6 ms·

In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. In my western Europe

by dtech 5y ago

In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. In my western European city of ~100k people there's hundreds of such spots already. Capacity is rapidly being added too. On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.

Febra33 5y ago
I don't know where you live but I live in western Europe and almost every household owns a car that they park somewhere on the street. There almost no charging stations around. Now I just can't imagine a universe where every street has enough chargers for EVERY single household. That's just utopic.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Is there a gas pump for every street parked car? No. Contention for EV charging is trivial to charge with a combination of home, workplace, public parking, and street parking charging.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    You don’t need a gas pump for every car because gassing up doesn’t take hours. In many places there isn’t even enough street parking to reliably park your car every night. You often have to park illegally and wake up early to move the car before the ticket comes. If there isn’t even enough parking how is there going to be enough overnight charging?
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Are you telling me the car is never parked legally anywhere and is in constant motion? Charging exclusively at fast DC chargers is feasible and done by many Tesla owners.
      - Swizec 5y ago
        No I’m saying that “I will have a place to charge overnight every night” is unfeasible. Whether that’s good enough depends on what you’re doing and your car’s range. edit: I remember renting a Tesla once in San Francisco and when we got home with very low charge after a fun trip (on which we had to visit a random small town for an hour just to top up a little), we couldn’t find a place to charge. Everything the Tesla map showed was a locked garage with no public access. After a frustrating hour of searching and the car increasingly panicking at us about permanent damage, we resorted to going back to the only place we knew for sure it could charge – back where we rented it from. We then ubered home for $20 and back to the Tesla next morning for another $20 (we rented for 3 days). It was easily one of the frustratingest cars I ever rented.
        mjevans 5y ago
        If you're renting housing (with slowly increasing exceptions, mostly at higher end hotels and recently renovated apartments) this is a tough problem.
      - tzs 5y ago
        Fast DC chargers are still more than an order of magnitude slower than refueling an ICE car for an equivalent amount of travel.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        It’s fast enough for Tesla to sell almost a million EVs a year and to be unable to build vehicles fast enough to keep up with demand. Those who argue the problems haven’t been solved are ignoring the very clear market forces demonstrating that they have been. Sometimes my Tesla charges “too fast” (~20 min) and I have to move the vehicle before my shopping or rest stop is complete. It helps to colocate fast chargers at businesses people patron anyway (supermarkets, for example), where they’ll naturally take longer than the vehicle will take to charge. These are solved problems, it’s install and equipment colocating logistics at this point.
        5y ago
- Hithredin 5y ago
  Why even bother charging when you could replace a loan battery at pump station ?
emptyfile 5y ago
If putting the equivalent of a functioning high grade electrical socket in every parking space is a minor obstacle I don't want to see a major one.
- FredPret 5y ago
  How about removing millions of tons of certain gases out of the planetary air
- dtech 5y ago
  We're not talking about Tesla Superchargers here, but things that let you charge overnight. On the scale of civil construction, it doesn't seem to be more difficult than highways, street lighting, sewers, etc.
zemvpferreira 5y ago
Sure, we have a few outdoor charging spots here in Lisbon as well. I can tell you exactly what will happen here: -politicians made a big deal of building said spots when there were close to zero electric cars on the street. Many tv spots were bought. -people start buying electric cars en masse because hey, insfrastructure! Two free chargers per street! -no more easy PR to milk. Turns out scaling street charging will be expensive and bring no extra popularity. -Five years later, we'll still have two chargers per block but a hundred times more electric cars. Back to step zero.
- zachkatz 5y ago
  Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need.
  - imchillyb 5y ago
    > Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need. @zachkatz Next downpour: @imchillyb: ::waves to silly biker as I pass them:: Hey guys, pipe down, we're almost home. @zachkatz: ::Grumbles about rain, snow, sleet, and more recently hail. Looks behind at Timmy, Sally, Sue, and the dog all miserably following them home; drenched and shivering-cold on their e-bikes, and dog's paws on wet-cold-concrete. Glad you're gonna fight for that e-bike spot, I sure won't!
    - dash2 5y ago
      That might apply more in Chicago than Lisbon, though.
    - Tostino 5y ago
      They are not a replacement for every situation, but they work amazingly well when they do. I don't think you are making a good faith argument here. I've been in towns and cities all up and down the east coast of the US with my bike, and they range from absolutely terrible for any bike traffic (stroads everywhere) to fantastic. The biggest obstacle to bikes being more usable is simply not designing our infrastructure in the least human/bike friendly way possible.
smt88 5y ago
Adding millions of chargers to city streets is an insane way to solve charger shortages. It makes much more sense (and would be much cheaper) for the govt to mandate interchangeable batteries, so you could just go to a gas station and swap out a battery instead. The stations already exist where you need them and only need one charger for all the batteries.
- FredPret 5y ago
  That would also remove range anxiety for me. However, this will only work if batteries become smaller and more energy-dense - because they are huge and heavy, electric cars today are built around them. This causes two problems: You can’t easily remove them because they’re big and have to be built into the structure of the car, and are sometimes lod-bearing, and each car model has a different shape of battery.
bsder 5y ago
> On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve. Copper wiring to deliver that power is expensive. It's also a really good theft target. Everyone adding a mere window air conditioner is enough to cause new electric lines to be needed. Electric car charging is way worse than that.
blincoln 5y ago
> In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. Will it? Every city parking spot in every city in the world potentially pulling ~220V @ ~60 amps overnight seems like an awful lot of electricity to generate, to say nothing of the expense of running all of the necessary cabling and charging stations. Are there cities actively implementing that strategy?
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  Why on earth would you need 60 A? My Model S add a kilometre for every amp-hour at 230 V. Charging from 18:00 to 06:00 adds 120 km at 10 A. Residential streets already have cables for street lighting, adding extra cable or uprating the existing cable to support charging posts can use the same cable ducts.
- dtech 5y ago
  Obviously it's not feasible to have every parking spot pull 13KW, they would need to coordinate to manage load. The core thing is that you're assuming that every parked car arrives in the evening with near-zero charge and needs to be full in the morning. This is not the case, cars are parked 95% of the time. They can charge at work on in garages too - useful for solar power peak supply. Let's do some napkin calculations: 95% = 1 hour per day of use for 23 hours of charging. Let's assume that's 100km drive in that 1 hour, 15Kwh for a typical EV. So on average you need 15/23=0.65KW per car, not 13KW. There's 285 million cars in the US, so you'd need 4.3 billion KWh per day for full electric. Currently US generates 11 billion KWh per day [3]. [1] https://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-time/ https://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-tim... [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

by dtech 5y ago

Febra33 5y ago

I don't know where you live but I live in western Europe and almost every household owns a car that they park somewhere on the street. There almost no charging stations around. Now I just can't imagine a universe where every street has enough chargers for EVERY single household. That's just utopic.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Is there a gas pump for every street parked car? No. Contention for EV charging is trivial to charge with a combination of home, workplace, public parking, and street parking charging.
- Swizec 5y ago
  You don’t need a gas pump for every car because gassing up doesn’t take hours. In many places there isn’t even enough street parking to reliably park your car every night. You often have to park illegally and wake up early to move the car before the ticket comes. If there isn’t even enough parking how is there going to be enough overnight charging?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Are you telling me the car is never parked legally anywhere and is in constant motion? Charging exclusively at fast DC chargers is feasible and done by many Tesla owners.
    - Swizec 5y ago
      No I’m saying that “I will have a place to charge overnight every night” is unfeasible. Whether that’s good enough depends on what you’re doing and your car’s range. edit: I remember renting a Tesla once in San Francisco and when we got home with very low charge after a fun trip (on which we had to visit a random small town for an hour just to top up a little), we couldn’t find a place to charge. Everything the Tesla map showed was a locked garage with no public access. After a frustrating hour of searching and the car increasingly panicking at us about permanent damage, we resorted to going back to the only place we knew for sure it could charge – back where we rented it from. We then ubered home for $20 and back to the Tesla next morning for another $20 (we rented for 3 days). It was easily one of the frustratingest cars I ever rented.
      - mjevans 5y ago
        If you're renting housing (with slowly increasing exceptions, mostly at higher end hotels and recently renovated apartments) this is a tough problem.
    - tzs 5y ago
      Fast DC chargers are still more than an order of magnitude slower than refueling an ICE car for an equivalent amount of travel.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        It’s fast enough for Tesla to sell almost a million EVs a year and to be unable to build vehicles fast enough to keep up with demand. Those who argue the problems haven’t been solved are ignoring the very clear market forces demonstrating that they have been. Sometimes my Tesla charges “too fast” (~20 min) and I have to move the vehicle before my shopping or rest stop is complete. It helps to colocate fast chargers at businesses people patron anyway (supermarkets, for example), where they’ll naturally take longer than the vehicle will take to charge. These are solved problems, it’s install and equipment colocating logistics at this point.
        5y ago
Hithredin 5y ago
Why even bother charging when you could replace a loan battery at pump station ?

emptyfile 5y ago

If putting the equivalent of a functioning high grade electrical socket in every parking space is a minor obstacle I don't want to see a major one.

FredPret 5y ago
How about removing millions of tons of certain gases out of the planetary air
dtech 5y ago
We're not talking about Tesla Superchargers here, but things that let you charge overnight. On the scale of civil construction, it doesn't seem to be more difficult than highways, street lighting, sewers, etc.

zemvpferreira 5y ago

Sure, we have a few outdoor charging spots here in Lisbon as well. I can tell you exactly what will happen here: -politicians made a big deal of building said spots when there were close to zero electric cars on the street. Many tv spots were bought. -people start buying electric cars en masse because hey, insfrastructure! Two free chargers per street! -no more easy PR to milk. Turns out scaling street charging will be expensive and bring no extra popularity. -Five years later, we'll still have two chargers per block but a hundred times more electric cars. Back to step zero.

zachkatz 5y ago
Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need.
- imchillyb 5y ago
  > Meanwhile, you can charge 12+ e-bikes in the space of one car. That's the real infrastructure we need. @zachkatz Next downpour: @imchillyb: ::waves to silly biker as I pass them:: Hey guys, pipe down, we're almost home. @zachkatz: ::Grumbles about rain, snow, sleet, and more recently hail. Looks behind at Timmy, Sally, Sue, and the dog all miserably following them home; drenched and shivering-cold on their e-bikes, and dog's paws on wet-cold-concrete. Glad you're gonna fight for that e-bike spot, I sure won't!
  - dash2 5y ago
    That might apply more in Chicago than Lisbon, though.
  - Tostino 5y ago
    They are not a replacement for every situation, but they work amazingly well when they do. I don't think you are making a good faith argument here. I've been in towns and cities all up and down the east coast of the US with my bike, and they range from absolutely terrible for any bike traffic (stroads everywhere) to fantastic. The biggest obstacle to bikes being more usable is simply not designing our infrastructure in the least human/bike friendly way possible.

smt88 5y ago

Adding millions of chargers to city streets is an insane way to solve charger shortages. It makes much more sense (and would be much cheaper) for the govt to mandate interchangeable batteries, so you could just go to a gas station and swap out a battery instead. The stations already exist where you need them and only need one charger for all the batteries.

FredPret 5y ago
That would also remove range anxiety for me. However, this will only work if batteries become smaller and more energy-dense - because they are huge and heavy, electric cars today are built around them. This causes two problems: You can’t easily remove them because they’re big and have to be built into the structure of the car, and are sometimes lod-bearing, and each car model has a different shape of battery.

bsder 5y ago

> On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve. Copper wiring to deliver that power is expensive. It's also a really good theft target. Everyone adding a mere window air conditioner is enough to cause new electric lines to be needed. Electric car charging is way worse than that.

blincoln 5y ago

> In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. Will it? Every city parking spot in every city in the world potentially pulling ~220V @ ~60 amps overnight seems like an awful lot of electricity to generate, to say nothing of the expense of running all of the necessary cabling and charging stations. Are there cities actively implementing that strategy?

kwhitefoot 5y ago
Why on earth would you need 60 A? My Model S add a kilometre for every amp-hour at 230 V. Charging from 18:00 to 06:00 adds 120 km at 10 A. Residential streets already have cables for street lighting, adding extra cable or uprating the existing cable to support charging posts can use the same cable ducts.
dtech 5y ago
Obviously it's not feasible to have every parking spot pull 13KW, they would need to coordinate to manage load. The core thing is that you're assuming that every parked car arrives in the evening with near-zero charge and needs to be full in the morning. This is not the case, cars are parked 95% of the time. They can charge at work on in garages too - useful for solar power peak supply. Let's do some napkin calculations: 95% = 1 hour per day of use for 23 hours of charging. Let's assume that's 100km drive in that 1 hour, 15Kwh for a typical EV. So on average you need 15/23=0.65KW per car, not 13KW. There's 285 million cars in the US, so you'd need 4.3 billion KWh per day for full electric. Currently US generates 11 billion KWh per day [3]. [1] https://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-time/ https://fortune.com/2016/03/13/cars-parked-95-percent-of-tim... [2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3