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How will EVs or vehicles running on alternate fuel sources work in areas where there is no fuel distribution system to support them?

exelius 8y ago
You know how there is already a divide between people who live in cities and people who live in rural areas? It’s about to get a whole lot worse.
- chcknsammich 8y ago
  I live in a city, I have no garage, an EV is impractical for me. I grew up outside of a city, with a garage, and electric. It isn't the 1890s. Cities are less equipped for self-owned EVs than the rural.
  - outworlder 8y ago
    > I live in a city, I have no garage, an EV is impractical for me. Here's my heuristic. What are the places your car usually spends parked at, and do these places have at least a power outlet you can plug into(a proper charging stations is better of course)? For most city-dwellers, that's either their home, their workplace, or any other place they spend some time on (supermarkets?). Do any of these places, or places nearby, provide a way for you to charge? If yes, you should be fine. Failing that, it starts to become less practical, as you'll have to rely on quick-charging (if it is even available). Honestly, this isn't much of a concern medium term. Yes, it's problem now. But, as the EV fleet increases, so will the market pressures for a proper charging infrastructure. It costs much less than creating a gas infrastructure. Most places have electricity, they may require some upgrades, but that's relatively cheap (compare that to adding more gas stations).
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      Walking to friends that own EV's one metric really is how many days can you go between charges. And the ratio of miles driven vs charging opportunities. And old lady that drives 1500 miles a year to go shopping might well find all of her charging needs are satisfied by plugging the car in while shopping Petco and Walmart. Because at that rate she only needs the car plugged in for an hour a week. 1500miles/52weeks -> 30 miles/week / 30 miles range per charging hour -> 1hr/week.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Wow. What city do you live in where EVs are impractical? Even the small cities where I live are starting to make ICE vehicles feel a bit less convenient. Right now it's barely noticeable, but you can certainly see where it's headed. Just as an example, things like going to the city for groceries, pulling into a parking space, and realizing that it is for EVs only. That was last year. This year, at the good grocery store anyway, a second bank of spaces were made EV only. Point is, I can kind of see where this is all going. So if even small cities here in bass ackwards Wisconsin are doing this kind of thing, I'd have thought it would be rampant in the large cities?
    - Eric_WVGG 8y ago
      New York City? Most cars are stored out on the street. The notion of sidewalk-side EV chargers around here is ridiculous.
      - outworlder 8y ago
        It is just as ridiculous a notion as parking meters. Yet, they exist.
        Eric_WVGG 8y ago
        Barely. Modern parking meters, there's one per side of the street, folks walk up and down to retrieve receipts. That model isn't going to work with power cables. And parking meters don't even exist in most of Brooklyn and Queens (or even a huge amount of Manhattan). That's a massive amount of infrastructure. (Don't interpret this as an anti-electric-car argument, I just personally think it's better and maybe more likely that personally-owned-cars in general are what fade from NYC)
        outworlder 8y ago
        Understood. It is expected that some places are better positioned for an EV switch than others. That's ok. One thing of note: dense cities like NYC are less amenable to cars in general. And at the same time, driving distances tend to be less, and there is congestion, all of which benefit EVs(engine is not turning if you are not moving, draw from other systems is negligible). If you don't drive as much as someone commuting in the bay area, then you might be able to get away with topping off whenever you go to a mall or something like that. Chargers are appearing at public parking buildings too. Also do you park you car in the street at your workplace? If they have their own parking, that could also eventually be a charging location (as it is in many workplaces elsewhere). As we speak, my car is charging at my employer's parking garage (it's actually shared between several buildings, but you get the picture). By the time I end my shift I'll just disconnect and go home. I haven't charged at home in more than one year(although I have the ability). In fact, Chargepoint tells me it's already charged. This means that I don't have to take time off my schedule to go to a gas station, all because of my employer. Given the proximity, I only have to charge once a week or less. If you also have to park in the street at your workplace, then it won't be as convenient. But then again, I think finding a parking spot should already be stressful enough as it is :) Hold on for a while. Cities will adapt, they will have no choice.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    I know a guy who lives in a town 70 miles away from the city where all the large stores are. And 110 miles from the nearest major city with an airport. There is one gas station in his town, the gas is way overpriced so everyone fills up during their weekly shopping trip and then drives back home. That puts a constraint on them. It's 70 miles home. Then a week later another 70 miles to get to the cheap gas station in the city. So 140 miles out of 300-350 on a tank of gas. Thus the local gas station is sort of immaterial to them since they don't use it if they can help it. I asked him if he could deal with an electric car with 150 miles of range and he said, oh god yes. He knows that he's spending $300/month just to drive to go shopping. And with an electric he can start his shopping trip with a full charge. Come back and plug the car in and have full range again the next day.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  ...or those living in rural areas will keep buying ICE trucks and people living in cities will stop buying cars.
- medion 8y ago
  Can you extrapolate? I live in a rural area and heavily depend on personal transport - there are no buses, no trains, etc. I have a lease on an ICE car to the tune of about $30k - and I am genuinely wondering how smart that is, and whether I should offload it while it is still valuable (it's a niche vehicle which is holding value, in some cases going up) and get around in a cheap Toyota until an EV is realistic for my scenario. What I want to understand is, how does the price of gas play out with EVs - in ten years time, is gas literally going to be unaffordable for most people? Will gas stations start drying up?
  - barney54 8y ago
    The price of oil will be pretty stable over the next ten years. The life of the average vehicle is now around 12 years and getting longer. Demand for gas isn’t going to massively decrease in the next ten years. Also, many gas stations don’t make a ton of money selling fuel, but on selling items from the convience store. So gas stations aren’t going anywhere for at least 10 years.
- rconti 8y ago
  Seems to me electricity is a lot more available in rural areas than, say, affordable broadband.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  By 'worse' do you mean one group will own pure EVs and the other probably hybrids? 'Whole lot'? Where's the problem?
pxeboot 8y ago
People will keep using existing vehicles for another 10-20 years like they currently do.
danhak 8y ago
Electricity is pretty ubiquitous, not sure why this is a concern?
- paganel 8y ago
  It's not ubiquitous in much of Africa, which is an entire continent. Also, in case of natural disasters (think big earthquakes, tornadoes) it becomes instantly un-ubiquitous for large swathes of more advanced economies too, that is at the exact moment when you kind of need the first responders to be able to get to you. On the other hand gasoline is much easier to provide, you just need another gasoline- or diesel-powered bigger tanker. Those things can cross even the Sahara desert [1], that is a place where I don't think we'll get to have a reliable power network in the next few centuries, if at all. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeE3VkoDm14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeE3VkoDm14
  - outworlder 8y ago
    How often do you cross the Sahara desert in a hatchback? You don't. You go with specialized, 4 by 4 vehicles. This is a very, very niche application. How many people make this crossing every day? How many people commute to work every day. It's not even in the same ballpark. Why are you trying to optimize for the very rare use-case? You can keep using your trucks in the Sahara desert for as long as there is gasoline being made and replacement parts. Not sure what you are worried about.
    - paganel 8y ago
      > How often do you cross the Sahara desert in a hatchback? You don't That was an extreme example, I agree, not one of the best, just wanted to point out that using gasoline/diesel for vehicle transportation is a lot more failure-resistant compared to a power network. And you said nothing about my point about the entire continent of Africa and about post-disaster interventions in the rest of the world. The last thing you want to hear after your house has been blown out by an earthquake or a tsunami is that the first responders can't get to you and your family because the power network is down so that they cannot move their vehicles. And such events (I mean, major natural disasters followed by extensive power-cuts) do indeed happen pretty often even in developed countries.
EwanToo 8y ago
About halfway through the article it says "VW will continue to modify its combustion engine technology after the new platform is introduced next decade. After 2050, there may still be some gasoline and diesel models in regions where there is insufficient charging infrastructure, according to Jost"
Joe-Z 8y ago
How are gasoline or diesel powered vehicles running in areas where there is no fuel distribution system to support them? I guess either people bring along what they need or they don‘t work. However I don‘t think EVs will fail because of a lack of gas stations. Obviously owners will invest in the future and also provide charging for EVs.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  I've only seen it for remote islands, but people carried the fuel needed to get back to the mainland on the boat, and potentially extra if it was needed for cars or other boats on the island. So there is a fuel distribution system, it's just very small-scale, or informal. This probably already happens for remote farms etc — it's cheaper to have a large fuel tank, and pay for fuel to be delivered to it, rather than trying to drive tractors and other equipment for hours to the nearest town.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    The nice thing about electricity is that you don't even have to get it shipped. It can come from the sky.
drdrey 8y ago
A solar installation and battery system seems much easier to build in isolation than a gasoline supply chain
- jacquesm 8y ago
  The hard part of fossil fuels is the fuel itself, once you have it the supply chain is the easy part, much easier than semiconductor manufacturing or high capacity battery (and in verter) technology.
outworlder 8y ago
Do they have a power plug? That's all that's required. If they don't have electricity at all, it's a bigger problem.
- mtmail 8y ago
  What's required is a socket to put the power plug into. There might be houses along your route but it's unrealistic to drive up to a stranger and ask for electricity except for emergencies (like water, food, phone). I think OP is talking about remote areas like national parks, deserts, central Australia.
  - outworlder 8y ago
    Well, aren't these areas already a problem today? You won't try to cross a desert on a whim, without enough fuel(including jerry cans) or without a scheduled refuel stop. EV changes nothing in that regard. It will either be feasible or it will not. If it is not, then an alternate form of transportation is required. If we are talking about deserts, we still favor EVs. You can have automated, solar-powered charging stations which require minimal logistics (unlike a gas station in the middle of nowhere which requires a truck visit every so often). I expect a few internal combustion engine vehicles will be in use in some very remote areas for quite some time. Also in the hands of some enthusiasts.
- soganess 8y ago
  I live in Portland. Specifically, in a little house that wouldn't muster 900 square feet using the most generous of calculations. The lot is similarly small with really no place for a driveway, let alone a garage. I can probably run a cable out to street, but, if my amazon packages are any indicator, I'm not in a spot where that won't eventually get damaged or stolen (let alone the tripping liability). So my best option is to charge at work. Luckily for me, I my work is forward thinking enough to have a few places to plug-in! Expect my office has more than a few people, thousands more than a few people. What do I do? Honest question. I always think about going electric but can't fathom a situation that doesn't bite me more than it helps. And I'm guessing I'm not alone, think of my coworkers, how 'bout anyone working downtown? What about Intel or Nike or any other large campus? It just doesn't seem like we live in a world where owning an electric car doesn't presuppose owning a home with a garage.
avar 8y ago
They don't have to. Just like combustion cars haven't been a full replacement for the horse as a mode of transport, horses are still a better option for some areas. It's very likely that combustion cars will still exist in some form in 200 years for niche use, but for most other things things will be changed to accommodate EVs, just like they now accommodate combustion cars.
- temporallobe 8y ago
  The horse and the car are not analogous. The car was not a 1:1 replacement for the horse, but a huge leap in range and speed, and an entire infrastructure (roads and gas stations) was but around it. EVs, however, ARE intended to be a more or less 1:1 replacement for the ICE vehicle, but there is very little infrastructure being built around it, and for the consumer, the EV is not an improvement over the ICE in any way.
floatrock 8y ago
Exactly why you should be looking at the companies building EV infrastructure, not the EV's. Chargepoint doesn't care if it's a Chevy, Hyundai, Kia, Jaguar, or Nissan stopping at its stations, it'll fill them up. Well, maybe not Nissan... the Leaf is still the main chademo holdout in the US.

exelius 8y ago

You know how there is already a divide between people who live in cities and people who live in rural areas? It’s about to get a whole lot worse.

chcknsammich 8y ago
I live in a city, I have no garage, an EV is impractical for me. I grew up outside of a city, with a garage, and electric. It isn't the 1890s. Cities are less equipped for self-owned EVs than the rural.
- outworlder 8y ago
  > I live in a city, I have no garage, an EV is impractical for me. Here's my heuristic. What are the places your car usually spends parked at, and do these places have at least a power outlet you can plug into(a proper charging stations is better of course)? For most city-dwellers, that's either their home, their workplace, or any other place they spend some time on (supermarkets?). Do any of these places, or places nearby, provide a way for you to charge? If yes, you should be fine. Failing that, it starts to become less practical, as you'll have to rely on quick-charging (if it is even available). Honestly, this isn't much of a concern medium term. Yes, it's problem now. But, as the EV fleet increases, so will the market pressures for a proper charging infrastructure. It costs much less than creating a gas infrastructure. Most places have electricity, they may require some upgrades, but that's relatively cheap (compare that to adding more gas stations).
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Walking to friends that own EV's one metric really is how many days can you go between charges. And the ratio of miles driven vs charging opportunities. And old lady that drives 1500 miles a year to go shopping might well find all of her charging needs are satisfied by plugging the car in while shopping Petco and Walmart. Because at that rate she only needs the car plugged in for an hour a week. 1500miles/52weeks -> 30 miles/week / 30 miles range per charging hour -> 1hr/week.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Wow. What city do you live in where EVs are impractical? Even the small cities where I live are starting to make ICE vehicles feel a bit less convenient. Right now it's barely noticeable, but you can certainly see where it's headed. Just as an example, things like going to the city for groceries, pulling into a parking space, and realizing that it is for EVs only. That was last year. This year, at the good grocery store anyway, a second bank of spaces were made EV only. Point is, I can kind of see where this is all going. So if even small cities here in bass ackwards Wisconsin are doing this kind of thing, I'd have thought it would be rampant in the large cities?
  - Eric_WVGG 8y ago
    New York City? Most cars are stored out on the street. The notion of sidewalk-side EV chargers around here is ridiculous.
    - outworlder 8y ago
      It is just as ridiculous a notion as parking meters. Yet, they exist.
      - Eric_WVGG 8y ago
        Barely. Modern parking meters, there's one per side of the street, folks walk up and down to retrieve receipts. That model isn't going to work with power cables. And parking meters don't even exist in most of Brooklyn and Queens (or even a huge amount of Manhattan). That's a massive amount of infrastructure. (Don't interpret this as an anti-electric-car argument, I just personally think it's better and maybe more likely that personally-owned-cars in general are what fade from NYC)
        outworlder 8y ago
        Understood. It is expected that some places are better positioned for an EV switch than others. That's ok. One thing of note: dense cities like NYC are less amenable to cars in general. And at the same time, driving distances tend to be less, and there is congestion, all of which benefit EVs(engine is not turning if you are not moving, draw from other systems is negligible). If you don't drive as much as someone commuting in the bay area, then you might be able to get away with topping off whenever you go to a mall or something like that. Chargers are appearing at public parking buildings too. Also do you park you car in the street at your workplace? If they have their own parking, that could also eventually be a charging location (as it is in many workplaces elsewhere). As we speak, my car is charging at my employer's parking garage (it's actually shared between several buildings, but you get the picture). By the time I end my shift I'll just disconnect and go home. I haven't charged at home in more than one year(although I have the ability). In fact, Chargepoint tells me it's already charged. This means that I don't have to take time off my schedule to go to a gas station, all because of my employer. Given the proximity, I only have to charge once a week or less. If you also have to park in the street at your workplace, then it won't be as convenient. But then again, I think finding a parking spot should already be stressful enough as it is :) Hold on for a while. Cities will adapt, they will have no choice.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  I know a guy who lives in a town 70 miles away from the city where all the large stores are. And 110 miles from the nearest major city with an airport. There is one gas station in his town, the gas is way overpriced so everyone fills up during their weekly shopping trip and then drives back home. That puts a constraint on them. It's 70 miles home. Then a week later another 70 miles to get to the cheap gas station in the city. So 140 miles out of 300-350 on a tank of gas. Thus the local gas station is sort of immaterial to them since they don't use it if they can help it. I asked him if he could deal with an electric car with 150 miles of range and he said, oh god yes. He knows that he's spending $300/month just to drive to go shopping. And with an electric he can start his shopping trip with a full charge. Come back and plug the car in and have full range again the next day.
dwighttk 8y ago
...or those living in rural areas will keep buying ICE trucks and people living in cities will stop buying cars.
medion 8y ago
Can you extrapolate? I live in a rural area and heavily depend on personal transport - there are no buses, no trains, etc. I have a lease on an ICE car to the tune of about $30k - and I am genuinely wondering how smart that is, and whether I should offload it while it is still valuable (it's a niche vehicle which is holding value, in some cases going up) and get around in a cheap Toyota until an EV is realistic for my scenario. What I want to understand is, how does the price of gas play out with EVs - in ten years time, is gas literally going to be unaffordable for most people? Will gas stations start drying up?
- barney54 8y ago
  The price of oil will be pretty stable over the next ten years. The life of the average vehicle is now around 12 years and getting longer. Demand for gas isn’t going to massively decrease in the next ten years. Also, many gas stations don’t make a ton of money selling fuel, but on selling items from the convience store. So gas stations aren’t going anywhere for at least 10 years.
rconti 8y ago
Seems to me electricity is a lot more available in rural areas than, say, affordable broadband.
solarkraft 8y ago
By 'worse' do you mean one group will own pure EVs and the other probably hybrids? 'Whole lot'? Where's the problem?

pxeboot 8y ago

People will keep using existing vehicles for another 10-20 years like they currently do.

danhak 8y ago

Electricity is pretty ubiquitous, not sure why this is a concern?

paganel 8y ago
It's not ubiquitous in much of Africa, which is an entire continent. Also, in case of natural disasters (think big earthquakes, tornadoes) it becomes instantly un-ubiquitous for large swathes of more advanced economies too, that is at the exact moment when you kind of need the first responders to be able to get to you. On the other hand gasoline is much easier to provide, you just need another gasoline- or diesel-powered bigger tanker. Those things can cross even the Sahara desert [1], that is a place where I don't think we'll get to have a reliable power network in the next few centuries, if at all. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeE3VkoDm14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeE3VkoDm14
- outworlder 8y ago
  How often do you cross the Sahara desert in a hatchback? You don't. You go with specialized, 4 by 4 vehicles. This is a very, very niche application. How many people make this crossing every day? How many people commute to work every day. It's not even in the same ballpark. Why are you trying to optimize for the very rare use-case? You can keep using your trucks in the Sahara desert for as long as there is gasoline being made and replacement parts. Not sure what you are worried about.
  - paganel 8y ago
    > How often do you cross the Sahara desert in a hatchback? You don't That was an extreme example, I agree, not one of the best, just wanted to point out that using gasoline/diesel for vehicle transportation is a lot more failure-resistant compared to a power network. And you said nothing about my point about the entire continent of Africa and about post-disaster interventions in the rest of the world. The last thing you want to hear after your house has been blown out by an earthquake or a tsunami is that the first responders can't get to you and your family because the power network is down so that they cannot move their vehicles. And such events (I mean, major natural disasters followed by extensive power-cuts) do indeed happen pretty often even in developed countries.

EwanToo 8y ago

About halfway through the article it says "VW will continue to modify its combustion engine technology after the new platform is introduced next decade. After 2050, there may still be some gasoline and diesel models in regions where there is insufficient charging infrastructure, according to Jost"

Joe-Z 8y ago

How are gasoline or diesel powered vehicles running in areas where there is no fuel distribution system to support them? I guess either people bring along what they need or they don‘t work. However I don‘t think EVs will fail because of a lack of gas stations. Obviously owners will invest in the future and also provide charging for EVs.

Symbiote 8y ago
I've only seen it for remote islands, but people carried the fuel needed to get back to the mainland on the boat, and potentially extra if it was needed for cars or other boats on the island. So there is a fuel distribution system, it's just very small-scale, or informal. This probably already happens for remote farms etc — it's cheaper to have a large fuel tank, and pay for fuel to be delivered to it, rather than trying to drive tractors and other equipment for hours to the nearest town.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  The nice thing about electricity is that you don't even have to get it shipped. It can come from the sky.

drdrey 8y ago

A solar installation and battery system seems much easier to build in isolation than a gasoline supply chain

jacquesm 8y ago
The hard part of fossil fuels is the fuel itself, once you have it the supply chain is the easy part, much easier than semiconductor manufacturing or high capacity battery (and in verter) technology.

outworlder 8y ago

Do they have a power plug? That's all that's required. If they don't have electricity at all, it's a bigger problem.

mtmail 8y ago
What's required is a socket to put the power plug into. There might be houses along your route but it's unrealistic to drive up to a stranger and ask for electricity except for emergencies (like water, food, phone). I think OP is talking about remote areas like national parks, deserts, central Australia.
- outworlder 8y ago
  Well, aren't these areas already a problem today? You won't try to cross a desert on a whim, without enough fuel(including jerry cans) or without a scheduled refuel stop. EV changes nothing in that regard. It will either be feasible or it will not. If it is not, then an alternate form of transportation is required. If we are talking about deserts, we still favor EVs. You can have automated, solar-powered charging stations which require minimal logistics (unlike a gas station in the middle of nowhere which requires a truck visit every so often). I expect a few internal combustion engine vehicles will be in use in some very remote areas for quite some time. Also in the hands of some enthusiasts.
soganess 8y ago
I live in Portland. Specifically, in a little house that wouldn't muster 900 square feet using the most generous of calculations. The lot is similarly small with really no place for a driveway, let alone a garage. I can probably run a cable out to street, but, if my amazon packages are any indicator, I'm not in a spot where that won't eventually get damaged or stolen (let alone the tripping liability). So my best option is to charge at work. Luckily for me, I my work is forward thinking enough to have a few places to plug-in! Expect my office has more than a few people, thousands more than a few people. What do I do? Honest question. I always think about going electric but can't fathom a situation that doesn't bite me more than it helps. And I'm guessing I'm not alone, think of my coworkers, how 'bout anyone working downtown? What about Intel or Nike or any other large campus? It just doesn't seem like we live in a world where owning an electric car doesn't presuppose owning a home with a garage.

avar 8y ago

They don't have to. Just like combustion cars haven't been a full replacement for the horse as a mode of transport, horses are still a better option for some areas. It's very likely that combustion cars will still exist in some form in 200 years for niche use, but for most other things things will be changed to accommodate EVs, just like they now accommodate combustion cars.

temporallobe 8y ago
The horse and the car are not analogous. The car was not a 1:1 replacement for the horse, but a huge leap in range and speed, and an entire infrastructure (roads and gas stations) was but around it. EVs, however, ARE intended to be a more or less 1:1 replacement for the ICE vehicle, but there is very little infrastructure being built around it, and for the consumer, the EV is not an improvement over the ICE in any way.

floatrock 8y ago

Exactly why you should be looking at the companies building EV infrastructure, not the EV's. Chargepoint doesn't care if it's a Chevy, Hyundai, Kia, Jaguar, or Nissan stopping at its stations, it'll fill them up. Well, maybe not Nissan... the Leaf is still the main chademo holdout in the US.