In the UK, every new street light will double as an EV charger.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/07/08/every-new-ho...

That's pretty cool, but even if we converted every single one we'd still be lacking. My street has a car to streetlight ratio of 10 or 15 to 1. Even if the cars only needed to be charged once a week, and everyone was very good at coordinating to allow cars needing charged to be parked next to the streetlight, that would still only work for half the cars parked. There's vast swathes of UK cities - especially the highest density most polluted ones - which have the same problem.

I used these every week. It works great. https://www.ubitricity.com/en/

> I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside.

You're thinking about this from the wrong way around. The people who buy the first electric cars mainly don't live in places they can't charge them, they live in single family homes where they can install a charging port.

That allows enough electric cars to accumulate that the lobby for installing charging ports on city streets can form and get a few of them installed. But with more charging ports you get more people buying electric cars and so the lobby for installing even more charging ports grows, until they're all over the place.

It raises the value of houses that have garages where you can plug your car in. I'm looking at buying a house in Belgium and it's a definite issue.

How much of that is the garage (which I agree would raise the value) vs the EVSE in the garage (which can be added for under 1500€ in most cases)?

Just the garage. If you don't have a garage, you have to buy one apart which is about €20,000. Then you always have a trip to the car and there might still be issues with installing the EVSE.

It's been quite a while since I visited NYC so forgive me if my memories are outdated, but when I was there, parking meters were commonplace along the roads. Would it not at least make sense to slowly replace those with combination parking meter + charging station, which might be easier for the city to monetize in the long run? I realize this doesn't solve the home-side storage problem, but it might be one way the infrastructure could move forward in common hubs.

They’ve replaced the meter-per-space with a single digital meter per block. And that’s also only there in particularly commercially oriented areas, not in residential areas. Though I personally agree with the argument that we should be charging for parking on public property everywhere in the city.

There's no physical reason why there can't be municipal on street charging, even if it's "pay to charge." Think like parking meters.

There just needs to be a demand for the initial infrastructure to be built.

So my local council doesn't even have the money to stay on top of fixing potholes and uneven streets , but will somehow find the money and will to put electric charging points everywhere? Yeah, I don't see that happening.

they put in parking meters to collect money. Are you sure they wouldn't put in charging meters with the equivalent price of gas? That's worth maybe 15k mi/yr / 30mpg * $3 = $1500/yr for the average user (assuming they use it regularly.. which apartment users would). That seems like a pretty decent incentive.

Why would someone buy an electric car if they had to pay the equivalent price of gas to charge it?

I bought a used C-MAX plug-in hybrid and was told that with the EV plan offered by PG&E, I'd save money versus gas. Only after I purchased did I learn that the EV plan gives you cheaper charging at night only if you're willing to stomach very high rates during the day. Since I work from home a lot and have a toddler, this is a non-starter for my family.

So we pay roughly the same amount per mile with electricity as for gas — and I'm in CA, where gas is expensive. We do save a tiny bit when we get to charge for free or at a subsidized rate somewhere. But I think most of the savings comes from not wearing down our brake pads on the hills in our neighborhood, and not having so many moving parts to wear out. These savings are not huge when amortized over the number of miles driven.

>in CA, where gas is expensive

That actually made me laugh. It might cost more than in other US states, but is almost free comparing to most of Europe [1]. Average size of cars and engines, larger car with larger engine use more gas, also tell a lot of price compared to income, and it you compare traffic in Europe and America you will also see that Americans pay way to little for gas

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/221368/gas-prices-around...

I'm in MA (home of $0.20/kWh electricity) and my LEAF gets about 21 miles per dollar of energy. A comparable gas car would get ~13 miles per dollar of gasoline.

I think you're likely still saving money on the electric portion of your driving, as CA rates seem to be slightly lower than MA rates from a cursory Google search.

We pay a bit more than this for electricity, on the margin (they give you low rates on the first chunk but then it goes up from there).

But most of the difference is that our vehicle is nowhere near as efficient as yours. The 9kW/h battery only goes about 18-20 miles on a charge, and it costs more than the $1 that you pay to get that many miles.

C-MAX only gets 2 miles per kWh? They should call it C-MIN. Most electric cars get around 4 miles per kWh.

I don't understand this calculation. Does your toddler use a excessive amount of electricity? Do you work at home running an aluminum smelter?

Snark aside, when we got our Chevy Spark EV in 2013, we switched to the EV rate plan and it has saved us a lot. I work at home too, and but the peak hour use on the EV plan is quite small, so the higher rate is balanced out by having the car automatically charge during off-peak.

It means I have to run the AC in summer and heat in winter for much of the day. The age of my child is relevant because older kids are in school during the day.

I'm in the East Bay, so don't really need AC and have gas heat so the EV plan works for me. What part of PG&E service area do you live in?

I'm on the peninsula. This summer has been very mild so we've gotten off easy, but I certainly can't count on that most years. Since you can't switch plans frequently, I didn't want to take the risk of switching.

How much use do you get out of the pure electric range on the C-MAX? I have a Chevy Spark EV and can make almost all trips I need. My longest is Oakland to San Jose and back. It has only 18kWh battery, but in warm weather we see 4.8 avg miles per kWh.

Perhaps solar would help solve your daytime rate problem? Or a car with more battery?

Wife's commute is 15 miles roundtrip, so we get good use out of it. Just wish it took less kWh in to get the same number of miles out.

It would in all likelihood still be cheaper than gas, but even if it weren't, electric cars are just that much better all around. After you've driven one for a while, you realize what a smelly complicated Rube Goldberg mess the internal combustion engine is.

To each their own, but I work for a service provider tangential to the auto industry, so I've had the chance to drive a lot of different cars, and I'm pretty ambivalent about electric vs ICE cars. None of the engineering complexity of an ICE (and associated components) is particularly relevant to me as a car owner, and we've been building them for long enough that despite their complexity, they're extremely reliable.

Yes, to each his own. Even with reliability, I find several aspects of ICE undesirable: Slower start time, vibration, noise, inconsistent acceleration, the smell of gas at the pump and exhaust from the tailpipe, the pollution, the maintenance schedule, less cargo space, and the greater decrease in reliability with time.

Why? If they care about the environment. If they don't like wasting time at the gas station every week or more. If they don't like to deal with the horrible maintenance schedule of traditional engines vs having an oil change every 2 years.

They're quieter and safer and as Tesla has shown can have much better acceleration.

The batteries are likely to survive 500k miles and there's a lot less moving parts so less things to go wrong.

They have money. They just don't care about potholes and uneven streets.

Sadly not true - father was a civil engineer in council highways dept before he retired. For years he had been saying that funding was so small they were having to patch roads where they should have been renewing the road bed. Now they can't even afford to do all roads. It might be a problem of funding allocation of course - but it wasn't a lack of desire.

Yeah, I'm saying maintaining infrastructure is not a political priority, because it doesn't win elections.

Not that the people working in infrastructure maintenance waste the money.

They care about education, social services and care for the vulnerable more.

It will be privatized, like some parking meters and infraction monitoring already are.

And, at an equivalent of about $1 a gallon, lots of people will get on that.

We can't even handle parking meters out here, though.

I think there is a "physical" reason, or to be exact, a concrete logical reason why it will be difficult. We have X number of gas pumps. If it takes Y times the amount of time to charge a car as pumping fuel, then we need X*Y chargers for everyone to go electric. It's not just a matter of what's convenient, but of multiplying the infrastructure.

Yes, but the power grid is already in place (although it'll probably need upgrading, piecemeal, to handle the additional load). You couldn't run a gas pipeline to every kerbside parking spot but you could put a paid charge point there and it would pay for itself in no time.

> although it'll probably need upgrading, piecemeal, to handle the additional load

Not necessarily, see this document from the UK National Grid which discusses the options: https://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/articles/electric-dreams-fut...

Conveniently cities have already done a huge amount of the legwork for enabling charging at street parking thanks to street lights. It will be expensive no doubt, but so was converting gas street lights to light bulbs.

Cars draw a lot of power vs electric lamps.

Street lights are currently changing from 250-1000 watt HIDs to LEDs, so they used a lot of power in the past and not much in the future.

It's better to have a car partly charged vs not charged at all during the night. On my morning walks in Brooklyn I noticed many cars didn't move an inch for days.

You don't need a 35kW charger to charge overnight. Low power overnight will be good enough to top off most cars' daily usage.

So? It's about the voltage lines. They aren't running low voltage lines to power the street lights.

Range will solve this issue. For 18 months I charged my Tesla at Whole Foods, Target, etc, at a paltry 20mph charge rate. When my commute was 40+ miles round trip, that meant I had to charge a couple of times a week for multiple hours. Very frustrating. But when I got my weekly miles under my max range (180 miles) and started using a near-ish high-speed charger, I'd just catch a movie once a week, and my car would be fully charged for the week by the time I was through. A high-speed charger is enough to put 300-400 miles on an EV while you watch an average movie, if they have that capacity.

My Camry Hybrid can have 500+ miles of range recharged in a few minutes. That's the "killer app" that electric has to beat, one way or another. Spending multiple hours recharging is like driving 30mph on the freeway.

The killer app of EVs with access to home chargers (even slow ones) is that going somewhere else to fill up the car will be a rare occurrence. UK stats show EVs only charge outside home or work ~7% of the time. For a minority of people, regular fast charging will be a must but vast majority of people will just stop going else where to fill up their cars.

It's moving quickly. The Tesla Model 3 can charge over 300 miles in less than an hour. It's coming fast.

Once it becomes easy to charge your car overnight, e.g. because every street lamp is a charging station, I don't think the charging time matters very much anymore.

And yet hybrid sales are low, despite your enthusiasm.

Hybrid or not isn’t really the point.

A gas car refills to max range almost instantly. It just so happens this Camry example has particularly good range on one tank of gas by virtue of being a hybrid, but the point is no more diminished with any other ICE car. Many non-hybrid models will also comfortably manage 500+ miles on a single tank.

All that said, I suspect there is a “good enough” tipping point for EVs, especially now that we are seeing some manage ~300 miles on one charge, which is more than enough for many commutes/weekly shopping trips etc.

Uh, OK, I thought it was, but you're free to disagree.

I do agree that there's a ton of evidence that Tesla's S/X have plenty of range for most people to not be bothered by it. And it doesn't appear to matter to these folks that a hybrid would fill up faster, which brings us back to hybrids.

Many dense European cities have installed on street charging points.

https://andrew.london/2018/01/solving-the-electric-car-on-st...

It's really not a big deal. Chargers are everywhere in urban areas. I've lived with an EV for two years now with just street parking.

Maybe everywhere in urban areas in certain US cities. I live in a mid-size EU city(<500k people) and there's just few charging points around me, which are pretty much permanent occupied.

Things are much different in the bay area at least. My employer has a whole bunch of of plugs in our parking garage, and I charge for free every day. My commute cost is almost negligible because of it. I can totally see a future where it just becomes standard for every parking lot to be powered with at least a few plugs. When you're plugging in everywhere you go, there's no need for overnight charging.

> My employer has a whole bunch of of plugs in our parking garage

An employer with a parking garage. That's a very funny concept.

NYC seems like a good place to have autonomous electric taxis. No ownership, no streetside storage. When battery drops, it goes home and swaps with a charged-up car.

Unless the municipality installs street size charging stations. Then they can charge for parking and electricity.

Presumably at that point the 0%-100% recharge time will be competitive with pumping gas.

But I do think between now and then we need more infrastructure for tenants to charge at home.

> I still can't fathom how electric cars are going to make more than a dent in NYC where most cars are stored streetside

Consumer/taxpayer demand for a solution, like most problems in a capitalist democracy.

I imagine streets where every nth parking spot has something that looks like a beefy parking meter, but will allow thick-ish extension cords to run from a car to it. Turn it on with an RFID tied to which house you belong to on the street (ensures only locals can use it, charges the electrical costs to the right house).

It's technically doable with the technology in our hands today and not very complicated to install. Give in 10 more years, there'll be even smarter ideas.

In most urban areas hooking up new electrical service does not usually mean breaking concrete. I think you'll be amazed how quickly cities deploy charging infrastructure once they realize the premium they can charge for the same parking spot.

What's the "premium" that a typical consumer would pay?

Take 15K miles/year at 4 miles/kWh or 30 miles/gal. 3750kWh or 500 gallons of gas.

At MA electric rates, the electricity is $750, the gas is about $1500. It's unlikely that an electric car consumer would pay more than the $750 delta for the electric charging spot, and would likely be willing to pay only a smaller figure because they are unlikely to do all of their charging in that space or network of spaces.

That premium/willingness-to-pay won't even cover the all-in cost of installing a single EVSE in the first year.

Any infrastructure spend that paid for itself in a year would be like winning the lottery. Infrastructure investment is evaluated on a timescale more akin with geology.

Agreed with the first sentence, but I still don't think the math pencils out. I'm not going to pay City X $750 (on top of the existing parking charge and electricity) so I can use their charging network. The figure I'm willing to pay specifically for the EVSE access is probably more like $100.

Barring significant over-subscription, that's still a ~10 year payback. With massive over-subscription, it doesn't become a reliable charging source. (My prior post, which I'll leave unedited, was unclear/insufficient in stating it was longer than a one-year payback.)