I had a tire that needed air in my tire, so I went to the gas station with my EV and got some in there.
That's great for now, but what happens in several years when the number of Gas stations declines? Gas stations have been great resources for air, bathrooms, and snacks on road trips. What is going to replace it?
Service stations. Little shop and cafe, rest rooms and some car related amenities. If people wait a few minutes to an hour at a charger and don’t need to hold on to a fuel hose, it’s even more likely they’ll pop in. I think they’ll actually do better with more EV traffic than with ICE.
Right now, many people who can’t charge at home (because they live in an apartment and/or rely on street parking) don’t consider EV ownership to be practical… But when public charging infrastructure gets better, maybe they will.
And level 2 or 3 chargers already cover almost all of those people.
People don’t generally need to charge a huge amount in a few minutes other than road trips. For the vast majority of people having chargers in parking lots that can do 100 miles an hour of charging is more than sufficient. You just plug in in the parking spot while you’re shopping and keep your car with sufficient charge all the time.
When you’re on the road is the only time that you really need a super fast charger because nobody wants to sit around for an hour to only get another hour and a half on the road, turning a 10 hour trip into 20+.
I’m confused-- You said “The majority of people with EVs are going to do the bulk of their charging at home,” but now you’re suggesting that the vast majority of people (maybe you meant apartment-dwellers specifically?) will charge at the mall or grocery store… Those ideas seem to contradict.
In my experience, charging at home (if you can) is super convenient, but when I lived in an apartment, keeping the car charged was excruciating: It’s either queueing for one of the L3 chargers, going at some weird hour of the night/morning, or spending hours at the mall or whatever every few days to use the L2… If I was relying on public L2’s only, I’d need to spend something like 6+ hours every 3 days at the mall to charge-- And that’s if the L2’s are even available, which they often aren’t! Not practical.
Now if apartment complexes and/or employers could all get on board with providing lots and lots of L2’s, we’d be set: It’s not an imposition to spend 6+ hours every 3 days at work or at home :) But that’s a huge amount of change to ask for, and I can imagine EV-focused service stations being a boon for folks whose residence/employer aren’t stepping up.
Eventually, I'd imagine that they just buy every stall a cable, and there's a smart charger that delivers charge to each stall in turn. Yes it's extra copper expense, but that's the only way that charging in a garage becomes convenient
Maybe one day, that’d be great! Especially if that applies to parking stalls at work as well.
We’ll still continue to have the problem of people who don’t even have access to a parking stall where they live, though. In some buildings that I’ve lived in, if you have roommates, one of you probably pays extra for parking privileges and the others have to figure something else out… Plus, not every unit even gets a stall to begin with.
So even if we get this “cable in every stall” ubiquity-- already a massive project-- there will still be lots of people who can’t “just charge at home.”
My EV came with a compressor in the trunk. Last time I needed to fill the tires it worked fine.
I didn't even realize this until one day on the Nissan Leaf discussion boards, which led to a hilarious discussion of a whole bunch of us who had no idea we were carrying our own solution to this....
I fully expect as EVs start becoming more popular, we’ll see more businesses that build services around fast charging. Right now, it’s more of an ad hoc situation, where these things are placed in small lots as just standalone charging because it’s cheap and simple, but as it proves to be the case that people who are charging want something to do in the meantime, that kind of product and/or service will catch on.
Air, for instance - one could easily package an EV charging station with a compressor addon, allowing complementary tire inflating on their charging stations. Right now, they’re just focused on making the chargers more capable and reliable, but when most brands are pretty consistent across the board, they will want more features to attract customers.
I can imagine investors are coming up with all sorts of ways to expand on chargers. I could see Montana going hard on adding little gambling outposts where you can sit and play slots and buy junk food from vending machines while you wait. I think it will be quite a while before we see gas stations shutting down due to lack of interest, but it should be a no-brainer to use that same building in nearly the same way, just for EV charging instead.
When the charges on our thru-way all failed over Memorial Day weekend, they provided the emergency service. I heard they were also in talks with AAA to be something that a tow truck could carry, or some emergency service vehicle.
I think the state legislation on this is going to be interesting. Do we again push the costs for infrastructure onto private parties? Or do we let the free market handle it - like the $2.00 I paid for 5 mins of air?
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