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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's not a problem unique to California?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/16/23833337/ev-charging-unre...

  The survey also identified the worst place to charge: Miami-Port Saint Lucie-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, with a 35 percent chargeless visit rate. That compares to a not-as-bad 29 percent rate in the Seattle-Tacoma, Denver-Aurora, and Dallas-Fort Worth metro areas.

  The least-abhorrent place to charge is the Cleveland-Akron-Canton metro area, with just a 12-percent failure rate amongst those who attempted to charge their EVs.

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This is pretty mind boggling. Imagine if 1 out of 8 gas stations had all the pumps broken. There'd be riots! And that's the best case city for EV charging?

They'd just go out of business and close down.

These charging things are unmanned and unmonitored and clearly nobody cares.

It's myopic / counter intuitive;

An example near me is a Live/Work/Play development that put chargers congregated together in an open area away from businesses. Another example is an old mall, that has a struggling food court, with chargers the longest walk away.

What's weird is that chargers started with the Nissan Bolt/Leaf with a concept of businesses/malls will put chargers up to encourage visitors to shop - or of cracker barrel (https://investor.crackerbarrel.com/news-releases/news-releas...) locations. But it seems charger networks have ignored that gas stations don't make money on gas, but make money on convenience stores and have gone unmanned, even as significant numbers of new vehicles are sold.

There are issues if they get placed too close to the amenities in busy lots. People will block them while not charging.

But you are right that it has sometimes swung too far the other way. I've seen struggling food courts like that where just being a little closer would be vastly better for everyone.

Personally I'd rather the EV chargers be put in the back of the parking lot away from the prime spots, as long as they're still easily walkable to businesses and amenities.

That provides less incentive for non-EVs or EVs that aren't charging to park in them and block the charger just because they want a good parking space.

I agree though that the best economic model for travel chargers is to combing the charging with another business that benefits from the chargers. Some of my favorite travel EV charger stops are at "premium" gas station franchises like Buc-ee's and Wawa that have clean bathrooms and good snacks.

Eh, we'll figure out something that works. Change always has some bumps, no need to blow your top over it. It's a rougher transition than it needed to be because we wasted 50 years arguing with morons about whether water is wet (yes, idiots, climate change really is happening), so now we need to do it in a bit of a hurry. But, we'll get there.

The big difference is that most EV owners today are homeowners and they can and have installed home chargers that completely sidestep the question of public charging. Unlike gas cars that have to visit gas stations, EV owners charge at home. What's better than spending three minutes to fill up gasoline at a gas station is to just spend five seconds plugging in when you arrive at your garage and another five seconds unplugging. In other words EVs take advantage of a pre-existing energy distribution network that's basically already in every home.

And there's another benefit that people don't talk about: You don't have to deal with smelly gasoline and burning smells from the gas station.

No joke, a lot of people love that smell.

They can go huff gasoline in the privacy of their own homes, then. :shrug:

If the whole station was down I'd just go to the next one and wouldn't riot.

I'm a new EV adopter and so far my household gets by with the L1 home charger. We don't drive that far on a daily basis. Home charging is another disincentive to rioting. How much does home charging eat into demand for public chargers?

People in LA just really like to riot.

Imagine correspondingly that you could put a box in your house that pumped gas into your car at the rate of 1 gallon per hour. That's what electric cars owners do.

Correct. There is nothing about fair weather that makes California's EV chargers particularly bad. They are all bad. It is a harder problem than the EV industry boosters want you to believe. Coupling and decoupling a load of hundreds of kilowatts to and from the grid presents significant life safety issues and the people who make the equipment are biased towards having the equipment fail open at the slightest whiff of a fault.

> Coupling and decoupling a load of hundreds of kilowatts to and from the grid presents significant life safety issues [..]

Am I the only one who read that bit and immediately started thinking of all the things that can - and very occasionally do - go wrong when refueling an ICE vehicle?

It's a mixture of different problems.

L2 charging is pretty simple -- connect to existing AC grid, let people charge slowly. Needs to be everywhere (light poles) and needs to be robust and inexpensive.

L3 charging is hideously complex -- you're dumping 5-10 single families of power into a cord, outside in the driving rain. You're getting billed as a commercial utility consumer where you're charged at your 95th percentile current draw for any given month, and you're paying commercial power rates. People will get mad if you vaporize their husband or hurt their car.

But -- Tesla seems to have done L2 and L3 at scale. Other companies such as electrify america seem to be examples of malicious compliance or, at best, absolute incompetence.

Yeah, I saw a video recently where an EVGo stall was down because someone had reported a cracked connector. They are pretty quick to just disable things until they can have it inspected, and this can be the case even when the other cable might be fine.

It isn't an easy business right now.

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