> This will slowly change as more EVs are sold and the charging infrastructure improves.

Yeah.. no. Especially not in old big towns around Europe where hundreds of thousands (even millions) of people live without underground garage and there's literally no place to install street side chargers on every corner.

I'm living in the center of Munich, and they've built out a lot of curb-side chargers over the last years here.

My personal hope is that advances in technology and grid upgrades will eventually lead to every single lamp post being a charge socket - a lot of the cars here belong to residents and stay parked for days, so they can get away with 3.6 kW charging just fine.

In the end, however, the solution likely will be a massive expansion of public transport, to a point where almost no one but people with disabilities and tradespeople will have their own cars.

I don't think that last thing will ever happen. Even in Denmark, where cycling culture predates the car and there used to be (or is - I'm not up to date), among other disincentives, a hefty 180% registration tax people still drive.

All in all it's a useful tool if used in moderation.

How will we ever deliver 240VAC electricity to locations that are directly adjacent to urban city streets. Seems like an intractable problem. /s

240VAC, maybe if you have 4-6 hours for your car to charge.

You need a minimum 3 phase 480v electrical source to charge even a small battery in under an hour. We are talking 150-200Kw, or the equivalent energy to run around 170 American sized households to fast charge a single car. You think that’s happening in Europe, pretty much ever?

Cars are parked for approximately 100% of the time they're not being driven. For typical vehicle owners (insomniac driving fanatics and corporate "fleet vehicles" excepted), that's much more than 4-6 hours per day. So no: we do not need 200kW HVDC chargers on every city street.

What we do need is ubiquitous Level 2 (240V AC) charging present at the locations where most drivers store their cars. For drivers who store their cars on public city streets, that means installing new cable runs and charging poles. Obviously this infrastructure isn't going to be "free", but it's not some kind of intractable technical challenge. Moreover it will eventually pay for itself through a modest surcharge on the electricity consumers use for charging.

"You need a minimum 3 phase 480v electrical source to charge even a small battery in under an hour. We are talking 150-200Kw?"

The Tesla 3 Long Range AWD has a 76 kWh battery with a range of 358 miles (576 km). The average European car drives 18,000 km/year, or 72 km/day or 10 kWh/day with Tesla's efficiency.

If everyone has giant EV pickups with 200kWh batteries driving 500 miles every day, yeah you have a problem. But that's the tiny minority.

But I thought the advantage of European towns was that you didn't need a vehicle because you could walk to everything you need?

I certainly do walk and cycle. That doesn't mean millions of other don't and not everyone has workplace 5min away by foot

It is. Electric cars are a sideshow, the real disruption is e-bikes, e-scooters and golf carts.

How much space do you think an EV charger takes? They are the size of parking meters. They are built into lamp posts.

And of course, electricity will come out of unicorn's farts straight into your car. You literally need to rework complete infrastructure to support EV cars. It also motivates car culture even further, while we should be working other way around