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by toomuchtodo 683 days ago
There are 82 million single-family homes in America, and this does not include parking spots available at employer parking lots where chargers are provided, nor condos where you can run an EV charger circuit to the parking spot. Airport parking and other long dwell parking can supply 120V 20A circuits, which is more than sufficient for more than a day of parking.

Everyone else can fast DC charge (~20 min 0-80%) at the grocery store or Walmart, or at traditional travel stops during road trips. Electricity is ubiquitous, chargers can be everywhere.

3 comments

In the USA, in public areas where there are 120v 15a or 20a outlet -- I 100% guarantee that if you had more than one oaf with an EV charging from those plugs at the same time you'd pop a circuit breaker. Those plugs are almost always for convenient maintenance of the site and share several outlets to a single circuit breaker -- if 2 thieves tried to steal power at the same time they'd overload the circuit.

Public EV charging is going to need to be much better than it is currently; part of that means having lots of public EVSEs that properly share a common backhaul without popping their breakers, and it also means figuring out how to bill people for the power they need.

I've been able to get by solely with my EV for 6 years, and it's only occasionally been a minor inconvenience (mostly having to spend 20-30 minutes charging per 3ish hours driving on long distance trips); I've had to wait for charger capacity only when foolish enough to drive into or out of an eclipse totality path, and even then I was forced to wait a total of 20 minutes before getting a charging stall.

I'm lucky -- I also have access (10 months out of the year) to a parking place with a dedicated 240v/20a charger. For 2 months of the year I charge at a L3 station when I go grocery shopping; (in those 2 months I also have access to L1 charging and a dedicated parking spot but it's more convenient to charge at the grocery store.)

In North America, non-tesla L3 charging seems to be managed by organizations mostly dedicated to making people foolish enough to buy a non-tesla EVs miserable.

L3 charging, btw, is really exotic, or at least really heavy duty technology -- you can't trivially drop 8 stalls of 400v / 200a just anywhere; many of the tesla superchargers near where I live have local power generation facilities (big natural gas fuel cell setups) to do peak shaving.

Largely I agree with you -- electricity is everywhere, and it should be possible to make L2 evse plugs available to 20-30% of street parking spots and put L3 charging in lots more places than it is. It's not trivial but it also isn't insurmountable.

Just because you have a single family home does not mean you can install a charger circuit. Not every single family home has driveway. Half the houses on my street lack a driveway/ (The two houses on the east side of mine were built in 1898 and didn't need a driveway.) There is street parking only on one side of the street, as well; so, running a cord from the house could mean crossing the street with it.
Or at work.