> So why not smooth it out? Put another battery in the charger which slowly replenishes.

There are 1.4B vehicles one earth, the plan apparently is to replace them all with battery powered vehicles

I don't think people understand the scale of this and how many batteries we can produce and recycle given the limited resources we have.

> 1.4B vehicles one earth

Most of which spend approximately 90% of their time stationary and unoccupied.

I've never seen an empty gas station during the day in my city.

You can't have batteries to charge batteries, then you'd need batteries to charge the batteries charging the batteries. All of that because we simultaneously decided that nuclear was bad and all we need is windmills, which are like the worst thing to power a fully electric world with high demand peaks, and to move from gas to electric cars

Adding batteries won't solve any problem. Gas allowed us to live unsustainably and made it easy to do so. Wanting to replicate that with electricity/batteries is plain stupid.

If everyone needs three tonnes of steel and their own body weight in rare earth material to cover 30km per day on average we're totally fucked from the get go

Locally, the same 90%. It's no use sharing a car with someone who needs to commute somewhere else at the same time, you need to share it with non-conflicting use.

Another battery is another 10-15% loss of efficiency, which makes charging 10-15% more expensive. Far better in most situations to distribute the spike it to the grid.

But then we need to wait for the charging station to charge. How many of those batteries would a charging station need to ensure continuous service?

Likely we'll see such a system with electric motorcycles (and similar categories) first, which is like a "small scale" version due to the smaller battery capacity & size.

E.g. Honda is working on it: http://www.honda-mpp.com/in/

It doesnt need to completely disconnect from the grid, just smooth the load as much as is economicallly useful. A load that is already statistically smoothed by multiple cars charging at once, arriving and leaving at different, but statistically predictable, times.

And people are already attaching batteries to the grid to earn money by smootging supply and demand, it just makes sense to locate those near to demand so they can share cables. Then to the grid the car charger station looks like a consistent energy user that can flex a little to help the grid (possibly even feeding back during peaks), rather than a random one.