Yeah, there's absolutely no reason for chargers to be rare. In much of the world we have the electricity already spread amazingly wide. Every outside plug is already a potential Level 1 charger. You may frown at how slow Level 1 "trickle" charges, but think about how long most cars spend sitting somewhere, anywhere. Gain a few miles every time the car is parked. You can't put a gas station in every parking space, but you can certainly put a boring old fashioned three-prong plug there. (We have that technology. We've had it for like a century now.)
"Charging Stations" as a construct are certainly a convenience, especially when looking for reliable charging away from home, but chargers can be anywhere the (electric) light (bulb) touches (and that's a lot of the developed world). Thinking of chargers in traditional gas station terms is missing the opportunity, and confusing how the supply chain works. We don't need to centralize big reservoirs of "fuel" to maintain an EV fleet, we use the electric grid we've already spent a century building out, diversifying, and largely decentralizing.
You have never had an apartment offer power at the parking lot? Isn't that an issue with your landlords like any other apartment feature/benefit? Isn't that the same as price shopping for an apartment with in-unit Laundry or up-to-date Appliances? Maybe the Landlord doesn't presently see a need for such a convenience, but they should be willing to compete, open to suggestions and the right sort of incentivization, right? (At least, so claim the free market folks.)
Do you even need to charge at home? What's your daily commute, can you buy an EV with enough range that a supercharge once every two weeks will do it? That's the exact scenario discussed just posts above, this discussion is a flat circle.
Can you charge at work? Can you charge at the grocery when you are running errands?
Most Americans can, statistically, find a range in an EV today that they could charge once every two weeks and handle 100% of their average work life. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of how they are a special outlier that needs personal attention to their complaints.
You couldn't buy a non-hybrid EV, or you just aren't willing to put the work out into figuring out any sort of strategy or plan? It's not even rocket science. Electricity is everywhere and this should be really easy for everyone to figure out.
Does the building you are parked outside of have electricity? If yes, ask if it can give you an outside plug. That's it. Level 1 charging is that simple.
Level 2 charging is nearly as simple: Does that building have Dryers or any other reason to already have 220+ Volt A/C circuits? (Maybe you are somewhere like England where that's actually the wall sockets.) Get a "dryer plug" installed in the parking lot. Admittedly we use a bit fancier of a plug socket in that case, but the basic electronics are the same.
You aren't probably going to get a Level 3+ supercharger at an apartment complex any time soon (though it depends on your municipality and electric company and their goals for subsidizing the fun), but you probably don't need it. In most cases it's a lovely either/or: Level 1 or 2 charging at home/work, slow and steady every day, or Level 3+ charging in short bursts every two weeks or so. (Though it's not an exclusive-or; you could do both.)
There are options already. None of these are hard problems to solve. We have the technology, it's just amazing we don't seem to have the will or the imagination, at least in terms of how often these same questions come up in repeat on HN comments, and HN is an audience I'd expect to be more willing to explore creative technical solutions to problems rather than to just stop at the first anecdotal problem to mind.
If you provided some anecdotes about how you live, in an apartment, with a BEV as your only car, on a middling salary for a white collar worker (say $40-50K USD). Possibly some numbers/calculations based on your experience.
Putting people down for "anecdotes" and not having "imagination" gives the impression you might be basing your opinions on theoretical ideas.
If you really want my anecdata, I do live in an apartment building with a tiny shared garage. I use a "range extended" EV (Generation 1, 2012 Volt) as my only car. I do my entire daily commute on a Level 1 charge, 8-12 hours charging each night for roughly 35-42 miles of charge depending on weather, entirely off of a boring, normal three-prong garage outlet. I have a dedicated parking space for my unit, but it's not entirely as convenient to the plug as I would like, but it's served me well enough now for 7-ish years. I've not yet convinced my building to install a Level 2 or higher charger, but as some of my neighbors start to talk about the idea of also buying EVs it could happen as a joint effort.
The only big maintenance issues I've had with my car in all this time have been related to its gas engine for range extending and partly related to how little I've wound up using it. (I used it a lot in the first couple of years for a dumb commute I wasn't happy with; on an average year since then I use a full tank of gas at most twice in that year for big road trips, with rare sips for weather or the car's own monthly maintenance cycle.) At this point, I do feel certain my next car when it comes time to replace the Volt will be entirely battery electric. A gas range extender made sense in 2012, but I'd strongly recommend against it in 2019, the range in BEVs is now good enough to cover 100% of my daily driving for two whole weeks between required charging, and I do have years of experience now that I can also easily cover ~140% of my daily miles in the evenings on the most boring of a Level 1 charger (110 volt, standard US three prong wall outlet), not even counting how long my car usually sits on the weekends, nor how much of a charge I could get if I could convince my office to give me even a boring old Level 1 plug while I'm parked at work.
There's this perspective that Chargers are something new and unique and need to be giant gas-station like things, and it just belies the fact of how ubiquitous our electric grid already is, just how many plug outlets we've placed throughout our cities. In my years of owning my car, I've found a small game of cataloging outdoor outlets and their rough distance to parking lots. (I've found parking spots to charge in at the back of hotels I've stayed at. The hotels didn't even know they had spots that could charge a car, and always had fun reactions if I asked to use those outlets.) Then that lead to a game of cataloging the nearest electric device to a parking spot. Do you realize how many parking lots have lots of bright shining lamps every so many feet? How many street lamps on the average street? Do you know how easy it would be to install a plug at the base of each and every one of those lamps?
(More interestingly, it was brought to my attention that the vast majority of parking lot lamps run in the US actually run at 220 volt A/C for reliability of the most common type of halogen lamps at the time a lot of parking lots were built. In theory we should be easily capable of adding Level 2 chargers near every parking lot lamp.)
We could argue middling salary multiple ways, and I'm not sure I'd fit some of your definitions, but I will offer as some evidence that I'm driving a 7-year old car, expect to keep it until at least 10-years old, and my previous car was 13-years old (and I had driven it for 10 of those) when I upgraded. I had to buy this car new to put my money where my mouth was on EV as the present in 2012, but it was a trade-off I felt important. For the most part I've saved on maintenance and gas more than enough to make up the difference from buying used, at least according to the last time I did a back-of-the-envelope check (which was an important check for my father, who is very adamant from experience about never buy a new car, always buy used).
So yeah, electric charging is already the past and present for me, I'm not just talking theoretically.
Well, nobody is comparing a charger to a gas station. More like a gas pump. And I don't understand your tone of "oh, electricity is everywhere, you can basically get it for free". It costs what it costs. When almost nobody has an electric car, public chargers can be installed and subsidized as a gimmick. At some point, if people actually use them, "free" will vanish in a puff of logic.
Also, you know, I have seen public chargers in parking lots that cost money, and you know what was missing that gas stations always have? A sign with the price! I guess there are no specific regulations or something, but as far as I'm concerned if you can't see the price up front (and probably have to agree to a click-wrap list of terms) I think nobody is serious.
Yeah, electricity has a cost, but when was the last time you checked your utility rates? Electricity itself is stupid cheap, it's a commodity, as it should be. Depending on city and time of day, you are talking dimes per kilowatt-hour. When was the last time you were asked to pay 45 cents for the energy you used to charge your phone in a café, restaurant, or at an airport?
For mostly one-off, random charges at places you are only at for a couple of hours, existing parking costs can and should cover it.
Sure, you do that every day for a month and those cents add up to dollars, and that's why a lot of the chargers are more like clubs where you pay monthly dues. Which is a business model that almost works as intended, except to really work well it should just be part of your monthly utility bill with your electric company with no extra middle men in the way.
But right now the vast majority of public chargers, at least in the US, are costing a whole lot more than the raw electricity prices. They've got tons of service fees they cost to pay for their "subsidized" installation costs. It is a bit of a racket, and should be better regulated.
Which is also why it's a psychological game they are playing right now to make you think that you need expensive chargers everywhere, because it is marketing that makes them (outrageous amounts of) money. The wall outlet at your home is good enough. A wall outlet from your employer would be good enough. An electrician can install an extra outlet on a circuit for sometimes dozens of dollars (after the basic service charges of making an appointment), and if you are more the DIY sort you can pick up most of what you need in a Lowe's or Home Depot and watch a YouTube video or three. You probably don't need to invest thousands of dollars into a gas pump looking charger. If you want to worry about the cost of electricity you are adding to the electric bill of whatever building it is you don't even have to install an extra meter, just do the math, round up a bit and pay that. While you are doing the math, maybe do the math on everybody's cell phone charging while they are in the building?
Yes, there's going to be a need/use case for superchargers at Level 3+, especially for long distance travel, but all the public chargers in the middle (Level 1 and Level 2) that are fancier than just a boring old wall outlet are in many ways a psychological game that charging is more of a service and less of a commoditized utility than it actually is. Electricity doesn't magically get 5000% more expensive because it's coming out of a machine made up to look like a gas pump with lightning bolts painted on the side and a fancy cable with a silly looking connector.
Yeah, yeah...the DC fast chargers though? I saw where somebody said they were charged like $10 for enough electricity to drive less than 20 miles. I don't know if that is really representative, but what feels right to you or anybody in terms of price is even less meaningful than one random data point.
Gas stations can sell gas for minimal cost usually due to having a convenience store with high margins attached. You can charge at home due to having a connection to the grid, a house, and wiring, all of which cost substantial money beyond the per-kwh charge. So regardless of what charging "really" costs, your reasons for why it should be essentially free seem obviously flawed to me.
The "parking meter" business model is also a valid strategy. My complaint with that business model, if its not apparent enough yet, is not that they are charging more for that business model, but that they aren't being transparent about it and double and triple dipping. If you want to charge $5-$15/hour parking, that's fine, that's a parking fee. Don't call it "electricity fees", because that's not what that is. Also, don't charge me $5-15/hour parking at both the Gate and the Meter (Charger), because that's $10-$30/hour parking and your signs are wrong.
But the further point is that those aren't the only business models. You don't need fast chargers everywhere, because cars spend most of their lives parked and the electric grid is everywhere, if we could just drive enough business models that encourage "slow" chargers everywhere we "win" when it comes to competition. Utilities make great amenities to bundle with other products, services, employment relationships.
Right now too, there's a lot of "worst of both worlds" business models, at least in the US. I've seen grocery stores with both free parking lots and low margin gas pumps, and yet very high electric parking fees. Some of that is simply because the same grocery stores that just spent millions in becoming their own gas stations are outsourcing their chargers to third parties because they don't have to compete on margins yet, and they aren't paying attention to what the chargers are costing, and how it affects the public perception of their overall amenities just yet. I suppose we'll know when electric is finally on their radars when you can use "gas points" for electric rates.
Wait. A 115 VAC socket exposed to the elements with no meter? How do you pay for it? Was it under lock and key?
In all the times I asked, paying for it never came up. Admittedly, when I was asking it was always a "nice to have it" request and at least to some degree I hit a sweet spot between "Hospitality companies want to agree to things that are easy for them to provide to make customers happy" and "this is new enough and uncommon enough a question that they aren't going have written policies on it yet". I was also making sure to only do it with businesses that I had an established customer relationship with (I'm staying in this hotel and/or Since I'm paying for parking here anyway). Much of the time the extra bit of electricity I was using was a drop in the bucket of the business' usual utility overhead, and/or a drop in the bucket compared to my existing expenditure (the cost of a hotel room, even the cost of parking).
(Aside rant: I think it's a scam to meter some Chargers at all. Chargers in some of the parking garages I've used or attempted to use had some outrageous surcharges to make it seem like metering was a useful value add to the process. Use something like $0.75 in electricity, tops, get a combo of $12+ in surcharges from three different middlemen [the garage, the charger company, a bonus kickback to the power company], all on top of $15-$30 parking fee just to get into the garage. You could easily cover $0.75 of electricity in that $30 parking fee.)
I think there is an issue that may not be obvious with the charging time.
Let's say for the sake of argument, sure, people can tolerate taking ten times the amount of time to charge as filling a gas tank.
But what that means on a large scale, if everyone switches to electric, is that we need ten times the number of charging stations as gas station pumps in order to have the same number of locations open per person.
Of course, you say, people mostly charge electric cars at home. Sure, but if they do it 90% of the time, we still need just as many public chargers as there are gas stations now. On top of a charger for (almost) every home.
Without much faster charging or much higher capacity batteries, it seems to me like this is a basic problem with switching everything to electric that I haven't heard about from others.
Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing, but I never see people address this or identify the incredible infrastructure requirements as a problem. People describe occasional waits for access to a charger and don't extrapolate.