Maybe if you live somewhere like New York it's possible, but I can't see it in other US cities. You definitely need a car in the US. If you don't have one as a parent in the US, you wish you had one.
It’s anxiety. I took a parent’s EV to Sonoma and back (100 mi each way + detours + driving around Sonoma) and stopped once for a 5-minute fast charge on the way back. The battery got to a low of 5%, but that was expected.
Unbeknownst to me, my father was checking the battery level remotely and freaking out that it would get that low. Let me remind you, this is in the Bay Area. There is no deficit of public chargers here.
Another: I had a mid-forties friend visit me in Wyoming. I have a gas Subaru. Its fuel level getting to quarter full—good for at least 100 miles—freaked them out. To go to the grocery store. Two miles away.
The same thing cannot be said about electric cars, unless you have a good friend with a fuel generator. Even then you still have to wait for it to charge. More likely you will be towed, at least in The Netherlands they will tow you to the next parking place. If you are lucky it will be one with a charger, if you are unlucky you are once again on your own.
I think the shitty part at least in Canada is the sheer network fragmentation for fast charging. Understandable why it's fragmented but it's still frustrating nonetheless.
Gas cars need a jump all the time.
If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger. That should work in 90%+ of situations.
In my family's 20+ years of owning multiple vehicles I can count on one hand how many jumps we've needed, and they fall under the category of 1. old battery or 2. left some lights on.
The latter wouldn't even kill the battery any more.
All the time? That's some strong exaggeration there. Last time I needed a jump start was in 2016 and before that.. can't put an exact year to it but it was back in the 80s.
> If this is really an anxiety of someone’s, they can carry a capacitor in the back sufficient to be charged somewhere and take the vehicle to a charger.
Please describe in some detail how you expect this to work? Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?
As in it's frequent. I'd estimate about as frequent as someone running out of charge in an EV nowadays.
(If you're in a hot climate, e.g. Arizona, and park your car outdoors, it literally can be every year or two.)
> Can you link to this "capacitor" that people should buy that can do that?
Apparently they're still marketed to commercial users, pricing in the $5k+ range. EV to EV charging, emerging on newer vehicles, would be the analog.
A quick Google turns up this kind of thing [0] which, based on the price point and form factor, is aimed at tow truck operators rather than individual drivers. Costs $10k+ and will take up most of the back of your car.
[0] https://jtmpower.ie/collections/electric-vehicle-charging
That's probably the right solution to this - and something every tow truck will carry in 10 years - but it's not the "capacitor in the back" analogue to an empty jerrycan.
"The scenarios where this is useful are plentiful, from helping a stranded EV driver with no power to whipping up a brew with a portable kettle."
https://www.ag-elec.com/vehicle-to-load-v2l-what-is-it-and-h...
I see it like "give the vehicle a few miles, to get to a better charge point" and nothing more.
If you come to a busy charging station... are you really going to wait for an hour? are you going to risk it with the next one? What if that one is even busier?
I live in a country which is full of people transiting every summer from norther europe to croatian beaches, like literally 10km traffic jams to go through a tunnel, police stopping transiting vehicles from leaving the highway (so the locals can use the side roads, but the gas stations can manage it, because refilling takes just a few minutes.
Now replace just 10% of those german cars with electric ones, calculate how many refills you need to drive between eg. frankfurt to split, multiply by thousands going through every weekend, and there's no way to get efficiently charge all those cars, and noone is designig charging stations for peak traffic. 30km left? 8 charging stations, 15 cars waiting, will you really risk it? Or will you wait two hours at least to get a chance to charge your car?
On the road trips I've gone on with my EV the average charge time I had was like 15 minutes. The longest was 22 minutes. I sometimes charged a little longer than as it took some time getting the kids through the bathroom and get a snack.
And my EV kind of sucks for road trips. Smaller battery, only 400V instead of 800V, and a less efficient motor setup compared to other EVs on the market.
VW id.3 are one of the most popular electic vehicles here.. They don't need an hour on fast charger, but still...
I took the data from here: https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro
> Charge Time (35->280 km) 31 min
So, for ~250km of driving, you chrage it four half an hour (let's say everything is ideal, no AC needed, no stopping in traffic with ac running)... for a drive from eg Frankfurt to split (~1200km) and then back, this means 9 charges (assuming you did the first charge at home, which is far from a common thing in frankfurt with a lot of apartment buildings and not a lot of chargers there). For a normal diesel car, that would be 2 refills (assuming you started with a full tank... and you'll still haeve half a tank left over).
So, 9 charges means using the charging stations for 279 minutes, a bit over 4 and a half hours if done ideally. Refilling a diesel would take 10 minutes. So to serve an equivalent number of tourists here in transit (since our gas is cheaper outside of highways, and locals fill their cars there), we'd need 28x more charging stations compared to gas/diesel pumps. Also, even with gas pummps, during peak times (weekends all summer), you sometimes have to wait for 3-4 cars infront of you to refill, so even that is not enough for peak usage.
So, for an average german tourist going to croatia for a vacation (and there's a lot of them.. a lot!), the electric car is useless until we build A LOT more charging stations, 30x more than our curret gas ones, and add 4.5 hours of drive time.
Sure, living in a house (charge at home) and commute to work and back within the range of the vehicle... that's great. But for road trips, we're not really there yet.
But you're saying 4 and a half hours to charge to go 2,400km is worse than the above poster who said 1+ hour to go like 200-300km. 4.5 hours of charging to go 2,400km is ~533km/h effectively, assuming starting with a good state of charge.
But you're also ignoring the fact nobody doing that route would be driving 1,200km and then immediately turning around and driving back home. They're probably going to stop at some point along that 24+ hour journey, right? Probably going to spend the night somewhere, probably going to get food to eat somewhere, right? I imagine most people need to use the bathroom at least once every 24+ hours? And they're probably driving that distance to actually visit someplace, so they're likely going to stay there at least a few hours if they're willing to drive over a dozen hours each way right? So some of those charging stops are realistically only a few minute wait, as you're just talking about the time to plug in to the charger near a restaurant, or plug in to the charger near your destination, etc.
Do drivers in Frankfurt really get in their car and drive 24+ hours round-trip only stopping to get gas a couple of times? Do people in Frankfurt not need to sleep, eat, or pee? Is driving 24 hours non-stop round trip an ideal German vacation?
And then to top it all off, the ID.3 isn't the best road trip EV. There are many other models that will charge faster. If you're the kind of person making non-stop 2,400mi road trips every few months you could pick a different EV that has better charging speeds.
Pick a Kia EV6 Long Range and you'll get an average of nearly 200kW charging speeds doing a 10-80% charge. The ID.3 Pro in your link only gets about 82kW average charging speed for a 10-80% charge. (1070 km/h vs 470 km/h). You'll end up doing the trip in significantly less charging time.
I also live in a transit country for them, so I have to actively try to avoid them every summer: https://www.rtvslo.si/slovenija/zastoj-pred-predorom-karavan... most of them have german plates (this is on the way back in a 15km long traffic jam before a tunnel, and our police closed the exits so they can't leave and use the local roads.
This is the charging station before that 15km traffic jam: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xBrxbccqVg7mSw3D8 ...so, either wait here in line, or risk it for a few hours... will you use the AC, or not? :) It's not much better in austria, and even worse in croatia.
The obvious difference is that you can’t pump your car at home, and by installing chargers in ordinary car parks you can mitigate the need the specific infrastructure of petrol stations, but the number of total chargers needed is still high, they are just not in the same places.
If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor.
In the suburbs or even smaller cities, driving is still faster. Hell, the trains here hardly have time to accelerate past 120kmph so driving can actually be faster than the train too unless you are going directly from city center to city center (most people need a 10 min bike ride on one or both sides).
Even If North America starts taking transit seriously, the routes needed to connect the suburbs to most metro downtowns will be enormous. There will either needs to be hundreds of bus routes feeding into light rail, or perhaps better bike infrastructure can get people close enough to one of dozens of light rail stops.
In any case, sprawl is currently setup to make urbanizing a slow and painful future for transit enthusiasts.
I was just rarely traveling to other city centers, and some town or forest isn't going to have a time competitive public transport options.
Hell, the Flixbus Amsterdam-Maastricht (station to station) is faster than the train. It has a lower top speed, no direct line, but it just doesn't stop 7 times or so in between.
If the Netherlands wants to continue to be competitive and ease the housing crisis, the trains need to be faster and cheaper so everyone can spread out and not be forced to spend 3 or 4 hours a day commuting to work if they live in a different city.
NL public transport is super expensive. Doesn't mean it's never interesting, but when I lived in France near a TGV station, I took the train much more often. It did often have both speed and price advantages.
Where things really shine is high-frequency, high-speed rail plus bikes. The IC Direct Rotterdam-Amsterdam is fast enough that I used to go from my place to my sister's, door-to-door, in about fifty minutes by bike+train, versus typically around a little over an hour for a car.
If you want a really impressive ratio you have to look to the TGV; in college I did Marseille-Paris, Paris-Lille, Lille-Brussels often and each of those segments are three times faster than the car!
Car dependency is a choice. Even in Europe the norm of cars is strong.
That argument can be made everywhere even with perfect public transport.
On the other hand, capacity planning e.g. for charging or gas stations, has everything to do with averages and the aggregate effects of people each exercising that flexibility occasionally.
Needed capacity for EV charging will be lower, and more centred around longer trips, since a large percent of charging is at home, from wall sockets or L2 chargers.
It’s not a matter of being glamorous or not. Public transit is with relatively few exceptions much slower than point to point driving. This is true even in places with excellent public transit, like Tokyo.
Or conversely, folks who are making this argument underestimate the flexibility people want out of a car.
If all you factor in is the average daily work commute, then most car owners don't need a car to begin with - even in the US. There's usually some public transport, or work-provided transportation, or opportunities to carpool with a neighbor. Not glamorous, but enough to get you through your average day.
The car culture has very little to do with averages. And for what it's worth, it's the same for most other goods, from computers to kitchen appliances. I mean, how many techies need a kitchen in their home to begin with?