[oh_hello]

I always thought this was a big problem for EVs, but recently came to think nightly charging might not matter so much for these drivers. If an urban apartment dweller has an EV with 200+ miles of range, can't a public fast charger be used once or twice a week instead? I lived in an apartment with a ~200 mile range ICE car and filled it less than once a week.

[jedberg]

Filling your car at the gas station is a five minute stop on the way home. Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full. To get totally full, it would take a multi-hour stop.

[693471]

Only takes 15 minutes to go from 0-40% in a Tesla Model 3 Long Range (310 miles max) at a superCharger, and full is only about an hour because the last 20% is slow.

You can hit another charger 2 hours down the road after that 15 minute charge and plug in for 5-10 minutes to get to the next charger if needed. It will be ready after you're done taking a bathroom break and you bought a snack.

Few people need to charge to 100% on a road trip if they have a good EV. Tesla did the right thing with their design. Everyone else should catch up.

Imagine if GM cars only came with 5 gallon gas tanks but the Audi came with a 15 gallon tank. That's basically what we're talking about. Don't shit on EVs because only one company is doing it correctly.

[kennywinker]

Sure. If your commute is 15% of your range, you’d be able to charge once a week. I’m pretty sure most people could work out a multi-hour stopover near a charging station into their week. Put them near a restaurant, arts, or shopping district and bingo problem solved.

[ghaff]

Near where I live, there's actually one in the parking lot of the almost derelict shopping mall. But that's also right next door to a particularly busy grocery store. There are usually vehicles in it and this is in an area (Mass) that doesn't have a lot of Teslas generally and certainly not in the somewhat rundown small city this store is on the outskirts of.

[aaomidi]

> Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full.

..What? Where are you getting your numbers from.

[Brakenshire]

You’d do a weekly food shop, and do your weekly charge at the same time.

“Well over an hour” is wrong, there’s almost no electric car that won’t do an 80% charge in 45 minutes, and most take half an hour.

[jedberg]

I never said it would take an hour. I specifically said you could get an 80% charge in about an hour.

And the grocery store better have a lot of chargers if everyone is doing their weekly fillup while they shop.

[Brakenshire]

> Filing your electric car is at least an hour if you have a DC fast charger and that gets you only 80% full.

“At least an hour” to 80% charge. I don’t think there’s a car on the market for which this is the case.

People will charge in a variety of way. Some people in apartments will have block parking for which there will be chargers, some people will go to superchargers or similar, some will do it at the gym, some at the train station, some shopping, some at work, others will have chargers for on street parking. Other people will use car sharing schemes which have dedicated chargers. Ultimately cars are parked for hundreds of hours a week and you only need a tiny fraction of that for charging.

[kelnos]

That might work for urbanites who drive to work and work in the same city where they live.

But I know quite a few people whose daily commute is 40+ miles each way. They'd be visiting the charger every other day. That's unfortunately very common for people who live in San Francisco and work outside the city, and vice versa.

(I have a different problem: I walk or take transit to work, and have a car mainly for longer trips outside the city. I also have no charging station in my building's garage, so I've stuck with an ICE car for now.)

[Brakenshire]

Surely not having access to private parking is almost entirely an urbanite problem, to do with living in apartment blocks. Anyone who lives in the suburbs would be very likely to have their own parking.

[neogodless]

It's mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

> This issue will hopefully be transient; once charging speed is comparable to filling your ICE vehicle with fuel.

> Until then, the lack of fast public chargers combined with the relative slowness of charging makes this a major downgrade from ICE.

In other words, the only reason most people are OK with this one attribute of EVs that is inferior to ICE is the fact that they can charge at home (and/or work.) But there are plenty of people that do not fit into that category.

[throw0101a]

By being able to easily plug-in at home, overnight, one always has a full battery in the morning. Especially nice if you can program things to charge during off-peak hours.

[neogodless]

That is exactly my point. The people that can plug-in at home find it very convenient, but if that's not an option, it's not convenient at all! So I don't understand why you posted that comment as a response to mine?

[rco8786]

This is where my family is - we're considering an EV but do not have a charger at home. We live in a reasonably dense urban area w/ a dedicated spot in a garage and don't typically drive more than 200 miles a week, so we'll just use public chargers.

This will be a second car though - and I would be slightly wary of this sort of responsibility for a primary vehicle.

[ryanmercer]

>can't a public fast charger be used once or twice a week instead?

It takes me less than 2 minutes to fill up my tank and pay, now you want me to sit 1-4 hours at a fast charger a week twiddling my thumbs?

Never mind the fact a Tesla Model 3 starts at my annual salary.

[claytoneast]

Why is a fast charger 1-4 hours a week? You can do an 80% charge in a Tesla Model 3 in 24 minutes with the new generation of Superchargers, https://electrek.co/2019/07/02/tesla-supercharger-v3-range-m.... That will only improve in the coming years. 1-4 hours is not a valid charge time even now.

[ummonk]

I think it works if the fast charger is at e.g. a shopping center where you can grab dinner or shop while the car charges.

[neogodless]

Any solution that requires a certain behavior is unnecessarily coupling that behavior to transferring energy into transportation.

In a world where a couple owns two EVs, and only one does the weekly grocery shopping, do they have to swap cars to get them both charged? Do they have to start eating out to charge their car? What if you use Amazon Fresh for food deliveries? Give that up; you need to charge your car.

In other words, there are lots of ideas that might work for some people, but they shouldn't be necessary for EV ownership.

[kelnos]

I think your point hits to the heart of it for many people's situations. You can fit car-charging into your routine if you make some very specific changes to your routine to accommodate it, and you must make possibly several hours of time for those changes every X days, or else you'll have a car with a flat battery and no quick fix that will let you complete your regular car-requiring errands.

If that errand is "go grocery shopping" or "drop a large package off at the post office", you might be fine rearranging or postponing, but if it's "go to work", you're completely screwed. There are quite a few jobs where "I can't get to work because my car's battery is dead" will get you fired.

For me, I'm privileged enough that it's simply inconvenient to put that constraint on my lifestyle (inconvenient enough that I won't buy an EV), but for many people it's a showstopper.

[zip1234]

What if workplaces add chargers as a benefit? I've seen several do it near me. People then just plug their car in at work.

[neogodless]

> Any solution that requires a certain behavior is unnecessarily coupling that behavior to transferring energy into transportation.

Remember when we coupled health insurance to employment? (Also, what if I want to retire next month, but I still drive an EV? Now I'm stuck spending hours of my retirement waiting for my car to charge somewhere? First world problem, I know...)

These ideas are OK for a few people. But then wealthy people with wealthy employers are perhaps less likely to be "garage orphans" to begin with.

[erik_seaberg]

They have a few at work, but people complain about nobody vacating them promptly. With no guarantee that I would reliably have one every day, I'm not sure I see the point, I would always have to be prepared to get home without it.

[ryanmercer]

I'm at the grocery less than 10 minutes from the time I park my car til the time I start my car to leave. Aside from Church, work and my gyms (good luck getting a CF affiliate that barely keeps his doors open to install EV chargers in the parking lot of the half of a warehouse he leases and I don't see a chain gym in a small strip small that barely has adequate parking adding them to encourage people to loiter longer) I don't particularly go anywhere other than my apartment.

There are tons of us in this scenario that would have to go waste our free time sitting around at some business, running our cars for heating or air conditioning, while we charge one or more times a week.

The only way you ever get more than a token percentage of homeowners to switch to EVs is make it where you pull up to a building, a robot arm removes your batteries, slides new ones in, and you pull away 30 seconds later.

I know 1 person that owns an EV, he has a Tesla. Everyone made fun of him when he bought it, and still does months later. It looks like Tesla has two locations in all of Indianapolis with 8 super chargers at one and 12 at the other. 2 locations for 361 square miles.

The only place he goes regularly where he can charge it is his attached garage where he had a charger installed. I've only seen a few random business with a few generic (non fast-charging) charging stations around Indy with the exception of the EV smart-car looking cars in some of the hipster neighborhoods that you pay a monthly fee to use and have to return them to a handful of charging locations.

[kennywinker]

Not sitting twidding your thumbs. If they are near somewhere you want to be recreationally, you’re set. The gym, the grocery store, the movies, a hiking trail, spending 1-4 hours at one of these once a week would likely enhance your life not take away from it.

[chc]

If your solution to the difficulty of finding an EV charger is "put EV chargers literally everywhere," that would hypothetically solve the problem, but how do you propose to make that happen? That's what the question here is.

[zip1234]

Somehow people figured out how to make gasoline fueling infrastructure, which is amazing in itself. Extracting fuel out of the ground, transporting to refinery, transporting to destination holes scattered nearly everywhere around the world and pumping refined fuel back in, and then pumping back out of the ground into little fuel tanks in cars for it to be burned. If someone described that to me as a plan for internal combustion I would not believe them. With EVs, we actually have the delivery mechanism for fuel already mostly figured out.

[chc]

I know, it's amazing how it seems like it should be a relatively simple problem to solve, and yet it remains unsolved in real life. Hence my question: How do you propose to make that happen?

[esotericn]

Time.

We've had less than seven years of a legitimately usable EV even existing. Seven years.

[magicalhippo]

An EV charging station just requires a nearby transformer with spare capacity and a bit of digging. Here in Oslo (Norway) they're peppered all across town.

Check out this[1] map of them. It's slightly misleading since it counts one station which can charge either CCS or CHAdeMO as two, but still. To get a sense of scale, driving from Lysaker on the left to Manglerud on the right is about 15 minutes.

A fair number of them have been put up by the local government, but the rest are commercial.

[1]: https://www.ladestasjoner.no/kart/?lat=59.9138688&lng=10.752...

[Brakenshire]

Low power points aren’t expensive.

Ultimately if it was the other way around, and gasoline cars were the new technology, people would think it was mad to put huge underground storage depots filled with explosive liquid dotted throughout residential neighbourhoods. Charging infrastructure will just become normal. If there are people willing to pay to use it there are people who are going to fit it.

[pi-rat]

Here in Norway the cities and government offer(ed) subsidies to build EV chargers where it’s needed. (About $3000 for a public dual AC charger, or $22000 per triple DC fast charger)

We’re slowly but surely moving towards “chargers literally everywhere”.

[kennywinker]

If I, as a business owner, can get 1-4 hours of your time and spending money - it’s probably going to be well worth it to front the cost of land and charging equipment for a park-n-charge spot

[chc]

And yet business owners aren't rushing to install chargers, even in places where I'll regularly see a bunch of EVs on my way through the parking lot. So that theory doesn't seem to pan out.

[kennywinker]

> So that theory doesn't seem to pan out.

There are many reasons why my theory could still be valid but the circumstances have not yet kicked in. Awareness of the potential for profit could be missing. I assume the cost of installing EV charge stations is still coming down. EVs are definitely still largely a luxury item in north america, so usually owned by drivers with garages. and of course, the percentage of EV cars could still be too low to justify the infrastructure.

So, my theory may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's still largely untested.

[pi-rat]

Here in Norway they do (about 50% of new cars are electric, so there’s always someone in need of charging)

The local convenience store might have 1 or 2[1], big shops like IKEA might have 20+ free AC charging spots, and 5-6+ DC fast chargers[2] (costs money).

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.3579898,5.3582122,3a,42.9y,9...

[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.4750298,5.3308811,3a,75y,23....

[wutbrodo]

It's because we don't live in the metaphorical frictionless vacuum where the speed of light is infinite.

Less pithily, complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems don't instantaneously adapt to shifts in incentives, but that doesn't mean that we can't reason about tendencies that will shape long-term equilibria.