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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

The concern is that problems like Thanksgiving will decrease the demand for EVs.

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.

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