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> In urban areas, most people park on the streets

If you look at Paris or Montréal, they have L2 chargers on the streets. Easy solution for that problem, they’re just 240v/32A stations, you don’t need fancy hardware for that.

> That’s setting aside the problem than many power grids can’t handle that many cars plugged in at once.

People overestimate how much they drive, on average you’re not going to see a load that big, 13500 miles a year is 36 miles a day, or 9kwh in an efficient car, 18kwh in a bloated F-150 lightning. We might need financial incentives to charge cars at different times, sure.

I get by fine with 240v/20a charging (16a in reality).

Street charging, leveraging things like existing utility lines to street lights, isn't a huge lift. The individual chargers can balance the current they deliver among themselves if / when they share a common feed.

Similarly in large parking lots where people spend lots of time, you can put "low power" DC charging so people can charge while they're shopping.

The key to thinking about EV charging vs petrol charging is that you can and should do it without locking the operator to the vehicle -- plug in and walk away should be the expected interaction. DC fast charging like using petrol is useful in a very specific use case (long distance travel) but the requirement of "dump a gas tank of energy into an EV" is actually absurdly complex and requires huge power infrastructure. Around where I live many of the tesla superchargers have a natural gas fuel cell electric generator right next to them.

Remember: for L2 charging the charger is part of the car. The thing with the cord is mostly just a fancy on/off switch.

Wouldn’t the time-of-day effect be amplified with enough EVs? Everyone arrives home at 6pm after work and plugs in.

My EV (and presumably most others) has settings so that it charges uses cheaper off-peak power. I tell it to make sure it's fully charged and preheated and ready to go at 7AM. So when it gets plugged in a 6PM it doesn't start charging until after midnight.

If evening peak loads become an issue then power companies can incentivise people to use less by raising the price at peak, and/or lowering it at off-peak times. And the software in the car can schedule charging to take advantage of cheaper prices. For example, you might plug in at 6pm, but the car will know to not start the charge until after 10pm, for example, or whenever power becomes cheaper.

Many EVs already allow for timing / delays for charging when plugged in. Also, charging at work should help balance out solar generation, especially.

> It seems like we’re massively ignoring the infrastructure problems of mass electrification.

In the US, the number of public chargers more than doubled in 2022. New Solar added set a record. Wind generation continue to be added. Power companies continue to add new distribution lines. The White House put forward $25 Billion in federal funds for EV batteries, chargers, and related items.

In contrast, I think it's going to get really interesting when a tipping point is reached.

At some point, EVs will replace enough of the automobile population that gasoline sales decline below profitability for most petrol stations.

While the ordinary thought is that this will happen gradually, it seems more likely to resemble the dynamics of an animal population that suddenly has insufficient food (whether by over-breeding or a food supply shortage). This dynamics is not that if the population is 110% of the food supply that 10% die off, it is more like a crash where 90% die off in such a situation; the starvation is evenly distributed so almost no one gets enough to survive.

So, when petrol stations have a great crash and mostly die off, suddenly the range anxiety will be pervasive in the petrol-powerd drivers. Which will make them want to get out even more, etc.

There's probably solutions to this, but will it be managed in time? Petrol-station subsidies seem like a bad idea...

Right now gas stations operate in a cutthroat industry. The price is mounted on big signs visible from the street, and people will irrationally drive across town to save 10 cents per gallon.

Once 90% of gas stations go away, that dynamic will be gone. Few gas stations mean there won't be the same level of price competition, so they'll be able to survive on much less volume. And there will be always be some demand for gasoline from classic cars, et cetera.

IIRC I've read that gas stations don't make much on gas sales but mostly on other items you buy. If so, the dynamic may be different from the population model.

What's the likelihood that gas stations change to offering charging also/instead?

I expect the survivors will do that, but then charging also requires more spaces to sell the same energy/hour, with an average charge taking what 30min, vs 6 min to fill a petrol tank?

The main difference is that with electric vehicles you can mostly charge at home. The only time you need a station is on a long trip. So much less demand on these than gas stations.

One of my thoughts is yes there is an issue with people that have to park on the street. A few random thoughts on that.

Urban drivers drive about half the miles/year than suburban ones. Probably 6000 vs 12500. And being an average some of them drive a lot less than that. I had a car in SF that I was putting 3000 miles/year on. If it was electric it's only use a batteries worth of power every month.

Given the duck curve and oversupply of solar during the day (oversupply == cheap) we should be installing chargers in employee parking lots. It's possible urban commuters could totally get by with charging at work. And it's probably cheaper and logistically simpler to install chargers there than on random street where cars park at night. Not to mention eventually power in the evening and night time is going to cost more than during the day.

Basically I think we still have a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to electrified transport.

A non-trivial number of EV owners at my office get by without charging at home. Easier with a Tesla + Superchargers nearby (as a backup), but non-Tesla drivers do get by.

> areas, most people park on the streets or in shared garages that have maybe 2 chargers for 100+ cars

Just install chargers. It’s fine. You can have one in every spot in a parking garage. My apartment building in SF did this. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more incidental installs in street parking areas as well.

Depends on the building, the size and construction of the parking garage, and the amount of power that it is set up to draw. This can be easy or extremely expensive depending on the circumstances.

The building owners will install ones if there is enough incentive, as in, they losing out to buildings with charging infrastructure. Can you imagine a building that can’t run power cables to every single room?

I have long wondered why battery swapping is a no-go. Just like with a propane tank (e.g. for backyard grilling) I just take the empty to a store and swap it for a full. I don’t wait for them to fill it.

My guess is that for engineering reasons this is a no-go because the carmaker needs to be able to cram battery into odd nooks and crannies of the car, so it isn’t practical to make them interchangeable. I did once hear of an idea to have ships use electric while in port, and have swappable batteries for this - but on a ship space is hardly a limiting factor.

I know nothing about this though.

There's at least one automaker (Nio) with battery swaps as part of their regularly offered services.

There are a number of reasons why battery swapping is not feasible in the real world, among them: - Batteries age differently from one another, so swapping would only be fair if you had a similarly aged battery that had a similar number of miles & charge cycles on it - Batteries need to be taken care of (like not using the last 10% at each limit of the battery). some people take really good care of their batteries, others don't. I would never want some random battery swapped into my car, as I've taken really good care of my car's battery - Batteries are structurally built into the vehicle, and making them easily removable would make a lot of the engineering more difficult - Batteries could become commoditized so that they fit in any car, but right now there are tons of different shaped & sized batteries, so it would be really hard to build the tooling to support all these different cars & battery types

The weight is crazy (Model 3 long range is ~1000lbs), so you need a serious facility to swap.

They are relatively delicate, and flammable in a terrifying way, so you'd need to trust the facility more than e.g. your average oil & tire swap shop.

From an engineering POV they need a coolant loop w/ a pump, a high voltage connect to the charger, and usually also a connection to a DC-DC converter for the 12v systems on the car. So if you make it modular/removable, you need a (standardized) answer for how to do all of this.

The form factor of the battery is tied fairly strongly to the chassis generally, so if you force a standardization of it you limit manufacturer's options there.

Finally, probably the most important, is ownership model. The battery is the most expensive part in the car, by far. It basically is the car. Who owns it? What's the revenue model? How does insurance handle it? Will consumers accept a situation where they're getting random batteries shoved in affecting the performance etc. of their car?

It's just a whole thing. It's been attempted, and not succeeded is what I see.

Now, what I don't understand is why this isn't the model for EV shipping trucks. In that case they already have a highly modular, heavy duty platform and they already have to check into frequent weigh stations, and the operator rarely owns the truck. I don't understand why the shipping industry wouldn't pursue a model where a standardized set of pre-charged batteries aren't sitting on automated forklifts at weigh stations ready for swap during weigh-ins, with the fleet owners paying a fee for that maintenance...

The mechanical issues appear to me to be legitimate stumbling blocks.

The ownership model is surmountable. Make the battery a service. I pay $xxx/month or $xxx/mile to Battery Exchange Corp. which replaces my battery each time I “fuel up”. Maybe I do this routinely, or maybe I typically charge at home and do an exchange only when on long road trips.

As far as performance etc, surely the battery can track its health the way an iPhone measures battery health. Have specs for what a good battery is. But if Battery Exchange Corp. owns the battery, who cares? Corp. cares but it can figure this out, and maybe go after customers who destroy batteries (however this happens.)

A typical car owner is interested in transportation. He’s not interested in owning a battery and he’s certainly not interested in sitting around for half an hour waiting for a battery to charge during a road trip.

I’m not saying battery exchange would work, I just don’t think the ownership model is a difficult aspect of it.

Battery [edit changing to swapping]swapping is never going to work while people own the car and the battery. There will always be incentive to keep a battery that's healthy and dump a wonky battery back into the swapping pool.

I've got a natural gas grill with a $20 tank. The tanks all have a "do not refill past this date" stamp on them to keep people from using 30 year old rusty tanks. New tanks typically have a stamp that's 10 or more years in the future.

Some places swap the tanks rather than filling them. Whenever I took my tank to a "swap" place, the end-date is always closer to now than the one I gave them, to the point where you may start with a tank that's good to 2035 and if you swap it 8 times (over the course of 2 years) they'll refuse to take it because it will have expired.

> a natural gas grill with a $20 tank

A natural gas grill with a tank? I don't think I've ever seen one. Are you sure its not propane?

sorry yes -- propane. I guess natural gas is (mostly) methane? Bottle of compressed flammable gas.

Yeah, bottling useful amounts of natural gas requires very high pressures or cryogenic storage facilities which require much more expensive bottles. They're pretty rare to see used for something like a grill.

Meanwhile the phase change of propane from gas to liquid is a much lower pressure so its way easier to handle with far cheaper bottles.

A battery is practically the wear component of an EV drive train.

Imagine if every time you got gas it also quickly swapped out your transmission and engine with someone else's who may or may not have abused the hell out of that drivetrain previously. You buy a new EV, you go do a battery swap, the battery you got dies in a month. Who replaces the battery?

There's some talk about making battery leasing programs which could potentially be tied to battery swap stations, but I don't think I'd ever tie my refueling strategy to a $10k+ lease.

Battery swapping is just very impractical when we can just recharge them. One of the big positives of battery swapping is reducing the load on the grid for those extremely high power draws in fast recharging, but if we just build up batteries at the charging site it can help smooth those demands out more evenly making it easier for the grid to handle in the same way. Either way you're going to need a cache of batteries extra on site at the charging site.

Yes I rented a Tesla recently in Ontario and I didn’t realize it takes 6h for a full charge, I also didn’t had a charger in the hotel neither did I have a nearby.

Basically had to Uber while charging…

> In urban areas, most people park on the streets

Isn’t this the main problem? People parkig on the streets simply cannot buy EVs cause charging would be a royal hassle for them

This is my main rub, I live in one of these situations (like I'm sure a huge percentage of Americans do), and there's zero way I could own an EV. Are we all supposed to run the charging plug across the sidewalk? We've had kids mess with cars previously, undeterred by security cameras, so now we have to worry about them unplugging our cars in the middle of the night too?

I'm strongly in support of alternatives to ICE cars, but the idea of auto makers being able to sell only EVs in America by 2030 or whatever is an absolute farce.

I know people who live like you do with EVs and they have zero problem. Either they can charge at work or they charge when they're parked while out shopping or similar or, worst case scenario, they just have to drive down the road to the nearest super charger and just sit there 15-25 minutes watching YouTube while their car charges.

I think there is probably some selection bias here, you know people in those situations that don't have any problems because they wouldn't have bought those cars if they would have problems. But I don't want to make any assumptions about the people you know, some people are also just less bothered by these things or care enough about driving an EV that they take it in stride.

I'm sure that when you want 100% of car owners to switch to EVs there are those that will run into issues. Like people that work from home and can't charge at an office, or when there's no charging spot available when they're out shopping and they really don't have time this week to go charge their car somewhere. Not to mention the fact that charging at home is likely a lot cheaper than charging from public infrastructure (I don't own an EV so I don't actually know how the prices compare)

I'm not saying that these are insurmountable problems, or that some of them won't get solved along the way (like if we end up getting a surplus of chargers at public parking spots), but there are some genuine disadvantages to owning an EV when compared to an ICE.

I personally wouldn't want to buy an EV until I have my own driveway and can charge my car at home, but with current housing prices (and EV prices) I don't see this happening for a while.

Most EVs have locked charging ports, so they can’t disconnect it without unlocking the car. However, they could just cut the wire for laughs, although the result of that might be shocking.

Where I live, street parking is rife with catalytic converter theft and gas siphoning (they drill a hole in your tank).

2030 is the date for some European countries, but in the USA 2035 is the date being set by some states.

You could add charging poles on the street.

Definitely.

I just bought an EV (Model Y) because I needed a new car (I would have waited longer if I could have), and I live in an apartment that doesn't have chargers. I work from home, so I don't have a commute, so it's not a deal breaker, but it's definitely not ideal. I live in Austin, which has a network of public chargers that you can use for only 4$ a month, so that helps, but still not ideal. With my ICE car, I can run it until the gas light goes on, and even then I know I can drive for 20 miles without worries, because there's invariably a gas station within < 5 miles away. With the EV right now, that's not the case. There are slow chargers nearby, but fast chargers are about 7 miles away.

In my situation, my worst case is that I have to go to a supercharger about once a week. I did this for the first time recently, another gripe I have is that the range I get out of the car (Model Y LR) is a lot lower than what I expected to get (~200 miles vs 330). At current gas prices, it's actually MORE expensive to charge the Tesla at a supercharger (0.38$/kWH @ 74KW capacity / 200 miles = 0.14$ a mile, than it was to fill up my Elantra at a gas station (3.50$ per gallon at 30MPG = 0.11$). If I lived in a house, obviously I would save a lot more money, since electricity prices are only like 0.11$/kWH I think.

It's an interesting problem. In dense urban environments, the infrastructure has a long way to go. However, I think this is probably the minority, since most people live in the suburbs or smaller cities in America. In those cases, they can simply charge at home, and they might have to visit a supercharger on road trips or odd cases. Therefore the demand for charging will be lower than it would be for gas cars.

Street charging at 10-30a wouldn't require much more infrastructure than existing street lights; most cars are parked on the street for hours at a time (depending on if parking near where the owner lives / works or "just visiting"). An hour at 16a / 240v is 10-15 miles of added range.

An AC charger is basically just a smart extension cord. A public AC charger is a smart extension cord plus a payment terminal or 3g backhaul to payment APIs and maybe power balancing (draw 30a if nothing else is charging; draw 5a if every other charger on the circuit is also charging). You could have a street with 20 of these things and it'd draw the same power as a normal house (IE it's not big infrastructure).

It wouldn't be perfect, but it's certainly possible.

The key to thinking about charging EVs is you can do it without the person attending to the process. Plug car in; walk away.

5-10x as many chargers doesn’t seem unreasonable if there are 5-10x as many EVs