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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

You are totally correct, yet OP's point is still reasonable - this was written from the perspective of a petrol-car driver; moreover, it's a missed opportunity to think differently. Petrol stations require big tanks underground to store the petrol; we don't have pipelines through the city carrying petrol. On the other hand, we do have a massive network of wires carrying electricity. EV charging can so easily be distributed, that there is simply no need for 'petrol stations.' Put charging spots directly on the street and other parking places, with an app/API to show availability. Monitor demand, and add more in hotspots.

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That would require significant more infrastructure in public spaces. Requiring petrol stations is a good first step to break the barrier that combines private/public work.

(I'm assuming petrol stations are private enterprises in Germany on this point)

Would it? My local city has electric parking meters, is it hard to add a cable to that?

I imagine the wiring to the meters is designed to carry the current necessary to run an electric parking meter and wouldn't hold up to the current required to charge an EV.

Yes, because an electric parking meter uses only a few watts of electricity and may not even be connected to the grid (the most common ones I've seen just have a tiny solar panel). A electric vehicle charger may use 200 kW and require its own dedicated transformer. A fast charger is a fairly substantial cabinet. Now you're jackhammering the sidewalk to bring an underground electrical service to that spot.

Can you apply your thinking to petrol stations. We build floating city's to extract oil thousands of meters down. Is running some cables harder then that?

An off shore oil well will basically extract black gold, paying for themselves in no time(at least when the oil barrel price was high). Electrical charging station on the sidewalk not so much.

We already have similar on-street charging stations like that in Berlin, just not enough. I suspect the reason it's not all street-parking is the strain on the electric infrastructure which would probably require a lot of rewiring.

The current needed to charge an EV is far higher than what a parking meter was wired for.

Privately run charging stations on public sidewalks are few and pricey and most of the time sitting empty.

So it's clear that if you want a mass switch to EVs the government will need to subsidize the infrastructure to make EV charging affordable. However, digging up the sidewalks of a whole city with public funds to cable it for EV charging is the last thing taxpayers want to hear even in green Austria since it's seen as a something that will only benefit the top % that can afford EVs and they already have charging stations at their houses.

So we're back to square one.

What would be a good use of gas stations for electric cars is battery swapping. It is too early to make this mandatory but I think it might be time to start working on this idea. (It has been looked into before.)

Battery swapping was an idea that made sense when battery tech wasn't as good and ranges weren't as great, but its window has passed. You might be thinking of Better Place, which actually launched a battery-swap station. It made sense (some) sense at the time to spend 5 minutes on a battery swap that would otherwise take 6 hours to charge for 111 miles of range. But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger.

...which is also why it's a bit frustrating to see people saying "Oh, this is from the perspective of gas guzzlers!"...no it isn't. this is a huge win, we're not trying to replace all infrastructure overnight, but it lowers the inconvenience of a marginal EV greatly...174mi in 20 min is damn good, that's 4 of my loooong commutes

Only if they put in fast chargers, though. If they put in L2 (i.e., 8 hours for a full charge) chargers, it’s worse than useless.

> But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger.

That's still 20 minutes longer than it should take. And probably around 15 minutes longer than it takes to fill up with gas (which will give you twice the range). Speeding that up makes sense.

(To be clear, I don't think it's reasonable to mandate swappable batteries, for instance; there's far too much innovation and potential innovation in battery technology for that. However, I think it's reasonable to experiment with that, and any other solution that will let it take less time to charge.)

Maybe just swap cars. They can maintain a small inventory of fully charged EVs, just swap your depleted EV out and be on your way. Then your previous EV gets charged up for the next guy.

is the sensor density in cars not high enough yet to detect and notify?

Oh I’m sure that would happen - and it would probably be the same 10% of people who leave 90% of the stuff behind.

Why would you make any of this mandatory?

If people are willing to pay for this service, someone will be eager to make a buck and supply.

While I would usually agree with your line of thinking, I'm not sure it applies here as well.

There is more money to be made in not providing the service and slowing down EV adoption, environment be damned. That makes it the perfect situation for the government to jump in and re-align those incentives.

Just charge an carbon tax. That should give people the right incentives.

(Including eg just drive your existing cars less. 50% reduction in driving existing cars is as good or better for the environment than eg 50% conversion to electric cars. But I don't expect the government to know what is better for the customer.)

This isn't just a matter of paying for a service because ICE cars will disappear in a few decades. Removing options before there are viable alternatives is bad policy. Good policy would make the migration from an old to a new technology as smooth as possible.

Don't worry we will line the streets with charge points too

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