My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon.
This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week!
Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news? Are they from another planet where electricity delivery is not a problem that architects have to deal with in building design?
Mind you, I got the exact same dumbfounded stare from people when talking to cafe managers and gym owners about the impending COVID lockdowns back in February 2020: "Lock...down...? You think so? Really? Here?" (Don't think IT is spared from this, I get the same vacant expression when I talk to network engineers about IPv4 exhaustion and the need for IPv6.)
On a more practical note, I have business idea that might interest the YC News crowd: The main problem raised by building managers I spoke to was that it was "too hard" to solve charge-back and the like. Wiring is "easy", that's just a matter of calling out contractor, but organising the billing of the tenant and then splitting the revenue between the various parties involved is more work for them than it is worth, because it is complex to set up but initially there may be only a couple of electric cars generating very little revenue. An "electric charging billing" cloud service that manages everything with low overheads might sell well...
A staggering amount of buildings are built to code, and nothing more. If code says that there needs to be 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom for the complex, and the complex has 80 bedrooms, you can bet there will be 120 parking spots.
Apartment managers will be dragged kicking and screaming into offering chargers for cars. The best way to get chargers into apartment buildings is going to be a local mandate that they have a charger per X units.
I disagree with this. Retro installs maybe, yes. But new construction, which I consult heavily on, most of the developers I work with are motivated to install them. They’re revenue sources and attract the kind of tenants they want occupying their new building.
The answer to retro installs (which is always about money anyway) is to not force the hand of property owners, but make the install cost a no brainer with tax rebates and subsidies. Regulation in this regard would just cause negative effects I think, IF it ever passed a public vote (Cali maybe, but not much of the rest of the country).
My city is building tons of new apartments clearly meant for commuters to the nearby big cities and exactly zero of them have EV chargers despite being the most expensive apartments in town. I'm not holding my breath that new construction will do this all that soon, either.
I agree it's probably not so bad even for retrofits - 70% of housing in the US is SFH or a duplex (https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/housing-statistics). Getting a charging solution for those units seems achievable. I'm also willing to bet that multifamily housing is generally massively over represented in blue cities, which might be able to require/incentives retrofits. That's a huge marketable population to start buying electric vehicles and normalize them. I suspect that by the time there is significant used electric market there will also be enough market and political demand to figure out the multi-family situation.
Subsidies are the way to do this. The government should be highly motivated to spur transition to EVs for carbon emissions, and what is holding back almost everyone except Tesla is charging infrastructure.
Cities where concentrated apartments reside have the double whammy of pointless carbon emissions in traffic jams and smog.
Identifying lobbying groups with common interest in this would lead me to the mainline auto industry, especially GM and Ford. They need a charging infrastructure build pronto to compete with Tesla and its Supercharger network. This would probably be related, since city drivers are younger and more likely to buy an EV.
Such is American Politics that you have to lobby the lobbying groups to get anything done.
I was looking at a few new apartment in london that are just completing construction. The amount of charging points I personally was able to find is big fat zero.
With the rare exception for when the expected marketing value of having those spots or tax subsidies make installing them appear to have a positive value.
The exception that definitely proves the rule. Until it's mandatory in new construction it won't even start to become normal.
I'm curious how street parking is supposed to work, that photo is hilarious but I imagine that on the streets of Boston where you'll get hit with a bat over trying to save a parking spot (or trying to use a saved parking spot, it's Boston in the winter).
I have the feeling you're going to see better adoption in suburbs and lower density urban areas first because the range doesn't need to be so high but it's also not impossible to have a consistent parking space (or garage or driveway) that you can invest in improving. I'd probably have to get a special variance from the city to install an outlet in the sidewalk...
A bit off topic, but your example of parking spots probably isn't the best. There's been some calls to lower the kinda ludicrous parking requirements mandated by local authorities
If the efforts to reduce parking requirements succeed, you can be sure that more units will be built with no parking lots at all (Profit$). We are seeing this in Portland where 20 unit apartment buildings are getting built with zero parking (or maybe 10 spaces available for additional rent). The end result, for now at least, is 30-40 more cars parked in the surrounding streets.
I lived in London where new buildings are required to be zero parking - the thinking is that the roads are already congested enough and so anything that encourages bringing more cars in is bad for the city. It's a pretty good approach IMO, though I guess you need to combine it with something like Tokyo's rule that you can't buy a car unless you can show you have a parking space to register it to.
Right, and this is typically in the form of a planning condition where residents waive their right to cheap on-street parking (ie: no resident’s parking permits). Smaller Central London buildings typically wouldn’t provide off-street parking anyway, there just isn’t space!
Large, luxury developments often do still provide parking facilities, even in Central London. Transport for London sometimes makes attempts to get these reduced in size or eliminated, but hasn’t always succeeded.
London transition should focus on running a good, reliable system at low cost. London isn't the worst in the world, but they seem to be trying to be the most expensive.
The planning goal seems to be focused on a future where remote vehicles are summoned to convey the inhabitant 'on demand' from what I've heard. Permissions based travel with costs associated for emissions etc...
> If the efforts to reduce parking requirements succeed, you can be sure that more units will be built with no parking lots at all
I'm having trouble seeing the problem here. :)
Y'know what's even better for the environment than electric cars? No cars! I realize that living in California without a car is going to be difficult, but if you can manage it, you shouldn't have to pay for other people's parking spaces.
Can confirm, I lived in one of those apartments, now I'm very happy in a suburb. It's nice to be able to haul groceries to your place without walking 4 blocks from the car for each load.
Typically in such neighborhoods in Europe the grocery store is no further than 4 blocks away, so you just walk and don't use a car. It works since the store doesn't have parking minimums either so don't take a lot of space, even if it is a fairly large one.
Carrying 35kg of groceries sucks. Especially when it rains. Personally, I drive 2km to a larger store with underground parking instead of visiting the store two blocks away.
People don't carry around 35kg of groceries each time they go to the local supermarket. They buy a tiny bit of what they need each day, walking back from home/school, since it takes so little time and often it's on the way, anyway.
I've had a frustrating form of this conversation with so many Americans. The concept of buying less than 40L of soda at a time, because presumably they drink many liters per day, is hard to overcome for some.
They literally will not believe that it is possible to but a days worth of groceries every day, and get fresh, quality food.
But the more people saying that it can be done, and is a superior way to shop, the more likely we will convince them finally.
You're really comparing apples to oranges because the majority of Americans don't live within reasonable walking distance to a grocery store to begin with. Depending on where you live, it's not uncommon to take 15-20+ minutes to drive to the closest store.
With the return trip time + parking, you can see how it's much more sensible to plan your shopping ahead of time to optimize for the fewest amount of trips possible.
Even if you currently live in a borderline walkable area, there's a solid chance you grew up in an area where driving to the store was a norm and thus contributes to the decision to walk vs drive.
Agreed on the design of most grocery store in the US. Most people can't stop in quick on a normal daily walk, because the inherent space-inefficiency of cars means a long detour to hit multiple stops, whereas with walking it's an easy in-and-out grab.
However, even when patiently explaining this difference, it is a mental leap too far to consider any change. Not only is it the physical design of the stores and car-only infrastructure, a lot of it has to do with package sizing and pricing structure, as another poster pointed out; smaller quantities get massive markups in US stores, for no good reason other than once they've got you in a store, you're fairly captive and they want to extract the maximum amount of money from you so that you don't end up elsewhere.
Until people experience it, and realize that having a five person family is no challenge at all for this style of life, it's hard to give them the picture.
In most American cities, going to the grocery store is kind of a pain. You have to drive somewhere, usually at least a mile or two. You have to find some place to park and walk across a huge parking lot. The store itself will be huge, if you're just getting three things you have to trek all the way across the store to retrieve them. And the lines at the checkout can be bad.
As I mentioned in another comment, I had the opportunity to live for a year in a very walkable neighborhood, with an excellent grocery store. It was convenient, it was small, the food was high quality, checkout was lightning fast. I found myself going there nearly every day and it was wonderful.
But once I needed to move back to a more car-centered city, the idea of doing this became once again unthinkable. Far too big of a chore to do daily.
Indeed, for a year I had the chance to live five minutes' walk from an excellent grocery store. It was right across the street from the yoga studio where I practiced, and on my way between home and work. There were lots of automated checkouts and the store was very efficiently run.
Previously, the idea of going to the grocery store every day had sounded like terrible tedium -- but I found myself doing it and it was wonderful.
There’s usually also the option of having stuff delivered. The heaviest items are drinks and getting those delivered has the additional benefit of getting them brought to the doorstep. Costs a bit more, but not owning a car offsets that easily. Friends just call a cab for their monthly large shopping.
Some people have a couple of kids, and need more groceries that can be done that way. Some times there is this thing called "inclement weather" which means it rains 2-3 days in a row and makes doing this miserable. Or you work a double shift and are too tired to get groceries, or you work 2nd shift and everything is closed on the way back except convenience stores. Or you get sick and can't actually go out to get food for a few days.
There's so much of a bubble here sometimes. Narrow minded...dude, not everyone is a single, childless, wealthy knowledge worker that can waste their time to do this.
I have kids and deal with inclement weather - it’s been a mix of rain and snow for most of the last couple of days. Granted, I’m a knowledge worker, but shops are open until midnight in the neighborhood and worst case, both of the large supermarket chains here deliver until late with prearranged slots.
For the majority of (urban) people it’s definitely manageable. More than 50% of all households in central Berlin own no car, numbers rising.
I used to own a car, and the tipping point from “I can’t do that” to “no problem to do that” was selling the car. It’s an acquired habit for most of us. I now own an umbrella and a good waterproof jacket instead.
I have kids. I know a lot of people that have kids. Again, narrow mindedness.
You don't just go to buy STRICTLY what you need today. You buy something like 10% over each time. Within several weeks of shopping you'll have a full fridge, heck, even a full pantry.
Then you only need to top up when you go each day. And I'm being generous, you can go every 2-3 days, even.
There are comfortable solution, you need two things:
1. An environment that helps (most European cities).
2. A bit of planning/flexibility/smarts.
If you don't have 1. you're dead in the water, from the start. If you don't have 2., well... get them :-)
It's going to be very hard to apply that mandate to existing construction. I feel like the best way to move forward is for charging companies like EVgo or Chargepoint (or a new HN company!) to approach building owners, install pay per use chargers for free, and offer the building owners a 10% cut of the charging revenue.
> A staggering amount of buildings are built to code
A staggering amount of buildings are also NOT built to code. My smoke detector failed and isn't getting replaced for a whole week. My heater makes scraping noises every time it starts and maintainence thinks it's normal. Smack in the middle of Silicon Valley.
But this is the best of what I could afford. It's decent. It's clean. Everything else I saw at my budget was worse. One apartment I saw was $2400 for a 1-bedroom and had the toilet paper holder was bolted to the wall right above a red hot heating element recessed in the wall with a grill. Needless to say I didn't rent there.
Want an apartment that is built to code? It'll cost you $3000 or more.
The valley is well known for not building enough, thus allowing this to happen. You can find apartments like that in any city, but it will be the bad part of town and rent will be in the 500 range.
housing in the US is just not that great for the thing right in the center of the national psyche: cookie cutter designs with no attention to the environment, low-quality constructions, apartments with zero soundproofing (no wonder everyone wants a house) and then the laws that force people to keep antiquated structures around for way longer than reasonable.
Why are people so numbskulled to downvote this - A guy sharing his firsthand experience? Let me guess, everyone on HN in SV lives in a fancy multistorey condo overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge? /s
I'm in China where everybody rides ebikes and my building has a free for all parking space where 2/3rds of the parks have no chargers and the spots with charge ports all have qr codes you scan and pay with wechat to turn the port on.
Here in The Netherlands, we get charged about 0.33 euro per kWh (= 0.40 US$), and that's for overnight charging of cars, where you typically draw no more than 11 kW.
How does that compare to your household €/kWh? I appreciate there's a value-add, just seems a lot compared to mine (£0.12something).
I suppose if expect to pay roughly a day's standing charge, plus the kWh used. I'd rather pay for it like that than roll it together and have my overnight charge subsidise someone else's 30min top-up.
WeChat is just how things are paid for here, obviously the solution would not rely on WeChat in any other country. In Australia you'd just tap your credit card.
Of course it is easy. You can just pay with a credit card or mobile payment etc. like is already done when paying for parking. Even easier, the charging around where I live you have an account and a card and you just swipe and charge and the bank transfers the money monthly. Solved many years ago. The only thing that isn't all the way solved is the massive drain charging lots of cars at the same time can induce.
An electrobike is a substantially lower electrical load than an electrocar. Many existing residential buildings can't handle adding a EV charging spot per unit (probably needs a 100A breaker each).
A Tesla gets about 3 miles from 1kWh. Average car in the UK does 140 miles a week, or 50kWh, or about 1kW of constant draw for 8 hours a night, or 4 amps. That's not an excessive amount compared with peak morning usage when everyones showers and dishwashers are starting.
The four-amp draw in your calculations provides the user a 12-mile operating radius each day. Somewhat to my original point: an electrobike is a much lower load than an electrocar!
This might be acceptable on average; theory in practice are the same in theory, but in practice they differ. A real-world user will require the ability to fully charge his electrocar on occasion, which means the fullbore 240V connection and a 100A breaker (potentially a 50A breaker depending on vehicle).
Assuming that every user follows average patterns will break the system.
Taking this idea out further, it speaks to infrastructure upgrades that will be necessary in order to power all of these electrocars. Estimates vary by region, power generation from automobiles as a fraction of total is somewhere between 10% and 30%, which exceeds both the spare capacity of the electric grid in aggregate, as well as often exceeding local transmission capabilities.
All-in-all, the costs of electrocar adoption are nonlinear: the first few percent of the population who adopt don't have to deal with the structural problems: a 100-unit condominium building can add two or three 240V chargers, the local grid can handle a handful of vehicles. At scale, however, major infrastructure upgrades will be required.
One of my cars does 30 miles a day and is in the driveway from 1600-0730, so needs 10kwH in 15 hours, or a draw of 700W. 10 years ago the lights in my house drew about 700W.
The other car does 6 miles 3 times a week and is in the driveway almost all the time.
Sure, there are whales that do 300 miles a week, but that's not most people.
Looking at a sample of about 13 million vehicles that passed MOT tests in both 2018 and 2019, and thus reported the milage
Lets assume that's all commuting over 5 days a week, 47 weeks a year. That means in an average 12 hour night:
20% of cars would need less than 11 miles of charge, or 4kWh -- 350W
Another 20% of cars would need less than 21 miles of charge, or 7kWh -- 600W
Another 20% of cars would need less than 10kWh -- 850W
Another 20% of cars would need less than 15kWh -- 1.25kW
Another 15% of cars would need 24kWh -- 2kW
All of that is less than a kettle, an average 13A plug is more than enough.
Now if those mileages include many people doing long distance drives at weekends and not regular commuting, the actual top-up needed every night isn't anywhere near as much. Some cars will do lots of miles at the weekend and need to draw the full 3kW out of a standard socket, sure. My kettle doesn't have an issue with doing that. For every car needing that full charge on a Sunday and during the rest of the week, there's a dozen that don't. OK, your battery might be down to 10% on Sunday night, but then you charge it to 20% for Monday morning, drop to 17% after your commute, charge to 27% Tuesday, and so on.
100A, or even 60A, house breakers aren't going to have an issue with keeping 95% of cars topped up, so you're at the next level. On the rare occasion you need to fully recharge really quickly, go to a specialist location with a 20kW+ charger. The data shows that most people won't need that most of the time.
Looking at newer cars -- ones made in 2016 (and thus having first MOT in 2019), you'd think they'd have a higher mileage. And they do, median is 8400, and 80%ile is 13,300, 95% 22700 -- about 30% higher in each bracket, but that's still well within a home charge range, even for the 95%ile, and only 1 in 4 cars are new enough to be in that category, so median mileage of all cars would be under 7,000 miles a year range.
You're right there's a grid level problem -- the dip in power generation in the UK overnight is about 10GW, which could sustain about 14 million cars - not too great when there's more than twice that needing power.
Assuming that in a given area cars are distributed fairly evenly as above, with some cars needing 24kWh a night, but others needing 4kWh, the average overnight draw would still only be 700W, that doesn't feel like it's going to trip neighbourhood substations, but further upstream could be problems.
Commutes in your United Kingdom are much shorter than commutes in the United States. Average USA mileage is 13,500 miles, close to your 90th percentile.
It seems like your intuitions are correct for your country, and mine are correct for mine.
Widespread charging points in newly constructed parking areas will happen when required by building code and enforced by local governments; and likely not one minute before.
The construction industry is brutally competiive and cost-centric; things are included because they are required or because of customer demand, almost never just because they are a good idea.
Construction companies (on average) don't look further than the point of sale. It doesn't matter if a poorly chosen element of design in an apartment building will potentially affect thousands of people over the course of decades, the incentive/risk structure just doesn't exist to make forward thinking decisions.
Its basically got to be in the building code or (almost) no one will do it.
I can relate to that kind of frustration but at the end of the day nobody plans ahead further. For various reasons, to be fair not even EV consumers and producers look much further speaking of ecological risks from the supply chain. It's a gamble anyway, hoping that EVs will not only look great on the surface. But that depends also on scientific progress, production and engineering capabilities.
On the other hand if EVs gets serious mass adoption outside of Scandinavia, I bet upgradeability of building infrastructure will become a topic and companies will make money by selling some sort of upgrade solution for properties.
> Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news?
Neither the architect, nor the developer, nor the landlord are the beneficiaries of charger infrastructure. They aren't going to spend money on it until they absolutely have to.
Given the decade of record-low vacancy rates in coastal metros, if a lack of an electric charger is a deal-breaker for you, they will shrug their shoulders, and move on to the next applicant. To them, you are the product, not the customer - the customer is the bank that underwrites their loans, that they use to buy/build more properties, backed by cashflow from tenants.
They certainly aren't going to put dollars down today, to meet demand that will come a decade from now. The entire business model of being a residential landlord is spending every penny you have on acquiring more property to lease - not making long-term investments into existing property.
If you're looking for someone to blame, blame cheap availability of credit, or your local municipality for not updating their building codes to require electric chargers [1].
[1] The reason they haven't updated their building codes is because in my experience, 8 times out of 10, municipal politics is completely dominated by landlords and developers. Those groups of people are the most affected by municipal law, so they have a huge vested interest in making sure government is looking out for their financial interests.
> Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news?
They do read the news, but there's still plenty of news that EV is still largely powered by coal and also something about lithium mining (while never ever talking about other minig issues, particularly oil), therefore we should use hydrogen (which will need more electricity, but we skip over that) or synthetic fuels (which will need crazy amounts of electricity, but we won't mention that) and that'll be the future.
Of course you can read the other news, the ones that correctly point out that between EV, hydrogen and synfuels EV has the vast advantage of being much more efficient, and that will never change, because physics. But you can pick and choose your news, and if you would prefer the news that tell you nothing changes you may just decide to trust those.
My problem is renting apartments. If you ask the strata or the building managers about charging points in the carpark, they look at you like you're speaking Klingon.
There is legislation on your side in California now. It's even called "right to charge!"
Despite that law, it can still be difficult to get a charger installed if the property owner or HOA is against it. In some cases the electrical work requires trenching across a parking lot to a carport, or upgrading the electrical system in a parking garage. Those costs need to be borne by the tenants if they are exercising their rights under this law.
How do people with gas cars handle living in apartments without gasoline lines? They go to a gas station. So the tipping point is when you can take a 300-mile range car and quick-charge it in 5 - 10 minutes. Or when it is profitable enough to have charging ports at destinations (parking garages in the cities, credit-card swipe charging outlets at the mall, chargers at the office, etc).
Quick charging is a just in case solution and probably shouldn’t be relied on. It’s more efficient and likely much easier on the battery to slow charge it overnight.
The problem with that is that in many places (i.e. most European cities) you don't have a dedicated parking spot, so to park overnight you would need to put charging spots on every street every five meters.
Those exist in the Netherlands too, but the problem is that those spots are now _exclusive_ to EVs. An ICE car is not allowed to park there. I live in an area where >95% of parking spots are occupied on a given night. The current approach is, at least for the time being, only making it worse.
For those people it's a matter of buying a number of chargers that they can choose between.
They can limit access to those chargers to the people living in the building or allow anyone to use them and make some money by selling the electricity. You can even have access control depending on the time of day.
Another benefit is that you get load balancing when many people are charging at the same time.
Private chargers are only a good idea if you there's only a few living spaces.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Workplaces (if they come back) will get charging first. More chargers will be added to apartments, fast charging will improve.
This is certainly location-dependent. I just went through an apartment search in San Francisco where one of my requirements was electric car charging. Yes of course SF is tech-forward, but most buildings are fifty years or older which makes installation of a charger non-trivial. I just signed a lease for an apartment that doesn’t have a car charger, but the property manager added an amendment which stipulated that one will be installed in a few months, otherwise I’m free to break from the lease. I’d say about half of the property managers I talked to across about 15 tours were amenable to it.
I had to pay a large (too large) an amount to purchase an extra parking space when I bought my condo. I personally didn't need the space all the time, but guests to the condo didn't have to hunt for parking on the street in an area with busy nightlife. I figured that when I sold the condo the parking space would raise the value of the condo, maybe not enough to make up for the cost but enough to be worth having the parking spot and it's convenience.
It turned out that in the building there were owners of units with two cars but only one space that wanted to rent unused parking spots. I didn't do this but there were posting where condo owners could find people to pay for the right to use otherwise unused parking.
All this seems a bit off topic, but couldn't electric chargers be handled the same way. Pay for the cost of a charger to be installed in one's designated parking spot and "resell" the improvement to the next condo owner. One could even allow others to use the charger while being reimbursed for the electricity. Of course being the owner of a unit in a condo building isn't the same as leasing an apartment and dealing with a large company that owns the apartment building.
I've random workers from a restaurant nearby parking in my unused space (in a private enclosing) all the time. And my parking space even require a special card to use.
It would be nice if they offered to pay.
I reported them to the police, but I haven't heard about them fining them and they don't stop using it.
A neighbour used the parking space once and my landlord that was passing by reported her and she got a fine.
What I can't stand about the police here in UK is that it's so inconsistent.
Having a charger I get charged for would be an absolute nightmare.
As others have mentioned, Teslas charge at their fast chargers (and getting faster all the time) spread around the area. Other cars can do the same, or at workplaces.
Some new building codes now mandate that the parking be charging ready, so they have to put the conduit under the pavement, but they don’t need to wire it right away. So that’s a first step to simplifying a retro-install.
I do think apartment parking will eventually be retrofitted. The charging networks could easily have a apartment product—or license their network access to a manufacturer. So you would just use your charging network app or card as when charging around town. There are also products like Evercharge that split the power from a single circuit across several plugged in cars (optimizing power usage and reducing the need
for conduits and wiring).
The various EV promoters have been tackling this issue for a while, something like the Electric Auto Association may have people or resources to help convince an apartment owner.
I wonder: shouldn’t a grid with lots of solar incentivize workplace charging (day-time use of peak generation), and a grid with wind majority incentivize home charging (night-time use of peak generation)? Maybe
> This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries
In the UK planning guidelines say that charging stations have to be provided, have done for a while
110. Within this context, applications for development should:
...
(e) be designed to enable charging of plug-in and other ultra-low emission vehicles in safe, accessible and convenient locations.
Locally planning permissions in my area (I'm a local councillor and have to view them all) for new houses have come with power for some years
The larger problem we'll see as we move away from petrol based cars is people in old terraces that park on narrow streets. The options are
1) Remove parking space to put in chargers
2) Remove footpath to put in chargers (won't pass muster in my council area at the moment, fortunatly)
3) Not do anything until after new petrol cars are banned and hope that something magically comes along
So no one has said this yet, but a lot of people charge their cars at work. I don't know if you're in the US but in my experience this seems like a east coast phenomenon. Lots of electric chargers in bay area, seattle and generally urban areas on the west coast.
"Lots" is still relative though. A large employer near me has something like 50 chargers available in their lot. Of course, on a normal workday, 8,000 cars are being parked there. If 4,000 of those employees start driving electrics, I'm not sure it would be possible to accommodate them.
Do you really need 4,000 chargers though? I don't think so.
Between charging at home and charging at work, it shouldn't be necessary to occupy the charger every single time you pull in. Maybe once or twice a week, depending on your commute. A long range Model 3 has as much range as your average gasoline vehicle... how often do most people fill that up?
Seems to me if 4000 employees go electric and you can slow charge anywhere from 5-30 miles' worth of power per hour at a worst case scenario and up to 44 at the best, then it stands to reason not everyone has to plug in every single day. In fact, I'd argue most folks would only need to charge up once a week, and for those with very short commutes, once every 2-3 weeks.
I think 250-500 chargers for 4000 vehicles would likely be sufficient to keep everyone charged up and moving around.
Pre-pandemic I was commuting to a large bay area employer. About a ~hundred or so chargers in the parking lots.
The choices were to either arrive very, very early (<8am) or you missed it. Then had to wait until around 4+pm when the early risers started to leave and move the car to a charging spot.
I mostly left after 7pm so it was ok but on days when I had to go at 5pm it was a big problem, didn't have time to get enough charge to get back home.
Also, there's not enough power available to feed all the chargers simultaneously. So when all chargers are used and charging, the power delivery dropped to ~1.5kW. As cars started to get full and stopped drawing power only then power delivery would rise later in the day. So there's no way to install a thousand+ more chargers, there's not enough power delivery available.
I don’t know how anyone is so casual about this. If a charger is only available half the time, I have to plan as if it weren’t there, and then what good is it?
I can run my gas tank down below 1/4 because the Bay Area is littered with 24 hour gas stations; I never have to wait a day to get gas. I’m considering a PHEV, but I can’t buy a BEV until a large majority of apartments (or maybe employers, after WFH ends) have that kind of reliable charging whenever I might need it.
To be honest I'm not casual about it, it's always very stressful if I have to drive the electric car!
I'm ok driving the e-car to work if I know for sure I can stay there until well past 7pm. If there's any chance I might need to leave before 7pm I want to drive my other (not electric) car.
On the few days where I need to leave early and can't drive the gasoline car (because wife needs it), I spend all afternoon stressing about it and walking to the parking lot every 30 minutes to look for empty spots to get the charging started ASAP so I can get home. Not fun.
Imo, this is the single biggest argument that can still be validly made to prevent the mass adoption of EVs.
People, for the most part, are easy to convince when it comes to buying expensive products that promise to reduce the amount of stress in their lives. Not so much for products that they are told will do the opposite though.
I could imagine an opportunity here too. Some places have a bulk buy or business rate for electricity that is cheaper. If a car park has 8k spaces and a meaningful number were electric, it may even justify battery storage to get off peak rates (this may be a stretch), with the employer splitting the saving with staff or pocketing the lot.
I don't see why it would be a big deal. First, my employer doesn't buy me gas so I don't see why they'd charge my EV. Expecting this to be the norm may have unintended side effects. Second, power outlets in parking lots are reasonably common in colder cities so that people can plug in their bloc heaters. You don't need a fancy fast charger if you're going to be at work all day.
On the other hand its pretty easy to retrofit car parks with chargers if there is demand for it. My building (which, to be fair, is a new construction highrise in seattle) has ~15% of its carpark with charging capacity and I suspect they could add more if needed.
Tesla has also recently added wi-fi to their existing chargers, and will facilitate payment processing:
> With a growing number of Tesla cars on the road, a Wall Connector can pay for itself over time. Property managers will soon be able to set the price of charging sessions while Tesla handles payments automatically and securely – with no monthly fees. [1]
This is a model similar to what chargepoint offers, though I suspect it will have lower fees as their main goal is to sell more cars.
Perhaps not but we are at the point now where it is not economically viable to buy new IPv4 blocks. Many smaller (and more recently established ISPs) ISPs have given up on buying IPv4 addresses and are now running CG-NAT behind the handful of IPv4 addresses they still own. Even big (especially older) ISPs with large IPv4 blocks are experimenting with CG-NAT (e.g. I know one large ISP who is doing it only for wireless broadband probably because it's a easy test market). Either they're looking at selling part of their blocks (since they could operate out of smaller blocks with CG-NAT if they downsized) or they are genuinely predicting that they will eventually run out of space in their existing blocks--and these blocks are huge.
My ISP runs CGNAT, and they published a report in 2019 predicting that: "Even with CGNAT, we will still exhaust our current IPv4 space in September 2021."
One part of it is that in many urban areas, the intent is to reduce the number of cars, not necessarily provide accommodation for them (gas or electric.)
Glad I stumbled upon your post. The problem is you have all the best ideas and there is only one of you in the world to go around. I will point people to your posts from now on when they have menial solutions to modern problems and hopefully they are self aware enough to get a swift jolt of what the best way to move forward in life looks like.
It seems like car sharing should sort this out. Uber, car share schemes, self-driving cars...the trend seems towards less ownership and more short term use. Having a car sit around for 22 hours a day is a massive waste. These schemes suit cities, exactly where parking is a problem.
What makes it especially weird is that (at least for now - while electric cars are still expensive) putting in chargers will make a big competitive advantage, and a very right kind of it - by attracting wealthier, more responsible tenants that make building a good image, attracting other better tenants and driving up prices... It's a big win for any building.
There are some large drawbacks with the large structure needed to swap the batteries though. Not sure if it'll be that successful in places where people mostly have single family homes.
I think the market has already solved this with companies like E-on and the like solving all the complexity for both public and private charging stations. Perhaps there is still an open market opportunity for this in your local market for entrepreneurs to fill.
The market hasn't solved jack untill they have actually installed enough chargers to support at least 50% EV ownership. Untill then the jury is still out, so please don't claim that the probelm is solved and we can rest easy because 'muh market'
Let me clarify that the “solved problem” I was referring to was that of the complexity for the building owners if they thought the only solution was to roll their own charging and billing solution.
It is so incredibly varied as well. Some municipalities, like Burnaby, are leading the charge (pun intended) requiring all new buildings to have stalls wired for EVSEs.
Here in East Palo Alto there are a number of charging stations at the shopping mall. I don't know what the markup is compared to a home charging station.
Lithium mining outrage is a sham. What about the many, many more tons of iron ore, aluminum ore, copper ore, etc., that we're mining? Lithium mining is just a tiny fraction of those.
We're producing ~7800 million tons (!!!) of coal per year.
You're either nitpicking for who knows what reason, or it's a bad faith argument.
Yes, lithium mining is bad for the environment. Yes, it probably sucks to be living in a lithium mining town. Yes, lithium is still the least bad alternative we have. Yes, people in those lithium mining towns should be compensated better and their lives should be improved.
There is nothing we can do as humanity, to absolutely, definitely, not harm someone or something. Life is a compromise and lithium is a huge step up from where we are now.
If you're saying otherwise, then go look up documentaries about coal mining, fracking & shale oil in general.
TL;DR: Lithium mining sucks but not mining any lithium sucks more. In parallel to mining more and more lithium, we should improve the mining process and also improve the lives of communities affected by lithium mining.
Mass adoption won't happen until charging infrastructure improves dramatically.
As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them would charge - yet they all showed available).
I don't even bother with L2 stations as I'm never in a place long enough to get any meaningful charge out of one - and I'm not going to go out of my way to a location that has one.
With all that said, taking a long trip is out of the question for me.
I've driven through Germany last summer, tried 3 different charging stations, none of them worked. Or rather, they did, but I couldn't set up the app for them, one because it didn't have an English option, one because it wouldn't accept my non-German card and another because it was giving me an extremely helpful "unspecified" error. But even here in UK it's a mess. There is a charging station near my home that seems to be out of order 90% the time. There is another one where I can't set up an account and their customer support is non existent. Funnily enough the best experiences I ever had with charging stations in the UK were always at Shell charging stations - plug in, tap your payment card on the side, done. No apps, no stupid fobs or anything, it's easier than paying for petrol. I really do think that legislation should come in to force all providers to accept card payment at the charger, even if the cost is higher(offer discount to account holders, but at least let me pay even without an account)
Charging in much of Europe is really not a great experience. It's a fragmented market, different electricity providers (this matters, some chargers really want you to be a customer of a specific electricity provider, some just offer different prices depending on this), different charging networks, different plugs, different apps and payment methods, different behavior even if you're seemingly in the same network, wildly different prices, etc.
Every app shows different chargers and different status on whether they're occupied or not. Most are broken anyway. Some are on hotel or supermarket grounds so they're accessible only to some people, and even in the same network might have a different price because the owner of the land asks for a cut (yes, that's a thing). Some are inside a parking lot so you pay the parking on top of the charging. Some are on a free parking spot for EVs so someone will park there all day. Some charge per KWh, per minute, or a combination, plus maybe another one time fee.
Chargers need to be as ubiquitous as gas stations, and provide an experience that's just as frictionless. Drive in, pick a plug and start fast charging, get a maximum allotted time to charge, then pay like you'd do in any store, or better yet have the car talk to the charger and handle this for you (ISO 15118) and be on your way. Alternatively, to take advantage of how different electricity is from gas and maybe also use those cars as electricity storage, governments could invest to put charging points on every street parking, in every streetlight, etc.
This sounds like an opportunity for an independent app unifying all of those and gathering/displaying real usability data. I don't think it could make official app stores due to having to reverse-engineer payment APIs of others, but... maybe something open-source and side-loaded?
Ugh, card payments in Germany, for non-Germans, is generally a nightmare anyway. It's a bummer that it's not a solved problem for EV charging, because in many ways, I think the EU is ahead of the US in (non-Tesla) charging infra.
Credit cards are not widely accepted in Germany. Germans generally use cash or EC/Maesto debit cards, and you can't get an EC card if you're not an EU resident with an EU bank account (which can be hard for Americans, and, to a lesser extent, any foreigner, I'm sure).
I used to have a Maestro-branded debit card (in the US) when I was younger. I have no idea if it's the same system and/or if they're compatible. I checked my wallet and my current debit card has no Maestro branding.
I've more than once found myself halfway through a meal before realizing that I might not have a way to pay for it.
I've been paying with my phone using Google Pay connected to PayPal for the past year. It works basically everywhere, except for places that only take cash.
We need the Google Fi equivalent of credit cards. Even with vaunted "international credit cards", there are still use cases where they do not work, which seem country-specific, and finding information about what is actually going on under the hood has been difficult for this layperson.
With the caveat that I've only travelled in the Western world, credit cards really are almost universally accepted, Germany aside. Obviously, the smaller the merchant, and the smaller the country/town, the less likely.
As an American, a particularly odd experience was at a shop in Peru, where they only accepted MasterCard and not Visa. These days we're so used to them being interchangeable, it had never even crossed my mind. Between my wife and I, we had 5 or 6 Visa debit/credit cards, and 0 MasterCard.
Exceptions abound in Asia, though there are far fewer exceptions in the West.
For example in Taiwan, in their online grocery ecosystem all the market participants use the same kind of SMS verification step that is intercepted at the card network stage (the issuing bank doesn't see this activity). So Visa and MasterCard both generate the challenge, but US card holders do not see this, and US customer support does not know what to do on the back end to support it.
I know somewhere, there is some kind of setting that interfaces with for example, Visa International, but only a credit card industry domain expert with the lingo would know the right words. I suspect I need a Chip and PIN EMV card issued, and it drops to SMS for certain online transaction types, but that's just a WAG at this time.
I've run into similar exceptions elsewhere in transactions that require some kind of national ID number tied to a delivery address for higher-value orders.
The types of risk profiles associated with many new use cases is fracturing credit card handling, but the use cases international travelers encounter is so small it isn't worth addressing just for that demographic. However, as the Net continues to bleed international transactions across borders (AliBaba is just the beginning), I think this will be a very lucrative market for the first-mover to do the Uber-like Herculean work of addressing every jurisdiction's concerns to put them all under a next-generation credit card.
I remember in Thanksgiving 2019 that Tesla owners were sometimes waiting in line for hours at Supercharger stations in California -- and California has a lot of those! Even Tesla doesn't have it figured out during peak travel times.
Gas stations seem to be able to handle it. Why can't we expect the same for charging stations? Build for peak capacity. The chargers don't draw much when they aren't plugged in to cars. If we expect to succeed with charging infrastructure we need to make it convenient, even during holidays.
Contrast Tesla superchargers in CA with, e.g. getting gas at a Costco. They experience similar degrees of queuing. There is a limit to how much of peak capacity you can build for. The solution is not to increase the capacity of a single station, but to build more of them (just as with gas stations). Which is obviously what Tesla is doing.
Building a gas station for peak capacity would mean building so many pumps that you never have to queue. Even when people leave their car by the pump while going to the bathroom or grab a slushie and some snacks.
That is a solved problem in most of the world. I have waited at a gas station at most 5 times in my life and never more than 2-4 minutes. Going to the bathroom or leaving the pump I have never seen anyone do. If I did I would turn off the pump at the big red STOP button as leaving the pump running unattended is illegal.
I think he's saying leaving the pump after getting your gas. That's very common in my area. You pump your gas, go into the shop to get something and you leave your car at the pump. Nobody leaves their car while pumping.
It's not uncommon to have to wait a few minutes for a pump to open up in my local gas station and it's got about 15 pumps.
Where do you live? Everywhere in the US I've been the normal use case if you're getting something other than gas is to start the pump and then walk into the store to get food/use bathroom/etc., while the tank is filling. Yes, it's illegal, but people do it all-the-time.
That must suck in the middle of winter if you have to stand there holding subzero temperature metal while filling your 20-gallon tank and when it's done, go clean off your windshield, hatchback glass, etc.
Hell, around here, when the temperature drops well below 0F, lots of people keep their car running and just sit in it while the tank fills.
And like every ICE fan likes to repeat, it's like 2-3 minutes to fill up a tank in a European car. And 2 minutes of that is fiddling with the chip&pin card reader in the cold.
Even if it's negative Freedom Units outside, the car won't cool down enough to get cold during refueling - keeping it running is just plain stupid.
> You can't leave the pump running outside of the US, the fuel nizzle won't lock.
There might be places where locking nozzles are indeed uncommon, but I don't think you can generalise this to "outside of the US". I'm living outside of the US, but gas stations still commonly have locking nozzles.
You've got the provider for the actual charger (a handful of different providers), which needs to negotiate with the car via CCS. This can fail in umpteen different ways, as car manufacturers differ on how they implement CCS (Dunno how, but it happens).
Then you've got the software in the charging point, which needs to be customised for the brand you're selling under (another moving part).
And lastly, you have the back end system for the brand, which handles authentication, authorization (RFID or App) and billing - this is the bit that ultimately gives the charger the go-ahead to start feeding power to the connected car.
Any of these fails, no electricity for you.
For 22kW "slow" chargers this is a bit simpler as the actual charger is a lot less complex, it doesn't need to negotiate, it just needs to switch one relay.
Tesla is like Apple in this case, they take care of the whole stack. So as long as the charger has power, it'll work. Authentication and authorization are done by having the car negotiate with the charger directly via the charging cable, no dongles or apps needed.
> For 22kW "slow" chargers this is a bit simpler as the actual charger is a lot less complex, it doesn't need to negotiate, it just needs to switch one relay.
To be more explicit, the actual AC "slow" charger is built into the car, so it's guaranteed to work (and indeed, it just needs to signal a contactor to close the circuit).
It's not really a mystery if you understand who the customers are. Tesla's Supercharger customers are Tesla owners (for the most part), and Tesla has a vested interest in keeping them happy.
Other charging stations are mostly installed in mall parking lots and so on by government mandate. The owners of the parking lots pay to get them installed and maintained--they are the customers. And since they're (mostly) satisfying a government tick box, there's not nearly as much incentive to keep functioning.
Opposite experience in 2020 here at EA: sure, I've seen stalls that don't work a few times but it seems to be well correlated with their app showing you they don't work, and most of the time it just works
That is in California, did around ~40-50 charging sessions.
Tesla has said they are willing to license the Supercharger network. That said, superchargers are not immune to being broken either. I find that many if not most have at least one broken stall.
I got free supercharging for ordering an early Model 3 and didn't expect to use it, but it has been a lifesaver during covid when I suddenly lost access to work charging.
As a petrolhead who has never even seen a Supercharger station: what exactly is broken? What is there to break? Physical damage to the cable / connector?
Many things can break: the internet connection, the internal computer, the main power wire to the car connector, something inside the connector, something with the charger circuity like a bad contactor.
Then there's the obvious stuff like physical damage from vandalization or someone driving into it.
Having never used or even seen a super charger, I have no idea why one would need a friggen internet connection. Don’t you just plug them in and swipe your card like a gas station?
You just plug in, no card. The car identifies itself. It needs an internet connection to report the usage so it can be charged to the correct account. Gas stations obviously need a network connection of some kind too for card swipes to work. Otherwise you'd have to fall back to cash or manually writing down card numbers (is that even allowed anymore?) Almost all Superchargers are unmanned so no cash.
EMV (chip/contactless) credit cards are capable of working without an internet connection, including PIN or device-based verification. Transactions get stored/batched on the payment terminal until the connection is available again.
EV chargers often still require internet, however, as payment is via app or their own RFID card/dongle. Putting credit card readers directly on the chargers is a relatively recent (and not yet universal) improvement.
Another reason for internet is so that chargers can report their availability status. In-car navigation or charging apps can direct you to locations with available chargers, avoiding ones that are fully occupied or out of service.
There's no way to verify the balance offline. But, generally speaking, the offline mode is only used if there's a network/connectivity failure, and there's generally no way for a fraudster to know in advance if that's going to happen.
The acquirer (ie: the merchant's bank) accepts liability in the case of fraudulent transactions. There are limits on offline transaction values, and merchants that have high fraud risk may not allow it at all.
That may be theoretically possible but I very much doubt any retailers have that set up to work properly. Around here the gas stations still verify your ZIP code. Superchargers could also store transactions in theory but I doubt it actually works there either.
It certainly happens, very occasionally, here in the UK. You try to pay something with contactless but there's a long processing delay. The terminal will then time out and ask you to insert the card and enter PIN, and you will get something strange printed on the receipt like "CVM: offline PIN". You may then see the transaction pop up in your notifications a few hours later, or early the next morning.
Also, some merchants do offline or semi-offline transactions as a matter of course. London Buses, for example, accept contactless payments via bank card. But the transaction must be processed very quickly and the mobile data connection is not entirely reliable - the bus could be in a tunnel or a coverage black spot. So what really happens is the transactions are batched and processed at the end of the day (this also allows them to do some post-processing for multiple-journey discounts, daily price caps, etc).
Someone like London Buses isn't overly concerned about fraud because the transaction values are low. But they do have a way to blacklist cards numbers that are known to be bad.
There are only half million Teslas so you can just distribute the VIN numbers of all of them with a single bit flag saying whether they are eligible for free charging and another bit saying that they have an account in good order. Twenty bytes per car should do it, say 10 MB of storage to hold enough information to say which cars are allowed to charge even if the network is down.
Mind you in three years of owning and driving (70k km) my Model S I have never encountered a Supercharger station that was entirely out of order, just a few heavily used ones that have one or two stalls often not working.
To be able to swipe your card you also need internet connection. Very rare, but I did have experience at a gas station when I couldn't fill up, because the internet connection was down.
I don’t think they require one to function. Gas stations, including ones where you pay at the pump, functioned fine without Internet before the Internet.
You go inside and pay cash to the clerk who authorizes $20 of gas on pump #5.
I'm in Oregon where we (mostly) legally can't pump our own gas. There may be pumps that are like vending machines: they take cards or cash.
There are exceptions, like if you're in the rural areas (counties under 40,000 residents). They also changed it for a while during the early part of COVID.
I notice that the pumps still run the commercials on the pumps here. Probably cheaper to just build one model of pump even though Oregon and New Jersey but it would drive me crazy if I was pumping gas for a living.
> How exactly does a pay-at-the-pump gas station function without internet?
I realize that there are gas stations where you can't pay at the pump, but that's not the claim I was responding to in the PC.
Regardless, if you are using your credit card to pay for your gas (which I am certain you can do in Oregon gas stations), the gas station is utilizing internet in order to give you gas.
It's frustrating when chargers don't work, I was using them frequently for a while when I was taking a child to and from doctors appointments multiple times a week and encountered a few.
That being said, I never got stranded and there was always a charger I could use. This was in metro Atlanta in 2017, the situation only got better since then.
Pretty sure this is a reference to the cases where Tesla has revoked different features (SuperCharger access, AutoPilot, extended mileage) from cars.
Sometimes that seems to be because they had the feature enabled by accident or the car was declared as totaled but I haven't been tracking the cases closely enough to be definitive. Not sure that anybody is.
SuperCharger access has nothing to do with "owning your car". Less so but still ditto for AutoPilot, as it is not a piece of hardware but rather software that is constantly being updated and honestly dangerous to deploy/use if Tesla cannot guarantee the integrity of sensors/drive-by-wire mechanisms/etc.
Extended mileage does seem weird though – they've revoked software updates that have extended mileage? That would be shitty if true (if not for a good reason), but I honestly haven't heard about that one. And I'd still argue in favor of this being ownership, as updates are not your right as an owner of the vehicle (and with every other car you've ever owned don't come with the vehicle at all). At the very least you always have whatever features you had when you bought the car from Tesla, which is exactly what you expect from any other car you purchase.
EVs currently have high enough utility in the wealthy suburbia where you own your garage and have the capability to charge overnight.
If you are a euro-peasant living in a third floor apartment, street parking and commuting to work, then an EV has very little utility to offer. You cannot expect that people will go on a regular basis to charge stations and spend an hour to charge their car. You cannot also have a reasonable expectation that employers will install a charger per employee, or that employees will gamble every day to see if there is a charger open at work.
An EV cannot be your single car given the 2 main constraints:
1. Slow charging (>>5')
2. Lack of charging networks
#2 can be fixed with investments. #1 needs a technological advance that is not clear that will be commercially available soon.
I did not mention cost at all in the above comment, which is maybe the biggest factor currently limiting adoption, but I assume that eventually economies of scale will aleviate this.
I’m literally a euro-peasant in my third floor apartment with street parking outside my third floor apartment window. The city has but up a bunch of charging parking stations on said street parking and it’s great. There are no gas stations on the ”island” (Södermalm, Stockholm) I live on, but a ton of electric street parking charging stations. I think the decentralisation of these types of charging stations will win in the end.
The price of electric cars currently is a problem though, but everything is pointing in the right direction.
> The city has but up a bunch of charging parking stations on said street parking and it’s great
I noticed this in Amsterdam. Over a year period (late 2018 - late 2020), the street-parking-charging-stations went from virtually non-existent to about 2-3 in a 1KM radius and increasing.
I guess it's logistically easier to build such a charging network compared to say gas stations. They take very little space, about a square foot and ~1.5 meter tall.
They could replace service station charging, but you'd need an app that navigated you to one that's available. And make a reservation, so you didn't keep heading toward the nearest just to find it occupied. And if they were in interesting locations e.g. near a restaurant or shopping or bathrooms or a coffee shop.
Let's take Madrid as an example of a typical densely populated euro-city. ~ 3M population, half a million registered cars. I really don't see it economically, environmentally, or even technically viable to install a quarter million chargers to fix the battery charging problem.
If the wiring isn't strong enough to support chargers (it might, for slow charging, if the cables were designed for old lighting technology), fine, dig up the street, lay thicker cables, use the opportunity to bury FTTH, and you can now place a charger at every parking bay.
Because every car needs to charge 1-2 times per week and you also don't want to park 10 blocks away from home. Maybe 50% coverage is indeed excessive, but it is correct ballpark estimate. Maybe you can get away with 20-30% in cities with less lazy (and more coordinated) people :)
People fixate on charging speed and forget that the best use case for EVs is to literally charge them when you sleep at a low current.
If the the street has lights on it, they can be used to deliver power to EV cars easily. Adding Type2 plugs and kWh meters to street lights is not a technical issue, it's a political thing of who gets the money and who pays for the up-front costs.
230V/8A per car with smart load balancing will charge 100km of charge overnight. Up that to 12 amps and you've covered the majority of Europeans' daily commute.
Won't work for the US though, your two hour commutes are Mad Max -levels of madness =)
#1 had a practical solution back in 1896: replaceable batteries.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the electric car was the most popular type of car after steam-powered. Their range was limited of course, but they had many features that were improvements over Gasoline-powered cars. So, how was it that many cities around the world used electric cars and trucks more than any other type? Two ways: 1) fleets where you could drop off one car and pick up another, and 2) an easily-replaceable battery. Just drive to a service station and replace the battery and get back on your way. At least one company providing these services operated for 14 years.
Funny how tech people always look for a tech solution, and business people look for a business solution.
I disagree charging points should be introduced at work place parking rather than home. In the day time we have a lot of excess electricity available from solar where as at night gas and coal plants are used. If everyone starts charging at home more coal and gas plants will be needed to be built which will result in higher electricity prices for everyone as capacity payment parts of the electricity bills increase. Majority of cars are parked in parking spots at work between 9am to 5pm just like they are parked at home for 10-11pm to 7-8am at home. Electricity from solar is still getting cheaper by 15-20% a year most of us don't see it in our bills is because of capacity payments that power producers negotiated into our bills.
Another Euro-peasant living in a 2nd floor apartment with street parking here. My street and kiez is full of electric chargers and special parking zones for them. Recently Germany passed a law that enables all gas stations to have electric chargers. I’ve booked an e-up! and it’s a perfect city car for small errands and weekend excursions to Potsdam etc.
In Norway if you have a parking spot at an apartment block and want a charging station to be installed the housing association can't deny your request. At least when you're the home owner (the vast majority of Norwegians owns rather than rents). Not completely sure how things are for renters, but electric cars are so common at this point that most landlords will probably allow it if only to raise the value of their place.
Even if we assume battery size/shape standardization, this would move the baterry liability from the car owner to the battery pack vendor, since they would have to maintain the batteries in circulation (introduce new ones, retire old ones) etc. This would require crazy high locked capital and it would cause the cost to be prohibitively high for a casual weekly swap.
I wouldn't trust a high voltage battery pack that is structurally important to the chassis to the minimum wage equivalent of an oil place technician with the uuga-duuga impact gun.
The UK plan for no ICE vehicles to be sold by 2030 is fairly ambitious. I'm seeing more and more electric vehicles on the roads, but I think some regular customers will be disappointed by how poor the infrastructure is. Not only that electric chargers aren't as prevalent as they need to be, but the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city), but an even bigger problem is the heterogeneity and complexity of coming across a charger and being able to use it on your car. The requirement for registration, fobs/cards etc is crazy.
This is a good opportunity for government to step in and mandate that all electric charging points also have the option to pay by contactless/android/apple pay, for example. I don't mind if I pay a few pence more, but I do mind having to find a website on my phone and sign up then wait for a fob to be posted to me.
The 2030 date will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So long as "everybody" truly believes the Governments threat to effectively ban ICE sales after 2030, then clear economic opportunities to service the future demand for electric cars and charging infrastructure become apparent.
This sidesteps the issues with network effects. You don't have to worry about building a charging network before electric cars become widespread, because the Government is sending a clear signal of when that transition will happen.
>So long as "everybody" truly believes the Governments threat to effectively ban ICE sales after 2030
Will anyone believe that though? Given the propensity of virtually all governments worldwide to do less than promised and the overwhelming amount of infrastructure still needed, I don't take this date seriously at all.
The EU legislation regarding CO2 emissions has teeth, and no respite has been given. This is the reason so many PHEVs are being introduced lately, they are about the only way to comply except pure BEVs. Sure, UK is not EU anymore but the legislation is felt worldwide.
> they are about the only way to comply except pure BEVs
On paper. In reality [0][1] unless you drive all electric all or most of the time the actual, real life CO2 emissions are far worse. Because now you have an ICE engine that hauls around an extra battery and electric motor, occasionally inefficiently charging the battery by burning gasoline.
Many (most?) PHEVs owners don't have charging at home (reason to buy hybrid), and the rest of the charging infrastructure is far more inconvenient to use than a gas station. Depending on where you live it may also prove more expensive to drive electric. Add to this the small battery and you see why most of them are driven mostly in ICE mode.
This being said, if I were in the market for a new car I really wouldn't care about what the government promises will happen in 2030. I'd look around to see what makes sense for me. Is the government doing anything about it? Are they heavily investing in making this a reality (new chargers, new electrical infrastructure, etc.)? Talk is cheap.
I bought a PHEV a year ago and the fuel savings are enormous. I've been filling it up once every 3 months so far, most of my journeys are done in fully electric mode, and when they are not I'm averaging 100-150mpg. Charging at home is pretty easy, but I do have my own driveway which I realize a lot of people don't.
But yes, UK company tax structure around them is absolutely broken. You can get one, get a massive tax discount, and then simply never charge it, resulting in higher emissions than in a normal car, and yet keep the low emissions discount. It's stupid. I think you should have to prove that you're actually using the EV capabilities, otherwise it's just straight up fraud.
I think the question is where we want to be in 5 years, not being blinded by aiming for perfect or nothing today.
The ability to charge will drive infrastructure investments from the bottom up. Especially if it's cheaper than fossil fuels. My guess is we will start to see charging mentioned as a selling point in real estate ads in the coming years. Same with charging at stores or similar, although that is more limited.
All while helping BEVs become even more attractive.
This just confirms what I said above, if you drive them all electric it's great, they're an EV with a small battery. But if you can't and just charge occasionally the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions are nowhere close to the official numbers, as evidenced by the studies I linked above. I see this struck a nerve with some people but the reality is that those are only best case and the people who meet them are the long tail of the numbers.
And that's the crux of the matter, most people buy hybrids because they can't charge at home. Those cars end up driving a lot on gas. If you can't conveniently charge at home or at work, waiting for 1.5-2h to charge for 40-50Km is far less appealing than 3 minutes for 500Km worth of gas. Place more chargers and make gas more expensive than electricity and the situation would probably change.
One specific German manufacturer featured in the studies I linked above sees most of the kilometers driven in their hybrids using the ICE, with a lot of that time the ICE inefficiently charging the battery, and almost cancelling out the fuel efficiency brought by the electrification. The number of people who see anything close to the officially estimated fuel consumption or CO2 emissions is vanishingly low. And the manufacturer knows it but they aren't ready with EVs, they have to meet new fleet regulations, and they wanted to benefit from the incentives the German government offers to manufacturers for any EV or PHEV.
Looking at a family member in this situation (the one who provided me with the statistics from the manufacturer), they drove ~2000Km in a brand new PHEV with ~11 liters + 9KWh per 100Km. The manufacturer suggests ~2 liters per 100Km. That's where most efficiency numbers revolve for that particular PHEV. It doesn't help that where they live in Germany charging the battery at a public charger even when assuming the full ~40Km range is 30% more expensive per Km than filling the tank but this is a local issue that's not generally applicable.
>>And that's the crux of the matter, most people buy hybrids because they can't charge at home.
Well, that bit I don't really believe. I'd love to see some data about it. If you're buying a plug in hybrid and don't have the plug-in part.....then what are you even doing. Like I said I understand that in UK the tax structure is beneficial regardless of whether you charge it or not. But yeah, if people buy PHEVs and then don't charge them then it's pointless. I just don't think that people buy them because they don't have somewhere to charge. I got a PHEV not full electric car because there wasn't a fully electric car in my price range of the size that I wanted, not because of the lack of charging space .
>>they drove ~2000Km in a brand new PHEV with ~11 liters + 9KWh per 100Km. The manufacturer suggests ~2 liters per 100Km
I drive a Volvo XC60 T8 and that's completely not what my stats are. My long term average over a year is 3L/100km. It really depends what kind of usage you want out of it - short journeys are done without burning any petrol whatsoever. But if you travel long distance frequently then it's simply the wrong drivetrain for you. I mean it's not a novel concept either - for decades we've been telling people that if you only drive in the city don't buy yourself a diesel, but if you drive long distance often don't buy a petrol. PHEVs are in a different category where they really really really work well if you're just commuting within the EV range but can also go further if you need to. The main problem of high usage when out of the battery range usually comes from the fact that most PHEVs use petrol motors and you're not going to see any good numbers from very heavy SUVs with a small-ish petrol engine. Mercedes has it right with the 300de drivetrain where you get about 50 miles of EV range and then a diesel engine after. Like, that just works well on both short and long journeys, but that's not what most PHEVs are like.
>> It doesn't help that where they live in Germany charging the battery at a public charger even when assuming the full ~40Km range is 30% more expensive per Km than filling the tank but this is a local issue that's not generally applicable
Well, exactly, charging at public stations can be incredibly expensive, in some cases it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel car than an electric one if you're charging at public stations. Here in UK for instance Ionity charges £0.69 per kWh, while at home at night I pay £0.05 per kWh. The difference is insane.
> Well, that bit I don't really believe. I'd love to see some data about it
As you said in a comment below:
> According to Volvo's own data 60% of PHEV buyers never plug them in
You confirm what I said in my unpopular comment above, on paper PHEVs reduce emissions by a lot but in reality, as a fleet, the numbers are far worse than suggested. Many are company cars because the company wanted the tax cuts and subsidies, others just test the waters with this electric stuff. They don't go full BEV because they can't reliably charge. The UK is a great place to have an EV, with the most people living in (semi)detached houses in Europe [0] and cheap electricity. Most of the rest of Europe doesn't do so well at either point.
I can't show you data but I personally know it from a very reliable source who has access to this kind of (unpublished) data from one large German manufacturer. While their EV owners charge every day, less than 1 in 6 of the drivers who ever plug in their PHEV (~40-50Km of range in ideal conditions) do so at least once every 2 days, and only about 25% of Km are driven in EV mode. This average is pulled up by those very few who charge regularly (every 1-2 days). Some more kilometers are "electrified", EM gives a boost from standstill or under hard acceleration. And a huge percentage of PHEVs were never connected to a charger. Real life fuel consumption of the fleet is 4 times higher than the official numbers.
> I drive a Volvo XC60 T8 and that's completely not what my stats are. My long term average over a year is 3L/100km.
Yes but you have to admit that you're close to the ideal case, you charge every night and drive almost exclusively electric, and you still get 50% higher consumption that the official numbers. Doesn't this tell you anything about the reality of the whole fleet, and not just your particular situation? All numbers I find online for real life fuel consumption for an XC60 T8 points to an average of over 7l/100Km. For every PHEV that's almost always charged, there are a few PHEVs that are almost never charged. This doesn't lead to great overall fuel numbers. Perhaps better than pure-ICE but certainly nowhere close to the official numbers. If I had your car after 2 days of driving I'd run out of juice, have nowhere to charge conveniently, and just fill the tank.
Ok, I was asking specifically for data that shows that people buy hybrids because they don't have somewhere to charge(rather than, for instance, that they get a nice tax discount by doing so). In my other comment I pointed out that on my street there's someone else with a PHEV and I have never seen him charge it, even though he could easily do so - private driveway, plenty of space, if he wanted to then he could.
And while I agree with you in general, I think you obsess with the official numbers a little bit too much. In my previous mercedes AMG the official numbers were something like 6L/100km, in normal use it was hard to get under 12L/100km. Those numbers just don't mean anything.
And if you see somewhere that the fleet average for the XC60 T8 is just 7L/100km then that's frankly fantastic. It's a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. That's an incredible fuel consumption(as in - low) even if it's above the official numbers. Do you happen to know what the fleet average for the XC60 T6 is? That's the same petrol engine without the hybrid system(not the PHEV T6). Because I imagine that fleet average will be closer to 12-14L/100km than 7L/100km.
My point is that for most people who ever charge the car the PHEV is an improvement. It's those who don't charge it who are the problem, but I'm confident this is a problem of legislation and/or tax rabates.
> I think you obsess with the official numbers a little bit too much.
Maybe but that's because it was that particular statement that started the discussion. The only reason I mentioned it was in response to OP's statement:
> [hybrids] they are about the only way to comply except pure BEVs
Of course it warranted the addendum "on paper" since in reality and according to all studies and data from any source they do not comply as a fleet, it's a mathematical trick.
Saying that I obsess over the particular point that started the discussion seems a bit unnecessarily dismissive. You obsess about your very particular situation and your neighbor's even if we can both agree it's not generally applicable to the vast majority of people out there.
> if you see somewhere that the fleet average for the XC60 T8 is just 7L/100km then that's frankly fantastic
I simply googled for websites that collect user submitted fuel consumption data and picked the median rather than the average. This data is of course very limited. And it may very well be fantastic but again, the whole point of my interjection was that official numbers are fake and from the data I do have access to fuel consumption of PHEVs is marginally better than the equivalent ICE (despite being a bit heavier). As a fleet they barely make a dent in the emission problem. But people either see this as being different from their particular situation and assume it must be wrong, or they realize it's exactly their situation and don't like it being pointed out.
I was turned on to this thread, by an HN user. I work for Audi in Germany. The real stats for our hybrids are not great if you compare to newer Toyota hybrids, for example and as far as all my contacts tell me the situation is identical for all German manufacturers.
We are not selling the Audi Q5 TFSIe 55 - 14KWh battery, around 12KWh usable, and (unless you are hypermiling) ~25-40Km of realistic electric range depending on weather - for lowering real life emissions. We do it for 3 reasons: 1) it allows us to mix in "fake" estimated fuel consumption and emission numbers thus lowering the fleet overalls, 2) we also get money from the EV/PHEV incentive programs, and 3) it is an awesome car, it has a great gas engine, a great electric motor, great transmission, it's actually one of the most fun SUVs to drive. Companies lease a lot of these, because the incentives cover most of the price of the lease and the taxes are close to nothing. But I mean we lease these 60K+ EUR PHEVs for as low as 3000EUR per year (limited to 1-2 years) just to get them out there, get the money from the government, get the official fuel/emission numbers into the fleet average, and a lot of the private buyers are cross-shopping, so it's win all around.
But we know from sale time that most private buyers do not have regular access to a charger at all, at home or work. Which is why most of our customers never plug in the car or do it a few times just to see how it works. They are usually charged while driving from the engine at a big fuel penalty. Most cars have a higher fuel consumption than the equivalent hon-hybrid Audi Q5. But overall the fuel consumption for the hybrid fleet (~9.5l/100Km) is lower than for the ICE fleet (~11l/100Km) because of a number of cars which get to drive a lot and almost only in electric mode. Some charge only during the day so at work and very few only during the night so at home.
In Germany at least charging at a public charger is guaranteed to be more expensive per Km than gas for this car. The cheapest chargers are 50c/KWh and I saw some that charge 65c/KWh + 3-4c/min + 1E/h for the parking + 1E one time plug in fee (that's at best 6E and at worst ~12E for the 40Km electric).
I happen to drive one and since I don't have a charger at home, and 2020 meant I mostly don't go to work, my fuel numbers are bad. I charge once per moth, use it in hybrid mode (dynamic), and once the battery is empty it will try to charge it as long as the engine is running whether it's in static or dynamic mode (most people never read the manual, have no idea how to change some extra modes other than the big button in the center console that switched between EV - hybrid - battery hold). And when this happens the fuel consumption just explodes, I'm visiting friends across town and I get there with >18l/100Km even with no traffic (just the occasional light).
Fun car, not made to save the world unless you can plug it in every night. But if you can it's hands down great!
Your fraud scenario is just straight up not going to happen. It's significantly cheaper to run on electricity instead of fuel so it's in the drivers best interest to charge as often as possible.
Except that it does happen a lot of time. According to Volvo's own data 60% of PHEV buyers never plug them in. I have a guy on my street who has a Cayenne E-Hybrid and I've never ever seen him charge that car. Yeah it's dumb, but it lets you buy a very expensive car and deduct almost all tax if it's a company purchase.
> So long as "everybody" truly believes the Governments threat to effectively ban ICE sales after 2030
Does "everybody" matter in this case? The reality for the manufacturers is that they need designs, standard, deals, factories, production lines ready years before 2030 if the ban actually happens. So it's really a question whether they believe the plan, or are they ready to call the bluff and go out of business if they're wrong.
> the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city)
That's not so far off. Even large cities in North America have no more than a few dozen gas stations (and the UK likely fewer still due to things like London's congestion pricing reducing vehicle count). Once-a-week-or-so fueling doesn't really require a huge amount of infrastructure. That's one of the reasons we're all addicted to driving in the first place, after all.
And charging stations are, of course, absolutely dirt cheap to build relative to fuel stations. They'll keep up with demand easily as the driving stock expands. The limit, if there is one, is going to be the electrical distribution infrastructure. High voltage lines into cities aren't as cheap as we'd want.
>> And charging stations are, of course, absolutely dirt cheap to build relative to fuel stations.
Really? A normal gas station can handle around 100 cars per hour using a handful of pumps and is refueled by daily deliveries from a big truck. Simple. An electric charge point capable of that will require a massive amount of electricity, electricity delivered over wires. Look into how much it costs to run such a service to a random location in a city. Look at the costs of putting up even a handful of towers capable of delivering a thousand amps peak load. Then look the additional real estate costs need to facilitate 100 cars/hour worth of charging points. Electric 'stations' are very much not drop-in replacements. We need a very different physical infrastructure (ie smaller charge points at every parking spot rather than central stations).
This is a false dichotomy, we have to get away from thinking of charging stations like gas pumps. Charging stations can be everywhere: grocery stores, retail stores, office buildings, malls, just about any parking lot or parking garage, hotels, airport parking and on and on. Gas pumps have to have huge underground tanks, and they have to be regularly refilled by large tanker trucks, by their very nature they will be less common and so they'd better be able to service more cars per hour. Charging stations are much smaller and can tie into the grid just about anywhere, there should be a lot more of them and thus they won't need to handle as many cars as a gas station does.
Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable.
Reusing the land of all gas stations for other things will be a good benefit of all this. Except for San Francisco, where they all will be preserved as historical landmarks.
> Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable.
...and the infrastructure to distribute the electricity.
Back of the napkin math with the mall of America: 5.6 million sq ft at ~14kWh/sq ft per year (rough average estimate of all retail buildings) [1] equates to about 78.4 million kWh/year or 784,000 100kWh Model S's charged to full or 7.84 million charged 10% assuming 100% efficiency. The Mall of America has about 40 million annual visitors so about a fifth would be able to charge their batteries 10% if the Mall doubled its (hypothetical) capacity, which would likely require at least some infrastructure upgrades since we're talking about ~10 MW of extra power - and that's averaged out 24/7/365, in actuality it'll be a much higher peak load since the mall isn't 24/7.
I'm not an expert but I doubt the property developer and power companies overbuilt by that much.
A rollout could be smaller in scope yet be useful. Most parking lots have at least one street light... start by connecting the existing grid/infrastructure that already is there powering the streetlight, upgrading if necessary, to a handful of nearby parking spots. Go from there.
Take a step back and think about the ridiculous infrastructure build to support gas powered cars. Imagine a time before gas stations; someone doing a back of the napkin math about a future of cars would have also been met with disbelief - developers will have to invest millions/billions of dollars and build hundreds of thousand of stores across the entire country to sell gas? And how will those stores get the gas to sell? Truck it in?? That's just ridiculous.
Every parking space doesn't need to have the capacity to fill up a Model S from 1% to 100% during a lunch break.
What us civilized people here in the EU do, is we have 11-22kW charging points in pretty much all malls and supermarkets. You drive there, plug in your car, swipe the RFID and go shopping. You come back and your car has charged a bit.
No, it's not at a 100%, but it still has more charge than it did when you came in.
And again, load-balancing electricity is REALLY old tech. It's completely trivial to balance the load among the whole field during Christmas shopping season with every charger occupied so that everyone gets some charge, but the transformers don't explode.
There will be gas stations for generations to come. If California can meet its sales ban for new ICE cars in 2035, which is a tall order, ICE cars will still be on the road. Contributing to this trend will be people keeping their cars for years; used cars which represent two thirds of car sales; and cars driven into California from other states. As an example, I have a 2007 Honda and it will be on the road until it falls apart or I die.
California successfully forced me to sell my 80’s sports car out of state by constantly tightening smog requirements to the point where they were far above what the car ever had to meet and banning non-CARB stamped aftermarket parts. I have no doubt that they would be able to squeeze perfectly working ICE cars out of the state with draconian rules.
There are two emission standards for California, state and federal. If the car was sold in a state that follows federal and it meets the emission standard for the model year, it can be registered in California. The state doesn't change smog requirements; older cars remain at their original specification.
I also think from the driver's perspective the usage will be totally different.
Today's driver generally goes to the gas station only when the tank is empty.
That leads to a 'big bang' event in that the tank will be close to empty at the start of the visit and full by the end of the visit.
By comparison the driver of the electric car will be using a 'top up' approach, charging the car at home over night, at work when parked, at the shopping center, etc. etc.
Those 'big bang' events, where a full recharge is required will be fewer and far between.
People also are supposed to charge their cellular phones and laptop batteries in the same manner. You'd be surprised if you ever worked in retail how many people forget this, their phones die, and they scrambled to buy cords to do so.
I feel like people don't get the difference between ideal and reality here that often.
Excellent points. Also people seem to be forgetting a large percentage of people will be charging at home overnight, and will largely never need to charge their cars at places other than home.
I just charge my car from the same 240V outdoor socket I use for the lawnmower. Sure that's no good for somebody who can't park in front of their house, but it's false to say you need a dedicated EV charger.
I live in downtown Oslo (capitol of Norway). I park my car on the street, but we have a decent amount of type-2 chargers around so its hardly any trouble.
We’ve charged on a fast-charger three times the past three months, all of those times were on longer trips we usually don’t do.
You don't need a "charging station", you need a wall plug that can handle 8A current without melting. In Finland we have one of those for most private parking spaces for car block heaters.
If you want something fancier, it's 300-1000€ for a "proper" charging station with a Type2 cable. If you've already bought an electric car, it'll pay itself back in a few months just with fuel costs. (EU prices, American fuel prices are just bonkers-cheap).
Clearly you don't think it will ever be practical for you, or people in your situation. However, I encourage you to open your mind that you might not be representative of the entire auto buying market.
The first electric cars were very niche. The next were a bit more capable, and the number of people that they were suitable for increased. Each iteration they get better and better. Perhaps this iteration doesn't suit you needs. Maybe the next will not either. But one by one the objections will fall. Charging infrastructure will improve. New battery chemistries will be invented. You'll come around.
Yes, they are several orders of magnitude worse than gas stations. For an 110V AC outlet to fully charge any vehicle will take days. Anything less than a fast charging station will not meaningfully charge a vehicle when you are outside.
A L2 charger will not even make a dent in your range when you are out running errands (20-25 miles of range per hour of charging). They are generally only useful when they are at your workplace and can charge for hours at a time.
Typical L1 charging adds 3 or 4 miles of range per hour on-plug. So if you're plugged in for 12 hours overnight, that's 40-ish miles, which is more than most people drive in a day. Or 8 hours at work, you get 30-ish miles, still significant.
If the parking lot at work has solar-shaded carparks that feed the chargers, the building might not even need a service upgrade. I don't know why this isn't more common.
Tell that to the person i was replying too. My point was that the problem will not be solved simply by swapping gas pumps for charge stations. The two are not interchangeable nor would doing so be cheap/easy.
I'd want to see numbers for that argument, because I don't think I'm willing to buy it on assertion. A single, routine, boring 100A building drop is enough to charge 4-5 cars (i.e. "one station worth"), and those wires and infrastructure are already there, and have been for decades.
The biggest problem is peak power. The naïve approach is to try to pull 500kW from the grid during the 20 minutes that you have five cars charging, then zero once they leave. This will at best be very expensive, but most likely impossible as the local grid won't support it.
So a battery buffer needs to be built into the charging station in order to operate them cheaply, with a smoother load profile that the power company and grid operator will service without exorbitant costs.
Thankfully, at least one EV company has already realized this :-) Let's see if more than one of them eventually starts producing enough batteries to support the strategy.
That will be less of a problem than you think. Power demand is already inconsistent throughout the day. Depending on the time of year it will peak around noon or in the evening but overnight the demand is low.
When people start charging overnight at home the overnight loads will increase. This will intern allow power companies to increase capacity.
I suspect new payment plans will get more popular soon. I'm not familiar with the US providers, but in Australia there are already at least two companies allowing you to buy energy at a current, hourly adjusted price. I expect that in a couple of decades "energy cost arbitrage via car charging" will be a normal thing.
You're probably right. In the US there's generally two systems, flat-rate or time-of-use.
A lot of people on time-of-use plans are installing battery backups and/or solar to avoid the peak charges. I have a Tesla solar/powerwall setup that's configured for cost savings and it decided that today 100% of solar was going to be back fed to the grid and we've been running 100% off the batteries. Usually the system just switches to batteries during peak.
> Usually the system just switches to batteries during peak.
You'd think you'd want to be using them more often - is it just that there's no grid demand for the power?
My hope is that the addition of a huge number of batteries to the grid, in the form of all these EVs, actually adds to its capacity, since most people won't be running them down to 0 and the software to optimize when to charge vs. when to power the grid seems to be evolving.
Pity it's not a nice open source standard or anything
I don't know that any EV is capable of providing power from its charge port, but that would be helpful for stranded vehicles.
Even if my EV could push power to the grid, I'm not sure I would want it too. It would require me to keep my EV plugged in and topped off which isn't good for the batteries. Currently both my EVs are sitting at around 50% unplugged.
I’m pretty confident that this will work itself out, but you see the problem very clearly in Norway already. Non-Tesla charging stations are much more expensive per kWh due to this, reducing the cost-of-ownership advantage of EVs vs. fossil cars. It doesn’t put the cost in no-go territory, but it’s enough that users feel cheated and complain.
So if the established manufacturers or third-party charging providers want to be competitive, they will eventually have to think about this.
Tesla superchargers take about 40 minutes to deliver an 80% charge. Call that a "full" tank. A gas pump can do the same in about 5 minutes (probably less). So to charge/fill the same number of cars per hour as one gas pump you need 8 superchargers. That's a significant increase in real estate area needed.
Another approach: A top-end Tesla supercharger delivers around 250kW. So eight of those would be 2000kW or 2 Megawatt, or around 20,000 amps, to give the equivalent number of fills/charges per hour as ONE gas pump.
I filled my tank at a medium-sized station this morning that had 8 pumps (4 islands, double-sided). So the drop-in electric replacement would be 8x the numbers above.
This line of reasoning is incorrect. Unlike fossil refuelling, the vast majority of EV charging happens at home. This charging does not load public charging stations at all. Unless your needs are esoteric, you might only charge at a public charging station one out of twenty times.
Of course some homes don't have private charging easily available, but that's a different argument.
Very few homes have anywhere to charge anything in London as an example. I don’t think the model works without knocking cities down and starting again.
The two people I know with Teslas have to charge at the local supercharger or park it a quarter of a mile away at the nearest slow charger which becomes a chore.
Not what i was talking about. I was speaking about replacing gas stations with charging stations, how the problem is not going to be solved by swapping one for another. I made no mention of other non-station charging options.
Well, my point was that public charging demand per EV will be much lower than fuelling demand per fossil car, which obviously affects the number of minutes per week each vehicle has to spend at the gas station/recharging station, and hence the feasibility of gas station owners to install charging infrastructure.
I’m sure there will be exceptions, e.g. in sparsely populated areas. And I don’t think market forces will make drop-in replacement the primary solution, but it will probably be part of the solution.
More to the point, I'm not sitting around for 40 minutes at a charging station even once a week to get recharged (and it will be more frequent than that for many). Especially given that offices may be a less regular thing, people need ways to charge when their cars are parked wherever they're parked when they're at home. Even if they eat out a bit that's not a substitute.
True, but I’m not going to want to spend the overhead time to figure out if my car is compatible with some random charger, figure out if the price is favorable (some are by the minute, others by the kilowatt hour), and then plug and unplug just to get the range equivalent of 2 gallons of gas while I’m at a store.
Tesla is the only one who doesn't support J1772. The compatibility problem has mostly solved itself with the industry adopting CCS, which is backwards compatible with J1772. Teslas sold in North America are the only new EVs without CCS.
The reason charger pricing is inconsistent is because there isn't regulation requiring a standard the way fluid pricing is regulated.
All slow charging points use the same connectors, which are compatible with all EVs. It's the rapid chargers where there are different standards, but most seem to be converging on CCS, and all chargers support that (and all except Tesla superchargers also support ChaDeMo, the other standard).
Applebee's can add charge points without any increase in real estate (as an example). The ongoing logistics of having chargers in the parking lot is pretty different than running a gas station.
Which is to say, quickly fueling up at a convenience store probably won't be the only way people charge their vehicles going forward.
Exactly. I wasn't saying that charging was impossible, rather that drop-in replacements for gas stations are impracticable and certainly would not be "cheap". The widespread use of EVs will require a very different physical infrastructure.
The concept non-EV owners struggle with is that with an EV you don't normally go out of your way to charge it the way you do with an ICE. If you can charge at home, at work, at the grocery store, and at restaurants then why do you need a filling station? If you start your day at 100% because you charge at home then you don't need any of the other infrastructure unless you go on a road-trip.
The amount of charging infrastructure need is also based on both demand and use case. A grocery store or restaurant might opt for DC fast chargers because they know customers won't be around for more than 30 minutes, but an office park can use 3-6kw chargers because users are there for 8 hours a day. The EVSEs are smart too so you can balance output based on demand. Have two EVs plugged in, they both get 3kw. Just one can pull 6kw.
OK, maybe the goal should be to relax our assumption that recharging happens at the gas stations, and just spread the load to all the parking lots we can find. Then gas stations could just have the quick-charge versions for more $$.
> That would be useful at a hotel or workplace, but it won't replace a gas station.
Also useful at any sit down restaurant (even fast food). (which although self driving makes driving while eating safer, was a horrible practice to begin with)
Addon; Tracked long trips we took in the SE last year against the Tesla charger map; There was always a super charger within 1 mile of where we stopped for food, were stopped for about an hour, etc. And some in our group also needed bio breaks every hour and a half; aka < 150 miles.
Unless you regularly drain all 4 cars to 0% in 8 hours, this is not really a problem. And if you do, you're likely running some kind of transport company and can afford planning for better charging.
For a gas station you need permits to place cubic meters of flammable poisonous liquids underground.
For a charging station you need: electricity. And not even huge amounts of it unless you're planning on building a huge charging field with dozens of high-power chargers (300kW+). Even then you can load balance the power with 90's technology to keep up. For peak loads you can have a battery on-site, charged on off-peak hours.
And none of this requires hazardous materials permits or safeties for flammable liquids.
Cost to build a gas station includes cost to build a giant storage tank for hazardous material and piping to deliver that to outlets at ground level. Running it may be simple but building it is absolutely not.
I've been mapping Michigan gas stations on OpenStreetMap so I have some data ready at hand here. Wayne County, which is essentially all part of the Detroit metro area, has more than 800 retail fuel establishments licensed by the state of Michigan.
(I don't think my point particularly rests on how the Detroit metro is defined; Detroit itself has 349 gas stations)
Well, OK, but I'm not sure that really reflects the subject under discussion (a recognized place with a sign or whatever where you know you can drive in and fill up).
I mean, to be glib: I have no Detroit-area GIS experience whatsoever, but I can type "gas station" into a Google Maps search for the area and count how many flags I see. And it's absolutely not 800. Indeed, it looks like 40 or so.
Surely there are technicalities that make other places "technically" gas stations too. But then, there are technicalities that make any AC outlet a charging station -- virtually every large retail facility near me has one or two car chargers, for example.
> Even large cities in North America have no more than a few dozen gas stations (and the UK likely fewer still due to things like London's congestion pricing reducing vehicle count).
That's quite funny reading from my chair. I live in a small town in Scandinavia (~50.000 people in all of the county) and a quick count at Google maps show me that apparently there are more gas-stations here (14 in a 5km radius from me - 5 inside the city limits itself) than in "large cities in North America".
Was having this conversation with a neighbour the other day.
I have a 7kw charger at my house, but the loop for our street is 21kw, which is typical here. It’s going to be a big problem to solve when it comes to it.
I wouldn’t mind if I had to charge at 3.3kw, but if every car is an EV the current grid just isn’t going to be able to carry enough juice.
To put some numbers on this, you can measure charge rates/fueling rates as number of miles worth of charge/fuel provided per hour of charging/fueling.
A Tesla V3 Supercharger can charge at a rate of about 1000 mph or 1600 kph.
A 240 volt 48 amp home charger home charger can charge a Model 3 at a rate of 44 mph or 71 kph.
A US gas pump can pump a maximum of 10 gallons per minute. If you refill at a station with such a pump, and your car gets 25 mpg (about average for the current US fleet), that's 15000 mph or 24000 kph.
Perhaps we should be pushing for plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs) as a transition between ICE and EV. PHEVs have ranges between about 20 and 60 miles on electricity, which for many people is enough to cover all of their normal day to day driving except possibly their commute entirely on electric if they have a place for overnight charging at home, and when they need more range it has the ICE engine.
The flaw in your reasoning, and most people arguing against BEVs is they envision the demand for charging stations is going to be in any way similar to the demand for gas stations.
A regular 120v charger can put 60 miles on an EV overnight which is more than enough for the average commute. I did this for 2 years with a 50 mile round-trip commute. I started each day with 100% charge on my Nissan Leaf, arrived home each night with ~35 miles of range, and plugged it in.
When we got our Model 3, we charged exclusively on 120v for about a year and only used a Supercharger on road trips out of state.
We're a BEV only household and have used a charging station once in the last 6 months. I took the Leaf out to empty a storage unit 40 miles away and I only stopped for 10 minutes to put enough range so I wasn't coasting home on fumes.
I realize that not everyone can charge at home, but a large portion of the population can and that will dramatically reduce the demand for charging stations. When you realize that anywhere you stop for long periods of time (e.g. restaurants, grocery stores, office parks) can install chargers, then you quickly realize that charging stations will only really be needed along highways.
On the road for long trips, yes absolutely. But the EV usecase also includes low and medium speed charging at home overnight, and while at your destination (say a retailer) which you can't do with your ICE car. So overlapping but not identical comparison.
1st, you're assuming people can charge at home - assuming they have a garage and access to power. This isn't true for a huge portion of the population.
> and while at your destination (say a retailer) which you can't do with your ICE car. So overlapping but not identical comparison.
This really isn't available yet either. Who's going to pay for this? Really?
I don’t think they claimed that everyone has access at home. They said “the use case includes” which doesn’t exclude other possibilities.
There are many great options for charging if you choose your car wisely.
Our apartment building with six parking spaces has three Teslas and no charging on site. We do just fine.
Charging takes about 15 seconds of my day on work days. And on the occasion when I need more, it’s quick and I can grab a few minutes (like, 10 or 15) of a youtube video or Netflix while charging. Or step into a store and do an errand while charging.
In 10 minutes I can get about 100 miles of charge. I often go to our nearby Target (a store in the US) which has a supercharger right in the parking lot, and I don’t charge, even though I’m already there shopping right where the charger is. Why? No need. Already charged. It’s not that difficult.
Notice I never said this will work for everyone. But it works for some, with no assumption about having chargers at home.
>Who’s going to pay?
Sometimes you pay per kilowatt. Other times you’re charged per minute, like 3 cents a minute or so which includes parking. Other places it’s free and advertising on nearby signs subsidies for it. Or employers pay for it as a work benefit. One network (Chargepoint) covers most of this stuff.
This is what always happens when I bring up product problems about EVs. Everyone on HN who owns a luxury car Tesla in SV or some major metro with their six figure plus salary gets all bent out of shape, and ask "omg why can't everyone do this!" It's tone deaf and out of touch.
EVs simply are not there yet. They're ludicrously expensive, inconvenient to refuel, don't offer utility like ICE trucks/SUVs, can't be charged effectively without huge infrastructure investment. I'm not saying we aren't making strides, I'm saying there are loads of improvements that need to come before EVs take over ICE sales to ultimately help us fight global problems.
EVs have never been about rich people having a toy. We need cheap EVs now to help us fight global climate change and frankly they aren't there yet. You need to make massive assumptions for the vast majority of Americans to make EVs work compared to ICE vehicles.
Of course there are a lot of issues still needing solutions.
If you re-read my comment you will see that I acknowledged this won’t work for everyone. Quite far removed from how you portray my comment.
You’ve also made several poorly chosen points that are easily refuted. Perhaps if you want to engage with sincerity and read what people say, your experience here will be better.
You and I both agree a lot of improvements are needed. In the meantime watching evolutionary-paced progress crawl along can be frustrating for sure.
There’s something fascinating though about the difference between what we impatiently want to see, asap, as consumers, and how stuff actually gets done. And you touched on it with the rich people toy comment. The people who can figure out the steps to get from here to there — some of which steps take us through stages that look quite non-ideal along the way — those people really have some special insight or talent.
I find this amazing. Who would have thought that the way to get eco friendly cars to take off would have been to leverage humans’ enjoyment of endorphins? Pretty nonlinear thinking, but it’s working, in the case of Tesla.
(I say it’s working because it helped (or frankly, enabled, full stop) the company to even survive at all to this point. If they had tried to move straight to a cheap model on day 1, there would be no Tesla Inc. today. And now it’s putting pressure on other car companies to catch up. Anyone who thinks it is easy to finance a company while starting with a low priced model is free to try doing so, of course.)
Yes, they can't compete on price with a cheap used car (though look at models like the Renault Zoe), but the inconvenience of refuelling is really overblown (almost always by people who don't drive one). If you don't live in a city you can probably charge at home. If not, maybe at work, almost certainly when shopping. There are so many places to charge.
How do we know this? Despite tax breaks we still have to pass laws telling people they will have to buy them! If they were ready I'd be able to buy one locally, have it serviced locally and take a trip without needing to plan stops to charge.
"It's tone deaf and out of touch"
Amen. As someone who lived in a city and did the commute and left it all, I've realized that many people can't imagine what life is like somewhere else. An EV in this area it is a cross between a child's plaything and a rich person's toy - but I get that for someone else they are perfect. I'm glad we aren't all the same and in the same circumstances, but I wish that was easier to keep in mind.
I live in a city. I do understand that people in rural areas need reliable trucks.
I think that most people would prefer a short walk to work. You can stop at a local shop and buy groceries on the way home. Stop at the coffee shop on the way in. This is the life that most people should be advocating for.
I feel that electric vehicles are a suburban dream. That you can have your suburb, and not feel bad about all the driving that you're doing. It's green washing.
Lots of great points to agree with! I do want to point out that rural isn't just about trucks.
Distances are greater (Costco is an hour away), the need for ground clearance, real AWD or 4x4 and lack of a local service center - those are real limiting factors. EVs don't have to replace a truck, just an Outback.
Off the topic a bit, but you got me thinking - I drive WAY less now than I did from the suburbs. Sure Costco is an hour away, but when you only go once a month it doesn't add up to much.
The thing is, they're not "ludicrously expensive". Sure, Teslas and Porsches and Jaguars are, but you can also get a late-model used Nissan Leaf for under 10k, or a brand new Kia Niro for ~30k after tax credit. That's well within the bell curve of what people spend on ICE cars, used or not. A Leaf might not meet your needs, but it's not like there aren't other options out there. If you factor in longer-term costs like fuel cost, maintenance, and wear-and-tear, the equation tilts even further towards EV.
Not to say they shouldn't be cheaper, but they'll definitely get there. We're pretty close to price-parity as is (just not tons of options).
> This really isn't available yet either. Who's going to pay for this? Really?
In Europe some retailers have this, sure, for 2 or 3 parking spots.
If the demand is there, I'm pretty sure they'll expand it, even as a paid/loyality bonus. I don't expect them to offer superchaging but 50-60 km/h charge would be more than enough.
2 or 3 parking spots. It's a token gesture, not meaningful infrastructure. Electrifying an entire parking lot is a lot more expensive than 2 or 3 spots.
You don't need to electrify the entire parking lot.
Even if you do, not every parking spot needs to have a 350kW HPC charger. 11-22kW is more than enough. Add load balancing and maybe a battery in the future and you're good.
The handful of spots is part greenwashing part gauging the demand. They do track the usage of those spots and increase the amount if they see that they're in use and driving business.
Here in The Netherlands, most big cities really appreciate electric cars. Thus, in streets where the demand is big, they add additional charging stations.
It's not like charging needs a garage and access to power. Sometimes, the local government is competent enough. So it really depends.
> 1st, you're assuming people can charge at home - assuming they have a garage and access to power. This isn't true for a huge portion of the population.
So what, figuring out how people without a designated parking space can change their car is trivial compared to trying to undo global warming. Also Covid has shown us how much disruption we can actually tolerate, hint: a lot more than the powers that be want you to believe.
> So what, figuring out how people without a designated parking space can change their car is trivial compared to trying to undo global warming.
No it isn't. NYC has limited space. There simply isn't enough room for a charger for every car. That is a nontrivial problem with extreme cost. You can't just handwave it away.
Because of the infrastructure surrounding it - e.g. fleets of cars taxis, public transit, etc. In other words, better options than having an owning an EV, which, if you pay attention, is what we're talking about here.
> In other words, better options than having an owning an EV is what we're talking about here.
Nope. The topic is about mass adoption. Not mass adoption by people who take trains or taxi in a certain city.
Even within this sub thread, it's comparing the "ease" of getting fuel and parking in nyc (neither of which are actually easy) to which charging is a mass hurdle.
Are there people who don't have access to power and security at a parking spot who drive more than 100 miles a day (and drivers that use bottles and get blood clots instead of stopping for 1hr every 250 miles), sure, but that's not the mass, it's somewhere <5%. And roughly a smaller population to whom don't need a car on a regular basis at all.
I don't think anyone is suggesting you buy an EV if you don't need a car at all. It's about replacing an ICE car. If you have one of those, you must be parking it somewhere already.
I spent 25 years living in San Francisco. What I know is I put about 6000 miles a year on my car. Of which about 4000 was around the city. Assuming a city dweller with a car charged it every 200 miles, that's be once every two and half weeks.
That doesn't seem impossible, just merely inconvenient. On the same level of having to wash your clothes at a laundromat. It's thing, if you live in a real city, it's not the Suburbs.
A couple of people on my street in SF commuted to the south bay with electric cars. They'd park them on the street at night and charge them at work.
Also thing I know about SF. People that work in SF park their car in the same spot for days at a time. And remembering to move the car is another inconvenience they deal with. When I lived and worked in SF I would drive down town and park. Which I could do because I had a parking sticker. Most people do not have that option. Which says to me, me putting 6000 miles a year on my car probably made me an outlier on the high side. There are people putting much less.
I've seen plenty of chargers at malls and Walgreens and other areas. Usually it's a ChargePoint or blink app, which connects through your phone. One of the local malls subsidizes the electricity and charging is free.
> over an hour, and that only nets you ~20-22 miles.
Most modern EVs can do 24-25 miles/hour on L2.
How is that not meaningful?
The average trip to the grocery store is 41 minutes [1] so that's 15 miles of charge which would negate most or all of the range lost traveling to the store.
Stop assuming that anyone plugging their EV into charge is on empty and NEEDS to charge. That's an ICE vehicle use pattern that doesn't apply, people wait until their empty when driving an ICE because they have to make a special trip. With an EV and charging everywhere, you can charge whenever you want.
You are assuming EV charging is everywhere, but right now infrastructure is extremely limited.
I have yet to see a grocery store with a charging station in Seattle (QFC/Safeway/Whole Foods), and the one I have seen (at a Safeway far north), there were are only 2 spots and power was shared across ports.
The reality for me is that L2 charging is currently useless as the places I go do not provide chargers.
You're moving the goal post. No the infrastructure isn't in place everywhere and your experience is evidence of that. But it works in other places, my experience is evidence of that. Everyone isn't going to have an EV overnight and there's time to build out reliable infrastructure everywhere.
Tangentially gas cars are convenient because you just don't have to think about the length of your next trip: there will be gas available wherever you go. Long trips with an EV require planning due to missing infrastructure, longer "fueling" times, and shorter ranges.
But if we break out off the assumption that you can go anywhere any time in your electric car because there's another option available (rental? ride sharing? public transportation?) and EVs are at least for now meant for shorter trips then it becomes less of an issue.
But you're right - the freedom to just hop in an EV and go isn't here yet. I look forward to when it is. Can't come soon enough for me.
Long trips might be an anomaly, but they are a common one in that every person I know takes a couple every year. So a good answer needs to exist or the whole thing dies.
> they are not counting the drive time to the actual gas station
More often than not, this is on the way home / on the way to work, no? I don't just start the car and drive it down to a station to get gas and then come home (barring strange circumstances).
So if we are looking at this objectively. Zero minutes is far better than 10-15 minutes.
I've been an EV owner since 2016. I am yet to experience "waiting to charge" while commuting 20 miles to work and running errands. I park in our garage, plug in, and wake up to a full charge.
That's with being a 2 EV household with only one Tesla wall connector that is set to 30A (can support up to 100A).
Own a TM3, my issue isn't traveling from city to city but its instead trips where the round trip is over two hundred but I am not traveling by any major route. There are lot of what I call "country drives" where the quick route may not involve highways and with an ICE car those country bumpkin gas stations are all you see.
So until charging becomes as ubiquitous to where the country store has "two pumps" or such people are going to find situations where it does not work or only works on a good day.
hence the reason I am an advocate of range, range, and more range. Range that lets you make big round trips without charging are the goal. I know many say "they don't need range" or whatnot and can use a short range city car, well that same rule applies to ICE but you will see the market for those small lower end lower range ICE cars was never great so why would an EV market of the same be different?
Soon even low 200 mile range BEVs will be looked at similar to how many look at the sub 150 crowd today; Mini should have been ashamed to release their car; and 250-350 will be the norm (numbers in miles, so KM is 400 to 560)
Yes, with very few exceptions, late night driving, very rural locations (where you at least want to top off sooner than you normally might), etc. you basically don't need to plan driving an ICE. There will be some sort of gas station along your route. You're almost certainly not going to have to alter your route for sake of hitting a gas station in time. (And even if you have to wait for an available pump somewhere, the car in front is only going to take a few minutes to fill up.)
The number of people in the UK and Ireland that have to park overnight on the street is way too high to start banning ICE vehicles within the next decade. Electric infrastructure isn't enough, they will have to completely revamp entire neighborhoods to provide space for permanent and predictable overnight parking for residents.
> The number of people in the UK and Ireland that have to park overnight on the street is way too high to start banning ICE vehicles within the next decade.
You're not wrong (and I too am a "garage orphan"—neither a garage or even a driveway), but there are some options being developed. The YT channel Fully Charged featured two a while back:
After street lighting was upgraded to more energy-effective LEDs there's surplus capacity. Making every pole available for slow overnight charging does not mean to "completely revamp entire neighborhoods". The possibility to sell the electricity might even become attractive for municipality or utility.
Also, parking is going to be overhauled anyway, after decades of cars occupying every nook and cranny, there's a strong push to free the streets.
I lived in London until 2015 and took a recent look on Street View where I lived (Search for E10 6QB if you want to see) . It was a typical London street where everyone parks nose to nose. There's about 20 cars for every lamp post.
No way could you charge every car that way. With the typical 50-70% street occupancy. You'd be lucky to find a spare lamp post.
But surely the majority of those cars have a short commute. We have a BMW i3 which has a relatively small 33kWh battery, and we usually charge it less than twice per week.
A car with a longer range wouldn't need to be charged that often.
>But surely the majority of those cars have a short commute.
That is irrelevant. If you cannot always get a parking spot where you can charge then from time to time you would end up not being able to change when you absolutely need to. It's like parking at work and there's no charging available and you have to drive around for 20 minutes and turn up late for work. No, there's a need for either always available charging in every single area or a system that is a direct replacement for gas stations (IE. charge in a couple of minutes every week or so).
I have lived in an area like it (luckily I moved) and the amount of time I have driven around in circles just to get a parking spot is more than I'd like to know. If only some of them had charging people with cars would be forced to either move away or drive around in circles for hours on end every day.
I wonder what the yin and yang / success rate of such mandates are / how the response really goes.
I remember the light bulb rules at a national level had to be rolled back when there just wasn't enough capacity to replace them all with non incandescent options.
The light bulb rules in the UK were frequently snorted at, but everyone has moved over now, and whether it is associated with it or not, we're using less electricity these days too.
Thankfully I charge my car at home and that’s enough for me about 99% of the time. There’s a fairly reliable CHADEMO pretty close by regardless, which helps.
The infrastructure in the UK has been really neglected though. They pushed hard early on, but since then they just let the L2’s fail for months then it’s a coin toss as to whether they fix them or just decommission them.
Given that the entire length of Britain is 600 miles, going ICE-free seems almost... easy, compared to the US.
You really don't have the concerns about long-haul trips impacting range. Obviously there are point-charging concerns etc, but that's something you can throw small money at to fix. You don't really need to convince consumers they won't be stranded in the mountains and freeze to death.
Long haul trips were never the biggest concern for EV adoption, that's something that can largely be worked around through planning.
The biggest concern has always been charging infrastructure. EVs are great for people with garages, but not so much for the people in cities with no dedicated parking spot.
Banning ICEs is probably the best mechanism to get society to solve this problem. Otherwise, most city-dwellers will just sit back and continue to drive ICE cars waiting for someone else to solve the charging issue.
I don't know why you assert this. It is the concern for literally every person I know who would otherwise have bought an EV, including myself.
People like the freedom to take longer road trips without meticulous planning, and without sticking to certain interstate routes which skip the interesting parts of the country.
I never said it wasn't a concern, I said it wasn't the biggest concern.
If all the gas stations around your house disappeared, would your first concern be how you are going to get to Indianapolis? No. It's going to be how are you going to get work/school/etc everyday (assuming you don't work in Indianapolis).
EVs have an issue where most drivers have to own their own gas-station equivalent. And people without the space to put a personal "gas station" can't really own one. At that point, they don't give a damn whether they can drive to Indianapolis.
Solving the day-to-day charging problem for people without the space for personal charges will, as a side-effect, also solve the issue for driving long distances. Because the issue with going long distances in an EV comes down to availability of charging.
Except these are basically the same overlapping issues, and you're describing the more difficult way to solve it.
If vehicles have twice the range, you only need about half the charging infrastructure.
If I don't have a personal charger at home, 1-2 charges a week while I'm shopping is doable. But that's not something most people will be willing to do daily, away from home, unless it's super convenient.
>Solving the day-to-day charging problem .... comes down to availability of charging.
This might work in idealized theory, but not in practice. From a market-systems perspective, it'll be the opposite, because range is the more flexible, independent variable. More required charges means more constraints, which requires a much more complex (and therefore inefficient) system to solve.
And this is even more applicable when factoring in grid supply/demand/capacity.
Separately: the market isn't always rational. If people say they want the range to drive to Indianapolis, believe them, no matter how irrational that demand is to you. Especially if meeting that requirement (range) also satisfies their others (daily charging).
But again, concerns over range are really just a type of concern over public charging capacity.
If the people who drive those roads regularly can charge on public chargers, then people driving through on long trips also have the ability to charge there. Thus range isn't a concern.
In the early days of ICE vehicles, range would have been a concern. After all, horses can eat almost anywhere and there was plenty of infrastructure (hay barns) available.
The solution to range for an ICE is "carry more fuel". I can load my truck bed with 500 gallons of fuel and tow 1000 more without taking a significant mileage penalty and drive 2/3 of the way around the world. An exaggerated scenario, to be sure, but the concept holds on smaller scales and is a valuable ability for many.
What does an electric vehicle offer for someone in the USA's mid-west, Canada's far north, or the Australian outback where a vehicle may need to travel for days off road without seeing civilization, possibly while maintaining heat for survival or running equipment via e.g. a PTO?
Edit to add a reply to your earlier comment: The majority of consumer uses of ICEs at the moment is commuting, agreed. Governments aren't talking about banning the majority of ICE sales. What fills the hole?
I think I'm with you on this. Range is largely a solved problem now. Once a car can go 120 miles, that's 2 hours of driving, at which point you need a break anyway. My car is already nearly a 1000kg too heavy because of the battery, and I use only half of it daily for a long commute. Most people would only use a fraction for their commute. Instead of pushing for more miles we now need surplus chargers everywhere. Homes, work, car parks and stations.
I get why you like the freedom to take longer road trips without meticulous planning, however when I look at how I use my EV (Renault Zoe), it's not that bad. Basically for normal daily usage, you don't really care because the range (180-240 km) is big enough to not worry.
We take longer trips maybe 3-4 times per year. And then you do need to plan. In that case, not a big deal to me.
Self driving taxis are like flying cars- they’re technically possible and have been for some time, but you don’t see them on roads, because they’re just not quite right
There are areas of the US where electric will probably be a tough sell as someone's only vehicle for certain types of trips and driving. Is it a large percentage? Probably not. (And before someone says just rent a car for those times. For a lot of driving away from pavement, you can't rent vehicles even if you wanted to.)
Even with chargers everywhere there will be a problem: we'll have to produce a lot more electricity. And when we start reading about possible blackouts in some countries in Europe due to environmental decisions 2030 feels like not far enough.
Solar and wind won't be enough. Nuclear suffers from NIMBY. So what? We'll produce electricity from oil, coal and gaz? Awesome way to move the emission problem. Same method as moving production and recycling to Asia and Africa.
> We'll produce electricity from oil, coal and gaz?
Yes, it's still better because you can move the electricity production to another source, but you can't move the petrol production the same way. If it buys time, it's still an approach to a better future even if it's not immediate.
I'm really curious to see how the used electric car market shapes up.
New cars (electric or not) are pretty expensive. The average price of a new car in the US just topped $40k, which is out of reach of many car buyers. The people who buy new obviously tend to be well-off, and are often older. Then at some point down the road, those cars end up in the hands of (on average) younger, less-wealthy folks.
But younger folks might not want the same thing as older folks. One niche example is the manual transmission. Looking at a car like the Mazda Miata - something like a third of those are sold new with an automatic transmission. The buyers (again, maybe older) don't want to bother shifting their own gears, so they pay an extra $1k or so for an automatic. But when those cars are affordable used cars, and the market is younger car enthusiasts, Miatas with an automatic transmission are worth quite a bit less. The preferences of the new $30k convertible buyers aren't the same as the preferences of the used $5k convertible buyers, even though those $30k cars eventually become the $5k cars.
With electric cars I wonder if we'll see a similar divide. I know a few people (software engineers who own their own single family homes) who have bought new electric cars. Folks I know from less wealthy walks of life (daycare providers, teachers, grad students, etc) have not bought used electric cars. Surely that's at least partially because used electric cars don't exist in great numbers, but I also wonder if those folks (people who rent, or move often, etc) might be less enamored with a car where they don't know they'll be able to charge it at home, or a depleted battery pack means less range or costly repair, etc.
I'm hoping for an electric future and I want my next car to be electric ... I'm just really curious to see if/when middle- and lower-class Americans start adopting these in large numbers.
>a depleted battery pack means less range or costly repair, etc.
This has actually stopped me from buying a used EV in the last year, twice. Dealers aren't up front about used cars history in general, and, again from just the two I looked at, they are 1000% hiding any information they can regarding the battery packs.
This is the largest hurdle to the used car market (after the shortage of used EV's because of their novelty). People hesitate to buy used combustion cars, because of unknown mechanical issues that may pop up; but this can be alleviated by using a trusted mechanic to once-over the car. They ABSOLUTELY hesitate to buy used EV's because of the battery packs, and who can you go to in order to evaluate that? Nobody.
>I'm just really curious to see if/when middle- and lower-class Americans start adopting these in large numbers.
When they have no choice. I'm in this boat - I work in education and my spouse works in education. We are solidly middle- to lower-middle class. We can't afford most new cars. Used cars are pricey anymore as well. The only way we will upgrade to an EV is if we can find a trustworthy used model, or when we have no choice, because gas is $10/gallon.
The computer on an EV will tell me the state of the battery. You can ship an ICE over to the best mechanic in the world, and that mechanic won't be able to reliably tell you state of, for example, the bottom end bearings. Not without cracking the engine open, anyway. A compression test will reveal a lot, but it could still break a piston ring tomorrow.
That said, I'd not hesitate to buy a Honda with over 100K miles on the clock. But the point is that checking the state of a singular point of most likely failure (battery) is many orders easier to check than the state of an ICE.
Leak down test, oil pressure, opening the filler cap for blow by, sound... Plenty of accessible options there that will diagnose a bad bottom-end or piston rings. Further, your average Joe can replace crank bearings in an afternoon and many could re-ring an engine with some help from youtube. Your average Honda will need this once every 200-400k miles (14-25 average 14k driving years) with proper oil changes.
There are a lot more components (cells) in a battery pack than rotating components in an average engine. I'm unsure if they're generally individually addressable, but I know they're not designed to be serviced at the cell level. That has you replacing the battery pack any time there is a problem, a many thousands of dollars adventure just in parts. There's also no major differentiator from a software perspective between "the battery is old and has reduced capacity" and "the battery is swelling and has reduced capacity". The latter could lead without warning to a catastrophic failure that would make a ringland failure laughable.
I do appreciate your view is held by many consumers who purchase a new or certified pre-owned car every N years. For those in lower income brackets (including most countries in the world) or who like to buy things that last, electric cars don't seem to carry a huge value proposition over a traditional ICE car.
who like to buy things that last, electric cars don't seem to carry a huge value proposition over a traditional ICE car.
Our Scion xB has over 100K miles on it, and our Leaf is one of the first to roll off the line. We tend to keep things. And I'm perfectly happy with the value proposition of even that early-adopter tech. There's a lot more to EV ownership than just range and battery life. Ten years later, I can hardly wait for our next vehicle that we'll drive the wheels off of...and it will be electric.
EDIT: and if you can get the oil pan off a modern car without removing the engine or at least undoing the mounts and $STUFF so it can be jacked up (thereby cancelling any "in an afternoon" of changing crank bearings), you're a better mechanic than I ever was (and I used to do it for a living).
Having an expert analyse your car by sight and sound is decidedly different than you popping open the OBD2 port in an EV, opening an app on your phone and checking directly what condition the battery is in.
I don't know about other EVs, but the Leaf shows the battery capacity on the dashboard at all times - if you know how to read it. I had to google it because the salesman had no idea.
The first leaf we looked at was already down to 80%, but the second was in perfect condition at two years old, and is still in perfect condition at age six.
In a way it is much easier to evaluate the condition of an EV battery than in internal combustion engine: start with a full charge and see how far you can drive. It may take some time, but there's really no way to fake a good battery for that kind of test.
That’s kind of funny to me. I’m old and I’ve got a manual transmission Saab. Young people who get in the car with me (back before COVID) have literally asked what that thing (the shifter) is.
Yeah, obviously the Miata buyers are not necessarily the average young person, but that market niche is definitely there. I think the issue of which features are desirable in new vs older cars holds though. Another example could be 4x4s - 4Runners, Land Rovers, etc - most of these are bought as family cars, and those first buyers are looking for niceties like high-end stereos, leather seats, etc. But once the trucks are older, people care less about an obsolete stereo or worn leather and more about which suspension or other off-road options it has, etc.
Going down a bit of a rabbithole there, but I'm still curious to see what the perceived desirability of used electric cars turns out to be for "average" Americans.
I had a stick shift Honda del Sol until about a year ago. One of the last times I had it in at the dealer, the service rep had to get one of the techs to bring the car around to me after I settled up because she couldn't drive it.
I'm a MT diehard (owned 9 cars in my life, 9 of which were MTs), and I'm trying to think what my must have feature is for an EV.
Probably some sort of aggressive or responsive driving mode. I mean, the reason I go with MTs is because I love how responsive it is. I still giggle when I'm driving around at 4000 RPMs and punch the throttle to get that instant thrust. Even with manual shifting modes on automatics, it's not the same because the torque converters mute this responsiveness.
I've never driven a Tesla or anything, but I expect that they aren't so hyper-responsive under normal driving conditions because it would be pretty fatiguing to drive. Adding that back I think is must have for me to go full EV and not keep around a Miata or WRX for fun driving.
My "save the manuals" score isn't as high as yours (I've owned 6 cars, 5 of which were stick-shift), but I do vastly prefer changing my own gears to automatics or CVTs.
That said, if you get a chance to drive a Tesla or similar, try it out! I did a test drive and liked it more than I thought I would. To me, the throttle response felt immediate and direct, reminiscent of driving a manual-shift car in the correct gear. You're just ALWAYS in the correct gear!
That being said, I suspect I'll probably do the same as you and keep a fun, old-fashioned ICE roadster in the garage for the occasional spin.
Every car I've owned except for a $300 beater in college was manual transmission (including a modified WRX STi) and my Model 3 Performance is much more responsive to the "throttle" than any of them. The speed of electricity is much higher than fuel pumps and gasoline. And the regenerative braking does a pretty good imitation of a manual transmission's compression braking when you lift.
Here's a quote from Car & Driver's review of the 2018 Model 3 P (which has since been made faster through software):
"This Model 3 needed only 1.4 seconds to leap from 30 to 50 mph and just 2.0 seconds to get from 50 to 70. Never mind other sports sedans—they're not competitive by this measure. This Tesla's mid-range acceleration tops the performance of 700-hp sports cars like the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and Porsche 911 GT2 RS, in which there's a moment's delay while automatic transmissions downshift and engines rev up. And the Tesla does it without drama beyond the alarming way it pushes you back into the seat as the car closes on any traffic ahead. There's no jerk and no roar—plant your foot on the accelerator and it simply goes."
I'm in the UK, so have only owned manual cars before I switched to EVs. I hate the lack of responsiveness on automatic transmission ICEs, but EVs are great, even cheaper ones. The power is instant. A Tesla has more torque than pretty much any ICE car.
Of the ~20k used electric cars listed on cars.com, ~3k are $10k or less. Mostly Nissan Leafs and Chevy Sparks, so it depends on your definition of decent :).
I used to drive a Leaf and it was more enjoyable to drive than the Mercedes E Class that I drove when my Tesla was being repaired. EV torque is fun, and you miss it when you go back to an ICE.
You can buy a 2011 Leaf for about 3 grand. Sure, the battery is probably toast, but replace it for 5 grand, you're still well under 10, and now you have 100 miles of range and a car with the only wearable item brand new.
Sadly, Nissan has jacked up the price of battery replacement to I think 8k now, which turns my car into scrap in 5 years unless a third party steps in.
I think those average numbers get skewed by expensive SUVs and luxury cars. You don’t need to spend $30k to get something decent and new, I think my Mazda 3 was like $17k in 2016. I think we’ll need a combo of good used prices like you mention as well as new prices comparable to a Corolla to see mass adoption.
Battery pack depreciation is the one thing that worries me the most.
But I wonder if it would be possible and cost effective to test cells and combine the cells that are still good into a newer battery pack. Maybe by the manufacturer.
Or to just rate an existing one and give it a score so the consumer can have a clue.
The batteries themselves already have sensors you can query for individual battery pack (a bunch of cells) voltages. Replacing a set of cells inside a battery isn't a completely trivial operation, but still doable, people are already doing this for Priuses and Nissan Leafs - the only two cars old enough to have batteries go bad outside of warranty.
The 3rd party battery industry will catch up when cars get old enough to have battery issues.
On the other hand, according to recent studies, EV batteries don't really degrade that much over time. Leaf is the exception, because the battery temperature management was utter shit.
So far it's only Nissan that has pretty bad batteries. AFAIK everyone else actively manages the temperature when charging/discharging and are over-provisioned.
Plus batteries are getting dirt cheap. As in - TCO is less than your tyres.
Yeah, you basically need to own a home to have an electric car right now. Many blue-collar workers who have to drive around a lot in the middle of nowhere are also excluded at least for the next few years.
Do you not understand there are these things called "industrial parks" "distribution centers" or "factories" that are often not put anywhere near houses due to noise, odor, and other reasons? Many of them in my town are often 30 + min trips one way down roads where there are barely any houses, let alone places that could host a charger.
Another example; one time I worked for an inventory service which are the people who count goods in stores and other places. We often spent 45 minutes plus getting to stores, and one particularly wonderful refrigerated warehouse was located in another state.
You all need to get there is a whole other world besides people who can work remote or knowledge professionals who walk ten minutes to their 9-5 job. In my career many people often commute from 30+ one way minute drives because there's only so many places where you can actually work at.
If your daily job involves long-ass drives in the middle of nowhere, do not, I repeat, do not get an EV unless you know exactly what you're getting in to.
> The average price of a new car in the US just topped $40k, which is out of reach of many car buyers.
I haven't found this stat to be particularly compelling. Other than indicating that buyers of new cars are willing to spend money on extra features.
There are tons of cars at much more affordable prices. They are across the board safer, more reliable, more fuel efficient, and last longer than pretty much any historical vehicles. In 2006, the average vehicle life expectancy was about 8 years, 150k miles. Now it's 12+ years, 200k+ miles.
I like your Miata example, mostly because I think it may illustrate that the problem won't exist for EVs. Range is king in EVs, new or used. I can't think of any EV feature quite like a stick shift in an ICE car.
I actually am seeing lots of used EVs here in Portland. Mostly Nissan Leafs. They are dirt cheap to buy and nearly free to operate (especially given their terrible range). If you have a commute under 20 miles, you can't do better than an EV that's 5+ years old.
Tesla is still selling every car it can make and used Tesla command nearly new prices. I think the new end of the market isn’t saturated yet, and used prices won’t start coming down to affordable levels for the bulk of the used market until the demand of the new end is met.
It isn’t a problem; clean, efficient ICE vehicles are being sold by EV buyers and replacing older, dirtier cars in a cascade which is exactly what you want. Trickle-down, basically.
> The people who buy new obviously tend to be well-off, and are often older.
One might think this to be the case, but the breakdown of new car buyers shows about the same % of buyers make <50k as those who make >100k (roughly 1/3rd in each cohort, but varies based on vehicle type). Sadly, many of those buyers will take out out a 72-84mo loan that they probably can't afford in order to pay for that new car.
We priced out pickup trucks recently for shits and giggles (because we live in rural america and really have a decently often use for one).
They're so expensive. And the dealer pushes the 84+ month loan to bring the payment down. Like, I get that it's a $450/month payment, and that's supposed to sound reasonable (it isn't reasonable, at 3/4 the cost of our mortgage). But it's for 8 years! There's no way this truck is going to last that long. Who does this? Why?
> There's no way this truck is going to last that long.
I agree with everything you said up til this point. Unless you crash into a brick wall, a modern pickup will last at least 20 years. Look on Craigslist or FB marketplace for 2005ish F-250s - they’re still fetching 5 figures...
Heck, I won’t even look at a truck less than 8 years old until my next stock option boat comes in...
The recent increase in EV demand has come entirely from Europe. Really. China and the US were flat for the year, and pretty much all the gains came from Europe, where BEV and PHEVs are selling like hot cakes.
There are also some electric cars being sold for the lower end of the market, mainly because auto manufacturers have to comply with CO2 legislation and they can't do that only by selling expensive PHEVs, much as they would prefer to. On top of that, with more and more charging stations being built in cities and on highways, range anxiety is not as much as it used to be. Pretty much all new BEVs can go 200km in a charge and charge reasonably fast.
I believe 2021 this trend will only accelerate, especially in the US with Biden coming in.
One side of this that doesn't seem to get looked at much is how many ICE cars are on the roads that could be converted. Doing conversions at high volume would be very labor intensive, but it would give dealerships and mechanics something to do, and it would generate less waste than replacing whole cars.
Right now it's kind of on the edge of being practical, mostly because of the batteries. They're expensive and bulky and they need to be fitted to cars that weren't designed for them. 200+ mile ranges aren't really realistic either, because you'd be adding too much mass that the car wasn't designed for. Conversion kits now seem to be a custom thing made in low volume for a handful of vehicles and usually cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 or so.
On the other hand, if a major manufacturer can buy batteries and motors and controllers at wholesale cost and engineer a conversion kit for their own cars, amortizing the engineering cost across thousands or hundreds of thousands of cars, then maybe you can get the cost down to something reasonable and have something where all the parts just bolt in perfectly and all the car systems work the way they're supposed to. Maybe it can be a simple as walking into a dealership and saying "I want my car to be converted to electric" and they say, "sure, just drop it off for a week and here's what it costs, etc..."
The other day I decided to change the oil in my Honda Element myself and crawled under the car. The gas tank is basically a big metal box stuck to the bottom, with a bar in front to keep it from getting scraped off by a rock. It looks a little ridiculous, like Honda designed a car and at the last moment realized "oh, we forgot about the gas tank; let's just stick it to the bottom." If gas cars are made this way, then maybe finding a spot for the batteries in a car that wasn't originally designed for them maybe isn't any worse.
Even the cost of conversion kits goes down, you are ignoring the most expensive part and that's labor. You can't install these things easily. You have to take the engine out with all is associated parts and then put all the EV parts with all the wiring associated. Someone had to do this. If you want conversations for everyone and I doubt that it's going to be either cheap or scalable.
Sure, the labor would be a big part of the cost. You have to remove the engine, the gas tank, and exhaust system, and probably the transmission and swap in a motor, route battery cables, install some electronics, probably replace the engine ECU, and so on. Probably a several day project for someone who knows exactly what they're doing and has all the right tools and has done it many times before.
I think that's okay. It employs mechanics, who are going to have less to do as low maintenance EVs replace high maintenance gas cars. It's scalable in the sense that someone just has to make a kit available and if someone wants it in their car they can hire their preferred mechanic to install it.
Considering that we currently have a $7500 federal tax credit for new EVs and some states add a couple thousand more, if that were extended to conversions as well as new vehicles it could cover most of the cost. If batteries get significantly cheaper such a subsidy could cover the whole cost.
There's Zero-EV in the U.K. I only know about them because of a Youtube video series where they convert a Miata. Looks like they're selling a Porsche kit at the moment.
I wonder if electrical grids are really prepared for mass adoption of EV. For example, UK is already quite reliant on the HVDC link [0] from France. In 2016 it got damaged resulting in a reduced capacity, which has caused serious concerns at the time. And it's not only about power generation, it's also quite probable that a lot of existing power lines would have to be updated to satisfy a higher demand for electrical power.
I've been trying to wrap my head around this as well. You look at the repeated rolling brown-outs that seem to happen in places like California every few years, and I wonder how throwing 10s of millions of cars that all need to charge at extremely high rates is going to be absorbed.
Sure, SOME of those people might also install things like solar panels and batteries, but I just don't see how the math works right now.
During "peak" hours they're using roughly 17Gw total, and during off-peak, it's at 15Gw so we've only got 2Gw total to buffer electric cars charging.
Feel free to tell me how my math is wrong, but let's assume worst case scenario: a tesla charger lists 11.5kW max draw. There are roughly 14m people in New England, if we assume even half of them were charging overnight, that's 86Gw of power draw. Even if you back that off to 25% of the population and half the power draw from the charger, you're at 21.5Gw of power, which is 10x what is available, and more than the total power usage during peak hours.
If someone else has some different math I'm all ears but I don't know how we're going to more than double the total power capacity in 10 years - even if you assume we can get there with renewables, the backend infrastructure can't handle it.
2021 Tesla Model S has a 100kW battery and 402-mi range. I searched for "average driving miles per year" and Google says 13,500 miles - assuming this, we have about 37 miles per day, which would mean our Tesla S only needs to charge 9.2kW every day. If they're sitting on a charger 10 hours per day, they can take a leisurely 920W per vehicle (less than a good hair dryer), not 11.5kW.
I'm not sure I agree with that math for a number of reasons. For starters if you want to go strictly by averages, the average household has two cars, so your 9.2kW goes to 18.4kW out of the gate. Additionally that average includes teenagers which drives the mileage down, but households with teens tend to have more cars, so that means either they come out of the average or the 18.4 jumps to 27.6kW/day.
The average household uses <1200kWh per month. Adding another 18kW per day increases power usage by almost 50%, which goes back to: the national power grid doesn't have anywhere near 50% spare capacity.
Sure.. but for 980Watts you're talking a system with multiple RTX3090 GPUs and a threadripper CPU - and even with that it wouldn't be a 980Watt constant draw, it would spike based on the game and what was happening in the game.
I would be surprised if even half a percent of Americans have that kind of setup. If even 50% of Americans suddenly had that setup and all gamed every night for 10 hours a night, I would expect that would also cause the power grid to have issues.
There are two aspects to it: generation and transmission.
The peak power draw will lie somewhere between your estimate (11.5kW/vehicle) and the typical estimate (920W), which would assume everyone charging at home. Clearly not everyone would charge at home (or with a 1kW charger), so the number is in between.
Both transmission and generation tend to cost mostly their peak usage. Generation is likely easier to upgrade, given a few years. I would imagine transmission is significantly more costly and complex, since the last mile network is enormous, but transmission likely has much more overhead (it has a soft instead of hard maximum as well due to simply increasing losses and increased thermal stress). I would say we probably are nearly prepared (with significant generation investments) if everyone charges at home at low power -- a 1-2 decade transition would go smoothly (my guess/estimate is 65% more average usage by that date). If most people opt for fast charging, the system will need significant overhaul (with widespread use of buffer batteries helping). It seems very wise for State incentives to increase capacity as soon as possible, to anticipate market demand -- the energy sector is likely slower than the automotive industry.
I think it's fair to assume that America's current grid cannot handle 50% of people switching to EV, so obviously we need to build more. However, it's not like they're switching to EV overnight - even with the best (worst?) scenario it will take years, so hopefully we'll be able to ramp up the grid in time.
Except the people that don't have a charging station in their garage or folks that have a power outage. Just this week, we had a heat wave (70-80F) and winds up to 90MPH across California that resulted in power outages throughout the state as well as several fires.
If a Tesla battery is 100kWh and it gets like 350 miles - and you can get 6 hours of sun on a 350 watt panel per day on average - that means 2 panels could charge your car about once per month, right?
Alternate numbers: typical home solar installation delivers 10-15 kWh per day. Tesla model 3 has 50kWh battery and 220 mile range.
15kWh * (220 miles / 50 kWh) = 60 miles of charge a day.
If your commute is less than 30 miles each way you don't touch the grid to charge. Of course if you plan on getting or have an electric car you can always get a larger system.
I think the other side of the coin is also interesting: If we're smart, could we use EVs to make the grid more resilient? Could we be thinking of EVs both as transportation and as flexible and hyperlocal power storage. E.g. parked EVs could reverse-meter if there's very high power demand, and absorb cheap (or negative cost) power when it's really windy in Texas, etc.
- EV battery recharge resource is not infinite. Spending it on grid stabilization could be quite costly if you'll factor in cost of battery replacement. In the long run it could be cheaper to build mines for hydroelectric/compressed air storage.
- It will require huge capital investments. You have to equip every parking spot with inverters which can both charge EV and supply power from it to the grid and invest into upgrading grid to be smart enough to work in such conditions.
- What will happen on low-energy days? It's fine to drain most of power from hydroelectric storage or from stationary flow batteries, but you simply can not do it with EV. Imagine being told "sorry pal, you have to walk home today, power from your EV was used to stabilize the grid".
I would hope if we started selling power from EVs back to the grid, that owners would be able to set a reserve amount of charge, and only sell excess above that level. And presumably it would only make sense for owners who could charge when demand is less, and opportunistically sell back a portion if demand is unusual high.
I guess one more cynical read of the same suggestion is that, having failed to gather the political will to modernize our power infrastructure, we're grasping at straws by suggesting that we can piggyback off of private consumption to cobble together some of the same benefits.
Ding ding. Ideas like this are fantastic and I believe should be pursued. But it's ultimately going to be a band-aid (and a costly, fragile one at that), not a holistic solution.
They’re most suited to be huge on demand power sinks. Build out your monster wind farm; no more curtailment losses eating profits, the electric fleet can soak it all up. That’s almost as good as bidirectional storage.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, because this is a valid idea that's being seriously researched.
Will it offset the surge of electric usage caused by mass adoption of EVs? Probably not. But could it help? Very likely, and I think ideas like this need to be pursued.
If the distribution grid can power every AC unit in the city (5.5kW apiece) running at the same time at 3pm, I don’t really see why it would fundamentally struggle with 6kW car chargers spread out overnight. It might not be quite up to task yet, and AC cycles while cars don’t, but it seems within spitting distance.
Speaking as a worker at an electric utility company--we aren't.
Sure, solar panels and batteries help. Plus there's the possibility of using EVs as a distributed battery system, and lots of other clever ideas like that.
But it's not enough. We hit a record load this summer, and expect another record this year.
Add on the extra burden of regulation that enforces green energy production, and we're edging toward not being able to meet customers' needs. (Green energy is a worthy cause, don't get me wrong, but far more costly and time-consuming to build out the infrastructure.)
TLDR; We're struggling. Real bad.
(Edited to add: I should define "struggling." We strive to keep prices as low as possible, and also to fund low-income assistance programs. We keep having to raise prices, are looking at jacking them up even more this year, and are struggling to fund our low-income programs.
Our community is deeply hurting from these changes, and are making their voices heard.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro green energy. But the effects of green regulation needs to be seriously studied and the negative impacts mitigated.)
It's normal bread and butter work to plan ahead incrementally increase capacity over time. Wind and solar also need more transmission capacity. The transition is after all happening relatively slowly, there's not going to be a EV flag day.
Of course there may be dysfunctional transmission organisations that have been able to hobble along without anyone noticing for a while that get caught by this, but that's just something that needed to be fixed anyway.
That HVDC link is 2000 MW, consisting of 2 independent 1000MW systems even built by different manufacturers. Sounds very similar to risk that the grid has to manage (with backup power etc) with normal power stations. The UK is much less dependent on cross border electricity than most European countries.
If people don't stop with the wishful dreaming of how 'renewables' are the future, it's hard to image the grid supporting massive adoption of anything of non-trivial load.
I'm curious how many EV purchasers live in single family homes, or other places where they can provide their own ability to charge at home. I wonder if a new scale of adoption will require a change where most (or a lot) of street parking is by cheap charging.
https://youtu.be/RMxB7zA-e4Y?t=1245
Even where I live, the streets are full of cars but there are maybe 2-3 lamp posts on the street. You’d need lamp posts every 50 feet on both sides of the street. Which we definitely don’t have.
I live in the peninsula in the Bay Area in a rich neighborhood. If there is that many cars on the street here in a place with $2mil+ homes then there’s no way it’s gonna work in other areas as well.
I’ve lived in mostly working class suburban neighborhoods and it’s the same thing: the entire street is Joe’s Used Car Lot. Two cars in each driveway, and more cars packed in every available nugget of street between driveways. Ain’t nobody gonna be charging all those cars if they were EVs.
I absolutely don't mean rural areas, I mean medium density urban communities with very low levels of street lighting, which is great from a light pollution perspective, but less good from a bootstrapping a charging infrastructure perspective
We recently bought a new house, didn't bother looking at any place that didn't have off-street parking and the ability to install a charger (overnight charging for a Leaf just needs 6A from a normal 240V 10A circuit)
In Copenhagen there are charging poles in a lot of places, also in the inner city. They’re reserved for EVs. For this reason, it’s very easy to find parking with a EV and leave with a full tank.
You bring your own cable which costs $120 (+25% VAT), which is locked to the car and the charging pole, so it can’t be stolen without being ruined.
As a Dane I can attest that charging infrastructure is most definitely not anywhere near good enough for most people that doesn't have their own parking spot. I just bought a mild-hybrid for the exact reason that charging is impossible if I don't want to drive in circles looking for a spot or risk having to either walk home or sit at a charging station starring at the sky on my way home.
Most of the price is in the copper inside. Walk around with an insulated bolt cutter, and you can make a lot of money. Alibaba will sell you a device to get the insulation off the wire. Plenty of scrappers bring copper into the scrap yards already.
I wouldn't do it, but it is easy to see how a dishonest person could make it work.
The cable can be cut with $30 Bolt Cutters, and sold to the scrappers for its weight in copper. Multiply by the number of cars charging that night on one street. Faster, cleaner and tons more profitable than cutting catalyst converters from under the cars.
It also has up to 32 amps of current running through it. Better get those industrial cutters with proper insulation =)
BTW, are all scrappers completely unethical? People steal the weirdest shit for the value of the metal and they always seem to find some scrapyard that'll take it and pay for it.
The way I would frame it is this:
1. Your car has x range. Let's say 200 mi. or 321 km. And takes 1 hr. to charge. (Just for reference, my current car gets refilled with gas every 400 km. and takes 10ish minutes to do the task).
2. How long does it take you to travel that range in everyday life. For me, it would take about 2 weeks. But lets assume that its winter or I'm driving a lot and my time is cut in half, so I need a full charge every week.
3. Now I ask myself if there is anywhere in my driving schedule where I consistently spend about an hour in a place where there are chargers. The answer is, of course, I might go to Costco, the grocery store, home depot and the library In the course of a week. Of course partial charging is also an option, so two 30 min stays at any of the above also solves the issue.
So I'm covered for my average use case if charging at home isn't an option.
It is a smart question to ask, but it is actually pretty easy to answer if you think it through. Obviously there are a million and one use cases for a personal vehicle, but me and all my friends would be fine.
Even thinking back over the past year, including lots of outdoor activities into the backcountry in Canada, I have a hard time thinking of more than one trip that would have been different with an electric car (towing on backroads in the mountains. A corner case if ever there was one).
My theory is that charging infrastructure will all of a sudden become as necessary a commodity as parking. A restaurant that has a few chargers in the parking lot will attract more business, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also became a revenue stream as well.
I have a plug-in hybrid in the US (which assuages my range concerns). It's pretty great to putter around the city on electric power, almost never swapping to gas unless I head over to the highway.
But if I want to keep puttering on EV, I need to charge, and I rent. Thankfully, my city (Boston) has a decent number of chargers. My most convenient one is a couple blocks down the street, in front of a parking meter. The meter is only enforced from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, so I can get a charge for free if I park outside those hours. Sometimes my desire to not give off emissions even when I haven't had a chance to do it for free will encourage me to pay $1 or so for the 19ish mile range of a full charge... so it's not even a bad rate compared to the price of gasoline.
Experience: swapping the car out with a mild hybrid as the charging while shopping strategy is awful and broken. If you absolutely have to charge there (because you can't charge at home for a lack of a private spot) you end up driving in circles, trying to get a spot, or go to a charging station instead after you have given up at the mall when the parking is full. Suddenly every shopping trip ends up with the risk of taking an hour instead of 15 minutes. Not recommended unless you have your own charger and parking available.
Some workplaces (like mine) offer charging (mostly L2) for employees. Makes commuting via EV more feasible. I mean, honestly, it's one of the only reasons I need a car.
Of course, as I haven't had to go in for the past 10 months due to shelter in place - I charge like 1/week or less as opposed to daily.
Also stuck with on-street parking. I don't need a car so I don't own one, but if I did, and got an EV, I'd charge it at the fast charger close to my apartment and go grocery shopping while I did so.
It's not like a phone or a normal gasser car, you don't and probably won't need to fill it to 100% all the time. 20%-80% doesn't take that long.
I don't understand how this can happen. An equilibrium seems more likely to me.
If massive amounts of people move to electric vehicles gas prices will fall. This will make combustion vehicles more attractive.
Also, government depends on all the taxes they put on combustion vehicles. As those revenues decline they may choose to get that money from electric vehicle drivers under the guise of 'congestion' taxes or such.
> If massive amounts of people move to electric vehicles gas prices will fall.
This isn't entirely true. The cost of gas has a hard floor due to the cost of extracting oil from the ground. Nobody is spending $40 a barrel to extract oil that's selling for $25 a barrel. So if oil demand falls and prices fall, many of the current sellers pull out of the market entirely.
On top of that, as the number of cars going to gas stations starts to drop, gas stations will get less profitable. As profits drop, stations start closing down. Eventually, enough stations close down and it becomes inconvenient to own and operate an ICE vehicle regardless of the cost of fuel.
>This isn't entirely true. The cost of gas has a hard floor due to the cost of extracting oil from the ground. Nobody is spending $40 a barrel to extract oil that's selling for $25 a barrel. So if oil demand falls and prices fall, many of the current sellers pull out of the market entirely.
Not all producers have the same cost. Saudi Arabia is the cheapest I know of at $2.80 per barrel. Others can be 10 times higher or more.
Is $2.80 the floor? Maybe not, since SA is a monopoly and can manipulate the price.
I think the point is that we can both agree on is that it's a complex dynamic system, with lots of variables and interconnections, and it reacts to changes.
>Saudi Aramco, the monopoly oil producer in Saudi Arabia, boasts an extraction cost of about $2.80 a barrel
>A geographical comparison from the annual reports of four major international oil companies shows that production costs in Russia were about $22 a barrel
Yeah, what I was trying to say is individual suppliers will drop out of the market as the price of oil drops. That in turn reduces the supply. For Oil Sands, that's roughly $43. Shale oil is similar. Every time the price drops, the number of suppliers drop.
OPEC will fight to keep oil prices up by limiting supply when they can, since most of the governments in the Middle East are run on oil profits, they need to!
Gas taxes set a floor for how low prices can go. They'll probably increase as gas motor cars are phased out before the process ever sink too low.
In Washington, US, they increased the registration fee for electrics to make up for the shortfall in gas taxes that pay for road wear, congestion, etc. So that's already happening.
The demand side is where it gets tricky. If there are only a few gas stations in your state it doesn't matter that the list price if oil is cheap. Gas stations will tear out their pumps as demand drops.
Increased gas taxes would drive behavior change towards electrics. Similar to tobacco and alcohol taxes to discourage their use.
I don't see diesel going away so soon though because of industrial, agriculture, and military use. It will probably be taxed differently according to it's use. In fact it already is taxed differently in the US for home heating, vehicle, and aviation use.
And if it’s about revenue, which is obviously the reason why the tax exists at all, what we’ll see is that the taxes will follow the money . They’ll find a way to increase the tax on the use of electric vehicles.
> If massive amounts of people move to electric vehicles gas prices will fall. This will make combustion vehicles more attractive.
If gas prices fall any lower due to demand, then production capacity will probably disappear permanently, leading to shortages and a huge, long-term rise in price. Oil pumps aren't like taps that can be shut off and powered back on demand. They basically need to be operated continuously because restarting them is pretty expensive. And storing excess oil is also pretty expensive.
We also have to consider that low gas prices are due to volume. Refinement is still costly, and if the volume of gas falls by a large amount, that refinement costs gets distributed among the remaining volume. Refinement capacity is even more expensive to bring back online than pumps.
I predict gasoline production will death-spiral at some point. Gas stations will be culled as prices spike and volumes drop. I would expect this to happen in a relatively short timespan, over maybe 1-2 years for the bulk of it, then a long tail of persistent decline.
I think the petrochemical industry might disagree with you there. Sure petrol/diesel for transport will decline but pharmaceuticals, plastics and many more items are made that way and they are not going away. This site has a big list. https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-p...
Per your own link, 50% of a barrel of oil goes to gasoline production. If by, "ultra-low sulfur distillate", they mean diesel fuel for road going vehicles, that increases the percentage dedicated to motor vehicle transportation to 75%.
That is pretty staggering. If automotive transportation consumes somewhere between 50-75% of crude oil production, then the fallout from the reduction in that market is going to be very significant. There's no way that growth in the ammonia and rubber boots sector is going to be enough to capture the production excess left by EVs.
Your link has me pretty well convinced that the gasoline market collapse will be swift and extreme.
Remember that time photo film got cheaper as more and more people switched to digital cameras? Combustion engine powered cars will be relegated to hipsters, museums, hardcore enthusiasts and specialist/niche applications.
I'm not aware of a strong functional benefit of electric versus combustion. But digital cameras had strong benefits over digital, so I don't think it's a good analogy.
In general, I don't think analogies are for making arguments, because people focus on the difference between the analogy and what it's being applied to, like I just did. In education, to teach a new principle, I think they are great.
Accelerate faster than a combustion sports car, no expensive engine maintenance etc. And since the only major cost of electric cars is the battery they will go down in price as we get better batteries and very likely get cheaper than combustion cars pretty soon. Electric engines are super simple, only reason combustion cars are even competitive today is that we have invested so much research into building combustion engines.
Governments certainly have the power to screw things up, but also to accelerate things. If electrics take over so much of the market that gasoline gets super cheap, there won't be that much political resistance to a carbon price on gasoline, since most people are driving electrics anyway.
Besides that, it's not all about fuel costs. Electric vehicles are fun, and generally low-maintenance.
In the US there was a "cash for clunkers" program about 10-15 years ago that tried to clear out ineficient older model cars. It was fairly successful and stimulated purchases of newer cars. The downside was that some perfectly fine cars were scrapped.
I suspect that gas stations will start swapping pumps for chargers, and that will motivate people to switch too.
By the time this all happens though we will have more car sharing programs and maybe autonomous vehicles, so the ownership paradigm will be different in 2030 compared to now. Why buy a car that sits idle for 90% of the day?
> I suspect that gas stations will start swapping pumps for chargers, and that will motivate people to switch too.
This may happen some places, but I expect the charging infrastructure to ultimately look very different from the refueling one we have today. Today's fueling infrastructure is the way it is largely due to the difficulties of storing and pumping fuel safely (physically and environmentally speaking). There's no reason that an electric car shouldn't be able to 'refuel' at a restaurant, grocery store, or at work (ie, where we see most charging places pop up).
Having four-corners real estate and employees dedicated for electric charging all over even city is just inefficient.
Assuming charging will take at least 15 minutes or so, you really would like to be able to charge somewhere that doesn't involve hanging around a crappy convenience store while your car charges. A deadish mall near me has some Tela chargers right next to a popular grocery store. I expect that sort of thing will be fairly common.
Agree, but my point is that when the gas pumps are gone or hard to find it will make owning an ICE vehicle more inconvenient and encourage use of electrics.
Because you want to customize it, leave stuff in it, hop in it right now, etc. Most of the cost associated with owning a car--especially outside of the snow belt--is in the mileage so having a car that spends a lot of time idle isn't really all that economically inefficient.
> So long as screwing people too poor to justify a new or new-ish car is politically unacceptable there will be some resistance.
The obvious solution to this is to use the money from the carbon tax to fund a dividend that goes to everybody. Then the net result is progressive because everybody receives the same amount back but people with less money tend to buy higher fuel economy vehicles or take mass transit.
> So long as screwing people too poor to justify a new or new-ish car is politically unacceptable there will be some resistance.
Sadly, that (admittedly sound and good) argument will run headlong into the resounding cry of 'for the environment'. Since both sides of that fight vote for the same party (in the US) the option that brings more revenue into the government coffers is likely to win. See every fuel tax increase in the last 40 years in blue states as examples.
Gas prices might temporarily fall as there is a very brief over-supply. Then the exact opposite will happen, gasoline will become more expensive as the economies of scale vanishes, refineries shut down permanently (never to be restarted, and no new refineries will be built), the market demand continues to dwindle, and on the cycle goes. Gasoline ends up as a largely niche fuel many decades out.
And that's before we get to the obviously anti-fossil fuel era we're entering, where they will increasingly hammer fuels like gasoline with taxes, driving the cost up around the globe. Even if somehow the market didn't drive the prices up from the economic efficiency change I described, the taxes will regardless and that's guaranteed to occur.
Gasoline is (something like) 20% of refinery outputs. I think a lot of that is coming out of upgraders, so there can be quite a decline in output before there's not enough gasoline refiners for there to be price competition.
Also, the cost to extract oil is higher in some regions and production will drop off as prices drop. Canadian sands oil and shale oil both cost about $40/ barrel to extract so there isn't a ton of room for prices to go down from here before big chunks of supply vanish.
Maybe in the UK, but not where I am. It was -26 this morning. Batteries don't handle such temperatures well. And the nearest civilian airport is 400km away. I haven't seen a single all-electric car in my town since I moved here over a year ago.
What percentage of the world's car owning population lives in a place with a restriction like that? Few enough that it would be fine to let you keep your ICE/hybrid vehicles with almost no impact on climate is my guess.
If I had to guess, you live in Canada which is a country of extremes like what you mention.
The solution for Canada probably isn't to prohibit ICE vehicles, but to disincentivize them heavily where they make less sense. So in the areas where extreme cold and long range is the use case, provide an exemption. Out here on Vancouver Island where the longest possible route is less than 500km and a cold day is one where there's frost on my car, there's really not a great reason for me to be buying a brand new ICE car 10 years from now. Same thing for when I lived in Vancouver and drove 5,000 km per year.
My point is that a huge majority of people live in circumstances where electric cars will be fine. We shouldn't let the corner cases (living in a place with extreme cold where driving 400km to the airport is routine) dictate what the rest of the world needs to do.
Yep where its so cold, block heaters are popular. You see little plugs sticking out from under the bonnet. Diesels are also less popular in frigid climates because the fuel becomes a gel at those temperatures.
With most BEVs nowadays, you can set the battery to warm up and also warm up the interior on mains power before you set off. Far more convenient and comfortable than scraping the frost off, getting into a freezing cold car, and hoping the engine gets warm enough to put out some warm air before you succumb to frostbite.
I've noticed that HN and Reddit tends to gravitate to ridiculous examples to show how "Solution A" can't possibly work.
EVs are pretty impractical to virtually impossible for use in the vast majority of the American Midwest. With temperatures that frequently get below 0F in the winter and the huge distance between cities, I will be very surprised if EVs have anywhere close to a majority within the next 10-20 years here. Some people own them as their 'commuter' vehicle and own ICE vehicles for longer distances, but most people can't afford or don't have space to store 2 vehicles.
The EV will just start. You press a button and it turns on. In under 5 minutes it will be so hot inside that you need to take off your jacket.
Yes, range will suffer if you don't pre-heat the battery (by plugging in the car over night), but I still get 200km range off my car even when it's up to -30 outside.
Weirdly, the most popular car in Ulan Bator (capital of Mongolia) is the Prius because in their super cold winters it, of all cars, starts and runs best in the cold.
The Prius Secret is that the engine is so loosely tuned it doesn't have much friction when starting, the oil also has the viscosity of colored water :)
Best of all it uses the EV motor and battery to crank the ICE engine, there's no separate weak-ass starter motor.
Had mine in -30C weather for a weekend, cranked it on monday night and it just - started. Like it had been vacationing in the French Riviera.
Compare that to my old Diesel VW, which - when cranked at the same situation - made a sound like someone was strangling a moose. I had two attempts to get it to start, then the battery would run out because of the friction caused by the thick-ass oil.
Solar panels actually do rather well in the north, even in winter. They are more efficient at cold temperatures. When the sun is up, colder air tends to have fewer clouds and having the sun lower on the horizon means static panels can be pointed more efficiently. Shorter trees mean housed generally have a better view of the horizon/sky/sun. And snow on the ground acts as a reflector, increasing the light hitting the panels. So long as you are below the actual arctic circle, there is a place for panels even in winter.
Current ICEs seem to be doing a good job of working everywhere. I won't downplay their disadvantages, but the slope down from the current local maximum is pretty steep, and it's not obvious that area electric cars currently (or can in the next 10 years) occupy constitutes an improvement.
It's one thing to install a charger in a two-car garage. Installing charging capacity for 20, or 50, or 100 cars is something else. I'm not sure how most existing apartment buildings could handle all of their tenants charging their cars at night at the same time. I'm not even clear on how much strain that would put on the electrical grid.
How much more power would we need to produce to handle the demand if everyone had electric cars instead of gas cars? That power consumption would be added on top of all the power consumption we currently have.
Pretty much every single private parking spot in an apartment building will have a 8A plug for block heaters and cabin heaters (1,5-2,5kW load). They all trigger around 6 in the morning so the car is nice and warm for the 7:30 commute. Nothing melts, nothing breaks or starts smoking.
And even then people are panicking about EVs charging from 2100-0600 overnight. NOW they think everything will melt, break and be on fire.
Seems like this could be solved if the chargers were networked and programmed with a set group charge limit. If you are a charger, and you're the only charger actively charging, you get 100% of the limit; two chargers get 50% of the limit; three chargers get 33% of the limit, etc.
We have remote working here to stay. It will be a massive change in transportation needs and habits. Which means cars will be mainly used for non-city trips, i.e. nature / recreation / roadtrips. Sounds like the worst use case for a battery car. Short inner city transportation may be covered by an electric bike / scooter / tiny car, there is not even need for a huge battery, a 30km battery would do and would be more eco-friendly. I think banning non- electric is overkill
a year ago I bought a used 2016 nissan leaf for driving around town for 11k.
it's the best car i've ever owned. the design is ugly, the generic silver is hideous, but i'm so emotionally attached to it. i don't drive my really nice (and newer) VW GTI anymore.
if you're thinking of getting an EV, you don't have to buy a tesla. the used leafs are just brilliant.
There is a reason that used Leafs are cheaper - the range is reduced due to poor design around thermal management for the battery (no active cooling) so the battery life degrades quickly.
Newer (2018+) Leafs fixed this, but if you plan on buying used - make sure the range is confirmed.
All that said, I have a cheap EV (2017 Focus) and it's a blast to drive - not a Tesla but still a sleeper.
Worth mentioning that they upgraded the packs in 2013/2014 to be more resistant to hotter climates, but in colder parts of the world the range degradation seen in hotter places didn’t happen anyway.
When I bought mine it had been through something like 900 rapid charge cycles (the Nissan battery report scored it 0/5 which was helpful for getting the price down). Even now years later it’s capacity is about 80-85% of new.
ah, that's good to know. well, i'll say this, i bought one that only has 80 miles of range anyway since it's pretty much just used for short trips. most of my trips are pretty short so it fits my current needs.
based on my experience, i'd still feel comfortable recommending the used leafs for those who don't need 100+ miles of range per day.
I love my frog-looking golf cart of a car. It’s also (between tax incentives and subsidised electricity) been essentially free to own and run - and is worth about the same now as what I paid for it years ago.
I looked into it and got a bit scared about charging it. I don’t have a garage and I do street parking and it didn’t seem like I had many options. For road trips it seemed a bit scary too, do I need to stop somewhere and wait for hours to charge?
I just got a Renault Zoe 2020 last December and it's been great. Commuting to work and going to the shops is just as comfortable as with a combustion engine. No gas station visits and even with the high cost of electricity in Germany (0,3€/kWh) it's still worth it. Only when driving longer distances (>250km) you need to plan ahead for charging and trips take longer (1-3 hours).
I'd go with "more comfortable" when you're talking about a car that can heat the cabin almost instantly, rather than waiting for the combustion engine to heat the coolant enough to trip the bi-metallic thermostat, thereby routing tepid coolant into the heater core in the cabin, and then blowing a fan over it. :)
That is really expensive electricity. Does anyone and everyone with the ability to finance solar panels just install them pronto, or do you not have net metering?
Putting electricity into the grid is almost useless in Germany because you don’t get much back. Solar panels and the legal stuff behind them is expensive and it will take many years to break even. Might be better with an electric car, but you charge your car at night usually. When there isn’t a lot of sun available.
Half of people live in flats - solar is mostly not possible (unless they have system like some countries where you buy a share of solar farm somewhere outside city (arguably much smarter than wrecking roofs with expensive labor)).
Same here; but living in a big city I can't wait for diesel fumes to not be a thing when I'm riding my bike across town. It's not just annoying, this stuff is actually killing people. But because it's a slow killer nobody seems to care much. EVs are changing that as well; people are getting more critical of pollution like this because they know it is not necessary. The recent lock downs were kind of a preview of what might be in our near future when transport is cleaned up.
In terms of tipping point, the other thing that is happening (besides battery cost dropping) is the massive ramp-up in production volume. Just a few years ago, Tesla producing more than 50K cars was news worthy. Last year they did half a million and they have a few more factories coming online this year. Also VW, GM, and other manufacturers are producing cars by the hundreds of thousands per year as well. Soon it will be millions. By mid this decade, the second hand EV market will also start ramping up. Right now a lot of people are still on their first EVs.
It's basically a supply constrained market: people are buying these things as soon as they get produced. Most of the popular EVs have waiting lists for getting them and would be selling more if they could produce more of them. These manufacturers are still learning how to produce and design efficiently. A lot of the cars on the market right now are still designed to come in both ICE, hybrid, and EV configurations. That makes them less efficient and more costly to make. It's just not optimal. A few years from now, that will stop being a thing. There will just be too many purposely designed EVs on the market that will be a better deal overall.
It's going to take a while for manufacturers to switch to producing EVs only. Production volume overall is something like 90M cars per year and only a few percent is EVs currently. Probably by the end of the decade it will be the other way around. There are billions of vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) it will take a while for those to disappear. That being said, it will be similar to horses disappearing from the streets early last century. Once it makes sense economically, people will switch as fast as they can (function of price and production volume).
Then the couple living down the road from me would have to pay the same for their Tesla as their neighbor would pay for their Ford Mondeo. When they drive past me they are emitting the same amount of nose to the roadside since all I can hear is wind and tire noise. Then you could measure the noise inside the car instead (or it would be a race to the bottom of who will put on the worst tires from the factory) and a huge Mercedes SUV would be dirt cheap compared to an old Nissan Leaf.
However wind noise in highway doesn’t change anything. Whereas motorbike can wake entire neighbourhood at 6AM (saw this few times in my life). Accelerating truck, bus or sports car can startle child or adult even taking off from pedestrian crossing.
The first picture in that article is just one of the problems. On street parking and running cables across a public pavement. Many UK houses don't have off-street parking, particularly in cities. Like a thousand other comments, on here, until the infrastructure is solved, it's nowhere close to the tipping point for electric vehicles.
The other problem is range vs time to charge. Members of my family frequently drive hundreds of miles a day from one end of the country to the other. There isn't an electric car that can match a diesel (or petrol) car's range. And then charging time adds an hour to a long journey. No one wants a 5 hour journey to become a 6 hour journey. If time isn't an issue, and we want to be 'green', why don't we just return to a horse and cart?
I recently got a plug in hybrid, due to road trips a full ev is not great for me.
The all electric range is so nice to drive. But it makes me realize how loud the ICE is after that kicks in, which now annoys me. I’m excited for when electrics will get a 500 mi range. It will happen.
Driving from SoCal to Utah or SoCal to Tahoe is a long drive. Adding in a 2 hour stop on top of that makes it that much more unpleasant. A quick stop or two for gas, bathroom and coffee is better.
And driving in remote areas on BLM land seems to leave very low safety margin with a tank less than 300.
This is great but the pandemic triggered a permanent shift toward WFH which undoubtedly will drive down total miles driven. In addition, car ownership is increasing. I wonder how all these dynamics will play out in coming years.
How can 1 000 000 German tourists drive to croatia in the summer for holidays if all have electric cars? Right now in high season the normal gas stations have long lines of cars waiting...
Europe has a big advantage that distances are closer and cars are smaller and newer. USA still will be a long long time. My apt building has 500 cars and zero electrical outlets.
One of Europe's biggest disadvantages is that a larger proportion of people live in apartment blocks and the like (compared to the US, anyways), so no easy way for those people to charge their EVs over night (I'm an European living in such a building myself).
Will be watching for the success of Rivian and Cybertruck to see if the rural market can accept electric.. but can't think of any good reason why not, other than pride and prejudice. (FD, I grew up in the country).
I have a feeling Rivian and the Cybertruck will not be able to penetrate the rural market, at least not any more significantly than the Raptor or FCA's souped up half-tons. They fill the same high $$$$$ light duty niche that wealthy ruralites like to buy as a daily driver.
Ford is introducing hybrid trucks which I predict will not only become the new default, but also beat the other manufactures to market. Rivian will not ship more than 1000 trucks in 2021, and the cybertruck, at this moment, is complete vaporware.
I do enjoy driving down country roads which won't have superchargers for some time, but these trips are usually <300-500miles and by it's nature the route is flexible enough to hit a supercharger near a highway if necessary.
Forgetting to plug in is like forgetting to bring your keys. It becomes second nature pretty fast. You always do it after you park, unless you do 20 errands a day or something. It takes five seconds.
> Unless you forget to plug in, then the fix is not as simple as hopping to the gas station.
Forgetting to plug in will rarely be a big issue unless you forget 3-4 days in a row. Flipwise, there have been many times where I've forgotten to fill up before coming home and had to make a side-trip to a gas station before heading out.
As for apartment dwellers. The economics of EVs for people without access to home charging are pretty different you miss out on one of the biggest benefits -> rarely having to fill up.
And the once in a blue moon they do have to drive more than 300 miles, they'll need to have a spare car to do it. They'll buy their new shiny very expensive Telsa and still have to keep a gasoline-powered car around.
> And the once in a blue moon they do have to drive more than 300 miles, they'll need to have a spare car to do it. They'll buy their new shiny very expensive Telsa and still have to keep a gasoline-powered car around.
I don't think this is the way EV owners deal with long trips.
Most Tesla owners seem to just use the Supercharger network and deal with waiting 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes. After 4 hours driving I usually take a lunch or dinner break regardless.
That's the way I, an an EV owner, deal with long trips. I would never try to plot a course from charger to charger. That sounds annoying and dangerous.
I also highly doubt that charger networks would scale. Right now there are already busy gas stations by every exit on the highway. Imagine how overloaded they would be if it took an hour to fill up the tank.
A plug-in hybrid still makes more sense. They're far cheaper than any electric car, have all the advantages of an electric car for short trips, and have all the advantages of a gasoline car for long trips.
Electric cars are usable. They are not yet practical.
(By the way, as you may see from my other comments, I consider Tesla a criminal enterprise. It is possible I am dismissing the Supercharger network a little too easily.)
This is why Tesla has such a big emphasis on range. If a car has a 300 mile range, I think dealing with charging stations is tolerable. Few people drive more than 500 miles a day so you just have 1 stop, not a bunch.
> Right now there are already busy gas stations by every exit on the highway. Imagine how overloaded they would be if it took an hour to fill up the tank.
How much of that traffic would be eliminated because EVs start the day full charged?
It only takes 20 minutes for the supercharger stations (And most newer entrants are pushing for faster charging with mixed results). It will certainly be interesting to see how well these networks hold up to increasing traffic over time. I've heard the super charger network can get pretty bogged up already on holiday weekends.
In the United States there are several large charging networks who work with businesses to install their branded chargers. The rates are set by the business and you use the network's charge card or App to activate the charger. I've seen a couple, and used one charger that accepted credit cards but those are definitely the minority.
I only ever used one network, ChargePoint, and they sent you 2 RFID cards in the mail you could put in the car or on your keychain. You could swipe them on the charger or use your NFC equiped phone with their App. I accidentally swiped my phone once without opening the App and it opened up Google Pay and let me pay that way as well. There are a lot of free ChargePoint chargers, I encountered those mostly on government property.
Allegedly the larger networks are interoperable now to some extent but I've yet to use that. Since I moved to California I've only charged away from home once.
Can someone who knows more about the subject that I do comment on the statement "electric powered vehicles are coal powered vehicles?" I'm seeing that in conservative circles.
At least in the US, that statement was much more true 20 years ago than it is today [0]. Today, swapping “natural gas” out for coal is more accurate. There are three big points to consider:
- Overall, the (US) electricity mix is lower-emitting than gasoline.
- The US electricity mix is trending greener. (Gasoline cars are also getting more efficient, but many of those changes also apply to electric cars)
- The electricity sector is easier to move than automobiles. We’ve already seen a couple of major shifts (coal->nat gas->renewables), while we’re still very slow on the first big paradigm shift for cars.
Yep! Moving air pollution sources somewhere else is always good (though coal is so much worse than gasoline that any increase in coal burning might be a net negative). This is one reason to be super excited about coal plant shutdowns: often coal plants (even “clean coal”) represent the largest point sources of PM2.5 in a whole region.
It’s worth remembering that this does have the effect of concentrating pollution. If a coal plant opens near you, that might be worse on your health than even a broad change to EVs. Happily, nobody is really building much coal anymore, and natgas/renewables are much better for air quality than either coal plants or gasoline engines.
Are these the same people pushing "clean coal?" If so, it shouldn't be a pejorative.
Anyway, it seems patently obvious that a massive coal power plant should be cleaner per unit of energy than a janky disposable ICE powerplant shoved under the hood of a cheap little mass-produced car.
I'm not sure it's entirely worth your time to engage with intellectually un-curious people not capable of thinking in shades of grey.
Even an EV powered 100% by coal is creating less emissions than a gas powered vehicle, the reason for this is that electric drivetrains are very efficient.
The electricity that charges electric car batteries has to be generated somehow. In America, a lot of electricity is generated by coal power plants. For now, most electric cars are not in use in places where coal is the dominant energy source, so it's not a fair statement (for now).
Only if the country itself is producing electricity with coal.
But the catch here is that when the politicians get their shit together and more to more renewable and less polluting methods of electricity production, suddenly ALL EVs in use will instantly become less polluting.
ICE cars don't mysteriously grow new particle filters or catalytic converters with a free OTA update. They pollute the same amount (or more) for their whole existence.
The tipping point might be for new car sales, but I'd be more interested in second hand market which is the vast majority of car sale transactions.
I personally would not buy a new car with my current finanical situation, even though i'm well paid, because i'd never have the sort of cash on hand to buy one and I try to avoid debt.
And so like many I'll be still buying used cars for the foreseeable, which will likely remain ICE cars.
The major problems with EV that will keep me from buying one in the foreseeable future are:
* Low range, combined with a lackluster charging infrastructure. I think from my list this is the closest issue to being resolved, if I could consistantly get 800km range (in real world usage, not "800km in the brochure but actually 400km in real life") it would be fine because (1) with such a long range the risk of having to recharge multiple time on a single journey is fairly small, thus reducing the inconvenience [assuming one can charge at home or work, otherwise recharging will always be a pain in the butt regardless of how you look at it] (2) it's enough to cross "charging station deserts", areas where inevitably there will be little to no charging infrastructure (see the charging stations on french highways for reference, recharging is just as expensive as refueling and the charging stations don't even work reliably).
* A large segment of the EV market is made of cars that remind me more of technological gadgets than proper vehicules. I have very little patience to deal with technology and I certainly don't want my car to be basically a software platform. I shouldn't get angry before bed time but I'm still going to mention the privacy aspect of it. Having SIM cards embedded in every car is bad enough already but at least with the more traditional "analog" cars you can give the manufacturer the benefit of the doubt that the SIM card is only activated in case of accident. Most EV cars lift the doubt by collecting analytics and installing software updates remotely. One day there will be a data breach and everywhere you've ever been with your car will be free for the general public to see. Even worse, a malicious actor gets a hold of the manufacturer's private key and can push arbitrary updates to your car.
* Most charging networks (I'm tempted to say "all" because I've never seen an instance where it wasn't the case, but again let's give the benefit of the doubt) are basically spying networks that require an account and a credit card to use. Someone (everybody once there's a data breach) knows everytime/everywhere you recharge your car, how much you used since your last charge, etc. Why can't we just pay cash for, say, $10 worth of electricity just as we do with ICE cars?
I believe the first point will be solved in a relatively near future because it's mostly a matter of improving the technology a bit (or paying more for a bigger battery). For the two last points however I only see things getting worse since the current trend is to go further and further in this "everything as a digital service" direction.
I never thought I would own another vehicle, then I saw Nimbus: http://nimbus.green
It's a tiny car that fits in a motorcycle parking spot, charges via a wall outlet, has AC, and is 15x safer than a motorcyle or scooter. Just preordered one.
I think not needing a supercharger will change everything.
This is as of 2018, and one would expect that the grid will continue to get cleaner as time goes on, which means the BEV options will get cleaner as well.
Yes. If all your cars get the maximum use out of the energy in the petroleum and you provide atmospheric pollution controls on the power plants that eliminate smog/particulates then you have a net win, even if your total energy from petroleum doesn't change.
At what point are battery swaps going to become more feasible than charging a battery (or at least an additional option). I’d much rather role into a gas/battery station and have my depleted battery swapped out with a fully charged one in 2 minutes and be on my way than sit at a Tesla supercharger for an hour.
I think the electric f-150 and hummers are going to be huge for adoption in the US. Not necessarily because they'll sell a ton initially (although the f-150 might) but because they make electrics "safe" for a large portion of US consumers.
I don’t see mass adoption being realistic until people can charge on long distance trips that they take few times a year in a reasonable amount of time without congestion and waiting lines at the limited number of charging ports available. Then there’s the question of what people in rural areas or trade jobs or other situations will do, given their needs may be different (working vehicles like pickups may see different adoption rates or constraints). There’s also the question of whether the power grid is ready. And finally I wonder if all the mass mining of lithium and other metals will create its own problems. If all things are better in moderation I wonder if a mixed end state with ICE, EVs, and PHEVs all available is the best equilibrium. Personally I think aggressive bans on gasoline vehicles may be short sighted, apart from being another reduction of individual freedoms.
I think what needs to be "mass adopted" is parking etiquette from ICE car owners.
Often do I find them parked on parking bays designated to electric car charging. This is such an annoyance when you have an electric car with limited range.
Norway is one of the world's most prosperous countries, and oil and gas production account for 20 percent of its economy. Other important sectors include hydropower, fish, forests, and minerals. State revenues from petroleum are deposited in the world's largest sovereign wealth fund.
Does anyone have a measure of the feasibility (or lack thereof) of converting ICE vehicles to electric within the next decade? Is there a potential to reduce waste here?
I've worked on ICE vehicles my whole life and I'd be happy to say good riddance. But this article has a heavy urban bias. The author has obviously never driven through West Texas or taken a road trip from Brisbane to Alice Springs. You'll need to show me how I can drive an $80K Tesla from Austin to Big Bend NP before I start to believe.
OK, I have to conceed your point. You can drive from Austin to Big Bend NP in an electric car. I didn't know you could now buy a Tesla with a 400m range.
Of course that longer range Model S costs $65K, not $48K. And you have to drive 55mph, with the heater off to get that range. Which, in West Texas, is 30 mph under the posted speed limit for many roads. And (I apologize for moving the goal posts) when most people get to Big Bend they don't want to turn around at the entrance and go back to the closest charger -- they want to drive around and see things and maybe vist Terlingua or Alpine or Ft Davis. Maybe they want to spend several days in the area but that's not an option in an EV. Thats probably why I've never seen one in Big Bend.
I drive out there often from Austin. I drive a 2004 Sienna which I bought for about $4000. The $61K I save by not buying a Tesla would buy me 700,000 miles in my ICE.
Electric cars are perfectly pleasant to own as a second car or if you very rarely take long road trips.
If it's very cold or very hot, if you drive to the mountains or rural areas for pleasure, range anxiety is a serious problem. Waiting for a re-charge is ok if you have access to Tesla supercharger speeds. Forcing this lifestyle change on everyone is absolutely insane.
The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands. Renewables alone will not be able to keep up, so we will need to increase fuel based generation of electricity, which is less efficient as an overall usage of fuel for transportation versus an efficient hybrid vehicle.
I've taken several long (2000mi) road trips in my Tesla. The only range anxiety I've had has been self induced. Eg, skipping the Tesla map planned supercharger and using the next one down the road for a variety of reasons [1] . The most anxious I've been is when I pulled into a supercharger with 2% remaining.
[1] I often do this to arrive at a supercharger with a lower state of charge. This allows for charging lower on the curve, which allows for faster charging. I sometimes do this to avoid unpleasant chargers. My least favorite is the Savannah super charger, which is located several stoplights from the highway in an airport parking garage.
I understand and overarchingly agree - my drive to my preferred ski resort nearby is approx. 180mi roundtrip and this can be easily covered in a Tesla. I used to take weekend trips to Whistler and the increased travel time from charging would be much more noticeable, as the entire trip timeline is pretty tight as it is.
I think charging infrastructure like superchargers will have difficulty scaling up to large potions of the population owning electric vehicles. This is of course my opinion, but if there are a factor of a hundred more Teslas or equivalent on the road than there currently are, and supercharging stops regularly are 30-60 minutes, I suspect the convenience factor of supercharging may decrease substantially.
It's wild to me that no other car manufacturers have taken Tesla up on their offer for supercharger access.
EVs without supercharger access are strict city cars.
The electrify america network sucks, non tesla range is mostly bad (with a small number of exceptions). Even with decent range, lack of supercharger access makes the car a non-starter.
I think Tesla's advantage here remains huge, I think legacy car companies are in trouble (and this is even ignoring their inability to write or ship software). The dealership model of legacy car companies will also be a big problem for them and will continue to hold them back.
That said, I think ultimately forcing the EV switch makes sense and with something like supercharging in place is viable. Battery capacity will continue to improve, charging rates will continue to improve. Pushing this shift makes sense.
It just might be that legacy car companies are too dumb to do it properly and will cede a lot of the market to Tesla (and maybe Apple).
>this is even ignoring their inability to write or ship software
If anyone cannot write or ship software it is Tesla. My Toyota is light-years ahead in the software and updating department and I'll never again touch a Tesla with a stick in my life. Talk about crappy software. No what Tesla's got going for them is first mover and that is over soon. Even cheap Chinese EVs like the MG is closing with Tesla fast. Apple is working with Hyundai, which is another company biting at Tesla's heals. Hyundai cars with Apple software/design for Apple fans and Tesla is left in the dust. They need to invest a lot more in quality than they do now -without raising the price- if they aren't going to be left behind when the big guys get moving.
I think most people would disagree with you on the point that Toyota software is “light years ahead in software and updating”, but there is some subjectivity here.
> It's wild to me that no other car manufacturers have taken Tesla up on their offer for supercharger access.
It's a prestige thing. Legacy manufacturers would lose face if they'd have their cars charging at the young upstart's superchargers.
This is why most european manufacturers have partnered with 3rd party companies and provide some amount of free charging at certain branded locations for new vehicles.
> The climate imperative is poor reasoning because this will be a significant increase in electricity generation demands.
Relatively centralized electricity generation can be converted to lower carbon generation. This is happening pretty rapidly in many places for economic reasons; renewable power generation is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel power generation.
Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distributed all over the world is effectively impossible.
I'm merely making an in my view commonsense point. ICE engines are carefully regulated worldwide, certainly in any nation which would consider mandating a transition to electric vehicles. Subsidies and gasoline taxes encourage societal transition to make transportation as efficient as possible, without mandating a full phase out of gasoline as a power source.
Renewables have scalability issues. Grid scale renewable energy is possible but needs to be supplemented by either significant on-demand generation when the renewables are offline (at night, when wind is weak), or very large scale battery storage. Localized in-home energy storage is plausible but expensive to roll out. We are also talking about absolutely gigantic demand for raw materials to produce sufficient battery capacity to smooth out the renewable power generation curve.
My point is that in order to feasibly power a society which is heavily reliant on electric cars, power generation via renewables alone is not a viable answer.
> Doing the same for more than a billion ICE engines distributed all over the world is effectively impossible.
Delivering said energy to over a billion cars all over the world is pretty impossible. As things stand right now that's an entire continent (Africa) which in many places doesn't have reliable power even for basic things like keeping the hospitals running (they have to use diesel generators and the like).
But, then again, this EV-vehicle "revolution" is targeted at the Western middle-classes + China, they can afford to not care about the rest of the world as they've done until now.
You can generate electricity on-site with quite limited resources.
What you can't do is drill, refine and distribute liquid fuel. First you drill crude oil in one location, ship it to a second location to be refined, ship it to your country and then someone has to drive tanker to every single gas station to fill them up.
With electricity you put up solar panels or wind turbines and add a battery. Now you've got electricity for years to come.
I recently drove over 800 km in my Hyundai Ioniq 28 kWh EV, it only took 1 hour more than when I drive my Tesla. Most of that time was spent eating or stretching legs anyway so it is fully possible to take longer trips :)
People always bring up long road trips as an excuse against EVs but honestly I don't get it. On road trips the stop for gas was always an excuse to stretch your legs, use the restroom, grab snacks at the convenience store, and just GTFO of the car. A gas stop is never just 5 minutes to fill up.
I moved from GA to CA last summer. I drove a moving truck towing our Leaf and my partner in our Model 3, we made it a point to take the same route but not stick together. When ended up staying together for most of the trip and would arrive at our hotels within half an hour of one another, usually the Model 3 arrived first. Often we would pass them charging at a Supercharger only to be overtaken when we stopped or just due to speed.
For me, the only thing keeping me from going to 100% electric for my household is that nobody seems to offer an EV with 200 miles of range with AWD and clearance for a rough forest road with potholes. Until then, we're sticking to a short range EV for the city and a crossover for the mountains.
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This is true of even very recently completed buildings in well-off areas of relatively wealthy western countries. Heck, I just walked past three Teslas in my building's car park, one of which is new and wasn't there last week!
Do people... not plan ahead? Do architects not read the news? Are they from another planet where electricity delivery is not a problem that architects have to deal with in building design?
Mind you, I got the exact same dumbfounded stare from people when talking to cafe managers and gym owners about the impending COVID lockdowns back in February 2020: "Lock...down...? You think so? Really? Here?" (Don't think IT is spared from this, I get the same vacant expression when I talk to network engineers about IPv4 exhaustion and the need for IPv6.)
On a more practical note, I have business idea that might interest the YC News crowd: The main problem raised by building managers I spoke to was that it was "too hard" to solve charge-back and the like. Wiring is "easy", that's just a matter of calling out contractor, but organising the billing of the tenant and then splitting the revenue between the various parties involved is more work for them than it is worth, because it is complex to set up but initially there may be only a couple of electric cars generating very little revenue. An "electric charging billing" cloud service that manages everything with low overheads might sell well...