Logistics. A petrol station can fill up any single isolated car or truck really fast, but when the local supply is gone, it can only be returned via a delivery truck (unless I'm very wrong and they have pipes direct to refineries?)
An electric charger can recharge one car battery much slower than a tank can be refilled, but the grid can be approximated as "not running out" over that kind of timescale.
I'm not sure which would be better for mass evacuations in practice, especially given traffic jams are where EVs excel.
Having wireless tech that can charge that fast would be even better. Maybe get on a little conveyer belt similar to an automated carwash and by the time you exit, you have 50 more miles than before. Hell, imagine these things running parallel to a road like a pit lane on a racetrack. Move on the track for 5 minutes, then they turn around and grab cars going the opposite direction.
Seems pretty inefficient and probably a logistical nightmare, but it would be cool to see it work!
Now doing this in a portable way is the difficult part. There are a few trucks now that can do 7-10 kW output to charge cars, but that's only about 30-40 miles of range per hour, which is still quite slow. But it might be enough to top you up for 15-20 mins to get you 10-15 miles down the road to a charger. I imagine this will improve though quite a bit as more EVs are adopted. I think if we can get to 50 kW chargers from service vehicles that's good enough. On a 50 kW charger 15 minutes of charging will give you 50 miles of range on a Tesla, and on less efficient cars it will still give you at 30+ miles.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f...
There's basically three options: overhead lines, which are cheap but kind of ugly and don't really work for passenger cars (they'd need a really tall pantograph to reach as high as a truck), rails embedded in the road surface which can be used by cars and trucks but are more expensive than overhead lines, and wireless charging which is much more expensive than rails and the amount of power you can reasonably transfer is pretty limited.
I'm in favor of the rail approach, like they're testing in Sweden. If some billionaire with money burning a hole in your pocket is reading this, might I suggest buying a stretch of land parallel to a busy highway and constructing a parallel road with rail-style charging, and establish an in-motion charging standard. Let people charge for free and see what comes of it.
In the long run I hope all the major highways get electrified this way. It's disappointing that Congress isn't already working on this.
I don't have a Tesla, but maybe someone here does and can chime in.
If you want EVs to take over, get feature parity with the current technology.
[1] https://www.autotrader.ca/editorial/20190201/how-long-can-yo...
That's an interesting point.
We see this a couple of times a year in the United States — tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people evacuating because of an approaching hurricane.
It takes hours and hours and hours to go not very far. And when you finally get someplace with an open hotel room, it's hundreds of miles away.
Although I believe they are close, I'm not sure EVs are ready for that challenge yet. Especially since a gas station half-way to safety can fill up hundreds of cars faster than a dozen EVs can charge.
Can more chargers solve this problem? Better chargers? Both? Something else?