The EV charging problem is enormous. So many people can't charge at home. And even if they find public chargers that are available and actually working, and have the time to wait around while they're charging, the COST at those chargers is usually far higher than home charging would have been. Just doesn't make sense.
@kyleha 10 to 15 minutes is too long. You can drop a gas station practically anywhere, but a significant charging facility impacts the entire local grid. It's not going to fly. I don't see EVs cracking 50% of "on the road vehicles" anytime in this century. The trend lines are already down, and that can create a death spiral in any industry.
@lauren
For most people, most ofthe time, owning an EV makes no sense. It's a huge capital outlay for something that spends most of its time parked up.
Car clubs and care hire for when you need it, and public transport when you don't, would move the charging infrastructure away from residential areas and be easier to install and a lot safer. You don't want high power electrics next to your house, and definitely don't want a lithium battery fire in a built up area.
@lauren I keep pointing at the street where I live and how full of parked cars it is at night and asking where all those people are going to charge their EVs in 20 years
@hermannus Because a vast number of people live in apartments and other buildings they don't own, often with no parking spaces or lots at all. Many park blocks away on the street. C'mon, does everyone own their own home in Holland? Wow!
@lauren
You’re taking automobiles, of course. Around Boston, there are now tons of other electric vehicles — bikes (some of which approach small delivery vehicles), scooters (both the Vespa and the kick-board variety), unicycles — the sort of transportation revolution it was thought Segways might become. With Boston and surrounding communities adding bike lanes and bike paths, it even feels pretty safe. Those have a much simpler recharging story.
@lain_7 How often does it hit 110F in Boston? Very common during summers here. It's hit 120F a couple of times here in my corner of L.A. It can be 90+ for many days on end.
@lauren On many older homes the house wiring or the utility feed itself are inadequate to support more than perhaps 3.5kw charging (rather than the more typical 6kw+ level 2 charging). This is fine for plug-in hybrids, but is marginal for full battery powered EVs.
(People need to be careful about charging from plug-in wall sockets - often the electrical contacts in those, especially on outdoor sockets, are somewhat corroded and can get really hot if run above 8Amps.)
Not true. While our Kia can charge at 7.2 kW, I set it to charge at 4.4 kW and it's easily done in far less time than is available overnight. Several hours before we need the car most days. Plus we wait until after 7 due to time of use rates. 70% of the battery in 10 hours.
Plus 7.2 kW is only 30 amps which is doable in most houses (dryer). Our old house in Palos Verdes was built in 1964. SCE upped us from 100 to 200 amp service at no cost, we just needed a new panel.
@Brendan@lauren Our Tesla takes up to 21 hours to charge at home (built 1987). (However, we have two Supercharger centers within five minutes of the house.)
I was going to buy a Polestar but the house wiring would not sustain simultaneous charging with the Tesla.
We had to downgrade our home charger because of inadequacies of the internal house wiring. We've fixed that for about half the house, but fixing it for the rest (including garage) will cost some serious $$.
I'm nervous about not overloading things - I tried to charge my old Chevy Volt at my mother's house, built around 1950, and smoked a couple of the outlets, even at 8A. It was sad - and dangerous.
We asked for additional PGE service but they want to dig up street & sidewalk to do it - with us paying roughly $50K to $100K to do the upgrade - and that was only to the power meter, not the house main panel.
21 hours sounds like 4 kW (16 amps @ 240 volts) for 85 kWh which would be 0 to 100 percent in some Teslas or about 300 to 350 miles. Pretty rare that most people would have to do that very often or that most houses could not handle 16 amps.
Our upgrade from 100 to 200 amps service in Palos Verdes was $2,000 for a new panel and breakers, which was necessary since the 50 year old panel had breakers that were no longer available. Each circumstance will be different.
There are issues with charging, especially for apartment renters. Those problems are probably solvable with changes to the building code but that will take time. Chargers at work will help and those can probably help even in 120 volt, 15 amp.
@Brendan@lauren It doesn't help that different cars brands have different locations for the plug-in socket on the vehicle. That tends to force parking/charger layouts that have long, heavy charge cables (that attract copper thieves.)
I've seen recent condo designs that have NEMA 14-50 "dryer" outlet in the parking areas. I have not seen many apartments with this. How apartment owners will recoup charge costs will be interesting to watch.
I only recently learned that plug-in level 2 chargers - the ones that plug into those NEMA 14-50 outlets - downgrade their draw by something like 10% (as compared to hard wiring of the charger) in order to provide a safety margin.
A dryer uses a 14-30 outlet. Most garage chargers are 14-50 but you can get a 14-30 EVSE if you already have a 30 amp outlet.
Anything that uses power continuously for 3 hours (I think) or more has to max out at 80% of the breaker (40 amps for 14-50). 40 x 240 = 9.6 kW, more than enough overnight.
@Brendan@karlauerbach The U.S. grid is a train wreck. It can hardly handle a/c loads in hot climates during summer. It's going to be even worse during winter with the push for heat pumps, which use exactly the same amount of power per hour as a/c does. Anyone who can't charge at home has to charge during the day in almost all cases, where you're competing with a/c during the summer and heat pumps during the winter. Older homes do not have the capacity in some cases even to handle low speed charging safely. To fix the grid will take TRILLIONS of dollars. Not billions, trillions. Where is it going to come from? If you push too hard, voters will revolt. The EV mandates are fantasies, and frankly, are playing into Trump's hands right now.
@lauren@Brendan I totally and absolute agree with you. One decision that Tesla got right was to install a network of high power, high availability, super chargers.
It is said that buying and EV is really buying into a charging technology. CCS kinda sucks both in its "camel is a racehorse designed by a committee" engineering and its poor reliability as deployed. Tesla's is much better. But adapters have been slow in coming and are far from being trivially priced.
We recently drove to Texas (from California) to view the eclipse (it was cloudy, grrrr) and we were able to travel much further each day in our gasoline Honda than we would have been able to do in our Tesla. Even with superchargers, charging is too slow as compared to filling with gasoline. (Plus there aren't a lot of superchargers where we were in west Texas.)
@karlauerbach@Brendan You've heard that Musk just fired the entire supercharger team, and that plans for new superchargers are already being rolled back and canceled? Just happened today apparently.
I moved to SoCal in 1991 and as I recall, California had a zero emissions mandate for sometime later that decade or early in the 2000s. When the technology did not support the mandate, it magically vanished. That's likely to happen again and while I hope to never buy another vehicle with an ICE, the near term solution is probably plugin hybrids with 50+ miles of range on battery. The incentives for those should require you to prove you charge the battery frequently.
@Brendan@karlauerbach Of course, the mandates will push back and back. They are POLITICAL, not technological. Mix politics and tech and the result is a mess 9 times out of 10. You know where I stand on a range of issues in this respect, I suspect. Hybrids don't meet the zero emission standards of course. And won't satisfy the radical EV crowd.
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