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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an empty tank versus 30 minutes to fully recharge an electric car, then you really need 75 times as many charging points to claim you have something resembling equality.

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The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars, versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations as there are gas stations wouldn't be an issue there.

Also, once you have an operational charge point you can easily go parallel with stations, just like with gas pumps.

In rural areas, it's actually common to have a gas pump near the garage. After all, what are you going to do, drive your tractor to town to fill up?

Near Dillingham Alaska: The guy I was briefly working for would have to take his boat two miles up (down?) river to get his mail.

also, most people charge their cars while sleeping, so in your day-to-day, moving around the city, maybe you will never use an electric station ever.

Is like saying I will never use a pump for my diesel engine.

those are different animals. one of which may never see a public charge utility.

(Take for example me, I just move home-gym-work, the max I can move in a given day are 30 km, so, I will never need one of those utilities)

Assuming 100% utilization of course, which around here is very far from the truth.

Peak utilization is more important than average.

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