I’m on vacation with a rented Tesla Y LR in Tuscany right now. We traveled all the way from northern Germany (about 1500 km) and never had any issues finding a free charging station. Just once every single parking spot was used and the charging automatically stopped at 80% in order to make space for others more quickly (and to be honest, this was due to other cars parking in the Tesla reserved parking spots at an Italian supermarket).
Traveling with kids automatically makes you take a break every 3 hours or so. This time, we just let the car charge during these breaks and had a 100% charged car afterwards. That’s about 55 min of charging time. In about 25 min you can charge from 20% to 80% using a 250 kW supercharger.
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important. Most camping sites, hotels and vacation resorts offer at least two 11 kW stations at their own rates.
right now
That’s the key phrase. Consider a regular gas station where cars constantly come and go. Now, imagine if in 10 years we’ll have a similar demand for EV charging stations. I can’t see that working well with the current batteries. Solid-state batteries are not available yet and there’s no guarantee that they’ll hit the market anytime soon.
You realize you can put “electricity pumps” in any retail parking spot, right?
Putting in a gas station is a horrifyingly complex infastructure demand. Slapping 2-4 chargers in literally every retail parking lot is simple in comparison.
No, you can’t. Adding a large number of EV chargers requires a significant upgrade to the electrical grid. This is a massive infrastructure challenge. Charging an electric vehicle consumes a large amount of electricity, and the current electrical grid may not be equipped to handle a significant increase in demand. This could lead to overloads and blackouts.
Unlike refueling a car with gasoline, charging an electric vehicle takes a significant amount of time. Even with fast chargers, a full charge can take more than an hour. This would mean that you wouldn’t be able to put nearest gas station in your Waze, you might need to cruise around an unknown city, looking for a free spot.
The cost of installing EV charging stations is significant, and it’s not clear who should bear this cost. Should it be the government, property owners, or the consumers? Additionally, the maintenance and repair of these charging stations are not negligible.
If the electricity used to charge the vehicles is not generated from renewable sources, then the overall environmental impact could still be significant as well as impact on the electricity prices.
There is a lot one should consider before writing witty replies.
Thanks for your feedback! I’m just curious how it would be realistic to scale the charging stations enough to sustain a larger (let’s say 30% or even 50%) of cars being EV. Should we just have giant charging stations hubs every 50 km?
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important.
That’s very true, to be honest my personal preference would be to reassess the need to have so many people travelling so much during July/August (you see the most popular hotspots such as Venise or Barcelona trying to reduce the number of tourists) but that’s a different story
