7 ms·

Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations

124 points by cryptoz 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
acveilleux 12y ago
They count charging stations in homes, not just public ones.
- sbierwagen 12y ago
  Plus, you really should be comparing the number of pumps, not gas stations. Additionally, the power throughput of a gas pump is way, way higher than a car charger. (Probably measured in the dozens of MWe per hour, compared to 50 KW/h of a DC fast charger) A single car ties up a gas pump for five minutes, an electric car ties up a charger for half an hour.
  - to3m 12y ago
    https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-hands/ https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-ha... suggests (with calculations) a throughput of 87MW.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Would be hard to fit a petrol station in everybody's home though. edit - was also thinking that providing extra plug-in points on the side of your property to sell rooftop solar or grid at a premium, as part of a global charger sharing network, is probably going to happen eventually and has a good business plan in there somewhere.
  - cpwright 12y ago
    I don't think it is that hard, it just isn't as useful. I have a tank in my basement that holds 300 gallons of heating fuel (basically diesel); and it is pumped to my boiler. Instead of diesel it could easily be gasoline to a car; but why worry about delivery, etc. when there is already a large infrastructure to fuel my car and the marginal benefits are tiny. Whereas, if I bought an electric car; having the charger would really be a necessity, because having to wait 30-60 minutes for your car to charge is not going to be something that you want to work into your routine.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      For a lot of people it is one less thing to work into their routine. For other people it is hassle. Round where I live no houses have driveways or garages, so the only electric vehicles I have been seriously researching have been motorbikes that can fit through the front door and as much as I think electric cars are the future of much of transport, the charging cable problem hasn't yet been seriously addressed for high density urban use yet. edit - Or fold-up cars. One that can fit in a lift.
      - justincormack 12y ago
        In London there are 1300 public charge points so far. I have seen people just running charge cables out of their front window to the kerbside. Garages are not very common in centralish areas. So I think bringing it indoors is pretty extreme.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      People who already have a tank in the basement are pretty rare. How much effort/money would it take to install a new tank, plus a car-compatible pump? Compare with a couple hundred bucks for an electrician to install a 240V outlet, and a few hundred more for a charger (if you don't just use the one that comes with your car).
      - cpwright 12y ago
Shivetya 12y ago
I would be real happy if employers would focus more on adding reserved parking with chargers instead of reserve parking for mid level management. It would send a much better message. It might take something akin to handicap parking to convince people to think different. I would use the carrot method, get better parking with your plug in (hybrid or otherwise) instead of taxing the other to death.
- greglindahl 12y ago
  Huh. In Silicon Valley it is already more common to have EV chargers with dedicated parking than it is to have dedicated management spaces.
- oaktowner 12y ago
  There are companies that reserve parking for mid-level managers?!? I agree: that sends a terrible message.
  - alistairSH 12y ago
    Yup. One of my wife's previous employers did this. The first row of spaces were reserved for long-time employees, which really just meant the VPs who had been there a while. The CEO's admin might have had one of those as well. The rank and file had very little change of ever obtaining a reserved spot.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    Where mid-level = VP+, it used to be quite common. Among companies I go to these days, it would be rare enough as to be noteworthy--not that I visit a representative cross-section of all companies.
closetnerd 12y ago
Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline? I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and I'm not too sold on that idea yet.
- NickM 12y ago
  My understanding is that ecological impacts were more of a problem with older battery chemistries (lead-acid, nickel-cadmium), whereas lithium-ion packs are relatively benign. For instance, the batteries used by Tesla are mostly composed of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, and lithium, and none of these things are especially toxic. Mining these different metals may have some negative impact, but it's pretty easy to recycle li-ion packs, so in the long term it's a much more sustainable solution compared to gasoline, where you have to keep drilling for more and more of it forever.
- linkregister 12y ago
  Battery recycling is a thing and it works well. Tesla[1] The main battery recycling firm[2] [1] http://my.teslamotors.com/en_HK/node/3855 http://my.teslamotors.com/en_HK/node/3855 [2] http://www.kinsbursky.com/ http://www.kinsbursky.com/
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle and adding them to street level atmosphere, so that is an immediate bonus that batteries would seem to win on, especially in the built environments in which we live. Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes, but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is much less abundant than lithium or silicon. However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.
  - closetnerd 12y ago
skywhopper 12y ago
IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an empty tank versus 30 minutes to fully recharge an electric car, then you really need 75 times as many charging points to claim you have something resembling equality.
- foobar2020 12y ago
  The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars, versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations as there are gas stations wouldn't be an issue there. Also, once you have an operational charge point you can easily go parallel with stations, just like with gas pumps.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- nightski 12y ago
  Assuming 100% utilization of course, which around here is very far from the truth.
  - vkjv 12y ago
    Peak utilization is more important than average.
- sparkman55 12y ago
  In rural areas, it's actually common to have a gas pump near the garage. After all, what are you going to do, drive your tractor to town to fill up?
X-combinator 12y ago
Reddit comment thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2vrlzx/japan_has_more_car_chargers_than_gas_stations/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2vrlzx/japan_has...
paws 12y ago
"Three years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis all of Japan's 48 operable reactors remain shut, with no restarts scheduled." via http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-plant-idUSL4N0MN1X520140328 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-pl... Worth keeping the big picture in mind.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  The real bogeyman isn't nuclear. It's companies getting away with poor practices, hanging onto outdated equipment, and whittling down safety recommendations/regulations. The same thing with the BP refinery disaster. (And two of those 3 with the gulf oil spill.) If we look at organizations with good records with regards to nuclear power (US Navy and France) it's somewhat different from what we have in the US.
liyuanli 12y ago
It would be cool to see more automakers invest in an infrastructure dedicated to electric vehicles (not necessarily limited to charging). EVs are not mainstream today, but they most likely will be in the near future. I see a vague connection with mobile ecosystems like iPhone and Android. Heavy investment in the mobile development infrastructure is paying off. It's giving device/app makers more leverage to turn ideas into products. A great infrastructure definitely helps drive adoption.
sandworm 12y ago
People have commented on the pumps v. station issue, but what about time? The most accurate measure of the infrastructure might not be how many plugs are around, but how many cars can be charged per day. Or perhaps how many vehicle-kilometers are available to electric cars. With pay-at-the-pump any gas pump can fill a car in say two minutes. An electric charger, even the fast ones, will take 10-100 times as long to "fill" a tank. So take the number of charging plugs and dived that by a factor of 10x->100x. Then come back when the number of available "fills" per day becomes comparable. Then adjust for the reduced range and come back when the total number of available vehicle-kilometers breaks even. I'm afraid that day is still a long way off atm.
- robotcookies 12y ago
  That's a good point. And if people are leaving their cars while charging to run errands or such, they are likely to take up more charging station time than what might be presumed if they immediately opened up the spot after getting their car charged.
- greglindahl 12y ago
  The overwhelming majority of electric car charging takes place overnight in the owner's garage, while the owner sleeps. So there's your time issue: no having to stop to fill up once a week or so, just plug in and unplug each day. There's no comparison to be made, because electric cars are just plain different.
hudibras 12y ago
n=1, but my Japanese house built in 2013 has a car charger. It wasn't even mentioned by the real estate agent as a feature, but I don't know if that was because it's so common now or because few people use them.

124 points by cryptoz 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

acveilleux 12y ago

They count charging stations in homes, not just public ones.

sbierwagen 12y ago
Plus, you really should be comparing the number of pumps, not gas stations. Additionally, the power throughput of a gas pump is way, way higher than a car charger. (Probably measured in the dozens of MWe per hour, compared to 50 KW/h of a DC fast charger) A single car ties up a gas pump for five minutes, an electric car ties up a charger for half an hour.
- to3m 12y ago
  https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-hands/ https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-ha... suggests (with calculations) a throughput of 87MW.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Would be hard to fit a petrol station in everybody's home though. edit - was also thinking that providing extra plug-in points on the side of your property to sell rooftop solar or grid at a premium, as part of a global charger sharing network, is probably going to happen eventually and has a good business plan in there somewhere.
- cpwright 12y ago
  I don't think it is that hard, it just isn't as useful. I have a tank in my basement that holds 300 gallons of heating fuel (basically diesel); and it is pumped to my boiler. Instead of diesel it could easily be gasoline to a car; but why worry about delivery, etc. when there is already a large infrastructure to fuel my car and the marginal benefits are tiny. Whereas, if I bought an electric car; having the charger would really be a necessity, because having to wait 30-60 minutes for your car to charge is not going to be something that you want to work into your routine.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    For a lot of people it is one less thing to work into their routine. For other people it is hassle. Round where I live no houses have driveways or garages, so the only electric vehicles I have been seriously researching have been motorbikes that can fit through the front door and as much as I think electric cars are the future of much of transport, the charging cable problem hasn't yet been seriously addressed for high density urban use yet. edit - Or fold-up cars. One that can fit in a lift.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      In London there are 1300 public charge points so far. I have seen people just running charge cables out of their front window to the kerbside. Garages are not very common in centralish areas. So I think bringing it indoors is pretty extreme.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    People who already have a tank in the basement are pretty rare. How much effort/money would it take to install a new tank, plus a car-compatible pump? Compare with a couple hundred bucks for an electrician to install a 240V outlet, and a few hundred more for a charger (if you don't just use the one that comes with your car).
    - cpwright 12y ago

Shivetya 12y ago

I would be real happy if employers would focus more on adding reserved parking with chargers instead of reserve parking for mid level management. It would send a much better message. It might take something akin to handicap parking to convince people to think different. I would use the carrot method, get better parking with your plug in (hybrid or otherwise) instead of taxing the other to death.

greglindahl 12y ago
Huh. In Silicon Valley it is already more common to have EV chargers with dedicated parking than it is to have dedicated management spaces.
oaktowner 12y ago
There are companies that reserve parking for mid-level managers?!? I agree: that sends a terrible message.
- alistairSH 12y ago
  Yup. One of my wife's previous employers did this. The first row of spaces were reserved for long-time employees, which really just meant the VPs who had been there a while. The CEO's admin might have had one of those as well. The rank and file had very little change of ever obtaining a reserved spot.
- ghaff 12y ago
  Where mid-level = VP+, it used to be quite common. Among companies I go to these days, it would be rare enough as to be noteworthy--not that I visit a representative cross-section of all companies.

closetnerd 12y ago

Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline? I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and I'm not too sold on that idea yet.

NickM 12y ago
My understanding is that ecological impacts were more of a problem with older battery chemistries (lead-acid, nickel-cadmium), whereas lithium-ion packs are relatively benign. For instance, the batteries used by Tesla are mostly composed of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, and lithium, and none of these things are especially toxic. Mining these different metals may have some negative impact, but it's pretty easy to recycle li-ion packs, so in the long term it's a much more sustainable solution compared to gasoline, where you have to keep drilling for more and more of it forever.
linkregister 12y ago
Battery recycling is a thing and it works well. Tesla[1] The main battery recycling firm[2] [1] http://my.teslamotors.com/en_HK/node/3855 http://my.teslamotors.com/en_HK/node/3855 [2] http://www.kinsbursky.com/ http://www.kinsbursky.com/
lotsofmangos 12y ago
In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle and adding them to street level atmosphere, so that is an immediate bonus that batteries would seem to win on, especially in the built environments in which we live. Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes, but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is much less abundant than lithium or silicon. However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.
- closetnerd 12y ago

skywhopper 12y ago

IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an empty tank versus 30 minutes to fully recharge an electric car, then you really need 75 times as many charging points to claim you have something resembling equality.

foobar2020 12y ago
The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars, versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations as there are gas stations wouldn't be an issue there. Also, once you have an operational charge point you can easily go parallel with stations, just like with gas pumps.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
nightski 12y ago
Assuming 100% utilization of course, which around here is very far from the truth.
- vkjv 12y ago
  Peak utilization is more important than average.
sparkman55 12y ago
In rural areas, it's actually common to have a gas pump near the garage. After all, what are you going to do, drive your tractor to town to fill up?

X-combinator 12y ago

Reddit comment thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2vrlzx/japan_has_more_car_chargers_than_gas_stations/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2vrlzx/japan_has...

paws 12y ago

"Three years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis all of Japan's 48 operable reactors remain shut, with no restarts scheduled." via http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-plant-idUSL4N0MN1X520140328 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-pl... Worth keeping the big picture in mind.

stcredzero 12y ago
The real bogeyman isn't nuclear. It's companies getting away with poor practices, hanging onto outdated equipment, and whittling down safety recommendations/regulations. The same thing with the BP refinery disaster. (And two of those 3 with the gulf oil spill.) If we look at organizations with good records with regards to nuclear power (US Navy and France) it's somewhat different from what we have in the US.

liyuanli 12y ago

It would be cool to see more automakers invest in an infrastructure dedicated to electric vehicles (not necessarily limited to charging). EVs are not mainstream today, but they most likely will be in the near future. I see a vague connection with mobile ecosystems like iPhone and Android. Heavy investment in the mobile development infrastructure is paying off. It's giving device/app makers more leverage to turn ideas into products. A great infrastructure definitely helps drive adoption.

sandworm 12y ago

People have commented on the pumps v. station issue, but what about time? The most accurate measure of the infrastructure might not be how many plugs are around, but how many cars can be charged per day. Or perhaps how many vehicle-kilometers are available to electric cars. With pay-at-the-pump any gas pump can fill a car in say two minutes. An electric charger, even the fast ones, will take 10-100 times as long to "fill" a tank. So take the number of charging plugs and dived that by a factor of 10x->100x. Then come back when the number of available "fills" per day becomes comparable. Then adjust for the reduced range and come back when the total number of available vehicle-kilometers breaks even. I'm afraid that day is still a long way off atm.

robotcookies 12y ago
That's a good point. And if people are leaving their cars while charging to run errands or such, they are likely to take up more charging station time than what might be presumed if they immediately opened up the spot after getting their car charged.
greglindahl 12y ago
The overwhelming majority of electric car charging takes place overnight in the owner's garage, while the owner sleeps. So there's your time issue: no having to stop to fill up once a week or so, just plug in and unplug each day. There's no comparison to be made, because electric cars are just plain different.

hudibras 12y ago

n=1, but my Japanese house built in 2013 has a car charger. It wasn't even mentioned by the real estate agent as a feature, but I don't know if that was because it's so common now or because few people use them.