The Throughput Problem: Recharging Electric Cars Requires the Patience of Job

Article misses out that in all but the smallest/tightest parking lots (which I guess are more common in tighter downtown areas), gas stations typically have additional parking already that could also be converted to charging stations. Article also brings up the specter of extra carbon emissions for extra charging infrastructure, but doesn't provide even a basic analysis.

There are certainly some logistical issues that electrical has to work out. But this is straight up a fear piece. Yes, gas is transportable by hand if required, but I bet most North American drivers (or at least urban ones which this piece is targetting) just go with roadside assistance anyways, so the charger will come to them.

And finally, with the potential of charging at home/work (which I know can't include everyone... but I think can cover a reasonable percentage of people), you don't NEED to charge up even to 80% all the time. Needing a full charge all the time is a hold over of gas mentality and logistics.

The one bit that is reasonable here and noting that our current laws probably need a tune up in recognition of the changing nature of driving.

Most electric cars won't be charged at fast chargers most of the time. Because unlike fossil cars you can refuel them pretty much anywhere where there is electricity. At first this is only true for people with garages (or employers with a garage), but eventually most parking spots will have a slow charger installed. Since the typical car is parked for about 23h a day, charging time becomes a non issue as soon as charger availability is good enough. Fast charging is really only necessary for long roadtrips that exceed whatever range the car has.

Somehow this article misses the fact that electric cars are charged every day when parked at home. In the typical scenario of a car used to get into the city and back, it will not need to ever hook up anywhere in the city and will not run out of charge for the day.

When the article in the end complains that it will waste so much time I just wonder how the daily hookup at home compares to the weekly gas station visit. I'd say it pretty much evens out.

A gas station costs millions of dollars, an environmental impact assessment, regular safety checks, staff to run it, etc, etc. A fast charging station needs a machine. A gas station requires you to transport the gasoline to the gas station. A fast charging station can be put practically anywhere in a city now.

I don't even have a charger at home. I recharge at a fast charger every time. Usually I go shopping, or do some programming or play a game. Not for everybody perhaps, but seriously not as bad as portrayed by this article.

Someone please explain to me why we have built electric cars so that the battery is fixed to the car and gets recharged rather than making the batteries swappable for an instant "recharge".

Sure, it moves the cost of wear and tear on batteries to the car owner rather than the fuel supplier, but since it seems it would makes such a big difference in the user experience of electric car ownership can this really be the whole explanation?

Recharging doesn't require any patience at all if done correctly (ie. overnight at home, or while you're stopping for a meal). Complaining that you can't run your EV to empty then drop in to a gas station for 10 minutes to refill it is like saying cars are useless because they can't eat the grass on the side of the road.

This isn't an article, it's a hit piece.

I personally think that EV charging infrastructure is not ready for mass adoption of electric cars. (This is, migration from internal combustion engines.)

But this article tries to seem "more than fair" without stopping to mention the one great advantage of charging - that some can do so at home, every night. So that should greatly reduce the infrastructure needs.

Peak charging in the public can and will be a problem, but I don't think the scale can be quantified without factoring in home charging.

1. When the powers out, gas pumps are out too unless there are generators. Even in Florida where this is expected after storms, we still have 95%+ of stations offline during power outages.

2. Typical fast charging times are < 20 minutes and you don't typically aim for full. The first half of the battery charges in less than 15 minutes, nearly matching a typical gas station stop on a road trip. You can get 75 miles of charge in just 5 minutes at peak with a Tesla.

3. Most users charge at home or work keeping them topped up ready for up to 180 miles typical miles of driving that day as long as they return to base and don't want to extend into the lower or higher reservations in the battery for long term health.

Recharging electric cars requires plugging it in and walking away to do something else instead.

Electric car fuelling is a parallel operation, not a serial one.

Rapid charging happens on the longer journeys that require it while you're using the restroom, or grabbing a bite to eat or drink, or simply improving your safety by having a snooze

And if you get an efficient electric car with a high miles/kWh rating - rather than a status symbol electron guzzler - then there is less time required anyway.

There's a mental paradigm shift required when you have an electric car to one where you have a fully fuelled car every morning by default. Once you've made that switch you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

I don't think EVs can be exact replacement of traditional vehicles in all instances yet, for this very reason. But in many cases they fit a use case perfectly. In my case I have 4 kids and a wife, and we have 2 cars. One is a mini-van and fits everyone with room to spare. The other one only seats 5 (uncomfortably) but I only use it to drive myself to work. So my next car may very well be an EV of some sort, but we cannot replace the mini-van with an EV due to the range and requirement that we need to drive farther than that (which means quick fueling at gas stations).

Isn’t this missing the point that you can put an EV charger ANYWHERE. There’s no need to regularly deliver gas to it. You can have it in you home and charge overnight. There’s no need to cluster them together.

I think this article went a little too far and overstated the point.

I wouldn't be worried about charging my electric car in the city where I live. That's a nonissue, just charge at home.

I'd be worried about going longer distances. You roll up to the supercharger in the middle of nowhere, no ability to go anywhere else since you're out of battery, and every charging slot is full. There's a line of tesla's to get a spot. Sitting around in your car for a half hour as you wait for owners to leave to even start charging. This would be a legitimate fear of mine.

It’s true, cars are big and require a ton of energy. That’s not a huge problem though, because with the correct land use policies you can pretty much replace them with bikes.

As somebody who has owned 3 different EVs (LEAF, Model X, and now I-PACE), I find this article a bit hyperbolic. Okay, it's a rather poorly-researched fluff piece that wouldn't pass muster in any of the subreddits I frequent. I'd expect something with more substance here at HN.

That said, I no longer drive an EV when I do road trips over 150 miles. I replaced one of my EVs with a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), so my household has one BEV and one PHEV.

The reason for having plug-in capability in both cars is because the "full tank every morning" part is amazing. The reason for having gas capability in one car is because the convenience of using gasoline on longer road trips is amazing. With a PHEV, you don't have to compromise in either case (around-town or road trip).

Individual situations can be highly varying, and so for some people all-BEV can work. In my family's case, we have one 150-mile trip that we do about 8 times a year where we can charge at the destination. The BEV can make that trip direct in pretty much any weather conditions without a problem. There's another trip we do to see family in another state that's 230 miles away, and we can't charge at their house. Can't do that one comfortably in the BEV, so we usually just take the PHEV for that one.

However with the BEV it's possible to do the 230-mile trip since there are Electrify America (EA) rapid charging stations both along the way and at the destination. Along the 150-mile trip there are in fact four EA locations, so if something weird or unexpected happens with the distance driven or the destination charging, there's no problem getting a quick charge at one of those stations. In any case it's been working out to just an extra 30 minutes of charging maybe 2 or 3 times a year, during which we can grab a bite to eat or get some shopping done. Really no big deal at all.

All that said, I would never attempt to drive a Tesla on a trip where I'd need to rapid charge frequently during times like spring break, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. You're beholden to a single proprietary rapid charging infrastructure, and that's very likely to suffer "hot spots" that are difficult to predict and that can ruin your day. The unpredictability, I would imagine, is due to Tesla being a victim of its own success. Having more cars on the road means that there ends up being more "tail-end" situations in the population.

If you can afford a $40k+ car, you can afford one of those "clean" and quite running honda generators...

These are problems associated with personal car ownership, not EV's themselves. In a utopia with fully autonomous affordable electric taxi cabs this is not an issue, as they can charge by themselves in a cheap parking field outside cities, combined with a large solar array.

Article fails to note that most EVs are charged at home most of the time.

Just need to make the battery packs removable - then the car can be "recharged" fully in less than 5 minutes.

It's a short term problem. Self-driving cars will drive themselves to a charger.