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These are relatively minor problems however. The gas station problem for example is solved by charging your car at home or work. Gas stations exist because we c

These are relatively minor problems however. The gas station problem for example is solved by charging your car at home or work. Gas stations exist because we can't refuel our cars at home.

vkou 11y ago
What about people who park curbside? Will their cars be spending 2 hours/night at the charging station?
- cloudwalking 11y ago
  Curbside chargers.
- mikeash 11y ago
  There's no particular reason you can't install curbside chargers. It's just a matter of convincing the powers that be to allow it, and that is just a matter of EVs becoming common enough for there to be demand for it.
  - vkou 11y ago
    There's no particular reason we can't install a gas pump on every street corner, and in every office parking space, either - except for economies of scale, environmental reviews, HOA opposition, theft and vandalism... These are not insurmountable problems, but they are expensive, or very time-consuming ones. You also can't just run a power cord from a wall outlet to the street. You'll need to tear up the sidewalks, to connect the charging stations to the grid. In many places, power isn't underground, so you'll have to bring it down from the power lines to the underground - maybe through the buildings? This quickly starts running to far more then $1000/charging station, and closer to $10,000/charging station. This is what curbside parking looks like where I live: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6236671,-122.3252994,3a,73.2y,7.77h,80.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjRaPaYN1H3ZYnCkDQVHexw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6236671,-122.3252994,3a,73.2... It would cost a fortune to wire that up. Better yet, if only half the streets in the area were wired up, due to the saturation of parking spaces, it would be close to worthless.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      What's your point? The expense and danger of gas pumps make them completely incomparable to EV charging stations. Replying to your edit: If you're installing them for a whole street at once, then the cost of bringing power down from a pole or digging under the sidewalk gets amortized across them all. We already hook every house up for water, gas, electricity, and communications. Providing power to every parking spot doesn't have to be particularly hard. It's not so easy you can ignore it, but nor is it a particularly big deal, not when looking at a timespan of decades.
      - vkou 11y ago
        Most of the houses in these areas are already hooked up for water, gas, electricity, and telecom - and the power comes from throwing a power line to the roof. Bringing it down to ground level would be cheap-ish if you're already tearing up the street, but there isn't all that much new construction, either. Yes, you can slowly convert the whole area to support street-level chargers over the next few decades - but until you do, having chargers on ~20% of the streets would be next-to worthless. There is a dire shortage of street level parking in this neighborhood - if you limit your possible spots to the ones where chargers are available, it's quite unlikely that you'll be able to get a space.
        mikeash 11y ago
        Sure, I know they're already hooked up. My point is just that these utilities, which are generally more difficult to connect, managed to be run to every dwelling, showing that hooking stuff up on a large scale is doable. It's an existence proof. There does seem to be a chicken-and-egg problem as you describe. Making the spots with chargers EV-only would mitigate that, although I'm sure it would be unpopular with the non-EV owners. It would help if cities got out of the business of subsidizing parking for their residents, but that ship sailed long ago.
- paol 11y ago
  To all the people replying "curb chargers", how much do you think it would cost to equip tens of thousands of street parking spaces (per town) with them? I don't see that happening any time soon, and if it does the huge capital expenditure will have to be passed down to the consumers, reducing the economic attractiveness of electrical.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    With economies of scale I'd estimate about $1,000 per spot. As things stand right now I think it's more like $3-4,000 per spot, but the cost of EVSEs will come down, and the cost of installation will be lower per unit if you're doing a whole street at once. That may still sound like a lot, but the parking spot itself typically costs $2,000 or so, and you're saving on the cost of the gas pump that this charger helps to replace. Yes, you have to account for the cost of charging infrastructure when looking at the total cost of an EV, but it doesn't greatly change the picture.
- sickbeard 11y ago
  you mean like this? https://www.kaltire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Jan-6-PlugIn.jpg https://www.kaltire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Jan-6-Plu... we have heating blocks for cars that park outside in north america. If you can install a street light, it's not that hard to install a curbside charger
Grishnakh 11y ago
That doesn't work for longer trips however. So what's going to happen when EVs take over is that local gas stations will disappear, as people will just recharge at home or at work. But for long trips, what we'll like see (well, it makes the most sense anyway) is highway rest areas where there's recharging stations and eating areas in one complex. Most people can't go more than a few hours in a car without stopping to go to the bathroom or get something to eat and walk around anyway; it's just screwed up now because we have these different functions separated instead of putting them all in one place together. This isn't a new idea by any means. There's several of these rest areas on the New Jersey Turnpike now. They have a gas station plus a mini-mall with gift shops, fast-food eateries, bathrooms, etc. It's basically like the "quick-stop" gas station, like Wawa, where you get gas and then go inside and get drinks, sandwiches made-to-order, use the bathroom, etc., except at the Turnpike rest areas, you have the choice of several different shops to go to, all in the same building. So in a future where many people are driving EVs that need 30 minutes to recharge, I predict we'll see more of these kinds of rest stops, catering specifically to people taking road trips that are beyond the range of a standard EV that gets charged at home.

These are relatively minor problems however. The gas station problem for example is solved by charging your car at home or work. Gas stations exist because we can't refuel our cars at home.

vkou 11y ago

What about people who park curbside? Will their cars be spending 2 hours/night at the charging station?

cloudwalking 11y ago
Curbside chargers.
mikeash 11y ago
There's no particular reason you can't install curbside chargers. It's just a matter of convincing the powers that be to allow it, and that is just a matter of EVs becoming common enough for there to be demand for it.
- vkou 11y ago
  There's no particular reason we can't install a gas pump on every street corner, and in every office parking space, either - except for economies of scale, environmental reviews, HOA opposition, theft and vandalism... These are not insurmountable problems, but they are expensive, or very time-consuming ones. You also can't just run a power cord from a wall outlet to the street. You'll need to tear up the sidewalks, to connect the charging stations to the grid. In many places, power isn't underground, so you'll have to bring it down from the power lines to the underground - maybe through the buildings? This quickly starts running to far more then $1000/charging station, and closer to $10,000/charging station. This is what curbside parking looks like where I live: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6236671,-122.3252994,3a,73.2y,7.77h,80.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjRaPaYN1H3ZYnCkDQVHexw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6236671,-122.3252994,3a,73.2... It would cost a fortune to wire that up. Better yet, if only half the streets in the area were wired up, due to the saturation of parking spaces, it would be close to worthless.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    What's your point? The expense and danger of gas pumps make them completely incomparable to EV charging stations. Replying to your edit: If you're installing them for a whole street at once, then the cost of bringing power down from a pole or digging under the sidewalk gets amortized across them all. We already hook every house up for water, gas, electricity, and communications. Providing power to every parking spot doesn't have to be particularly hard. It's not so easy you can ignore it, but nor is it a particularly big deal, not when looking at a timespan of decades.
    - vkou 11y ago
      Most of the houses in these areas are already hooked up for water, gas, electricity, and telecom - and the power comes from throwing a power line to the roof. Bringing it down to ground level would be cheap-ish if you're already tearing up the street, but there isn't all that much new construction, either. Yes, you can slowly convert the whole area to support street-level chargers over the next few decades - but until you do, having chargers on ~20% of the streets would be next-to worthless. There is a dire shortage of street level parking in this neighborhood - if you limit your possible spots to the ones where chargers are available, it's quite unlikely that you'll be able to get a space.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        Sure, I know they're already hooked up. My point is just that these utilities, which are generally more difficult to connect, managed to be run to every dwelling, showing that hooking stuff up on a large scale is doable. It's an existence proof. There does seem to be a chicken-and-egg problem as you describe. Making the spots with chargers EV-only would mitigate that, although I'm sure it would be unpopular with the non-EV owners. It would help if cities got out of the business of subsidizing parking for their residents, but that ship sailed long ago.
paol 11y ago
To all the people replying "curb chargers", how much do you think it would cost to equip tens of thousands of street parking spaces (per town) with them? I don't see that happening any time soon, and if it does the huge capital expenditure will have to be passed down to the consumers, reducing the economic attractiveness of electrical.
- mikeash 11y ago
  With economies of scale I'd estimate about $1,000 per spot. As things stand right now I think it's more like $3-4,000 per spot, but the cost of EVSEs will come down, and the cost of installation will be lower per unit if you're doing a whole street at once. That may still sound like a lot, but the parking spot itself typically costs $2,000 or so, and you're saving on the cost of the gas pump that this charger helps to replace. Yes, you have to account for the cost of charging infrastructure when looking at the total cost of an EV, but it doesn't greatly change the picture.
sickbeard 11y ago
you mean like this? https://www.kaltire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Jan-6-PlugIn.jpg https://www.kaltire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Jan-6-Plu... we have heating blocks for cars that park outside in north america. If you can install a street light, it's not that hard to install a curbside charger

Grishnakh 11y ago

That doesn't work for longer trips however. So what's going to happen when EVs take over is that local gas stations will disappear, as people will just recharge at home or at work. But for long trips, what we'll like see (well, it makes the most sense anyway) is highway rest areas where there's recharging stations and eating areas in one complex. Most people can't go more than a few hours in a car without stopping to go to the bathroom or get something to eat and walk around anyway; it's just screwed up now because we have these different functions separated instead of putting them all in one place together. This isn't a new idea by any means. There's several of these rest areas on the New Jersey Turnpike now. They have a gas station plus a mini-mall with gift shops, fast-food eateries, bathrooms, etc. It's basically like the "quick-stop" gas station, like Wawa, where you get gas and then go inside and get drinks, sandwiches made-to-order, use the bathroom, etc., except at the Turnpike rest areas, you have the choice of several different shops to go to, all in the same building. So in a future where many people are driving EVs that need 30 minutes to recharge, I predict we'll see more of these kinds of rest stops, catering specifically to people taking road trips that are beyond the range of a standard EV that gets charged at home.