[gambiting]

I'm still eagerly awaiting explanation on how this is going to work with terraced houses where there's about 40 houses on each side and people park how and where they want, and most importantly where the local council barely has enough money to fix the worst potholes. But suddenly they are going to dig up a 300 year old street to put down enough cabling and charging points for every car. My question is "with what money".

[ClumsyPilot]

"My question is "with what money"."

This is a good question, we know that total cost of ownership of the charging network for cars is massively lower than that of petroleum infrastructure. So the problem is not shortage of money, but alighning incentives and investment. I believe this needs to be done through a large-scale national program, where central govermnet provides granta for modernising cities for efficiench: that includes charge points, insulation and enegy efficiency, etc. All those measures result in long-term savings, and we have record low interest rates

[erik_seaberg]

Is it actually? A gas station can serve thousands of cars every week without wiring thousands of street parking spaces.

[ClumsyPilot]

Its not just my opinion, UK government has brough forward it's ban of fossil fuel cars to 2030 from 2040 because they've done the research and found that it would geberate savings for the overall economy.

Consider thay the gas station is just the tip of the iceberg, it comes with an underground cistern of flamable liquid, trucks for delivery, complex oil refinery, pipelines and tankers. We are talking about literally hundreds of people working to keep a gas station pumping.

You are weighing all that up against one-tine installation cost of sinple cable and sockets? They need basically no ongoing maintenance, and car batteries are perfect for dumping excess power from renewables, and long as they are connected from prolonged periods - something you won't get out of a carging station approach

[gambiting]

>>They need basically no ongoing maintenance

The problem is that this is where you're wrong. Even if we get regular 3-pin 13amp sockets installed everywhere instead of the proper type-2 connectors, you can't just leave domestic sockets outside and unprotected, because in case of any damage or injury you'd be liable. At the minimum you need some circuit that can detect faults and report to HQ that it needs repairs. Then are you going to provide electricity for free? Because if not you need metering and billing infrastructure for all of these, and that absolutely does require maintenance. Even proper "hardened" type 2 chargers go out of order all the time and have to be maintained. 3-pin sockets everywhere are not the solution.

Tldr: a street with 40 sockets on it will require constant maintenance, and if the idea is to have every single Street everywhere wired with sockets, then this becomes a stupidly expensive endeavour.

[ClumsyPilot]

What is stupidly expensive in your book? Whats the total cost of parts for installing a socket, even with electronics, £50-£100? Average car owner spends £160 a month in UK.

Petroleum fuel is more expensive that eqivalent electricity because they have to pay for massive oil refineries, etc. It costs a fortune and you seem to totally ignore. Once you net out these costs, petroleum will not come out on top.

[gambiting]

>>Whats the total cost of parts for installing a socket, even with electronics, £50-£100?

According to the latest version of the electrical regulations, any external socket used for charging a car(and that includes regular domestic 3-pin sockets) has to have earth independant of the supply earth. Meaning that a separate earth stake has to be installed for each socket. I've gotten several quotes to do this recently and they all came back at around £400-500 mark. But even ignoring that, you are completely off the mark when it comes to parts, proper external armoured sockets and cables cost a lot more than "£50-100". That's dumb sockets that don't do anything. Commercial charging points that provide just regular 13amp charging without anything fancy go for multiple thousands of pounds, but you think a £50 socket would do? Have you considered why it might not? If you want to do it on the entire street then multiply that number + add the costs of digging up the street which can be a small fortune(ask OpenReach how much they charge per metre of groundworks, it's not uncommon to get bills for £100k for a 50ft of cable laid in ground).

>> It costs a fortune and you seem to totally ignore.

Uhm, I don't, but I just don't see how that's relevant. I'm also not saying that we should continue using petrol. Just that building this infrastructure in our cities is going to be incredibly expensive, and our councils already struggle so much to provide any support to our streets and roads. But somehow there are people who believe that by 2030 councils will magically pull the money out of their backsides and build it. I just don't believe that will happen.

[88]

So charge your vehicle at your workplace, or at the shops, or at a dedicated charging station?

In the medium term, if this becomes a real problem, properties will be devalued and owners can decide whether it’s worth contributing to the cost of installing the infrastructure.

In the long term, most people won’t have private vehicles, so there won’t be any need to store and charge them on public roads.

[gambiting]

>>In the long term, most people won’t have private vehicles

You see, I don't believe this point at all, and I'm yet to see a convincing argument why it would be true. It would already be cheaper for me to take an Uber to work rather than own my car yet the convenience of having your own personal space that is mine far outweighs the savings. Also anyone who has children and knows the insane amount of stuff that babies require would laugh at the mere idea. Autonomous vehicles can be fanciest robo taxies(and they won't be, if normal taxies are anything to go by) but the hassle of moving stuff from and out of each for a baby each time one arrives(car, not a baby) would drive you mad.

[88]

I don’t imagine private vehicle ownership will disappear entirely. It will just become even more of a luxury than it already is.

When autonomous vehicles halve the cost of an Uber/Lyft journey, many more people will weigh up the costs/benefits of private vehicle ownership and decide it’s not for them.

Different services will compete based in part on the luxuriousness of the interiors and the frequency at which they are cleaned.

As private vehicle ownership becomes rarer, so to will parking, particularly on-street parking. People will look back and think it odd that we dedicated vast public spaces to the storage of private property.

Finally, as private vehicle owners become a minority group, they will become an easy target for even more punitive taxation and regulations which will see the group shrink even further still.

[gambiting]

>>When autonomous vehicles halve the cost of an Uber/Lyft journey, many more people will weigh up the costs/benefits of private vehicle ownership and decide it’s not for them.

That's kind of my point - this won't happen, because Uber is already at rock bottom prices. For me to take it to work is about £10. That can't cover anything about the journey and is clearly heavily subsidised by Uber. That cost isn't going down to £5, it's just not going to happen. Just like when people predict that since flash memory prices keep falling down, you will be able to buy a 1TB pendrive for 5 cents. That's not going to happen because you do have the minimum costs of production and transport that aren't going anywhere even if the chips themselves are free.

And if people aren't taking Uber instead of their own cars for these frankly ridiculous prices then I don't see why they would simply because the cars drive themselves.

>>Different services will compete based in part on the luxuriousness of the interiors and the frequency at which they are cleaned.

The same principle should apply to taxis and it just doesn't. I live in a medium size UK city and every company, every brand, has crappy cars. Only price matters, nothing else and Uber Lux is not an option because you're waiting 40-50 minutes for one, that's just not acceptable.

[ogre_codes]

> That's kind of my point - this won't happen, because Uber is already at rock bottom prices.

Not really. There are a lot of places to optimize the cost of an Uber competitor. If you have electric self driving cars that pick people up, maintenance and fuel are much less expensive and you aren't paying for a driver. Most of these would only need a 50-100 mile range and could fuel up between passengers.

Full self driving cars is a few years out, but having a service that has defined roads it can travel on is likely possible in the fairly near term. Waymo is already doing this to some extent.

[gambiting]

>>Full self driving cars is a few years out

More like 50+ years for something that is actually allowed on most roads commercially, but sure. I just don't think the margins are there. Uber already subsidizes the human cost.

[ogre_codes]

> My question is "with what money".

If people want to charge their electric cars and live in a place where it's difficult to do so, that is their problem.

Most places with super dense housing like you describe are probably in fairly dense urban areas where other forms of transportation are probably better regardless.

[kwhitefoot]

I take it you don't live in the UK. At least a third of the population already lives in accommodation that does not include any off road parking. They haven't carelessly moved there knowing that they wouldn't not have somewhere to charge an electric car and they certainly will not be able to afford to move just to be able to park the car off the road so they can park it.

And 'other forms of transportation' are not 'better regardless', merely better for some limited purposes.

[chrisseaton]

Can lampposts be adapted?

[gambiting]

Sure, but there's 4-6 of them on the street and probably 40-50 cars. That will work in short term, but not in 10+ years.

[kwhitefoot]

Surely ten years should be long enough to work on a better solution? Why does everyone seem to expect perfection overnight?