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.
> The only barrier I see is that each charger network might want their own app, etc.
It is noteworthy in this regard that part of the EU mandate for a charger network is "without requiring an app or subscription"... "They must also accept contactless payment and provide full pricing and live charge point availability information through ‘electronic means’ such as an app or sat nav system."
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.
> 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.
In the US it's not as feasible because of driving distances between cities, but in the EU where cities are closer and the train system is healthy I can see EVs gobbling up market share fast.
In the US you would need random charging stations lining the highways like we have gas stations. I expect people are much less likely to want to stop for 30 min at a random gas station than in a city center to recharge.
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.
Europe is different, certainly in the UK. The charging network is being built and you can go cross country with an electric car.
From what I understand from watching the Fully Charged Show there is plenty of charging infrastructure being put in place in mainland Europe. However, we are more like two or three plugs at a motorway service station (with one broken) fifty miles away rather than every lamp post having a plug on it.
Really it is the electricity companies rather than the auto manufacturers who are taking that part up, much like how BMW et al. don't own petrol filling stations they don't own the charging infrastructure.
As an EV owner I see not much reasons to agree, I'm from EU so my point of view might be different but... I almost NEVER charge of public chargers except on highways. I sometimes charge on some sparse public chargers in cities but as a comfy way to have a pack place where no other option is available for the amount of time I need.
Essentially: I have not bought an EV if I can't recharge it at home. No one can have a life on public-charging only, no matter how spread will might became.
IME the real needs for public charging are:
- on highway, for trips longer than the battery range, so fast charge
- similar for long range artery not necessarily highways
- inside parking lot/garage of hotels/other touristic places, for visitors
- casual fast chargers spread just for quick "emergency" charges
In this terms the low level of EU offer is already more than enough, try to do more targeting those who do not own a garage is pointless: they'll never buy EVs until being forced and even in this case they'll probably can't afford them anyway.
In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. In my western European city of ~100k people there's hundreds of such spots already. Capacity is rapidly being added too.
On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.
that's also would allow broader adoption in countries where charging infrastructure is not yet ready.
eg. in my country we have very little charging stations because there is just not enough demand, and we do not have much electric cars because not many people want to pay that much for car that you have no way to charge (especially when you do not have garage)
We can mandate EV chargers anywhere we want them. Workplaces, apartments, wherever. We already do this with handicap parking spots, and the US government can and does subsidize commercial EV installs using tax code.
If you run out of charge, you get a tow to a fast DC charger or home. AAA piloted an EV charger truck for dead EVs, and deprecated it because no one was using it.
We can fly a helicopter on Mars, but we’re wringing our hands over the equivalent of dryer outlets and where they’re installed. It’s comical. Europe mandated all fast DC chargers inter operate, and everyone swapped their cables to CCS and supported frictionless payments because it was the law (even Tesla at their Superchargers) [1].
It’s a climate emergency [2], not a climate inconvenience, and we should start acting like it collectively.
Billing system is not standardized in EU though. And for some ungodly reason no charging company is able to just add a card reader, oh no, you got to download an app on your phone! And there's a whole bunch of charging companies, each with their own app. You can of course use a RFID chip, but you still have to add your card details in the apps and then add your RFID chip to the app for each company. I know there's some discussions about using the UUID the car exchanges with the charger and have a centralized payment system, but last I heard it's not going smoothly as every car maker and charging company wants to control the centralized system.
As an aside, range is not a problem with new EV's with 500-600 km range as long as the charging network is good. There was a lot of talk about range anxiety in the early days when cars had 150-300 km range and charging stations were rare. These days with charging stations on every gas station, mall, ferry port, grocery store, random parking lots and what not long drives are no longer a problem as long as you plan a little bit and don't drive through hundreds of kilometers of no mans land without charging up first.
Looking around urban streets in the UK, the biggest blocker to widespread electric car adoption is almost certainly charging infrastructure.
Most people in cities here live in flats, terraced houses or other houses without driveways. Charging therefore needs to be on-street or in centralised locations. We have a handful of electric car charging points, but these are often full even now, when electric cars make up a tiny proportion of the fleet.
The amount of investment needed in street charging and supercharger like stations before electric cars can be the majority is absolutely vast here. It's going to need a lot of political will to happen.
I think the situation is similar across much of Europe and the rest of the world. The US model - a driveway for every house across most of the country - is quite unique globally.
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.
I really wonder about the charging infrastrucuture. I guess it is doable and a necessary transmission, but I am a bit afraid it may be the next thing some countries are sleeping on.
As a German, there are serious subsidies for home owners to install one right now. However, I just moved into a new rental apparment and visiteted quite a few places that were all built in 2020. All of them had very nice parking spaces allocaed to the flat, but zero wallboxes for the entire appartment. I also looked into buying a flat and often it would have been difficult, sometimes even impossible to install one on my own behalf wihtout checking with all other buyers (and these kinds of changes often lead to tedious legal fights, afaik). The place I'm moving to doesn't have one either, but the ladlord will install one, once needed. At the moment I still have a car with a diesel engine and no plans to change soon(I go almost everywhere by bike, even have a different one for rainly days and to carry groceries, and do 0-2 longer trips per month and ~1 very long trip for vacation per year, bike + diesel seems to fit that quite well) soon, but the next car will be electric i guess
To make things worse: The overall power comsumption should not be too much of a problem, but if almost vehicle was electric and charged where people live, the power infrastructure could be in serious trouble. If improving it in remote areas goes anywhere as well as FTTC/FTTH internet, we're headed for disaster. There are a lot of interesting ideas, e.g. decentralized batteries within people's homes and renewables. But if all the focus is on changing the cars on the road, I have little hope that other transitions will be quick enough
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.
> the number of high-speed chargers are tiny (think a couple of locations per large city)
That's not so far off. Even large cities in North America have no more than a few dozen gas stations (and the UK likely fewer still due to things like London's congestion pricing reducing vehicle count). Once-a-week-or-so fueling doesn't really require a huge amount of infrastructure. That's one of the reasons we're all addicted to driving in the first place, after all.
And charging stations are, of course, absolutely dirt cheap to build relative to fuel stations. They'll keep up with demand easily as the driving stock expands. The limit, if there is one, is going to be the electrical distribution infrastructure. High voltage lines into cities aren't as cheap as we'd want.
> I'm not sure that the current locations that companies like BP and Shell have for gas stations would work for EV charging station.
North America is behind on EV infrastructure. The current fighting over which plug to use will delay it by some more years. In Europe there are many fuel station style charging locations. For example:
> 15x faster than the fastest charging EV at a Supercharger
Shell's new station has 400 kW CCS chargers, but the problem is on the battery side more than the charger side. EVs can't make full use of the charger's available power across the whole charge curve. Better, fast charging batteries are needed.
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.
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.
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