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The charging story is still far from ideal. Even if a large-scale supercharger network is developed and deployed it still takes far too long and needs to happen

The charging story is still far from ideal. Even if a large-scale supercharger network is developed and deployed it still takes far too long and needs to happen far too frequently to be convenient is many places in the USA. I was idly watching a Hasan Piker Twitch stream this weekend when he was in Austin, TX and most of the time in a rented Tesla they were very concerned with finding charging stations and the range predictions were dropping far quicker than expected in the hot Texas sun. Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Gas stations even 100 years ago operated faster than superchargers promise to in the foreseeable future.

iainmerrick 5y ago
But isn’t that a niche case? I’d have thought the vast majority of car usage is short local trips and regular commutes, not road trips. If you’re able to charge the car at home that should cover most usage.
- TrisMcC 5y ago
  Well, the use-case I mentioned above was not a road-trip but just driving around Austin doing errands. Many places in Texas are routinely 30+ miles away from each other.
  - manmal 5y ago
    All recent electric cars can manage multiple 30+ mile trips on a single charge. Bad privacy around supercharger stations due to streaming is definitely an edge case.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  People expect vehicle to work even in the one-off cases like long trips. You can't just design for the median trip.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    It’s not the median, it’s the 90th percentile of car miles. And people do have alternatives for longer trips - either using charging stations, renting a different vehicle with better range characteristics, or mode switching to another form of transport, like a train. This is where someone always chimes in with ‘but what about people who live in rural Idaho and need to drive eighteen hours to a hospital once a quarter and they need to tow their boat when they do it’ There are outliers who have specialist niche needs. But the vast majority of trips taken by the vast majority of drivers are short range and start/terminate at home. Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.
    - frankbreetz 5y ago
      >>Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all. Will this be the case going forward? I wouldn't consider apartment dwellers a niche case. It is a lot to ask for apartment building to install chargers at every parking place.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Apartment owners will do what it takes to get renters. Most apartments have Cable TV wired in even those built before cable TV. If landlords discover that potential renters are refusing their apartments because they can't charge their cars they will install charges to attract those people. Of course this is an economic decision - they will consider if the additional rent they can charge is worth it (or in some cases if the high class people they can attract for the same rent are worth it)
      - chipsa 5y ago
        It won't be when states implement new ICE vehicle bans. If you can't register a new ICE vehicle in CA or MA, then you won't look at places where you can't charge your EV at home. Because you're going to be buying a EV if you're getting new after the ban takes effect, and you're probably going to be looking at that before then too.
    - 5y ago
- donatj 5y ago
  People without a ton of disposable income who can’t afford to rent a car for fun don’t want a car that only fits _most_ of their use cases.
  - cmckn 5y ago
    People without a ton of disposable income probably aren’t buying electric vehicles today (or brand new cars in general). The industry will cater to those folks in the medium term, I think; but for now I think it’s just one of the trade offs of being an “early adopter”.
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    If I could (hypothetically) buy an electric car that’s affordable, cheaper to run, more reliable than an internal combustion car, less environmentally damaging, and covers most of my normal usage, I’d be on it like a shot, even if it means I have to figure out another solution for occasional stuff like house moves and driving holidays, and I think a lot of other people would too. I think the biggest blocker right now is just price. It seems like electric cars are either very expensive or not very good. Charging networks are definitely an important part of the overall solution but I don’t think they’re the whole story. I think if enough people have EVs, charging networks will inevitably follow, rather than the reverse. Edit to add: I’m assuming I can charge at home in this scenario, which I realise may not be easy for many people (eg in apartment blocks). I would have thought that’s a somewhat different problem from charging networks, though.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Price will block you again. You pay as much insurance and tax on cars that sit around doing nothing as cars you use every day. You have to drive the extra car a lot more than the average person to make it worth having a second car sitting around for rare trips. Renting is expensive enough that the rare trip has to be very rare before it is worth it. For most people the oversized SUV that can do anything they need is a more economical choice than a similar SUV and even a "cheap beater" car for most of their driving - and of course most people would demand both cars be expensive nice cars.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  For particularly short trips I would hope that even smaller forms of transportation like bikes and e-scooters would gain some ground. Looks like a huge percentage of car traffic in the most congested cities is under 3 miles: https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-could-replace-a-lot-of-car-trips-in-u-s-cities/ https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-co...
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  That is my usage pattern yes but then I’m used to having one car satisfy both the use cases. In many developed countries one could rent a car for road trips, but not in India unfortunately. There are some rental companies but it’s mostly a hit and miss and when it misses the experience is a shitshow. While I can afford to buy two cars it’s a big capital expenditure that’s extremely under utilized. And so my wait continues, looks like I’ll be stuck with ICEs for at least a half a decade.
  - gopkarthik 5y ago
    Agreed. Half a decade seems too optimistic to me though - lack of charging facilities at residences, current power grid cannot support any significant usage of electric cars, little space for charging stations in cities etc. Though if fuel taxes & prices continue to rise in current fashion, ICE might become too costly to use.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I use public transport or bikes for local trips, the car is for all the exceptions.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  At least in the US, this is very regional. As an example, I don’t use a car at all for commuting or short local trips because I live in a dense urban area. When I do need a car it is almost invariably for those cases where range and recharging are a material limitation, so I have an ICE. In the agricultural regions of the US where I’ve lived in the past, distances are intrinsically long even in the small cities and infrastructure sparse. Real shopping may be 70+ miles away (but road speed is 80-85 mph so not that long). In other non-coastal city I’ve lived it was normal for people to do a 300 mile (each way) drive twice a month between cities. While more niche, a lot of working trucks in the agricultural and mining regions of the West are modified to increase their range — almost twice the range of the F-150 Lightning on a single charge. There is little charging infrastructure at all, and what exists is clearly positioned to target tourists from the coast, not the driving patterns of people that live there. There may be charging stations in these towns one day but I suspect it won’t be for a long time and range will still be a very real issue for a significant percentage of people. There is a chicken-and-egg problem with the lack of range and lack of charging stations that make them unusable in many parts of the US. If no one buys EVs then no one will build charging stations, and the lack of range in regions that really need range means they aren’t a practical vehicle absent ubiquitous charging stations in places that probably won’t pay for the investment.
ianai 5y ago
Destination chargers seem a key point. If I could reliably add significant charge while spending time in a store/restaurant I’d probably never worry about range.
- cujo 5y ago
  True, but it doesn't look like we're trending towards an entire parking lot/garage of chargers at the mall/grocery/theater/rec site/etc.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Supply is well matched with current demand. The Tesla "charging station" I've personally been to was a few chargers on the edge of a supermarket parking lot (I live in rural-ish Michigan).
  - pydry 5y ago
    It'll probably trend like WiFi did. Initially it was seen as a luxury to draw people in. Nowadays people get pissed if you don't have it. I doubt we will have dedicated "gas" stations for electricity in the future. Most car parking spaces will come equipped instead. Shop at BigBoxStore and charge your car for free when you spend over $45, courtesy of their fleet of rooftop solar panels.* * Offer only valid on sunny days
    - ianai 5y ago
      It’s not like they all need to be fully functional at the same time. I could see it being only a few are active at a time and it rotates the load as vehicles fill or leave.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Destination chargers will be a huge thing for people on road trips. If your Mom & Pop coffee shop/restaurant adds a few 22kW AC chargers on their parking lot, those will show up in the "find me a charger" navigators in thousands and thousands of EVs. This _will_ drive new business. If I have the choice of stopping at Generic Station Chain Alpha to charge vs. a smaller shop on a road trip or vacation, I'll always pick the latter one.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
> due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Doesn't seem to be something most car owners would have to contend with.
CydeWeys 5y ago
> Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Ahh yes, a problem that will certainly affect the majority of Tesla owners.
josho 5y ago
Fast swap batteries is the solution. I remember a company years back was taking this approach. If we standardize on battery size/format. Then it becomes possible to drive up. Have a machine swap out the battery, and have you off again in less time than fuelling at a gas pump. It also removes my biggest concern about owning an electric car—the replacement cost of its batteries.

iainmerrick 5y ago

But isn’t that a niche case? I’d have thought the vast majority of car usage is short local trips and regular commutes, not road trips. If you’re able to charge the car at home that should cover most usage.

TrisMcC 5y ago
Well, the use-case I mentioned above was not a road-trip but just driving around Austin doing errands. Many places in Texas are routinely 30+ miles away from each other.
- manmal 5y ago
  All recent electric cars can manage multiple 30+ mile trips on a single charge. Bad privacy around supercharger stations due to streaming is definitely an edge case.
throwaway3699 5y ago
People expect vehicle to work even in the one-off cases like long trips. You can't just design for the median trip.
- jameshart 5y ago
  It’s not the median, it’s the 90th percentile of car miles. And people do have alternatives for longer trips - either using charging stations, renting a different vehicle with better range characteristics, or mode switching to another form of transport, like a train. This is where someone always chimes in with ‘but what about people who live in rural Idaho and need to drive eighteen hours to a hospital once a quarter and they need to tow their boat when they do it’ There are outliers who have specialist niche needs. But the vast majority of trips taken by the vast majority of drivers are short range and start/terminate at home. Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all.
  - frankbreetz 5y ago
    >>Most electric car owners don’t rely on public charging infrastructure at all. Will this be the case going forward? I wouldn't consider apartment dwellers a niche case. It is a lot to ask for apartment building to install chargers at every parking place.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Apartment owners will do what it takes to get renters. Most apartments have Cable TV wired in even those built before cable TV. If landlords discover that potential renters are refusing their apartments because they can't charge their cars they will install charges to attract those people. Of course this is an economic decision - they will consider if the additional rent they can charge is worth it (or in some cases if the high class people they can attract for the same rent are worth it)
    - chipsa 5y ago
      It won't be when states implement new ICE vehicle bans. If you can't register a new ICE vehicle in CA or MA, then you won't look at places where you can't charge your EV at home. Because you're going to be buying a EV if you're getting new after the ban takes effect, and you're probably going to be looking at that before then too.
  - 5y ago
donatj 5y ago
People without a ton of disposable income who can’t afford to rent a car for fun don’t want a car that only fits _most_ of their use cases.
- cmckn 5y ago
  People without a ton of disposable income probably aren’t buying electric vehicles today (or brand new cars in general). The industry will cater to those folks in the medium term, I think; but for now I think it’s just one of the trade offs of being an “early adopter”.
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  If I could (hypothetically) buy an electric car that’s affordable, cheaper to run, more reliable than an internal combustion car, less environmentally damaging, and covers most of my normal usage, I’d be on it like a shot, even if it means I have to figure out another solution for occasional stuff like house moves and driving holidays, and I think a lot of other people would too. I think the biggest blocker right now is just price. It seems like electric cars are either very expensive or not very good. Charging networks are definitely an important part of the overall solution but I don’t think they’re the whole story. I think if enough people have EVs, charging networks will inevitably follow, rather than the reverse. Edit to add: I’m assuming I can charge at home in this scenario, which I realise may not be easy for many people (eg in apartment blocks). I would have thought that’s a somewhat different problem from charging networks, though.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Price will block you again. You pay as much insurance and tax on cars that sit around doing nothing as cars you use every day. You have to drive the extra car a lot more than the average person to make it worth having a second car sitting around for rare trips. Renting is expensive enough that the rare trip has to be very rare before it is worth it. For most people the oversized SUV that can do anything they need is a more economical choice than a similar SUV and even a "cheap beater" car for most of their driving - and of course most people would demand both cars be expensive nice cars.
ryukafalz 5y ago
For particularly short trips I would hope that even smaller forms of transportation like bikes and e-scooters would gain some ground. Looks like a huge percentage of car traffic in the most congested cities is under 3 miles: https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-could-replace-a-lot-of-car-trips-in-u-s-cities/ https://cal.streetsblog.org/2019/09/16/bikes-and-scooters-co...
vishnugupta 5y ago
That is my usage pattern yes but then I’m used to having one car satisfy both the use cases. In many developed countries one could rent a car for road trips, but not in India unfortunately. There are some rental companies but it’s mostly a hit and miss and when it misses the experience is a shitshow. While I can afford to buy two cars it’s a big capital expenditure that’s extremely under utilized. And so my wait continues, looks like I’ll be stuck with ICEs for at least a half a decade.
- gopkarthik 5y ago
  Agreed. Half a decade seems too optimistic to me though - lack of charging facilities at residences, current power grid cannot support any significant usage of electric cars, little space for charging stations in cities etc. Though if fuel taxes & prices continue to rise in current fashion, ICE might become too costly to use.
ehnto 5y ago
I use public transport or bikes for local trips, the car is for all the exceptions.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
At least in the US, this is very regional. As an example, I don’t use a car at all for commuting or short local trips because I live in a dense urban area. When I do need a car it is almost invariably for those cases where range and recharging are a material limitation, so I have an ICE. In the agricultural regions of the US where I’ve lived in the past, distances are intrinsically long even in the small cities and infrastructure sparse. Real shopping may be 70+ miles away (but road speed is 80-85 mph so not that long). In other non-coastal city I’ve lived it was normal for people to do a 300 mile (each way) drive twice a month between cities. While more niche, a lot of working trucks in the agricultural and mining regions of the West are modified to increase their range — almost twice the range of the F-150 Lightning on a single charge. There is little charging infrastructure at all, and what exists is clearly positioned to target tourists from the coast, not the driving patterns of people that live there. There may be charging stations in these towns one day but I suspect it won’t be for a long time and range will still be a very real issue for a significant percentage of people. There is a chicken-and-egg problem with the lack of range and lack of charging stations that make them unusable in many parts of the US. If no one buys EVs then no one will build charging stations, and the lack of range in regions that really need range means they aren’t a practical vehicle absent ubiquitous charging stations in places that probably won’t pay for the investment.

ianai 5y ago

Destination chargers seem a key point. If I could reliably add significant charge while spending time in a store/restaurant I’d probably never worry about range.

cujo 5y ago
True, but it doesn't look like we're trending towards an entire parking lot/garage of chargers at the mall/grocery/theater/rec site/etc.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Supply is well matched with current demand. The Tesla "charging station" I've personally been to was a few chargers on the edge of a supermarket parking lot (I live in rural-ish Michigan).
- pydry 5y ago
  It'll probably trend like WiFi did. Initially it was seen as a luxury to draw people in. Nowadays people get pissed if you don't have it. I doubt we will have dedicated "gas" stations for electricity in the future. Most car parking spaces will come equipped instead. Shop at BigBoxStore and charge your car for free when you spend over $45, courtesy of their fleet of rooftop solar panels.* * Offer only valid on sunny days
  - ianai 5y ago
    It’s not like they all need to be fully functional at the same time. I could see it being only a few are active at a time and it rotates the load as vehicles fill or leave.
theshrike79 5y ago
Destination chargers will be a huge thing for people on road trips. If your Mom & Pop coffee shop/restaurant adds a few 22kW AC chargers on their parking lot, those will show up in the "find me a charger" navigators in thousands and thousands of EVs. This _will_ drive new business. If I have the choice of stopping at Generic Station Chain Alpha to charge vs. a smaller shop on a road trip or vacation, I'll always pick the latter one.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

> due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Doesn't seem to be something most car owners would have to contend with.

CydeWeys 5y ago

> Also, due to it being a livestream, the supercharging stations were a liability because of the time needed to charge and how "fans" could locate and cause security problems. Ahh yes, a problem that will certainly affect the majority of Tesla owners.

josho 5y ago

Fast swap batteries is the solution. I remember a company years back was taking this approach. If we standardize on battery size/format. Then it becomes possible to drive up. Have a machine swap out the battery, and have you off again in less time than fuelling at a gas pump. It also removes my biggest concern about owning an electric car—the replacement cost of its batteries.