Consider that a great deal of that price difference may just be scale. Combustion engines are extremely complex and have hundreds of parts, and require tons of automation and labor to make and assemble. Batteries can be spat out of a few machines. Batteries are heavier, and made of more stuff than an engine+transmission, but they are way simpler to build.
Also the highest material expenses of batteries, nickel and cobalt, may also become cheaper at scale.
I live in a place that prides itself on being 'green' - but at-home charging stations for apartment dwellers are just a not-thing.
Not yet. The technology is absolutely ready, it's just stuck at the chicken-and-egg stage in most places. Anywhere you can fit a parking meter, you can fit an EV charger. Rolec produce a street light with a built-in EV charger.
On-street EV charging is ready and waiting for the demand. I think it's almost inevitable that every parking space will eventually have an EV charger.
http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Str...
How do you propose they charge their cars? On some nights you can fit 20 cars on each side. On others, 10 cars. Sometimes you can park right in front of your house, sometimes you have to park two streets away because there was no room on yours.
Do we just install a charging point ever ~10 meters? If yes, who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down? Won't it be an eyesore? How about vandalism and damaged cables?
Same questions could have been asked about fiber optics, cable TV, electricity, telephones, water and sewers. Yet we have that infrastructure.
Also, some people believe by the time that future will come many people would opt out of buying cars, in favor of driverless taxis. These don’t need to stay parked in residential areas.
If we’ll start running out of places to charge EVs, the existing places will raise their per-KWh prices to maximize their profits. This in turn will create incentive to install more plugs, and upgrade electrical grid and generation to supply them. No need to bury millions in advance installing the infrastructure before there's a demand.
Yep. Most homeowners will just install their own charge point on their own front wall, which costs £150 after subsidy (£600 unsubsidised). If your street has chronic parking problems that mean you can't always park in front of your house (a definite minority outside of London), the council or a charge point provider will need to sort it out. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles already provides subsidies to any local authority that wants to install on-street charging infrastructure.
Given the cost savings of running an EV, the infrastructure will pay for itself quite quickly. Shared charge points use a contactless payment system, so it's easy to recoup the cost of installation and maintenance over time through a small premium on metered electricity rates.
http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/OLEV-Grant-Fund... https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
>How about vandalism and damaged cables?
Most EV charging cables automatically lock in place, which prevents the petty nuisance of someone unplugging your car for a laugh. If someone chooses to vandalise a cable carrying 7kW, they're likely to experience very swift karmic retribution. The charge point itself may be a target for vandalism, but it's no more attractive a target than any amount of other street furniture. Cars and bicycles are an easy target for vandalism when parked, but it's relatively rare in practice.
Which brings up another interesting point - if you do any work in UK and have to run an electrical cable across the pavement, you have to mark the area so that people won't trip over your cable or electrocute themselves.
In the picture I posted, if you had a charging point on the wall of the building, you would absolutely have to run it across the pavement to get to your car - so how can this be allowed? What about wheelchairs riding on the pavement? Or prams? Or people who trip over the cable?
Can someone else who parks in front of your house use your cable? If not, why not? The street parking is free for everyone, anybody can park there, electric car or not.
>> (a definite minority outside of London)
You mean outside literally any city in UK. Terraced houses are bread and butter of living in the UK and they all have the same problem - you usually don't park in front of your own door.
On-street chargers can be mounted to a bollard or lamp post at the kerbside, avoiding a cable run across the pavement. Alternatively, the cable can be routed through a sunken channel with a removable cover, similar to a standard drainage channel.
>Can someone else who parks in front of your house use your cable? If not, why not?
A private EV charger running from your own electricity supply has a lockable receptacle. A shared EV charger uses contactless cards for billing.
>You mean outside literally any city in UK. Terraced houses are bread and butter of living in the UK and they all have the same problem - you usually don't park in front of your own door.
70% of UK households have access to off-street parking. The other 30% do pose some significant challenges, but they're not insurmountable.
http://www.ecolane.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Ecolane-...
Parking meters is not a thing in Europe though. Usually there's a single ticketing machine, possibly behind a door. You either get a paper ticket and put it behind the windscreen or pay before leaving to get through the barrier.
Note the I've seen a lot of the Europe style meters in the US. Each city gets to choose, and the one machine for numerous parking spaces has some advantages, and other disadvantages.
At least in my city, there's literally no space on sidewalks for per-car meters. And there're no designated spots on many streets - all spaces are fluid. Nobody would be guaranteed to park in front of one. While somebody may be in front of two. Most public garages and big lots are bumper-to-bumper 90-degree parking with not much space either.
Of course, there's plenty of space in suburbs. But there's no parking meters at all over there.
Electric cars have a lot of advantages but they still have enormous negative externalities on cities.
You might want to spend your effort on the parking space rule instead of the extremely minor issue of electric chargers.
Green is riding a bike.
The things these have in common were winters (indiana), employers without a decent area to change clothes in, lack of places to safely store a bike, lack of places to safely ride the bike, and a lack of public transportation. Some employers wouldn't hire you if you didn't have reliable transportation (a car) : Even McDonalds inquired about this in the late 90's. One job preffered one to have a vehicle occasionally to take deposits to the bank and get small change for customers. The penalty was crappier work hours because you could not meet business needs. The bank wasn't far away (8-10 blocks) and was in a tiny town (less than 3k people), yet the store was neither busy enough nor in a crime area high enough to qualify for an armored car service.
And that's not to mention things like having to go travel to wash clothes or, like some even smaller towns than the one mentioned above, not having even a convenience store in town to get basic items.
But also, I have a child, not yet 3. If you're going to say that I shouldn't have a car in this scenario you're either single or uninvolved in the realities of having a child.
I understand that manufacturing batteries has negative externalities. I'd argue that removing myself from the carbon spraying game has immediate impact (we cannot stop ACC now, but we can temper its course), and that's good. Reducing the US's economic incentive to screw with the world's politics to maintain gas prices: also good.
The other option (and I do this a lot) is to just go to whole foods and use their monster-fast chargers. You can do a whole car in just a few hours with an L3 charger, it's amazing. This is more expensive than using any kind of outlet, but so is gas.
Please forgive the imposition, but if you live in the dense and expensive part of the city, you probably are best off simply not owning a car.
I'm sorry but things like this always come up and I can't keep my head from shaking at these types of comments. So, you don't have other options to charge and simply go somewhere else where there is a charger that can do a car in "a few hours"?!
So, I guess you say if you can do it, everybody else in that situation can, too? A short thought experiment, if everybody else did exactly that, how often would you say you will find your charger occupied? And since it is "a few hours" per car, you are in for a nice long shopping spree in whole foods while you wait for the guy in front of you to finally drive off. IF you are already next in line, that is. "Hi Honey, sorry, it'll be a couple of hours till I'm home. What? No, I'm not working late, I just want to gas up the EV and there is one person in front of me."
And before you say "But there are two or three chargers there" I say: And all would be constantly occupied if EV adoption would take of as many here wanted it to. The only way this could technically happen would if if at a snap of a finger suddenly every parking space had a charger available. Then the EV industry could go "Buy an EV today, no matter where you park, you can always charge it" Before something like that is in place, the odd charger at whole foods ONLY works as a solution as long as only a tiny subset of driver choose an EV. If not, you will find yourself cursing all the other EV drivers that constantly block your charging spot and you curse at anyone who still tries to drum up support for EV adoption. Cause that just means an even longer queue to get to your charger.
You can fill a car from a dead charge in a few hours with these type 3 DC chargers. If your car's battery is NOT empty, it'll go significantly faster. Or if your car has a smaller battery.
> So, I guess you say if you can do it, everybody else in that situation can, too? A short thought experiment, if everybody else did exactly that, how often would you say you will find your charger occupied? And since it is "a few hours" per car, you are in for a nice long shopping spree in whole foods while you wait for the guy in front of you to finally drive off. IF you are already next in line, that is. "Hi Honey, sorry, it'll be a couple of hours till I'm home. What? No, I'm not working late, I just want to gas up the EV and there is one person in front of me."
Yours is a great example of a terrible comment. The kind of comment where you showed up wanted to yell at people about something, not talk about something. This discussion is about short term solutions for people in an early electric car market, specifically because the infrastructure isn't there for everyone yet.
That's okay, most people in this discussion do not have the option to purchase a pure electric car, yet.
> And before you say "But there are two or three chargers there" I say:
See what I'm saying about "yelling at" rather than "talking to"?
> If not, you will find yourself cursing all the other EV drivers that constantly block your charging spot and you curse at anyone who still tries to drum up support for EV adoption.
Quite the contrary. EV drivers are pretty good about this and we share where we can. Driving an EV is a interesting experience, because other EV drivers on the road will interact with you.
And governments will tax electric cars to make up for the loss of fuel duty.
Very few people do this, that I know.
I think widespread electric vehicle adaption will happen due to price but you have a very valid point on recharge time.
Basically your car is unusable if low and being recharged and there is nothing you can do about it. Unless swapping heavy batteries becomes practical.
Teslas have a driving range of ~200 miles or something like that right? After driving 200 miles, most people are happy to stop and stretch their legs for 15-20 minutes. Tesla superchargers take about 30 minutes to charge your battery most of the way. Drive another 200 miles and you're ready for lunch or dinner, which could be a ~1 hour break, if you're not getting drive-thru and a chance for a much longer charge.
The only limiting factors I see are cost, the availability of charging options (and density of locations) and charging for apartment dwellers. Charge times are probably "good enough" already and likely to get better.
Note that the Leaf's battery is not actively cooled (it does have heaters for extreme cold). So it could be the case that people living in colder climates could get away with it with little degradation.
Still, you should keep quickcharging to 80%.
Don't forget too that there are certainly other interesting infrastructure solutions to deal with as well. A lot of people's cars spend most of their week in the parking lot of a job, so chargers in work places can be a more than good enough option for apartment dwellers.
The interesting thing to electricity is that the grid infrastructure is already very well distributed. Just about anywhere your car sits for more than a few minutes could potentially be a charger. The question is probably less when such things will show up and more what sort of interesting things people will do with that.
There are all sorts of interesting possibilities, such as inductive chargers embedded into street beds and parking lots that the only need is to park on top of them to get a charge.
It'll still take time for me to see savings over a car in the $20-$30k range. But in terms of daily operating costs for equivalent priced cars I'm there. Gas prices can only go up and electrical storage is on a downward trend.