Last year I saw a charge point added to a public curb parking area near me.

It's about half the height of a parking meter. The power is right there under the pavement. Probably cost £800 to install, which could generate £200 in revenue each year.

Not every charger needs to be a super charger.

Getting lots of 11kw chargers in every parking bay would be a higher priority than everywhere having super chargers. Most people could keep topped up and those doing long trips use the faster charging points.

The grid capacity is not infinite. Of course, we are going to improve the grid but it is not a trivial problem.

1. Many owners run a cord from their house — this can be solved with a modest update to city codes and maybe a trenching service to help run lines under sidewalks. 2. Street lights have power lines and it seems like that infrastructure can be reused: https://metroenergy.org/programs/current-projects/streetligh... 3. We should be doing everything possible to discourage urban car ownership — EVs still make the city more expensive for everyone else, hurt people, pollute (tire, brake, sound), and require far more space than any other form of transportation.

You have an odd way of using the word zero. I see plenty of infrastructure including both charging stations, as well as the undeniably real electric grid infrastructure which is a huge start on solving the problem.

I think you're missing your parent's point here. Folks who have street parking don't have a way to charge their cars at home. Folks are currently doing ad-hoc solutions draping wires overhead or underfoot, which is seen as a nuisance. If every residential block had a single charger, it would be both hugely expensive for a municipality and inadequate to the point of conflict among neighbors sharing that block.

No I got the point but the point is misinformed.

We have many blocks (roughly 10x10 blocks, so 100 square blocks) sharing a single charger site now and for the last 3 years with only two plugs in a high EV density area and we don’t have any conflicts that I know of.

Most of these objections are just imagined problems coming from the minds of people without actual experience of owning an EV.

That being said, some EVs, once bought, are an easier ownership experience than others, but that’s getting off track.

> Most of these objections are just imagined problems coming from the minds of people without actual experience of owning an EV.

Hi, previous EV owner here, had to get rid of it because there was too much range anxiety thanks to the lack of chargers near my house and inability to use my house's power thanks to street parking. Saw multiple conflicts at congested chargers, mostly passive, some aggressive, because the infrastructure was insufficient to meet the demand.

Most EVs do it poorly though. This may be the fallacy of judging an entire product category based on a poor implementation. Very common amongst people who bought cheaper EVs. In any case both EVs, and charging options, are only getting better.

Most EVs do what poorly? Get charged from a 120V cable stretched across a sidewalk? Last I looked, it would take a several days to fill a Tesla's battery like that. That's not because somebody cheaped out on the Tesla.

Lots of things poorly. A lot of EVs don’t have internet so you can’t monitor the status, don’t have sentry mode so people can screw with the cable without being noticed, don’t have a mobile app that lets you (again) check on things or remotely control things like when your wife goes to collect the car but forgets the key and you can unlock it remotely, don’t give you a fast charging backup option that makes life easier, don’t have the range, don’t have Netflix and YouTube to pass the time for the odd times when you need to sit in the car for a while… the list goes on.

Okay, but we were talking about a lack of charging infrastructure, and your evidence that I'm misinformed and making up imaginary problems is... watching youtube and a forgetful wife trope? And BTW my combustion car lets me do almost all that crap, including turning on the AC over the internet. Whoop dee.

Fast charging sounds so great! It sounds like you've got two Teslas in a place where fast chargers are plentiful. That doesn't describe where I live. So, good for you, but please remember that people aren't necessarily idiots just because their life experience differs from yours.

But, hey. Credit where credit's due... at least you didn't say FSD.

My list of stuff is specifically things that help make life better for charging.

... if you can find a charger. All those bells and whistles are beyond useless if you can't. It's rather amazing that you continue to talk past this point.

When I had an EV, it frequently took several hours of combined searching and waiting to find a charge per week. That's not counting time to charge. Frequently, broken chargers would remain listed on apps for weeks, which made it a terrifying gambling game when range was low.

A combination of superchargers and plugshare helps a lot!

What you say is indeed right for some EVs and some locales, but give it time, it’s getting better.

Are you sure you are in a high EV density area? Because I can't imagine how that can work out if more than a few % of cars in the area are EV.

I used a rented BMW i3 with range of 150km in Warsaw city center for a month or two. Charging was not an issue - there were multiple. harging public spaces within 5 min walking dostance from my apt, and also a communal charging spot in my apartament building. I just left the car there for one in a few nights.

The real issue - and the one that prevented me from buing an electric car so far - was that without my own charging spot I would have an issue leaving the city for a month or two, or just swotching to transit for a while. With ICE I can leave the car for 6 months unused and it’s not a big problem.

I was wondering this same thing, then I found out that in many cities home owners can have a high speed charging port installed at the front of their property line and run a cord across the side walk to their car.

Of course this doesn't work well if your neighbors park right in front of your house, oops. (In most American cities, AFAIK, home owners have no claim over the parking space directly in front of their home)

Not sure what to do in "real" dense cities, Chicago row houses and such.

Honestly making them public infrastructure where people pay a monthly fee subscription fee to the city might just work. (And generate revenue for the city!)

As an urban car owner with a car that has a 300 mile range, when I am running low on “energy”, I will drive the car to a dedicate place where more “energy” is put into the car. ICE or EV, it makes no difference to me, energy goes in at an external place.

What EV has over ICE is that these energy-giving places can be located anywhere - my work, the supermarket, a town car park, a mate’s house, an extension cable pit my window in absolute emergencies, etc. I really don’t see why this is a good argument against EV. Yes I can’t fill up outside my house, but I can’t do that with a petrol car either.

They're doing pilots in my city where there are just chargers next to some of the street parking spaces. They use one of the major EV networks, so you can use the app to get an alert when it's free, and people cycle through.

Well the infrastructure certainly needs to be built, but the solution is straight forward. You just place slow charging stations where the cars are parked overnight.

Yes, in the UK it will be a massive problem. But practical issues seem to be irrelevant to those making policies.

1300 street lights already converted as chargers: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/...

Seems like there's a lot less street lights than cars.

Really, people should just have fewer cars.

Overly simplistic nonsense like this does not add to a discussion

If you live somewhere so dense that there is no off-road parking then why do you have a car in the first place?

It's not density that makes this happen in the U.S., but age. Old streetcar era suburbs didn't have driveways or garages. I've lived in neighborhoods entirely made of single family homes with hardly any off street parking. It was terrible coming home after 6pm. Ironically, if you live in a dense area of the U.S., your building probably has a parking spot for you in the garage as most apartment builds since the 60s included parking.

Because having a car is nice and convenient? Its great and all to be able to take the subway to a bar but the subway doesn’t get me to my golf club, the beach, the mountains etc.

> Because having a car is nice and convenient?

But it's not convenient if you have to park on the street... because there's nowhere to charge. That's the point.

Which is why I have an ICE and will continue to have an ICE... which is exactly the point: EV's are not convenient and they will not work for a large number of us.

Within a few years you will have dedicated parking spots with chargers on every other street corner, so it won’t really be an issue.

In Warsaw city center there is a such a public parking spot every 300-500 meters or so, where you can park for free as well if you have an electric. Those will get even more common as electrics get more popular.

The only issue is if you tend to leave your car unused for extended periods of time.

As demand for gasoline drops, more gas stations (which are already declining) will close. As time goes on, it will be more and more convenient to charge an EV than to drive half way across town to a gas station.