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These articles keep omitting a pretty big barrier to adoption: street parking. (Maybe it's a function of US being suburb-centric? But at least the New York Time

by paol 9y ago

These articles keep omitting a pretty big barrier to adoption: street parking. (Maybe it's a function of US being suburb-centric? But at least the New York Times ought to know better.) One of 2 things needs to happen, either charging technology improves to the point where you can charge at a gas station in a span of time comparable to refueling a conventional car, or all street parking spots need to be fitted with charging ports for overnight charging. Neither thing looks likely to happen soon.

samcheng 9y ago
Or street parking needs to make way for bike lanes, transit, and pedestrian space! To be honest, though, electrifying public parking isn't that outlandish either. Fairbanks, Alaska has done it for a while to power engine block heaters.
- paol 9y ago
  Sure, it's entirely possible but it represents a major capital expenditure for urban municipalities, probably more than most could afford without external subsidies.
  - kuro68k 9y ago
    In the long run it saves money on cleaning and dealing with the health consequences. Like all infrastructure projects there is an initial outlay.
- kozak 9y ago
  Wow, an image search for the query "engine block heaters public parking" gave me a peek of how our all-electrified automotive future is going to look like. Impressive.
jmnicolas 9y ago
This is what I never understood : why don't they create cars where the battery is removable and when you go to a "gas" station there's a machine that just change your empty battery for a full one. In fact I thought about patenting the idea 10 years ago but I didn't have the know-how.
- empyrical 9y ago
  Tesla was going to have something like that, but they ended up dropping the idea for a while. Looks like they might be considering it again, though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-program-for-superchargers/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog... https://electrek.co/2017/09/15/tesla-new-battery-swap-technology-to-deploy-trailer/ https://electrek.co/2017/09/15/tesla-new-battery-swap-techno...
- afterburner 9y ago
  They did this in Israel. Maybe still are.
  - azernik 9y ago
    Better Place sadly went under in 2013; not enough market penetration, lack of focus on a few target markets, and difficulty getting enough capital together for the infrastructure.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Kind of like how you can swap the gas canister of a BBQ grill!
- eloisant 9y ago
  Because batteries get old and need to be replaced, so you'd have to pay for the aging of your battery when you get the new one
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    you pay for the service and that cost should be factored in.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    You could solve that by subscribing to your battery rather than outright owning it.
- 9y ago
IndrekR 9y ago
Why can't your (or shared) car go and charge itself while you are not using it?
- mamon 9y ago
  You are confusing electric vehicles with self-driving ones.
  - IndrekR 9y ago
    Not confusing. It is so much easier to make electric vehicles self-driving compared to the ICE vehicles. It may be economically feasible to do so in not so distant future. Real estate, including parking spaces is expensive. There was a good Freakonomics episode about that few years ago [1]. Main barriers to self-driving will soon be juridical, not technological. This is not just random internet rambling. I'm an engineer and have been working on commercial autonomous vehicle subsystems for a while. I can with full confidence say that the technology is already there. [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/parking-is-hell-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/parking-is-hell-a-new-freako...
    - explainplease 9y ago
      > It is so much easier to make electric vehicles self-driving compared to the ICE vehicles. Why?
      - IndrekR 9y ago
        Faster response time in motor control, high torque in low revs. Makes math simpler.
        NLips 9y ago
        What maths? I don't see what I'm missing: Normal acceleration and maintaining speed is trivial to handle with simple control loops. This isn't like e.g. phase detect autofocus where you want to supply a single input at the start to get to the correct end position; accelerating a massive vehicle takes a significant amount of time, such that a control loop has to: - gradually increase the accerator input from the start point - decrease accelerator input as the desired speed is approached - maintain a constant speed This is trivial for a control engineer. In some ways ICEs are easier than electric motors - you get free damping on your accelerator input! Outside of normal driving, you also have emergencies, where surely the alternatives are basically braking, steering, and hard acceleration, which respectively require engine inputs of 0 (i.e. no gas), no change (or again 0), and max. And hard acceleration is almost never the answer to emergencies anyway. When does a self driving car need to know "provide exactly X power to the engine", where X is none of [0, a little less than currently, no change, a little more than currently, max]? Source for control loops: On a general engineering course bachelors, our 1 days labs included one of which a part was writing speed control software for ICEs and one of which a part was writing position control software for an electric helicopter.
toAnswerIt 9y ago
in Norway they have free charging in the street for electric cars. https://youtu.be/zSjYra7cYqY?t=4m8s https://youtu.be/zSjYra7cYqY?t=4m8s
- dagw 9y ago
  Only in a tiny handful of places. But it at least shows that it can be done.
mikepavone 9y ago
This gets mentioned a lot, but I think the point is really over stated. First, there's a huge amount of room for growth in electric vehicle adoption even if we assume that EVs are a non-starter for people who park on the street at night. The problem is worth solving, but we're no where near the point in which it's the main obstacle to further adoption. Second, cars that are being used will generally spend a fair bit of time parked places other than home. For some subset of street parkers, enough of that parking time will be spent at facilities with public chargers to meet their weekly charging needs. This subset will grow as electric charging infrastructure expands to more places. My wife and I actually own a Chevy Bolt as our only car and park on the street. We don't drive especially far in a typical week (I take mass transit to work and she works from home), but we generally are able to get all our charging in from our parking when we're out and about. And that's just using Level 2 AC chargers. If we drove further each week (or parked in places with chargers less often) we could easily get enough charging in by shifting some of our grocery shopping to Whole Foods so we can use the DC fast charger there while shopping. Now this is in a city with pretty decent public charging infrastructure (Berkeley, CA) and obviously even within my city this approach won't work well for everyone. Still, I think it shows a possible way forward that could potentially work for a lot of people without necessarily having to have chargers at every street parking space.
- paol 9y ago
  > we're no where near the point in which it's the main obstacle to further adoption Sure. I'm talking about universal adoption because the article is ("take over the world") > We don't drive especially far in a typical week This is a good point, EV range is already long enough that many urban drivers will not need to charge every day. > For some subset of street parkers, enough of that parking time will be spent at facilities with public chargers to meet their weekly charging needs. This subset will grow as electric charging infrastructure expands to more places. My point exactly: to reach close to 100% EV market penetration, so will the infrastructure need to grow to 100%. Tricks like going to that one Whole Foods store that has the fast chargers won't work when a significant % of cars are EVs, there simply will need to be a lot more public chargers (or, charging time will need to decrease).
aquadrop 9y ago
I think that will happen if it will be needed. But there's plenty of people who can just charge car at home every night, that's a big market for adoption
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
Note that as battery prices drop, just having a larger battery that only needs charged once a week becomes more and more possible. People in suburbs need to drive further for a daily commute, but have easier overnight charging. People in urban centers have more trouble charging but need to drive less distance (and often in the kind of start-stop traffic that EVs work so well for, which changes their range in comparison with an ICE car).
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Larger batteries are prohibitively heavy though; electric cars are already pushing the weight up, compensating it with being more powerful, but at the same time they cost more energy to get in motion, which lowers battery life. Lighter and higher capacity batteries would be ideal, but I'm not sure how feasible that is with current battery tech. I gathered one manufacturer was working on solid state batteries for use in cars, which should give more capacity at the same weight? not sure.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    Average commuting distance by car is 8.5 miles in London. The batteries are already big enough and are only going to get bigger/lighter/cheaper.
lazyjones 9y ago
As an electric car owner, I can assure you, that that isn't an issue. You don't need to charge every time you park. A trip to a fast charging station once a week is enough for the average driver (perhaps these will be installed at shopping malls, supermarket parking lots eventually). People who drive a lot will typically visit fast charging stations when they cover longer distances anyway and also usually own a garage. So, this is a non-issue. Enough peak (fast) charging capacity (when millions of Germans drive to their holidays in Italy e.g.) is a real problem.
tomohawk 9y ago
Half the range is really a non-starter. And is that range a "best case" range with ideal weather and new batteries and all down hill, or is that a worst case when its 20 below and the batteries are 5 years old? What's the minimum guaranteed range? Having to have the car tied up to a charging station for long periods of time just to do normal kinds of around-the-town kinds of trips - also a non-starter. Can you imagine a hurricane evac with primarily electric cars? Well, kids, we only made it 50 miles because daddy didn't have hours to charge the car after he got back from work... Currently gas powered cars have a common fuel and storage that does not "wear out" or become obsolete (a tank). Battery powered cars are not quite that way. Kind of in the same way that battery powered tools all have different, incompatible batteries. Those battery powered tools become obsolete all the time when you can no longer find the batteries, or if you can, its cheaper to buy a new tool. So, until they get interchangeable batteries with compatible interfaces, there's significant risk of premature obsolescence, which could significantly inflate the cost. What are you going to do with a 5 year old car in this situation? That same situation is highly unlikely with gas powered cars.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  I’ve seen work electric vehicles advertised that let you plug your electric tools in. No battery powered tools required and no generator. However not all tools are better when attached by a cord - my lithium ion drill is incredible.
  - tomohawk 9y ago
    I agree the new tools are incredible. Their planned obsolescence interval seems to be a lot shorter, though.
- kuro68k 9y ago
  I am on my second Nissan Leaf and can tell you that your concerns are largely unfounded. Most charging is opportunistic, and when you do need to do a big evacuation a Tesla sized battery can last longer than you can safely drive. In fact in the EU legal limits on commercial drivers are already exceeded by battery tech. As for wearing out, taxi companies with leafs have over 200k on the packs and they are still good. Teslas have hit 500k miles and are still find. All that "new battery every five years" stuff turned out to be nonsense.
flexie 9y ago
First world city streets already have electricity supply (for the street light and for the buildings). Setting up charging ports is already rather cheap and once cities realize that they can - drastically reduce air pollution - make more money selling electricity than just charging for parking they will quickly start installing plugs everywhere. Battery range is already at around 500 km for Tesla model S and X and the long range version of model 3, and close to 1,000 km for the new roadster. With the current incremental improvements, in 4-5 years battery range for ordinary medium priced EVs will go beyond 7-800 km on a single charge, super chargers and other chargers will be abundant, and charging will become a non-issue. Within 8-10 years, even the lowest priced EVs will have a range beyond that of combustion engine cars (6-800 km), unless innovation mysteriously were to end.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Id speak to an electrical engineer before you make such wild assertions - upgrading supplies like this will be massively expensive. Also battery tech doesn't follow mores law so we aint going to get an order of magnitude change in battery tech ever
  - flexie 9y ago
    We don't need improvements at a rate that is anywhere near Moore's law. Moore's law is about doubling transistor density every two years. But for EVs to reach that kind of ranges (7-800 km for mid range price) we just need to add 50-60 percent or so one time, and I'm talking about that happening in 4-5 years. For the cheap EVs that currently have a range of around 3-400 km we need to double one time. I suggest we will get there in less than 10 years and that is not even taking into consideration the fact that prices on batteries keep dropping. A "modest" 5-10 percent improvement like we've seen historically, for another 7-10 years, and we have more or less doubled the energy density of batteries. Plenty for EVs to beat combustion engine cars. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-chart-8 https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-... https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density-improves-5-8-per-year-Does-this-represent-an-average-or-is-it-a-consistent-trend-each-year-Do-these-improvements-increase-the-cost-What-has-been-the-trend-if-any-regarding-energy-to-weight-ratio https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...
_up 9y ago
Are you needing parking spaces at all. I think the big benefit is that you wouldn't need parking spaces in cities at all. "Uber" cars could instead drive to the next passenger. You also could avoid driving around over a ton of batteries. Instead you could use self driving battery packs that are laid out on the side of the road and can follow you and dock on to your car if you need an extension.
unabst 9y ago
You're still talking today. By the time electric takes over, there is a good chance self driving will be here also. That's when this becomes possible: Your car will drop you off, go get charged, and come back if you want it to, or just park off-site and pick you up in the morning. But now think about zip cars and Uber/Lyft. The price of point to point transit will fall from human wage level to robot wage level. Imagine those services at a fraction of the cost. And more rides would be available also without the need for paid drivers. They'd also deliver mail and food. Of course... all this was also omitted by the article. But this does appear to be the consensus regarding where this is all headed.
- rohit2412 9y ago
  > By the time electric takes over, there is a good chance self driving will be here also. Either you are very unoptimistic about electric cars, or have an unrealistic view of what self driving is going to mean. Electric cars are gaining traction, and by all accounts will be 10-20% of new cars by say 2023-2025. A completely driverless self driving car on the other hand is still a fantasy, despite Elon musk's constant claims.
Retr0spectrum 9y ago
In the slightly more distant future, when we have perfected autonomous driving, it could be feasible for a car to drive itself to a large parking facility on the outskirts of a city, for example. Assuming people still want to own their own cars by then.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The low-tech version of that already exists - a lot of big cities offer P+R, that is, you park your car outside of the city and get cheap public transit the rest of the way. Still only feasible if you're okay spending an extra half an hour traveling and your destination is hard to reach / expensive park at though. If that's automated it'd be neat. I mean it already sorta is if you have a good bus network, but those generally aren't door-to-door. There's also taxis, that is, if you're rich enough you can afford to take a taxi to work every day. Might even be the gig economy / uber becomes cheap enough to make it compete with public transit.
audunw 9y ago
These are misconceptions, that stems from applying your expectations from how ICE is used, to BEV. You don't need to get the time down to the same as it would take to refuel a conventional car, because unlike filling an ICE with gasoline, you can walk away from a charging BEV. As BEV become popular, you won't see gas stations that offer fast charging. You'll see supermarkets, shopping malls, stores etc. Places that want to attract customers that have 10-30 minutes to kill. You already see this at places where the infrastructure is ahead, like here in Norway. For most drivers, this is a win. Although charging takes longer, you're usually wasting less time. Street parking is not much more of a challenge than any other infrastructure improvement. Does your street have light poles? Adding a charging pole isn't that much more difficult. The two can even be combined. Again, you can look to Oslo, Norway. There are street-side charging poles all over the place. I get that the US is a bit more challenged when it comes to infrastructure. The governments isn't very effective these days it seems. But it's not impossible. With all that said. The first people who adopt BEVs, will be people with a garage. Of course the people who have the easiest time adopting a new tech, will be the first to adopt it. But once the BEV+PHEV market hits a critical threshold, you'll see the infrastructure bloom. It's a pretty simple business model: there will be companies that offer to install chargers for free, on the street side, in shared garages, at shopping locations, etc. In return they'll charge a small fee on top of the electricity. Who wouldn't want a free improvements for their citizens, shoppers, apartment tenants, etc? Once investors realize that these companies will essentially grab most of the revenue of gas stations in a relatively short span of time, getting investments for this business model will not be an issue.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
No, street parking is unique enough and inconvenient enough already that electric cars can take over for everyone else and force those who rely on street parking to adapt. Looking for some sources on the population distribution of street parking, I found this [1] (admittedly from 1999, but still pretty informative even if the numbers have changed by more than I'd expect): > PARKING: Slightly more than nine in ten American households (91 percent) have at least one car, van, or light truck at home for personal use. > Because 71 percent of homeowners and 35 percent of renters have more than one vehicle, parking space can be a real concern. Garages or carports are common for households living in single-detached units–just over three in four of these homes (76 percent) have a covered shelter for vehicles. Townhouses or row houses, on the other hand, include a garage or carport less than half the time (46 percent). In both mobile homes and units in multi-unit buildings, the proportion is 26 percent. > At homes without a garage or carport available, vehicles may be left either on the street or in a driveway, parking lot, or other off-street space. For homes without a garage or carport, some kind of off-street space is available at 87 percent of the detached units, at about 75 percent of both the single attached units and units in multi-unit structures, and at 90 percent of the mobile homes. > All this leaves about 7.8 million households who must rely on street parking. Of course, not all of those households have vehicles. Four in ten households who report no offstreet or garage parking also have no vehicles. That suggests there are roughly 4.7 million of 100 million households that park on the street. That's small enough that electric vehicles could 'take over' even if those people were holdouts. [1]: https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/ahb-9901.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/ahb-9901.pdf
thinkcontext 9y ago
London is installing electric car charging stations inside lamp posts for street charging https://electrek.co/2017/11/14/london-electric-car-charging-stations-lamp-posts-street/ https://electrek.co/2017/11/14/london-electric-car-charging-...

by paol 9y ago

samcheng 9y ago

Or street parking needs to make way for bike lanes, transit, and pedestrian space! To be honest, though, electrifying public parking isn't that outlandish either. Fairbanks, Alaska has done it for a while to power engine block heaters.

paol 9y ago
Sure, it's entirely possible but it represents a major capital expenditure for urban municipalities, probably more than most could afford without external subsidies.
- kuro68k 9y ago
  In the long run it saves money on cleaning and dealing with the health consequences. Like all infrastructure projects there is an initial outlay.
kozak 9y ago
Wow, an image search for the query "engine block heaters public parking" gave me a peek of how our all-electrified automotive future is going to look like. Impressive.

jmnicolas 9y ago

This is what I never understood : why don't they create cars where the battery is removable and when you go to a "gas" station there's a machine that just change your empty battery for a full one. In fact I thought about patenting the idea 10 years ago but I didn't have the know-how.

empyrical 9y ago
Tesla was going to have something like that, but they ended up dropping the idea for a while. Looks like they might be considering it again, though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-program-for-superchargers/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog... https://electrek.co/2017/09/15/tesla-new-battery-swap-technology-to-deploy-trailer/ https://electrek.co/2017/09/15/tesla-new-battery-swap-techno...
afterburner 9y ago
They did this in Israel. Maybe still are.
- azernik 9y ago
  Better Place sadly went under in 2013; not enough market penetration, lack of focus on a few target markets, and difficulty getting enough capital together for the infrastructure.
chrisper 9y ago
Kind of like how you can swap the gas canister of a BBQ grill!
eloisant 9y ago
Because batteries get old and need to be replaced, so you'd have to pay for the aging of your battery when you get the new one
- ekianjo 9y ago
  you pay for the service and that cost should be factored in.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  You could solve that by subscribing to your battery rather than outright owning it.
9y ago

IndrekR 9y ago

Why can't your (or shared) car go and charge itself while you are not using it?

mamon 9y ago
You are confusing electric vehicles with self-driving ones.
- IndrekR 9y ago
  Not confusing. It is so much easier to make electric vehicles self-driving compared to the ICE vehicles. It may be economically feasible to do so in not so distant future. Real estate, including parking spaces is expensive. There was a good Freakonomics episode about that few years ago [1]. Main barriers to self-driving will soon be juridical, not technological. This is not just random internet rambling. I'm an engineer and have been working on commercial autonomous vehicle subsystems for a while. I can with full confidence say that the technology is already there. [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/parking-is-hell-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/parking-is-hell-a-new-freako...
  - explainplease 9y ago
    > It is so much easier to make electric vehicles self-driving compared to the ICE vehicles. Why?
    - IndrekR 9y ago
      Faster response time in motor control, high torque in low revs. Makes math simpler.
      - NLips 9y ago
        What maths? I don't see what I'm missing: Normal acceleration and maintaining speed is trivial to handle with simple control loops. This isn't like e.g. phase detect autofocus where you want to supply a single input at the start to get to the correct end position; accelerating a massive vehicle takes a significant amount of time, such that a control loop has to: - gradually increase the accerator input from the start point - decrease accelerator input as the desired speed is approached - maintain a constant speed This is trivial for a control engineer. In some ways ICEs are easier than electric motors - you get free damping on your accelerator input! Outside of normal driving, you also have emergencies, where surely the alternatives are basically braking, steering, and hard acceleration, which respectively require engine inputs of 0 (i.e. no gas), no change (or again 0), and max. And hard acceleration is almost never the answer to emergencies anyway. When does a self driving car need to know "provide exactly X power to the engine", where X is none of [0, a little less than currently, no change, a little more than currently, max]? Source for control loops: On a general engineering course bachelors, our 1 days labs included one of which a part was writing speed control software for ICEs and one of which a part was writing position control software for an electric helicopter.

toAnswerIt 9y ago

in Norway they have free charging in the street for electric cars. https://youtu.be/zSjYra7cYqY?t=4m8s https://youtu.be/zSjYra7cYqY?t=4m8s

dagw 9y ago
Only in a tiny handful of places. But it at least shows that it can be done.

mikepavone 9y ago

This gets mentioned a lot, but I think the point is really over stated. First, there's a huge amount of room for growth in electric vehicle adoption even if we assume that EVs are a non-starter for people who park on the street at night. The problem is worth solving, but we're no where near the point in which it's the main obstacle to further adoption. Second, cars that are being used will generally spend a fair bit of time parked places other than home. For some subset of street parkers, enough of that parking time will be spent at facilities with public chargers to meet their weekly charging needs. This subset will grow as electric charging infrastructure expands to more places. My wife and I actually own a Chevy Bolt as our only car and park on the street. We don't drive especially far in a typical week (I take mass transit to work and she works from home), but we generally are able to get all our charging in from our parking when we're out and about. And that's just using Level 2 AC chargers. If we drove further each week (or parked in places with chargers less often) we could easily get enough charging in by shifting some of our grocery shopping to Whole Foods so we can use the DC fast charger there while shopping. Now this is in a city with pretty decent public charging infrastructure (Berkeley, CA) and obviously even within my city this approach won't work well for everyone. Still, I think it shows a possible way forward that could potentially work for a lot of people without necessarily having to have chargers at every street parking space.

paol 9y ago
> we're no where near the point in which it's the main obstacle to further adoption Sure. I'm talking about universal adoption because the article is ("take over the world") > We don't drive especially far in a typical week This is a good point, EV range is already long enough that many urban drivers will not need to charge every day. > For some subset of street parkers, enough of that parking time will be spent at facilities with public chargers to meet their weekly charging needs. This subset will grow as electric charging infrastructure expands to more places. My point exactly: to reach close to 100% EV market penetration, so will the infrastructure need to grow to 100%. Tricks like going to that one Whole Foods store that has the fast chargers won't work when a significant % of cars are EVs, there simply will need to be a lot more public chargers (or, charging time will need to decrease).

aquadrop 9y ago

I think that will happen if it will be needed. But there's plenty of people who can just charge car at home every night, that's a big market for adoption

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

Note that as battery prices drop, just having a larger battery that only needs charged once a week becomes more and more possible. People in suburbs need to drive further for a daily commute, but have easier overnight charging. People in urban centers have more trouble charging but need to drive less distance (and often in the kind of start-stop traffic that EVs work so well for, which changes their range in comparison with an ICE car).

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Larger batteries are prohibitively heavy though; electric cars are already pushing the weight up, compensating it with being more powerful, but at the same time they cost more energy to get in motion, which lowers battery life. Lighter and higher capacity batteries would be ideal, but I'm not sure how feasible that is with current battery tech. I gathered one manufacturer was working on solid state batteries for use in cars, which should give more capacity at the same weight? not sure.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  Average commuting distance by car is 8.5 miles in London. The batteries are already big enough and are only going to get bigger/lighter/cheaper.

lazyjones 9y ago

As an electric car owner, I can assure you, that that isn't an issue. You don't need to charge every time you park. A trip to a fast charging station once a week is enough for the average driver (perhaps these will be installed at shopping malls, supermarket parking lots eventually). People who drive a lot will typically visit fast charging stations when they cover longer distances anyway and also usually own a garage. So, this is a non-issue. Enough peak (fast) charging capacity (when millions of Germans drive to their holidays in Italy e.g.) is a real problem.

tomohawk 9y ago

Half the range is really a non-starter. And is that range a "best case" range with ideal weather and new batteries and all down hill, or is that a worst case when its 20 below and the batteries are 5 years old? What's the minimum guaranteed range? Having to have the car tied up to a charging station for long periods of time just to do normal kinds of around-the-town kinds of trips - also a non-starter. Can you imagine a hurricane evac with primarily electric cars? Well, kids, we only made it 50 miles because daddy didn't have hours to charge the car after he got back from work... Currently gas powered cars have a common fuel and storage that does not "wear out" or become obsolete (a tank). Battery powered cars are not quite that way. Kind of in the same way that battery powered tools all have different, incompatible batteries. Those battery powered tools become obsolete all the time when you can no longer find the batteries, or if you can, its cheaper to buy a new tool. So, until they get interchangeable batteries with compatible interfaces, there's significant risk of premature obsolescence, which could significantly inflate the cost. What are you going to do with a 5 year old car in this situation? That same situation is highly unlikely with gas powered cars.

lostlogin 9y ago
I’ve seen work electric vehicles advertised that let you plug your electric tools in. No battery powered tools required and no generator. However not all tools are better when attached by a cord - my lithium ion drill is incredible.
- tomohawk 9y ago
  I agree the new tools are incredible. Their planned obsolescence interval seems to be a lot shorter, though.
kuro68k 9y ago
I am on my second Nissan Leaf and can tell you that your concerns are largely unfounded. Most charging is opportunistic, and when you do need to do a big evacuation a Tesla sized battery can last longer than you can safely drive. In fact in the EU legal limits on commercial drivers are already exceeded by battery tech. As for wearing out, taxi companies with leafs have over 200k on the packs and they are still good. Teslas have hit 500k miles and are still find. All that "new battery every five years" stuff turned out to be nonsense.

flexie 9y ago

First world city streets already have electricity supply (for the street light and for the buildings). Setting up charging ports is already rather cheap and once cities realize that they can - drastically reduce air pollution - make more money selling electricity than just charging for parking they will quickly start installing plugs everywhere. Battery range is already at around 500 km for Tesla model S and X and the long range version of model 3, and close to 1,000 km for the new roadster. With the current incremental improvements, in 4-5 years battery range for ordinary medium priced EVs will go beyond 7-800 km on a single charge, super chargers and other chargers will be abundant, and charging will become a non-issue. Within 8-10 years, even the lowest priced EVs will have a range beyond that of combustion engine cars (6-800 km), unless innovation mysteriously were to end.

walshemj 9y ago
Id speak to an electrical engineer before you make such wild assertions - upgrading supplies like this will be massively expensive. Also battery tech doesn't follow mores law so we aint going to get an order of magnitude change in battery tech ever
- flexie 9y ago
  We don't need improvements at a rate that is anywhere near Moore's law. Moore's law is about doubling transistor density every two years. But for EVs to reach that kind of ranges (7-800 km for mid range price) we just need to add 50-60 percent or so one time, and I'm talking about that happening in 4-5 years. For the cheap EVs that currently have a range of around 3-400 km we need to double one time. I suggest we will get there in less than 10 years and that is not even taking into consideration the fact that prices on batteries keep dropping. A "modest" 5-10 percent improvement like we've seen historically, for another 7-10 years, and we have more or less doubled the energy density of batteries. Plenty for EVs to beat combustion engine cars. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-chart-8 https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-... https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density-improves-5-8-per-year-Does-this-represent-an-average-or-is-it-a-consistent-trend-each-year-Do-these-improvements-increase-the-cost-What-has-been-the-trend-if-any-regarding-energy-to-weight-ratio https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...

_up 9y ago

Are you needing parking spaces at all. I think the big benefit is that you wouldn't need parking spaces in cities at all. "Uber" cars could instead drive to the next passenger. You also could avoid driving around over a ton of batteries. Instead you could use self driving battery packs that are laid out on the side of the road and can follow you and dock on to your car if you need an extension.

unabst 9y ago

You're still talking today. By the time electric takes over, there is a good chance self driving will be here also. That's when this becomes possible: Your car will drop you off, go get charged, and come back if you want it to, or just park off-site and pick you up in the morning. But now think about zip cars and Uber/Lyft. The price of point to point transit will fall from human wage level to robot wage level. Imagine those services at a fraction of the cost. And more rides would be available also without the need for paid drivers. They'd also deliver mail and food. Of course... all this was also omitted by the article. But this does appear to be the consensus regarding where this is all headed.

rohit2412 9y ago
> By the time electric takes over, there is a good chance self driving will be here also. Either you are very unoptimistic about electric cars, or have an unrealistic view of what self driving is going to mean. Electric cars are gaining traction, and by all accounts will be 10-20% of new cars by say 2023-2025. A completely driverless self driving car on the other hand is still a fantasy, despite Elon musk's constant claims.

Retr0spectrum 9y ago

In the slightly more distant future, when we have perfected autonomous driving, it could be feasible for a car to drive itself to a large parking facility on the outskirts of a city, for example. Assuming people still want to own their own cars by then.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
The low-tech version of that already exists - a lot of big cities offer P+R, that is, you park your car outside of the city and get cheap public transit the rest of the way. Still only feasible if you're okay spending an extra half an hour traveling and your destination is hard to reach / expensive park at though. If that's automated it'd be neat. I mean it already sorta is if you have a good bus network, but those generally aren't door-to-door. There's also taxis, that is, if you're rich enough you can afford to take a taxi to work every day. Might even be the gig economy / uber becomes cheap enough to make it compete with public transit.

audunw 9y ago

These are misconceptions, that stems from applying your expectations from how ICE is used, to BEV. You don't need to get the time down to the same as it would take to refuel a conventional car, because unlike filling an ICE with gasoline, you can walk away from a charging BEV. As BEV become popular, you won't see gas stations that offer fast charging. You'll see supermarkets, shopping malls, stores etc. Places that want to attract customers that have 10-30 minutes to kill. You already see this at places where the infrastructure is ahead, like here in Norway. For most drivers, this is a win. Although charging takes longer, you're usually wasting less time. Street parking is not much more of a challenge than any other infrastructure improvement. Does your street have light poles? Adding a charging pole isn't that much more difficult. The two can even be combined. Again, you can look to Oslo, Norway. There are street-side charging poles all over the place. I get that the US is a bit more challenged when it comes to infrastructure. The governments isn't very effective these days it seems. But it's not impossible. With all that said. The first people who adopt BEVs, will be people with a garage. Of course the people who have the easiest time adopting a new tech, will be the first to adopt it. But once the BEV+PHEV market hits a critical threshold, you'll see the infrastructure bloom. It's a pretty simple business model: there will be companies that offer to install chargers for free, on the street side, in shared garages, at shopping locations, etc. In return they'll charge a small fee on top of the electricity. Who wouldn't want a free improvements for their citizens, shoppers, apartment tenants, etc? Once investors realize that these companies will essentially grab most of the revenue of gas stations in a relatively short span of time, getting investments for this business model will not be an issue.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

No, street parking is unique enough and inconvenient enough already that electric cars can take over for everyone else and force those who rely on street parking to adapt. Looking for some sources on the population distribution of street parking, I found this [1] (admittedly from 1999, but still pretty informative even if the numbers have changed by more than I'd expect): > PARKING: Slightly more than nine in ten American households (91 percent) have at least one car, van, or light truck at home for personal use. > Because 71 percent of homeowners and 35 percent of renters have more than one vehicle, parking space can be a real concern. Garages or carports are common for households living in single-detached units–just over three in four of these homes (76 percent) have a covered shelter for vehicles. Townhouses or row houses, on the other hand, include a garage or carport less than half the time (46 percent). In both mobile homes and units in multi-unit buildings, the proportion is 26 percent. > At homes without a garage or carport available, vehicles may be left either on the street or in a driveway, parking lot, or other off-street space. For homes without a garage or carport, some kind of off-street space is available at 87 percent of the detached units, at about 75 percent of both the single attached units and units in multi-unit structures, and at 90 percent of the mobile homes. > All this leaves about 7.8 million households who must rely on street parking. Of course, not all of those households have vehicles. Four in ten households who report no offstreet or garage parking also have no vehicles. That suggests there are roughly 4.7 million of 100 million households that park on the street. That's small enough that electric vehicles could 'take over' even if those people were holdouts. [1]: https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/ahb-9901.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/ahb-9901.pdf

thinkcontext 9y ago

London is installing electric car charging stations inside lamp posts for street charging https://electrek.co/2017/11/14/london-electric-car-charging-stations-lamp-posts-street/ https://electrek.co/2017/11/14/london-electric-car-charging-...