We only charge our EV at home unless going on a long range trip.
For the few occasions we do charge on the road, I have no problems waiting a bit longer to charge than it would take to pump gas into a tank.
Is the only time of the day where police and civil police (ordungsamt) seem to close their eyes to what is clearly a violation of proper parking.
A couple of chargers here and there, hardly help.
A few km into the suburbs and hello to 1 - 2 hours transit time to come into the city center, with multiple connections, delays, dropped connections, stuffed with as much humans as possible, freezing in Winter, cooking in Summer,....
I would venture a prediction that it will be exponential - we'll be seeing charging for EV's popping up everywhere, even in standard public parking spaces. It already is - I'm surprised how quickly it's happening.
https://ubitricity.com/en/charging-solutions/ac-lamppost/
I see it as something entirely solvable considering that even a heavily used car spends most of its time parked.
What if it's parked up blocking the charging point? This hand waving away the central problem is common. Let the eat cake.
How does that work for people who live in cities? I like electric cars - less moving parts, less noise, less cost maintaining and driving - but they are utterly useless to me because there is no way I can charge one. Hybrids are ok, though, I can charge in the rare case I'm actually parked near a charger.
With curbside charging, and wireless charging will be convenient once that's rolled out. No cables, just park over the charging plate.
It's not like wireless phone charging. It's very efficient:
https://insideevs.com/news/340478/120-kw-wireless-charging-p...
https://witricity.com/newsroom/blog/what-is-efficiency-how-d...
Where do you 'slow charge' your car when you're the average German renter (i.e. more than half the population).
But irrespective of that, what does that have to do with charging times at fuel pumps?
https://www.destatis.de/Europa/EN/Topic/Population-Labour-So...
If you've got parking lots where cars are parked for hours then you've got lots of opportunities for installing DC and AC chargers.
This is precisely my point with EV. Don't get me wrong, I WANT to buy EV, but the whole ecosystem is still not quite mature enough.
With my petrol car, I can turn up at a gas station with the tank near-empty and I can fill it up to full in 5 minutes, or 8 minutes tops if I'm "running on fumes".
Meanwhile if I turn up with an EV (any EV, even a Tesla on the superchargers) with 8–10% charge left, I need to sit in a godforsaken carpark twiddling my thumbs for 15–20 minutes and that ONLY gets me to 80% charge, if I wanted 100% charge (i.e. on-par with a full-tank on petrol) I'd be sitting there forever.
I'm not talking out of my head or from heresy. On a recent holiday I hired a top of the range EV and did a lot of driving as it was a road-trip type holiday. So I'm speaking from first-hand experience here. (And before the EV-fanbois come along, yes I did my homework, yes I spoke to friends who are EV owners before I left, so I was absolutely up-to-date on the latest "how to do it" for the exact car I rented).
So yeah, charging ABSOLUTELY needs to get to a point where it's on-par with "splash and dash" in the petrol world.
The related point is batteries. Clearly more mature batteries equals more range equals less need to charge. So that is another area ripe for more maturity.
I don't think there's anyone in the world who wouldn't like this, and there are many people already working on it.
But I would say: you don't seem to be justifying the statement I've quoted. You're speaking from experience to say that filling up an EV from 0-100% is slower than an ICE vehicle, but everyone knows that. You're not saying why every EV needs this for everyone's case, aside from your use of capital letters.
The reality is that would be nice (or having a fusion reactor where I never have to fill up again would be nicer), but there are plenty of people and journeys that happen in ways that EVs could easily fulfil, and the zero to three journeys a year most people do that require a long uninterrupted haul across hundreds of miles might have to be planned a little differently, or might require the renting of an ICE car.
I'm afraid you are perfectly demonstrating my point that the pro-EV side contort themselves to extreme levels to try to justify the lack of maturity in EV.
The fact is: I own an ICE car. Whether I drive it 5 miles or 500 miles is irrelevant. I don't have to "plan a little differently" on my 500 mile journey. And I don't have to drive a different car on the 500 mile trip.
As I said at the start of my original post. I am on your side. I want to buy EV. But I suspect, like many others, I look at it objectively and I see that the technology is not quite mature enough. I've no doubt one day it will be, but not today.
I'm just saying there's no point flat out stating that things must improve when a) for a lot of people they're good enough right now, and it's about effort invested vs additional numbers of people to reach, and b) real experts are already constantly working on this.
People will accept some increase in inconvenience on a particular metric if the product is a lot better on other metrics.
Look at mobile phones. Before the iPhone, all of them had a detachable battery. When Apple came out with a device with a glued-in battery, a lot of people were saying they would never ever buy a phone whose battery can’t be swapped out for a fresh spare.
The argument was same as yours: “I can’t possibly wait ten minutes to charge if the phone dies!”
Presumably 99.9% of those people now carry a smartphone with a fixed battery.
Your argument happily co-incides with the point I was making.
Smartphones have matured and are now at the point where you easily get a whole day's battery life, maybe a day and a half if you don't use it much. So who cares if the battery is glued in. (And as an aside, phones also charge a lot faster than they used to).
EV needs to go through the same maturity process.
Similarly EVs don't need to exactly reach the convenience of refueling, it just needs to be good enough in balance.
You don't use the bathroom or buy coffees? With a family, that'll kill your entire 20 minutes. Food or sleep will kill even more time.
And why the heck would you sit in your car while waiting? If you're driving in your car all day, a 10 minute walk every 3 hours will do wonders for your sanity and health. There's a reason commercial drivers are required by law to take a 30 minute break every 4 hours.
1) More frequent but short breaks, e.g. literally a 3-4 minute break every hour. Just enough to fill up the tank, for someone to run into the bathroom etc.
2) If doing a long break (e.g. lunch with the family) do a 2-3 minute stop at a gas station before orafter, but for the stop itself drive 5-10 minutes off the main road to unwind somewhere for an hour on more.
E.g. I was recently driving through the Rheine valley, and had lunch with this view, which is a 10 minute drive from the closest gas station: https://goo.gl/maps/VVXTWQDkc2F48UHe8
If I had an EV I'd have been stuck with the family in some uninviting car park at that gas station instead, and instead of a nice lunch having to pick through overpriced gas station fast food options.
Re #1: I find that those types of stops happen at the beginning of trips. If you're only an hour or two into your trip when you need to grab gasoline, you grab it quick. But with an EV you should be charging at home or at your hotel overnight, so you start out with a full battery and don't need a charge until about 4 hours in. Once you're 4 hours into a driving day, you want to stop for more than 3 minutes.
With that in mind I think we've been optimizing the charging infrastructure in Europe for something that worked well in North America.
Since you are going to need a bit of a longer stop I'd think it would be equally if not more important to ensure that there's fast chargers at every restaurant & attraction that's a short drive from the highway, rather than blindly copying what works for gasoline powered vehicles.
Re #1: I didn't mean to do short pit stops because you need to, but, and particularly with kids of a certain age, getting them out of the car to walk around for 5 minutes every hour might work much better than a similar 15 minute break every 3 hours, etc.
Which is still a big advantage of combustion, since fueling itself takes 1-2 minutes you can more easily pick which stop is the rarer longer stop.
So how is that infrastructure going to work?