[bwhite]

Gas stations are incredibly common. Public EV charging stations will never be as common unless a different business model is adopted.

If EVs become common, people will have home charging stations. Demand for non-at-home charging stations will come from (1) folks who drive a lot and need to charge intraday (and who cannot charge at work) and (2) road trippers. The sum of both of these categories is fairly small and less demand means less supply. So if you do fit into one of those two categories, you will need to plan your driving carefully instead of figuring that you'll be able to pick up some gas when you need it. This can be overcome by arranging for the proliferation of public EV charging stations even absent the demand. Perhaps the manufacturer or municipalities will subsidize it.

[glenra]

Making people sit and wait for an hour whenever they need to recharge is just plain nuts. It makes the "road tripper" use case untenable. The right way to handle this for road trippers is to swap the battery packs or swap their contents. Don't make the driver wait while his battery is recharged - swap in a full pack and send him on his way. Charge the battery that was left behind slowly and at leisure, then give it to the next driver who pulls in needing a charge.

I don't care how many charging stations there are - adding multiple hours of charging time to a short trip like that is just not going to work.

Although there's one other conceivable option for a technical solution - if you could add charging circuitry to the freeway and recharge while driving, that would be a game-changer.

[rm999]

There's a company that's been working on swappable car batteries for some time now:

http://www.betterplace.com/

I agree with you that this is the only realistic mainstream future of electric vehicles as long as batteries remain in their current low-density state.

[JamisonM]

If swapping is the answer then in that case you need a non-ownership model for batteries. I am not going to swap out a brand-new battery for a 2 year old one and then be stuck with that one for the foreseeable future on my regular local car use.

[cshesse]

I think what will happen is that people will all own EVs and then rent gas cars for long distance trips until there is some huge breakthrough in battery capacity or charging times.