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240VAC, maybe if you have 4-6 hours for your car to charge.

You need a minimum 3 phase 480v electrical source to charge even a small battery in under an hour. We are talking 150-200Kw, or the equivalent energy to run around 170 American sized households to fast charge a single car. You think that’s happening in Europe, pretty much ever?




Cars are parked for approximately 100% of the time they're not being driven. For typical vehicle owners (insomniac driving fanatics and corporate "fleet vehicles" excepted), that's much more than 4-6 hours per day. So no: we do not need 200kW HVDC chargers on every city street.

What we do need is ubiquitous Level 2 (240V AC) charging present at the locations where most drivers store their cars. For drivers who store their cars on public city streets, that means installing new cable runs and charging poles. Obviously this infrastructure isn't going to be "free", but it's not some kind of intractable technical challenge. Moreover it will eventually pay for itself through a modest surcharge on the electricity consumers use for charging.


"You need a minimum 3 phase 480v electrical source to charge even a small battery in under an hour. We are talking 150-200Kw?"

The Tesla 3 Long Range AWD has a 76 kWh battery with a range of 358 miles (576 km). The average European car drives 18,000 km/year, or 72 km/day or 10 kWh/day with Tesla's efficiency.

If everyone has giant EV pickups with 200kWh batteries driving 500 miles every day, yeah you have a problem. But that's the tiny minority.




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