Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellisothers | Hacker News Reader

I would add one thing my family has complained about wrt road trip charging is it’s not just the time you wait to charge, it’s the time and games/anger dealing with all the people in line waiting to charge.

View on HN

And this is with marginal EV adoption. Imagine if it was full scale the headaches that would come. I mean think of the current amount of gas stations around, that would be insufficient to cover EV demand due to the fact EVs need to linger for so much longer. So good bye to whatever in your town needs to be destroyed in order to park more cars and charge them. So much for walkable cities.

The big difference between public EV chargers and gas stations: you can put an EV charger anywhere you have electricity, and with far lower space requirements. My city is slowly converting a few street parking spots in busy areas to EV charging, and it takes very little room - I have no complaints as someone who mostly uses sidewalks and bike lanes. Where did you think people were parking their cars in cities before?

Parking garages are also getting EV chargers. My office garage just added a couple dozen, and I don't think it would be hard for them to convert more once the demand shows up.

And I've seen them starting to go in at the little rest stops on the Autobahn that up to now only had unattended toilets; they're being added to the big, nice rest stops with gas stations, too, of course.

You forgot just one teeny tiny thingy - it's illegal to park ICE car on EV charging spot on the streets, in garages etc. So if the number of EVs grow the number of EV spots would grow which would take more space, not less.

If you take existing parking and make some of it EV charging, it doesn't take up much extra space; the charging equipment does take some space, of course, but sometimes there's room to be found for that.

Depending on EV adoption and how much charging people want/need, you can start with a couple spots that are active charging only, and see what that looks like. If the chargers are always full, consider adding more and/or having several spots for each charger and standards and practices to move your car and the charging plug when yours is full, etc. If the chargers are underused, consider making the spot open when the lot is full, etc.

If the number of EVs grows, ICE will shrink by as much so we can just convert regular parking spots to EV charging spots.

I'm not sure how cleanly that is going to scale when each and every charger is going to cost a couple grand to install. Think of all the street parking spots there are, that is an enormous amount of money. In LA county it is estimated there are 3.6 million on street and 15 million off street parking spots as of 2010 (1). Lets assume its 2k for one of these chargers assuming no further upgrades to grid infrastructure that it would just work on existing lines. Unless I fudged the numbers that's $7.2 billion dollars just for the street parking. That would buy a whole lot of bike and bus lanes that cities claim they don't have the funding currently to roll out. Probably make a good dent in rail projects as well.

https://la.streetsblog.org/2015/12/01/18-6-million-spaces-an...

It gets exponentially better with bigger adoption, because chargers being in use pay for installation of more chargers (and batteries got cheaper, so charging stations have their own storage and are less limited by the size of their grid connection).

Service stations on my route in the UK went from having 2-3 medium-speed chargers total in 2019 to having 2 rows of 20 high-speed chargers, and another parking doubling that is under construction. The same happened all over Western Europe - grew from a few singular chargers at supermarkets and hotels to many large charging hubs along highways.

Reliability and ease of payment also got better, partly because regulations started requiring it, but also because the stations don't sit idle any more, and it started to matter for revenue.

Also in EU there's enough charger coverage now that there's competition. I don't have to sit in line to the only charger in town, I can drive few miles to the next station.

This is very regional, and I suspect is more of a problem for SoCal that most anywhere else. I've been driving EVs since 2019 and I have experienced a line exactly one time.

I would agree, though, that if you do run into a situation where you have to wait, the current system does not deal with it well. They need a better way to fairly manage a queue if it forms.

Admittedly I don't use public chargers often, but I have yet to experience any kind of line.

I had to use public chargers for a while when my house was being worked on and it was pretty miserable. They were frequently broken, and lines were common.

The real problem with public charger lines is that there is no social protocol for them yet. At a gas station, it is fine to pull up behind a car currently fueling to indicate that you would like to fuel at the pump next. Charging stations, however, are not built with pull-through spots. There's no place to form a queue at all, so people park nearby, circle, and sometimes snipe a spot when it isn't their turn (because who can tell whose turn it is?).

I mean, it's not like I've never had to use public chargers. They just didn't have lines when I was there. Also, haven't encountered a broken charger. (Seattle area.)

The thing that actually bothered me the most is needing a different stupid app for every one of the ~5 different networks to pay, instead of just inserting or tapping a credit card. But this is mostly an occasional-user problem; the pain probably falls off dramatically once you've already registered for everything.

Charging at home is a great experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com