It sounds like the charging infrastructure isn't there yet where you live. Doesn't mean the cars are useless for many many people, including people in rural areas. In the US, I don't think most rural people are 40 miles from the nearest food store, and I'd be surprised to learn that's true in most European countries either.
While I agree with just about everything you are saying, rural Americans definitely have the ability to charge their electric vehicles. In fact it's a huge selling point when the nearest gas station is 30 miles away. Even if you don't have access to grid power, solar charging at level 1 and 2 is still a thing. Now, if you don't have enough range to make it into town and there are no chargers? That's a huge deal.
They’re actually nearly useless at non-rural gas stations. There’s no money to be made. Far and away most people on an ev will not stop at a charge station anywhere within a couple hundred kilometers of their home.
My experience using a non Tesla EV in rural places in Europe is far far better than in the US.
Charging station availability is a solved issues, now they are at the payment consolidation and subscription. ( that part is still the Wild West, but it exists )
I live in LA, ( not L.A ) I’ve seen charging station cropping up only this years in non-metro area.
Look at a deployment map in rural Spain or France.
Same experience. The infrastructure simply isn't there yet in most towns or cities.
Those who think otherwise forget that a large number of people in OECD countries don't own their own parking spots or have the legal right to run electricity or install their own chargers.
They also seem to greatly underestimate what it would cost to saturate street-side parking spots with car chargers.
Charging will eventually become convenient for people who don´t live in detached housing or happen to be in a small handful of forward-thinking towns or cities, but it's going to take a fair amount of time.
That's because the infrastructure is not ready yet. I live in one of Europe's most dense areas, with street parking anf thin roads. Local gas companies started installing chargers in many places, essentially transforming two existing roadside parking spots into charging stations. Most people do only short trips and wouldn't need to charge more than 1-3 times a month, so this should generally work out as long as there are enough spots, and else its a trip to a nearby fast charger.
I suppose the concern in rural/suburban areas is what happens when you need to be on the road? If you really need to charge, do you have to go out of your way to find a charging station? Gas stations are everywhere.
At a charging station? A lot of people do a lot of their charging not at home already - at least in cities. Presumably this could / will be true in rural areas, too.
It's cool that there is a mandate for it. I suppose I'm surprised they aren't close to achieving this already, or that it wouldn't happen on its own.
I was talking to my parents, who live in a very rural area of the U.S.—the nearest mailbox is a ten minute drive—and they said "we'd love an electric vehicle, but where would we charge it around here?" and we pulled up a map and there were something like two or three suitable charging stations within 20 miles, and many more within the range of a full charge.
That's why I'd assume that the busiest motorways in the EU would already have plenty of fast charging stations within a 60km drive. Maybe they already do, and this is more about adding additional bureaucracy. Or, more generously, maybe it's about those other clauses, like the payment system and displaying the prices and whatnot, and the bit in the headline was always expected to take care of itself.
Yeah, the issue is that you'll either have to install chargers every 10 feet in almost every city, or come up with some scheme to swap batteries, or have more "gas" stations because the charge time is longer.
My town has on average 1 car per household, but I'd guess like 0.25 off street spots per household. That's a lot of infrastructure on public land.
Along my long destination driving routes through rural areas, the charging stations rarely have a car in them. So yes and no to this. Obviously urban and near-urban areas are always packed.
The question here is how many people don't have a garage but still want a car. The rural and suburban folks are out - plenty of room for garages and charging. So any discussion of public charging infrastructure is focused on places where public transit would be a better investment.
I agree, but right now in the UK, aside from the odd token charging point in a supermarket car park, realiably accessible charging stations are few and far between, particulary outside major city centres.
That's probably true in the US. Not around here, in a semi-populated region of Europe. It's far shorter to somewhere to charge than it is to a gas station. There used to be lots of them, but they started to disappear even before EVs were a thing. For me the nearest one is quite a bit away, through a toll booth even.
Huh? In rural areas everyone has a driveway beside their house they can run an extension cord to. It's urban areas where charging can be difficult because most people don't have a parking spot that they own and can reasonably supply electricity to.
I don't know where you live but I live in western Europe and almost every household owns a car that they park somewhere on the street. There almost no charging stations around. Now I just can't imagine a universe where every street has enough chargers for EVERY single household. That's just utopic.
> Everybody will be charging at home/work. Other places you'll likely charge are conveniently located places between long distance destinations. Rest areas for example.
It seems like there's a lot of work to be done to scale this up for when electric vehicles get more popular. Many apartment complexes I see have no facilities for this, for example. But electric vehicles are also quite rare in this area.
Range isn't the problem, lack of charging stations is. Drive around any city at night and look how many cars are parked overnight on streets and in parking lots with no chargers anywhere near. That infrastructure can be built but it will take decades.
If you came to visit me, you couldn't charge your car where I live. I don't have private parking, and the places you can park near me do not have any access to a plug socket. Not everyone is lucky enough to have appropriate infrastructure around them.
range, availability, or charging which are solved enough
But are they really? Especially for charging, I'm still not convinced.
The articles makes a case that you can go and grab a coffee while your ID.4 charges in 30 minutes at a high-speed charging stations. Sorry, but "30 minutes" and "high-speed" in one sentence seems somewhat misplaced. Who can afford to just waste 30 minutes for charging on a regular basis?
I currently live in a suburb in central Europe. I just checked on https://chargemap.com/ for my area - I don't know how up-to-date their map is but there are only a few charging stations within 20 minutes from my house, none of which is a high-speed charging station.
And unlike houses in North America, almost none of the houses on my street has a drive way, i.e., me and most of my neighbors park on the road, sometimes a few houses down from mine - so, no chance for charging a car over night at home. Of course, before I moved to the burbs, I sometimes had to park a few streets away at night because apartment buildings here typically don't offer parking garages (they exist, but it's not common).
Unlike some people with strong opinions, I'm actually in favor of electric cars. However, the practicability is just not there for the way a lot of everyday life is currently organized in many parts of the world.
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