Either way, they're pretty abundant here. I see charging stations all over my city. Almost every branded car dealership has one, and there are dealerships everywhere. Also, people in Japan tend to live in multifamily buildings, and private garages can be quite large and serve a lot of cars.

It's rare if a day goes by when I don't see a Nissan with a charger plugged into the front badge somewhere.

> Also, people in Japan tend to live in multifamily buildings, and private garages can be quite large and serve a lot of cars.

How would you get the driver to reliably go back to the garage to move the car to a non-charging spot after completion? Sharing a parking charger between multiple users requires enormous coordination when usage patterns are not naturally collision free. Without autonomous parking and plugging, the whole concept of charging while parking is effectively creating a 1:1 relationship between chargers and cars

I'm not sure how it works. Many private parking garages here are relatively automated, though——you pull your car into an elevator, get out, walk outside, type in a code, the doors close, and your car disappears up the lift until you need it again. I'm certain that they will eventually work out a system for charging them all, but today the adoption of EV cars is probably not sufficient to warrant it. People are generally pretty ridiculously considerate of others here, so I can see them scheduling charging time and sticking to it.

The big plus of EV is that you can 'gas' (or charge) up your vehicle at your home. So I think including charger in private garage is just fine.

This implies an increased density of power availability, which doesn't follow given many charging stations are unavailable to the general public.

I think it's reasonable to count those. People use them, maybe even more than public ones. They serve a huge purpose and are an important part of having electric cars in society. They're very much on-par with gas stations for this count, and for the viability of the electric car system, in my opinion. After all, Nissan (referenced in this article) is talking about the viability of the electric car system in society, not just numbers for fun or headlines.

If people had personal gas stations because it took a long time to fuel your car and you had to do it overnight, those should count too, because they'd argue for the viability of the combustion engine. But that's not the case.

> "People use them, maybe even more than public ones"

I drive a Chevy Volt, which spends about 23 hours per day plugged in to the charger in my driveway. That private spot gets used a lot, but it only services one vehicle. Even a public charging station generally only serves the needs of a couple dozen vehicles per day. Whereas a gas station generally services hundreds, or even thousands, of vehicles. So a spot-to-station comparison isn't really very useful. The more relevant question is "how many vehicles does this infrastructure support, in what usage patterns?"

The answer to that question is, still a lot fewer electric vehicles than gasoline vehicles are supported by the current infrastructure (even in Japan), and the usage patterns are more limited.

We're clearly in a transitional period where electric vehicles are becoming viable, but there are limitations. As I said in a recent thread, "If I purchase a vehicle, I'm likely to want it to work for every trip I want to take ... If a car sucks for even one of those trips [to distant states, the airport at ~45 miles round-trip, or a long day of errands], I'm going to be hesitant to buy it". As electric ranges get longer and public charging stations get faster and more dense, electric vehicles will become more viable for more people, but right now they're still not on par with gasoline vehicles for the population as a whole (not even in a smaller country like Japan.) The progress is exciting, but sometimes it's presented in misleading ways that make it sound a lot closer to "always viable" than it really is.

> but right now they're still not on par with gasoline vehicles for the population as a whole (not even in a smaller country like Japan.)

Completely untrue. The average round trip daily commute in the US is ~45 miles. Even mediocre electric vehicles like the Leaf and the Bolt can do that.

I'm assuming Tesla's Model 3 is what causes EV demand to take off. ~200 mile range + Supercharger access = electric mobility is solved.

> "The average round trip daily commute in the US is ~45 miles."

You can't just look at an average trip and say "this vehicle can handle it, therefore it's completely viable for the average person", because the average person sometimes takes trips other than their average daily commute. Sometimes they go visit their grandparents or cousins out on the farm. Sometimes they visit their sister who lives two states over. Sometimes they make their ordinary daily commute but then follow it up by driving to a sporting event or a get-together some distance in the opposite direction. If an EV is suitable for your daily commute, but not for your occasional trips, then it's still not on par with a gasoline vehicle.

Even the supercharger network has a long way to go; here's a comment I made about it a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11431401

The takeaway is that about 1/4 of the US population lives in metro areas that are well-served by the supercharger network in all directions, and 3/4 lives in areas that have significant gaps for at least one significant direction of travel.

My uncle and my wife's grandpa were EV enthusiasts going back decades. I drive a plug-in electric (with a gas generator, which solves the not-well-covered trip problem) and so do my in-laws. I've been watching carefully. Right now, there are still lots of reasons for lots of people to stay away from pure electric vehicles, and while that list of reasons is getting shorter, it's still a long enough list that for a lot of people it's a non-starter as a primary vehicle.

I disagree, but respect your point of view.

I disagree completely. In your hypothetical world, what if they were all private gas stations? That would certainly affect the economics of owning a gasoline car for the worse, if you also had to build and maintain your own gas station to go along with it. But apparently we shouldn't take that into account?

Here's another hypothetical: What if every single private charging station in Japan was owned by the same individual, and he refused to let anybody else use them? Would that change your opinion? Because from the perspective of someone who's deciding which kind of car to buy, that scenario is functionally identical to the current reality.

The only infrastructure that affects "viability" of a new technology is infrastructure that's available to use. A bunch of roped-off private infrastructure doesn't change the equation for anybody whose not already a member of the club.

> The only infrastructure that affects "viability" of a new technology is infrastructure that's available to use.

In-home chargers do affect the viability of a new technology, and they are available to use. Just not to everyone. But most people who have an electric car have access to at least one private charger, and it's the one they will use most, so it affects them more than any other charger, especially for regular, in-region daily use/commuting.

> doesn't change the equation for anybody whose not already a member of the club.

Anyone who's not a member of the club probably doesn't have an electric car. When they get an electric car, they will likely either use their in-building charger or get their own.

All of these hypotheticals don't change the fact that this figure is encouraging to me. It shows that Japan is starting to figure out how to use the electric car as a reasonable replacement for the gasoline/diesel car. The number is still impressive, even if you don't compare it to the number of gas stations--but rather just to the number of people--it shows that they've adopted the electric car more than most (if not all) countries without their economy going to shit or a transport-related crisis happening.

> In-home chargers do affect the viability of a new technology, and they are available to use. Just not to everyone. But most people who have an electric car have access to at least one private charger, and it's the one they will use most, so it affects them more than any other charger, especially for regular, in-region daily use/commuting.

Yes, but you have to pay for one. It's part of the cost of switching (in a way that "constructing your own gas station" isn't). That's my point.

You're right, and I wasn't saying this article is groundbreaking, or that the progress is tremendous. I was just defending the figure/comparison as a reasonable one to make us aware of the progress in this early stage of EV adoption.

> If people had personal gas stations because it took a long time to fuel your car and you had to do it overnight, those should count too, because they'd argue for the viability of the combustion engine.

It's a different meaning, though—even if you have access to 1 million gas stations, it doesn't help you if your tank doesn't hold enough gas to get to the next station on your route. The total number isn't meaningful in "road trip" problems.

Every private charging station that provides for a driver who returns to that charger after each journey enables a space on a public charging station to remain free for people on road trips.

The total number might be too simplistic for planning a long journey, but private charging stations do have positive utility even for those that don't own them.

This exactly. I assume most people in Japan use cars for local trips/commuting and will return home at the end of the day.

After all, they have a brilliant long-distance transport system that vastly eliminates the need of a car for long trips.

That makes some sense, but still 40,000 is not a lot if you count private homes with electric car. It almost has to mean that substantially less than 40k electric cars are sold since not many people are buying them without a charger at home?

I wonder what the per-home number would look like relative to other countries. I'd think it's probably pretty high. Good for them, I say; they're still showing the rest of us that electric cars can work… and that takes a combination of having a good amount of public chargers, and people buying an electric car and owning a charger.

Remember, also, that it's still the dawn of the electric vehicle.

Why can't they be included?

Because you can't use them freely if you drive around.

There are dozens and dozens of petrol stations in my city, but when my tank runs low i only really go to "my usual place" that's near my house.

It's useful to have abundant stations in e.g. an emergency, but i assume most drivers refuel at their leisure.

It'd be like including your microwave in a map of restaurants in your area. Technically yes, you can get food there, but it's not the same.

It's an interesting part of the paradigm shift to EVs that one of the best things (refueling at home, cheaply, safely and greenly) is often discounted or even portrayed as a downside.

Similarly, in a parallel world where people only ate at restaurants, I can imagine suspicion about this new fangled home cooking, and how it's not a "real" restaurant, while the home cookers are like "it's cheap, convenient and healthy!"

Yeah, I definitely didn't mean it as a downside to EVs, just that home charging stations are private facilities, not public ones. The smear campaign to discredit plug-in charging (and its lasting effect on public perception) is one of the most annoying consequences of GM's attempt to get out of the old CARB EV mandate (before they just bought off some politicians or whatever they did to make non-plugin hybrids count as "EVs"). Witness the Prius being sold with "you never have to plug it in haha" as a selling point despite the fact that converting it to a plugin hybrid dramatically increases fuel economy. Gah.