I still do not see how they can role out charging infrastructure in just 15 years. Not everyone lives in a house.
I was in San Luis Obispo last December and the backup on I5 forced cars off the road. The wait at the Tesla charging station was 4-6 hours.
Getting back to the article. I'm liking the car. I would look into getting one if I owned a place where I could charge it.
That's not to say there won't be growing pains, but we will deploy. Over the course of 2015 I went from always being able to find a charger to not being able to ever find one, and then since 2017 I haven't had a single problem because more chargers were added. For a couple years, I lived in an apartment where the landlord was a dock and wouldn't let me install a charger at the car port, and I had to charge at public chargers. It worked out, even though it wasn't ideal. And when the laws finally reign in the rapacious landlords, we will have plenty of charging at apartments too.
That's cool if you live in apartment buildings with designated parking.
I don't. I live in a place with only street parking (don't give me the "charge at work" thing - street parking there too). As evident by how many cars are on the street at any given time, you can bet that that population is very sizeable.
Yes, because they're going to install chargers where parking meters never existed. As if.
Do you expect chargers to be all over the sidewalks in residential neighborhoods? That's where a lot of people park and I don't see it happening. It'd be such an eyesore.
I don't see it happening. The sidewalks are too narrow. It would require a massive investment.
But as somebody who also lives in a Bay Area suburban hell that is trying desperately to pretend it can get by with bad planning of suburban sprawl, this are is not a problem at all. People in my neighborhood work around that just fine! I see many electric cars on my street, mostly charging close to the house. Some people run wires to the sidewalk for curbside charging, but not many.
The harder areas are places like SF where there's even more limited driveway access. That's where streetlights come in.
If your neighborhood isn't dense enough to have streetlight, no problem.
Edit: one key piece to charging from a garage 220V outlet is that you don't need to charge every single day. Charging every other day or every four days is just fine. So if you have 4 single people living in a 4 bedroom house, each with cars, that's just enough to get by in one charger.
> It would require a massive investment.
Compared to the cost of all the cars people buy every decade it's not terribly much.
That's not a trivial thing to suddenly install. Often will require significant new ducting and cabling to be ran from far away.
Even before EV rollout getting a 1MW supply can take years from the power company.
You also have another problem that cities do not have enough transmission capacity from the main grid to them to handle 2xing power supply.
It's definitely doable but really is going to be similar to building today's power grid out all over again. Everything needs doubled.
That means rolling out demand response charging - not technically hard, but absolutely necessary before electric cars are too ubiquitous. We'll probably also find that in normal use most cars don't drive much on a given day, so they're not needing to draw full power all night to charge.
The charging infrastructure for those without a driveway is still a big question (one to which the answer isn't lampposts - there's at least a 7:1 ratio of cars to lampposts where I live).
I think demand response can help, but there is the fundamental issue that transportation uses as much as all electrical consumption currently, so there will be twice as much kWh needed.
That 7:1 ratio looks actually a lot worse in power terms. A streetlight consumes maybe 100W, 7 EVs could soak up 350kW for a period of time.
This is made much worse in N America with 110V everywhere.
Overnight light pole charging won't be delivering 100kW fast charging to a car, it will be for longer term parking, like overnight.
Averaging 12 hours at 1kW delivers enough charge to cover the average distance driven in the US. Non-average driving days will require using a fast charger or work place charging or charging at any number of other places.
Charging will be as ubiquitous as the rest of our car infrastructure. Personally, I'd rather we get rid of so much car infrastructure and devote it to transit and parks and bikes and walking, but I'm far outside the Overton window when it comes to that. However, being outside the Overton window also lets me see how we spare no expense when it comes to creating car infrastructure, and how charging infrastructure is a tiny tiny fraction of the massive amount of spend on the rest of car infrastructure.
https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/b2b-local-authorities/
They deliver 5.5 kW, which is fine for overnight charging.
They are also installing a few 43kw charging points for faster top-ups.
We rolled out gas stations faster than that. Gas stations went from something you had to worry about on long trips in 1975 to every corner convenience store by 1990.
And charging stations have none of the downside of gas stations (toxic leakage, theft, licensing, etc.). You can install charging stations at very small shops without worry.
I'm personally surprised that Target and Lowe's haven't rolled out charging stations in their parking lots. Once that happens, it's pretty much game over as everybody will have to roll out parking lot charging or lose business.
Even ignoring the above, state laws often give the local utility has a legal monopoly on selling electricity. Stores that have a charger are giving away the power to whoever uses the charger. Until the law allows some sort of profit from having a charger it doesn't make sense to have one.
Where people have EVs, they do.
Note that electric is often cheaper at night. Most free parking spots are empty at night: the cars are at home. Thus same price charging on the street as at home should be looked at as subsidized parking!
Don't get me wrong, it makes sense to have some on-street charging. However people won't normally use it. Most will charge at home for the cheaper rates. What is left is those who can't make it home on the current charge. This is a small minority of all who park even in an all electric car world.
Gas cars have to go to the gas station also, sometimes once a week too, and people do not complain that much about it. I think it has to do with how used we are to it that electric charging we tend to think it should be at home.
Have you ever noticed how many gas stations there are?
Years from now they'll look at the 150 years from the Model T's introduction to the final gas station closing and just shake their head at us.
Horses were around for millennia. ICE vehicles are going to seen as a barbaric blip that our forebears will be amazed at. Like leaching or witchcraft. Or life before smartphones.