Also city dwellers with street parking and it’s hard charge, so a pure EV is a bad fit.
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
This should really be handled in the car and through the charging cable.
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.
Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.
May save you 5-10% on the bill.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.
It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.
It could even be cheap in a low-current version — it would basically be an extension cord, with two 12AWG hots and a ground plus a couple of little wires and the whatever inexpensive electrical parts are needed to declare its capabilities. If you can buy an e-marked USB-C cable for a few dollars, the latter won’t cost much.
Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.
(For reference, I'm in a CCS2 marketplace.)
US power supplies tend to be 1kW though for constant load (1.5kW rather than 2kW) so even worse.
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).
For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gas-taxes-state/
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/08/07/governor-newsom-announces-...
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
[0] https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
The above is for most people. There are exceptions in both states where gas makes more sense.
It makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.
Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560 for energy costs in the EV, let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.
That sounds very high. The most common lease cap is 10k miles per year.
Also, 10K seems like a common base lease arrangement, but up to 15K is common. On top of that its not like most cars are leased.
They worked on the same principle as the old mechanical signs at airports and train stations.
So it was mechanical first with the motors, then the LED display and then LCD and then the current TFT etc.
I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.
It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.
I luckily live in a building with reasonable people, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
Long story short, I’d never have bought an EV if I couldn’t charge at home or work.
In April it cost about 14p mile off the motorway for petrol, 17 on the motorway (higher prices). Today it’s another 3p due to Iran, so 17/20p a mile.
Home electric costs 2.5p a mile at night, 8p during the day. public charging is around 15p on a slow overnight charger and 24p on a fast charger.
It was always an issue, but he ended up moving to a more surban place. If you drove to work daily and they had charging it wouldn’t be an issue. Rapid charging isn’t that quick.
Though at my old office they started limiting time at the chargers. The city has recently started having public chargers.
One of the selling point of electric is you always start out with a full ish charge.
I’m on my bike on most days I commute. I like it better. Except in the winter where the lack of plowing of these separated bike lanes forced me onto public transit, which I don’t love. My car (2010 element) is gas but I only fill every 3 or so weeks.
Which results in more total electric miles driven replacing gas? I don't know, but "gas is destroying the world" is a brain short circuit.
They still depend on minerals that require destructive mining from equipment that runs on fossil fuels, still use rubber tires, still has tons of plastics that are made with petroleum, still dependent on a power grid mainly sustained by fossil fuels...
We should be thinking bigger than this, even. Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit whenever possible. If it's not possible, try to move somewhere where it is.
We must be willing to be slightly inconvenienced for the greater good instead of arguing about which type of car to drive. People don't want to have that conversation, though.
TFA links another page where it is explained how the ICE motors used in Nissan hybrids have surpassed 50% efficiency, which is an efficiency that in the past was reached only in huge 2-stroke Diesel engines for ships.
50% is already not much lower than the efficiency of the gas turbines used in electricity generation plants, but the power plants with combined cycle (gas turbines + steam turbines) may reach over 65% efficiency and the power plants with Combined Heat and Power may reach over 80% total efficiency.
Battery EVs may take advantage of continuous improvements in the energy generation infrastructure, but for now they are still not usable everywhere, so hybrids are still preferable to cars with pure ICEs.
The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.
Also even in the sprawl, people usually don't drive hundreds of kilometers s day.
I dunno. Ask the OP.
The nearest level3 is off the peninsula and both are under repair.
The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out. EV is not for everyone (yet)
I know that EV infra generally sucks in the US, but don't people understand that more than 96% people on the planet live elsewhere? Often in places where EVs work just fine?
Parking during charging is often the only option. E.g. Gent even had parking only for rented BEVs and car sharing BEVs.
So, I don't know what you are talking about at all. There a restricted zones were you aren't even allowed to enter with an ICE.