I feel like what a lot of people miss is that with an EV if you have a garage or dedicated parking spot you’re leaving home with a “full tank” every single day. You only need to use a public charger if you’re on a road trip.

That is the big 'if' for the majority of population in European cities. Pretty convenient for suburbs though.

Yep, having to charge them at public charging stations is pretty shitty, takes a long time, and a lot of time they're not available to use.

I used to work in a large business building a few years ago, and they had 4 charging stations right next to the main entrance, and having an electric car then was great... the "plebs" would have to park behind the building or in the garage under, and you'd have priority parking infront. Then, the number of electic cars rose to above 4 there, and first 4 that came, parked there, connected the chargers and went to work. If you came 5th, there was nothing you could do, except maybe if you knew one of those 4, politely ask them to move their car during lunch, so you can charge yours too.. but most of the people left their car there until end of work at 3-5h in the afternoon.

Ive charged plenty of times on road trips on both the Tesla and Electrify America networks. Charge time is usually under 20-30 at places and times I’d already be stopping to use the bathroom and stretch my legs.

In regards to the chargers in your work garage: most modern charge systems let you set idle fees. If you install anything worthwhile you could easily configure it so people have to move after their car has been sitting fully charged for an hour.

Plenty of apartment buildings don't have a dedicated powerpoint per parking spot.

This can be fixed but in the meantime it is a significant cost for the building. And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints will be trumped by later installs of dedicated, secured charging stations.

I am not jumping to an EV any time soon.

> And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints

A 110V AC outlet is completely inappropriate and inadequate for charging a BEV; for example, it would take three days of nonstop charging to charge my car from a 110V outlet.

BEV automakers include the 110V adapter as an emergency stopgap more than anything else - I suppose they intend it to be used to help you get to a DC charger: but even assuming I'm no more than 100mi from a Supercharger then I still need to be plugged-in to 110V for at least 24 hours to get the 30kWh level I'd need to travel 100mi - and who is going to let someone borrow a days' worth of 1-2kWh electricity like that?

Could an apartment building even support say 50% or 75% of a typical sized apartments buildings parking garage's worth of 'supercharger' like installs? Later on times a whole cities worth of apartment buildings.

I'm not familiar with this field but I'd imagine this would take some special arrangement with the power companies. But so far that seems to be the only solution at the moment.

Without apartment buildings offering this I don't see how it could be widely deployed without changing how cities are built and transportation is deployed. Even if all the buildings offloaded to external Uber-style autonomous fleets they need to be charged somewhere and at a massive volume. And in my city 90% of new housin development for the last two decades seems to be on apartment buildings.

Preface: DC fast-charging is "Level 3". A 240V ("clothes dryer connector" in the US) or hardwired wall-connector is "Level 2" and in the US is typically 15-50A - if you have a modern home with plenty of free 'leccy panel spots then you can do 90A. A slow 110V or low-amperage 240V (for outside North America) is considered "Level 1". The supply of DC fast chargers is not open to the public at all: only Tesla and a tiny number of third-parties maintain Level 3 infrastructure, and they all require outhouse-sized transformer units for each car space, separate from the car-connector part.

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Level 3 / DC fast-charging is not intended for long-term and repetitive use: it's only intended for road-trips and that's it - that's because DC fast-charging is bad for your battery.

I primarily charge at home using my 90A wall-connector - but I still rate-limit the charging to ~60A to help conserve the health of my battery-pack. Not that it matters much: since Covid and WFH my driving has dropped drastically, from ~30,000mi/yr to less than 5,000mi in 2020, and less than 1,000mi so far in 2021. (I got my Model X in 2018 and it's still got under 20,000 miles on it, lol).

But you raise an excellent point about apartment complexes and parking-lots not being able to feed dozens or more charging spaces. Yes, it's a problem, and no, I don't see a viable long-term solution.

Other than apartments, cities like London, etc, have built car charger ports into streetlamps so people with street-parking can charge their car at Level 2 speeds using that pre-existing infrastructure - I'm unsure to what extent it's a public-private-partnership vs. public, but the opportunity to profit from car-charging infrastructure means pushing the cost-per-mile up above the cost of gasoline/petrol - which undermines the economic-and-environmental benefits of BEVs (especially when you consider the dreaded fuel-tax on petrol will eventually be extended to electricity if governments don't introduce usage-based road taxes). It'll be mess, methinks.

Also, everything is terrible.

> if you have a modern home with plenty of free 'leccy panel spots then you can do 90A.

How so? J1772 itself maxes out at 80A, and I don't even know of any production EVs that support that: most max out at 48A or lower. And even for Tesla's connector, the highest I've ever seen (which isn't even offered anymore) was 72A.

> And even for Tesla's connector, the highest I've ever seen (which isn't even offered anymore) was 72A.

The wall-connector in my garage has a 90A sticker put on it by the state-licensed electrician who installed it - and I can drag the rate-limit slider in my car's UI up to (and beyond) 90A. I'd take a picture and post it to show you, but HN is famously text-only.

Yes. In the South of the United States most apartments have individual aircon units with a 40-60A 240v draw that run nearly around the clock during the summer. It would not be unreasonable to imagine simply doubling the service to an apartment building and running a large deployment of level 2 destination chargers.

Yes, it would be unreasonable. Electrical equipment doesn't scale proportionally to power levels. It might cost 10 times as much to install a 480V connection than it does to install a 240V connection.

OTOH, plenty of people are getting along fine with 120V. Yes it would take days to charge from zero. But the average person drives 37 miles a day, and a 120V plugin can replenish 37 miles overnight.

I wanted to buy a Tesla and I asked my apartment building management about getting a charging spot. They have 12 spots already (it's a 150 unit building), and they're all taken...and they can't install more unless they run new lines direct from a power station 2 miles away and install $100k of equipment to receive it. So they said no.

Now maybe that is bad planning on their part, but I'd bet they're far from the only building in town that didn't build to accommodate a rapid growth in EVs.

I agree that apartments are CURRENTLY a problem.

But we're talking about a centralized high-density residential building vs sprawled out suburbia. It HAS to be easier to setup electrical charging en masse in an apartment building.

Once your downtown hi-rise loses market competitiveness b/c you DON'T have charging, it will change VERY quickly. The charging infrastructure will be a capital outlay with depreciation and there is about a 99% chance there will be some decent government and utility subsidies that come with it.

I agree none of that (the market force or the subsidies) exist currently, but I'm guessing in three years it will be happening.

We're not though. For the ease of calculation, let's take a 100kWh battery. To fill it up in 10 minutes, you'd need to charge it at 600kW. There isn't even an electrical standard which would allow this, not to mention having to somehow supply over half a megawatt(!!!!!) Into a single charging point, and somehow cool it and the battery. The best of the best charging systems draw "only" 250kW and even that is either impossibly rare in CCS world, and in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW.

I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase.

Having said all of the above - the 250kW charging as-is is already stupidly fast as "good enough". And charging at home will always be king even at slower speeds.

> The best of the best charging systems draw "only" 250kW

Actually Electrify America can charge at 350 kW. They have to actively cool the cables to keep them from overheating.

> in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW.

I think with v3 Superchargers, this is no longer true. There is a megawatt allocated per 4 chargers. I'm not sure how much this applies to the really big stations, because it seems they could be using multiple megawatts of power.

Tesla superchargers are delivering 250 kW today, at ~380V. The largest of these is like 40 stalls; they are not shared (you're thinking of the 150 kW v2 chargers that split current between two stalls). Hyundai is about to ship a car that can take current at 800V. (There are 350 kW CCS chargers too, though those seem to be poorly exploited and hard to measure in practice with real cars; but I've watched my Model Y sink 250 kW with my own eyes.)

So just naive application of already-deployed technology can get you to ~500 kW. You don't think someone's going to squeeze out a thicker cable, really? No, this is doable. The real limit is how much current the battery can sink without degradation at the top end of the charge curve. The electrical stuff is kinda trivial.

I think Porsche also has an 800V car.

I think the power-delivery aspect is solvable. From the perspective of a power company, EV chargers seem like ideal customers: you can run high-capacity power lines to one big customer instead of running little power lines to every residential customer. Though on the other hand, if you have a fast charger that's seldom used, that's a lot of infrastructure in place that's sitting idle most of the time.

Coming up with batteries that charge quickly is a different matter. Batteries are getting better, but it seems that part of the solution so far is to just have batteries that are so big that they don't need to be charged very often. Charging a 30kwh battery in an hour only gets you half the range in the same time as charging a 60kwh battery in an hour.

Maybe if we keep increasing the power of the chargers, we'll eventually ditch the cables and move to something like parking a car over a pair of big copper plates that extend to make contact with a matching pair of copper plates on the bottom of the car. I could also see some kind of system where the car has a fixture for attaching a coolant hose, and the charger pumps cold water through the battery while it's charging.

At some level, though, I think this is a trying to engineer around a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. If we had electrified roads that are capable of charging vehicles while they're moving, then battery sizes and charge times would be less of an issue, and we wouldn't need to have cars that devote a quarter of their mass or so to batteries. It would only really need to be on major roads, and probably only in short sections at regular intervals.

> I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase.

Chargers substantailly bigger than that are definitely in or past the planning phase, for example: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-po...

1MW chargers exist today (for electric buses)

4.5MW systems are being planned

https://cleancities.energy.gov/files/u/news_events/document/...

I think anything within a factor of two is just a mild engineering challenge away. The latest chargers are 350 kW. So use two of them.

With current battery tech we'd probably need a 600 mile pack to make those charging speeds feasible for 300 miles in 10 minutes. That's a big pack, but again, just a bit of an engineering challenge, not revolutionary.

Though I otherwise agree, home charging is where it's at. Starting every day with a full charge and never going to the gas station is really nice. I hope we can quickly scale up the infrastructure so everyone can enjoy it. Right now maybe 50% of the US population is able to easily charge at home.

What does all that fast charging do to batteries though?

I'm surprisingly ignorant on this. ICE engine is fast-recharge as baseline; feels like batteries will forever have slow charge as baseline, fast charge as emergency occasional compromise that you know is killing your durability. This is where hydrogen seemed an exciting alternative. Am I wrong?

> What does all that fast charging do to batteries though?

Jury's still out on that. Some manufacturers (GM comes to mind) are claiming their next generation batteries won't degrade from constant fast-charging.

I have been warning my apartment building committee for a while now they need to set aside money for a "every carpark has it's own powerpoint" project.

Charging at home can happen. But this will be a hassle for a lot of people.

That’s not adequate at all! The lines at gas stations would be massive. Charging via electric at home or in a parking spot seems a lot more convenient, even if it takes a few hours.

10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas. Especially people with trucks, which is a large part of the US.

Over half the population probably has the infrastructure to home charge right now, so this does not need to replace gas station pumps 1 for 1. I was not suggesting that all of us charging at home need to start using public chargers.

> 10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas.

I don't want to "uhm, acktually", but it's less than 5 minutes: https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-the-average-person-... - and that's including time spent faffing around with the awful pay-at-pump machines' UX.

I admit my experience is non-typical, as the only gasoline vehicle I own is a truck with a big tank, but 10 minutes is well within normal. For cars with 15 gallon tanks, 5 minutes is probably reasonable.

But in any case, 10 minutes is fine no matter what. If you are willing to spend 4x as much for fuel in order to save less than 10 minutes per week when you stop for fuel, then the problem isn't the charge time.

Filling your tank with fossil fuel is 5 minutes wall clock but also 5 minutes where you can't do anything else. If you need to pee or eat that's a few more minutes.

Filling your battery might be longer 10-15 minutes, but (at least for Tesla superchargers) about 20 seconds of your time, for the remaining 10-15 minutes you're free to do whatever you want.

Worth noting that "filling a gas tank" is something that makes sense to do every time you fill up at a gas station since that's your obly option to get energy.

It doesn't make sense to do the equivalent of charging an EV to 100% basically ever, so its a weird thing to compare against. Even very long distance trips will aim to bounce between 20-80% to minimize total charging time.

The big difference being that you don't have a small gas pump at home, in your office or at the supermarket that will fill your tank cheaply for you, and so you only need enough fuel to ensure you get to the next time that is available to you.

I think going forward, EV charging locations aren't going to be like gas stations: they'll be on bigger lots, maybe on the edge of town or between towns where land is cheaper. Or they'll co-locate in shopping center parking lots, which you see now.

Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time.

> Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time.

On the contrary - have you ever noticed how gas-stations don't have an _upstairs_? Without the massive fire-and-explosion risk from pumping gasoline, a typical urban filling-station could be converted to a multi-storey charging plaza at a a reasonable expense, imo.

I remember there was a brief fad in the 1990s to quickly build additional storeys of parking spaces on bare concrete/asphalt lots using metal superstructure: it worked and it was relatively cheap, but the results weren't long-lasting (my university tore-down their metal-based parking lot after it had been up for about 10-15 years IIRC) - I assume something similar could be done in this case.

The issue is that for a BEV, charging speed is directly coupled to energy demand from the grid. Using nice numbers, if you want to charge a BEV with a 100kWh battery in 6 minutes, you'd need a 1MW charger, which is a non-trivial amount of power that needs to be dispatched. Multiply this by the number of cars charging at any given time, and you have a recipe for huge demand volatility, which is a problem if our grid is going to be powered by non-dispatchable sources like wind and solar. The alternative is having chargers be so ubiquitous that everywhere you park you have some form of trickle charging, so that people living in apartments don't have to sit at a fast charger once a week.

Hydrogen gets around this, because eventually it's going to be a clean source of consistent demand that takes advantage of the fact that renewables require overproduction. A country like Denmark meets 40% of its electricity demand from wind, but produces up to 140% during periods of oversupply. If Denmark wanted to produce 80% of its electricity demand with wind, and do so with 90% confidence, it will generate more than 100% of its needs on average. Even if you wanted to look at the EU instead of Denmark, the same will still apply, because in order for two locations A and B to able to cover for each other when one has excess and the other doesn't, it must also be true that there will be times where no-one has a shortage. Since we want to guarantee our ability to provide X units of power at any given time, we need the grid as a whole to almost never have a shortage in aggregate, which means we will generally overproduce.

To give you an idea of the scale of this; California already curtails around 2.5TWh a year, which is enough to charge anywhere between 25 and 40 million BEVs. And that's one state, today, at relatively low-moderate renewable penetrations. It doesn't really matter if the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is lower than Li-ion, because we aren't going to have a shortage of electricity by any means. We're already throwing the stuff away.