[acallaghan]

I hear this view a lot - my main rebuttal is 'but can't top up your car with petrol/gas/diesel at home either'.

The infra around EV charging needs to be much much better, I totally agree with this, but the idea that everyone will be able to charge their cars at home just isn't going to happen

[cronokirby]

One big difference is the density of the fuel.

You can fill a car with gas in under a minute.

While fast-charging (like Tesla's super charging) has growing deployment, that's still at least 15 minutes or so, which is a significant difference.

And, the density of that is just not there yet, so for the near future having charging at home makes daily driving much more convenient.

[nulbyte]

The difference is: You're not standing around waiting for my car to charge. Your parked to do something else.

Depending on where there is, there may well be enough density. Here, we have 129 stations, and half of them are free. It goes up to over 300 if you include the rest of the metro. We're not that large a city, either.

[Yizahi]

I just looked at the plugshare map of the city I'm at currently. It show 101 stations up to 60 minutes pure drive distance. Also that's all kinds of chargers, private hotel spots, small two post stations, big stations.

Lets charitably assume that ALL of them are inside the city and that ALL of them are fast 10 post stations. So that's a capacity for about a thousand EV cars. That's in 1 million population city. I guess that's not enough at all.

PS: and what do you do for several hours while your car charges at the station? Walk in circles around the small overprices station shop? Drink coffee?

[shagie]

Imagine the road trip with an EV.

We're driving from Chicago to Memphis (about 600 miles or two full charges of a Tesla).

First question is "is there sufficient charging in the 200 - 300 mile distance? If you run out of charge, its a bit more difficult than "call AAA to bring you a gallon of gas" ( https://tiremeetsroad.com/2022/05/28/aaa-members-will-tow-tr... ). I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.

The next issue is the time to fuel. With a road trip, this isn't a "park in the EV vehicle spot at Fry's while you go shopping". With a gas station, I'm in and out in about 3 minutes tops. A Tesla super charger station takes 15-30 minutes - 5x to 10x longer than regular combustion. Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.

The image at https://electrek.co/2022/05/19/tesla-building-new-worlds-lar... claims it will be 100 stalls (There are about 30 in the picture, so 3x larger than the picture). That's 200-400 cars per hour. That's a 20 pump station - here's a 28 pump station ( https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5755315,-89.7774477,3a,75y,2... )

EVs are great if you are returning home each night or are in an area where there are EV stations while daily errands are run. I have difficulty seeing them useful for distance travel and the situations where one charges midway each day.

One such road trip / distance travel experience - https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-rented-an-electric-car-for-a-...

[rnk]

The wsj article was kind of from an idiot. At the same time, it's true there aren't enough chargers and we are building them out and it should be as easy as "just drive".

Separate from that, if you have a tesla, this problem is not there because they have enough chargers and they are maintained. It's the clown car mixed private ev chargers that are broken, in bad locations and have low power. When tesla opens up their network (by adding the other common plug) I expect many of the other ev charger companies will go out of business or have to significantly improve their speed and quality. My 2012 tesla had around 250 miles range (drove it for 50k miles, after 3 years upgraded to the awd, still have that one, still has 265/270 original miles range.

[ZeroGravitas]

Wall Stree Journal? no thanks. If you refuse to accept climate change then your opinions on EVs can't be trusted.

Doesn't Tesla have all this built in, and automatically tell you which charger to stop at based on optimal charge time (20% - 80%) and current usage of the chargers?

There's third party apps that do it for other EVs but I thought Tesla had this all tied up in a neat package?

[WorldMaker]

> I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.

Tow trucks don't need chargers, they just need to drop your car off at the nearest charger.

This isn't even "new" territory: tow trucks tow things from point A to point B all the time. That's what tow trucks were built for.

It isn't "new" territory for EVs: Anecdotally, I had a friend tell me working as a tow truck near a "blind spot" at the time in Tesla's charging maps along an Interstate through one of the Plains states. (A blind spot that has since been filled.) There was a driver that drove that stretch regularly and couldn't get enough charge to make it to the next station so would regularly call for tow. (So regularly in that case that they'd call a day ahead or so and schedule it like an appointment and the tow truck would just be waiting around the "usual spot".)

> Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.

Though it likely will not ever need the exact same throughput because home charging and destination charging remove a lot of "local traffic" through fast chargers that gas stations still have to regularly serve.

Even in long distance travel destination chargers will shake up and decentralize a lot of the "station need". On a road trip you might not need "park at a Fry's while you shop", but you might still find use in "park at a restaurant while you sit down and eat" and "park at a cool gift shop while you shop for souvenirs" and "park at the neat tourist trap and explore a mini museum" and maybe even "park at a motel where you can catch a quick nap".

EVs could herald a return to the sorts of weird destinations that Route 66, as one clear nostalgia-filled example, made US long distance travel such an "exciting thing" and that lots of people have great nostalgia for even if most of today's Route 66 is a rusted memory of itself. I know plenty of long distance drivers that might like a small return to that Americana tradition of weird tourist traps and strange excuses to stop, and even AAA still thinks you should pay them for trip tiks even in the internet age of GPS because they still think they can find some of that nostalgia for you.

With EVs, we don't have to cluster around the logistics of gas stations anymore and could have all sorts of chargers "off the beaten path" (of the Interstates). What sort of weird local and regional places could install chargers? There's all sorts of creativity to be explored here.

[lotsofpulp]

Why would that be a valid rebuttal? From turning into a gas station to exiting, completely filling a gas tank takes, at most, 5 minutes and gas stations are everywhere. How long does charging to be able to travel the same distance take?

[WorldMaker]

It's a rebuttal because it reduces local/regional pressure on fast chargers. If the average driver charges at home, fast chargers mostly only need to see the traffic of long distance drives. It's a move from strong centralization (gas stations are the only place to refuel a gas car) to much larger decentralization (in theory an EV can charge anywhere the electric grid touches and especially in the US the electric grid sure touches a large amount of the country, even "wilderness areas").

In terms of real world charging times added to travel the same distance, the raw numbers are generally for the same distance where you need one gas stop you need one charging stop. The charging stop is 15-30 minutes, which seems like a clear "loss" if you see gas stops as only 5 minutes. But gas refueling is a necessary serial task and you should not do anything else while waiting for your car to refuel. (technically, there are even laws that it is illegal to not watch your car the entire time), while charging is a parallel task and you can eat/hit the restrooms/do any number of other things while you wait. Experientially you may not notice any "lost time" in comparison of the two approaches depending on how you use refueling stops today. It sounds like a lot of lost time on paper, but you make up for it in parallel tasking.

[sdflhasjd]

I agree, but right now in the UK, aside from the odd token charging point in a supermarket car park, realiably accessible charging stations are few and far between, particulary outside major city centres.

[nicoburns]

Where I live (north west london), there’s a pilot scheme where they’ve installed roadside chargers on my residential street (these are pretty small - they look more like “cats eyes” than petrol pumps). I’m guessing that’s the future.

[Yizahi]

Let's imagine I need a car for a daily commute. Or work. After a day ends, I need to get it to the charging station, which is away from the home. I leave the car there and take a bus to the home. There I do something not engaging too much, because in 1-3 hours I need to get out again, at night, get a bus to the charging station (longer waits late in the evening too), then get the car to home and then finally I can rest. It's totally not an option. Also taking a bus or tram twice a day additionally is not free, and kinda defeats the economy part of the EV car.

PS edit: lets add some concrete numbers - the nearest station to my current home (in the peripheral region of the big city, but not the outskirts) is 10 minutes walk away, 2 (two) 22kW type-2 stations. The seconds closest station is 10 (ten) 100kW stations and it is 33 minutes away by bus with a single transfer. So I would need to wait for bus 4 times just to get to the big station and back.

[nicoburns]

You shouldn’t need to charge every day in a city. Also, a lot of people will be able to charge at home. You don’t need special infrastructure for this, you can just plug into it into the mains.