On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.
-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.
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!
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.
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?
Charging exclusively at fast DC chargers is feasible and done by many Tesla owners.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.