Simply replacing gas stations with chargers is a step back in electric's flexiblity. They don't need large underground storage tanks and special zoning. I think gas stations will simply vanish, and chargers will stay next to useful places like businesses, grocery stores restraurants, malls, etc.
This is true in Urban markets, but in more rural areas the gas station is the grocery store and the restaurant. It will probably help those businesses by giving bored drivers a reason to come into the business and spend.
In the ideal world we'd turn the existing gas stations into solar powered super charger stations (which do sort of look like current gas stations [1]). Existing gas stations are often found near useful places like grocery/restaurant/business areas.
But as you say, there are less needs for equipment and regulation, so we could potentially have existing gas station locations converted AND new sites even closer and even more liberally sprinkled about providing even more convenience.
That’s sort of pointless though unless the gas station is in the middle of nowhere. There is no point in wasting valuable real estate with solar panels covering a parking place in front of a building nobody has a reason to visit.
The grid functions with renewable energy so I would rather use the super charger at the grocery store than the one at a previous gas station.
There are a bunch of out-of-the-way gas stations in the US South that would benefit greatly from adding electric "pumps". They are generally located on vacation friendly roadways and are frequented mostly by travellers on their way to the beach.
Adding several electric recharge slots would be a great way to bring people and keep them there for 10-20 minutes. Restroom and snacks (or even meals) for 4-5 people plus you get to clean the bugs off of your windscreen. I personally make this trip every year (sometimes twice a year) and would love to see more electric refueling stops.
Middle of nowhere is a good place for a charger. mmost people will charge at home 95 % of the time. It is only the 5% trips where you don't get back home that you need a charger. Middle of nowhere is where that is likely to be. Look at truck stops, they are all stores and restaurants, everything someone going a long distance needs. They are never inside a city because land is too expensive and anyone in the city for the night has a parking space.
I think it's largely a matter of just getting charging stations in more places. People who own cars must park them somewhere, and all those somewheres can have utilities installed if someone's willing to pay for it, it's just a matter of figuring out how to make it happen (whether via mandates or incentives or just market forces).
They don't have to be superchargers, either, just good enough for overnight charging.
The transition will probably take a while, but I expect that eventually people will stop calling them "electric cars" and just call them "cars" and charging stations will become part of the ubiquitous infrastructure of cities, like sidewalks and fire hydrants.
I don't know if people stealing charging cables is a common problem now. People complain where I live about catalytic converter thefts. There are probably ways to solve the issue of people stealing expensive charging equipment and re-selling them, but if people steal cables simply to recover ten dollars or thereabouts of copper, I don't know how to fix that (aside from "move to a nicer neighborhood"). Maybe use less valuable metals like aluminum, if that can be made to work in this application?
I expect apartments will start installing chargers for residents. They just need a way to ensure that they don't lose money giving free power away. The early ones will do it for a direct profit. The later ones will do it because potentialnnew residents will start saying "nice place, but no placeto charge my car", after a while they will get the message and add them to compete. (where needed)
Event though youcan charge in minutes, that doesn't mean you should.
More than a handful of the high speed super chargers need some pretty serious electrical infrastructure so there's still a pretty important niche for something like a gas station for people taking longer trips where the charging time means you need somewhere to kill time while you charge.
Still think battery that can plug and play is a good idea, with all sort of monitoring tools you would not trade your good rental one with a bad one. A d if you have two to three you can simply like drinks just replace it when drive along. (Heave enough not easy to do in your neighbourhood store.). Charging is only for like cinema etc. Gas station is a goner except as cafe etc.
What I don't understand is why a replaceable battery is seen as an all or nothing proposition. Design the car so that you could add 1 or 2 extra batteries when you need them.
So 90%, 95%, 99% of the time you're using your built-in 150-mile range. But you're not dragging around the weight of the extra 200, 250, 300 miles that you don't need. Your car weighs a lot less so you get better eMPG.
Tesla did a demo of having a battery swap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY That's really cool but if you could roll into Jiffy Lube (now offering Jiffy Volts) and get your extra batteries ...
I like that idea. It's a little tricky to pull off, though. Adding cells in series increases the voltage (which the car might not be designed to handle) or adding them in parallel means they have to be well-matched to what the car already has.
I don't know if anyone has tried this, but a solution I like for adding dissimilar batteries is to break the battery up into blocks that are linked in series, with each block being, let's say, 50 volts. Maybe the stock battery has five of these in series for 250 volts.
If you add more blocks, it exceeds the voltage specifications. So what happens is that each block has a contactor (i.e. a big relay) that can bypass that block; it just looks like a 0-volt battery when enabled.
Supposing you add two extra blocks for a long trip. Then you have a scheduler that disables two blocks at a time on a rotating schedule, so it always has 250 volts. If the added blocks have more amp-hours than the OEM blocks, that's fine: they'll just be enabled for a longer duration. Rotating batteries in and out can be done in a way that keeps their voltages roughly equal with each other as they're depleted.
Maybe this is too complicated and too much of a hassle to be worth it in general (as opposed to just building a car with a big battery to begin with). I'm also not sure if typical relatively-inexpensive contactors can tolerate being switched on and off every few minutes while under load.
On the plus side, you could probably just have a few kinds of generic "extra" batteries that work in a wide range of vehicle as long as they can handle the required current. They wouldn't have to be an exact match for what's already in the car.