Even if we overbuild EV chargers, it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as overbuilding gas stations. Abandoned gas stations turn into nasty environmental messes — tanks leak, things spilled on the ground soak in, etc. Abandobed EV chargers are parking spaces with smallish, harmless machines that may even have some scrap value.

If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, we have to have places for all the apartment dwellers to charge, as well as for all the people who are driving on long trips.

Even with the limited number of Teslas on the road right now, I ended up having to wait for over an hour for a spot to charge while driving from Northern California to Southern California on a holiday weekend. The station had 40 superchargers and still had over and hour wait to get to them. If every single driver on I-5 had to stop to charge, you will need a LOT of charging stations.

I would love to charge at home. My landlord doesn't quite agree.

I would love to own my own home.

In the meantime, I will accept other EV charging initiatives.

There's more use cases for vehicles than driving around a major city, I use my vehicle as more than a grocery fetcher. I routinely drive hundreds of miles, I'm routinely in remote areas, I really value freedom of movement. At the moment an EV is completely out of the question for me because the infrastructure isn't remotely close to what would support my use case. I guess if you want to convert more people to EVs you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using.

Sets of 4 chargers interspersed along major interstates and highways, which are exactly the settings (long hauls/roadtrips) where you really do need chargers away from home.

Overbuilding? I regularly stop at highway rest stops to get gas and have to wait on line at an 8 pump gas station they takes minutes per fill. If people were using electric cars with similarly distributed infrastructure that took 1/2 hour or more to charge, it would be impossible to go anywhere. I don't understand how it moves from niche to mass adoption, but under the current system, I guess it involves an insane amount of chargers

Edit: my point above is that I'm talking about highway rest stops which are presumably exclusively frequented by people on long road trips. Maybe some started without a full tank, but the majority are gassing up to extend their range, and my point is that current infrastructure already gets bogged down with that despite the comparatively high speed of filling a gas tank.

We are currently far from overbuilding. Home charging is great and means we don't need EV chargers everywhere we currently have gas stations.

But highway chargers need to handle peak demand for highway travel, including holidays.

And we do need lots of slow chargers for those who can't install their own home charger. City street parking, offices, parking garages, apartment buildings, etc.

Better over than under. And if we overbuild, then just wait for the market to catch up to available capacity before building more.

Most isn’t all and a lot of places will be inaccessible if you don’t build out.

I'd love to see some modeling of charging demand based on travel patterns. Something that takes into account trips that take into consideration trips that would be served by overnight home charging vs need for freestanding charging out in the wild.