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Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow European you are grossly overstating the convenience of electrics based on a very special experience of living in Norway.

Western Europe (where I live) relies on street parking and has very little capacity for overnight charging. I regularly see people camping out for chargers in mall parking lots. I can't imagine the situation is much different in urban Romania, Poland or Lithuania.

I wish we had a charging grid that allowed for most private cars to be electric without any range anxiety, but that's just not true right now. You might also wish for street parking to go away (I do) but that's not happening either.

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It's still hard even in Germany and than you have broken charging stations on the Autobahn or fossil cars parking on charging spots (even though it's punishable now). Your employer won't have charging station at his place "because". You don't have one at home because you don't live in a house and so on.

We're seeing just another dividing line going through our society here. An fully electric car says a lot about your income. It's like a huge new IPhone everybody can see.

The first paragraph describes the situation in Norway that was like 5-6 years ago.

The second is less applicable in Norway due to zero tax policy on electric cars and like 100% in total taxes on ICE. So even 5 years ago it could be sensible to get an electrical car for a family with kids. Still at that time people complained in Oslo that electric cars were for the rich folk that got them as the second car to drive in bus lines and avoid traffic jams.

Unfortunately I don't believe much will change with the new German government as the green party gave away the Ministry of Transport to get the more prestigious Foreign Ministry....yeah.

Btw...did you see the new BMW SUV? So awesome!!111elf

> So awesome!!111elf Ha, I see what you did there! (elf is 11 in german)

A country gets the government it deserves.

Interesting thought... If those with higher income, who presumably can charge overnight, keep buying new electric cars, will the market for used electric cars saturate because others don't have this privilege (that much) and other infrastructure is not good enough yet?

We'll see about that. Right now most of them buy hybrids they never charge.

In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. In my western European city of ~100k people there's hundreds of such spots already. Capacity is rapidly being added too.

On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.

Sure, we have a few outdoor charging spots here in Lisbon as well. I can tell you exactly what will happen here:

-politicians made a big deal of building said spots when there were close to zero electric cars on the street. Many tv spots were bought. -people start buying electric cars en masse because hey, insfrastructure! Two free chargers per street! -no more easy PR to milk. Turns out scaling street charging will be expensive and bring no extra popularity. -Five years later, we'll still have two chargers per block but a hundred times more electric cars. Back to step zero.

Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need.

No the real infrastructure change we need are different urban zoning plans to eliminate single-use neighborhoods. We need to drastically cut down on commuting and switch to diffused co-working and telepresence.

> Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need. @zachkatz

Next downpour:

@imchillyb: ::waves to silly biker as I pass them:: Hey guys, pipe down, we're almost home.

@zachkatz: ::Grumbles about rain, snow, sleet, and more recently hail. Looks behind at Timmy, Sally, Sue, and the dog all miserably following them home; drenched and shivering-cold on their e-bikes, and dog's paws on wet-cold-concrete.

Glad you're gonna fight for that e-bike spot, I sure won't!

It rains more on average in the Netherlands than it does in the USA and the vast majority don't stop cycling. 30% of children under 12 ride their bikes to school year round in Oulu, Finnland, where it gets as cold as -30C. Cycling is faster, cheaper, healthier and even if you never want to ride a bike cycling infrastructure means less congestion for cars.

They are not a replacement for every situation, but they work amazingly well when they do. I don't think you are making a good faith argument here.

I've been in towns and cities all up and down the east coast of the US with my bike, and they range from absolutely terrible for any bike traffic (stroads everywhere) to fantastic. The biggest obstacle to bikes being more usable is simply not designing our infrastructure in the least human/bike friendly way possible.

I've been biking in -20oC, and it wasn't a big deal. You need the right clothing, but otherwise it's fine. Part of the issue is that people who drive never buy decent winter clothing.

That might apply more in Chicago than Lisbon, though.

So, wouldn’t building more then reap political benefits in that case?

Not when you have to ask people to pay for them. Which is why we haven't built a hospital or school in 10 years.

If putting the equivalent of a functioning high grade electrical socket in every parking space is a minor obstacle I don't want to see a major one.

How about removing millions of tons of certain gases out of the planetary air

We're not talking about Tesla Superchargers here, but things that let you charge overnight. On the scale of civil construction, it doesn't seem to be more difficult than highways, street lighting, sewers, etc.

I don't know where you live but I live in western Europe and almost every household owns a car that they park somewhere on the street. There almost no charging stations around. Now I just can't imagine a universe where every street has enough chargers for EVERY single household. That's just utopic.

Is there a gas pump for every street parked car? No. Contention for EV charging is trivial to charge with a combination of home, workplace, public parking, and street parking charging.

You don’t need a gas pump for every car because gassing up doesn’t take hours.

In many places there isn’t even enough street parking to reliably park your car every night. You often have to park illegally and wake up early to move the car before the ticket comes.

If there isn’t even enough parking how is there going to be enough overnight charging?

Are you telling me the car is never parked legally anywhere and is in constant motion?

Charging exclusively at fast DC chargers is feasible and done by many Tesla owners.

No I’m saying that “I will have a place to charge overnight every night” is unfeasible.

Whether that’s good enough depends on what you’re doing and your car’s range.

edit: I remember renting a Tesla once in San Francisco and when we got home with very low charge after a fun trip (on which we had to visit a random small town for an hour just to top up a little), we couldn’t find a place to charge. Everything the Tesla map showed was a locked garage with no public access. After a frustrating hour of searching and the car increasingly panicking at us about permanent damage, we resorted to going back to the only place we knew for sure it could charge – back where we rented it from.

We then ubered home for $20 and back to the Tesla next morning for another $20 (we rented for 3 days).

It was easily one of the frustratingest cars I ever rented.

If you're renting housing (with slowly increasing exceptions, mostly at higher end hotels and recently renovated apartments) this is a tough problem.

Fast DC chargers are still more than an order of magnitude slower than refueling an ICE car for an equivalent amount of travel.

It’s fast enough for Tesla to sell almost a million EVs a year and to be unable to build vehicles fast enough to keep up with demand. Those who argue the problems haven’t been solved are ignoring the very clear market forces demonstrating that they have been.

Sometimes my Tesla charges “too fast” (~20 min) and I have to move the vehicle before my shopping or rest stop is complete. It helps to colocate fast chargers at businesses people patron anyway (supermarkets, for example), where they’ll naturally take longer than the vehicle will take to charge. These are solved problems, it’s install and equipment colocating logistics at this point.

My point is that with current EVs you need to be able to overlap charging with other things. For those who can have a charger at home they can overlap charging with sleeping. For those who have chargers at work, they can overlap charging with work.

If there is parking lot charging where you shop you can overlap it with shopping, although most efforts I've seen in that direction only have a handful of charging spots. Maybe someday there will be enough of those spots that people who don't have home or work charging will be able to do much of the charging while shopping.

But as long as we are still at the stage where many people would have to specifically go to a charging place much like they currently refuel their ICE, the speed difference will be noticeable.

For a person that drives the average amount in the US it is about an hour a year sitting at gas stations vs about 11 hours a year sitting at fast charging stations.

(Of course there may be offsetting time savings. I believe some places allow EVs to use HOV lanes regardless of the number of passengers. If you have a solo commute during times of high traffic, the HOV lanes might save you more than 10 hours a year).

Why even bother charging when you could replace a loan battery at pump station ?

> In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago.

Will it? Every city parking spot in every city in the world potentially pulling ~220V @ ~60 amps overnight seems like an awful lot of electricity to generate, to say nothing of the expense of running all of the necessary cabling and charging stations. Are there cities actively implementing that strategy?

Why on earth would you need 60 A? My Model S add a kilometre for every amp-hour at 230 V. Charging from 18:00 to 06:00 adds 120 km at 10 A.

Residential streets already have cables for street lighting, adding extra cable or uprating the existing cable to support charging posts can use the same cable ducts.

Obviously it's not feasible to have every parking spot pull 13KW, they would need to coordinate to manage load.

The core thing is that you're assuming that every parked car arrives in the evening with near-zero charge and needs to be full in the morning. This is not the case, cars are parked 95% of the time. They can charge at work on in garages too - useful for solar power peak supply.

Let's do some napkin calculations: 95% = 1 hour per day of use for 23 hours of charging. Let's assume that's 100km drive in that 1 hour, 15Kwh for a typical EV. So on average you need 15/23=0.65KW per car, not 13KW. There's 285 million cars in the US, so you'd need 4.3 billion KWh per day for full electric. Currently US generates 11 billion KWh per day [3].

[1] https://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-tim... [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

> On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.

Copper wiring to deliver that power is expensive. It's also a really good theft target.

Everyone adding a mere window air conditioner is enough to cause new electric lines to be needed. Electric car charging is way worse than that.

Adding millions of chargers to city streets is an insane way to solve charger shortages.

It makes much more sense (and would be much cheaper) for the govt to mandate interchangeable batteries, so you could just go to a gas station and swap out a battery instead.

The stations already exist where you need them and only need one charger for all the batteries.

That would also remove range anxiety for me.

However, this will only work if batteries become smaller and more energy-dense - because they are huge and heavy, electric cars today are built around them. This causes two problems:

You can’t easily remove them because they’re big and have to be built into the structure of the car, and are sometimes lod-bearing, and each car model has a different shape of battery.

Drumwhirl.. Cue.. a robot-cabledrum, hiding beneath a manhole cover- they only come out at night to charge you - but hey at least they charge you for it.

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