More Californians are driving EVs, making public charging a potential nightmare | Hacker News Reader

More Californians are driving EVs, making public charging a potential nightmare

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18 pointsLinuxBender32 comments

Public charging has always been a nightmare. As an EV driver for (checks calendar) 14 years, it's always been a nightmare.

I certainly hope that the transition to NACS and wide availability of DC fast charging can change that.

Until then: you charge at home. You wake up in the morning, and like your phone, your car is charged. You go out, you come back, you plug your phone and your car into the wall. The next morning, all will be well.

I'm a huge proponent of EVs and I would not buy one unless I had a dedicated charging station where I lived.

A friend of mine said that "most cars spend 23 hours per day parked, and public charging is about doing the charging in the 24th hour". Not sure the 23 is a real number though.

If average commute would be around 1h then indeed that would be true. So probably this would be more or less in the ballpark.

but home charging is typically during hours where renewable output is at its lowest. would be amazing if/when all EVs are automatically grid-connected when not in motion. instead of expensive centralized energy storage in giant megapacks, we have low-cost (but stochastic) decentralized storage that is available when renewable generation is at its peak.

Depends on the country I suppose. In Scotland we have lots of wind excess at night. https://electricityproduction.uk/in/scotland/

(Note it was a wind storm last night for the whole of the UK)

The electricity company charge my car overnight on a schedule that they set. They charge in 30 minute chunks, stopping and starting the charge multiple times to optimise the network.

What was their point exactly? At-home charging is about doing it in the “23 hours” and the 24th hour thing applies to ICE vehicles too. Are they saying to not do public charging if you can? If so, I agree - at home charging is the way to go.

When I add up the 5 minutes I spent a week filling up my diesel I get over 4/hours a year. I’ve not used a public charger for months. I’ll probably save time this year. Plug in at night, unplug in the morning.

We also had a two week period of sun-zero temperatures with my neighbours standing and scraping their windscreen and windows. My car was automatically pre-heated and defrosted on a schedule. More time saved.

If you do lots of long journeys I could definitely see public charging being an issue, especially for non-Teslas. We need lots more fast chargers but in my country they seem hell-bent in building lots of slow ones.

How long does it take you to plug in and plug out? 30 seconds each? That is minute a day, or 7 minutes a week... So 20% more than ICE filling.

It’s only a few seconds (maybe 7?) and it’s done by the time my son is in/out of his car seat so it’s not really extra time. Just like charging on a long trip - if you’re eating etc it’s not really extra.

His point was that pushing more work into the few busy per cent of time is making things unnecessarily difficult. He was talking about fast charging, which is needed if you want to charge during the 5% of the time when you're in a hurry, see?

I see. Depends very much on the usage pattern. Since all my charging is done at home the thought of standing in a forecourt in winter weather just to spend 4x as much isn’t something I’d rush back to. But if I did more than 200 miles per day the thought of trying to use public chargers would change that.

If you did 200miles per day, that sounds like you'd be a professional, and in that case, I suspect that your employer would try to have the charging done during your mandatory rest time. The charging would need to be finished before the rest time ends. Fast enough, not fast.

I doubt that would be legal in my country.

What wouldn't be legal? Charging a lorry's batteries while the driver is sleeping?

That sounds fine. I thought you were talking about people spending their own break time charging a company vehicle.

Why doesn't slow charging while the car is parked at home solve this?

It can. Ubiquitous level 2 is probably more important than fast charging.

Being able to get 8kwhs typically requires a 2 phase 50a circuit. Delivering a garage full either requires shared charging, or upgrades to support it.

Nitpick, it’s called single phase :) there is no 2 phase in North America only single phase and 3 phase.

I do agree that level 2 is much more important than fast charging.

And much better for the longevity of the batteries.

Well, my apartment building of 36 units has zero exterior outlets, for a start.

Sure, but I don't think we need 100% coverage.

I guess I though that the majority of people would have the ability to trickle charge their cars overnight.

Google tells me people in LA drive 10 miles per day.

Builtin solar panels on the roof could handle that for a lot of the year on some cars at least, right?

Unless they park in parking garages.

The Toyota Prius had a solar panel option. It did not add a significant amount of range. It just ran a fan to moderate the cabin temperature during the summer.

> The logical answer is to add more chargers.

And to finally agree on a charging standard and to guarantee that all brands of charger will charge all brands of EV on that standard.

It is profoundly stupid to not agree on a charging standard. North America is now slowly standardizing on CCS with Tesla's plug on the end.

It is profoundly stupid to tolerate charging infrastructure which only charges one brand. You can fuel your ICE vehicle at any fuel station and you should be able to charge your EV at any charging station. Anything less than that is substandard, backward, and primitive.

Europe is so much further ahead of North America on EV infrastructure because Europe standardized on CCS type 2 Combo. Having a common standard has driven the investment into and the development of charging networks.

Europe has almost, but not totally, stamped out brand exclusive chargers. The remaining brand exclusive chargers need to be opened to all EVs.

> So while we’re waiting for that “convenient charging network” to appear, what should we do?

Emulate Europe. They're leading on this.

Here's the European charging infrastructure plan for the rest of the decade:

https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/article/f...

I thought more and more companies were switching to Tesla's connector? Anyways, I'm glad the North American standard is coalescing around Tesla's vs what is in Europe. The Tesla plug is much more compact, durable and more pleasant.

> I thought more and more companies were switching to Tesla's connector?

The chargers will be CCS with Tesla's plug on the end. It's CCS type 3.

I love the Tesla plug

> It is profoundly stupid to not agree on a charging standard. North America is now slowly standardizing on CCS with Tesla's plug on the end.

Or maybe it's smart to subsidize companies making their standard open so that the companies can pick the best one. It took what, less than 1 year after the subsidies were introduced for basically everybody announcing they're switching to Tesla's standard?

EVs are one thing too, but I really feel like the EU is gonna stunt tech advancements with making usb-c mandatory for everything.

> It took what, less than 1 year

It's taken a decade and it will be years more of fiddling around switching plugs and inlets. Europe standardized on CCS type 2 Combo in 2014.

Europe is deploying 400 kW public chargers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2M5W6saAk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ZWN_-a2j4

North America is still trying to work out how to plug in.

I dug deeper and the subsidies I'm talking about were announced in 2021 and Tesla created the standard in November 2022 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Charging_Standa...

Those are the interesting parts

>As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021, the US Government announced it would offer $7.5 billion in federal subsidies to build out a nationwide network of fast chargers at least every 50 miles along America’s major roads. One requirement to access the funding was that the chargers must be accessible by multiple brands of electric cars.

> In May 2023, the Ford Motor Company became the first large automaker to announce that it would use NACS with their electric vehicles.[19] Starting in 2025, new Ford electric vehicles will have native NACS charge ports and prior electric Ford models will be able to connect to NACS chargers by use of a NACS to CCS1 adapter.

>From June 2023 through January 2024, automakers BMW Group, Fisker, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai Motor Group, Jaguar Land Rover, Lucid Motors, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Rivian, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo Cars, and Volkswagen Group all announced that they would equip their electric vehicles sold in the North American market with NACS charge ports from the factory starting in 2025, with adapters available for existing vehicles.[27][28][29] As of January 2024, Mitsubishi Motors and Stellantis, are the only legacy automakers who have not announced that they will adopt NACS.[30]

To me, this seems like the connector war is finished.

It was stupid to have a war in the first place just to arrive at CCS type 3.

Europe did it better.

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