93 miles). It sees about 10 to 20km for errands, ideal city car model. It's home is a stand alone house with a 200v outlet, rare for this area. Typical residences are dense apartments with over subscribed mechanical parking spots.

I did consider the Toyota Prius and all it's variants; the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV; and Nissan's e-power series. Several negatives. Both the Prius and Outlander 10% to 20% more expensive then the Leaf. After government discounts; manufacturer discounts; and dealer incentives they ended up nearly 60% more expensive. All of these hybrids had the shortcomings of ICE (internal combustion engine) of dealing with fuel, oil changes, belts, plugs, and others.

The PHEV (plug in hybrid electric vehicle) would have worked in my use case as the battery has 30km range. Just recharge daily at home but the price was a turn off.

The perceived negative with the Leaf was range. But just the other day I've made a 300km round trip and the three 30 minute breaks to charge the battery was just fine. Japan is easy with such good density of chargers: https://www.plugshare.com/

We rarely use the charger at home. The Leaf gets charged at the local market whenever it's below 50%. Charge time is limited 30 minutes at the public spots and it's enough to get the charge to over 80%. This means that even for people without access to a charger at home easily use the public spots. The salesperson used the same pitch, saying that Leaf owners regularly drop in for a 30 minute charge and hang out at the lounge with free soft drinks.

Anyways, this was my reason and experience on getting BEV instead of a hybrid.

>Here in Tokyo I ended up with a Nissan Leaf v.2 (2018 model) with the 40kw/h model with real world range of 150 km (93 miles).

150 miles is the EPA range, not 150km.

EPA (US environmental protection agency) rates it as 241 km (150 miles)

JC08 (Japan's rating agency) rates it at 400km (248 miles). Even the dealer says this is wildly optimistic.

At 100% charge, my car reports 220 km. It's starting to "learn" my driving style.

My lead foot, my preference for 25dC (77dF) cabin temperature when it's 40dC (104dF) at 90%+ humidity drags this down to real world 150km (93 miles).

I'm sure if I drove more conservatively during more reasonable weather conditions, I could easily get over 220km. But with fast charge stations no more then 50km apart, no need to hypermile. It's good to take a break hour and half or so. (Speed limit in Japan is maximum 80kph (49mph) on highways.)

Oh we want them alright. But they are still far too expensive. I recently bought a brand new VW Polo for about £15k, you just can't buy a hybrid car for that much. And any price difference with a hybrid pays for years of petrol for the Polo - so why bother?

Maybe they should start with a common-sized charging plug?

This has essentially happened. J1772 is the standard for "normal" charging, CHAdeMO is the standard for fast charging.

Even Tesla, the only company to not follow these standards, supplies a J1772 adapter with every car.

In Japan, Tesla supplies the adapters to use CHAdeMO.

I've come to the conclusion that we need two cars. 1. an EV car for around town and 2. a gasoline powered car for when we are on a road trip to very rural places (which is quite frequent). I'm hoping that at some point even in the hinterlands of the US there will always be an available charging station, but we aren't there yet.

I saw the same split, but went with a PHEV (Toyota Prius Prime). Most of my in-town driving is free (PV on my roof makes a lot of power, and my utility gives me credits which expire with the calendar year otherwise), but out of town it's just like any other hybrid.

I road trip regularly with my Tesla Model S. You would be surprised at where there are charging solutions. Any RV park can charge you up over night. If you use superchargers, it's hardly slower than a gas car. A 600 mile day that would take roughly 9 hours of driving and 1.5 hours of stopping (getting gas, eating, bathroom breaks) in a gas car takes about 9 hours of driving and 2 hours of stopping (charging, eating, bathroom breaks).

To me that's totally worth the savings on fuel and the fact that the car does 90% of the driving for me. If you left at the same time, you'd beat me by 30 minutes, but I wouldn't feel like I'd been driving all day, and I would save $50+ on gas.

I'm not too familiar with how far an EV car can typically go on a charge. I looked at our typical trip on https://chargehub.com and there are three sections where there is a 200 mile gap between charge stations. Can a typical EV vehicle carrying say 7 people with all their gear, kayaks, roof top luggage shell, etc. go 200 miles between charging stations? Two of the sections would be through mountainous terrain with steep climbing if that makes any difference.

I've said this in similar threads and a reasonable counter-example is that in very rural places there aren't even enough gas stations (south eastern Oregon and north western nevada for example). However, for my truck I can easily bring a spare 5 gallons in a jerry can, I don't think doing that with an EV is possible yet (practically or economically). With an EV, however, you can charge at limited speed overnight from a regular outlet giving you some added flexibility.

you can bring a small generator though

One point to consider if buying a condo, assuming you can get board permission, it can cost $8-10k for a licensed electrician to extend a 240V 50A circuit to a plug on the wall of your parking spot. It is definitely a consideration. Electrical loads in parking structures for 60+ cars are not usually designed to support electrical cars.

What's the major impediment to installing new charging stations? My guess would be that tearing up and replacing pavement to run cables is the biggest expense, but maybe the charging electronics or the actual structural components are particularly expensive.

Here in flyover country, Kansas City has 1600 public charging plugs. I reckon that is much more per capital than Silicon Valley.

We need to improve the batteries/charging technology to make it possible to fully charge an EV in five minutes or less. That will make them more practical for long-distance travel and will also reduce the need for charging stations in parking areas and in homes. Instead they can supplement/replace fuel pumps at gas stations, and benefit from the existing built infrastructure, easing the transition and keeping refueling patterns the same.

Easier said than done, though multiple car companies and charging companies are stepping up the kW their cars can handle. It'll be a mixture of faster charging, more battery storage overall, as well as more efficient use of electrons, all three helping with range/recharge issues.

What are the obstacles to designing a new EV with a solar panel on the roof or hood?

Watts per square meter of solar radiation is ~1kW before taking into account solar panel efficiency (usually ~20% these days) so it just doesn’t generate that much power on the roof of a car to be useful.

The major obstacle is that the sunlight falling on the entire surface of a car does not contain enough power to run the car for a typical amount of driving (even unrealistically assuming no shade, no clouds, world record solar efficiency, etc). So it doesn't solve the problem of needing charging stations.

The fact that on the equator, at noon, you get 1kW of power for every square meter of surface. It's much much less elsewhere in the world. Then the best solar panels are about 40% efficient. Then the surfaces that could actually be covered by solar panels on a car are not that large, and you begin to realize that you could never recharge any meaningful amount with solar panels - we're talking couple miles of range for a day of charging.

Just saw this prototype in the newspaper today. It is covered with solar cells, and apparently, it recharges 18 miles of range if you leave it out in the sun all day.

https://www.dn.no/nyheter/2018/08/09/0926/Motor/testkjorer-s...

Is it possible/financially doable to make charging mostly a thing of the past with a standard replaceable battery pack? Tesla 3 gets 9, Prius uses 5 etc. You got to a charging station and they swap your batteries out for fully-charged ones if available, and charge if not.

>Is it possible/financially doable to make charging mostly a thing of the past with a standard replaceable battery pack? Tesla 3 gets 9, Prius uses 5 etc. You got to a charging station and they swap your batteries out for fully-charged ones if available, and charge if not.

The problem with swapping is that switching out a battery is not at all the same as switching out a gas tank. Batteries degrade over time, and with various different usages (lots of fast charging, high heat) can degrade much more severely. You would have to have some kind of system that grades the battery being turned in and credits/debits the account based on its condition. On top of that it's just not necessary. A full charge from 20% is less than 30 mins at a 100kw charger.

tesla already build and ran this for a while in cali. not much interest for those reasons, plus tesla superchargers are fast enough.

I agree with the sibling comment that it won't be the eventual solution because charging will be good enough. That said, the battery thing just isn't a problem with the right market setup.

Battery deterioration over a fleet is predictable enough. You could just buy a "never-ending battery subscription" when you buy a car or something.

The Renault Zoe does something like this. You buy the car, but you lease the battery from Renault (at least, thats how it used to work)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Zoe

I think all the Renault lineup is like this.

Swapping a fuel tank is actually not a bad analogy to swapping the battery. Both are much more involved than a simple refill, the fitment is limited to a single model (or a few similar ones), and I wouldn't want to replace my known good unit with a random used one.

It just takes about 10x more time to refill a battery than a fuel tank. Eventually gas stations will start to be replaced with more useful establishments (grocery, coffee shop, offices) that happen to have a charger at every parking spot.

Yeah, if you can find charging spots with no hassle, then this becomes a moot point. Buying some groceries? Plug it in. Going to the movies? By the time your movie is done you'll be ready to go. Work, school, etc.

Then only actual need for quick charging is road trips. And given a decent range, it is no big deal to stop every few hours. People do that even today, as they need bathroom breaks and the like.

I agree with the infeasibility of switching out batteries, but saying it isn't necessary? 30 minutes is a /long/ time. It takes like 2 minutes to go from 0-100 with gas.

Tesla S battery pack is 1,200lb or 550kg. Not exactly an easy swap.

Far from impossible though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlaQuKk9bFg

Oh hey, welcome to every news outlet that needs a quick "EV" article to get clicks over the last 10 years.

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