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Where will garage orphans add gasoline to their cars if they must park on the street? If only there was a way to add energy to a vehicle outside of the home. C

Where will garage orphans add gasoline to their cars if they must park on the street? If only there was a way to add energy to a vehicle outside of the home. Cars park all over the place. Distributed charging infrastructure doesn't sound too impossible -- parking meters probably already need electricity. Park and rides or business parking lots incentivize people to shop or commute in certain ways for a relatively modest investment.

goatinaboat 7y ago
parking meters probably already need electricity Not 50A they don’t. Retrofitting it would be a substantial engineering effort.
- chc 7y ago
  You don't necessarily need 50A everywhere. Level 1 charging only needs about 12A. It's slow, but if you can be plugged in most of the time, it doesn't particularly matter that it's slow. That's probably enough to keep you topped off when you're just doing light commuting. A lot of level 1, a healthy amount of of level 2 and a smattering of level 3 would probably cover people's charging needs.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    It’s still a pretty big upgrade. Parking meters take basically trivial power to run right now. The ones near me are solar! They might not even be connected to the grid at all!
chc 7y ago
It's not really comparable. Garage charging makes EVs more convenient than ICE cars, but they're much less convenient if you can't charge at home. ICE cars can stop at a gas station on empty and be back on the road completely full in two minutes. Even with a fast charger, it takes upwards of half an hour to charge an EV. Level 2 charging takes hours.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Maybe the PNW is different, but there are chargers everywhere here. Charge during work, while you shop, etc. Charging will be an incentive or even an expectation. Imagine if your employer said, "We'll fill your tank with gas while you work", people would love that perk. Having free or subsidized charging at work seems like an inevitability to me.
  - chc 7y ago
    The year of Linux on the desktop seemed like an inevitability for a lot of people. It never happened. I'd love for the future you envision to come true, but I don't see any reason to think it will, given how little movement there is in that direction even in a super EV-friendly region like Southern California. To be clear, there are chargers at my work...but only two, and they're for-profit, so the converted cost per mile of range is more than it costs to put gas in my Prius. It was the same at my last workplace.
    - llukas 7y ago
      In NorCal I got charger in following places: 1) apartment complex (one set of public + separate apartment dweller chargers) 2) at work 3) at supermarket I do shopping most often 4) on public parking in various places "The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed"
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  Workplaces need to install solar panels and chargers for electric cars. A large percentage of cars are parked for 7-8 hours at work and 8-10 hours at home. Charging car batteries with solar energy in the afternoon is the most optimal way to decrease carbon use as charging at home at night means you are using the most carbon intensive electricity.
davrosthedalek 7y ago
In (large?) parts of Europe, parking meters at each spot were replaced with central parking pay-machines. But even if there are powered meters at each spot, I doubt that the power lines can deliver semi-fast charging currents (say 5 kW so that you get 40kWh in an 8 h time window) for so many spots. While not impossible, this would mean substantial construction. Whoever pays for that, they probably want to recoup that by inflated power prices.
fwip 7y ago
"parking meters need electricity" The vast majority are mechanical or solar-powered. If you find some that are wired, good luck running hundreds of kilowatts through the wiring built for delivering 10 watts.
frankus 7y ago
The main difference is that a gas pump can dump single-digit megawatts of power, so a "full charge" only takes a few minutes. The best commercial EV fast chargers (that require a six-figure DC power converter) are on the order of a quarter of a megawatt, and a good level 2 charger (basically a glorified dryer plug) is just shy of 10kW.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  But it also requires human attention. There's TONS of time in a day when your car is just hanging around somewhere. It doesn't need to be as fast if it's ubiquitous.

goatinaboat 7y ago

parking meters probably already need electricity Not 50A they don’t. Retrofitting it would be a substantial engineering effort.

chc 7y ago
You don't necessarily need 50A everywhere. Level 1 charging only needs about 12A. It's slow, but if you can be plugged in most of the time, it doesn't particularly matter that it's slow. That's probably enough to keep you topped off when you're just doing light commuting. A lot of level 1, a healthy amount of of level 2 and a smattering of level 3 would probably cover people's charging needs.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  It’s still a pretty big upgrade. Parking meters take basically trivial power to run right now. The ones near me are solar! They might not even be connected to the grid at all!

chc 7y ago

It's not really comparable. Garage charging makes EVs more convenient than ICE cars, but they're much less convenient if you can't charge at home. ICE cars can stop at a gas station on empty and be back on the road completely full in two minutes. Even with a fast charger, it takes upwards of half an hour to charge an EV. Level 2 charging takes hours.

Pfhreak 7y ago
Maybe the PNW is different, but there are chargers everywhere here. Charge during work, while you shop, etc. Charging will be an incentive or even an expectation. Imagine if your employer said, "We'll fill your tank with gas while you work", people would love that perk. Having free or subsidized charging at work seems like an inevitability to me.
- chc 7y ago
  The year of Linux on the desktop seemed like an inevitability for a lot of people. It never happened. I'd love for the future you envision to come true, but I don't see any reason to think it will, given how little movement there is in that direction even in a super EV-friendly region like Southern California. To be clear, there are chargers at my work...but only two, and they're for-profit, so the converted cost per mile of range is more than it costs to put gas in my Prius. It was the same at my last workplace.
  - llukas 7y ago
    In NorCal I got charger in following places: 1) apartment complex (one set of public + separate apartment dweller chargers) 2) at work 3) at supermarket I do shopping most often 4) on public parking in various places "The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed"
xbmcuser 7y ago
Workplaces need to install solar panels and chargers for electric cars. A large percentage of cars are parked for 7-8 hours at work and 8-10 hours at home. Charging car batteries with solar energy in the afternoon is the most optimal way to decrease carbon use as charging at home at night means you are using the most carbon intensive electricity.

davrosthedalek 7y ago

In (large?) parts of Europe, parking meters at each spot were replaced with central parking pay-machines. But even if there are powered meters at each spot, I doubt that the power lines can deliver semi-fast charging currents (say 5 kW so that you get 40kWh in an 8 h time window) for so many spots. While not impossible, this would mean substantial construction. Whoever pays for that, they probably want to recoup that by inflated power prices.

fwip 7y ago

"parking meters need electricity" The vast majority are mechanical or solar-powered. If you find some that are wired, good luck running hundreds of kilowatts through the wiring built for delivering 10 watts.

frankus 7y ago

The main difference is that a gas pump can dump single-digit megawatts of power, so a "full charge" only takes a few minutes. The best commercial EV fast chargers (that require a six-figure DC power converter) are on the order of a quarter of a megawatt, and a good level 2 charger (basically a glorified dryer plug) is just shy of 10kW.

Pfhreak 7y ago
But it also requires human attention. There's TONS of time in a day when your car is just hanging around somewhere. It doesn't need to be as fast if it's ubiquitous.