Instead, "you can charge it while you work". Not many people drive more than an hour a day - that's 23 hours where it sits. I see lots of cars parked in residential streets during the day. Paid parking lots catering to commuters can also offer charging services.
> just shut down some factories
That's your strawman. I didn't propose that.
Same principle applies to most things. If electricity stops being readily available all the time, then you're introducing a new constraint that people have to optimize for. If that means they change their behavior, then they're doing something more expensive than whatever they were doing before, when they optimized without that constraint.
That extra cost generally isn't figured into the optimistic estimates of how cheap renewables are, but it's still a cost that society pays.
Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.
> Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.
The cost needs to be compared with building grid storage batteries.
Many factories don't run 24/7. And yet more factories don't run their most energy intensive processes continuously even when they factory is "running".
People talk about "demand management" as if it's free. Not much power available, just shut down some factories. But if you're running your factories only half the time, you need to build twice as many factories to make the same stuff. You're making renewables look artificially cheap by externalizing costs to their customers.