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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

Many, many houses do not have anything other than on-street parking here. Since 2012 I've lived in 5 houses, and three of them had no driveway. I'm currently buying a house which has no drive way, with no way of fitting one. Apparently 1/3 houses have only on street parking. Unless they also provide huge, huge grants to rapidly implement dense onstreet charging, and fast, this is a pipedream and will end up getting pushed back.

Edit: To evaluate the scale of how difficult it is to implement on street parking - go and have a look out of your own window in a built up area and count the number of lamp posts and the corresponding number of cars. Right now (9:35am), in a pretty built up area, I can see three lamp posts on my own street, and eighteen cars parked on the road. One of those lamp posts is located where it's illegal to park because of double yellow lines. I currently live in a rented flat at the moment, and that has another 25 car parking spaces. To get charging points located there would require a number of disparately located and willing landlords to agree to wire up the car park for electric charging too.

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I recently got a Tesla while living in London with no off street parking. I had the same basic concerns, and only went ahead because I knew I'd be moving somewhere with off street parking within a few months.

But it actually turned out to be a complete non issue. My usage pattern (short occasional trips around town to shops etc and regular long trips to Bristol and back) could be handled entirely by stopping off for 15 mins at a supercharger when I went passed one. A bit more frequent than ordinary refuelling but not much more. It's reasonable to assume that 10 years from now fast charging will be at least somewhat more effective and a lot more ubiquitous.

I didn't have to touch any of the other charging infrastructure in London but there is a lot of it.

If we had been staying long term we would have used the 7kw chargers being built into lampposts all over the place[1]. The council will add one in if you have a car and ask for one, but there was already one within my usual parking area.

The lamppost thing seems to be London focused for now, but they're extremely straightforward installations and news like this is going to see them pop up everywhere.

[1] https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/residential_charging/

For the monthly cost of your Tesla, you could probably take a taxi/uber everywhere you needed to go. You can afford 20 cab rides at $40/ride per month, totaling $800/month.

Do you take your car out more than 20 times a month?

Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property, and charge market rate for the land used by parking, thereby encouraging people who are not car dependent to buy houses such as yours instead of demanding a public handout for vehicle storage?

(The High Cost Of Free Parking explores this issue in depth)

I mean, I agree to some extent, but there's also no public transport service to the place I'm buying a house other than a single bus that runs twice a day for taking kids to school.

Then that would either create pressure to have more public transport, or affect the prices on the homes as people would prefer to live accessible. Changes don't happen in a vacuum, they bring other changes with them.

No public transport and not enough space to have off-street parking is a pretty terrible combination.

If there's no car storage and it's impossible to live without a car it might be better as grazing land, meadow, or similar.

What about houses which are not within walking distance of amenities, and do not have room for off-street parking? That's a large proportion of suburban (or even urban) housing in the UK.

Time to build some amenities and public transport. Suburban dead zones where you can't do anything without a car are terrible anyway. What about old people who can't drive anymore but can't afford to move? Or children?

Buy or rent a place to store your property, or sell the stuff you can't store on your land? I've been talking about getting a piano but my wife has reminded me we'll need to extend the house first, sadly.

>Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property

Are you arguing for getting rid of apartments?

They are proposing to charge for parking spaces, like installing meters.

Not at all! I just think yop've no more right to store your car on the public street than you do a hot tub, piano, etc.

There are about 7 million houses in England without some form of off street housing. Changing that will take far more work that wiring up ~2M lamp posts.

Also, to ban all parking on public roads is also infeasible aside from the houses with parking issues. Most city centre businesses would vehemently oppose such a move without replacement parking which would cost far far more money from the public purse.

So although I'm quite happy for people to have opinions, the consequences of enacting this opinion would be a greater waste of public resources than just allowing people to park on the side of the road (in most cases).

Well in practice you have a right usually to park your car on the street but not your hot tub because that's how things were designed and worked for decades and it's not going to change in a hurry. The public streets are controlled via the government by the public and they are mostly ok with it.

i mean thats what "road tax" is for....

I mean, with new teslas, their range is similar enough to gas cars that you only need to charge them about once a week, if that. And they charge fast enough that it's not terribly dissimilar from hitting the gas station, which currently is perhaps a 10 minute affair for gas. Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. It's feasible, if a little bit annoying, to have a refueling story for them that's similar to that of gas cars.

I think this idea of electrics desperately needing to charge every time they're parked - it's not wrong, but it's getting pretty close to being an anachronism, and I expect it actually will be on in 5ish years, certainly 10.

Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker.

Imagine you turn up to a charging station behind 4 other cars, and there's 2 charging points. Your 20 minute wait is now an hour. If each car took 10 minutes then you'd only be waiting 20 minutes.

Increasing the average waiting time in a queue has a terrible impact on throughput.

I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that. Presumably the number of pumps at a station is a function of required throughput.

I also think there will be a lot more roadside individual charging stations rather than specialised large locations that are convenient because of the centralised storage of a physical liquid.

I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that.

Sure, but that's limited by land in cities and electrical infrastructure in more rural areas. Whether there'll ever be enough charging points to make charging your car not be a hassle is something only time will tell.

In isolation yes. But holistically the "charging station instead of gas station" equation has more factors - you have to discount

- everyone who can charge at home (i.e. anyone with a garage or their own driveway),

- those who change in public places like shopping malls or at work, and

- any other infrastructure (like the "charging port in street light" thing)

so the new "gas station" is likely to get less busy - depending on home ownership in the area and how many shopping malls get charging ports, most cars might only ever visit "gas station" on a road trip.

> which currently is perhaps a 10 minute affair for gas. Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker

Here in the UK 10 minutes is already on the upper end of acceptable, I can't remember the last time it took me that long. 20 minutes would definitely be a dealbreaker for the vast majority of people.

Given that the alternative is not having a car at all (unless hydrogen takes off), surely people can adjust?

How much is a Tesla? Many tens of thousands of pounds. They have to be a lot cheaper or I am just going to buy another second hand car and just use it as a donour car for my existing vehicle.

As of this year you can get an a lease on an electric company car with a benefit in kind tax rate of 0%. i.e You don't have to pay income tax on the lease[0].

That can make an enormous difference to their affordability, and should also inject a large pool of electric cars into the second hand market over the next few years.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/support/incentives

I do not want to lease a car. I want to own a car. I don't want to be paying monthly for something unless I absolutely have to.

> That can make an enormous difference to their affordability, and should also inject a large pool of electric cars into the second hand market over the next few years.

Still too expensive. My current vehicle cost me £4000. It has been paid for (I got a bank loan, I didn't lease or hire purchase) for many years now. It cost me next to nothing to repair, run, tax and MOT. It has next to no fancy electronics and it just works. I can to take it to any garage in the UK and they can repair it, with Teslas, BMWs, Mercs etc you can't really do that.

There is no benefit to me in owning an electric vehicle.

It's not that hard to build curbside chargers. You don't need high current chargers when most parking spots have a charger. A kilowatt or two will be plenty. Cars spend 23h a day parked. EVs use 15-25kWh/100km. Most people drive less than 50km a day. Sprinkle some fast charging along highways for longer road trips and charging is no longer an issue.

As someone that works on software that includes functions to try to figure out where you can place electric car chargers - it absolutely is very hard. The grid just isn't ready for it.

It can be done, but will require massive investment in infrastructure.

There are also problems such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve and other things that can be mitigated with ADR to an extent, but it's absolutely not easy

It is a lot easier than the alternatives: unmitigated climate change or building the infrastructure for e-fuels.

Of course, unmitigated climate change will be catastrophic. No argument there.

I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles.

If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and forget about it in the atmosphere. Basically, extracting easy to use energy that was captured over a long period.

But we now have the tech to extend that to a closed loop system - capture enough energy from solar to recycle the burned fuel back into burnable fuel.

This will also mitigate all the co2 created when producing electric cars btw.

Electric vehicles solve several problems at once though. They don't emit any of the other unpleasant gases, particularly NO2. And they massively reduce other particulates (no clutch, regenerative brakes).

Plus, having that much battery capacity plugged into the grid should be exploitable to help manage the vagaries of solar and wind power.

This is hilariously impractical. Have you seen curbside chargers? There's some up the road from me and by no means does it look simple to install them, not to mention that you'd have to do it along _every_ single residential street _everywhere_ and we don't have the electrical capacity to do it anyway!

If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd think that'd be in place by now given the time frames?

I think it's hand-wavey to say 'oh you can just charge at low current'. And if you've ever seen a petrol station near a motorway here you'll realise the idea of parking your car for x * 10 mins to charge would simply not work, there'd be multiple mile tailbacks.

Overall the govt treats this issue like it's a smaller problem than it really is.

You don't see streets filled with chargers because almost nobody has an EV yet. Just like you didn't see many gas stations providing unleaded fuel two years before catalytic converters became mandatory.

It's funny because I actually remember the unleaded/leaded transition and petrol stations were stocking it very early on. The equivalent simile here would be if unleaded was going to be made mandatory in a year and basically 3 petrol stations in the UK stocked it.

The govt are going to make these cars mandatory soon. London is the ideal place to do this due to infra + rich people with EVs (more than you might think, far from 'almost nobody'), yet I don't see any street that has charges along it.

My point is that it's not easy. Having to upgrade the grid and dig up tons of roads is simply not easy no matter how much people want it to be.

That wasn't the case in Germany. Unleaded fuel actually was available only in a handful of gas stations until shortly before the transition.

There are several thousand in london already, embedded in lampposts so you might have missed them.

Here's one within 100 meters of my very run of the mill flat https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4689844,-0.1013741,3a,30.1y,...

You might be ignoring some big issues, such as grid availability on highways, and the capacity of the grid in those areas.

Not having a private drive is mostly an issue in London, where curbside chargers are already being built all over the city.

Here's an example of the light pole chargers that are being installed in residential areas in London:

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.

This is where autonomous vehicles come in.

Why pay to own and store your own vehicle, which you might use 5% of the time, when you could hail an autonomous vehicle on demand, for less than the cost of current ride-hailing services?

Owning your own vehicle will become an unnecessary luxury, reserved for the kind of people who have the space to store them.

Where can I buy an autonomous vehicle?

Perhaps in 2030 we'll have them. Most likely not.

Except that autonomous cars vastly far away despite all the hype by silicon valley. They still cannot deal with edge case scenarios at all well and are far from being proven to be safe. Relying on this being in place by 2030 + lifetime of 2nd hand cars is a huge gamble.

See https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and... and his blog in general for a more in-depth analysis of the situation. It's likely we need new AI techniques to have fully autonomous vehicles that function correctly.

I don’t disagree, but I wouldn’t describe it as a “huge gamble.”

People would just need to continue owning electric/second-hand ICE vehicles and, in the case of electric vehicles, find ways of charging them away from their homes.

When autonomous vehicles become widely available (2030, 2040, or whenever), I think many would decide owning an expensive, depreciating asset they only use sparingly is more hassle than it’s worth.

I agree that once it becomes feasible many would prefer autonomous (hell yeah, a cheap ride home when I'm drunk? Or a sleep on the way to work? Ideal) but given the timelines we should look elsewhere for the time being.

I think "find ways of charging them away from their homes" does not scale given how long a charge takes and the numbers involved. If you've ever seen a petrol station at peak time you tend to get an idea of just how impractical that is.

I don't see any way round a truly colossal investment in infrastructure in order to move to fully electric in the UK (or any country), which maybe is necessary - but govts need to openly say this and then start actually taking action on it, not haughtily act as if it's not the case.

My gut feel is that things will work themselves out.

A lot of people have driveways and can charge at home. Those that don’t are likely those in cities who typically make shorter journeys and will need to charge infrequently.

If you’re one of the strange people who commute long distances out of a major city, you’ll just need to make a personal decision whether it’s worth the hassle.

I’ve been quite impressed at the rollout of charging infrastructure so far. If my quick Googling is anything to go by, there are roughly 30k public charging points for approximately 160k all-electric vehicles in the UK. Both numbers are growing rapidly but that ratio feels high right now.

The tech is already there. The incentives are there for energy companies to charge for the electricity. The political will (i.e. to permit installation of charging points in public spaces) is there.

> owning an expensive, depreciating asset they only use sparingly is more hassle than it’s worth.

Appears though that electric cars are likely to be far more durable than gasoline powered cars and cheaper. In ten years a EV will probably cost 80% what a gasoline powered car would and will last 30 years not 15. Cost of ownership over the life of the car would then be 40% of a gasoline car is today. Less considering maintenance and fuel.

I disagree. Batteries are very expensive and ultimately consumable parts. I do not see them lasting 30 years.

Consider also it’s unusual for people to own cars for even 10+ years currently, for reasons that apply just as readily to electric or autonomous vehicles.

People want the latest and greatest. Many value the warranties they get with new vehicles. Over 30 years the odds of a vehicle being stolen or involved in an accident and being written off are also pretty high.

> I do not see them lasting 30 years.

High mileage Tesla's show that the batteries last somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 miles. Which is 25 to 40 years based on the median number of miles people drive per year.

> People want the latest and greatest.

Lot of people just want an affordable way to get from point A to B with a minimum of hassle and expense. The game changer with electric is if the batteries and motors last 25 to 40 years then the rest of the car needs to match that.

I am not sure how you converted mileage to time here. Dividing a distance by speed would only works in assumption that the battery does not degrade over time by itself. Is there any working 25 years old Li-ion battery somewhere?

I've messed with some 20 year old lion cells. They work okay.

You can buy a used petrol car for the next 20 years. I guess not having a place to charge your electric car will become a sign of the lower classes

most streets have electric lights. people have been trying to develop technology to allow to charge off that existing infrastructure.

https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/... is one example - very relevant, as it's from London.

but this isn't to say i disagree; quite the contrary, i agree completely that it's a huge problem for EVs in dense urban areas, perhaps the biggest.

Having seen London lampposts being mentioned in this discussion repeatedly, I must wonder - to what overprovisioning levels was the London streetlamp network built?

A typical oldschool sodium lamp pulls approx. 400-500 W. If you replace it with an appropriate LED - and that's critical, there are so many "superb" LED installations recently: yes, it pulls less, yes, it's more whiteish, no, you can't see s... Take two steps away from the very narrow cone and you are standing in total darkness, somebody can mug you and the person looking from the window in the building right next to you would see nothing. So, if you replace it with a proper LED, you save let's say 400 W per lamppost plus any extra the original design left for voltage losses, impedance loop, etc.

Now, this is all fancy schmancy when you install one charger per street and one car uses it occasionally, but when making bold claims like "all electric within few years", you take 4 lampposts x 400 W for 20 cars and you can charge each car with 0.08 kW. That may not be even enough for standby consumption (battery lifesupport - cooling/heating).

So, back to the original question - does London have some kind of special supernetwork running through streets with megawatts to spare, or is it just capitalising of having just few percent of cars charging from it. What's the plan to get to 100 % load within 10 years?

I agree. My previous flat had parking about 50 metres away. The previous, people just parked anywhere on the road. I bet they won't be installing charging points at every random location on a road that anyone could possible park on

I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers. Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when planning what to do at the weekend I check nearby charging locations.

Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.

How do these public charging stations work in terms of payment? Do you have to activate it using a credit/debit card first and then just leave it plugged in?

The supermarket ones are free - though only 7kW, as they're for customer use. I park up and go for a walk round the local park then do my shopping.

For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.

Wow ok, surprised that they are unmetered! Surely that can't scale? What is an estimate £ cost in electricity for filling an average battery?

Assuming ~75KWh batteries, £7.50 if the supermarket pays 10p per KWh.

Is this strategy still going to work if everyone is doing the same thing?

My local supermarket has a couple of electric car charging points, amongst perhaps 200+ car parking spaces. On a busy saturday most of those spaces are full.

Certainly it's possible to install a charging point at every parking space, but it requires both a large scale building project to lay all those wires (the existing charge points are right by the supermarket - where the power is already available), and also potentially an upgrade to the local power network.

If each of those cars is fast charging at 50 kW, the supermarket carpark will suddenly be consuming 10 MW. Assuming a constant cycle of people, that's equivalent to the average power usage of 20,000 houses.

Just in one supermarket car park.

Fortunately it's unlikely everyone will charge every time they pop in, but it's something that has to be considered carefully. The electric grid has to be sized for peak load - most of the time it's not near capacity. If we're going to slot electric cars into the existing grid we have to manage demand very carefully - which means only charging cars when electricity supply is high or demand is low. Everyone rapid charging whenever they feel like it (eg during the Saturday shop) will cause huge stability issues.

The most straightforward way to manage it is to try to get as many cars as possible charging overnight (or charging whenever they're idle) and then manage when they actually draw power centrally based on electricity supply. That means extensive kerb side charging points.

And places that do have driveways have often created them by paving over an existing garden, which is two steps back for the environment. In my lifetime I’ve seen proper front gardens all but disappear in my area.

I live in urban Japan and outside my window there are zero cars parked on the street because every car is required to have a registered parking space within 2km of its owners’ residence.

Yeah, but it was a policy enacted in 1962 when car usage worldwide was a fraction of what it is now. Can an elected government impose such a policy today? I don't see it as being politically realistic.

Not many houses come without petrol/gas stations on their drives. Yes its an issue at the moment with batteries and charging but tech will catch up with rapid charging points etc.

It's going to require a massive infrastructure investment. At the moment, the National Grid couldn't cope with millions of cars being charged. It's all perfectly possible with enough investment and political will but I'm not optimistic. Just look at the smart meter rollout [1] or broadband in rural areas [2] for examples of things which are technically possible but turn out to take huge amounts of money and time.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/four_year_delay_for_s...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/national_audit_office...

If self-driving takes off, perhaps our electric cars can self-drive themselves, at night, to the charging point? Would be cool!

Hopefully by then the cars will be able to drive themselves to a charger or park themselves away from your home.

Some places here you get no street parking, and if you're building you need a minimum amount of spots for cars in the plans.

In some parts of Japan, when you buy a new car the dealership has to get confirmation from police that you have a designated parking spot. They come around and measure it, then get back to the dealership who then gets to sell you the car. I'm sure now they sometimes have records and stuff they can go off but the gist is the city won't be providing space for your car, it's up to you.

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