How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations? | Hacker News Reader

How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?

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105 pointsBrajeshwar474 comments

Anecdotally, in conversations with other drivers, it seems that far too many people overestimate their driving habits.

A standard wall outlet will charge a car perfectly fine for your average driver assuming you can park the car for several hours. I would hope the vast majority of Americans who have access to a driveway will be able to find a block of time for this. Perhaps this duration may be found overnight when one sleeps.

If the worst happens and you need to travel for an emergency, you just need enough juice to get you to a DC fast charger. You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on. I would place bets that most people do not keep their gas cars filled to 100% in case they need to do that weekly emergency 300-mile drive that everyone seems to have.

The bigger and most realistic issue is capacity for travel rushes. When everyone’s driving to relatives for the holidays, finding a line at chargers isn’t ideal. Fortunately this isn’t a problem in the vast majority places today and I hope continued investment in fast charging networks ensures this remains a limited problem.

I was charging my car on a 120V, 15A circuit (12A draw to the car) for over a year. I'd use about 8kWh per day with a 20 mile round trip commute + extras; that translated to needing about 5.5 hours of charging.

It really was fine, but it was near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger. Extra trips around town would put me at a deficit, and it'd take a few nights of charging to bring things back up to my set point of 80%. Additionally, I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer. Now, having a charging circuit that can put out over 9kW means I can think about it a lot less.

But I thoroughly agree with you: a normal mains outlet is often fine, and holiday road trips can be messy.

You know, there's a car train between the northern US and further south. Your car goes on one train car, you get to relax in the train. And I know the UK/france tunnel is like this too.

Seems like an optimal solution in some respects, if optimized. For example, millions of Canadians travel to Florida each year for the winter, a lot by car. If such a train ran once a day, it would help many with range anxiety for such cases.

But imagine if major cities had such trains between them daily? These can still carry commuters without cars, too! And of course, we don't need everyone to be covered by this solution today, because the goal is to keep the transition to electric happening. This would help.

Looking at prices, the chunnel car shuttle seems to be $200 for a 50 mile trip. If a regular American car was driving this distance it would cost about $10 in gas.

I don't see this catching on for links between cities.

the chunnel goes _under the sea_ for 30 miles.

Yes. But most of the cost of the ticket will be operating expenses for the train and associated service. The cost of building under a body of water, which is large, does not make most of the ticket price difference.

The cost of the Channel Tunnel (by car) is determined by what the market will sustain: the only alternative to move a vehicle is a ferry. The train is a bit faster.

A more realistic comparison is something like Villach in Austria to Edirne in Turkey, which is 1400km by road, and €259 one-way for a car plus €149 for one person (https://www.seat61.com/motorail-trains.htm).

For comparison, math for the Villach to Edirne trip comes up with USD 158 in gas for the average US car mileage and gas price for 1400km, versus USD 443 for the car + person tickets.

I'd gladly pay 300 dollars not to drive 1400km. Once or twice a year, I drive 320km, and I think about twice that (to and fro) is the limit of what I am reasonably willing to drive over a couple of days.

Those are rookie numbers. I used to drive 100km for dinner sometimes or to visit friends on a Saturday afternoon. This is in a major US metro.

Driving 100km on a straight highway with driver assist is nothing.

Driving 100km on a nauseating mountain serpentine can easily take 2-3x longer.

But yeah, 300 dollars in Turkey is a lot of money that most people will be willing to save.

Depends on the roads, obviously, but my limit is around 12 hours a day, however far that gets you.

I’ve driven 680 km each way on interstates to my in-laws’ home. There on Friday, back on Sunday. Had to drive because I was bringing gifts, way too much for air travel.

And to most Americans, that’s not a particularly long drive. It’s all a matter of what you’re used to. I’ve done 4800 km in eight days and didn’t do anything but local driving on three of those days. That’s a bit more than Madrid to Berlin and back. It’s a lot of driving, but it’s definitely doable even if you’re not twenty years old.

Madrid to Berlin is not comparable to the same distance across the USA. The population density means the roads are much busier and have many more junctions etc.

I take it you’ve not driven from Boston to Miami and back.

Interesting.

In my own little world, I don't worry too much about 1400km in one day. I'll probably stop and take a long break at some point (and maybe catch a nap), but I don't think I'd be willing to pay $300 to avoid the drive.

It's a long day of driving, but I enjoy the diversions on trips like that. There's a whole world of stuff between A and B and it's nice to be able to stop and take some of it in whenever I feel like it when driving alone, which I can't do with a train that has my car loaded on it. (My solo driving style suits me very well.)

Or: With passengers, we can take turns driving and the cost per-head decreases instead of increasing.

1400km in Europe is significantly more taxing than in the USA. The density means more junctions, traffic, variations in speed etc -- I think it's twice the mental effort of the same distance in North America.

Something like a drive between Denver to Kansas City is utter torture for me because it's nearly void of any mental stimulus, doesn't matter that I can cruise along at a high speed in a straight line the entire time, I'm worried about myself or other drivers around me falling asleep at the wheel midway through the utter nothingness that is Kansas. Give me cities and terrain to navigate so that I'm doing something with my body while just sitting there for hours and hours and hours on end.

With the average EU consumption (6.0L/100km) and the average price (€1.59) it's €133.

(Though for a journey this long people with multiple cars would probably be taking the larger one.)

The train costs more, but means families can play with their children (around a table) rather than having them stuck in the back seats for hours, and probably part or all of the journey is overnight.

Yes, it does. It does to recoup costs, even decades later, and it does so because the alternative is a ferry, and so they can charge this price.

Also a lot of the cost is load/unload time.

There is one single car train route on the east coast that goes between Virginia and Florida with no stops.

I am skeptical about the ease of scaling this, especially given the state of non-car distance travel on Amtrak.

I looked into this a few years ago. It cost more and took longer than if I just drove it. Not sure how that calculation would work out today, though.

I've looked at it a bit tonight, since I do drive from DC-ish to Orlando-ish for a thing every year.

It looks like ticket prices vary considerably based on date, and tend to get cheaper as dates grow closer if bookings are sparse, much as airfares or hotels behave.

Depending on date, it looks like I can take one direction of that trip on a train for as low as $360. That's $75 for (what looks like decently comfortable) "coach" seating for 1, and $285 for a "standard size" vehicle.

To drive between those same two points is 811 road miles. At $0.67 per mile (the IRS reimbursement rate, which is supposed to include consumables like fuel and also less-visible things like insurance and depreciation), that's $544.

So the Auto-Train can be cheaper.

It can also be more expensive: Again, depending on date, I've seen coach seats as high as $280 -- a couple hundred bucks higher than the cheapest fare of $75 -- which makes it more rather more expensive than driving.

Trip time, if driving solo, looks close-enough to the same. It's 12-ish hours to drive straight-through, plus stops for fuel, libations and probably at least one nap of indeterminate length to combat fatigue. That seems close-enough to the auto train's ~17-hour trip to not be worth thinking too much about.

And theoretically, after getting off of the train, I won't be worn out from having spent an entire human day driving. That seems like it would be nice -- I can have a cocktail or two and play some Factorio instead of just...driving all damned day.

Fascinating stuff, I think.

I'll check out prices before I head out to make that trip again in the spring.

Who knows: Maybe I'll wind up taking the train.

If you used to sleeping in a very quiet room, I suggest getting some Loop Earplugs or similar.

The background noise should be much less than a plane, and the air pressure etc is obviously normal, but the erratic noise can be more -- e.g. some clunks if the train stops.

> To drive between those same two points is 811 road miles. At $0.67 per mile (the IRS reimbursement rate, which is supposed to include consumables like fuel and also less-visible things like insurance and depreciation), that's $544.

That IRS rate is incredibly high. It's probably around $150 or so in fuel depending on prices and efficiency to make that trip. I can't see food, insurance, and depreciation adding another $300. The ability to not drive is what can make it worthwhile for some, as you note.

Erm, $400 not $300. I guess I typoed that.

People will come up with the craziest solutions to problems solvable with 200 year old technology (trains). Why you need these heavy metal boxes instead of taking a train is beyond me. Cars are optimal for trips below 100-ish miles. Anything above is high speed train and airplanes.

You're making a very big assumption that once you get dropped off by the train at your destination that you aren't going to need a vehicle once you're there.

Rent one?

Have you rented a car recently? I'd rather drive my own car for 3 hours. Then I'll also have an easier time securely bringing a whole bunch of stuff, which I sometimes do also.

It's definitely worth reminding anyone that this is why you need train stations to have good bus service to the surrounding area. You can't even take a commuter rail (in a city with decent rail transit) unless your destination has good bus service or a friend to pick you up.

These things come hand in hand, if you want to make it work things either need to be walking distance from the station or with reasonably frequent buses. If a bus comes once an hour (actually the case in my city off rush-hour) it may as well not exist.

Or you take a folding bike with you. Brompton even make an electric version for those that need it.

Such an easy solution, all we need to do is raise every city and suburb in North America to the ground and rebuild them around a massively expanded rail network which we also need to build. It would be nice if NA cities were already amenable to walking and public transit and served by ubiquitous passenger rail but there’s a century of car infrastructure instead that nothing but a century of overhaul will fix.

> raise every city

raze = tear down

Absolutely, instead of actually fixing the problem, let’s invent muskisms like creating underground highways by boring tunnels underneath cities or ferrying said cars across long distances with a train.

That’s the public infrastructure equivalent of technical debt.

A better solution imho is to create a plan for building train capacity where it makes sense (high traffic areas where trips are such and such - Boston-NYC-Philly-DC) and fund them through public-private contracts.

> it'd take a few nights of charging to bring things back up to my set point of 80%

But is that an issue? As long as you always have enough juice to get to a fast charger, and you can always get back to 80% by Friday morning, isn't that enough?

Sure, it's nice to have a 9kW charger, and I'm glad I do. But if I would have been forced to pay $5K to upgrade my mains connection I would likely have just kept the $5K and charged on 120V.

I've been doing 120V for just over a year with the Chevrolet portable charging cable. It's mostly been fine, the main issue is that it stops working every so often and has to be unplugged and plugged back in.

My Bolt lets me say that the circuit is dedicated to it at home and pulls 12 amps instead of the 8 amps it would pull anywhere else. It's trying to make sure it doesn't overload the circuit.

We are moving to a newer home and I already have the 240V charger installed there. Looking forward to 25-30 miles of range per hour (running at 32A normally but have a dedicated 60A circuit) instead of the 3 I'm getting now.

At this house, the 200A panel is full so I would have had to add another panel.

Emporia makes a load balancing charger. You hook an anmeter around the mains and it can pull anything less than the max the box can handle.

My 200 service was also "full" but when monitoring the energy, we rarely pull above 40 amps. We'd only hit 200 if the emergency heat was running at max for both HVACs, the oven was on, the water heater was going and the dryer was running. Pretty hard to do by accident, nigh impossible if you think about it

I probably would've stuck with 120V charging if I didn't also want the 240V outlet for machine tools/etc in my garage. And like you, I wouldn't've paid to upgrade the panel if that was necessary. Fortunately there was capacity.

> that translated to needing about 5.5 hours of charging

How much time do you have available for charging? I'd have thought you'd spend a lot more than 6 hours a day at home. And chargers at work would allow charging the car near constantly when it's not being driven (other than days when you travel elsewhere), so I think that's an important part of transitioning to EVs.

Your daily travel was around half of the average American's[0], and as you said, that was near the limit of what's practical. It follows that for the average American, a normal outlet is not fine.

[0] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...

But using two outlets, on opposite phases, would give you double the voltage. Might be too much to expect people to identify two suitable outlets and have a “Y”extension lead that would bring them together.

Somewhere a copy of the NEC is bursting into flames.

You'd be better of installing a new circuit with proper equiptment. Most homes would be able to at least accommodate a 20amp 220v socket, which takes about 40% of the charging time of a regular socket (15amp 110).

OTOH I see no fundamental reason that one couldn’t build an EVSE that connected to two different outlets and drew from both of them. Two branch circuits supplying the same device is not especially rare.

I've never seen that. With the right protection circuits it could work safely. However, most garages seem to only have one branch anyways, so might as well add a 20amp+ 220v branch.

In a (large, recently constructed) garage, it seems likely that you've got multiple circuits with outlets. If you've got multiple outside outlets, they're probably all on the same circuit. If the hots are the same phase, I don't know if there's a way to determine if they're behind the same breaker or not. If the hots are on different phases, you need to return to each neutral or the gcfi that's likely to be present on an outdoor outlet will trip.

>I don't know if there's a way to determine if they're behind the same breaker or not.

Turn the breaker off and plug something in and see if it turns on

Well yeah, but it'd be a bad idea to make a charger with two 120v plugs, because chances are people will plug them both into the same circuit.

I'm not defending the idea of using two out-of-phase 110V circuits, but... this theoretical EVSE could detect its two inputs not being out-of-phase, blink its red "110V only" light, and only use one of the inputs to charge at 110V instead of 220V.

I’ve seen carpet cleaners where their machine had two 120v cords that needed to be on different breakers

If either circuit had arc fault or ground fault (or both) it would trip if you tried drawing power from both. Which is going to include pretty much any plug outside or in a garage in the past 30 years.

Yes, it'd create a multi-path circuit causing the trip.

This (multi-path circuits) is not uncommon when homeowners try to wire up a smart switch requiring a neutral to a switch-circuit without a neutral (as most light switches actually only need to switch the hot) and so they "borrow" a convenient neutral from a neighboring circuit which causes it to immediately trip!

If you are going to that effort do a 220v with a 60amp, should cost almost the same but is typically the top of level 2 charging specs.

Yeah, I put 20amp because the higher amps are nice, but many panels aren't going to handle an additional 60amp circuit (and be NEC compliant). Most panels should be able to handle an additional 20amp circuit though.

Any outlet that is safely usable outdoors will have a gfci, and using two outlets on different phases would be indistinguishable from a ground fault.

Many (if not most) residential electrical in North America is split-phase, not multi-phase. This is why residential high-power sockets are usually 240V, and industrial 2-phase is most often 208V.

There is a big carve out in your residential is 240 rule. A lot of apartment buildings have two phase and are also 208.

Why are you spit-balling bizarre and dangerous fixes to an already solved problem?

A certified electrician will know how to cable up a higher-capacity appliance such as an electric oven or level 2 home EV charger.

>> Why are you spit-balling bizarre and dangerous fixes to an already solved problem?

Darwin Awards don't just win themselves, you have to be creative about it, right?

Seriously. It's wiring up a dryer outlet. Takes very little work if the breaker box is nearby, to do it the right way.

My partner and I did it in less than a day in conduit in our garage. No jury rigging necessary.

That product exists, and it's called Quick220.

The Y extension lead would work, except that if either outlet has line and neutral swapped, you have a dead short, and if you pull one of the male ends while charging, you have a live male prong.

Quick 220 mostly resolves this, but you still need a 3 lamp tester, IIRC.

https://hackaday.io/project/4818-a-quick-220-clone

https://quick220.com/

My EV charging, at 32A, draws more power than the rest of the house combined at peak load. The battery capacity is also equivalent to the house's max power usage for an entire day. Even when the low temperature is 90F/32C.

I hired an electrician to come out and install the 240V 50A circuit. I'm sure I could've, but our local code requires it, I don't want our insurer to deny our claim if something goes wrong. I, obviously, think people should be pretty careful with 10kW (or more) continuous load for hours at a time.

I definitely don't think people should lean on janky solutions that are technically feasible when it comes to EV power.

you must be driving great distances if you're charging at 32A?

i've got 240V 40A and I trickle charge at at most 10A overnight, and it's way way beyond adequate. i don't drive super far daily...but easily could still.

At the moment, I'm WFH -- charging at 32A lets me utilize my solar panels instead of selling the energy to the power company at a discount and then buying it back at full price. It's also a bit more efficient, since the car's electronics consume 300W continuous during the charging process, which means shorter charging times use less total power.

But as I mentioned in my comment way above, 120V12A works, but 240V32A is notably more convenient.

yep, agreed. didn't realize the power company pricing dynamics would make it preferable: that's interesting!

> It follows that for the average American, a normal outlet is not fine.

Yes, that's why it's recommended to install a home "Level 2" charger (1). that's that's several times faster than "a normal outlet". It's both fine and practical to do that.

Not everything in a typical house runs on just "normal outlet" power. e.g. electric ovens also do not.

https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/a39917614/best-...

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-electric-veh...

We really need a device that can replace our current electric meters to charge a few EVs. Meters are often on the side of the house by the garage or driveway.

Having a device installed by the power company would be ideal.

Why replace the meter? Are you just suggesting that doing that would be easier than running a new high amp circuit from the circuit breaker?

The L2 chargers are often quite programmable to e.g. use the cheaper late-night electricity. And because what new gadget these days doesn't come with software and an iPhone app?

And some chargers would have an integrated meter as well. Would this suit you? But we don't really know what your intended for that meter use is.

I think street parking should be phased out. Private parking should be mandated. Then it'll be the matter of parking lot billing.

Totally.

As a person who doesn't drive I'm getting pretty sick of the expectation that I pay for parking spots every drivers may want to go, and find the exasperated and demanding attitude that drivers display when they can't find convenient parking to be utterly childlike behavior. God forbid you have to walk a block. You know how many blocks I walked to get here?

Also we need to have a discussion about the hoarding going on in suburban garages. People buy these tacky box houses and then cram all kinds of dumb shit in their garage where their vehicles are supposed to go and then park on the street and bitch about their neighbours friends stealing 'their spot.'

This is all so insane.

I have seen streetside chargers near me.

https://www.evstreetcharge.co.uk/

The electricity delivery infrastructure actually already exists, and has for a long time: street lamps were spec'd before the transition to low power LED lights.

Does it follow? I'd expect the average daily travel to be significantly higher than the median daily travel.

I said "average" twice, and "median" zero times, so yes, one statement does follow from the other. But you're right that the median may be different.

My point was that when the median of something is much lower than the average, the "average" member of the group can be way below the group average for that thing.

Consider a group of 200 people, where 50 drive 10 miles a day, 100 drive 20, 20 drive 30, 5 drive 40, 5 drive 60, 5 drive 80, 5 drive 100, 4 drive 200, 4 driver 400 and 2 drive 600.

That's 8100 miles per day by 200 people, giving an average daily drive of 40.5 miles. If we assume 40 miles is too much for an overnight charge on an ordinary outlet to cover then we might think this means the average person would find they need more than an ordinary outlet.

But 75% of those people drive 20 miles or less per day, and 85% of them drive 30 miles or less per day.

In standard usage, "the average member of the group" simply refers to the hypothetical member whose relevant attributes are those of the group's average.

> near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger

"fast charger" usually means one of those fancy DC systems, not just a bigger outlet.

Confusingly, Level 2 charging can refer both to 220V AC or fast DC charging. Context is key, but home level 2 (AC) can get up to about 20kW, while DC Level 2 easily delivers up to 400kW.

"Fast charger" in the context of home charging means 20-50A at 220V, which is enough to fully charge the battery in a few hours. Basically, you can roll in on fumes at midnight, plug in and go to sleep, and wake up and leave the next morning with a full tank.

I’ve always heard DC Fast Charging called “DC Fast Charging” or “Level 3”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called Level 2.

Because if you use the wrong terminology it's more clear, but SAE J1772 specifies two levels of DC fast charging.

No one calls DC fast-charging "level 2". It's a mistake. Let's not confuse the issue by starting now.

I dunno what you want to happen here: SAE J1772 refers to level 1 and level 2 DC fast charging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772

I stand corrected. Someone has called it that.

> it was near the limit of what's practical without using a fast charger

> I had to think a few days out for when I'd know I'd be doing a bunch of driving to make sure I gave myself enough buffer

Its hard to accept a future that involves this sort of compromise and introducing new stresses for an inferior solution.

You have to think about gas too, you're just used to it.

And the future has enough fast chargers that it's hard to be caught out no matter where you go.

The future also involves more high power plugs, which would have removed the issue you quoted.

If you would mind that issue more than they did, then you just need to get a plug installed when you buy an EV.

Its a different order of magnitude. I don't need to think about fuel every day, and I don't have to consider my week if I have a busy day.

All of that gets removed if you have a bigger outlet. There are some people that mind that very little and won't bother to get the upgrade, but judging EVs in general based on the 120-volt situation is like judging pasta in general based on cups of instant ramen.

People who walk out every morning to an EV fully charged up on a home L2 charger (the "high power plugs" mentioned above) very seldom have to think about charge, and definitely not "every day".

How would you feel if your car automatically had a full tank of gas every morning? Even when near empty the night before. It's described as the complete opposite of "worry every day".

It sounds like you feel the same way I feel about a gas car - ie highly unconcerned about distance, fuel, etc.

However, going off the post I initially replied to, it seems that this person did have additional anxiety on account of their EV - ie the issues EV's have with charging, short distances, etc.

It wasn't anxiety -- it was just awareness after having to unnecessarily go to a supercharger a couple of times.

But like I mentioned: I installed a 240V50A outlet, like I think most people will do. 120V15A works with some awareness. 240V50A is easier than having a gas car.

I have to think about my fuel a lot more on my ICE than my EV. I just plug it in when I get home and it's taken care of. Outside of a couple of road trips that were as simple as punching in addresses and following directions that's been my experience.

On my ICE, I think about if gas is expensive or cheap now, maybe I should go ahead and stop at Sam's/Costco while I'm out, but I still have a bit more than a quarter tank, maybe I'll get gas next time. Or I think darn I'm low, I guess I'll have enough, better stop on my way home. And then when I'm there I have to negotiate payment, stand in the 100F heat for several minutes, worry if this pump has a card skimmer on it, and get ads blasted at me. Rinse and repeat every couple of weeks.

"Thinking about gas" for 99% of people means either glancing at the fuel gauge when you get in the car and making a 15 minute detour + pit stop if you think it looks a bit low for your trip, or just ignoring it and making the 15 minute detour once the low fuel indicator comes on.

Electric is on the whole better & cheaper, but insisting the downsides around charging and endurance do not exist isn't going to help convince anyone

> glancing at the fuel gauge when you get in the car and making a 15 minute detour

You realize for a home-charged EV, that literally never happens, right? Your car is always charged, always ready. You never need to make a "detour + pit stop", ever. EVs are the superior solution in this regime, not a compromise. This is 100% not a "downside", period.

Repeating another comment further down - an EV is like an ICE that just magically has a full tank of gas again every morning.

All the comments on here calling them inconvenient seem to be either people who are clutching at straws because they want to believe that EVs are bad for whatever reason, or people with transport requirements well outside the norm (e.g. >~200km per day fairly regularly.)

I don't think it's intentional clutching at straws, but there are definitely people that are quick to notice the inconvenience of a 120v outlet and extrapolate that into the future when they shouldn't, and into more situations than it's actually relevant.

It matters that many people don't have outlets at all, but when we're talking about "how many EV charging stations does the US need" that lack of outlets is a problem that will be fixed.

This is only really true if you have a 240v charger at home, not everyone has the ability to have that kind of setup.

This is true enough, but it's advice of the same form as "Don't buy a pickup if you live in NYC and only have street parking". It's a valid exploration of the solution space but not a fundamental indictment of flatbed technology.

"We shouldn't say EVs are good because they aren't good in all ways" is... kind of a dumb point. And in particular the specific point you tried to make is, as I pointed out, actually incorrect for the bulk of actual owners.

>You have to think about gas too, you're just used to it.

Have you travelled in the past 40 years? There are gas stations on every corner across the USA. Even the smallest hovels have them.

> Even the smallest hovels have them.

Not sure what you are looking for, but it isn't sensible to use "hovel" (="a small, squalid, unpleasant, or simply constructed dwelling") here. "Hamlet", maybe?

I never think about gas. In 20 some years driving only once I ran into an empty gas station during an end of holiday weekend rush. I just drove to the next station and got gas there. I can drive around with less 1/4 tank knowing I can stop at gas station and in and out in 5 minutes with a full tank of gas.

> And the future has enough fast chargers that it's hard to be caught out no matter where you go

For sure. I will happily sit here waiting for the future. It’s just probably good to acknowledge this isn’t the future yet.

Most homes have access to 240V outlets that charge much faster, at a rate of 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.

The solution to this is an extra 240V AC circuit that’s basically the same wiring you already have to power your electric clothes drier or oven. It isn’t free, but it’s also a modest one-time investment that will eventually have to be made (either by you or some future owner), since it will soon be expected in the same way that electric/gas lines are expected to be available in the kitchen and laundry room. The upshot of making this investment is that it pays for itself in 2-3 years worth of gas savings, and your “tank” is always full.

The anecdote was about charging a car on a 120V 15A wall outlet, the kind of thing that a toaster usually saturates. Absolutely not about charging a car with household electricity.

Does your home have an electric dryer or oven? Use a circuit like that. Does it have that outlet in the garage or parking area right now? No, likely not. But the question is about running cable, not "introducing new stresses for an inferior solution".

I had been doing a similar 1kw trickle charging setup for 3 years. While it was sufficient for daily driving we would go on longer drives regularly, mostly on weekends so 2-4 times a month.

It was annoying mental overhead to have to plan out the charging so often.

Three months ago we ran 240v to the garage and now have 12kw charging at home. It has been a game changer! We don’t have to think or plan around the charging. Every morning the car is at 75% (the limit we have set). And if we are going on a long drive I can move it to 90% or 100%.

I really regret not getting the level 2 charger years ago when we got our first EV.

An acquaintance of mine lost his lease on house he was renting and temporarily moved his family out of state while looking for a new place here. As you can imagine, this turned into many months of them being gone.

He left his Chevy Bolt parked across the street from his former residence (or rather, across from the construction site that replaced it).

Eventually, the car got impounded and I got roped in to go bail it out and bring it to another friend of ours who had space to store it legally.

When I got the car, the battery was almost completely discharged. When dropped off the car I don't actually know how it was still moving. We plugged it in to a regual home wall outlet be cause that's all there was. The car computer said it would take SIXTY HOURS to charge to full.

That's two and a half DAYS.

Completely unsurprised. Just consider the energy density of gasoline or a modern EV battery.

The fact remains that a full EV battery can really take you a long ways.

It really can't.

A fully charge bolt (when it's still new) will take you about 250 miles.

You won't find a gas car that can't go 300 miles on a tank.

I currently have an old prius (which is admittedly far above average compared to regular cars) and it can go 450 miles on a tank.

And that tank gets filled up faster than the time it takes to walk inside and buy a bag of chips.

Very normal. You have to consider how long you need to 'replenish' the the range you used from your daily driving.

Assuming you plug in when you get home, you likely have ~10 hours of charging time. Standard wall outlet is 12A continous, so 1440W. Most 120V is relatively 'inefficient' due to needing to run all the cooling infrastructure which tends to be a fixed overhead. A good number is roughly 4 miles of range per hour of charge on a 120V standard outlet for most normal vehicles (Bolt, Model 3, Ioniq 5, etc)

So, as long as you're driving less than 40 miles per day, 120V outlet will always keep you topped up. If you charge longer (i.e., plug in at 8PM, leave at 7AM) then the numbers look even better. Some considerations for cold climate and whatnot, but 40 miles in a day is a good commute.

> That's two and a half DAYS.

yes, the largest possible charge on the slowest possible charger is not fast. That's why a higher capacity "level 2" charger at home is recommended.

The upside is that you don't have to attend this home charging. It's usually done overnight while the car owner sleeps. So the vehicle has "a full tank of gas" automatically, every morning.

This reply was to someone saying regular wall plug charging was good enough.

It's often good enough for most people.

0-100 is incredibly rare. If I had to deal with that commenter's situation back when I was only on 120V and actually needed 100% soon (this is getting pretty contrived,) I would've charged to 10-20% and then gone to a level 3 charger. Admittedly, this still isn't going to be fast -- but it's not going to take 60 hours.

I did the same thing. My daily use averaged 24 miles and 110v worked just fine.

Since then, batteries have gotten bigger, I have a 220v charger than can easily fill the large battery overnight with cheaper power, many parking garages have chargers, and high speed fast chargers have become commonplace.

I kind of wonder if the people purchasing cars for these theoretical events have a first aid kit in their car, emergency food in the house, or savings for a few months out of work.

I think getting a older big gas SUV with plenty of storage space is a good backup. You can haul things too big or dirty for your EV, use gasoline when electricity for some reason doesn't work, and haul around a big family visiting from out-of-town. You can also lend it to the people who don't understand EVs.

Yes, definitely agreed. My wife and I haven't ever used a public charger with just a 120V outlet in our garage, and I suspect that would apply to many other people as well. For a great many more, a 240V charger is easily installable in any garage or driveway and dramatically increases how much you can charge overnight.

That's obviously not going to work for everyone, but between the two of them it drastically reduces the number of charging stations needed in suburban areas.

One drawback of charging on an 120v (or 230v) outlet is efficiency. While charging, the energy consumption of an electric car can easily reach 300-400 watts. When you're only charging with 1800-2400 watts, that's a sizeable amount of energy that never reaches the battery.

With a dedicated level 2 charger, you can charge with 10+ kW, making the percentage that is lost in the electronics of the vehicle much smaller.

That doesn't match my experience. At 9-10A (2100W) the efficiency is way above 90%, meaning the consumption of the rectifier inside the car is more in the 100-150W range.

I agree that it isn’t the most efficient manner, this is not an insurmountable issue for the vast majority of people. The cost will still be well under half the price of gas for most people driving electric sedans and crossovers.

Yes, those living in the Bay Area with a Hummer EV will find the economics problematic but this solution is fine for the vast majority of other situations throughout the US.

> While charging, the energy consumption of an electric car can easily reach 300-400 watts

This is the first I'm hearing of this. Is this for real? Six modern desktop PCs worth of power, doing what? And that draw only occurs while charging, so it goes away when the car is "off"? Is this for heating the battery when it's cold? I'm not trying to jump on you, I'm just seriously surprised.

My source is an article from the ADAC, a German automobile association.

https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/elektromobilitaet/lade...

They say 100-300W for the onboard electronics, and 15-25% total loss when using a wall socket (other losers contribute as well, e.g. cables that weren't originally meant to run at peak current for hours on time).

If I'm reading that article/pictures right (using Doubleclick Translate), it's claiming that when charging at 2.3kW, 5-15% of the power is going to the 12V system. So assuming 90% efficiency for the main power converter and 80% efficiency for the 12V converter, that's at least 6-20 amps of draw on the 12V bus? That seems quite high.

Premises wiring seems like a red herring. At least in the US, conductors are sized based on a maximum percentage voltage drop at rated current, which means the branch circuit losses should be similar when using either one at full capacity. (A lower current circuit for a longer time is actually going to be slightly more efficient because the feeders are fixed sizes)

It's also even more of a problem in freezing temps. I've charged with both a wall outlet and a 240v at home and at 15amps it will really struggle to heat the battery enough to charge. It gets painfully slow.

> I would hope the vast majority of Americans who have access to a driveway will be able to find a block of time for this.

Given housing costs, that assumption of access isn't a sound one. And Apartments from what I've seen have maybe 5 total charging stations for every few hundred cars?

>Fortunately this isn’t a problem in the vast majority places today and I hope continued investment in fast charging networks ensures this remains a limited problem.

well, not today. If the adoption is aggressive this can and will quickly be an issue in urban areas.

In the US, ~70% of people live in single family houses.

Most people already have an EV "gas station" at home...

I'd want to see a breakdown of that by demographic. I don't think many boomers are itching to switch to FEV as of now.

Just to put some numbers on it. A standard outlet is rated for 1440 watts under continuous load (1800 * 80% per NEC) or 1.44 kWh. A Tesla Model 3 travels around 4 miles per kWh. So each hour of charging provides between 5-6 miles of range. Installing a 240V/30A "dryer" outlet would allow charging about 4X faster.

Personally, we own a Chevy Volt and get about 3.5 miles per kWh out of it. I installed a 240V/30A outlet in our garage, but the Volt's max recharging rate is 4 kWh. Still that gives us 14 miles/hour.

And in a gas car you get 300-400 miles of range or more in a 5-minute fuel stop. That’s the inconvenience they needs to be largely overcome.

As others mention it really depends on your use case.

If you can charge at home (ideally at 240v), and you don’t drive more than the range of your vehicle in a day regularly, it’s gas that has an inconvenience to overcome. I don’t have a gas pump at my house.

If you are an Uber driver and you do 2-3x the range every day, it’s a different story. But if you can charge for free - which isn’t hugely uncommon currently - you can save a lot of money on gas with an EV, so there are tradeoffs.

The daily drive isn't what people are thinking about when charging time is brought up.

They're thinking about visiting family, or short day trip vacations, or longer hauls through very rural areas.

Or, they live in an apartment complex that doesn't let them run extension cords out to their cars or have charging stations for everyone yet (though admittedly this is only a matter of time).

Anecdotally I just went on a 200 mile trip. Had to fast charge once but I was able to fully charge at my destination with a 110 volt outlet and a long extension cable. Turns out I like to lounge for about 16 hours a day on vacation.

Of course I rented a Tesla for this trip and at home I can’t charge because I live in a condo.

So it’s tradeoffs all the way down in life

As someone who owns an EV I'm 100% okay with spending an extra 30 minutes eating lunch somewhere with a fast charger when I'm likely on vacation and don't really care about time when what I get in return is more convenience the other 95% of the time when I never have to stop at a petrol station during my work commute.

Seriously, it's great. The FUD around EVs is ridiculous and so many people seem to have swallowed it wholesale without really thinking very hard.

I think this kind of sentiment is problematic. Ultimately, the people most qualified to tell you whether or not a given product will work for them are the potential users of that product. Most people these days have been exposed to EVs in some fashion, so it's not like they're an unknown quantity. If, at this point, people are telling you that the product doesn't work for them, that signal is probably real and needs to be addressed.

To put it another way, I'm not telling you an EV doesn't work for me because some online article told me what to think. I'm telling you that because I've investigated the options for myself, and come to a conclusion that, ultimately, only I am qualified to make.

You’re comparing the time to fuel a car at home vs a dedicated fuelling station.

You can’t (generally) refuel your ICE car at home. The times to recharge at a fast charge station is coming down and down.

> You can’t (generally) refuel your ICE car at home.

You potentially can, though. In many areas, laws/regulations/ordinances allow one to have a large tank and a pump. Bulk gasoline delivery can also cost less than what one would typically pay at the pump. I've rarely seen it done except at businesses with fleets of vehicles or large farms, though.

Potentially true, but in practice much less useful than fitting one more high-power electric plug, to a garage.

A house will already have electricity, even high-power plugs for electric stoves and dryers. A house will not already have any gasoline taps. A gasoline storage tank is another avoidable source of fire and chemical contamination risk. The shelf life of gasoline is not indefinite, it is "about six months".

Both are upfront costs, but the average person won't put a gasoline storage tank in the same ballpark as a L2 EV plug.

It would be somewhat comparable to a heating oil tank, which many residences in the northern US already have.

Note that I'm not suggesting this be done, only that it's potentially possible, and in some rare cases is done.

I refuel my ICEs at home all the time. I have many ICE tools, so I've got a pair of wonderful metal gas cans. I refuel the gas cans while I'm out, and then I can refuel tools and vehicles at home.

Capless tanks in cars are kind of a pain, but other than that it's easy. Storing filled gas cans isn't an option for everyone; usually the same people who will have trouble with a charger at home will have restrictions on gas cans. Regulatory devices to prevent spilling gas seem to ensure spilling gas too; it's better to use a 'for entertainment purposes only' flexible spout if you've got one.

Well unless you have an oil well and a full refinery in your backyard really it’s apples and oranges

And you have solar panels that can charge your car at night?

Why not? Home storage batteries are available.

Of the size of a car battery? Well, there go all your cost savings.

It's very much possible to buy a solar + battery system that will charge your car at any hour of the day or night. Tesla even sell them. People do it.

Actually my power company is offering free night electricity albeit at a higher day rate. I think it’s unused wind power. They have similar offerings in Texas

I swapped out all my gas tools years ago for battery operated tools (mower, edger, blower, chainsaw) and I don't miss those gas tools at all. There is nothing wonderful about metal gas cans or about gasoline. I mean, I converted my generator to natural gas just so I don't have to deal with gasoline during the rare power outage.

How does that matter? Generally never have to "refuel at home" because you refueled by taking a small fast detour on a path you were driving anyway.

I spend hours a year more doing those "small fast detour on a path you were driving anyways" rather than charging. And I do way more miles on my EV than my ICE.

Yeah but you're at a gas station for that stop (and you had to drive there). Charging an EV at home at night involves approximately 10 seconds to plug the car in followed by going inside, eating dinner, watching tv, going to sleep etc just like you would have without the EV.

Unless the average needed charge time is more than the average gap you have between "come home" and "go out again" it's a meaningless number.

As someone who owns an EV and doesn't regularly drive more than ~200km in a single trip the EV is much more convenient than my old ICE. "Oh no I need to stop off at the petrol station before/after work" used to be a fairly regular occurence and now it's something I never think about.

What about apartment dwellers? They can't just plug in their cars at night. They'll need to go to a charge station. Now we're comparing a 5 min fill up to a 1 hour charge.

I agree for me as a home owner the charge station question is no big deal, but when I was doing apartment living it's a completely different consideration.

> Yeah but you're at a gas station for that stop (and you had to drive there).

Uhhhh, you mean an extremely brief stop along a common route I was already traversing anyway?

I really don't understand your approach here, are you speaking from the perspective of some region where gas-stations are rare remote outposts that require a dedicated trip?

I'm not arguing that gas stations are horribly inconvenient or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that with EVs you don't have to do anything at all.

We're quibbling over very small amounts of inconvenience with either option.

That is just not true. Planning a handful of longer trips a year require much more planning than dropping by a gas station for 5 minutes every few weeks.

For now it's a trade off. Besides the Volt which is my wife's daily driver, we also own a Mazda CX-9.

They're both about 7 years old now. My wife's Volt has 80K miles and has been to the gas station only a handful of times because 95% of my wife's driving fits within its 50 mile all-electric range. Literally just on the rare road trip she takes does she need to gas it. Meanwhile my CX-9 with half the mileage (I work from home) has visited the gas station a hundred or more times. Plus the additional maintenance that it has as an ICE vehicle over the Volt which isn't even pure electric.

But yes, we use the CX-9 for our yearly family road trip of 650 miles because for me, I like to stop, gas and go. But not everyone has my driving stamina or willingness to sit in a car w/o a longer break. So for them, having to spend 30+ minutes charging an electric car might not be an inconvenience at all.

A few years ago I swapped out my gas mower for an Ego electric mower. Despite having had a top-of-the line Honda, I don't miss an ICE mower at all. And I don't have a tiny lot or easy to cut grass either. I'm in NC with a thick fescue lawn that takes me 45+ minutes to mow. The Ego has no trouble with it.

Recently I was at a hotel and bumped into another guest with a Chevy Bolt. I think he said it had about 200 miles range. I asked him if that was an issue, but it turns out with his wife and dogs, he couldn't drive more than a couple hours at a time w/o taking a break anyway. So for him the vehicle fit his lifestyle and it was no compromise or inconvenience at all. Meanwhile the hotel had an on-site charger he could use.

At the end of the day we've spent 120 years building our lives and infrastructure around ICE vehicles. Electric vehicles have only been on the scene for what, 20 years now? So using electric vehicles in an ICE world requires compromises in some situations. But even since I purchased the Volt 7 years ago the equation has changed and my next vehicles will likely be electric. There's enough fast charging stations now that I no longer see that as an issue any more.

I keep a 110v charger in my car for emergencies (especially since my car can charge others in a pinch), but it wasn't that hard to install a 220 in my garage (of course Texas is a bit more lax when it comes to doing that kind of work without a license, though I was pretty meticulous about following code). I didn't buy a super expensive charger, and the most expensive part was the Romex (it was when copper was pricier), and overall it cost me about the price of a basic gas grill.

"A standard wall outlet will charge a car perfectly fine for your average driver assuming you can park the car for several hours."

This could be a problem in the future though. As the newer chemistry for batteries increases energy density, it would demand more power or time assuming one still drains the battery a sufficient amount to reduce cycles in an effort to preserve battery life.

Edit: why disagree?

Batteries don't care about cycle count, if "cycle" in this context is every time you switch between charging and discharging. They care about how many amps go in and out, along with disliking being too close to 0% or 100%.

Limiting max charge is easier if you have extra range, and so is staying away from empty. Making the battery hold more energy only improves things. Go ahead and charge every night.

If you see someone giving "cycle count" as a spec, they mean full cycles. If you charge 10% five times, that's half a full cycle.

I know specs go by full cycles. I was always taught not to shallow charge because each partial charge essentially carried some overhead to it. Sort of like two 10% is not equal to one 20% charge. I guess that's not true anymore since I couldn't find anything on it.

Keep in mind that the battery is doing an extra transition between charge and discharge every time regenerative breaking kicks in.

Looks like maybe I was thinking of the lead acid battery "formatting" phase. Seems as though lead acid batteries benefit from deep cycles with full charges, while lithium batteries benefit from smaller depth of discharge without going to full.

The biggest issue with real life is that we have to prepare for 5-6 sigma events, and they actually happen quite often. Otherwise the whole insurance industry should die away.

I think the biggest hassle is that we need to make sure that each place we spend vacation in has enough EV charging stations. We do go for distances that need intermediate filling/charging quite often (reads once per month perhaps) I never had to worry about that for my gas burning Tucson 2020. Even having to worry about it, having to do research about that is a hassle for ordinary people. We already have too much to worry about.

And then there is the issue of charing is way too slow. It may also induce excessive shopping at the charging station -- the most expensive places for drinks and foods.

And then there is the issue of long-term (read 2-5 days) power outage in Quebec early springs which occur more often than I want to believe (we just had one last year, and minor outages occur after EACH rain here and there). It does hit gas stations too, there are more gas stations than charging stations anyway.

And what benefit does EV give me? I don't care about driving experience. I'm insensitive to gas price jumps. And the cynical me believe that once we have more EVs the businesses would simply double the charging costs.

I'll probably switch to an EV eventually, but that's when charging stations are literally everywhere in Canada.

I think realigning expectations ever so slightly can cure a lot of that. The cost of renting a gas car once a year or calling a taxi when you're stranded are comparatively tiny compared to retaining full-time ICEs just in case. I'm a city person so my default is no car and rent/taxi when I need one. My automotive expenditures per month probably nets out around $50 or so and I can handle any exigency.

I think "cost" consists of two parts: financial and mental. The financial side is probably negligible, but the mental part could be larger.

But everyone has one's own needs so I fully understand your scenario.

> The cost of renting a gas car once a year or calling a taxi when you're stranded are comparatively tiny compared to retaining full-time ICEs just in case

That is because a lot of people have ICE cars already.

If there were a lot of people like you, I suspect rentals would get more expensive. In addition, because of the likelihood of correlation (for example a blizzard that knows out power) you may have a bunch of people also wanting to rent he ICEs at the same time making them unavailable for you.

And also, EV charging would a lot better than it is now. Gas stations are everywhere because the cars are everywhere. If EVs were the bulk of cars on the road, the charging experience would be better than it is now in the same way.

Sure, but electricity still isn't a great energy vector for mobile applications. A gas pump pumps at an equivalent rate of 3MW or so after accounting for thermal losses in the vehicle. To match that with electricity, someone is either dispatching capacity on demand, or you're already generating it and curtailing it, which puts to bed any arguments about efficiency.

Electricity only really exists in a transient state, and has to be stored in bricks made up of complex materials that are harder to scale than equivalent chemical storage mechanisms.

That's not the same thing as saying EVs have no place, because they clearly do, but I don't think that place is as a general replacement for a standard vehicle in societies that rely heavily on cars. I think they're a niche product there.

I live in such a society. I replaced my ICE vehicle with electric 2 years ago. I'm not going back. They CAN be a replacement but not for everybody. This equivalent pumping rate thing is interesting but it doesn't really capture the whole thing. I don't have gasoline deliveries to my house. What about oil changes per year?

The calculus changes for ubiquitous slow charging, and I think that's really where EVs make the most sense. The issue is that the fast charging problem needs to be solved for EVs to have functional parity for certain use cases that do affect purchasing habits (i.e. a car is expensive enough for me that I buy for all of my needs, not my average need).

Ultimately, everyone needs to make the call for themselves. I'm glad you're happy with your EV, but I can't see myself purchasing one within the next fifteen years or so. Even then, I'd still have an ICEV backup. But that's based on my particular needs, and not necessarily applicable to others.

I’ve been looking at a house in a city I visit often, thinking of buying it and renting it out via AirBnB or VRBO or similar. The Chinese EVs that are coming to the US market are cheap, less than a golf cart, and suitable for city driving. I would buy one to use there. Slow charging would be fine; I wouldn’t drive its 100 km range in a weekend, and 35 mph/56 km/h is enough speed for almost all my driving there.

But at home, I have to get on the limited-access highway to get to work (there really isn’t a good alternative). If it can’t travel at 100 km/h, it’s not a suitable commuter car, but that puts it in a very different price range.

And I’m still going to use the ICE car to get there and back. Needs 320 km each way of range with air conditioning running to be viable. That’s a trip I make at least every six weeks. The ICE car has a range of almost 1000 km on a full tank.

EVs have a lot of potential but there are still a lot of details to work out.

I'm curious, how often do you change the battery? A few years? What's the price? Genuinely curious as this is also part of my consideration when switching to EV.

Never. My sister-in-law had the same Model S for like 11 years. There was no need.

The whole thing about expensive battery replacements every 3 years is mostly propaganda from entrenched interests. There are legitimate isolated horror stories, but battery replacements don't generally need to be a thing. Do your own research, but that's my experience. I know a fair number of EV owners.

That kinda skirts the main reason EVs are being pushed which is that ICEs absorb energy very quickly and then spew massive amounts of byproduct out the back and into the air. EVs are less efficient at storing energy, but vastly more efficient at emissions. And the cost of ICEs are foisted on the entire world and not paid by drivers.

ICEs can run on pretty much anything, and there are a number of easy-to-make fuels that are carbon neutral or even carbon negative. Case in point: the global shipping industry is in the early stages of transitioning to green methanol as a fuel. They have trials of the fuel underway, new engine designs being made, and every indication is that they're serious about the transition. Modern cars are perfectly capable of running on methanol with minor modifications, and it's certainly more cost effective than buying a brand new vehicle. If we're going to be running the whole shipping industry on green fuels, I don't see any reason why we can't do the same for cars. Doing so is almost certainly a lower emissions path than replacing the whole fleet with EVs, and would still be necessary even if we did electrify most of the fleet, because battery electric just isn't suitable for some tasks. Long haul trucking, for example, won't be electrified any time soon.

> Anecdotally, in conversations with other drivers, it seems that far too many people overestimate their driving habits.

Or conversely, folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car.

If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor. Not glamorous, but enough to get you through your average day.

The car culture has very little to do with averages. And for what it's worth, it's the same for most other goods, from computers to kitchen appliances. I mean, how many techies need a kitchen in their home to begin with?

> folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car

It’s anxiety. I took a parent’s EV to Sonoma and back (100 mi each way + detours + driving around Sonoma) and stopped once for a 5-minute fast charge on the way back. The battery got to a low of 5%, but that was expected.

Unbeknownst to me, my father was checking the battery level remotely and freaking out that it would get that low. Let me remind you, this is in the Bay Area. There is no deficit of public chargers here.

Another: I had a mid-forties friend visit me in Wyoming. I have a gas Subaru. Its fuel level getting to quarter full—good for at least 100 miles—freaked them out. To go to the grocery store. Two miles away.

I think this is partly because there is not really an alternative once you run out. Getting a jerrycan of gas from a gasstation is possible, a reasonable expectation can be made that if that happens a good samaritan will help you. Or a friend can drop by with one.

The same thing cannot be said about electric cars, unless you have a good friend with a fuel generator. Even then you still have to wait for it to charge. More likely you will be towed, at least in The Netherlands they will tow you to the next parking place. If you are lucky it will be one with a charger, if you are unlucky you are once again on your own.

> same thing cannot be said about electric cars

Gas cars need a jump all the time.

If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger. That should work in 90%+ of situations.

> Gas cars need a jump all the time.

All the time? That's some strong exaggeration there. Last time I needed a jump start was in 2016 and before that.. can't put an exact year to it but it was back in the 80s.

> If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger.

Please describe in some detail how you expect this to work? Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?

> Last time I needed a jump start was in 2016 and before that.. can't put an exact year to it but it was back in the 80s

As in it's frequent. I'd estimate about as frequent as someone running out of charge in an EV nowadays.

(If you're in a hot climate, e.g. Arizona, and park your car outdoors, it literally can be every year or two.)

> Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?

Apparently they're still marketed to commercial users, pricing in the $5k+ range. EV to EV charging, emerging on newer vehicles, would be the analog.

Do these exist?

A quick Google turns up this kind of thing [0] which, based on the price point and form factor, is aimed at tow truck operators rather than individual drivers. Costs $10k+ and will take up most of the back of your car.

[0] https://jtmpower.ie/collections/electric-vehicle-charging

Yes, they do, and it's available as a service in Australia:

https://mobileevcharging.com.au/

That's a commercial unit again, not something you throw in your trunk.

That's probably the right solution to this - and something every tow truck will carry in 10 years - but it's not the "capacitor in the back" analogue to an empty jerrycan.

>Gas cars need a jump all the time.

In my family's 20+ years of owning multiple vehicles I can count on one hand how many jumps we've needed, and they fall under the category of 1. old battery or 2. left some lights on.

The latter wouldn't even kill the battery any more.

Errr that's a few minutes at most to fix, and once the car is started, the battery is no longer necessary. That's a fundamentally different thing to a dead battery in an EV, where the battery is essential to the propulsion system.

They also sell portable jumper battery packs for like 60 bucks. We got one because our car battery got terrible during COVID, when we barely drove it for a year or more. I've never had to use it, but it's nice to have in case the need ever arises (and it can be used to charge electronic devices). It stays basically 100% charged for surprisingly long periods of time.

Aren't their car models who can charge other vehicles ?

In some capacity yes, a lot of them. Plenty of EVs can do "vehicle to load" or V2L. i.e. they have plug points for running appliances off the vehicle battery. This can be used to slow-charge another EV.

"The scenarios where this is useful are plentiful, from helping a stranded EV driver with no power to whipping up a brew with a portable kettle."

https://www.ag-elec.com/vehicle-to-load-v2l-what-is-it-and-h...

I see it like "give the vehicle a few miles, to get to a better charge point" and nothing more.

We'll have to see. I know AAA has some mobile charging trucks that can boost an EV with a few extra miles (diesel generator AFAIK), but I don't know how widespread it's been deployed or response time, and it does mean that the service truck is on site for 30+ minutes vs the 1 minute to give you some gas.

I think the shitty part at least in Canada is the sheer network fragmentation for fast charging. Understandable why it's fragmented but it's still frustrating nonetheless.

It's not just that, it's also time... in 99.9% of cases, the gas station is there, and you'll get gas in ~5 minutes, full tank, enough to drive another 1000km. Even if it's busy, you wait a few more minutes and get it.

If you come to a busy charging station... are you really going to wait for an hour? are you going to risk it with the next one? What if that one is even busier?

I live in a country which is full of people transiting every summer from norther europe to croatian beaches, like literally 10km traffic jams to go through a tunnel, police stopping transiting vehicles from leaving the highway (so the locals can use the side roads, but the gas stations can manage it, because refilling takes just a few minutes.

Now replace just 10% of those german cars with electric ones, calculate how many refills you need to drive between eg. frankfurt to split, multiply by thousands going through every weekend, and there's no way to get efficiently charge all those cars, and noone is designig charging stations for peak traffic. 30km left? 8 charging stations, 15 cars waiting, will you really risk it? Or will you wait two hours at least to get a chance to charge your car?

Charging stations are extremely scalable, though. Tesla has one supercharger in California with 98 charging bays, and plans for another with 200 bays. You’ve never seen a gas station with that many fuel pumps because it would be extremely difficult to install the tanks and fuel plumbing and fire suppression systems to make it work. With electric charging you just need a parking lot.

But you don't need that many pumps, because it takes 5 minutes to fill up the gas and pay... and then drive a 1000 more kilometers. You don't have to stay there for 1hour+ and then repeat the same after a few hundred kilometers.

Pretty much no EVs on the market in North America take an hour or more to charge enough for a few hundred km.

On the road trips I've gone on with my EV the average charge time I had was like 15 minutes. The longest was 22 minutes. I sometimes charged a little longer than as it took some time getting the kids through the bathroom and get a snack.

And my EV kind of sucks for road trips. Smaller battery, only 400V instead of 800V, and a less efficient motor setup compared to other EVs on the market.

Yeah I’m baffled by the GP poster. 15 min is standard. 25 or 30 in rare circumstances or when you want to sit down for food. And this is using today’s battery chemistries, while even faster charging is already coming from solid state and sodium batteries. Naively if we assume that a gas car can move in and out in 5 minutes, you need 3-5x as many charging bays to maintain similar throughput, and those numbers are already deployed in some stations. I also think the poster seriously underestimates the cost of building, maintaining and decommissioning fueling infrastructure. Gas stations are not cheap or scalable in the same way that charging stations are.

I just did the math, and it's even worse...

VW id.3 are one of the most popular electic vehicles here.. They don't need an hour on fast charger, but still...

I took the data from here: https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro

> Charge Time (35->280 km) 31 min

So, for ~250km of driving, you chrage it four half an hour (let's say everything is ideal, no AC needed, no stopping in traffic with ac running)... for a drive from eg Frankfurt to split (~1200km) and then back, this means 9 charges (assuming you did the first charge at home, which is far from a common thing in frankfurt with a lot of apartment buildings and not a lot of chargers there). For a normal diesel car, that would be 2 refills (assuming you started with a full tank... and you'll still haeve half a tank left over).

So, 9 charges means using the charging stations for 279 minutes, a bit over 4 and a half hours if done ideally. Refilling a diesel would take 10 minutes. So to serve an equivalent number of tourists here in transit (since our gas is cheaper outside of highways, and locals fill their cars there), we'd need 28x more charging stations compared to gas/diesel pumps. Also, even with gas pummps, during peak times (weekends all summer), you sometimes have to wait for 3-4 cars infront of you to refill, so even that is not enough for peak usage.

So, for an average german tourist going to croatia for a vacation (and there's a lot of them.. a lot!), the electric car is useless until we build A LOT more charging stations, 30x more than our curret gas ones, and add 4.5 hours of drive time.

Sure, living in a house (charge at home) and commute to work and back within the range of the vehicle... that's great. But for road trips, we're not really there yet.

I deleted my earlier comment, I didn't realize you were saying 1,200km there and back. So nine charges to go 2,400km does sound a bit realistic.

But you're saying 4 and a half hours to charge to go 2,400km is worse than the above poster who said 1+ hour to go like 200-300km. 4.5 hours of charging to go 2,400km is ~533km/h effectively, assuming starting with a good state of charge.

But you're also ignoring the fact nobody doing that route would be driving 1,200km and then immediately turning around and driving back home. They're probably going to stop at some point along that 24+ hour journey, right? Probably going to spend the night somewhere, probably going to get food to eat somewhere, right? I imagine most people need to use the bathroom at least once every 24+ hours? And they're probably driving that distance to actually visit someplace, so they're likely going to stay there at least a few hours if they're willing to drive over a dozen hours each way right? So some of those charging stops are realistically only a few minute wait, as you're just talking about the time to plug in to the charger near a restaurant, or plug in to the charger near your destination, etc.

Do drivers in Frankfurt really get in their car and drive 24+ hours round-trip only stopping to get gas a couple of times? Do people in Frankfurt not need to sleep, eat, or pee? Is driving 24 hours non-stop round trip an ideal German vacation?

And then to top it all off, the ID.3 isn't the best road trip EV. There are many other models that will charge faster. If you're the kind of person making non-stop 2,400mi road trips every few months you could pick a different EV that has better charging speeds.

Pick a Kia EV6 Long Range and you'll get an average of nearly 200kW charging speeds doing a 10-80% charge. The ID.3 Pro in your link only gets about 82kW average charging speed for a 10-80% charge. (1070 km/h vs 470 km/h). You'll end up doing the trip in significantly less charging time.

https://ev-database.org/car/1481/Kia-EV6-Long-Range-2WD

No, those drivers drive 10, 12 hours from frankfurt to croatia, then park in a place like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hRNCgPUhGEHayXex6 or this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/mTg4SpaNrcsi1hiv5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/dWEqaBQNVbMtC26f8 or https://maps.app.goo.gl/w4Ywf5cMzU1e4dSf8 etc. No charging station anywhere. I live much closer to that (only ~500km), and park between cars with german and czech licence plates in parking "lots" just like these every year.

I also live in a transit country for them, so I have to actively try to avoid them every summer: https://www.rtvslo.si/slovenija/zastoj-pred-predorom-karavan... most of them have german plates (this is on the way back in a 15km long traffic jam before a tunnel, and our police closed the exits so they can't leave and use the local roads.

This is the charging station before that 15km traffic jam: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xBrxbccqVg7mSw3D8 ...so, either wait here in line, or risk it for a few hours... will you use the AC, or not? :) It's not much better in austria, and even worse in croatia.

The throughput of a charger is a lot lot lower. A single pump can maybe serve 20 cars an hour if it’s got a credit card reader. Most petrol stations in the UK have this and maybe 4-12 pumps depending on size. So just ball parking, if the average needed duration to charge is 10 mins on a supercharger, you need 4x more chargers than you would pumps for an equivalent.

The obvious difference is that you can’t pump your car at home, and by installing chargers in ordinary car parks you can mitigate the need the specific infrastructure of petrol stations, but the number of total chargers needed is still high, they are just not in the same places.

> Or conversely, folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car. ... The car culture has very little to do with averages.

On the other hand, capacity planning e.g. for charging or gas stations, has everything to do with averages and the aggregate effects of people each exercising that flexibility occasionally.

Needed capacity for EV charging will be lower, and more centred around longer trips, since a large percent of charging is at home, from wall sockets or L2 chargers.

  If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor.

I don't know if this is true. For example, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest cities in the US. Public transport for my typical journeys (kid's school, Costco, doctor, dentist, visiting in-laws) takes twice to four times as long as the same journey by car. I wish it were not so.

That argument can be made everywhere even with perfect public transport. It is usually about choices you have made. Of course in the US it is far too easy to become car dependent. If you wish it, it is most certainly possible but you have probably made some personal choices that makes it harder.

Car dependency is a choice. Even in Europe the norm of cars is strong.

  That argument can be made everywhere even with perfect public transport.

Where I grew up (London) public transport was usually faster than driving.

Even that is only really true when traveling within zone 1 and 2. If you're further out and not going into zone 1, then driving is generally faster, especially if you have to change trains/busses.

2x is pretty common in some parts of the Netherlands. If you’re deep within the city center, sure, public transit is faster because streets are designed intentionally to be hostile to drivers.

In the suburbs or even smaller cities, driving is still faster. Hell, the trains here hardly have time to accelerate past 120kmph so driving can actually be faster than the train too unless you are going directly from city center to city center (most people need a 10 min bike ride on one or both sides).

Even If North America starts taking transit seriously, the routes needed to connect the suburbs to most metro downtowns will be enormous. There will either needs to be hundreds of bus routes feeding into light rail, or perhaps better bike infrastructure can get people close enough to one of dozens of light rail stops.

In any case, sprawl is currently setup to make urbanizing a slow and painful future for transit enthusiasts.

When I lived in Amsterdam, so a solid public transport connection on at least one end, the best I clocked is 2x. Often it was more like 3x.

I was just rarely traveling to other city centers, and some town or forest isn't going to have a time competitive public transport options.

Hell, the Flixbus Amsterdam-Maastricht (station to station) is faster than the train. It has a lower top speed, no direct line, but it just doesn't stop 7 times or so in between.

Hah I didn't know about the Flix bus! Living near Eindhoven, it's crazy to me that I need it's almost faster to drive to Amsterdam, especially when I need to cycle to the station first. Not to mention the ticket is 22 euros one way. I drive a very fuel efficient car, so paying 40 euros for a day trip is crazy. If you add one more family member or friend, then taking the car is a no brainer. You can park at one of the P+R facilities and take the metro to the center and still come out ahead financially.

If the Netherlands wants to continue to be competitive and ease the housing crisis, the trains need to be faster and cheaper so everyone can spread out and not be forced to spend 3 or 4 hours a day commuting to work if they live in a different city.

Even as of 1 person, the car was also cheaper, all in, for me back then (a 20 year old car).

NL public transport is super expensive. Doesn't mean it's never interesting, but when I lived in France near a TGV station, I took the train much more often. It did often have both speed and price advantages.

Yeah, that's pretty accurate, I'd say that population-weighted for the Netherlands the average is around 2x. If you're in rural areas it can easily be 8x or worse (2 hours for a 15-minute drive.)

Where things really shine is high-frequency, high-speed rail plus bikes. The IC Direct Rotterdam-Amsterdam is fast enough that I used to go from my place to my sister's, door-to-door, in about fifty minutes by bike+train, versus typically around a little over an hour for a car.

If you want a really impressive ratio you have to look to the TGV; in college I did Marseille-Paris, Paris-Lille, Lille-Brussels often and each of those segments are three times faster than the car!

Parents make up a significant enough part of thr population that I can't believe this is true for most people. When you have a kid you have a significant chance of impromptu emergency trip to pick up your kid. It's bad enough that I have seen this restrain people's careers because committing an hour was not viable when you might have to drop everything and get your kid, so they took lesser jobs in order to maintain that flexibility. Speaking as someone who actually lived on public transportation for years in the US, you definitely need a car in the US the moment you have a child. It was what prompted me to get a car. Working with the US's public transportation system is awful when you have to make these kinds of time sensitive trips. Taking ubers to where you need to go is prohibitively expensive (I've done this). Relying on neighbors just puts your kid's wellbeing on the grace of others which is untenable for parents.

Maybe if you live somewhere like New York it's possible, but I can't see it in other US cities. You definitely need a car in the US. If you don't have one as a parent in the US, you wish you had one.

> If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor. Not glamorous, but enough to get you through your average day.

It’s not a matter of being glamorous or not. Public transit is with relatively few exceptions much slower than point to point driving. This is true even in places with excellent public transit, like Tokyo.

I won't buy a car that I can't adequately evacuate in. This means 700 miles with a 10 minute stop for gas / restroom.

I don't care about personal emergencies. I care about local emergencies. It only sounds unreasonable until you've had to do it multiple times.

If you need to evacuate 1000km as fast as possible without stopping, bring water and food and be prepared to die in a massive traffic jam. Or in the post apocalyptique world that will follow.

Or maybe you can stop a few more minutes when it happens?

Did you ever consider that the reason I would prefer a gas engine over electric is because I can quickly refuel a gas tank to be full and be on my way? You aren't doing that when there are lines down the road at each station along the route and you're in an electric car. You're just stranded, because if these are EVs, they will either take forever to charge or you're going to make a dozen supercharger stops that will literally eat up HOURS of your time.

Your gas station has electric pumps. Doesn't take hours to fast charge.

It does when everyone is waiting on "electric pumps" because they've switched to vehicles which are far more inefficient on average at refueling. Try thinking about the situation instead of just coming up with a dumb rebuttal that doesn't make even a tangential amount of sense.

Since, we're just making stuff up and lambasting someone else for doing it. Think about this...If everyone has switched to electric cars. Doesn't it stand to reason that everyone would have switched to electric chargers or by then the inefficiency of charging would be gone?

If charging queues are a worry, gas stations queues and shortages are also a problem.

I understand your worries but I am not sure it’s a great excuse to keep driving ICE cars.

Where do you live that you've had to do multiple 700 mile evacuations?

Probably hurricane strike zone. It's not weird to travel that far to get out of the way of a hurricane. Usually because that's when lodging becomes available. I did it every few years as a kid.

Hurricaneland. Unless you are SUUUUUUUPER on point with booking a room well in advance at the far edges of the state, you are definitely driving out of it and likely a good bit away. I've had friends who needed to drive to Tennessee from New Orleans, and when the last major storm that hit the NOLA area, my parents asked me to check hotels in Dallas but they were all booked.

My family had to evacuate from Houston a few times from hurricanes in my childhood. Every time involved a shit ton of idiling in high heat. Every time saw tons of cars stranded from no gas, every time saw rural gas stations along the highway close from being out of gas. Every time we barely made it.

Those trips were Houston to San Antonio. A bit under 200mi. It took over 12 hours. Loads of modern EVs would have made that trip in one charge, slowly crawling along the whole way, without an issue. My EV can idle for hours without using much range. My ICE chugs gas sitting there doing nothing but running the AC.

People overestimate because underestimating means you just wasted 50k+ on something that doesn’t meet your needs. That’s why normal people don’t buy EVs, cars are usually the most expensive thing someone owns outside of real estate and you’re going to have a hard time convincing someone to buy something that is a worse value.

It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs. People don’t buy vehicles for what they need 95% of the time, they buy vehicles that will do whatever they want it to do 100% of the time.

Which is an interesting parallel to Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority." Essentially one's own fringe preferences dictate the design requirements of something that doesn't utilize that preference a significant amount of time.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Which makes sense, imagine only have shoes that worked on 95% of the floors you walk on. Imagine a fridge that only cools 95% of your food, and it’s a fun surprise when it doesn’t.

This is entirely rational, and reminds me of people who can’t understand why everyone doesn’t bike everywhere. It just reeks of solipsism.

I own a Tesla, and I have to tell you it’s a massive pain to own an EV and live in an apartment complex. It’s honestly frustrating to the point that I regret getting it. The performance is great, but the interior, significant price drop in the year I’ve owned it, and the constant anxiety about the battery has not made for a pleasant experience.

If I could go back I’d get a Mercedes S class that’s 5-7 years old.

Gotta admit, after moving to the Netherlands, it’s kinda legit insane how much stuff people will carry on a bike. A new 55” tv is not uncommon! Today I saw a lady with two toddlers and a grocery bag swinging from the handlebars.

I take your point though. There are still plenty of delivery trucks and personal autos, even in this biking paradise.

Imagine you have a portable laptop that works for 95% of all your use cases except those days when you need a cluster of GPUs training a ML model or doing some large-scale scientific calculation.

Imagine having a fridge that isn't cold enough for storing ice cream and frozen veggies.

And yes, none of my shoes are even remotely close to covering 95% of floors. Some are good for hiking, some are good for running, some are warm in the winter.

The issue is not the lack of 100% coverage. The issue is that there is no sufficiently appealing option for a large number of people to get access to the 5% of cases when you do need it. Apparently rentals and other sharing options aren't quite up to snuff, so everybody overprovisions like crazy.

It's not exactly irrational though. Swinging back to car rental companies, they will overbook their vehicle fleets in order to maximize the amount of time that they're out generating revenue. Even if you prepay a reservation, it's no guarantee you will get a car.

It gets awful stressful awful quick when you have to deal with availability uncertainty and other things depend on it.

Those items are all vastly cheaper than a car. When shoes were expensive relative to what the average family could afford, families bought for quality and longevity, because they would need to last for years at a time, and most people only had a single pair.

A car is just a fundamentally different product to a set of shoes. If cars ever get to the point where the cost of one is trivial for the average person, we'll probably see the kind of specialization you see in other cheaper products. Also note, we can see pressure in the opposite direction for phones. Phones have become more expensive as they become more general purpose.

I've read all of Taleb's major works, twice. "The Most Intolerant Wins" is not in any way an explanation of the market failure of EVs.

His canonical example was "kosher food is acceptable to nearly everyone, and required by a small minority." Thus kosher takes over.

"EVs vs. ICEs" is nothing like that. EVs have been rejected by vast numbers of consumers because they find them impractical. That's all.

> His canonical example was "kosher food is acceptable to nearly everyone, and required by a small minority." Thus kosher takes over.

Which is a great example of how Taleb's "examples" are BS. Really, when Taleb goes into a grocery store, is all of the food kosher? Or even a majority? Kosher has not "taken over". It's a niche product.

so why did you quote him in the first place?

Secondly, his examples were from the Middle East, where kosher food is indeed ubiquitous even for non-Jewish consumers. Because almost no one really objects to it.

Whereas US consumers really do object to EVs.

> why did you quote him in the first place?

I didn't bring Taleb into the thread, adolph did.

> his examples were from the Middle East

Not the one in the article adolph referenced:

"The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher."

> "The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher."

This implies that some sort of considered effort has been made to produce these drinks as kosher. This is just paying some money to get the private certification and the license to put it on the can. In the context of a drink, the drink ingredients is almost certainly already kosher, so the certification is just saying: "there was no cross-contamination in the making of this product". Which isn't a special consideration made for kosherness.

If I told you that you could increase your TAM by a million people, and open new wholesale marketing opportunities for a onetime payment of ~$1000, you take the deal.

I don’t think the EV market has failed in any way. What makes you think it has failed?

My analogy for the most intolerant wins is treating a decision-maker’s personal values as a population, one of which is “the most intolerant” and thus drives the decision because the others are indifferent to that quality.

There are a variety of aesthetic or prosaic values that might drive a decision for EV or ICE. A minority of those values will likely drive the decision since the majority will be satisfied by any number of options.

> I don’t think the EV market has failed in any way. What makes you think it has failed?

I guess you don't read the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise follow automotive news. I don't feel a need to provide links for you.

> the others are indifferent to that quality

No auto buyer is indifferent to the choice of EV vs ICE.

If you got nothing to back up your assertion there is no need to type it out. Let your thumbs relax in a fact free zone.

it's not up to me to prove to you what everyone knows. Except you, apparently.

Growth is slower this year vs last year but the growth is still happening...

How is that a failure? Slow sales are occurring across the entire auto industry probably because people are broke/unemployed and dont want to spend the cash right now.

> I guess you don't read the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise follow automotive news. I don't feel a need to provide links for you.

I don't read the WSJ, but I do understand numbers. This site seems to indicate that 4% of global new car sales were electric in 2020, and 18% are electric at the end of 2023. https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

What are you reading that would indicate that an industry segment that is up 450% in four years has "failed"?

You have made an extraordinary claim, and refuse to back it up in the face of compelling evidence.

The rate of growth is falling, but the overall sales trend is still up. Perhaps you are confused with the math, and the difference between rate of growth and growth?

> That’s why normal people don’t buy EVs

Are you sure that the reason isn't the cost of them? I mean, sure charging is one aspect, but is there actually a study that compares the two? There's plenty of "normal" people buying cheap BYDs.

> It’s why so many people own pickup trucks and large SUVs.

That's a very region/culture-specific thing.

This is a thread about US charging infrastructure, BYD does not sell vehicles here and large trucks and SUVs are extremely popular here.

The thread is about incentives and future possibilities in the US. The current state of the charging network is not set in stone. Neither is regulation, EV availability, etc.

Even then, the question "what are the actual preferences when adjusted for price" is valid even in today's US.

I'm definitely not an expert but I think BYDs are popular in China and EU because of governmental policies (in China) and geographical reasons (both China and EU are more urban than North America, owning a detached house in China that is closer to good schools, hospitals and infras are unthinkable for most Chinese).

I live in Canada and I really can't see myself driving an EV right now. It doesn't guarantee my not-so-rare but crucial requests:

- Going to some random places for vacationing without worrying about whether there are enough charging stations;

- Going through early spring without adding anxiety about a power outage that sweeps for 2-7 days;

The infra is just not ready. And TBH, I don't think it's going to be ready forever. Infra construction is so corrupted and so expensive in NA that I absolutely have zero faith in it.

Actually, the push to more EVs in China is already a bit problematic due to lack of Infras. Just imagine you are in the middle of Spring festival traffic jam...it's already bad for gasoline cars but it's a nightmare for EVs.

>I live in Canada and I really can't see myself driving an EV right now.

We live in a semi-rural part of Canada, and have a bit of a (pleasant, country) commute. I want the most efficient vehicle. I ran the numbers and an EV just did not make sense. If you're driving mostly highway, the overall cost/km isn't that much better than the best ICEs, and the ICE is much cheaper.

Oh I wish I could live in such a place too.

Financial-wise, I actually haven't compared the cost/km because of two things:

- I'm not sure how expensive a switch of battery going to be (do we have data on that?)

- Yeah they are outright more expensive than ICEs, and with the current financing climate, not very attractive

This what I don’t get about EV

If you live in suburban and commuting to downtown for work, large part of the driving would be high way. Having hybrid makes way more sense in this scenario.

If you live in downtown, you probably don’t need a car or you are parking in a underground parking lot that does not guarantee you a charging plspot

I'm not sure the urban part is that relevant as a country-scale statistic. Australia is uninhabitable in lots of areas and 90% of people live in cities. I'm still planning an EV in a small town, because I'm never driving more than a single tank anyway and that one time I want to do a cross-country trip, I'll just rent a car for that time.

A more interesting statistic would be something like daily commute https://www.thinkinsure.ca/insurance-help-centre/commuting-t... which recently was ~30min each way on average - very much in range.

On the other hand the power issues could actually improve with enough V2L deployed.

You will never, ever be able to spend any amount of money on any vehicle that will perpetually guarantee a 100.000% success rate for all situations you will end up in.

Suddenly inherit a boat? Perhaps your towing capacity is inadequate.

A ravine appears due to an unexpected earthquake? Four tires probably won’t traverse it.

You’re out at a dinner party. Your friend’s car breaks down and you now need to carry 9 people? Anything but a small bus will be inadequate.

How to solve this? Look at your last X years of driving and solve for that. For everything else, vehicle rental exists for the exactly-once occasion.

I’m impressed by how many 9’s people try to solve for. It’s completely unreasonable. I solved for my 99.9% of days driving and am extremely happy.

Plus, how many of us would be currently unemployed if our respective industries demanded a 100.0% solution before adoption?

> You will never, ever be able to spend any amount of money on any vehicle that will perpetually guarantee a 100.000% success rate for all situations you will end up in.

True, except all they said was that consumers "overestimating" their needs, which is pretty reasonable, not that they contracted pathological monomania leading to psychiatric and financial disaster.

> I solved for my 99.9% of days driving and am extremely happy.

That’s mostly what people are trying to do. In that 1000 days of driving, they are going to have ~three of every annual event. Thanksgiving travel to family three times. Christmas travel three times. Three years of summer vacations or ski trips, etc.

We have an EV and love it. We also have a hybrid for road trips.

Why not just have the hybrid? You already blew your carbon budget by having two cars so this is definitely not about saving the environment.

We have two adults and two kids and frequently need to be in two different places at the same time, each in a car, between the combination of two working adults and various activities.

I never said it was about saving the environment. (It’s about not being outright ridiculous in either direction.)

My strategy is never buy new cars, period. Spending $50k+ on a car seems absolutely insane to me. In the past 26 years I've been driving, I've spent a total of $19k on cars, $11k of which is on my most recent as I got a great deal from a family member. So previous to last year, I was averaging a $26/mo "car payment". No major repairs outside of alternators, starters, batteries, and tires. I probably won't own an EV for another 20 years.

Is t one of the main problems with used EVs the battery cap? Unless battery tech gets better can it be assumed that most EVs on the used market would also require a battery replacement so they have the original range?

Liquid cooled batteries (so, not the LEAF) have pretty modest degradation. Yes, it would require a new battery if you needed 100.0% of original range, but if you need 92% of range, you just buy a much cheaper used EV.

You would just deal with the reduced range. With a hybrid it's not really an issue.

The battery replacement meme seems like mostly propaganda. Lots* of 10 year old EVs have 20% or less degradation. That's very usable.

Excluding cars without active thermal management, which mostly means the Nissan Leaf.

Yes sounds like propaganda but I worry about the long term repair costs of the rest of a car like Tesla. They weren't built well in the first place and age can only make that worse. This is where right to repair would have really helped Tesla but no they have to act like every other crap SV company.

At this point, most car brands with dealerships also have a selection of EVs. You can get things like extended bumper-to-bumper warranties also.

Tesla batteries are close to 90% after 200,000 miles. There is some degradation but it plateaus quickly.

It’s a good strategy for someone who doesn’t care about vehicles and mostly sees them as a point A to B thing.

That’s not how many Americans view vehicles though. They view them as a reflection of themselves and as a status item.

$50k to you seems insane but I was eyeing a car that was about $280k in Redwood City last week. It’s been sold. Some of us enjoy cars.

That's what blows my mind. A married couple in the midwest might make $130k combined and have 2 $60k cars in the garage.

If so, they probably didn't buy them outright. They probably leased them.

I certainly find that standard wall outlet charging at 240v is enough for me in Australia, altho the US power system is lower voltage/power. I don't even plug in every night, usually every second night.

The problem is that I need to move and I can't afford a house, only an apartment. I may never afford a house. So I'll be relying 100% on public charging. Not because home charging is too slow, but because I will have no access to it.

The US power system is 240V. Every home has 240V service.

> A standard wall outlet will charge a car perfectly fine for your average driver assuming you can park the car for several hours.

"several" doesn't convey the reality here. It's a lot of hours. My partner has an EV and coming back from work it gets plugged in and by noon next day it is still not charged up to what it was before going to work the day before.

It kind of works because here they only need to go to work twice a week and not on consecutive days, but on rare occasions when consecutive days are needed it requires a trip to a commercial charger.

> You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on.

No. They drive to whole foods and spend an hour or so waiting around to charge it up enough to get to work and back (not 100%).

It takes a lot of committment and careful planning to drive an EV. For an occasional commute like here, it's mostly ok.

> It's a lot of hours. My partner has an EV and coming back from work it gets plugged in and by noon next day it is still not charged up to what it was before going to work the day before.

What kind of outlet are we talking about here. Either this outlet is somehow very limited or the commute is very long.

> What kind of outlet are we talking about here.

A standard wall outlet, as in the post I was responding to.

> Anecdotally, in conversations with other drivers, it seems that far too many people overestimate their driving habits.

I mean, yes and no.

But there's side effects.

Haven't looked at TFA but unless they considered realities of condos/etc (my condo, parking is more like an apartment) that must be considered too.

If I don't have a way to charge my car at night I will hold on to an ICE with every fiber of my being, and at this rate unfortunately it's the just about-ish 12 year old 20-25MPG WRX instead of the 2.6 year old 37-45MPG Maverick Hybrid, based on downtime/repair cost if I had to pick one today.

As far as 'driving habits' mine vary greatly.

However whenever possible I take the Maverick for trips that can be hotshot (my current record is ~830 miles in 14ish hours with 10-15 minute stops along the way as needed.) Honestly with a good side crew I can do it all myself while clearing my mind (i.e. spare cycles while focusing on driving, I think about baggage.)

I honestly don't know if I could do the same sort of trip in a current EV even if there were the best charging stations at every stop we went to.

Maybe we could?

OTOH that's the 'distance' case. Compare to driving up north in MI where stations are few and far between, or worse, the UP where a car accident may cause a many-hour backup.

I should note, for my hybrid, my 'cutoff' for Hotshotting, once I am <100 miles till refuel, I get topped fully back off.

I know how to mitigate, but how do we deal with the people that can't even handle stop signs and signals?

Also: If you only slow charge, it will _drastically_ increase your battery life span / general health.

> If the worst happens and you need to travel for an emergency, you just need enough juice to get you to a DC fast charger. You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on.

And if it's an emergency, why would I want to waste 10 minutes charging instead of just going where I need to go right away--since it's an emergency?

Arguments like this boil down to "I think you should accept just giving up something you want, for nothing in return." Which ordinary people quite rationally do not see as a deal they should accept.

Cheers an EV on a 120v outlet is extremely slow, over the course of 6-8 hours you may get only 8% or so, at best. It's unclear what experience you've had but the laws of physics are a pain in North America.

I usually get a bit above 20% when I get home to when I leave in the morning. My vehicle has about a 70kW battery and ~300mi range.

I have relied on this setup for multiple years without stress.

It’s simple, they’re just stubborn. Almost no one in the US has a commute of more than 40 miles a day, and most Americans own their own place. If EVs had a 600 mile range and could charge in fifteen minutes, they’d be saying they need to have a 900 mile range and charge in five minutes.

For EVs to truly win in the US, we’re going to have to wait for boomers to die, or stop driving.

Edit: downvote me boomers. Do it.

…or, an EV has yet to be proven to be comparable to the cost per mile (including depreciation) of a hybrid, especially a plug in hybrid, for the driving patterns of most Americans.

It is going to be a while until a brand has the trust per dollar that Prius/camry/corolla/rav 4 hybrids and the like do.

It’s really not. Hybrids are going to be obsolete way faster than you think, given the price and innovation curves of EVs.

It takes 20 years to build up a track record of 20 year reliability.

During which they’re going to become irrelevant clinging to out of date technology. Building reliable ICEs is much much harder than EVs, the field is wide open now.

If you have a driveway, I don’t see why you don’t just add the little extra to add a charger at home. That’s actually my plan when I eventually get a UV. Just get a face charge and someone to wire it. Where I’m located at the current rate it should be around $1600 for the charger and the install.

This is my thought, too.

My wife has the charging concern when I bring up buying a Tesla as her next car. She's worried about running out of juice but she only drives 30 miles round trip to work every day plus maybe a grocery run or a similar trip to relatives.

She asks about going on longer range trips and I say that's why our second car would be a hybrid, such as the Prius I have.

>If the worst happens and you need to travel for an emergency, you just need enough juice to get you to a DC fast charger. You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on. I would place bets that most people do not keep their gas cars filled to 100% in case they need to do that weekly emergency 300-mile drive that everyone seems to have.

That's because gas stations are plentiful in most areas and you usually only spend a few minutes refueling. If gas stations are rare and/or the pumps are slow or unreliable, you bet most drivers will keep themselves topped up more often than not.

I've leased 3 Leafs in the past and have a Niro EV now. Always charged them exclusively from a 110V regular outdoor outlet. Have a 18miles commute roundtrip and never had an issue. I'd get a 220V charger if we didn't have a PITA HOA.

> most people do not keep their gas cars filled to 100% in case they need to do that weekly emergency 300-mile drive that everyone seems to have

The behaviour is caused by "ease of resolution".

Low Petrol - 10 minutes to drive to the servo and fill up, almost guaranteed and no more worries. If a long drive, then maybe another stop.

Low EV charge - where I live, maybe you can do a quick 10 minutes somewhere and get a long way and while you're travelling find another 10 minute stop etc.

But people don't want to add extra "unknowns" - however small - in an emergency. People want certainty. People want "Problem fucking dealt with."

Emergencies don't happen often, it really isn't optimal day-to-day behaviour. But sometimes emergencies matter; for themselves, their family, or their friends.

So I don't think you'll stop this range anxiety until it is as easy - and well known to be easy - as dinojuice currently is.

> I would place bets that most people do not keep their gas cars filled to 100%

A sibling comment put it well -ease of resolution. I can drive comfortably with less a 1/4 of a tank either in town or on long trips. I can easily find a gas station, fuel up in 5 min and drive away with a full tank without worrying much about it. I don’t want to think about looking for chargers, or structuring my trips around them. It would just not be fun for me and add extra hassles. That’s just my personal take, of course. One day we’ll have super high capacity batteries, much faster and ubiquitous chargers, and then I will happily buy an EV.

Access to a driveway means that the first hurdle to own an EV is probably owning a suitable home. EVs will be a less practical option for future generations unless we can fix this broken financial system and inflated assets.

>You’d only be spending 10 minutes charging anyways to carry on.

I am sorry but NO. EV fans always push this narrative but now finally having experienced it myself by doing day long road trips in Mach-e, Bolt, and Tesla I can clearly say that this is more of a problem than you let on.

Maybe if you are on Tesla NACS which is plug in and 3 seconds later it starts but for others you must account for the time it takes to get the charger to start. Even if you are on Tesla, repeating the process of stopping, connecting and then waiting still adds time to the trip.

Typically on Non Tesla it involves bringing up the app, waiting for the charger to "negotiate" with the car and then accounting for any failures in communication and restarting the process to compensate. To be fair, Tesla has really perfected this as much as they can but that time is still spent.

Repeat this process for every "10 mins" you have to stop and for a long road trip all of a sudden all those minutes end up to 1+ hours.

And no typically, 10 mins gets you 300-500 miles of range in a gas car depending on model but 10 mins cannot get anything close to that in any electric car(and thats accounting for ideal conditions like being in the right part of the battery charge curve, no other cars occupying the same block of chargers, etc.)

You will spend more minutes despite Tesla being the clear leader in making this experience as painless as possible and in an emergency that could be a dealbreaker.

agreed.

10 years driver of evs here (california then arizona): 110v wall outlet was more than adequate almost always...not adequate if trying to go super far.

the question is what fraction of daily distances driven exceed what overnight recharging can do, I believe.

My concern is the number of charger stations required between LA and Phoenix in the remote sections of I-10. Replacing all the cars with EVs that need to charge at a minimum of twice and you need two parking garages the size of the mall of America’s parking lot - each spot with its own supercharger. The power consumption is equal to a nuclear power plant for each garage. And this is only required for the peak Thanksgiving traffic. The rest of the time, 90% of the chargers would be idle. Oh, and this would in Quartzsite, a town of 2500. There aren’t power lines capable of this power. All the infrastructure would need to be built.

If this is so heavily traveled, then maybe rail is a better option. We need to dispense with the idea that auto traffic is the only option, or that we need to optimize for a particular mode.

Wouldn’t rail also be idle 90% of the time?

Rail can haul cargo as well. The cost of idle rail is very very low compared to the cost of maintaining charging infrastructure.

The intercity rail part is the easy part. Getting people to actually use it requires a pretty decent city transit network on each end.

On top of that, cargo and passenger trains don't really coexist that nicely. Nobody really wants to spend bullet train money on cargo, but that's what you need if you want to have bullet train speed for passengers on the same track.

Nice thing about charging infrastructure is that another name for it is "the grid." It already exists everywhere. And in rural areas that don't have enough grid capacity for high peak loads, use batteries (which are getting much cheaper) as a buffer.

> The intercity rail part is the easy part. Getting people to actually use it requires a pretty decent city transit network on each end.

I don’t think this is true. People take airplanes and rent a cars all the time. The same could be true for train travel. All of the ways someone would leave a train station generally exist.

People don’t take trains for two reasons: 1. They take too long. 2. They are too expensive.

For example sf to la takes at least ~9-13h and costs between 50-80 dollars. Versus a southwest flight for ~140 that takes an hour. For most people that extra 60 dollars for 7-11 hours is worth it.

Amen, we ain't gonna get much greener either by making a hundred million EVs per year..

Agreed, but you could start trying to build out that rail system right now and it'll still be decades before it meaningfully changes the need for car traffic (even then, look at Europe, cars are still quite popular and necessary in many places despite a significantly better passenger rail system). EVs are already a huge improvement on the status quo. And there's no reason we can't do both.

I think there's appetite for it to happen. There's a new rail line going in between the LA area and Las Vegas. Amtrak is now running a new route between Minneapolis and Chicago. I'm sure there are more like this.

Certainly there are challenges with rail in some of the more sparsely populated areas, where it doesn't necessarily make sense. I think it will start by building out regional networks. It certainly won't happen by optimizing for NYC to LA.

I'm much more optimistic on solving the energy problem than the public transportation problem at this point. You gotta remember that Arizona and many western states were ratified not too long before automobiles took over. There has quite literally never been a "walkable city" in consideration for these states.

They could compromise and use car shuttles[1]. Then people could still get the joy of 5 lanes of gridlock on the 101.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_shuttle_train

Neither Phoenix or LA are cities where the average person would be happy without a car. Sure you could take a train and rent a car at your destination, but that’s adding many hundreds of dollars to a week at the beach.

In Sweden they install temporary chargers containing both a battery and charger along the route when it is spring break season and everyone heads north to ski.

This allows the grid infrastructure to be better utilized and provide more charging spots for the users.

The goalposts for "No uh, EVs will never work!!!" just continue to get moved.

Batteries are common even in permanent charger installations, because they enable use of cheaper off-peak electricity, and peak charging rates higher than the grid connection.

> at a minimum of twice

The most popular EVs today would stop once on that trip. There's probably a couple that can do it without stopping.

As the EVs gain battery capacity the chargers need to gain amperage. If those don't happen in concert then that one stop is going to take quite a bit of time.

This is what the article misses. You can't count 1:1 replacements. Fuel pumps dispense gasoline at 10 gallons per minute. That's an _insane_ power transfer rate and one that EV chargers just aren't anywhere near, and until they are, you can't imagine that "swapping infrastructure" is going to work in practice.

Chargers don't have to have higher amps for larger batteries. It's nice to have, but not necessary, and nothing gets worse with a bigger capacity.

Rate of charging can stay the same, and it will add about the same range in the same amount of time.

> and it will add about the same range in the same amount of time.

So the spots get used more, or the drivers charge at more stations along the way, meaning "some cars only need to charge once" is not a consequence free conclusion.

It is possible to split one long charge into two charging stops that take half of the time, but that doesn't increase overall utilization of chargers.

EVs are not filled up to full like gas tanks, so a larger "tank" doesn't make people stay for longer. Charging to full is slow and unhealthy for the battery. EVs charge what is minimum required for the next leg of the journey, and leave with the rest of the battery empty.

> EVs charge what is minimum required for the next leg of the journey

If you put the route in there and it has access to the weather. I imagine this is a standard feature on a few luxury models but my guess it's not in most of the EVs sold on the market. It also requires the user to know this and to remember to do this on long journeys when they're likely not in the habit of it on short ones.

> and leave with the rest of the battery empty.

This compromise does not exist in current fueling stations. I can get a full 300 miles in my 30mpg vehicle in 60 seconds. You've very effectively summed up "range anxiety" in two sentences.

I mean.. I get that people want EV infrastructure to replace petroleum infrastructure. I am one of those people. I simply think it's unrealistic to expect this hyper fast infrastructure change and I think it's bad practice to ignore the obvious factors or user experience when plotting out the roadmap of the future.

I would personally plan on a 25 to 50 year cycle for complete replacement of petroleum. In the scale of human ventures, this is a heartbeat, and I genuinely don't understand the reluctance to simply admit it and be a small part of it.

The only reason to broadcast a "revolution" prematurely is to profit off of peoples ignorance. It's nice to believe /we/ could be a part of that revolution but I honestly think it sets the whole market back. It's far more successful and ethical to make the small incremental steps towards a true progress that you may never witness (or profit from) in your lifetime.

You can do the math on this, I don't think anyone does. I did the math with some basic assumptions using some simple queueing theory, which unfortunately I don't remember very well right now, but your intuition is correct.

It isn't charging time one needs to worry about, it's charging time and queuing time. In a city with high rates of home ownership, home charging might solve the latter (assuming infrastructure can handle it), but on busy transit corridors the queueing time will be the predominant factor.

I have a long range Model 3, I can assure you that you cannot drive from Phoenix to LA, charging just once. According to the Tesla trip planner, it’s two stops. One in Quartzsite and the second in Indio. When I do the drive, it’s typically three stops, or I arrive at my destination completely empty.

Even with the Model S, the trip planner indicates 2 stops.

https://www.tesla.com/trips#/?v=MS_2020_LongRange&o=Phoenix,...

> Oh, and this would in Quartzsite, a town of 2500.

While Quarzite has an year-round population of 2500, the actual winter population is much, much higher in addition to significant tourist traffic..

Blythe is right nearby and has year-round population an order of magnitude higher. Both cities are not far from the Parker Dam which distributes it's 120 MW via power lines.

> There aren’t power lines capable of this power

Um, what? Long distance transportation of power at these scales happens routinely in the US.

> My concern is the number of charger stations required between LA and Phoenix in the remote sections of I-10.

I'm assuming there are already gas stations on this "remote" stretch of road (all of 370 miles).

What power service do those gas stations already have?

Bulldoze the gas station and put EV chargers in their place. Problem solved.

Except that doesn't solve the problem. Those gas stations have an exponentially higher energy transfer rate than the chargers would. The delays will stack up in only that footprint. Not to mention those gas stations need a tiny fraction of the power. So there's no guarantee the electrical infrastructure is in place

It's worth noting that energy transfer rate is not the average limiting factor of pump turnover time at gas stations. A significant portion of people are also doing some combination of going to the bathroom, buying snacks, washing their windshield, etc. And I'd be willing to bet most gas stations have idle pumps the majority of the time. You'd have to do a real study of a station to determine if replacing pumps with fast chargers would serve enough cars or not.

I'd say way less than half the people I see at gas stations actually go in and buy stuff, the fueling time is the limiting factor the vast majority of the time.

But that's besides the point anyways. Electric cars take forever to charge. So the turnover rate is a fraction of a normal gas station, and thus a lot more stations would have to be built out to accommodate the demand. That's the point, whether or not someone adds an extra minute buying a drink to their quick gas fill up has nothing to do with it

> Electric cars take forever to charge.

Electric cars take 20 to 30 minutes to charge enough to resume your journey. That is pretty far from forever.

That route is possibly one of the sunniest in the entire US. And most of the land around it is barely used.

I suspect this is not a hard problem.

That’s one of the problems. The land is barely used. The infrastructure to charge the vehicles at peak, would be unused for the majority of time.

It would be far easier to just add EV charging stations at unpopulated exits.

The footprint to charge all these electric vehicles would be equal to the parking lot for the mall of America. Much larger than a single gas station.

That’s a 370 mile drive. Most EVs can already make that trip today, with a stop in San Bernardino if necessary. Some like the Lucid can do substantially more. In 5 years I suspect no EV beyond a city commuter sold can’t make that trip without a single charge. Those who make the trip without a full charge knowing it’s a limited resource trip would suffer the same fate as people who ignore “last fuel for 100 miles” signs on the route today. Regardless I suspect this problem isn’t one, and it’s not a problem for almost any other location in the entire country so I don’t think we should set national policy based on the relatively uncommon trip of non stop between LA and phoenix, which has an alternative route slightly longer through San Diego and Yuma with more infra.

I would note that a 6 hour drive requires for most people at least one stop to use the restroom and most people require food and beverage at some point as well as a stretch. This is the time span for EV charging. If that infrastructure can exist today it can have EV charging at those locations. In fact the locations who add EV charging will attract customers during the transition period between the age of fire and the age of Maxwell.

> That’s a 370 mile drive. Most EVs can already make that trip today

Per https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/range-electric-car, there seems to be essentially two cars that theoretically have >370 mi range (and looking at the data, the range is distinctly less if you're on a highway and not regeneratively braking a fair amount).

That's a pretty big difference between gasoline and electric cars. With gasoline cars, 400 mile range is a comfortable low bound on how far you can go after filling up, no matter the driving conditions; with electric cars, 400 mile range is something you might hit in optimal driving conditions.

San Bernardino would be your stop as I mentioned. I mentioned lucid as the car that can today make the trip without a charge. I further mentioned that even on the trip the fact people need to take rest breaks after hours of driving incentivizes businesses to provide fast charge points to attract paying customers.

My statement was that within 5 years almost all cars would be able to do the trip end to end. At that point no intermediate charging would be necessary, but having charge points at restaurants and other places for breaks would be sensible even so and a net positive for those businesses. This would break the value of a gas station since it’s a pretty low end experience as a customer, while say a Starbucks with EV charge points would be a higher margin business end to end and provide a generally superior customer experience. I think these economics are unassailable.

I would note regenerative braking in an EV doesn’t give you an advantage in any context. With a hybrid the gasoline expenditures of power can be recaptured as electrical charge. Highway driving for an EV is optimal because regenerative braking is not perfectly efficient and the act of slowing and accelerating at all will reduce your range. Your best profile in an EV is accelerating slowly and keeping a constant speed.

Most EVs can make the trip today? The most popular EV, the Model Y, has a stated range of 320 miles.

With a stop in San Bernardino as I said. In 5 years most cars will be able to do it without, as I said. The lucid can make the trip today without stopping. But most humans can’t drive 5-6 hours without stopping once.

> Most EVs can already make that trip today, with a stop in San Bernardino if necessary.

With the AC running which is a practical requirement on that drive for most of the year? Highly doubt any current EV is going to do fewer than two stops on that drive. I doubt even more if that drive were from the LA metro to Phoenix as the first quarter of the route has a lot of day time traffic.

I'm not saying the drive is impossible for an EV or anything, I just don't see an EV not having to stop several times on that drive. Maximum range numbers for every EV I've ever looked at seem to be pulled from the world of frictionless pulleys and spherical cows.

This is a common misconception about EVs. The stated range is for the EPA range, not on open roads at 80MPH (typical speeds on I-10 between Phoenix and LA). Even Tesla’s longest range Model, a Model S, with a 405 mile “range” needs to charge TWICE on the Phoenix to LA drive. This is only a 373 mile drive, and assumes you start completely full. From the 405 mile advertised range, you’d think you could drive Phoenix to LA, and arrive with enough charge to still drive to dinner. One of my most annoying revelations in owning a Tesla.

https://www.tesla.com/trips#/?v=MS_2020_LongRange&o=Phoenix,...

How about between people where they live and anywhere else in the west? People take the 4 hour road trip for granted if we are to all transition to EVs with dubious >100mi range when its cold or hot. The settlements in the eastern sierra alone are scarcely close enough to feel comfortable even with a gas car in my experience. Let alone the more remote regions of the west.

Then they can buy EVs last. Let's start with the low hanging fruit like the eastern seaboard and California.

Yeah let's get to 50% EVs running on 100% nuclear or solar and then let's talk about the other 50% of cars, airplanes, etc.

I have driven that route many times in a Model 3 and it's been fine. Easier today than it was a few years ago. It's a theoretical issue not an actual one.

> All the infrastructure would need to be built.

This creates jobs.

Traffic on I-10 at Arizona state line is 31k vehicles per day, with peak hour being 4.3k vehicles per hour. Assuming 350Wh/km, 120kW average charging rate and 90% utilization 3.2 charger stalls per mile per 1k vehicles/hour are needed. Or putting it differently, a 100 charger site with 12MW of power every 5 miles.

Is that peak for a normal day, or for Thanksgiving weekend?

Anecdotally - probably not that many. I have a 2018 leaf with ~220km of range on a full charge, and my commute is about 20km each way. We probably travel far enough to actually need a fast charge maybe once every 6 months or so? It will charge to full overnight on regular wall power from ~30% so it never runs anywhere near low enough to be a problem.

The convenience factor of never having to spend time stopping at a petrol station can't be overstated, now I just spend 10 seconds plugging the car in after work every two or three days instead (although I do still stop for junk food sometimes).

And to preempt the "it wouldn't work for me" comments - sure, but "how many chargers do we need" is a whole population average question, and I suspect (although I have no hard data) that the vast majority of driving is work commutes that aren't long enough for most EVs to come close to running out of charge.

Although I live in a country with 240v power - I imagine you might want to hook up a dedicated full 240v socket similar to the wiring for ovens/stoves if you were in the United States?

Here in NorCal it is common to have the laundry in the garage. If you have an electric dryer, then sharing the dryer circuit makes some sense. Sure, you can’t dry clothes and charge the car at the same time. I can live with that.

This is assuming that electrical cars are "filled up" the same way as gas cars are. This is very far away from being as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes.

I like the model that you swap your low charge battery with a fully charged one. That would require some new technology.

In Norway, people charge at home. EV stations are mainly for roadtrips. The gas station comparison does not make sense.

I’m actually confused about Norway, you see a lot of electric cars parked down the street but no one has a garage in Norway (in the city, at least), and I haven’t seen many cars actually plugged in. Where does everyone charge?

In the UK supermarkets have fast chargers. You park, plug in, go shopping, return to a fully charged car (similarly at pubs, cafes, gyms, etc.)

BEVs don't have to be plugged in like cellphones. In city driving one full charge can suffice for a whole week of commuting and errands.

How is the price for fast chargers in the UK?

In the Netherlands it's crazy, something like 3-4x the price of home charging and close to 10x what you would "loose" on using your own solar power instead of selling it to the grid.

For most hybrids using a fast charger is over 2x more expensive per mile than using petrol.

Most people live outside the cities, so the more common scenario is having a house and a garage. If you live in an apartment building, there might be charging points. People parked on the street in the city streets have fewer options.

In the US as well. I have to admit however that I didn’t think of this as that much of a big deal before we bought a Tesla. The FUD about charging that’s out there is really effective. But then it turned out I can even charge it out of a common household outlet and there’s really no problem at all until you need to drive 300+ miles

Forget it. Folks have been thinking about this battery swap thing for years and years, and it is not going to happen.

However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.

What I however still don't understand is why this isn't at least offered in niches where it would make even more sense, like electric buses. If you have a fleet of these buses, minimizing the charging downtime should be a priority, right? Plus, in a bus it should be easier to find a suitable place for the battery pack where it can be accessed easily.

I happen to work in the bus industry and the way we work, at least, is the buses are all out working by day and in the depot at night - there’s a lot less demand for bus ops during the night.

For a variety of reasons, you don’t really want to have to fill up on either diesel or electrons while away from the depot, if you can avoid it. So what you really want from electrification is a battery that lasts all day.

So battery swapping doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard since it would require multiple returns to depot during the day, or new swapping depots being built, or relying on someone else’s infrastructure. Of course all of this is possible but not ideal.

Tangentially, the overnight charging model introduces other problems - a large depot might have 100+ buses, all of which are charging simultaneously in one place. That’s a lot of electrons, and it is causing us a lot of trouble planning for it. And since the buses are charging at night, we can’t use solar to offset battery storage and in any case it’s not reliable enough - the buses have to run regardless of weather - setting aside the obvious commercial issues, in many cases it’s a safety issue too (eg school buses).

This is why H2 fuel cells have been viewed as potentially a better solution to BEVs in our industry, but H2 has its own (plentiful) problems and we appear to be shifting focus back to BEVs now and using H2 for energy storage and transport… that’s another story.

There are many Chinese and European cities where the majority of buses are now EVs.

I'm sure there was some investment in chargers, reconfiguring the depot etc, but it's evidently not insurmountable.

It’s not the cost of chargers or construction, or even the battery capacity, but the cost of transmission and delivery of the energy to charge them that has been the main problem.

Urban bus operations are just one aspect of the bus industry. I imagine it’s much easier for a municipal-owned bus company in a dense urban area to negotiate with the power company than it is for us.

Yea, every battery needs to be checked thoroughly before getting back into circulation.

Just one idiot sabotaging batteries is enough to collapse the whole business.

That's much more difficult than throwing an adulterant in the bulk tanks at a gas station which would let you destroy hundreds of vehicles.

What's the easy way to get to the bulk tanks?

The bulk tanks aren't in my closed garage for a week, where I can do whatever I want to them in the privacy of my own home.

You know what's really convenient? Never having to stop to fuel up for something like 90% of the miles I drive.

I spend way more time fueling my ICE than my EV. It's a pain to have to go out of my way to a fueling station. It's far less convenient than just plugging in every few days at home or at the office.

> and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes.

But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything.

Where I’m from almost every roadside McDonalds has fast charging. And almost every road trip I’ve taken where I’ve had to fast charge we’ve taken the kids to a McDonalds for a short break and finished charging long before we were finished eating and doing bathroom breaks.

I haven’t really owned an ICE. (Used my parents cars quite a lot though). Our first car was EV 9 years ago. But I’m fairly sure ICE would be significantly less convenient for us than EV. Especially with the newer one we recently got that has a more reasonable battery size, which we’ve never even had to fast charge once. Even on road trips. We never go anywhere we don’t need/want to go anyway. So having to go to a gas station just to fill the car with gas would be a significant inconvenience.

You wouldn’t want a phone that you’d have to take to a phone station to fill with phone juice would you? Even if it lasted longer on a fill-up (say two weeks)

Of course you can walk away from a gas car while it's filling. Where'd you get that idea?

The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America?

Plus it just seems like a stupid idea given that I have far less than 100% confidence in automatic cutoffs especially given the potentially serious consequences of a failure.

> The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America?

I have to say I've never seen such a sign. Admittedly I don't read every sign on the pump so who knows.

I nearly always walk inside to the store while the tank fills.

There are number of states in the US where this isn’t allowed, and the latch that holds the fill trigger open has been removed from the handle. Sure you can walk away, but the tank won’t keep filling.

I'm pretty sure the USA is the only country I've found these latches in, too.

Why do you suppose that might be? Difficulty: if you think the latches are a bad idea, back up your point with actual statistics.

It’s not hard to extrapolate that it’s a safety feature in case the auto-shutoff valve malfunctions and, when the tank is full, you’d end up with a dangerous and damaging fuel spill if someone isn’t standing there monitoring it. If you can’t walk away, the risk of this goes down a lot.

Also, people often start the pump and get back into the car while it fills. When it’s full, they get out of the vehicle which generates static electricity (often in winter months where it’s dry and wool or other clothing increases this) and has the risk of discharging on the handle, sparking a fire.

When it’s full, they get out of the vehicle which generates static electricity (often in winter months where it’s dry and wool or other clothing increases this) and has the risk of discharging on the handle, sparking a fire.

An excellent example of a point with no actual statistics behind it.

I don't think they're a bad idea and I appreciate them on a cold morning. But I have had them not shut off on a a couple of occasions and it's certainly a good idea to keep your eye on them. They're not failsafe.

There are other states where you're not even allowed to pump your own gas at all for "safety." (Two, although I understand that Oregon has walked it most of the way back.) Like prohibitions against unattended filling, these law have no statistical basis.

Well the reality is that sometimes the pumps don't shut off. I've seen it happen. It's not a statistics thing as much as just simply reality

That isn't reality. It effectively never happens. Maybe once in your lifetime might see it happen to someone else, if you frequent stations with old pumps.

> not even allowed to pump your own gas at all for "safety."

It's a jobs program, not a safety program.

Its unsafe, and there are warning signs everywhere warning you to supervise the fuelling and not leave it unattended. You could walk away from a fuelling car... but the failure mode of burning down the whole gas station is so severe it seems a poor idea.

You "can" but if anything happens, you'll be liable.

Cite a single instance in which "something happened" when someone ducked into the 7-11 for a snack or a bathroom break while refueling. You'll have to dig for it, as such issues are vanishingly rare.

Fact is, this practice is universal, at least in the US where latches are provided on the pump handles.

Fact is, 99.99999% of the time, it's fine.

The times I've seen it happen will suffice

Welp, can't argue with that logic.

Of course, it should go without saying that nobody should walk away from the pump for much longer than it takes to fill the tank, if only because it's a douchy move to tie up a gas pump for longer than you need it. But if shutoff failures were anywhere near as common as you seem to think, the latches would be prohibited everywhere.

I never said it was common. But it's undeniable that it happens, and the consequences can be extremely expensive if not deadly.

Lung cancer is extremely rare, regardless of your risk factors. Yet people are still told not to smoke because of the risk increase over it.

Let's see. It looks like about a million people a year die of lung cancer, with about 90% of those attributed to smoking. But we still haven't seen any statistics on the number of burn victims and damaged/destroyed gas stations due to popping into the 7-11 for a Slurpee while the tank fills.

A temporary oversight, I'm sure.

Try a tenth of that in the US. Looks like at first glance there's 4,150 gas station fires a year

The big signs that say the process must be supervised by an adult?

I've only seen a requirement that it be supervised by a licensed driver (not all of whom are legally adults).

It would be a pain for a 16 year old to be able to drive but not to dispense fuel.

Oh good point - I'd internalized them as "someone has to supervise and it can't be a child" but yeah 18+ wouldn't make sense, would it?

While the other replies about the legality of walking away for a short period may or may not be valid, GP was talking about leaving their car charging while they go get a short meal with their family. You could probably get away with leaving your car at the gas pump that long at some gas stations, but if wouldn’t be a very considerate thing to do.

I drive past a gas station every time I go to or from work. And if I could stop off there and get two weeks of charge out of my phone with a five-minute fill-up, I would, because that’s way better than having to remember to plug it in.

I’m sure it’s nice to have a car that is always ready to go, and I don’t think EVs are bad, but let’s not pretend that gasoline or diesel fuel isn’t really easy for most people, most of the time. The only time I ever had to go out of my way regularly for gas was in college, and they wouldn’t have had charging points in the mass parking lots anyway.

I don't have an EV but I've got the complete opposite view as you. Having my car always sitting around full and ready to go would be awesome. Leaving home in one direction, gas stations are plentiful and competitively priced. In the other direction, they are scarce and overpriced. Lately we've been doing a bunch of trips in the scarce direction, so I invariably end up digging into the cache of lawnmower/generator gas to solve the immediate problem, rather than going twenty minutes out of the way or paying the Dane-geld to fill up at an overpriced station. An EV would make it so I would never have to think about refueling, except for long trips for which I already have to think about rest stops.

> having to remember to plug it in

I have had an electric car for eight years now. I think I may have missed plugging it in twice, as I got distracted by unloading. Neither time a big problem as my regular commute is 15-20% charge. As I step out of the car I walk past the cable. It takes 5 seconds to plug it in.

My small solar panel installation on the garage deliver 4 MWh in a year, which is about what the car uses. Albeit not exactly when the car needs it, but that is covered by my share of the wind power co-op I am part of, and of course the rest of the grid. Cheaper than gas (by a lot), no cancerous fumes and less climate emissions. Not going back from that.

> But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything.

That's probably a US (or maybe some other places) thing but you certainly can do that here in Estonia. I do it all the time - start the pumping and then go inside to the gas station to buy a drink or whatever. Especially with the in-app payment for gas it's great.

Never heard of anyone having an accident with it either...

> And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything.

You don't need to do much of anything because the fillup takes like 2-3 minutes max.

It's enough time to go buy a bottle of water or something at the attached convenience store, but then you're done and ready to go.

> filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes

It doesn't help the comparison to lie about the time. If you have a smaller gas tank and the pump can fill at it's maximum speed, you can fill in 1-2 minutes from the moment you put the nozzle in. As a practical matter, you're rarely getting in and out of a gas station in under 5 minutes, and only then if it's completely empty when you arrive. When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic.

Most EVs only need a "fill up" on a road trip, and AAA puts the average road trip refueling stop at 15 minutes. The technology in place today is adequate to do the same with EVs, and it only gets better every year. Battery swapping was a cute idea for a while but kinda pointless now.

Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle. 10 seconds to plug in when you arrive home, full every morning. Imagine trying to sell someone on the idea of going the other direction "Hey, buy this fancy car, it's great, but you have to take it to a dedicated location periodically just to keep it fueled up."

> 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic.

Blimey! Lord only knows where you live that it can take that long. I can count on one hand the number of times it's taken anything like 10 minutes over the years and they were during crises!

In reality, even if I have to wait for a free pump, my car is at 100% range in 5 mins when I pay at the pump by using my credit card.

I want my car filled to the brim any time I go to the petrol station (gas station to our friends over in the colonies :D). That's just how I roll. And I know many others who are the same. I also know some that just put in £10-£15 at a time, mainly due to finance constraints tbh.

To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel.

As a consumer, if I have to join a queue for hours [0] then to hell with that! However, with my diesel, it's literally 5 minutes once a week and I'm full up.

In addition, I run my car until 50 - 100 miles left in the tank and I don't get bent out of shape when the light comes on at < 50 miles. In an EV I'd shit bricks if that happened. I'd have to change my behaviour to many smaller topups.

The simple fact is that we have a chicken and egg scenario with EV's vs charging points/charging time at this time and I don't see it changing any time soon.

Anecdote: I just remember something I saw 3 weeks ago. I was in a town near where I live. I parked up to walk to a shop about 2 mins away and I walked past a girl at a charging station staring at the big charger thingy while on her phone. I couldn't hear what she was saying but I could see that the charging flap on her car was open. I was in the shop for about 10 minutes and came back the same way and she was still there, this time poking away at her phone and the cable still wasn't in her car but the charging flap was still open. No idea what the problem was but it caught my attention. Anyway, just thought I'd share.

Edit: Something else to mention - Many people round where I live are in Victorian flats with almost no parking nearby. It's not umcommon to park streets away from where you actually live... they'll not buy electric for the most part.

[0] - https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/video-massive-line-of-e...

> To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel.

It takes me 0 minutes to fill my EV. Plug in at night and full in the morning (and pre-heated / de-iced on an automatic schedule too). Going somewhere else and standing for 5 minutes once a week isn’t something I’d rush back to.

Edit: My anecdote is about my mum filling up the car with petrol instead of diesel because the handle of the pump was black. You don’t want to know how long we waited for that.

The pre-heating/de-icing does sound nice, I'll give you that but EV's just do not work if you live in a flat and unfortunately in and around the cities in the UK there are millions living in flats.

Of course, many living in flats won't have a car so that's moot but walk up any street with Victorian 4 floor flats and you'll not see a single parking space available outside them: they're all taken, all the time, but not necessarily by the people that live immediately next to them.

Even if they do manage to park right outside their flat, they won't be trailing a cable from their window :D

For me, EV's do not make sense for a significant portion of the people driving in the UK. Perhaps the majority. I don't have numbers to back that up but my argument about flats still stands.

What I do think makes sense is hybrids (assuming cost parity!). Put a small 30-mile battery in new cars. Let it charge from braking. Use it only when going from 0 - 30 or even just below 30 only and I bet you'd significantly reduce your fuel bills (and carbon if that's part of your reasoning for purchase).

I drive a 9 yo Hyundai diesel so I have a cheap car anyway.

I’m in the UK. There are a million EVs already out there yet I’m the only one on my street of 100 houses with one. Each of those houses has a drive.

They are not for everyone but there is plenty of room for growth. It costs me 3p/mile to run it too saving me about £100/month.

Self charging hybrids are a waste of time. My Hyundai i20 1.1 diesel got 60mpg while my colleagues hybrid got 50. Plug-in hybrids are slightly better, but you’ve got additional complexity and all the maintenance of an ICE. Plus you are cycling the small battery more. 1,000 cycles on a 250 mile battery is 250,000 miles - on a 30 mile battery it’s 30,000.

> There are a million EVs already out there yet I’m the only one on my street of 100 houses with one

You have a driveway (I assume) so you can make use of it but would you still buy one if you had a flat?

Still can't overcome the fact that (compared to ice cars and spec being somewhat equal) EV's are way more expensive to buy, more expensive to insure [0], more expensive to repair [0] (especially after a bump/crash), have less resale value than ICE cars, burn forever if set on fire.

ICE cars are not going away any time soon and gov trying to ram it down our throats will just cost billions and will turn people off (I don't want one, for instance). The car industry is pushing back too... reality is setting in.

For me, if I had to pick the primary reason why I think they're dead is price. My car, for example, was an 8 yo Hyundai Santa Fe 2.2 Diesel with 80k on it when I bought it. I paid 11k for it 2 years ago. I own it outright. It's 10 years old now and you wouldn't know it.

I've paid £900 for tyres, tracking and aircon recharge and about £160 a month on fuel since I bought it. It's had 2 MOT's too but didn't have to get anything fixed.

You just can't get equivalent EV's for that kind of money and for many, that kills them stone dead.

[0] - https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/361588/why-electric-car-i...

From your article:

> The results reveal that the cost of insuring these electric cars is indeed higher, but the difference is not as substantial as the headlines would suggest. The EV was actually cheaper to cover for one of our drivers.

Your £160/month on fuel over 2 years is £3,840. An EV charged on octopus would be at least a quarter of that, maybe less. So let’s say £960 - almost a £3k difference.

You can absolutely get second hand EVs for £11k - this seems to be at odds with your statement about low resale values too. The low residuals angle is being pushed hard at the moment but when I go looking all I see is standard depreciation on new vehicles.

The “burn forever” thing seems to be getting pushed a LOT lately too. Strange when they are 20x less likely to catch fire in the first place and car fires are already pretty rare. https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-ti...

I agree with your assessment of fuel prices and whatnot but I just checked Autotrader. I set 11k as the price, SUV body type and there are 63 electric cars to choose from. Over 40 are MG...

If I change it to Diesel I get over 11k cars available. 171 Santa Fe models.

The range on those MG's is about 180 miles too: 3 times this year I've driven to Aberdeen - I'd run out of juice on the way in the EV. I get just over 400 in my diesel.

The energy density of batteries isn't comparable to ICE cars.

An 11k EV is not a patch on a 11k diesel.

You’re comparing older ICE vehicles with relatively new EVs. In a few years time you will have more choice of older EVs in the same age bracket as the ICE cars. The second hand market will be awash with Model Ys, Audi SUVs and more in a few years.

For long distance travel it’s a bit more complicated and you have to get your calculator out.

A quick look using ABRP suggests that a trip from Newcastle ( not sure where you’re coming from but that’s 380 miles) to Aberdeen in a MG ZS EV Long Range would require 1.5 hours of charge along the way, turning a 6 hour drive into 7.5. If you’re stopping anyway (I would) then it might not be a lot of additional time.

If you do that journey a lot, it might not be worth it. A few times a year it might be worth the compromise considering fuel costs saving the rest of the time.

If you filling up your diesel takes 10 minutes a fortnight then that’s 4 hours a year too. More if it’s out of your way. You save that if you charge an EV at home but spend it on long journeys.

You can also take the train or rent a car with the fuel savings and probably still be saving overall.

So it really depends. They are not a drop in replacement for every scenario but in some circumstances they do have benefits.

well I fill up a sedan (~13 gallons), So 2-3 minutes fits unless I'm in a long line. I'd only be spending 15+ minutes in a Costco line.

>all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle.

Depends on how readily you have access to a charging port at home/work. if you have no garage to park in and charge overnight with, you're pretty much stuck at some public space for 30 minutes minimum (assuming fast charging).

> Depends on how readily you have access to a charging port at home/work. if you have no garage to park in and charge overnight with, you're pretty much stuck at some public space for 30 minutes minimum (assuming fast charging).

Right; as the article puts it,

> The majority of today’s American EV owners charge at home, but more than 20 percent of US households don’t have access to consistent off-street parking where they can plug in overnight. The public charging network, meanwhile, can be spotty, and drivers have complained that chargers aren’t always well maintained or even functioning.

Although, that said, it's possible that getting 80% of cars to be EVs would be a big win already; assuming the number really is 20% that may not be a big problem.

People who rely on street parking don’t buy EV

> When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic.

I'm willing to believe that it takes 15-20 minutes to fill your pickup, but that's a far outlier. If I was guessing, I'd say that your tank is a factor larger than most cars, and I'd also say that I can't remember the vapor pressure sensor malfunctioning like that and that's also skewing your data.

It takes about 3-4 minutes to fill my 30 gallon tank from near empty at the Murphy's in town here.

15-20 minutes seems crazy unless it's a huge tank in the bed of the truck. And I've not had a vapor issue with them either, they fill at full speed.

> When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time

Well yes if you have a huge pickup that can take a while. I have 35 gallon tank on the pickup and it does take a while (never measured it so not sure how many minutes).

But on our regular cars, it takes less than 2 minutes to fill the tank.

> Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle.

Well the EV driver spends less "CPU time" (using computer analogy) since they plug it in and go do something else. But the wall-clock-time is orders of magnitude higher so if the battery is empty and you need to go somewhere, it's not happening very soon.

Yeah, my first thought on seeing the title question was "well, they charge slower than you can refill gas, so obviously you need more chargers than existing gas stations, though of course most people don't have gas stations at home so it's a kind of messy comparison".

> as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes.

I recently drove to the airport in a bit of a rush in a small 4-cylinder car. Drove straight up to pump that was basically touching the road I was on, tapped credit card, authorized for $100 and opened cap at same time. Stuffed the pump in and held it at max flow. 45l of gas later, cap back on, pump away and moving again.

I don’t think it would be possible to be faster.

Total time stopped: 7 minutes.

I'd love to know how much range you're adding to your ICE vehicle after pumping gas for 1-2 minutes.

Fast DC chargers add 7 to 13 miles of range per minute (charging is fastest when the battery is almost empty).

Competent charging networks also accept contactless cards or even automatically bill your account when you plug in.

All these people saying it takes a minute or two to get gas haven't paid attention to how long they actually spend entering the gas station, driving to the pump, getting out, negotiating payment, choosing fuel type, opening your tank, pumping, putting the handle back, hitting no on the receipt option, getting back in the car, leaving the pump, and entering traffic. Sometimes it'll take a minute just waiting for traffic to clear to pull out!

And then it's also assuming there is a gas station on your current route, and that it's one with a decent price and not more expensive than other stations around. A lot of the trips I take don't go past a decently priced gas station, the few I routinely do pass are often 5-6¢/gal more than others. At 22 gallons that's over a dollar more.

And also assuming you never get gas at a place like Sam's Club or Costco, which offer some big discounts but often have lines.

I can tell you from experience that leaving my EV to charge in my driveway overnight is way, way more convenient than stopping for gas (and paying a lot more for it).

I drive a lot, and I’ve ran into a situation only once where I had to find a charging station away from home. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people worry.

If you forget to charge overnight you're stuck waiting. If you forget to get gas, you can just go get gas and be on your way in a few minutes

• BEVs need to be plugged in about once a week (for a median US commute). If you forget one day, you can plug in another day, or day after.

• DC fast chargers can add 100 miles of range in 10 minutes.

> and paying a lot more for it

Do you have a low electricity rate?

A petrol car would use around 0.03 gallons per mile (33 mpg). At $ 4 per gallon that's $ 0.12 per mile.

A Tesla model S does around 0.3 kWh per mile. So to get to the same cost per mile your electricity price would have to be below $ 0.40 per kwh.

In a lot of places electricity isn't (much) below $ 0.40 per kwh.

Nearly everywhere in the US is below $0.40/kWh. The average nationwide is $0.17/kWh. Only a handful of cities in California and Hawaii are over $0.40 (those places have the highest gas prices too). Most people will pay less than half as much to charge at home.

ref: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

My overnight rate is $0.02/kwh

$0.40/kwh is an absurd embarrassment for the local government. Move or vote them out.

> My overnight rate is $0.02/kwh

Where in the world is this?!

East Coast USA.

> In a lot of places electricity isn't (much) below $ 0.40 per kwh.

Here in my corner of Silicon Valley, electricity is never below that price! Thanks PG&E.

Off-peak rate (starts at midnight) is 44.2 c/kWh which is as cheap as it gets.

(Peak rate in the afternoon after 3pm is 71.3 c/kWhw)

I've heard that the issues with the "swap the battery" model are:

1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. People won't want to swap it for some random battery, and you risk an illicit market for swapped out "good" batteries. Sure, if swapping is very common, then batteries are fungible and maybe it all evens out. I doubt it, though.

2. Batteries are large, heavy, and not necessarily centrally placed. You'd need some sort of winch/harness/crane system, which is dangerous and expensive to automate. Even if you figure it out, swappable batteries might be a negative design constraint for electric cars (e.g. "what if we want to put battery cells throughout the body of the car?").

I also like the model, but how could it be made to work well?

This assumes the car has one big battery.

What if it has a number of smaller ones that can easily be swapped out by one person?

Or maybe one big unswappable battery, and 1-3 smaller swappable ones?

NIO just did the expensive-to-automate part, it's not just theory... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w (Tom Scott demo/walkthrough.) Press release from April says https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/chinas-nio-to-expand-battery... "it completed 40 million battery swaps" across 2300 stations.

It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) did before it failed 10 years ago.

> 1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car.

Obviously, a swappable battery is something you rent.

Car manufacturers would love to charge us a monthly fee. They are currently trying all sorts of schemes to do it.

But a swappable battery might justify a monthly fee.

Headline 100 years ago: "How many gas stations does the US need to replace Hay and farriers?"

Obviously for the first few years it was difficult to drive an automobile very far.. and every year it got better and better.

The difference is, you can create a gas station with a barrel and a pump. No need for infrastructure.

Also every single house in the civilised world has an electric outlet, the infrastructure is already built.

Sure, but the curbs three blocks away do not, and around here there's been no progress towards building it.

Curbside parking is shit for everyone. I would be really hesitant to leave any car I'm not willing to lose on the curb.

You can (and people do) create a charging station with just a battery. Using the same metric as the gas station, which will indeed need more than just a barrel to make it work.

You can create a charging station with solar panels and a battery.

Gas stations don't fill up themselves out of thin air — a massive infrastructure has been built (and wars fought for) for extraction, refining, and supplying the fuel.

I’m pretty sure you would need a huge, extremely expensive battery and it could only charge one or two cars a day, and take multiple days to recharge.

You're saying as if it was hypothetical. This is already being done.

UK's gridserve has solar farms producing 62GWh/year, that's over 2000 full recharges per day.

Their "Electric Forecourts" have 6MWh of battery storage (~100 cars).

https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/electric...

Battery storage is common in charging stations, because it allows peak charging speeds higher than the grid connection, plus use of renewable and off-peak electricity.

Someday… someday… (sub)urban dwellers will wake up to cars being the problem, not the type of car.

Yep, EVs are better than ICEs. Public transportation and proper infrastructure is far better (and cheaper overall).

Get the public transit in order, and you don't need so many charging stations.

How about self driving cars as public transport?

Doesn’t solve the underlying problems that are caused by having car-centric cities. Walkable cities where most people’s needs are meet within walking distance and the mass transit for times you need to further is the real solution.

Agree on walkable, although I really like the idea of personal public transport that would be door-to-door and on-demand. I expect it would distribute cities more, and alleviate the hub-and-spoke model that public transport is sometimes built to, e.g. Dublin, Ireland.

Which would still cause traffic issues, wasting public land on building more roads and wasting energy and resources. Plus propping up the auto industry that caused the problem in the first place.

What if you don't want to live in a city as dense as that?

Cars are carry less people per area of road than buses do and it's even worse for self driving cars that are empty half the time.

My car is empty 99% of the time, it could be very highly utilised by the general public.

Given the current lower bound of one passenger in personal vehicles the process for using driverless cars needs to incentivize car pooling to the point that the average occupancy of traveling cars is considerably above 1 to make up for all the cars taking up road space while empty.

There is a possibility of municipalities having many mid to large vans that do routes at higher frequencies because they don't need drivers.

This deals mainly with commercial vehicle electrification, but the broader discussion is on topic: Grid not ready, not close. https://www.fleetowner.com/emissions-efficiency/video/550204...

Money chart (2022) is here: https://www.fleetowner.com/perspectives/running-lights/blog/...

In the US, ~70% of people live in single family houses.

Most people already have an EV "gas station" at home...

How hard could it be to add chargers to most gas stations? Just add them to the front of the building where the row of parking spots is. Bet they'd sell a lot more snacks, too.

Yeah but who wants to spend 45 minutes sitting around in a gas station parking lot? It be much nicer to install them in roadside rest stops, city/state parks, or near dense clusters of businesses.

EVs can be charged while parked, and there are nicer destinations to park at.

Shopping malls usually are in a better position to add charging, because they already have high-power grid connections, more parking space, and more things to do while the car is charging.

Chargers are not going to be a problem as long as they are profitable.

Looking a few years ahead, there's enough going on with solid state batteries that somebody, probably Toyota or one of the Chinese manufacturers, will ship that in quantity. Charging times should drop to 10 minutes. Chargers will have to have more power, but might not be more than the current number of gas pumps.

We won't need more real estate for charging stations. This matters.

> as long as they are profitable

Which will be a big part of the problem. Gas stations aren't profitable. The convenience store with $6 bags of chips next to it is.

We also learned in the early 2000s with the "datacenter in a shipping container that can go anywhere" fad that highly dense power isn't available in most places. As EV charging chains try to scale externalize costs onto the grid we will just end up subsidizing corporate profits.

McKinsey claims charging stations can be.[1]

That was written before 10 minute charging looked possible. If charge times get down to 10 minutes, a gas station model works. Hour-long charging requires something for the humans to do.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...

Sorry I should say gas stations are profitable standing alone. Once two gas stations exist it is a race to the fixed price floor (all stations buy from the same distributors in the same way all charging stations will buy from the same grid). There is no brand loyalty or product differentiation.

McKinsey also thought it was a good idea to produce a report for the Saudi government that brought their attention to Jamal Khashoggi, ultimately leading to his murder.

I live in the Midwest and the biggest issue I see here is that all the fast chargers are in the cities, which is precisely where you don't need many of them. There are not nearly enough along interstates between cities, which is where you need them for road trips.

We charge our EV in our garage and that's fine for 95% of all driving. For apartments having outlets or simple L2 charging would be perfectly adequate.

> the US currently has 188,600 public and private charging ports

That seems... very low. Admittedly I'm from UK, but I don't know a single EV owner that doesn't have a home charger.

Yea, not sure about that number for private charging ports. They certainly don’t know about the Level-2 charger in my garage. I wouldn’t even include private chargers since the numbers would necessarily be unreliable.

Private chargers may refer to e.g. those on Apple’s campus available only to their employees.

You need to calculate how many charging stations you need at time of peak demand, like Thanksgiving weekend when half the country is making a road trip.

I don't think building a bunch of year round useless charging capacity is useful. But I also think relying on car infrastructure for Thanksgiving is a bad idea and that hasn't stopped the US.

So what is your solution? Because if your answer starts with "people should just stop traveling for holidays" then it's not going to work.

If people want to drive during peak seasons, let them wait a few extra minutes at chargers? This seems like a problem that supply and demand will solve pretty efficiently.

The concern is that problems like Thanksgiving will decrease the demand for EVs.

Sure, if it's just a few minutes. I've heard of 4 hour waits at Thanksgiving. If it's that or worse "supply and demand" will result in people buying gasoline vehicles instead of electric vehicles.

There are other ways to make sure people can travel but I understand those are hard to imagine if you live somewhere where you only have hammers.

Building anything to match peak demand is stupid.

Like should we build every stadium so big that it can fit every Swiftie that wants to see the concert?

We already have infrastructure to handle Thanksgiving travel. Humans react very strongly when you take something away from them.

I'm wondering if there is a way to calculate the peak KW amount during Christmas or Thanksgiving or any national holidays, for Quebec. My friends said it's going to break the infras but I'm just curious. It's actually pretty frequent, not just once a year, not two, but probably 4-6 per year.

Of course, whatever Wired says only works if everyone lives the suburb life style.

In Europe you'd need a lot more public chargers.

One could argue that in Europe, you’d have a much easier time to design the infrastructure in such a way that reliance on cars in general is substantially reduced, hence also removing demand for EV chargers of any kind

Europe isn’t this monolithic 100% hyperdense urban utopia Americans tend to think it is. There are a lot of suburbs and rural areas where people still use cars.

I am aware that this is the case, especially since I am European. However, this is a non-argument against my initial claim.

The top comment made a point implying that having home charging stations is only possible if you're living that suburban lifestyle (i.e. single family home/duplex with designated parking) but in a city with on street parking it is not.

Howver, most (bigger) european cities have some resemblance of decent public transport infrastructure and are less car-centered than US cities, making the move to non-car transportation much easier than in the US. For rural areas and suburbs, where people have to rely on cars, the initial argument doesn't even apply considering they are living the "suburban lifestyle" that has been deemed a non-issue from the go

Nice theory but while Europe is better than the US in that respect, I believe the only place where that actually works is the likes of Japan...

[Bet that some Japanese HNer will show up in 4... 3... 2... 1... to complain about their traffic though.]

> As a result of the early efforts to make the switch to EVs, the US currently has 188,600 public and private charging ports, and 67,900 charging stations, according to data collected by the US Department of Energy

and

> There were more than 630,000 charge points in the bloc at the end of 2023 (https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/most-eu-countr...)

so Europe (the EU) is already well ahead.

The title literally says the US. Every country is different.

Well over half of the population owns or rents a detached or semi-detached home with plausible driveway charging. Yes we need to work on the people who don't have that option, but it is totally valid to observe that a huge chunk of people only need public chargers a couple times a year.

Seattle is rapidly installing EV chargers on power poles for public use in dense urban areas

Only 25 for the whole city so far, and with a 60% markup over standard electricity rates (0.21/kWh vs 0.13/kWh).

That's about half the price of commercial DC fast charging in my area ($0.40-$0.50/kWh), and, according to the math in another comment, about half the break even price with gasoline.

It's certainly more expensive than what I pay to charge at my house, but I wouldn't be mad about it if I had that available to me.

I think most 2 car households could have a full EV and a hybrid combination and basically never use gas throughout the year.

We moved to 2 full EVs and have no problems getting anywhere (Texas to Wyoming to Illinois and back was easy)

Here is a crazy idea: maybe cars need easily removable, standardized, commoditized batteries.

At a charging station, you don't charge, you swap to a charged battery, leaving the discharged one there.

The silly status quo has to be abolished, that the battery is an expensive part that is semi-permanently attached to a particular car, until that battery becomes worn out, and is then replaced at great expense and difficulty.

Charging stations should charge batteries. Not only can they do that 24/7, whether or not there are any customers present, but a given charging lot can accomodate a lot more simultaneous batteries than parked cars. If too many spent batteries accumulate, they can be taken away for charging in some charging warehouse.

Upgrade all parking spaces to wireless charging.

(I don't know if it exists yet, but it will. Same with charging strips on roads. Death Stranding forever.)

Wireless charging is shit and snake oil.

What you need is a law that requires every apartment parking spot to have a charger - or at the very least a law that explicitly allows people to install chargers in their parking spots themselves[0]

Also a certain percentage of public/store/corporate parking should be mandated to have chargers. One stop at Target is enough to charge more than it took to drive there and back even with a Level 2 charger.

[0] by hiring a licensed electrician of course, not by themselves

I'm hoping for a less car centric future. Cars seem so limiting to me.

I'm a fairly early adopter of EVs, and my family's current collection includes 2 BEVs, 1 PHEV, and 1 ICE.

Road tripping more than about 250 miles in an EV with today's class of 18650-like cells doesn't give me the experience that dino juice does, which is what I want. So when I'm going out of town, I'm either in the PHEV or the ICE car.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I headed out from Seattle to Walla Walla for the weekend. This is a 275-mile trip through the Cascade mountain range with speeds close to 80mph for most of the drive. BEVs that can do that without stopping tend to cost between 3-5 times the cost of either my PHEV or ICE.

If I were to take my $25k (current value) BEV from 2019 I'd need to stop at least once, likely in Yakima, to roll the dice with the Electrify America stations in the Walmart parking lot. When I get there I can expect that several of the stalls will be ICEd because nobody in Yakima gives a flying fsck about anyone else, especially jackwads in their fancy weird EVs passing through town on their way to anywhere-but-Yakima. There's no practical enforcement of the "Pretty please only let people in EVs use these stalls" signs.

There's a better-than-not chance that at least one of the chargers will be broken. Depending on when I get there -- say, late afternoon at the end of Memorial Day weekend -- I will find that there is a line of BEVs waiting to charge. And by "line" I mean people arriving and parking in whatever haphazard way they can somewhere near the chargers and then maybe following some vague resemblance of "first in first out" queuing as stalls open up. Maybe they will form an actual line snaking through the parking lot blocking regular parking spots. I don't know, but for me at least being in a crowd of people trying to get a charge will at least be awkward and stressful.

When I finally get into the stall to charge I will need make sure I have cell phone reception so I can activate the charger, unless maybe I got lucky and found a charger that actually works with a credit card. Then hopefully the charger will successfully handshake with my EV from 2019, start charging, and keep charging without faulting out. It takes about 45 minutes to get enough charge to make it to my destination. Depending on how long it takes to wait for a stall to open up and then get enough charge, my 4-hour trip has turned into what's likely to be a 6-hour trip each way, making a total of 8 hours on the road look more like 12 hours. It will cost about as much as it would have cost to use gasoline instead.

So that's what needs fixing. The charger capacity we have now wouldn't be horrible if (1) "charging EVs only" rules were swiftly and regularly enforced, (2) the chargers that did exist were reliable, and (3) my $25k EV were capable of charging 10% to 90% in about 15 minutes.

Bonus points if I can walk up to a teller, hand them cash, and then charge without my car reporting its identity or anything like that. Because, you know, people should be able to travel without having their comings and goings tracked by data brokers. But I'm just one of those old-school privacy freaks who thinks where I'm going and when isn't anyone's business but my own, I guess.

We're getting there, gradually. Very, very gradually. I am frankly very disappointed in how things have turned out since I bought my BEV 5 years ago. I'll continue driving in around town because it's so convenient to have the proverbial "full tank" pulling out of my garage every morning. I simply don't care about any rapid charging infrastructure any more. I can and will just drive my gas car when doing road trips for the foreseeable future.

Gas stations aren’t going anywhere. On the contrary, the end of EVs has already started. Just wait a couple years, they’d be labelled as a failed idea.

Unrelated to the article....but I can't ree myself getting an EV currently.

1. They just don't sound like the muscle cars. 2. For me personally, battery density isn't good enough, and I don't like how you can't just buy replacement batteries for some cars.... 3. With the lack of energy density comes the range issues in extream weather. 4. Software. Iv seen the software on some of these cars....I'd rather bike somewhere than drive in those. 5. Some vehicles with the one pedal driving have an issue where can can be slowing down, yet not hitting the brake pedal, yet no break lights are engaged.

6. Safety, gas isn't safe but I fear those EV battery's more than explosives or florine. EV battery's are big, bulky, and despite how big they are are not as energy dense as gasoline....yet they are a magnitude worse to put out. Also electricity isn't cheap where I live...and while charging to 100% is cheaper than gas....combined with the density and safety factors it's just not viable for me to be a consumer yet

This is the most uninformed comment I have ever seen at the top of HN. So much so I think it is likely trolling. Somehow you all fell for it.

Literally every single point is wrong(other than 1 which is obviously true and 4 which is subjective). It absolutely has to be a troll, or someone who is genuienly tragically uninformed.

That's human... there will always be the kind of people that have their lists ready why the future will right now and also never in the future work for them, fortunately there is a long time perspective in evolution also in regard to ideas&thinking.

Well, first of all, you should definitely consider biking some places rather than taking a car, EV or not. Even e-bikes are more energy efficient than most other modes of transport.

There's also nothing that could really convince you if you want your cars to be noisy because there's no need for EVs to be noisy. I guess the only way to check that one off the list would be environmental regulations controlling noise pollution which would ding most ICE vehicles (and having lived and worked near busy roads I'm surprised those aren't already much stricter).

But I'd still like to address some of your worries:

> battery density isn't good enough

I guess you mean "range isn't good enough" as battery density isn't really a meaningful stat by itself. I agree, there are few models available that have a good range comparable to an ICE. However with "super charging" you often don't spend more than 10 or 20 minutes at a charging station and these stops can often work nicely as toilet breaks or food breaks when making longer trips. But the real answer is that for longer trips you just need to plan your trips differently. With home charging you also ideally don't need to use public charging for most day-to-day trips. EVs certainly excel more at shorter ranges and frequent trips than occasional long range travel.

> replacement batteries

This really depends on the make and model. Some brands offer batteries for lease which means your battery will be swapped out before it reaches its end of life. If you buy the battery you might save money in the long run but will have to take care of replacing it yourself. Some Chinese manufacturers are fielding technology that allows swapping out batteries instead of charging them so that may also become a thing in the US and EU in the future.

> range issues in extreme weather

This one is true to some extent but varies by model. There was a lot of FUD about this earlier this year because it makes for good (i.e. high engagement) news stories but the short of it is that EVs behave differently than ICE cars and you need to take this into account. Cars generally don't handle extreme cold well and running your heating/aircon on max will drain your battery/fuel in either case.

> I've seen the software on some of these cars

Not much I can say to that as you're not giving me much to respond to. Yeah, some early models (e.g. Fisker Ocean) are notorious for software issues but these are usually mostly annoyances, nothing safety relevant.

> Some vehicles with the one pedal driving have an issue where can can be slowing down, yet not hitting the brake pedal, yet no break lights are engaged.

This is a common misunderstanding of how EV braking works: most EVs have a form of regenerative braking that recovers the energy from deceleration by releasing the gas pedal. If the brake lights came on every time you took the foot off the pedal, that would confuse everyone involved, so usually the brake lights will engage only on a delay or when actively braking using the brake pedal. Think of it like switching gears in a stick shift to "engine brake" - that wouldn't trigger the brake lights to come on either.

Usually regenerative braking can't do a full stop so it will cut out at a certain minimum speed and require manual braking to stop the car. This has in some cases led to confusion because the stop in deceleration will be misinterpreted as the car accelerating again, especially when regenerative braking happens while manually braking using the brake pedal. It's 100% a matter of what you're used to.

> gas isn't safe but I fear those EV batteries

That's absolutely correct. EV batteries, once burning, will keep burning and will need to be submerged and kept submerged to ensure they don't catch fire again. I guess the positive is that they can't leak. A fuel leak might result in combustible fumes spilling into the interior whereas a battery will only catch fire exactly where it is. But realistically I'd rather hope we can move away from lithium in the future.

> electricity isn't cheap

I think that's the crux of it. EVs work best in urban or suburban environments with private charging infrastructure and cheap energy sources like rooftop solar. Gas is also notoriously cheap in the US compared to most EU countries where EVs can be significantly cheaper. But the killer app really is at home "slow" (i.e. over night) charging.

> electricity isn't cheap where I live

Electricity is literally free where I live at the moment (0.17c/kWh). And in a few hours I'll actually get paid to use it as the price will dip down to -0.20c/kWh at night

Meanwhile gasoline costs around 1.80€/litre and diesel is 1.60€/l.

With these prices it's really hard to justify driving an ICE vehicle.

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