Oil companies buying up EV charging networks: Shell acquires Ubitricity | Hacker News Reader

Oil companies buying up EV charging networks: Shell acquires Ubitricity

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107 pointsantimora120 comments

I think what these oil companies realized is that they will cater to two personas of their customers. EV and IC vehicles

I think they realized that IC and EV are both not going away soon, so why not keep their customer base instead of other competitors taking them away.

Also, they already have the advantage of real estate. They know that they can add a charging network cheaply in their gas stations than a new player in town building one.

I don't really buy the argument that they can limit supply to increase the price of driving EV.

I recently bought an EV and sold my IC car because it puts a smile on my face when I drive it. It was never a financial decision for me. Plus EV are insanely expensive, most of these people can afford a substantial increase in electricity prices

Like geez, you can buy two IC for one EV. I do hope that EV car prices go down significantly as it seems like a lot of people would want to buy an EV, but the price point is just too much

> They know that they can add a charging network cheaply in their gas stations

Maybe a dumb question, but is it safe to put a bunch of EV chargers at gas stations? I don’t think I’ve seen any so far.

There is power at gas stations already, there is in fact power at the pumps. They also let you drive your car up to the pump, use your cell phone, and wear clothing that generates static electricity.

I'm not an electrical engineer, but from watching this video [0], there seem to be about a million and a half different mechanisms to prevent sparks from chargers.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMxB7zA-e4Y

Most gas stations in Oslo have fast chargers, between 50 and 300kW each.

I’ve seen them installed on a few stations already - they are in the parking areas, not filling areas - if fume concentrations are high enough to light up there then there are way bigger issues with the station :)

The oil companies don’t own gas stations. Those are privately owned with franchising agreements.

franchising agreements can force people to add new products like the McRib, or charging stations or lose supply.

Depends on the supermajor. I know BP for sure has a retail arm where they own gas stations in addition to franchises. Same for shell.

the franchisee has a profit motive too. If adding a charging station brings in more revenue - I don't see why the franchisee would refuse.

Also, factor in that charging times are longer for EV. This means they'll spend more money at the in-station cafe/convenience store vs the avg IC car driver.

I can see that. Gas at gas stations is more of a loss leader, the real profits are in alcohol and tobacco.

I don't buy the advantage of adding charging networks to existing gas stations being cheaper.

For one, it'll probably cost the same as for existing retail stores to install charging points. But all existing retail stores have the extra benefit of saving you time while you shop, do laundry, get your hair done, etc.

I suspect these companies saw elon musk on battery day say "yeah, this is happening".

Now they want to make sure they have a plan if gasoline usage, er, tanks.

Retail stores operate ludicrously thin margins, particularly in the USA where there was a retail apocalypse already happening because there is way too much retail per capita even before you consider the effects of online shopping. where are they supposed to get the money for installing lots of chargers in their lots?

It's a mutually beneficial arrangement. AFAICT the charging networks will set up a charging station for free, although you may be on the hook for some incidentals.

I disagree. A lot of gas stations are conveniently located near the highway. You may think that not everyone drives on the highway - but people who do lots of road trips or drive continuously for work or have an hour long commute make up a disproportionate amount of the driving.

It's probably true a lot of upper-middle class people now would prefer to charge while getting some shopping in - but presumably in the future people will just want convenience. I could see a chain like Costco or Target adding EV stations to every parking lot - but I think for the most part gas stations are located where the cars are.

(Also, the scale of this seems good and a good way to make investors feel good about a hedge, but that's beside the initial point)

A highway charge takes about twenty minutes. Charging stations at restaurants and coffee shops do much better than those at gas stations.

Gas stations are almost always near other things, including restaurants.

This is probably highly variable. None of the gas stations I can think of off the top of my head are near anything particularly nice nor interesting, and often are pretty inaccessible if you discount the road.

Seems fairly easy to turn a gas station store into a store and coffee shop.

We have this in Germany in pretty much every gas station: I never sit down for a coffee there if I can avoid it. The atmosphere of looking at gas pumps and lorries while slurping my coffee just doesn't cut it for me.

Commonly gas stations here on interstate highways are complimented with a number of restaurants, from fast food to sit down.

Target and Meijer are not uncommon supercharger locations for Tesla. Works well on road trips.

I'm not sure I understand the retail store charging points.

Very few are going to need charging when doing a shopping run. So why not just charge at home?

Those not having a good over-night or at-work charging on the other hand I do understand. But how many that don't have either of that can and will buy an EV in the first place?

This point comes up a lot. About 1 in 8 Americans live in apartments where charging may prove a challenge.[1] And this number will only increase in the future. This demographic will also be living closer to city centers where retail charging points will be an incentive while eating out or doing errands.

[1] https://www.naahq.org/news-publications/units/june-2017/arti...

My point is that they are least likely to buy an EV.

In time, maybe, yes. But I don't think the deciding factor for these people (myself included) are charging stations at the mall.

> Also, they already have the advantage of real estate. They know that they can add a charging network cheaply in their gas stations than a new player in town building one.

Then why buy up charging networks? Why not just develop their own? Genuine question.

It’s a good way to bootstrap. They will also acquire the technical know how to retrofit parts of their gas stations with EV charging stations. They either way need to spend money so why not just spend it to acquire the tech and infrastructure to gain time.

As far as acquisitions go this makes so much business sense. Same domain, complementary user base and technology, and with great growth opportunity.

Shell is an evil oil company. For example, they knew about climate change in 1986 already and kept it quiet[1]. But now they are pressured by public opinion, court, government, and even shareholders to take action. Their PR propaganda is now to reduce CO2 as much as possible for fossil fuels and to develop alternatives. They are a key player in liquidised natural gas, which produces less CO2. Next they are engineering heavily in hydrogen production, which sucks for cars but will probably be nice for ships.

[1] https://thecorrespondent.com/6285/shell-made-a-film-about-cl...

>Shell is an evil oil company

No one "knew" about climate change in 1986. It took 20+ years of research to gather and analyze enough evidence to prove such an enormous claim, that humans had been inadvertently geoengineering the planet. Also shell employs tens of thousands of people - this myth comes from one internal communication that maybe a dozen eyes at most even saw.

The basic science behind climate change is relatively easy - we know co2 keeps infrared radiation, and by 1980s we saw how quickly co2 levels increase in the atmosphere.

It’s widely asserted that Exxon knew about what they are doing back in 1970s.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

My main problem with this argument is that I'm not sure what the alternative should have looked like.

Exxon having a "oh fuck" moment where they told their workers to stop working, their customers that there is no product to sell etc. seems something so extremely hard to pull off even if all of upper and middle-management wanted to do the right thing, I can't see how they could have.

I always imagine what would happen if the "5G/Radio is bad for you" crowd was proven right by people at Nokia. What would a realistic while morally sound strategy have looked like?

It's not so much that they continued operating. Everybody was still using their products after all and there was no alternative anyway. It's not even that they passively sat on it. It's that, in the same vein as the tobacco companies, they merchants of doubted us over the following decades, spending considerable amounts of money in questioning climate science and hindering action.

While being a heinous thing to do, the only devils-advocatey thing I can't refute is that there are no examples of the inverse, e.g. companies not trying to protect their businessmodel via despicable tactics for the greater good of humanity.

If this is just an inherent condition of humans working together in groups, shouldn't we rather put the blame on the regulators for ignoring the science and accepting the bribes for this long?

There is nothing basic about climate science. You're talking about a massive, chaotic, nonlinear system.

Case in point, from the article:

>present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical

Yet decades later that window continues to shift. This was an unverified theory in the 70s, and rightly so - we had spatially sparse measurements at the very tail end of a time series which naturally cycles on the order of hundreds to millions of years. For example a consensus has only recently formed that the oceans have been absorbing energy and delaying atmpspheric temperature rise.

Finally, the sources for that Scientific American are InsideClimate and Greenpeace, which are at least as biased as any oil company, just in reverse. I know that oil companies are the Philip Morris du jure, but this article is just retroactive demonization.

You can go back even further than that— here’s a clipping from 1912, warning the dangers of burning coal, “the effect may be considerable in a few centuries”.

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....

I agree and they also killed the electric car once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

No doubt they will try to kill it a second time or hinder sales it it diminishes there profit. In my country, we have some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Despite that it is barely advantageous financially to recharge an EV on the highway. It mostly depends on the efficiency of the EV and about half of them are less economical than IC vehicles in this setting, per magazine tests.

Since charging on the highway is already a boottleneck (recharge time x number of charging stations x real estate), energy companies lose no customers by charging (no pun) a premium for it.

do you also consider those who consume oil and gas products as evil?

They carry incomparable levels of responsibility

please elaborate.

I see lots of hate for oil companies, but not a lot for those who choose to fly a lot or drive gigantic cars. The F150 is America's best selling vehicle, passenger trains are basically unusable in North America, suburbia makes public transport impossible.

We live in a consumerist society where virtually every product we own or use contains plastic or has been shipped from the other side of the world, but we lay blame on those who extract the oil.

How convenient.

Yes, wasting oil and causing excess emissions is unethical at the consumer level too. But let's not descend into whatabouism.

Don’t you think there’s a difference between people making decisions based on propaganda and a system designed to subsidize certain outcomes and the people who setup that system and produced that propaganda because it was profitable?

In much of the world, fossil fuel usage has been heavily subsidized and alternatives actively opposed. I would not blame anyone who bought the car their society made necessary anywhere near as much as the people who saw a problem and prevented it being addressed at far less cost than it will now take. When Exxon first learned global warming was happening, it was the 1970s – a carbon tax, renewable fuels, transit investments, etc. would have been so much cheaper back then – but not for them, so they heavily funded efforts to make the topic political, told everyone it wasn’t real and you shouldn’t feel a need to buy a fuel efficient vehicle, and successfully stymied action for half a century.

I mean, the average SUV sold now gets much worse mileage than the car my dad bought to commute in the 80s - simply staying on that curve would have bought us a decade or two.

It sounds lazy to me to say that one industry was able to push through its interests for 50 years running, as if a democracy has no way of defending itself. It is scary how effective Exxon and Koch are (the book Kochland is a good read), but I don't accept that this strips all consumers of responsibility for all eternity.

What oil companies have done is certainly damaging to society - but let's please not lose sight of the fact that it is ultimately consumers who are calling the shots.

To me the truth is that we love convenience, enjoy travel and just having lots of stuff - hundreds of millions of people are fully aware of the effects of climate change and still choose to consume unbelievable amounts of oil, directly and indirectly. The title of Al Gore's "an inconvenient truth" is really quite apt - people watch and understand to then go on an fly across the globe.

If our image of the average citizen is that they are helpless in the face of propaganda/advertising, cannot think for themselves and cannot be held accountable for their behavior/decisions, then I don't believe that's compatible with a democratic system.

Consumers/voters have responsibility and corporations stand and fall based on how we all choose to spend our money. The one-sided criticism of oil companies is boring and almost childish in the way it deflects responsibility.

The geopolitics of energy: What's easy to forget about subsidies is that enormous shock the western world has gone through in 1973 - suddenly the oil stopped flowing and leaders everywhere figured out how vulnerable industrial societies are to even slight disruptions in supply. We also have to consider the security and moral implications of relying on Saudi Arabia and Russia for most of our oil needs - claiming that politicians are supply corrupted by oil money just shows a lack of appreciation for the complexity of the situation.

Eating meat is bad for the climate (methane emissions - you know the drill) - if you consume meat again after reading this, please don't blame it on politics, McDonald's or a lack of knowledge.

Was there an alternative? No. Why not.. Guess who stopped it? This liberal stand of calling people lazy or weak to not resist things that kills them self or the environment is a argument what puts the blame on the people instead of the one making sure everything stays in there interest.

And yeah 'democracy' the term the US used to invade countless of countries in the name of freedom, peace and democracy. What were the wars really about the last 20 to maybe 50 years? About private interest of oil.

The US democracy is nothing more then big industries calling the shots. Spreading so much propaganda people don't know what to believe any more.

50 years ago presidents were already shouting that they were going to cut back on fossil fuels. What happend there? If the US really was a democracy you would have had free healthcare by now. It's nothing more then a smoke screen.

And by now with the help of social media propaganda has become more of a psychological weapon. They know exactly what triggers specific individuals and how to steer them. If we keep trying to fool our self with this believe that people should just be come magically immune to propaganda and advertisement we are pretty domed.

I’m not saying they deserve all of the blame, especially for getting us into heavy fossil fuel dependency. Note that what I said was that I hold the people with the least agency and information less accountable, and especially assign blame to people who knew the problem and privately made plans around it while funding public denial. Ignorance isn’t good but it beats active lying.

Gas stations make very little margins selling gas/fuel ~2%. However, their own convenience stores have very good margins.

So, a gas station operator would like to keep you at the station for as long as they can in the hope that you'll enter the convenience store.

That's partly why they have restrooms, smoking zones(for countries where public smoking is illegal), etc. They are partly their for your own convenience and partly to make you stick around and eventually enter the convenience store.

EV charging presents a perfect opportunity to keep you at their station longer. Each charge is probably going to take a minimum of ~30mins; and you'll spend most of it lazing around the convenience store drinking crap coffee marked up at 60%

Everybody missing the point of this purchase. Ubitricity feeds electricity to cars via existing lamp post sockets. Designed for dense urban areas where street to home connection is a big problem. I've been using the Ubitricity charge point in my street for over a year, it's not speedy at 3 to 5.5kW so I have to hook up for hours , but that doesn't really matter because there are around four charge points with two blocks, so there's usually spare capacity. It's quite frankly brilliant.

This in and of itself is not concerning. It makes sense for them to diversify into other forms of energy used for transportation.

What we need to keep a close watch on is what it does to prices. Will they use their position to artificially inflate the price of electricity? Or shut down existing charge points to limit supply?

Hopefully this is just them diversifying to get ahead of declining revenue of their main product, and not something more nefarious.

"Will they use their position to artificially inflate the price of electricity"

Maybe but they have significantly less power to maneuver with solar, batteries and on-premise charging. All property is potentially a cheap gas station and for those that don't own a home with cheap electricity or solar, I'd guess that the market would respond with some form of airbnb for charging if prices at charging stations got too out of whack. Shell doesn't have the ability to create the strangle-hold that is possible with gas.

Wouldn't creating a bottleneck to significantly increase the supply be more expensive than competitors expanding the supply

The only way I see that the competitors being crushed is through IP. But for me that seems a little farfetched

But maybe someone smarter can tell me I'm wrong as I'm kinda curious about this.

>... and not something more nefarious.

Like maybe having a good supply of oil to run diesel generators to supply power for charging stations, maybe?

Why would they need that? Power from the grid is still cheaper than a diesel generator.

Diesel generator is useful when the grid is down.

The grid never goes down in the western world. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get more gasoline for my generator.

As demand for ICE will decrease so will demand for gas and that would drive the price down wouldn’t it? It may be in fact based on generators, especially in remote areas. IDK, I may be completely off here as gas is not the most efficiently converted into electricity but rather than give up the industry will find ways to valorize their assets. Ideally Id like the whole fossil indy to go away but am not sure how that’s going to pan out

This is about diversifying and getting out of the oil business the writing is now on the wall for oil and gas as growth will die out in the next few years. And seeing that investments in oil gas will decrease which will result less production higher prices and fewer people will use it because of higher prices the cycle of people getting off oil will get faster.

I don't think they can control this. Electricity is available everywhere, and there will be plenty of competition for charging spots in malls, restaurants, 7-11s, and all kinds of places that could benefit from business during a charging session.

I wouldn't be surprised if the gas stations make as much from the convenience store angle as the gas. And with charging stations, which slow things down, people have time on their hands - they can't pump and leave.

In my country general idea is that gas stations make almost no profit on gas because of amount of tax included in fuel price.

Then most of them earn they keep on being convenience stores.

> because of amount of tax included in fuel price.

That arguably can't be true, because every gas station pays the same tax. That means, if you removed the tax, gas stations would still be making almost zero profit on gas (but the gas would be cheaper to customer by the amount of tax). Competitive pressure pretty much ensures that.

I checked up and they have 6% margin on fuel where food and drinks it can be up to 30%.

That is true, but I don't think it has much to do with the tax. Credit card transaction fees have a big impact as well...it's why you often see a lower cash price for fuel.

In the US, gas stations make pennies per gallon of gas at best- I think around 5 cents is somewhat normal.

They've been rebranding themselves as energy companies for a while. There's nothing sinister, they're just reading the room

Shell has branded itself back in the early 00 years that they're basically a solar company now. So have other oil companies ("Beyond Petroleum").

The "but the oil industry is investing in other energy including renewables!" was all a big lie, the numbers never supported that. It'll take more than some token investments to convince people that it's different this time.

It's not a moral pivot. They're still bastards.

The economics of fossil fuel energy is becoming increasingly poor with the advancements in alternatives. It's becoming more expensive while electric storage and generation is become cheaper.

I'm sure they'll raid their way into the alt-energy market, squeeze out small businesses, do price cartels, try to form monopolies, and do a bunch of other nasty things. But they won't continue to be propping up absolute monarchies and funding international terrorist organizations like they have been. It'll be a different kind of evil - closer to Nestle, Monsanto or Bechtel.

Companies become large through aggressively exercising power. Sometimes it's mostly benign, sometimes it's bloody. Electric storage/generation looks like it'll be less bloody than oil.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the graphs of cost to produce batteries and solar power plummeting. In 3 years, it’ll cost more to operate existing coal power plants than it will to build a solar plant. If that trend continues for a further 3 years, electricity during the day will be given away nearly for free, making it dirt cheap to own an EV. It’s hard to compete with free for petroleum companies. It’s a bit worse than that for them because lower demand means they might lose certain economies of scale, making it even harder to compete. For example, some gas stations might close down if they lose half their customers, making it even more likely that customers will switch. And of course, after 2030 it’ll be difficult to find anyone selling an ICE car at all.

Transportation (land, sea, air) accounts for 60% of all petroleum. And land accounts for 75% of that. So around half of all consumption is going dwindle to 0 over the next 10-15 years.

The writing is on the wall for those who care to read it.

None of this is inevitable. I'm sure lots of smart people are working hard finding out how to make sure PV is still metered or the panels are leased or licensed or some other scheme to put a middleman or two between us and every watt.

Demonitization of clean energy is within the realm of physically possibly but we'll still have to fight like hell for it.

What I don’t get why power companies don’t setup their own stations. Infrastructure seems to be largest cost of such stations and they are in best position to enable it. Heck it could even be billed to your account, especially if you sell your solar excess to network.

My guess is power companies are more or less monopolies, they might not care enough

I don't know about other parts of the country, but the chargers in my building are operated by the local power utility and gets charged to my power bill. I've lived in other buildings where this isn't the case, but at least in my city the utility is making an effort to do that.

I think they will still get their cut because they provide power to those charging stations without having to invest anything. Why would they spend money when they will get free profit?

If you would say they still would have to invest in infrastructure then they won't and they will say "you want better connection to the grid than normal people, pay up $$$".

They do: in my neighbourhood the two leading providers are E.on (German, EU wide) and Clever (Danish, focusing on the Nordics).

They are both expanding rapidly - for example Clever alone is planning to provide fast charging stations for 70% of the projected national demand in 2025, and growing their charging network size by around 6x.

Startup idea: Users sell surplus Powerwall charge/charging access via a real time auction site.

Airbnb for charging.

This trading market for energy is already a reality for big consumers and is being developed for private consumers as well. Apart from that, you don't have easy control over the necessary infrastructure to facilitate such a private market.

If I had a solar array, a Powerwall, and charger, why couldn't I sell the excess charge in my Powerwall to anyone who wanted to drive over, and get a charge?

Why couldn't property owners with big power feeds offer supercharger type services to complement the existing networks?

One home isn't something worth of a network, but AirBnB aggregated them into something disruptive. The same could be done for lone charging stations.

Early days but it's starting to happen: https://octopus.energy/tesla-energy-plan-faq/

Its surprising to me oil companies are getting into charging, rather then materials processing. The is a gigantic market emerging for battery materials. All of these high grade materials need processing.

Given oil companies should be expert at dealing with extraction and processing, I would expect them to get into that supply chain.

There is tons of places where a large investment could lead to huge returns.

- Lithium

- Nickel

- Graphite

- Cobolt

All of these need significant amount of processing before they go into batteries.

I understand oil pumping and refining is different then a nickel mine and refining, but it doesn't seem to be a crazy transition to make. Had they started this a couple years ago they would be in a great position.

Promising projects were incredibly cheap to buy up a couple years ago.

Mining is unclean and they already have an operation where the best money is made from oil that comes out of the ground by itself after the well is drilled.

Here they are drilling into electricity reserviors and also taking their cut as it makes its way to consumers, with what they think is probably the best technology for the occasion too.

Who knows where that electricity is coming from but the math could probably be done and it may turn out this makes Shell just a little bit cleaner.

Could Shell rebrand to Plug, problem solved. Interesting how our views are molded by media and news, some years ago there were wars in middle east to balance petrol prices. Sure it’s about controling the market

Be more appropriate to rebrand to Coal...or Sun, if they want to be forward thinking.

Nordics succed with Statoil and speed up the EV market.

Yeah.. good domains on sun & light ;)

RIP - Better Place (2007 - 2013)

Yet another case study of being right but at the wrong time

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

Wow, I didn't know that story.

Their idea wasn't really right, so I'm not sure why you are saying that. In fact, it seems to me their idea was absolutely and totally wrong, now and then. Its not at all what oil companies are doing.

Tesla has clearly shown that a charging network doesn't make nearly enough money to subsidies cars. In fact the opposite is true, car sales finance the charging network.

Battery swapping, out-side of a single luxury brand in China has also seen very little adoption. So that part of the idea was also wrong.

Seem like 'Better Place' was literally getting everything thing possible wrong.

Well, with the benefit of hindsight you are correct, however in 2005 things may have looked a bit different to them but I think the bigger point here is that having a $900M budget for charging stations today is a much better fit than it was when they got funded.

Had they actually focused on charging station and not bringing a car to market and battery swapping, they could have had much more success and wouldn't need $900M.

I hope it won’t end up like tyre companies buying up train companies...

the post-gas station model- the "charging network"- is lock in beyond what oil companies ever could have dreamt of.

I don’t have a gasoline pipeline to my house, but I do have electrical service.

this is a very good point but what about when we have to depend on infrastructure not our own? if you aren't home, what do you do? right now, Tesla is the one company that has a 100.1% proprietary infrastructure answer of their own. gas cars have unlike electric been standard "forever".

Keep an eye on these purchases. They may be buying them as part of a strategy to kill EVs.

The billions of euros many of these oil majors are throwing behind renewable forms like solar, offshore wind, hydrogen, etc. would suggest that the idea this is a strategy to kill EVs is nonsensical.

That train has left the station long ago. Killing EV was something feasible 20 years ago. Today the amount of investment and capability of the players involved is on a whole different level.

The oil companies couldn't stop Tesla or VW if they tried.

I just don't see how any network can even compete with https://na.chargepoint.com/charge_point

Are we saturated yet? Demand forecast? https://www.plugshare.com/

There seems to be a rather large number of charging stations in America already...

And soon they will be owned by oil companies. That’s the point. These large oil companies have so much money they just will buy the companies that run the networks. Throw a dart at any station on chargepoint.com and it could be owned by big oil.

Does that matter? My objection to big oil, such as it is, is the carbon emission/fossil fuel stuff. I don't have a problem with the corporate structures inherently.

Unless the artificially keep prices high so as to keep gasoline as a cheaper fuel.

Unless they artificially keep prices high. Full stop. It's not about gasoline, it's about control over energy in any form, concentrated in a small number of hands.

Lot harder to concentrate when solar power is inherently distributed.

They've not managed to do that with gas. I expect that solar will be much the same.

Good luck buying up Tesla.

There’s plenty of other charging station companies they could buy and corner Tesla.

Compared to the number of gas stations, this is still rather low. Since you actually have a lot less throughput at a charge point versus a gasoline vendor, we'll actually need more charging stations than gas pumps.

I'd guess actually we'll need significantly less charging stations than gas stations at full electric conversion being that you can fill up at home and its most desirable to do so time and cost wise. I have an electric car and use a charging station about once every 3 months when on a long trip.

Except most people charge at home, and most driving is local.

You only need charging stations when traveling long distance.

Depends on the locale. Plenty of us city folks don't have a 'home' for our cars to charge in. Our cars live their whole lives on the road. And quite a few suburb-dwellers seem to park their vehicles on the streets as well.

The thing is as adoption increases there will be less charging stations and just spots with EV charging whether its in a home, apartment or street parking. I think the idea of a station where you go to fill up with electricity or gas will become obsolete - it'll be ubiquitous as anywhere can effectively be a gas station for very little investment comparatively.

I suspect there will definitely be concentrations and branding around charging stations. As I wrote above, users of fast charging stations will likely be heavily oriented toward those that put the most miles on their vehicles everyday- commercial drivers. I predict that lunch spots will end up with a lot of charging stations- drivers will do half a day's work, charge the vehicle during lunch, then be able to finish up the day without worry. The restaurant/charging station association works will for travelers.

This is likely true even once we get autonomous vehicles- people may not drive the vehicles anymore, but they will still be loading/unloading, selling, or fixing things at the destinations.

I think the unknown really is the progression of battery technology. If in 5-10 years every EV's range is 1000 miles, charging stations could be very limited in their economic viability if apartments and homes have ubiquitous installations. Commercial is a bit different but still battery technology would likely have similar effects where it would still push charging to be at the home base.

With current battery tech, fast charging wears out the battery faster than slower charging. If you are fast charging every day, your battery won't last very long.

60% of US housing is SFH and another 22% are in townhomes, mobile homes, or apartments of 4 or less units. As EVs grow in popularity a huge portion of those housing units are going to adapt, because charging your car overnight is just so much more convenient then spending 15-30 minutes at a charging station, even if that initially means a ton of extenions cords running from garages to driveways or curbs Yes, there are geographies and regions where people will find it harder or less convenient, but in the US at least its hard to imagine the general trend being anything but at home charging being the rule, with charging stations primarily being available for high use vehicles (delivery trucks, taxis, postal carriers, etc...) and long distance travelers.

There is no point buying an EV if your apartment doesn’t have chargers for its tenant parking spots, or if you are relying on on street parking. That isn’t most of the market in the USA, though. It does make me wonder how EVs are rising in popularity in China, where wild parking of even high end cars is much more common.

There’s a simple solution: Mandate EV charging for residential parking spots.

Many cities are doing that, some are just doing it for new constructions, many people aren’t rich enough to live in brand new constructions. In China, all on street overnight parking is illegal anyways (at least in Beijing, hence why they call it “wild parking”), but laws/mandates don’t matter much anyways.

There are regularly same chain gas stations on the same corner because people don't search for a station, they use one that doesn't require an extra left turn. I don't ever see an EV station and live in a large city. I think that map gives a false impression of density.

We're not even close to saturated. On the contrary, we're so far from being saturated that I'm having trouble taking this comment seriously.

To take an example, just a couple days ago the Verge published their review of the Mustang Mach-E [0]; the bottom line was that the car is great but the chargers are impossible to find.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/22265570/mustang-mach-e-review-elec...

I wish they’d focus on making a truck (or maybe an explorer, or even a.. mustang). It’s their core competency, and Tesla already cornered the SUV and sedan market. Also, trucks are gas guzzlers, so replacing one with and EV is comparable to replacing 2-3 sedans or compact SUVs.

This release makes me think they’re too risk adverse to start with flagship models, and don’t really think this car will be read for the mass market.

(Mustangs are their best selling car in California; F-150’s and Explorers are one and two across their whole market.)

Easy to compete with ChargePoint. Most of them are in expensive garages, and charge more on top of the parking fee (and more than gas would cost for the same mileage, to boot). And frequently they’re out of order, or in use, or the guy on the other side steals the cable while you’re charging. And it’s slow, but you’d better be back when charging is complete, or you’ll be charged an extra penalty. - A Dissatisfied Customer

Saw this coming.

I see the end goal as making EVs as expensive to drive as ICE powered vehicles.

I can't see electricity prices coming down ever, and as EV penetration increases there will be plenty of ostensible, or actual, reason to charge (ha!) a premium for EV charging, especially if you're not fortunate enough to own a home and require either on-street or a benevolent landlord who will likely charge (ha!) a premium for charger installation / continued access.

I see the end goal of diversifying out their oil exposure. It may be entertaining to harbor unlikely conspiracy theories, but it's not helpful.

Occams razor.

Like how Facebook diversified their way into every viral messaging platform besides Snap?

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