Power delivery exists more places than gasoline delivery. The number of places that have gas but no power is very, very low. Enough to ignore.

It's amazing to me we have put all this work into a fantastic logistics network for gasoline and cough at the thought of chargers in all the same places.

A mere 6 fast chargers at 20% utilization would roughly double the electricity needs of a store.

Double.

Not to mention, we haven’t had to increase the capacity of our electric grid in decades (and it’s still falling down regularly), yet getting everyone in EVs quickly would increase the average need by a fair bit.

I did the calculations some time ago, and it was about 43,000 GWh/y for CA (15m cars * .24 KWh/m * 12,000 annual miles). For reference CA has a yearly electricity generation capacity of just under 200k GWH/y.

First I don't think EVs will ever fully replace ICE. There's use cases for gas.

But when I hear about the grid load, I have no pity. Or fear.

Imagine going back to 1800 and describing to an engineer the vast scale of gasoline production, distribution and consumption. Billions of ICEs distributed around the globe. The scale of fuel distribution! The network of trucks. The massive holding tanks. The inshore and offshore refineries. The pipelines and wells. The geopolitics. The strategic reserves, and prodigious tanker fleets. All because we need something everywhere that is only available in a few places.

We can send a rover to Mars for less cost than a prospecting well in the ocean, and there are lots of oil wells in the ocean. Trillions have been spent.

It seems unfathomable to go to such lengths from scratch. To invent and maintain so much, and for what? And we did.

Now imagine all that exists and you just want more. That's not unfathomable. It's just market dynamics. It'll double just fine thanks. It'll more than double.

> It's just market dynamics. It'll double just fine thanks. It'll more than double.

Sure. If you let the market operate. But at least in Sweden we don’t. So we’re stuck in this loop of conflicting requirements: “no greenhouse emissions, no nuclear, no wind farms close to my home, and double the capacity - thanks!” It’s not going to happen.

When you put all this in perspective, it makes sense. Electricity usage will probably tripe or quadruple and I think we can handle that.

But I'm going to miss the sweet petrol and diesel engine cars.

TL;DR: Market forces have been proven to be insufficient to force changes on public utilities.

I agree, nothing technological blocks the grids from growing. But there are plenty of political and profit driven blocks which are preventing it.

To continue with my theme of CA power grid bashing - PG&E is still starting forest fires due to poor quality infrastructure (pushing too much power through lines not rated for it, causing sagging). PG&E does constant rolling blackouts over the summer because of their lacking capacity. PG&E imports about 20% of the electricity that CA requires yearly. They do this because it's cheaper than fixing their infrastructure.

And there's no reason they won't just continue in this fashion in the face of their 2035 electric car replacement deadline. They have a government-created monopoly, and have no reason to build out their capacity.

Rinse and repeat for most states and countries.

But why would a store need fast chargers? 22kW is perfectly enough for any place where you stop for an hour or more.

Fast chargers would require you to leave your shopping cart in the middle of Costco and run back to your car to unplug & move so you don't get idle fees :)

Counter argument: Why would I want to spend an hour in a minimart? The equivalent of gas stations will be required to support long-distance travel. And there are a lot of gas stations out there today.

And I'm guessing you mean 20W, not kW? Fast chargers are 300W as a point of reference.

You really think you can charge a car with a phone charger ? Of course it's 20kW...

You're right, my memory messed that up.

To avoid looking like more of an idiot, I went back and found the official DC Fast Charge levels and wattages (level 3 DC fast charge is up to 350kW, level 2 is up to around 18kW). Which, thankfully, didn't change my conclusions above, I was of a more sound mind when I did those calculations before.

But here they are again.

Level 2, at 18kW, would be around 157,680 kWh/y per charger at full utilization. (18*24*365)

Level 3 would max out at 3,065,000 kWh/y per charger; but it's much more likely to be intermittently used. (350*24*365)

Compare to these commercial building utilization numbers (the units are thousands of kWh/y): https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm...

There are exactly zero cars on the road today that won't be 100% full from 0.1% battery in under 24 hours when plugged in to a Level 2 charger.

Depending on the car's internal charger (1 or 3 phase) most charge from "towed to charger" empty to absolutely full in well under 10 hours.

Doing it like that is like trying to calculate how many fuel trucks would a gas station need if all its pumps were being run 24/7/365 at full blast. It'll never ever happen.

That's more related to the the calculation from my statement a bit back up the comment tree:

> it was about 43,000 GWh/y for CA (15m cars * .24 KWh/m * 12,000 annual miles). For reference CA has a yearly electricity generation capacity of just under 200k GWH/y.

But the numbers I posted that you're directly referring to are still important, as they indicate the need for improved electrical infrastructure for individual buildings who may want to put in chargers. Your grocery stores, apartments, motels, etc.

If just one 18kW charger can double demand on a motel's power, what happens when you add ten? Twenty?

If you're just grabbing a coffee and protein bar, of course it doesn't make sense.

But I said "Costco" on purpose, it's not a place you just drop in real quick and grab one thing. You're gonna be there for a while. Target is another good reference for US people. Maybe even Ikea.

And yes, it's kilowatts. They're not mobile phone chargers =) The Hyundai Ioniq 5 charges at 350kW, 800 volts.

>we haven’t had to increase the capacity of our electric grid in decades

Who's we? In China, generation has doubled in a decade. What a sad time to be alive if even existential failure isn't a strong enough motivator to get a developed country to pay for some infrastructure.

The US. Since I was posting statistics for CA, I had hoped that was clear. Sorry if it wasn't.

Here's CA, a state well known for its rolling brownouts throughout summer, as an example:

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

The logistics of a 15-30 minute charge time at a power station seems harder than a 1.5 to 3 minute gasoline fill, IMO.

Chargers at work. At the grocery store. At your doctors appointment.

Most people spend a significant time with their car sitting somewhere for at least that amount of time.

at least where i am, these either do not have their own parking lots, or have multistory lots where maybe 5 spaces out of dozens are equipped with chargers, and I have no idea how feasible a full retrofit would be.

in the pre-pandemic world they had to implement a queue system for the charging spots, so you couldn't just park your car the whole day in one and had to move it out to let someone else have a turn.

I'm also wondering how this works in areas where it snows. My dad's old apartment in Virginia would routinely get snow in the winter, and his apartment complex had no covered parking. One needed to park in the limited number of spaces in the parking lot or park on the street. Imagine trying to coordinate rotating EV charging while digging your car out of the snow. I'm sure someone will think of a solution, but it's not immediately obvious how one would handle that.

The solution there would be something like a 110V 15A outlet at a large portion of the parking spaces and some method for metering and accounting for the delivered power so it can be charged to the tenant. And if they charge a convenience fee like most apartments do for preferential parking then that financial outlay would become a profit center after it was paid off.

I'm sure it'd be more costly for commercial work but a simple home charger infrastructure installation runs around $1k, and that's for a Level 2 (240V) charger. Although that doesn't account for the supplemental meter equipment costs.

A Level 1 charger can recharge say a Nissan Leaf from empty overnight. A single day's drive is far more likely to be at or below 20% of the capacity which is closer to 2hrs. For the average user that would be just fine.

A small number of time-limited slots with Level 2 charger could be provided for convenience, but even just allowing individuals to charge at Level 1 rates while their cars are parked would likely suffice in at least half the cases.

There seems to be this misconception that every EV will eventually need a dedicated fast charger and needs to charge to full capacity in 5 mins. But the reality is that, for a large portion of the driving population, a car tends to sit in place for large amounts of time and a modern 150mi+ range EV rarely get depleted in a day. A Level 1 charger would be more than enough for those people. Especially with public fast chargers available for those unusual situations where you need more charge very quickly.

For those who need more than that, an EV is truly not an ideal vehicle for them.

I think in general a lot of people "sleep" on how much of a game changer just having Level 1 "chargers" aka "boring wall outlets" everywhere would be.

I also think that thinking of Level 1 as "chargers" and not "boring wall outlets" is a part of the remaining problem. You shouldn't need to bother with the costs for metering and accounting the delivered power at Level 1. Does Starbucks charge you a wall outlet fee to charge your cell phone or laptop? At Level 1 it can just be a "courtesy".

At Level 1 each car is basically the extra draw of one additional old school incandescent light bulb. Who seriously cares to measure that accurately?

You can do a rough math estimate at Level 1 and just add that overhead to your operating expenses per usual. Many places with existing parking fees the added overhead likely is a rounding error compared to the existing parking price. (Same versus apartment rentals or HOA/COA dues.)

Individual outlet metering is expensive and complicates everything, just install boring outlets like we've done for more than a century.

> I think in general a lot of people "sleep" on how much of a game changer just having Level 1 "chargers" aka "boring wall outlets" everywhere would be.

Exactly! So many people fixate on fast charging that they just don't register the magic inherent in your car and home running on the same "fuel".

And having heard from people that cold climates often have outlets like these in place for engine heaters to prevent engine freezes shows that infra for this can easily exist. Though it's probably more investment for 3-7kW capacity at each outlet compared to powering a block heater.

> Does Starbucks charge you a wall outlet fee to charge your cell phone or laptop? At Level 1 it can just be a "courtesy"

Oh I totally agree, but try getting an apartment complex to buy into thousands of dollars in electrical work only to shell out even more money buying "gas" for all their tenants.

My in-law has trouble getting his complex to fix sidewalks let alone do something like installing charging infra and providing electricity. If the $1k estimate was even close for commercial 120v charging infra, you'd still be talking between 10k and 100k in just electrical work.

But that sounds like something that could be easily turned into a market differentiator, so it's not to say it won't happen.

Perhaps tacking on a flat-rate fee to offset costs would be a strong middle ground as well. That concept is something apartments/HOAs are already quite familiar with, what with things like covered parking, garages, and even additional storage space already available as add-on charges in many places.

> Individual outlet metering is expensive and complicates everything, just install boring outlets like we've done for more than a century.

Somewhere in the eventual development of this tech could be something like a complex level charging system where an apartment could meter through the charger, since most modern IoT type chargers track this anyways. That way the infra is still just as simple as a dumb outlet.

> You can do a rough math estimate at Level 1 and just add that overhead to your operating expenses per usual

This pans out at small scale, though I wonder how that pans out in the real world. The sticker shock of running that calculation at "worst case scenario" seems like an issue. With even 100 EVs at worst case using todays numbers (~60kWh capacity per car, $0.15/kWh, full charge daily) that number is nearly $1k per day. Realistically it'll be much lower since that full charge nightly is highly unlikely, but sticker shock is real.

His comment was about snow though. What do you think of that?

Other than the small range decrease because of the cold weather, how does that differ from an ICE car? His comment was about swapping cars at the charger with cars buried in snow, which isn't an issue when you no longer need to swap cars because they are charging at their own spot (per my comment about adding L1 charging to a large portion of the spots).

I guess if you're for some reason running your cabin heating the whole time then I suppose you're reducing your range, but that's solved by not doing that perhaps.

Finland here. Every single car parking spot has had a dedicated 230V 8-16A plug for over 30 years for ICE car block and cabin heaters.

The power grid hasn't melted even though the plugs at the parking spots are on a timer and usually run two hours from 0600 to 0800 so the car is nice and unfrozen when it's time for the daily commute.

Now when we are moving to PHEVs and EVs some people are _very_ worried that an EV using the exact same plug with the exact same load steadily from evening to morning will melt the entire power grid and the local wires and melt the plug. Dunno why.

Street parking is still an issue, but there are solutions for that too. The power could be pulled from street lamps for example.

Some parking spaces may be designed for bursting loads, and the wires actually do heat up if used continuously. They may still need upgrades for EVs, but overall should be only a modest cost.

When it's -25C outside the wires heating up isn't really an issue, it's more of a bonus feature :D

But yea, the cabling needs to be checked by an actual electrician and they'll determine how many cars can be charged in the ye olde block heater system without melting any wires or tripping fuses.

The 1980's stuff can usually handle 8A continuous loads. They changed the standard some time in the mid 90s, those can handle multiple cars at 10-16A continuous depending on the main fuse.

Anything above that and you'll need to overhaul the whole field and people usually go for Level 2 capable cabling if they need to break ground for cabling anyway.

I'm kinda joking but can the solution be a... Roof? (Like, over the parking lot, place to install solar panels or just a simply a roof from elements?)

Of course, this would probably (?) be a bit absurd for street parking, that's true.

Also expensive, to provide a roof that’s able to withstand snow and solar panels.

The roof doesn't need to "withstand" snow. It just needs to be sloped enough for it to fall down.

Source: My dad has his hobby car in a glorified tent during winter, works just fine, the roof is in a 45 degree-ish slant so any snow just falls off.

45° wouldn't work well with any overhangs which are not facing south - not when the goals is to put solar panels on them.

And I, every winter, see snow clinging to 45° roofs quite often. Slightly wet snow (also the heaviest snow) can even stick to vertical surfaces.

45° would also make an overhang more susceptible to wind forces, acting like a sail.

Could be. But why would they do that?

Over 80% of Americans live in a single family home.

I already faced this in 2016, living in Philadelphia, lucky to have parking at the apartment and two EV chargers. Back then there were no other EVs at the apartment complex to coordinate charging shifts with.

Methinks the number of stations will organically grow with the predicted amount of EVs an apartment will have parking on site. That’s how it started for me in 2015-2016!

Well, yeah, because demand is still relatively low. Availability like that would change if/when EVs are more widely adopted.

> Chargers at work. At the grocery store. At your doctors appointment.

This doesn't work in cities. None of those places have parking lots.

And don't say "chargers on all the curbs" because we can't afford to further entrench car supremacy and make it harder to reallocate space to bus lanes and pedestrians.

> This doesn't work in cities. None of those places have parking lots.

Put the chargers where the cars are parking. With vanishingly few exceptions, they're all parking somewhere.

I'm all for a less car-centric society, but it's gonna be easier to reach that future if we address climate change a bit on the way.

> Put the chargers where the cars are parking.

That would really be doubling down on the high cost of free parking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

I'm of the opinion the cost of climate change is likely to exceed the cost of free parking.

Great, so replace all the ICE parking lanes with electric bus rapid transit lanes. It will do much more for climate change than car chargers.

Edit: Should have mentioned the climate change is one of the biggest components of the cost of free parking. Without all the government-mandated parking spaces for the past 60 years, there would be far fewer cars today. It's not too late to reverse that.

Then the power source of for cars needs to be more available than what you're suggesting.

If addressing climate change is the goal, existing vehicles can be converted over to methanol far more cheaply than buying a whole new vehicle. Methanol can be made carbon neutrally, or carbon negatively, and will power the next generation of cargo ships.

>This doesn't work in cities. None of those places have parking lots.

Where so they park? Put chargers there, then.

Your car will drop you off at work and drive itself to the nearest parking lot/charger.

It will also fly so no need for roads anymore, just green fields everywhere.

At work? For those lucky enough to have chargers at work, good luck when fighting for one. Also, I really hope the world keep shifting towards remote working; I won’t drive to the office just to charge my car.

You have it backwards.

Put chargers where people park cars. Don’t awkwardly drive to a random place to charge.

For 75%? Of people that can be at home. For others work. For others the grocery store.

Most cars parked at "home" dont have access to a charger.

Most? In what country?

The UK for one, and I dare say most of Europe. Our nations are vastly older than the US and were not purpose built for cars. Many here have on street parking, you can't dangle a cable from your house to your car (which may not be outside of your house).

There's been arguments about putting them on lamp posts - ok, but again, cables. 1 lamp post for ~10 cars doesnt really work.

Plucking a random average UK street off of Google maps - figure out how you charge cars at 6pm when everyones home from work and this road is full of cars on both sides of the street: https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4257624,-2.9412328,3a,60y,22...

>you can't dangle a cable from your house to your car (which may not be outside of your house).

That must vary between countries, because I've seen tons of outlets on the outside walls of homes in Finland. They need a weatherproof extension cord, but it comes in handy for a lot of tools. Though most homes have at least a driveway, cars are generally shorter than homes, so they fit close by.

The cost of free parking and where to park should really be reconsidered in cities though, as with your image, those exist here as well and are really bad places to drive in. IIRC in Japan they require people to prove a car has it's own dedicated parking space before they're allowed to get a car

Requiring you to provide a dedicated parking space would be a non starter in the UK. There's just no land for that. Your dedicated parking space would end up being miles away from your home.

The issue as shown in the streetview image is that those are public footpaths next to the houses. If you tried dangling a cable from your home to your car (if you were lucky enough to get a spot outside your house) you'd very quickly be in a lot of trouble when someone trips over it.

This is false. In the UK most homes have a driveway, so fitting a charger is a no brainer.

Many do - and for those of course they can fit a charger. Terrace houses in major cities often do not have any form of allocated parking, it's all on-street. You'd be sued pretty quickly if you dangled a cable across a public footpath and someone tripped over.

Not seeing anyone coming up with a way to solve that pretty important issue.

We already manage electrically powered machines for the purpose of lighting the streets at night and for parking meters. Extending those to provide power to EVs isn’t too far fetched. https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/electric-vehicles-and-rapid...

Assuming they meant access to a L2 charger at home, every country? Sure L2 chargers can be installed, but in a lot of cases it requires upgrading the electrical service and replacing the electrical panel which isn't a home improvement project most car buyers are looking to undertake.

Which is why GM has an ongoing incentive program to try to alleviate that problem: https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/living-electric/home-char...

> The electrical panel must have 40 amps of spare ampacity according to the load calculation for the new breaker

This is where the incentive program breaks down and the 4- or 5-figure electrician quotes start for a lot of houses that were built in a time and place where natural gas powered all of the heavy appliances and panels were sized for 60- or 100-amp service.

Vast majority of Americans live in a single family home that can easily add chargers. Those that don't can charge their car when they park it in a parking lot.

Yes the chargers will just magically appear everywhere for free.

The chargers aren't that expensive. Mine was 300€ + 2 hours of installation by an electrician.

Fancier Level 2 ones with Wifi and shit are up to 1k€.

True, but ideally we'd reduce land that's allotted to simply parking a car long-term, instead of turning a single gas station into something like 250 parking spaces spread out around town.

There are just certain sections of the country where you'd either have to turn half of the streetlamps into a chargers (maybe a good idea?)...or make a modular battery swap gas station scheme....or stick with ICE.

The point isn't to add new parking spots for EV charging - it's to making charging available at places you normally park anyway.

A trip to the grocery store takes 30-45 minutes. If even 20% of the existing spots had a charger (even a modest rate charge), you'll get quite a bit of charge. Or if 20% of the parking spots at your workplace had chargers, you could leave it on the charger all day one day a week and charge very slowly (which as a bonus, low-rate chargers should be easier to provision than superchargers).

You'd never have to visit a "gas" station. You'd charge at home, at work, everywhere the car parks. Every parking lot in every building will be a charging station. You plug in your car wherever you are, and get a bill from the electricity company at the end of the month. Just park the car, and the lot will charge your batteries for you.

Yeah, the issue is that you'll either have to install chargers every 10 feet in almost every city, or come up with some scheme to swap batteries, or have more "gas" stations because the charge time is longer.

My town has on average 1 car per household, but I'd guess like 0.25 off street spots per household. That's a lot of infrastructure on public land.

> Yeah, the issue is that you'll either have to install chargers every 10 feet in almost every city

It's just an electrical outlet. There are dozens of them for every parking spot already, in the house/office/building. Adding an extra electrical outlet isn't hard for a homeowner/lot-owner to do. This isn't going to have to happen overnight. It will happen slowly over two decades.

I think we're talking about completely different areas. There aren't any electrical outlets on any of the parking meters or utility polls in my city or the surrounded city, and it's illegal to run an extension cord from, say, your 3rd story window, down the side of the building, across the sidewalk, to the street.

Regardless though, you're correct that it will take decades, but I think that this is one reason why a CEO wouldn't be all in. If it's going to take 25 years for a large chunk of customers to buy an EV, you still have a lot of cars to sell that are ICE.

So instead of building some gas stations here and there we just install hundreds of thousands charging stations on private and public property across a metro?

It's not a "charging station", it's an electrical outlet. Your house probably has a couple dozen of them, they're cheap and easy to install. In cold regions, most parking spots already have one so people can plug in their block heater. That's proof by example that it can be done.

You need to change your view of a "charging station". It's not the huge fridge sized thing that says "Electrify America" or something on it.

It's just a normal plug, maybe with some components related to metering and billing included. Load balancing if you want to be fancy.

Charging anywhere but home absolutely ruins EV economics. It’s almost impossible to make an economic argument to buy an EV in 2022, but it’s outright impossible to make that argument without fuel savings.

It actually doesn’t. If you bought an EV and just used L3 chargers to fill it, you would still come out far ahead given the current price of gas, at least where I live.

But I generally agree: unless you drive a lot and can charge at home (or at work, or both), you aren’t going to get very far ahead with an EV (and lots of L3 charging supposedly strains the battery). But they are also really fun to drive, so it might still make sense for some people to get them even if they aren’t going to be saving money.

Hard disagree. It’s definitely area dependent but in New York for me it’s a 8-12 year ROI depending on fuel prices and energy prices. This is me comparing a CRV and a Model Y. If I swap out my energy savings and charge exclusively not at home the ROI horizon goes to infinity.

5 years ago, the most common EV on the road only went 84 miles to a charge and couldn't charge faster than about 45 kW. Today, you can get EVs with 500 mile ranges and charge at over 300 kW. By the mid-2030s when EVs are supposed to be the only thing on new car lots, they'll probably take less time to charge than pumping gas did.

There's also no reason cars really need to charge that fast. Most people park their cars for hours at a time, either at home or work or a store.

Imagine if every parking spot in an apartment had a slow charger that could charge your car overnight. Simply plug in and activate and it properly charges your apartment.

And now your employer makes it a free perk, or teams up with the electric co. so that you could do the same at work and get charged market rates directly.

Perhaps malls or larger stores provide a similar slow charger without the insane upcharge of Level 2 chargers. Heck, imagine something similar to parking validation. If you make purchases at the store or see a movie or whatever, then you get a code to "validate" your charging so you get the cost (or a portion) waived.

With infrastructure like that, then you only need fast chargers when you travel long distances, such as between states or cities.

This is the way.

People need to get over their mental view of "refueling" being a thing you do when your tank is almost empty and then you fill it to the brim.

It's perfectly workable to charge 50km of range while you're at the grocery store, maybe 100km while you're at work and another 100-150km overnight at home.

I've got a 230V/12A capable plug on my parking spot and I don't bother to plug in every night. A full charge would take around ~18 hours (10% to 100%), but my daily drives rarely take me under 50% and I don't charge to a 100% because the manufacturer recommendation is to keep the car at 80% unless you're going for a longer trip.

The only time I visit a fast charger is when I go see my family, who live a bit beyond my car's comfortable max range. I stop half way for 20 minutes to top up a bit from a 50kW charger (old car, slow charging =) ) and grab some food from the local shop while I'm at it. I don't need to charge to a 100% during the stop, 15-20% of charge is perfectly enough to get me to my destination - where I have a 230V/10A plug to charge overnight.

Seems like a pain, having to top your car up all the time like an old phone. Prefer one 5 min stop a fortnight to fill the tank up, until an EV can do similar they will remain a niche product.

It takes me literally under 20 seconds to plug in my car at home. Get out of car, walk to the back of the car, grab Type 2 cable from wall holder, poke charge port to open, plug in. Do the reverse when I leave.

That's it, I don't need to drive 5-10 minutes to tank up.

And given that my daily driving is well under 50km, I don't even need to plug in every night at home, maybe 2-3 times per week.

Also it costs me 2,25€/100km to drive. With our current prices (~2€/litre) it's the equivalent of a car that does 1.1l/100km. I'm willing to spend the extra 30 minutes to drive back home when I'm saving 50€+.

I assume many (most?) cities have the same rules as mine and you aren't allowed to run an extension cord from your house, across the sidewalk, to the street.

You're commiting the sin of assuming your workload is representative of everyone else's.

You do you, but it doesn't tend to make you many friends. Then there's the old diddy of "to Assume is to make an Ass of U & Me".

If you haven't actually sampled a sufficiently diverse set of people's travel use cases, making statements such as yours is at best ill informed and disingenuous.

And you're making the assumption that everyone has to have the same type of vehicle. There's nothing to say that the person who needs to drive 100-200mi per day needs to be using an EV. Even then, those people would likely still be fine with a Level 2 charger provided they can plug in overnight.

As for the diverse set of travel, the various DMVs and highway safety groups have done that for us. The average daily drive is under 40mi. When talking about core infrastructure here, assuming a daily drive of 40mi and basing the average charging infrastructure around would go a long way.

If EVs don't fit your life, then don't buy one. Though most people thing they drive much more often than they do, and fixate way to much on this once per week "fillup" charge idea when the daily partial charge is far more viable for the average driver.

Might seem that way, but after switching to an EV I'd never go back. Going to a gas station is a real annoyance, now I just spend 5 seconds plugging my car in whenever it gets below half.

You're comparing the most common EV on the road five years ago with the longest-range option available today. What you're saying could be true even if EVs hadn't advanced at all!

Am I computing this correctly? Assuming charger is at 120V, P = VI -> I = 300*1000/120 = 2500 Amps? That's a lot of juice...

EVs "quick charge" at 350-1000V. The charging stations today typically go up to 350 amps.

Interesting, wonder what the hard limits on voltage are? 350 amps @ 1000V must have one hell of a cord! Would be interesting to see what this station looks like.

Type "Electrify America" into Google and hit the images tab. The majority of their 788 sites include one or more 350 kW stations. The cords are probably over an inch thick, I've never measured, but no thicker than a fuel hose for a gas pump. They're liquid cooled to carry that current without overheating.

What EV has 500mile range?

Lucid Air. Dream Edition trim is EPA rated over 500 miles, and achieved over 500 miles in Edmunds' real-world range testing. It's also the car that charges the fastest, I believe.

1.5 to 3 min gasoline fill is trivial. 15 minute EV charge is not. It's also a long time to wait in terms of the logistics of queuing people.

EV is kinda limited to out and back trips. Which is a lot of the need (commuting), to be fair. Recharging on the go will always be worse compared to ICE.

Road trip stop time with gasoline car: 3 minutes to fill + 15 minutes to go to the bathroom and buy a coffee.

With an EV car: 15 minutes to go to the bathroom and buy a coffee, done in parallel with the charge.

Time spent filling a gasoline car in your home city: 5 minutes 3x a month = 3 hours / year.

Time spent filling an EV at home: 5 seconds 3x a week = 3 minutes / year.

I really need to see videos of people doing these mythical 90 second gasoline fills on long road trips.

Do you practice it like you're at NASCAR or F1? How do you manage bathroom breaks? Bottles or catheters for everyone?

The point is more that if you want to drive like that, you can. My partner and I will typically stop for five to ten minutes to fill up, take a quick toilet break, and then get back on the road. We'll eat in the car, because we're trying to get somewhere. And that time adds up. In this video [1], Engineering Explained spends 8 hours charging, a bit over 20% of his total trip time. That's staggering; it's effectively a whole day, and could mean the difference between staying in a hotel overnight, and sleeping in your own bed.

BEVs are fine for many people, but I don't think Toyota is wrong in their assessment. Requirements typically aren't set at the mean, they're set at the extreme. I know people who had to make emergency trips during COVID that wouldn't have been possible in a BEV. Hell, I went on a work trip with some colleagues the other day and we had to use my car, because my coworker's BEV wouldn't have made the distance back.

The reality is that a BEV isn't a one-to-one replacement for an ICEV, and ICEVs are still superior for the "non-average" use case. I'll think about getting a BEV if they're ever able to compete at Le Mans.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UskzfQJt2Bc

And there are dozens of youtubers doing 1000km+ trips with maybe a hour extra compared to ICE - while saving hundreds compared to gas/diesel.

The US charging infrastructure is really bad outside of few major thoroughfares.

Please share them, then. For example, here's another video of Engineering with Rosie [1]; 4 hours spent charging on an ordinarily 8 hour trip after a mishap. I've driven those roads, and her trips are consistently 1-2 hours longer than an equivalent ICEV. So no, I don't buy that the performance is anywhere close to ICEVs for longer trips, and reliable charging is absolutely an issue.

Secondly, You aren't saving hundreds when using fast charging; in many places you're doing roughly the same cost wise, for a worse experience [2]. Here's a reddit comparison from a year ago versus a hybrid, which came out to be more expensive [3]. It's fair to say that if you're just charging it at home and using it as a commuter, then yeah, you're coming out ahead on fuel costs, but as I mentioned above, you just can't do some things as well as a normal car, and sometimes that really matters.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0cK582iqnY [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-charging-costs-equal-fue... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/jrwet6/road_tr...

Here's TeslaBjörn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_04rk3lIFcM&list=PLqKx2qnB8X...

He's done a 1000km trip on almost a hundred different EVs in Norway. Very few have any major issues.

A car that's fully fueled when you leave your home is even simpler.

Damn, you must be rich I suspect? With your fancy garage and all that. In the last 14 years of my life, I have not had a place to charge my battery at home. Only at work, but it’s practically a territory battle for the few EV spots there are…

And some apartment and office space owners outright refuse to add chargers. With all that copper, they’re outright magnets for thieves.

Underrated comment.

Not sure where you grew up but garages are standard in much of the US, minus dense urban centers.

The entire Bay Area is less than 50% homeowners. The suburbs are full of low-rise apartments with street parking or asphalt lots with no power and no security. It’s not impossible to put in four million public chargers, but we’ve barely started.

> Power delivery exists more places than gasoline delivery.

This doesnt address the point that lots of people dont have access to this. Particularly in late cities.

The plan shouldn’t be to replace 100% of existing ICE cars with electric cars. The carbon impact of the construction of those would still be too high. The plan should be to invest in public transport and electric bicycles, and use electric cars when either of those options isn’t enough, to complement.

All cities built around cars (and that’s almost every American city for instance) will have to change—either by arranging for bicycles and building public transport or through floods, fires, and hurricanes.

I think this is the key. Almost too the point that car sized private vehicles should be banned from the inner city.

Yes, but I don't see that happening in the near and not so near future.

My 82 years old, disabled dad disagrees that this is a good idea.

With awareness of having zero context, I'd believe your 82 year old disabled dad, and the general public, would be safer if he was not allowed to drive a car in the inner city.

That's an easy problem to solve, though. Lower-speed L2 charging could easily be made ubiquitous anywhere that street parking exists.

Since the wattage demands are relatively low, it would not be too difficult to have L2 charging available anywhere that residential parking exists. Unlike fast-charging, you wouldn't need a lot of expensive high-power infrastructure, and if the power utilities were smart they'd do it themselves.

They could put little parking-meter size boxes by the side of the road—tapped off of existing residential power infrastructure—with credit card tap to pay.

I don't think it would take that long to reach a large density of that type of inexpensive, overnight charge systems.

Already a thing in cold climates in parking lots, except it’s for your block heater. Usually it switches between sides of the lot every X minutes.

https://www.gm-volt.com/threads/plugging-into-outdoor-parkad...

Yup!

I'm not sure what the max power output of those types of deployments are, but I've seen block heaters in Canada that pull as much as 1500 watts, so that's not insignificant.

Over here it's a 2 hour timer you set up, most cars heat up from 0600-0800 or 0700 to 0900, depending on when people start off to work.

I think that calling this "an easy problem to solve" is really understating the issue. It may not require any new inventions or new technology, but it requires a monumental infrastructure effort, on the same scale as the original electrification processes that happened to industrialized societies 100 years ago.

The effort is already underway.

California's building code requires all residential and commercial buildings have EV chargers starting on January 1, 2023.

The national electric vehicle infrastructure program (NEVI) has $7 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill passed last year and just approved the charging station construction plans for all 50 states. Within a few years we'll have "fast charge" stations for EVs every 50 miles along nearly every highway in the nation.

EVs already made up more than 10% of global new car sales this summer. Market demand will mean that apartment buildings and condos will start putting in outlets for EV charging on their own otherwise they'll not be able to attract tenants pretty soon.

Houses last for centuries, a few thousand new builds in Cali is not going to make the slightest difference. I think EV will remain a niche (<15%) until they can charge as quickly as filling a tank and until their (real) range is 700+ miles.

I'd say by 2030 buying an EV would be a viable option for most. The people buying them now are usually early adopting Tesla fan-bois who are happy to pay through the nose to be a crash test dummy for self driving.

Nearly all houses these days have electrical outlets. A 110 volt 20 amp circuit isn't the most ideal way to charge an EV, but it can work. Most houses have 220 outlets, and adding one to the garage is no big deal. Few people will ever install a DC fast charger in their house, and that's fine because it's not needed.

~700 mile range and ~30C charging rates are ridiculous bars to meet. EVs with ~200 mile range and ~2C charging rates work just fine right now for a lot of people.

The main issue right now with EV adoption is just the cost of batteries, and lack of a convenient way for people in apartments to charge.

There's a decently high current power line available from street lights. Not sure if they're still putting them in with high current since so many are converting to LED, but sodium lights drew ~1kW iirc.

There's already been projects to put in chargers on street lights, like this one https://lalights.lacity.org/connected-infrastructure/ev_stat... and this one https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/renewables/conv...

Shipping and processing oil isn't trivial either. At least with electric we aren't poisoning the nearby air.

It certainly isn't. But it's also already done. That doesn't make it better or worse, it just makes it a sort of benchmark for the infrastructure work required to replace that energy distribution system (based on liquid hydrocarbons) with something else.

Well, not exactly. EV's still have emissions, they are just displaced. They happen at the power plant instead of the tailpipe. You would cause more pollution if the electricity was generated with coal instead of gasoline, for example.

Hence the word 'nearby'. And it's easier to replace fewer polluting sources via electricity.

Over 80% of apartment parking spots in Finland have had a power plug since the 80s. It's not that hard.

People just keep thinking that every car needs a 350kW fast charger on their parking spot, when a normal three phase plug would do just fine.

It's better for the battery to charge slowly anyway.

EV enthusiasts' arrogance and cult-like devotion to dismissing the very real problems with EVs and lack of infrastructure will only hurt, not help their cause.

Never pricing in externalities of gas powered vehicles is only hurting their cause.

How can you describe such a gargantuan infrastructure project as "easy"? You're talking about power structures and associated transmission to virtually every carpark in a city, as well as a way to monetize it.

It’s like that here in the NL. My power company has an EV sparking spot on every block in my neighborhood. I rented an EV for a weekend and was pleasantly shocked at how easy it was to find a charger. Well, as long as you’re not in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is hell in any kind of vehicle.

> It’s like that here in the NL.

We’ve gone from “ubiquitous” to one spot on every block.

I say it's easy to make L2 street parking ubiquitous _anywhere_, not _everywhere_ all at once.

Obviously taken in totality it's a massive undertaking, but you could say the same thing about streetlamps, or roads, or basically any ubiquitous infrastructure.

Many places have started with 1-2 spots per neighborhood, which is prudent and scalable. As demand rises they should be able to keep pace with that demand without significant technical challenges.

That’s potentially plenty though. You only need street charging for a relatively small Percent of the population. For most drivers 1 night in 3 would keep you fully charged.

Sounds terrible. Now instead of worry about finding a spot, you worry about whether your car will be functional or not.

Nah you can always l3 charge for 15 minutes.

It’s like this in Oslo and it didn’t take a lot of efforts.

> They could put little parking-meter size boxes by the side of the road—tapped off of existing residential power infrastructure—with credit card tap to pay.

Most of that is private property. They could probably treat it like a telephone pole, but it's not as simple as "just go install 400,000 chargers wherever their is street parking."

For private property it's easy and inexpensive to just install your own L2 charging. Even if you rent, it probably wouldn't be too hard to convince your landlord to let you pay for an L2 charger install if they already offer you private parking.

I was thinking more about street parking and parking lots, though, since that's an area with a the less immediately obvious solution.

I'm sure it differs between principalities, but in many places the city/government controls the area immediately beside the street and if they were onboard it would be feasible to install streetside chargers early everywhere.

Privately owned parking lots couldn't be forced to do so without legislation, but it's inexpensive and adding a few into the mix could add to their revenue streams.

How many tons of copper would that require?

Maybe it's not your intention, but your comment seems to imply that it's too difficult to attempt because of how much copper would be involved. However, I suspect you wouldn't need to purchase all the copper up front.

You'd be aiming for short runs off of existing power infrastructure and you'd be scaling up over time. You also wouldn't be running these to every single place that a car _could_ park, just trying to get a critical mass of them near where people live.

Most people already have lots of copper cabling in their houses and most cars are parked overnight near to residential housing, so the additional copper used would only be some fraction of what is already in most homes.

I remember someone did an analog British Telecom. At the time, BT had a market cap of something like 30 billion pounds, and the estimated value of all their copper wiring was around 50 billion pounds. The (amusing and not thoroughly convincing) argument was that take away the copper, and BT was worth -20 billion pounds. Maybe with all that legacy copper, someone will start a copper mine in the UK.

not very many. most streets already have power lines. you just need a few extra feet to get to the car.

My neighbourhood (London, UK) has on-street charging ports. Some of them are in lampposts and some of them are sunk into the pavement (sidewalk). This seems to work well.

This seems to work well when 95% of cars are still ICE.

Why would it not work with 100% EVs?

Because the cables that deliver the energy would then burn through.

Cars don't actually use that much power relative to the amount that households already use if they're not fast-charging (using power here in the technical sense (amps) not as a synonym for energy (watts)). Smart charging meters that default to a cheap off-peak slow-charge (i.e. an overnight charge) with the option to override with a fast charge for a premium will probably solve 90% of our problems here.

Or get nicked.

I wonder how well this works when some (many?) people don’t move their cars for days or weeks as a time.

That's not a huge deal either, really. In time, more and more parking spots will have charging ports. The fact that they aren't all used all the time will actually make it easier to manage the grid loads.

Imagine you park your car and let either the car or the charger know you aren't moving the car for 2 or 3 days. It can use that knowledge to delay your charging until local demand is lower, or power is cheaper.

Most of the places they drive their car to, will have chargers. Supermarkets, workplaces, parks, etc.

You don't need to charge at home. It's just the most convenient.

Many of those parking spaces in major cities cannot handle even a slight increase in congestion due to charging, and the time to plug-in and un plug is too much for them. Think about your local downtown Whole Foods parking lot.

My local Whole Foods parking lot has had EV charging spaces for 8 years. I used to charge my Nissan LEAF there while grocery shopping back in the day.

And how many others can charge when you charge? 5? Or fewer?

4, and I never saw all 4 in use at once. You don't need infrastructure for 200 million EVs today if there's only 2 million on the road. They'll grow together.

Is that a bad thing if it’s still early days for EVs? Do you not think that more stations can and will be installed?

Why are you driving downtown to supermarket? Perhaps your city needs to be planned in a more efficient and livable manner.

You stay at the supermarket the whole day ?

No, but it’s usually 30 minutes. Enough to take a normal EV from 20-80 percent.

No it's not, not unless you have Tesla style massive DC chargers. And they are not putting those in every supermarket. Regular chargers will barely give you enough charge to get home in that 30 minutes.

> No it's not, not unless you have Tesla style massive DC chargers. And they are not putting those in every supermarket. Regular chargers will barely give you enough charge to get home in that 30 minutes.

Not it's not, not unless you have IBM style massive cabinet hard drives. And they are not putting those in every home computer. Regular hard drives will barely give you enough disk space to store plaintext documents.

Sorry, you just sound like people that used to say things like "you'll never need more than 1 GiB of hard drive space." Things will evolve. It'll happen faster than you anticipate.

Wake up, we don't talk about computers. We talk about cars. Big heavy maschines that can't be shrinked and where the technic is not evolving as fast as the first years in computers. You will need the same amount of energy to bring a car today or in 20 years from a to b. And this amount of energy needs to be transfered to the place where you want to charge your battery. And there is the problem that will not change in 20 years. You can supercharge 5 cars an a parking lot now, but for 50 cars you need a complete other infrastructur thats bind on the same physics that cars have today.

And no, you never ned 1GB of hard drive for anything that was done with computers at this time. Now we use computers for completly other things. I suppose on cars the usage will not change as far as with computers.

> We talk about cars.

No, we're talking about batteries and charging. If you think battery tech is done evolving, wont shrink, and that "energy" and "power" are interchangeable concepts, then I don't think we can have a fruitful discussion.

> And no, you never ned 1GB of hard drive for anything that was done with computers at this time.

That was my point. Saying something wont happen based on what's happened so far is foolish.

I think the point is that if battery technology is good enough, it's not the limiting factor. Being able to deliver that much power becomes a bottleneck. At some point the owner of the parking lot will have to upgrade their electrical service, which could be expensive.

I'm not sure how much of an issue that really is, though. Even if all cars are EVs, it's not like every single grocery store customer is going to fully charge their car every time they buy groceries.

You find DC fast chargers in many supermarkets in Norway. Not every but it’s really not a problem to find one with chargers.

The supermarket is 5 miles away. You can charge that in a few minutes even on a 7kw charger.

> Supermarkets, workplaces

Problem there is that the trend is towards home delivery and working from home.

They're not using the car, so the battery isn't depleting.

Tell that to all the Tesla owners that leave their cars at the airport and return to a dead battery.

That's a (mostly early model year) Tesla problem, not an electric car problem. My Nissan LEAF sat unused in my driveway for several months in 2020 and its charge level didn't drop at all.

I would think the ambient outdoor temperature would have a rather large impact here. If it's cold outside the car has to use battery power to keep the batteries themselves within operating range.

The Nissan LEAF's battery warmer only activates at -17C and turns off at -10C.

It does not reach -17C any day of the year in much of the world.

First I'd have to find them, but I've never heard of that happening. On the other hand, I've had plenty of battery problems in ICE cars.

I bought a bunch of LFP cells a couple years ago to do an EV conversion of a Mazda RX-8. After a couple years of literally just sitting there, they went from about 3.2 volts to about 3.1 volts.

Tesla cell chemistry is different (unless you get one of the new ones that use LFPs from CATL), but it's not an inherent problem with electric cars generally.

Late to reading this comment. That's a beautiful option for an EV conversion, how's it going / how'd it turn out? Is there a progressive diary blog or somesuch?

That's true for city dwellers in the west. I wonder how a 100% electric world would work in the parts of the world where the Toyota Hilux is a necessity.

Electric is great for off-road - all that torque at low speeds! And you can recharge from anything you can get power from - not dependent on only diesel.

Off road implies not near the grid.. though if you are going to play you are fine, but some people get far enough out that they pack extra fuel.

> if you are going to play you are fine

I manage a fleet of off-road vehicles at work, and just came back from a camp location we were operating out of a wood clearing with no mains. We pack in our own generators and fuel for these periods where we can't access the grid, which could be used for charging.

It would be cool if they built a car with a generator in it so you wouldn't need to fill up the generator and then the generator charges the car. You could just put gas in the car!

That’s actually already how the diesel-electric drive-train of a railway locomotive works - and coupled with a battery it would give the best of all combinations. Only downside is permanently lugging around the generator. This is what they’re looking at for some military vehicles.

If you're hauling around a fossil fuel generator to plug charge your EV, that kind of defeats the purpose :) That's like using a giant fan to move the clouds so your solar panels work.

> If you're hauling around a fossil fuel generator to plug charge your EV, that kind of defeats the purpose :)

How does diesel get to where you need it to refuel except for being hauled around?

With electric you have options. Charge off mains at home base 90% of the time. Then maybe you go to a camp and run off a generator for a couple of days a month.

If only they made some sort of hybrid.

Charging an EV with a generator is actually a more efficient way of using liquid fuel than exploding it in an engine.

The generator runs at its peak efficiency RPM at all times, car engines do not. Combine that with the 90%+ efficiency of an electric motor and you're good.

I regret to inform you that plugging your EV into a tree to charge only works in cartoons.

I don't get why you're being sarcastic to me?

You can recharge from mains, or a diesel generator, or a gas generator. Maybe put a big diesel field generator and tank static in a temporary camp location and then work out of that location charging each night.

Because out in the bush there is no mains, no diesel generators, and no gas generators, so they probably regards comment as worse than useless, at a guess.

There's no diesel in the bush either. So how do you refuel a diesel vehicle? You haul it in. How do you think a diesel generator would get into the bush? Haul it in with the diesel. An off-road tanker can carry 40 tonnes of diesel into a camp. A generator doesn't add much to that.

Have you got much experience running an off-road operation at distance?

A tanker, even empty, cannot get into the bush. Even an unprepared 4WD is often unwise to take into the bush. A few jerry cans of gas in the bed are no bother at all.

> A tanker, even empty, cannot get into the bush.

I’ve literally personally driven a diesel tanker off-road through the Kenyan bush.

I was just thinking about the water trucks in Nepal. They go anywhere, it's impressive.

You probably know things that the person you are replying to doesn't and arguing is futile.

Nonetheless, electric isn't so great if you have to pack generators to make it work. It defeats the purpose, right?

My comment up there was from the perspective of a long distance motorcycle traveler. When I look around, I see cars that are already packed: children on parents' knees, one child in the back, and luggage on top. A generator and fuel wouldn't be trivial to add to this.

Above all, it means that fueling up becomes something you can only do where you stop. It's no longer a five minute break, but a constant logistical issue.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's a tough sell. Have you seen The Long Way Up? They attempt a Pan-American trip with electric bikes, and boy what a headache.

And I've forded rivers that would swallow your tanker truck. Just because you have done some basic bitch off roading doesn't mean you know the bush.

If the river swallows your tanker truck, how do you answer his first question:

> There's no diesel in the bush either. So how do you refuel a diesel vehicle?

Ridiculous. Then what's happening in the bush except for being a rich person's safari playground?

This person is single-handedly driving all resources into all remote locations, in the bed of their truck. No other transport allowed.

Many people that do multi day car/RV camping, bring a generator.

People are building their own #vanlife vans nowadays with full electric systems using panels on the roof and maybe a few they can spread around on longer stays.

Rivian R1T, Ford 150 Lightning, Hummer etc.

They've all shown that trucks are one of the easier parts of fully transitioning to EV.

Except they're useless as actual trucks. Put a heavy load in the back, or tow something, and you get about 1/4 of the rated range.

TFL truck found this out with a new Lightning.

Except for the big selling point for trucks, the ability to tow for long distances.

Hard pass. Towing is unusable.

Living in Australia where the hilux & land cruiser are ubiquitous, I’m excited for Toyota to release an hybrid-diesel drivetrain - it seems perfect for long distances.

I never understood what the problem with hybrid EVs was. They seem like the best of both worlds. Drastically improved gas mileage - competitive with the effective mpg of a full EV - but without the requirement to build superchargers everywhere (and add 30-60min stops on your longer trips)

They are more expensive to buy, you need two drivetrains.

They are more complex, you have two drivetrains.

They are heavier, you have two drivetrains.

They are not as nice to drive compared to any pure EV.

You have to put gaz into them.

You may look stupid in your neighbourhood too. Not everyone buy a car for the social status but buying a more expensive fossil car today is not cool. At least in Norwegian urban areas.

But yes you save a few minutes if your long trim at the cost of losing a few minutes every time you fuel it.

Counterpoint to all of the above except your image problems: batteries are heavy and expensive. Also, studies have shown that PHEVs have a similar maintenance cost per mile as BEVs.

Most people don't need to charge every night. You likely don't refuel every night, do you?

The average commute is like 40 miles a day. Go somewhere and recharge once a week while you have a coffee.

It won't be a big deal. Just like there are apartments without washing machines and people deal with it. The batteries are big enough that you really only need to charge once a week with a good EV and an average amount of driving. Tesla super chargers are often co located with grocery stores so people will just end up charging while they grocery shop once a week it will be a non issue. It's what I did for the first couple months before I installed an at home charger. minor inconvenience at worst.

I was surprised there was a Tesla charger right nearby. I live in middle of nowhere Missouri.

The future is bright. And electric, apparently.

It isn’t perfect, but 120V outlets are not that bad for overnight charging, and pretty easy to add. Some 50kW chargers nearby can top you off when you need extra.

Some claim it’s impossible to add such outlets to parking everywhere, but I’ve noticed some wintery towns already do this- for block heaters!

The plan is more like 80% EV. A key feature of technological progress is that some people and some places will always be left behind. At least without massive government intervention.

Once EVs are in a clear majority, gas station network will start shutting down, as it is no longer a profitable business. Without easy refueling, old ICE cars will become almost useless for most purposes, and that 80% will start looking more like 100%.

Feel like solar panel roof/hood are an underrated solution here. Lots of people park outdoors and the trickle charge of 20-40 miles a day is nearly enough to meet the everyday needs.

Patiently waiting for my Aptera. Yup. This is the way.

Most cars won't gain anywhere near 20-40 miles per day from solar, though, they're simply not efficient enough. Get the consumption down, and the same amount of panels can accomplish a lot more.

And, most folks who live in awkward parking situations are also near the city where their commute needs are very short. Folks out in the country who need to drive farther, generally have their own parking and can do plug-in charging. (Probably also supplied by solar.)

ioniq 5 with solar roof promises like 6-7 km a day (4 miles in weird). can we expect an order of magnitude improvement here?

No. The solar panels are likely more than 10% efficient and the battery and motor are going to be pretty efficient. Hitting 100% efficiency on the solar panels is ~impossible, so even if you get really close to ideal on both sides of it you aren't going to do 10 times better.

I guess a wildcard would be making the vehicle lighter.

The Aptera is lighter and can get 40 miles of range from its solar panels on a sunny day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpiH-Y-HOvE

yeah i'm also sceptical

and that's i'm worried that it's going to be part of a hype to symbolically buy them, wasting the materials to create solar panels even further, only for them to stand in a garage or otherwise well-protected from the sun by the buildings around

Solar panels are getting pretty darn cheap these days. A roof + hood panel system is probably in the low hundreds to 1k per car. And ultimately more panels being sold leads to lower prices for everyone long term due to economies of scale.

There will be some improvement in batteries but the big win will be in EVs that can get 10 or more miles per kWh because then you can get up to 40 miles of range on a sunny day.

The Porsche Taycan only gets 2 miles per kWh. The Tesla Model 3 gets 5 miles per kWh. The Aptera gets 10 miles per kWh.

Aptera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpiH-Y-HOvE

It doesn't have a hood panel, from what I can tell, so probably double just from that. Then it's a pretty beefy car so lighter and more aerodynamic ones would get more range. Lastly we will get some more battery & panel improvements. So probably pretty easy to end up in the range I gave.

Maybe 20-40 is too optimistic. But even at 10-20 a day that's going to cover a significant amount of usage. It will cut down the fast charging needed from once a week to once a month or so. That's a significant convenience improvement.

This isn't the odd part for me.

The part I'm curious about is how will militaries manage the change?

It's clear fuel isn't going to disappear but will the military or the government end up refining their own petrol for cost reasons or will they just end up shipping around batteries as if they were fuel.

Military fuel infrastructure is already separate from civilian. The US uses JP-8 for everything it can because it simplifies logistics, but that's hardly what you fill up with at the servo.

And at one time there was no place to put gasoline into your automobile. How did that play out? It played out very well and you can fuel up with multiple types of fuel in every corner of the continent. EV charging is simple by comparison.

There seems to be some movement in putting PV on the roof of cars. With that you can get a significant part of the needed electricity of everyday driving (average is between 30-50km, if you remove long distance trips you end up with much lower numbers).

PV on car roofs is as useful as those powerbanks with solar cells on them. Unless you keep them in optimal sunlight 100% of the time, the amount of electricity generated is next to useless.

The only smart use I've seen of that was my old Prius that ran a fan using the panel on the roof if it noticed the indoor temp was higher than outdoor. Kept the car cool-ish when parking during the summer.

800v cars can charge to 80% capacity in ~20 minutes on fast chargers, and that's for well over 300 miles of range.

However: EVs don't fix the problems inherent with high rates of individual car ownership in high population density areas, or with low occupancy vehicle, short distance travel.

There are only two cars that make 300 miles at highway speed. Lucid Air and Tesla S Long Range Plus. Tesla is still at old 400V system.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36302930/tesla-model-s-lo...

The Aptera will do over 300 miles at highway speed, probably over 600: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpiH-Y-HOvE

Who drives 500km on a highway in a luxury vehicle without allowing them to take a little break? Do they pee in a bottle too?

Do you have to pee every 3 hours?

I drink enough water yes.

Most people also lack a gas station in their driveway, seems to work out.

The same way it works out for ICE vehicles.

Do you have a gas station at home?

Can you estimate the percent of households which aren't able to plug in an EV overnight?

Put chargers wherever they park

How is California planning to cleanly support the extra electricity load from EVs since they've planned to decomission all their nuclear power plants? The base load is going to be generated with coal and nat gas now. Most people will likely be charging their EVs at night so they'll be charging their cars from coal or gas rather than carbon free nuclear.

Imagine if, when people plug their big battery into the grid, the grid and the millions of big batteries talk to each other to negotiate electicity flows. Then the EV fleet could help even smooth the power supply and shift load and supply to match. Sun comes out, loads of EVs are charged at that point. A bit of cloud. The EVs give some back. To incentivise you could choose a cheaper per kwh "keep me topped up if you can" and more expensive "definitely fill the battery asap" and even a "hey not using this car for a bit, make use of my battery and pay me!".

This is in addition to, if the battery is plugged in at home with solar panels, the home can self-smooth and do a lot of this locally, giving the grid the net in/out it desires from the house based on sum of: battery, appliances, solar as a whole unit.

Because of scale, an EV running off of coal-powered electricity is better for the environment than a gas powered car, not even taking into account emissions that aren’t carbon dioxide.

That aside, there are a variety of electricity storage mechanisms that have been becoming more and more efficient, like normal batteries, hydrogen electrolysis, and pumped water. With some clever engineering, solar power works at night.

I wish California would keep their nuclear plants open, but the loss of them is not an impediment for electric vehicles.

Most people charge their cars at night because utility companies incentivize to do so via time-of-use rate plans. There's nothing natural or convenient about delaying the charge until the middle of the night, what's most convenient is plugging in the car as soon as you park it.

Wind farms generate the most power at night, so that'll continue to work. If solar becomes dominant, then they'll make it cheaper to use electricity when the sun's still up, and we'll stop delaying charges until after sunset.

It's going to take decades to fully transition to electric vehicles, plenty of time to build all the renewables needed, all the storage needed for time shifting, and all the smarts needed for cars to participate in the smart grid.

There are substantial efforts in California (at least in SoCal, which I’m most familiar with) right now to supply renewable energy. I’m not sure what’s preventing you from doing a search before asking such questions. Lotta information at your fingertips.

https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/los-angeles-100-percent-renewa...

https://ceo.lacounty.gov/2021/12/07/sustainability/staying-p...

The grid needs 30% more power generation. If all cars are EV. CA is doing rolling blackouts as it is.

Maybe Californians will be riding horses in the next 10 years ;)

I am curious how a voluntary "please conserve power 4 hours a day during a historic heat wave" request turned into "CA is doing rolling blackouts because they don't have enough energy" in the minds of millions. Residential electric use doubled over the past 30 years without issue.

The NYTimes The Daily podcast described the voluntary request as “the state asked people to not charge their EVs” (paraphrase). Poor quality information everywhere.

Rolling blackouts are separate from Flex Alerts.

Hence me asking why they're being conflated in the public consciousness.

Are they? Both of these things happen regularly in California and have been for decades.

California is a big state. In Southern California, neither of those things happen regularly (source: I've lived here since 1980). The last time they did happen regularly was with Enron.

There is substantial unused grid capacity overnight and during the day that the most basic of smart grid logic can schedule the car to turn on charging during.

In other words, shift the demand from the 4-9PM slot that is the hot spot.

For what this doesn't cover, this is not rocket science. We will build the capacity. It's just wires and generators.

And storage.

I work at an engineering firm that is heavily involved in these efforts in SoCal, and this is probably boring to say (without details) but the storage component is fascinating. Not my sector, though, so I won’t/can’t elaborate (I do work in sustainable transportation planning, though).

Even if all new cars were 100% electric from now on, it'd take twenty years to convert all cars. 30% more power generation in 20 years is 1.5% per year. Not a big ask.

Enjoy your substantial power cuts.

Who is paying for that ?

The people charging both your car and your wallet. Fuel isn't free, why wouldn't chargers become a vehicle^ for investment?

^ not intended but I'll leave that in there