Range is no longer an issue for electric cars in most of Europe. Here in Norway 70% of new cars sold in November were battery electric with the Tesla Model Y being the winner. For the year as a whole more than 60% of cars sold are electric and the Model Y is the winner. Also sold are lots of Citroen, Renault, VW, Audi, Jaguar, and a substantial number of Porsche and some Toyotas.

My 2015 Model S 70D has a range of 330 km in summer a little less in the winter. I use a supercharger to add perhaps 40% charge about once a week, the rest of the time I charge overnight.

Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

14.8% of private cars in Norway are electric now, more than 25% if you include hybrids.

The only thing holding most people back from buying electric is the cost and that is why we have so many in Norway, at the moment they are exempt from the purchase taxes and annual fees that ICE cars must pay.

As a fellow European you are grossly overstating the convenience of electrics based on a very special experience of living in Norway.

Western Europe (where I live) relies on street parking and has very little capacity for overnight charging. I regularly see people camping out for chargers in mall parking lots. I can't imagine the situation is much different in urban Romania, Poland or Lithuania.

I wish we had a charging grid that allowed for most private cars to be electric without any range anxiety, but that's just not true right now. You might also wish for street parking to go away (I do) but that's not happening either.

It's still hard even in Germany and than you have broken charging stations on the Autobahn or fossil cars parking on charging spots (even though it's punishable now). Your employer won't have charging station at his place "because". You don't have one at home because you don't live in a house and so on.

We're seeing just another dividing line going through our society here. An fully electric car says a lot about your income. It's like a huge new IPhone everybody can see.

The first paragraph describes the situation in Norway that was like 5-6 years ago.

The second is less applicable in Norway due to zero tax policy on electric cars and like 100% in total taxes on ICE. So even 5 years ago it could be sensible to get an electrical car for a family with kids. Still at that time people complained in Oslo that electric cars were for the rich folk that got them as the second car to drive in bus lines and avoid traffic jams.

Unfortunately I don't believe much will change with the new German government as the green party gave away the Ministry of Transport to get the more prestigious Foreign Ministry....yeah.

Btw...did you see the new BMW SUV? So awesome!!111elf

> So awesome!!111elf Ha, I see what you did there! (elf is 11 in german)

A country gets the government it deserves.

Interesting thought... If those with higher income, who presumably can charge overnight, keep buying new electric cars, will the market for used electric cars saturate because others don't have this privilege (that much) and other infrastructure is not good enough yet?

We'll see about that. Right now most of them buy hybrids they never charge.

In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. In my western European city of ~100k people there's hundreds of such spots already. Capacity is rapidly being added too.

On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.

Sure, we have a few outdoor charging spots here in Lisbon as well. I can tell you exactly what will happen here:

-politicians made a big deal of building said spots when there were close to zero electric cars on the street. Many tv spots were bought. -people start buying electric cars en masse because hey, insfrastructure! Two free chargers per street! -no more easy PR to milk. Turns out scaling street charging will be expensive and bring no extra popularity. -Five years later, we'll still have two chargers per block but a hundred times more electric cars. Back to step zero.

Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need.

No the real infrastructure change we need are different urban zoning plans to eliminate single-use neighborhoods. We need to drastically cut down on commuting and switch to diffused co-working and telepresence.

> Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need. @zachkatz

Next downpour:

@imchillyb: ::waves to silly biker as I pass them:: Hey guys, pipe down, we're almost home.

@zachkatz: ::Grumbles about rain, snow, sleet, and more recently hail. Looks behind at Timmy, Sally, Sue, and the dog all miserably following them home; drenched and shivering-cold on their e-bikes, and dog's paws on wet-cold-concrete.

Glad you're gonna fight for that e-bike spot, I sure won't!

It rains more on average in the Netherlands than it does in the USA and the vast majority don't stop cycling. 30% of children under 12 ride their bikes to school year round in Oulu, Finnland, where it gets as cold as -30C. Cycling is faster, cheaper, healthier and even if you never want to ride a bike cycling infrastructure means less congestion for cars.

They are not a replacement for every situation, but they work amazingly well when they do. I don't think you are making a good faith argument here.

I've been in towns and cities all up and down the east coast of the US with my bike, and they range from absolutely terrible for any bike traffic (stroads everywhere) to fantastic. The biggest obstacle to bikes being more usable is simply not designing our infrastructure in the least human/bike friendly way possible.

I've been biking in -20oC, and it wasn't a big deal. You need the right clothing, but otherwise it's fine. Part of the issue is that people who drive never buy decent winter clothing.

That might apply more in Chicago than Lisbon, though.

So, wouldn’t building more then reap political benefits in that case?

Not when you have to ask people to pay for them. Which is why we haven't built a hospital or school in 10 years.

If putting the equivalent of a functioning high grade electrical socket in every parking space is a minor obstacle I don't want to see a major one.

How about removing millions of tons of certain gases out of the planetary air

We're not talking about Tesla Superchargers here, but things that let you charge overnight. On the scale of civil construction, it doesn't seem to be more difficult than highways, street lighting, sewers, etc.

I don't know where you live but I live in western Europe and almost every household owns a car that they park somewhere on the street. There almost no charging stations around. Now I just can't imagine a universe where every street has enough chargers for EVERY single household. That's just utopic.

Is there a gas pump for every street parked car? No. Contention for EV charging is trivial to charge with a combination of home, workplace, public parking, and street parking charging.

You don’t need a gas pump for every car because gassing up doesn’t take hours.

In many places there isn’t even enough street parking to reliably park your car every night. You often have to park illegally and wake up early to move the car before the ticket comes.

If there isn’t even enough parking how is there going to be enough overnight charging?

Are you telling me the car is never parked legally anywhere and is in constant motion?

Charging exclusively at fast DC chargers is feasible and done by many Tesla owners.

No I’m saying that “I will have a place to charge overnight every night” is unfeasible.

Whether that’s good enough depends on what you’re doing and your car’s range.

edit: I remember renting a Tesla once in San Francisco and when we got home with very low charge after a fun trip (on which we had to visit a random small town for an hour just to top up a little), we couldn’t find a place to charge. Everything the Tesla map showed was a locked garage with no public access. After a frustrating hour of searching and the car increasingly panicking at us about permanent damage, we resorted to going back to the only place we knew for sure it could charge – back where we rented it from.

We then ubered home for $20 and back to the Tesla next morning for another $20 (we rented for 3 days).

It was easily one of the frustratingest cars I ever rented.

If you're renting housing (with slowly increasing exceptions, mostly at higher end hotels and recently renovated apartments) this is a tough problem.

Fast DC chargers are still more than an order of magnitude slower than refueling an ICE car for an equivalent amount of travel.

It’s fast enough for Tesla to sell almost a million EVs a year and to be unable to build vehicles fast enough to keep up with demand. Those who argue the problems haven’t been solved are ignoring the very clear market forces demonstrating that they have been.

Sometimes my Tesla charges “too fast” (~20 min) and I have to move the vehicle before my shopping or rest stop is complete. It helps to colocate fast chargers at businesses people patron anyway (supermarkets, for example), where they’ll naturally take longer than the vehicle will take to charge. These are solved problems, it’s install and equipment colocating logistics at this point.

My point is that with current EVs you need to be able to overlap charging with other things. For those who can have a charger at home they can overlap charging with sleeping. For those who have chargers at work, they can overlap charging with work.

If there is parking lot charging where you shop you can overlap it with shopping, although most efforts I've seen in that direction only have a handful of charging spots. Maybe someday there will be enough of those spots that people who don't have home or work charging will be able to do much of the charging while shopping.

But as long as we are still at the stage where many people would have to specifically go to a charging place much like they currently refuel their ICE, the speed difference will be noticeable.

For a person that drives the average amount in the US it is about an hour a year sitting at gas stations vs about 11 hours a year sitting at fast charging stations.

(Of course there may be offsetting time savings. I believe some places allow EVs to use HOV lanes regardless of the number of passengers. If you have a solo commute during times of high traffic, the HOV lanes might save you more than 10 hours a year).

Why even bother charging when you could replace a loan battery at pump station ?

> In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago.

Will it? Every city parking spot in every city in the world potentially pulling ~220V @ ~60 amps overnight seems like an awful lot of electricity to generate, to say nothing of the expense of running all of the necessary cabling and charging stations. Are there cities actively implementing that strategy?

Why on earth would you need 60 A? My Model S add a kilometre for every amp-hour at 230 V. Charging from 18:00 to 06:00 adds 120 km at 10 A.

Residential streets already have cables for street lighting, adding extra cable or uprating the existing cable to support charging posts can use the same cable ducts.

Obviously it's not feasible to have every parking spot pull 13KW, they would need to coordinate to manage load.

The core thing is that you're assuming that every parked car arrives in the evening with near-zero charge and needs to be full in the morning. This is not the case, cars are parked 95% of the time. They can charge at work on in garages too - useful for solar power peak supply.

Let's do some napkin calculations: 95% = 1 hour per day of use for 23 hours of charging. Let's assume that's 100km drive in that 1 hour, 15Kwh for a typical EV. So on average you need 15/23=0.65KW per car, not 13KW. There's 285 million cars in the US, so you'd need 4.3 billion KWh per day for full electric. Currently US generates 11 billion KWh per day [3].

[1] https://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-tim... [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

> On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.

Copper wiring to deliver that power is expensive. It's also a really good theft target.

Everyone adding a mere window air conditioner is enough to cause new electric lines to be needed. Electric car charging is way worse than that.

Adding millions of chargers to city streets is an insane way to solve charger shortages.

It makes much more sense (and would be much cheaper) for the govt to mandate interchangeable batteries, so you could just go to a gas station and swap out a battery instead.

The stations already exist where you need them and only need one charger for all the batteries.

That would also remove range anxiety for me.

However, this will only work if batteries become smaller and more energy-dense - because they are huge and heavy, electric cars today are built around them. This causes two problems:

You can’t easily remove them because they’re big and have to be built into the structure of the car, and are sometimes lod-bearing, and each car model has a different shape of battery.

Drumwhirl.. Cue.. a robot-cabledrum, hiding beneath a manhole cover- they only come out at night to charge you - but hey at least they charge you for it.

friendly reminder: Norway represents Europe same way Alaska is representative of USA.

Well, nothing really is representative, is it?

Norway is a sparsely populated, thin country over a vast distance, and the northern half has some pretty harsh winter conditions.

Put another way: If Norway can, surely Germany and Spain can.

it's the opposite

I park on the street and live at the fourth floor, I can't charge overnight at home.

Even if there was a charging station, there are at least 100 other cars in the parking spots below my building. So you'd need dozens of them.

If Norway can, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Austria, etc have to solve a ton of problems Norway simply doesn't have.

Plenty of people living in Oslo have exactly the same problem. The fact that some, even many, people are unable to use something doesn't many that a large number of other people in the same country can't use it.

In my travels in Germany, France, Italy, I saw plenty of houses with off street parking. Not the majority of course but a significant minority.

> Plenty of people living in Oslo have exactly the same problem

Plenty of people in Oslo means the same population of one neighborhood of one big city like Rome, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, etc.

The entire Norway population would fit in Rome.

> I saw plenty of houses with off street parking

True, and those are the areas where generally infrastructure is lacking behind and you have to travel to a close town to find a gas station.

Really, Spain? The european country with one of the lowest number of houses and highest number of apartments.

I agree that "If Norway can, surely Germany and Spain can", however the population centers in Norway are relatively temperate (for Norway!) and relatively close together. I was quite surprised at how small and slow even major roads were.

I beg to disagree. South Europe is not like Norway: https://svedic.org/tech/daddy-did-you-really-need-electric-c...

A lot of that is bad preparation/understanding of an EV. They didn't plan well nor bring their charging cable on a road trip.

What's the infrastructure like in Norway for the car owners who live in flats? As others commented, it's not the range that is an issue( I could cross my entire country with one charge in most EVs) but rather the charging infrastructure. Also the purchasing power in more than half of Europe makes EVs prohibitively expensive.

At least in the capital it is unproblematic. The charging places on the streets that supplies at least 3KW are common, parking garages advertise that they have many charging places (one near me states over 100 spots for about 300 parking places in total), there are a lot of fast charges with at least 50KW chargers. Still you may need to park the car 500 meters or father from the apartment on unlucky day when all the spots nearby are taken.

On the other hand outside the cities the situation became worse during the last year based on my anecdotal observations. One may need to wait at charging stations for another car to leave. Clearly the pace of building those lags behind the number of cars.

> Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

Yes, hardly anyone needs 600 miles, but if you can't find a place to charge overnight, boom, you wake up to 80 kilometers left in your charge, and you need to find a fast charger somewhere in the vicinity, and high chances are, it wil be occupied by other cars.

You grossly overestimate availability of chargers in Europe (or anywhere, for that matter)

I think you’re grossly underestimate the availability of chargers in Europe.

They’re far more common than people expect, but you won’t see them unless you’re looking for them. 90% of the chargers are just posts with a cable, or just little black box on a lamppost with a socket. (There’s about 5 within a 10min walk of flat in London, that are hardly used)

Certainly it can be tricky in more rural areas, but if you’re spending most of your time around towns and cities you’ll be fine. If you live rural you’ll have the space to install your own private charger.

> but you won’t see them unless you’re looking for them.

I was looking for them when I had an EV over an extended weekend. Availability of chargers, especially fast chargers is grossly overestimated.

> (There’s about 5 within a 10min walk of flat in London, that are hardly used)

So, I zoomed in on Trafalgar Square (using PlugShare). Within a 10 minute walk from there:

- there are ~40 available plugs

- of those 40, 9 are fast chargers

- of those 40, 12 are non-Type-2/non-CCS compatible (1 is fast ChaDeMo, so if you're type 2, it's one connector less)

So, yeah. Whichever "10 minute walk" you chose situation will be the same.

> Certainly it can be tricky in more rural areas,

Define "more rural areas". I live 20 minutes away from Stockholm. I'll let you guess how many chargers there are within a "10 minute walk" from a suburb which is mostly apartment buildings.

Here's a representative suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@59.2855172,17.9568074,3a,75y,21...

And it's the same everywhere. Here's Coulommiers, 1 hour outside Paris. Population, 14 thousand people: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8206163,3.0939561,3a,75y,115...

There's definitely plenty of space to "install own chargers", right? ;)

Right now EVs are in the same place where cars ini general where over a 100 years ago: toys for sufficiently rich early adopters who can afford to deal with all the issues.

Oh, wow, five chargers in 1000m of walking in London.

You right, I should have said 5 chargers within a 3 min walk of my flat. I couldn't count all the chargers within 1km of my flat, there's too many.

I used to live in different town. One way trip 160km. Mix of freeway and highway. Could charge at work there. No such luck at other end. My cheap b-segment car managed trip both ways and some weeks of regular use with one tank.

But I have read from news that electric-cars can't do similar round-trip all the way at highway speeds. So in addition to having find charging point somewhere, I would have had to spend extra half-an-hour driving slower... Not to even think of winter case...

And no public-transport would be even slower than electric car with some charging...

Considering that you can (slowly) charge an EV even with a normal socket, this overnight road trip problem seems vastly overstated to me. A socket and cable reel you should be able to scrounge up anywhere you can reach on asphalted roads.

I live in an appartment, as do many others. Good luck reeling your cable from the 4th floor to your car which is 100m away and with a sidewalk between. Even if you can do it, not sure whether you will get fined for it.

Others have brought up how unlikely it is to find a parking space close enought to an apartment building (you know, the kind of place the vast majority of people live in, at least in Europe). There's also the matter of charging 30 cars at the same time from the electrical infra designed for an apartment building - I very much doubt adding this type of load would be safe.

Cute that you think everyone can find parking in front of their apartment and that the cable won't be a trip and fire hazard.

To counter all the whataboutism in the replies to your comment, I just wanted to say that I live in a flat in central Berlin and park on the street, and charging or range have never been actual issues. My car use consists of trips around Berlin and Germany, driving to rural Finland and back, regularly towing a trailer, etc.

>Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

I could do with a 200km range for my daily commute, but I also have a camping trailer that I'd like to use at least once every year for a 1000km+ trip. This is just not feasible with the current generation of EVs. I could imagine loading up the camping trailer with batteries to give me that 1000+ km range, though that will increase the weight and recharging at the destination is usually impossible.

This isn't the convenient answer we want, but I keep thinking that personally I should invest in a vehicle that suits 90% of my transportation needs, and plan to rent for the other 10%. It is likely the better financial approach, although it's definitely not a silver bullet.

The issue with that approach is that renting is a lot more expensive than owning a car long-term. Something like 4x. This means that the small car you buy should be at least 40% cheaper than the car you would originally have bought and are now renting 10% of the time.

At that price difference you are probably giving up on a lot more than just range and towing capacity for your daily driver.

But how can people living in cities charge their cars overnight? Does each private garage spot have it's own electricity meter?

In Amsterdam when you have an EV you can ask the city to install a new charging point near you: https://oplaadpuntaanvragen.amsterdam.nl/

Also EV owners are spoiled in several other ways: https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/parking/electric-charging/

Use charging point in the street, if it a communal or private garage install a charging point.

A basic charging point capable of charging a car and accurately measuring consumption for the purpose of charging costs about $700.

Electricity meters are extremely simple and cheap devices. There’s literally nothing probative about installing one in every parking space. While your at it, might as well integrate a proper car charger.

nothing excet economics. And I'm not talking only about the huge cost of having 1 charging point for each parking space, but I doubt current utitlity pole lines can handle the power needed to charge every car so every city must invest in completly new Electric infrastructure too.

I seriously doubt putting a charing point in every parking space is that expensive. We don't struggle to install lamp posts, or connect up houses. The cables are already there, you just need to tap into them. In the case of a lamp post that's trivial to do.

Certainly capacity is a bit of a worry. But there are simple solutions to that as well. Offer cheaper charging, but you guarantee that you'll get X KWh between 8pm and 8am, but don't specify exactly which hours. Then just have the chargers load share, only having 20%-30% of cars charging at any one time, and changing which cars are charging to make sure that everyone get's their allocated KWhrs, and the grid isn't overloaded.

This a feature that pretty much every commercial charger already supports. It's basically a standard feature to gang a bunch of chargers together, give them a shared power budget, and then let them either queue cars, and limit charging rates, to remain within the power budget.

And even then, the cost of all this infrastructure is minuscule compared to cost of climate change defences and remediation. To claim this infrastructure is too expensive is penny wish, pound foolish. Finally there's already a bunch of companies installing these chargers, its gonna be a god damn gold rush. EV are inevitable, the companies that own the physical infrastructure are gonna make bank. Just like telecom and electricity companies did.

Why does it need to be overnight though. Cars are also parked 9-5 when people are at work easily long enough for a full charge also with the added benefit of cars getting charged with solar in many places. As more electric cars get on the road the charging infrastructure will get built. At night charging will get expensive in the future as more electric cars and start charging at night.

People living in cities don't need cars. At least, that should be the goal.

If you live in a city you shouldn't be using cars.

Doesn't it get cold in Norway? I live in the Upper Midwest of the U.S. In our colder months, the range of a Tesla can drop in nearly half.

Do you know this from first hand experience? Or is it just something you heard somewhere? It is certainly not my experience of my 2015 Model S 70D. If it is really cold (-20C) and I am doing short journeys (so the battery never gets warm) then it might drop by 25%.

74% :P https://electrek.co/2021/12/03/norway-again-shows-all-electr...

I think we started to pay some of the annual fees last year. Your insurance probably increased a little bit because of that.

In America 600 miles is a short road trip.

Haha, while relatively common, I wouldn't call it "short". That's like going from SoCal all the way to Norcal, or Atlanta to Miami. 10+ hours of driving.

And for anybody reading, Norcal in this example does not mean San Francisco, which is ~350 miles driving from Los Angeles. Driving 600-700 miles would be going from Los Angeles to the Oregon border or San Diego to Redding in far Northern California...

I bet you live in Southern Norway.

Good luck driving electric in the North.

Also. Electric cars are slow.... Good luck holding 120 kph with an electric and not watch the battery melt.

I know several people that live "in the north" that have BEV. They seem to be doing fine.

I regularly drive for 4 hours straight on highway speeds on a single charge. The battery doesn't melt. I don't know where you get that idea from, certainly not reality.

I bet you don't live in Norway at all and I also doubt that you have first hand experience of driving an EV. My battery doesn't melt at 120 kph nor does it melt at 240 kph on the autobahn.

Good electric cars are not slow any more than good ICE cars are slow. If you don't think EVs can handle 120kph perhaps you should visit California. I quite regularly hold 140kph, it's simply not an issue.

By the way, where are you going 120kph? I think I averaged 80kph between Bergen and Oslo. I was shocked at how slow typical road speeds are in Norway.

I think general familiarity is a bigger factor.

The news won't stop when some technical or economic barrier is passed (which I'd argue has already happened) but when people generally believe it to be true.

But the news won't stop, because battery, motor, charging innovations now have an even bigger market and even more people will be working on it. They'll just change from "this is the breakthrough that makes EV practical" to "this innovation will make your already more than adequate EV even better and cheaper in a relentless progress of technology".

The petrolhead press will never stop criticizing electric cars until their range is 10 times that of a comparable weight of gasoline, and then they will choose some new strawman to battle, like cobalt or grid capacity or whatever. These guys are not interested in a fair conversation.

I wish that government electric car subsidies would be retargeted at cheap cars. I want to drive an electric economy car, not a luxury car. Here in Switzerland, we kind of have that: subsidies are in the form of a 99% reduction in road tax, so that every year you get a subsidy, flashy car or boring car. I'd like to see the kind of people who have to flash their cash (ahem, Tesla buyers) pay for moderate income car owner's road taxes.

> The petrolhead press will never stop criticizing electric cars

No. The petrolhead press praises today's EVs for what they're strong at (acceleration) and correctly criticizes them for what they're (generally) weak at (price, range, charge time). When EV's come along with strong range like the Mercedes EQS and the Lucid Air they are rightly praised for their range.

> and then they will choose some new strawman to battle

No. This is just a strawman of your own.

The cheapest car is the one you never change or replace. Subsidizing buying new cars is not environment friendly at all, its just consumerism.

People who say "electric cars are good enough now, the median distance driven is just 20km anyway" act as if that's a good thing.

If you use an electric car only for a commute, why not commute by bicycle or by bus? Why buy an electric car at all if you only ever drive short distances? Why not take the train if you are going long distance only four times a year?

Why even buy a new car then?

Public transport is never going to provide a comprehensive point-to-point network, and every switch dramatically increases the cost (in terms of time, effort, and finances). The only way it can be remotely viable for commuting is if your city is organized into a hub-and-spoke model where everyone commutes into the same city core.

But that gets you very congested stations (great for occasions like COVID!), and is murder for a city's social life (since you're more than doubling the cost of visiting friends). I know, because I live in a city^Hhellscape designed like this...

Bikes, you say? Well, my old 20km commute took around an hour by ebike, around twice the time of the car. And that was an unpleasant experience in the best case, that got virtually unviable with weather (rain, leaves, ice, whatever else). And again, unviable for socializing since nobody I'm visiting is going to have an ebike charger (nor is it guaranteed that I'd be staying there long enough for it to work).

Public transit can be organized much better than that. There need not be one hub in a city for example. Sure it will never cover 100% if all cases well, but it can cover enough to get the majority of the people to not have a car at all.

Most of the leaders of transit systems are not interested in good transit though. (The exceptions don't speak good English from what I can tell )

> There need not be one hub in a city for example.

That's not a solution, that's just moving to another point on the continuum between the downsides of hub-and-spoke and the downsides of point-to-point.

And this kind of hub bifurcation typically only serves to make residential-to-residential journeys even worse, setting up social barriers based on which hubs people have easy access to.

> The exceptions don't speak good English from what I can tell

Can't really respond to this if you're not interested in citing which "good" example you'd like to see emulated.

the ultimate spoke location is a grid system with hubs every block, and a larger grid with express stoos every few blocks, with a still larger grid... no city in the world comes close to the population to support that.

Mass transport is a compromise to serve the masses well, but there are always losers in the compromise. Residential to residential is general the hardest to serve because other land uses value the easier to get to places far more.

There are many different cities with different constraints. They have pick different answers to the compromise. South Korea, France, Japan, and Switzerland just to name 4 very different systems that are fairly good. Each have things to learn from each other.

When you're buying a car, you're buying optionality for personally controlled mobility that's comfortable, immediately available, weather proof and able to carry people and cargo - even if you regularly take public transport, there can be major benefits to this.

Today, i live in a modern mega city were this kind of facility is available at any time of the day with a wait time of < 10 mins although i have a few situations a year where I've had to cancel appointments because i just couldn't get a cab. These instances are few enough that I don't bother with owning a car.

However in my previous city, many of these conditions were simply not true - so I had a car and because it was a low cost of living country, a driver too from the time we were expecting our first child to minimise the strain and uncertainty of chaotic traffic and parking. I used to get dropped at a convenient public transport point in a way that minimised my total commute time.

Where my parents and cousins live, most of these conditions are not true and they're forced to own a car.

As another example, in Japan, a very large proportion of households own a car for the optionality even though most commute via train to work because the places they live in don't have the facilities.

Today's new cars are tomorrow's used cars.

...that is, provided that said new cars are built with longevity in mind instead of planned obsolescence. Targeting subsidies toward EVs that maximize user-repairability and mandating right-to-repair would hopefully encourage that.

Today's new cars only become tomorrow's new cars if the owners keep buying new cars.

The purpose should be to make car manufacture a smaller industry, and have people buy a car once every, say, 20-40 years, using the same car in between.

EVs are not made at all to be repaired by their users. Today's new cars become tomorrow's junk.

Hence the entire second paragraph of the comment above.

My local Hyundai dealer told me that buying a new car every 6 months is the cheapest way to own an EV right now.

Sounds like something someone motivated to sell cars would say.

Even with subsidies, that first leg of depreciation is the steepest slope. Like I don't see how that beats just buying and owning it.

Supply is so constrained now (and was even before the chip shortage) that it can take up to a year to get a new car delivered, this changes the depreciation curve a bit.

Of course their incentives might be a bit different than yours are. ;)

With opex being so much lower for electric, I’ll believe they pay for themselves when corporate fleets become all electric on new fleet additions (e.g. delivery drivers/taxis).

Right now; they seem to be going for hybrids.

If they can’t make the economic case for electric, I don’t know how anyone that drives 1/5th or 1-10th as much can.

> delivery drivers/taxis

I suspect that is an unfair comparison. Electric cars often don't make sense for high duty cycle uses, or for long distance driving around town during the time they are active. Every minute waiting for a charge is a minute the vehicle is slack and wasting the driver's time.

Overnight charging works for lower km commuters, depending on specifics of opex and capex.

There are not enough range anxious people to continue to keep ICE manufacturers going. It's more a question of when production stops rather than if. There are a few holdouts of course that might last until they actually get banned on most roads. But for most manufacturers that is going to be a lot sooner than they are hoping right now.

That will no doubt upset some ICE vehicle owners with enough disposable income that they could feasibly be targeted with a lucrative product that appeals to them. Good news is that cars with 600 miles and 10 minute recharge to 300 mile (50%) are totally feasible!

E.g. the hummer that GM is rumored to be working on will apparently have 200kwh. Of course it has the weight of a Tank and the aerodynamics of barn door, so it might not be enough to get to 600 miles.

If Tesla ever puts that kind of battery in a Tesla it would probably end up with close to 1000 mile range and they would need to make it a bit bigger. That's 20 hours non stop driving at 50 miles an hour. Absolutely nobody should be doing that. But you could build a car that does that. That's a about 3x what they currently put in a model 3 (75kwh). It will be a bit heavier of course so maybe not 3x the range. But you get my point. Solvable problem for people with money.

For the rest of us normal people, take a break & plug in, go to the bathroom, eat some lunch, stretch your legs, relax, etc. After the 300+ miles that you can get with a few decent EVs that's probably a good idea. It's not the end of the world.

> There are not enough range anxious people to continue to keep ICE manufacturers going.

True in some smaller countries, but in places like the United States it’s very common for people to do a road trip occasionally to visit family or go on vacation.

Stopping for a 30-60 minute charge a couple times per trip isn’t terrible, but it would mean that my annual family visit would become a 2-day drive instead of a 1-day drive. I can deal with that, but many people aren’t ready for it.

I doubt we’ll see gigantic batteries going into small cars for ridiculous range. The efficiency hit would be too large due to the extra weight. I think fast charging and a fast charging network is what we need.

But charging networks are the real issue at this point. They’re out there, but interoperability issues means the various networks often don’t work as fast as they claim or maybe not at all with your car. Range anxiety is bad enough, but when you can’t even be sure the charging station will work when you get there it’s a different level of worry altogether.

I assume there are plenty of poorer people in nations with poorer electric infrastructure to keep ICE manufacturing going for a long time. At least a couple decades.

The more fossil fuel consumption drops in developed countries, the cheaper fossil fuels get, which would then allow people who currently cannot afford fossil fuels to buy them and replace demand.

>Imho it's 600+ miles on a single charge, with a 300m recharge in 10 minutes.

In my opinion the Battery equation is already solved. Even for those who are at the end of longer driving range curve, we have a solid and realistic roadmap of battery technology. Pick Tesla tabless battery for example. It isn't Solid Battery like Holy Grail Battery, but it gets to the point where even if you are somewhat skeptical of EV, surely this is edging close to good enough?

People often confuse range anxiety with battery capacity. I dont think that is strictly true. It is one of these things where engineers would come in and suggest we need bigger battery to solve our customer's problem. But here is an product person POV, what if you have fast charging station everywhere. From your car pack living in cities, to packing in a mall or pubic parking space. This is similar to charging smartphones. Once you can charge your smartphone even dinning in Restaurants or on a Bus. You dont get nervous about running out of battery.

So as many comment have suggested, the biggest obstacle to EV isn't battery, is the abundance of Charging station. And given I actually believe City transport in the future should be micro mobility, whether that is e-bike or something else we have yet imagined, we need charging port for both bike and EV. And this needs some government planning.

While this is all good discussion, I really wish we focus more on silicon carbide :)

I wonder why they didn't jump straight to 300mm and only upgraded to 200mm wafers. They could have completely cornered the market with better economy of scale.

For me personally, it is 500km range under bad conditions, i.e., 120km/h speed and in winter. Alternatively 300km range added in about 15mins. Make such a stop after three hours anyway.

You forgot to say that you need to pull a boat on a trailer and that you go uphill both ways. As they say, if an electric car can't do that, then they are not viable to anyone.

Towing is currently tedious with EVs. Not much range, not many chargers with pull through parking:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/43320/how-an-electric-rivian-r...

Just more pull through parking at chargers would help a lot.

Right. The current 300 mile target is fine for cities or more dense regions. But I routinely drive around 250 miles with large uphills regions in weather that requires AC. The uphill parts are like a 2x range cost compared with the rest.

And you drive that much without taking a break?

In terms of parking at a charger, yes I drive that without taking a break. I mean I’m going shopping “in the city”. But that city only has one or two fast chargers for EVs and they’re very much out of the way and a little crime ridden for my comfort. We’ve also got a whole charging station going to waste apparently because it broke shortly after being built and not being brought back up.

This isn’t what the future looks like if we’re replacing ICE vehicles with electrics. A driver needs to be able to pull into just about any commercial parking lot and find a fast charger. The most obvious would be wiring up the big box and grocery stores with fast chargers. But I’ve seen maybe a handful of those across three states.

Oh btw I’m talking only about the US. It should be a known that the distances in the west US easily exceed those in the northeast and Europe on average.

> This isn’t what the future looks like if we’re replacing ICE vehicles with electrics. A driver needs to be able to pull into just about any commercial parking lot and find a fast charger. The most obvious would be wiring up the big box and grocery stores with fast chargers. But I’ve seen maybe a handful of those across three states.

Can you drive into just about any commerical parking lot and find a gas station to fill up with? We certainly need a much denser network of fast charging than exist today. But we don't even need to achieve the same density as our current gas refueling infrastructure because many people will be able to charge at home overnight. At some point apartment complexes will start to provide charging station for some or most of their residents.

Remember most people will only need to charge to full once or twice a week.

250 miles without breaks is not a big challenge.

I routinely drove 400-500 kms without stopping when I toured Europe.

Once on the highway you only have to go straight, anybody can do that.

The only secret is to not make it a strict rule, if you feel like stopping, just stop.

It's actually unsafe. You have never been exposed to the communication campaign about taking breaks for safety ? You for example can see signs about this on the French motorways.

it's unsafe if you don't stop when you feel the need to stop.

Also: never drive long distances alone.

I worked as a roadie in the music business, and I would never put in danger the 5-6 sometimes 9 people I had in the van with me, with all the equipment.

I just drive at a regular pace around 100 kms/h and use the cruise control whenever possible

I also set the limiter to something below the speed limit, to remind me to not go too fast (sometimes you find yourself speeding without even noticing because the road allows you to)

I never drove more than ~5 hours straight and of course it all depends on the road conditions, crossing the Italian Alps toward Austria with snow it's not the same as cruising on German highways (where there's always some kind of fixing going on, so you aren't really going that fast)

All in all the safest safety device right now is the human driving.

But modern safety technologies are more than welcome , you can set a safety distance from the car in front of you, they follow the lines on the road so they actually can correct you if you make a mistake or are distracted, it got a lot better than the 90s where I drove my dad's car for 9 hours from my house to go snowboarding on the Alps. We were a gang of four and took turns.

It's a 4-5 hour drive. Yes, you may take a break (I do), but it will be liek a half-hour break, at most, and most available chargers (if they are available, in Europe), will give you what? 10 miles extra in that time?

Add extra weight (luggage) or anything external (skis/snowboard on the roof rack), and boom, your effective range in an electric vehicle has gone down by a factor of 1.5 or more

Depends on the EV and the conditions of course but you can charge quite a lot during half an hour. Probably more than half a the range. It may actually be faster to do two shorter breaks with the current technology.

> you can charge quite a lot during half an hour.

Strictly depeds on the charger. Where I live, the vast majority of chargers are slow chargers, and all fast ones are usually occupied.

> you may take a break (I do), but it will be liek a half-hour break, at most, and most available chargers (if they are available, in Europe), will give you what? 10 miles extra in that time?

Depends on the charger and the car. Ionity's chargers are 350 kW:

https://ionity.eu/en/design-and-tech.html

And, for example, cars on Hyundai's E-GMP platform (currently Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Genesis GV60) can charge 10 to 80% in 18 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J46mG7I78Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCqcqy29ZCc

The Kia EV6's WLTP range is 528km so 80% of that is 422km. If we say the real world highway range is more like 400km then 80% would be 320 km.

> Ionity's chargers are

And their availability is?

Excellent. And they're not the only DC fast charging provider. There's FastNed, EnBW, Allego, etc. Even Tesla has started to open their chargers to all makes (only 10 sites in the Netherlands so far).

Define "excellent". As in "available to anyone at anytime at short notice"?

Nothing is available to anyone at anytime at short notice, except possibly disappointment.

Here are examples of some of the best charging stations in Europe and the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK2shbCwDYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yra3AsicSRY

> Nothing is available to anyone at anytime at short notice

Funny. When I drive a regular car, gas stations are available all the time, at short notice. With a throughput of possibly hundreds of cars an hour.

Nope.

Fuel shortage: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/fuel-shortage-uk...

Fuel shortage: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59059093

Fuel shortage: https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/canadian-province-exten...

Fuel shortage: https://www.ibtimes.com/diesel-shortage-amid-soaring-prices-...

Things are tough all over in the real world.

> Nope

Yup

> Fuel shortage

Ah yes. Extraordinary short-term events affecting only some regions vs. chronic shortage of available fast chargers pretty much everywhere.

Yup, same thing.

> Extraordinary short-term events

You picked the conditions of the contest, son. You claimed "available to anyone at any time at short notice".

You were straight up wrong. Deal with it.

It's not a contest, and I didn't pick conditions for it. This is called a reality.

This all started with a discussion of a long trip. The reality is that, at best, EVs require you to do very careful planning with potentially lengthy breaks regardless of "excellent coverage" and exuberant youtube ads of "best charging stations".

If your grand insight is that charging infrastructure is still being built out then that's no insight at all. New stations are going in daily.

Look, if you're too afraid to think about EVs now then the best advice is not to worry about it. Live in the happy tail as a late adopter. By then all the decisions will have been made for you and you won't have to think.

> Look, if you're too afraid to think about EVs

Ah yes. "Son", "deal with it", "afraid to think about EVs", a couple of Youtube vidoes. The grand arguments of a person who pretends they have any arguments.

No one is "afraid to think about EVs". Those who actually think about EVs see what they are, and all the problems they have right now. Good luck to early adopters, come back when you have more arguments than those listed above.

But you plainly are afraid, kid. You've done nothing but argue dishonestly. You set a ridiculous standard that not even gas stations meet and you think you've discovered something. You haven't.

EVs are here now, they work, and they're getting better year by year. No amount of whining from you will change that.

Who says that? Most people don’t pull trailers

People against EVs. Though they are less and less vocal. People do love trailers in Norway. It's actually a very important car feature, even though they need to pull a trailer once a year on average.

You don't need to be against EVs to be concerned about range. You can be pro EV and still be anxious that current ones won't fit your life situation. Let's not polarize unnecessarily.

The problem is that the range arguments are always brought as if they were a general use case. Most people will have maybe 1 or 2 trips a year that go over 500km in one trip. They still insist on buying a car for being able to do that trip, instead of buying a car for their general use case and renting a car for that one trip (if really necessary). Similar arguments for being able to transport 7 people, pulling a trailer, going off road etc.. People hardly ever need this they still buy cars because of this capability. Even disregarding electric cars, it doesn't make any economic sense.

Getting any type of car is a type of luxury and likely does not make any economic sense for most drivers today: taxi, rentals, airplanes, trains and other public transport can probably take average family through 10 years for the average price of the new car they are buying (I am ignoring the fact that most people are buying used, but that argument does not help the relatively new EV industry).

It only makes economic sense for those that need a car for their work (taxis, delivery, lots of client meetings...), and that's where electric cars already have an economic advantage. So the "economic sense" is not the reason people buy cars in the first place, but instead convenience it affords them.

I'd love to get an electric car for my city driving, but considering what car my family can fit into, it'd have to be something like an Ioniq 5 at 50K€. And if it was available at that price range 2 years ago when I was getting a new car (still significantly cheaper than Ioniq5), maybe I just would have bit the bullet. But I had to perhaps spend 100K€ on a Tesla or 80k€ on a Jaguar I-pace just to get a comparatively sized car back then.

Renting a car for those one or two trips can be pretty expensive, especially in the travel season, when cars are mostly gone quickly (on top of a cost of an electric car vs. a petrol car). You also have to plan ahead and those impromptu long-weekend trips are now suddenly much harder.

But anyway, we WILL get there. The fact that there are enough people willing to live through the inconveniences caused by EVs today means that infrastructure will get on par, and then none of us will have an excuse.

But pretending that these are not inconveniences in a tool most people get for their convenience does not help anyone.

True, but usually people asking for a lot of range are looking for arguments to dismiss EVs. It's very few people who actually need more range than what is offered today, assuming you have a charging network developed where you drive.

In my experience this dismissive attitude you're talking about used to be much more common 5 years ago than it is now. Many people today want to go electric but are concerned about their own use case, and their expressions of range anxiety are personal concerns, not points of virtue. The way to ease them into it is to be a good role model, not to debated them on absolute terms. The paradigm has changed for the better.

In my experience most people do pull trailers. It is a 1% use case, but they have a SUV instead of a sedan or two vehicles for a few 1% cases.

At least two Tesla models have towing options (Models X and Y). Hills are not a big problem because you get some of the energy back when you go downhill again. The real issue is the air resistance of whatever you're towing, which you cannot regenerate. To mitigate this you drive slower and accept some range decrease.

I think it‘s an understandable demand, no reason for snark. It‘s just that I want to replace my ICE and that‘s how I use it.

You know that drops your range in a gas car too, right?

Yes, but the full-range refill takes only a few minutes, and generally at a station that has room for you to refuel while a trailer is attached.

There's still a ways to go.

> Alternatively 300km range added in about 15mins.

Doesn't that already exist in cars that consumers already have? Can't the Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan, and all of the new Teslas (and probably more I'm not thinking of) all do that?

I wonder not so much about retail customers as commercial ones. The Hertz-Tesla deal is spectacular, but what about all those dirty diesel Transit vans? Container trucks? The latter in particular need to manage the 8-10h maximum legal shift of a driver with a full load.

Maybe it's less about range than having charging available everywhere.

Well the range is shorter, towing anything reduces range further, charging is slow, few gas stations support electric, the initial car price is higher and I'm sure there are other arguments as well.

Serious answer I've heard many times. For anyone on the coast from Texas to Florida, it means being able to evacuate a hurricane. This means the possibility of sitting in traffic for 12 hours to travel 300 miles.

Good point. It is comforting to have access to a backup ICE car.

The other thing you can get burned with is to forget to charge before a trip. If so, it’s about an hour detour to drive to super charger, wait and get back.

In the US I've driven several cross country trips (multi-thousand miles) in a Tesla with 300 miles of range. It's not only not a big deal; it's the most comfortable touring car I've ever owned.

If you stick to interstates, recharging at superchargers is easy. If you travel on smaller roads you have to plan more carefully to find destination chargers, RV parks, etc along the way but so far that hasn't been a problem for me.

Granted I recharge in my garage so I can commute locally without ever needing to think about range, but for purposes of long-distance driving I think range anxiety is an overblown issue, at least for Teslas in the US.

Looking at the trip I took over Thanksgiving, there are 3 Superchargers on the route, 2 of which I would pretty much have to stop at. The 3rd one is more than 300 miles from the start, and the second one is more than 200 miles from the destination. So 2 stops, 10-15 minutes each. One stop is several miles from the freeway on a busy town road, which isn't bad, but another 10-15 minutes. The other stop is very close to the freeway, so pretty much just charge time.

The largest gaps between gas stations on that trip are probably 20 or 30 miles.

I would describe the Supercharging trip as very doable, but it requires following ~1 available plan vs just stopping when it is convenient (for a bathroom break or snack or whatever).

Yeah, planning is key. We do a Bay Area to Central California trip regularly and there is no super charger at destination, nor is there one close enough on the way back along the route, so you can’t drive there and back and land at a super charger on the route. And if you use the car (or just let it sit) some power is drained at destination.

Charging on the way there just doesn’t feel right since we have enough juice to get there and everyone is anxious to reach destination, but it’s the only way to ensure we don’t have to take a detour at some point.

We solved this by getting an adapter so we can charge at their house using their dryer plug.

Yes, these are completely first world problems but it adds just enough hassle I could see some people just wanting to use an ICE car to make the trip.

We carry a full set of adapters including NEMA 14-50 and TT-30 so we can charge at state parks and RV parks along the route. We also have a nice air mattress so we can sleep in the Model Y overnight while the car charges. This is quite comfortable in a Tesla because you have climate control while you sleep. Probably not a viable option if you have kids but it works well for two people.

Agreed. Tesla touring requires more planning than touring in an ICE car. But the car itself (and the Plugshare app) helps with the planning process. I enjoy planning; some people might not. In general I find the supercharger locations occur at about the right interval for a pee break and a leg stretch, and more superchargers are being added all the time.

I don't think it needs any new inventions, only wider rollout of what we can do already: fast DC chargers.

Current EVs need a 20 min charge per 3 hours of driving. It may not be ideal for pee-in-a-bottle cannonball racers, but IMHO it's entirely reasonable for most people. It's approaching a point of diminishing returns.

Compare this with charging of smartphones vs brick phones. Daily charging used to be considered a dealbreaker, but fast charging made it a no-big-deal, and people got used to it.

Depends, if you don’t toad trip much in a huge geography like the usa or australia, and have a house, range is already solved.

Range is solved. The issue now is charger density. In some more remote places you may have to go 50 miles to find a charger. Same thing was probably an issue for gas cars a long time ago and it solved itself when gas stations became profitable everywhere.

You can’t fill up a ICE car at home, so the density will be less as a result.

I know people all can’t charge at home and street parking is a thing, so it seems like 400+ mile range and 10 minute fill ups 10 minute away will be needed.

this will vary a lot by region. some places are more densely populated than others. looking up regional statistics of average trip length and percentiles (like the length of 95% of trips) could give some objective metrics to complement what might be primarily psychological / behavioral hangups

I think what would really clinch this is not creating gargantuan batteries but simply making batteries universal plug-n-play. So if needed you just stop a battery station and replace it.

This solves also the unfortunate bottleneck of everybody charging their batteries during night-time, which (last time I checked) is when the sun is not shinning...

I do think that the required range is much less, especially with fast recharge. What is required is to have more people actually drive electric cars and of course make sure, that there are enough recharging spots.

And trasform into electricity all the energy that we deliver as gasoline and diesel now.

That could come from burning oil (probably new power plants) or from solar or whatever (new infrastructure anyway.)

Depends on the available charging infrastructure. If you can go 6-7 hours without passing a fast charger and it’s -20C outside then you need the equivalent of a 60L diesel tank (1000km range) to manage.

In city driving somewhere from 200 to 300 miles will be enough. For long trips, charge time is important and can be reduced by using higher voltage batteries. 10 minutes is still out of reach.

We did 400 miles / hour at super charger just recently on a 2018 car, so 100km in 10 mins. Yes, not there, but getting closer. 2x better than where it was a few years ago.

That's 1000 km. Which is much farther than any gasoline powered car with a full tank.

Range anxiety will stop being a thing when electric vehicles are common and nobody thinks of them a something special. It's a matter of social acceptance, and the infrastructure that follows.

You can always find a gas station that will get you going within 10 minutes, so it’s a different consideration when charging is hard.

Driving an EV would be terribly annoying if I didn’t have a charger at home, but I know people that rely on super charging to keep their car going (have free super charging given early Tesla adopter).