8 ms·

Most EV drivers have no need to visit charging stations [...] You do realise that we're talking about Germany here, don't you? You cannot apply US standards to

by qayxc 6y ago

Most EV drivers have no need to visit charging stations [...] You do realise that we're talking about Germany here, don't you? You cannot apply US standards to a foreign country with 7x the population density and only a ~50% home ownership rate... The fact of the matter is, that half of German households cannot charge their vehicles at home, because they live in a rented apartment. In cities in particular (you know, the places where EVs make the most sense), many people don't have a garage - often not even a dedicated parking spot. This is an actual problem that prevents many people from owning an EV in Germany.

mc32 6y ago
By home I don’t think they mean having a garage with a charger. By home I think they mean wherever you park your car at night.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mdoms 6y ago
  Using chargers that don't exist?
  - mc32 6y ago
    I think the suggestion is that rather than build them at gas stations build them where people park their cars at night.
- Tomte 6y ago
  Roadside. Every night in another spot, sometimes even hundreds of meters away from your apartment. The situation I have in mind is for large parts of a middle-big town that's a regional center.
askvictor 6y ago
You are totally correct, yet OP's point is still reasonable - this was written from the perspective of a petrol-car driver; moreover, it's a missed opportunity to think differently. Petrol stations require big tanks underground to store the petrol; we don't have pipelines through the city carrying petrol. On the other hand, we do have a massive network of wires carrying electricity. EV charging can so easily be distributed, that there is simply no need for 'petrol stations.' Put charging spots directly on the street and other parking places, with an app/API to show availability. Monitor demand, and add more in hotspots.
- gpsx 6y ago
  What would be a good use of gas stations for electric cars is battery swapping. It is too early to make this mandatory but I think it might be time to start working on this idea. (It has been looked into before.)
  - Zanni 6y ago
    Battery swapping was an idea that made sense when battery tech wasn't as good and ranges weren't as great, but its window has passed. You might be thinking of Better Place, which actually launched a battery-swap station. It made sense (some) sense at the time to spend 5 minutes on a battery swap that would otherwise take 6 hours to charge for 111 miles of range. But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger.
    - anoncareer0212 6y ago
      ...which is also why it's a bit frustrating to see people saying "Oh, this is from the perspective of gas guzzlers!"...no it isn't. this is a huge win, we're not trying to replace all infrastructure overnight, but it lowers the inconvenience of a marginal EV greatly...174mi in 20 min is damn good, that's 4 of my loooong commutes
      - zamfi 6y ago
        Only if they put in fast chargers, though. If they put in L2 (i.e., 8 hours for a full charge) chargers, it’s worse than useless.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      > But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger. That's still 20 minutes longer than it should take. And probably around 15 minutes longer than it takes to fill up with gas (which will give you twice the range). Speeding that up makes sense. (To be clear, I don't think it's reasonable to mandate swappable batteries, for instance; there's far too much innovation and potential innovation in battery technology for that. However, I think it's reasonable to experiment with that, and any other solution that will let it take less time to charge.)
elihu 6y ago
> The fact of the matter is, that half of German households cannot charge their vehicles at home, because they live in a rented apartment. Do apartments in Germany not have charging stations? And if not, is there a fundamental reason why they can't be remedied somehow in the near-ish future?
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  My apartment building in Berlin doesn't even have dedicated bathrooms. The shower is in the kitchen. They used to be workers dorms which were converted. They previously had communal facilities and they had to squeeze these in where ever they could when converting. There is on street parking. Really I think the next step isn't EVs but kicking cars out of the neighbourhood altogther. We don't need them. They are mostly used for ego not transport it seems.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Do apartments in Germany not have charging stations? The US is fairly unusual in its "for every apartment building there must be a giant parking lot" zoning.
  - nend 6y ago
    Like most general statements about the US, this is only true in parts of it. Plenty of cities in the US, especially the older east coast one's, do not have apartment buildings with parking lots.
  - ivan_gammel 6y ago
    New buildings usually have underground parking, but I don’t think this policy has anything to do with the residents of the big cities. Car-sharing is more viable option there and it’s easy to provide chargers for car-sharing services on the streets.
- ido 6y ago
  Where would you put them? Most German cities are old and there's only on-street parking (that you have to be lucky enough to get). This is what my neighborhood looks like: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4550916,13.3779422,183m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4550916,13.3779422,183m/data... All of these are 5-6 story apartment buildings with no parking lots. I would be surprised if even 1 unit in a 100 has dedicated parking.
deelowe 6y ago
OP said home, not house. This would include apartments.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  This is how a typical German residential street looks (https://reidiculoustravels.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/dsc_0722.jpg https://reidiculoustravels.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/dsc_0...) It's not really trivial to pack that full of chargers if you don't want to interfer with pedestrians or cyclists.
  - deelowe 6y ago
    I get it, but do you think queuing up at a petrol station is a viable solution to this or is it more likely to be political maneuvering to appease the station owners who are worried their business models will be obsolete soon?
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      I haven't looked much into it and I don't know that many people who own an electric car, to be honest. What I could think of is that gas stations themselves might become somewhat more multi-use, that's already the case in some places in Germany. So people might to grab something to eat while charging up or do some shopping and so on. Scale them up a bit so that people have something useful to do while their car charges. People in Germany still like traditional stores and physical shopping a lot, I don't think it's just pandering to the owners.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      > or is it more likely to be political maneuvering to appease the station owners who are worried their business models will be obsolete soon? What would be the point of that? If station owners believe that charging stations will keep their businesses alive, then they'll put them in themselves, without needing a law telling them to do so.
  - caf 6y ago
    Probably need to develop some kind of under-street mounted charging, like the way conference room tables hide their port clusters.
ivan_gammel 6y ago
Half of German households does not need to own a car because of excellent public transportation systems, car-sharing and policies oriented to remove personal cars from the streets.
pkaye 6y ago
I think another option is charging stations at major stores and office spaces that have parking lots. That way you can charge while shopping or working. I see this become more common in the US.
cookiengineer 6y ago
Another problem is that even if you are lucky to be able to rent a garage for a few hundred bucks per month, you are not able to get your car charged inside. A lot of building regulations will prevent that, including Erschliessungsgebühren, Elektroverträglichkeitsmessungen, the required VDE Sicherheitsprüfungen and the fact that each garage lot would require a legal address in order for paying Energiesteuer there, as the control of that is done by external organizations like the ISTA or similar entities. And yes, overall for private people it’s totally impossible to think of everything in this regard, even if you are lucky enough to have an owned home.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Interesting. Do you have details to share, because I'd vaguely planned to equip my garage with electrical charging capability? I can assure you though that nobody is paying several hundred bucks per month for a garage or parking lot except maybe in the very city center of the four big cities in Germany, like next to the iconic main attraction of that city. It seems the public sector wants to grab the money for EV charging, with public parking lots being dedicated to it, while there's no plan for private proprietors to install their own charging.
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    > Do you have details to share, because I'd vaguely planned to equip my garage with electrical charging capability? Where do you live? The regulations vary a lot from state to state and even city to city, as the local Bauamt or Baubehoerde usually has the last say when it comes to approval/denial of installations like this. In the BW area there's something available like the Netze-BW initiative that does most of the mentioned regulations/paperwork for you [1]. I'm not sure whether or not RWE or EON (the energy suppliers for more Northern states of Germany) have a similar initiative, but it seems that you can get the "Wallboxes" from them as well [2]. In the larger cities like Karlsruhe, I've seen a lot of the charger stations of Innogy [3] that seem to offer installation services for parking lots and private garages as well as for businesses. > I can assure you though that nobody is paying several hundred bucks per month for a garage or parking lot Prices kinda exploded around the Baden-Wuerttemberg area over the last years in the "Regionalmetropolen" aka where most industries or businesses are located. Can only speak for those, though I'd imagine that a lot of the mid-larger cities have even more problems with higher densities of people/m^2. [1] https://www.netze-bw.de/netzanschluss/elektromobilitaet-zuhause https://www.netze-bw.de/netzanschluss/elektromobilitaet-zuha... [2] https://www.eon.de/de/eonerleben/elektroauto-zuhause-laden-wallbox.html https://www.eon.de/de/eonerleben/elektroauto-zuhause-laden-w... [3] https://www.innogy-emobility.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte https://www.innogy-emobility.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte
eloff 6y ago
If you don't have a parking space, you probably don't have an EV and whether gas stations have chargers or not is irrelevant. If you do, it doesn't matter if you're renting or not, you have a similar ability to charge at home. What you probably can't do is install a dedicated fast charger unless you somehow plan to take it with you when you move, or work a deal with the landlord to share the cost. I think the one thing that does change in Germany is more people live in apartments where you have less options for installing a charger than in the suburbs in your own garage in the US.
- eigenvector 6y ago
  Parent comment said "no dedicated parking space" which is a different thing. When I lived in Toronto, I had a resident permit issued by the city to park on the street on same block as my building, but I was at the mercy of whatever space was available. Some days I'd get a spot right in front of my building, some days I had to walk around the corner. This is a pretty common parking scenario in dense, older areas - there is no dedicated parking lot and the space you are parking on is part of the public realm.
- virgilp 6y ago
  Not in Germany, but I do have a dedicated parking space, I could totally afford an electric car, an yet it would not be practical to get one. Here are my reasons: - I need one car, not many (I'm lucky to get _one_ space, ain't gonna get several!). - I can't charge it there, there's no infrastructure. Sure, I can ask city to add infrastructure but... good luck with that, it's going to take a while, there are a lot of problems to solve (besides actually installing power near my space, we need a meter to charge me, and it needs to be a "smart meter" that doesn't allow everybody to use power paid by me; it needs to be at least moderately vandalism-proof. And I need to find a way to leave my car plugged in for extended periods of time, unsupervised, without fearing that someone will steal stuff from it - e.g. the charging cable?) - If all the above are solved - I still need to use that car for extended trips (vacations, visiting parents in a different city). Those would still mean that I need to charge "on the road". Due to the first point, it'd still be a challenge to go 100% electric even if I had the "charging at home" part covered. Really, I think if we don't solve the "charging in gas stations" part, electric vehicle use is going to be inherently limited.
Gibbon1 6y ago
One thing I've wondered about is key less entry could solve a bunch of issues with cars. Like pay the local charging station to deal with charging. As in middle of the night a attendant gets in your car, drives it a couple of minutes to a charging station and plugs it in. Brings it back an hour or two later.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
"You do realise that we're talking about Germany here, don't you? You cannot apply US standards" a) I'm not in the US. b) My extended family is all German. I'm quite familiar with the differences in Germany. Gas stations are still not the right distribution model.
sprafa 6y ago
the 2nd favorite activity in HN is to talk about shit they have no idea about.

by qayxc 6y ago

mc32 6y ago

By home I don’t think they mean having a garage with a charger. By home I think they mean wherever you park your car at night.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mdoms 6y ago
Using chargers that don't exist?
- mc32 6y ago
  I think the suggestion is that rather than build them at gas stations build them where people park their cars at night.
Tomte 6y ago
Roadside. Every night in another spot, sometimes even hundreds of meters away from your apartment. The situation I have in mind is for large parts of a middle-big town that's a regional center.

askvictor 6y ago

You are totally correct, yet OP's point is still reasonable - this was written from the perspective of a petrol-car driver; moreover, it's a missed opportunity to think differently. Petrol stations require big tanks underground to store the petrol; we don't have pipelines through the city carrying petrol. On the other hand, we do have a massive network of wires carrying electricity. EV charging can so easily be distributed, that there is simply no need for 'petrol stations.' Put charging spots directly on the street and other parking places, with an app/API to show availability. Monitor demand, and add more in hotspots.

gpsx 6y ago
What would be a good use of gas stations for electric cars is battery swapping. It is too early to make this mandatory but I think it might be time to start working on this idea. (It has been looked into before.)
- Zanni 6y ago
  Battery swapping was an idea that made sense when battery tech wasn't as good and ranges weren't as great, but its window has passed. You might be thinking of Better Place, which actually launched a battery-swap station. It made sense (some) sense at the time to spend 5 minutes on a battery swap that would otherwise take 6 hours to charge for 111 miles of range. But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger.
  - anoncareer0212 6y ago
    ...which is also why it's a bit frustrating to see people saying "Oh, this is from the perspective of gas guzzlers!"...no it isn't. this is a huge win, we're not trying to replace all infrastructure overnight, but it lowers the inconvenience of a marginal EV greatly...174mi in 20 min is damn good, that's 4 of my loooong commutes
    - zamfi 6y ago
      Only if they put in fast chargers, though. If they put in L2 (i.e., 8 hours for a full charge) chargers, it’s worse than useless.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger. That's still 20 minutes longer than it should take. And probably around 15 minutes longer than it takes to fill up with gas (which will give you twice the range). Speeding that up makes sense. (To be clear, I don't think it's reasonable to mandate swappable batteries, for instance; there's far too much innovation and potential innovation in battery technology for that. However, I think it's reasonable to experiment with that, and any other solution that will let it take less time to charge.)

elihu 6y ago

> The fact of the matter is, that half of German households cannot charge their vehicles at home, because they live in a rented apartment. Do apartments in Germany not have charging stations? And if not, is there a fundamental reason why they can't be remedied somehow in the near-ish future?

rorykoehler 6y ago
My apartment building in Berlin doesn't even have dedicated bathrooms. The shower is in the kitchen. They used to be workers dorms which were converted. They previously had communal facilities and they had to squeeze these in where ever they could when converting. There is on street parking. Really I think the next step isn't EVs but kicking cars out of the neighbourhood altogther. We don't need them. They are mostly used for ego not transport it seems.
ceejayoz 6y ago
> Do apartments in Germany not have charging stations? The US is fairly unusual in its "for every apartment building there must be a giant parking lot" zoning.
- nend 6y ago
  Like most general statements about the US, this is only true in parts of it. Plenty of cities in the US, especially the older east coast one's, do not have apartment buildings with parking lots.
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  New buildings usually have underground parking, but I don’t think this policy has anything to do with the residents of the big cities. Car-sharing is more viable option there and it’s easy to provide chargers for car-sharing services on the streets.
ido 6y ago
Where would you put them? Most German cities are old and there's only on-street parking (that you have to be lucky enough to get). This is what my neighborhood looks like: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4550916,13.3779422,183m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4550916,13.3779422,183m/data... All of these are 5-6 story apartment buildings with no parking lots. I would be surprised if even 1 unit in a 100 has dedicated parking.

deelowe 6y ago

OP said home, not house. This would include apartments.

Barrin92 6y ago
This is how a typical German residential street looks (https://reidiculoustravels.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/dsc_0722.jpg https://reidiculoustravels.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/dsc_0...) It's not really trivial to pack that full of chargers if you don't want to interfer with pedestrians or cyclists.
- deelowe 6y ago
  I get it, but do you think queuing up at a petrol station is a viable solution to this or is it more likely to be political maneuvering to appease the station owners who are worried their business models will be obsolete soon?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    I haven't looked much into it and I don't know that many people who own an electric car, to be honest. What I could think of is that gas stations themselves might become somewhat more multi-use, that's already the case in some places in Germany. So people might to grab something to eat while charging up or do some shopping and so on. Scale them up a bit so that people have something useful to do while their car charges. People in Germany still like traditional stores and physical shopping a lot, I don't think it's just pandering to the owners.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > or is it more likely to be political maneuvering to appease the station owners who are worried their business models will be obsolete soon? What would be the point of that? If station owners believe that charging stations will keep their businesses alive, then they'll put them in themselves, without needing a law telling them to do so.
- caf 6y ago
  Probably need to develop some kind of under-street mounted charging, like the way conference room tables hide their port clusters.

ivan_gammel 6y ago

Half of German households does not need to own a car because of excellent public transportation systems, car-sharing and policies oriented to remove personal cars from the streets.

pkaye 6y ago

I think another option is charging stations at major stores and office spaces that have parking lots. That way you can charge while shopping or working. I see this become more common in the US.

cookiengineer 6y ago

Another problem is that even if you are lucky to be able to rent a garage for a few hundred bucks per month, you are not able to get your car charged inside. A lot of building regulations will prevent that, including Erschliessungsgebühren, Elektroverträglichkeitsmessungen, the required VDE Sicherheitsprüfungen and the fact that each garage lot would require a legal address in order for paying Energiesteuer there, as the control of that is done by external organizations like the ISTA or similar entities. And yes, overall for private people it’s totally impossible to think of everything in this regard, even if you are lucky enough to have an owned home.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Interesting. Do you have details to share, because I'd vaguely planned to equip my garage with electrical charging capability? I can assure you though that nobody is paying several hundred bucks per month for a garage or parking lot except maybe in the very city center of the four big cities in Germany, like next to the iconic main attraction of that city. It seems the public sector wants to grab the money for EV charging, with public parking lots being dedicated to it, while there's no plan for private proprietors to install their own charging.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  > Do you have details to share, because I'd vaguely planned to equip my garage with electrical charging capability? Where do you live? The regulations vary a lot from state to state and even city to city, as the local Bauamt or Baubehoerde usually has the last say when it comes to approval/denial of installations like this. In the BW area there's something available like the Netze-BW initiative that does most of the mentioned regulations/paperwork for you [1]. I'm not sure whether or not RWE or EON (the energy suppliers for more Northern states of Germany) have a similar initiative, but it seems that you can get the "Wallboxes" from them as well [2]. In the larger cities like Karlsruhe, I've seen a lot of the charger stations of Innogy [3] that seem to offer installation services for parking lots and private garages as well as for businesses. > I can assure you though that nobody is paying several hundred bucks per month for a garage or parking lot Prices kinda exploded around the Baden-Wuerttemberg area over the last years in the "Regionalmetropolen" aka where most industries or businesses are located. Can only speak for those, though I'd imagine that a lot of the mid-larger cities have even more problems with higher densities of people/m^2. [1] https://www.netze-bw.de/netzanschluss/elektromobilitaet-zuhause https://www.netze-bw.de/netzanschluss/elektromobilitaet-zuha... [2] https://www.eon.de/de/eonerleben/elektroauto-zuhause-laden-wallbox.html https://www.eon.de/de/eonerleben/elektroauto-zuhause-laden-w... [3] https://www.innogy-emobility.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte https://www.innogy-emobility.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte

eloff 6y ago

If you don't have a parking space, you probably don't have an EV and whether gas stations have chargers or not is irrelevant. If you do, it doesn't matter if you're renting or not, you have a similar ability to charge at home. What you probably can't do is install a dedicated fast charger unless you somehow plan to take it with you when you move, or work a deal with the landlord to share the cost. I think the one thing that does change in Germany is more people live in apartments where you have less options for installing a charger than in the suburbs in your own garage in the US.

eigenvector 6y ago
Parent comment said "no dedicated parking space" which is a different thing. When I lived in Toronto, I had a resident permit issued by the city to park on the street on same block as my building, but I was at the mercy of whatever space was available. Some days I'd get a spot right in front of my building, some days I had to walk around the corner. This is a pretty common parking scenario in dense, older areas - there is no dedicated parking lot and the space you are parking on is part of the public realm.
virgilp 6y ago
Not in Germany, but I do have a dedicated parking space, I could totally afford an electric car, an yet it would not be practical to get one. Here are my reasons: - I need one car, not many (I'm lucky to get _one_ space, ain't gonna get several!). - I can't charge it there, there's no infrastructure. Sure, I can ask city to add infrastructure but... good luck with that, it's going to take a while, there are a lot of problems to solve (besides actually installing power near my space, we need a meter to charge me, and it needs to be a "smart meter" that doesn't allow everybody to use power paid by me; it needs to be at least moderately vandalism-proof. And I need to find a way to leave my car plugged in for extended periods of time, unsupervised, without fearing that someone will steal stuff from it - e.g. the charging cable?) - If all the above are solved - I still need to use that car for extended trips (vacations, visiting parents in a different city). Those would still mean that I need to charge "on the road". Due to the first point, it'd still be a challenge to go 100% electric even if I had the "charging at home" part covered. Really, I think if we don't solve the "charging in gas stations" part, electric vehicle use is going to be inherently limited.

Gibbon1 6y ago

One thing I've wondered about is key less entry could solve a bunch of issues with cars. Like pay the local charging station to deal with charging. As in middle of the night a attendant gets in your car, drives it a couple of minutes to a charging station and plugs it in. Brings it back an hour or two later.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

"You do realise that we're talking about Germany here, don't you? You cannot apply US standards" a) I'm not in the US. b) My extended family is all German. I'm quite familiar with the differences in Germany. Gas stations are still not the right distribution model.

sprafa 6y ago

the 2nd favorite activity in HN is to talk about shit they have no idea about.