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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

> Just pointing out that people spending 15-20 mins at stations is not unrealistic.

This is super unrealistic due to volume.

I filled my car at Costco this morning. I spent about 3 minutes pumping 10 gallons. At the same time, 25 other cars filled up at the 25 pumps. And there was a line backed up. To change refuel times from 3-5 minutes to 15-20 (rather optimistic based on my supercharging experience) won’t work unless you increase the charging infrastructure significantly.

People will need to charge at home, not at gas stations. And motorway stops are going to have to have hundreds of chargers not the current dozen or two.

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I can't remember the last time I had to wait in line for gas that wasn't at Costco. Costco is a pretty extreme outlier.

But agreed that charging should shift to the home, the problem there is chargers for on-street parking though for people who don't have driveways/garages (of course this might eventually get solved by fully automated vehicles and lowering ownership of vehicles, but that's still vaporware right now while EVs are clearly here right now).

It's not too hard to imagine parking meters having charging ports.

Running a 240v 50A power cable is orders of magnitude cheaper than building a gas pump.

Ports is right. This is only viable if the cars bring the cable.

Seattle tried installing chargers at public street parking spots and the cables were stolen.

There are endless street level, public EV chargers in Seattle with cables.

Some random chargers being vandalized isn't really indicative of anything.

Huh, I can’t think of a single one. All the chargers I know about are in parking garages.

That's a first step, but I don't see parking meters in US suburbs. Some barely have streetlights.

though, In the suburbs, you're more likely to have a house with a garage where there can be a charging port.

It’s not the waiting that’s the important part. It’s that lots of people want to get gas and they can’t all wait 20-30 minutes to recharge.

Especially problematic during peak periods like longer distance holiday travel?

Now imagine if instead of those 25 pumps, each parking spot in the regular costco parking lot had a charging station. Suddenly 25 min isn't a big deal, and you "fuel" just as many, if not more cars in the same time frame as the mega large gas station, which itself could be even more charging spots.

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