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Comment by dude187 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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