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Re:New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal com... by gambiting on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @11:16AM (#23312186)
I still don't think that this will be anywhere enough. This is a street I used to live on: https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.9941128,-1.6077652,3a,75y,286...

From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.

Re:New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal com... by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:16PM (#23313774)
The key to this is you don't build too many of them.

The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive.

Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs.

Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use.

Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.

Re:New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal com... by petre on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @02:37AM (#23320046)
The best thing would be to make them expensive when the vehicle is >70% charged so it incentivizes drivers to free the charger equipped parking spot when the vehicles is full of almost full. That way the charger becomes available to others.
Re:New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal com... by ChuckNorris89 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @12:06PM (#23312885)
1000x this! People never stop to ask themselves who will pay for the infrastructure needed to upgrade the existing public electrical networks in our cities to support everyone charging their EVs on the street.

Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.

Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property.

There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run.

Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption.

Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.

Re:New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal com... by petre on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @02:54AM (#23320130)
Western Europe will do it as means to incentivize auto sales after the pandemic. Car sales fell 80% in Europe. President Macron has already announced such a plan yesterday. This includes infrastructure:

"The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52814074

Re:New two-stroke engine design could help keep internal com... by xyzzyz on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:16PM (#23313772)
Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.

These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.