From the headline:
>the problem is getting it where it's needed.
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.
There's definitely a gulf between living-situations, and people assuming their local experience is nationally representative.
I had a car-purchase decision a few years ago, and ultimately I had to choose based on the housing I had, not the housing I wish I had. It was frustrating to hear a lot of "you can just X" from folks who couldn't seem to imagine an apartment or chaotic street-parking.
if super chargers were always within 5 minutes, located around desirable locations to spend an hour, did not charge idle fees, and everyone had 30 minutes of free stuff to do at these locations... then it might just work!
Owning an EV doesn't necessitate spending a few grand to have a fast charger installed. They charge fine from a regular 110v US wall outlet -- they just do it slowly.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
Even people who have a round trip commute of 30 miles drive other places than work on average days and have days when they drive 2 and 3x as much as normal days every time enough greater than average days line up you have to contend with finding a charger which gets more contentious as more electric cars exist AND as they age in the hands of people who cannot afford to just replace car or battery.
Doesn’t matter, go to a charging station once every two weeks if/when charging gets behind. If you’re determined to fail instead of succeed there’s always more excuses to be made.
There’s a good tech connections series on this.
Slow home charging has been doable for quite a while.
It's doable for single family detached housing for users with a modest daily drive and relatively flat usage patterns so long as they can afford to pay a premium on the car and replace it in a timely fashion when the battery gets sufficiently old that its capacity continues to match peaks in usage with the understanding that failure to keep up means you don't get to work on time or can't get home.
Which is exactly why techbros think its obvious and most regular people aren't buying.
It falls into the bin of "tragedies of the commons we could fix with current technology but fail to sufficiently fund and support in earnest"
Really, when is the last time we overhauled our built environment and actually followed through with a comprehensive plan in the west? We couldn't even finish the interstate highway system in a time when we had seemingly great alignment towards it along with far cheaper costs. Public housing failed too. Broadband access failed. Cell service is still pretty spotty and unreliable.
Public housing failed not because of insufficient funding or support but because a small fraction of residents were sociopaths and criminals. The authorities refused to take decisive action to quickly evict the troublemakers and so they wrecked the projects for everyone. Section 8 vouchers have been far more effective by enabling low-income people to rent housing from private landlords at market rates. There are some abuses but overall it's a better model than public housing.
Starlink satellite cellular service is available pretty much everywhere now.
Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
This math is bad and shouldn't be used as a justification. It presumes that every charger is always available, that variable battery conditions and traffic conditions make reaching that charger every time, and that drivers have time to drive to the fast charger and spend 30 minutes there every time their car has low battery.
I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an in-home charger is a massive pain even with Superchargers within 20 minutes drive and a 300 mile range.
A trip to the super charger takes about 1.5 hours assuming its available when I arrive, I can only make the trip when the car needs charging or I am wasting time and energy. The exact time I will need to make this 1.5 hour trip work is variable. It depends on battery conditions, traffic conditions, and what I need to do. I cannot assume that the car will be charged when I need it to be - if I need to depart on Friday evening, or unexpectedly needed to get groceries during the week - I am obliged to spend the 1.5 hours at that moment.
To avoid these problems, I generally need to charge the car when it has ~30-40% and for battery protection I can only charge to 80%. Turning a car rated for 310 miles range into one with ~100-120 miles of usable range and a 1.5 hour weekly maintenance schedule. That range could be further reduced to 50-70 miles in winter conditions. The stalls at charging station charge by the minute, so you can't exactly wonder off.
With a reliable home charger, these problems mostly go away, even a slow 5kw charger should charge the car overnight - and a typical tesla installation delivers 11kw. A renter with no ability to plugin and charge overnight will have a tough time with an EV compared to a gas car.
Sounds like lack of a good network of fast chargers is a real issue for you. I can understand why you're so frustrated.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger. My math works fine here. It works fine in China, and Nepal too. Is Boston still not electrified? Because lack of a grid would be constraint, but otherwise its a very easy problem to solve.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
I live in the SF Bay Area and the local shopping centers closest to me have zero EV chargers. California is supposedly going to mandate that all new vehicles be electric in 2035 but that's obviously a ridiculous fantasy; the deadline will be pushed back or eliminated.
Which is why I'm advocating for them to get built.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
I don’t have a garage, as is common in my country. Charging my car off a regular socket would thus require leaving a ground floor window open all night (undesirable from both a security and wildlife intrusion perspective) or installing a socket outdoors (at which point why not just get a charger?)
There are so many different options, it's confusing. But a "proper" 7 kW charger can cost over £2000 to install if your house isn't wired in a convenient way, while installing an ordinary socket outside might cost about a tenth of that and give you 2.3 kW. You might get about 4.5 miles per kWh, so potentially more than 80 miles from an 8-hour overnight charge from an ordinary 230 V socket, which can deliver 10 A for a long time if it's a modern one and properly installed though you need to be a bit careful because it's not normal to take that much current from an ordinary socket and you'd be doing this at night so you should worry a bit about something overheating and catching fire. Worth getting someone competent to take a look at the wiring, I'd say.
Basically, as far as I can tell, you can take 10 amps off lots of places in an ordinary modern house, but to get 32 amps for a "proper" EV charger you probably need to go back to where the power supply enters the house and start there afresh with new and rather more expensive equipment and cables.
(US readers note that I'm talking about GB where domestic wiring is all 230 V.)
Sounds like my suggestion to use a high speed public charger is perfect for you since that's a solution that scales and makes it so people that don't have a garage can use EVs and keep their windows closed at night.
How many is enough is a complicated thing though. You don't need there to be as many pumps as cars because there is enough everywhere that you know with certainty that you can find one any given time within 15 minutes and be refueled in 5.
If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty.
If you have some small number of chargers at work do you know that you are going to be able to charge? Are you going to go into work park at the charging spot for 30 minutes then play musical chairs with your coworkers instead of working or are you going to park for 9 hours then leave at approx the same time as others ensuring that exactly 5 cars get charged per week despite being able to theoretically charge 336 per week in 3O minute blocks.
Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week? I haven't this month and even so you can't be sure that one of a small number of spots are actually available.
Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
We could just look at countries like Norway where the internal combustion car is extinct and see how they do it. If you are going to nitpick that Norway has a lot of houses and is rich enough to install chargers in every apartment parking spot, then we can look at Hong Kong, or China, or Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or any of the countries that have mass EV adoption and a variety of conditions including incredible density.
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car that has a power line (its actually pretty hard to find a place where this isn't true). The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
Whenever I’m in a hurry the local gas stations are swamped. Twenty minutes is common, thirty minutes not uncommon. A month ago the pump we were on was broken and had to get my money back and abandon the attempt. Had no more than ten minutes to fuel and couldn’t do it.
See, we can apply the same brand of defeatism to anything.
Do you live in any extremely poor and rural area this isn't the experience for 99.9% of Americans where stations are plentiful and waits are 0-2 minutes
I still don't understand. So you do have an EV charger at home? Just a slow one? The issue with EVs is that a majority of people doesn't have any EV charger at home at all. These is almost no one who would willingly downgrade from a convenient car to a car which requires driving to some far away gas station and sit there for hours in a parking lot in a cold or in a heat, if it's even working in the first place which they often aren't.
Well, when there were no cars using gasoline, there were no gas stations, what a surprise!
Sure, there might sometime be a chicken-and-egg problem initially, but saying a new but proven technology is totally unusable because it does not have infrastructure everywhere seems kinda weird to me. The infrastructure will catch up as usage grows.
Ew apartment buildings have them where I live, though a limited number so I can imagine that their use fluctuates. Someone who can’t reserve an open charger can’t move in. Someone who can’t get the floor plan they want is less likely to sign a lease even if a charger is available.
I think this is usually done with idle fees and the like. I was recently apartment hunting and we tested out the EV chargers -- in this case it was a Tesla destination charger, but I didn't realize those now had smarts built into them to provide for billing and idle fees just like superchargers have.
We ended up in an apartment without any way to charge, so for now we're dealing with supercharging -- and just recently found a nearby condo complex (1/3mi walk) with 19 completely free chargepoints. But yeah, this is Menlo Park, so we have 5 superchargers within a few miles.
All three employers I've had over the last ten years now offer free charging at work. New houses everywhere have been putting in extra circuits for charging for years. Apartment buildings are commonly built with chargers now, and older ones are starting to see retrofits.
Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
I think you may need to reset some of your assumptions. :)
The future is not evenly distributed and the outliers matter little.
>Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
Depends entirely on your assumptions about where you draw the line for emissions from second and third order effects.
Saudi oil is so easy to get out of the ground that compared to coal it's practically green.
Yeah seemingly this is not a problem with data centers. I am sure it was astroturfing all along. Also you never hear about climate change even though that's the cause of the heat wave in Europe and the US
I think Elon Musk would have happily built gas turbines on high-rises if we let him build them in the middle of the city to power those electric cars. I don't think that's a good idea, though.
At least in California it is felt really among people who have private power providers that need to both turn a profit and appease shareholders while also paying out various lawsuits and penalties from causing wildfires with poorly maintained equipment. Compare those rates to what you'd get under a municipal power company like LADWP and the difference is dramatic.
It doesn’t really matter if, at the end of the day, our current usage is too high and consumers see EVs as a pro-social purchase. I don’t really think they’re a problem, personally, but it IS the topic of this comment thread, so it’s an appropriate place to complain about this particular issue.
Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.
The article discusses how the biggest problem is peak demand, but that midday electric prices have fallen as solar has grown. EVs are perfect for charging during solar peak and making use of energy that would have had to be curtailed, they can even feed back into the grid helping during peak demand.
The price of electricity in Seattle has effectively dropped - we went from a flat 13.4c/kWh to an opt-in time of use system with an overnight rate of 8c/kWh. My bill dropped by a third.
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.