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Comment by _Mark | Hacker News Reader

What happens when there is mass adoption for people needing to drive long distances?

This video seems to be the start of something https://youtu.be/a1uFudf37JU

I drive long distances in my model 3. 1000 mile road trips throughout the Midwest. I have already seen some changes. There are several traditional gas stations that are also installing chargers and superchargers. These tend to have a restaurant attached. Works incredibly well for my needs. These new charging speeds can pretty much fill my battery to 80% in 20-25 minutes. Perfect for a bite to eat and a bathroom break.

I suspect more and more gas stations will switch over when it more vehicles get on the road that need electrons over gas.

Besides Tesla’s network there are quite a few places that have chargers. More and more businesses and hotels are installing them.

What will happen is that all EV manufacturers will move to a common charging standard and that will make more chargers available for EV drivers. CCS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Charging_System) is the obvious candidate for that.

ccs is likely to be the eventual standard. Of course stupid infighting between auto companies means the us and euro ccs standards are different (but similar). China has their own standard, of course.

The tesla standard is arguable superior to all others and is offered unencumbered by patents if the other company agrees not to use it. I've had one for 7 years without running into this problem, but it's not impossible. Tesla keeps building more and more stations, but they are selling so many model 3s.

The tesla patent free offer is a trojan horse though. To use tesla's charging port you have to agree to not sue them over patents not just regarding charging but everything. You also don't get access to the supercharger network at any price. No sane manufacturer is going to agree to terms that one sided.

Once things settle down a bit I'm pretty confident each region will regulate a charging standard and eliminate the confusion, but it's still too early since vehicle to grid has hardly been touched outside of Japan and actively cooled cables are not part of any spec.

This was taken at the end of Thanksgiving weekend and isn't representative of typical supercharger stations.

And even in that situation, the queue wasn't much longer than the number of stalls of the supercharger, so the waiting time should be like 30 minutes. That certainly sucks , but at some gas stations you can have quite some wait time too, if they are overrun by demand.

What you are seeing as bad, thousands of business owners are going to see as a huge, huge opportunity to make money.

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