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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

A fuel pump can fill up 6-7, maybe more cars in the time it takes to partially (say to 80% or so) fill up one electric car.

So how is that infrastructure going to work?

Edit: funny how few people are trying to comment on the '80% of gas stations shall have ev charging' and rather focus on alternatives to such gas stations, such as home charging, street side charging and what not. The article is about gas station charging, as is my comment.

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The usage patterns are entirely different.

We only charge our EV at home unless going on a long range trip.

For the few occasions we do charge on the road, I have no problems waiting a bit longer to charge than it would take to pump gas into a tank.

The problem is that many (most?) people won't be able to charge at home. Living in apartments, using public parking spaces. Owning an EV in that circumstance sucks.

Don't know where you live, but I'm seeing more and more public parking spaces and apartment parking lots with charging poles both in Netherlands and Germany.

In German cities during the night, the streets look hardly different from southern countries, where any place that a car is able to fit goes.

Is the only time of the day where police and civil police (ordungsamt) seem to close their eyes to what is clearly a violation of proper parking.

A couple of chargers here and there, hardly help.

It's more varied than a couple here and there. It really depends on where you are living, and even which part of town in which town. In my german location I see 6 type two chargers from my balconies, most of time only two of them used. I think I'd have to rewind my cam feeds for very long to see all of them used. Don't know exactly, never watched for that, so far :-) There are at least 2 dozen other chargers in a walking distance of 2 to 3 minutes. And much more on many parking spaces of businesses a litlle farther away. In my stroboscopic flashes of memories from the times I visit, they've grown more and more over the last years. Still don't care, because in HH I usually walk, ride my bicycle, or take the fucking BUS &BAHN. In my other location I pose as the man in the high castle, and guzzle gas, as it should be. EV is inconvenient to me, you see?

True, but I think the solution to that problem is simply less cars. On-street parking it's a huge subsidy for car owners, if people had to prove that they own a parking space fewer people would have cars.

Most people buy cars because even in European cities public transport sucks, unless one lives right into the city center.

A few km into the suburbs and hello to 1 - 2 hours transit time to come into the city center, with multiple connections, delays, dropped connections, stuffed with as much humans as possible, freezing in Winter, cooking in Summer,....

A couple of chargers here and there is not the desired end state.

Public chargers usually have very low power (e.g. 11kW), are as of now not common enough and typically limit the parking time to a few hours (that are not even sufficient to fully charge), requiring one to go back again and find another parking space after that (which, later in the evening/night, is even harder).

In addition, in many countries and charger networks, there’s often a surcharge past 5th hour or so plugging in, charged by the minute, resulting in a prohibitive cost overnight. So 11kW peak power times 5 hours times efficiency of .8-.9 gives you like a half of a recent Tesla Model 3 or Y battery capacity.

A few hours at 10kW recharge several days typical use.

Lamppost chargers are a way out of this problem:

https://ubitricity.com/en/charging-solutions/ac-lamppost/

I see it as something entirely solvable considering that even a heavily used car spends most of its time parked.

> I see it as something entirely solvable considering that even a heavily used car spends most of its time parked

What if it's parked up blocking the charging point? This hand waving away the central problem is common. Let the eat cake.

There is the separate question - should people in apartments with public parking spaces be incentivized to even own vehicles? (Talking about dense cities like mine, I'm in this situation) Currently EV seems to be an upper-middle class sort of thing - for people with houses.

I would venture a prediction that it will be exponential - we'll be seeing charging for EV's popping up everywhere, even in standard public parking spaces. It already is - I'm surprised how quickly it's happening.

> A fuel pump can fill up 6-7, maybe more cars in the time it takes to partially (say to 80% or so) fill up one electric car.

This is precisely my point with EV. Don't get me wrong, I WANT to buy EV, but the whole ecosystem is still not quite mature enough.

With my petrol car, I can turn up at a gas station with the tank near-empty and I can fill it up to full in 5 minutes, or 8 minutes tops if I'm "running on fumes".

Meanwhile if I turn up with an EV (any EV, even a Tesla on the superchargers) with 8–10% charge left, I need to sit in a godforsaken carpark twiddling my thumbs for 15–20 minutes and that ONLY gets me to 80% charge, if I wanted 100% charge (i.e. on-par with a full-tank on petrol) I'd be sitting there forever.

I'm not talking out of my head or from heresy. On a recent holiday I hired a top of the range EV and did a lot of driving as it was a road-trip type holiday. So I'm speaking from first-hand experience here. (And before the EV-fanbois come along, yes I did my homework, yes I spoke to friends who are EV owners before I left, so I was absolutely up-to-date on the latest "how to do it" for the exact car I rented).

So yeah, charging ABSOLUTELY needs to get to a point where it's on-par with "splash and dash" in the petrol world.

The related point is batteries. Clearly more mature batteries equals more range equals less need to charge. So that is another area ripe for more maturity.

> ‘charging ABSOLUTELY needs to get to a point where it's on-par with "splash and dash" in the petrol world’

People will accept some increase in inconvenience on a particular metric if the product is a lot better on other metrics.

Look at mobile phones. Before the iPhone, all of them had a detachable battery. When Apple came out with a device with a glued-in battery, a lot of people were saying they would never ever buy a phone whose battery can’t be swapped out for a fresh spare.

The argument was same as yours: “I can’t possibly wait ten minutes to charge if the phone dies!”

Presumably 99.9% of those people now carry a smartphone with a fixed battery.

> Presumably 99.9% of those people now carry a smartphone with a fixed battery.

Your argument happily co-incides with the point I was making.

Smartphones have matured and are now at the point where you easily get a whole day's battery life, maybe a day and a half if you don't use it much. So who cares if the battery is glued in. (And as an aside, phones also charge a lot faster than they used to).

EV needs to go through the same maturity process.

But today's smartphones are still nowhere near the convenience of a 2005 Nokia phone which could go several days on one charge, and you could also swap out the battery for a spare. Phones used to do so much less, and the software was optimized to conserve energy on those limited use cases.

Similarly EVs don't need to exactly reach the convenience of refueling, it just needs to be good enough in balance.

How does that analogy apply if you’re trying to justify that one should simply give up that “convenience,” which has just been a basic notion of car driving? In my view it’s rather an inconvenience. I’d rather not have to manage that concern at all. Instead, you suggest to accept an even worse alternative? Smartphones are capable of more, not less. EVs aren’t capable of more than an ICEV, which doesn’t hold up to an analogy.

> So yeah, charging ABSOLUTELY needs to get to a point where it's on-par with "splash and dash" in the petrol world

I don't think there's anyone in the world who wouldn't like this, and there are many people already working on it.

But I would say: you don't seem to be justifying the statement I've quoted. You're speaking from experience to say that filling up an EV from 0-100% is slower than an ICE vehicle, but everyone knows that. You're not saying why every EV needs this for everyone's case, aside from your use of capital letters.

The reality is that would be nice (or having a fusion reactor where I never have to fill up again would be nicer), but there are plenty of people and journeys that happen in ways that EVs could easily fulfil, and the zero to three journeys a year most people do that require a long uninterrupted haul across hundreds of miles might have to be planned a little differently, or might require the renting of an ICE car.

> but there are plenty of people .....

I'm afraid you are perfectly demonstrating my point that the pro-EV side contort themselves to extreme levels to try to justify the lack of maturity in EV.

The fact is: I own an ICE car. Whether I drive it 5 miles or 500 miles is irrelevant. I don't have to "plan a little differently" on my 500 mile journey. And I don't have to drive a different car on the 500 mile trip.

As I said at the start of my original post. I am on your side. I want to buy EV. But I suspect, like many others, I look at it objectively and I see that the technology is not quite mature enough. I've no doubt one day it will be, but not today.

I'm not on a side.

I'm just saying there's no point flat out stating that things must improve when a) for a lot of people they're good enough right now, and it's about effort invested vs additional numbers of people to reach, and b) real experts are already constantly working on this.

In addition, there’s an immense mental burden on the driver from having to keep track of everything related to charging and planning your trip ahead. And battery capacity degrades over time, too. I have yet to find a reliable wear and tear figure to estimate when to sell the EV.

What mental burden? I punch my destination into my nav and it tells me if & when & where I need to charge.

> I need to sit in a godforsaken carpark twiddling my thumbs for 15–20 minutes

You don't use the bathroom or buy coffees? With a family, that'll kill your entire 20 minutes. Food or sleep will kill even more time.

And why the heck would you sit in your car while waiting? If you're driving in your car all day, a 10 minute walk every 3 hours will do wonders for your sanity and health. There's a reason commercial drivers are required by law to take a 30 minute break every 4 hours.

I'm not the GP, but I've driven a lot through western Europe, including Germany. There's two break patterns when driving a gasoline powered vehicle that I'd really miss if I had an EV:

1) More frequent but short breaks, e.g. literally a 3-4 minute break every hour. Just enough to fill up the tank, for someone to run into the bathroom etc.

2) If doing a long break (e.g. lunch with the family) do a 2-3 minute stop at a gas station before orafter, but for the stop itself drive 5-10 minutes off the main road to unwind somewhere for an hour on more.

E.g. I was recently driving through the Rheine valley, and had lunch with this view, which is a 10 minute drive from the closest gas station: https://goo.gl/maps/VVXTWQDkc2F48UHe8

If I had an EV I'd have been stuck with the family in some uninviting car park at that gas station instead, and instead of a nice lunch having to pick through overpriced gas station fast food options.

I totally understand your #2. My long drives are across Canada, and between Ottawa and Winnipeg (2200km) it's all relatively unpopulated Canadian Shield so it's rare to find a stop that isn't well treed. Most of the superchargers on the route are in "towns" with populations of about 10 and pleasant environments.

Re #1: I find that those types of stops happen at the beginning of trips. If you're only an hour or two into your trip when you need to grab gasoline, you grab it quick. But with an EV you should be charging at home or at your hotel overnight, so you start out with a full battery and don't need a charge until about 4 hours in. Once you're 4 hours into a driving day, you want to stop for more than 3 minutes.

Yeah, it definitely depends on the country. For western Europe in general the reason to stop at a highway gas station is because you're looking to go-go-go. If you're willing to do a 10-15 minute detour off the highway there's almost always both cheaper gas, and a much more pleasant place to stop.

With that in mind I think we've been optimizing the charging infrastructure in Europe for something that worked well in North America.

Since you are going to need a bit of a longer stop I'd think it would be equally if not more important to ensure that there's fast chargers at every restaurant & attraction that's a short drive from the highway, rather than blindly copying what works for gasoline powered vehicles.

Re #1: I didn't mean to do short pit stops because you need to, but, and particularly with kids of a certain age, getting them out of the car to walk around for 5 minutes every hour might work much better than a similar 15 minute break every 3 hours, etc.

Which is still a big advantage of combustion, since fueling itself takes 1-2 minutes you can more easily pick which stop is the rarer longer stop.

It's either Rhine or Rhein. The town of Rheine is not near the Rhine at all, nor in some valley to speak of. It's all rather flat, with only some small hills here and there ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheine

People will only fast charge on long trips and slow charge whenever the car is parked, i.e. 22h per day.

>slow charge whenever the car is parked

How does that work for people who live in cities? I like electric cars - less moving parts, less noise, less cost maintaining and driving - but they are utterly useless to me because there is no way I can charge one. Hybrids are ok, though, I can charge in the rare case I'm actually parked near a charger.

> How does that work for people who live in cities?

With curbside charging, and wireless charging will be convenient once that's rolled out. No cables, just park over the charging plate.

It's not like wireless phone charging. It's very efficient:

https://insideevs.com/news/340478/120-kw-wireless-charging-p...

https://witricity.com/newsroom/blog/what-is-efficiency-how-d...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1gaNO9nj0

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We install curbside chargers

Did you just make that up or...?

Where do you 'slow charge' your car when you're the average German renter (i.e. more than half the population).

But irrespective of that, what does that have to do with charging times at fuel pumps?

https://www.destatis.de/Europa/EN/Topic/Population-Labour-So...

I charge my car where it is parked, as I said above. Obviously the necessary infrastructure doesn't exist yet, but with EVs only making up a couple percent of the cars on the road that's not really a problem right now.

Through the combination of DC fast charging, AC slow charging, and battery swaps.

If you've got parking spaces where cars are parked for hours then you've got lots of opportunities for installing DC and AC chargers.

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