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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

I've no idea how they'd even begin to create the infrastructure to support a large amount of electric cars. In a typical street of terraced houses in the UK, there are no driveways - In fact, 32% of the population rely on on-street parking. You park on the road. How are you supposed to charge your vehicle? Is the plan to line streets with unsightly charging points?

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On-street charging is already available though a fair number of ubitricity charging points, who install 5kW sockets in lamp posts and bollards. They're basically invisible – there are a bunch of them in my area in London that I didn't even know about until I was specifically researching.

This depends on the borough.

My London borough (Haringey) does not do this and only use the Source network for which my home is equidistant to several... being more than 1km from all of them. No letters or pleas, or offers from myself to fund installation of lamp post charges in line with govt grants have been successful.

I'm going to be purchasing another fossil fuel vehicle as it's clear that electric won't work for me unless I can get the distance to a charger below 100m.

Oh... and charging from the property by running a cable over or across a path is apparently against the law: "Highways Act 1980, it is illegal for any person to place or run a cable or wire along or across any part of a public highway. So running a charging cable across a footway is not permitted" (excerpt from council reply to my enquiries).

I think shared care services should be heavily promoted and subsidized in cities, especially for small cars, with their own smaller parking spots. These cars should be in every street. If cars are not autonomous by then, there should be drivers going around the city to move and distribute these cars. You should be able to take them from spot A and leave them at spot B, just like the bikes in Paris. Charging points should be moved into the ground, and cars should be able to park and connect themselves. That is not a big issue, although it will require adjustments to parking spaces. You could also create chained parking, bumper to bumper, where the cars interconnect and move if you need to get one out.

If the streets are lined with cars already, then objecting to the addition of charging points seems the height of absurdity.

There are already some of these dotted around. On a quiet side round near my house, for example. Presumably the residents have requested them in this case, but they're not too ugly.

Every street light is a potential charging point.

The challenge with the electric charging infrastructure is not the number of endpoints, but rather the amount of energy being transported.

The underground cables for streetlights have been dimensioned for the power draw of light bulbs (~100W each), not for a charging car (10kW or more).

Even if you change those cables: The distribution box for those streetlights is only dimensionded for say 100 lights (~10kW), not 100 charging cars (~1MW).

Even if you change the distribution box, the cable to that distribution box... well you get the point by now.

You don't need all that many Watts. Cars are parked about 23h a day. Electric cars need something like 20kWh/100km. Most people don't drive 100km a day, so on average you need a lot less than 1kW per car if every parking spot is also a charging point.

Still, the infastructure (if old) has been dimensioned for max 250 W per lamp post, if recent (LED lamps) for 80-100 W at the most.

So, the increase in power need (according to your 1 kW) is between 4 and 10 times.

Also if a lamp post is every 30 meters and each car takes 5 meters, each post needs to serve 6 cars.

And we are already between 24 and 40 times.

Besides, how long is the cable of an electric car (the one on-board)?

You will need to have a 20 m cable on board if you happen to park in a spot mid-way betwen two 30 m spaced lamp posts.

Not to long ago we switched from gas lights to electric lights. That seems like a more difficult change than beefing up the electric infrastructure. I'm sure we'll manage.

Sure it can be done (technically), as often happens the issue is about the related costs, that are not at all trivial.

Who will finance the new installations?

Where will the newly added (or enlarged) electric cabins be put (in already densely populated/built EU cities)?

The problem with this line of thinking is that you are designing for the average case, while current fuel infra is designed for (almost) any case. A third of people will be a sigma or more off from you estimate of 100km max, which may mean that for one in 6 this solution will not be sufficient. It would be a pity if you're talking half measures only designed to fit a narrow use case. It is both strictly worse, and I suspect will affect people who have little other options disproportionately. (People who need long range may live further, because they are poorer, emergency vehicles who need the range, travellers/irregular travel).

The current fuel infrastructure is definitely not designed for any case. Gas stations run out of gas almost immediately in case of a rush to fill tanks (e.g. because of some crisis).

Similarly loading infra won't be able to to handle everybody suddenly needing their cars fully charged from empty. For the rare cases where people actually need more range than can be filled over a day with low power charging, there can always be a separate network of fast chargers. There is absolutely no need to design every parking spot for fast charging.

I've never experienced a fuel station out of fuel here in (mainland) Europe.

They run out fairly quickly if there is a strike of workers in any part of the supply chain.

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