Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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Not to say EV charging has been solved, it is still very much in progress, but 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station. We should continue to use policy to encourage "EV ready" infra in residential and apartment settings, places of business, commercial/retail, government, etc, but lots of folks can be served today. The vast majority US housing stock is single family homes (attached and detached combined), and those can, in most cases, be upgraded to support a dedicated circuit for charging. And, to your point, you'll also want to mandate new apartment building build outs are EV charging ready for their tenants.

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/23/electric-ve...

Key takeaways from the above:

> The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.

> EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.

Maps: https://supercharge.info/map | https://www.plugshare.com/ | https://afdc.energy.gov/stations#/find/nearest?country=US&fu...

2 miles is an awfully long way, and 36% of Americans are even further away. That’s 4 miles round trip. Presumably many of those charging stations aren’t that big and disallow you leaving your car overnight. The rest of the numbers are similarly bad.

Doesn’t appear to be a problem for EV sales. Is your closest gas station 2 miles away?

https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2024-ev-sales/

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...

>is your closest gas station 2 miles away?

No but it only takes 3 minutes to dump 45 litres of fuel into my car and that lasts about 3 weeks of driving.

Almost there.

https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo...

Battery swapping in 3 minutes...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=09VxbzB8x4M

Some of the new 1000v infrastructure has 10-80% charging occuring in 5 minutes.

These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.

It’s not insane to hope many cars will be able to go and charge themselves at 2am, when roads are quiet and chargers are free, a few years from now. Optimise over the entire system, schedule it, car ready for the morning.

This is going to be a long time coming. Owners of EVs overwhelmingly live in houses not apartments. No one is going to send their car off to pay many times their home rate per kWh when they could get a home L2 charger and charge it themselves. It would pay for itself in under a year.

My comment is not solving for people who would be better served by charging at home, because they don’t care about the distance to a charger. Waymo’s can already find their own way to a charger, so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine people innovating around this problem for owned cars.

Waymo might build a waymo specific solution, but the general case for the general population won't exist for a long time.

The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.

I’m making very loose claims. Hope, it’s not an huge stretch, etc. My error bars are very wide, intentionally, because it’s hard to predict the next 5 years. Your position is a lot more brittle. If self driving works, cars can go fill themselves up. That can change demand, so the demand argument falls away. If taxi’s work and scale up, costs drop, so the economic issue falls away. For you to be right, no innovation must happen.

The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.

I disagree, you're missing a really important part. If self driving exists, then cars can drive themselves to the spot where the chargers are, which is necessary but not sufficient.

Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.

Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.

I’d considered it but assumed a person in one place is cheaper than many people wandering around to fill their own cars. Just bake it into the price. This is not an insurmountable problem compared to “require all buildings must be upgraded to power EV charging”. If I paid you a million dollars to figure it out I think you could make a plan in under a day.

The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.

It's certainly not an insurmountable problem, I just think we're in a local minimum that will prevent it from being a thing in, say, the next 5 years. I would agree with your other statement that China may well figure it out.

The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.

This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.

I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.

The chargers probably have 2/4 chargers working at any given time.

> 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station.

If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.

If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?

Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.

I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.

I’m lucky to be able to charge quickly at home.

I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.

The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.

> It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.

It is curious that this is the case. If chargers were profitable a couple of years ago, you would expect more chargers and more profit today.

I haven’t noticed much growth in chargers where I live but I have noticed more EVs on the road.

I think the difficulty is the installation process. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the challenge of getting that much run to convenient places isn't always that easy and, combined with the regulatory burdens likely involved in something providing that much power is scaring away potential installations.

You have to think a lot of the low hanging fruit locations are taken by now and, even if it's profitable, it doesn't make any profit while you're building it and I've seen a "coming soon" sign on top of what looked like a finished installation for more than a year at a mall near me.

And how many gas stations were there in 1930? We can build more charging stations, and they’re way more environmentally friendly that gas stations.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gas-stations-prices-closing

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