You can hit another charger 2 hours down the road after that 15 minute charge and plug in for 5-10 minutes to get to the next charger if needed. It will be ready after you're done taking a bathroom break and you bought a snack.
Few people need to charge to 100% on a road trip if they have a good EV. Tesla did the right thing with their design. Everyone else should catch up.
Imagine if GM cars only came with 5 gallon gas tanks but the Audi came with a 15 gallon tank. That's basically what we're talking about. Don't shit on EVs because only one company is doing it correctly.
..What? Where are you getting your numbers from.
“Well over an hour” is wrong, there’s almost no electric car that won’t do an 80% charge in 45 minutes, and most take half an hour.
And the grocery store better have a lot of chargers if everyone is doing their weekly fillup while they shop.
“At least an hour” to 80% charge. I don’t think there’s a car on the market for which this is the case.
People will charge in a variety of way. Some people in apartments will have block parking for which there will be chargers, some people will go to superchargers or similar, some will do it at the gym, some at the train station, some shopping, some at work, others will have chargers for on street parking. Other people will use car sharing schemes which have dedicated chargers. Ultimately cars are parked for hundreds of hours a week and you only need a tiny fraction of that for charging.
But I know quite a few people whose daily commute is 40+ miles each way. They'd be visiting the charger every other day. That's unfortunately very common for people who live in San Francisco and work outside the city, and vice versa.
(I have a different problem: I walk or take transit to work, and have a car mainly for longer trips outside the city. I also have no charging station in my building's garage, so I've stuck with an ICE car for now.)
> This issue will hopefully be transient; once charging speed is comparable to filling your ICE vehicle with fuel.
> Until then, the lack of fast public chargers combined with the relative slowness of charging makes this a major downgrade from ICE.
In other words, the only reason most people are OK with this one attribute of EVs that is inferior to ICE is the fact that they can charge at home (and/or work.) But there are plenty of people that do not fit into that category.
This will be a second car though - and I would be slightly wary of this sort of responsibility for a primary vehicle.
It takes me less than 2 minutes to fill up my tank and pay, now you want me to sit 1-4 hours at a fast charger a week twiddling my thumbs?
Never mind the fact a Tesla Model 3 starts at my annual salary.
In a world where a couple owns two EVs, and only one does the weekly grocery shopping, do they have to swap cars to get them both charged? Do they have to start eating out to charge their car? What if you use Amazon Fresh for food deliveries? Give that up; you need to charge your car.
In other words, there are lots of ideas that might work for some people, but they shouldn't be necessary for EV ownership.
If that errand is "go grocery shopping" or "drop a large package off at the post office", you might be fine rearranging or postponing, but if it's "go to work", you're completely screwed. There are quite a few jobs where "I can't get to work because my car's battery is dead" will get you fired.
For me, I'm privileged enough that it's simply inconvenient to put that constraint on my lifestyle (inconvenient enough that I won't buy an EV), but for many people it's a showstopper.
Remember when we coupled health insurance to employment? (Also, what if I want to retire next month, but I still drive an EV? Now I'm stuck spending hours of my retirement waiting for my car to charge somewhere? First world problem, I know...)
These ideas are OK for a few people. But then wealthy people with wealthy employers are perhaps less likely to be "garage orphans" to begin with.
There are tons of us in this scenario that would have to go waste our free time sitting around at some business, running our cars for heating or air conditioning, while we charge one or more times a week.
The only way you ever get more than a token percentage of homeowners to switch to EVs is make it where you pull up to a building, a robot arm removes your batteries, slides new ones in, and you pull away 30 seconds later.
I know 1 person that owns an EV, he has a Tesla. Everyone made fun of him when he bought it, and still does months later. It looks like Tesla has two locations in all of Indianapolis with 8 super chargers at one and 12 at the other. 2 locations for 361 square miles.
The only place he goes regularly where he can charge it is his attached garage where he had a charger installed. I've only seen a few random business with a few generic (non fast-charging) charging stations around Indy with the exception of the EV smart-car looking cars in some of the hipster neighborhoods that you pay a monthly fee to use and have to return them to a handful of charging locations.
We've had less than seven years of a legitimately usable EV even existing. Seven years.
Check out this[1] map of them. It's slightly misleading since it counts one station which can charge either CCS or CHAdeMO as two, but still. To get a sense of scale, driving from Lysaker on the left to Manglerud on the right is about 15 minutes.
A fair number of them have been put up by the local government, but the rest are commercial.
[1]: https://www.ladestasjoner.no/kart/?lat=59.9138688&lng=10.752...
Ultimately if it was the other way around, and gasoline cars were the new technology, people would think it was mad to put huge underground storage depots filled with explosive liquid dotted throughout residential neighbourhoods. Charging infrastructure will just become normal. If there are people willing to pay to use it there are people who are going to fit it.
We’re slowly but surely moving towards “chargers literally everywhere”.
There are many reasons why my theory could still be valid but the circumstances have not yet kicked in. Awareness of the potential for profit could be missing. I assume the cost of installing EV charge stations is still coming down. EVs are definitely still largely a luxury item in north america, so usually owned by drivers with garages. and of course, the percentage of EV cars could still be too low to justify the infrastructure.
So, my theory may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's still largely untested.
The local convenience store might have 1 or 2[1], big shops like IKEA might have 20+ free AC charging spots, and 5-6+ DC fast chargers[2] (costs money).
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.3579898,5.3582122,3a,42.9y,9...
[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.4750298,5.3308811,3a,75y,23....
Less pithily, complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems don't instantaneously adapt to shifts in incentives, but that doesn't mean that we can't reason about tendencies that will shape long-term equilibria.