8 ms·

Many, many houses do not have anything other than on-street parking here. Since 2012 I've lived in 5 houses, and three of them had no driveway. I'm currently bu

Many, many houses do not have anything other than on-street parking here. Since 2012 I've lived in 5 houses, and three of them had no driveway. I'm currently buying a house which has no drive way, with no way of fitting one. Apparently 1/3 houses have only on street parking. Unless they also provide huge, huge grants to rapidly implement dense onstreet charging, and fast, this is a pipedream and will end up getting pushed back. Edit: To evaluate the scale of how difficult it is to implement on street parking - go and have a look out of your own window in a built up area and count the number of lamp posts and the corresponding number of cars. Right now (9:35am), in a pretty built up area, I can see three lamp posts on my own street, and eighteen cars parked on the road. One of those lamp posts is located where it's illegal to park because of double yellow lines. I currently live in a rented flat at the moment, and that has another 25 car parking spaces. To get charging points located there would require a number of disparately located and willing landlords to agree to wire up the car park for electric charging too.

ehnto 6y ago
Some places here you get no street parking, and if you're building you need a minimum amount of spots for cars in the plans. In some parts of Japan, when you buy a new car the dealership has to get confirmation from police that you have a designated parking spot. They come around and measure it, then get back to the dealership who then gets to sell you the car. I'm sure now they sometimes have records and stuff they can go off but the gist is the city won't be providing space for your car, it's up to you.
ChrisRR 6y ago
I agree. My previous flat had parking about 50 metres away. The previous, people just parked anywhere on the road. I bet they won't be installing charging points at every random location on a road that anyone could possible park on
- cmdkeen 6y ago
  I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers. Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when planning what to do at the weekend I check nearby charging locations. Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.
  - mcjiggerlog 6y ago
    How do these public charging stations work in terms of payment? Do you have to activate it using a credit/debit card first and then just leave it plugged in?
    - cmdkeen 6y ago
      The supermarket ones are free - though only 7kW, as they're for customer use. I park up and go for a walk round the local park then do my shopping. For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.
      - mcjiggerlog 6y ago
        Wow ok, surprised that they are unmetered! Surely that can't scale? What is an estimate £ cost in electricity for filling an average battery?
        ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
        Assuming ~75KWh batteries, £7.50 if the supermarket pays 10p per KWh.
  - leoedin 6y ago
    Is this strategy still going to work if everyone is doing the same thing? My local supermarket has a couple of electric car charging points, amongst perhaps 200+ car parking spaces. On a busy saturday most of those spaces are full. Certainly it's possible to install a charging point at every parking space, but it requires both a large scale building project to lay all those wires (the existing charge points are right by the supermarket - where the power is already available), and also potentially an upgrade to the local power network. If each of those cars is fast charging at 50 kW, the supermarket carpark will suddenly be consuming 10 MW. Assuming a constant cycle of people, that's equivalent to the average power usage of 20,000 houses. Just in one supermarket car park. Fortunately it's unlikely everyone will charge every time they pop in, but it's something that has to be considered carefully. The electric grid has to be sized for peak load - most of the time it's not near capacity. If we're going to slot electric cars into the existing grid we have to manage demand very carefully - which means only charging cars when electricity supply is high or demand is low. Everyone rapid charging whenever they feel like it (eg during the Saturday shop) will cause huge stability issues. The most straightforward way to manage it is to try to get as many cars as possible charging overnight (or charging whenever they're idle) and then manage when they actually draw power centrally based on electricity supply. That means extensive kerb side charging points.
kungito 6y ago
You can buy a used petrol car for the next 20 years. I guess not having a place to charge your electric car will become a sign of the lower classes
baq 6y ago
most streets have electric lights. people have been trying to develop technology to allow to charge off that existing infrastructure. https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/1300-street-lights-converted-ev-chargers-london?a=JMA06&t%5B0%5D=Siemens&t%5B1%5D=Ubitricity&t%5B2%5D=electric%20vehicle&t%5B3%5D=charging%20infrastructure&t%5B4%5D=London&curl=1 https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/... is one example - very relevant, as it's from London. but this isn't to say i disagree; quite the contrary, i agree completely that it's a huge problem for EVs in dense urban areas, perhaps the biggest.
- throwawayr123 6y ago
  Having seen London lampposts being mentioned in this discussion repeatedly, I must wonder - to what overprovisioning levels was the London streetlamp network built? A typical oldschool sodium lamp pulls approx. 400-500 W. If you replace it with an appropriate LED - and that's critical, there are so many "superb" LED installations recently: yes, it pulls less, yes, it's more whiteish, no, you can't see s... Take two steps away from the very narrow cone and you are standing in total darkness, somebody can mug you and the person looking from the window in the building right next to you would see nothing. So, if you replace it with a proper LED, you save let's say 400 W per lamppost plus any extra the original design left for voltage losses, impedance loop, etc. Now, this is all fancy schmancy when you install one charger per street and one car uses it occasionally, but when making bold claims like "all electric within few years", you take 4 lampposts x 400 W for 20 cars and you can charge each car with 0.08 kW. That may not be even enough for standby consumption (battery lifesupport - cooling/heating). So, back to the original question - does London have some kind of special supernetwork running through streets with megawatts to spare, or is it just capitalising of having just few percent of cars charging from it. What's the plan to get to 100 % load within 10 years?
adrianN 6y ago
It's not that hard to build curbside chargers. You don't need high current chargers when most parking spots have a charger. A kilowatt or two will be plenty. Cars spend 23h a day parked. EVs use 15-25kWh/100km. Most people drive less than 50km a day. Sprinkle some fast charging along highways for longer road trips and charging is no longer an issue.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- terryf 6y ago
  As someone that works on software that includes functions to try to figure out where you can place electric car chargers - it absolutely is very hard. The grid just isn't ready for it. It can be done, but will require massive investment in infrastructure. There are also problems such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve and other things that can be mitigated with ADR to an extent, but it's absolutely not easy
  - adrianN 6y ago
    It is a lot easier than the alternatives: unmitigated climate change or building the infrastructure for e-fuels.
    - terryf 6y ago
      Of course, unmitigated climate change will be catastrophic. No argument there. I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles. If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and forget about it in the atmosphere. Basically, extracting easy to use energy that was captured over a long period. But we now have the tech to extend that to a closed loop system - capture enough energy from solar to recycle the burned fuel back into burnable fuel. This will also mitigate all the co2 created when producing electric cars btw.
djmobley 6y ago
This is where autonomous vehicles come in. Why pay to own and store your own vehicle, which you might use 5% of the time, when you could hail an autonomous vehicle on demand, for less than the cost of current ride-hailing services? Owning your own vehicle will become an unnecessary luxury, reserved for the kind of people who have the space to store them.
- barnacled 6y ago
  Except that autonomous cars vastly far away despite all the hype by silicon valley. They still cannot deal with edge case scenarios at all well and are far from being proven to be safe. Relying on this being in place by 2030 + lifetime of 2nd hand cars is a huge gamble. See https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and-facts-2020-update/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and... and his blog in general for a more in-depth analysis of the situation. It's likely we need new AI techniques to have fully autonomous vehicles that function correctly.
  - djmobley 6y ago
    I don’t disagree, but I wouldn’t describe it as a “huge gamble.” People would just need to continue owning electric/second-hand ICE vehicles and, in the case of electric vehicles, find ways of charging them away from their homes. When autonomous vehicles become widely available (2030, 2040, or whenever), I think many would decide owning an expensive, depreciating asset they only use sparingly is more hassle than it’s worth.
    - barnacled 6y ago
      I agree that once it becomes feasible many would prefer autonomous (hell yeah, a cheap ride home when I'm drunk? Or a sleep on the way to work? Ideal) but given the timelines we should look elsewhere for the time being. I think "find ways of charging them away from their homes" does not scale given how long a charge takes and the numbers involved. If you've ever seen a petrol station at peak time you tend to get an idea of just how impractical that is. I don't see any way round a truly colossal investment in infrastructure in order to move to fully electric in the UK (or any country), which maybe is necessary - but govts need to openly say this and then start actually taking action on it, not haughtily act as if it's not the case.
silveroriole 6y ago
And places that do have driveways have often created them by paving over an existing garden, which is two steps back for the environment. In my lifetime I’ve seen proper front gardens all but disappear in my area.
Jetrel 6y ago
I mean, with new teslas, their range is similar enough to gas cars that you only need to charge them about once a week, if that. And they charge fast enough that it's not terribly dissimilar from hitting the gas station, which currently is perhaps a 10 minute affair for gas. Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. It's feasible, if a little bit annoying, to have a refueling story for them that's similar to that of gas cars. I think this idea of electrics desperately needing to charge every time they're parked - it's not wrong, but it's getting pretty close to being an anachronism, and I expect it actually will be on in 5ish years, certainly 10.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. Imagine you turn up to a charging station behind 4 other cars, and there's 2 charging points. Your 20 minute wait is now an hour. If each car took 10 minutes then you'd only be waiting 20 minutes. Increasing the average waiting time in a queue has a terrible impact on throughput.
  - markburns 6y ago
    I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that. Presumably the number of pumps at a station is a function of required throughput. I also think there will be a lot more roadside individual charging stations rather than specialised large locations that are convenient because of the centralised storage of a physical liquid.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that. Sure, but that's limited by land in cities and electrical infrastructure in more rural areas. Whether there'll ever be enough charging points to make charging your car not be a hassle is something only time will tell.
  - glogla 6y ago
    In isolation yes. But holistically the "charging station instead of gas station" equation has more factors - you have to discount - everyone who can charge at home (i.e. anyone with a garage or their own driveway), - those who change in public places like shopping malls or at work, and - any other infrastructure (like the "charging port in street light" thing) so the new "gas station" is likely to get less busy - depending on home ownership in the area and how many shopping malls get charging ports, most cars might only ever visit "gas station" on a road trip.
CalRobert 6y ago
Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property, and charge market rate for the land used by parking, thereby encouraging people who are not car dependent to buy houses such as yours instead of demanding a public handout for vehicle storage? (The High Cost Of Free Parking explores this issue in depth)
- physicsguy 6y ago
  I mean, I agree to some extent, but there's also no public transport service to the place I'm buying a house other than a single bus that runs twice a day for taking kids to school.
  - matsemann 6y ago
    Then that would either create pressure to have more public transport, or affect the prices on the homes as people would prefer to live accessible. Changes don't happen in a vacuum, they bring other changes with them.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    No public transport and not enough space to have off-street parking is a pretty terrible combination.
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    If there's no car storage and it's impossible to live without a car it might be better as grazing land, meadow, or similar.
- johnday 6y ago
  What about houses which are not within walking distance of amenities, and do not have room for off-street parking? That's a large proportion of suburban (or even urban) housing in the UK.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Time to build some amenities and public transport. Suburban dead zones where you can't do anything without a car are terrible anyway. What about old people who can't drive anymore but can't afford to move? Or children?
PJDK 6y ago
I recently got a Tesla while living in London with no off street parking. I had the same basic concerns, and only went ahead because I knew I'd be moving somewhere with off street parking within a few months. But it actually turned out to be a complete non issue. My usage pattern (short occasional trips around town to shops etc and regular long trips to Bristol and back) could be handled entirely by stopping off for 15 mins at a supercharger when I went passed one. A bit more frequent than ordinary refuelling but not much more. It's reasonable to assume that 10 years from now fast charging will be at least somewhat more effective and a lot more ubiquitous. I didn't have to touch any of the other charging infrastructure in London but there is a lot of it. If we had been staying long term we would have used the 7kw chargers being built into lampposts all over the place[1]. The council will add one in if you have a car and ask for one, but there was already one within my usual parking area. The lamppost thing seems to be London focused for now, but they're extremely straightforward installations and news like this is going to see them pop up everywhere. [1] https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/residential_charging/ https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/residential_charging/
- jbob2000 6y ago
  For the monthly cost of your Tesla, you could probably take a taxi/uber everywhere you needed to go. You can afford 20 cab rides at $40/ride per month, totaling $800/month. Do you take your car out more than 20 times a month?
astannard 6y ago
Not many houses come without petrol/gas stations on their drives. Yes its an issue at the moment with batteries and charging but tech will catch up with rapid charging points etc.
- spzb 6y ago
  It's going to require a massive infrastructure investment. At the moment, the National Grid couldn't cope with millions of cars being charged. It's all perfectly possible with enough investment and political will but I'm not optimistic. Just look at the smart meter rollout [1] or broadband in rural areas [2] for examples of things which are technically possible but turn out to take huge amounts of money and time. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/four_year_delay_for_smart_meter_rollout/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/four_year_delay_for_s... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/national_audit_office/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/national_audit_office...
rich_sasha 6y ago
If self-driving takes off, perhaps our electric cars can self-drive themselves, at night, to the charging point? Would be cool!
rangibaby 6y ago
I live in urban Japan and outside my window there are zero cars parked on the street because every car is required to have a registered parking space within 2km of its owners’ residence.
- physicsguy 6y ago
  Yeah, but it was a policy enacted in 1962 when car usage worldwide was a fraction of what it is now. Can an elected government impose such a policy today? I don't see it as being politically realistic.
bradgessler 6y ago
Hopefully by then the cars will be able to drive themselves to a charger or park themselves away from your home.

ehnto 6y ago

Some places here you get no street parking, and if you're building you need a minimum amount of spots for cars in the plans. In some parts of Japan, when you buy a new car the dealership has to get confirmation from police that you have a designated parking spot. They come around and measure it, then get back to the dealership who then gets to sell you the car. I'm sure now they sometimes have records and stuff they can go off but the gist is the city won't be providing space for your car, it's up to you.

ChrisRR 6y ago

I agree. My previous flat had parking about 50 metres away. The previous, people just parked anywhere on the road. I bet they won't be installing charging points at every random location on a road that anyone could possible park on

cmdkeen 6y ago
I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers. Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when planning what to do at the weekend I check nearby charging locations. Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.
- mcjiggerlog 6y ago
  How do these public charging stations work in terms of payment? Do you have to activate it using a credit/debit card first and then just leave it plugged in?
  - cmdkeen 6y ago
    The supermarket ones are free - though only 7kW, as they're for customer use. I park up and go for a walk round the local park then do my shopping. For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.
    - mcjiggerlog 6y ago
      Wow ok, surprised that they are unmetered! Surely that can't scale? What is an estimate £ cost in electricity for filling an average battery?
      - ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
        Assuming ~75KWh batteries, £7.50 if the supermarket pays 10p per KWh.
- leoedin 6y ago
  Is this strategy still going to work if everyone is doing the same thing? My local supermarket has a couple of electric car charging points, amongst perhaps 200+ car parking spaces. On a busy saturday most of those spaces are full. Certainly it's possible to install a charging point at every parking space, but it requires both a large scale building project to lay all those wires (the existing charge points are right by the supermarket - where the power is already available), and also potentially an upgrade to the local power network. If each of those cars is fast charging at 50 kW, the supermarket carpark will suddenly be consuming 10 MW. Assuming a constant cycle of people, that's equivalent to the average power usage of 20,000 houses. Just in one supermarket car park. Fortunately it's unlikely everyone will charge every time they pop in, but it's something that has to be considered carefully. The electric grid has to be sized for peak load - most of the time it's not near capacity. If we're going to slot electric cars into the existing grid we have to manage demand very carefully - which means only charging cars when electricity supply is high or demand is low. Everyone rapid charging whenever they feel like it (eg during the Saturday shop) will cause huge stability issues. The most straightforward way to manage it is to try to get as many cars as possible charging overnight (or charging whenever they're idle) and then manage when they actually draw power centrally based on electricity supply. That means extensive kerb side charging points.

kungito 6y ago

You can buy a used petrol car for the next 20 years. I guess not having a place to charge your electric car will become a sign of the lower classes

baq 6y ago

most streets have electric lights. people have been trying to develop technology to allow to charge off that existing infrastructure. https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/1300-street-lights-converted-ev-chargers-london?a=JMA06&t%5B0%5D=Siemens&t%5B1%5D=Ubitricity&t%5B2%5D=electric%20vehicle&t%5B3%5D=charging%20infrastructure&t%5B4%5D=London&curl=1 https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/... is one example - very relevant, as it's from London. but this isn't to say i disagree; quite the contrary, i agree completely that it's a huge problem for EVs in dense urban areas, perhaps the biggest.

throwawayr123 6y ago
Having seen London lampposts being mentioned in this discussion repeatedly, I must wonder - to what overprovisioning levels was the London streetlamp network built? A typical oldschool sodium lamp pulls approx. 400-500 W. If you replace it with an appropriate LED - and that's critical, there are so many "superb" LED installations recently: yes, it pulls less, yes, it's more whiteish, no, you can't see s... Take two steps away from the very narrow cone and you are standing in total darkness, somebody can mug you and the person looking from the window in the building right next to you would see nothing. So, if you replace it with a proper LED, you save let's say 400 W per lamppost plus any extra the original design left for voltage losses, impedance loop, etc. Now, this is all fancy schmancy when you install one charger per street and one car uses it occasionally, but when making bold claims like "all electric within few years", you take 4 lampposts x 400 W for 20 cars and you can charge each car with 0.08 kW. That may not be even enough for standby consumption (battery lifesupport - cooling/heating). So, back to the original question - does London have some kind of special supernetwork running through streets with megawatts to spare, or is it just capitalising of having just few percent of cars charging from it. What's the plan to get to 100 % load within 10 years?

adrianN 6y ago

It's not that hard to build curbside chargers. You don't need high current chargers when most parking spots have a charger. A kilowatt or two will be plenty. Cars spend 23h a day parked. EVs use 15-25kWh/100km. Most people drive less than 50km a day. Sprinkle some fast charging along highways for longer road trips and charging is no longer an issue.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
terryf 6y ago
As someone that works on software that includes functions to try to figure out where you can place electric car chargers - it absolutely is very hard. The grid just isn't ready for it. It can be done, but will require massive investment in infrastructure. There are also problems such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve and other things that can be mitigated with ADR to an extent, but it's absolutely not easy
- adrianN 6y ago
  It is a lot easier than the alternatives: unmitigated climate change or building the infrastructure for e-fuels.
  - terryf 6y ago
    Of course, unmitigated climate change will be catastrophic. No argument there. I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles. If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and forget about it in the atmosphere. Basically, extracting easy to use energy that was captured over a long period. But we now have the tech to extend that to a closed loop system - capture enough energy from solar to recycle the burned fuel back into burnable fuel. This will also mitigate all the co2 created when producing electric cars btw.

djmobley 6y ago

This is where autonomous vehicles come in. Why pay to own and store your own vehicle, which you might use 5% of the time, when you could hail an autonomous vehicle on demand, for less than the cost of current ride-hailing services? Owning your own vehicle will become an unnecessary luxury, reserved for the kind of people who have the space to store them.

barnacled 6y ago
Except that autonomous cars vastly far away despite all the hype by silicon valley. They still cannot deal with edge case scenarios at all well and are far from being proven to be safe. Relying on this being in place by 2030 + lifetime of 2nd hand cars is a huge gamble. See https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and-facts-2020-update/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and... and his blog in general for a more in-depth analysis of the situation. It's likely we need new AI techniques to have fully autonomous vehicles that function correctly.
- djmobley 6y ago
  I don’t disagree, but I wouldn’t describe it as a “huge gamble.” People would just need to continue owning electric/second-hand ICE vehicles and, in the case of electric vehicles, find ways of charging them away from their homes. When autonomous vehicles become widely available (2030, 2040, or whenever), I think many would decide owning an expensive, depreciating asset they only use sparingly is more hassle than it’s worth.
  - barnacled 6y ago
    I agree that once it becomes feasible many would prefer autonomous (hell yeah, a cheap ride home when I'm drunk? Or a sleep on the way to work? Ideal) but given the timelines we should look elsewhere for the time being. I think "find ways of charging them away from their homes" does not scale given how long a charge takes and the numbers involved. If you've ever seen a petrol station at peak time you tend to get an idea of just how impractical that is. I don't see any way round a truly colossal investment in infrastructure in order to move to fully electric in the UK (or any country), which maybe is necessary - but govts need to openly say this and then start actually taking action on it, not haughtily act as if it's not the case.

silveroriole 6y ago

And places that do have driveways have often created them by paving over an existing garden, which is two steps back for the environment. In my lifetime I’ve seen proper front gardens all but disappear in my area.

Jetrel 6y ago

I mean, with new teslas, their range is similar enough to gas cars that you only need to charge them about once a week, if that. And they charge fast enough that it's not terribly dissimilar from hitting the gas station, which currently is perhaps a 10 minute affair for gas. Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. It's feasible, if a little bit annoying, to have a refueling story for them that's similar to that of gas cars. I think this idea of electrics desperately needing to charge every time they're parked - it's not wrong, but it's getting pretty close to being an anachronism, and I expect it actually will be on in 5ish years, certainly 10.

onion2k 6y ago
Bumping that to ~20min isn't a dealbreaker. Imagine you turn up to a charging station behind 4 other cars, and there's 2 charging points. Your 20 minute wait is now an hour. If each car took 10 minutes then you'd only be waiting 20 minutes. Increasing the average waiting time in a queue has a terrible impact on throughput.
- markburns 6y ago
  I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that. Presumably the number of pumps at a station is a function of required throughput. I also think there will be a lot more roadside individual charging stations rather than specialised large locations that are convenient because of the centralised storage of a physical liquid.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that. Sure, but that's limited by land in cities and electrical infrastructure in more rural areas. Whether there'll ever be enough charging points to make charging your car not be a hassle is something only time will tell.
- glogla 6y ago
  In isolation yes. But holistically the "charging station instead of gas station" equation has more factors - you have to discount - everyone who can charge at home (i.e. anyone with a garage or their own driveway), - those who change in public places like shopping malls or at work, and - any other infrastructure (like the "charging port in street light" thing) so the new "gas station" is likely to get less busy - depending on home ownership in the area and how many shopping malls get charging ports, most cars might only ever visit "gas station" on a road trip.

CalRobert 6y ago

Perhaps we should stop letting individuals appropriate public space for storage of their private property, and charge market rate for the land used by parking, thereby encouraging people who are not car dependent to buy houses such as yours instead of demanding a public handout for vehicle storage? (The High Cost Of Free Parking explores this issue in depth)

physicsguy 6y ago
I mean, I agree to some extent, but there's also no public transport service to the place I'm buying a house other than a single bus that runs twice a day for taking kids to school.
- matsemann 6y ago
  Then that would either create pressure to have more public transport, or affect the prices on the homes as people would prefer to live accessible. Changes don't happen in a vacuum, they bring other changes with them.
- pjc50 6y ago
  No public transport and not enough space to have off-street parking is a pretty terrible combination.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  If there's no car storage and it's impossible to live without a car it might be better as grazing land, meadow, or similar.
johnday 6y ago
What about houses which are not within walking distance of amenities, and do not have room for off-street parking? That's a large proportion of suburban (or even urban) housing in the UK.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Time to build some amenities and public transport. Suburban dead zones where you can't do anything without a car are terrible anyway. What about old people who can't drive anymore but can't afford to move? Or children?

PJDK 6y ago

I recently got a Tesla while living in London with no off street parking. I had the same basic concerns, and only went ahead because I knew I'd be moving somewhere with off street parking within a few months. But it actually turned out to be a complete non issue. My usage pattern (short occasional trips around town to shops etc and regular long trips to Bristol and back) could be handled entirely by stopping off for 15 mins at a supercharger when I went passed one. A bit more frequent than ordinary refuelling but not much more. It's reasonable to assume that 10 years from now fast charging will be at least somewhat more effective and a lot more ubiquitous. I didn't have to touch any of the other charging infrastructure in London but there is a lot of it. If we had been staying long term we would have used the 7kw chargers being built into lampposts all over the place[1]. The council will add one in if you have a car and ask for one, but there was already one within my usual parking area. The lamppost thing seems to be London focused for now, but they're extremely straightforward installations and news like this is going to see them pop up everywhere. [1] https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/residential_charging/ https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/residential_charging/

jbob2000 6y ago
For the monthly cost of your Tesla, you could probably take a taxi/uber everywhere you needed to go. You can afford 20 cab rides at $40/ride per month, totaling $800/month. Do you take your car out more than 20 times a month?

astannard 6y ago

Not many houses come without petrol/gas stations on their drives. Yes its an issue at the moment with batteries and charging but tech will catch up with rapid charging points etc.

spzb 6y ago
It's going to require a massive infrastructure investment. At the moment, the National Grid couldn't cope with millions of cars being charged. It's all perfectly possible with enough investment and political will but I'm not optimistic. Just look at the smart meter rollout [1] or broadband in rural areas [2] for examples of things which are technically possible but turn out to take huge amounts of money and time. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/four_year_delay_for_smart_meter_rollout/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/four_year_delay_for_s... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/national_audit_office/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/national_audit_office...

rich_sasha 6y ago

If self-driving takes off, perhaps our electric cars can self-drive themselves, at night, to the charging point? Would be cool!

rangibaby 6y ago

I live in urban Japan and outside my window there are zero cars parked on the street because every car is required to have a registered parking space within 2km of its owners’ residence.

physicsguy 6y ago
Yeah, but it was a policy enacted in 1962 when car usage worldwide was a fraction of what it is now. Can an elected government impose such a policy today? I don't see it as being politically realistic.

bradgessler 6y ago

Hopefully by then the cars will be able to drive themselves to a charger or park themselves away from your home.