Germany Will Force 80% of Gas Stations to Install EV Charging, Too
reuters.com
reuters.com
People who come to gas stations to fuel up their cars behave very differently from people who come to a place to charge, no?
What I'd like to see more of is comforts -- I want a comfy place to sit and relax for a bit or a park trail to walk around. I hate when I pull into a charger and it's just a parking lot. Not stimulating at all. Nothing to do but sit there. If I'm not using the gas station amenities it's not much better than an empty parking lot.
I feel like gas stations have this "grind" / roadtrip mentality whereas I kind of want a relaxing, decompression space to charge my car. So maybe you're right...
Range is the one thing that is preventing me from looking at EVs at the moment. I own a car but I don't actually drive much in the city since I work from home and use grocery delivery services since I hate grocery shopping. When I tend to drive most it's because I'm going a long distance: 8 to 10 hour road trips up north etc. The idea of adding hours to such a trip, or turning it into an overnight trip, makes it a non-starter for me.
I bring this up because the article specifically talks about about gas stations along the Autobahn. I've never been to Germany, let alone driven on the Autobahn, so maybe it is used quite frequently for shorter trips. But speaking of freeways in general, especially here in North America, I wonder if this is another reason that looking to gas stations along a freeway is a misguided "target." If people are using EVs on freeways, wouldn't they be more inclined to exit the freeway into a city and charge at a motel or a shopping centre while they stop overnight or at least a few hours?
Yes you're right on the money.
I bought an EV to drive around my home area in CA. Instead I've just used it for road-tripping back East to see family.
Each road-trip has convinced me how bad these cars are for long-range driving. Aside from "range anxiety" (going only from one supercharger location to another, and not venturing away) - the charging times are brutal for cross-country trips.
You will spend hours per day, hours, sitting in back of Holiday Inn Expresses in the middle of nowhere Kansas, or in back of a shady truck stop in the middle of Texas.
Safety as well: I've thought about if I were a female for example at some of these locations it wouldn't be safe to be alone, with nobody around, sitting in your car. You're unable to start it and drive away if it's plugged in, not without getting out to unplug it which you have to do manually (there's no emergency eject charger cable button). So if there is a Texas Chainsaw Killer outside your window you're screwed.
Having said all that. It is a perfect car for just driving around my neighborhood IF that's what I intended to. In practice, I never do it.
Being a young family, we had to stop more frequently and for longer for bathroom breaks etc than it took to charge.
Hopefully you get a NACS adapter and a proper experience soon.
For example, here's a 7+ hour drive from Calgary to a campground in the middle of Saskatchewan: https://i.imgur.com/GTeNnYa.png (the 5.4 hour charge is us charging up using the RV hookup at the campground)
We stopped for about an hour total. If you are a "roadtripper" -- that is, no stopping, just getting to the destination, then sure, you have a point. That's 1 hour where you could have been at your destination. From my perspective, I took that time to get lunch and stretch my legs and use the washroom... mental health stuff.
For rural, yeah you gotta make do with what's already there. Gas-stations fit the bill.
I don't have any better ideas, mind you; maybe small local parks should have to have charging infra if they have parking spots. Great place for the family to just get out of the car and stretch their legs for a while.
Second, a 20-minute stop is much longer than pit stops I make. It takes 3 minutes to fill my gas tank, and then I can go for another 400 miles. I might add another 4 minutes to use the bathroom, but I never stick around for 20 minutes.
I can imagine in the future there might be plentiful supply of super-fast chargers that can add 400 miles in 5-10 minutes. But today, the much more common experience is to add 250 miles in 20-30 minutes, which is a far, far slower rate. Until things change, EV advocates aren't helping their cause by claiming that charging doesn't take much longer than pumping gas. You might be correct that "by the time I'm done with that, the car is ready to make it to the next charger", but who wants to stop at every charger? I don't gas up my car enough to make it to the next gas station — I fill up the tank so I can make it to my destination.
For the record, I own a PHEV and like it. But I don't have an full EV because it introduces too much uncertainty for road trips, and because electricity is subject to outages where I live (norcal).
Don't do this. It's extremely bad for your health, and it also results in degraded and more dangerous driving quality. The worst thing is you probably don't realize it. Unless you're a professional driver, you should take a break every 2-3 hours for at least 15 minutes (which is coincidentally about what charging requires.)
Besides, chargers are usually really far from the actual building so you gotta add another couple mins just walking to/from your car :)
If we need to offer more efficiency beyond that, improving rail transportation is probably more realistic than EV infrastructure.
I'm not even arguing that I hardly ever do or want to have longer stops at gas stations. Restrooms only when it's urgent (so maybe once per 5h drive), food only when needed (overpriced and not good). So I'm the 90% "stop, fill tank, go pay, drive off" person, so if I had an EV this would be.. mostly as unpractical as everywhere else.
If you need to charge on the road then most rest-stops and fast food restaurants along the main roads have charging stations installed.
That's why I specified the middle of nowhere ones as the "interesting" ones. The mall one, like Norway, was explicitly stated.
US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.png
Norway: https://popdensitymap.ucoz.ru/news/174_population_density_ad...
Germany: https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/624149000030978048/g...
Europe: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/these-maps-reveal-truth-a...
[0] Play around, you'll find constant 8hr+ drives between "major" cities. Cities which aren't very large, especially in middle America https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dallas/Las+Cruces,+NM/@32.24...
EV: 30-45 minutes
Human attention span: a few tiktok videos
You be the judge. It is literally an order of magnitude longer than filling up with gas (this is actually why some car companies have pursued hydrogen which is also 3-5 minutes).
No need to drive to a gas station, pay, and watch something flammable for several minutes. Just plug in and go to sleep. Different technologies simply have different trade offs.
Waiting 45 minutes at a charger is also really inefficient. At 350kW a 100kWh car would fully charging in 17 minutes but unfortunately things really slow down above 80% charge, optimum is closer to 10-50%. This makes longer stops wasteful unless you happen to want to stop for something else.
Optimizing for speed it’s ~10 minute stops and fully charging at night thus skipping multiple fueling stops.
On longer trips the pay/pump/bathroom/grab a soda/hit the road cycle is probably 15 minutes. I expect many businesses focusing on capturing revenue from the captive audience of people waiting 20-30 minutes for their cars to charge.
However, this goes away if we end up with in road charging.
In-road charging would render this article moot, together with the discussion about it.
I do know people who try and minimize such stops. They got an extra gas tank and use a piss bottle etc but businesses optimize for the general population not extreme outliers.
Honestly, seems like you have a bias. If you're timing yourself you're biasing yourself to be faster. So incorporate higher variance into your model and assume you're on the lower end of at least that 1std deviation.
And again, I'm considering a long trip as multi-day 8hr+ driving. Your legs just don't last that long. First day is usually fine. Second if you're seasoned. Beyond that is where it gets real hard.
EV chargers have the benefits of being cheap, take little space, and permitting is raesonably simple. Expecting them to be way more widespread than fuel stations ever can be.
(Side note, I actually wish EV charging stations tried to be less like gas stations)
Unlike an ICE, you want to keep your car between like 10% and 70% while road-tripping for charging efficiency.
There are times I'd stop for 30+ minutes but typically I'd go find a place to eat or take a walk at those stops.
Average gas station stop looks to be ~8 minutes. Tesla superchargers can do up to 200 miles in 15 minutes. So 100 miles of range in the same timeframe. And the charging technology is still in the middle of constant improvement.
> Average gas station stop looks to be ~8 minutes. Tesla superchargers can do up to 200 miles in 15 minutes. So 100 miles of range in the same timeframe.
But if you make a long trip, just doing ~8 minute, 100 mile charge stops, you'll be stopping about every 100 miles to charge. On a 1000 mile trip that's 80 minutes at charging stations.
With an ICE that ~8 minute gas station stop would have filled the tank, giving 500+ miles of range. On a 1000 mile trip that's 16 minutes at gas stations.
A gas station pump can pump 10 or more gallons per minute. (They are limited to 10 by regulation in the US, but I've heard that Europe allows more than that).
If a car got 25 miles/gallon, which even a big SUV can do on highways, recharging at a gas station gives you 15000 miles/hour.
Something smaller that gets 40 miles/gallon highway recharges at 24000 miles/gallon.
Even driving some giant truck or SUV in a city where you might only get 10 miles/gallon would recharge at 6000 miles/hour.
No matter how you slice it then the time actually taken to put a given number of miles into the vehicle is at least an order of magnitude more for an EV with current charging technology unless you driving a huge ICE in city conditions or you are at a very badly maintained gas pump. (And even then gas will be several times faster).
If the other things you do at a charging stop, such as paying, using the restroom, getting snacks, checking the tires, cleaning the windshield, stretching, etc., take long enough and can be done sufficiently parallel to the actual charging the impact of EV charging being an order of magnitude slower might be lessened or even eliminated.
On a long trip where you are going most of your vehicle's range between stops that very will might be the case. If I've been driving 3 or 4 hours I certainly want to stretch and walk around a bit before resuming.
But when I'm just out and about doing normal daily stuff and see that gas is getting low, I just pay at the pump with Apple Pay, fill it up, and leave. The total time at the station is rarely more than a minute more than the pumping time.
Chargers in the parking lots of supermarkets would make much more sense. And indeed that is already where the chargers are to be found. This is a case of the market outsmarting the stupid bureaucrats.
This effort is better spent on a carbon tax that directly funds rebates for electric vehicles and charger installations.
EV chargers belong in safe, bright areas as you sit in your car or somewhere else for 20-30 minutes. A gas station parking lot is not clean and safe, in Germany or elsewhere.
I can't believe McDonald's hasn't realized the huge potential here. They have the real estate, they have the safety and could get a ton of customers eating out of pure boredom.
They'd end up with half the neighborhood using up all the parking space (which is really expensive in urban areas) to charge their EVs for hours, buying nothing at all at worst or a cheeseburger at best.
- Those in the city centers which mostly offer no parking space at all.
- Those which are so far outside the urban area that parking is no problem anyway.
Gas and Service Stations have their own category as they are a significant target for crime. Unlocked vehicles, stores open at night, cash on site, etc.
Here is an advisory by the Florida Sherriff's on how to deal with gas stations: https://www.flsheriffs.org/uploads/docs/How_to_Prevent_Gas_S...
CCTV prevents no crime, it exists for insurance purposes.
But hey, TALK TO WOMEN, you will learn a lot. Safety/Risk is a totally different perception and issue across gender lines. Just like why humanity agreed on separating bathrooms in the first place.
Gas stations are typically more dangerous because there's far more foot traffic in close proximity, and it's more socially acceptable and expected at night at a gas station than at a McDonald's (which tend to close lobbies at night).
I feel like this makes more sense for a big box store, you know, a place where you would naturally park your car for a time anyway, not a place you tend to try to get in and out of relatively quickly - or often never leaving your car at all.
That said, there are big picture infrastructure considerations (Eg, load on the grid at differing times of day). If the convention moves to charging at destinations (eg work, stores), that could see the power needs once met by gasoline now being offloaded onto the grid during day hours, and that's likely not ideal vs charging overnight.
While some gas stations may be in badly lit areas, a lot of gas stations are in pretty well-lit and well trafficked areas.
In addition, with pay at the pump and the speed of filling a car, you can basically tap your credit card, fill up your car, and be out of there in 2-3 minutes. Even a minute’s with of pumped gas will probably give you a 100 mile range.
And if you have kids, in the car, maybe sleeping, they can remain in the car while you pump gas.
An EV charge will take at least 15 minutes minimum maybe more. You likely have to go find somewhere nearby where you can sit and wait for your car to charge.
I’ve seen multiple MacDonald’s already in the Netherlands and Germany with one or two charging spots. My guess is that they are measuring return on investment and will go for it once the return looks good. Same for Shell. They also have a few chargers at various locations.
However, oil companies that should be protecting their moat and putting plugs at every freaking station, especially the rest stops and stations that have coffee bars or places where people socialize.
The electricity prices still beats nearly $10/gallon petrol, and one friendly Airbnb let us charge on their property’s solar+battery installation, making their power half the market price.
As far as I know, (higher) fuel taxes are more effective, much more fair, create better incentives and have more scientific evidence backing them up than this, but I may be missing something.
Advantage is through the coupled mechanism. There's a chicken and egg problem for consumers of EVs. People are less likely to buy EVs because there aren't many charging ports so they take on extra risk and cost while betting that the future will allow them to regain similar conditions to their ICE vehicle. Filling stations are also at a similar risk investment situation as they don't want to build charging stations when there aren't enough EVs on the road to justify their costs.
So consumers and filling stations are stuck in a Nash Equilibrium because neither wants to take on the market bet. Both will actually suffer losses for moving first and realistically will not receive rewards for investing early (i.e. there is little to no opportunity cost). So Germany is shifting the risk away from the consumer.
But this is just a guess and I'm sure there are naive aspects about it. But it is also naive to just assume that everything can be solved with taxes and incentives. Though I hope this policy has some aspect that creates opportunity costs for not installing charging stations (i.e. gov will subsidize stations installing them at a decreasing rate)
One issue the German state is trying to solve is that even charging stations that aren't economically profitable can be valuable to the overall system. Something along the lines of "you barely ever need that charger, but having it available solves range problems that would otherwise prevent you from getting an EV".
It's about the order of operations.
Ubiquitous fast charging infrastructure makes it much easier for people to make the switch to EVs, especially for people who don't have the ability to charge at their homes.
Lacking that, increasing gasoline taxes will just anger people who don't have access to a practical electric fueling option.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is just the place where they are not needed, except perhaps on the Autobahn.
When you stop to fill your car with melted dinosaurs, the time is so short you can just wait for it to complete. If it's crowded you can even wait for one or two people to finish so you can start filling -- the overall time is not terrible. OTOH, it takes longer to charge your car with electrons, so you want to overlap it with an errand or excursion you'd make anyway.
The Tankstelle on the Autobahn often have a cafe, sometimes a playground, so you could make an actual stop on a trip. But usually when you are running errands you don't want to be stuck in some random location for an extended period.
Otherwise, L3 is for road trips, especially if it's coming out of my pocket. And partly because one of the reasons we bought our second electric car is because you don't have to go out of your way to a special place just to keep the thing running.
2. I've not seen free charging at places like HD. What I have seen are Level 2 chargers at Safeway grocery stores that are subsidized by the advertising on the giant-ass (a meter tall?) screen. Advertise all you want on that screen, I'm in the store not seeing it. Other places you'll swipe a credit card or summat.
But if you have access to home charging and don't drive a lot, you'll rarely ever use a charging station. But when you need access, e.g. on a memorial day road trip, the L3 chargers you find will be swamped while the L2 chargers are too slow.
EV is partially sold as not having to go to convenience stores/gas stations to recharge.
When you do charge, you'll be stuck at the charger area for ~20-30 minutes, so colocating them with restaurants and other things to do during that wait would be useful. You definitely can't structure them as drive through and out like a gas pump.
For example, in Alameda California I pay:
* 15.17 cents per kWH during off-peak times (nights and weekends)
* 50 cents per kWH during peak times (5pm-9pm)
The Supercharger down the road charges:
* 51 cents per kWH from 12pm-11pm (the time you're most likely to use it)
* 41 cents per kWH from 11pm-4am
* 32 cents per kWH from 4am-12pm
No one is going to leave their car at a Supercharger overnight though. So more realistically you're paying over 3x the cost if you use public Superchargers.
My Model Y has a 75kWH battery so its about ~$11 to charge it from zero to full at home vs about ~$38 at a Supercharger during the day.
The Bolt will be cheaper per mile if G/E > 9.4, where G = price of gas in $/g, and E = price of electricity in $/kWh
I looked at average gas prices and residential electrical rates in all 50 US stats plus DC, and in all of them G/E > 9.4.
This comment has a table showing G and E for all states and DC at the time [1].
Maybe it is better to judge how many miles a dollar gets you? 8 miles per dollar for the Model Y vs 4.3 miles per dollar for the Q5.
If you charge at home during off-peak hours, like most people do, the numbers get a ton better.
The original (and HN) article title is clickbaity. This isn't a "will". It's not a law yet.
To recoup the money would they be allowed to up-charge for it? "I was forced to install this, I am getting my money back in 2 years..." kind of an idea.
Hell, Tesla got rightful praise for creating a decent charger network, when a state takes steps to make it happen it is a bad idea all of a sudden...
Of course. However, if they can make money they'd already be installing them and there would be no need for the legislation. So, perhaps, if they are allowed to charge extra to recoup the cost, or perhaps the government would give out some credit or tax reduction plan, it might work.
ev charging takes longer, the design of a gas station doesn't fit the time you'd need for EVs. and most gas stations are probably too small too incorporate enough charge ports to make their inner traffic easy imo
Other than that, sounds great!
(2) The electricity grid.
I do hope they don't force it on gas stations. Make it voluntary and give them subsidies instead.
2. No
they shut down their nuke plants and the nordstream pipelines were destroyed by Biden (an act of war btw, but somehow Russia's their enemy and we're their ally)
I think about the gas stations nearby here, and there's no room on their small footprint for two cars to park for any length of time without everything getting much more difficult for everyone else trying to use the station. If they could remove half the pumps it would free up space to park several cars to charge, but that also seems impractical and overreaching.
I'd love to just eliminate gas stations entirely and replace them with charging stations and a nice little park to sit and eat lunch in, but when you have these cramped situations on these tiny footprints, it just doesn't seem like it's the most optimal place to charge.
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Interestingly, earlier this year, Tesla dragged Tank & Rest, a large gas station corporation in Germany, to court over its monopoly over service stations along the Autobahn, as the company has the right to decide where chargers can be installed. Tesla feels that it should be allowed to install Superchargers where they're most needed. With this new law, Tank & Rest may be pressured into working with Tesla to save on installation costs for mandated chargers.
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The actual Reuters article has even less information though:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/germany-launch-mass...
Put another way, the GP comment is a pretty damning comment about the failure of lawmakers to pass laws modernizing the electric grid. It doesn't really matter much if the fuel used to produce all of this electric energy happens to be worse and more destructive to the environment than gasoline.
When people refuse to have intellectually honest conversations about this, it dramatically undermines the stated objective and gives detractors legitimate evidence of bad faith dialog.
Improving the grid's mix is also very important, of course, but it's something that can be done in parallel or lagging of electrification. Improvements to the grid are amplified by electrification. When everything is electric, there's only one thing to focus on and it becomes electricity generation. But without this, improvements to the grid are much less impactful.
Also it's to be noted that grid scale non-renewable power plants are orders of magnitude more efficient than the same power sources at household scale.
That somewhere some government replaced wind with coal doesn't change this.
The most outraging piece to me, is the that in large part the push against modern safer nuclear energy production (that could have mitigated this situation) comes from the Green Party. All mentioned so far comes off political nature, so if your point is the grid is easier to change... i haven't seen a single fact pointing in that way.
There is also the engineering appreciation for reducing energy loss vs. pollution it creates; which low quality coal -> high voltage transmission -> EV is an insanely ineffective method all along. Any EV being charged by coal is a pathetic attempt of green wash.
I constantly hear about Germany forcing private industry to change. It sounds like absolute hell to live there. If there's a demand for EV charging and gas stations don't adapt, they'll simply go bankrupt and be replaced by a newer, more forward-focused fuel company. Regulation is necessary, but an industry shouldn't be forced by government to adopt specific products, the industry should perform market research, determine demand, and then decide to put out a product or not.
And it’s not exactly “hell” to live in Germany. In fact, I don’t know why gas stations being forced to install EV chargers would affect life quality at all.
And for every reminder from someone that "fossil fuels are convenient", I'll respond with "regulations are powerful".
The future of EV charging is that every parking spot is a charging spot. Almost all charging will be destination charging.
Even the small amount of charging needed in the middle of a long trip will be done differently - nobody wants to spend 30+ mins in a gas station. The design of the station need to also be different, more like a Tesla supercharger which essentially located inside parking lots.
And by increasing the density of chargers, you are spreading out the usage, so _per station_ the increase in cars idling in their lots I don't think would be a significant problem.