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Looking around urban streets in the UK, the biggest blocker to widespread electric car adoption is almost certainly charging infrastructure. Most people in cit

Looking around urban streets in the UK, the biggest blocker to widespread electric car adoption is almost certainly charging infrastructure. Most people in cities here live in flats, terraced houses or other houses without driveways. Charging therefore needs to be on-street or in centralised locations. We have a handful of electric car charging points, but these are often full even now, when electric cars make up a tiny proportion of the fleet. The amount of investment needed in street charging and supercharger like stations before electric cars can be the majority is absolutely vast here. It's going to need a lot of political will to happen. I think the situation is similar across much of Europe and the rest of the world. The US model - a driveway for every house across most of the country - is quite unique globally.

londons_explore 7y ago
The issue is current charging stations are big dedicated things that cost thousands of dollars. They have screens and card readers, and loads of relays and switches inside. Some models (like Tesla superchargers) have a lot of very expensive power electronics in. They'll only be successful when someone can come up with a sub-$100 model which is integrated into a kerbstone.
- homero 7y ago
  There are cheap plugin ones but they take all night
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  I could easily do a sub-$100 AC charger; installation cost is the real problem.
shawabawa3 7y ago
Nobody in the UK has a petrol pump in the front of their house, it didn't stop petrol cars taking off I imagine people will charge at work, or supercharge for 20mins once a week
- homero 7y ago
  Petrol takes 5 minutes
  - yahwhatev 7y ago
    And that 5 minutes takes you farther.
  - thebruce87m 7y ago
    Sure - maybe supermarkets will become the new place to charge for example? You’re in there for 30 minutes anyway so you’ve just saved that 5 minutes. It could be the next differentiating factor for a lot of business.
  - davidgould 7y ago
    This only applies if you happen to live at a gas station.
- drcross 7y ago
  Agreed. Imagine if reality was inverted and electric cars were as common as gas cars are now and you proposed moving people to gas cars. Everyone would be incredulous- what? I have to drive somewhere a mile away to refill? With a highly toxic liquid? Instead of using a pervasive charge network which is connected to everyone's home already?
stevesimmons 7y ago
(I just posted this in reply to a different comment. But it is more relevant here.) On charging infrastructure, here where I live in London, a lot of the light poles now have EV charging points. They are very subtle: just a blue LED, a small black charger cover and a small Siemens logo. Everything else is inside the preexisting pole (diameter about 4 inches). https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-news/2018/08/20/siemens-to-provide-london-street-light-ev-chargers https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-news/2018/08/2... I would never have thought of doing this. But once you've seen it, it's an obvious cheap, quick and non-intrusive solution.
- leoedin 7y ago
  That's a smart solution, but it doesn't solve the whole problem. Since I became aware of lamppost charging I've been counting the lamppost to car ratio. It's generally somewhere around 7-10:1. Even if you convert every lamppost you're still only 15% of the way there. There's also the power distribution problem. To charge a lot of cars takes a lot of power. A typical residential house uses 4760kWh/year in the UK - that's about 500W average. It's maybe 3x as much in the US - call it 2kW. The most basic, 13A electric car charger will draw maybe 3.1kW. A more reasonable electric car charger might draw 7kW. A supercharger is somewhere between 50 and 150kW. at the very least, you're doubling the amount of power you need to distribute to residential streets, at worse you're increasing it by a factor of 75. Total UK electricity production is around 300TWh/year. We consume 46 billion litres of transport fuel a year - that's around 51GW, or 447TWh/year. Even accounting for the improved efficiency of electric cars, you're still looking at doubling the electricity production, and distributing that to 30 million cars, each of which is down a very long wire. I'm all for electric cars, but there's some serious infrastructure issues we have to deal with before they're physically able to be ubiquitous.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    If you own the lamppost, perhaps you could own orchestration of power delivery as well? If load exceeds tolerances, the EV plugs apply a "rolling blackout" that oscillates through the network every N minutes, to give every car at least some juice? Also, typical EV eMPG is double an ICE. LEAFs are 124/90 eMPG City/Highway, for example. That makes your math for doubling electrical production a bit less scary. The fact that EV charging is commonly off peak also makes it more convenient for the grid.
dicroce 7y ago
maybe you guys should push for electric bicycles?

londons_explore 7y ago

The issue is current charging stations are big dedicated things that cost thousands of dollars. They have screens and card readers, and loads of relays and switches inside. Some models (like Tesla superchargers) have a lot of very expensive power electronics in. They'll only be successful when someone can come up with a sub-$100 model which is integrated into a kerbstone.

homero 7y ago
There are cheap plugin ones but they take all night
goodcanadian 7y ago
I could easily do a sub-$100 AC charger; installation cost is the real problem.

shawabawa3 7y ago

Nobody in the UK has a petrol pump in the front of their house, it didn't stop petrol cars taking off I imagine people will charge at work, or supercharge for 20mins once a week

homero 7y ago
Petrol takes 5 minutes
- yahwhatev 7y ago
  And that 5 minutes takes you farther.
- thebruce87m 7y ago
  Sure - maybe supermarkets will become the new place to charge for example? You’re in there for 30 minutes anyway so you’ve just saved that 5 minutes. It could be the next differentiating factor for a lot of business.
- davidgould 7y ago
  This only applies if you happen to live at a gas station.
drcross 7y ago
Agreed. Imagine if reality was inverted and electric cars were as common as gas cars are now and you proposed moving people to gas cars. Everyone would be incredulous- what? I have to drive somewhere a mile away to refill? With a highly toxic liquid? Instead of using a pervasive charge network which is connected to everyone's home already?

stevesimmons 7y ago

(I just posted this in reply to a different comment. But it is more relevant here.) On charging infrastructure, here where I live in London, a lot of the light poles now have EV charging points. They are very subtle: just a blue LED, a small black charger cover and a small Siemens logo. Everything else is inside the preexisting pole (diameter about 4 inches). https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-news/2018/08/20/siemens-to-provide-london-street-light-ev-chargers https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/car-industry-news/2018/08/2... I would never have thought of doing this. But once you've seen it, it's an obvious cheap, quick and non-intrusive solution.

leoedin 7y ago
That's a smart solution, but it doesn't solve the whole problem. Since I became aware of lamppost charging I've been counting the lamppost to car ratio. It's generally somewhere around 7-10:1. Even if you convert every lamppost you're still only 15% of the way there. There's also the power distribution problem. To charge a lot of cars takes a lot of power. A typical residential house uses 4760kWh/year in the UK - that's about 500W average. It's maybe 3x as much in the US - call it 2kW. The most basic, 13A electric car charger will draw maybe 3.1kW. A more reasonable electric car charger might draw 7kW. A supercharger is somewhere between 50 and 150kW. at the very least, you're doubling the amount of power you need to distribute to residential streets, at worse you're increasing it by a factor of 75. Total UK electricity production is around 300TWh/year. We consume 46 billion litres of transport fuel a year - that's around 51GW, or 447TWh/year. Even accounting for the improved efficiency of electric cars, you're still looking at doubling the electricity production, and distributing that to 30 million cars, each of which is down a very long wire. I'm all for electric cars, but there's some serious infrastructure issues we have to deal with before they're physically able to be ubiquitous.
- mceachen 7y ago
  If you own the lamppost, perhaps you could own orchestration of power delivery as well? If load exceeds tolerances, the EV plugs apply a "rolling blackout" that oscillates through the network every N minutes, to give every car at least some juice? Also, typical EV eMPG is double an ICE. LEAFs are 124/90 eMPG City/Highway, for example. That makes your math for doubling electrical production a bit less scary. The fact that EV charging is commonly off peak also makes it more convenient for the grid.

dicroce 7y ago

maybe you guys should push for electric bicycles?