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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.