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Comment by Bissness | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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