3 ms·

My brother recently asked me a question that I didn’t have an answer to. In urban areas, most people park on the streets or in shared garages that have maybe 2

My brother recently asked me a question that I didn’t have an answer to. In urban areas, most people park on the streets or in shared garages that have maybe 2 chargers for 100+ cars. Electric cars also take longer to charge. With the car electrification push, even with rapid charging, it seems like a real risk that chargers will become overwhelmed and have long wait times since you’d need ~5-10x as many chargers to handle the same amount at peak throughput. Swapping batteries seems like a no go. Is the expected solution to build waaay more chargers than we have fuel stations today? That’s setting aside the problem than many power grids can’t handle that many cars plugged in at once. It seems like we’re massively ignoring the infrastructure problems of mass electrification. We should electrify, but I think the infrastructure piece is an overlooked unsexy undertaking that is often ignored by politicians because it’s too complicated and their constituents don’t complain about like they do with electric cars for that reason.

Gibbon1 3y ago
One of my thoughts is yes there is an issue with people that have to park on the street. A few random thoughts on that. Urban drivers drive about half the miles/year than suburban ones. Probably 6000 vs 12500. And being an average some of them drive a lot less than that. I had a car in SF that I was putting 3000 miles/year on. If it was electric it's only use a batteries worth of power every month. Given the duck curve and oversupply of solar during the day (oversupply == cheap) we should be installing chargers in employee parking lots. It's possible urban commuters could totally get by with charging at work. And it's probably cheaper and logistically simpler to install chargers there than on random street where cars park at night. Not to mention eventually power in the evening and night time is going to cost more than during the day. Basically I think we still have a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to electrified transport.
- r00fus 3y ago
  A non-trivial number of EV owners at my office get by without charging at home. Easier with a Tesla + Superchargers nearby (as a backup), but non-Tesla drivers do get by.
thatfrenchguy 3y ago
> In urban areas, most people park on the streets If you look at Paris or Montréal, they have L2 chargers on the streets. Easy solution for that problem, they’re just 240v/32A stations, you don’t need fancy hardware for that. > That’s setting aside the problem than many power grids can’t handle that many cars plugged in at once. People overestimate how much they drive, on average you’re not going to see a load that big, 13500 miles a year is 36 miles a day, or 9kwh in an efficient car, 18kwh in a bloated F-150 lightning. We might need financial incentives to charge cars at different times, sure.
- cduzz 3y ago
  I get by fine with 240v/20a charging (16a in reality). Street charging, leveraging things like existing utility lines to street lights, isn't a huge lift. The individual chargers can balance the current they deliver among themselves if / when they share a common feed. Similarly in large parking lots where people spend lots of time, you can put "low power" DC charging so people can charge while they're shopping. The key to thinking about EV charging vs petrol charging is that you can and should do it without locking the operator to the vehicle -- plug in and walk away should be the expected interaction. DC fast charging like using petrol is useful in a very specific use case (long distance travel) but the requirement of "dump a gas tank of energy into an EV" is actually absurdly complex and requires huge power infrastructure. Around where I live many of the tesla superchargers have a natural gas fuel cell electric generator right next to them.
- lokar 3y ago
  Remember: for L2 charging the charger is part of the car. The thing with the cord is mostly just a fancy on/off switch.
- pbourke 3y ago
  Wouldn’t the time-of-day effect be amplified with enough EVs? Everyone arrives home at 6pm after work and plugs in.
  - surfaceofthesun 3y ago
    Many EVs already allow for timing / delays for charging when plugged in. Also, charging at work should help balance out solar generation, especially.
granshaw 3y ago
> In urban areas, most people park on the streets Isn’t this the main problem? People parkig on the streets simply cannot buy EVs cause charging would be a royal hassle for them
- auto 3y ago
  This is my main rub, I live in one of these situations (like I'm sure a huge percentage of Americans do), and there's zero way I could own an EV. Are we all supposed to run the charging plug across the sidewalk? We've had kids mess with cars previously, undeterred by security cameras, so now we have to worry about them unplugging our cars in the middle of the night too? I'm strongly in support of alternatives to ICE cars, but the idea of auto makers being able to sell only EVs in America by 2030 or whatever is an absolute farce.
  - dzader 3y ago
    [dead]
  - dagw 3y ago
    I know people who live like you do with EVs and they have zero problem. Either they can charge at work or they charge when they're parked while out shopping or similar or, worst case scenario, they just have to drive down the road to the nearest super charger and just sit there 15-25 minutes watching YouTube while their car charges.
    - bakje 3y ago
      I think there is probably some selection bias here, you know people in those situations that don't have any problems because they wouldn't have bought those cars if they would have problems. But I don't want to make any assumptions about the people you know, some people are also just less bothered by these things or care enough about driving an EV that they take it in stride. I'm sure that when you want 100% of car owners to switch to EVs there are those that will run into issues. Like people that work from home and can't charge at an office, or when there's no charging spot available when they're out shopping and they really don't have time this week to go charge their car somewhere. Not to mention the fact that charging at home is likely a lot cheaper than charging from public infrastructure (I don't own an EV so I don't actually know how the prices compare) I'm not saying that these are insurmountable problems, or that some of them won't get solved along the way (like if we end up getting a surplus of chargers at public parking spots), but there are some genuine disadvantages to owning an EV when compared to an ICE. I personally wouldn't want to buy an EV until I have my own driveway and can charge my car at home, but with current housing prices (and EV prices) I don't see this happening for a while.
massysett 3y ago
I have long wondered why battery swapping is a no-go. Just like with a propane tank (e.g. for backyard grilling) I just take the empty to a store and swap it for a full. I don’t wait for them to fill it. My guess is that for engineering reasons this is a no-go because the carmaker needs to be able to cram battery into odd nooks and crannies of the car, so it isn’t practical to make them interchangeable. I did once hear of an idea to have ships use electric while in port, and have swappable batteries for this - but on a ship space is hardly a limiting factor. I know nothing about this though.
- roumenguha 3y ago
  There's at least one automaker (Nio) with battery swaps as part of their regularly offered services.
- ylhert 3y ago
  There are a number of reasons why battery swapping is not feasible in the real world, among them: - Batteries age differently from one another, so swapping would only be fair if you had a similarly aged battery that had a similar number of miles & charge cycles on it - Batteries need to be taken care of (like not using the last 10% at each limit of the battery). some people take really good care of their batteries, others don't. I would never want some random battery swapped into my car, as I've taken really good care of my car's battery - Batteries are structurally built into the vehicle, and making them easily removable would make a lot of the engineering more difficult - Batteries could become commoditized so that they fit in any car, but right now there are tons of different shaped & sized batteries, so it would be really hard to build the tooling to support all these different cars & battery types
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  The weight is crazy (Model 3 long range is ~1000lbs), so you need a serious facility to swap. They are relatively delicate, and flammable in a terrifying way, so you'd need to trust the facility more than e.g. your average oil & tire swap shop. From an engineering POV they need a coolant loop w/ a pump, a high voltage connect to the charger, and usually also a connection to a DC-DC converter for the 12v systems on the car. So if you make it modular/removable, you need a (standardized) answer for how to do all of this. The form factor of the battery is tied fairly strongly to the chassis generally, so if you force a standardization of it you limit manufacturer's options there. Finally, probably the most important, is ownership model. The battery is the most expensive part in the car, by far. It basically is the car. Who owns it? What's the revenue model? How does insurance handle it? Will consumers accept a situation where they're getting random batteries shoved in affecting the performance etc. of their car? It's just a whole thing. It's been attempted, and not succeeded is what I see. Now, what I don't understand is why this isn't the model for EV shipping trucks. In that case they already have a highly modular, heavy duty platform and they already have to check into frequent weigh stations, and the operator rarely owns the truck. I don't understand why the shipping industry wouldn't pursue a model where a standardized set of pre-charged batteries aren't sitting on automated forklifts at weigh stations ready for swap during weigh-ins, with the fleet owners paying a fee for that maintenance...
jitl 3y ago
> areas, most people park on the streets or in shared garages that have maybe 2 chargers for 100+ cars Just install chargers. It’s fine. You can have one in every spot in a parking garage. My apartment building in SF did this. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more incidental installs in street parking areas as well.
- farnsworth 3y ago
  Depends on the building, the size and construction of the parking garage, and the amount of power that it is set up to draw. This can be easy or extremely expensive depending on the circumstances.
  - signatoremo 3y ago
    The building owners will install ones if there is enough incentive, as in, they losing out to buildings with charging infrastructure. Can you imagine a building that can’t run power cables to every single room?
jncfhnb 3y ago
5-10x as many chargers doesn’t seem unreasonable if there are 5-10x as many EVs
Nifty3929 3y ago
The main difference is that with electric vehicles you can mostly charge at home. The only time you need a station is on a long trip. So much less demand on these than gas stations.
Vvector 3y ago
> It seems like we’re massively ignoring the infrastructure problems of mass electrification. In the US, the number of public chargers more than doubled in 2022. New Solar added set a record. Wind generation continue to be added. Power companies continue to add new distribution lines. The White House put forward $25 Billion in federal funds for EV batteries, chargers, and related items.
toss1 3y ago
In contrast, I think it's going to get really interesting when a tipping point is reached. At some point, EVs will replace enough of the automobile population that gasoline sales decline below profitability for most petrol stations. While the ordinary thought is that this will happen gradually, it seems more likely to resemble the dynamics of an animal population that suddenly has insufficient food (whether by over-breeding or a food supply shortage). This dynamics is not that if the population is 110% of the food supply that 10% die off, it is more like a crash where 90% die off in such a situation; the starvation is evenly distributed so almost no one gets enough to survive. So, when petrol stations have a great crash and mostly die off, suddenly the range anxiety will be pervasive in the petrol-powerd drivers. Which will make them want to get out even more, etc. There's probably solutions to this, but will it be managed in time? Petrol-station subsidies seem like a bad idea...
- r00fus 3y ago
  What's the likelihood that gas stations change to offering charging also/instead?
  - toss1 3y ago
    I expect the survivors will do that, but then charging also requires more spaces to sell the same energy/hour, with an average charge taking what 30min, vs 6 min to fill a petrol tank?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Right now gas stations operate in a cutthroat industry. The price is mounted on big signs visible from the street, and people will irrationally drive across town to save 10 cents per gallon. Once 90% of gas stations go away, that dynamic will be gone. Few gas stations mean there won't be the same level of price competition, so they'll be able to survive on much less volume. And there will be always be some demand for gasoline from classic cars, et cetera.
- giardini 3y ago
  IIRC I've read that gas stations don't make much on gas sales but mostly on other items you buy. If so, the dynamic may be different from the population model.
aprdm 3y ago
Yes I rented a Tesla recently in Ontario and I didn’t realize it takes 6h for a full charge, I also didn’t had a charger in the hotel neither did I have a nearby. Basically had to Uber while charging…

Gibbon1 3y ago

One of my thoughts is yes there is an issue with people that have to park on the street. A few random thoughts on that. Urban drivers drive about half the miles/year than suburban ones. Probably 6000 vs 12500. And being an average some of them drive a lot less than that. I had a car in SF that I was putting 3000 miles/year on. If it was electric it's only use a batteries worth of power every month. Given the duck curve and oversupply of solar during the day (oversupply == cheap) we should be installing chargers in employee parking lots. It's possible urban commuters could totally get by with charging at work. And it's probably cheaper and logistically simpler to install chargers there than on random street where cars park at night. Not to mention eventually power in the evening and night time is going to cost more than during the day. Basically I think we still have a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to electrified transport.

r00fus 3y ago
A non-trivial number of EV owners at my office get by without charging at home. Easier with a Tesla + Superchargers nearby (as a backup), but non-Tesla drivers do get by.

thatfrenchguy 3y ago

> In urban areas, most people park on the streets If you look at Paris or Montréal, they have L2 chargers on the streets. Easy solution for that problem, they’re just 240v/32A stations, you don’t need fancy hardware for that. > That’s setting aside the problem than many power grids can’t handle that many cars plugged in at once. People overestimate how much they drive, on average you’re not going to see a load that big, 13500 miles a year is 36 miles a day, or 9kwh in an efficient car, 18kwh in a bloated F-150 lightning. We might need financial incentives to charge cars at different times, sure.

cduzz 3y ago
I get by fine with 240v/20a charging (16a in reality). Street charging, leveraging things like existing utility lines to street lights, isn't a huge lift. The individual chargers can balance the current they deliver among themselves if / when they share a common feed. Similarly in large parking lots where people spend lots of time, you can put "low power" DC charging so people can charge while they're shopping. The key to thinking about EV charging vs petrol charging is that you can and should do it without locking the operator to the vehicle -- plug in and walk away should be the expected interaction. DC fast charging like using petrol is useful in a very specific use case (long distance travel) but the requirement of "dump a gas tank of energy into an EV" is actually absurdly complex and requires huge power infrastructure. Around where I live many of the tesla superchargers have a natural gas fuel cell electric generator right next to them.
lokar 3y ago
Remember: for L2 charging the charger is part of the car. The thing with the cord is mostly just a fancy on/off switch.
pbourke 3y ago
Wouldn’t the time-of-day effect be amplified with enough EVs? Everyone arrives home at 6pm after work and plugs in.
- surfaceofthesun 3y ago
  Many EVs already allow for timing / delays for charging when plugged in. Also, charging at work should help balance out solar generation, especially.

granshaw 3y ago

> In urban areas, most people park on the streets Isn’t this the main problem? People parkig on the streets simply cannot buy EVs cause charging would be a royal hassle for them

auto 3y ago
This is my main rub, I live in one of these situations (like I'm sure a huge percentage of Americans do), and there's zero way I could own an EV. Are we all supposed to run the charging plug across the sidewalk? We've had kids mess with cars previously, undeterred by security cameras, so now we have to worry about them unplugging our cars in the middle of the night too? I'm strongly in support of alternatives to ICE cars, but the idea of auto makers being able to sell only EVs in America by 2030 or whatever is an absolute farce.
- dzader 3y ago
  [dead]
- dagw 3y ago
  I know people who live like you do with EVs and they have zero problem. Either they can charge at work or they charge when they're parked while out shopping or similar or, worst case scenario, they just have to drive down the road to the nearest super charger and just sit there 15-25 minutes watching YouTube while their car charges.
  - bakje 3y ago
    I think there is probably some selection bias here, you know people in those situations that don't have any problems because they wouldn't have bought those cars if they would have problems. But I don't want to make any assumptions about the people you know, some people are also just less bothered by these things or care enough about driving an EV that they take it in stride. I'm sure that when you want 100% of car owners to switch to EVs there are those that will run into issues. Like people that work from home and can't charge at an office, or when there's no charging spot available when they're out shopping and they really don't have time this week to go charge their car somewhere. Not to mention the fact that charging at home is likely a lot cheaper than charging from public infrastructure (I don't own an EV so I don't actually know how the prices compare) I'm not saying that these are insurmountable problems, or that some of them won't get solved along the way (like if we end up getting a surplus of chargers at public parking spots), but there are some genuine disadvantages to owning an EV when compared to an ICE. I personally wouldn't want to buy an EV until I have my own driveway and can charge my car at home, but with current housing prices (and EV prices) I don't see this happening for a while.

massysett 3y ago

I have long wondered why battery swapping is a no-go. Just like with a propane tank (e.g. for backyard grilling) I just take the empty to a store and swap it for a full. I don’t wait for them to fill it. My guess is that for engineering reasons this is a no-go because the carmaker needs to be able to cram battery into odd nooks and crannies of the car, so it isn’t practical to make them interchangeable. I did once hear of an idea to have ships use electric while in port, and have swappable batteries for this - but on a ship space is hardly a limiting factor. I know nothing about this though.

roumenguha 3y ago
There's at least one automaker (Nio) with battery swaps as part of their regularly offered services.
ylhert 3y ago
There are a number of reasons why battery swapping is not feasible in the real world, among them: - Batteries age differently from one another, so swapping would only be fair if you had a similarly aged battery that had a similar number of miles & charge cycles on it - Batteries need to be taken care of (like not using the last 10% at each limit of the battery). some people take really good care of their batteries, others don't. I would never want some random battery swapped into my car, as I've taken really good care of my car's battery - Batteries are structurally built into the vehicle, and making them easily removable would make a lot of the engineering more difficult - Batteries could become commoditized so that they fit in any car, but right now there are tons of different shaped & sized batteries, so it would be really hard to build the tooling to support all these different cars & battery types
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
The weight is crazy (Model 3 long range is ~1000lbs), so you need a serious facility to swap. They are relatively delicate, and flammable in a terrifying way, so you'd need to trust the facility more than e.g. your average oil & tire swap shop. From an engineering POV they need a coolant loop w/ a pump, a high voltage connect to the charger, and usually also a connection to a DC-DC converter for the 12v systems on the car. So if you make it modular/removable, you need a (standardized) answer for how to do all of this. The form factor of the battery is tied fairly strongly to the chassis generally, so if you force a standardization of it you limit manufacturer's options there. Finally, probably the most important, is ownership model. The battery is the most expensive part in the car, by far. It basically is the car. Who owns it? What's the revenue model? How does insurance handle it? Will consumers accept a situation where they're getting random batteries shoved in affecting the performance etc. of their car? It's just a whole thing. It's been attempted, and not succeeded is what I see. Now, what I don't understand is why this isn't the model for EV shipping trucks. In that case they already have a highly modular, heavy duty platform and they already have to check into frequent weigh stations, and the operator rarely owns the truck. I don't understand why the shipping industry wouldn't pursue a model where a standardized set of pre-charged batteries aren't sitting on automated forklifts at weigh stations ready for swap during weigh-ins, with the fleet owners paying a fee for that maintenance...

jitl 3y ago

> areas, most people park on the streets or in shared garages that have maybe 2 chargers for 100+ cars Just install chargers. It’s fine. You can have one in every spot in a parking garage. My apartment building in SF did this. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more incidental installs in street parking areas as well.

farnsworth 3y ago
Depends on the building, the size and construction of the parking garage, and the amount of power that it is set up to draw. This can be easy or extremely expensive depending on the circumstances.
- signatoremo 3y ago
  The building owners will install ones if there is enough incentive, as in, they losing out to buildings with charging infrastructure. Can you imagine a building that can’t run power cables to every single room?

jncfhnb 3y ago

5-10x as many chargers doesn’t seem unreasonable if there are 5-10x as many EVs

Nifty3929 3y ago

The main difference is that with electric vehicles you can mostly charge at home. The only time you need a station is on a long trip. So much less demand on these than gas stations.

Vvector 3y ago

> It seems like we’re massively ignoring the infrastructure problems of mass electrification. In the US, the number of public chargers more than doubled in 2022. New Solar added set a record. Wind generation continue to be added. Power companies continue to add new distribution lines. The White House put forward $25 Billion in federal funds for EV batteries, chargers, and related items.

toss1 3y ago

In contrast, I think it's going to get really interesting when a tipping point is reached. At some point, EVs will replace enough of the automobile population that gasoline sales decline below profitability for most petrol stations. While the ordinary thought is that this will happen gradually, it seems more likely to resemble the dynamics of an animal population that suddenly has insufficient food (whether by over-breeding or a food supply shortage). This dynamics is not that if the population is 110% of the food supply that 10% die off, it is more like a crash where 90% die off in such a situation; the starvation is evenly distributed so almost no one gets enough to survive. So, when petrol stations have a great crash and mostly die off, suddenly the range anxiety will be pervasive in the petrol-powerd drivers. Which will make them want to get out even more, etc. There's probably solutions to this, but will it be managed in time? Petrol-station subsidies seem like a bad idea...

r00fus 3y ago
What's the likelihood that gas stations change to offering charging also/instead?
- toss1 3y ago
  I expect the survivors will do that, but then charging also requires more spaces to sell the same energy/hour, with an average charge taking what 30min, vs 6 min to fill a petrol tank?
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Right now gas stations operate in a cutthroat industry. The price is mounted on big signs visible from the street, and people will irrationally drive across town to save 10 cents per gallon. Once 90% of gas stations go away, that dynamic will be gone. Few gas stations mean there won't be the same level of price competition, so they'll be able to survive on much less volume. And there will be always be some demand for gasoline from classic cars, et cetera.
giardini 3y ago
IIRC I've read that gas stations don't make much on gas sales but mostly on other items you buy. If so, the dynamic may be different from the population model.

aprdm 3y ago

Yes I rented a Tesla recently in Ontario and I didn’t realize it takes 6h for a full charge, I also didn’t had a charger in the hotel neither did I have a nearby. Basically had to Uber while charging…