3 ms·

It's not just that, it's also time... in 99.9% of cases, the gas station is there, and you'll get gas in ~5 minutes, full tank, enough to drive another 1000km.

It's not just that, it's also time... in 99.9% of cases, the gas station is there, and you'll get gas in ~5 minutes, full tank, enough to drive another 1000km. Even if it's busy, you wait a few more minutes and get it. If you come to a busy charging station... are you really going to wait for an hour? are you going to risk it with the next one? What if that one is even busier? I live in a country which is full of people transiting every summer from norther europe to croatian beaches, like literally 10km traffic jams to go through a tunnel, police stopping transiting vehicles from leaving the highway (so the locals can use the side roads, but the gas stations can manage it, because refilling takes just a few minutes. Now replace just 10% of those german cars with electric ones, calculate how many refills you need to drive between eg. frankfurt to split, multiply by thousands going through every weekend, and there's no way to get efficiently charge all those cars, and noone is designig charging stations for peak traffic. 30km left? 8 charging stations, 15 cars waiting, will you really risk it? Or will you wait two hours at least to get a chance to charge your car?

matthewdgreen 2y ago
Charging stations are extremely scalable, though. Tesla has one supercharger in California with 98 charging bays, and plans for another with 200 bays. You’ve never seen a gas station with that many fuel pumps because it would be extremely difficult to install the tanks and fuel plumbing and fire suppression systems to make it work. With electric charging you just need a parking lot.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  But you don't need that many pumps, because it takes 5 minutes to fill up the gas and pay... and then drive a 1000 more kilometers. You don't have to stay there for 1hour+ and then repeat the same after a few hundred kilometers.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Pretty much no EVs on the market in North America take an hour or more to charge enough for a few hundred km. On the road trips I've gone on with my EV the average charge time I had was like 15 minutes. The longest was 22 minutes. I sometimes charged a little longer than as it took some time getting the kids through the bathroom and get a snack. And my EV kind of sucks for road trips. Smaller battery, only 400V instead of 800V, and a less efficient motor setup compared to other EVs on the market.
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      Yeah I’m baffled by the GP poster. 15 min is standard. 25 or 30 in rare circumstances or when you want to sit down for food. And this is using today’s battery chemistries, while even faster charging is already coming from solid state and sodium batteries. Naively if we assume that a gas car can move in and out in 5 minutes, you need 3-5x as many charging bays to maintain similar throughput, and those numbers are already deployed in some stations. I also think the poster seriously underestimates the cost of building, maintaining and decommissioning fueling infrastructure. Gas stations are not cheap or scalable in the same way that charging stations are.
    - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
      I just did the math, and it's even worse... VW id.3 are one of the most popular electic vehicles here.. They don't need an hour on fast charger, but still... I took the data from here: https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro > Charge Time (35->280 km) 31 min So, for ~250km of driving, you chrage it four half an hour (let's say everything is ideal, no AC needed, no stopping in traffic with ac running)... for a drive from eg Frankfurt to split (~1200km) and then back, this means 9 charges (assuming you did the first charge at home, which is far from a common thing in frankfurt with a lot of apartment buildings and not a lot of chargers there). For a normal diesel car, that would be 2 refills (assuming you started with a full tank... and you'll still haeve half a tank left over). So, 9 charges means using the charging stations for 279 minutes, a bit over 4 and a half hours if done ideally. Refilling a diesel would take 10 minutes. So to serve an equivalent number of tourists here in transit (since our gas is cheaper outside of highways, and locals fill their cars there), we'd need 28x more charging stations compared to gas/diesel pumps. Also, even with gas pummps, during peak times (weekends all summer), you sometimes have to wait for 3-4 cars infront of you to refill, so even that is not enough for peak usage. So, for an average german tourist going to croatia for a vacation (and there's a lot of them.. a lot!), the electric car is useless until we build A LOT more charging stations, 30x more than our curret gas ones, and add 4.5 hours of drive time. Sure, living in a house (charge at home) and commute to work and back within the range of the vehicle... that's great. But for road trips, we're not really there yet.
- physicsguy 2y ago
  The throughput of a charger is a lot lot lower. A single pump can maybe serve 20 cars an hour if it’s got a credit card reader. Most petrol stations in the UK have this and maybe 4-12 pumps depending on size. So just ball parking, if the average needed duration to charge is 10 mins on a supercharger, you need 4x more chargers than you would pumps for an equivalent. The obvious difference is that you can’t pump your car at home, and by installing chargers in ordinary car parks you can mitigate the need the specific infrastructure of petrol stations, but the number of total chargers needed is still high, they are just not in the same places.

matthewdgreen 2y ago

Charging stations are extremely scalable, though. Tesla has one supercharger in California with 98 charging bays, and plans for another with 200 bays. You’ve never seen a gas station with that many fuel pumps because it would be extremely difficult to install the tanks and fuel plumbing and fire suppression systems to make it work. With electric charging you just need a parking lot.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
But you don't need that many pumps, because it takes 5 minutes to fill up the gas and pay... and then drive a 1000 more kilometers. You don't have to stay there for 1hour+ and then repeat the same after a few hundred kilometers.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Pretty much no EVs on the market in North America take an hour or more to charge enough for a few hundred km. On the road trips I've gone on with my EV the average charge time I had was like 15 minutes. The longest was 22 minutes. I sometimes charged a little longer than as it took some time getting the kids through the bathroom and get a snack. And my EV kind of sucks for road trips. Smaller battery, only 400V instead of 800V, and a less efficient motor setup compared to other EVs on the market.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Yeah I’m baffled by the GP poster. 15 min is standard. 25 or 30 in rare circumstances or when you want to sit down for food. And this is using today’s battery chemistries, while even faster charging is already coming from solid state and sodium batteries. Naively if we assume that a gas car can move in and out in 5 minutes, you need 3-5x as many charging bays to maintain similar throughput, and those numbers are already deployed in some stations. I also think the poster seriously underestimates the cost of building, maintaining and decommissioning fueling infrastructure. Gas stations are not cheap or scalable in the same way that charging stations are.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    I just did the math, and it's even worse... VW id.3 are one of the most popular electic vehicles here.. They don't need an hour on fast charger, but still... I took the data from here: https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro https://ev-database.org/car/1202/Volkswagen-ID3-Pro > Charge Time (35->280 km) 31 min So, for ~250km of driving, you chrage it four half an hour (let's say everything is ideal, no AC needed, no stopping in traffic with ac running)... for a drive from eg Frankfurt to split (~1200km) and then back, this means 9 charges (assuming you did the first charge at home, which is far from a common thing in frankfurt with a lot of apartment buildings and not a lot of chargers there). For a normal diesel car, that would be 2 refills (assuming you started with a full tank... and you'll still haeve half a tank left over). So, 9 charges means using the charging stations for 279 minutes, a bit over 4 and a half hours if done ideally. Refilling a diesel would take 10 minutes. So to serve an equivalent number of tourists here in transit (since our gas is cheaper outside of highways, and locals fill their cars there), we'd need 28x more charging stations compared to gas/diesel pumps. Also, even with gas pummps, during peak times (weekends all summer), you sometimes have to wait for 3-4 cars infront of you to refill, so even that is not enough for peak usage. So, for an average german tourist going to croatia for a vacation (and there's a lot of them.. a lot!), the electric car is useless until we build A LOT more charging stations, 30x more than our curret gas ones, and add 4.5 hours of drive time. Sure, living in a house (charge at home) and commute to work and back within the range of the vehicle... that's great. But for road trips, we're not really there yet.
physicsguy 2y ago
The throughput of a charger is a lot lot lower. A single pump can maybe serve 20 cars an hour if it’s got a credit card reader. Most petrol stations in the UK have this and maybe 4-12 pumps depending on size. So just ball parking, if the average needed duration to charge is 10 mins on a supercharger, you need 4x more chargers than you would pumps for an equivalent. The obvious difference is that you can’t pump your car at home, and by installing chargers in ordinary car parks you can mitigate the need the specific infrastructure of petrol stations, but the number of total chargers needed is still high, they are just not in the same places.