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.
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 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.
Btw...did you see the new BMW SUV? So awesome!!111elf
On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.
-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.
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!
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.
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?
Charging exclusively at fast DC chargers is feasible and done by many Tesla owners.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
At that price difference you are probably giving up on a lot more than just range and towing capacity for your daily driver.
Also EV owners are spoiled in several other ways: https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/parking/electric-charging/
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.