Feels like this needs someone to look at this from an industrial design lens.
People who come to gas stations to fuel up their cars behave very differently from people who come to a place to charge, no?
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...
For rural, yeah you gotta make do with what's already there. Gas-stations fit the bill.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Besides, chargers are usually really far from the actual building so you gotta add another couple mins just walking to/from your car :)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
In-road charging would render this article moot, together with the discussion about it.
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.
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 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.