Electricity infrastructure already exists everywhere where we have civilization. And production is usually just hundreds or less km away. For lots of people it even happens at their own home.
The average amount of km every European drives is around 40km. For a standard EV that is around 7,2 kWh of energy per day, which can be charged in 2-3 hours from a normal 240V Schuko plug at home.
If there’s no option to charge at home, a weekly load on newer EVs with around 500km range would be more than enough, taking around 3-4 hours on standard 22kW chargers or less than 2 hours in a DC 50kW chargers.
EVs are a real option for lots of people. Main blocker for most of people according to most statistics is lack of knowledge on how to operate, and as a consequence fear of the unknown.
People aren't that stupid as you think, you are just ignorant. EV preachers take the easy route and ignore issues which are inconvenient to them, or focus only on home charging.
A RWD Model 3 and Model Y with around 500km range is even less than that right now in their available stock.
How can that be stupidly expensive if it’s even below average price?
Street chargers are more expensive than home charging, that is right. However it is still cheaper than gas and diesel by 50-70% by average in mainland Europe.
You can look up facts instead of calling me ignorant.
The 500km mark is calculated in ideal conditions, flat street at 60km/h or something like that in more realistic highway conditions it's about 300km
That's why plugins have so much sense even when they cost about the same that EV would. I can drive fully electric on everyday short distances (my car is rated for 33km of electric range, but I'm able to squeeze about 40 by careful eco driving) That usually covers my city driving and at the same time I have 700-1000km backup of ICE/hybrid range
In my observation hybrid approach have about 30% better fuel efficiency than pure petrol.
I agree that having 22kW charger nearby that is affordable could solve all of that. But for many people that is not the case and if so they are so expensive.
In my case petrol costs me about $0.12/km and electric from supercharger would be $0.14/km (assuming 19kW/100km). Why would I want to switch to more expensive car to pay more per driven distance?
Of course everything changes when you have solar installation and you have basically free electricity (of course I omit here installation cost that would make if free after about 10years or so) then driving basically everyday for free and paying for fast charging few times a year when doing very long distance trip makes is fine.
But again, not everyone can have solar installation.
I have high hopes for new sodium batteries, give them 2 more generations and we could afford ev cars with 1000km of range in cars less expensive than ice and that would be very compelling.
Now imagine we came along and said we were going to add to the electrical grid a parallel system of transporting explosive liquid to billions of distributed combustion engines. Not only that, the explosive liquid is only available in a few politically charged areas in the world. Add all the tankers refineries pipes truck lines holding tanks pumps etc so that most people live at most a few miles from a holding tank that will distribute hundreds of gallons to them for their own micro power plant that only exists for their commute.
It seems crazy. We built both systems incrementally over time so we're in a massive sunk cost analysis whenever we think about replacing gas cars.
The same is not true of electric cars. People have real mileage anxiety because they can’t use petrol when a charger isn’t available
> The highest peak electricity demand in the UK in recent years was 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.
> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...
Saving the environment is nobel, but affording it is another thing.
If price hikes in the US continue, there are places in the US where that may soon be the case, too. Then we're screwed. Thankfully hybrids aren't going anywhere. They may be more complicated, but they have the most critical feature, regenerative braking. instead of shedding the energy spent slowing down as pollution and heat, it gets saved and is used to move the vehicle later.
I’m always amazed by statements like this. People who have lived through the rollout of the internet to the masses can’t see how we’d modify existing structure to accommodate needs. We had phone lines initially, 20 years later now we have 5G, fibre, satellites.
They just dug up every street in my European town to put fibre internet in. We already had broadband in the town. They dug up every street to give us fibre that most people won’t even need over their existing connection. People look at this and say “how will we charge electric cars” when we are already surrounded by electricity.