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Re:Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked by bonzini on Friday November 25, 2016 @04:22PM (#13039941)
Well, there was one battery swap station, and you had to book it and pay for it. Not exactly encouraging.

Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted.

Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.

Re:Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked by greglindahl on Friday November 25, 2016 @04:36PM (#13040030)
I'm not sure how to reply, given that the things you say are hard are beginning to happen already.
Re:Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked by bonzini on Friday November 25, 2016 @04:57PM (#13040151)
In a handful of big metropolitan areas. Good luck doing that throughout multiple continents. Most European countries are still on the order of magnitude of 1000 total EVs sold per year. Growing, sure, but still hardly a serious market penetration.

And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.

Re:Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked by mseebach on Saturday November 26, 2016 @06:09AM (#13042935)
Your error seems to be that you insist on seeing a big-bang overnight solution that works for Everyone(tm). That never happens.

There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.