The plan to go 100% EV seems odd to me. There are many people who have cars with no place to charge at home because they lack in premise parking. Not sure how that plays out.
It's amazing to me we have put all this work into a fantastic logistics network for gasoline and cough at the thought of chargers in all the same places.
Most people spend a significant time with their car sitting somewhere for at least that amount of time.
Put chargers where people park cars. Don’t awkwardly drive to a random place to charge.
For 75%? Of people that can be at home. For others work. For others the grocery store.
This is where the incentive program breaks down and the 4- or 5-figure electrician quotes start for a lot of houses that were built in a time and place where natural gas powered all of the heavy appliances and panels were sized for 60- or 100-amp service.
There's been arguments about putting them on lamp posts - ok, but again, cables. 1 lamp post for ~10 cars doesnt really work.
Plucking a random average UK street off of Google maps - figure out how you charge cars at 6pm when everyones home from work and this road is full of cars on both sides of the street: https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4257624,-2.9412328,3a,60y,22...
Not seeing anyone coming up with a way to solve that pretty important issue.
That must vary between countries, because I've seen tons of outlets on the outside walls of homes in Finland. They need a weatherproof extension cord, but it comes in handy for a lot of tools. Though most homes have at least a driveway, cars are generally shorter than homes, so they fit close by.
The cost of free parking and where to park should really be reconsidered in cities though, as with your image, those exist here as well and are really bad places to drive in. IIRC in Japan they require people to prove a car has it's own dedicated parking space before they're allowed to get a car
The issue as shown in the streetview image is that those are public footpaths next to the houses. If you tried dangling a cable from your home to your car (if you were lucky enough to get a spot outside your house) you'd very quickly be in a lot of trouble when someone trips over it.
There are just certain sections of the country where you'd either have to turn half of the streetlamps into a chargers (maybe a good idea?)...or make a modular battery swap gas station scheme....or stick with ICE.
It's just a normal plug, maybe with some components related to metering and billing included. Load balancing if you want to be fancy.
My town has on average 1 car per household, but I'd guess like 0.25 off street spots per household. That's a lot of infrastructure on public land.
It's just an electrical outlet. There are dozens of them for every parking spot already, in the house/office/building. Adding an extra electrical outlet isn't hard for a homeowner/lot-owner to do. This isn't going to have to happen overnight. It will happen slowly over two decades.
Regardless though, you're correct that it will take decades, but I think that this is one reason why a CEO wouldn't be all in. If it's going to take 25 years for a large chunk of customers to buy an EV, you still have a lot of cars to sell that are ICE.
A trip to the grocery store takes 30-45 minutes. If even 20% of the existing spots had a charger (even a modest rate charge), you'll get quite a bit of charge. Or if 20% of the parking spots at your workplace had chargers, you could leave it on the charger all day one day a week and charge very slowly (which as a bonus, low-rate chargers should be easier to provision than superchargers).
in the pre-pandemic world they had to implement a queue system for the charging spots, so you couldn't just park your car the whole day in one and had to move it out to let someone else have a turn.
Of course, this would probably (?) be a bit absurd for street parking, that's true.
Source: My dad has his hobby car in a glorified tent during winter, works just fine, the roof is in a 45 degree-ish slant so any snow just falls off.
And I, every winter, see snow clinging to 45° roofs quite often. Slightly wet snow (also the heaviest snow) can even stick to vertical surfaces.
45° would also make an overhang more susceptible to wind forces, acting like a sail.
I'm sure it'd be more costly for commercial work but a simple home charger infrastructure installation runs around $1k, and that's for a Level 2 (240V) charger. Although that doesn't account for the supplemental meter equipment costs.
A Level 1 charger can recharge say a Nissan Leaf from empty overnight. A single day's drive is far more likely to be at or below 20% of the capacity which is closer to 2hrs. For the average user that would be just fine.
A small number of time-limited slots with Level 2 charger could be provided for convenience, but even just allowing individuals to charge at Level 1 rates while their cars are parked would likely suffice in at least half the cases.
There seems to be this misconception that every EV will eventually need a dedicated fast charger and needs to charge to full capacity in 5 mins. But the reality is that, for a large portion of the driving population, a car tends to sit in place for large amounts of time and a modern 150mi+ range EV rarely get depleted in a day. A Level 1 charger would be more than enough for those people. Especially with public fast chargers available for those unusual situations where you need more charge very quickly.
For those who need more than that, an EV is truly not an ideal vehicle for them.
I guess if you're for some reason running your cabin heating the whole time then I suppose you're reducing your range, but that's solved by not doing that perhaps.
I also think that thinking of Level 1 as "chargers" and not "boring wall outlets" is a part of the remaining problem. You shouldn't need to bother with the costs for metering and accounting the delivered power at Level 1. Does Starbucks charge you a wall outlet fee to charge your cell phone or laptop? At Level 1 it can just be a "courtesy".
At Level 1 each car is basically the extra draw of one additional old school incandescent light bulb. Who seriously cares to measure that accurately?
You can do a rough math estimate at Level 1 and just add that overhead to your operating expenses per usual. Many places with existing parking fees the added overhead likely is a rounding error compared to the existing parking price. (Same versus apartment rentals or HOA/COA dues.)
Individual outlet metering is expensive and complicates everything, just install boring outlets like we've done for more than a century.
Exactly! So many people fixate on fast charging that they just don't register the magic inherent in your car and home running on the same "fuel".
And having heard from people that cold climates often have outlets like these in place for engine heaters to prevent engine freezes shows that infra for this can easily exist. Though it's probably more investment for 3-7kW capacity at each outlet compared to powering a block heater.
> Does Starbucks charge you a wall outlet fee to charge your cell phone or laptop? At Level 1 it can just be a "courtesy"
Oh I totally agree, but try getting an apartment complex to buy into thousands of dollars in electrical work only to shell out even more money buying "gas" for all their tenants.
My in-law has trouble getting his complex to fix sidewalks let alone do something like installing charging infra and providing electricity. If the $1k estimate was even close for commercial 120v charging infra, you'd still be talking between 10k and 100k in just electrical work.
But that sounds like something that could be easily turned into a market differentiator, so it's not to say it won't happen.
Perhaps tacking on a flat-rate fee to offset costs would be a strong middle ground as well. That concept is something apartments/HOAs are already quite familiar with, what with things like covered parking, garages, and even additional storage space already available as add-on charges in many places.
> Individual outlet metering is expensive and complicates everything, just install boring outlets like we've done for more than a century.
Somewhere in the eventual development of this tech could be something like a complex level charging system where an apartment could meter through the charger, since most modern IoT type chargers track this anyways. That way the infra is still just as simple as a dumb outlet.
> You can do a rough math estimate at Level 1 and just add that overhead to your operating expenses per usual
This pans out at small scale, though I wonder how that pans out in the real world. The sticker shock of running that calculation at "worst case scenario" seems like an issue. With even 100 EVs at worst case using todays numbers (~60kWh capacity per car, $0.15/kWh, full charge daily) that number is nearly $1k per day. Realistically it'll be much lower since that full charge nightly is highly unlikely, but sticker shock is real.
Methinks the number of stations will organically grow with the predicted amount of EVs an apartment will have parking on site. That’s how it started for me in 2015-2016!
The power grid hasn't melted even though the plugs at the parking spots are on a timer and usually run two hours from 0600 to 0800 so the car is nice and unfrozen when it's time for the daily commute.
Now when we are moving to PHEVs and EVs some people are _very_ worried that an EV using the exact same plug with the exact same load steadily from evening to morning will melt the entire power grid and the local wires and melt the plug. Dunno why.
Street parking is still an issue, but there are solutions for that too. The power could be pulled from street lamps for example.
But yea, the cabling needs to be checked by an actual electrician and they'll determine how many cars can be charged in the ye olde block heater system without melting any wires or tripping fuses.
The 1980's stuff can usually handle 8A continuous loads. They changed the standard some time in the mid 90s, those can handle multiple cars at 10-16A continuous depending on the main fuse.
Anything above that and you'll need to overhaul the whole field and people usually go for Level 2 capable cabling if they need to break ground for cabling anyway.
This doesn't work in cities. None of those places have parking lots.
And don't say "chargers on all the curbs" because we can't afford to further entrench car supremacy and make it harder to reallocate space to bus lanes and pedestrians.
Put the chargers where the cars are parking. With vanishingly few exceptions, they're all parking somewhere.
I'm all for a less car-centric society, but it's gonna be easier to reach that future if we address climate change a bit on the way.
That would really be doubling down on the high cost of free parking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
Edit: Should have mentioned the climate change is one of the biggest components of the cost of free parking. Without all the government-mandated parking spaces for the past 60 years, there would be far fewer cars today. It's not too late to reverse that.
Where so they park? Put chargers there, then.
But I generally agree: unless you drive a lot and can charge at home (or at work, or both), you aren’t going to get very far ahead with an EV (and lots of L3 charging supposedly strains the battery). But they are also really fun to drive, so it might still make sense for some people to get them even if they aren’t going to be saving money.
Fancier Level 2 ones with Wifi and shit are up to 1k€.
Imagine if every parking spot in an apartment had a slow charger that could charge your car overnight. Simply plug in and activate and it properly charges your apartment.
And now your employer makes it a free perk, or teams up with the electric co. so that you could do the same at work and get charged market rates directly.
Perhaps malls or larger stores provide a similar slow charger without the insane upcharge of Level 2 chargers. Heck, imagine something similar to parking validation. If you make purchases at the store or see a movie or whatever, then you get a code to "validate" your charging so you get the cost (or a portion) waived.
With infrastructure like that, then you only need fast chargers when you travel long distances, such as between states or cities.
People need to get over their mental view of "refueling" being a thing you do when your tank is almost empty and then you fill it to the brim.
It's perfectly workable to charge 50km of range while you're at the grocery store, maybe 100km while you're at work and another 100-150km overnight at home.
I've got a 230V/12A capable plug on my parking spot and I don't bother to plug in every night. A full charge would take around ~18 hours (10% to 100%), but my daily drives rarely take me under 50% and I don't charge to a 100% because the manufacturer recommendation is to keep the car at 80% unless you're going for a longer trip.
The only time I visit a fast charger is when I go see my family, who live a bit beyond my car's comfortable max range. I stop half way for 20 minutes to top up a bit from a 50kW charger (old car, slow charging =) ) and grab some food from the local shop while I'm at it. I don't need to charge to a 100% during the stop, 15-20% of charge is perfectly enough to get me to my destination - where I have a 230V/10A plug to charge overnight.
That's it, I don't need to drive 5-10 minutes to tank up.
And given that my daily driving is well under 50km, I don't even need to plug in every night at home, maybe 2-3 times per week.
Also it costs me 2,25€/100km to drive. With our current prices (~2€/litre) it's the equivalent of a car that does 1.1l/100km. I'm willing to spend the extra 30 minutes to drive back home when I'm saving 50€+.
You do you, but it doesn't tend to make you many friends. Then there's the old diddy of "to Assume is to make an Ass of U & Me".
If you haven't actually sampled a sufficiently diverse set of people's travel use cases, making statements such as yours is at best ill informed and disingenuous.
As for the diverse set of travel, the various DMVs and highway safety groups have done that for us. The average daily drive is under 40mi. When talking about core infrastructure here, assuming a daily drive of 40mi and basing the average charging infrastructure around would go a long way.
If EVs don't fit your life, then don't buy one. Though most people thing they drive much more often than they do, and fixate way to much on this once per week "fillup" charge idea when the daily partial charge is far more viable for the average driver.
EV is kinda limited to out and back trips. Which is a lot of the need (commuting), to be fair. Recharging on the go will always be worse compared to ICE.
With an EV car: 15 minutes to go to the bathroom and buy a coffee, done in parallel with the charge.
Time spent filling a gasoline car in your home city: 5 minutes 3x a month = 3 hours / year.
Time spent filling an EV at home: 5 seconds 3x a week = 3 minutes / year.
Do you practice it like you're at NASCAR or F1? How do you manage bathroom breaks? Bottles or catheters for everyone?
BEVs are fine for many people, but I don't think Toyota is wrong in their assessment. Requirements typically aren't set at the mean, they're set at the extreme. I know people who had to make emergency trips during COVID that wouldn't have been possible in a BEV. Hell, I went on a work trip with some colleagues the other day and we had to use my car, because my coworker's BEV wouldn't have made the distance back.
The reality is that a BEV isn't a one-to-one replacement for an ICEV, and ICEVs are still superior for the "non-average" use case. I'll think about getting a BEV if they're ever able to compete at Le Mans.
The US charging infrastructure is really bad outside of few major thoroughfares.
Secondly, You aren't saving hundreds when using fast charging; in many places you're doing roughly the same cost wise, for a worse experience [2]. Here's a reddit comparison from a year ago versus a hybrid, which came out to be more expensive [3]. It's fair to say that if you're just charging it at home and using it as a commuter, then yeah, you're coming out ahead on fuel costs, but as I mentioned above, you just can't do some things as well as a normal car, and sometimes that really matters.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0cK582iqnY [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-charging-costs-equal-fue... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/jrwet6/road_tr...
He's done a 1000km trip on almost a hundred different EVs in Norway. Very few have any major issues.
Double.
Not to mention, we haven’t had to increase the capacity of our electric grid in decades (and it’s still falling down regularly), yet getting everyone in EVs quickly would increase the average need by a fair bit.
I did the calculations some time ago, and it was about 43,000 GWh/y for CA (15m cars * .24 KWh/m * 12,000 annual miles). For reference CA has a yearly electricity generation capacity of just under 200k GWH/y.
But when I hear about the grid load, I have no pity. Or fear.
Imagine going back to 1800 and describing to an engineer the vast scale of gasoline production, distribution and consumption. Billions of ICEs distributed around the globe. The scale of fuel distribution! The network of trucks. The massive holding tanks. The inshore and offshore refineries. The pipelines and wells. The geopolitics. The strategic reserves, and prodigious tanker fleets. All because we need something everywhere that is only available in a few places.
We can send a rover to Mars for less cost than a prospecting well in the ocean, and there are lots of oil wells in the ocean. Trillions have been spent.
It seems unfathomable to go to such lengths from scratch. To invent and maintain so much, and for what? And we did.
Now imagine all that exists and you just want more. That's not unfathomable. It's just market dynamics. It'll double just fine thanks. It'll more than double.
But I'm going to miss the sweet petrol and diesel engine cars.
Sure. If you let the market operate. But at least in Sweden we don’t. So we’re stuck in this loop of conflicting requirements: “no greenhouse emissions, no nuclear, no wind farms close to my home, and double the capacity - thanks!” It’s not going to happen.
I agree, nothing technological blocks the grids from growing. But there are plenty of political and profit driven blocks which are preventing it.
To continue with my theme of CA power grid bashing - PG&E is still starting forest fires due to poor quality infrastructure (pushing too much power through lines not rated for it, causing sagging). PG&E does constant rolling blackouts over the summer because of their lacking capacity. PG&E imports about 20% of the electricity that CA requires yearly. They do this because it's cheaper than fixing their infrastructure.
And there's no reason they won't just continue in this fashion in the face of their 2035 electric car replacement deadline. They have a government-created monopoly, and have no reason to build out their capacity.
Rinse and repeat for most states and countries.
Fast chargers would require you to leave your shopping cart in the middle of Costco and run back to your car to unplug & move so you don't get idle fees :)
And I'm guessing you mean 20W, not kW? Fast chargers are 300W as a point of reference.
To avoid looking like more of an idiot, I went back and found the official DC Fast Charge levels and wattages (level 3 DC fast charge is up to 350kW, level 2 is up to around 18kW). Which, thankfully, didn't change my conclusions above, I was of a more sound mind when I did those calculations before.
But here they are again.
Level 2, at 18kW, would be around 157,680 kWh/y per charger at full utilization. (18*24*365)
Level 3 would max out at 3,065,000 kWh/y per charger; but it's much more likely to be intermittently used. (350*24*365)
Compare to these commercial building utilization numbers (the units are thousands of kWh/y): https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm...
Depending on the car's internal charger (1 or 3 phase) most charge from "towed to charger" empty to absolutely full in well under 10 hours.
Doing it like that is like trying to calculate how many fuel trucks would a gas station need if all its pumps were being run 24/7/365 at full blast. It'll never ever happen.
> it was about 43,000 GWh/y for CA (15m cars * .24 KWh/m * 12,000 annual miles). For reference CA has a yearly electricity generation capacity of just under 200k GWH/y.
But the numbers I posted that you're directly referring to are still important, as they indicate the need for improved electrical infrastructure for individual buildings who may want to put in chargers. Your grocery stores, apartments, motels, etc.
If just one 18kW charger can double demand on a motel's power, what happens when you add ten? Twenty?
But I said "Costco" on purpose, it's not a place you just drop in real quick and grab one thing. You're gonna be there for a while. Target is another good reference for US people. Maybe even Ikea.
And yes, it's kilowatts. They're not mobile phone chargers =) The Hyundai Ioniq 5 charges at 350kW, 800 volts.
Who's we? In China, generation has doubled in a decade. What a sad time to be alive if even existential failure isn't a strong enough motivator to get a developed country to pay for some infrastructure.
Here's CA, a state well known for its rolling brownouts throughout summer, as an example:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
This doesnt address the point that lots of people dont have access to this. Particularly in late cities.
All cities built around cars (and that’s almost every American city for instance) will have to change—either by arranging for bicycles and building public transport or through floods, fires, and hurricanes.
Since the wattage demands are relatively low, it would not be too difficult to have L2 charging available anywhere that residential parking exists. Unlike fast-charging, you wouldn't need a lot of expensive high-power infrastructure, and if the power utilities were smart they'd do it themselves.
They could put little parking-meter size boxes by the side of the road—tapped off of existing residential power infrastructure—with credit card tap to pay.
I don't think it would take that long to reach a large density of that type of inexpensive, overnight charge systems.
https://www.gm-volt.com/threads/plugging-into-outdoor-parkad...
I'm not sure what the max power output of those types of deployments are, but I've seen block heaters in Canada that pull as much as 1500 watts, so that's not insignificant.
California's building code requires all residential and commercial buildings have EV chargers starting on January 1, 2023.
The national electric vehicle infrastructure program (NEVI) has $7 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill passed last year and just approved the charging station construction plans for all 50 states. Within a few years we'll have "fast charge" stations for EVs every 50 miles along nearly every highway in the nation.
EVs already made up more than 10% of global new car sales this summer. Market demand will mean that apartment buildings and condos will start putting in outlets for EV charging on their own otherwise they'll not be able to attract tenants pretty soon.
I'd say by 2030 buying an EV would be a viable option for most. The people buying them now are usually early adopting Tesla fan-bois who are happy to pay through the nose to be a crash test dummy for self driving.
~700 mile range and ~30C charging rates are ridiculous bars to meet. EVs with ~200 mile range and ~2C charging rates work just fine right now for a lot of people.
The main issue right now with EV adoption is just the cost of batteries, and lack of a convenient way for people in apartments to charge.
There's already been projects to put in chargers on street lights, like this one https://lalights.lacity.org/connected-infrastructure/ev_stat... and this one https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/renewables/conv...
People just keep thinking that every car needs a 350kW fast charger on their parking spot, when a normal three phase plug would do just fine.
It's better for the battery to charge slowly anyway.
We’ve gone from “ubiquitous” to one spot on every block.
Obviously taken in totality it's a massive undertaking, but you could say the same thing about streetlamps, or roads, or basically any ubiquitous infrastructure.
Many places have started with 1-2 spots per neighborhood, which is prudent and scalable. As demand rises they should be able to keep pace with that demand without significant technical challenges.
You'd be aiming for short runs off of existing power infrastructure and you'd be scaling up over time. You also wouldn't be running these to every single place that a car _could_ park, just trying to get a critical mass of them near where people live.
Most people already have lots of copper cabling in their houses and most cars are parked overnight near to residential housing, so the additional copper used would only be some fraction of what is already in most homes.
Most of that is private property. They could probably treat it like a telephone pole, but it's not as simple as "just go install 400,000 chargers wherever their is street parking."
I was thinking more about street parking and parking lots, though, since that's an area with a the less immediately obvious solution.
I'm sure it differs between principalities, but in many places the city/government controls the area immediately beside the street and if they were onboard it would be feasible to install streetside chargers early everywhere.
Privately owned parking lots couldn't be forced to do so without legislation, but it's inexpensive and adding a few into the mix could add to their revenue streams.
Imagine you park your car and let either the car or the charger know you aren't moving the car for 2 or 3 days. It can use that knowledge to delay your charging until local demand is lower, or power is cheaper.
You don't need to charge at home. It's just the most convenient.
Not it's not, not unless you have IBM style massive cabinet hard drives. And they are not putting those in every home computer. Regular hard drives will barely give you enough disk space to store plaintext documents.
Sorry, you just sound like people that used to say things like "you'll never need more than 1 GiB of hard drive space." Things will evolve. It'll happen faster than you anticipate.
And no, you never ned 1GB of hard drive for anything that was done with computers at this time. Now we use computers for completly other things. I suppose on cars the usage will not change as far as with computers.
No, we're talking about batteries and charging. If you think battery tech is done evolving, wont shrink, and that "energy" and "power" are interchangeable concepts, then I don't think we can have a fruitful discussion.
> And no, you never ned 1GB of hard drive for anything that was done with computers at this time.
That was my point. Saying something wont happen based on what's happened so far is foolish.
I'm not sure how much of an issue that really is, though. Even if all cars are EVs, it's not like every single grocery store customer is going to fully charge their car every time they buy groceries.
Problem there is that the trend is towards home delivery and working from home.
It does not reach -17C any day of the year in much of the world.
Tesla cell chemistry is different (unless you get one of the new ones that use LFPs from CATL), but it's not an inherent problem with electric cars generally.
I manage a fleet of off-road vehicles at work, and just came back from a camp location we were operating out of a wood clearing with no mains. We pack in our own generators and fuel for these periods where we can't access the grid, which could be used for charging.
You can recharge from mains, or a diesel generator, or a gas generator. Maybe put a big diesel field generator and tank static in a temporary camp location and then work out of that location charging each night.
Have you got much experience running an off-road operation at distance?
I’ve literally personally driven a diesel tanker off-road through the Kenyan bush.
You probably know things that the person you are replying to doesn't and arguing is futile.
Nonetheless, electric isn't so great if you have to pack generators to make it work. It defeats the purpose, right?
My comment up there was from the perspective of a long distance motorcycle traveler. When I look around, I see cars that are already packed: children on parents' knees, one child in the back, and luggage on top. A generator and fuel wouldn't be trivial to add to this.
Above all, it means that fueling up becomes something you can only do where you stop. It's no longer a five minute break, but a constant logistical issue.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's a tough sell. Have you seen The Long Way Up? They attempt a Pan-American trip with electric bikes, and boy what a headache.
> There's no diesel in the bush either. So how do you refuel a diesel vehicle?
How does diesel get to where you need it to refuel except for being hauled around?
With electric you have options. Charge off mains at home base 90% of the time. Then maybe you go to a camp and run off a generator for a couple of days a month.
The generator runs at its peak efficiency RPM at all times, car engines do not. Combine that with the 90%+ efficiency of an electric motor and you're good.
They've all shown that trucks are one of the easier parts of fully transitioning to EV.
The future is bright. And electric, apparently.
They are more complex, you have two drivetrains.
They are heavier, you have two drivetrains.
They are not as nice to drive compared to any pure EV.
You have to put gaz into them.
You may look stupid in your neighbourhood too. Not everyone buy a car for the social status but buying a more expensive fossil car today is not cool. At least in Norwegian urban areas.
But yes you save a few minutes if your long trim at the cost of losing a few minutes every time you fuel it.
The average commute is like 40 miles a day. Go somewhere and recharge once a week while you have a coffee.
Some claim it’s impossible to add such outlets to parking everywhere, but I’ve noticed some wintery towns already do this- for block heaters!
Once EVs are in a clear majority, gas station network will start shutting down, as it is no longer a profitable business. Without easy refueling, old ICE cars will become almost useless for most purposes, and that 80% will start looking more like 100%.
I guess a wildcard would be making the vehicle lighter.
and that's i'm worried that it's going to be part of a hype to symbolically buy them, wasting the materials to create solar panels even further, only for them to stand in a garage or otherwise well-protected from the sun by the buildings around
The Porsche Taycan only gets 2 miles per kWh. The Tesla Model 3 gets 5 miles per kWh. The Aptera gets 10 miles per kWh.
Maybe 20-40 is too optimistic. But even at 10-20 a day that's going to cover a significant amount of usage. It will cut down the fast charging needed from once a week to once a month or so. That's a significant convenience improvement.
Most cars won't gain anywhere near 20-40 miles per day from solar, though, they're simply not efficient enough. Get the consumption down, and the same amount of panels can accomplish a lot more.
And, most folks who live in awkward parking situations are also near the city where their commute needs are very short. Folks out in the country who need to drive farther, generally have their own parking and can do plug-in charging. (Probably also supplied by solar.)
The part I'm curious about is how will militaries manage the change?
It's clear fuel isn't going to disappear but will the military or the government end up refining their own petrol for cost reasons or will they just end up shipping around batteries as if they were fuel.
However: EVs don't fix the problems inherent with high rates of individual car ownership in high population density areas, or with low occupancy vehicle, short distance travel.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36302930/tesla-model-s-lo...
The only smart use I've seen of that was my old Prius that ran a fan using the panel on the roof if it noticed the indoor temp was higher than outdoor. Kept the car cool-ish when parking during the summer.
Do you have a gas station at home?
https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/los-angeles-100-percent-renewa...
https://ceo.lacounty.gov/2021/12/07/sustainability/staying-p...
Maybe Californians will be riding horses in the next 10 years ;)
In other words, shift the demand from the 4-9PM slot that is the hot spot.
For what this doesn't cover, this is not rocket science. We will build the capacity. It's just wires and generators.
I work at an engineering firm that is heavily involved in these efforts in SoCal, and this is probably boring to say (without details) but the storage component is fascinating. Not my sector, though, so I won’t/can’t elaborate (I do work in sustainable transportation planning, though).
Wind farms generate the most power at night, so that'll continue to work. If solar becomes dominant, then they'll make it cheaper to use electricity when the sun's still up, and we'll stop delaying charges until after sunset.
It's going to take decades to fully transition to electric vehicles, plenty of time to build all the renewables needed, all the storage needed for time shifting, and all the smarts needed for cars to participate in the smart grid.
That aside, there are a variety of electricity storage mechanisms that have been becoming more and more efficient, like normal batteries, hydrogen electrolysis, and pumped water. With some clever engineering, solar power works at night.
I wish California would keep their nuclear plants open, but the loss of them is not an impediment for electric vehicles.
This is in addition to, if the battery is plugged in at home with solar panels, the home can self-smooth and do a lot of this locally, giving the grid the net in/out it desires from the house based on sum of: battery, appliances, solar as a whole unit.
^ not intended but I'll leave that in there