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Comment by hvjackson | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the "gas station on every corner" model is going to transition to the EV world. First of all many people will do the bulk of their charging at home, so paying for a charge will be mostly limited to long distance road trips, etc. It's not something you necessarily need to do at all during your regular commute or running errands around town.

Second, even with a fast DC charger it still takes 20-60 minutes to get a useful amount of charge. That's a lot longer than you need to run into a convenient store to buy a coffee or whatever. It makes more sense to put these chargers where people will naturally be parked longer: office buildings, restaurants, highway service plazas, etc.

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Hm, the US tend to have "home" defined as a stand along house with a garage/land plot, which makes it possible to have a charger at home.

In most of the world city people live in flats/apartments, where you can't really do that.

So i don't see how you can avoid "gas station on every corner" model.

Presumably you have "some place" where you store your car when you're not using it. It makes sense to put a charger there, as opposed to on the block corner.

Which will be the job for the same people that put up buildings on block corners, rather than something you do yourself.

Unlike with ICE cars, it's trivial to turn any parking spot into a charging station for an EV. The model changes from "expensive building with attendants on every corner" to "a (120v/slow charging) plug at most parking spots". This is already the norm in northern communities where you need to plug in ICE cars if you want them to start in the morning.

In apartments/flats you are usually parking in a dedicated parking lot, that can be easily renovated to have spots with a plug. Street parking in front of small houses will likely gain parking meter like devices with extension cords.

> In apartments/flats you are usually parking in a dedicated parking lot

More like all over the nearby streets, but i get the idea.

Downtown flats and apartments around here generally don't have any streets that allow overnight parking, and do generally have their own dedicated parking, but that probably varies with location.

Once people started building with cars in mind here, they were building single family detached houses. Most apartments, duplexes, 4-plexes, etc. were built in the era of streetcars.

We do have some multifamily from the postwar era, but it tends to be either very luxe (contemporary gentrification) or very crappy (from when cities were for poor people). The stately, comfortable, once-grand-but-now-middle-class stock is all pre-automobile.

Honestly, as someone who has owned and driven an EV for the better part of a decade, L1 home charging has been sufficient most of the time. That uses the same type of 120V plug that you'd use for a coffee maker, and it's enough for about 40 miles of range while you sleep.

With a modern long-range EV, nightly L1 charging plus occasional DCFC or L2 charging would meet the driving needs of almost everyone.

So the solution is very simple: Just install L1 EVSEs everwhere. Streetlights have extra capacity now that LED bulbs are in vogue, so putting L1 charging next to every on-street parking space isn't even a technical challenge.

So... that's just "gas station on every corner" model taken to it's extreme, no?

I guess that's one way to look at it.

But:

1. Most gas stations break even on the gas an make money on the attached convenience store. That's a different business model than "charge at home" or "charge at streetlight" while you're sleeping.

2. A gas station is a place you "go" to. You're normally taking a detour or at least making an extra stop. Most day-to-day EV charging is done at your normal destination while you're doing things you'd otherwise be doing.

Those are fairly fundamental differences to the gas station model, as far as I'm concerned.

This could actually work pretty well. It would add more complexity to building parking lots, and possibly retrofits, but running junction boxes out to every parking space should be possible.

It can start small as well, maybe converting 10% of spaces and then expanding as adoption ramps up. You run into the grocery store for an hour, and you get a couple of miles. Park at work and get some more, then plug it in when you get home. I'm envisioning something like a retractable cable that you can pull out to your car, but maybe I'm overthinking the desire for theft of these cables.

In Europe in cities you often have parking garages for a whole bunch of buildings together. In such case you can just have chargers there.

Fair enough, I used "home" but it could just as easily be anywhere else the car is stored: garage, office building, even public streets maybe. Going to a filling station is just too slow to be the main way to charge. No EV owner wants to dedicate 30 minutes a week twiddling their thumbs while the car charges. I just can't see a dedicated filling station will be part of the regular routine for most EV owners the way it necessarily is for gas cars.

In the U.S., the majority of people drive to work, so even if you don't have a place to charge at home, you can still fully charge every weekday if your employer has chargers.

Where I live, you see these all over the place:

https://chargingforward.chargepoint.com/story/charging-forwa...

They also usually place them close to the building to reduce the distance they have to wire, so that's a nice side benefit.

I'm not sure how feasible it is for an employer to have charging stations for 80% of their workforce. It would be a nice benefit though.

One nice thing about charging at your workplace though is typical 9-5 jobs are quire compatible with solar charging. So you put up an array of solar with electrical outlets in the lot. Excess power feeds back into the business.

As soon as there are enough electric vehicle ownership among employees, they can't reliably charge at work. I already can't, the chargers are always taken.

If all the chargers are regularly full, presumably they will build more chargers.

In the long run, having a higher percentage of EV owners should increase ability to reliably find a charger because there will be less variability in demand.

I live in a condo with underground parking. I had an EV charger installed over a year ago.

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