ExCivilian
Well-known member
I think the "problem" is far worse. I actually think there's not enough room on the roadways to setup sufficient public charging stations. Currently there are roughly f EA stations in a lot of Targets, Walmarts, and malls in SoCal--but in my experience over the past four years only 2, or at most, 3 of them work at any one time. Sometimes you're down to one charger working and sometimes not even that! There are 8 "hoses" in that setup but only four can be used for charging at any one time.
Meanwhile, you've got a line of EVs waiting to charge. None of those places have sufficient space, or markings, for a rational queue to form. People just end up parking wherever, most often in the curbside pickup area, and being polite about the line order. With half a dozen people it's manageably chaotic. Double that number, though, and it realistically won't work. I'm ignoring the issue that people will be sitting for hours even in a perfectly working system.
That's now when California has less than a million EVs and hybrids. We're mandated by law to replace the ~20 million vehicles in CA alone with EVs over the next decade. Our state estimates we need roughly 1.2 million chargers to serve the estimated EV population by 2030...we have 160,000 total chargers in the entire US right now. We need to have more than five times the chargers than we currently have in the US in CA alone to serve the upcoming needs of our state! I haven't even done the math on this but it seems absurd and approaching a saturation point where we'd see charges basically along the entire stretch of every major interstate rather than in rest areas that people keep thinking we're going to get. If anyone wants to do the math we have roughly 90 rest areas in CA.
Even if we get charging down to 10-15 minutes it's still going to be a shitshow. If you have a Costco or other club warehouse gas stations you already know what it's going to look like. Gas stations serving a hundred people lock up even though they can get people up and off a pump in a matter of minutes and they can use both sides of the pump without capacity loss.
Once we transition to less than one million EV drivers to twenty times the numbers those 400 person lines waiting for a Tesla charge will be an everyday occurrence. We can wax poetic all we want about the benefits of charging at home but enough people can't do that with enough people who won't do that to put us into a significant corner when this all comes to a head. We still have to pull in to charge stations in wonky ways that take up more than a single space because of how they're placed and spaced. We certainly seem to need places with a hundred charge banks in operation but I doubt anyone wants to see what that looks like. There is something to be said regarding quality of life that tells me I really don't want a future with ten thousand chargers up and down our beaches.
I see no evidence of battery tech breakthroughs that would render public charging completely unnecessary, which is what needs to happen for things to remain smooth. I haven't even touched on the issue of the dangers of hooking up a $50-100K vehicle to a charge station in certain neighborhoods that can't be driven away from in an emergency--places where many average citizens wouldn't be safe pumping gas for a few minutes--let alone what it means to hang hundreds of thousands of dollars of copper off a pedestal and expect it to remain there for any length of time.
Personally I think EVs are a stepping stone. That said, the stepping stone in our natural lifetimes may just be that 20 million EVs take to the road freeing up resources for those of us remaining in ICE. This all or nothing perspective isn't doing anyone any favors as far as I can tell. The conversation would seem a lot more sane to me if we were legitimately considering long-haul diesel (w/ electric), hydrogen, and EVs all in the pool instead of just wiping all other tech into the colloquial dustbin.
Meanwhile, you've got a line of EVs waiting to charge. None of those places have sufficient space, or markings, for a rational queue to form. People just end up parking wherever, most often in the curbside pickup area, and being polite about the line order. With half a dozen people it's manageably chaotic. Double that number, though, and it realistically won't work. I'm ignoring the issue that people will be sitting for hours even in a perfectly working system.
That's now when California has less than a million EVs and hybrids. We're mandated by law to replace the ~20 million vehicles in CA alone with EVs over the next decade. Our state estimates we need roughly 1.2 million chargers to serve the estimated EV population by 2030...we have 160,000 total chargers in the entire US right now. We need to have more than five times the chargers than we currently have in the US in CA alone to serve the upcoming needs of our state! I haven't even done the math on this but it seems absurd and approaching a saturation point where we'd see charges basically along the entire stretch of every major interstate rather than in rest areas that people keep thinking we're going to get. If anyone wants to do the math we have roughly 90 rest areas in CA.
Even if we get charging down to 10-15 minutes it's still going to be a shitshow. If you have a Costco or other club warehouse gas stations you already know what it's going to look like. Gas stations serving a hundred people lock up even though they can get people up and off a pump in a matter of minutes and they can use both sides of the pump without capacity loss.
Once we transition to less than one million EV drivers to twenty times the numbers those 400 person lines waiting for a Tesla charge will be an everyday occurrence. We can wax poetic all we want about the benefits of charging at home but enough people can't do that with enough people who won't do that to put us into a significant corner when this all comes to a head. We still have to pull in to charge stations in wonky ways that take up more than a single space because of how they're placed and spaced. We certainly seem to need places with a hundred charge banks in operation but I doubt anyone wants to see what that looks like. There is something to be said regarding quality of life that tells me I really don't want a future with ten thousand chargers up and down our beaches.
I see no evidence of battery tech breakthroughs that would render public charging completely unnecessary, which is what needs to happen for things to remain smooth. I haven't even touched on the issue of the dangers of hooking up a $50-100K vehicle to a charge station in certain neighborhoods that can't be driven away from in an emergency--places where many average citizens wouldn't be safe pumping gas for a few minutes--let alone what it means to hang hundreds of thousands of dollars of copper off a pedestal and expect it to remain there for any length of time.
Personally I think EVs are a stepping stone. That said, the stepping stone in our natural lifetimes may just be that 20 million EVs take to the road freeing up resources for those of us remaining in ICE. This all or nothing perspective isn't doing anyone any favors as far as I can tell. The conversation would seem a lot more sane to me if we were legitimately considering long-haul diesel (w/ electric), hydrogen, and EVs all in the pool instead of just wiping all other tech into the colloquial dustbin.
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